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 survivor, and prostitutes, prostitutes, and more prostitutes, provided some of the year’s most talked about performances, some of which were nominated for Oscars, some of which even won, all of which still resonate with audiences today.

Sex was a major theme in three of the year’s Best Picture nominees.

Jack Lemmon was the insurance clerk who climbs his way to the top of the corporate ladder by lending out his key to his bosses in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. It takes the suicide attempt of the elevator girl (Shirley MacLaine) he’s smitten with to wise him up. Fred MacMurray and Ray Walston co-star in the film which was nominated for ten Oscars and won five including Best Picture, Director and Screenplay, all of which were awarded to producer-director-writer Wilder. He shared the screenplay award with co-writer I.A.L. Diamond. Lemmon and MacLaine had to be content with mere nominations.

The Apartment shared Best Picture honors with Jack Cardiff’s film of D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers at the New York Film Critics Awards, the only Best Picture tie in that body’s history. Its Best Picture Oscar nomination was inevitable.

Wendy Hiller was the smother-mother with incestuous feelings for son Dean Stockwell who learns about sex from married suffragette Mary Ure. Trevor Howard as Stockwell’s gruff father and Ms. Ure were the film’s acting nominees in a total of seven nods given the film. The film won Best Black-and-White Cinematography for Freddie Francis.

Oddly enough, Sons and Lovers has never been released on home video in the U.S.

Burt Lancaster brought Sinclair Lewis’ phony evangelist to life in Richard Brooks’ film version of Elmer Gantry, the first Hollywood film since the pre-Code era to tackle sex and religious hypocrisy but gave the faithful someone to root for in Jean Simmons’ true believer. Nominated for five Oscars including Best Picture, it won three for Brooks (Best Screenplay), Lancaster and Shirley Jones as the prostitute Gantry “rammed the fear of God” into. The film also contains fine supporting turns by Dean Jagger as Simmons’ mentor and Arthur Kennedy as a cynical reporter.

The other two Best Picture nominees were family films. In the case of Fred Zinnemann’s The Sundowners, that was literally the case as we follow the lives of itinerant sheep drover Robert Mitchum, his wife, Deborah Kerr and son, Michael Anderson, Jr.

Kerr and Anderson want to settle down, Mitchum doesn’t, in this highly entertaining film for which the luminous Kerr won her third New York Film Critics Award and her sixth Oscar nomination, setting a new record for non-winning acting nominations. Nominated for five Oscars, the film went home empty-handed although co-star Peter Ustinov won for a different film. Glynis Johns won her only nomination as an innkeeper.

John Wayne received his first official credit as director for The Alamo, a by-the-numbers western that was popular at the time. It was nominated for seven Oscars including Best Picture and won one for Best Sound.

Far better than The Alamo were a number of fine films that deserved the last slot more. Among the best were Psycho, Inherit the Wind, Home From the Hill, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, Sunrise at Campobello, Tunes of Glory, The Trials of Oscar Wilde, Wild River, Spartacus and Exodus.

Alfred Hitchcock won his fifth and final Oscar nomination for Psycho, the film that redefined the horror film for generations. Still virulently creepy fifty years on, the film received a total of four nominations, but no wins. Janet Leigh was nominated for her iconic portrayal of the woman on the run who ends up at the Bates Motel, but there was no nomination for Anthony Perkins whose subsequent career was forever in debt to his twisted transvestite killer. Although always intended as an A picture, Hitch deliberately filmed it in black and white on Universal’s back lot with his television crew to give it an eerie B picture look..

Spencer Tracy and Fredric March were, at the time, two of only three two time Best Actor Oscar winners (the third was Gary Cooper). Working together for the first time, they triumphed as fictional versions of legendary defense attorney Clarence Darrow and three time Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan in Stanley Kramer’s film of Inherit the Wind, the hit Broadway play about the Scopes monkey trial of 1925.

Taken largely from transcripts of the actual trial, both actors excel, particularly in the scene in which Tracy corners a squirming March with questions about Genesis. Tracy: “Where did she come from?” March: “Who?” Tracy: “Mrs. Cain.”

Nominated for four Oscars, including one for Tracy as Best Actor, the film failed to win any.

Robert Mitchum won the National Board of Review Award for his performances in both The Sundowners and Home From the Hill, but failed as usual to receive an Oscar nomination for either film.

Mitchum, Eleanor Parker, George Peppard and George Hamilton are all memorable in Vincente Minnelli’s Home From the Hill, in which Parker and Hamilton are the unhappy wife and son of the brutish Mitchum, while Peppard, also a National Board of Review winner, as Mitchum’s older illegitimate provides is the film’s moral center.

Delbert Mann’s film of William Inge’s The Dark at the Top of the Stairs provided meaty roles for Robert Preston as a philandering salesman, Dorothy McGuire as his repressed wife, Eve Arden as her bigoted sister, Angela Lansbury as Preston’s mistress and Shirley Knight and Lee Kinsolving as star-crossed young lovers. Only Knight won an Oscar nomination. This is oddly another fine film that has never been released on home video in the U.S. or anywhere else for that matter.

Greer Garson won the National Board of Review Award, a Golden Globe and her seventh Oscar nomination for her moving portrayal of Eleanor Roosevelt in Vincent J. Donehue’s film version of Sunrise at Campobello. The film was nominated for four Oscars, but none, alas, for Ralph Bellamy reprising his Tony winning role as FDR.

John Mills and Alec Guinness, who switched roles in pre-production to play against type as the quiet Army colonel and garrulous replacement in Ronald Neame’s Tunes of Glory,showed us once again what great acting is all about.

Dueling biopics about “the love that dare not speak its name” gave us Robert Morley in Oscar Wilde and Peter Finch in The Trials of Oscar Wilde, for which he won a Bafta as Best British Actor. Nominated for five Baftas including Best British Film and Supporting Actor (John Fraser), Trials was easily the better of the two films, the first to deal openly with homosexuality on screen even it was about events that occurred more than half a century earlier. Neither film has been released on DVD in the U.S.

Although it pretty much fell between the cracks in its initial release, Elia Kazan’s Wild Riverhas subsequently been acclaimed as one of the director’s best films. Montgomery Clift stars as a Tennessee Valley Authority agent whose job it is to convince 80 year-old Jo Van Fleet to move off her property before it is flooded by the building of a dam. Lee Remick plays the old lady’s grand-daughter with whom he has an affair. Van Fleet’s is absolutely amazing as the cantankerous old lady. The film, previously unavailable on DVD in the U.S., is being released by Fox as part of next month’s Kazan box set.

An entertaining, if somewhat overlong epic, Stanley Kubrick’s film of Spartacus was nominated for six Oscars and won four including one for Peter Ustinov as Best Supporting Actor. Personally I prefer Ustinov in The Sundowners, but he does manage to hold his own amidst a galaxy of fine performers including Kirk Douglas, Laurence Olivier, Jean Simmons and Charles Laughton.

Ernest Gold’s Oscar winning score and Sal Mineo’s Oscar nominated portrayal of the boy who was “used like a woman” were the best things about Otto Preminger’s film of Leon Uris’ mammoth Exodus. The epic about the founding of the state of Israel is often fascinating if overlong. The sterling cast also includes Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint, Ralph Richardson and Lee J. Cobb.

Other films of note include Pollyanna for which Hayley Mills received the last SpecialOscar awarded child stars; Bells Are Ringing with Judy Holliday reprising her Tony award winning role as a lovesick telephone answering service operator; Never on Sunday with Melina Mercouri Oscar nominated as a happy-go-lucky prostitute and BUtterfield 8, a trashy melodrama that won Elizabeth Taylor her first Oscar playing the “slut of all time”.

All films except those noted have been released on DVD in the U.S.

This week’s new DVD releases include the Blu-ray debuts of Psycho, Apocalypse Now, Moulin Rouge! and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.