Cinema '65: The Sistine Chapel and the Salzburg Gazebo

Prestige roadshow epics only, please -- this is the Art Direction-Set Decoration category.

Only Hollywood roman à clef Inside Daisy Clover could break up the whiff of Oscar Bait that permeates this category -- and by the way, lest we think otherwise, I'm a fan of Oscar Bait, and feel Daisy is easily the weakest film here. We have the Michelangelo vs. The Warrior Pope drama-dsiguised-as-an-epic The Agony and the Ecstasy, which is a surprising treat. There's the period romance and actual epic Doctor Zhivago. The intimate in tone, epic in scope Jesus biopic The Greatest Story Ever Told. And the smash musical The Sound of Music.

Zhivago won

Let's get to it, shall we?

Cinema '65: The Abbess and the Racist

A returning champ...a veteran honored...a writer...a second go-rounder...and the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

I'm sure one of the surprising omissions from 1965's Supporting Actress lineup was Joan Blondell in The Cincinnati Kid. Blondell, after all, had been nominated for the Golden Globe and won at the National Board of Review. But it's not as though the eventual nominees were without love.

At the Golden Globes, Ruth Gordon, Joyce Redman, and Peggy Wood were nominated alongside the aforementioned Blondell and Thelma Ritter for Boeing Boeing.

You may have noticed...only the Academy honored Shelley Winters' work as the monster momma in A Patch of Blue. Of course, Shelley's was the winning performance, scoring a second Oscar for the actress on her third nomination -- and she would return for The Poseidon Adventure in 1972.

But obviously, the real story here is the first of many nominations for the incomparable Maggie Smith. This was her first nomination at the Oscars; the very same role got her nominated at the Golden Globes for Lead Actress in a Drama. Smith was also honored at the BAFTAs...albeit as Best British Actress for Young Cassidy. As we all know, she would soon return with 1969's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie -- and this time, she would win the Oscar.

But for now...

Cinema '65: The Spy and the Gunslinger

A comic performance dominating the year? Strange but true: Lee Marvin's role as a drunken gunman and his evil nose-less brother in the western spoof Cat Ballou won Best Actor honors from the National Board of Review, the Golden Globes, the BAFTAs, and the Berlin Film Festival -- oh, and the Academy.

Humbled

It's a rare moment for an industry that famously undervalues comedy. Especially since most of the other nominees went unrecognized the rest of the year. Richard Burton -- nominated at the Oscars for Becket the year previous -- won Best British Actor at the BAFTAs...but for the next year, and winning for both The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Oskar Werner was nominated at the Golden Globes, but he was getting more attention for his supporting performance in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Rod Steiger, at least, was nominated for a Globe and won for the previous year's Berlin Film Festival -- his was the critical darling.

Then there was Laurence Olivier in blackface, which showed up nowhere else.

And what did I make of it all? After the jump, please.

Cinema '65: Ann-Margret Dances, Jason Robards Marches

Ah, Adapted Score, the unusual Oscar category now relegated to history, alongside Best Choreography and Best Assistant Director. We've discussed the odd history of this category before, so like -- let's just get to it.

Cat Ballou

DeVol, adapting the music of Jerry Livingston

****

A surprising use of electric guitars makes Cat Ballou stand out among other westerns, western comedies, comedies... DeVol takes the central theme by David and Livingston, using it romantically, ominously, triumphantly, even dancing-ly! It's wonderfully straight-faced.

Cinema '65: Kinky Sex and the Singing French

What an unusual group, these contenders for Best Original Screenplay!

Two of them are rather frank about sex: adultery, live-in loving, and homosexuality in Darling; impotence and kink in Casanova '70.

Two of them are comedies: Casanova '70, and the period ensemble screwballer Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines.

Two of them are foreign-language films: Casanova '70, and the French musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a romance that is completely sung-through.

Indeed, the only American one, The Train, is set (and was shot) in France -- a World War II thriller about art-thieving Nazis, the same tale that inspired The Monuments Men.

It's a bizarre group to see together -- but that's not to say it's an unwelcome group.

Take a look for yourself after the jump

Cinema '65: A POW Camp and a Suicide Hotline

The nominees for Black-and-White Art Direction-Set Decoration (hyphen city over here) consist of a war film, a social drama, a Cold War thriller, a shipboard ensemble, and The Slender Thread.

In King Rat, a POW camp in Southeast Asia, more or less permitted to run itself with little interference from the Japanese camp commandants, becomes the setting for a dark comedy survival -- not just physical, but psychological. George Segal is the king of the title, a soldier who has never been more powerful and influential than he is as a hustler and black marketeer in the camp.

A Patch of Blue follows a blind white girl who lives with her perpetually drunk grandfather and abusive, shrill, racist mother. She escapes, when she can, to the park -- where she meets and falls for a black man, a writer, who treats her with kindness -- played by Sidney Poitier. It's the annual Film with a Social Conscience, but it's by no mean the only one -- look, too, to fellow nominee Ship of Fools, about passengers on a boat heading for Germany from Vera Cruz, which explores class, race, prejudice in general, Anti-Semitism in particular, sex...the whole human experience.

Poitier also stars in The Slender Thread, playing a student (!) working at a suicide prevention center in Seattle; Anne Bancroft plays a caller who has just taken an overdose of barbiturates. If memory serves, the film plays out in real time, and is quite thrilling to experience -- and it's always a pleasant surprise to see contemporary-set films nominated in craft categories. Apparently, it takes a Poitier to bring attention to such films.

Rounding out the list is The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, one of those sophisticated, slow, highly-watchable John le Carre Cold War thrillers in which spy Richard Burton goes over the Berlin Wall to...but no. Best to just watch the whole thing unfold yourself.

The nominees, after the jump....

Cinema '65: Here We Go

And so it's happening: our look back at 1965.

Over the past few months, I've caught up with 67 films released in 1965 -- the only nominated film I missed among the regular Oscar categories (non-doc, non-short, non-foreign) was Von Ryan's Express. I've watched several Beach Party movies, four Vincent Price flicks, three Japanese films, two documentaries, two Jean Harlow biopics (both titled Harlow), and four Russ Meyer experiences. Some of the films were reviewed; most will be looked at over the next month, as we go through Oscar's nominees in fifteen categories.

Yes, fifteen. For it's 1965, and categories like Art Direction-Set Decoration and Cinematography have separate awards for Color and Black-and-White -- a practice that will be discontinued for the 1967 Oscars.

After that, of course, I will name my own picks in eighteen categories for the Retro Hollmann Awards.

Tomorrow: a look at POW dark comedy King Rat, blind-white-girl-meets-black-man romance A Patch of Blue, suicide prevention drama The Slender Thread, and more! Until then...the total list of films screened follows:

The Agony and the Ecstasy

The Awful Dr. Orloff

Beach Blanket Bingo

The Beach Girls and the Monster

Bunny Lake is Missing

Casanova ‘70

Cat Ballou

The Collector

Darling

The Defilers

Devil Doll

Die! Die! My Darling!

Die, Monster, Die

Doctor Zhivago

Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine

Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors

The Eleanor Roosevelt Story

Fanny Hill

Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

The Flight of the Phoenix

Genghis Khan

Girl Happy

The Great Race

The Greatest Story Ever Told

Harlow (Carol Lynley version)

Harlow (Carroll Baker version)

Help!

How to Stuff a Wild Bikini

In Harm’s Way

Inside Daisy Clover

The IPCRESS File

King Rat

Kwaidan

Lord Jim

The Loved One

Mondo Pazzo

Morituri

Motorpsycho

Mudhoney

Murder Most Foul

The Nanny

None But the Brave

Onibaba

Othello

A Patch of Blue

The Pawnbroker

The Pleasure Seekers

A Rage to Live

The Sandpiper

Shenandoah

Ship of Fools

Ski Party

The Slender Thread

The Sons of Katie Elder

The Sound of Music

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines

A Thousand Clowns

Thunderball

Tomb of Ligeia

The Train

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

War-Gods of the Deep

What’s New Pussycat?

Who Killed Teddy Bear?

Woman in the Dunes

Young Cassidy

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