What We Missed: 1956

The rest of Yul's big year.

ICYMI: the four films nominated for Best Actor Oscars in 1956 were Richard III, Lust for Life, Giant (which scored two nominations), and The King and I. The links provide the trivia write-ups on those films while this post discusses what else was happening in the movies that year.

1956 Best Picture winner: Around the World in 80 Days. Based on the Jules Verne novel, AtWi80D starred David Niven as Phileas Fogg (yeah, it’s “Phileas,” don’t mess that up). Fogg’s valet, Passepartout, was played by comedian Cantinflas; Cantinflas was considered the “Charlie Chaplin of Mexico.” If you want an entirely unhelpful introduction to him, watch his appearance on “What’s My Line.”

AtWi80D beat out four other color epics for Best Picture. Those were The King and I, Giant, the Civil War drama Friendly Persuasion, and the year’s highest grossing film...

Highest grossing film: The Ten Commandments. Adjusting for inflation, this is one of the most successful films of all time. Charlton Heston starred as Moses while Yul Brynner made a heel turn as Ramses. The plot is from Exodus so we’ll run it down quick: baby Moses in a basket down the Nile, burning bush, staff into snake, “let my people go,” plagues, the Red Sea parts, Pharaoh’s army gets wet, a golden calf explodes. There, I saved you 220 minutes.

Best Actress Oscar race: Ingrid Bergman won the prize for Anastasia, starring alongside the (very busy) Yul Brynner. Bergman played a woman pretending to be the youngest daughter of murdered czar Nicholas II. She beat out Deborah Kerr (The King and I), as well as Katharine Hepburn (a stalwart here), Carroll Baker, and Nancy Kelly. 

Relitigating the Best Actor race: Laurence Olivier vs. Yul Brynner. Funny hair vs. no hair. Shakespearean English vs. broken English. Ooh, but Yul had to sing? Yeah, he deserved the Oscar. Rock Hudson and Kirk Douglas would have coasted to victory in 1955, but the sledding was much tougher in ‘56. As for James Dean…well, I’m glad we won’t be talking about Dean anymore.

Quick Hits

• John Wayne in The Searchers. John Ford directed this film, considered by many to be the greatest Western ever, in Monument Valley on the border of Arizona and Utah.

  

  That’s a pretty good valley.

• Two boxing movies. One was the Rocky Graziano biopic Somebody Up There Likes Me, starring Paul Newman, who replaced the by-then-dead James Dean. The other was Humphrey Bogart’s last film, The Harder They Fall. 

• Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a horror film where alien seed pods replace people with emotionless duplicates. “Pod people” became slang for conformists, like yesterday’s “sheeple” and today’s “NPCs.” Capgras syndrome is when you think someone you know has been replaced with an identical duplicate.

• And God Created Woman, a Roger Vadim picture starring Brigitte Bardot. It’s about a sexually-liberated eighteen-year-old in St. Tropez and helped pave the way for French New Wave (since it turns out what we wanted in movies were more sexually-liberated eighteen-year-olds).

  

  Jeez.

• The 1956 tea movies: The Teahouse of the August Moon, starring Marlon Brando as a wily Japanese man, and Tea and Sympathy, where adult Deborah Kerr kisses a seventeen-year-old boy like it’s French New Wave.

• The first Elvis movie: Love Me Tender (if you don’t know the song, it’s probably worth a listen, despite it being boring as hell).

• There are some other movies we’ve mentioned in passing from 1956. These include: The Man Who Knew Too Much (Jimmy Stewart, Doris Day, “Que Sera, Sera”); High Society (Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Bing Crosby remake The Philadelphia Story); Forbidden Planet (Leslie Nielsen in a sci-fi adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”); Carousel (the worst Rodgers and Hammerstein musical); and Bus Stop (a Marilyn Monroe drama based on a William Inge play).

Trivia Questions

The quiz below serves as a refresher for some of the material covered in the four articles on 1956. The answers can be found in the footnotes.

1. This famous temperance advocate born in 1846 was nicknamed “The Lady with the Hatchet.”¹

2. In 1901, Texas saw its first big oil strike at this oil field near Beaumont.²

3. A film adaptation of this Edna Ferber work about the Oklahoma land rush was the first Western to win Best Picture.³

4. Rock Hudson was paired with Susan St. James on this San Francisco-set police series.⁴

5. This EGOT winner played Tuptim in The King and I.⁵

6. This director of West Side Story (1961) also did the choreography for The King and I.⁶

7. Since 2005, this has been the capital of Burma.⁷

8. He’s the Nobel-winning author of “The White Man’s Burden.”⁸

9. He’s the author of “Lust for Life” and “The Agony and the Ecstasy.”⁹

10. Vincent van Gogh described this homeopathic doctor as “sicker than I am, I think, or shall we say just as much.”¹⁰

11. The Stanley Kubrick film Paths of Glory (1957) gets its name from the poem “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by this poet.¹¹

12. Kubrick’s insistence that this blacklisted screenwriter receive credit for Spartacus (1960) effectively ended the blacklist.¹²

13. Provide the eight words that complete the quote that starts “Richard III”: “Now is the winter of our discontent / [BLANK]”¹³

14. George, Duke of Clarence is drowned in a butt of this specific wine.¹⁴

15. This is the 1485 battle that ends “Richard III”—you know, where Richard yells “A HORSE! A HORSE! MY KINGDOM FOR A HORSE!”¹⁵

16. The Star of Africa, now in the Sovereign’s Sceptre with Cross, is one of nine large stones cut from this diamond.¹⁶

On to 1957, where we’ll tackle racism, drug addiction, and the best way to build a bridge on the river Kwai.

1. Carrie Nation

2. Spindletop

3. “Cimarron” (1930)

4. McMillan and Wife

5. Rita Moreno

6. Jerome Robbins

7. Naypyidaw (it replaced Yangon, which itself replaced the royal capital of Mandalay)

8. Rudyard Kipling

9. Irving Stone

10. Paul Gachet

11. Thomas Gray (“The paths of glory lead but to the grave”)

12. Dalton Trumbo

13. “Made glorious summer by this son of York”

14. Malmsey wine (a type of madeira)

15. Battle of Bosworth Field

16. Cullinan Diamond