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 have been that movies could do better than TV even when playing TV’s game.

It may have been a fluke, but it helped that the films the Academy chose to put up against Marty were not the year’s best. If you couldn’t vote for East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, The Night of the Hunter, The Man From Laramie, Bad Day or Black Rock or Summertime,what could you vote for? Maybe you could be persuaded to cast a vote for Mister Roberts or Picnic,but not Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing or The Rose Tattoo.

A film about a middle-aged Bronx butcher living with his elderly mother and finding romance with a shy, homely, Brooklyn schoolteacher doesn’t seem to resonate with today’s audiences who have many more options. Fifty-five years ago, however, the situations featured in Delbert Mann’s Marty were commonplace and struck many a chord with contemporaneous audiences. Whether or not you can relate to those situations, you should be able to relate to the moving performances of Oscar winner Ernest Borgnine as the self-proclaimed “fat, ugly, little man”, nominee Betsy Blair as the wallflower he falls in love with, Esther Minciotti as his confused, but kindly, mother and Augusta Ciolli as his bitter aunt.

Based on a smash hit 1948 Broadway play starring Henry Fonda and directed by Joshua Logan, Mister Roberts was an even bigger smash hit film that not only starred Fonda but James Cagney, William Powell and Jack Lemmon as well. It wasn’t directed by Logan, but John Ford who left the film after clashing with Fonda, and by Mervyn LeRoy who took over from Ford.

The film is an unusual mix of poignant drama and high comedy aboard a Navy cargo ship in the Pacific during World War II. The drama surrounds second-in-command Fonda’s attempts at a transfer to a destroyer where he can be more useful while the comedy is left mostly to Cagney as the ship’s mean captain and Oscar winner Jack Lemmon as the ensign who is Cagney’s nemesis. In addition to Best Picture and Supporting Actor, the film was nominated for Best Sound.

Joshua Logan did get to direct the film version of another of his Broadway hits, Picnic, with a dream cast that included William Holden, Kim Novak, Rosalind Russell, Cliff Robertson, nominee Arthur O’Connell, Susan Strasberg, Betty Field and Verna Felton.

Set over a steamy Labor Day weekend, Picnic is the story of a handsome drifter whose presence upsets life in a small Kansas community. Nominated for six Oscars, it won two for Color Art Direction and Editing. The instrumental recording of “Moonglow” from the film’s picnic scene became a huge hit.

Holden and a hit record also figured in another of the year’s Best Picture nominees, Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, directed by Henry King. The story of a Eurasian doctor, nominee Jennifer Jones, who has an affair with the married journalist played by Holden, was based on a best-selling autobiography by Han Suyin. It was nominated for eight Oscars and won three for Best Color Costume Design, Score and Song, the hit title tune.

A bit of trivia: Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing is the only film in which Charlie Chan’s three screen sons, Keye Luke, Sen Young and Benson Fong all appeared.

Though hardly in the same league as A Streetcar Named Desire, the latest Tennessee Williams play to reach the screen, The Rose Tattoo, directed by Daniel Mann, was well received at the time due to Williams’ name and the excitement surrounding Italian star Anna Magnani’s Hollywood debut.

Magnani did not speak English well and had to learn her lines phonetically, but her performance was impressive all the same, winning all the year’s acting awards including the Oscar. Her co-star Burt Lancaster was another matter. His over-the-top performance is quite an embarrassment.

Nominated for eight Oscars, The Rose Tattoo also won for Best Black-and-White Cinematography and Art Direction.

The dominant film personality of the year, however, was not Magnani, but James Dean, who died on September 30, 1955, five and a half months after the release of East of Eden and almost a month before the scheduled release of Rebel Without a Cause. His iconic performances in both have kept his legend strong all these years.

Based on the last section of John Steinbeck’s famed novel, East of Eden won nominations for Best Actor (Dean), Director (Elia Kazan), Screenplay (by Paul Osborn) and Supporting Actress (Jo Van Fleet), with only the latter winning for her brilliant portrayal of Dean’s whorehouse madam mother. Julie Harris, Raymond Massey and Richard Davalos also starred.

Nominated for three Oscars, Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause was up for Best Screenplay (Ray), Supporting Actor (Sal Mineo) and Supporting Actress (Natalie Wood). Generally considered the best of the teen angst films, Dean, Mineo and Wood all play anxious teenagers misunderstood by their parents. Corey Allen and Dennis Hopper are the teen bad guys and Jim Backus and Ann Doran are Dean’s parents.

A huge flop in its day, but now considered one of the greatest films of the all time, Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter,with its unflinching screenplay by James Agree and a no-holds-barred performance by Robert Mitchum as evil personified, was way ahead of its time.

Mitchum plays a twisted preacher who marries widow Shelley Winters, then kills her and attempts to kill her children who come under the protection of Lillian Gish in one of her signature roles as a woman of great kindness. Brilliant as Laughton’s direction is, legend has it that he had no patience with child actors Billy Chapin and Sally Jane Bruce who were actually directed by Mitchum.

Based on the evidence here, Laughton should have had a second career as a director but due to the film’s failure at the box-office, he was never given another opportunity.

Perhaps the best of the Anthony Mann directed westerns starring James Stewart, The Man From Laramie with its literate script, exquisite cinematography and great performances by Stewart, Arthur Kennedy, Donald Crisp, Aline MacMahon and Alex Nicol should have been recognized for something but standard westerns at the time were considered the province of television and even the best of them such as this, were ignored.

A ‘modern’ western, John Sturges’ Bad Day at Black Rock is set in the recent past as one-armed war hero Spencer Tracy comes to a small Arizona town to present a posthumous medal of honor to the father of a Japanese-American war hero. The town’s tight-lipped citizens as exemplified by Robert Ryan, Dean Jagger, Walter Brenan, Ernest Bognine and Lee Marvin try to prevent him from finding the man’s farm. The highly atmospheric film was nominated for three Oscars including Best Actor (Tracy), Director and Screenplay.

David Lean’s gorgeously filmed Summertime, his first film in color, which was also the last of his “small” films, was based on the Broadway play, The Time of the Cuckoo. Katharine Hepburn gave one of her best performances as the middle-aged spinster on vacation in Venice before settling down for a life of presumed spinsterhood. Rossano Brazzi co-starred. Hepburn and Lean received the film’s sole Oscar nominations.

No less than three major actresses played legendary real life singers in major biographical films – Susan Hayward was Lillian Roth in I’ll Cry Tomorrow directed by Daniel Mann, Eleanor Parker was Marjorie Lawrence in Interrupted Melody directed by Curtis Bernhardt, and Doris Day was Ruth Etting in Love Me or Leave Me directed by Charles Vidor. Hayward and Parker were nominated for Best Actress. Day was not, but James Cagney as her gangster husband, was.

Love Me or Leave Me was nominated for six Oscars and won one for its screenplay. Interrupted Melody was nominated for three and also won one for its screenplay. I’ll Cry Tomorrow was nominated for four and won one for its black-and-white costume design.

Other 1955 films of note included Richard Brooks’ Blackboard Jungle with Glenn Ford and Sidney Poitier (four nominations, no wins); Otto Preminger’s The Man With the Golden Arm with Frank Sinatra, Eleanor Parker and Kim Novak (three nominations, no wins); Mark Robson’s The Bridges at Toko-Ri with William Holden, Grace Kelly, Fredric March and Mickey Rooney (two nominations, one win); Raoul Walsh’s Battle Cry with Van Heflin, Tab Hunter, Aldo Ray, Dorothy Malone and Nancy Olson (one nomination, no win); Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film of Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls with Marlon Brando, Jean Simmons, Frank Sinatra and Vivian Blaine (four nominations, no wins); Fred Zinnemann’s film of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! with Gordon MacRae, Shirley Jones and Gloria Grahame(four nominations, two wins) and John Ford’s The Long Gray Line with Tyrone Power, Maureen O’Hara and Donald Crisp (no nominations although Ford was nominated by the Directors’ Guild).

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

New DVD releases this week include Letter to Juliet and Glee, Season One, Vol. 2 – Road to Regionals, which is also available as part of Glee – The Complete First Seasons, which includes the previously released Glee – Season One, Vol. 1 – Road to Sectionals.