Hitch's Last Chance: Best Director, 1960

Here we come to the final Oscar category we're covering for 1960, the nominees for Best Director:

Jack Cardiff, Sons and Lovers

Jules Dassin, Never On Sunday

Alfred Hitchcock, Psycho

Billy Wilder, The Apartment

Fred Zinnemann, The Sundowners

Now, this would not be Hitchcock's year at the Oscars, though he didn't leave 1960 without some honors: when the Walk of Fame officially opened in early 1960, Hitchcock was among the first honorees, with two stars, one honoring his film work, the other honoring his television work. And as we discussed before, Psycho itself was a major hit, breaking box office records all around the world, with Hitch himself raking in over $15 million. It was a great year for the director, the year that, I would argue, made him the legend he is today. The Oscar nomination was the capper. Unfortunately, it wasn't a win, and it was his final nomination; he would finally get an Oscar seven years later ... an honorary award.

The night's big winner was Billy Wilder. Hitchcock had five Best Director nominations, Wilder had seven Best Director nominations, and four times - 1944, 1945, 1954, and 1960 - those nominations were against each other. This was the second time Wilder triumphed. It was also his last nomination, in this category, at least. Worth noting, too: this was also the third match-up between Wilder and Fred Zinnemann.

And how do I rate them? From fifth to first, here we go:

An All-Timer: Best Picture, 1960

Tomorrow we close out the 1960 Oscars with Best Director, since this 1944/45/60 run began with the nominations for Alfred Hitchcock. That’s the marquee category this time around. Which means today, we get into the Big Prize. The nominees for Best Picture are:

The Alamo

The Apartment

Elmer Gantry

Sons and Lovers

The Sundowners

My rankings, from fifth to first:

Billy's Turn: Best Director, 1945

We came to 1945 for the same reason we came to 1944: to explore all the years where Alfred Hitchcock was nominated for Best Director. This was his third nomination overall, for his second film under the auspices of producer David O. Selznick. The two admired each other, but both laid heavy hands in their work, so it's little surprise that, despite technically working for Selznick, Hitch made more films on loan to other studios during their seven years "together." Spellbound, fortunately, was a huge hit, the third greatest earner of the year in the US, while breaking box office records twice over in London.

Hitchcock found himself up for Best Director in a rare 3/5 repeat of the previous year's Best Director lineup:

Clarence Brown, National Velvet

Alfred Hitchcock, Spellbound

Leo McCarey, The Bells of St. Mary's

Jean Renoir, The Southerner

Billy Wilder, The Lost Weekend

The year before, Hitchcock, McCarey, and Wilder were all nominated, with McCarey winning; this year, Wilder would come out the winner. Hitchcock and Wilder were up against each other twice more, which we'll get into next month. In the meantime, my rankings, from fifth to first:

Hitch Limits Himself: Best Director, 1944

The 17th Academy Awards' nominees for Best Director are:

Alfred Hitchcock, Lifeboat

Henry King, Wilson

Leo McCarey, Going My Way

Otto Preminger, Laura

Billy Wilder, Double Indemnity

Hitchcock is the reason we're here. This month, next month, and the month after that, I'm focusing on 1944, 1945, and 1960, years where he was nominated for Best Director (we've already covered 1940 and 1954). 

Having read Patrick McGilligan's Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light - and perused, without finishing, Leonard J. Leff's Hitchcock and Selznick - earlier this year, I...won't say I'm expert on Hitchcock, but I have some context. Context I hope to share, accurately, with you, dear reader. Both tell of how Hitchcock was the wünderkind of British cinema, having worked his way up from title writer and art director to film director, even learning the ropes from the visionaries of German Expressionism. But by the 1930s, those German visionaries had been run out by the Nazis, while British cinema was famously very limited regarding resources. It was difficult for a man of Hitchcock's vision to get the films he wanted to make, made in the way he wanted to make them, and already by the mid-1930s, he was looking to Hollywood. He secured the services of Myron Selznick as his agent and, would you believe, the best offer came via Myron's brother David O. Selznick and his independent Selznick International - amazing!

Hitchcock came to the United States with a New York Film Critics Circle Award (for The Lady Vanishes) and 26 films already under his belt. He was no novice. Yet, apparently, there was little joy in the making of his first American film, the very British Rebecca, since David O. had a very heavy hand in production, and Hitchcock was used to doing his own thing. Fortunately, it was possible to be loaned out to other studios - thus 20th Century-Fox and the making of Lifeboat.

Hitchcock makes a cheeky cameo

This was Hitch's half-realization of his dream project, which was to explore the tensions and joys among sex and race and class in a single space (the full realization would have been a film about twelve hours in one of those famous London parks, either Kensington or Covent, I forget). The desire was retooled a few times throughout his career, but he was able to scratch that itch within a timely wartime milieu with Lifeboat, an original concept that saw a glamorous journalist, a tycoon, several shipmates, a mother, a nurse, and a Nazi, all thrown together for 97 minutes. Execs, and some critics, balked at what they saw as noble treatment of the Nazi (as always, a critique says more about the viewer than about the filmmaker), and the film was dropped at the end of January 1944 to disastrous box office. Nevertheless, it managed three Academy Award nominations, a spot in the National Board of Review's Top Ten Films of 1944, and the NYFCC Award for Best Actress for Tallulah Bankhead in her first real screen performance since 1932.

Were those accolades all due to Hitchcock? Did he deserve this nomination? I've ranked the nominated directors from fifth to first:

1948: Best Screenplay

The closest equivalent to Adapted Screenplay at the 1948 Academy Awards is just plain Screenplay, differentiating itself from Original Story by honoring the writers of the script itself - the dialogue, the stage directions, the INT./EXT., all that. For some reason (and we mentioned this before) the people who wrote both the story and the screenplay did not get their own category his year, so the writers of The Search found themselves winning one category and being nominated in the other. Here it is, alongside another original (albeit with three screenwriters working off a fourth person's story) and three direct adaptations. But you can see that for yourself:

1950: Director

We close out the first week of 1950 with the nominees for Best Director:

Day Two: Best Screenplay, 1954

Until 1957, the Academy Awards had three writing categories: Best Motion Picture Story honored original stories (obviously) as written in the treatment stage, but not the final screenplay; Best Story & Screenplay honored original works where the story and screenplay came from the same writer or writing team; and Best Screenplay honored the work of writers either adapting another work, such as a play or novel, or writing the script from the original story. Often it was more the former than the latter, and this year is no exception: two Broadway shows, two short stories, and a novel that was simultaneously adapted into a Broadway show while the film version was in production.

The nominees are...

Day One: Best Director, 1954

As I mentioned earlier, musicals brought me to 1954, particularly the Actor-and-Actress-nominated A Star is Born and Best Picture nominee Seven Brides for Seven Brothers - stellar cinematic works whose directors (George Cukor and Stanley Donen, respectively) went un-nominated. You'd think Seven Brides would have a better shot here, but 1954 was one of those odd years where only 2/5 of the Best Director roster helmed Best Picture nominees: On the Waterfront's Elia Kazan and The Country Girl's George Seaton.

The three "lone" director slots went to Alfred Hitchcock for the unassailable thriller Rear Window, Billy Wilder for the influential rom-com Sabrina, and William A. Wellman

 for the execrable-but-profitable disaster flick The High and the Mighty. For Hitchcock, it was the second of three times that he would be up for a film that wasn't a Best Picture nominee, the other two being Lifeboat and Psycho. For Wilder, it was the second time in a row, having been nominated just the previous year for Stalag 17 - he'd be a lone director nominee again for Some Like It Hot in 1959. For Wellman, it was a first, his previous nods having come from Best Picture nominees Battleground...and the original A Star is Born! Funny how things work out...

Was their 1954 output worthy of a nomination? Let's check after the jump....

Day Seven: Best Adapted Screenplay

Often the basis of a great film script...is someone else's story. In fact, this year sees two remakes among the nominees! Another two nominees are based on fictionalizations of true stories. And Room at the Top is a straight up book. Let's get into them, after the jump.

Day Five: Best Director

It's been a while. You know where we left off, right? On Best Supporting Actor, which Oscar gave to Hugh Griffith and I gave to...well, check it out if you haven't already. And check out our look at Best Actress, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Score.

As for today? Let's get to Best Director, after the jump.

Trial and Terror: Witness for the Prosecution, 1957

All month long, we're celebrating the Queen of Crime as she and her works appeared on screen, with a grand finale of five Murder on the Orient Expresses the first full week of November. Today, and all this week, we're focusing on her standalone works. Yesterday, we talked the page to stage to screen transfer that made "Philomel Cottage" into Love from a Stranger; today, a similar trick is performed... 

Witness for the Prosecution began as "The Witness for the Prosecution", a short story published in 1928 in . The story is familiar: Leonard Vole is accused of murdering an older woman, and the star witness for the prosecution...is his own wife! There's a twist, then a turn, then it closes with a shocker of a final line.

The story was popular enough to inspire adaptations on its own, including an episode of Lux Video Theater with Edward G. Robinson. But Christie herself wasn't satisfied with the story as is. A slight spoiler here, but part of the shock in the story involves, of course, the revelation of the true murderer, who gets away with the crime; Christie felt the culprit should not go completely unpunished. She also thought it was quite a good plot (if she do say so herself), and didn't want it completely confined to short fiction. So she set about expanding it, for a medium she had gotten quite good at...

The end result was the stage play, which Christie would later name her personal favorite of her 19 theatre works, and which became a smash hit on the West End and Broadway. Oh, yes, I know I said that about Love from a Stranger, but that show's comparatively limited runs cannot rival Witness for the Prosecution. In the West End, it ran concurrently with Christie's The Mousetrap and Spider's web, making her the only female dramatist to have three shows running simultaneously. The New York production alone ran 645 performances, winning Tony Awards for its leading players, Francis L. Sullivan (a friend of Christie's) and Patricia Jessel.

When you're a hit on the page and a smash on the stage, the next step is obvious: HOLLYWOOD! And boy howdy, did Hollywood deliver....

Witness for the Prosecution (1957)

dir: Billy Wilder

Director, 1953

Of all the categories, this and Best Picture were the two that had me in constant back-and-forth. At first, for instance, I gave George Stevens a lower score -- but the more I thought of Shane, the more I appreciated, admired, and adored it. Then there was my own wrassling with the results -- no, it can't be. That can't be my choice!

But it is. As unexpected as it may seem, I gotta be me.