Category: Home Viewing with Peter
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The DVD Report #182: Oscar on DVD – 1964
New This Week Jack Warner paid the then astronomical sum of $5,000,000 for the screen rights to Lerner and Lowe’s smash Broadway musical, My Fair Lady. His dream star cast consisted of Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant and James Cagney in the roles created by Julie Andrews, Rex Harrison and Stanley Holloway. Both Grant and Cagney…
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The DVD Report #181: Oscar on DVD – 1963
New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. 1963 has a reputation among revisionist critics as being the weakest year in Oscar history, with the Oscar winning Tom Jones one of the least deserving Best Picture winners of all time. Balderdash! It’s one of the best, but I guess you had to be…
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The DVD Report #180: Oscar on DVD – 1962
New This Week 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…
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The DVD Report #179: Oscar on DVD – 1961
New This Week 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…
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The DVD Report #178: Oscar on DVD – 1960
New This Week 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…
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The DVD Report #177: Oscar on DVD – 1959
New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. 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…
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The DVD Report #176: Oscar on DVD – 1958
New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. 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,…
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The DVD Report #175: Oscar on DVD – 1957
New This Week Three of 1957’s Best Picture nominees have held up extremely well while the other two have lost the luster they once had. The year’s big awards winner, and still deserving of all its honors, was David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai. With its brilliant score accented by the invigorating Colonel…
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The DVD Report #174: Oscar on DVD – 1956
New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. 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…
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The DVD Report #173: Oscar on DVD – 1955
New This Week 1955 was the year the movies and the Oscars met TV head on. While the trend was to bigger, wider, more colorful films, a 35mm. black-and-white film based on a TV play won the year’s major film awards including four of the eight Oscars it was nominated for. The idea may well…
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The DVD Report #172: Oscar on DVD – 1954
New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. Elia Kazan’s compelling film about union racketeering on the New Jersey docks, On the Waterfront won everything in sight in late 1954, early 1955, including eight of the twelve Oscars it was nominated for. The film’s soiled reputation as an apologia for Kazan and screenwriter…
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The DVD Report #171: Oscar on DVD – 1953
New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. After two years of shocks, the 1953 Oscar went to the film everyone expected to win – Fred Zinnemann’s production of James Jones’ novel about life at Pearl Harbor just before the Japanese attack in From Here to Eternity. The film, which won eight of…
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The DVD Report #170: Oscar on DVD – 1952
New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. Perhaps the least regarded Oscar winning Best Picture winner of all time, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth was a huge commercial success in its day. In fact, it was the biggest box office hit of 1952, one of the rare occasions when…
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The DVD Report #169: Oscar on DVD – 1951
New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. One of Oscar’s biggest upsets ever occurred at the 1951 awards when An American in Paris beat both A Streetcar Named Desire and A Place in the Sun to capture the award for Best Picture. Fashioned around George Gershwin’s music of the 1920s and 30s,…
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The DVD Report #168: Oscar on DVD – 1950
New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. The 1950 movie year was one of the best ever. It provided many pleasures, not all of which were recognized by Oscar. Oscar nominations, as expected, were dominated by the year’s two best films, both about the underbelly of show business. Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All…
