What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1960

The Year: 1960

What the Nominees Were: The Alamo, The Apartment, Elmer Gantry, Sons and Lovers, The Sundowners 

Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: In terms of American films, the two giants in the room here are Psycho and Spartacus. Other great American films include The Magnificent Seven and Comanche Station. Overseas was an embarrassment of riches as well, with Breathless, La Dolce Vita, Shoot the Piano Player and Peeping Tom.

What Should’ve Won and Did Win: The Apartment
How Hard Was the Decision: Very hard. Psycho is obviously a great film, and Spartacus is easily the best of the sword-and-sandal epics. Either of them could have been a shoe-in most other years, but I just couldn’t take away The Apartment’s win.

Director: Billy Wilder
Writers: Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond
Stars: Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, Ray Walston, Edie Adams

The Story: A nebbish named C. C. Baxter lets higher-ups at his insurance company use his apartment to sleep with their mistresses. His boss finds out and demands it stop …because he wants exclusive use of this privilege for himself. It turns out the boss’s mistress is the elevator operator Baxter has a crush on, Miss Kubelik. When the boss jilts her, she attempts suicide in Baxter’s apartment, and he has to nurse her back to health.

Any Other Nominations or Wins: It won Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Art Direction and Editing. It lost Cinematography, Sound, Actor, Actress, and Supporting Actor for Jack Kruschen, who played the doctor next door.
How It Won: One can understand why Psycho wasn’t nominated (it may have come from an acclaimed director, but it was still a lurid low-budget horror shocker) but Spartacus would seem like a lock for a nomination and win. Maybe the Academy was prejudiced against it because it hired a blacklisted screenwriter? With that out of the way, there was really no competition for this stellar comedy-drama.

Why It Won:

1. Why was this the first comedy to win best picture? I have postulated in the past that the fundamental difference between literature and entertainment is that literature is about unintended consequences and entertainment is about intended consequences. If that definition holds, then this movie is obviously literature, because every action leads to a delightful spiral of consequences nobody foresaw or wanted, each an ironic reversal of anybody’s intentions. The movie ends with both Baxter and Kubelik getting exactly the happy endings they were promised by the supposed bad guy (who leaves his wife for Kubelik and promotes Baxter) …only to realize they never wanted them.
   
2. If Baxter was told to “be a mensch” by someone who fully understands his situation, it would just be good advice and much less interesting. But coming from a man who mistakenly thinks he’s much more of a heel than he is, at a time when Baxter is ironically doing the mostly right thing, it hits so much harder.
   
3. Miss Kubelik’s broken hand mirror changes hands several times, and of course so does Baxter’s key, and each one gives off a big bang every time it’s exchanged. The shot of Baxter seeing his reflection in the broken mirror and realizing what that means (that she’s his boss’s mistress) is one of the most heartbreaking shots in cinema.
   
4. Imagine making Some Like It Hot and then turning out The Apartment just one year later. We have some talented directors working today, but none who can work this fast in the current system. Just think of all the great films we’re losing out on!
5. We started this whole project by looking at The Crowd from 1928. This movie’s opening shot is copied from that movie, surely intentionally, and this too is an examination of an average American chewed up by the American Dream. My father once asked me what the point of homage shots are. Don’t they just take you out of the film? I said that the sort of people like me who recognize homage shots are never fully “in” a film, and such shots are a delightful shout-out to the fact that this film is in a certain tradition.
   

Ah, 1960: The ham that induces madness

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1959

The Year: 1959

What the Nominees Were: Anatomy of a Murder, Ben-Hur, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Nun’s Story, Room at the Top
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Hitchcock’s most delightful confection North by Northwest, Billy Wilder’s seminal Some Like it Hot, and the wickedly modern romcom Pillow Talk

What Did Win: Ben-Hur
How It’s Aged: It’s bloated. Too long and too impressed by itself, and I’ve never been a fan of Charlton Heston’s wooden acting. The chariot race is a lot of fun, but not worth sitting through the rest of it. And talk about a deus ex machina!

What Should’ve Won: Some Like It Hot
How Hard Was the Decision: Not that hard. Some Like It Hot is the most acclaimed movie of 1959.

Director: Billy Wilder
Writers: Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond, based on the French film “Fanfare of Love” written by Robert Thoeren and Michael Logan
Stars: Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, George Raft, Pat O’Brien, and Joe E. Brown

The Story: Chigago musicians Joe and Jerry accidentally witness the St. Valentines Day massacre, and have to flee town in drag as members of Sweet Sue’s Society Syncopators (using the names Josephine and Daphne). They both fall for the band’s singer, Sugar, but Joe wins her by adopting a third identity: Oil heir Junior. Daphne, meanwhile, accepts a wedding proposal from a millionaire. When the gangsters show up at the resort, everything gets quite chaotic until the millionaire spirits them all out of town. When Daphne finally reveals she can’t marry him because she’s a boy, he just replies, “Nobody’s perfect.”

Any Nominations or Wins: It won Costume Design but it lost Director, Actor for Lemmon, Adapted Screenplay, Art Direction and Cinematography. And it didn’t even get nominated for picture!
Why It Didn’t Win: It’s tempting to say that biblical epics are a shoe-in, but that’s not true at all, because Ben-Hur was the only one that won. Just chalk this up to the Academy’s distaste for comedy. (And yet, that too feels like an insufficient answer, because Wilder and Lemmon would win Picture the next year with another comedy, but that one had more sour to leaven the sweet, as we’ll soon see.)

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Sugar says, “I come from this musical family. My mother is a piano teacher and my father was a conductor.” Joe asks, “Where did he conduct?” Sugar replies, “On the Baltimore and Ohio.” (A railroad.)  The big question is, does Sugar know she’s being funny when she says that or not? Monroe plays it as if she doesn’t, but then you think about it and realize that of course she does, she’s just deliciously deadpan. As a result, she couldn’t be funnier.
   
2. One of those pieces of movie trivia everyone knows is that Curtis said kissing Monroe was like kissing Hitler, but you’d never guess it. Of course, the whole gag is that Sugar is doing all the work, and boy oh boy is she working those kissing scenes. Despite Curtis’s warning, there’s not a red-blooded, straight American male that wouldn’t take his place.
   
3. One aspect of drag comedy is watching our heroes discover what women have to go through, in terms of unending unwanted physical contact. Josephine says to an indignant Daphne, “Now you know how the other half lives.” As Shakespeare could tell you, drag always gets a laugh, but it also allows you to show things that don’t usually get shown. (There have been two hit Broadway adaptations of this movie. In the more recent one, Daphne was shown as being happily and permanently trans, but then I realized halfway through that they couldn’t end on the line “Nobody’s perfect” because they wouldn’t want to say there was anything less than perfect about her transition. Indeed, the line did not appear, though they did gesture to the fact that it wasn’t there.)
4. When I broke down the structure of genres, I said that the second and third quarters of comedies frequently boil down to “success with mask”. Well that would make this the ultimate comedy because Curtis’s character is having success with two masks, for twice the fun. When he’s doing a quick change from Josephine to Junior, he forgets to take his earrings off, and, because they’re sparkly, we’re very aware that he’s running off to his date with them still on. The comedic tension builds and builds until he finally discovers them and whips them off just in time.
   
5. The movie is leisurely paced: The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, which is the inciting incident, doesn’t happen until 21:04, when it could easily have happened ten minutes earlier. They don’t arrive in Florida until 48:29. All of Wilder’s post Apartment movies (many of which I love) are too bloated, and this one is just pushing the line, but ultimately it justifies its shaggy-dog pacing, because things get quite zippy at just the right points.

Ah, 1959: Shudder

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1958

The Year: 1958
What the Nominees Were: Auntie Mame, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Defiant Ones, Gigi, Separate Tables
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Vertigo, Anthony Mann’s Man of the West, Welles’s Touch of Evil. Over in Japan, Akira Kurasawa turned out The Hidden Fortress, which would be a huge influence on Star Wars.

What Did Win: Gigi
How It’s Aged: It’s awful. Its supremely creepy story is summed up by the song “Thank Heaven for Little Girls,” which is, unfortunately, the movie’s high point.

What Should’ve Won: Vertigo
How Hard Was the Decision: Not hard at all. Vertigo was ranked for many years as the greatest film of all time by the Sight and Sound Critics poll. It’s universally considered the best film of 1958.

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writers: Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor, Based on the novel “D’entre les Morts” by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (who also wrote the source material for Diabolique)
Stars: James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes, Tom Helmore

The Story: A policeman develops vertigo and has to leave the force, but gets hired by an old college friend to do an odd job. The friend fears his wife is possessed by an ancestor in old San Francisco who is driving her to suicide. Our hero falls in love with the wife but can’t save her when she (seemingly) throws herself from a mission tower. Later, he meets a similar looking woman on the street and becomes determined to give her a makeover to recreate his dead love. She eventually admits that she is the same woman after all, and she faked her death as part of the friend’s scheme to get his wife’s money. She ends up dead, too, and Stewart is devastated.

Any Nominations or Wins: It was nominated for Best Art Direction and Best Sound but lost both.
Why It Didn’t Win: The movie was not particularly well-reviewed at the time and a big flop at the box office. (Hitchcock knew it was a masterpiece but decided he had made a fatal mistake casting Stewart, who was too old for the role, so he came to dislike the film, too.) It was only decades later that the film was restored, re-released, and belatedly recognized (at least for a while) as the greatest movie of all time.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. I had the great honor of being T.A. for Andrew Sarris’s Hitchcock class at Columbia. (Sarris was the scholar/critic most responsible for building Hitchcock’s towering reputation in America.) The week before my section watched Vertigo I asked how many had already seen it. Most had, so I asked them, in this rewatch, to watch the movie from Judy Barton’s perspective (Judy Barton is the real name of Kim Novak’s character) The film doesn’t really give us enough information to do that (it’s unclear if she participated in the scheme for love or money) but it’s certainly a wild time trying to track what this all must be like for her. Like any great film, it rewards rewatches and always has new layers.
   
2. One of my students pointed out to me: “You said that North by Northwest is perfectly constructed, whereas this movie is a big mess, so why is this considered to be the better film?” I said that depth is found in holes. We begin with Scottie dangling from a gutter about to fall, then we cut to weeks later and never find out how he was rescued. That hole disturbs us. Later, there are unexplained phenomena such as how Novak disappears from the hotel room. When the truth about Novak is revealed, there are potential explanations, but thankfully the movie does rewind an hour to provide one. The holes are the whole point. It’s a glorious mess.
   
3. The movie has Hitchcock’s most sophisticated color palette. Certain colors predominate, glowing and pulsing into the movie through means natural and artificial. Generally, red is violence and green is lust, but they get mixed up constantly throughout the picture, which is only appropriate, I suppose.
   
4. The movie essentially ends at 1:29:00 which is longer than Hitchcock’s shorter masterpieces. Stewart is institutionalized, his friend declares he will never get better, the camera pans back and the music swells ...Then we jump to some time later and Stewart is out on the street, seemingly alright but very much not alright. But… is he still in the hospital? Is the rest of the movie in his mind? Any possibility is open.
5. The movie’s most brilliant decision is to reveal the twist to us, but only to us, shortly after we meet Judy. We now shift our identification to her and come to see Stewart as loathsome as he attempts to transform her. It’s not a thriller anymore, it’s a very dark movie about control.
   
6. This movie is, of course, really all about Grace Kelly. Hitchcock had five years to toy with the most beautiful woman in the world, dressing her up how he wanted and telling her exactly what to do (at least when she was on screen). Then she quit to go into a fairy tale and become a literal princess, leaving Hitch bereft. He is trying futilely to turn the much earthier Novak into her, and confessing everything with the very dark story he’s telling. This movie is a cri de coeur.

Ah, 1958: The popularity of these colors didn’t last long…

New Episode of "A Good Story Well Told" on The Scorpion King!

My other podcast, “A Good Story Well Told” with Jonathan Auxier, returns for a second season! This season, Jonathan, various guests, and I will be extolling the virtues of commercially unsuccessful or critically derided works, so in this episode I get things going by making the case for The Rock’s 2002 starring debut The Scorpion King. Will Jonathan see the hidden value?