The DVD Report #58

Continuing my look at the films of previous years available or not on DVD, it’s time to look at 1960.

The film year of 1960 holds special significance for me as it was the year in which I first worked in a movie theatre after school and, for the first time, saw almost all of the films released in the U.S. that year – and most of them for free!

As usual, I’ll start with the films I consider the ten best of the year, four of which are, incredibly, still missing on DVD.

Billy Wilder reached the pinnacle of his considerable career with what was then called a seriocomedy and might now be called a dramedy. Whatever you call it, The Apartment was a brilliantly written, photographed, acted, scored and directed film about a lowly office worker who schemes his way to the top by renting out his apartment for the extracurricular affairs of his bosses. Jack Lemmon as the lovable schnook, Shirley MacLaine as the elevator operator he’s sweet on and Fred MacMurray as the head of personnel who breaks MacLaine’s heart all give career high performances. The expert supporting cast includes Ray Walston, Edie Adams and Jack Kruschen as Lemmon’s neighbor, a doctor who comes in handy when MacLaine overdoses on pills after being abandoned by MacMurray on Christmas Eve.

Wilder’s direction and the film tied with Jack Cardiff and his film of D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers at the New York Film Critics Award, but triumphed on its own at the Oscars, winning awards for Best Picture, Direction, Writing (Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond), Black-and-White Art Direction and Editing. It was also nominated for Best Actor (Lemmon), Actress (MacLaine), Supporting Actor (Kruschen), Black-and-White Cinematography and Sound.

The film it tied with for its New York Film Critics win, Cardiff’s Sons and Lovers was also named Best Picture by the National Board of Review. Ace cinematographer Cardiff (Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes) directed only a handful of films, of which this was easily his best. Another ace cinematographer, Freddie Francis, won the Oscar for his work here, no doubt aided by Cardiff’s keen eye.

The film is about the coming of age of the artist son of a coal miner and his possessive wife, splendidly acted by Dean Stockwell, Trevor Howard and Wendy Hiller, with Mary Ure as the older woman Stockwell is attracted to and Heather Sears as the young innocent who is attracted to him. Both Howard and Hiller have said that they directed themselves in the film. If so, they did so brilliantly. Howard as the rough, gruff coal miner and Hiller as the mother with obvious incestuous feelings for her son, have never been better.

In addition to its Oscar for Francis, the film was nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Picture, Director, Actor (Howard), Supporting Actress (Ure), Screenplay and Editing.

For some reason, which I’ve never been able to fathom, this film is not available on home video in the U.S. but is on DVD in Europe and Australia.

An audience pleaser from the outset, and a perennial favorite ever since, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was not met with universal acclaim by the critics of the day. They objected to the pace, the manipulation, the fact that it was filmed in black and white on the Universal back lot where Hitchcock’s highly successful TV series had filmed for years making it seem somehow inferior to Hitchcock’s meticulously-crafted color films of the 1950s. The film won no awards from critics’ groups and received a measly four Oscar nominations for Best Director, Supporting Actress (Janet Leigh), Black-and-White Art Direction and Cinematography. Yet today you’d be hard pressed to find a critic who doesn’t consider it one of the greatest films ever made with its place in history forever secure as the first modern psychological horror film. Anthony Perkins’ performance as the mother-fixated motel owner is justifiably the stuff of legend, as is Leigh’s performance as a remorseful thief hiding out at the motel.

Critics were kinder to Vincente Minnelli’s Home from the Hill than the Academy was. It got no Oscar nominations, but Robert Mitchum and George Peppard were named Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor respectively by the National Board of Review, Mitchum having won for his work in The Sundowners as well.

No director of the day was more adept at filming in Cinemascope than Minnelli who fills his screen with one beautiful-to-look-at scene after another. The film is melodrama at its best. Mitchum is the local Texas patriarch whose upbringing of son George Hamilton is left to his repressed wife, played by Eleanor Parker, until Mitchum decides to make a man of him under the tutelage of his foreman, George Peppard. Peppard just happens to be Mitchum’s illegitimate son and when Hamilton runs off after impregnating local girl Luanna Patten, it’s Peppard who steps in to make things right. You’ll need to keep a box of tissues handy for the final scene between Parker and Peppard.

Minnelli won a Directors Guild nomination for his work.

Even more heated than Sons and Lovers and Home from the Hill, and certainly more controversial, was Richard Brooks’ film of Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry about a phony evangelist brilliantly played by Burt Lancaster in his Oscar-winning role.

Lancaster had previously won the New York Film Critics award and a Golden Globe. Jean Simmons as a true believer evangelist and Shirley Jones as a preacher’s daughter-turned-prostitute were nominated for Globes as was the film and Brooks for his direction. Jones won an Oscar for her performance as did Brooks, albeit for his screenplay. The film was also nominated for Best Picture and Best Score.

Another controversial drama, Stanley Kramer’s Inherit the Wind was the fictionalized dramatization of the 1920s Scopes Monkey Trial in which a high school teacher was prosecuted for teaching evolution. Famed lawyer Clarence Darrow became the teacher’s defense attorney while three-time U.S. Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan prosecuted. The fictionalized Darrow and Bryan were played by two-time Best Actor Oscar winners Spencer Tracy and Fredric March and it’s a treat to watch the two legends square off against each other. Florence Eldredge, March’s real life wife, is quite touching as his wife here.

The film was nominated for four Oscars including Best Actor (Tracy), Cinematography, Editing and Screenplay. Tracy was also nominated for a Golden Globe, while March won the Best Actor award at the Berlin Film Festival. Both actors were nominated for BAFTAs, the British Academy Award.

Exploring the world of migrant Australian sheep drivers, Fred Zinnemann’s The Sundowners provided Robert Mitchum with one of his best screen roles, for which he won the National Board of Review award in conjunction with his performance in Home from the Hill. Deborah Kerr, as his long-suffering wife, took home her third New York Film Critics award for Best Actress while Zinnemann won a Golden Globe nomination for his direction. Five Oscar nominations went to the film for Best Picture, Director, Actress (Kerr), Supporting Actress (Glynis Johns) and Screenplay.

Set in small-town-Oklahoma of the 1920s, Delbert Mann’s The Dark at the Top of the Stairs from William Inge’s play offered a great exploration of the Americana of a by-gone era. Robert Preston starred as a travelling salesman whose wife, Dorothy McGuire, holds the family together. Shirley Knight is their teenage daughter being romanced by troubled Lee Kinsolving, and Richard Eyre is their impressionable son. Good as they all are, veterans Eve Arden as McGuire’s bigoted sister and Angela Lansbury as Preston’s sometimes-mistress steal the film.

Kinsolving and Knight were nominated for Golden Globes, while Knight was the film’s sole Oscar nominee. Arden and Max Steiner’s great score were nominated for Laurel awards and Mann won a DGA nomination. This woefully neglected film sadly has never been available on commercial home video in any region.

Reprising the role he was born to play, Ralph Bellamy once again portrays Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Vincent J. Donehue’s Sunrise at Campobello, for which he won a Tony on Broadway. On screen, however, it was the normally garrulous Greer Garson, as shy Eleanor Roosevelt, who won the lion’s share of awards including the Best Actress award of both the National Board of Review and the Golden Globes. Donehue was nominated at the DGA and the film earned four Oscar nominations including Best Actress, Color Art Direction and Costume Design, and Sound. Eclipsed by later versions of the story of FDR’s fight to overcome polio, it remains a treat thanks to its impeccable star performances, but it’s not available on DVD.

The eviction of life-long residents from their homes and the subsequent flooding necessary to build the dams on the Tennesee River in the 1930s is the background of Elia Kazan’s Wild Riverfeaturing strong performances by Montgomery Clift and Lee Remick and a great one by Jo Van Fleet in meticulous old age makeup down to the last liver spot.

Clift is the government’s man, Remick the poor widow he falls in love with and Van Fleet her grandmother who refuses to budge from the property she’s lived in all her life. Kazan was nominated for a Best Director award at the Berlin Film Festival but the film failed to win any major critics’ awards or Oscar nominations. This quintessentially American film is oddly only available on DVD in Europe.

1960 was such a banner year for film that an alternative ten best list could easily be created from amongst the many other great films released in the U.S. within the year.

Two groundbreaking Soviet films, Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying and Grigori Chukharai’s Ballad of a Soldier, were the first Russian-made films since prior to World War II in which war was not seen as the idealistic triumph of the Soviet leadership but as the cause of much suffering for ordinary people. Cranes won the Palme d’Or for Best Film at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival and winning a Special Mention was its enigmatic star, Tatiana Samoilova, who plays the girl who waits for a lover who will never return from the war. Ballad was nominated for the same honor at the 1960 Festival and its star, Vladimir Ivashov as the idealistic doomed soldier of the title, won many international awards.

A classic of the emerging French new wave, Alain Resnasis’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour is a complex romantic drama about a married French woman, played by Emamuelle Riva, involved in an affair with a married Japanese man, played by Eiji Okada, recalling an earlier affair with a German soldier. He has memories of his own, including the loss of his family when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Alec Guinness played against type as a blowhard Scottish Army colonel at war with his replacement, martinet John Mills, in Ronald Neame’s provocative Tunes of Glory. Jack Hawkins leads a group of ex-Army men in a bank heist in Basil Dearden’s droll comedy The League of Gentlemen. They were the year’s two best British imports.

Lilli Palmer is splendid as usual as the Italian Mother Superior responsible for hiding Jewish children from the Nazis in Ralph Thomas’ deeply moving Conspiracy of Hearts. Sylvia Sims has one of her best early roles as an impressionable novice and Yvonne Mitchell is equally fine as the doubting nun whose reluctance to shelter the children thaws as unimaginable atrocities make the official neutrality of the Church impossible to live with.

The third in his trilogy about life amongst Calcutta’s poor, Satyajit Ray’s The World of Apu is perhaps the greatest of the three films with the now-grown Apu struggling between worldly responsibilities and his own ambitions.

Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece of blind vengeance, The Virgin Spring, helped propel the career of Max von Sydow who plays the father of the murdered girl. It won numerous international awards including the Oscar for Best Foreign Film.

An atypical non-action film in master Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s canon, Ikiru features a commanding performance by Takashi Shimura as a bureaucrat who searches for meaning in his life when he is diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Nominated for six Oscars, and winner of four, Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus is a thinking man’s epic about the slave revolts in ancient Rome featuring an all-star cast led by Kirk Douglas, Jean Simmons, Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, John Gavin, Tony Curtis, Woody Strode and Oscar winner Peter Ustinov.

Other films of note included Jules Dassin’s raucous Never on Sunday featuring Melina Mercouri’s joyful Oscar-nominated performance as a carefree Greek prostitute and the unforgettable Oscar winning title song; Otto Preminger’s film about the founding of Israel, Exodus features Sal Mineo’s soulful Oscar-nominated performance and Ernest Gold’s magnificent Oscar-winning score; Vincente Minnelli’s Bells Are Ringing, the year’s best musical, with Judy Holliday reprising her delightful Tony Award-winning role; John Ford’s revisionist western, Sergeant Rutledge, with a great performance by Woody Strode as a black soldier falsely accused of rape; John Sturges’ reworking of Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai becomes The Magnificent Seven with Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen; Anthony Mann’s epic widescreen color remake of Edna Ferber’s Cimarron with Glenn Ford and Maria Schell; John Wayne’s evocation of the tragic last days of The Alamo featuring Wayne, Richard Widmark and Laurence Harvey; Wolf Rilla’s minimalist, eerie and influential Village of the Damned; those dueling Oscar Wilde biographies: Ken Hughes’ The Trials of Oscar Wilde (aka The Man With the Green Carnation) with Peter Finch, and Gregory Ratoff’s Oscar Wilde with Robert Morley; and the Disney remakes of the classics Swiss Family Robinson and Pollyanna, the former with John Mills and Dorothy McGuire, the latter with Hayley Mills and Jane Wyman.