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 Bogey March, its mammoth art direction and set design and its breathtaking cinematography, the film is still a pleasure to look at and listen to. Aside from a forgettable romantic subplot, the story of a clash of wills in a Japanese prisoner of war camp remains top notch entertainment. William Holden receives top billing as a soldier leading a small unit ordered to destroy the titled bridge, but it is Oscar winner Alec Guinness as the vain British colonel duped into building the bridge and Oscar nominee Sessue Hayakawa as the Japanese commandant who knows exactly how to play him, who command our attention with their unforgettable dual of wits.

Charles Laughton was offered the Guinness part, but turned it down because he didn’t understand the character. Instead, he gave one us one of his greatest performances in a role he understood well, the scowling barrister (court room defense attorney) in Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution for which he won his first Oscar nomination in 32 years. A rare film directed by Billy Wilder that he didn’t write himself, the film has more twists and turns than any other mystery ever written. Matching Laughton’s brilliance are Marlene Dietrich in her best film role in years as the title character,Oscar nominee Elsa Lanchester, Laughton’s real-life wife, in a role written for the screen version expressly for her as a nurse keeping her eye on the ailing Laughton, and Una O’Connor, repeating her stage triumph as the murder victim’s hearing impaired housekeeper. The one off note is Tyrone Power playing against type as Dietrich’s milquetoast husband accused of murdering a rich old lady for her money.

Henry Fonda produced TV director Sidney Lumet’s first theatrical film and gave himself one of his best roles as a juror in 12 Angry Men. The film, which has since been used as a prototype for an episode of just about every TV series out there, has Fonda as the sole holdout for a quick conviction in what appears on the surface to be a slam dunk case of murder. Layers of the prosecution’s case are peeled away as are layers of various jurors’ prejudices. The strong supporting cast includes Lee J. Cobb, Jack Warden, E.G. Marshall and Ed Begley.

Though beautifully photographed and scored, both Peyton Place and Sayonara,two once highly respected films, lose points with modern audiences due to their less than stellar main story lines. Subplots in both films are far more interesting.

The mother/daughter relationship between Oscar nominees Lana Turner and Diane Varsi in Peyton Place actually take a back seat to the subsidiary one involving doctor Lloyd Nolan, Oscar nominated rape victim Hope Lange and her despicable stepfather, Oscar nominated Arthur Kennedy. The main romance between Oscar nominee Marlon Brando and Miiko Taka in Sayonara isn’t half as compelling as the secondary one between Oscar winners Red Buttons and Miyoshi Umeki.

While these two films have fallen in stature, at least three of the year’s other films have gained in reputation.

The darkest days of World War I are explored in Stanley Kubrick’s Kirk Douglas starrer, Paths of Glory. Douglas is outstanding as a French defense officer trying to get at the truth in the court-martial of three men who refuse to take part in a suicide mission ordered by malevolent generals George Macready and Adolphe Menjou. Based on a true story, the film was banned in France for decades.

Playing against type, Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis are two of the nastiest characters ever put on celluloid in the NYC noir, Sweet Smell of Success, directed by Alexander Mackendrick. Lancaster is the egomaniacal Broadway columnist patterned after Walter Winchell and Curtis is the sleazy press agent who will do anything to curry his favor. Susan Harrison, who makes her screen debut as Lancaster’s sister, came briefly out of obscurity in 2000 when her daughter, Darva Conger, courted notoriety as an instant bride on TV’s Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire.

Don’t believe everything you see on TV is the basic message of A Face in the Crowd, directed by Elia Kazan, featuring Andy Griffith in a tour de force performance as an overnight TV star who becomes drunk with his newfound fame and power. Patricia Neal is equally superb as the woman who discovers him and directs his career to its logical conclusion. Anthony Franciosa, Walter Matthau and Lee Remick provide finely etched supporting performances.

Among the many fine foreign language films making their way into U.S. theatres in 1957 were Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet and Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night. Of these, Fellini’s Cabiria proved to have the most immediate impact. Fellini’s wife, Giulietta Masina, who had scored in the director’s La Strada, was the chief reason for its success. Her portrayal of a prostitute looking for love, but finding only heartbreak and misery was one of the finest performances of the year in any language. Fellini’s sit up and take notice images of modern Rome pre-dated those in his masterpiece, La Dolce Vita, by only a few years.

The year’s best romantic comedy was Leo McCarey’s remake of his own Love Affair, re-titled An Affair to Remember, with Deborah Kerr, Cary Grant and Cathleen Nesbitt in the roles once played by Irene Dunne, Charles Boyer and Maria Ouspenskaya. All are fine, especially Kerr as the cabaret singer who leaves shipboard paramour Grant waiting atop the Empire State building for reasons beyond her control.

The way most people saw films in 1957 was as part a double bill at their local neighborhood theatre. An example of a second feature on such a bill that was even better than the main one was Fear Strikes Out, the story of Boston Red Sox pitcher Jim Piersall’s nervous breakdown, directed by Robert Mulligan with a standout performance from Anthony Perkins fresh from his Oscar nominated turn in Friendly Persuasion and several years before his signature role in Psycho. Karl Malden is equally effective as his stern father.

What was the film that was on top of the bill with Fear Strikes Out, you ask?That was Funny Face, directed by Stanley Donen with Audrey Hepburn as a beatnick model in love with much older photographer Fred Astaire to the beat of glorious Gershwin music. “Eloise” author Kay Thompson all but steals the film as a fashion editor singing “Think Pink”.

Other films of note include John Huston’s Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison with Oscar nominated Deborah Kerr as a nun hiding out with U.S. marine Robert Mitchum on a Japanese held island; Oscar winner Joanne Woodward as a woman with multiple personalities in Nunnally Johns’s The Three Faces of Eve; Martin Ritt’s Edge of the City with John Cassavetes and Sidney Poitier in fine form as longshoreman buddies battling racial prejudice; Jack Arnold’s sci-fi classic, The Incredible Shrinking Man with Grant Williams and Randy Stuart; Allen Reisner’s Christmas classic, All Mine to Give with Glynis Johns and Cameron Mitchell and three memorable musicals: George Cukor’s film of Cole Porter’s Les Girls with Gene Kelly, Mitzi Gaynor, Kay Kendall and Taina Elg; Rouben Mamoulian’s film of Cole Porter’s Silk Stockings with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse and George Abbott and Stanley Donen’s film of Adler and Ross’s The Pajama Game with Doris Day and John Raitt.

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

New DVDs this week include the first U.S. release of Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence on both Blu-ray and standard DVD and the Blu-ray debuts of Terrence Maick’s The Thin Red Line and Merian C. Cooper and Ernst B. Schodesack’s original 1933 classic, King Kong.