Success or Snub? The Apartment (33rd Academy Awards Review Pt. 2)

  To see part 1, click here.

Psycho Suite~Bernard Herrmann - Psycho

A few notable changes helped to open up this Academy Award ceremony going into the new decade. This was the first time the Academy Awards were broadcast on ABC, where they would remain for the rest of their ungodly long reign. More interestingly, this was actually the first ever time that a red carpet was rolled out leading into the ceremony. From here, “the red carpet treatment” would forever be associated with the ceremony, evolving through the decades for celebrities to dress up in the most gaudy suits and dresses they could find to get snapped by paparazzi.

This was also the last time that the Honorary Juvenile Award would be awarded (going forward, children would be eligible for the proper awards thought it's always rare that it happens), for Hayley Mills’ performance in Pollyanna.

A decent film for an excellent child actress who filled the void left behind by Bobby Driscoll as Disney’s golden child. She would make six films with the company, the most famous (and best) of which were The Parent Trap (1961) and That Darn Cat (1965). Pollyanna itself had middling receipts upon its release as the book used to be considered a cherished part of Americana but, by 1960, it had garnered a reputation as sickeningly saccharine and audiences weren’t looking to buy it. Which is a shame as the director actually went out of his way to cut down as much of the cutesiness as possible. While Pollyanna isn’t a great film, it’s definitely not as vomit-inducing as some of Disney’s other live-action works.

(An example would be the other major Disney film that year, Swiss Family Robinson

which was a high grosser due to it being a high-octane adventure film about a family that gets stranded on a desert island and fights pirates. This level of action helps make up for the very annoying child actors who have caused Swiss Family Robinson to age exceptionally poorly for a movie from this era.)

A few pieces of film history are worth acknowledging before we get into the gritty of the major film line-ups. First is Ocean’s 11

a film notable for being the breakout movie of the Rat Pack. Led by Frank Sinatra and consisting of Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop; the Rat Pack was an informal group of singers who were the most popular musicians in pre-Beatles America. Sinatra had already been making waves before this in his attempts at becoming a movie star in films like From Here to Eternity (1953) and The Man With The Golden Arm (1955). Both films are definitely more highbrow as the Rat Pack movies were very silly and more about watching these popular performers work off of each other. I’ll fully admit to actually not being a big fan of Rat Pack movies as they usually have fun set-ups (as evidenced by Ocean’s 11 spawning an excellent remake which would have its own franchise) but don’t really do much besides watching these charismatic guys who are too self-absorbed to be the butt of the joke work off each other.

The last hurrah of the 50s sci-fi craze was The Time Machine.

Based off of the H.G. Wells novel of the same name, the movie revolves around a Victorian gentleman named George (Rod Taylor) who invents a time machine and travels forward in time to see what the future will be like. Eventually, he travels so far forward in time that he ends up in a post-apocalyptic future where humanity has regressed back to the stone age. The Time Machine is a commentary on humanity’s thick-headedness leading to its ruin though the movie does fall into the trap of becoming a bit Hollywoodified in ultimately distilling complex and grey ideas into a black-and-white battle of good versus evil. While not a masterpiece, the movie is good and the effect of the time machine traveling, while dated today, garnered a well-deserved Academy Award for Best Special Effects.

One of the greatest films of all time that wasn’t regarded as such was Peeping Tom.

The last film made by British film legend, Michael Powell, Peeping Tom revolves around around a serial killing photographer named Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) who records and photographs himself murdering his victims before later playing the snuff footage back home to pleasure himself (you don’t see him actually choke the chicken but the implication is quite clear). Introducing the sexual element is something that is definitely true in real-life serial killers but had not been done before in movies. It makes the character very disturbing, the movie very excellent and also ensured that conservative British society would make Michael Powell’s career very ruined.

Similar to The Night of the Hunter (1955) or It’s A Wonderful Life (1946), Peeping Tom’s status as a great film wouldn’t happen until years later. Unlike those movies, however, Peeping Tom would see its resurgence by the end of the decade. This was a highly-studied film during the 60s counterculture as cinephiles would love to analyze how the main character’s voyeurism reflects that of the audience watching violence in movies and on TV and what that says about us as a society. Michael Powell himself would be quite bitter about the fact that so many people loved the film that ruined his life and noted ruefully that if it had come out only a few years later, he would still have had a job. It was a very tragic end for such a great directing career and really goes to show just how rapidly the world would be changing. (And, in case you’re wondering, yes, Peeping Tom is quite tame by today’s standards.)

In terms of those epics Hollywood kept putting all their chips on, there were three big ones this year that are worth noting. First is The Alamo.

Based on the legendary siege of the Texan fort, this is the first, and one of only two, film(s) directed by John Wayne. If you’ve been following this blog long enough, you’ll know that it is the opinion of this writer that John Wayne was a middling-at-best actor whose brand was the embodiment of American toxic masculinity, which isn’t helped by the fact that he acted like one of his characters in his day-to-day life (in case you’re wondering which character, the answer is all of them because he played the same damn person in each of his movies). He had that special type of hypermasculinity that is oh-so-common in Hollywood: the type that cares way too much about seeming cool without realizing that actually cool people don’t really care what other people think about them. Armed with this knowledge, The Alamo is notorious as being one of the most historically inaccurate movies to have ever been based on a real-life event. It’s one of those movies that will tell you less about the actual Battle of the Alamo and more about the jingoistic worldview of the man who directed it.

The Alamo is very, very stupid though I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t fun to watch for how up its own ass it is as well as Richard Widmark’s scenery chewing role as Jim Bowie. As a historical oddity, it’s fun, but it ended up being a frontrunner at the Academy Awards since Wayne very aggressively lobbied for it. In a merit-based system, The Alamo would barely be looked at but because the director was wining and dining the system, it ended up being a strong contender, winning 1 award (for Best Sound which… sure, why not), and being nominated for 6, including Best Picture (no sane human being would ever consider this in the top 10 movies of 1960, let alone the top 5). It might have won if it wasn’t for a very public fight when the film’s nominee for Best Supporting Actor, Chill Wills, took out an ad in the Hollywood Reporter saying that the crew is praying for Wills to win harder than the folks at the Alamo prayed for survival. This quote was so tasteless that even Wayne himself came out against Wills, leading to a very public and embarrassing fight that ruined The Alamo’s chances of winning.

Equally jingoistic, but not as obnoxiously so, was Exodus

a movie about the Hebrew people escaping from the shackles of their oppressors and following their savior to their home in the Holy Land… in 1947. This movie is a historical fiction account of the founding of the nation of Israel, mainly revolving around Captain Ari Canaan (Paul Newman), who rescues an army of Jewish refugees from the Holocaust to try to pressure the British into letting them set up the state of Israel. The 3-hour epic goes through much of the emotions that went into this movement, ultimately climaxing in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948.

This is a pretty transparently pro-Zionist film and has been heavily criticized by Palestinian scholars for basically being Israeli propaganda. Ignoring the contentiousness of that decades-long conflict, especially in light of current events at the time of this being written, Exodus is a very good movie in its own right. It’s interesting as most of these big film epics took place in olden times while the events of this movie would have been pretty relatively recent at the time this came out. Exodus is well-paced, with the standoff sequence in the British port being especially excellent, though I’d hesitate to call it a masterpiece just because of how scattershot the plot is. Exodus is smart in keeping most of the focus on the emotions instead of the reasons of why the war is fought but those missing details do add up and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t completely lost by the end of this film. The politics of Israel and Palestine can be very difficult to understand at the best of times and Exodus does not offer a good synopsis to the uninformed viewer.

The third, and most famous, epic film of the year was Spartacus.

This movie revolves around the servile rebellion led by the titular gladiator, Spartacus (Kirk Douglas), showing most of Spartacus’ life leading up to the eventual rebellion. Unlike many of these other Biblical or Roman epics, Spartacus is a very political movie as there’s a lot of time spent with the Roman senators who are split between crushing the rebellion or using Spartacus as a pawn. This is admittedly a bit of a flaw with the movie as the politics are so interesting that the actual rebellion is a bit underwhelming by comparison but, I digress, this is one of the greatest of these old-school Hollywood epics. The performances are all phenomenal (particularly Laurence Olivier as the villain, Marcus Licinius Crassus), the film is pretty well-paced and, despite it being one of the most famous and parodied scenes in cinematic history, the “I’m Spartacus” scene is still excellent.

Ultimately, though, much of Spartacus’ success has to be owed to its director and writer. The film was the only major Hollywood film directed by Stanley Kubrick, who is often considered the greatest American film director who ever lived and, rest assured, we’ll be discussing him later on. He would later distance himself from Spartacus as it was a studio film, not one that he really personally wanted to make, but, regardless, the film shows that the man knew how to direct a studio movie if he wanted to. The writer of Spartacus (as well as Exodus) was Dalton Trumbo, one of the famous Blacklisted Hollywood Ten, who had been writing numerous films under pseudonyms by this point. The two films’ gargantuan success ensured the end of the Hollywood Blacklist and Trumbo, and the others, were finally free to return to work.

Let’s move our focus back to the awards themselves as the lead acting awards are both pretty notable snubs that are worth acknowledging. Elizabeth Taylor won the Academy Award for Best Leading Actress for her role in BUtterfield 8.

Elizabeth Taylor plays a literal hooker with a figurative heart of gold who meets a client that she falls in love with and navigates the pitfalls of their relationship. This is a very hackneyed setup that Hollywood circles tend to love (as evidenced by later Academy Award successes, Pretty Woman (1990) and Anora (2024)) though even by those schmaltzy standards, this is especially eyeroll-worthy. Taylor famously did not want to do this movie and it definitely comes through in her performance and the film has this constant aura of being phoned-in about it. BUtterfield 8 was regarded by critics back then as one of the most aggressively mediocre movies to ever win an Academy Award. So why did it?

Well, Taylor had a very nasty bout of pneumonia at the time of this Oscar season so the Academy elected to vote her in instead of just sending a get-well card. Apparently, in Hollywood circles, get-well cards mean nothing unless they’re glitzed in gold. Had Taylor not needed the lavish attention, the likely winner would’ve been Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment, who was excellent, but a more notable snub was actually a foreign actress. 1960 was the first time in Oscar history that a foreign film was nominated for Best Leading Actress, that being for Melina Mercouri’s role in the Greek comedy, Poté tin Kyriaki (Eng.: Never on Sunday).

Often considered the greatest film in Greek history (there’s another country’s record during the European New Wave), Never on Sunday revolves around a pretty hilarious culture clash as an American of Greek descent, Homer Thrace (Jules Dassin), moves to a Greek fishing village intent on getting in touch with his Hellenic roots. Homer is more than a little obsessed with classical Greek culture (as in Socrates, Aristotle, Odysseus, that era) and is disgusted that modern Greek culture bears little to no resemblance to its classical roots. In fact, the locals, led by a charismatic prostitute named Illia (Melina Mercouri), are completely ignorant of this classical culture, seem to just want to live life for the moment and have no interest in asking deeper questions. So, Homer takes it upon himself to improve Illia’s understanding of the world, offering to pay her if she gives book-learning the old college try.

Never on Sunday is one of those wonderful movies that’s engaging from beginning to end as a farce but also gets smarter the more and more you think about it. The film is a commentary on the obnoxious Westerner/American trying to impose their will upon a country, being ignorant of how much he hurts them. There’s also the commentary of knowledge vs wisdom as, despite having an encyclopedic knowledge of Ancient Greek history, Homer is a social dumbass. And then, of course, there’s the bitter irony that by acknowledging that they know little about the world around them and just want to live life in the moment, Illia and the other Greek locals actually understand and embody Hellenistic Stoicism better than Homer ever does.

While it’s often considered the best film in Greek history (as in films made in Greece, not movies about Greek mythology), Never on Sunday was actually directed by an American: Jules Dassin, who fled to Europe after becoming a victim of the Blacklist. Further demonstrating the Blacklist’s downfall, Never on Sunday would become one of the first movies not from England or America to be nominated for major Academy Awards. It won the Academy Award for Best Song (for "Never on Sunday," composed by Manos Hadjidakis) and, as mentioned, Mercouri was the first foreign actress to be nominated for Best Actress, an award that she was most certainly snubbed for.

(The other notable foreign films to be released in America in 1960 were the French New Wave film, Hiroshima mon Amour (Eng.: Hiroshima My Love),

which was the first film to show disturbing imagery of the waste from the atomic bombs, and Touchez pas au Grisbi (shortened to just Grisbi in America),

which is an excellent crime thriller that was actually released in France all the way back in 1954, thereby predating the New Wave, though for the sake of this blog, it would've qualified for this year's awards since that's when it saw its American release.

Also notable was Ingmar Bergman’s film Jungfrukällen (Eng. The Virgin Spring)

which was the first ever rape and revenge movie and the winner for this year’s Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Film. The film’s rape scene invited a lot of controversy, which is pretty notable for an Oscar winner, though I think it’s not Bergman’s best and, once again, the French New Wave was snubbed, with that country’s nominee being the much more clichéd (and anticlimactic) La Vérité (Eng.: The Truth).

Also, Never on Sunday is a much better movie then all of these (with the possible exception of Hiroshima mon Amour) and wasn’t nominated for the award.)

The winner for the Academy Award for Best Leading Actor was Burt Lancaster as Elmer Gantry in Elmer Gantry

which, besides The Alamo, was arguably The Apartment’s greatest competition at the ceremony as evidenced by its numerous awards and nominations. The film is about the titular snake oil salesman who masquerades as an evangelical preacher to try to fleece parishioners out of donations. Over time, however, due to a series of odd decisions, he actually becomes more and more of a real pastor and slowly begins to find God for himself. The movie was based off of a novel of the same name from the 20s but bears almost nothing in common with it. This is a flaw as Gantry in the novel is a much more awful human being which makes the Christian morality on display much more powerful while the events he encounters in the movie are pretty benign and Hollywoodified by comparison.

While it has a good set-up that probes good questions, Elmer Gantry plays it very safe and the performance is the typical Oscar-bait performance that the Academy loves. “Oh, look, he’s a huckster who finds the real important stuff in life.” But, because he’s not particularly mean, there’s not much to make him stand out. Given how much evangelical conservatism ruled the 50s, making a movie deconstructing it might seem pretty socially relevant at the time but the movie takes no chances, drags on for an eternity and it seems like Lancaster got the Oscar just because he was due one right about now.

A much better movie that handles this topic with astronomically better leading performances was Inherit the Wind.

The film is loosely based off of the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial wherein a small-town schoolteacher in the 1920s named John Scopes (named Bertram Cates (Dick York) in the film) taught Darwinism to his students while the local community and school board wanted the teachers to stick strictly to creationism. Scopes was fired and fined for violating a state law that forbid teaching Darwinism in public schools, the American Civil Liberties Union countersued to get the law overturned and the whole thing turned into one of history's first media circuses as the prosecuting attorneys hired three-time Presidential candidate and religious zealot William Jennings Bryan (named Matthew Harrison Brady (Fredric March) in the film) while the defense enlisted legendary attorney and known atheist (back when that was a very big deal) Clarence Darrow (Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy) in the movie). Neither particularly cared about Scopes himself, they both wanted a chance to defend their viewpoint to the world during the height of the creationism/Darwinism debate.

(In case you don’t know who these historical figures are and why their being there would've caused such a furor, Clarence Darrow was a political activist who made his career on defending labor strikers against corporations, usually pro bono, and was one of the founders of the ACLU. William J. Bryan was the de facto leader of the Democratic Party for a generation and, to make a very long and complex story extremely short, his Free Silver Democracy was more or less analogous to the modern-day MAGA movement. Both were considered titans of the Progressive Era (early 20th Century) of American politics.)

The film is an excellent legal thriller that does justice to both men’s point of views though it does embellish certain aspects of the story to make it more dramatic (in the film Cates is facing a serious prison sentence while in real-life he was only being tried for a fine which Bryan offered to pay for himself). In fact, it adapts the trial so closely (some of the arguments in the film are lifted word-for-word from the actual trial) that it’s actually surprising that they decided to change the names as this movie is more historically accurate than most films that claim to be based on true stories. Fictionalizing this is a surprising amount of respect given historical figures for a Hollywood film but I think it’s to the story’s benefit. At the time Inherit the Wind came out, the Scopes trial was only 30 years in the past but by obfuscating the names and situations, it allows the audience to forget about Darrow and Bryan and instead just study the big debate of fundamentalism versus science.

Inherit the Wind is an obvious repudiation of the evangelical furor that fueled the McCarthyist witch hunts of the early 50s and the audience is invited to be disturbed by how much the church rules the town. March is especially excellent as Matthew Harrison Brady. You can tell that he does care about his nation and the people and believes that what he’s doing is right and even tries to reel in the townspeople’s more hateful actions. Yet he’s also haughty, thick-headed and has a belief system that is so devout that it cannot tolerate any dissent. Even if he (and the real-life Secretary Bryan) aren’t quite as nasty as the recently-deceased Joseph McCarthy, the film is clear that this viewpoint is how the road to Hell is paved.

Inherit the Wind is easily one of the best movies of the year and so perfectly captured the crossroads of American evangelism in its time. Even today it gives a very intelligent and pensive take on religion, showing how badly it can go awry, how it shouldn’t drown out the foundations of American democracy and yet how it still has its place in the world. The film wasn’t nominated for Best Picture and only Spencer Tracy was nominated for Best Leading Actor, which is a shame. Comparing this film to Elmer Gantry provides a crystal-clear point on how the Academy will sometimes make a choice that is socially relevant but choose the safer, less thought-provoking film that analyzes these social issues as opposed to a film that analyzes the social issues while also challenging the viewer and playing with the art of cinema. (Make a note on that because that will be a very common critique for the rest of this series.)

Inherit the Wind is obviously a much better movie than Elmer Gantry or The Alamo but could it be considered better than The Apartment? Well, before we can answer that, we have one more film to analyze. If Inherit the Wind was the most socially relevant film of 1960, the most famous and legendary one had to be Psycho.

We’ve been talking about Alfred Hitchcock for the better part of ten blogs by now but only because he made one of the most consistently excellent outputs of any film director for the better part of a decade. Psycho is far and away his most famous film and has been called the most heavily analyzed films of a man who is already one of the most influential and analyzed directors in the history of film.

The film centers around Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), a real estate secretary who steals $40,000 from her boss, George Lowery (Vaughn Taylor), and hits the road before she’s found out. In true Hitchcock fashion, the combination of guilt and paranoia send her into a psychotic stupor as she deals with one suspenseful encounter after another during her journey. The most famous pit stop on her adventure ends up being when she decides to stop for the night at the off-the-beaten-track Bates Motel, where she encounters the genial Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), who lives on a hill overlooking the Motel with his mysterious mother who Norman has a thinly-veiled Oedipus complex towards. The rest of the movie is these characters working off of each other while Crane is tracked by her concerned boyfriend, Sam Loomis (John Gavin), and sister, Lila Crane (Vera Miles).

Along with several of the other movies on this list, Psycho acts as a divide between the conservative 50s and the edgier, more sexualized 60s. While Hitchcock’s previous movies usually focused on murder-mysteries, they were a bit more, for lack of a better word, benign and were clear-cut thrillers. Psycho, by contrast, is more an overt horror film since it has much more extreme acts of violence that, while tame today, can still be frightening for just how out of left field they can erupt (the most famous example being the iconic shower scene that is still effective despite being parodied countless times). And while Hitchcock’s previous villains were all obviously demented, they usually murdered for pretty clear-cut causes of greed and power. In Psycho, sex acts as the driving motivation. It’s never shown or explicitly said but the undercurrent is always there and you can feel that undercurrent is what drives both Marion and Norman to commit their actions.

Psycho was a colossal blockbuster when it was first released, being the second-highest-grossing film of the year (behind Spartacus) and the only one in the top 5 that wasn’t a big adventure film (3, 4 and 5 were Exodus, Swiss Family Robinson and The Alamo respectively). Its budget was less than $1,000,000 and it ended up grossing over $50,000,000. It’s often considered a landmark in the horror genre and it, along with Peeping Tom, is considered an inspiration for the slasher genre (though, in my opinion, I wouldn’t consider either the first true slasher film as they’re missing too many hallmarks of the genre). The level of violence and sexuality was so extreme at the time that it’s credited with opening the door to a lot of exploitation and splatter films throughout the next 20 years, much to most critics’ and parents’ consternation. Still, it does raise a question as to why Psycho was so successful while Peeping Tom didn’t catch on until later? Both are excellent but why is one so much more famous than the other? I think there’s four reasons why.

First is obviously the downfall of the Hays Code in America while England still had more overt censors but that’s just one piece of the puzzle.

Second, is Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates. While Mark Lewis is a great villain in his own right, Norman is one of the most iconic characters in cinematic history. What makes him great and unique is just how unassuming (and obviously sexually repressed) he is and how he’s not the overtly evil baddy of the piece. In a fun piece of writing, most of the crimes in the film are committed by Norman’s mother who we almost never see; we see the aftermath of Norman trying to cover them up. Instead of being driven by malice, he’s driven by fear; he’s caught between his fear of his mother and his fear of the people who are coming to take her away from him. You’re never sure about how to feel for him: he’s committing crimes but we understand what drives him to these actions but, also, dude, you’re in your 30s and the momma’s boy thing is really weird, but, also, she’s clearly a terrifying individual who anyone would have trouble standing up to. It’s almost impossible to imagine anyone else in this role besides Perkins: he’s the perfect blend of menacing, pathetic, sympathetic and creepy all rolled into one.

Third, is that while Peeping Tom’s plot structure and pacing isn’t that much different than some of the monster movies of yore, Psycho is famous for its twists and turns. The plot moves very quickly from the word go and it never lets up until the end. Not only that, but the plot structure completely deconstructs everything you think you know about movies, even by today’s standards. Every time you think you know where Psycho is going, the script will completely change gears and go somewhere else entirely. I really hope I didn’t spoil anything too much describing this movie for you because seeing it for the first time without knowing anything is a real treat.

This then ties into the fourth and final reason why and that is one Hell of a smart marketing campaign. Hitchcock, already the most famous director in America due to his films and TV show Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1965), showed nothing about the film in the trailer, instead showing a piece of him giving a press junket of the locations. As cheesy as the below trailer may seem, it does definitely invite your interest. I mean this guy has already done so many movies so if he’s not even going to show us a single clip from this one, then he must really have something special cooking. As word of mouth picked up about Psycho’s twists and turns, Hitchcock then brokered a deal with theater distributors saying that theaters would bar anyone from entry who was more than a few minutes late to the film.

It says a lot about what a great haunted house set the Bates Motel is that just seeing it could make you want to see the movie.

This last one is very important to understand as this is a bigger deal than it might initially sound. For the first half of the twentieth century, moviegoing habits were very different than they are today. How it would go is that movies would play on loop (usually with another film, a news bulletin, a short, some trailers etc.) throughout the day and you would just walk on over to the theater when you felt like it, pay the admission, show up partway through the movie and then stick around for the next viewing to catch up, leaving when you’ve seen enough that you were satisfied with a complete viewing. (This is the phrase, “This is where I came in,” comes from.) If you wanted to see Psycho in 1960, you had to be there at the exact time it was starting or you wouldn’t get to see it until the next viewing a couple hours later. It speaks to Psycho’s popularity that people were willing to radically alter their entire viewing habits just to get to see this movie that everyone was talking about. After this, it would become more and more customary to show up at the movies when it began so you could catch the whole thing from start to finish.

Psycho’s success was so mammoth that it proved to be the first time in about ten years that the Academy simply couldn’t ignore it. By Hitchcock standards, it had a pretty strong showing although the qualifier I had to put at the front of this sentence is part of the problem. Psycho received nominations for Best Director, Best Supporting Actress for Janet Leigh, Best Black-and-White Art Direction and Best Black-and-White Cinematography. It received none of these victories and also was snubbed for the categories of Best Picture, Best Leading or Supporting Actor for Anthony Perkins, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedic Picture and Best Film Editing. Psycho, The Apartment and Inherit the Wind are all in the same echelon of being truly great films but, in terms of the most influential movie of the year, Psycho blows these other two movies away. So what made this choice?

Well, first things first, let’s talk about why The Apartment won. As good of a movie as The Apartment is, it didn’t win because it was doing stuff the romantic movies had never done before, it won because Billy Wilder lost the Academy Award the previous year and the Academy crowd felt that he was about due for another one. But, by that logic, Hitchcock should also have been due for one right about now, shouldn’t he? Last time Wilder won the Oscar was for The Lost Weekend (1945) while Hitchcock’s last victory was for Rebecca (1940), 5 years beforehand. Wilder’s victory can be seen as a sympathy vote for the loss of Some Like It Hot but where was the sympathy vote for the snub of Vertigo (1958)?

The next obvious answer is that Psycho might have been too edgy for the Academy crowd but that’s also not true. The Apartment also riled up some conservatives with its sexual overtones (Wilder told a story about how a woman smacked him with her purse after seeing the movie though I'd take that story with a pinch of salt). Psycho initially had a mixed critical reception but was such a hit that most critics rewatched it for the awards season and almost all changed to universally agreeing it as one of the best of the year. Genre snobbery probably played a large part but I also think bruised egos are to blame.

When Hitchcock bought the rights to Robert Bloch’s novel, Psycho (1959), his producers wanted nothing to do with it. They were convinced that the book had no commercial potential and did everything they possibly could to bury it. Hitchcock paid for it out-of-pocket, reused his own crew from his TV show and forwent a salary in exchange for a 60% stake in the movie. The cherry on top is that Paramount refused him access to their sound studios and refused to even pay for any film, meaning that Hitchcock had to buy those from his TV show’s producers as well. (So, fun fact, Psycho isn’t shot in black-and-white just as a stylistic choice; they literally couldn’t afford a Technicolor print.) All the studio had to do was distribute it and they even half-assed that one as Hitchcock did most of the marketing himself. This is a classic, infuriating trend in Hollywood: if a producer decides that a film is going to flop, they will do everything in their power to ensure that it will, even if all signs point to the fact that the film could potentially do well.

Psycho did very, very well. So well that the Academy simply couldn’t ignore it no matter how hard they tried. I think this is a choice that is attributable to just plain old stubbornness. Hell hath no fury like a Hollywood ego scorned and the people who are in charge of this institution will only ever admit to so much of a mea culpa for being wrong. If they said that Psycho isn’t that great just from reading the script, then nothing would ever change their mind. Plus, the fact that Wilder was much more affable with the in crowd while Hitchcock tended to march to his own drum kinda sealed the fate in this regard.

Make no mistake, The Apartment is a great movie and you should watch it if given a chance. There is even an argument to be made for The Apartment potentially being a superior film to Psycho. But in terms of influencing the medium, changing the ball game and completely destroying everything you know about the 3-act structure, Psycho is far more legendary. I mean, for Christ’s sake, Psycho actually completely changed how people would watch movies. You don’t get much bigger than that.

Calling The Apartment the best movie of 1960 was a…

SNUB!

Personal Favorite Movies of 1960:

• Hiroshima mon Amour (Hiroshima My Love) (dir. Alain Resnais)
• Inherit the Wind (dir. Stanley Kramer)
• Peeping Tom (dir. Michael Powell)
• Poté tin Kyriaki (Never on Sunday) (dir. Jules Dassin)
• Psycho (dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
• Spartacus (dir. Stanley Kubrick)
• The Apartment (dir. Billy Wilder)
• The Fall of the House of Usher (dir. Roger Corman)
• The Time Machine (dir. George Pal)
• Touchez pas au Grisbi (Grisbi) (dir. Jacques Becker)

Favorite Heroes:

• C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) (The Apartment)
• Captain Ari Canaan (Paul Newman) (Exodus)
• Colonel Jim Bowie (Richard Widmark) (The Alamo)
• Elle (Emmanuelle Riva) (Hiroshima mon Amour (Hiroshima My Love))
• George (Rod Taylor) (The Time Machine)
• Helen Stephens (Anna Massey) (Peeping Tom)
• Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy) (Inherit the Wind)
• Illia (Melina Mercouri) (Poté tin Kyriaki (Never on Sunday))
• Mr. Max (Jean Gabin) (Touchez pas au Grisbi (Grisbi))
• Sam Loomis and Lila Crane (John Gavin and Vera Miles) (Psycho)

Favorite Villains:

• Calvera (Eli Wallach) (The Magnificent Seven)
• Homer Thrace (Jules Dassin) (Poté tin Kyriaki (Never on Sunday))
• Marcus Licinius Crassus (Laurence Olivier) (Spartacus)
• Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) (Psycho)
• Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) (Peeping Tom)
• Matthew Harrison Brady (Fredric March) (Inherit the Wind)
• Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) (Psycho)
• Reverend Jeremiah Brown (Claude Akins) (Inherit the Wind)
• Roderick Usher (Vincent Price) (The Fall of the House of Usher)
• Seymour Krelboined (Jonathan Haze) (The Little Shop of Horrors)