The DVD Report #56

We’ve previously taken a look back at the films of 1957 and 1958. This week, I’d like to take another stroll down memory lane and look at the films of 1959 starting with that year’s ten best, all of which are available on DVD.

The year’s best film, certainly the most fun, was Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot in which musicians Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon unwittingly witness Chicago’s St. Valentine’s Day massacre and spend the rest of the film hiding out from the mob disguised as women in an all-girl band with a gig in Florida.

Curtis alternates his female character with a suave faux millionaire in order to romance fellow band member Marilyn Monroe while Lemmon stays in character and is pursued by nearsighted real millionaire Joe E. Brown. The film ends with one of the most hilarious and famous lines in movie history.

The film won Golden Globes for Best Picture – Comedy, Actor (Lemmon) and Actress (Monroe). It was nominated for six Oscars and won one for its black-and-white costume design. Director Wilder and Lemmon were nominated, but Curtis, Monroe, Brown and the film itself were overlooked.

Based on the true story of a Belgian nun who entered the convent in 1930 and endured years of questioning her order’s strict code of obedience in the face of overwhelming odds, Fred Zinnemann’s The Nun’s Story provided Audrey Hepburn with her finest performance as Sister Luke. The daughter of a famed doctor, she is ordered by the Mother Abbess to fail her exams to show true humility, but can’t. Despite her high test scores she is denied a longed-for assignment in the Congo and is assigned to a mental institution in Brussels instead. Finally allowed to go to the Congo, she later serves in France during World War II but is forbidden by the Order to take sides in the war.

Hepburn is beautifully supported by such luminaries as Peter Finch, Edith Evans, Peggy Ashcroft, Dean Jagger, Mildred Dunnock, Patricia Collinge, Ruth White, Barbara O’Neil and Colleen Dewhurst, but it is her film all the way.

The film was nominated for eight Oscars including Best Picture, Director and Actress. Hepburn won the New York Film Critics Award for her performance and Edith Evans, as the Mother Abbess, won the National Board of Review’s award as the year’s outstanding supporting actress.

Another film about the questioning of one’s faith, William Wyler’s Ben-Hur was the prestige film of the year, a thinking man’s spectacle with Charlton Heston as the Jewish nobleman who loses his position and is falsely enslaved due to the betrayal of life-long Roman friend Stephen Boyd. He returns to seek vengeance on Boyd and eventually becomes a Christian. Spectacularly filmed amidst a slave ship’s galley, rich Roman estates, on the road to Galilee, and in a leper colony, the film’s centerpiece is its famed chariot race in which Heston and Boyd battle to the death.

Nominated for twelve Oscars, the film won eleven, a record it still holds, although it was tied 38 years later by Titanic. Among its awards were Best Picture, Director, Actor and Supporting Actor Hugh Griffith in a minor role as a slave trader. Griffith’s nomination and win over Boyd as the malevolent Messala was something of a surprise.

One of Alfred Hitchcock’s most exhilarating films, North by Northwest is a deft comedy as well as high-octane suspense thriller about an advertising executive who is mistaken for a government agent by a ring of spies. From a murder at the United Nations to an aerial chase over a cornfield to a climax on Mount Rushmore, the film is as breezy as it is spectacular with Ernest Lehman’s script providing one droll line after another.

Cary Grant was still, in his mid 50s, the most suave of leading men, Eva Marie Saint the loveliest of leading ladies, and James Mason the meanest of villains. The strong supporting cast includes Martin Landau, Leo G. Carroll and the wonderful Jessie Royce Landis, in real life the same age as Grant, delightfully playing his wisecracking mother.

Based on the best-selling novel by Wendell Mayes, Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder provided James Stewart with one of his last great roles as a folksy small town lawyer defending an Army officer accused of murdering the man who may or may not have raped the officer’s wife. Highly controversial in its day, the clinical language used in the courtroom is mild compared to the more graphic descriptions heard almost daily in today’s TV dramas.

Stewart won the New York film critics Award, as did Mayes for his screenplay. Lee Remick as the Army wife, Joseph N. Welch as the acerbic judge, and Preminger were all nominated for Golden Globes, while the film won seven Oscar nominations including Best Picture, Director, Actor and two Supporting Actors, Arthur O’Connell as Stewart’s alcoholic partner and George C. Scott as the tough prosecutor. Stewart, O’Connell and Eve Arden as Stewart’s secretary were all also nominated for the now-defunct Laurel Awards.

Joseph Schildkraut repeated his acclaimed stage role as Otto Frank in George Stevens’ The Diary of Anne Frank, the harrowing story of the young Jewish girl who is forced into hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam with her family and friends. Newcomer Millie Perkins is quite good as Anne, interacting nicely with veterans Schildkraut, Shelley Winters, Ed Wynn and others.

The film was nominated for eight Oscars and won three for its black-and-white art direction and cinematography as well as supporting actress Winters in the showy role of a difficult friend of the family reluctantly forced into hiding with them. The film had also been nominated for Best Picture, Director and Supporting Actor Ed Wynn as a crotchety old man who also shares the hiding space. Schildkraut, who gave the film’s best performance had to content himself with a Golden Globe nomination in the crowded best actor category.

One of several fictionalized films clearly based on the notorious Leopold-Loeb murder case of the 1920s, Richard Flesicher’s Compulsion was also one of two films released a year apart in which legendary defense attorney Clarence Darrow is depicted under another name. Spencer Tracy famously plays him in 1960’s Inherit the Wind. Here he’s played by Orson Welles who commands attention as he makes an impassioned plea to spare the two crazed killers from the death penalty.

Welles, as well as Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman as the thrill killers, won the Best Actor award at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival. Flesicher was nominated for the Golden Palm as Best Director at the Festival, an honor later duplicated by the Directors Guild of America (DGA), but neither he nor anyone connected with the film received an Oscar nomination.

Elizabeth Taylor and Katharine Hepburn set off acting fireworks in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film of Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly, Last Summer. The film, which deals with all sorts of deliciously macabre subjects such as cannibalism and a threatened lobotomy, is basically a showcase for the two actresses with Taylor the unwitting witness to her cousin’s death and Hepburn the wealthy aunt who tries to keep her from telling the truth of what happened. Basically all the other actors including Montgomery Clift, Mercedes McCambridge and Albert Dekker can do is get out of their way.

Taylor and Hepburn were nominated for most of the year-end awards including the Golden Globe and the Oscar.

Douglas Sirk’s re-working of Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life is much more than the remake of a classic film. Whereas the first version gave equal weight to businesswoman Claudette Colbert and maid Louise Beavers, this version clearly sides with the maid in subtle ways. Sirk is constantly undermining the superficiality of Lana Turner’s character’s, a stage actress turned movie star, life and that of privileged daughter Sandra Dee by showing them in some trivial situation followed by a great tragic event in the lives of maid Juanita Moore and her daughter, Susan Kohner in her attempts to pass for white.

Turner, despite the superficiality of her character, delivers her best screen performance, but it’s Moore and Kohner who deservedly reaped the accolades. Both were nominated for Golden Globes and Oscars, with Kohner winning the former. Sirk won a DGA nod.

A standout among the British kitchen sink dramas of the period, Jack Clayton’s Room at the Top told the tale of a socially ambitious lout who abandons his older woman mistress to marry the boss’s daughter who he doesn’t love. Laurence Harvey gave one his best performances as the social climber but it’s Simone Signoret as the cast-off mistress whose performance lingers.

The film was a surprise Oscar nominee for Best Picture. It also won nominations for Best Director, Screenplay, Actor, Actress and Supporting Actress Hermione Baddeley in a minor role as Signoret’s friend. Signoret and the screenplay won.

A top ten list only scratches the surface, of course. Among the many other outstanding films released in the U.S. in 1959 were Ingmar Bergman’s reflections on old age, Wild Strawberries, featuring a masterful performance by Victor Sjostrom; Francois Truffaut’s reflections on youth, The 400 Blows, featuring Jean-Pierre Leaud in the first of five portrayals of Truffaut’s alter ego Antoine Doinel over a period of twenty years; Satyajit Ray’s Aparajito, the second and possibly best film in his Apu trilogy about Calcutta’s poor; Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach with Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins facing the end of the world to the strains of Austrailia’s “Waltzing Matilda”; and Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo with John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, Angie Dickinson and Walter Brennan in Hawks’ rebuke of Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon.

Other films of note available on DVD include J. Lee Thompson’s Tiger Bay featuring Hayley Mills in her stunning screen debut; Vincent Sherman’s The Young Philadelphians with Paul Newman holding his own against estimable scene stealers Billie Burke, Brian Keith and Oscar-nominated Robert Vaughn; Fred Capra’s jaunty A Hole in the Head with Frank Sinatra, Edward G. Robinson, Thelma Ritter and the Oscar winning “High Hopes” which became JFK’s campaign song; Henry Levin’s special effects-laden film of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth with James Mason, Pat Boone and Arlene Dahl; and Delmer Daves’ overheated teen romance, A Summer Place, with Sandra Dee, Troy Donahue, Dorothy McGuire and that great Max Steiner score.

Among the films of 1959 without a DVD Region 1 release are Delmar Daves’ pacifist western The Hanging Tree with Gary Cooper, Maria Schell and Karl Malden; Michael Anderson’s Irish troubles melodrama, Shake Hands With the Devil, withJames Cagney, Don Murray and Sybil Thorndike; Ranald MacDougall’s post-nuclear war drama The World, the Flesh and the Devil with Harry Belafonte, Inger Stevens and Mel Ferrer; Henry King’s wine country melodrama This Earth Is Mine with Rock Hudson, Jean Simmons and Dorothy McGuire; Frank Tashlin’s comedy about a show business priest, Say One for Me, with Bing Crosby, Debbie Reynolds and Robert Walker; Frank Borzage’s epic tale of St. Peter, The Big Fisherman, with Howard Keel, Susan Kohner and Beulah Bondi; and Irving Rapper’s spectacle about a nun in love with a soldier, The Miracle, with Carroll Baker, Roger Moore and Katina Paxinou.

Next week: back to new DVD releases.

-Peter J. Patrick (May 27, 2008)