ICYMI: the five films nominated for Best Actor Oscars in 1957 were The Bridge on the River Kwai, Witness for the Prosecution, Sayonara, A Hatful of Rain, and Wild Is the Wind. The links provide the trivia write-ups on those films while this post discusses what else was happening in the movies that year.
1957 Best Picture winner and highest grossing film: The Bridge on the River Kwai. This was the year of Bridge, with its big box office gross and seven Oscar wins (including trophies for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor). Well deserved! Though Bridge had the most wins, Sayonara had the most nominations (ten) and took home four statues, including Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress.
Best Actress Oscar race: Joanne Woodward won for The Three Faces of Eve. It’s basically “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” played straight: Eve White is the mild-mannered housewife and Eve Black is her wild side that comes out at night. They’re collapsed into the well-adjusted “Jane” (the third face of Eve) at the end of the film. We haven’t discussed Woodward yet, but she was married to Paul Newman for over 50 years and was a big star in her own right. We’ll see her in a film in [checks notes]—1993? Damn, good longevity from Joanne.
Beyond Woodward, the other nominees were Anna Magnani (who we saw in Wild Is the Wind) and three column mainstays: Liz Taylor (for Raintree County), Deborah Kerr (Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison) and Lana Turner (Peyton Place).
Peyton Place is noteworthy: it was based on a Grace Metalious novel about a seemingly-respectable New England town (the titular, fictional Peyton Place) where scandal lurks behind every closed door. The term “Peyton Place” is still used to represent a town like that. The film’s ensemble cast received a record five acting Oscar nominations, though it shares that record with eight other movies. (Which eight is left as an exercise for the reader, or for anyone who wants to click through to this Reddit thread.)
Relitigating the Best Actor race: give Alec Guinness all your flowers. But besides him and Brando, it wasn’t a memorable year for leading men—and, by that, I mean “I couldn’t even remember who was nominated from A Hatful of Rain.” (It was Anthony Franciosa, probably.)
Quick Hits
Twelve Angry Men marked the first directorial effort from Sidney Lumet. Henry Fonda played Juror 8, the lone dissenting voice in a jury room that’s debating whether an 18-year-old boy killed his father.
The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. What, was this Ingmar Bergman’s annus mirabilis?
Remember the part in 1993’s Sleepless in Seattle where Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan agree to meet at the top of the Empire State Building? That’s a conceit from An Affair to Remember. The meeting goes worse in Affair, though: Deborah Kerr’s character is hit by a car and can’t rendezvous with Cary Grant.
Plan 9 from Outer Space, considered by some to be the worst film ever made and by others to be so bad it’s good. You gotta know its director, Ed Wood, and that horror movie star Bela Lugosi was in it. The making of Plan 9 was covered in the 1994 film Ed Wood, with Johnny Depp as Wood and Martin Landau as Lugosi.
Quicker hits: Akira Kurosawa’s film “Throne of Blood,” based on “Macbeth”…Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis in Sweet Smell of Success…Glenn Ford in the original 3:10 to Yuma, based on an Elmore Leonard short story…Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, about a waifish prostitute…Marilyn Monroe and Laurence Olivier in The Prince and the Showgirl…Billy Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon, with Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, and Maurice Chevalier…the musical The Pajama Game, starring Doris Day and based on the novel “7 ½ Cents”…Silk Stockings, with Fred Astaire & Cyd Charisse, which was a remake of the 1939 Greta Garbo comedy “Ninotchka.”
Trivia Questions
The quiz below serves as a refresher for some of the material covered in the five posts on 1957 films. The answers can be found in the footnotes.
Pellagra, a disease characterized by the “3 Ds”—diarrhea, dermatitis, and dementia—is caused by a deficiency of this vitamin.1
Malaria is spread by this mosquito, whose name comes from the Greek for “not benefit” or “useless.”2
This French author wrote the novels with the English names “The Bridge Over the River Kwai” and “Planet of the Apes.”3
Agatha Christie’s murder mystery play with this name has been performed in London for 71 years.4
This author wrote “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” memorializing a futile British cavalry charge during the Crimean War.5
This term for the outer courtyard of a castle has been applied to an old court in England.6
This author wrote “Tales of the South Pacific” and “Sayonara.”7
This is a Japanese word used to designate second-generation Japanese-Americans.8
This traditional Japanese puppet theater involves large puppets manipulated by puppeteers who are visible to the audience.9
This man scored eight Alfred Hitchcock movies, including Psycho (1960) and Vertigo (1958).10
These two cards (number and suit both needed) make up a pinochle in the game pinochle.11
This was a network of spies active during the Revolutionary War, organized by Major Benjamin Tallmadge and General George Washington in 1778.12
He was the director of the Italian Neorealist film Rome, Open City (1945), which starred Anna Magnani.13
Commonly called wool fat, this substance obtained from the greasy coating on wool is used in cosmetics.14
This is the name for the spool that holds the bottom thread on a sewing machine.15
On to 1958, a year of acting. A film about a guy in a boat by himself; a film about two guys chained together on the run; a film about three guys in a house yelling at each other. Maybe, uh, a little too much acting.
B3 (niacin)
Anopheles
Pierre Boulle
“The Mousetrap”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Old Bailey
James Michener
Nisei
Bunraku
Bernard Herrmann
Jack of diamonds and queen of spades
The Culper Ring
Roberto Rossellini
Lanolin
Bobbin