The Winners of the 1962 Retro Hollmann Awards

Wrapping things up with the winners of the 1962 Retro Hollmann Awards. Make sure you refer back to the nominations for full context, as well as the Top Ten for further insight.

Let us begin:

Best Ensemble

The End of Summer

2. Long Day's Journey Into Night; 3. The Connection; 4. Billy Budd; 5. Victim

Every character, no matter how brief their turn, is perfectly performed. Not just the sisters and their father, but the aunt who shows up in two scenes, the mistress's daughter and her American boyfriend, the potential suitor, the woman who runs the bar, the two farmers at the end: all of them have their own stories happening off-screen, and the glimpse we get makes them just as compelling as our leads.

The remaining 17 categories after the jump...

Nominees for the 1962 Retro Hollmann Awards

I screened 69 movies for the 1962 retrospective:

Advise & Consent

Billy Budd

Billy Rose's Jumbo

Birdman of Alcatraz

Blast of Silence

Bon Voyage!

The Cabinet of Caligari

Cape Fear

The Case of Patty Smith

Carnival of Souls

The Connection

Confessions of an Opium Eater

Creature from the Haunted Sea

Damn the Defiant!

David and Lisa

Days of Wine and Roses

Divorce Italian Style

Electra

The End of Summer

Experiment in Terror

Eyes Without a Face

Fallguy

A Flame in the Streets

Freud

Gigot

Girls! Girls! Girls!

Hatari!

Horror Hotel

In Search of the Castaways

The Interns

Jack the Giant Killer

Jules and Jim

Last Year at Marienbad

Lawrence of Arabia

Lolita

Long Day's Journey Into Night

The Longest Day

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

The Manchurian Candidate

The Miracle Worker

Mr. Arkadin

Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation

Mothra

Murder She Said

The Music Man

Mutiny on the Bounty

Peeping Tom

Period of Adjustment

Phaedra

The Phantom of the Opera

Premature Burial

The Road to Hong Kong

Satan Never Sleeps

State Fair

Sweet Bird of Youth

Tales of Terror

Taras Bulba

A Taste of Honey

Tender is the Night

That Touch of Mink

Through a Glass Darkly

To Kill a Mockingbird

Tower of London

Two for the Seesaw

Victim

A View from the Bridge

Walk on the Wild Side

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm

From that batch of films comes this slate of nominees - 32 films in 18 categories, all after the jump:

My Top Ten of 1962

A month late it may be, but I think that extra reflection gave me a more accurate read on which movies really knocked my socks off. Some faded a little after the initial excitement, while others that just wouldn't leave me be. Apologies to the nine that just missed out: Blast of Silence, The Connection, In Search of the Castaways, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Miracle Worker, Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation, Mothra, Phaedra, and Taras Bulba.

Now, without further blah-blah: my top ten films of 1962, in alphabetical order:

Cinema '62: The Moneymakers

And now, the Top Ten Films of 1962...at the box office.

Cinema '62: In Color!

Almost done. Here are five films in glorious color:

Cinema '62: Lives of Crime

The following films deal with crime, at least as it was interpreted in 1962. We've got murder, rape, stalking, sex trafficking, drug use, conspiracy, racketeering, theft, and back-alley abortions. Bring the kids!

Cinema '62: Something Queer

Lawrence of Arabia has the Turkish Bey, David and Lisa has David's smitten friend Simon. There's a scene in Tender is the Night sympathetic to a young one, That Touch of Mink has a running gag in fear of it, and there's definitely something happening between Claggart and the titular Billy Budd. And then, of course, there's Walk on the Wild Side, wherein the lesbian madam has taken her star attraction as a lover. The 1962 Academy Awards were full of winks, nods, and semaphore signals to the lavender set. Restrictions were loosening, thank goodness, and the button-pushers were coming out (ha!) to take advantage. Here are some other queer-tinged films released that year: 

Cinema '62: Sing It!

In addition to musical fare discussed before, a number of 1962 releases - some musicals, some not - feature notable songs or musical numbers. A look at nine of those films:

Cinema '62: Boo!

It's Halloween! Happy Halloween, everyone! We've discussed the Academy Award nominees of 1962, so, in light of it being October 31st, why not discuss the year's horror offerings? The following ten films were released in the US in 1962, though some were out much earlier in their home countries:

Cinema '62: Best Picture

And here we have it - the finale! The nominees for Best Picture of the Year are:

Cinema '62: Best Actress

Full stop, this might be one of the greatest Best Actress lineups of all time, not a whiff in the lot, everyone giving their all, sometimes above and beyond what's asked of them. The nominees:

Cinema '62: Best Actor

This is my last post on a Peter O'Toole Oscar nomination! I've managed to watch them all, my thoughts on each are linked below (except for Venus, which I think I reviewed on my long-defunct LiveJournal; at the first-ever Hollmann Awards, its one acting nomination went to Leslie Phillips in Supporting). Naturally, I saved his first for last, because...well, that's just the way it worked out.

Indeed, I've managed to discuss all these actors before. They are favorites of Oscar: a total of 28 nominations, an average of 5.6 noms per actor! Not that those always translated to wins: only four statues among all five, and two of them were Jack Lemmon's. Still, compare that to 1962's Supporting Actor, a five-wide race of one-and-doners; or Supporting Actress, where both first-time nominees were also one-time nominees; or Lead Actress, where...oh, we're talking about that tomorrow. 

In the meantime, the nominees for Best Actor:

Cinema '62: Best Original Screenplay

For the second year in a row, non-English language films dominate the Original Screenplay race. Last Year at Marienbad had been submitted by France for Best Foreign Language Film consideration the year before; beautiful yet inscrutable (to me), it's the kind of film people picture when they say "art film." Through a Glass Darkly won Best Foreign Language Film the previous year for Sweden, a Bergman film dealing with a family on the verge of collapse. And then there's the previously-discussed Divorce Italian Style, not even submitted for Foreign Language Film consideration, just a hit!

Joining them are the biopic Freud and That Touch of Mink, a rom-com in the Rock Hudson-Doris Day-Tony Randall style but with Cary Grant instead of Hudson, Gig Young instead of Randall. Day remains, thank goodness. 

The nominees:

Cinema '62: Best Original Song

From scores we move on to songs - sing along, won't you, if you know the words?:

Cinema '62: Best Original Score

Each category always seems to have one lone nominee, the sole representative of a film that, perhaps, had greater Oscar dreams. I'm sure the lone nominee in this category had higher aspirations: Taras Bulba.

Based on the novel by Nikolai Gogol, Taras Bulba is the story of a family. Taras is a proud Cossack, a ferocious military leader, an enemy of the Poles, a friend as well a father to his sons. His sons Andriy and Ostap are educated in Kyiv, where Andriy falls in love with a Polish noblewoman. This leads to some tensions when the Cossack take arms against the Polish government. Exciting battle scenes, with so many horses, extras, and pyrotechnics, you'll thrill even as you worry for everyone's safety! A bear pit! Lots of drinking and singing! Great performances!

And, of course, a sweeping, epic score - let's discuss further:

Cinema '62: Best Adapted Screenplay

All five Best Picture nominees were adaptations, yet the Adapted Screenplay category is a better side-by-side match with Best Director. The only exception is Divorce Italian Style, an original screenplay, which we'll discuss later. Otherwise, all the best-directed films also appear to be among the best-written, with Lolita in the fifth slot.

"How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?" That was the original ad copy, and it was a fair question - this was, after all, the controversial novel about a middle-aged pedophile defending his lust for his stepdaughter. The discerning reader can see Nabakov's disdain for his subject, as well as his distress at the elements that enable their exploitation. And he does it all with a dark, sly sense of humor - Stanley Kubrick proved a perfect match for that sensibility.

Anyway, the nominees:

Cinema '62: Best Director

Although we've seen this before, rare indeed is the Best Director lineup where the majority of nominees are representing films not nominated for Best Picture. Indeed, I believe since the category went five-wide in 1936, three lone directors have only occurred five times: 1954, 1955, 1962, 1963, 1966. Curious that they're all within a 12-year span, coinciding with the winnowing-away of the Hays Code and the growing appreciation for international cinema. 

The lone directing nominees here represent David and Lisa, a drama about youths in a residential home for mental health issues; Divorce Italian Style, an Italian comedy about a man who plots the death of his wife so he can seduce his teenage cousin; and The Miracle Worker, a surprise Best Picture snub, about Anne Sullivan teaching Helen Keller how to communicate. The directors "snubbed" are The Longest Day's triumvirate of Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton, and Bernhard Wicki (with significant though uncredited contributions from Gerd Oswald and Darryl F. Zanuck); The Music Man's Morton DaCosta; and Mutiny on the Bounty's Lewis Milestone (with uncredited filming from Carol Reed, who was fired mid-production). Here's who made it:

Cinema '62: Best Supporting Actress

Today, we look at the nominees for Best Supporting Actress, with four movies we'll be seeing a lot more of - Bird Man of Alcatraz, The Miracle Worker, Sweet Bird of Youth, To Kill a Mockingbird - and The Manchurian Candidate. 

The original AFI List of the 100 Greatest American Movies included The Manchurian Candidate at #67, TIME named Mrs. Iselin among the 25 Greatest Movie Villains, and Screen Drafts called it the second-best Cold War film. It's a well-done noose-tightener about brainwashed soldiers, political manipulation, and the conspiracy that binds these two into one master plan. It's interesting because there's not a lot of mystery behind it, the movie tipping its hand pretty early as to what's going on, though not necessarily why it's going on. That seems a little muddled, particularly the cross and double-cross. Great performances from Laurence Harvey and Khigh Dhiegh. Ballsy finale. Great (Oscar-nominated) editing by Ferris Webster. I wish I liked it!

The nominees:

Cinema '62: Best Supporting Actor

Yesterday, we looked at the Adapted Scores of 1962. Today, it's the Best Supporting Actor lineup. All of these actors were here for the first time; none of them would be back for a second nomination (although...one of them still could, one day). We'll talk about many of these films again, but there is one film for which this was the lone nomination: Billy Budd.

Have you seen Billy Budd, co-written and directed by Peter Ustinov, adapted from the novel by Herman Melville and a play by Louis O. Coxe and Robert H. Chapman? It's a beautifully done movie whose conversations about interpreting justice, shortcomings of the law, and the decision to believe in and behave the best in the face of the worst could be dull or didactic; instead, the intelligent screenplay and complex performances make for an exciting two hours. Good year for boat films!

The nominees:

Cinema '62: Best Adapted Score

Our first category is Adapted Score, or as it was known at the time, Scoring of Music - Adaptation or Treatment. Four of these nominees are musicals, while one of them is an "adaptation" (read: orchestration) of a score by Jackie Gleason. The nominees: