The screen adaptations of Broadway’s 1962 and 1963 Best Play winners battled it out for the 1966 Oscars.

Paul Scofield repeated his Tony award winning role of Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons and nabbed an Oscar for his brilliant portrayal.

The film recounts the story of More, Lord Chancellor of England, and his conflict between loyalty to his king, Henry VIII, and his conscientious objection to Henry’s naming himself Supreme Head of the Church of England in order to precipitate divorce from Catherine of Aragon and marriage to Anne Boleyn. Seen at the time of its release as an uncanny rumination on the contemporaneous objection of draft age American men to the Vietnam War, the film was the perfect metaphor for its time. However, to paraphrase its title, it is truly a film for all time. Every era has its uncompromising moralists who may not be truly appreciated in their own lifetimes. Indeed, it wasn’t until 1886, 301 years after his beheading, that Thomas More was beatified by the Catholic Church and not until 1935 that he was canonized. He was eventually added, as well, to the Church of England’s calendar of saints in 1980.

The film, directed by Fred Zinnemann, features magnificent cinematography, art direction, set design and costumes as one might expect, but its true value is in Bolt’s articulate screenplay and the performances, particularly of Scofield’s sad eyed, world weary saint in the making, Wendy Hiller as his uncomprehending wife and Robert Shaw as a young and vibrant Henry VIII, quite a revelation after all those years in which portly Charles Laughton was everyone’s idea of what the randy king looked like. Susannah York, Leo McKern, Nigel Davenport, John Hurt and Orson Welles are also memorable and Vanessa Redgrave makes a brief appearance as Anne Boleyn.

The film was nominated for eight Oscars and won six, including Best Director and Screenplay. Shaw and Hiller had to settle for nominations.

With an even more impressive thirteen Oscar nominations, Mike Nichols’ film of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? gave Zinenmann’s masterpiece quite a run for its money, but ended up coming short of A Man for All Seasons’ haul with five wins of its own.

Elizabeth Taylor, who six years earlier ostensibly won an Oscar because the world thought she was on her deathbed, won a second one this time clearly on merit. Her frumpy, foul-mouthed, middle-aged professor’s wife was far and away the most impressive thing she had ever done on screen, or would do again. Richard Burton, her then real life husband, had his greatest screen role as well as her put-upon husband. Unfortunately he was up against an even greater actor in an even greater role in Scofield and there would be no husband and wife wins this year.

George Segal as a younger instructor and Sandy Dennis as his mousey wife also scored in the film’s only other principal roles. Both were nominated in support, with Dennis winning her category.

The film, with its barrage of four-letter words put a major dent in Hollywood’s Production Code, from which it never recovered.

Another film which flaunted the Production Code was Lewis Gilbert’s Alfie, although since this was a British film it didn’t actually count as Hollywood biting the hand that slapped it for so many years.

Michael Caine starred as the Cockney philanderer who questions his seemingly carefree existence. Shelley Winters, Millicent Martin, Julie Foster, Jane Asher, Shirley Anne Field and a superb Vivien Merchant were the women in his life. The film was nominated for five Oscars including Best Picture, Actor and Supporting Actress (Merchant).

If Alfie was the year’s best adult comedy, and it was, then Norman Jewison’s The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming was the year’s best family comedy. An hilarious send-up of the Cold War, Alan Arkin and John Phillip Law starred as Russian sailors whose submarine runs aground in New England. Carl Reiner, Eva Marie Saint, Brian Keith, Paul Ford and Tessie O’Shea were among the inhabitants they encounter.

The film was nominated for four Oscars including Best Picture and Actor (Arkin).

Fresh on the heels of his second Oscar win as Best Director for 1965’s The Sound of Music, Robert Wise produced and directed another dream project, the film version of Richard McKenna’s novel, The Sand Pebbles. Set in the revolution torn China of 1926, Steve McQueen had one of his best roles as a loner sailor who befriends a Chinese coolie (Mako) and a lady missionary (Candice Bergen). Jerry Goldsmith’s haunting score, McQueen and Mako’s performances and the film itself accounted for four of the film’s eight Oscar nominations. Richard Attenborough as another troubled sailor and Richard Crenna as the ship’s captain also turned in fine performances.

Among the films Oscars recognized, in addition to the Best Picture nominees, were The Professionals, A Man and a Woman, The Shop on Main Street, Blow-Up, Morgan!, Georgy Girl, Fantastic Voyage, Born Free, Seconds, The Fortune Cookie, Hawaii and You’re a Big Boy Now,but not The Shameless Old Lady or 7 Women.

Nominated for three Oscars, two of them for Richard Brooks for writing and directing, The Professionals was a rip-roaring western about four adventurers (Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan and Woody Strode) hired by Texas millionaire Ralph Bellamy to rescue his young wife (Claudia Cardinale) from Mexican bandit Jack Palance. All the performers are at the top of their game and Conrad Hall’s Oscar nominated cinematography is a pleasure to behold.

A huge international hit, Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman, a simple romance that is about just that, a man and a woman, the film won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film and Original Screenplay. It was also nominated for Best Director and Actress (Anouk Aimee). There was a sequel exactly twenty years later called A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later with the same stars, Aimee and Jean-Louis Trinitgnant, again written and directed by Lelouch.

The prior year’s Best Foreign Film award went to Jan Kadar’s The Shop on Main Street. Eligible this year for nominations in other categories based on its L.A. release date, the Czechoslovakian film brought a Best Actress nomination to veteran Polish stage actress, Ida Kaminska as a Jewish shopkeeper unaware of the war around her. Josef Kroner plays her Christian overseer. The two make movie magic together.

The first major English language film to feature casual nudity, presenting yet another blow to Hollywood’s Production Code, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up was the legendary Italian director’s first film in English. David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave and Sarah Miles star in the story of a photographer who witnesses a murder. Nominated for two Oscars for Best Director and Original Screenplay, Antonioni was named the year’s Best Director by the National Society of Film Critics.

Vanessa Redgrave also made a splash in Karel Reisz’s Morgan!, a slapstick comedy which made a star of David Warner as her dreamer ex-husband. Vanessa was nominated for an Oscar for her scintillating performance, but it was not the definitive role that was her sister Lynn’s in Silvio Narizzano’s Georgy Girl.

Lynn Redgrave shared the New York Film Critics Award for Best Actress for Georgy Girl with Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and was Liz’s only serious competition for the Oscar. She plays the homely but vivacious friend of swinging Londoners Charlotte Rampling and Alan Bates, who has a fling with her middle-aged employer, played by James Mason. The film was also nominated for Best Supporting Actor (Mason), Best Song and Best Black-and-White Cinematography.

Nominated for five Oscars, and winner of two for its inventive Art Direction and Special Effects, Richard Fleischer’s Fantastic Voyage is one of the screen’s most unusual science fiction films and one of the best. It concerns a small crew in a shrunken submarine injected into the bloodstream of a wounded diplomat and the crew’s efforts to save his life. Stephen Boyd, Raquel Welch, Edmond O’Brien, Donald Pleasance, Arthur O’Connell, William Redfield and Arthur Kennedy starred.

John Barry’s soaring music accounted for Born Free’s two nominations and wins for Best Score and Best Song. The true story of Joy and George Adamson who raised a lion cub in Kenya, The Adamsons were played by the real-life married couple, Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers.

Rock Hudson had one of his best roles in John Frankenheimer’s very scary Seconds in which he plays the surgically altered version of John Randolph given a new lease on life. But has he? It was nominated for James Wong Howe’s splendid black-and-white cinematography.

Walter Matthau finally became a star as Jack Lemmon’s shyster lawyer in Billy Wilder’s The Fortune Cookie, but not too much of a star that he couldn’t be nominated in support and win. The film received three other nominations.

George Roy Hill’s sprawling epic, Hawaii, was nominated for seven Oscars including one for first and only time actress Jocelyne Lagarde as the Queen of the Islands who all but steals the film from Julie Andrews and Max von Sydow.

Veteran stage actress, Geraldine Page, a major film star from 1961 to 1964 swallowed her pride and her dignity to play the silly overprotective mother of a horny teenager in Francis Ford Coppola’s You’re a Big Boy Now. The transformation won her a nomination in support.

Two films that got no respect from Oscar then, and get no respect from DVD companies now, are The Shameless Old Lady and 7 Women.

The Shameless Old Lady is a poignant French film from a story by Bertolt Brecht about an old lady who learns she has six months to live and spends the time she has left dong all the things she’s always wanted to do. The wonderful 83 year-old French character actress, Sylvie, who won the National Society of Film Critics Award for her performance, is simply magical. It is not available on DVD anywhere.

John Ford’s last film, 7 Women,is about a group of female missionaries in revolutionary China and the atheist doctor who joins them in their stand against a barbaric Mongolian warlord and his men. Anne Bancroft had one of her best roles as the doctor who uses sex the way a gunslinger would use a gun and Margaret Leighton is almost as good as the shrill head missionary. Flora Robson, Mildred Dunnock, Betty Field, Anna Lee, Sue Lyon and Eddie Albert provide strong support. Despite the film’s splendid pedigree, Warner Bros. has yet to issue a DVD of it.

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

New DVD releases this week include The Twilight Saga: Eclipse and the dual disc Blu-ray debut of Walt Disney’s Fantasia and Fantasia 2000, which are also being reissued on standard DVD.