The Top 10 Films of 1949: Jolson Is King…Well, His Voice, Anyway

11.20.24 |
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Last week we took a quick trip in the Wayback Machine to the year 1924 for a peek at what the top 10 films were a century ago, when America was learning to Keep Cool with Coolidge and the cinema had yet to find its voice. This time around, let’s pop ahead 25 years and look at which flicks and stars ruled the box office roost in 1949. This was the year that the North Atlantic Treaty creating NATO was formed; Mao Zedong’s communist forces took over mainland China; Hamlet won the Academy Award for Best Picture; and Yul Brynner, Tony Curtis, Martin and Lewis, and the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote all made their big screen debuts. As for 1949’s biggest grossing movies:

  1. Jolson Sings Again – A surprise 1946 hit was The Jolson Story, which featured Larry Parks in the title role with Al Jolson supplying his own singing voice. Three years later, Columbia continued the (highly fictionalized) saga of the famed singer/actor/PC lightning rod’s life with this follow-up starring Parks, the real Jolson’s voice, Barbara Hale, and William Demarest. Although it was the biggest draw of ’49, Jolson Sings Again would prove to be the final film credit for Jolson before his 1950 death, while Parks only made four more pictures before his career was derailed during the Red Scare of the 1950s.
  2. Battleground – Hailed as one of the first serious depictions of World War II combat, director William Wellman gripping drama of a U.S. Infantry division fighting in the besieged French city of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge earned six Academy Award nominations and two wins. The squad’s diverse roster included Van Johnson, John Hodiak, Ricardo Montalban, George Murphy, and James Whitmore.
  3. I Was a Male War Bride – A much more lighthearted look at military life came in this Howard Hawks romp set in post-WWII Germany. Cary Grant plays a French Army officer who is reluctantly teamed with a U.S. WAC lieutenant (Ann Sheridan) on an assignment. In true romcom fashion, the at-first antagonistic pair fall in love and eventually wed, but complications arise when Sheridan is due to ship back to America and the only way Grant can get a visa to follow is under the War Brides Act. Fun Fact: This comedy is based on a true story.
  4. Sands of Iwo Jima – John Wayne received the first of his two Best Actor Oscar nominations for this actioner that followed a band of U.S. Marines from boot camp to the title battle in the final months of World War II. Some of the actual men who took part in the conflict and raised the Stars and Stripes on Mount Suribachi appear in the film. SPOILER ALERT: This is one of the nine movies where Wayne’s character dies before the ending.
  5. The Stratton Story – James Stewart played the title role in the inspiring true story of 1930s Chicago White Sox pitcher Monty Stratton, who lost a leg after a 1938 hunting accident. Fitted with a prosthetic limb and encouraged by his wife Ethel (June Allyson), Monty would go on to make a valiant return to professional baseball in 1946. Fun Fact: Ronald Reagan actively sought the role of Stratton, but Warner Bros. wouldn’t let their contract player go to M-G-M.
  6. Pinky – After 1947’s Gentleman’s Agreement won the Best Picture Oscar for 20th Century-Fox, producer Darryl F. Zanuck and director Elia Kazan gave the studio another socially conscious hit with this drama starring Fox ingénue Jeanne Crain as “Pinky” Johnson, a light-skinned Black woman who passes for white while studying nursing in Massachusetts. Returning to her Deep South home to help her grandmother (Ethel Waters) care for an elderly white neighbor (Ethel Barrymore), Pinky must confront the realities of life in the Jim Crow south and the white doctor (William Lundigan) who loves her. Dorothy Dandridge and Lena Horne were considered for the lead before Zanuck went with the “less controversial” casting of Crain.
  7. Mr. Belvedere Goes to College – The 1948 Fox comedy Sitting Pretty, which introduced Clifton Webb as self-proclaimed genius and jack of all trades-turned-nanny Lynn Belvedere, was a surprise top 10 success. Webb returned to the role in this follow-up where Belvedere hits the halls of higher learning to obtain the degree he needs to claim a literary prize. Shirley Temple co-starred in one her final film roles. Fun Fact: Webb would play the title character once more in 1951’s Mr. Belvedere Rings the Bell.
  8. Neptune’s Daughter – M-G-M’s Sweetheart of the Swimming Pool, Esther Williams, plays a bathing suit designer who tries to break up a “romance” between her guy-crazy sister (Betty Garrett) and a Latin American playboy polo star (Montalban, making his second appearance on this list). Garrett’s real suitor, however, is a klutzy masseuse (Red Skelton) posing as a polo player. The wintertime favorite “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” made its film debut in this musical and won the Oscar for Best Original Song.
  9. Little Women – The second sound adaptation (and first in color) of Louisa May Alcott’s beloved coming-of-age novel, this lush M-G-M production starred Allyson, Janet Leigh, Margaret O’Brien, and Elizabeth Taylor as the March sisters, who learn to depend on one another as they and their mother “Marmee” (Mary Astor) wait for their chaplain father (Leon Ames) to return home to New England during the Civil War.
  10. Sorrowful Jones – Paramount’s top funnyman, Bob Hope, starred as the titular bookie who must play papa when a customer leaves his four-year-old daughter as collateral for a bet and then is bumped off by gangsters. Based on the Damon Runyon short story “Little Miss Marker”–which was also made into movies in 1934, 1962, and 1980–this breezy comedy also starred Lucille Ball in the first of four films she would make opposite Old Ski-Snoot.