Success or Snub? Ben-Hur (32nd Academy Awards Review Pt. 2)

  To see part 1, click here.

O Nosso Amor~Tamburine & Accordion - Orfeu Negro

Ben-Hur was a capstone to the Biblical epics of the Golden Age of Hollywood. I would call it the ending point this trend but that isn’t true as they did keep making these types of movies all throughout the 60s. It was, however, the last time that a film like this would be such a mammoth success as later Biblical epics would crash and burn in spectacular fashions. But while Ben-Hur was knocking records and showing off everything that Hollywood studios were able to do, other films were pushing boundaries in new ways and showing where things could be going during the course of the revolutionary decade to come (a.k.a. the 60s). Of particular importance in this regard was foreign cinema which exploded in a big way with the French New Wave.

We’ve been mentioning this for a few blogs now and, now, it’s finally time to talk about it. The French New Wave is probably the most significant gear change in cinematic history and one of the thickest roots of the counterculture that would dominate the Western world for most of the next 20 years.

For those who aren’t familiar with the French New Wave, it can be very difficult to try to summarize as you can read entire books of the origins (I highly recommend A History of the French New Wave Cinema (2002) by Richard Neupert) but I will do my best. By the late 50s, France (and most other Western countries) was seeing the coming-of-age of most people who had grown up entirely with movies. To these folks, they had never known a world without cinema and had spent most of their formative years watching them and gaining a pretty solid understanding which ones worked and which ones didn’t and why.

The French in particular always had a bit of a possessive chip on their shoulder regarding the art their country put out. So young French beatniks and hipsters, fresh out of college, started criticizing most of contemporary cinema in film magazines, most famously in Cahiers du Cinéma, often demanding a level of quality that few movies seemed to be able to achieve. (For an example, see in the previous blog where the Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Film, Mon Oncle (1957), was lambasted by the critics in Cahiers du Cinéma.) The French government, eager to get a piece of the movie-making pie that was monopolized by Hollywood (with the British as a distant runner-up), passed a law offering large tax grants to any Frenchman who made a film entirely within French borders.

These two developments coalesced into a lot of art students coming out of these simultaneous film groups to create movies that were entirely new and fresh. The self-appointed leader of this movement was François Truffaut, who brought international attention to the French New Wave, with his film, Les Quatre Cent Coups (Eng.: The 400 Blows).

The 400 Blows (an old French idiom that roughly means “to raise Hell”) details the life, tribulations and juvenile delinquency of Antoine Donel (Jean-Pierre Léaud). Films about juvenile delinquency were nothing new, being tackled in other Hollywood movies like Boys Town (1938) and Blackboard Jungle (1955) but The 400 Blows treats the subject matter with a lot more maturity. Instead of showing juvenile delinquents as some pure avatars who just don’t get life and can be allowed to enter society if they just believe in themselves, The 400 Blows shows much more of a tragedy. Antoine is inclined to committing crimes and raising Hell but only because of how morally bankrupt the world around him is as he is habitually abused by his mother (Claire Maurier), stepfather (Albert Rémy), teacher (Guy Decomble), policemen and basically every other authority figure in his life.

The 400 Blows is a pretty interesting film in that it takes most of the “moral decline” tropes we see in a movie and projects it onto a child. Antoine Donel is clearly far too young to be forced to make this kind of life-altering moral decisions but he still has to make them all the same. The kid’s life is the kind of abject failure that is inflicted upon him by society that reflects poorly upon Charles de Gaulle’s France.

For a first-time director, it is very impressive and showcases many of the styles that would come to be associated with the French New Wave. Truffaut was clearly influenced by the Italian Neorealist movement, ignoring a typical Hollywood narrative for a more natural story, but unlike the Neorealist movies, The 400 Blows still has a stylized look to it, with particular mention going to the climax of the film and its haunting final tracking shot.

(Another famous moviemaking fairy tale surrounds this film. Truffaut’s father-in-law was a rich film producer at the time and the story goes that he bankrolled the movie because Truffaut kept disparaging so many movies as a critic that he was basically given the money with the intent of: “If you want to see a good movie so bad, why don’t you make one yourself and see how easy it is?” This story is more or less false as said producer did genuinely just want to help his son-in-law achieve his dream. Still, the fact that this story became so well-known should tell you a lot about Truffaut and his personality.)

The 400 Blows would be nominated for the Palme d’Or at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival and Truffaut won the Best Director, which brought international attention to the movie, the French New Wave movement and Truffaut himself (and only a year after Truffaut was thrown out of Cannes for being disrespectful to other filmmakers). As a result, The 400 Blows made a strong second showing in America and brought several other French New Wave films with it. Other noteworthy French films that saw 1959 releases in America are Le Beau Serge (Eng.: Handsome Serge)

a truly timeless look of a depressed and dying town and the difficulties of post-war masculinity (and one of the most beautifully-shot sequences in cinematic history for the climax of the film); Les Cousins (Eng.: The Cousins)

a tragic tale of a pair of cousins (Gérard Blain and Jean-Claude Brialy) whose contrasting personalities ends in tragedy; and Bob le Flambeur (Eng.: Bob the Gambler)

a heist movie that at first seems like a cash-in to Rififi (1955) but ends up having a nice surprise twist for the finale.

As I’m sure you noticed, something I mentioned with all of these movies is the climaxes. All of these films experimented with the art of moviemaking and storytelling in such a way that had never been tried before. Not every movie needed to have a happily ever after to be narratively satisfying. These directors wanted to say new things and say them in new ways and make you think about how their characters eventually reached their grim conclusions.

None of these movies were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Instead the winner, of both the Academy Award and the Palme d’Or, was another French movie, Orfeu Negro (Eng.: Black Orpheus).

Black Orpheus is set in Brazil and is largely a retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus in the streets of Rio de Janeiro, as a local man named Orfeu (Breno Mello) falls in love with the new-in-town Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn), who is on the run from her mysterious past. The movie is kind of the anti-New Wave film, being much more exotic and showing these characters with a very party going lifestyle. It’s big, it’s energetic, the characters are all a ton of fun and yet it still has a dark, sinister undertone that slowly ramps up until it gets to its very suspenseful, almost Hitchcockian climax.

To put in perspective how heavily the French gatekept the French New Wave, there were, and still are, heavy debates about whether or not Black Orpheus could be considered part of the New Wave. It’s definitely much more bacchanalic and energetic than the other New Wave films but it was still experimenting with the medium in a new and fresh way. While most New Wave films kinda examine average lifestyles with Hollywood shooting styles in a modern France, offering a grittier Paris than the one shown in films like Gigi (1958), Black Orpheus is still clearly a Hollywood fairy tale, set in an exotic location.

Looking back many years later, it seems like a no-brainer that The 400 Blows would’ve been the better movie to earn the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. But Black Orpheus was respected in its day, released by a major French studio and even earned the Palme d’Or as mentioned above. We can probably accept this decision on those grounds though, as we’ll see, this wouldn’t be the last time that a film from the French New Wave was more or less completely ignored by the Academy.

As long as we’re traveling abroad, another foreign episode in the Academy's history concerns the Swedish director, Ingmar Bergman, when he released Smultronstället (Eng.: Wild Strawberries).

This film and The Seventh Seal (1956) cemented Bergman’s reputation as a filmmaker analyzing complex theological and philosophical concepts as it revolves around an elderly doctor (Victor Sjöström) using his wife’s recent death to come to grips with his own mortality. Coming off of The Seventh Seal, this one is a lot more grounded in modern times. It’s also notable as being one of the first times that anyone has ever rejected an Academy Award. Wild Strawberries was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay (as it was thankfully finally renamed to) and Bergman rejected it, calling the Academy an art-humiliating institution and asked to be recused from the Academy’s jury ever again. With this in mind, can we really blame the Academy for never nominating the guy for any award?

There were other excellent movies released abroad and would continue to be but it’s becoming clearer and clearer that the Academy never had much interest in giving the award to a foreign film until very recently. Since they are officially called the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, I think now is as good a time as any to retire this complaint and focus largely on American cinema for the rest of this series. We’ll still mention foreign movies when they’re worth bringing up but, for now, let’s just continue looking at American cinema as is because it was about to get very exciting. As the 60s began and eventually turned in the 70s, American cinema would learn from the best of the French New Wave, the European New Wave and the Italian Neorealism wave to create arguably the greatest movies ever made.

Battle with the Forces of Evil~George Bruns - Sleeping Beauty

But all that would have to wait. For now, let’s look at some quick-hitters from America. Ben-Hur basically walked away with almost all of its awards, setting a record with 11 Academy Awards, beating out Gigi’s record of 9 the previous year and holding the record for almost 40 years until the release of Titanic (1997). Its awards won are as follows:

• Academy Award for Best Special Effects (deserved)

• Academy Award for Best Music - Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture (fair enough)

• Academy Award for Best Sound Recording (fair enough)

• Academy Award for Best Film Editing (deserved for the chariot chase alone)

• Academy Award for Best Costume Design - Color (deserved)

• Academy Award for Best Cinematography - Color (deserved)

• Academy Award for Best Art Direction/Set Decoration - Color (deserved)

• Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Hugh Griffith (didn’t deserved as mentioned in previous blog)

• Academy Award for Best Leading Actor for Charlton Heston (debatable though it seems like Heston won to make up for his snub in The Ten Commandments (1956))

• Academy Award for Best Director (we shall see)

• Academy Award for Best Picture (we shall see)

As you can tell, Ben-Hur more or less walked away with its Academy Award wins which seems a bit of a shame. The movie’s a landmark but it’s not head and shoulders above every other American movie that year as there were some excellent ones. Let’s talk about some other landmarks with some quick-hitters.

To show how pulpy popular American cinema was by comparison to the New Wave, the most famous horror film of the year was House on Haunted Hill.

This is one of the corniest horror movies ever made as it’s less of a horror movie and more of a Halloween decoration. This is a loose parody of the “old dark house” sub-genre as a bunch of colorful characters must spend a night in a haunted house with its eccentric owner (played wonderfully by Vincent Price) and figure out if the house is actually haunted or has more mundane explanations. The movie is a fun ball of corn but it mainly gained notoriety for director William Castle’s process of what was called Emergo, where the film would emerge from the screen into the audience (in modern parlance, 4D experiences). The big scare at the end of the movie is when a skeleton comes to life and attacks someone so the theater would have a jury-rigged skeleton soar over the audience, causing thrills and chills.

These kinds of gimmicks predominated a lot of cinema in the 50s and 60s as producers were trying everything possible to get audiences into the theaters as movies kept losing more and more money to television. Other concepts include widescreen, the Biblical epics, 3D and, most famously, the drive-in theater. House on Haunted Hill’s contributions to cinema might be a bit more lowbrow though it does raise the question if these sort of marketing campaigns should be acknowledged by the Academy? Lord knows it requires a creativity that many don’t possess and it would be a fun award to see how it developed over the years.

Walt Disney produced three films to add to his infamous lexicon (though, by this point in his life, Walt hardly cared about his movies anymore, preferring to focus on his theme park). First is The Shaggy Dog

the film to pioneer the “[insert magical creature here] running amok in suburbia” trope, in this case, the main character (Tommy Kirk) turning into a talking dog. It was Disney’s highest-grossing yet most thoroughly wretched film of the year as the acting is that painful blend of both unfunny and atrocious. (Which is a massive letdown considering how the kid in this movie is the same one who starred in Old Yeller (1957).)

More legendary is Sleeping Beauty

the last of the company’s classic fairy tales. This exists as the polar opposite of The Shaggy Dog in that it has aged well but was less well-received at the time with its disappointing box office return being responsible for the studio no longer turning out fairy tales (the next animated fairy tale from the company would be The Little Mermaid all the way in 1989). While Sleeping Beauty probably has the most generic prince and princess in Disney's lexicon, it remains a classic for having some truly phenomenal animation as well as one of the greatest and most iconic villains in cinematic history, the wicked sorceress Maleficent (Eleanor Audley), who the Disney Corporation uses as the flagship character for their Disney Villains merchandising line.

Meeting the middle here of quality and high gross is Darby O’Gill and the Little People.

This was Disney’s adaptation of Irish mythology and the first major film to depict leprechauns, as well as being the reason why pop culture associates them with wearing green attire (leprechauns in classic Irish folklore usually wore brown). It’s surprising that this is one of the studio’s more relatively forgotten films, both because it’s a fun flick but also for its groundbreaking special effects work of making Darby O’Gill (Albert Sharpe) tower over the leprechauns. The film, of course, wasn’t even nominated for the Academy Award for Best Special Effects due to their chronic dislike and ignorance of the Walt Disney Studios’ contributions to cinema, and remains quite overlooked. Nowadays, when it’s brought up, it’s mostly mentioned as an example of gross stereotyping of Irish folks though it never really caught on as one of the studio’s most egregious examples. Probably because if there’s one ethnicity on Earth that would find over-the-top, borderline racist stereotypes of themselves hilarious, it’s the Irish.

One of the greatest independent films of all time was released by mid-century auteur John Cassavetes, Shadows.

I was actually considering putting this in the feature presentation argument but indie cinema still was not yet at the level where it was recognized by the Academy (you could argue it still isn’t but that’s an argument for another day). Regardless, Shadows is often considered a landmark in independent filmmaking with its improvisation-heavy dialogue, racial commentary and a time capsule of the beatnik generation. Despite it feeling a bit loose in the plot, it has a surprisingly rich narrative and moves at a good pace. Because of how gaudy and fantastical Golden Age of Hollywood films feel, it can be almost impossible to find films that portray a realistic sense of life in America from before the 60s. While I’m sure there’s parts of it that are exaggerated, Shadows feels almost documentary-esque at times and is still mesmerizing in how it transports you back in time to the 1950s in Greenwich Village.

The Gate/The Stone Faces/The Ridge/On the Rocks/The Cliff/Finale~Bernard Hermann - North by Northwest

Moving onto our feature presentations. First up is the British drama, Room at the Top.

This was the beginning of the British New Wave, which they referred to as kitchen sink films (so-called because they depicted stories about working-class Britons who would deal with problems that they would encounter, right down to mundane things like how to manage their kitchen sink) and, since it was in English, that obviously meant that it was eligible for the Oscars in such a way that the French New Wave films were not. It’s easy to tell that this was heavily influenced by The 400 Blows as it has the same heavy shadows, class consciousness and completely joyless feel about it. It would’ve been nice if the more influential film was the one actually nominated but, I digress, Room at the Top is an excellent movie as well.

Room at the Top revolves around a blue-collar man named Joe Lampton (Laurence Harvey) who manages a love triangle with two women: the daughter of an industrial magnate named Susan (Heather Sears) and an older French woman named Alice (Simone Signoret), the latter of whom he considers more of a friend with benefits than an actual relationship. While this might initially seem like a typical relationship melodrama, Room at the Top actually uses this as an interesting allegory to analyze the two motivators that encompass Lampton’s life. One woman symbolizes the rich upper-class that he wants to enter while the other symbolizes a fun lifestyle that he just wants to enjoy and not worry about his problems in life.

Room at the Top has a lot of musings about class consciousness for post-WWII Britain, particularly in how hierarchical it is. Lampton was born in the lower-class and, according to British societal rules, he’ll be destined to die there. The more he tries to get out of it, however, the more pigeonholed he’ll be unless he just sheds all morals and wants and focuses exclusively on his rise to the top. It’s a very cynical look at this kind of upward mobility (especially contrasted with films showing the American dream on the other side of the pond). Yet, in the last act, we see how Lampton’s quest probably has made things worse as he no longer fits in with the lower class from which he hails.

On a more upbeat note, Alfred Hitchcock made another one of his masterpieces, and one of his most influential ones, with North by Northwest.

The film revolves around Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant), an ordinary loser who gets suckered into a conspiracy of espionage and spies as he has found out that he’s been mistaken for a real government agent by a nefarious organization. Thornhill, framed for a crime that he didn’t commit by the evil spies, embarks on a country-spanning adventure as he fights for his life while slowly getting to the bottom of this vast conspiracy that he finds himself at the center of.

It feels like each decade has their thing. If the 30s were all about the musicals, the 40s were the war adventures and film noirs, the 50s were the Biblical epics, sci-fis and Westerns, the 60s would largely be defined by these spy adventures. When you think of the 60s, you think either of the hippie movement or of these globe-trotting Cold War adventures such as in the James Bond films (1962-present), The Pink Panther series (1963-1993) or The Manchurian Candidate (1962). A lot of the tropes you associate with those movies tend to start here: with the wise-cracking main character, the exotic locales, the femme fatale who our main character never knows if he can trust or not, the diabolical villain and the large action setpieces. In North by Northwest’s case, there are two major action sequences that still live on in film legend: the iconic shot where Thornhill almost gets run down by a crop duster in a field and the climax where Thornhill and his love interest, Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), escape from the villains atop Mt. Rushmore.

Despite pioneering a whole new genre of films, North by Northwest still holds up very well as one of the most unique films in its genre so many years later. I think there are two reasons for North by Northwest’s longevity. First is that while most of these spy movies were set in Europe or other exotic locales, North by Northwest is a genuinely American movie, running the gamut from the city streets to the rural plains. Thus, it remains a nice little time capsule of Cold War-era America and the paranoia that could be on display.

The other is Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill. Most of these espionage thrillers starred hyper-competent spies but Thornhill is an ordinary man getting suckered into extraordinary circumstances. He’s scrappy, likable and you get really attached to his frustration as he’s desperately struggling to just stay alive. It also ends up being a nice twist where as he gets deeper and deeper into this conspiracy, he ends up slowly turning into the spy that he’s been suspected of being.

The last vestiges of the Hays Code received its final death knell from two other classic movies: the comedy Some Like It Hot and the legal thriller Anatomy of a Murder.

Some Like It Hot is a nostalgic throwback to the Roaring 20s as a pair of musicians named Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon) accidentally witness bootleggers murder some rival gangsters. Escaping for their lives, the two disguise themselves as women and join an all-woman band, led by Sugar Kane Kowalczyk (Marilyn Monroe). From there, the two heroes remain in drag for almost the duration of the rest of the movie and just about every joke and funny situation you can think of from this farcical set-up ensues: Joe and Jerry both become smitten with our female lead who remains blissfully unaware, other men start to find them attractive and pursue them, the bootleggers arrive at the same hotel and flirt with them while they privately freak out etc.

Some Like It Hot is often considered one of the greatest comedies of all time and is probably the most famous comedy of the 50s. It was directed by Billy Wilder, a director of several other award-winning movies that analyzed social mores (e.g. The Lost Weekend (1945), Sunset Blvd. (1950), Ace in the Hole (1951)) but, compared to those, Some Like It Hot doesn’t seem as scathing in analyzing culture. Instead, his brand of inviting controversy comes with the fact that the main characters spend almost the whole movie wearing drag. Cross-dressing was a big no-no under the Hays Code which had been falling out of favor more and more. By this point, the studios had elected to just fully ignore the Hays Code altogether and they were rewarded by a $49,000,000 gross on a $3,000,000 budget, a colossal hit.

It’s interesting how cross-dressing was considered so taboo for the Hays Code as Bugs Bunny had been doing it for over a decade by this point. Though I suppose the difference is that those were short scenes in short cartoons and, in this movie, the characters spend almost the entire movie in drag. Regardless, this movie’s success is often considered to be one of the biggest reasons for the final nail in the coffin of the Hays Code. While it wouldn’t be formally abolished until the mid-60s, Some Like It Hot ensured that basically no studio would follow it anymore.

On the movie itself, Some Like It Hot is a lot of fun and still tastefully raunchy. It remains Marilyn Monroe’s most iconic film, has likable main characters, funny moments and is especially remembered for the ending. The final line in particular is famous for being one of the greatest zingers in cinematic history, so much so that Billy Wilder would have it engraved on his tombstone.

Anatomy of a Murder is a wildly different movie but is notable for similar reasons. It’s set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula as a small-town lawyer, Paul Biegler (James Stewart), is asked to defend a retired army lieutenant, Frederick Manion (Ben Gazzara). Manion has been accused of murdering a local innkeeper but, in an unusual twist for the genre at the time, Manion doesn’t deny it at all. Instead, he claims that the innkeeper had raped his wife, Laura (Lee Remick), and that he has no memory of the event, apparently the rage causing him to snap out of reality for a second. Thus, the case is on for Biegler to prove Manion as not guilty for reason of insanity.

With a set-up like that, you can see why this movie may have raised some eyebrows. While murders in legal thrillers have been commonplace ever since the genre was created (in fact, I’m actually struggling to think of a single legal thriller where murder isn’t the crime being prosecuted), including the element of rape, probably the only crime considered as heinous as murder, was brand new. It also portrays a very legal and morally grey area by having it be all but outright confirmed that the defendant actually did commit the murder for which he’s accused. (In fact, it’s strongly implied that he’s actually lying about forgetting about killing the innkeeper altogether.) This introduces the concept of if there’s such a thing as a justifiable murder, a topic that most justice systems and lawyers try to shy away from.

Lee Remick’s portrayal of a sexual assault survivor is stellar and the film’s tackling of this subject feels years ahead of its time. One particularly despicable scene that stands out is when one of the prosecuting attorneys (George C. Scott), examines her as a witness and tries to get her to admit that her revealing clothing was asking for her to be seduced by the murder victim.

This portrayal, and the film’s frank language of the matter, got the movie into hot water with censors. The Mayor of Chicago at the time, Richard J. Daley, was so offended by the content that he ordered the film banned in the city. Director Otto Preminger (who spent most of his moviemaking career deliberately instigating censors) sued the city, landing in front of the Supreme Court of Illinois who overturned the ban on free speech grounds. This lawsuit, combined with Some Like It Hot’s box office success, basically spelled the end of the Hays Code and just about every major censor board until the founding of the MPAA almost 20 years later.

On Anatomy of a Murder itself, a UCLA law professor once described it as probably the finest pure trial movie ever made. The movie is close to 2-and-a-half–hours long and most of it is showing the painstaking process of how a murder trial is conducted. We see the arraignments, the opening introductions, the cross-examination of witnesses and every other minor detail. There are no surprise witnesses, no antagonistic judge who is out to get our protagonist or most other clichés of the genre. Similarly, most movie lawyers tend to just make their arguments with inspirational speeches but Paul Biegler is interesting in that he shows the different ways of winning a case that might be considered less heroic. Examples include his coaching his witness on what to say and objecting to almost every single point that prosecution makes to break their concentration.

Despite being over 2.5 hours, it’s a very engaging and clinical film; the fact that it also talks about some taboo subjects just happens to be a nice bonus. The social commentary is so well-interlaced into the case that you don’t even feel like you’re being preached to. It just shows the facts of the case as it is and invites you, the audience, to suppose some things about human nature from the findings.

Anatomy of a Murder was one of the two frontrunners at the 32nd Academy Awards, being nominated for 6 awards and losing almost all of them to Ben-Hur. The other frontrunner, and our last film to discuss on this blog, was The Diary of Anne Frank.

History lesson: Anne Frank (Millie Perkins) was a young Jewish teenager living in the Netherlands when the Nazis annexed the country and started subjugating the populace. When Anne’s older sister, Margot (Diane Baker), was ordered to report to a concentration camp, the two sisters, along with their parents, Otto (Joseph Schildkraut) and Edith (Gusti Haber), went into hiding into an attic over Otto’s spice factory. Joining them in hiding was the van Daan family (van Pels in real life); Hans (Lou Jacobi), Petronella (Shelley Winters) and their son, Peter (Richard Beymer); and eventually a doctor named Albert Dussel (Fritz Pfeffer in real life) (Ed Wynn). The group hid in the attic for over a year before eventually being discovered by the Nazis. Otto Frank would be the only member of the group to survive the Holocaust.

Upon returning to the factory, Otto discovered his daughter’s diary and, remembering her wishes to be a famous author, had it published. From there, The Diary of Anne Frank (1947) became a cultural phenomenon, partly because of Otto’s driven pursuit to make it as famous as possible, both to honor his dead family and as part of a cultural drive to make sure that the Holocaust is never forgotten. A famous (and tragically true) quote stated by Joseph Stalin notes that, “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” It’s one thing to read the number of 11,000,000 people murdered during the Holocaust; reading about one girl dealing with teenage problems and being forced to spend the best years of her life trapped inside just because she was born Hebrew is a much more powerful way to show the horrors of this event.

The diary would be adapted into a play in 1955 and eventually, yes, a movie, with several actors from the play moving laterally into the film. Otto Frank was heavily involved in the production and the director, George Stevens (director of other socially conscious films such as Shane (1953) and Giant (1956)), was a World War II veteran who captured footage of the concentration camps when they were liberated. In other words, everything about this production was very serious about giving it the respect it deserved.

The movie is adapted verbatim from the play, which means it takes place almost exclusively inside the attic that the two families plus one resided in. The rules are established very clearly: during the day, when the factory is occupied, they all must be as silent as the grave: no talking, no moving. When the workers leave, the families can do whatever they like and relax so long as they don’t leave the confines of the attic. The basic throughline of the story is the group, most of whom have personalities that wouldn’t quite gel in the best of times, dealing with cabin fever and trying to lead normal lives in what is a very abnormal circumstance.

A common trap that many movies adapted from plays fall into is not making the jump to a movie medium. We’ve talked about this a few times on this blog but, to make it more clear, what it means is that movies have different rules and techniques of telling a story than a play does. In a play, it all comes down to how you make the stage directions work. In a movie, you have the camera. Many directors, especially from old Hollywood, would usually just do standard shots, reverse shots and not anything interesting. That’s thankfully not the case here. The movie is very visually interesting, particularly the scenes whenever they all have to be quiet when they hear noise downstairs. These scenes are so suspenseful and you’re constantly terrified that they might be found out any second; especially knowing how the story ends.

Making it so that the camera never leaves the attic actually does a great job at sucking us into the world of the Frank family and makes it stand out from other film adaptations (most of which are equally good). The whole story is a real exercise in the horrors of cabin fever. Cramming 8 people into a handful of rooms with no fresh air for months on end will already make them testy and let’s just say that this group don’t all have congruent personalities. As the story progresses, we feel the anger with them. Yet there never is a moment when it feels like they got too unlikable. You’re always aware that it’s the situation that’s at fault; not the people. Sure, they might be getting testy and nasty but can you blame them? The constant horror that lurks right outside their sanctuary is omniscient.

In comparing The Diary of Anne Frank to Ben-Hur, this film does also run into the issue of being a little too long for its own good and the climax is definitely overwrought, elevating Anne Frank from an ordinary girl into practical sainthood. Though, in this movie’s case, it’s a bit more understandable once you know it was produced by her grieving father. The Diary of Anne Frank is a very socially important film that forever cemented Frank’s name into history.

This is an interesting Academy Award ceremony to compare, especially since all of these five films and Ben-Hur were pop cultural zeitgeists in their own separate ways. The Diary of Anne Frank, Anatomy of a Murder, Some Like It Hot, North by Northwest and Room at the Top are all far more socially relevant and indicative of where movies were about to go. Ben-Hur was closing off where movies had already been for a while though the chariot chase (along with the crop duster scene in North by Northwest) did break some ground. In terms of what makes a Best Motion Picture, all of these films are superior. And that’s not even mentioning by today’s standards. Ben-Hur was already considered a little long in the tooth back when it came out; nowadays, you practically need to watch the last third at 1.5x speed to make it a well-paced movie. By contrast, Anatomy of a Murder is close to 3 hours and doesn’t feel like it all. And while Ben-Hur is an excellent showcase for special effects, it also doesn’t appear to have revolutionized all that much; just smoothing out the road that was already paved by The Ten Commandments (1956) and Quo Vadis (1951).

On the other hand, the movie was clearly respected in its day. It was the highest-grossing movie of the year and did receive rave reviews, even if there were some critiques (yes, critics complained about its length but that wasn’t quite the dealbreaker back then). The fact that it won 11 Oscars is absolutely insane, a record that would be held for almost 40 years. And, yes, it’s still a great story and a generally good movie. It’s not perfect but, is it good? Yes it is. A story this big and sprawling could easily fall apart under the weight of its own arrogance and it still clicks for the most part.

At this point, it becomes more of a question of what kind of movie should win the Oscar. Should they have given it for a Biblical epic or should they be paying attention to more socially conscious stuff? The Academy was clearly trying to prop up the epics to try to increase box office gross. So maybe it’s a bit more understandable? Plus Ben-Hur did pave new ground in terms of action movies. That’s probably not the reason it was respected but it’s still notable.

But then we loop back around to that word, best motion picture. Let’s just put ourselves in the shoes of an average American filmgoer in February of 1960. No one can see the future so maybe we could say that they didn’t know a pop culture revolution was around the corner? Maybe they didn’t know just how important these other films could be? While I think that’s a fair argument for Room at the Top and North by Northwest, I don’t think it applies to the other three. Some Like It Hot was raunchy enough to spell the death of the ratings system, Anatomy of a Murder was asking questions about law that no legal thriller ever had and The Diary of Anne Frank’s importance is difficult to overstate. Not only does it humanize the greatest tragedy of the 20th Century in such a way that no work has before (or arguably since) but it basically does the exact opposite of Ben-Hur in making a small scale period piece and is still a great movie

Twelve years before this, the Academy gave the Award for Best Picture to Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), a highly flawed film about anti-Semitism that came at the right time to reflect a mirror on society’s prejudices. In our review of it, we noted that this was the right thing to do and would also reflect a barometer for future Academy Award winners. Thus, it is an interesting case study of 50s Hollywood vs. the Hollywood immediately after World War II as a film about the horrors of the Holocaust is ignored for a big-budget epic that doesn’t have much to say about religion beyond the fact that it’s okay to kill your enemies as long as you feel bad about it afterwards.

From today’s perspective, this would be considered a snub. At the time, though? Considering the cultural attitudes of America at the time, the impressive scale and the fact that no Biblical film had won by this point, I can see the reasoning. It probably wasn’t that hard for the Academy to decide and I don’t think the film is great enough to deserve its Oscars record and Hugh Griffith’s win for Best Supporting Actor over any of the characters in The Diary of Anne Frank or Anatomy of a Murder is frankly ridiculous but we’re missing the forest for the trees here. Any of these films could be called the best of the year so we’ll consider it a tie. And since a tie is still technically a win that means that calling Ben-Hur the best film of 1959 was a…

SUCCESS!

Personal Favorite Movies of 1959:

• Anatomy of a Murder (dir. Otto Preminger)
• Bob le Flambeur (Bob the Gambler) (dir. Jean-Pierre Melville)
• Darby O'Gill and the Little People (dir. Robert Stevenson)
• Le Beau Serge (Handsome Serge) (dir. Claude Chabrol)
• North by Northwest (dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
• Pillow Talk (dir. Michael Gordon)
• Room at the Top (dir. Jack Clayton)
• Shadows (dir. John Cassavetes)
• Sleeping Beauty (dir. Clyde Geronimi, Wolfgang Reitherman, Eric Larson and Les Clark)
• The Mummy (dir. Terence Fisher)

Favorite Heroes:

• Anne Frank (Millie Perkins) (The Diary of Anne Frank)
• Brad Allen (Rock Hudson) (Pillow Talk)
• François Bayon (Jean-Claude Brialy) (Le Beau Serge (Handsome Serge))
• Joe and Jerry (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) (Some Like It Hot)
• Joe Lampton (Laurence Harvey) (Room at the Top)
• Oreste Jacovacci and Giovanni Busacca (Alberto Sordi and Vittorio Gassman) (La Grande Guerra (The Great War))
• Otto Frank (Joseph Schildkraut) (The Diary of Anne Frank)
• Paul Biegler (James Stewart) (Anatomy of a Murder)
• Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) (North by Northwest)
• Sherlock Holmes (Peter Cushing) (The Hound of the Baskervilles)

Favorite Villains:

• Assistant Attorney General Claude Dancer (George C. Scott) (Anatomy of a Murder)
• Bob Montagné (Roger Duchesne) (Bob le Flambeur (Bob the Gambler))
• Jack Wales (John Westbrook) (Room at the Top)
• M. Sourpuss (Guy Decomble) (Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows))
• Maleficent (Eleanor Audley) (Sleeping Beauty)
• Mehemet Bey (George Pastell) (The Mummy)
• Messala (Stephen Boyd) (Ben-Hur)
• Mira (Lourdes de Oliveira) (Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus))
• Mme. Donel (Claire Maurier) (Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows))
• Tony (Anthony Ray) (Shadows)