For several years Hollywood had been doing everything it could to entice customers away from their TV sets and into theatres.  By 1955, films shot on location in widescreen processes and glorious Technicolor and films with mature themes that wouldn’t play on TV were commonplace.  How ironic, then, that a little film shot in 35MM in black and white and based on a TV play, was the one that walked away with the year’s Best Picture Oscar and three more wins out of its eight nominations.

Marty, the simple story of a shy, homely butcher and an equally shy, homely schoolteacher who meet at a dance hall and fall in love, written by Paddy Chayefsky, produced by Burt Lancaster and directed by TV director Delbert Mann was based on Chavefsky’s teleplay that aired a year earlier with Rod Steiger and Nancy Marchand in the leads.  For the film version, Steiger, who had won an Oscar nomination the year before as Marlon Brando’s older brother in On the Waterfront, and Marchand, a TV staple, were replaced by Ernest Borgnine, a pug faced actor way down in cast lists, usually as a bad guy, and Betsy Blair, known primarily as Gene Kelly’s wife.  They became instant stars and early Oscar favorites.

After Marty won both the National Board of Review and New York Film Critics awards, the only question was which of the Hollywood blockbusters and/or films with mature themes would AMPAS put up against Marty in the Best Picture race.

An even bigger new star than Borgnine was James Dean who made a huge impression with his first film, East of Eden, made two more major films, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant, and then died in an automobile accident two weeks before Rebel opened. Both Eden and Rebel were expected to do well at year-end awards, and indeed, East of Eden won the Golden Globe. Both were nominated for major Oscars, Eden’s Jo Van Fleet even trumping Betsy Blair in the Best Supporting Actress race, but shock of shocks, neither of Dean’s films were nominated for Best Picture. The fifth nominee was The Rose Tattoo, from Tennessee Williams’ play, with Anna Magnani in her first English language film opposite Marty’s producer, Burt Lancaster.

Nominated in their place were Warner Bros. wartime comedy and box office smash, Mister Roberts, which marked Henry Fonda’s return to the screen for the first time in seven years, two adult dramas starring the hugely popular William Holden, Picnic opposite Kim Novak, and Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing opposite Jennifer Jones, who had to drop out of the previous year’s The Country Girl due to pregnancy, paving the way for Grace Kelly’s Oscar.

Only two Best Picture directors made the cut in their own category – Marty’s Delbert Mann and Picnic’s Joshua Logan. They were joined by East of Eden’s Elia Kazan, Summertime’s David Lean and Bad Day at Black Rock’s John Sturges.

A ten Best Picture slate would certainly have included East of Eden as well as Lean’s lushly romantic Summertime with Katharine Hepburn at her peak and Sturges’ suspense filled present day western, Bad Day at Black Rock, with Spencer Tracy in one of his best performances. Would Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause have made it two Dean films in the running? With three other nods it certainly seems likely.

That leaves two slots open. A good bet is that one of them would have gone go to Oklahoma!, the first of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s great stage musicals to be filmed. It was actually filmed twice, once in the new widescreen three camera process of Todd-A-O and once in regular Cinemascope for theatres unequipped to show the Todd-A-O process. Oklahoma! had been nominated for four Oscars and had won two.

The tenth nomination would likely have gone to Blackboard Jungle, Richard Brooks’ hard-hitting drama of high school violence starring Glenn Ford in one of three major 1955 films.

Left in the cold: Charles Laughton’s only directed film, The Night of the Hunter, now considered a masterpiece and quite possibly the best loved film of its year. It was a critical and commercial failure at the time.