Big widescreen color epics were king of the box office from 1953-1955, but not the Oscars where black-and-white prevailed. With the 1956 awards, Oscar joined the party. Only one more black-and-white film would win Oscar’s big prize and that wouldn’t be until 1960.

The nominees this year were all big ones – Mike Todd’s spectacular and spectacularly hyped Around the World in 80 Days; William Wyler’s hearty, homespun Quaker western, Friendly Persuasion; George Stevens’ sprawling modern western, Giant; the lavish Rodgers & Hammerstein musical, The King and I and Cecil B. DeMille’s years-in-the-making spectacle, The Ten Commandments.

The second film made in the 70mm process called Todd-AO, co-owned by producer Todd and American Optical, Todd’s film of Jules Verne’s classic Around the World in 80 Days was even more of an event film than the first projected in this process – Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! Going to the see the film in its initial reserved seat engagements was like going to the circus or the zoo – a really special event. The excitement was palpable and impossible to comprehend by anyone whose first encounter with the film was on a small TV screen in later years.

Todd invented the term “cameo” to entice then major stars to appear in small roles in the film in support of David Niven, Cantinflas, Robert Newton and Shirley MacLaine. Among them were Frank Sinatra, Marlene Dietrich, Noel Coward, Fernandel, Charles Boyer, Ronald Colman, Peter Lorre, Charles Coburn, Red Skelton, Beatrice Lillie, Joe E. Brown, Buster Keaton and even Edward R. Murrow. Part of the fun was in spotting the star. Nominated for eight Oscars, it went into the race the clear favorite and won five including Best Picture and Best Screenplay.

One of the screenplay winners was John Farrow, who was the film’s initial director. He had been fired by Todd and replaced by Michael Anderson.

Based on a best-seller by Jessamyn West, a second cousin of then Vice President Richard Nixon, the gentle hero of Friendly Persuasion,played by Gary Cooper, was based on their great-grandfather.

The beautifully shot film with its memorable soundtrack gave Cooper one of his most atypical roles. He plays a pacifist Quaker who refuses to give in to the violence all around him during the Civil War. It’s also one of his best performances. Dorothy McGuire as his fretful wife and Anthony Perkins as his teenage son, torn between what he has been taught and what he thinks is right, are also effectively cast. McGuire won the National Board of Review award as the year’s Best Actress, Cooper and Marjorie Main, in full Ma Kettle mode as a neighbor, were nominated for Golden Globes and Perkins accounted for one of the film’s six Oscar nominations. Alas, it didn’t win any.

Edna Ferber, whose previously filmed works included Cimarron and Show Boat, provided another best-selling novel ripe for adaptation with Giant, the story of a Texas family rich in oil. Rock Hudson is the titled giant, tall in stature, tall in might and tall in moral values. Elizabeth Taylor is his long suffering wife, James Dean a troublesome former employee, now a rich oilman in his own right, Carroll Baker and Dennis Hopper his and Taylor’s offspring, Sal Mineo a troubled kid and Mercedes McCambridge his bitter sister. Nominated for ten Oscars including two for Best Actor (Hudson, Dean), the film won only one, but it was a big one – George Stevens as Best Director.

One of the most beloved stage musicals of all time, Rodgers & Hammerstein’s The King and I was brought to the screen virtually intact with Yul Brynner reprising his star making triumph as the King of Siam and Deborah Kerr, in for the late Gertrude Lawrence, as Mrs. Anna, whose tale was told on the screen ten years earlier sans music as Anna and the King of Siam with Irene Dunne and Rex Harrison. Nominated for nine Oscars, it won five including one for Yul Brynner as Best Actor.

Brynner was also one of the stars of the fifth Best Picture nominee, The Ten Commandments,as Rameses, the Egyptian ruler and Moses’ nemesis. Both he and Charlton Heston as Moses gave strong, resilient performances that were as big as the epic they were starring in. Certainly there was more chemistry between Heston and Brynner than there was between leading lady Anne Baxter as Neferiti than there was between Baxter and either of them. Also caught up in the spectacle were Edward G. Robinson, Yvonne De Carlo, John Derek, Nina Foch, Martha Scott, Judith Anderson, Cedric Hardwicke and thousands more. Nominated for seven Oscars, it won one for its Special Effects.

Having stood the test of time at least as well as the five Best Picture nominees were five other films, two of which were nominated in lesser categories and three of which weren’t nominated at all.

The winner of the first competitive Foreign Film Oscar, Federico Fellini’s La Strada (The Road) was a huge hit in the U.S. Anthony Quinn starred as the strong man who buys waif Giulietta Masina from her parents as a helper to him in his traveling shows. Richard Basehart was the man who comes between them. It was the first major starring role for veteran character actor Quinn and the first international success for Masina, who was Fellini’s wife. The film was also nominated for Best Screenplay.

The most popular Japanese film to be released in the United States up to that time, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai was the inspiration for John Sturges’ virtual 1960 remake, The Magnificent Seven, which relocated the action from feudal Japan to the Old West. Toshiro Mifune starred in the film that was nominated for two Oscars – Best Black-and-White Art Direction and Costume Design.

Probably the most enduring film of 1956 is John Ford’s The Searchers, released at a time when westerns were popping on TV practically every night and Oscar nominations only went to westerns with a twist, e.g. the Quaker western, Friendly Persuasion,and the modern western, Giant. The Directors Guild, however, did nominate Ford for the film which has influenced everything from Taxi Driver to Star Wars and beyond.

The impeccable cast of Ford’s revenge western included John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles, Ward Bond, Natalie Wood, John Qualen, Olive Carey and Harry Carey, Jr., all at their best. The film proves Wayne with two of his most iconic lines, the image defining “that’ll be the day” and the surprisingly tender “let’s go home, Debbie”, the latter still capable of wringing tears from the most hardened viewer.

It won no awards at the time, but Don Siegel’s science fiction masterpiece, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a frightening parable of the Communist takeovers happening all over the world at the time, is still capable of provoking nightmares and insomnia in audiences discovering it for the first time. Kevin McCarthy’s increasingly terrified everyman is one of the prime reasons for its success.

An exciting heist film in which everything typically goes wrong, Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing was the film that put him on the international stage. Ignored by Oscar, it was nominated for a Bafta as Best Film of the Year from Any Source. Sterling Hayden stars, and he’s fine, but the film is stolen lock, stock and barrel by character players Elisha Cook, Jr. and Marie Windsor. Why the latter failed to win an Oscar nomination for her classic portrayal of a mean, vicious wife defies credulity.

Other films of particular note include Ingrid Bergman’s comeback vehicle, Anastasia,and two by two directors of particular distinction, Douglas Sirk and Vincente Minnelli.

Bergman had been the most popular actress of the mid to late 1940s when she went to Italy to make a film with Italian neorealist director Roberto Rossellini. Their ensuing love affair sparked world-wide indignation as the actress who had been held on a pedestal after her portrayals of nuns and saints was brought low by Hollywood gossip columnists for abandoning her husband and young daughter.

By 1956, however, Bergman had been married to Rossellini for six years and had borne him three children. Was the American public ready to welcome her back? Fox, the producers of Anastasia, weren’t so sure so they hedged their bets by securing the services of Broadway legend Helen Hayes, then the most beloved woman in America except for maybe Eleanor Roosevelt or Helen Keller, as one of her two co-stars. The other was the ubiquitous Yul Brynner.

All three performers won raves for their performances and audiences as well as critics and Bergman’s fellow actors welcomed her back with open arms. She was the overwhelming favorite to win her second Oscar as the is-she-or-isn’t-she long lost daughter of the last czar of Russia, and she did.

Douglas Sirk’s forte was taking time worn soap operas and remaking them even better than their originals. He also directed a number of originals, among them 1956’s All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind. The latter, an overheated melodrama was quick to win attention and awards – it was nominated for three Oscars and won one for Dorothy Malone as a nymphomaniac, a sure sign that the Hollywood Production Code was cracking.

While Written on the Wind may not be as popular today as it was then, Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows has only grown in acclaim. On the surface it’s an obvious tearjerker about a widow whose children buy her a TV set, hoping that will stave off her interest in hunky gardener Rock Hudson. It doesn’t work, of course, and the on-screen lovers are even more memorable here than they were two years earlier in Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession which made Hudson a star and earned Wyman her fourth Oscar nomination. On a deeper level, it’s an exercise in film-making mastery as Sirk’s camera lingers on faces, looks through mirrors and more, to underline his characters’ motivations.

Heretofore best known for his many musicals, by 1956 Vincente Minnelli had also become known as the director who made the best use of the widescreen process. Most other directors were still struggling with the process by either limiting their action to center screen with side images of no particular interest, or placing actors on either side of the screen with a fruit bowl or something in-between. Minnelli, on the other hand, filled every inch of the screen with something to look at. In 1956, he gave us two of the best films made in the early days of the process.

The story of the volatile life of Vincent Van Gogh, Lust for Life starred Oscar nominee as Van Gogh and Oscar winner Anthony Quinn as Paul Gauguin. It had also been nominated for Best Screenplay and Color Art Direction.

Marred somewhat by a tacked on explanatory ending, discerning audiences nevertheless knew that Tea and Sympathy really ended with Deborah Kerr seductively lowering her shoulder strap and saying to sensitive John Kerr (no relation), “when you talk of this…and you will…be kind”, as it did in Robert Anderson’s Broadway smash. Neither Kerr was nominated for this, though both should have been. There is some consolation, however, in the fact that Deborah Kerr was nominated for The King and I, that John Kerr’s Broadway replacement, Anthony Perkins, was nominated for Friendly Persuasion,and that Ingrid Bergman, who played Deborah Kerr’s role in Paris, won for Anastasia.

All films discussed have been released on DVD in the U.S. except Tea and Sympathy, which one assumes will eventually be released by the Warner Archive.

New on DVD this week are the Oscar winning Argentine mystery, The Secret in Their Eyes and Neil Jordan’s fantasy film, Ondine starring Colin Farrell.