Show People (1928) — A Mini-Review

The story of a girl from the country who makes it big in Hollywood was a staple of the silent era — see, e.g., A Girl's Folly, Souls for Sale, The Extra Girl, Ella Cinders — so much so that when Marion Davies (with King Vidor directing) spoofed the genre in the 1928 silent comedy Show People, everybody in town was in on the joke.

Look for cameos from just about everybody who was anybody including Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, John Gilbert and even Marion Davies and King Vidor as themselves.

While she is mostly remembered now as the inspiration for the no-talent opera singer in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane — a grossly unfair characterization if that's what Welles really thought of her — Marion Davies was actually a very good comedic actress and this movie was the best showcase of her talent.

Recommended.

Tie Breaker: Orson Welles's Citizen Kane or Charlton Heston's Ben-Hur?

The Great Imaginary Film Blogathon

The Metzinger Sisters over at Silver Scenes are hosting the Great Imaginary Film Blogathon this week, from October 1st to the 3rd. The rules are simple enough: imagine a movie you wish had been made and then blog about it.

Here's mine, a movie that not only has never been made, but I can practically guarantee you will never be made—Model Railroader Magazine: The Movie, directed and written by and starring the ultimate movie train guy, Buster Keaton:

If you're a regular reader of the Mythical Monkey, Keaton's connection to trains should require no explanation—The General, about a locomotive chase during the Civil War, is the greatest silent movie ever made. He loved trains, big and small. Here's a picture of him with his own model railroad:

"Music & Lyrics by Rod Stewart" probably does require an explanation. Maybe you didn't know this, but Stewart doesn't just sing for his supper—after the show, he sits quietly in his hotel room and builds museum-quality structures for his model train layout. He's twice been featured on the cover of Model Railroader, and deservedly so.

As for Keaton's co-stars, John Astin as Gomez Addams has blown up more trains than Lawrence of Arabia. He also teaches acting just up the road from here. Great man, funny man. I'd happily have him in any movie I was making.



The others on the list starred in some of the greatest train movies of all time—I'll leave it to you to match them to their movies—except possibly for Orson Welles (did he make a train movie?). He did once call RKO studios "the biggest electric train set a boy ever had!" so close enough. Here's Welles speaking in favor of train travel:



Boy, with a testimonial like that, no wonder everybody drives!

And how would a Buster Keaton movie about a man with a hobby play? About like this, I imagine:



As a bonus for fans of NCIS, that should answer how Gibbs gets the boat he's building out of his basement. As always, click on the photos to see them full size.

Book Review: My Lunches With Orson—Highly Recommended

Upon reflection, the next time someone launches another of those internet memes asking who from Hollywood history, living or dead, you'd like to have lunch with, I'm going to answer "Orson Welles." Because if there are two things Orson Welles did better than anyone, aside from making such classic films as Citizen Kane and The Lady From Shanghai, it was (1) eating and (2) talking. I imagine the food would be good, the conversation (on Welles's end, at least) even better, and if in the process, you gained a little insight into one of film history's most mercurial figures, well then the hefty bill at the end would be well worth paying.

Back in the early-1980s, director Henry Jaglom sat down to just such a series of lunches, recorded them, then after letting the tapes gather dust in a shoe box for three decades, allowed Peter Biskind, author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, to transcribe and edit them for public consumption.

The resulting book, My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles, available from Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company, is just as lively and insightful as, and a great deal funnier than, any lunch I ever imagined having with Welles—or any other celebrity for that matter.

The relationship between Jaglom and Welles was one between friends and equals—Jaglom had somehow persuaded Welles to star in his directorial effort, then became Welles's trusted go-between with the various moneyed interests who dangled promises of funding for the aging director's film projects—and for years they lunched weekly at Ma Maison, Wolfgang Puck's hideaway restaurant in West Hollywood. The recordings were Welles's idea, inspired by similar conversations Jaglom had taped with his own father, and with no plans for their future use, and thus no sense of history's judgment hanging over his head, Welles is as close to unguarded as he ever was.

Neither adversarial, as between a journalist and his quarry, or worshipful, as between an acolyte and his idol, the conversations are freewheeling and completely unvarnished. Political correctness ("Sardinians have stubby little fingers") is set aside, civility ("I gave him an evasive answer. I told him, 'Go f#ck yourself.'") is forgotten, and good taste ("Buchwald drove it up Ronnie's ass and broke it off") isn't even honored in the breach.

Jaglom was the perfect lunch companion for Welles. Welles was a raconteur, a provocateur, a poseur and sometimes an out-and-out liar, and it would have necessarily taken a man with a quick mind, opinions of his own, unafraid to say, "Orson, that's ridiculous," when he was indeed being ridiculous (which was often), and able to draw out the great man on a broad range of topics, to serve as the host of these repasts at Ma Maison.

The lunches are delicious, lively and hilarious, what I would imagine the Algonquin roundtable was like, with Welles simultaneously playing the parts of Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and George Kaufmann, tossing out one liners like hand grenades while eating food enough for six. It's wonderful stuff. I wound up neglecting everything—the dog, dinner, this blog—just to read another chapter.

Indeed, if I wrote as quickly as I read, you'd have had this review the day after the book arrived in the mail.

These lunches are also filling, as good lunches should be, featuring lengthy discussions of Irving Thalberg ("Satan"), Erich von Stroheim ("genius"), David O. Selznick ("pious old fart"), Carole Lombard ("very bright"), Rita Hayworth ("magnificent"), Joan Fontaine ("a plain old bad actor"), Laurence Olivier ("very—I mean, seriously—stupid"), Charles Chaplin ("wonderful—but not funny"), and many others.

The greatest insights, though, are into Welles himself, although certainly not the ones he intended. Throughout the book, he and Jaglom are in discussions with the French to finance Dreamers, discussions with the Italians to finance Cradle Will Rock, discussions with Hollywood A-listers to star in The Big Brass Ring, and discussions with everybody to finance King Lear, ultimately with no success on any front. Welles complains frequently about his reputation for being difficult, insisting it's the propaganda of enemies with an axe to grind, and that, really, he was just trying to help those poor slobs sell their terrible wine when he insisted on rewriting their ad copy, and who doesn't hate the tedium of editing film, and yes, he was eating four steaks and seven baked potatoes for dinner at Cannes, but he only sniffed the pork tenderloin.

When over one of these lunches Welles pitches a project to Susan Smith of HBO, it becomes obvious why his career went to hell in a handbasket—he may have been a genius, but he was also ill-tempered, insecure, and surprisingly bashful to boot. One imagined look on her part and a single wrong word and he winds up chasing her out of the restaurant even as she's begging him to do a deal for the cable network.

It's no wonder that when Welles died, he left nineteen unfinished projects, and hadn't completed a feature-length film in twelve years.

The question you always have to ask yourself when reading anything Welles ever said is how much of it is real and how much of it is a put-on (to shock, delight or deflect his questioner). In the end, I'm not sure it matters because to a great degree, the pose was the man. But if anyone ever got close to revealing in a series of conversations the flighty bundle of brilliant insecurities that were apparently dancing around inside Welles's over-sized carcass, it was Jaglom.

At one point, Welles discusses the concert pianist, Arthur Rubenstein, and his description could serve as his own epitaph: "He was the greatest cocksman of the ... twentieth century. The greatest charmer, linguist, socialite, raconteur. ... 'I am too lazy to practice ... I play clinkers all the time [but] I play it better with the clinkers.' [He] walked through life as though it was one big party."

One big party, or a series of very funny lunches.

P.S. Don't know your Orson Welles movies as well as you'd like? Click here for some suggestions from the Monkey.

Orson Welles: What To See (And What Not To See)

I'm currently writing a glowing review of My Lunches With Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles which will be up in a day or two. In the meantime, if you don't know Welles as well as you should, here are some recommendations:

Indispensable

Citizen Kane (1941)—love it or hate it (I love it), you can no more call yourself a film buff without seeing Kane than you can call yourself literate without knowing the alphabet. As Jean-Luc Godard said of Welles, "Everyone will always owe him everything."

The Third Man (1949)—Welles didn't direct this suspense classic (Carol Reed did), but his supporting performance as the charming arch-criminal Harry Lime is one of the most memorable in movie history.

Highly Recommended

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)—the studio re-shot the ending and the film flopped at the box office, but this story of a spoiled rich kid and his tragic comeuppance is a masterpiece anyway.

The Lady From Shanghai (1948)—starring his soon-to-be ex-wife Rita Hayworth, this film noir thriller boasts the legendary shoot-out in a hall of mirrors.

Touch of Evil (1958)—from the twilight of the film noir era, Welles is a cop run amok terrorizing both good guys (Charlton Heston) and bad guys (Akim Tamiroff).

Chimes at Midnight a.k.a. Falstaff (1965)—the least seen of his classic films, Welles plays Shakespeare's fat fool as a tragic-comic figure and a meta-commentary on his own career.

Recommended

The Stranger (1946)—Suspected Nazi (Welles) plays a deadly game of wits with Nazi hunter (Edward G. Robinson).

Macbeth (1948)—One of Welles's three Shakespeare films, this atmospheric interpretation made a lot more sense after it was restored in the 1990s.

Othello (1952)—personally, I think the only way for a white actor to play Othello is the way Patrick Stewart did it at the Shakespeare Theater back in 1997: with an otherwise all-black cast. Except for the matter of pigmentation, Othello was right in Welles's wheelhouse.

Mr. Arkadin a.k.a. Confidential Report (1955)—the studio messed around so much with this whodunit about a private detective hot on the trail of the mysterious Mr Arkadin, that the Criterion dvd contains three versions.

Compulsion (1959)—another acting-only movie, Welles plays a lawyer defending two killers based on the infamous Leopold and Loeb.

Meh

Journey Into Fear (1943)—director only. Joseph Cotten should have chosen a different cruise line: this one is full of Nazis and nonsense.

Jane Eyre (1944)—acting only. Welles is pretty good as Mr. Rochester, but Joan Fontaine obviously didn't read the novel about a feisty girl who marries above her station.

Tomorrow is Forever (1946)—acting only. I waited forever for this three-hanky weeper to finish. Co-starring Claudette Colbert.

Catch-22 (1970)—acting only. Alan Arkin is good, but the screenplay makes too much sense to capture the flavor of the classic Joseph Heller novel.

F for Fake (1973)—Welles's last feature-length directorial effort, this documentary about art forger Elmyr de Hory and his biographer Clifford Irving who got rich off a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes is beloved by some, but I'm not some.

Burn Before Watching

The V.I.P.'s (1963)—acting only. One of those group-of-strangers-stuck-in-one-place potboilers, this time in a fog-bound airport. Worst layover ever. Glossy, high-toned stupidity starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor at their worst.

Casino Royale (1967)—no, not the Daniel Craig classic. This is the swingin' 60s spoof. Incoherent, self-indulgent and painfully unfunny. Acting only.

It Happened One Christmas (1977)—made for tv remake of It's A Wonderful Life with Welles as Mr. Potter and Marlo Thomas in the Jimmy Stewart role. Saw it as a teenager and was scarred for life. Acting only.

Man Of Steel: An Observation

Duck Soup—running time: 1 hour 8 minutes

Casablanca—running time: 1 hour 42 minutes

Citizen Kane—running time: 1 hour 59 minutes

North by Northwest—running time: 2 hours 16 minutes

Man of Steel—running time: 2 hours 23 minutes.

I will grant you that Gone with the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia and Schindler's List are long movies, but they fully justify their running time. Otherwise, if you make a movie longer than Casablanca or Citizen Kane, you better have something to say. Anyway, that's my opinion.

Alexandra Petri's New Oscar Categories (Taken More Seriously Than She Intended) (Part Four)

(What is this? Read here.)

Best Performance in a Movie That Involves Running Away From No Fewer Than Two Explosions
How many explosions were there in the first Die Hard movie—well, let's see, there was one on the roof, and one in the elevator and—well, that's two right there. So I'm going with Bruce Willis in Die Hard, which is not just a great action picture, but a great picture, period.

Best Musician Trying To Cross Over Into Acting
If singers count as musicians, it'd be either Will Smith or Frank Sinatra, and since I've already gone with Smith in an answer, let's say Sinatra in From Here To Eternity, The Man with the Golden Arm and The Manchurian Candidate.

If, on the other hand, an actual musical instrument must be played, then I'm going with a personal favorite, pianist Oscar Levant, who was hilarious in Humoresque and An American in Paris. "I'm a concert pianist. That's a pretentious way of saying I'm ... unemployed at the moment." I can dig it, Oscar. It works the same for writers, too.

Best Performance as an Aging Character Who Wants to Prove He or She's Still Got It
There are a lot of good ones to choose from—Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, Bette Davis in All About Eve, John Wayne in The Shootist, Orson Welles in Touch of Evil, and that's just off the top of my head—but I'm going with William Holden in The Wild Bunch. As I wrote a year ago, "I don't know anybody over the age of fifty who isn't a little startled, dismayed and embarrassed to realize that the upward trajectory of the life that they so took for granted has nosed over and is now on a permanent downward spiral toward the grave. For Pike Bishop (William Holden), the aging leader of a gang of Old West desperados, it's not just that he no longer understands the world that has changed around him; it's the realization that even if he did understand it, he no longer has the energy, stamina or reflexes to do anything about it. But as Dylan Thomas pointed out, there's more than one way to grow old: you can go quietly into the night, or you can rage, rage against the dying of the light. Pike chooses to rage. And oh how he rages."

Best Performance Involving a Single Manly Tear
That's easy—the native American in the that late-1960s public service ad lamenting the casual littering of the American landscape. Really, people used to throw their trash out the car window without a second thought. This one ad did more to change attitudes than probably all the other ads and speeches on the subject combined.

And no, I have no evidence to support that. Just my personal impression.


Best Performance Where You Have to Age Citizen-Kane-Style Over Years and Years
Another easy one—Orson Welles in Citizen Kane! Sometimes they just softball it in there for you.

Tomorrow: dogs, gays, boats, sandals and parents.

The Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (1965)

A fool who is unaware he is a fool is a ripe subject for comedy. A fool who knows he is a fool, but who hopes and believes he is loved not just in spite of his foolishness but because of it only to discover at the critical moment that he is in fact despised, that's the stuff of tragedy.

And thus it is that Shakespeare's greatest comic creation, the blustering, cowardly, buffoonish Falstaff, who made appearances in the Henry IV plays, The Merry Wives of Windsor and finally in Henry V, winds up a tragic figure in one of the Bard's saddest story arcs.

In 1965, Orson Welles, a director of Shakespearean film adaptations rivaled only by Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh, put Falstaff front and center where he belongs, stitching together all the fat fool's scenes into a single production. The result, Chimes at Midnight (a.k.a. Falstaff), tells the story of Prince Hal's rise to power through the eyes of theater's greatest clown, and despite technical limitations arising from Welles' lack of funding, belongs on a list with Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil as the best work of the great director's career.

It's also the most personal of Welles's films, a lacerating self-portrait of a man fully aware of the cost of his life of excess and wasted potential—but who's had a good time nevertheless.

Highly recommended—if you can find it. There's a DVD available in Brazil that I hear might work on a U.S. player. Otherwise, it's pretty much YouTube or nothing.

P.S. And on a side note, a point I'd make a few paragraphs further down if I were writing a full-blown essay, I think Shakespeare dispatched Falstaff in such a coldblooded manner largely to get him off the stage—his outsized presence would have thrown the tone of Henry V out of whack—but I think he also wanted to make the point that our greatest leaders necessarily have within them a streak of ruthless pragmatism that's not pretty to look at but which separates them from the Don Quixotes of the world.

It's the price you pay for getting things done.

PICTURE (Drama)
winner: Chimes At Midnight (a.k.a. Falstaff) (prod. Ángel Escolano, Emiliano Piedra and Harry Saltzman)
nominees: Doctor Zhivago (prod. Carlo Ponti); For A Few Dollars More (Per qualche dollaro in più) (prod. Arturo González); The Hill (prod. Kenneth Hyman); A Patch of Blue (prod. Pandro S. Berman); The Pawnbroker (prod. Philip Langner and Roger Lewis); Repulsion (prod. Gene Gutowski); The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (prod. Martin Ritt); The Train (prod. Jules Bricken)

PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: The Sound Of Music (prod. Robert Wise)
nominees: Help! (prod. Walter Shenson); A Thousand Clowns (prod. Fred Coe)

PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: Obchod na korze (The Shop On Main Street) (prod. Milos Broz and Jaromír Lukás)
nominees: Akahige (Red Beard) (prod. Ryûzô Kikushima and Tomoyuki Tanaka); Pierrot le fou (prod. Georges de Beauregard)

ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Rod Steiger (The Pawnbroker)
nominees: Claudio Brook (Simón del desierto a.k.a. Simon of the Desert); Richard Burton (The Spy Who Came In From The Cold); Sean Connery (The Hill); Burt Lancaster (The Train); Sidney Poitier (A Patch of Blue); Terence Stamp (The Collector); Orson Welles (Chimes At Midnight a.k.a. Falstaff)

ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Lee Marvin (Cat Ballou)
nominees: The Beatles (Help!); Jean-Paul Belmondo (Pierrot le Fou); Jason Robards (A Thousand Clowns)

ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Julie Christie (Darling and Doctor Zhivago)
nominees: Catherineo Deneuve (Repulsion); Samantha Eggar (The Collector); Elizabeth Hartman (A Patch Of Blue); Ida Kamiska (Obchod na korze a.k.a. The Shop on Main Street)

ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Julie Andrews (The Sound Of Music)
nominees: Anna Karina (Pierrot le fou); Guiletta Musina (Giulietta degli spiriti a.k.a. Juliet of the Spirits); Rita Tushingham (The Knack ... And How To Get It)

DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: Orson Welles (Chimes At Midnight a.k.a. Falstaff)
nominees: John Frankenheimer (The Train); Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos (Obchod na korze a.k.a. The Shop on Main Street); David Lean (Doctor Zhivago); Sergio Leone (For A Few Dollars More a.k.a. Per qualche dollaro in più); Roman Polanski (Repulsion)

DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Richard Lester (The Knack ... And How To Get It and Help!)
nominees: Milos Forman (Lásky jedné plavovlásky a.k.a. Loves of a Blonde); Jean-Luc Godard (Pierrot le fou); Robert Wise (The Sound Of Music)

SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Paul Scofield (The Train)
nominees: Harry Andrews (The Hill); Martin Balsam (A Thousand Clowns); Keith Baxter (Chimes At Midnight a.k.a. Falstaff); Tom Courteney (Doctor Zhivago); John Gielgud (Chimes At Midnight a.k.a. Falstaff); Edward G. Robinson (The Cincinnati Kid); Oskar Werner (The Spy Who Came In From The Cold)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Silvia Pinal (Simón del desierto a.k.a. Simon of the Desert)
nominees: Joan Blondell (The Cincinnati Kid); Claire Bloom (The Spy Who Came In From The Cold); Ruth Gordon (Inside Daisy Clover); Maggie Smith (Othello); Peggy Wood (The Sound Of Music)

SCREENPLAY
winner: Orson Welles, from the plays "Henry IV: Part I," "Henry IV: Part II," "Henry V," "Richard II" and "The Merry Wives of Windsor" by William Shakespeare, and the book Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande by Raphael Holinshed (Chimes At Midnight a.k.a. Falstaff)
nominees: Robert Bolt, from the novel by Boris Pasternak (Doctor Zhivago); Ladislav Grosman, Jan Kadar and Elmar Klos; story by Ladislav Grosman (Obchod na korze a.k.a. The Shop On Main Street)

SPECIAL AWARDS
"Help!" (Help!) music and lyrics by John Lennon and Paul McCartney (Song); The Beatles (Help!) (Original Song Score); Maurice Jarre (Doctor Zhivago) (Score)

The Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (1958)

"If I let you change me, will that do it? If I do what you tell me, will you love me? All right. All right then, I'll do it. I don't care about me anymore."

That's Vertigo in a nutshell. Ostensibly, it's a murder mystery, but it's really a stalker movie with the viewer thrust into an uncomfortable 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 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.

It's an old Hollywood trick. Bible movies were often about sex, Westerns about racism, noir about the emptiness of the American Dream, but served up in a palatable popcorn genre, the studios were able to skirt both Production Code censorship and audience reluctance to talk about anything serious. In the process, they made some of the best movies of the period.

Here, James Stewart plays an ex-cop, Scottie Ferguson, retired from the force after a bout of vertigo during a rooftop chase left a fellow officer dead. [SPOILERS] An old school chum hires Scottie to follow his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak) who believes herself to be possessed by the spirit of a long-dead woman, Carlotta Valdes, who committed suicide during San Francisco's golden age.

Scottie's acrophobia masks a deeper psychological problem—personally, I think the evidence obliquely suggests his mother killed herself when he was young, but that's just my surmise—and he chases Kim Novak around, not for a second believing she's possessed by a ghost but convinced that if he can keep her from toppling over into insanity, he can avoid falling himself. When she instead falls to her death, largely (he believes) because of his own weakness, it pushes him all the way over the edge.

And then after a year, he gets out of the sanitarium, bumps into a Madeleine look-alike (Kim Novak again) and tries to relive the past, this time fixing it. Instead, in the fashion of a classic Greek tragedy, he ensures the very end he was trying to avoid.

It's not a thriller, it's not a mystery, it's not a noir. Maybe it's just a perverse love story dressed up in Hitchcock clothing. I didn't much care for it the first couple of times I saw it, including at the Uptown in Washington, D.C., after its restoration—I found it slow, the spiritual possession angle preposterous (although I imagine Val Lewton could have made you believe every second of it) and the mystery, well, once Kim Novak reveals the plot mid-way through, there is no mystery. But somewhere along the line, Vertigo put its hooks into me and it's my choice as the best movie of 1958.

"If you'll permit the Siren a bit of life advice, barbed clothing critiques from a straight man are a 100% surefire sign of a control freak to be avoided at all costs."—Self-Styled Siren

PICTURE (Drama)
winner: Vertigo (prod. Alfred Hitchcock)
nominees: The Big Country (prod. Gregory Peck and William Wyler); Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (prod. Lawrence Weingarten); The Defiant Ones (prod. Stanley Kramer); Horror of Dracula (prod. Anthony Hinds); A Night To Remember (prod. William MacQuitty); Separate Tables (prod. Harold Hecht); The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (prod. Charles H. Schneer); Touch of Evil (prod. Albert Zugsmith)

PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: The Horse's Mouth (prod. John Bryan and Ronald Neame)
nominees: Auntie Mame (prod. Morton DaCosta); Bell Book and Candle (prod. Julian Blaustein); Gigi (prod. Arthur Freed); Indiscreet (prod. Stanley Donen)

PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: Mon Oncle (prod. Jacques Tati)
nominees: Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows) (prod. Jean Thuillier); I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street) (prod. Franco Cristaldi); Jalsaghar (The Music Room) (prod. Satyajit Ray); Kakushi-toride no san-akunin (The Hidden Fortess) (prod. Sanezumi Fujimoto and Akira Kurosawa); Popiól i diament (Ashes and Diamonds) (prod. Zespól Filmowy "Kadr")

ACTOR (Drama)
winner: James Stewart (Vertigo)
nominees: Tony Curtis (The Defiant Ones); Peter Cushing (Horror of Dracula); Charlton Heston (Touch of Evil and The Big Country); Christopher Lee (Horror of Dracula); Paul Newman (The Long, Hot Summer and Cat On A Hot Tin Roof); David Niven (Separate Tables); Sidney Poitier (The Defiant Ones); Vincent Price (The Fly); Frank Sinatra (Some Came Running); Spencer Tracy (The Last Hurrah)

ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Alec Guinness (The Horse's Mouth)
nominees: Cary Grant (Indiscreet and Houseboat); Andy Griffith (No Time For Sergeants); Jacques Tati (Mon Oncle)

ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Susan Hayward (I Want To Live!)
nominees: Ingrid Bergman (The Inn Of The Sixth Happiness); Rita Hayworth (Separate Tables); Shirley MacLaine (Some Came Running); Jeanne Moreau (Ascenseur pour l'échafaud a.k.a. Elevator to the Gallows); Kim Novak (Vertigo); Jean Simmons (The Big Country); Elizabeth Taylor (Cat On A Hot Tin Roof)

ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Rosalind Russell (Auntie Mame)
nominees: Ingrid Bergman (Indiscreet); Doris Day (Teacher's Pet); Kim Novak (Bell Book And Candle)

DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo)
nominees: Richard Brooks (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof); Stanley Kramer (The Defiant Ones); Akira Kurosawa (Kakushi-toride no san-akunin a.k.a. The Hidden Fortess); Satyajit Ray (Jalsaghar a.k.a. The Music Room); Andrzej Wajda (Popiól i diament a.k.a. Ashes and Diamonds); Orson Welles (Touch Of Evil); William Wyler (The Big Country)

DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Jacques Tati (Mon Oncle)
nominees: Vincente Minnelli (Gigi); Mario Monicelli (I soliti ignoti a.k.a. Big Deal On Madonna Street); Ronald Neame (The Horse's Mouth); Richard Quine (Bell Book and Candle)

SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Burl Ives (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Big Country)
nominees: Joseph Calleia (Touch of Evil); Ernie Kovacs (Bell Book and Candle); Eli Wallach (The Lineup); Orson Welles (Touch Of Evil)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Hermione Gingold (Gigi and Bell Book and Candle)
nominees: Marlene Dietrich (Touch of Evil); Barbara Bel Geddes (Vertigo); Wendy Hiller (Separate Tables); Deborah Kerr (Bonjour tristesse); Hope Lange (The Young Lions); Angela Lansbury (The Long, Hot Summer); Tina Louise (God's Little Acre); Lee Remick (The Long, Hot Summer); Gwen Verdon (Damn Yankees!); Kay Walsh (The Horse's Mouth); Cara Williams (The Defiant Ones)

SCREENPLAY
winner: Orson Welles, from the novel Badge Of Evil by Whit Masterson (Touch of Evil)
nominees: Alec Guinness, from the novel by Joyce Cary (The Horse's Mouth); Agenore Incrocci, Furio Scarpelli, Suso Cecchi d’Amico and Mario Monicelli (I soliti ignoti a.k.a. Big Deal On Madonna Street); Ryuzo Kikushima, Hideo Oguni, Shinobu Hashimoto and Akira Kurosawa (Kakushi-toride no san-akunin a.k.a. The Hidden Fortress); Alec Coppel and Samuel A. Taylor, from the novel D'entre les morts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (Vertigo)

SPECIAL AWARDS
Bernard Herrmann (Vertigo) (Score); Robert Burks (Vertigo) (Cinematography); Ray Harryhausen (The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad) (Special Effects)