Best Drama Movies of 1953

Tough cop Dave Bannion takes on a politically powerful crime syndicate.

A weary gunfighter attempts to settle down with a homestead family, but a smouldering settler and rancher conflict forces him to act.

In 1941 Hawaii, a private is cruelly punished for not boxing on his unit's team, while his captain's wife and second in command are falling in love.

In New York City, an insolent pickpocket, Skip McCoy, inadvertently sets off a chain of events when he targets ex-prostitute Candy and steals her wallet. Unaware that she has been making deliveries of highly classified information to the communists, Candy, who has been trailed by FBI agents for months in hopes of nabbing the spy ringleader, is sent by her ex-boyfriend, Joey, to find Skip and retrieve the valuable microfilm he now holds.

The assassination of the would be ruler of Rome at the hands of Brutus and company has tragic consequences for the idealist and the republic.

Unable, due to the seal of the confessional, to be forthcoming with information that would serve to clear himself during a murder investigation, a priest becomes the prime suspect.

Howard Kemp has been tracking killer Ben Vandergroat for a long time. In the Colorado Rockies, he teams up with prospector Jesse Tate and former Union soldier Roy Anderson. Thinking Kemp is a sheriff, they agree to help for a small fee. When they catch Vandergroat, he tells them Kemp is pursuing a $5,000 bounty. After demanding equal shares, the uneasy alliance heads for Kansas as Vandergroat tries to turn them against each other.

Marcellus is a tribune in the time of Christ. He is in charge of the group that is assigned to crucify Jesus. Drunk, he wins Jesus' homespun robe after the crucifixion. He is tormented by nightmares and delusions after the event. Hoping to find a way to live with what he has done, and still not believing in Jesus, he returns to Palestine to try and learn what he can of the man he killed.

The Black Rebels Motorcycle Club ride into the small California town of Wrightsville, eager to raise hell. Brooding gang leader Johnny Strabler takes a liking to Kathie, the daughter of the local lawman, as another club rolls into town.

An ambulance driver gets involved with a rich girl that might have a darker side.

The controlled explosion of an atomic bomb in the Arctic Circle awakens a frozen dinosaur that will wreak havoc in New York City.

Victor Marswell runs a big game trapping company in Kenya. Eloise Kelly is ditched there, and an immediate attraction happens between them. Then Mr. and Mrs. Nordley show up for their gorilla documenting safari. Mrs. Nordley is not infatuated with her husband any more, and takes a liking to Marswell. The two men and two women have some difficulty arranging these emotions to their mutual satisfaction, but eventually succeed.

After their airplane crashes behind enemy lines, four soldiers must survive and try to find a way back to their battalion. However, when they come across a local peasant girl the horrors of war quickly become apparent.

At the start of World War II, Cmdr. Ericson is assigned to convoy escort HMS Compass Rose with inexperienced officers and men just out of training. The winter seas make life miserable enough, but the men must also harden themselves to rescuing survivors of U-Boat attacks, while seldom able to strike back. Traumatic events afloat and ashore create a warm bond between the skipper and his first officer

After a prank makes Joey Norton believe he killed his older brother, he runs away from home and spends the day at Coney Island while his brother tries to find him before their mother gets home.

A former boxer --now taxi driver-- gets mixed up with jewel thieves.

Members of a circus troupe "adopt" Lili Daurier when she finds herself stranded in a strange town. The magician who first comes to her rescue already has romantic entanglements and thinks of her as a little girl. Who can she turn to but the puppets, singing to them her troubles, forgetting that there are puppeteers? A crowd gathers around Lili as she sings. The circus has a new act. She now has a job. Will she get her heart's desire?

In 1910, a wayward mother re-visits the family she deserted.

On the run from the police, an atheist masquerades as a religious icon.

Unhappily married, Julia Sturges decides to go to America with her two children on the Titanic. Her husband, Richard also arranges passage on the luxury liner so as to have custody of their two children. All this fades to insignificance once the ship hits an iceberg.

Elia Kazan's 1953 film stars Fredric March as the owner of an impoverished circus in Communist-ruled Czechoslovokia who plots to flee across the border to freedom, taking his entire troupe of performers and wild animals with him. The cast also includes Gloria Grahame, Terry Moore, Cameron Mitchell, Richard Boone and Adolphe Menjou.

An old king, stepping down from the throne, disinherits his favorite daughter on a mad whim and gives his kingdom to his two older daughters, both of whom prove treacherous.

Deeply distraught that her GI ex-boyfriend plans to marry another woman, Norah Larkin agrees to go out on a date with lothario Harry Prebble. Norah's drunken night out with Prebble ends in a hazily remembered confrontation and the next day a startling discovery: Harry has been murdered, and the police have found Norah's personal effects at the scene. Tipped off to the breaking news, reporter Casey Mayo invites Norah to tell her side of the story.

A woman discovers her husband has another family in another city.

By the early 1900s, the extraordinary Houdini earned an international reputation for his theatrical tricks and daring feats of extrication from shackles, ropes, handcuffs and... Scotland Yard's jails.

Washington hostess Sally Adams becomes a Truman-era US ambassador to a European grand duchy.

A young bride is set to begin her honeymoon aboard a luxury liner. Her happiness does not last when she finds that her husband has disappeared. Trouble is, no one else ever saw him board the ship with her and his name has mysteriously dropped from the passenger list.

The story of Colonel Paul Tibbets, the pilot that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Although unaware of the full potential of this new weapon, he knows that it can do tremendously more damage than any other weapon used before, and that the death toll resulting from it will be huge. He is reluctant to be the person who will end so many lives, but as time goes on, the pressure upon him only increase.

A woman is kidnapped when she goes to get help for her husband who is trapped on a beach with the tide coming in to surely drown him.

When selfish and arrogant millionaire Donald Carson fractures his leg during a desert vacation, his wife, Geraldine, leaves with their friend Joseph Duncan to supposedly get help. However, the two of them are really lovers who are leaving Carson to die in the heat. Slowly, Carson realizes he is on his own and vows revenge on the traitorous couple. Having had a privileged life, Carson must now use his wits to stay alive.

A C-47 transport plane, named the Corsair, makes a forced landing in the frozen wastes of Labrador, and the plane's pilot, Captain Dooley, must keep his men alive in deadly conditions while waiting for rescue.

Escaped convicts hold hostages in a ghost town targeted for a nuclear bomb test.

John Ford weaves three "Judge Priest" stories together to form a good- natured exploration of honour and small-town politics in the South around the turn of the century. Judge William Priest is involved variously in revealing the real identity of Lucy Lake, reliving his Civil War memories, preventing the lynching of a youth and contesting the elections with Yankee Horace K. Maydew.

Chicago cop Johnny Kelly, dissatisfied with his job and marriage, would like to run away with his stripper girlfriend Angel Face, but keeps getting cold feet. During one crowded night, Angel Face decides she's had enough vacillation, and crooked lawyer Biddel has an illegal mission for Johnny that could put him in a financial position to act. But other, conflicting schemes are also in progress...

A young Army nurse, Lt Ruth McGara, newly assigned to the 66th MASH during the Korean War, attracts the sexual attention of the unit's commander Dr. (MAJ) Jed Webbe. Webbe, who has a drinking problem, at first wants a "no strings" relationship. McGara is warned by the other nurses of Webbe's womanizing ways. Despite these initial handicaps, their love flourishes against a background of war, enemy attacks, death and injury. The relationship deepens and uplifts both characters.

A supermodel gets murdered. While investigating the case the story of a waitress turned glamor girl is revealed.

Whitney Cameron is in a quandary: he's attracted to his beautiful sister-in-law, Lynn, but also harbors serious suspicions about her. Her husband, Cameron's brother, died under mysterious circumstances, and now that the death of her stepchild, Polly, has been attributed to poisoning, he suspects that Lynn is after his late brother's estate, and killing everyone in her way.

The mother died under the executioner's axe; the daughter rose to become England's greatest monarch -- the brilliant and cunning Queen Elizabeth I. Jean Simmons portrays young Bess in this rich tapestry of a film that traces the tumultuous, danger-fraught years from Elizabeth's birth to her unexpected ascension to the throne at a mere 25. Charles Laughton reprises his Academy Award®-winning* role as her formidable father Henry VIII. Deborah Kerr plays her last stepmother (and Henry's last of six wives), gentle Catherine Parr. And Simmons' then real-life husband, Stewart Granger, adds heroics as Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour. In a resplendent world of adventure, romance and court intrigue, Young Bess reigns.

Richard Burton plays a Scottish Army officer put in charge of a disparate band of ANZAC troops on the perimeter of Tobruk with the German Army doing their best to dislodge them

Struggling to retain custody of his daughter following his divorce, football coach Steve Williams finds himself embroiled in a recruiting scandal at the tiny Catholic college he is trying to bring back to football respectability.

Mediterranean ferryboat captain Henry St James has things well organized - a loving and very English wife Maud in Gibraltar, and the loving if rather more hot-blooded Mistress, Nita in Tangiers. A perfect life. As long as neither woman decides to follow him to the other port.

Marty Pilletti is a 36-year-old butcher who lives with his mother, who is always asking him why he doesn't find a nice girl and get married. The truth is Marty is lonely and would like nothing better, but he has low self-esteem and admits to his mother that he's ugly and no one wants him. He's tired of going to the Saturday night dance with his buddies and then going home more depressed than he was when the evening started. But at one of those dances he meets Clara. They have a great deal in common but Marty will have to overcome peer pressure if he and Clara are to have a relationship.

A Southern belle (Eleanor Parker) frees a Rebel officer (John Forsythe) and his men from a Union captain's (William Holden) Arizona fort.

The script, which was written on a day-to-day basis as the film was being shot, concerns the adventures of a motley crew of swindlers and ne'er-do-wells trying to lay claim to land rich in uranium deposits in Kenya as they wait in a small Italian port to travel aboard an ill-fated tramp steamer en route to Mombasa.

The true story of Ruth Gordon's early struggles on the road to stage stardom.

Passengers on an ocean liner recall their greatest loves.

A war correspondent who was stationed in Paris during WW II married a French girl who was murdered by the Nazis. After the war he returns to to try to find his son, whom he lost during a bombing raid but has been told is living in an orphanage in Paris.

Peter Kuban, a Hungarian refugee, is about to be deported after jumping ship in New York harbor. He needs to find an ex-G.I named Tom whom he helped during the war, as Tom can prove Peter's right to legal entry in the United States. If he can't find Tom within 24 hours and prove his case, he will be branded a fugitive and will be permanently disqualified for U.S. citizenship.

Shrimpers and oilmen clash when an ambitious wildcatter begins constructing an off-shore oilrig.