1960 was an interesting year at the Oscars. Adult themes were much more in evidence than ever before.

Sex was one of the themes, if not the major one in The Apartment; Sons and Lovers; Home From the Hill; Elmer Gantry; Psycho; The Dark at the Top of the Stairs; Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Never on Sunday, all of which figured heavily into year-end awards.
The National Board of Review, as usual, led off awards season by bestowing their Best Picture award on Jack Cardiff’s film of D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and the New York Film Critics quickly followed suit, albeit co-honoring Billy Wilder’s The Apartment in the only tie in the critics’ then 26 year history.

The Apartment handily won the Golden Globe for Best Comedy while Sons and Lovers lost to Spartacus in the Best Drama category.

Oscar nominations went to The Apartment and Sons and Lovers along with Richard Brooks’ Elmer Gantry, Fred Zinnemann’s The Sundowners and John Wayne’s The Alamo. Best Director nominations went to The Apartment’s Wilder, Sons and Lovers’ Cardiff and The Sundowners’ Zinnemann but Brooks and Wayne were overtaken by Alfred Hitchcock for Psycho and Jules Dassin for Never on Sunday.

Hitchcock’s savvy marketing strategy for Psycho – no one seated after the film begins – paid off in huge box office and four Oscar nominations. It would certainly have been the sixth Best Picture nominee in a ten nominee scenario. The Greek film, Never on Sunday would have had a tougher battle, but with five nominations and a certain win for its catchy title tune, a Best Picture nomination would not have been out of the question.

What then, would have been the other three nominees? Let’s look to the Directors Guild with their usual long mixture of the ridiculous and the sublime. The ridiculous would include Lewis Glbert for Sink the Bismarck!; Walter Lang for Can-Can; Carol Reed for Our Man in Havana and Charles Walters for Please Don’t Eat the Daisies. Sublime, but absent from the list of five finalists were Richard Brooks for Elmer Gantry; Vincent J. Donehue for Sunrise at Campobello; Delbert Mann for The Dark at the Top of the Stairs and Alain Resnais for Hiroshima, Mon Amour.

Vincente Minnelli was nominated for his two 1960 films, Home From the Hill and Bells Are Ringing, but was incredibly a DGA finalist for the latter rather than the former which had been a National Board of Review winner for Best Actor (Robert Mitchum) and Supporting Actor (George Peppard). Wilder, Cardiff, Hitchcock and Zinnemann were the others. Stanley Kramer (Inherit the Wind), as usual, was left out in the cold as were Stanley Kubrick (Spartacus) and Elia Kazan (Wild River).

My gut tells me that despite its DGA snub, Spartacus with six nominations and four wins under its best would have easily been the eighth nominee and Inherit the Wind and Sunrise at Campobello with four nominations, no wins each, would have been the ninth and tenth.