1958 Alternate Oscars

My choices are noted with a ★. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.

Vertigo famously topped Sight & Sound magazine's 2012 list of the best movies of all-time, which is okay by me even if I don't think it's Alfred Hitchcock's best movie (Rear Window, North By Northwest) or the best movie of 1958 (Mon Oncle, Touch of Evil) or the best movie set in San Francisco (The Maltese Falcon, Bullitt) or ...

You get the picture.

And yet, Vertigo is the only serious contender from 1958 that I've ever felt the urge to watch twice. Several times, in fact.

As I've written before, Vertigo is ostensibly a murder mystery, but it's really a stalker movie with the viewer thrust into a queasy complicity with a control freak. You could legitimately complain that Hitchcock's normally-reliable suspense angle doesn't work, but that's beside the point. What you're really watching is an abusive relationship from the inside out with a sugar coating of murder on top.

Vertigo isn't North By Northwest; Vertigo is Sleeping With the Enemy. You can practically feel the crazy dripping from every scene.

Still, it's a bitter cup of tea. For a more upbeat — and offbeat — brew, perhaps you'd be willing to try another of my favorites, Jacques Tati's Mon Oncle.

Admittedly, Tati is himself an acquired taste, but one well worth acquiring, I'd say. He made the gentlest of gentle comedies, with low-key pleasures akin to watching your dog warm her belly in the sun on a nice Spring day. And I like doggies and warm Spring days.

What's Mon Oncle about? It's about taking your own sweet time in a world that's increasingly obsessed with hurrying through one moment to get to the next moment that needs to be hurried through. In terms of philosophy and spirit, Mon Oncle would make a good double feature with Bruce Brown's surfing classic, The Endless Summer.

Roger Ebert took time to write this in his review of Mon Oncle for his Great Movies series and it captures why I am so enamored of Tati and his Zen-like approach to comedy:

There's also a supporting cast of dogs, who are seen in the first shot and the last, and hurry on their doggy business in between. They don't have an important role in the plot; they're just there, checking things out, marking their territory. I learn from the elegant Web site Tativille.com that Tati found the dogs in the pound, and didn't train them but simply observed and encouraged them. "At the end of the film, we had to get rid of them," Tati wrote. He refused to send them back to the pound, and had an inspiration: He took out an ad in the paper describing them as movie stars, and they all found good homes. There is a lot of Tati in that serendipitous story.

Yes, indeed.



Hey, and lastly, allow me to mention my personal favorite from 1958, the little-seen, under-appreciated Alec Guinness comedy The Horse's Mouth, the story of a crazy painter who wreaks havoc in the pursuit of his artistic vision. If you've ever wondered what the Monkey is like in real life, this is the movie to see. Why, I even look like Alec Guinness! if I must say so myself, which I must, being the only one here.



Note: David Niven (Separate Tables) won for best actor in what is very clearly a supporting performance — I have put him in the supporting actor category where he belongs.