The Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (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)

The Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (1955)

Generally speaking, the phrase "Ingmar Bergman comedy" is the very definition of an oxymoron, but Smiles of a Summer Night is the exception I can recommend to you.

Loosely adapted from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and later to inspire Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music and Woody Allen's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night is the story of tangled relationships—she loves her ex, he loves his bride, she prefers his son, and the maid sleeps with everybody—set right on a long summer evening with the aid of magic wine and moveable beds.

Serve with champagne.

PICTURE (Drama)
winner: The Night Of The Hunter (prod. Paul Gregory)
nominees: Bad Day At Black Rock (prod. Dore Schary); East of Eden (prod. Elia Kazan); Kiss Me Deadly (prod. Robert Aldrich); The Man From Laramie (prod. William Goetz); Rebel Without A Cause (prod. David Weisbart); To Catch A Thief (prod. Alfred Hitchcock)

PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: The Ladykillers (prod. Michael Balcon)
nominees: Guys And Dolls (prod. Samuel Goldwyn); Lady And The Tramp (prod. Walt Disney); Mister Roberts (prod. Leland Hayward); Oklahoma! (prod. Arthur Hornblow, Jr.); The Seven Year Itch (prod. Charles K. Feldman and Billy Wilder); The Trouble With Harry (prod. Alfred Hitchcock)

PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: Pather Panchali (prod. Satyajit Ray)
nominees: Les diaboliques (Diabolique) (prod. Henri-Georges Clouzot); Du rififi chez les hommes (Rififi) (prod. René Bezard, Henri Bérard and Pierre Cabaud); Lola Montès (prod. Albert Caraco); Ordet (prod. Carl Theodor Dreyer, Erik Nielsen and Tage Nielsen); Sommarnattens leende (Smiles of a Summer Night) (prod. Allan Ekelund)

ACTOR (Drama)
winner: James Dean (East of Eden and Rebel Without A Cause)
nominees: Ernest Borgnine (Marty); Cary Grant (To Catch A Thief); Robert Mitchum (The Night Of The Hunter); Laurence Olivier (Richard III); Jean Servais (Du rififi chez les hommes a.k.a. Rififi); Frank Sinatra (The Man With The Golden Arm); James Stewart (The Man From Laramie); Spencer Tracy (Bad Day At Black Rock)

ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Gunnar Björnstrand (Sommarnattens leende a.k.a. Smiles of a Summer Night)
nominees: James Cagney (Love Me Or Leave Me and Mister Roberts); Henry Fonda (Mister Roberts); Alec Guinness (The Ladykillers); Gordon MacRae (Oklahoma!)

ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Anna Magnani (The Rose Tattoo)
nominees: Julie Harris (East of Eden and I Am A Camera); Susan Hayward (I'll Cry Tomorrow); Katharine Hepburn (Summertime); Grace Kelly (To Catch A Thief); Eleanor Parker (Interrupted Melody); Simone Signoret (Les diaboliques a.k.a. Diabolique); Jane Wyman (All That Heaven Allows)

ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Doris Day (Love Me Or Leave Me)
nominees: Eva Dahlbeck (Sommarnattens leende a.k.a. Smiles of a Summer Night); Katie Johnson (The Ladykillers); Shirley MacLaine (The Trouble With Harry); Marilyn Monroe (The Seven Year Itch)

DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: Satyajit Ray (Pather Panchali)
nominees: Robert Aldrich (Kiss Me Deadly); Henri-Georges Clouzot (Les diaboliques a.k.a. Diabolique); Jules Dassin (Du rififi chez les hommes a.k.a. Rififi); Carl Theodor Dreyer (Ordet); Alfred Hitchcock (To Catch A Thief); Elia Kazan (East of Eden); Charles Laughton (The Night Of The Hunter); Nicholar Ray (Rebel Without A Cause); John Sturges (Bad Day At Black Rock)

DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Alexander Mackendrick (The Ladykillers)
nominees: Ingmar Bergman (Sommarnattens leende a.k.a. Smiles of a Summer Night); John Ford and Mervyn LeRoy (Mister Roberts); Chuck Jones (One Froggy Evening); Billy Wilder (The Seven Year Itch)

SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Robert Ryan (Bad Day At Black Rock)
nominees: Jack Lemmon (Mister Roberts); Sal Mineo (Rebel Without A Cause); Arthur O'Connell (Picnic); Sidney Poitier (Blackboard Jungle)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Natalie Wood (Rebel Without A Cause)
nominees: Harriet Andersson (Sommarnattens leende a.k.a. Smiles of a Summer Night); Betsy Blair (Marty); Lillian Gish (The Night Of The Hunter); Mildred Natwick (The Trouble With Harry); Rosalind Russell (Picnic); Susan Strasberg (Picnic); Jo Van Fleet (East of Eden); Shelley Winters (The Night Of The Hunter)

SCREENPLAY
winner: Millard Kaufman (Bad Day At Black Rock)
nominees: William Rose (The Ladykillers); Paddy Chayefsky, from his teleplay (Marty); James Agee, from the novel by Davis Grubb (The Night Of The Hunter); Nicholas Ray, Irving Shulman and Stewart Stern (Rebel Without a Cause); Ingmar Bergman (Sommarnattens leende a.k.a. Smiles of a Summer Night)

SPECIAL AWARDS
One Froggy Evening (Cartoon Short); Stanley Cortez (The Night Of The Hunter) (Cinematography); Hilyard M. Brown and Alfred E. Spencer (The Night Of The Hunter) (Art Direction-Set Decoration)

The Great Directors Tournament: Art House Favorties Bracket—Round One

All the first round polls are now up and running. Don't forget to vote in the other brackets if you haven't already.

Ingmar Bergman
Born: July 14, 1918 (Uppsala, Uppsala län, Sweden)
Directorial Debut: (Crisis (1946)
Academy Awards: 9 nominations (including 3 for direction)
Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (for direction): 1 win—The Seventh Seal (1957) (Drama)
Three More To See: Wild Strawberries, Persona and Scenes From A Marriage

Stanley Kubrick
Born: July 26, 1928 (New York, New York)
Directorial Debut: Flying Padre (documentary short) (1951)
Academy Awards: 13 nominations (including 4 for direction), 1 win—2001: A Space Odyssey (Visual Effects)
Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (for direction): 1 win—2001: A Space Odyssey (Drama)
Three More To See: The Killing, Paths Of Glory and Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Akira Kurosawa
Born: March 23, 1910 (Tokyo, Japan)
Directorial Debut: Uma (some scenes) (uncredited) (1941)
Academy Awards: 1 nomination, honorary Oscar
Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (for direction): 3 wins—Rashômon (1950), Seven Samurai (1954) and Ran (1985) (all for Drama)
Three More To See: Ikiru, The Hidden Fortress and Yojimbo

Federico Fellini
Born: January 20, 1920 (Rimini, Emilia-Romagna, Italy)
Directorial Debut: Luci del varietà (Variety Lights) (1950)
Academy Awards: 12 nominations, honorary Oscar (1993)
Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (for direction): 8½ (1963) (Drama)
Three More To See: La Strada, Nights of Cabiria and La Dolce Vita

Best Director Of 1928-29: Carl Theodor Dreyer (The Passion Of Joan Of Arc)

When we celebrate great directors—Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Ford—we are actually often celebrating wildly different qualities. Sometimes it's the gift of an Ingmar Bergman (remember a chess-playing grim reaper in The Seventh Seal?) to translate a deeply personal vision into an unforgettable image. At other times it's the knack of a William Wyler (who directed the most Oscar-winning performances in history) for coaxing award-winning performances from his actors. And at yet other times, it's the sheer determination of a Marcel Carné (who directed Children of Paradise during the Nazi occupation of France) to conjure a masterpiece from nothing under the most difficult of circumstances.

To turn a personal obsession into one of the greatest movies of all time, Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer had to become a combination of all three.

Dreyer was already slated to direct a movie about Joan of Arc when he discovered in a Paris library the complete transcript of the trial that led to her execution. Poring over the court's meticulous notes, Dreyer became obsessed with the Joan revealed in the give and take of the trial. Dreyer threw out Joseph Delteil's screenplay, which was a more traditional account of Joan's life, and instead wrote his own screenplay focusing the story solely on the interrogation.

The result, as the opening titles put it, is a portrait of Joan "not in armor, but simple and human." It's also one of the best movies ever made about the collision of religious faith and worldly cynicism.

Dreyer subscribed to what Ernest Hemingway later called the iceberg theory of storytelling, that if you focus on the core of the story and get the details right, then like the seventh-eights of the iceberg that's underwater, the audience will intuitively sense the parts of the story that you've left out. In directing The Passion of Joan of Arc, Dreyer stripped away everything—subplots, politics, and especially showy, kabuki-style acting—that distracted from the emotional core of his story.

He even went so far as to bar the cast from wearing make-up, unprecedented in the Silent Era.

The brutal demands Dreyer made on his star, Maria Fal- conetti, were legendary. To get the performance he wanted from Falconetti, a stage actress known for light comedy, Dreyer had her kneel on the stone floor of the set for weeks on end, blank all emotion from her face and do take after endless take. In addition to cropping her long hair, Dreyer insisted over Falconetti's objection that in a key scene where the judges cut her hair in preparation for her execution, her head be shaved for real. And when a doctor is brought in to bleed the ailing Joan, Dreyer took a knife to Falconetti's arm and opened a vein.

Reportedly, the suffering etched in every line of her face was genuine, the tears well-earned.

Dreyer was as demanding of every performer in the movie, from his star to the extras. For the duration of shooting which ran from May to November 1927, he required that his performers stay in character as much as possible and keep their heads shaved in monkish tonsure-style haircuts. As Gary Morris pointed out in an essay for Bright Lights Film Journal, this included even those actors whose characters wore caps that entirely covered their heads.

Likewise Dreyer built an elaborate, three- dim- ensional set and then never showed it, shooting nearly the entire movie in a series of close-ups, possibly using more close-ups than any other movie in history. Yet following the iceberg principle again, the reality is there in the background so that without drawing attention to the set or stopping to pat himself on the back for the effort, you never question that what you're seeing is real.

Can you image a director now who would blow a substantial chunk of his budget to create such an elaborate set and then not shove it in your face every minute to the detriment of the final product?

Because it stripped away every ex- traneous detail, Dreyer's version of the Joan story doesn't delve into the political or military conflict that drove the trial, nor does it directly answer the question of whether Joan was a saint (the Catholic church declared her to be so in 1920; my own religious background makes no allowance for such a possibility). Dreyer made clear, however, where his sympathies lay. As Roger Ebert noted in his review of the movie, the judges are photographed in a harsh white light that exposes every wrinkle and blemish that "seem to reflect a diseased inner life. Falconetti, by contrast, is shot in softer grays." Joan looks like a saint, bedeviled by corrupt, venal men with a worldly axe to grind.

In many ways, The Passion of Joan of Arc is the opposite of what I usually I like in a silent movie. It's a heavy drama, laden with dialogue (which of course must be read on intertitle cards that appear between scenes). Except at the end, it features little of the visual lyricism that can eliminate the need for pages of exposition. And yet, Dreyer, who along with Marguerite Beaugé edited the movie, found an effective rhythm as he cut between close-ups of Joan, her inquisitors and the intertitle cards, a rhythm that steadily increases the tension until it explodes, like screwing a lid tightly onto a pot of boiling water.

Dreyer's approach to filmmaking was idiosyncratic, wholly at odds with, say, F.W. Murnau's, who was aiming to make movies a purely visual experience. And yet because he did make it work, Dreyer managed a nearly unique achievement, a movie so modern in its look and its pared-down approach to storytelling, that if I didn't know better, I would have assumed it was made forty years later.

That we can see this movie at all almost qualifies as a miracle in itself. Censors went to work on the movie soon after Dreyer completed it and then the film was lost to fire—twice. The negative was destroyed soon after its premiere and Dreyer cobbled together another print out of scraps from the cutting room floor only to see that print destroyed in a fire too. Dreyer died in 1968 believing that his finest achievement was lost forever.

Then in 1981, while cleaning out a janitor's closet in an insane asylum in Oslo of all places, workers discovered a complete copy of the original print, apparently ordered by a forgotten doctor to show to his patients fifty years before. Often these rediscovered lost films prove to be a disappointment that cannot live up to idealized memories; The Passion of Joan of Arc proved to be even better. Critics hailed it as a masterpiece, a word too casually tossed around, but for once they were right.

Of my three nominees for best director, Luis Buñuel made the most influential movie, the sixteen-minute surrealist experiment Un Chien Andalou, possibly the best example of experimental film ever created. Victor Sjöström (credited here as Victor Seastrom) is better known now for his performance as an aging professor in Ingmar Bergman's classic Wild Strawberries, but in his native Sweden he is remembered as the father of Swedish cinema and he directed fifty-five movies in his career. Hand-picked by star Lillian Gish for The Wind, he directed a near textbook example of a silent movie that sheds the need for dialogue and he did it under grueling conditions in the Mojave Desert.

In other years, either of these nominees would have been an excellent choice for a Katie Award.

In the case of The Passion of Joan of Arc, Dreyer made neither an influential movie nor a textbook example of anything. He simply made the best movie of the year and without his determination, it wouldn't have been made at all.

Dreyer followed The Passion of Joan of Arc with an atmospheric foray into the horror genre, Vampyr. Although some now believe it rivals Murnau's Nosferatu as the best vampire movie ever made, Vampyr flopped so miserably at its premiere in Berlin that Dreyer fell into a deep depression and didn't direct another movie for ten years.

In his career, Dreyer directed a total of twenty-three movies, including Day of Wrath (1943) and Ordet (1955); he wrote forty-nine others. He directed his last movie in 1964, just four years before his death at the age of 79.