1959 was a year of many big films – Ben-Hur; North by Northwest; Some Like It Hot; On the Beach; Imitation of Life; The Diary of Anne Frank; Anatomy of a Murder and The Nun’s Story to name a few with room for only five in Oscar’s Best Picture line-up. Four of them, Ben-Hur; The Diary of Anne Frank; Anatomy of a Murder and The Nun’s Story made it with dark horse Room at the Top the fifth nominee.

With twelve nominations, the biblical epic Ben-Hur was the likely winner, and did in fact take home eleven of the twelve it was nominated for, losing only Best Screenplay. Securing the next highest number of nominations were two films based on fact, the The Diary of Anne Frank taken from the diary of a young girl in hiding with her family from the Nazis and The Nun’s Story about a nun’s crisis of conscience which eventually leads to her renouncing her vows. They each garnered eight nominations, followed by the frank courtroom drama, Anatomy of a Murder with seven and the British angry young drama, Room at the Top with 6. The Diary of Anne Frank won three and Room at the Top two, including the Best Screenplay Oscar that Ben-Hur lost. Its other win was for Best Actress Simone Signoret who won over favorite Audrey Hepburn in The Nun’s Story. Both The Nun’s Story and Anatomy of a Murder went home empty handed.

The nominees for Best Director lined up with those of Best Picture with the exception of Billy Wilder nominated for the comedy classic, Some Like It Hot in lieu of Anatomy of a Murder’s Otto Preminger. Preminger had been a Directors’ Guild nominee in lieu of Room at the Top’s Jack Clayton. With five additional nominations and one win, Some Like It Hot would certainly have been the sixth nominee in a ten nominee scenario.

The DGA had thirteen nominees this year including the five finalists, Ben-Hur’s William Wyler (the winner), The Nun’s Story’s Fred Zinnemann and The Diary of Anne Frank’s George Stevens in addition to the aforementioned Wilder and Preminger. Additional nominations went to Charles Barton for Dsiney’s The Shaggy Dog; Frank Capra for the lighthearted A Hole in the Head featuring the Oscar winning song “High Hopes” which became John F. Kennedy’s Presidential campaign theme song; Richard Fleischer for Compulsion about the Leopold-Loeb thrill killing; John Ford for his Civil War western, The Horse Soldiers; Howard Hawks for Rio Bravo, his anti-High Noon western; Alfred Hitchcock for the suspense classic, North by Northwest; Leo McCarey for the anti-suburban Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys! and Douglas Sirk for his remake of Imitation of Life. Oddly missing from the list were Stanley Kramer for the end of the world drama, On the Beach and Vincent Sherman for the multi-generational saga, The Young Philadelphians.

To complete a list of probable nominees had there been ten, North by Northwest, which had in fact been nominated for three and Imitation of Life, which had been nominated for two are easy picks, but for the other two I’m going to disregard the DGA’s selections and go with On the Beach which wound up with two nominations and The Young Philadelphians which amassed three.