1958 was an interesting year at the Oscars. The two films now regarded as the greatest of the year, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil were not on Oscar’s short list. Nevertheless some very good films were.

Oscar chose to embrace instead, Morton Da Costa’s film of the irrepressible stage hit, Auntie Mame; Richard Brooks’ film of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Stanley Kramer’s race relations drama, The Defiant Ones; Vincente Minnelli’s charming musical Gigi and Delbert Mann’s film of Terrene Rattigan’s Separate Tables. All but The Defiant Ones had stage origins, but it wasn’t Colette’s obscure stage play that drew audiences to Gigi, but the fact that its score was by Lerner & Lowe, the composers responsible for My Fair Lady, then in its third year on Broadway and a long way from being able to be filmed. Gigi was nominated for nine Oscars and won every single one of them.

We’ll look to the Directors’ Guild for an idea as to which films might have been added to Oscar’s short list to fill a ten nominee scenario.

The DGA nominated fourteen semi-finalists this year and whittled them down to five finalists. All five were nominated by the Academy. They were Gigi’s winning Minnelli; The Defiant One’s Kramer; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’s Brooks and I Want to Live!’s Robert Wise and The Inn of the Sixth Happiness’ Mark Robson. The other semi-finalists were Richard Brooks, also nominated for The Brothers Karamazov; Delmer Daves for Cowboy; Stanley Donen and George Abbott for Damn Yankees; Edward Dmytryk for The Lion Lions; Richard Flesicher for The Vikings; Alfred Hitchcock for Vertigo; Martin Ritt for The Long Hot Summer; George Seaton for Teacher’s Pet and William Wyler for The Big Country.

Missing from the DGA’s long list were Da Costa (Auntie Mame) and Mann (Separate Tables) whose film were Best Picture nominees as well as John Ford, who won the National Board of Review Award for The Last Hurrah; Joshua Logan who directed the year’s biggest box office hit, another musical, Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific; Welles, whose Touch of Evil was considered a B picture at the time and Anthony Mann whose Man of the West closed out his reign as the 50s best director of westerns.

Certainly I Want to Live! with six nominations and a win for Best Actress Susan Hayward would be Oscar’s sixth nominee. The Inn of the Sixth Happiness with no other nominations beside Robson’s would have had a tougher time but might have had enough steam to nab the seventh slot. Vertigo, which actually did manage to nab two nominations despite Hitchcock’s snub, could have easily nabbed the eighth slot. That leaves two.

Despite its lack of Directors Guild recognition, I think South Pacific with its three nominations and one win in addition to its box office clout would have nabbed the ninth slot.

Inasmuch as I’d like to see the last slot go to either The Last Hurrah or Touch of Evil, their snubbing by the DGA and lack of any other Oscar nominations would likely leave them out of consideration for a lone Best Picture nod. More likely would be The Big Country with two nominations and a win for Best Supporting Actor Burl Ives or Some Came Running, Vincente Minnelli’s second film that year with a total of five nominations. I’d give the edge to The Big Country which was hugely popular at the time.