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, Morton Da Costa’s film of Patrick Dennis’s Auntie Mame; Richard Brooks’ film of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Stanley Kramer’s race relations drama, The Defiant Ones; Vincente Minnelli’s charming musical Gigi and Delbert Mann’s film of Terrene Rattigan’s Separate Tables. All but The Defiant Ones had stage origins, although it wasn’t Colette’s obscure stage play that drew audiences to Gigi, but the fact that its score was by Lerner & Lowe, the composers responsible for My Fair Lady, then in its third year on Broadway and a long way from being able to be filmed. Gigi, starring Leslie Caron, Maurice Chevalier, Louis Jourdan and Hermione Gingold was nominated for nine Oscars and won all of them.

Rosalind Russell was so identified with the role of Patrick Dennis’s irrepressible aunt Auntie Mame that audiences forever after confused her with the real woman based on Dennis’ real-life eccentric aunt. The laugh-a-minute film was nominated for six Oscars, including one for Roz and Peggy Cass as Agnes Gooch, but, alas, none for Coral Browne as Vera Charles. Forrest Tucker, Patric Knowles, Roger Smith, Joanna Barnes, Lee Patrick and Pippa Scott were also memorable in other roles.

Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman and Burl Ives burned up the screen as Maggie, Brick and Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Toned down somewhat to comply with the Hollywood Production Code, then still in force, the film still sizzles. Nominated for six Oscars including ones for both Taylor and Newman, Ives, thought a shoo-in for Best Supporting Actor could not be nominated in that category as MGM listed him as lead under Academy rules in effect at the time. Happily for Ives, he had another film he could be nominated for in that category – see below.

Nominated for seven Oscars, the ingeniously re-written Separate Tables intertwined the two separate stories of the original and split the four leading roles among four actors instead of two. David Niven won an Oscar as a phony retired Army major and Wendy Hiller won one as well as the hotel manager. Deborah Kerr was nominated for her portrayal of a repressed spinster, but Gladys Cooper, who my opinion steals the film from everyone else as Kerr’s bitchy mother, was shockingly overlooked. Rita Hayworth and Burt Lancaster were also starred.

Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier were escaped prisoners, one white, one black, who escape together from a Southern chain gang and must overcome their hatred for one another to survive in The Defiant Ones. Nominated for nine Oscars including one each for Curtis and Poitier, as well as co-stars Theodore Bikel and Cara Williams, the film won two for its Back-and-White Cinematography and for its Original Screenplay.

More than any of these, though as I said at the outset, the two most highly regarded films of the year were Vertigo and Touch of Evil.

Filmed largely on location in San Francisco and the San Francisco Bay Area, the locations used in Hitchcock’s Vertigo have all become tourist destinations. Nominated for only two Oscars, Best Art Direction and Best Sound, it won neither. The only other major recognition it received was a Best Director nomination for Hitchcock form the Directors Guild. Ironically when the film was re-issued in 1996 it was given a Special Award from the New York Film Critics as the year’s “most distinguished re-issue”. The film is rightly renown as one of Hitchcock’s most mesmerizing thrillers feautirng one James Stewart’s best performances and Kim Novak’s bet by far.

Receiving no nominations and no awards of any kind in its day, Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil received a Special Award from the New York Film Critics when it was re-released in a “re-worked “edition” in 1998. The ‘re-worked edtion’ was largely comprised of an opening tracking shot excised from the original release print. The late film noir starred Chrlon Heston, Janet Leigh, Marlene Dietrich, Joseph Calleia, Akim Tamiroff and Welles himself, allin outstanding performances.

Among the other important films of the year were I Want to Live!; The Last Hurrah; The Big Country; Damn Yankees and South Pacific.

Susan Hayward won her fifth Oscar nomination and her first and only Oscar for her portrayal of convicted murderess Barbara Graham in Robert Wise’s I Want to Live! Hayward’s final scenes in the film are among the most gut-wrenching ever captured on film.

John Ford made a rare film about contemporary politics in his films of Edwin O’Connor’s best-seller, The Last Hurrah. Starring Spencer Tracy in one of his best roles as an old-style politician facing a sleek, slick TV era newcomer in the showdown for his city’s mayoral race, Ford surrounds Tracy with a gallery of familiar faces – Jeffrey Hunter as Tracy’s nephew, Pat O’Brien, Donald Crisp, James Gleason, Wallace Ford, Edward Brophy and Ricardo Cortez as Tracy’s cronies, Jane Darwell as an old lady who shows up at everyone’s wakes and Basil Rathbone and John Carradine as Tracy’s long time political foes. They’re all given a moment or two in the spotlight, but Tracy is very much the glue that holds it all together.

Burl Ives’ Oscar nomination and his Oscar came for William Wyler’s The Big Country in which he plays a sort of Big Daddy of the range in this stirring western also starring Gregory Peck, Jean Simmons, Carroll Baker, Charlton Heston and Charles Bickford.

Tab Hunter was given lead role of the younger version of a middle-aged baseball fan in the Hollywood version of Adler and Ross’s Damn Yankees which otherwise kept its Broadway cast. Among them were Gwen Verdon as the devil’s chief temptress and Ray Walston as the devil himself.

Director Joshua Logan made some strange choices in filming the musical sequences in Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific with garish color filters marring the beauty of Leon Shamroy’s cinematography. The core, however, still shines through. Mitzi Gaynor, Rossano Brazzi, John Kerr, Ray Walston, Juanita Hall and Frances Nuyen were starred.

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

New DVD releases this week include the Blu-ray debuts of two Oscar nominated classics, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and William Friedkin’s The Exorcist.