1959 Alternate Oscars

To be honest with you, Rio Bravo is my favorite movie of 1959. But I think Some Like It Hot (a movie I love, understand) has a bigger place in the history of movies. So I voted for the latter. If you care ...

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 ✱.

1959 Alternate Oscars

My choices are noted with a ★. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔.

That's some competition for best director, huh. Five of the greatest directors of all time, each turning in what might be the best movie of his career.

At one time or another, I've had three different movies — Some Like It Hot, Rio Bravo and finally North By Northwest — in the top slot. The Academy's choice, Ben-Hur, was no slouch either. A terrific epic, Ben-Hur features what I think is the best action sequence ever, the chariot race.



Vote well and live.

Alternate Oscars: Vote For The Best Picture Of 1959

They Came To Cordura (1959): Mini-Review

Katie-Bar-The-Door is out of town this weekend, so last night the Monkey sat on the couch with the dog and box of ginger snaps and watched They Came To Cordura, a mediocre late-50s western starring Gary Cooper as a coward ironically put in charge of making Medal of Honor recommendations during America's little-remembered invasion of Mexico in 1916.

Because America will need live heroes to pimp for the coming world war, Cooper is charged with escorting the Medal nominees back to base, giving him a perfect opportunity to quiz each man on the essential nature of courage and to marinate in his own lack thereof. Unfortunately, the nominees aren't really heroes, just deeply (deeply!) flawed men who happened to have had one reflexive moment of extraordinary valor. Given ample opportunity to demonstrate their true nature, they talk-talk-whine gripe-carp-moan all the way home while the supposed-coward Cooper shows them what real men are all about.

Sort of a Red Badge of Courage for people who wished that classic novel had fewer battle scenes and more ham-handed philosophical discussions.

The main attraction of this film for me was its setting. My late father-in-law was pals with John Eisenhower who wrote a series of books about U.S.-Mexican relations including one, Intervention!, about the time Black Jack Pershing, his cavalry aide George S. Patton and half the U.S. Army chased Pancho Villa around the mountains of northern Mexico. Eisenhower sent me a copy of the book, wrote a nice note, and I've since become something of a nut for the subject. The movie doesn't have much to say about that farcical episode in American history, but there are a few location shots and when Cooper mentioned hiding in a railroad ditch in Columbus, New Mexico, I knew exactly what he was talking about.

So in a sense, this review is really about me. As is everything I write.

Also starring Rita Hayworth and Van Heflin.

Rating: 2 stars out of 5.

Trivia note: It was during the filming of this movie that Dick York of Bewitched fame severely injured his back leading to a lifetime of pain and addiction that cut short his career.

The Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (1959)

At the heart of every Howard Hawks action movie is the concept of the professional doing his job, and doing it well, despite the imminent threat of death, an idealized code of conduct Hemingway called "grace under pressure." We're all going to die sooner or later, Hawks seems to be saying, can't we at least do it with a bit of dignity and honor and laughter and good company?

After nearly three decades of genre defining action pictures—from Dawn Patrol to Only Angels Have Wings to Red River to The Thing From Another World—Hawks topped himself with Rio Bravo, if not the best Western ever made then certainly the most entertaining.

It's also Hawks at his most compassionate, not an attribute I would always associate with his brusque heroes and no-nonsense women. But John Wayne watches over his ragged crew—a drunk, a cripple, and later a girl, a young gunslinger and even the manager of the local hotel—like a mother hen, with a love that is sometimes tough and sometimes tender, but always genuine.

There's a lesson here for purveyors of the modern summer blockbuster: don't confuse a slowing of the action with a flagging of the audience's interest. If you don't give us a reason to invest ourselves in the characters on the screen, the non-stop action, no matter how well choreographed, eventually becomes a tedious bore.

Hawks, for example, takes time after one character's particularly intense personal crisis for a trademark song (here, "My Rifle, My Pony and Me") which not only allows the audience to catch its breath, but also adds another dimension to the friendship between the four men involved that makes the final payoff (one of the greatest shootouts in movie history) so much more satisfying—because by then you really care.



I'll take Rio Bravo with its ups and downs of pacing and mood over all the empty, rote action movies ever made.

PICTURE (Drama)
winner: Rio Bravo (prod. Howard Hawks)
nominees: Anatomy of a Murder (prod. Otto Preminger); Ben-Hur (prod. Sam Zimbalist); Imitation of Life (prod. Ross Hunter); North By Northwest (prod. Alfred Hitchcock); Shadows (prod. Maurice McEndree); Room at the Top (James Woolf and John Woolf)

PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Some Like It Hot (prod. Billy Wilder)
nominees: I'm All Right Jack (prod. Roy Boultin); The Mouse That Roared (prod. Walter Shenson); Our Man In Havana (prod. Carol Reed); Pillow Talk (prod. Ross Hunter and Martin Melcher); Sleeping Beauty (prod. Walt Disney)

PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows) (prod. François Truffaut)
nominees: Apur Sansar (The World of Apu) (prod. Satyajit Ray); Ballada o soldate (Ballad of a Soldier) (prod. M. Chernova); Hiroshima mon amour (prod. Anatole Dauman and Samy Halfon); Ningen no jôken (The Human Condition) (prod. Shigeru Wakatsuki); Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus) (prod. Sacha Gordine); Ukigusa (Floating Weeds) (prod. Masaichi Nagata)

ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Cary Grant (North By Northwest)
nominees: Peter Cushing (The Hound of the Baskervilles); Charlton Heston (Ben-Hur); Jean-Pierre Léaud (Les quatre cents coups a.k.a. The 400 Blows); Dean Martin (Rio Bravo); Paul Muni (The Last Angry Man); James Stewart (Anatomy of a Murder); John Wayne (Rio Bravo)

ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Jack Lemmon (Some Like It Hot)
nominees: Tony Curtis (Some Like It Hot); Alec Guinness (Our Man In Havana); Rock Hudson (Pillow Talk); Peter Sellers (The Mouse That Roared and I'm All Right Jack)

ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Simone Signoret (Room At The Top)
nominees: Audrey Hepburn (The Nun's Story); Katharine Hepburn (Suddenly Last Summer); Eva Marie Saint (North By Northwest); Lana Turner (Imitation Of Life)

ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Marilyn Monroe (Some Like It Hot)
nominees: Dorothy Dandridge (Porgy And Bess); Doris Day (Pillow Talk)

DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: Howard Hawks (Rio Bravo)
nominees: John Cassavetes (Shadows); Alfred Hitchcock (North By Northwest); Masaki Kobayashi (Ningen no jôken a.k.a. The Human Condition); Otto Preminger (Anatomy of a Murder); Douglas Sirk (Imitation of Life); François Truffaut (Les quatre cents coups a.k.a. The 400 Blows); William Wyler (Ben-Hur)

DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot)
nominees: Marcel Camus (Orfeu Negro a.k.a. Black Orpheus); Michael Gordon (Pillow Talk); Yasujirô Ozu (Ohayô a.k.a. Good Morning); Carol Reed (Our Man In Havana)

SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Walter Brennan (Rio Bravo)
nominees: Joe E. Brown (Some Like It Hot); Ben Gazzarra (Anatomy of a Murder); Hugh Griffith (Ben-Hur); Martin Landau (North By Northwest); James Mason (North By Northwest); Arthur O'Connell (Anatomy of a Murder); Tony Randall (Pillow Talk); George C. Scott (Anatomy of a Murder); Orson Welles (Compulsion)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Juanita Moore (Imitation Of Life)
nominees: Eve Arden (Anatomy of a Murder); Angie Dickinson (Rio Bravo); Susan Kohner (Imitation of Life); Jessie Royce Landis (North By Northwest); Lee Remick (Anatomy of a Murder); Shelley Winters (The Diary of Anne Frank)

SCREENPLAY
winner: Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, from the story by Robert Thoeren and Michael Logan (Some Like It Hot)
nominees: Karl Tunberg, from the novel by Lew Wallace (Ben-Hur); Ernest Lehman (North By Northwest); Graham Greene, from his novel (Our Man In Havana); François Truffaut (scenario and adaptation), Marcel Moussy (dialogue and adaptation) (Les quatre cents coups a.k.a. The 400 Blows); Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett, from the short story by B.H. McCampbell (Rio Bravo)

SPECIAL AWARDS
Saul Bass (Career Achievement Award); Jazz on a Summer's Day (Documentary); William A. Horning and Edward Carfagno; Hugh Hunt (Ben-Hur) (Art Direction-Set Decoration); Franklin E. Milton (Ben-Hur) (Sound); Ralph E. Winters and John D. Dunning (Ben-Hur) (Film Editing); Elizabeth Haffenden (Ben-Hur) (Costumes); A. Arnold Gillespie, Robert MacDonald and Milo Lory (Ben-Hur) (Special Effects)

That's Typing Tuesday #1: An Introduction

I was chatting this last weekend with Thingy over at Pondering Life—she says she's hit a bit of a dry spell recently, blog-wise (not so's you'd notice, but I'll take her word for it), and she got to wondering what other bloggers do, whether they bank up a supply of future posts to dip into or just ride out the storm.

Me, I type up notes on movies as I think of them, but I never polish anything in advance, which is why I tend to break those long essays into six parts—otherwise, I'd wind up posting once a month. The problem for me is I have some 50,000 words worth of notes (more than a hundred typed pages) that I'm unlikely ever to get to, fragments about Hitchcock, Capra, Cary Grant, etc.

So Thingy suggested that once a week I post one of these random, unpolished fragments. Okay, I will. We'll call it "That's Typing Tuesday," from Truman Capote's famous quote—"That's not writing, that's typing"—about the novel On The Road. Which may not have been a fair reading of Jack Kerouac but is certainly a fair description of what I'll be offering up—not only future movie posts, but poems, fiction, grocery lists, what have you.

I tend to think in phrases and ellipses, which I later fill in with something we like to call grammar. Grammar will not be much in evidence here on Tuesdays. Neither will tact, which I insert along with the grammar. These are unedited thoughts transferred directly from my frontal lobes to my word processor and now to my blog. Don't choke on it.

To give you a taste of what's to come, here are the four fragments I shared with Thingy on her blog:

Cary Grant (North By Northwest)
ad man ... expedient lie—thinks it's amusing ... floats above life, untouched by it ... "rot" ... Roger O. Thornhill— "O" for "nothing" ... the CIA (or is it the FBI? "We're all part of the same alphabet soup.") teaches him the hard way the real consequences of the "expedient" lie ... and thus underneath all the movement and brilliant action sequences is the story of a man discovering he actually gives a damn ...

The Apartment
... I've read some complaints that the happy ending is contrived and tacked on, to which I say if you want to see a man sell his soul for a career in mid-level management, don't bother buying a theater ticket, just go to the office on Monday. There are millions of those guys walking around, and some of them are selling their souls for a whole lot less than a corner office with three windows. Movies—the ones we remember beyond a single award season—get made about the one in a million guy, whoever he is, and that's as it should be.

Psycho And The Problem Of Endings
I think Hitchcock was reacting to the critical and commercial drubbing Vertigo took ... "You want me to spell it out for you?" he seems to be saying, "I'll spell it out until you're begging me to stop" ... and he just keeps going and going, belaboring the issue long past the point where we care, and then he goes some more, just so Alfred Hitchcock can give his audience the finger.

It's the one significant flaw in an otherwise perfect movie ...
Psycho
Norman has mother issues. Well, don't we all. At least he can keep his in the fruit cellar.

In the future, you'll get one fragment. One fragment only, Vasili.

Next Tuesday: The Sound of Music

Postscript: I finished the final part of my essay about the films of 1915 last night, but too late to post it. I guess I could have posted it this morning, but you can't very well start a series called "That's Typing Tuesday" on Wednesday. So the 1915 essay gets pushed back, to either this afternoon or tomorrow morning.