If you're anything like me, you see the year "1957" on a post and you immediately think, "Oh, yeah, the year Auburn won a national title in football."
What? That's not what you think of? Hmm, strange ...
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated 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 ✱.
My choices are noted with a ★. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ.
Alternate Oscar guru Erik Beck of the Boston Becks (who somewhere along the line became Erik Beck of the San Diego Becks — that's some move!) considers 1957 rather than 1939 the best year for movies. He makes a good case.
I originally had eleven movies in my top ten which is a bit of problem if you're at all familiar with the concept of math. I suppose I could have made an exception and nominated all eleven this year, but that would have required me to noodle together a whole new template on Photoshop and who's got time for that?
Eight picks were carved in stone from the get-go: the Academy's choice for best picture, The Bridge on the River Kwai; and my own pick, of course, The Seventh Seal; along with Fellini's Nights of Cabiria; Kubrick's anti-war classic, Paths of Glory; Sweet Smell of Success, maybe the most cynical picture of the decade; 12 Angry Men, starring a dozen really pissed-off dudes; Bergman's second great movie of the year, Wild Strawberries; and Billy Wilder's courtroom classic, Witness for the Prosecution.
On the chopping block? The Cranes Are Flying, the first great movie to come out of the Soviet Union since Stalin destroyed the Russian film industry; A Face in the Crowd, about a populist blowhard who rises to fame and fortune stoking the fears and prejudices of white, rural America; and Throne of Blood, Akira Kurosawa's samurai take on Shakespeare's Macbeth.
After a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, Throne of Blood wound up the odd man out. It's the lowest rated of the bunch on the Internet Movie Database (8.1, mind you, which is terrific) and, well, we've already nominated a lot of Kurosawa movies with more to come. If you really, really wanted to vote for it, my apologies.
Speaking of math, there really should be ten nominees for best actor this year: Tony Curtis, Kirk Douglas, Henry Fonda, Andy Griffith, Alec Guinness, William Holden, Charles Laughton, Robert Mitchum, Victor Sjöström and Max von Sydow. Eleven, if you consider Burt Lancaster in Sweet Smell of Success a lead.
It's a great year for actors. I went with the five who I thought gave the best performance of their careers in 1957.
If you're anything like me, you see the year "1957" on a post and you immediately think, "Oh, yeah, the year Auburn won a national title in football."
What? That's not what you think of? Hmm, strange ...
PICTURE (Drama) winner:The Bridge On The River Kwai (prod. Sam Spiegel) nominees:A Face In The Crowd (prod. Elia Kazan); Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (prod. John Huston); The Incredible Shrinking Man (prod. Albert Zugsmith); Paths Of Glory (prod. James B. Harris and Kirk Douglas); Sweet Smell Of Success (prod. James Hill); 12 Angry Men (prod. Henry Fonda and Reginald Rose); Witness For the Prosecution (prod. Arthur Hornblow, Jr.)
PICTURE (Comedy/Musical) winner:Funny Face (prod. Roger Edens) nominees:A King In New York (prod. Charles Chaplin); Love in the Afternoon (prod. Billy Wilder); Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (prod. Frank Tashlin)
PICTURE (Foreign Language) winner:Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal) (prod. Allan Ekelund) nominees:Donzoko (The Lower Depths) (prod. Akira Kurosawa); Il Grido (prod. Franco Cancellieri); Kanal (prod. Zespól Filmowy "Kadr"); Kumonosu-jô (Throne of Blood) (prod. Akira Kurosawa and Sôjirô Motoki); Letyat zhuravli (The Cranes Are Flying) (prod. Mikhail Kalatozov); Le notti di Cabiria (Nights Of Cabiria) (prod. Dino De Laurentiis); Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries) (prod. Allan Ekelund)
ACTOR (Drama) winner: Tony Curtis (Sweet Smell Of Success) nominees: Lee J. Cobb (12 Angry Men); Kirk Douglas (Paths Of Glory); Henry Fonda (12 Angry Men); Andy Griffith (A Face In The Crowd); Alec Guinness (The Bridge On The River Kwai); William Holden (The Bridge on the River Kwai); Rock Hudson (The Tarnished Angels); Charles Laughton (Witness For The Prosecution); Toshiro Mifune (Kumonosu-jô a.k.a. Throne of Blood); Robert Mitchum (Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison and The Enemy Below); Sidney Poitier (Edge of the City); Victor Sjöström (Smultronstället a.k.a. Wild Strawberries); Max von Sydow (Det sjunde inseglet a.k.a. The Seventh Seal)
ACTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner: Tony Randall (Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?) nominees: Fred Astaire (Funny Face and Silk Stockings); Gary Cooper (Love In The Afternoon); Frank Sinatra (Pal Joey)
ACTRESS (Drama) winner: Guilietta Masina (Le notti di Cabiria a.k.a. Nights Of Cabiria) nominees: Marlene Dietrich (Witness For The Prosecution); Deborah Kerr (Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison); Patricia Neal (A Face In The Crowd); Tatyana Samojlova (Letyat zhuravli a.k.a. The Cranes Are Flying); Joanne Woodward (The Three Faces Of Eve)
ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical) winner: Audrey Hepburn (Funny Face and Love in the Afternoon) nominees: Doris Day (The Pajama Game); Rita Hayworth (Pal Joey); Jayne Mansfield (Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?)
DIRECTOR (Drama) winner: Ingmar Bergman (Det sjunde inseglet a.k.a. The Seventh Seal and Smultronstället a.k.a. Wild Strawberries) nominees: Federico Fellini (Le notti di Cabiria a.k.a. Nights Of Cabiria); Stanley Kubrick (Paths of Glory); Akira Kurosawa (Kumonosu-jô a.k.a. Throne of Blood and Donzoko a.k.a. The Lower Depths); David Lean (The Bridge On The River Kwai); Alexander Mackendrick (Sweet Smell Of Success); Billy Wilder (Witness For The Prosecution)
DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner: Chuck Jones (What's Opera, Doc?) nominees: Charles Chaplin (A King In New York); Stanley Donen (Funny Face); Frank Tashlin (Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?); Billy Wilder (Love in the Afternoon)
SUPPORTING ACTOR winner: Burt Lancaster (Sweet Smell Of Success) nominees: Red Buttons (Sayonara); Errol Flynn (The Sun Also Rises); Sessue Hayakawa (The Bridge On The River Kwai); Curt Jürgens (The Enemy Below); Walter Matthau (A Face In The Crowd); Adolphe Menjou (Paths of Glory); Tyrone Power (Witness For The Prosecution); Jack Warden (12 Angry Men)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS winner: Kay Kendall (Les Girls) nominees: Bibi Andersson (Det sjunde inseglet a.k.a. The Seventh Seal and Smultronstället a.k.a. Wild Strawberries); Joan Blondell (Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?); Mitzi Gaynor (Les Girls); Carolyn Jones (The Bachelor Party); Elsa Lanchester (Witness For The Prosecution); Kay Thompson (Funny Face); Ingrid Thulin (Smultronstället a.k.a. Wild Strawberries); Miyoshi Umeki (Sayonara)
SCREENPLAY winner: Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, from the novella by Ernest Lehman (Sweet Smell Of Success) nominees: Pierre Boulle (later accredited to Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson), from the novel by Pierre Boulle (The Bridge On The River Kwai); Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli (story and screenplay), Pier Paolo Pasolini (screenplay), from the novel by Maria Molinari (Le notti di Cabiria a.k.a. Nights Of Cabiria); Stanley Kubrick, Calder Willingham and Jim Thompson, from the novel by Humphrey Cobb (Paths Of Glory); Ingmar Bergman, from his play (Det sjunde inseglet a.k.a. The Seventh Seal); Ingmar Bergman (Smultronstället a.k.a. Wild Strawberries); Reginald Rose, from his teleplay (12 Angry Men); Billy Wilder and Harry Kurnitz (screenplay), Larry Marcus (adaptation), from the play by Agatha Christie (Witness For The Prosecution)
SPECIAL AWARDS "Jailhouse Rock" (Jailhouse Rock) music and lyrics by Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller (Song); What's Opera Doc? (Cartoon Short); James Wong Howe (Sweet Smell Of Success) (Cinematography)
In honor of Deborah Kerr's 90th birthday, Sophie of Waitin' On A Sunny Day is hosting the "Darling Deborah Blogathon." This is my contribution ...
John Huston's Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison is a decidedly odd entry in that seemingly endless parade of World War II movies to come out of Hollywood in the last seventy years. More Brief Encounter than Saving Private Ryan, this low-key, tender would-be romance between a marine and a nun is as talky as a Woody Allen movie, and chaste even by Production Code standards, but it's also as good as anything its stars ever did and is one of my favorite movies of the era.
The Allison of Mr. Allison is Robert Mitchum as a marine who's separated from his unit during a naval battle and washes up on the shore of a remote South Pacific island. With no means of communication or escape, and very little chance that anyone will ever find him, he may be there for years.
And then to his shock he discovers that marooned on the island with him is a nun, Sister Angela, played by the disconcertingly beautiful Deborah Kerr.
"That's my luck," he complains. "If ya gotta be a nun, why ain't ya old and ugly? Why do ya gotta have big blue eyes, and a beautiful smile—and freckles?"
Despite the fact that they are both already in committed relationships—him to the Marines, her to Jesus Christ—Allison asks Sister Angela to marry him. She turns him down, of course, but, her protestations to the contrary, it's a close run thing.
And then the Japanese army shows up.
Although the plot of Mr. Allison is simple, the material is delicate, and in the hands of different actors could easily have turned into something comical, something cynical, or something hopelessly sentimental. In fact, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison sounds like the set-up for some kind of joke: "A marine and a nun are stranded on an island together—" But far from turning into a romantic comedy or a traditional war movie, Mr. Allison instead becomes a meditation on the war between the spirit and the flesh, between the darkness and the light, or, if you will, between man's natural depravity and the better angels of our nature. Rather than favoring one over the other, though, the film suggests that we can only reach our true potential when we are well acquainted with and comfortable with both.
Here, Kerr's Sister Angela begins the movie wholly ignorant of what human beings are capable of—lust, fear, anger, hatred, murder—while Mitchum's Allison has known little else. Before the movie is over, both end up with an appreciation of the full range of human behavior to their immediate salvation and their lasting benefit.
This wasn't the first nun Kerr played. Her performance in Black Narcissus in 1947 is a classic and paved the way for her move to Hollywood. It also serves as a counterpoint to her performance in Mr. Allison. In Black Narcissus, her Sister Clodagh is all too acquainted with the human heart and its complications, and in fleeing from that terrible knowledge, she becomes, if not a bad nun, then a tragically ineffective one. Here, she learns to look reality straight-on, and just as Allison's acquaintance with the spiritual makes him a better Marine, so, too, I suspect will Angela's acquaintance with human frailty make her a better nun.
To get a sense of the different direction this set-up could have gone in, look at Huston's take on a similar story, The African Queen. His Oscar-winning tale of a drunken riverboat captain and a starchy New England missionary who sail down a river together is essentially the same odd couple set-up as Mr. Allison—only there, the film's stars, Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, played the material for laughs, with the loutish Bogart bumping up against the patrician Hepburn to great effect. The result was one of the best romantic comedies of the decade.
But Bogart and Hepburn were playing over-the-top, larger-than-life characters—Hepburn said later that director Huston told her to imitate Eleanor Roosevelt—and much of the pure pleasure of watching The African Queen comes from knowing that they're never in danger, not really. War is a lark and the threat of death by drowning, disease or a hangman's noose is simply foreplay—what fun! I mean, it was either this, Kate and Bogie seem to be saying, or dinner and dancing and maybe a nightcap up in her apartment.
At least they get an A for originality.
In Mr. Allison, though, Kerr and Mitchum play their roles absolutely straight, with a sincerity and vulnerability that's actually pretty rare for a star vehicle. If you're at all familiar with Deborah Kerr's work, that should come as no surprise—she was the gentlest, most guileless actress ever to grace the big screen, and I can't imagine her ever holding any part she played at arm's length.
That Robert Mitchum also leads with his chin comes as a surprise only if you've bought into the laconic, insolent facade he presented on screen and in interviews. The fact is, under those heavy, drooping eyelids and that weary, disinterested demeanor, there beat the heart of an artist, and in his best work—Out of the Past, The Night of the Hunter, The Friends of Eddie Coyle and this one—Mitchum was exposed, vulnerable and completely authentic.
Of all his great performances, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison was Mitchum's personal favorite.
Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison was the first of four movies Mitchum and Kerr made together. In 1960, they made both The Sundowners (for which Kerr received her final Oscar nomination) and The Grass Is Greener (co-starring Cary Grant and Jean Simmons). In 1985, they starred in Reunion at Fairborough, a made-for-television movie about a veteran who returns to England and rekindles a wartime romance.
Of his co-star, Mitchum said, "The best, my favorite—life would be kind if I could live it with Deborah around."
For her performance in Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, Kerr was nominated for an Oscar, but she lost, of course, this time to Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve. It was the story of Kerr's life. In all, she was nominated for six Oscars and lost every time, still a record in the best actress category. I think more than anything, she was a victim of bad timing. A list of those she lost to is a veritable Mount Rushmore of actresses from the post-war era: Olivia de Havilland, Audrey Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Joanne Woodward, Susan Hayward and Elizabeth Taylor.
And maybe also she was too unassuming and what she did on screen looked too effortless. The Academy has always tended to reserve its top prizes for those who remind us what a terribly difficult and lonely job acting is—even when it isn't.
In fact, maybe that's Mr. Allison in a nutshell: you expect fireworks and instead get something as quiet as a whisper. Don't make the same mistake the Academy did and fail to listen closely.
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
If you're anything like me, you see the year "1957" on a post and you immediately think, "Oh, yeah, the year Auburn won a national title in football."
John Huston's Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison is a decidedly odd entry in that seemingly endless parade of World War II movies to come out of Hollywood in the last seventy years. More Brief Encounter than Saving Private Ryan, this low-key, tender would-be romance between a marine and a nun is as talky as a Woody Allen movie, and chaste even by Production Code standards, but it's also as good as anything its stars ever did and is one of my favorite movies of the era.
"That's my luck," he complains. "If ya gotta be a nun, why ain't ya old and ugly? Why do ya gotta have big blue eyes, and a beautiful smile—and freckles?"
Although the plot of Mr. Allison is simple, the material is delicate, and in the hands of different actors could easily have turned into something comical, something cynical, or something hopelessly sentimental. In fact, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison sounds like the set-up for some kind of joke: "A marine and a nun are stranded on an island together—"
Here, Kerr's Sister Angela begins the movie wholly ignorant of what human beings are capable of—lust, fear, anger, hatred, murder—while Mitchum's Allison has known little else. Before the movie is over, both end up with an appreciation of the full range of human behavior to their immediate salvation and their lasting benefit.
This wasn't the first nun Kerr played. Her performance in Black Narcissus in 1947 is a classic and paved the way for her move to Hollywood. It also serves as a counterpoint to her performance in Mr. Allison. In Black Narcissus, her Sister Clodagh is all too acquainted with the human heart and its complications, and in fleeing from that terrible knowledge, she becomes, if not a bad nun, then a tragically ineffective one. Here, she learns to look reality straight-on, and just as Allison's acquaintance with the spiritual makes him a better Marine, so, too, I suspect will Angela's acquaintance with human frailty make her a better nun.
To get a sense of the different direction this set-up could have gone in, look at Huston's take on a similar story, The African Queen. His Oscar-winning tale of a drunken riverboat captain and a starchy New England missionary who sail down a river together is essentially the same odd couple set-up as Mr. Allison—only there, the film's stars, Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, played the material for laughs, with the loutish Bogart bumping up against the patrician Hepburn to great effect. The result was one of the best romantic comedies of the decade.
In Mr. Allison, though, Kerr and Mitchum play their roles absolutely straight, with a sincerity and vulnerability that's actually pretty rare for a star vehicle. If you're at all familiar with Deborah Kerr's work, that should come as no surprise—she was the gentlest, most guileless actress ever to grace the big screen, and I can't imagine her ever holding any part she played at arm's length.
That Robert Mitchum also leads with his chin comes as a surprise only if you've bought into the laconic, insolent facade he presented on screen and in interviews. The fact is, under those heavy, drooping eyelids and that weary, disinterested demeanor, there beat the heart of an artist, and in his best work—Out of the Past, The Night of the Hunter, The Friends of Eddie Coyle and this one—Mitchum was exposed, vulnerable and completely authentic.
Of his co-star, Mitchum said, "The best, my favorite—life would be kind if I could live it with Deborah around."
And maybe also she was too unassuming and what she did on screen looked too effortless. The Academy has always tended to reserve its top prizes for those who remind us what a terribly difficult and lonely job acting is—even when it isn't.
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