Conventional wisdom says that The Sound of Music was such a huge hit in 1965 because everything else around it was dark and dreary and generally disappointing. Maybe so, but that doesn’t explain the film’s enduring popularity with succeeding generations in all parts of the world.

Rodgers and Hammerstein had tackled many bold subjects in their long careers, from mixed marriage in Show Boat (Hammerstein) to unapologetic raging sexuality in Pal Joey (Rodgers) to racial prejudice in South Pacific and spousal abuse in The King and I, the latter two together. By the end of the 1950s, shortly before Hammerstein’s death from cancer, they had nothing left to prove. The result was their most relaxed effort. While the stage version of The Sound of Music was good, it was the film version that became their masterwork.

Often sentimental, but never cloying, the tale of the postulant nun who becomes a nanny and then a wife and mother was only the first part of Maria Von Trapp’s intriguing life story, but it was enough for us to get a look at one of the Twentieth Century’s most amazing personalities.

Never mind that the real Maria looked more like Peggy Wood (who plays the Mother Abbess in the film) than Julie Andrews, Julie and she were kindred spirits and Julie beguiles from beginning to end.

Nominated for ten Oscars, it won five, including Best Picture and Director, Robert Wise. Both Andrews and Wood were nominated, but lost to other performers.

Another 1965 film that had lots of fans at the time was David Lean’s film of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Eschewing much of the political turmoil that made the book an international best-seller, Lean focuses on the romance between Zhivago and Lara (Omar Sharif and Julie Christie). The results are mixed, but the film’s glorious score and breathtaking cinematography, both of which won Oscars, are unforgettable.

Like The Sound of Music, Doctor Zhivago was nominated for ten Oscars and won five. Tom Courtnay as Christie’s militant husband was the only actor singled out for a nomination.

A must-read novel of the day, Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools was made into an all-star cast film by Stanley Kramer. The tale of a fateful voyage from Mexico to Germany on board a German ship in 1933 provided stellar roles for Oscar nominees Oskar Werner, Simone Signoret and Michal Dunn, as well as Vivien Leigh, Lee Marvin and Heinz Ruhmann. Leigh as a disillusioned matron, Signoret as a drug-addicted countess and Werner as the ship’s doctor come off best.

Nominated for eight Oscars, Ship of Fools won two for its black-and-white art direction and cinematography.

A social observation of its time, John Schlesinger’s Darling is remembered today as the film that won Julie Christie her Oscar in a close race with the other Julie (Andrews). If the trappings of the swinging London of the sixties seem somehow quaint now, Christie’s stunning performance as a model who sleeps her way to the top, still holds up. Laurence Harvey and Dirk Bogarde co-star.

Darling was nominated for five Oscars and won three, including one for its screenplay.

A matter of taste, then as now, Fred Coe’s film of Herb Gardner’s quirky Broadway play, A Thousand Clowns, somehow managed to snag Oscar’s fifth slot.

Jason Robards starred as a verbose non-conformist raising impressionable nephew Barry Gordon, with Martin Balsam in an Oscar winning performance as Robards’ disapproving, conventional brother. It was the film’s only win out of four nominations. Barbara Harris also starred.

Other films receiving Oscar’s attention this year include The Eleanor Roosevelt Story; Woman in the Dunes; The Collector; A Patch of Blue; Cat Ballou; The Spy Who Came in From the Cold; The Pawnbroker; Othello; The Agony and the Ecstasy; Shenandoah and The Flight of the Phoenix,but not Young Cassidy.

I don’t usually comment on documentaries, but The Eleanor Roosevelt Story, written by Archibald Macleish and narrated by Macleish, Eric Servereid and Mrs. Francis Cole, is a special case. The National Board of Review singled it out the year’s Best Picture. Oscar endorsed it as the year’s Best Documentary.

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) was born into wealth and privilege, the niece of future president Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909), so documentary footage of her entire life was available to the filmmakers. Her future husband, Franklin Roosevelt (President from 1933-1945) was her fifth cousin. A lifelong crusader for human rights, particularly women’s rights, she was appointed delegate to the UN General Assembly (1945-1952) by her husband’s successor, Harry Truman, who called her the First Lady of the World. At the time of her death she was chair of John F. Kennedy’s Presidential Commission on the Status of Women. Her unique life was more dramatic than anything fictional filmmakers could make up.

A nominee for Best Foreign Film the previous year, Hiroshi Teshigahara became the first Japanese director nominated for Best Director when his Woman in the Dunes became eligible for Oscar consideration in other categories this year. It’s an eerie, haunting, horror film like no other, about an entomologist trapped in a sand dune with a woman he slowly realizes he will be forced to spend the rest of his life with. Eiji Okada and Kyoko Kishida starred.

The English language equivalent of Woman in the Dunes may well have been The Collector from John Fowles’ novel about a butterfly collector who decides to expand to human conquests. William Wyler won his twelfth and final Oscar nomination his meticulous direction. Terence Stamp was the collector and Samantha Eggar his terrified captive. Eggar and the film’s screenplay were also nominated.

Elizabeth Hartman was a captive of another kind as the blind daughter of a cruel and abusive mother in Guy Green’s A Patch of Blue. She meets Sidney Poitier, a kindly stranger who befriends and tries to help her. The performances of Hartman and Poitier, as well as Wallace Ford as Hartman’s alcoholic grandfather and Shelley Winters her foul-mouthed prostitute mother, are extraordinary. Winters won her second Oscar in support, while Hartman accounted for one of the film’s other four nominations.

Lee Marvin won a rare Oscar for playing comedy in a dual role as a famous gunslinger and his brother with a missing nose in Elliot Silverstein’s Cat Ballou. The film, which also starred Jane Fonda, was nominated for an additional four Oscars.

Marvin’s competition, in addition to his Ship of Fools co-star Oskar Werner, included Richard Burton, Rod Steiger and Laurence Olivier.

Burton had one of his best screen roles as an aging British spy in Martin Ritt’s film of John Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Oskar Werner as his Russian counterpart and Claire Bloom as a woman caught in the middle were equally fine. The film was also nominated for its art direction.

Steiger, who also won kudos this year for his villainous role in Doctor Zhivago, had his most acclaimed role ever as the concentration camp survivor who holds the key to a preventing a current injustice in Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker. The gritty drama also provided Geraldine Fitzgerald and Brock Peters with strong supporting roles.

Olivier’s film of Shakespeare’s Othello, directed by Stuart Burge, was an acting tour-de-force, winning all four of the film’s stars Oscar nominations. Although Maggie Smith’s Desdemona is probably the best thing about it, her starring role was unceremoniously relegated to the supporting categories along with fellow nominees Frank Finlay and Joyce Redman.

Smith was also the best thing about the non-nominated Young Cassidy, John Ford’s penultimate film. Replaced by Jack Cardiff, due to illness, the film is an actor’s showcase, not only for Smith, but also for Rod Taylor, Julie Christie, Edith Evans and Flora Robson. Taylor plays struggling Irish playwright Sean O’Casey, inexplicably renamed Cassidy for the film. Smith is the librarian who loves him. Never released commercially on home video, it deserves a long overdue DVD release.

Among the performers who were left out of the crowded Best Actor category this year were former winners Rex Harrison and James Stewart, both of whom may have been nominated in less competitive years.

Harrison played the Pope to Charlton Heston’s Michelangelo in Carol Reed’s film of Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy. Although the film centers on the artist, it’s the Pope who has all the best lines and Harrison delivers them with panache. The film was nominated for five Oscars, but none for any of its actors.

Although we didn’t know it at the time, Stewart has his last two great screen roles this year, first as a farmer caught in the middle of the Civil War in Shenandoah, directed by Andrew V. McLaglen, then as the pilot of the downed airplane in Robert Aldrich’s The Flight of the Phoenix.

Shenandoah was nominated for Best Sound, while The Flight of the Phoenix was nominated for Best Editing and Best Supporting Actor, Ian Bannen, who took the slot many had expected to go to Hardy Kruger. Kruger actually gave the film’s best performance as the technical expert who clashes with Stewart, but his refusal to accept a Golden Globe nomination hurt his chances, throwing the nomination Bannen’s way. Bannen had been a Golden Globe nominee for Best Newcomer.

All films discussed have been released on DVD in the U.S. except A Thousand Clowns and Young Cassidy.

New DVD releases this week include the “complete” version of Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece, Metropolis, on both DVD and Blu-ray and the Blu-ray release, several weeks ahead of the DVD release, of Criterion’s mammoth America Lost and Found: The BBS Story,consisting of Head; Easy Rider; Five Easy Pieces; Drive, He Said; The Last Picture Show; The King of Marvin Gardens and A Safe Place.