Success or Snub? Lawrence of Arabia (35th Academy Awards Review Pt. 2)

  To see part 1, click here.

Days of Wine and Roses Suite~Days of Wine and Roses - Henry Mancini

Lawrence of Arabia had an unsurprisingly commanding lead at the 35th Academy Awards ceremony though the awards were a bit more competitive than you might initially think. Not because of studio politics (well at least not exclusively so) but because 1962 was a damn good year for movies. Lawrence of Arabia handily and rightfully won almost all of the technical awards (specifically the color ones; cinematography and costume design were still divided by color and black-and-white categories at this time) and won Best Director and Best Picture, accumulating a total of seven Academy Award wins. A bit of a smaller number coming off of West Side Story (1961) and Ben-Hur (1959) (both of which won eleven) but would we call these snubs? Let’s find out.

Before we dive into it, there are two minor pieces of film history that are worth acknowledging, less because they’re interesting and more because they somehow gained nominations for the Academy Award for Best Picture. First is the remake of Mutiny on the Bounty.

This is one of the earliest examples of a remake being inferior to the original and one of the first straight-up production disasters in Hollywood history. It ended up being the most expensive movie ever made up to that point in time, with over 3 months being spent on location in the South Pacific without any scenes shot before they switched directors. Marlon Brando’s prima donna antics on-set ended up ruining his career for a decade and the film was castigated by critics, grossing only $13,000,000 on a $19,000,000 budget, a terrible flop.

Despite those numbers and being panned, Mutiny on the Bounty honestly isn’t bad. It's paced well and the production design’s amazing but the main problem is that they remove a lot of the shades of grey and complex motivations that made the original such a great movie. Normally, we won’t talk about major production disasters in this series (as that could be the focus of its own separate fun blog series) but, somehow, Mutiny on the Bounty was nominated for Best Picture. This movie spent most of its time in theaters being raked over the coals so how the Hell did that one happen? I’m seriously asking this, how?

The other piece of Hollywood ego that got into the system’s good graces was Darryl F. Zanuck’s (the long-time baron of 20th Century Fox) independently-financed and internationally-casted passion project, The Longest Day,

which is a 3-hour epic that details the Siege of Normandy during D-Day in World War II. This is another case of a movie that’s good, not great, as it’s a pretty well-paced and intense (for its time) portrayal of D-Day. Unfortunately, it’s more about the spectacle and battle scenes than about character development, to the extent that, by the time it was done, I still wasn’t entirely sure who the protagonist was supposed to be. And if there’s no single protagonist, or group of protagonists, we’re not going to particularly care if their lives are in danger. It’s also one of those rare films that I think is truly outdated as it became obsolete the second that Saving Private Ryan (1998) came out. Another case of a good movie that invites our skepticism because it was nominated for Best Picture. Again, it’s good, but, when compared to some other movies that came out this year, there’s no way this deserved to be in the top 5. (The Longest Day also won the Oscars for Best Black-and-White Cinematography and Best Special Effects which do seem more deserved.)

Moving onto some genuinely great movies. After about five years of the ongoing French New Wave, one of them finally won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film: Cybéle ou Les Dimanches de Ville d’Avray (Eng.: Sundays and Cybéle).

A very dark and excellent movie about a traumatized veteran named Pierre (Hardy Krüger) who strikes up a friendship with an 11-year-old girl named Cybéle (Patricia Gozzi) and they end up getting inappropriately close together. Sundays and Cybéle is an uncomfortable character study about the looseness of French sexual mores as Pierre’s relationship with the girl gets increasingly uncomfortable despite the character’s childlike innocence. Is he a pedophile or is he simply at a stage of arrested development that makes him mentally even younger than Cybéle? It’s a great think piece and one of the best of the French New Wave. I don’t know why specifically this is the movie that made the Academy finally pay attention to it and award it the Oscar but, regardless, it’s a deserved win for one of the greatest filmmaking movements in history.

(Other notable New Wave films that year (that weren’t nominated since the Academy only accepts one nomination per country) were Jules et Jim (Eng.: Jules and Jim)

a tragic love triangle about doomed friendships set against the backdrop of postwar France; L’annee Derniére á Marienbad (Eng.: Last Year at Marienbad)

an arthouse movie that turns an upper-class party into a Gothic thinkpiece and Cléo de 5 á 7 (Eng.: Cléo from 5 to 7)

a movie about a singer (Corinne Marchand) who has an existential crisis while waiting 2 hours for a doctor’s diagnosis to find out whether or not she has cancer. I will agree that, of these 4, Sundays and Cybéle was the best of them.)

Another foreign film that received Academy attention was the Italian dark comedy, Divorzio All’Italiana (Eng.: Divorce Italian Style).

Apparently Divorce, Italian Style refers to when a man (Marcello Mastroianni) wants to separate from his wife (Daniela Rocca) and, since divorce is considered taboo in Italian culture, conspires to have her murdered. The movie is amusing and remains an Italian cult classic but what’s interesting is that it received attention from the Academy, being nominated for Best Director and Best Leading Actor for Mastroianni and winning the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Yet, despite this, it didn’t receive any nominations for Best Foreign Film. Makes you wonder what the distinctions the Academy made for foreign films to be nominated for bigger awards versus just being relegated to the Foreign Film category. The answer? Whatever movie made a deal with a Hollywood producer who could then market it effectively.

Unfortunatey snubbed for the Best Foreign Oscar category was the dark comedy, Viridiana,

that year’s winner of the Palme d’Or and what is often considered the greatest film in the history of Spain. Viridiana is a very mean and satirical deconstruction of Christian iconography and philosophy, detailing the tribulations of the titular main character (Silvia Pinal) who tries to use her inherited wealth to help the poor only for them to take advantage of her and raise Hell. While great, it’s understandable why it didn’t catch on as censors in Spain, the United States and basically every other country it was released in had a field day. While a lot of European New Wave films were pushing Christian sensibilities, Viridiana is so pointed and mean-spirited that it borders on being flat-out blasphemous. (The movie gets even more nuts when you remember that, when this came out, Spain was still under the thumb of a Catholic dictator. This is the craziest poking of the bear we’ve seen from a filmmaker since Rome, Open City (1944).)

Let’s switch gears back to America and run down the list of a few classics. Following the mammoth success of West Side Story (1961), the two major musicals of 1962 were The Music Man and Gypsy.

The Music Man is a farce about a con artist (Robert Preston) who moves to a sleepy small town in Iowa to fleece the citizens into putting on a marching band before slowly developing a conscience. It’s that kind of Golden Age of Hollywood/Broadway musical that was very popular back in the day with its hackneyed plot and one-note characters. Somehow, this was the third movie on our list to warrant a nomination for Best Picture and is far and away the worst of the line-up. The Music Man has no right being mentioned even remotely close to the top 5 movies of the year. Nothing about it is bad per se but it is very mediocre. The story is mediocre, the characters are mediocre, even the song and dance numbers aren’t all that great. It is interesting watching this coming off of West Side Story as the dancing in The Music Man is almost as good but the cinematography is a lot more static and rarely moves which makes dance numbers more dull. Really makes you appreciate just how talented of a director Robert Wise was by comparison.

Gypsy, which is the better film, is a backstage musical about famed Broadway star Gypsy Rose Lee Hovick (Diane Pace as a child, Natalie Wood as an adult) and her contentious relationship with her mother, Rose Hovick (Rosalind Russell, singing voice dubbed by Lisa Kirk). This role is the most famous trope of the theater mom stereotype with Russell creating a very layered and simultaneously hilarious, lovable and hateful character. Critics at the time compared the movie in quality to West Side Story though that one is a lot more grand and this one is more grounded by comparison. By comparison being the operative words here as Gypsy is still an over-the-top parable and sendup to the Ziegfeld-esque theatrical world of the 1930s.

(As an aside, something that I find interesting is how decades nostalgia works for 60s films. We’ve discussed previously how decades nostalgia works in 30-year increments as in how 2020s pop culture is obsessed with the 90s and 90s pop culture was obsessed with the 60s. Decades nostalgia existed in the 60s as well but it seemed to revolve more around the pop culture of the 1930s (specifically the Golden Age of Hollywood and musical theater) rather than any styles, fashions, etc. Most likely because the 30s must’ve been terrible to live through and people would’ve preferred to remember the fluffier stuff of that time period.)

Foreign cinema wasn’t the only place where you could go for darker themes in 1962 as a few mainstream English-speaking films started experimenting more with sexual and taboo themes this year. For example, a major British film was Victim

a movie about a lawyer named Mel Farr (Dick Bogarde) who is also a closeted homosexual. One day he finds that he’s the victim of a mysterious conspiracy that threatens to expose his secret and ruin his life. The movie is a landmark as being the first film to display homosexuality as just being a normal part of life and how society cruelly tries to ruin people who just want to exist. The film isn’t a sermon, however, just making the homosexual commentary the driving motivation of a film noir thriller. Unfortunately, Victim is not quite a masterpiece as it falls into the trap of making the conspiracy overly-convoluted and hard-to-follow. As a result, the movie is more notable for its place in history as a statement than as a great movie in its own right.

Also notable in this regard is the thriller, Cape Fear.

Probably the most famous classic thriller not directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Cape Fear revolves around a suburban lawyer and family man named Sam Bowden (Gregory Peck) who helped put away a criminal named Max Cady (Robert Mitchum). After Cady has been released from prison, he starts stalking Bowden and his family, deliberately getting under their skin, slowly ruining their lives and sending them into a paranoid frenzy. Where the movie pushed boundaries is how Cady threatens Bowden. In movies before this, he would probably simply allude to killing or hurting them. Here, many of Cady’s threats consist of lewd comments towards Bowden’s pre-teen daughter, Nancy (Lori Martin), and he clearly has every intention of carrying out those threats. This might be the very first villain in cinematic history that has expressed a desire to sexually assault a child and helps make Cady that much more evil and memorable of a villain.

If Cape Fear was pushing boundaries, then those boundaries were completely annihilated by the other famous thriller that year, Lolita.

Lolita is about a college professor named Humbert Humbert (James Mason) who courts a widow named Charlotte (Shelley Winters) because he’s enamored with Charlotte’s 14-year-old daughter, Lolita (Sue Lyon) and wants to start grooming her. Considering how the movie is about a pedophile for a main character, Lolita is that excellent blend of being both tasteful and uncomfortable. Humbert seems to behave more like a spurned boyfriend in a classic romantic drama but knowing that he’s preying on a child creates an uncomfortable cognitive dissonance that gives Lolita its own identity. The movie is very well-paced despite its daunting length (over 2.5 hours) and does a great job at making you understand Humbert’s twisted logic despite him being a thorough and unrepentant piece of human garbage.

What I find most surprising about these three movies is that they weren’t nearly as controversial when they came out as you would think. While the dying Hays Office tried to hack apart all three movies, their American producers just told them to piss up a tree, released the movies anyway and they all became modest box office successes (the films didn’t fare as well with the British Board of Censors however). Lolita especially seems like it could have ruffled some feathers but, instead, audiences proved to be perfectly accepting of a film portraying a main character that we’re supposed to hate.

While these films were all successful and helped introduce audiences to darker concepts, all were ignored by the Academy. Though, in fairness, the only one that might be called a great film is Lolita and, while it has some commentary about the sexualization of youth in the early 60s and reflecting on how we tell ourselves we’re good people even when there’s all evidence to the contrary (and is so famous that its title entered pop cultural lexicon to refer to scantily-clad underage girls), it’s no Lawrence of Arabia. That having been said, James Mason and Robert Mitchum both gave great and iconic performances that were snubbed for Best Leading and Supporting Actor respectively. Mitchum especially should’ve won it over the actual winner for Best Supporting Actor, Ed Begley in Sweet Bird of Youth

an Oscar-baiting movie that, by contrast, is about a gigolo (Paul Newman) who is never actually allowed to say or do anything to indicate that he’s a gigolo, thereby defanging the film. So while Victim, Cape Fear and Lolita pushed boundaries with their sharp edge, the one that became an Academy notable had sanded down its edge completely. Begley’s performance seems more like an “old actor due for an award” consideration than an actual clear best performance but I digress. Moving onto a few more notable genre classics.

Another dark film that year was Days of Wine and Roses.

Along with The Lost Weekend (1945), Days of Wine and Roses is a pioneer in the genre of movies based about substance abuse and addiction. Both movies feature a main character who has trouble shirking their addiction to alcohol though Days of Wine and Roses ups the ante by introducing the codependent aspect of it. The film begins initially as a cute romance, showing the burgeoning relationship between Joe Clay (Jack Lemmon) and Kristen Arnesen (Lee Remick). The two initially fall in love over drinks and, as their relationship continues to bloom, they end up drinking more and more, ultimately descending into full-blown alcoholism.

The transition from a cute romantic-comedy into a self-destructive drama is a very effective way of showing the two characters’ downfall. The film never overtly tips its hand as to what the real conflict of the movie is going to be about but alcohol is ever-present throughout the entire first act so it’s no surprise when it rears its ugly head. This also is what presents the main conflict of the film in showing how hard it can be to escape an addiction. If the movie was about one character or the other, they might be able to do it but alcohol is the entire bedrock of their relationship; all they ever did when dating was drink so they obviously associate it with what was the happiest time of their lives. It’s a very tragic tale of how this drug ruins both of their lives and what was supposed to be their love. The film also does a good job at analyzing the casual fun of alcoholism in everyday American culture which can make quitting for an addict even more difficult.

While Days of Wine and Roses is an excellent and chilling movie, the actors’ performances during their bender scenes can sometimes verge on the over-the-top. It rides the line between what you could consider disturbing and just flat-out ridiculous. The greenhouse scene in particular exhibits some behavior that would seem more reminiscent of a cocaine addict than an alcoholic.

One of the great Westerns came out that year from the genre’s preeminent director-actor team (John Ford and John Wayne), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance acts as a more philosophical take on the genre and the Wild West from a man who spent more time in the genre than most of the actual homesteaders in the real-life Wild West. The film is set on a frontier town as a U.S. Senator named Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) has returned home to attend the funeral of a rancher named Tom Doniphon (John Wayne). When asked about why a powerful Senator would care about the death of a poor rancher, Stoddard flashes back 25 years to when he first arrived in the town and details his relationship with Doniphon and his encounter with a local bandit who used to terrorize the town named Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin).

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance has the typical Western plot of “hero stands up to ruthless castle-rustler” that had already become clichéd but what sets it apart is the commentary on how the West was civilized. The movie’s set against the backdrop of the (unnamed) territory applying for statehood and how the area needs to shed the violence, whoring and hedonism that is omnipresent on the frontier to make a better place for their children. This also acts as one of John Wayne’s more complex and interesting characters. While he’s still the same hyper-masculine cowboy he plays in all of his films, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance toys with a level of pessimism with his character. While the civilizing of the West will mean the end of men like Liberty Valance, it’ll also mean the end of men like Tom Doniphon: he’s a born sharpshooter and meant to be the hero of the town but, soon, the town won’t have need for heroes anymore. It’s a great spin on a character trope that audiences would have been very familiar with by this point.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, alongside The Searchers (1956), is often considered John Ford’s masterpiece. It takes all of the clichés of the West and re-examines them through the lens of the end of this way of life. All three of the leads are excellent, with Stewart rounding out the trio as a bit of an incompetent shooter who still comes off as a leader, and the black-and-white cinematography adds to a darker atmosphere. Unfortunately, it runs into the same issue of Ford’s other movies where it has forced and painfully unfunny comic relief as the incompetent sheriff played by Andy Devine is one of the most incredibly annoying characters I’ve ever seen in a movie. He doesn’t ruin the film but you’re going to want to have that fast-forward button ready every time he pops up on screen.

Another famous genre film that came out that year was the espionage thriller, The Manchurian Candidate.

The Manchurian Candidate revolves around a pair of Korean War veterans, Major Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra) and Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), who reunite and are finding that they have large chunks of their memory missing. There is buildup in this movie but, honestly, the real appeal of the film was spoiled during the advertising blitz when it came out so I’ll just say it: the two find out that they were brainwashed in Korea and are being hypnotized and mind-controlled by secret Communists back here in America. The plot ramps up at a nice pace to Sergeant Shaw being hypnotized to assassinate the political opponents of a presidential candidate and his wife, Senator and Mrs. Iselin (James Gregory and Angela Lansbury), who are a part of this international Communist conspiracy.

The Manchurian Candidate has one of the most serendipitous release dates in movie history which allowed it to fully capture the zeitgeist of the times. 1962 was the height of the Cold War and the closest America and Russia came to full-on nuclear armageddon during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The crisis began on October 16th, 1962 and ended on October 28th, 1962. Every American, and most of the Western world, spent that week-and-a-half trying to go about their daily lives while mentally preparing for the worst. The Manchurian Candidate saw its theatrical release on October 24th, 1962.

Seeing this for the first time when it came out on opening day must’ve been one of the most intense moviegoing experiences of the 20th Century. The Manchurian Candidate still holds up as one of the most airtight and intense thrillers of the Cold War era, with the leader of the conspiracy being especially vile when you find out who it is. I also enjoy how the Communist presidential candidate is clearly a Senator McCarthy stand-in, making the audiences think about how right-wing populists will lead them to their doom.

Normally, I would take this opportunity to analyze each of these three films and note their snubs in terms of genre snobbery and how their relevance meant they should’ve been considered but, honestly, while they’re all great, none of them compare to Lawrence of Arabia. They are all definitely better than The Longest Day, The Music Man and Mutiny on the Bounty, and this is a ceremony where we can and should criticize them for the bad choices for the nominees, but in terms of winning, Lawrence of Arabia was definitely the best and did the most to push the medium forward. So let’s take a break from the Best Picture for one go-around and, instead, play Success or Snub with the Leading Actor and Actress category because both were very interesting.

Despite Peter O’Toole giving a legendary performance as T. E. Lawrence, he actually did not win the Academy Award for Best Leading Actor. Instead that honor went to Gregory Peck’s performance of Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird, which was also Lawrence of Arabia’s greatest competition at the Oscars ceremony.

The film (and the classic novel that it’s based on) is set in a suburban town in the Deep South with the nucleus of the story being a court case wherein a black man named Tom Robinson (Brock Peters) has been accused of assaulting a white woman named Mayella Ewell (Collin Wilcox) and is defended by the intelligent and respected lawyer, Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck). What sets this story apart from most other ones is that the movie and book are told from the perspective of Atticus’ 6-year-old daughter, Scout Finch (Mary Badham).

The character of Scout is one of the key points to this movie’s success and helps To Kill A Mockingbird stand out from the crowd when compared to most other anti-racism movies, both back then and now. The movie has a very laidback tone to it that really emphasizes the joy and mysteries of childhood. You can tell that both author Harper Lee and director Robert Mulligan have a clearly distinct memory of what it was like to be a child as some of Scout’s logic is both so pure and so naïve at times. This also makes the racism on display that much more chilling as Scout struggles to wrap her head around the sheer unfairness of it.

While she and the other child actors are excellent, it’s Gregory Peck who gives the real landmark performance. Atticus Finch is one of the most legendary figures in cinematic history, being ranked by the American Film Institute as the greatest hero in movies. And rightfully so. This is what a real hero looks like. He doesn’t blow away evil Communist bad guys with an assault rifle, he doesn’t infiltrate grand espionage schemes, he doesn’t marry his rich neighbor so she can escape life as a spinster; he’s a smart, educated man who is standing up to 300 years of prejudice despite constant social pressure telling him to just let Tom Robinson hang. Yet Peck doesn’t portray Finch as a total saint either. He gives the character very subtle mannerisms that remind us that he's still only human. For example, in one great scene, Mayella’s father, Bob (James Anderson), spits in Atticus’ face. Peck with a few key twitches of his face and a few short steps of his legs tells so much: he’s pissed, he loathes this man in front of him, he wants to strike back at the flagrant disrespect but he still keeps himself composed because his children are nearby and he must set a good example for them.

To Kill A Mockingbird is a very influential and powerful movie that avoids getting lost in its social conscience by being about the impact these words have on our children. Many other films, especially about racism, can come off as schmaltzy and sanctimonious; To Kill A Mockingbird remains very effective and subtle. Atticus Finch is easily Peck’s most identifiable role and he would consider it a point of pride at having played such a great character. The movie also I think really gets the thumb to the pulse of where racism in the South emanates from. With the exception of the main villain, most of the locals are sympathetic and are merely portrayed as poor and uneducated, which leads to a cycle of resentment that they take out on those they perceive as below them. Atticus’ climactic courtroom speech is one of cinema’s greatest and remains one of the most enduring calls for justice from cinema in the Civil Rights Era.

In terms of who deserved the Best Leading Actor Oscar more, this is one of those choices that gets into the weeds of how pointless these awards can be. Both Atticus Finch and T. E. Lawrence are two of the most iconic characters in cinematic history and have very layered performances being delivered by two actors at the top of their A-game. They both deserve to be acknowledged; there’s no way to ascertain which one here is the “best.” But the same cannot be said for the other side of the gender aisle.

The last major film to talk about in 1962 is the Hollywood thriller, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

The movie opens by introducing us to a pair of sisters: Jane Hudson (Julie Allred as a child with Debbie Burton dubbing the singing voice, Bette Davis as an adult) and Blanche Hudson (Gina Gillespie as a child, Joan Crawford as an adult). Jane is an adorable Shirley Temple-esque childhood star that is the most beloved child in America while Blanche stews in envy at being in her shadow. The film then fast-forwards many years into the future when the two are adults and the shoe is now on the other foot: Blanche is the most popular leading lady in Hollywood while Jane is the archetypical childhood star who had a very unkind encounter with puberty. She’s drunker, uglier, meaner and constantly envious of her sister for having stolen her limelight. After a bad car crash, Blanche is rendered a paraplegic and Jane is forced to take care of her in a mansion bought with Blanche’s film earnings. Now being forced to care for her invalid sister and see her mountains of fan mail, it isn’t long before Jane’s resentment and hatred boils over and she starts to abuse Blanche and do anything to regain her old spotlight.

This is, in my opinion, one of the absolute best movies about the cycle of stardom in Hollywood and the codependent relationship movie stars have with the public. This is one of the first movies to really analyze how being famous at too young of an age can screw a person up and the movie still feels like it isn’t pulling many punches so many years later. Jane Hudson is so tragic in how she is unable to care about the only family she has left because her real love is with her adoring public. The movie gets really twisted and the extremes that Jane goes to to get her spotlight back put Sunset Blvd.’s (1950) Norma Desmond to shame. This is one of those movies that really challenges the pursuit of fame in Hollywood and how it can utterly ruin a person and, furthermore, a family.

The film would relaunch both Davis and Crawford’s careers and allow them both to continue acting right up until they entered the grave, which is pretty impressive considering how most actresses usually retire around age 40 or so. The movie also started a little sub-genre of exploitation horror films called “psycho-biddy” movies which are about an old lady who kills people, many of which starred Davis or Crawford. Most of these movies are fairly mediocre but What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? remains excellent.

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is one of those movies that is great in its own right but it only becomes better when you learn about some of the behind-the-scenes stories. Hollywood tabloids love nothing more than to emphasize rivalries between actors and actresses and no rivals ever let this tabloid-esque view of the world conquer their own reality better than Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. These two actresses hated each other. They hated that they competed for roles, for husbands and, worst of all, for Oscars. They hated that each basically epitomized everything the other person despised about women in Hollywood (Crawford liked more typical leading lady roles where nothing makes a woman happier than a husband while Davis was willing to try new things and push the envelope more with liberal social commentary). And, finally, they both hated the fact that the other person was, by all accounts, a thoroughly unpleasant narcissist to be around which basically meant that neither would be able to fully conduct a mea culpa and patch things up.

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is a stroke of casting brilliance that elevates the film as you can tell that the hatred that Blanche and Jane feel for each other is being channeled from a very real place. The movie came about as both Crawford and Davis were experiencing lulls in their career as they had gotten older. Since the two were famous in the tabloids for their feud, they played it up for the film’s publicity, encouraging audiences to see a movie where the two titans would let all that hatred spill on-screen. This is not the first or last time that an alleged feud between actors was used to drum up marketing for a movie. You and I both know that usually a lot of this is mugging up for the cameras and is the eyeroll-worthy stuff that the Academy Awards bases itself around.

This was not one of those times. The stories that came out of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?’s production makes some of Jane’s actions in the movie seem tame by comparison. There’s one scene in the movie where an enraged Jane, seeking to cut Blanche off from the outside world, kicks her into unconsciousness and then drags her up into the bedroom. When it came time to shoot this scene, Davis decided to wear stilettos and actually kick Crawford in the forehead as hard as she could, forcing Crawford to get stitches. Crawford responded by having the wardrobe department sew weights into her shirt so that Davis threw out her back when trying to carry Crawford up the stairs. These were not isolated incidents. What’s even more bizarre is that the two almost agreed to star in another movie together after What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?’s success.

Despite all the private hatred going on behind-the-scenes, the two actresses did have the class to speak highly of each other when drumming up press for the film. Crawford mused that Davis should win the Academy Award for Best Leading Actress, which would have been her third and first in over 20 years. Going into the ceremony, Davis was the odds-on favorite for the award and rightfully so. Jane Hudson is a terrifying, layered and iconic role that very few could have pulled off as successfully as she did. When it came time for the big night, however, the winner was Anne Bancroft in The Miracle Worker.

The Miracle Worker is one of the earliest and most crystal-clear examples of modern-day Oscar bait that you can easily point to. The movie is about the relationship between deaf, blind and mute Helen Keller (Patty Duke) and her teacher, Anne Sullivan (Anne Bancroft). The Miracle Worker is very insipid with annoyingly flowery speeches about how Sullivan is the only one who believes in Keller and the movie does absolutely nothing to inform you why Keller was a famous individual. This is one of the easiest ways to get the Academy to fawn over you: by having perfectly able-bodied actors play disabled persons in cloying displays of artificial sympathy. This trend would become annoyingly common in the 80s and 90s but even accounting for this being one of the first, the movie still isn’t good (though, in the interest of being fair, the scene where Sullivan tries to teach Keller table manners is a highlight).

While both actresses are giving it their all, neither deserved their victories. Duke won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress (over Mary Dunham’s lovable Scout Finch and Angela Lansbury’s diabolical Mrs. Iselin) and Bancroft, as mentioned, won the Academy Award for Best Leading Actress. The former can be attributed to the aforementioned trend of the Academy fawning over someone having the “courage” to play a disabled person but how the Hell did the Leading Actress snub happen?

Well, once it became known that Bette Davis was becoming the top contender for the Academy Award for Best Leading Actress, Crawford decided to carry out one last piece of payback for her old rival. Crawford, who wasn’t nominated for any awards that year (which is a shame as her performance as Blanche Hudson was probably the best of her career), met with each of the other nominees and learned that Anne Bancroft wouldn’t be able to attend the ceremony. So Crawford very “generously” offered to accept the award on her behalf should Bancroft win. She then proceeded to wine and dine as many Academy members as possible and talk bad about Davis to make sure that Bancroft did, in fact, win. These Academy Awards culminated with Davis not only not winning the Oscar but also having to watch her long-hated rival be the one caressing that statue on behalf of a movie that so clearly didn’t deserve it.

While I do find the pettiness on display here to be pretty amusing, the fact that the Oscars can so easily be kowtowed to a vindictive feud does undermine the prestige that the institution uses to sell itself. This vignette makes it seem less like a prestigious award to acknowledge excellence in an art form and more like a high school popularity contest on steroids. And, like most popularity contests, not winning one is one of those things that you should be able to let roll off your back. Unfortunately, most of society doesn’t think that way and neither did Bette Davis, who would never forgive Crawford for this transgression. (When Joan Crawford passed away, Davis allegedly quipped, “You should never say bad things about the dead, only good. Joan Crawford is dead. Good.”) The irony that the role in question was a woman who lets her obsession with fame and hatred for her rival ruin her life was clearly lost on Davis.

There’s a lot to complain about in regards to the 35th Academy Awards. 3 out of the 4 of the acting awards were clear and total snubs and 3 out of the 5 movies nominated for Best Picture were completely nonsensical choices. But, in terms of which movie deserved to win, then, yes, Lawrence of Arabia was the overall greatest movie of the year. To Kill A Mockingbird and The Manchurian Candidate could potentially be argued as being the most relevant of the times, and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was probably the most satirical, but Lawrence of Arabia did the most to push the medium forward.

Calling Lawrence of Arabia the best film of 1962 was a…

SUCCESS!

Personal Favorite Movies of 1962:

• Cape Fear (dir. J. Lee Thompson)
• Cybéle ou Les Dimanches de Ville d'Avray (Sundays and Cybéle) (dir. Serge Bourguignon)
• Days of Wine and Roses (dir. Blake Edwards)
• Lawrence of Arabia (dir. David Lean)
• Lolita (dir. Stanley Kubrick)
• Ride the High Country (dir. Sam Peckinpah)
• The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (dir. John Ford)
• The Manchurian Candidate (dir. John Frankenheimer)
• To Kill A Mockingbird (dir. Robert Mulligan)
• What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (dir. Robert Aldirch)

Favorite Heroes:

• Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck) (To Kill A Mockingbird)
• Joe Clay (Jack Lemmon) (Days of Wine and Roses)
• Mel Farr (Dick Bogarde) (Victim)
• Pierre (Hardy Krüger) (Cybéle ou Les Dimanches de Ville d'Avray (Sundays and Cybéle))
• Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance)
• Sam Bowden (Gregory Peck) (Cape Fear)
• T. E. Lawrence (Peter O'Toole) (Lawrence of Arabia)
• Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance)
• Viridiana (Silvia Pinal) (Viridiana)
• Zatoichi (Shintaro Katsu) (Zatoichi Monogatari (The Tale of Zatoichi))

Favorite Villains:

• Bob Ewell (James Anderson) (To Kill A Mockingbird)
• Captain William Bligh (Trevor Howard) (Mutiny on the Bounty)
• Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers) (Lolita)
• Don Jaime (Fernando Rey) (Viridiana)
• Jane Hudson (Julie Allred as a child (singing voice dubbed by Debbie Burton), Bette Davis as an adult) (What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?)
• Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance)
• Max Cady (Robert Mitchum) (Cape Fear)
• Mrs. Iselin (Angela Lansbury) (The Manchurian Candidate)
• Professor-Dr. Humbert Humbert (James Mason) (Lolita)
• Rose Hovick (Rosalind Russell, singing voice dubbed by Lisa Kirk) (Gypsy)