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 Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim musical, West Side Story, a modern day version of Romeo and Juliet with a Polish-American boy (Richard Beymer) and a Puerto Rican girl (Natalie Wood) as the star-crossed lovers.

The anticipation paid off with big box office receipts and 11 Oscar nominations including Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor George Chakiris as Natalie’s gang-leader brother and Supporting Actress Rita Moreno as his girl. It won ten, losing only Best Adapted Screenplay, which was awarded to Abby Mann for adapting his own teleplay for Judgment at Nuremberg.

Nuremberg, which had also been nominated for 11 Oscars, was thought be West Side Story’s toughest competition. Among its nominations were those for Best Director Stanley Kramer and two for Best Actor (Spencer Tracy as the American judge presiding over the Nuremberg trials, and Maximilian Schell as the German defense attorney.

Also in the cast were Marlene Dietrich, Richard Widmark, Burt Lancaster and supporting nominees Montgomery Clift and Judy Garland. Clift and Garland were nominated for what were essentially cameos as victims of the Nazis.

Schell was the film’s only other winner aside from Mann.

Nominated for nine Oscars, Robert Rossen’s The Hustler won two for its Black-and-White Art Direction and Cinematography. It has also been nominated for Best Director, Actor (Paul Newman as pool hustler Fast Eddie), Actress (Piper Laurie as his girl, the lame Sarah), Supporting Actor (Jackie Gleason as the legendary Minnesota Fats) and a second Supporting Actor (George C. Scott as gangster Bert Gordon). Newman would reprise his famous role here to an actual Oscar a quarter of century later in Martin Scorsee’s The Color of Money.

The Special Effects Oscar was the only win for J. Lee Thompson’s The Guns of Navarone out of the seven it was nominated for. Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn led the cast of the World War II high adventure taken form Alistair MacLean’s monumental bestseller. Irene Papas, James Darren and Gia Scala were also in the cast.

Marcel Pagnol’s Fanny trilogy of the 1930s was the source material for Harold Rome’s Broadway musical of the same name. Joshua Logan’s film version kept the score but inexplicably canned the lyrics, strange considering the film reunited Gigi’ssinging stars, Leslie Caron and Maurice Chevalier, along with Charles Boyer and Horst Buchholz in the principal roles.
Nominated for five Oscars including Best Director and Actor (Charles Boyer as Cesar), the film was the only one of the five Best Picture nominees to go home empty-handed. Caron and Chevalier had been nominated for Golden Globes as the title character and Panisse, the elderly store owner she marries on the rebound when Cesar’s son, Marius (Buchholz) runs off to sea unknowingly leaving Fanny pregnant.

Films outside of the top five garnering Oscars attention included La Dolce Vita; Breakfast at Tiffany’s; A Majority of One; One, Two, Three; Two Women; Splendor in the Grass; Summer and Smoke and The Children’s Hour.

An Oscar winner for Best Black-and-White Costume Design, Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita was nominated for three other Oscars including Best Director. The film for which Fellini coined the term “paparazzi” – Italian for sparrows – his name for the reporters and photographers swarming the famous in modern Rome. Marcello Mastroianni was the reporter through whose eyes we get to see a world we’d never seen before.

Nominated for five Oscars including Best Actress Audrey Hepburn, Blake Edwards’ Breakfast at Tiffany’s won two for Henry Mancini’s score and for the year’s Best Song, Mancini and Johnny Mercer’s “Moon River”. George Peppard, Patricia Neal and Buddy Ebsen were also memorable in the cleaned up version of Truman Capote’s memoir about a call girl. Though a favorite of romantics and cat lovers the world over, the film loses a few points for Mickey Rooney’s atrocious impersonation of Hepburn’s Japanese-American neighbor.

Rosalind Russell as a Jewish-American widow and Alec Guinness, eons removed from Rooney’s impersonation, as a Japanese businessman, played two people who find common ground in Mervyn LeRoy’s A Majority of One. Nominated for Best Color Cinematography, Russell won her fourth Golden Globe for Best Actress, her second of three for a comedic performance.

James Cagney had one of his best roles in years as a Coca-Cola executive stationed in West Berlin in Billy Wilder’s rapid fire dialogue comedy, One, Two, Three featuring memorable supporting performances from Horst Buchholz, Arlene Francis and Lilo Pulver. The film was nominated for Best Black-and-White Cinematography.

Sophia Loren won the year’s Best Actress award for her superb portrayal of a woman devastated by the war in Vittorio De Sica’s World War II drama, Two Women. The other woman was Eleanora Brown who played her young daughter. Jean-Paul Belmondo co-starred.

Loren’s competition, in addition to the previously mentioned Audrey Hepburn and Piper Laurie, included powerhouse performances from both Natalie Wood and Geraldine Page.

Wood starred as the high school girl whose unrequited love for Warren Beatty in Elia Kazan’s film of William Inge’s Splendor in the Grass drives her to madness. Pat Hingle and Audrey Christie co-starred. Inge won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

Page returned to films for the first time in eight years to play the repressed spinster in Peter Glenville’s film of Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke. The film was also nominated for Best Color Art Direction, Best Score and Best Supporting Actress (Una Merkel as Page’s kleptomaniac mother). Laurence Harvey co-starred as the object of Page’s affection.

Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine and James Garner starred in William Wyler’s second film version of Lilian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, previously made as These Three with Merle Oberon, Miriam Hopkins and Joel McCrea. Hopkins, who had MacLaine’s role in the original, was back to play that character’s aunt. The film was nominated for five Oscars including Best Supporting Actress Fay Bainter, who all but steals the film as the grandmother of the brat who makes a false accusation of a lesbian tryst between Hepburn and MacLaine.

Among the major films Oscar failed to recognize were A Raisin in the Sun; Purple Noon; Rocco and His Brothers; The Hoodlum Priest and Two Rode Together.

Daniel Petrie’s film of Lorraine Hansbury’s A Raisin in the Sun may have failed to pick up an Academy endorsement, but it did allow for both Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations for Claudia McNeilas the poor woman who wins a sizeable insurance settlement and Sidney Poitier as the son who has different ideas than his mom on how to spend the money. Ruby Dee won a National Board of Review as Poitier’s wife.

The first film version of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, filmed as Purple Noon, picked up an Edgar Allen Poe award but was otherwise not recognized by any of the major awards givers at the time. A pity, because the film directed by Rene Clement with Alain Delon and Maurice Ronet was even better than its more famous remake.

Delon also had a major role as the title character in Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers, a film that was heavily awarded in Italy and received two BAFTA nominations as well.

The story follows the travails of a widow (Katina Paxinou) and her sons, including Delon, who move to Milan where her eldest son is already established. Renato Salvatore as one of the brothers and Annie Girradot as a prostitute made major impressions.

Don Murray had his best starring role as the real life priest who administers to prison inmates in Irvin Kershner’s The Hoodlum Priest, but the film’s biggest impact was made by Keir Dullea as a prisoner on death row. The film won an award at Cannes.

Although it pretty much fell between the cracks at the time, John Ford’s Two Rode Together has since been acknowledged as one of the director’s great late career films. James Stewart, Richard Widmark and Shirley Jones star in the film which further explores themes set in motion in Ford’s The Searchers, namely that ofthe plight of children kidnapped by Indians and raised as such.

All films discussed have been released on DVD in the U.S. except, oddly enough, Two Rode Together.

Among this week’s new DVD releases are the Blu-ray debuts of Paths of Glory, the Back to the Future trilogy and the Alien Anthology as well as the breakout hit, Winter’s Bone.