What We Missed: 1955

We missed a lot.

Programming Note: Maybe you noticed that we jumped into 1956 without first wrapping up 1955. That’s because Tuesday’s newsletter on Richard III was sent out by accident—and, what’s worse, it was unfinished! What an embarrassing blunder for us here at Knowing Without Understanding headquarters. We’ll be taking the rest of the year off to recover from that shame and maybe also watch some movies made this millennium.

ICYMI: the five films nominated for Best Actor Oscars in 1955 were Marty, The Man with the Golden Arm, Bad Day at Black Rock, Love Me or Leave Me, and East of Eden. The links provide the trivia writeups on those films while this post discusses what else was happening in the movies that year.

1955 Best Picture winner: Marty. A low-budget, character-driven film produced by an independent studio winning the top prize? Don’t get used to it—we’ll be back to the Ben-Hurs and Lawrences of Arabia before long.

Besides Marty, three stage adaptations were nominated for Best Picture. Those were the dramas Picnic (written by William Inge) and The Rose Tattoo (by Tennessee Williams), plus the comedy Mister Roberts (by a guy you’ll never be asked about). Let’s speed run their plots and leads:

• Picnic: a stranger (William Holden) arrives in a Kansas town and causes love-related trouble

• The Rose Tattoo: a grieving widow (Anna Magnani) falls for a truck driver (Burt Lancaster) in Louisiana

• Mister Roberts: Lt. Roberts (Henry Fonda) faces boredom on a naval cargo ship helmed by a jerk captain (James Cagney).

The fifth movie nominated for Best Picture was Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing. We’ll discuss that when we watch Sayonara (1957), since I’m pretty sure they’re the same movie. 

Highest grossing film: Lady and the Tramp. The upright cocker spaniel falls in love with the mutt from the other side of the tracks. It’s this one: 

Y’know, it's considered impolite to slurp spaghetti.

The film has “The Siamese Cat Song,” sung by Peggy Lee. That’s Peggy Lee, known for hits “Is That All There Is?” and “Fever,” the Peggy Lee Wikipedia dubiously calls Queen of American Pop Music and erroneously cites as the namesake of the margarita. (Though Lee was actually the inspiration for the Muppet Miss Piggy—originally named Miss Piggy Lee.)

Best Actress Oscar race: Anna Magnini took it for The Rose Tattoo. The murderer’s row of women Magnini beat out (Katharine Hepburn, Susan Hayward, Jennifer Jones, and Eleanor Parker) were nominated for this award a combined twenty-four times. But Magnini’s no slouch—we’ll see her work in this column soon enough.

Relitigating the Best Actor race: I’d take four of the five Best Actor performances of 1954 over anything we saw in 1955. Sinatra was out of his depth, Tracy was miscast, and both Cagney and Dean actively made their movies worse. So fine, let Borgnine keep his Marty trophy.

Quick Hits

• Guys and Dolls: Though we already covered that Marlon Brando cannot sing, Stubby Kaye can and does in the standout “Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat.” But if you’d prefer your musicals with more dream ballets, Fred Zinneman directed the movie version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!

• The Night of the Hunter: A thriller best known for the Robert Mitchum character who has “love” and “hate” tattooed across his knuckles.

Clearly foreshadowing the modern rage for finger tattoos.

• Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy, about a poor Bengali village, began with the film Pather Panchali. Notably, Ravi Shankar did its music. 

• We’ve touched on these films before, so recall that 1955 had Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief, James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause, and Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch.

Trivia Questions

The quiz below serves as a refresher for some of the material covered in the five articles on 1955. The answers can be found in the footnotes.

1. This man was the screenwriter for Marty, The Hospital (1971), and Network (1976).¹

2. This prize, known as the “Nobel of Architecture,” is named for that family that founded Hyatt.²

3. He’s the author who created PI Mike Hammer, protagonist of novels like “I, the Jury,” “Kiss Me, Deadly,” and “My Gun is Quick.”³

4. This is a psychological condition where one pretends to be ill so that they receive care and attention.⁴

5. This man wrote the lyrics to “My Way,” Frank Sinatra’s signature song.⁵

6. “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” a profile of Sinatra that’s considered a seminal work of New Journalism, was written by this man.⁶

7. Anne Francis starred alongside Leslie Nielsen in this 1956 film, a sci-fi classic based on “The Tempest.”⁷

8. This island that guards the entrance to Manila Bay fell soon after the Battle of Bataan ended.⁸

9. This is the second-largest island in the Philippines (after Luzon).⁹

10. Doris Day sang this Oscar-winning song in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much.¹⁰

11. In Yankee Doodle Dandy, James Cagney won an Oscar for portraying this composer.¹¹

12. This woman, famous for singing “God Bless America,” had two nicknames: “First Lady of Radio” and “the Songbird of the South.”¹²

13. Vincent Massey was the first native-born holder of this position, the representative of the British monarch in Canada.¹³

14. Towards the end of John Steinbeck’s life, he wrote about his travels accompanied by a poodle with this name.¹⁴

15. Similar to Uncle Sam, this character represents England, first appearing in the 1712 satirical pamphlet “Law is a Bottomless-Pit.”¹⁵

On to 1956! What can King Mongkut teach us about epistemology? Why’d Vincent van Gogh cut his ear off? And can James Dean redeem himself by cosplaying as a rich Texan?

1. Paddy Chayefsky 

2. The Pritzker Prize

3. Mickey Spillane

4. Munchausen syndrome

5. Paul Anka

6. Gay Talese

7. Forbidden Planet

8. Corregidor

9. Mindanao

10. “Que Sera, Sera”

11. George M. Cohan

12. Kate Smith 

13. Governor general

14. Charley

15. John Bull