What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1965

The Year: 1965
What the Nominees Were: Darling, Doctor Zhivago, Ship of Fools, The Sound of Music, A Thousand Clowns 

Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: In America, Arthur Penn delivered his first great film, Mickey One. Orson Welles had Chimes at Midnight and Robert Aldrich turned out The Flight of the Phoenix. Overseas there was Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits, Forman’s Loves of a Blonde and Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers.

What Did Win: The Sound of Music
How It’s Aged: It’s a great two hour movie that is unfortunately three hours long. Does every single song need a reprise? Andrews is great, but ultimately there are tone problems as well.

What Should’ve Won: Doctor Zhivago
How Hard Was the Decision: Almost impossible. This was simply a year with no slam-dunk options. Certainly, the greatest film of the year is The Battle of Algiers, but I just couldn’t come up with any scenario in which that film (stridently anti-western, made by a proud communist) could have won. That left a lot of weaker choices: Stick with Sound of Music? Give comedy a chance and go with the wonderful-but-stagebound A Thousand Clowns? Ultimately, I decided to rewatch Dr. Zhivago, and I loved it. It’s not as strong as Lawrence of Arabia (which was made by all the same people) but in a weak year, I decided it still deserved its own Oscar.

Director: David Lean
Writer: Robert Bolt
Stars: Omar Sharif, Julie Christie, Rod Steiger, Tom Courtenay, Geraldine Chaplin

The Story: Unlike Sound of Music, this movie has tons of plot justifying its (even longer) epic length, so I can only briefly sum it up here. Doctor and part-time poet Yuri Zhivago marries his childhood sweetheart but falls in love with a nurse named Lara on the German front in WWI. As with any great European epic novel, he is separated and reunited with both women many times over the course of several wars, but dies alone.

Any Nominations or Wins: It lost Picture, Director, Supporting Actor for Courtenay, Editing and Sound. It won Adapted Screenplay, Color Art Direction, Color Cinematography, Color Costume Design, and Score. Christie did win Best Actress, but for a different movie entirely, John Schlesinger’s Darling (which is also excellent).
Why It Didn’t Win: It was clearly hard for the Academy to decide between this and Sound of Music. Both were big hits and widely acclaimed. But ultimately Sound edged this movie out at both the box office and the Oscars. Ultimately, feel-good usually wins over feel-bad.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. When I was 15 in 1990, I vowed to watch all the great movies. And so I did …in extremely low-quality VHS resolution. And the widescreen movies were all “pan-n-scan” (reformatted for square TVs, only showing half the original image.) That barely counts as having watched the movies at all. And even if I had seen ideal versions of these movies, it’s now been 35 years, and my memory is not good. The result is that I now realize that I can no longer claim to have seen many great movies. In some ways, this is wonderful: So many masterpieces are now waiting to be rediscovered. So I’ve been gradually rewatching them, and many have been spectacular. Especially the widescreen movies, which I can only now begin to appreciate, finally seeing the whole image. Like Lawrence, this movie would be a masterpiece for Freddie Young’s cinematography alone, and I’m so glad I finally get to see it all. (Lean originally wanted a new cinematographer, none other than future director Nicolas Roeg, but they couldn’t get along, so he returned to Young again.)
   
2. Omar Sharif blew everybody away as a fierce Arab chieftain in Lawrence. Could he do the same as a sensitive Russian poet/doctor three years later? Lean placed enormous faith in him to handle this very different role (an Egyptian as a Russian?) but Sharif rises to the challenge. Ali and Zhivago have very little in common…except smoldering stares of love (cast at very different objects of affection!)
   
3. Of course, the biggest difference between this and Lean’s two previous movies, Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence is the presence of… (can it be?) women! They do exist! You might think that Lean would not be able to get the hang of this new gender right away, but both Chaplin and Christie give wonderful performances as very rich characters. They’re both great at looking secretly wounded, though the man they both love is trying his best not to hurt anyone.
4. Directors teach you their vocabulary, and then they can play with that. In Lawrence, we don’t see the hero’s dead body at the beginning, just his dangling goggles that have been thrown into a tree. Likewise, where we’re with Lara’s husband Antipov at the front, he seemingly gets blown up and then we cut to his dangling glasses in a bush. Longtime Lean fans know that means he’s dead, right? Ah, but then, an hour of screentime later, he shockingly shows up alive. Lean seemingly repeats an old trick, but this time he does it to mislead us.
   
5. We know how things turned out, but the trick with any historical epic is to recreate moments in which the possibly of revolution seemed absurd, which are so deliciously ironic. The most painful statement in the movie happens early on when one character reassures another “People will be different after the revolution.” Unfortunately that turns out to be true, in all the worst ways.
6. The best scene in the movie is one in which soldiers marching to the front in WWI encounter soldiers who are deserting. Before long, anarchy has been unleashed, and the first group joins the second, leaving just Yuri and Lara to struggle on. Lean is the only director who is at his best when he has a hundred actors in a scene.
   
7. He’s also once again great with trains, of course. This time he doesn’t get to blow one up, but the passengers still don’t get a pleasant journey.

Ah, 1965: Cars (like movies) just had to get smaller, because they couldn’t get any bigger.