There was a newspaper strike in New York at the end of 1962 which prevented the New York Film Critics for the first and only time in their history from bestowing their annual awards. Thus, Oscar’s most reliable precursor was missing. No matter, David Lean’s spectacular Lawrence of Arabia was the obvious front-runner from the get-go.

David Lean’s epic tale of the controversial British WWI hero, Lawrence of Arabia,proved to be a towering achievement in every department – from Lean’s painterly canvas, beautifully realized by Freddie Young’s cinematography – to Maurice Jarre’s magnificent score – to the performances, particularly of Peter O’Toole as Lawrence and Omar Sharif as Sherif Ali, but also those of Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Arthur Kennedy, Jack Hawkins, Donald Wolfit, Claude Rains, Jose Ferrer and others.

Nominated for ten Oscars, Lawrencewon seven, including Best Picture and Director.

Two of the three Oscars Lawrence lost, went to Robert Mulligan’s film of Harper Lee’s beloved Pulitzer Prize winning novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, which won three of the eight awards altogether.

Gregory Peck finally won his Best Actor Oscar on his fifth nomination for his portrayal of Atticus Finch, the quietly effective small town lawyer and father to impressionable Mary Badham and Phillip Alford. Horton Foote won for his adaptation over Lawrence’s Robert Bolt. A bit of trivia: Bolt’s collaborator, blacklisted Michael Wilson wasn’t recognized by the Academy until 1995 when his name was added to the list of that film’s nominations.

Mockingbird works on several levels. It’s an uncanny exploration of childhood, it’s a civil rights lesson and it’s a thriller as Peck defends a poor black man (Brock Peters) falsely accused of raping a white woman. Robert Duvall makes a memorable screen debut as the mysterious Boo Radley. The film’s eight nominations included one for Mary Badham, who at ten became the youngest performance nominated for a supporting actress Oscar. She held the record until nine year old Tatum O’Neal’s nomination and win for Paper Moon eleven years later.

Joining those two masterworks on Oscar’s list of Best Picture nominees for 1962 were Darryl F. Zanuck’s mammoth recreation of D-Day, The Longest Day; the highly anticipated screen version of Meredith Willson’s rousing Broadway smash hit musical, The Music Man; and MGM’s troubled remake of Mutiny on the Bounty.

The pinnacle of his career, Twentieth Century Fox honcho Darryl F. Zanuck’s The Longest Day was nominated for five Oscars and won two – for Best Black-and-White Cinematography and Best Special Effects.

It took three million men and five thousand ships to effect the Normandy invasion, and Zanuck’s recreation seems to have duplicated the feat. The scenes of the invasion are staggering and memorable. This is one of the times that an all-star cast is used to excellent effect. John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton, Robert Ryan, Jeffrey Hunter, Rod Steiger, Red Buttons, Richard Beymer, Robert Wagner, Curt Jurgens and more are each given a chance to shine in one of Hollywood’s best war films.

On Broadway it beat West Side Story at the Tonys. On screen, it proved just as irresistible. Nominated for six Oscars, Morton Da Costa’s film version of The Music Man won one – for Best Adapted Score. Robert Preston, long a reliable character actor in films, became a major Broadway star with his portrayal of the con man who beguiles a small Iowa town. His performance in the film is spellbinding. He is superbly supported by Shirley Jones, Ronny Howard, Pert Kelton, Paul Ford and Hermione Gingold.

Nominated for seven Oscars, MGM’s remake of Mutiny on the Bounty was a troubled production from the start. Marlon Brando’s on set shenanigans and his affected portrayal of Fletcher Christian caused one director to quit and co-star Trevor Howard (as Captain Bligh) to almost quit. The film’s technical aspects, however, are first rate. Robert Surtees’ cinematography and Bronislau Kaper’s score are the film’s real stars.

Among the films garnering Oscar’s attention in other categories were The Manchurian Candidate; The Miracle Worker; Sweet Bird of Youth; Days of Wine and Roses; What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?; Long Day’s Journey Into Night; Gypsy; David and Lisa; Billy Budd; Bird Man of Alcatraz and Lolita.

Conventional wisdom says that The Manchurian Candidate was not successful on its initial release, that it wasn’t until its 1987 reissue that it became a hit. That’s not exactly true. I saw it with a packed house when it opened in October, 1962. BAFTA nominated it for one of the year’s Best Film(s) from Any Source. The Directors’ Guild and the Golden Globes nominated John Frankenheimer and the National Board of Review and the Globes gave heir Supporting Actress award to Angela Lansbury. Oscar nominated Lansbury and the film’s screenplay. The film also had a successful TV showing in 1963 but was pulled out of circulation after the assassination of President Kennedy.

The film, in case you’ve been living under a rock, is about an American POW (Laurence Harvey) trained by his Korean captors to be a dormant assassin. The film ends with a political assassination. Lansbury, 36 at the time of filming, played then 33 year-old Harvey’s control freak mother to devastating effect.

Lansbury lost the Oscar to Patty Duke, who along with Best Actress winner Anne Bancroft, provided half of one of the greatest acting duos in screen history as Helen Keller and her teacher, Annie Sullivan. Both actresses were repeating roles they honed to perfection on the Broadway stage in The Miracle Worker, roles created by Teresa Wright and Patty McCormack for TV’s Playhouse 90. The film received a total of five nominations including one for director Arthur Penn.

Bancroft’s competition, among the fiercest in Oscar history, included Geraldine Page, Lee Remick and long time Oscar favorites Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn.

Page was nominated for Richard Brooks’ film of Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth in which she plays an aging actress whose latest gigolo (Paul Newman) runs afoul of the mayor of the town they’re visiting during a promotional tour for her latest film. Ed Begley as the mayor won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor and Shirley Knight as his daughter, Newman’s first love, was nominated as Best Supporting Actress.

Remick was nominated for Blake Edwards’ film of Days of Wine and Roses, which like The Miracle Worker,had originally been a highly acclaimed TV production. Remick and Jack Lemmon played the alcoholics originally played by Piper Laurie and Cliff Robertson. Nominated for a total of five Oscars, it won for its title song by Henri Mancini and Johnny Mercer.

It was no secret that Hollywood legends Bette Davis and Joan Crawford hated one another, but now in their mid-50s, neither one was the box office star they once were. Director Robert Aldrich fed off the tension between the two and the public came in drove to see the fireworks as a grotesquely made up Davis menaces wheelchair bound Crawford as her more glamorous actress sister in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Nominated for a total of five Oscars including Best Supporting Actor Victor Buono, the film won for Best Black-and-White Costume Design.

Katharine Hepburn was named Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival while her co-stars Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards (Jr.) and Dean Stockwell shared the Best Actor award for their amazing work in Sidney Lumet’s film of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Only Hepburn as the drug addicted mother was singled out by Oscar.

Another star of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Rosalind Russell, had one of her best roles in Mervyn LeRoy’s film of the Jule Styne-Stephen Sondheim musical, Gypsy, and in fact, won her fifth Golden Globe for it. She was not nominated for an Oscar, but the film did receive three technical nominations.

The husband and wife team of Frank and Eleanor Perry received Oscar nominations, he for directing David and Lisa, she for writing the groundbreaking film about mental illness. Keir Dullea and Janet Margolin were the young stars.

Terence Stamp in the title role of Peter Ustinov’s film of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd emerged as a star and an Oscar nominee for his compelling performance. Ustinov, Robert Ryan and Melvyn Douglas co-starred.

Thelma Ritter received her sixth nomination for Best Supporting Actress as Burt Lancaster’s overbearing mother in Bird Man of Alcatraz, a record that still stands. Lancaster, Telly Savalas as a fellow convict, and the film’s black-and-white cinematography were also nominated.

Vladmir Nabokov won an Oscar nomination for adapting his controversial novel, Lolita, which was filmed by Stanley Kubrick with a curious performance by Peter Sellers and interesting ones by James Mason, Shelley Winters and Sue Lyon in the title role of the child seductress.

Among the films Oscar ignored were The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner; A Taste of Honey, Victim and Advise and Consent; the last three dealing with homosexuality, now apparently a fit subject for the screen, but not the staid Academy.

John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance has long been acknowledged as one of his best films. At the time, however, the film was greatly criticized for the casting of James Stewart and John Wayne, then in their mid-50s, as young men. Get past the obvious and it’s an engrossing tale of legend vs. truth. Lee Marvin, Vera Miles and Edmond O’Brien co-star.

Tom Courtenay became an overnight sensation as the rebellious juvenile delinquent in Tony Richardson’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, which also gave Michael Redgrave one of his best roles as the reform school governor who champions the lad.

Richardson’s even more acclaimed A Taste of Honey made a star of Rita Tushingham as the daughter of slatternly Dora Bryan, who is impregnated by a back sailor and helped through her pregnancy by a homosexual friend (Murray Melvin). The film won BAFTAs for Best British Film, Actress (Bryan), Screenplay and Most Promising Newcomer (Tushingham). Melvin was also nominated for Most Promising Newcomer and the film was nominated for Best Film from Any Source.

Exhibited in the U.S. without a code of approval, Basil Dearden’s Victim was a groundbreaking film about blackmail that led eventually to changes in British law. Dirk Bogarde, in his mpst acclaimed role, is the attorney who “comes out” to break the cycle of blackmail running rampant against gays at the time. Sylvia Sims as his wife and Dennis Price as an aging actor are also excellent. Nominated for two BAFAs, including one for Bogarde, Dearden made the film as a whodunit to attract wide audiences to his anti-discrimination film just as he had done with Sapphire, his earlier film which exposed the ugly underbelly of racial prejudice rampant in London at the time.

Otto Preminger, no stranger to controversy, actually avoided it with his take on homosexual blackmail in Advise and Consent by getting the Production Code committee to approve its inclusion as long as it was “in good taste”.

Don Murray was the blackmailed U.S. Senator in a cast that included Henry Fonda, Charles Laughton, Walter Pidgeon, Franchot Tone, Lew Ayres and Burgess Meredith among others. BAFTA posthumously nominated Charles Laughton for his brilliant portrayal of a wily Southern Senator, but not Oscar.

All films discussed have been released on DVD in the U.S. except A Taste of Honey and Sapphire. Sapphire is due in January as part of a Dearden set which will also include a re-mastered Victim.

Among this week’s new DVD releases are Toy Story 3 and the Blu-ray debuts of The Sound of Music; The Bridge on the River Kwai and White Christmas.