Success or Snub? West Side Story (34th Academy Awards Review Pt. 2)

  To see part 1, click here.

Breakfast at Tiffany's Suite~Henry Mancini - Breakfast at Tiffany's

Similar to Gigi (1958) and Ben-Hur (1959), West Side Story was another movie that made a very large sweep at the Oscars, being nominated for 11 and winning 10 as well as an honorary award. The list of awards are as follows:

• Best Film Editing

• Best Costume Design (Color)

• Best Cinematography (Color)

• Best Art Direction (Color)

• Best Sound

• Best Music (Scoring of a Motion Picture)

• Best Writing (Screenplay - Based on Material from Another Medium) (its sole loss)

• Best Supporting Actress for Rita Moreno

• Best Supporting Actor for George Chakiris

• Best Directing

• Best Motion Picture

• And an honorary award given to Jerome Robbins for “his brilliant achievements in the art of choreography on film” (which is warranted).

        There’s a few firsts in this rundown that are notable. Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins were the first directors to accept the Oscar for Best Director as a duo and Rita Moreno and George Chakiris were the first Latino and Latina actors to win an Oscar, for roles that definitely deserved it. (Going back to our complaints in the previous blog, it’s no accident or snub that these two won while neither Natalie Wood nor Richard Beymer were nominated for the lead roles.)

West Side Story is indeed an excellent film that it’s hard to argue against most of these though it has some very stiff competition. 1961 was one Hell of a great year for movies with almost every major film of note still remaining a classic years later. Normally, when I compile the movies for this blog, I end up unearthing films that I’ve never heard about that still had historical relevance at the time. Not so this time around. Buckle in, we have one Hell of a line-up to take a look at.

Let’s start with some quick-hitters. A notable cult classic is The Misfits

a contemporary Western that was highly lauded by critics but failed to take off commercially. The film is notable as being a swan song for film icons, Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe, giving what was arguably the best performances of both actors’ careers (Gable died less than 2 weeks after filming completed and Monroe was dead a year later). While the story isn’t the strongest, the two are excellent and the film lives on in Western legend for their send-offs.

The year’s second-highest grosser (after West Side Story) was The Guns of Navarone.

Along with North by Northwest (1959), this started the action-adventure spy films that would dominate much of the 1960s pop culture. The film is about a group of commandos who are tasked with destroying an impregnable German base on the Greek island of Navarone and, unlike many other films of the era, the movie earns its 2-and-a-half-hour running time. The espionage, the exotic locales, the action scenes, it’s all superb. The only thing that holds it back is that the characters are admittedly not the strongest. For a popcorn movie, that’s certainly not a bad thing but it does make it pale slightly in comparison to action-adventure movies with great protagonists such as North by Northwest and James Bond films (1962-2021).

The Walt Disney Co. had a very illustrious year with three live-action classics and one animated one. First is The Absent-Minded Professor

about a mad scientist/college professor (Fred MacMurray) who invents a new substance to save his college from an evil businessman (Keenan Wynn). It’s a delightful little film with some good slapstick and would be successful enough to become the first Disney film to have a (bad) sequel.

Second was Babes in Toyland

which is often considered the best film adaptation of the operetta, a title that it admittedly wins on account of the other adaptations being so mediocre but still the movie is good. Babes in Toyland was derided by die-hard fans of the operetta (yes, they do exist) for getting rid of some of the music for some original songs but, honestly, those original songs are the best part of the movie.

Third is The Parent Trap,

the most famous film of child actress, Hayley Mills. Here she plays a pair of twins who are separated at birth, meet at summer camp and then conspire to have their divorced parents (Brian Keith and Maureen O’Hara) reunite and get back together. While the film hasn’t quite aged the best, there are some admirable things here. The special effects of having Mills play two different characters on-screen at once are impressive (though attentive eyes will notice that they always stand at opposite ends of the screen) and she does a great job at playing two different characters at once, and in a way that’s believably subtle.

And Disney’s addition to his animated repertoire that year was One Hundred and One Dalmatians.

The movie is about a pair of dalmatian parents, Pongo (Rod Taylor) and Perdita (Cate Bauer), whose puppies get kidnapped by the psychotic Cruella de Vil (Betty Lou Gerson), a fur-obsessed socialite who combines them with a pool of 86 other puppies with the intention of turning them into a coat. Compared to Disney’s other works, the humor in this one is a lot drier and more British, with a bit of a slow burn though it does become a very fun adventure film once it gets going with a great villain and a surprisingly exciting car chase for the climax.

If you were to adjust for inflation and exclude re-releases, only taking into account their initial theatrical run, One Hundred and One Dalmatians is the highest-grossing animated movie ever made. It instantly garnered classic status, remains one of Disney’s most instantly recognizable properties and was also probably the biggest breakthrough in animation as an art form since Bambi (1945). The movie is known for pioneering rotoscoping and Xerox in animation, eliminating the need for the inking process that was so time-consuming in these films. (In other words, they were able to quickly copy-and-paste the dalmatians’ spots from frame to frame without having to painstakingly redraw them each and every time.)

While the aforementioned 3 live-action films all received Oscar nods in the special effects and costume categories, One Hundred and One Dalmatians was roundly ignored. While I don’t think this movie is quite “movie of the year” status the way that Pinocchio (1940) and Peter Pan (1953) were, some sort of acknowledgment should’ve been given by the Academy, whether as an honorary award for the animation breakthrough or, honestly, just rolling in animation with the Special Effects category.

Now, let’s go globe-trotting to find some truly great films. As foreign cinema continued its output, 1961 could conceivably have been called the best year for foreign films released in America. Beginning in Japan, Akira Kurosawa made two of his great masterpieces, Kumonosu-jo (Eng.: Throne of Blood) and Yojimbo (which roughly translates to Bodyguard though I have never heard of anyone ever referring to the movie by that name).

Throne of Blood is an adaptation of Macbeth (1606), being about the rise and fall of a samurai named Taketoki Washizu (named Chow in the English dub) (Toshiro Mifune) and how he slowly loses his mind and morals. The film is very Gothic and cool-looking and does a great job adapting the play, being one of the best film adaptations of Macbeth ever made (which, again, is not a high bar to achieve as the only other remotely good film adaptation of Macbeth I’ve seen is the 2021 version starring Denzel Washington).

Yojimbo is the more famous and better of these two films, being Kurosawa’s spin on the Western genre. The film takes place in a village that is being controlled by two gangs who are at odds but the only thing they seem to agree upon is that they love bullying the local villagers. One day, a samurai named Sanjuro (Toshiro Mifune) comes into town and, taking pity on the villagers, offers himself as a bodyguard to the gang leaders, Seibei (Seizaburo Kawazu) and Ushitora (Kyu Sazanka), secretly planning to play them against each other.

If one were to consider Yojimbo a Western, it would be the biggest landmark in the genre since Stagecoach (1939) and a prime influence on the spaghetti Western (and by influence, I mean that Sergio Leone literally stole the plot of Yojimbo for the first spaghetti Western, A Fistful of Dollars (1964), and Kurosawa sued him for copyright infringement). It’s a bit hard to articulate but classic Westerns of the John Wayne and Gary Cooper era seemed to be a bit more settings-focused in the sense that the real allure of the film are the vistas themselves. It’s extremely rare that you would ever see Wayne or Cooper in a close-up in these films; they’re almost always silhouetted against the horizon or the buildings in some way.

By contrast, while Yojimbo still has wind-swept streets and a frontier town (adapted to medieval Japan), the movie is a lot more stylized with a wide range of close-ups when the situation calls for it. In addition, a lot of these classic Westerns usually had a pretty similar cast of characters while the spaghetti Westerns would have more unique archetypes. The big allure of the movie is just how diabolical Sanjuro is and all of the villains he meets are memorable in their own way. The movie still remains an action masterpiece and completely altered the ballgame for both samurai movies in the East and cowboy movies in the West.

(Another great Japanese film that landed in the States that year was Narayama-bushi Ko (Eng. The Ballad of Narayama).

This movie didn’t take off as much as the Kurosawa movies, mostly because its plot is more deeply rooted in Japanese culture while Yojimbo is a bit more digestible for Westerners. Nevertheless, The Ballad of Narayama is still a cinephiliac essential and it’s one of the most beautiful-looking movies I’ve ever seen in my life.)

Italy had a couple great films as well. Coming off of last year when a foreign actress was nominated for Best Leading Actress, the 34th Academy Awards are notable for the first time that a foreign actor or actress ever won an Oscar. The Academy Award for Best Leading Actress was given to Sophia Loren in La Ciociara (Eng.: Two Women).

The movie revolves around a widowed shopkeeper named Cesira (Sophia Loren) raising her daughter, Rosetta (Eleonora Brown) during World War II. Loren is indeed phenomenal in it, creating a very memorable and unique character. While the “battered woman” trope isn’t anything new, she has this spunky and gregarious attitude that constantly lightens the mood of the grimness around her, giving a masterful performance in someone who commands your attention while barely holding it together.

While her performance is excellent, and well deserving of the award, the movie itself isn’t very good which would explain why it’s been relatively forgotten. Anyone who’s a fan of earlier Neorealist films will find Two Women to be a bit “been there, done that” and nothing new is really being said that wasn’t said multiple times back during the Neorealist films of the 40s, aside from a couple scenes that you honestly didn’t need to see (there’s a gang rape in this movie and it’s way more graphic that it had to be). Also, the movie’s portrayal of Moroccan Goumiers is uncomfortably, disgustingly racist. Like, this is one of those things that would have been unacceptable even back then; this movie makes Song of the South (1946) look like Malcolm X (1992). Considering how this was directed by Vittorio de Sica (the man who made the very excellent movies, Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto D. (1952)), this is a massive disappointment.

Another film from the Beautiful Boot was Rocco e i Suoi Fratelli (Eng.: Rocco and his Brothers).

This movie seems like more of the spiritual successor to the Neorealist wave and, in fact, has been called the last of the Neorealist movies. It revolves around a quartet of brothers (Alain Delon, Renato Salvatori, Spiros Focás and Rocco Vidolazzi) who move to working-class Milan and take jobs in the factory and local boxing tournaments to survive. True to the Neorealist ethos, the movie is mostly just showing the lifestyle of blue-collar Europeans as they try to make ends meet in a plot that slowly burns before climaxing in a very dramatic payoff.

But the two Italian films that really caught on, both in Europe and in America, this year were Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (Eng.: The Adventure)

and Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (Eng.: The Sweet Life).

These movies could be considered brother-and-sister films in that they both experimented with cinematic language and both revolve around the unhappiness of the upper-class. L’Avventura revolves around a group of friends who go yachting in the Mediterranean Sea. When one of their group goes missing, the rest of them start a search to try to find her. While this might sound like a fine set-up for an adventure film, it’s more of a set-up for a character study to analyze our characters and how empty they feel as they traverse these dying towns on the Italian coast.

La Dolce Vita is the more famous and better of these two, winning the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, being nominated for four Academy Awards (and winning the Oscar for Best Black-and-White Costume Design) and becoming one of the most-watched foreign films in America that year. This one revolves around a tabloid journalist named Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni), who spends several nights interacting with the rich and famous in Rome. It’s very much a local road trip movie as we experience some of the most interesting parts of contemporary Italian culture with Marcello, from seeing the installation of a gaudy building-sized crucifix to a graphic orgy being held in someone’s apartment.

Both of these start off a little subgenre that was prevalent in the 60s that I like to call richsploitation: movies that show characters who exist in the upper stratosphere of society who are deeply miserable. Thus, they allow audiences to both vicariously experience the high life while also feeling better about themselves as a reminder that money doesn’t always buy happiness.*** Both films were complete changes of the ballgame of the cinematic language, transforming Italian cinema in a new way from the Neorealist surge, while also building upon the Neorealist movement. It is interesting comparing the two movies, as they have similar themes but La Dolce Vita is far more vivacious and full of life while L’Avventura showcases much more dismal settings. L'Avventura is much more boundary-pushing, however, as it barely has a three-act structure and is very experimental in how its story unfolds.

Though if we’re talking about countries that truly experimented with the film medium and new concepts, we must once again return to France and the French New Wave. Jean-Pierre Melville made Léon Morin, Prêtre (Léon Morin, Priest),

a movie that challenged major Catholic taboos by having its handsome priest (Jean-Paul Belmondo) flirt with women with nearly-omnipresent sexual tension. While the movie's shooting style isn't anything too unique, the fact that it was taking on the Church with its sexy priest showed just how much these directors were willing to challenge the social norms of their time.

Louis Malle made Ascenseur pour L'échafaud (which translates to Elevator to the Gallows though it was initially released in America as Frantic).

This is a film noir that weaves a complex web of deceit and intrigue with the main plot revolving around a man named Julien (Maurice Ronet) who is arrested for a crime that he didn’t commit. Whereas most American noirs would make it part of a criminal conspiracy, the fun and uniqueness of Elevator to the Gallows is that the culprits are a couple of unrelated idiots who steal the protagonist’s car and go joyriding, unintentionally turning him into the prime suspect.

And, finally, Jean-Luc Godard made Á bout de Souffle (Eng.: Breathless).

With the possible exception of The 400 Blows (1958), this is the most famous and iconic movie of the French New Wave. Breathless, more than any other movie of the New Wave, seemed to really encompass the French beatnik of this era, both in its protagonists and its very style. The movie’s about a pair of young hipsters named Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Patricia (Jean Seberg) and their conversations as they dryly commentate on the modern world around them. The throughline of the plot is Michel being on the run from the law but the main appeal is mostly these two smoking, driving around Paris and discussing gender roles and movies.

Breathless lives on in cinematic legend for its pioneering use of jump cuts. A jump cut refers to when you make an edit without changing the shot enough so the characters seem like they just skipped in time. In other words, it’s a filmmaking mistake and you really don’t want it in your movie. (For an example of how jarring it can be, watch this notoriously terrible edit from the finale of the James Bond adventure, Thunderball (1965).) Breathless, however, shows that jump cuts do have their place in the world. Most famous is this scene where the jump cuts truncate an hour-long car ride between the two characters down to a much more economical 2 minutes.

Considering how Breathless is renowned for these jump cuts, I was half-expecting the movie to be a jumbled mess by an auteur who discovered this new thing and overused the Hell out of it. Instead, Breathless’ directing style is less “break all the rules into a million pieces” and more “I know the rules and I’m going to add a new one.” Godard actually demonstrates that he knows how to direct a movie very well and the film is impressive for a first-time outing. While the jump cuts are new, Godard knows when to slow them down or have a more traditional editing style when the story calls for it. The romantic scenes feel romantic, the suspenseful scenes feel suspenseful and the camera and editing get crackly only when they really need to.

Breathless pushed the art of filmmaking more than any other movie in this blog and it’s not even remotely close. There was nothing else like this at the time and it was, again, a bombshell when it was released. And not just in France either. If you look at interviews of any of the 70s American film legends (i.e. Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma etc.) almost all of them mention Breathless as one of those movies that completely changed their life and inspired them to do new and interesting things.

This is yet another case of the Academy completely ignoring the foreign accomplishments for American cinema. Even simply limiting it to the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, neither Yojimbo, La Dolce Vita nor Breathless were even nominated. The winner as Ingmar Bergman’s Såsom i en Spegel (Eng.: Through a Glass Darkly)

a great, minimalist film in its own right but there weren’t even any nominations from Italy or France. The French New Wave was dominated by its rebellious, counterculture attitude so the institutional Academy was prone to ignore it, especially since Academy voters, both back then and now, would tend to ignore most foreign cinema unless they seriously studied it. (As of the time of this blog being written, in April 2025, they only just recently instituted a rule that Academy members must watch all the movies nominated to grade them. Let that sink in for a moment.)

While, I don’t know if Breathless was quite up to par with being called the best movie of that year (Yojimbo definitely is though), there’s no reason why it shouldn’t have warranted a nomination for Best Editing. The winner was West Side Story, as mentioned above, which is a good choice, but Breathless did more to change the ballgame of editing since sound was first invented. If the Academy was willing to acknowledge an Italian movie for the Academy Award for Best Actress, why wouldn’t they acknowledge a French movie for Best Editing? Well, because a. the Italian movie had marketing from a major producer behind it, b. the more technical awards tend to get ignored by the press and, by extension, the entire Academy outside of those in the technical awards themselves so it wouldn’t have been as big a deal to them and c. Hollywooders think the world revolves around them and they would have been deliberately ignorant about this rebellious film style coming out of Europe at the time.

But, I digress. Let’s return to the States for our feature presentations. Besides West Side Story, there’s four major American classics that are near-universally regarded as masterpieces that came out that year. First on the docket is The Hustler.

The Hustler depicts the life and times of Fast Eddie Felson (Paul Newman in one of his breakout roles), a pool player who seeks to be the best pool player in the world. To achieve this, he challenges the man who currently holds the mantle: Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason) who easily destroys Felson. The rest of The Hustler then depicts Felson’s journey through a rotating gallery of American pool halls as he seeks to get good enough to once again challenge Minnesota Fats and take the crown.

The Hustler is an early precursor to the typical sports movie plot with the plot synopsis being about a scrappy up-and-comer challenging the world champion, getting humbled and going through some training to one day challenge him again. That’s not the main selling point, however. The Hustler is less of a sports drama and more of a commentary on life itself and the sacrifices it will take to be truly great at something. The movie is nominally about pool but you can very easily use the lessons shown as a parable for other aspects of life whether in art, sports, politics, whatever the case. The Hustler is about the sacrifices it takes to be great at something and how it takes even more sacrifice to bridge the gap from great to the best. It goes to show the frustrations that anyone who wants to put the effort in from the relationship issues that Felson struggles with from his taking advantage of players who are worse than him (which ends with him getting beat up for pool sharking) to George C. Scott’s character who personifies that inner voice we all have that tells us to give up or settle.

The Hustler is one of those movies that feels like a dividing mark between the 50s and 60s as, instead of being pure entertainment, the movie is very deliberately challenging the audience. Instead of just showing a movie character defy all the odds and live happily ever after, it deliberately provokes the question of what those odds will mean. It’s almost the voice of a generation-esque with the now-coming-of-age baby boomers, who were all looking to be the main characters of their own story. The Hustler also created a massive uptick in pool playing in America, showing a case of how reality can mimic fiction if people love a movie enough.

The Hustler isn’t just pure Taoist philosophy, though, as the movie is still entertaining. It’s especially notable for the cinematography, which the movie won a well-deserved Academy Award for. The pool halls are all very seedy and cool-looking with noir-esque lighting and the pool scenes are downright electrifying to watch.

Next of our major contenders, and the most controversial of the bunch, is Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

One of the most essential films of the 1960s and beloved romantic-comedies of all time, Breakfast at Tiffany’s is about a Manhattan socialite named Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) who sparks a relationship with her new neighbor, Paul Varjak (George Peppard). This is another film under that 60s banner of “richsploitation” in that the appeal of this movie is allowing us to vicariously experience a cosmopolitan partygoing lifestyle in Manhattan during the swinging 60s but it also shows the complex experiences of these characters that show how deeply unhappy they are. (Though Breakfast at Tiffany’s is definitely more upbeat and accessible than La Dolce Vita.)

The real appeal of this movie is Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly and this is a star-making performance if there ever was one. Breakfast at Tiffany’s is interesting to analyze in the history of the romantic-comedy genre as it seems to exist alongside The Apartment as a crossroads between the classic screwballs and the more modern iterations of the genre. Specifically, Holly seems like a character ripped from a classic screwball such as The Lady Eve (1941) or The Philadelphia Story (1940). She’s a very vain socialite who is obsessed with the trappings of wealth and being a party animal. Yet the movie is more of an analysis of how deeply unhappy and empty she is and these are the reasons why she and Paul have trouble getting together; not because of any screwball-esque misunderstandings. They do a great job at cutting to the bone on her starvation for love and the climax is surprisingly heavy yet sweet.

As great as the main relationship and time capsule of 1961 Manhattan is, the movie is also now famous for one of the most awful cases of ethnic stereotyping in cinematic history. A recurring side-character/comic relief is Holly’s neighbor, Mr. Yunioshi, a horrific Japanese stereotype played by Mickey Rooney wearing yellowface. We’ve danced around the question of racism in old movies multiple times in this blog and tended to take these things in stride in acknowledging that America was much more casually racist in the first half of the 20th century. So, movies like The Good Earth (1936), while horribly whitewashed by today’s standards, at the very least was trying to impart progressive conversations about other cultures and should be respected on some level for its steps forward even if they’re borderline unwatchable to a 2025 audience.

By the 1960s, however, this was becoming a lot more inexcusable in a time when steps forward for racial understanding were being made. Which wouldn't be as bad if the character was at the very least a good guy or meant well but he's basically every mean-spirited stereotype about Asian people distilled into one terrible person. And, honestly, the character isn’t even remotely funny. I enjoy the occasional off-color joke and am opposed to censorship of history as much as the next guy but there’s no punchline here: he’s just a bucktoothed Engrish-speaking jerk who scowls and engages in bad slapstick. (Though the fact that this character was considered funny would do a lot to explain why movies like Yojimbo never had a prayer of winning or being nominated for an Academy Award.)

In terms of if this character is enough to ruin the movie, both back then and now, that’s where it gets bizarre because I don’t think he has anything to do with the main plot. Yunioshi really feels like he wanders in from a completely different film. You could completely cut him out of the movie and nothing would change. It’d be like if The Hustler just had a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle wander on-camera every 30 minutes to say a hippie catchphrase, do a salsa dance and then vanish back into a manhole and no one acknowledges it. It’s very easy to divorce him from what is an otherwise excellent film but, yes, he does drag it down. Even ignoring the uncomfortable racism, he is a horribly unfunny piece of comic relief. Not ignoring the uncomfortable racism, that does make Breakfast at Tiffany’s somewhat outdated even at the time since several of the other American classics of the year were about that very topic.

Case in point, our next feature presentation: A Raisin in the Sun.

A Raisin in the Sun is a melodrama that details the trials and tribulations of the Younger family, specifically their acquiring of a large sum of money and their discussion about how they should spend that money, debating between investing it in a business opportunity, sending the youngest children to school to better themselves or moving the family into a nicer house in a better neighborhood. It probably bears mentioning at this point that the Younger family is black.

A Raisin in the Sun was one of the first movies to showcase the general day-to-day struggles and ambitions of your average blue-collar black family in America at the time. This is a family that has been struggling being in the poor working class their whole lives and how they’re given a once-in-a-life-time opportunity to better themselves. But how? School? Land? Work? Each family member has a different solution and each has adequate points about the flaws for each of these solutions. And while each solution might be better for an individual family member, they have to decide which one really has the biggest influence.

A Raisin in the Sun is very Tennessee Williams-esque in how it’s showing the aggravations and complexities that our protagonists face in an unfair world. Unlike the characters in Tennessee Williams’ plays, however, A Raisin in the Sun goes the extra mile by making it about a family who is constantly trying to escape the boot of a society that is out to oppress them at every turn. There is a lot of dialogue where each of the characters have their own story, resentments and levels of subservience to the world around them. While keeping the movie focused on the family and in their world, you always feel that harsh world constantly off-camera by the words they say and the resentfulness that they carry.

And last, but certainly not least, we have one of the most important movies ever made, Judgment at Nuremberg.

Judgment at Nuremberg is a fictionalized telling of the infamous Nuremberg trials. Formidable and respected legal mind, Judge Dan Haywood (Spencer Tracy) has been called to Nuremberg to preside over a trial of four German men (Burt Lancaster, Werner Klemperer, Torben Meyer and Martin Brandt) who served in the judicial system during the Third Reich (in real-life, there were sixteen defendants but any historical inaccuracies in the movie are just streamlined numbers such as this one). The defendants all claim that they were merely following orders from above them so the trial of the century is called to determine how much “just following orders” is allowed as a legal defense and how culpable they are and, ultimately, even how bad the Nazis’ treatment of Jews and other minorities really was (the answer: very, very bad).

The Nazis have been Hollywood’s favorite bad guys from the second that Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States. Nazis being evil villains is so ingrained into our culture that it is sometimes easy to forget that they were real and just how vile the Third Reich was. For most of WWII, the Nazis were just stand-in villains for attacking democracy; their racial obsession was usually downplayed or ignored for just making them Machiavellian (of course, exceptions to every rule like None Shall Escape (1944)). Post-war, there were some movies that talked about racism and anti-Semitism such as Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) and Crossfire (1947), but America would ultimately quickly move on. Partly because the Russians were rearing their ugly heads as the next big geopolitical villain, partly because of the HUAC trials and Blacklist years made studios less likely to make challenging films and partly because America wanted to prop up (West) Germany as an ally to act as a propaganda buffer against Eastern Europe.

Judgment at Nuremberg was the first movie to seriously talk about World War II with respect to the victims of Hitler's atrocities. A great deal of the moviegoing public by this point would have grown up in the shadow of the war but never have experienced it. This movie, along with The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), are the first movies to seem to really want to educate the public about how horrible and unfair it was to live as an “undesirable” under this regime. Judgment at Nuremberg is a very methodical and clinical court case, showing step-by-step how both sides build their case, all while being watched over by the inscrutable Judge Haywood.

It’s both a great legal thriller and a great history lesson of the horrors of the Holocaust. While the movie is fictional, almost all of the stories are based on real events and are disturbing to listen to. The performances are phenomenal, with the defense’s attorney, Hans Rolfe (Maximillian Schell, who won the Oscar for Best Leading Actor for this role), being especially despicable. And this movie also broke major ground by being the first Hollywood movie to show footage of the concentration camps. It’s one of the most disturbing scenes of the movie and only gets worse when you realize that these aren’t staged recreations; the filmmakers actually licensed the real footage for these scenes.

As mentioned in the previous blog, West Side Story’s winning of the Academy Award does seem timely since the big political movement of the decade would be America entering its long-overdue reckoning with racism. Pop culture, especially movies, have always had a strange symbiotic relationship with regular culture as they can reflect the mood of the times while also influencing the times right back at them. There’s a strong argument to be made for the fact that the reason why culture liberalized so much in the 1960s was because this was when the first generation who grew up after the maturation of film and World War II came of age. Much of the pop culture during World War II was about showcasing America as the defender of freedom and justice which made their subjugating of their own citizens that much more hypocritical. Ergo, much of the audience of that pop culture would've taken the lessons to heart and want to do something about it. Film and television were an integral part of the civil rights movement as Rev.-Dr. Martin Luther King very shrewdly made sure that TV and film crews were around for almost the entirety of his nonviolent protests to show just how bad things actually were in the South to outrage Americans in the other parts of the country. (It’s one thing to hear that things are bad secondhand; it’s quite another to actually see it.)

Bringing it closer to home, West Side Story, A Raisin in the Sun and Judgment at Nuremberg are all very important movies in this regard, each taking a different tact on the issue and throwing the responsibility onto the audience. West Side Story offers a cautionary tale of how, if hatred is left unchecked, it can ultimately boil over and ruin the lives of innocents around you. Judgment at Nuremberg examines the guilt of a whole society, showing the horrific endgame of racism being left to fester. And A Raisin in the Sun tells a greatly human story of the plights of an average African-American family. Any ignorant middle-class American accustomed to dismissing black American complaints as exaggeration who saw this movie would have to reexamine their words. And while The Hustler and Breakfast at Tiffany’s aren’t overtly about racism or the counterculture, they’re still movies that throw the responsibility of modern life onto the audience. How your problems are solved are going to be on you and nobody else. (Judgment at Nuremberg in particular shaped a lot of culture as its premiere on television was periodically interrupted with breaking news during the 1965 Selma Marches. The effect must’ve been sobering to say the least.)

In terms of getting the moral across, all of these movies do so quite excellently so it ultimately depends on which will affect you the most: do you want to watch a quiet family drama, an epic legal thriller or a rambunctious musical? With that being equal, the question for ascertaining the best movie of the year then becomes which movie pushed the art of filmmaking the furthest? And, in that case, yeah, West Side Story has a pretty strong argument for winning. A Raisin in the Sun does fall into the trap of feeling more like a play than a movie. It’s a great story, and the acting is phenomenal, but most of the camerawork is static and clinical. Judgment at Nuremberg did push boundaries with its uncomfortable content (the movie shows dead bodies and talks about stage-sponsored castration) but West Side Story is a masterpiece of song and dance. The fact that it’s talking about a relevant subject only adds to it. Plus, let’s face it, it’s almost probably the most famous and, in terms of inspiring future artists and filmmakers, influential of these films.

There is a lot to complain about in this Academy Awards ceremony that goes back to much of our complaints with the institution. It would be nice if the foreign and animated films were given the respect they deserved and it would be nice if they nominated more than five films for best picture because, honestly, all of the movies listed here are classics. You should take time to watch them all. And, also, if we’re being honest with ourselves, I think the reasons why West Side Story won the Academy Award are more because of its accomplishments as a musical than a social commentary. But, in terms of the big six awards (Best Film, Best Director and the Acting awards), it’s difficult to find any complaints. George Chakiris and Rita Moreno's supporting roles were great, Sophia Loren gave a great enough performance to warrant being the first foreign actress to win the Oscar (although with the benefit of hindsight, Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's is the more iconic and memorable character), Maximilian Schell’s leading role as the prosecutor was disturbing and, yes, West Side Story is great enough that I think we can say that calling it the best picture (and best directing job) of 1961 was a…

SUCCESS! 

***So, in the interest of film history, I’m obligated to mention that La Dolce Vita and L’Avventura are landmarks, which they are, and are widely considered two of the best and most influential films in Italian history, which is also true. For me personally, in terms of watching them today, I find both of these films to be insufferably boring and a cumulative 6 hours of my life that I’m not getting back. I have been told that La Dolce Vita does get better the older you get so maybe I’ll watch it again when I’m 40 to see if the years make me kinder. L’Avventura, on the other hand, is that kind of arthouse tripe that I loathe and probably will never like. It’s the type of movie where you can practically feel the coffee-chugging hipster that made it smiling smugly right off-camera because you’re not intelligent enough to get his “arteestic” vision. Again, trying to be objective from a historical point of view but, subjectively, L’Avventura is near the top of the list of well-regarded movies that I absolutely despise. Take that for what it's worth in terms of deciding whether or not to see it for yourself.

Personal Favorite Movies of 1961:

• Á bout de Souffle (Breathless) (dir. Jean-Luc Godard)
• A Raisin in the Sun (dir. Daniel Petrie)
• Ascenseur Pour L'echafaud (Frantic/Elevator to the Gallows) (dir. Louis Malle)
• Breakfast at Tiffany's (dir. Blake Edwards)
• Judgment at Nuremberg (dir. Stanley Kramer)
• The Absent-Minded Professor (dir. Robert Stevenson)
• The Guns of Navarone (dir. J. Lee Thompson)
• The Hustler (dir. Robert Rossen)
• West Side Story (dir. Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins)
• Yojimbo (dir. Akira Kurosawa)

Favorite Heroes:

• Chief Judge Dan Haywood (Spencer Tracy) (Judgment at Nuremberg)
• Colonel Tad Lawson (Richard Widmark) (Judgment at Nuremberg)
• Don Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar/El Cid (Charlton Heston) (El Cid)
• Fast Eddie Felson (Paul Newman) (The Hustler)
• Florence Carala (Jeanne Moreau) (Ascenseur Pour L'echafaud (Frantic/Elevator to the Gallows))
• Lena Younger (Claudia McNeil) (A Raisin in the Sun)
• Maria (Natalie Wood, singing voice dubbed by Marni Nixon) (West Side Story)
• Michel Poiccard and Patricia Franchini (Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg) (Á bout de Souffle (Breathless))
• R.C. MacNamara (James Cagney) (One, Two, Three)
• Sanjuro Kuwabatake/The Two-Bit Samurai (Toshiro Mifune) (Yojimbo)

Favorite Villains:

• Barnaby (Ray Bolger) (Babes in Toyland)
• Bert Gordon (George C. Scott) (The Hustler)
• Cruella de Vil (Betty Lou Gerson) (One Hundred and One Dalmatians)
• Dad Longworth (Karl Malden) (One-Eyed Jacks)
• Hans Rolfe (Maximillian Schell) (Judgment at Nuremberg)
• Louis and Véronique (Georges Poujouly and Yori Bertin) (Ascenseur Pour L'echafaud (Frantic/Elevator to the Gallows))
• Mark Lindner (John Fiedler) (A Raisin in the Sun)
• Simone Parondi (Renato Salvatori) (Rocco e i Suoi Fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers))
• Taketoki Washizu/Chow (Toshiro Mifune) (Kumonosu-jo (Throne of Blood))
• Unosuke (Tatsuya Nakadai) (Yojimbo)