The DVD Report #50

I’m not clairvoyant. I don’t have a crystal ball. I have no way of knowing which films from any given year will stand the test of time. Yet every now and then the films that I love from a particular year turn out to be more popular over time than those that were more widely heralded at the time. Such is the case with 1958.

The two films I most admired when I was 14 in the Spring and Summer of 1958 have emerged as the most revered films of that year even if at the time they won no awards and were not on the ten best lists of even the most prestigious critics. They were, of course, Vertigo and Touch of Evil.

Alfred Hitchcock’s tale of obsession, Vertigo, had its perfect leading man in James Stewart. Playing a retired cop, afraid of heights, who is lured into following enigmatic Kim Novak into the bell tower of an old mission, Stewart combines the boyish charms of his pre-World War II films with the hard edge he developed in his Anthony Mann-directed Westerns of the early 1950s. Filmed in and around San Francisco,it’s aided immeasurably by its great location cinematography as well as Bernard Herrmann’s hypnotic score. Stewart and Novak make a great team and are ably supported by Barbara Bel Geddes as Stewart’s long time girlfriend.

Originally hired just to play the bad guy, Orson Welles ended up re-writing and directing Touch of Evil thanks to the intervention of the film’s star, Charlton Heston. Welles, desperate to direct his first major studio film in years, agreed to perform the additional jobs at his original salary. The result is his most accomplished film since Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. The opening tracking shot alone is worth the money they paid him. It’s a classic B-film delivered in a Grade A style all the way. Heston is good as the protagonist, but he’s eclipsed by Welles, Akim Tamiroff and Marlene Dietrich in supporting roles.

Good as those two films were, they were just the tip of the iceberg. Rounding out my top ten for 1958 were these classics:

Stage-bound it may be, but Morton Da Costa’s Oscar-nominated film Auntie Mame is so hilariously funny from beginning to end that you don’t have time to notice. Rosalind Russell, Oscar-nominated for the performance of her considerable career, is the madcap aunt who raises her orphaned nephew with her irrepressible charm. She’s supported by a gallery of fine character performers at their best. Among them: Coral Browne, Oscar nominee Peggy Cass, Forrest Tucker, Patric Knowles, Fred Clark, Lee Patrick, Willard Waterman, Connie Gilchrist, Roger Smith, Pippa Scott and Joanna Barnes. If you don’t find something to laugh at in this one, there is something seriously wrong with you.

Conceived by Lerner and Loewe as the big screen equivalent of their long running Broadway Musical, My Fair Lady, Vincente Minnelli’s Gigi was the last of the great MGM musicals. Featuring such charming songs as “Thank Heaven for Little Girls”, “The Night They Invented Champagne” and “I’m Glad I’m Not Young Anymore”, the opulently-filmed, sophisticated romantic musical comedy provided Leslie Caron, Maurice Chevalier, Louis Jourdan and Hermione Gingold with their best big screen opportunities in some time. The film went on to win clean-sweeping nine Oscars. And Chevalier, on the strength of his charming performance, won a career achievement Oscar as well.

One of the best adaptations of a Tennessee Williams play, Richard Brooks’ film of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was brought to the screen with Elizabeth Taylor, at her smoldering best, as Maggie the Cat; Paul Newman, at his most virile, as Brick; and Burl Ives, at his most ferocious, as Big Daddy. With the homoerotic subtext played down and a more hopeful ending, it is not a pure adaptation, but an exceptionally strong one. It is second only in Williams adaptations, in my opinion, to Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire, made seven years earlier. Roof‘s supporting cast includes Judith Anderson as Big Mama, Jack Carson as Gooper and Madeleine Sherwood as Mae (a.k.a. Sister Woman).

Three years after winning his Best Director Oscar for Marty, Delbert Mann assembled one of the best casts of all time for the screen version of Terrence Rattigan’s Separate Tables set in an English seaside hotel out of season. Nominated for Best Picture, David Niven won an Oscar as Best Actor for playing a fake retired Army colonel who is really a dirty old man and Wendy Hiller won Best Supporting Actress for playing the hotel manager. Deborah Kerr was nominated for her homely, shy wallflower, but Gladys Cooper as Kerr’s controlling mother easily steals the show. Rita Hayworth, Burt Lancaster, Cathleen Nesbitt, May Hallat and Felix Aylmer are also quite good as other hotel guests.

An old man’s film in the best sense of the term, John Ford’s film of Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah provided Spencer Tracy with one of his best roles as the old-style big city mayor and political boss hanging on for re-election against the odds. He’s superbly supported by Jeffrey Hunter, Dianne Foster and a cast of veteran performers, each one given their own key scene. For many of them it was their own last hurrah on screen. They include Pat O’Brien, James Gleason, Donald Crisp, Basil Rathbone, John Carradine, Edward Brophy, Wallace Ford, Frank McHugh, Richardo Cortez, Basil Ruysdael, Jane Darwell, Anna Lee and O.Z. Whitehead.

Joshua Logan’s film of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Pulitzer Prize-winning musical, South Pacific,was a huge commercial hit, but not one with critics. However, I love it anyway. The film’s only real downside is Logan’s ill-conceived decision to have ace cinematographer Leon Shamroy employ hideous color filters for several of the song sequences. The songs, including “Some Enchanted Evening”, “Younger Than Springtime” and “There’s Nothing Like a Dame”, are more than strong enough to overcome even that obstacle. Rossano Brazzi, Mitzi Gaynor, John Kerr, France Nuyen, Ray Walston, and Juanita Hall, reprising her Tony-winning role as Bloody Mary, are all perfectly cast.

Susan Hayward won an Oscar for going through all the tortures of the damned as convicted murderess Barbara Graham in Robert Wise’s superb anti-capital punishment treatise, I Want to Live! The scenes of the preparation of the gas chamber and of Hayward’s on-again, off-again execution are superbly crafted. Hayward is at her peak here, especially in the film’s excruciating final scenes, but so is the rest of the cast headed by Simon Oakland as the reporter who narrates her story. Other key roles are played by Theodore Bikel, Virginia Vincent, Wesley Lau, Virginia Vincent, Dabs Greer and Raymond Bailey as the sympathetic warden.

Stanley Kramer’s social drama, The Defiant Ones can be enjoyed as both a high adrenaline escape yarn and as a tough examination of the racial politics of the day. Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier are escaped prisoners linked together both literally and figuratively by a piece of chain. They must learn to put aside their differences if they are to outsmart and outrun the posse hard on their heels. The film won a slew of awards including the New York Film Critics Award for Best Picture. It was also nominated for Oscars for Best Picture, Director, both lead actors, and supporting players Theodore Bikel as their pursuer, and Cara Williams as the woman who has a brief affair with Curtis.

Honorable mention goes to three legendary foreign films: Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal from Sweden, in which Max von Sydow plays an on-going game of chess with Death; Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali from India, the first of his trilogy of films about the life of a poor Brahmin; and Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle from France, in which sound effects and music convey most the comic genius’ then-latest adventure.

Not to be outdone, the British came up with three legendary films of their own: the docudrama A Night to Remember, Roy Ward Baker’s film about the sinking of the Titanic; Ronald Neame’s hilarious The Horse’s Mouth, with Alec Guinness as an eccentric artist; and Terence Fisher’s Horror of Dracula, a bloody re-telling of the greatest of the vampire tales that caused me to sleep with the lights on for an entire summer.

To these six and the aforementioned ten, I would add four other Hollywood gems.

Anthony Mann’s Man of the West substitutes Gary Cooper for James Stewart in this existential western that also features Julie London, Lee J. Cobb and Jack Lord.

A third great musical,George Abbott and Stanley Donen’sfilm of Adler and Ross’ Damn Yankees, substitutes movie star Tab Hunter for stage star Stephen Douglass, but otherwise leaves the original show in tact, including the Tony-winning performances of Gwen Verdon and Ray Walston.

William Wyler puts his stamp on the sprawling western with The Big Country,which features a superb cast headed by Gregory Peck, Jean Simmons, Charlton Heston, Carroll Baker, Charles Bickford and Oscar winner Burl Ives, more or less reprising his Big Daddy role from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Joseph Anthony’s film of Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker, the source material for Hello, Dolly!, was an uproarious comedy which provided Shirley Booth one of only four big screen opportunities, all of which she made the most of. She’s aided and abetted here by Paul Ford, Anthony Perkins and Shirley MacLaine.

Other 1958 films worth tracking down include the gentle westerns The Proud Rebel with Alan and David Ladd and Olivia de Havilland, and Cowboy with Glenn Ford and Jack Lemmon; the escape-from-the-Nazis comedy-drama Me and the Colonel with Danny Kaye and Curt Jurgens; the interracial romance Kings Go Forth with Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis and Natalie Wood; and the self-explanatory I Married a Monster From Outer Space with Tom Tryon in a dual role.

If that’s not enough, you can also look for The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, memorable for Ingrid Bergman’s portrayal of a British missionary and for Robert Donat’s last appearance as he plays a Chinese Mandarin; Hot Spell for the fireworks generated by Shirley Booth and Anthony Quinn; Bell, Book and Candle for a lesser, but still welcome, teaming of James Stewart and Kim Novak; Houseboat for the delicious teaming of Cary Grant and Sophia Loren; and Indiscreet for the first teaming of Grant and Ingrid Bergman since Hitchcock’s Notorious a dozen years earlier.

Films that others liked more than I did include Some Came Running with Shirley MacLaine’s Oscar-nominated performance and the stunning cinematography the film’s standouts; The Young Lions which went on so long I felt like an old lion by the time it was over; and The Old Man and the Sea which not even Spencer Tracy, in an Oscar-nominated performance, could keep from becoming tedious.

-Peter J. Patrick (April 15, 2008)