The DVD Report #179: October 26, 2010

Adaptations were the thing at the 1961 Oscars. Of the five films nominated for Best Picture, two were adaptations of Broadway musicals, twowere from best-selling novels and one was based on an acclaimed teleplay.

The most eagerly awaited film of the year was Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’ adaptation of the Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim musical, West Side Story, a modern day version of Romeo and Juliet with a Polish-American boy (Richard Beymer) and a Puerto Rican girl (Natalie Wood) as the star-crossed lovers.

The anticipation paid off with big box office receipts and 11 Oscar nominations including Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor George Chakiris as Natalie’s gang-leader brother and Supporting Actress Rita Moreno as his girl. It won ten, losing only Best Adapted Screenplay, which was awarded to Abby Mann for adapting his own teleplay for Judgment at Nuremberg.

Nuremberg, which had also been nominated for 11 Oscars, was thought be West Side Story’s toughest competition. Among its nominations were those for Best Director Stanley Kramer and two for Best Actor (Spencer Tracy as the American judge presiding over the Nuremberg trials, and Maximilian Schell as the German defense attorney.

Also in the cast were Marlene Dietrich, Richard Widmark, Burt Lancaster and supporting nominees Montgomery Clift and Judy Garland. Clift and Garland were nominated for what were essentially cameos as victims of the Nazis.

Schell was the film’s only other winner aside from Mann.

Nominated for nine Oscars, Robert Rossen’s The Hustler won two for its Black-and-White Art Direction and Cinematography. It has also been nominated for Best Director, Actor (Paul Newman as pool hustler Fast Eddie), Actress (Piper Laurie as his girl, the lame Sarah), Supporting Actor (Jackie Gleason as the legendary Minnesota Fats) and a second Supporting Actor (George C. Scott as gangster Bert Gordon). Newman would reprise his famous role here to an actual Oscar a quarter of century later in Martin Scorsee’s The Color of Money.

The Special Effects Oscar was the only win for J. Lee Thompson’s The Guns of Navarone out of the seven it was nominated for. Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn led the cast of the World War II high adventure taken form Alistair MacLean’s monumental bestseller. Irene Papas, James Darren and Gia Scala were also in the cast.

Marcel Pagnol’s Fanny trilogy of the 1930s was the source material for Harold Rome’s Broadway musical of the same name. Joshua Logan’s film version kept the score but inexplicably canned the lyrics, strange considering the film reunited Gigi’ssinging stars, Leslie Caron and Maurice Chevalier, along with Charles Boyer and Horst Buchholz in the principal roles.
Nominated for five Oscars including Best Director and Actor (Charles Boyer as Cesar), the film was the only one of the five Best Picture nominees to go home empty-handed. Caron and Chevalier had been nominated for Golden Globes as the title character and Panisse, the elderly store owner she marries on the rebound when Cesar’s son, Marius (Buchholz) runs off to sea unknowingly leaving Fanny pregnant.

Films outside of the top five garnering Oscars attention included La Dolce Vita; Breakfast at Tiffany’s; A Majority of One; One, Two, Three; Two Women; Splendor in the Grass; Summer and Smoke and The Children’s Hour.

An Oscar winner for Best Black-and-White Costume Design, Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita was nominated for three other Oscars including Best Director. The film for which Fellini coined the term “paparazzi” – Italian for sparrows – his name for the reporters and photographers swarming the famous in modern Rome. Marcello Mastroianni was the reporter through whose eyes we get to see a world we’d never seen before.

Nominated for five Oscars including Best Actress Audrey Hepburn, Blake Edwards’ Breakfast at Tiffany’s won two for Henry Mancini’s score and for the year’s Best Song, Mancini and Johnny Mercer’s “Moon River”. George Peppard, Patricia Neal and Buddy Ebsen were also memorable in the cleaned up version of Truman Capote’s memoir about a call girl. Though a favorite of romantics and cat lovers the world over, the film loses a few points for Mickey Rooney’s atrocious impersonation of Hepburn’s Japanese-American neighbor.

Rosalind Russell as a Jewish-American widow and Alec Guinness, eons removed from Rooney’s impersonation, as a Japanese businessman, played two people who find common ground in Mervyn LeRoy’s A Majority of One. Nominated for Best Color Cinematography, Russell won her fourth Golden Globe for Best Actress, her second of three for a comedic performance.

James Cagney had one of his best roles in years as a Coca-Cola executive stationed in West Berlin in Billy Wilder’s rapid fire dialogue comedy, One, Two, Three featuring memorable supporting performances from Horst Buchholz, Arlene Francis and Lilo Pulver. The film was nominated for Best Black-and-White Cinematography.

Sophia Loren won the year’s Best Actress award for her superb portrayal of a woman devastated by the war in Vittorio De Sica’s World War II drama, Two Women. The other woman was Eleanora Brown who played her young daughter. Jean-Paul Belmondo co-starred.

Loren’s competition, in addition to the previously mentioned Audrey Hepburn and Piper Laurie, included powerhouse performances from both Natalie Wood and Geraldine Page.

Wood starred as the high school girl whose unrequited love for Warren Beatty in Elia Kazan’s film of William Inge’s Splendor in the Grass drives her to madness. Pat Hingle and Audrey Christie co-starred. Inge won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

Page returned to films for the first time in eight years to play the repressed spinster in Peter Glenville’s film of Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke. The film was also nominated for Best Color Art Direction, Best Score and Best Supporting Actress (Una Merkel as Page’s kleptomaniac mother). Laurence Harvey co-starred as the object of Page’s affection.

Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine and James Garner starred in William Wyler’s second film version of Lilian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, previously made as These Three with Merle Oberon, Miriam Hopkins and Joel McCrea. Hopkins, who had MacLaine’s role in the original, was back to play that character’s aunt. The film was nominated for five Oscars including Best Supporting Actress Fay Bainter, who all but steals the film as the grandmother of the brat who makes a false accusation of a lesbian tryst between Hepburn and MacLaine.

Among the major films Oscar failed to recognize were A Raisin in the Sun; Purple Noon; Rocco and His Brothers; The Hoodlum Priest and Two Rode Together.

Daniel Petrie’s film of Lorraine Hansbury’s A Raisin in the Sun may have failed to pick up an Academy endorsement, but it did allow for both Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations for Claudia McNeilas the poor woman who wins a sizeable insurance settlement and Sidney Poitier as the son who has different ideas than his mom on how to spend the money. Ruby Dee won a National Board of Review as Poitier’s wife.

The first film version of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, filmed as Purple Noon, picked up an Edgar Allen Poe award but was otherwise not recognized by any of the major awards givers at the time. A pity, because the film directed by Rene Clement with Alain Delon and Maurice Ronet was even better than its more famous remake.

Delon also had a major role as the title character in Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers, a film that was heavily awarded in Italy and received two BAFTA nominations as well.

The story follows the travails of a widow (Katina Paxinou) and her sons, including Delon, who move to Milan where her eldest son is already established. Renato Salvatore as one of the brothers and Annie Girradot as a prostitute made major impressions.

Don Murray had his best starring role as the real life priest who administers to prison inmates in Irvin Kershner’s The Hoodlum Priest, but the film’s biggest impact was made by Keir Dullea as a prisoner on death row. The film won an award at Cannes.

Although it pretty much fell between the cracks at the time, John Ford’s Two Rode Together has since been acknowledged as one of the director’s great late career films. James Stewart, Richard Widmark and Shirley Jones star in the film which further explores themes set in motion in Ford’s The Searchers, namely that ofthe plight of children kidnapped by Indians and raised as such.

All films discussed have been released on DVD in the U.S. except, oddly enough, Two Rode Together.

Among this week’s new DVD releases are the Blu-ray debuts of Paths of Glory, the Back to the Future trilogy and the Alien Anthology as well as the breakout hit, Winter’s Bone.

-Peter J. Patrick (October 26, 2010)

The DVD Report #178: October 19, 2010

Mature themes prevailed at the 1960 Oscars.

An insurance clerk who provides his bosses with a cozy nest for their extra-marital trysts, a phony evangelist, an agnostic attorney providing comeuppance to a fundamentalist politician, a twisted transvestite killer, a mother with incestuous feelings for her son, a homosexual author, a male rape survivor, and prostitutes, prostitutes, and more prostitutes, provided some of the year’s most talked about performances, some of which were nominated for Oscars, some of which even won, all of which still resonate with audiences today.

Sex was a major theme in three of the year’s Best Picture nominees.

Jack Lemmon was the insurance clerk who climbs his way to the top of the corporate ladder by lending out his key to his bosses in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. It takes the suicide attempt of the elevator girl (Shirley MacLaine) he’s smitten with to wise him up. Fred MacMurray and Ray Walston co-star in the film which was nominated for ten Oscars and won five including Best Picture, Director and Screenplay, all of which were awarded to producer-director-writer Wilder. He shared the screenplay award with co-writer I.A.L. Diamond. Lemmon and MacLaine had to be content with mere nominations.

The Apartment shared Best Picture honors with Jack Cardiff’s film of D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers at the New York Film Critics Awards, the only Best Picture tie in that body’s history. Its Best Picture Oscar nomination was inevitable.

Wendy Hiller was the smother-mother with incestuous feelings for son Dean Stockwell who learns about sex from married suffragette Mary Ure. Trevor Howard as Stockwell’s gruff father and Ms. Ure were the film’s acting nominees in a total of seven nods given the film. The film won Best Black-and-White Cinematography for Freddie Francis.

Oddly enough, Sons and Lovers has never been released on home video in the U.S.

Burt Lancaster brought Sinclair Lewis’ phony evangelist to life in Richard Brooks’ film version of Elmer Gantry, the first Hollywood film since the pre-Code era to tackle sex and religious hypocrisy but gave the faithful someone to root for in Jean Simmons’ true believer. Nominated for five Oscars including Best Picture, it won three for Brooks (Best Screenplay), Lancaster and Shirley Jones as the prostitute Gantry “rammed the fear of God” into. The film also contains fine supporting turns by Dean Jagger as Simmons’ mentor and Arthur Kennedy as a cynical reporter.

The other two Best Picture nominees were family films. In the case of Fred Zinnemann’s The Sundowners, that was literally the case as we follow the lives of itinerant sheep drover Robert Mitchum, his wife, Deborah Kerr and son, Michael Anderson, Jr.

Kerr and Anderson want to settle down, Mitchum doesn’t, in this highly entertaining film for which the luminous Kerr won her third New York Film Critics Award and her sixth Oscar nomination, setting a new record for non-winning acting nominations. Nominated for five Oscars, the film went home empty-handed although co-star Peter Ustinov won for a different film. Glynis Johns won her only nomination as an innkeeper.

John Wayne received his first official credit as director for The Alamo, a by-the-numbers western that was popular at the time. It was nominated for seven Oscars including Best Picture and won one for Best Sound.

Far better than The Alamo were a number of fine films that deserved the last slot more. Among the best were Psycho, Inherit the Wind, Home From the Hill, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, Sunrise at Campobello, Tunes of Glory, The Trials of Oscar Wilde, Wild River, Spartacus and Exodus.

Alfred Hitchcock won his fifth and final Oscar nomination for Psycho, the film that redefined the horror film for generations. Still virulently creepy fifty years on, the film received a total of four nominations, but no wins. Janet Leigh was nominated for her iconic portrayal of the woman on the run who ends up at the Bates Motel, but there was no nomination for Anthony Perkins whose subsequent career was forever in debt to his twisted transvestite killer. Although always intended as an A picture, Hitch deliberately filmed it in black and white on Universal’s back lot with his television crew to give it an eerie B picture look..

Spencer Tracy and Fredric March were, at the time, two of only three two time Best Actor Oscar winners (the third was Gary Cooper). Working together for the first time, they triumphed as fictional versions of legendary defense attorney Clarence Darrow and three time Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan in Stanley Kramer’s film of Inherit the Wind, the hit Broadway play about the Scopes monkey trial of 1925.

Taken largely from transcripts of the actual trial, both actors excel, particularly in the scene in which Tracy corners a squirming March with questions about Genesis. Tracy: “Where did she come from?” March: “Who?” Tracy: “Mrs. Cain.”

Nominated for four Oscars, including one for Tracy as Best Actor, the film failed to win any.

Robert Mitchum won the National Board of Review Award for his performances in both The Sundowners and Home From the Hill, but failed as usual to receive an Oscar nomination for either film.

Mitchum, Eleanor Parker, George Peppard and George Hamilton are all memorable in Vincente Minnelli’s Home From the Hill, in which Parker and Hamilton are the unhappy wife and son of the brutish Mitchum, while Peppard, also a National Board of Review winner, as Mitchum’s older illegitimate provides is the film’s moral center.

Delbert Mann’s film of William Inge’s The Dark at the Top of the Stairs provided meaty roles for Robert Preston as a philandering salesman, Dorothy McGuire as his repressed wife, Eve Arden as her bigoted sister, Angela Lansbury as Preston’s mistress and Shirley Knight and Lee Kinsolving as star-crossed young lovers. Only Knight won an Oscar nomination. This is oddly another fine film that has never been released on home video in the U.S. or anywhere else for that matter.

Greer Garson won the National Board of Review Award, a Golden Globe and her seventh Oscar nomination for her moving portrayal of Eleanor Roosevelt in Vincent J. Donehue’s film version of Sunrise at Campobello. The film was nominated for four Oscars, but none, alas, for Ralph Bellamy reprising his Tony winning role as FDR.

John Mills and Alec Guinness, who switched roles in pre-production to play against type as the quiet Army colonel and garrulous replacement in Ronald Neame’s Tunes of Glory,showed us once again what great acting is all about.

Dueling biopics about “the love that dare not speak its name” gave us Robert Morley in Oscar Wilde and Peter Finch in The Trials of Oscar Wilde, for which he won a Bafta as Best British Actor. Nominated for five Baftas including Best British Film and Supporting Actor (John Fraser), Trials was easily the better of the two films, the first to deal openly with homosexuality on screen even it was about events that occurred more than half a century earlier. Neither film has been released on DVD in the U.S.

Although it pretty much fell between the cracks in its initial release, Elia Kazan’s Wild Riverhas subsequently been acclaimed as one of the director’s best films. Montgomery Clift stars as a Tennessee Valley Authority agent whose job it is to convince 80 year-old Jo Van Fleet to move off her property before it is flooded by the building of a dam. Lee Remick plays the old lady’s grand-daughter with whom he has an affair. Van Fleet’s is absolutely amazing as the cantankerous old lady. The film, previously unavailable on DVD in the U.S., is being released by Fox as part of next month’s Kazan box set.

An entertaining, if somewhat overlong epic, Stanley Kubrick’s film of Spartacus was nominated for six Oscars and won four including one for Peter Ustinov as Best Supporting Actor. Personally I prefer Ustinov in The Sundowners, but he does manage to hold his own amidst a galaxy of fine performers including Kirk Douglas, Laurence Olivier, Jean Simmons and Charles Laughton.

Ernest Gold’s Oscar winning score and Sal Mineo’s Oscar nominated portrayal of the boy who was “used like a woman” were the best things about Otto Preminger’s film of Leon Uris’ mammoth Exodus. The epic about the founding of the state of Israel is often fascinating if overlong. The sterling cast also includes Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint, Ralph Richardson and Lee J. Cobb.

Other films of note include Pollyanna for which Hayley Mills received the last SpecialOscar awarded child stars; Bells Are Ringing with Judy Holliday reprising her Tony award winning role as a lovesick telephone answering service operator; Never on Sunday with Melina Mercouri Oscar nominated as a happy-go-lucky prostitute and BUtterfield 8, a trashy melodrama that won Elizabeth Taylor her first Oscar playing the “slut of all time”.

All films except those noted have been released on DVD in the U.S.

This week’s new DVD releases include the Blu-ray debuts of Psycho, Apocalypse Now, Moulin Rouge! and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

-Peter J. Patrick (October 19, 2010)

The DVD Report #177: October 12, 2010

Oscar turned to religion in 1959 for three of its five Best Picture nominees – Ben-Hur, The Nun’s Story and The Diary of Anne Frank. This was not at all surprising given that there was a new religious fervor in the world following the election of “Good Pope John” or Pope John XXIII, the former Bishop of Venice who was the first Pope to acknowledge Jews as “brothers”. Indeed while the previous Pope (Pius XII) was often criticized for not doing enough to help the Jews during World War II, John’s many efforts to save Jewish and other refugees from the Holocaust have been well documented.

MGM’s spectacular film of Gen. Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel, Ben-Hur was actually the third film version of the epic tale. There had been a one-reeler in 1910 as well as the earlier MGM version in 1925 with Ramon Navarro and Francis X. Bushman under the direction of Fred Niblo.

Winner of a record eleven Oscars, the third version, directed by William Wyler, was filmed at Cinecitta Studios in Rome and at various other locations in Italy. Charlton Heston was named the year’s Best Actor in the title role of the Jewish nobleman who becomes a Roman slave, then hero and finally an early convert to Christianity. Stephen Boyd was Massala, his childhood friend and later enemy. The film’s centerpiece, the famed chariot sequence, took three months to film.

Among the film’s other Oscars were those for Best Picture, Director and Supporting Actor, Hugh Griffith as Sheik Ilderim. Jack Hawkins as Ben-Hur’s noble benefactor, Martha Scott as his mother and Cathy O’Donnell as his sister co-starred.

Audrey Hepburn gave the performance of her career as Sister Luke, the real life nun who questioned the neutrality of her order during World War II in Fred Zinnemann’s film of Kathryn Hulme’s The Nun’s Story.

The film has several memorable set pieces including Hepburn’s struggles in becoming a nun, her first assignment in a mental hospital, her eventual fulfillment of her lifelong wish to serve as a nurse in the Congo, and ultimately her return to the mother house and her decision to leave the convent.

Hepburn is magnificent throughout, supported by a gallery of brilliant players including Peter Finch as a lay doctor in the Congo, Edith Evans as the Mother Abbess of her order, Peggy Ashcroft as her Superior in the Congo, Dean Jagger as her father, Mildred Dunnock as the Mistress of Postulants, Beatrice Straight as her Superior in the Sanatorium, Patricia Collinge as a teaching nun, Ruth White as a martyred nun in the Congo and Colleen Dewhurst as a deranged mental patient.

Nominated for eight Oscars, the film failed to win any, although Hepburn won the New York Film Critics’ Award and Evans the National Board of Review Award. Both were nominated for Golden Globes and Hepburn for an Oscar as well.

Based n the real life diary of a young Jewish girl in hiding in Amsterdam until she and her family were caught and sent to concentration camps, George Stevens’ film of The Diary of Anne Frank is a warm, touching and moving drama of lives under constant threat. Yet, like Anne’s diary itself, the film is never maudlin.

Millie Perkins makes a memorable screen debut as Anne and Joseph Schildkraut repeats his acclaimed Broadway portrayal of Mr. Frank. Strong impressions are also provided by Diane Baker as Anne’s sister, Margot, Richard Beymer as their friend Peter Van Daan, Oscar winner Shelley Winters and Lou Jacobi as Peter’s parents and Oscar nominee Ed Wynn as an elderly refugee.

Nominated for eight Oscars, it won three, including awards for Best Black-and-White Cinematography and Art Direction, in addition to the one for Ms. Winters.

There was no religion in Oscar’s two remaining nominees, Anatomy of a Murder and Room at the Top.

Based on the best-selling novel, Otto Preminger’s film of Anatomy of a Murder was a searing study of a small town lawyer who defends a man accused of murdering the man who allegedly raped his wife.

Set to star James Stewart and Lana Turner, the film made headlines when Turner quit the film in a dispute over her wardrobe. Replaced by Lee Remick, the film was buzzed about for months before it opened.

James Stewart, in one of his best performances, was the perfect choice for the shy, yet brilliantly effective small town lawyer who got to say words like “panties” and “semen” on screen without having shocked 50s audiences giggle.

The superb cast also includes Ben Gazzara as the man on trial, Eve Arden and Arthur O’Connell as Stewart’s assistants, George C. Scott as the prosecutor, Kathryn Grant as a forthright witness and legendary Army vs. McCarthy lawyer Joseph N. Welch as the Judge.

Nominated for seven Oscars including acting nods for Stewart, O’Connell and Scott, the film won none. Stewart did, however, win his second New York Film Critics Award, his first since Mr. Smith Goes to Washington twenty years earlier.

One of the best of Britain’s angry young men or “kitchen sink” dramas as they were called, Jack Clayton’s Room at the Top starred Laurence Harvey as a social climbing executive in a small town who seeks to advance his career by marrying the boss’s daughter played by Heather Sears. In the meantime he has an affair with an older woman, played by Simone Signoret, whose heart he breaks.

Signoret won the Oscar while Harvey and Hermione Baddeley in a bit role as Signoret’s friend were nominated. The film, which was nominated for a total of six Oscars, also won for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Perhaps the best film not nominated for Best Picture, Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot did win one for Best Black-and-White Costume Design. Nominated for a total of six Oscars, Jack Lemmon accounted for the film’s only acting nod as one of two musicians disguised as women on the run from gangsters. There were no nominations for Tony Curtis as the other one, Marilyn Monroe as the ditzy singer and band member who falls for Curtis’ Cary Grant impressions or Joe E. Brown as the millionaire who chases Lemmon and utters one of the most famous closing lines in film history.

Completely ignored in the major categories, Alfred Hitchcock’s brilliant North by Northwest received only three technical nominations and no wins. Cary Grant had one of his best roles ever as a businessman mistaken for a government agent. Eva Marie Saint and James Mason co-starred in the film with such unforgettable set pieces as a murder at the U.N; a crop dusting plane chasing Grant and the climactic escape over the faces of the Presidents on Mount Rushmore.

Elizabeth Taylor and Katharine Hepburn had the rare distinction of being nominated in the lead actress category for the same film, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’ adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly, Last Summer. Hepburn, in a rare villainous portrayal, is the cold, manipulative rich bitch who seeks to have niece Taylor lobotomized to prevent her from spreading stories about how her son, Taylor’s cousin, died. Montgomery Clift is the doctor who steps in to prevent the unthinkable.

Lana Turner was the star, but Juanita Moore and Susan Kohner were the Oscar nominees in Douglas Sirk’s remake of Imitation of Life. Although the 1934 original with Claudette Colbert, Louise Beavers and Fredi Washington evenly balanced the white and black characters, Sirk’s version was clearly on the side of the latter and against the shallowness of the former. Moore’s beaten down maid was also nominated for a Golden Globe while Kohner’s race denying daughter won that trophy.

Doris Day’s already legendary career moved in a new direction with the smash hit comedy, Pillow Talk, prompting former co-star Oscar Levant to quip that he knew Doris “before she became a virgin”, which only helped her film opposite Rock Hudson become even more popular. Day won her only Oscar nomination for it while co-star Thelma Ritter won her fifth as her alcoholic maid. The film won an Oscar for its Original Screenplay, one of its total of five nominations.

Directed by veteran Vincent Sherman, The Young Philadelphians gave us a rare look into the machinations of Philadelphia law firms, providing major acting opportunities for Paul Newman, Barbra Rush, Brian Keith, Dianne Foster and veteran Billie Burke, but it was newcomer Robert Vaughn who won the film’s only acting nomination. It was nominated for two other Oscars as well.

Nominated for two Oscars, Stanley Kramer’s end-of-the-world melodrama, On the Beach starred Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Anthony Perkins and Fred Astaire in his first dramatic role.

All films discussed have been released on DVD in the U.S., although the long out-of-print Room at the Top may be difficult to track down.

This week’s new DVD releases include the animated How to Train Your Dragon and the art house hit, I Am Love starring Tilda Swinton.

-Peter J. Patrick (October 12, 2010)

The DVD Report #176: October 5, 2010

1958 was an interesting year at the Oscars. The two films now regarded as the greatest of the year, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil were not on Oscar’s short list. Nevertheless some very good films were.

Oscar chose to embrace, instead, Morton Da Costa’s film of Patrick Dennis’s Auntie Mame; Richard Brooks’ film of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Stanley Kramer’s race relations drama, The Defiant Ones; Vincente Minnelli’s charming musical Gigi and Delbert Mann’s film of Terrene Rattigan’s Separate Tables. All but The Defiant Ones had stage origins, although it wasn’t Colette’s obscure stage play that drew audiences to Gigi, but the fact that its score was by Lerner & Lowe, the composers responsible for My Fair Lady, then in its third year on Broadway and a long way from being able to be filmed. Gigi, starring Leslie Caron, Maurice Chevalier, Louis Jourdan and Hermione Gingold was nominated for nine Oscars and won all of them.

Rosalind Russell was so identified with the role of Patrick Dennis’s irrepressible aunt Auntie Mame that audiences forever after confused her with the real woman based on Dennis’ real-life eccentric aunt. The laugh-a-minute film was nominated for six Oscars, including one for Roz and Peggy Cass as Agnes Gooch, but, alas, none for Coral Browne as Vera Charles. Forrest Tucker, Patric Knowles, Roger Smith, Joanna Barnes, Lee Patrick and Pippa Scott were also memorable in other roles.

Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman and Burl Ives burned up the screen as Maggie, Brick and Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Toned down somewhat to comply with the Hollywood Production Code, then still in force, the film still sizzles. Nominated for six Oscars including ones for both Taylor and Newman, Ives, thought a shoo-in for Best Supporting Actor could not be nominated in that category as MGM listed him as lead under Academy rules in effect at the time. Happily for Ives, he had another film he could be nominated for in that category – see below.

Nominated for seven Oscars, the ingeniously re-written Separate Tables intertwined the two separate stories of the original and split the four leading roles among four actors instead of two. David Niven won an Oscar as a phony retired Army major and Wendy Hiller won one as well as the hotel manager. Deborah Kerr was nominated for her portrayal of a repressed spinster, but Gladys Cooper, who my opinion steals the film from everyone else as Kerr’s bitchy mother, was shockingly overlooked. Rita Hayworth and Burt Lancaster were also starred.

Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier were escaped prisoners, one white, one black, who escape together from a Southern chain gang and must overcome their hatred for one another to survive in The Defiant Ones. Nominated for nine Oscars including one each for Curtis and Poitier, as well as co-stars Theodore Bikel and Cara Williams, the film won two for its Back-and-White Cinematography and for its Original Screenplay.

More than any of these, though as I said at the outset, the two most highly regarded films of the year were Vertigo and Touch of Evil.

Filmed largely on location in San Francisco and the San Francisco Bay Area, the locations used in Hitchcock’s Vertigo have all become tourist destinations. Nominated for only two Oscars, Best Art Direction and Best Sound, it won neither. The only other major recognition it received was a Best Director nomination for Hitchcock form the Directors Guild. Ironically when the film was re-issued in 1996 it was given a Special Award from the New York Film Critics as the year’s “most distinguished re-issue”. The film is rightly renown as one of Hitchcock’s most mesmerizing thrillers feautirng one James Stewart’s best performances and Kim Novak’s bet by far.

Receiving no nominations and no awards of any kind in its day, Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil received a Special Award from the New York Film Critics when it was re-released in a “re-worked “edition” in 1998. The ‘re-worked edtion’ was largely comprised of an opening tracking shot excised from the original release print. The late film noir starred Chrlon Heston, Janet Leigh, Marlene Dietrich, Joseph Calleia, Akim Tamiroff and Welles himself, allin outstanding performances.

Among the other important films of the year were I Want to Live!; The Last Hurrah; The Big Country; Damn Yankees and South Pacific.

Susan Hayward won her fifth Oscar nomination and her first and only Oscar for her portrayal of convicted murderess Barbara Graham in Robert Wise’s I Want to Live! Hayward’s final scenes in the film are among the most gut-wrenching ever captured on film.

John Ford made a rare film about contemporary politics in his films of Edwin O’Connor’s best-seller, The Last Hurrah. Starring Spencer Tracy in one of his best roles as an old-style politician facing a sleek, slick TV era newcomer in the showdown for his city’s mayoral race, Ford surrounds Tracy with a gallery of familiar faces – Jeffrey Hunter as Tracy’s nephew, Pat O’Brien, Donald Crisp, James Gleason, Wallace Ford, Edward Brophy and Ricardo Cortez as Tracy’s cronies, Jane Darwell as an old lady who shows up at everyone’s wakes and Basil Rathbone and John Carradine as Tracy’s long time political foes. They’re all given a moment or two in the spotlight, but Tracy is very much the glue that holds it all together.

Burl Ives’ Oscar nomination and his Oscar came for William Wyler’s The Big Country in which he plays a sort of Big Daddy of the range in this stirring western also starring Gregory Peck, Jean Simmons, Carroll Baker, Charlton Heston and Charles Bickford.

Tab Hunter was given lead role of the younger version of a middle-aged baseball fan in the Hollywood version of Adler and Ross’s Damn Yankees which otherwise kept its Broadway cast. Among them were Gwen Verdon as the devil’s chief temptress and Ray Walston as the devil himself.

Director Joshua Logan made some strange choices in filming the musical sequences in Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific with garish color filters marring the beauty of Leon Shamroy’s cinematography. The core, however, still shines through. Mitzi Gaynor, Rossano Brazzi, John Kerr, Ray Walston, Juanita Hall and Frances Nuyen were starred.

All films discussed have been released on DVD in the U.S.

New DVD releases this week include the Blu-ray debuts of two Oscar nominated classics, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and William Friedkin’s The Exorcist.

-Peter J. Patrick (October 5, 2010)