Your Favourite Performances from 1929 to present are...

[Bogie56]

Here are Danny Peary’s Alternate Oscar choices for 1963.  Winners in bold.  

 

Best Actor

Jerry Lewis, The Nutty Professor*

Rex Harrison, Cleopatra

 

Best Actress

Leslie Caron, The L-Shaped Room* (62)

Shirley MacLaine, Irma la Douce

Patricia Neal, Hud

 

 

And here are Michael Gerbert’s Golden Armchair choices for 1963:

 

Best Actor

Jerry Lewis, The Nutty Professor*

 

Best Actress

Ethel Merman, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World*

[Bogie56]

The Golden Globe Awards for 1963 were …

 

Best Actor in a Drama

Sidney Poitier, Lilies of the Field*

Stathis Giallelis, America, America

Gregory Peck, Captain Newman, M.D.

Tom Tyron, The Cardinal

Rex Harrison, Cleopatra

Paul Newman, Hud

Steve McQueen, Love With the Proper Stranger

Marlon Brando, The Ugly American

 

Best Actress in a Drama

Leslie Caron, The L-Shaped Room* (62)

Romy Schneider, The Cardinal

Polly Bergen, The Caretakers

Alida Valli, El Hombre de Papel

Natalie Wood, Love With the Proper Stranger

Marina Vlady, The Conjugal Bed

Geraldine Page, Toys in the Attic

Rachel Roberts, This Sporting Life

 

Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical

Alberto Sordi, Il Diavolo*

Cary Grant, Charade

Frank Sinatra, Come Blow Your Horn

Jack Lemmon, Irma La Douce

Jonathan Winters, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

Terry-Thomas, The Mouse on the Moon

Albert Finney, Tom Jones

Jack Lemmon, Under the Yum Yum Tree

James Garner, The Wheeler Dealers

 

Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical

Shirley MacLaine, Irma La Douce*

Ann-Margret, Bye Bye Birdie

Audrey Hepburn, Charade

Molly Picon, Come Blow Your Horn

Jill St. John, Come Blow Your Horn

Doris Day, Move Over Darling

Joanne Woodward, A New Kind of Love

Hayley Mills, Summer Magic

 

Best Supporting Actor

John Huston, The Cardinal*

Paul Mann, America, America

Gregory Rozakis, America, America

Bobby Darin, Captain Newman, M.D.

Roddy McDowall, Cleopatra

Lee J. Cobb, Come Blow Your Horn

Melvyn Douglas, Hud

Hugh Griffith, Tom Jones

 

Best Supporting Actress

Margaret Rutherford, The V.I.P.’s*

Linda Marsh, America, America

Lilo Pulver, A Global Affair (64)

Patrica Neal, Hud

Lilia Skala, Lilies of the Field

Diane Baker, The Prize

Joan Greenwood, Tom Jones

Wendy Hiller, Toys In the Attic

[Kay]

1963 - This is another one of my most anticipated years. Choosing between the top two Leading Actors was one of the hardest decisions I've made so far; yet there was only one way to go, really.

 

Arch Hall, Jr. may not be a great actor; possibly not even a good one, I don't know, but somehow or another he produced one of the most effective and truly frightening psychopathic performances I've seen when he played the killer in The Sadist. It's a surreal character, even laughably over-the-top most of the time, but still I had this sinking feeling that this was a real person; unfathomable, but real. His performance is so cartoonish that it might be accused of being unbelievable, but I found it entirely too believable. It's because you want to think he can't exist; but he does- that's what makes him such a nightmare, (even when I'm laughing.)

 

 

Later I learned that this film was loosely based on the same real story that was dramatized in the film Badlands (1973), to totally different effect. After seeing some photos and listening to some audio recordings I got the impression that Arch Hall, Jr. captured the character astonishingly well, (whether or not it's closer to reality is another matter.)

 

Actor

 

Arch Hall, Jr. - The Sadist*****
Erol Tas - Dry Summer
Peter Lorre - The Raven

Donald Pleasence - The Caretaker

Boris Karloff - Black Sabbath
Peter Sellers - The Pink Panther

Lionel Jeffries - The Wrong Arm of the Law

Ray Milland - X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes

Vincent Price - The Comedy of Terrors

Kirk Douglas - The Hook

 

Actress

 

Julie Harris - The Haunting***

Hulya Kocyigit - Dry Summer

 

Supporting Actor

Tsutomu Yamazaki - High and Low***

Basil Rathbone - The Comedy of Terrors

Boris Karloff - The Comedy of Terrors

Hugh Edwards - Lord of the Flies (juvenile)
Dick Shawn - It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

Walter Matthau - Charade

Nehemiah Persoff - The Hook

 

Supporting Actress

 

I'm sorry to say that I wasn't able to come up with anyone for this category...

 

...so it will have to go to Ethel Merman in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

[Bogie56]

The 1963 Berlin International Film Festival winners were…

 

Best Actor

Sidney Poitier, Lilies of the Field

 

Best Actress

Bibi Andersson, The Swedish Mistress (62)

 

——————————————————————————————

 

The 1963 Cannes Film Festival winners were…

 

Best Actor

Richard Harris, This Sporting Life

 

Best Actress

Marina Vlady, The Conjugal Bed

 

—————————————————————————————

 

The 1963 Venice Film Festival winners were:

 

Best Actor

Albert Finney, Tom Jones

 

Best Actress

Delphine Seyrig, Muriel

[Bogie56]

The 1963 San Sebastian Film Festival winners were…

 

Best Actor

Jack Lemmon, Days of Wine and Roses (62)

 

Best Actress

Lee Remick, Days of Wine and Roses (62)

 

——————————————————————————————

 

The 1963 Moscow International Film Festival winners were …

 

Best Actor

Steve McQueen, The Great Escape

 

Best Actress

Suchitra Sen, Marriage Circle (61)

[kingrat]

Interesting to see that the Golden Globes also gave a supporting actor nomination to Gregory Rozakis for America America. Rozakis plays the young Armenian who lives up to the Biblical saying, "Greater love hath no man than he lay down his life for a friend." This did not lead to a big career for Rozakis, and the date of his early death suggests that he died of AIDS.

 

Unlike most of Kazan's other films, America America depends more on direction and cinematography (by Haskell Wexler) than on performances. This is a film I would like to see on the big screen. I would guess that the lack of financial success on release was mostly due to a general lack of interest at the time in the subject of immigration.

 

For those of you who have not seen The Fire Within (Le feu follet), this is my favorite Louis Malle film, though not recommended for anyone in a depressed mood. Maurice Ronet plays a young man who, after drying out in an alcohol rehab facility, visits his friends and acquaintances in an attempt to find something worth living for.

[Bogie56]

I actually picked out about half a dozen of the supporting performances in America, America for my choices.  Most of them were actors that are not that well known like Paul Mann, Salem Ludwig, Katherine Balfour, Linda Marsh and Lou Antonio.  And John Marley, of course.

[Swithin]

I met Stathis Giallelis, the star of America America, about ten years ago. He became a teacher and lived, with his wife, in Greenwich Village, NYC (I think they still live there). Lovely couple.

[Bogie56]

Here are some performances from 1963 that will be recognized in subsequent years …

 

Dirk Bogarde will be nominated for the NY Film Critics Best Actor Award in 1964 for The Servant (1963).

 

Peter Sellers will be nominated for the BAFTA Best Actor Award in 1964 for The Pink Panther (1963) and Dr. Strangelove (1964).

 

Cary Grant will be nominated for the BAFTA Best Foreign Actor Award in 1964 for Charade (1963).  That’s right, “Foreign Actor.”  He somehow made it into this category despite other ex-pats such as Audrey Hepburn (for the same film and who was born in Belgium) and Elizabeth Taylor being dubbed British!

 

Sidney Poitier will be nominated for the BAFTA Best Foreign Actor Award in 1964 for Lilies of the Field (1963).

 

Audrey Hepburn will be nominated for the BAFTA Best Actress Award in 1964 for Charade (1963).

 

Sachiko Hidari will win the 1964 Berlin Film Festival Best Actress Award for both He and She (1963) and The Insect Woman (1963).

 

Marcello Mastroianni will win Italy’s David di Donatello Best Actor Award and be nominated for the BAFTA Best Foreign Actor Award in 1964 for Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963). 

 

Sophia Loren will win Italy’s David di Donatello Best Actress Award in 1964 for Yesterday Today and Tomorrow (1963).

 

Shirley MacLaine will win Italy’s David di Donatello Best Foreign Actress Award and be nominated for the BAFTA Best Foreign Actress Award in 1964 for Irma la Douce (1963).

[skimpole]

 

One of my favorite movies, and certainly one of my favorite movies about history is The Leopard.  Among its many. many, virtues is its profound picture of history.  Its portrait of unification Sicily unsentimental and profound, in striking contrast to Gone With the Wind and Gangs of New York which both take place at roughly the same time.  But crucial to its success is Lancaster's remarkable performance.  And here I turn over to Roger Ebert's review:

 

"The Leopard" was written by the only man who could have written it, directed by the only man who could have directed it, and stars the only man who could have played its title character. The first of these claims is irrefutable, because Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, a Sicilian aristocrat, wrote the story out of his own heart and based it on his great-grandfather. Whether another director could have done a better job than Luchino Visconti is doubtful; the director was himself a descendant of the ruling class that the story eulogizes. But that Burt Lancaster was the correct actor to play Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, was at the time much doubted; that a Hollywood star had been imported to grace this most European--indeed, Italian--indeed, Sicilian--masterpiece was a scandal.

 

It was rumored that Lancaster's presence was needed to make the epic production bankable. And when the film finally opened in America, in a version with 40 minutes ruthlessly hacked out by the studio, and with a soundtrack unconvincingly dubbed into English, it was hard to see what Visconti and Lancaster had been thinking of. "Unfortunately Mr. Lancaster does have that blunt American voice that lacks the least suggestion of being Sicilian," wrote Bosley Crowther in the New York Times. Visconti himself was blunt: "It is now a work for which I acknowledge no paternity at all," he said, adding that Hollywood treated Americans "like a public of children."

 

"It was my best work," Lancaster himself told me sadly, more than 20 years later. "I bought 11 copies of The Leopard because I thought it was a great novel. I gave it to everyone. But when I was asked to play in it, I said, no, that part's for a real Italian. But, lo, the wheels of fortune turned. They wanted a Russian, but he was too old. [According to one account, it was Nikolai Chersakov, star of Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, but he was too drunk.] They wanted Olivier, but he was too busy. When I was suggested, Visconti said, 'Oh, no! A cowboy!' But I had just finished 'Judgment at Nuremberg,' which he saw, and he needed $3 million, which 20th Century-Fox would give them if they used an American star, and so the inevitable occurred. And it turned out to be a wonderful marriage."

 

 

 

 

 

When we talked, the original film--uncut, undubbed--had scarcely been seen since the time of its European release in 1963. But in 1980, four years after Visconti's death, the cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno supervised a restoration; at 185 minutes his version is still shorter than the original 205 minutes, but it is the best we are ever likely to see, and it is magnificent.

 

What's clear at last is that Lancaster was an inspired casting decision. An actor who always brought a certain formality to his work, who made his own way as an independent before that was fashionable, he embodies the prince as a man who has a great love for a way of life he understands must come to an end. He is a natural patriarch, a man born to have authority. Yet as we meet him, he is aware of his age and mortality, inclined to have spiritual conversations with his friend Father Pirrone, and prepared to compromise in order to preserve his family's fortunes.

 

We see him first leading his family at prayer. That is also the way Lampedusa's novel begins, and one of Visconti's achievements is to make that rare thing, a great film of a great book. Word comes that there is a dead soldier in the garden. This means that Garibaldi's revolution has jumped from the mainland to Sicily, and the days of the ancient order are numbered.

 

The prince has a wife named Maria Stella, who he dutifully honors more for her position than her person, three daughters of only moderate loveliness and a feckless son. He looks to his nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon) to embody the family's noble genes. Tancredi is a hothead who leaves to join Garibaldi, but a realist who returns as a member of the army of the victorious Victor Emmanuel.

 

 

Because of land reforms that he can clearly see on the horizon, the prince believes it is time for the family to make an advantageous marriage. He moves every year with his household from the city to the countryside to wait out the slow, hot summer months, and in the town of Donnafugata, he is welcomed as usual by the mayor, a buffoon named Don Calogero (Paolo Stoppa). This mayor has suddenly become rich through lucky land investments, and feels that wealth has given him importance, an illusion that the prince is willing to indulge, if it can lead to a liaison between the mayor's money and the prince's family.

 

He invites the mayor to dinner, in a scene of subdued social comedy in which Visconti observes, without making too much of a point of it, how gauche the mayor is and how pained the prince is to have to give dinner to such a man. The mayor has brought with him not his unpresentable wife but his beautiful daughter Angelica, played by Claudia Cardinale at the height of her extraordinary beauty. Tancredi is moonstruck, and the prince swallows his misgivings as arrangements are made to go ahead with the marriage.

 

All of this would be the stuff of soap opera in other hands, but Lampedusa's novel sees the prince so sympathetically that we share his regrets for a fading way of life. We might believe ideologically that the aristocracy exploits the working class (Visconti was a Marxist who believed just that), but the prince himself is such a proud and good man, so aware of his mortality, so respectful of tradition and continuity, that as he compromises his family in order to save it, we share his remorse.

 

There is another factor at work. The prince is an alpha male, born to conquer, aware of female beauty if also obedient to the morality of his church. He finds Angelica as attractive as his nephew does. But Visconti doesn't communicate this with soulful speeches or whispered insinuations; he directs his actors to do this all with eyes, and the attitude of a head, and those subtle adjustments in body language that suggest the desired person exerts a kind of animal magnetism that must be resisted. Observe how Lancaster has the prince almost lean away from Angelica, as if in response to her pull. He is too old at 45 (which was old in the 1860s) and too traditional to reveal his feelings, but a woman can always tell, even though she must seem as if she cannot.

 

 

The film ends with a ballroom sequence lasting 45 minutes. "This is a set piece that has rarely been equaled," writes the critic Derek Malcolm, and critic Dave Kehr called it "one of the most moving meditations on individual mortality in the history of the cinema." Visconti, Lancaster and Rotunno collaborate to resolve all of the themes of the movie in this long sequence in which almost none of the dialogue involves what is really happening. The ball is a last glorious celebration of the dying age; Visconti cast members of noble old Sicilian families as the guests, and in their faces, we see a history that cannot be acted, only embodied. The orchestra plays Verdi. The young people dance on and on, and the older people watch carefully and gauge the futures market in romances and liaisons.

 

Through this gaiety the prince moves like a shadow. The camera follows him from room to room, suggesting his thoughts, his desires, his sadness. Visconti is confident that Lancaster can suggest all of the shadings of the prince's feelings, and extends the scene until we are drawn fully into it. He creates one of those sequences for which we go to the movies: We have grown to know the prince's personality and his ideas, and now we enter, almost unaware, into his emotions. The cinema at its best can give us the illusion of living another life, and that's what happens here.

 

Finally the prince dances with Angelica. Watch them as they dance, each aware of the other in a way simultaneously sexual and political. Watch how they hold their heads. How they look without seeing. How they are seen, and know they are seen. And sense that, for the prince, his dance is an acknowledgment of mortality. He could have had this woman, would have known what to do with her, would have made her his wife and the mother of his children and heard her cries of passion, if not for the accident of 25 years or so that slipped in between them. But he knows that, and she knows that. And yet of course if they were the same age, he would not have married her, because he is Prince Don Fabrizio and she is the mayor's daughter. That Visconti is able to convey all of that in a ballroom scene is miraculous and emotionally devastating, and it is what his movie is about.

[Bogie56]

Italy’s Nastro d’Argento Film Awards for 1963 were …

 

Best Actor

Ugo Tognazzi, The Conjugal Bed

 

Best Actress

Silvana Mangano, The Verona Trial

 

Best Supporting Actor

Folco Lulli, The Organizer

 

Best Supporting Actress

Sandra Milo, 8 1/2

 

——————————————————————————————

 

Italy’s David di Donatello Awards for 1963 were …

 

Best Actor

Vittorio Gassman, Il Sorpasso (62)

 

Best Foreign Actor

Gregory Peck, To Kill a Mockingbird (62)

 

Best Actress’

Silvana Mangano, The Verona Trial

Gina Lollobrigida, Imperial Venus (62)

 

Best Foreign Actress

 

Geraldine Page, Sweet Bird of Youth (62)

[Bogie56]

Best Supporting Actor of 1963

 

MARIO PISU (Mario Mezzabotta), 8 1/2

 

Low down in the list of my runner ups for supporting actor is Mario Pisu from 8 1/2.  I caught a restored version of the film in London's BFI big theatre a few years ago.  I was amazed at its frantic pace.  Pisu plays a fellow director who is a ladies man and has a mistress.  Not that I have any factual reason to back it up, but I wondered if Fellini was having a little joke about Vittorio De Sica.

[Bogie56]

Sweden’s Guldbagge Awards began in 1963.  Here are their acting choices for that year …

 

Best Actor

Keve Hjelm, Raven’s End

 

Best Actress

Ingrid Thulin, The Silence

 

[skimpole]

James Quandt on the Criterion edition of Muriel:

 

Designated merely as “he” and “she” in Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and A, X, and M in Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Alain Resnais’s characters finally assume names in his third feature, Muriel, or The Time of Return (1963), whose very title tellingly exchanges a place for a person. That the eponymous woman remains unseen in the film, conjured only by a recounted memory, suggests that the filmmaker’s inclination to enigma and abstraction—often too simply attributed to the scripts by Marguerite Duras (Hiroshima) and Alain Robbe-Grillet (Marienbad) in the previous two films—continues in Muriel. But what Resnais himself called the “dreamlike” aura of Marienbad is here replaced by a new tactility, a much vaunted materialism that can be ascribed to both his intensified political resolve, which had caused conflicts with Robbe-Grillet, and to the documentarist tendencies of Muriel’s scenarist, Jean Cayrol. This precision is immediately evident in the opening volley of shots, which inventories, in over twenty lightning-quick jump cuts, a gloved hand, a teakettle, a chandelier, a tapestry, a cigarette, a clock. Ironically, this catalog reflects vestiges of the chosisme, or “thingness,” that Robbe-Grillet developed in his novels, in which inanimate objects sometimes predominate over plot, setting, and character, and protagonists are defined by the items they own. In which case, antiques dealer Hélène, played with restive intensity by Delphine Seyrig, is by nature precarious, as everything she possesses is for sale; even the china on which she serves dinner has been sold. Her future has been mortgaged, and her past increasingly recedes into uncertainty. “Can’t we be done with the past?” Hélène cries in exasperation, but the time-trapped characters in Muriel, forever announcing their imminent departure but staying on in a kind of willed immobility, can never elude their histories, even as they fabricate new ones (Hélène’s old lover, Alphonse), conceal them with bidden amnesia (Hélène), or attempt to expiate them with violence (her stepson, Bernard).

 

....Little is secure or fixed in Muriel, certainly not Hélène’s existence, prone as she is to compulsive gambling and escalating anxiety, or Alphonse’s histoire, finally revealed, as the double meaning of that word indicates, as fiction. (The duplicitous roué checks the newspaper like a hunted criminal in a mystery, which Muriel unquestionably is, replete with many homages to Hitchcock.) As Alphonse, who lies even when he is alone, describes his exclusive club in Algiers, Resnais captures the glances that ricochet around the quartet of characters—Alphonse’s shifty, Hélène’s vague, Françoise’s piercing, Bernard’s absent—their looks concatenated by the latter’s slow crunching of potato chips on the soundtrack.

 

....Hélène’s grasp of that history is tenuous, personal, banal. She associates Folkestone with a hotel in which she and Alphonse once stayed, cannot remember if the number of Boulogne inhabitants killed in World War II was 200 or 3,000, and later confides that a local chef has been deported and that if he had died, his seafood recipe would have been lost forever. Her vagueness seems a matter not of mere imprecision but of intentional disregard: “My memory’s so awful. I forget everything!” she exclaims, cultivating her own absentmindedness. The film’s relics and ruins emphasize its interleaved themes of memory and reconstruction: as did A and X before them, Hélène and Alphonse attempt to reconstitute their past together; Boulogne rebuilds after the war; Bernard revives the story of Muriel’s torture despite his fellow soldier Robert’s admonition to quell it.

 

....The temps d’un retour, as Alphonse returns to Hélène (and Muriel returns to reality in Bernard’s telling), becomes a temps d’un départ at film’s end, as the characters flee, decamp, and scatter—save for Hélène, who runs dazedly through the streets, arriving too late at the now disused train station. “Ça change,” the stationmaster comments, but for all her frenzied motion, Hélène remains entombed by the past, unable to change or escape. The film’s finale, which answers the initial montage with a Resnaisian tracking shot that explores Hélène’s apartment with a spatial continuity that the splintering jump cuts strenuously denied, introduces another arrival, that of Simone, who navigates the nest of portals, dramatically throwing open doors as if to disclose the untoward, but finding only detritus.

 

Another of the film’s twice-told tales concerns Hélène’s and Bernard’s shared but contrary recall of a bombing during the war that left a hole in the roof through which rain (her version) or snow (his) fell. What they most remember is the white ash left by the fire. Just as Hélène’s tormented “Do I look my age?” recalls Emmanuelle Riva’s cri de coeur “I was so young once!” in Hiroshima mon amour, the ash evokes the glimmering cinders that settle on intertwined flesh in Hiroshima’s opening images. In Muriel, the incinerated remains become for the forgetful Hélène and the obsessively remembering Bernard nothing less than the ashes of time.

[Bogie56]

Japan’s Blue Ribbon Awards for 1963 were …

 

Best Actor

Kinnosuke Nakamura, Bushido Samurai Saga

 

Best Actress

Sachiko Hidari, The Insect Woman and She and He

 

Best Supporting Actor

Ychoichiro Kawarasaki, Gobancho Yugiriro

 

Best Supporting Actress

Yoko Minamida, Samurai no ko

 

—————————————————————————————

 

Japan’s Mainichi Awards for 1963 were …

 

Best Actor

Keiju Kobayashi, The Elegant Life of Mr. Everyman

 

Best Actress

Sachiko Hidari, The Insect Woman and She and He

 

Best Supporting Actor

Hiroyuki Nagato, Twin Sisters fo Kyoto

 

Best Supporting Actress

Tamao Nakamura, Bamboo Doll of Echizen

[LawrenceA]

Here are the movies of 1963 that I have not seen (****denotes those I have recorded):

 

An Actor's Revenge

All the Way Home

Amanita Pestilens

Bamboo Doll of Echizen

Bay of Angels

The Big City

Bushido Samurai Saga

The Caretakers

The Ceremony

Come Blow Your Horn****

The Conjugal Bed

The Courtship of Eddie's Father

Critic's Choice

Dry Summer

El Hombre de Papel

The Elegant Life of Mr. Everyman

The Executioner

The Fire Within

Gobancho Yugiriro

The Guest/The Caretaker

He and She

Heavens Above

Il Diavolo

In the French Style

The Incredible Journey

The Insect Woman

Lord of the Flies****

Mary, Mary

The Mouse On the Moon

Move Over, Darling****

Murder at the Gallop

Muriel
The Organizer

Raven's End

Samurai no ko

Son of Flubber

Sparrows Can't Sing

Summer Magic

The Thrill of It All****

Toys In the Attic****

Twin Sisters of Kyoto

Under the Yum Yum Tree****

The Verona Trial

Vidas Secas

The Wheeler Dealers

The Wrong Arm of the Law

[LawrenceA]

While compiling that list, I came upon the information that Dr. Crippen is a 1963 film, and not a 1964 film like I believed. Therefore, I'll mention that I intended to nominate

 

Donald Pleasence in Dr. Crippen for Best Actor.

[Bogie56]

Here are the movies of 1963 that I have not seen (****denotes those I have recorded):

 

Amanita Pestilens

Bay of Angels

The Caretakers

The Ceremony

The Courtship of Eddie's Father

Heavens Above

The Incredible Journey

Lord of the Flies****

The Mouse On the Moon

Move Over, Darling****

Murder at the Gallop

Muriel

The Organizer

Son of Flubber

The Thrill of It All****

The Wrong Arm of the Law

 

Amanita Pestilens is a French Canadian film shot in English and features Genevieve Bujold's film debut.  It is the tale of a suburban man obsessed with his award-worthy lawn and the subsequent infestation of weeds.  It is quite funny.  I made the mistake of not keeping a (vhs) television recording of it for it is now almost impossible to find.  After lobbying Toronto's Cinematheque, now TIFF to screen a film print I received an email from the programmer two years ago proudly saying that he had found it and it was on the schedule.  Fate had it that I was out of the country when they screened it.  It was made by Crawley films, an Ottawa based film company that was at one time the largest independent film production unit in the world, specializing mostly in industrials.  More on Crawley Films in 1964.

Peter Brook's Lord of the Flies is really quite good.

[Bogie56]

Here are the films from 1963 that were mentioned that I have not seen as yet. 

 

An Actor’s Revenge with Kuzuo Hasegawa

Barren Lives/Vidas Secas with Maria Riberio

The Big City with Anil Chatterjee and Madhabi Mukerjee

Black Sabbath with Boris Karloff

Blood Feast with Mal Arnold

Bushido Samurai Saga with Kinnosuke Nakamura

Come Blow your Horn with Frank Sinatra, Molly Picon, Lee J. Cobb and Jill St. John

The Conjugal Bed with Marina Vlady and Ugo Tognazzi

Dr. Crippen with Donald Pleasence

Dry Summer with Erol Tas and Hulya Kocyigit

El Hombre de Papel with Alida Valli

The Elegant Life of Mr. Everyman with Keiju Kobayashi

The Executioner with Nino Manfredi

The Fire Within with Maurice Ronet

Gobancho Yugiriro with Choichiro Kawarasaki

The Hook with Kirk Douglas and Nehemiah Persoff

Il Diavolo with Alberto Sordi

In the French Style with Jean Seberg

The Insect Woman with Sachiko Hidari

Kanto Wanderer with Akira Kobayashi

Mary, Mary with Debbie Reynolds

Paranoiac with Oliver Reed

Raven’s End with Keve Hjelm

The Sadist with Archie Hall, Jr.

Samurai no ko with Yoko Minamida

She and He with Sachiko Hidari

Sparrows Can’t Sing with Barbara Windsor

Summer Magic with Hayley Mills

Take Her, She’s Mine with James Stewart, Sandra Dee and Audrey Meadows

Toys In the Attic with Geraldine Page and Wendy Hiller

Twin Sisters of Kyoto with Tamao Nakamura

Under the Yum Yum Tree with Jack Lemmon

The Verona Trial with Silvana Mangano

The Wheeler Dealers with James Garner

 

And I would like to see these again …

 

The Ugly American with Marlon Brando and Eiji Okada

[TomJH]

I've always had an affection for The List of Adrian Messenger, a 1963 thriller directed by John Huston, shot on location in England and Ireland, about the investigation into a list of names of men who are mysteriously dying. The title character (played by John Merivale) asks a friend (George C. Scott) to look up some of the men on the list to see how they are faring. A greater urgency then takes place when Messenger is suddenly killed when the plane he is on is blown out of the sky by a bomb, and a troubled Scott begins his investigation into the list of names more deeply to see if there is a connection.

 

The film is perhaps best remembered for its gimmick, five famous actors appearing in the film in heavily applied (and not particularly convincing) facial disguises. Will the audience be able to identify them? Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Frank Sinatra and Robert Mitchum are the five stars. Some will be easily spotted (particularly Mitchum), while others are a definite challenge. Sinatra is so unrecognizable that there were rumours that it was not actually him underneath the disguise.

 

 

But it's the intriguing qualities of the mystery itself that most draws my attention here. This is not a film of fast action and explosions, but of a gradual unraveling of a mystery, much of it through dialogue between the lead characters. Scott is impressive in this respect as he becomes increasingly convinced that there is a diabolical mastermind behind the deaths of the men on Messenger's list. The question is why, and how to save those on the list still living.

 

The story is a little involved, and it may actually take a couple of viewings to understand all aspects of it. It's been a few years since I last saw the film and the plot is now, I admit, a little vague in my memory.

 

The List of Adrian Messenger would be the final film of Clive Brook's career, and close to the last of both Herbert Marshall and Gladys Cooper, all in small supporting roles.

 

Huston stages an effective fox and hounds sequence towards the end, something that I suspect was close to his Irish land baron heart.

 

One of the things that most stays with me about this intriguing thriller is the quirky, at times, unsettling eerie musical score of Jerry Goldsmith, beautifully supplementing the visuals of this mystery. While the director may well have regarded Adrian Messenger as a lightweight minor effort compared to the two films that would sandwich it (Freud, Night of the Iguana), it's well worth a look.

 

[LawrenceA]

 

Black Sabbath with Boris Karloff

Blood Feast with Mal Arnold

Dr. Crippen with Donald Pleasence

The Hook with Kirk Douglas and Nehemiah Persoff

Kanto Wanderer with Akira Kobayashi

Paranoiac with Oliver Reed

The Sadist with Archie Hall, Jr.

Take Her, She’s Mine with James Stewart, Sandra Dee and Audrey Meadows

 

I've seen these, Bogie. Take Her, She's Mine is light-hearted early 60's fluff. Your tolerance for such will dictate your enjoyment. 

 

The Hook is a decent examination of the morality of military orders. Should some young soldiers carry out an order to execute a prisoner when they have moral objections? 

 

Dr. Crippen is a true-crime tale, told in a kitchen-sink style, about a meek doctor that poisons his wife so he can run off with his much younger mistress. Coral Browne and Samantha Eggar are both good as the wife and mistress, respectively, and Pleasence is fine as the murderous doctor.

 

Black Sabbath is an Italian horror anthology from Mario Bava, and has the usual colorful, stylish cinematography of his films. The stand-out story features Karloff as an undead "wurdalak", a vampire/ghoul.

 

Paranoiac is a Hammer thriller. It's not supernatural, but more reminiscent of their earlier, pre-horror offerings. Oliver Reed is good as the spoiled, abusive scion of a wealthy family who's desperate to get his inheritance. 

 

Blood Feast and The Sadist have both been discussed, and your enjoyment will vary depending on how seriously you take them.

 

I guess my pick would be Kanto Wanderer, a yakuza film about a group of high school girls who idolize first one, and then another (rival) young gang member, which escalates hostilities and violence. The plot is convoluted, as in many yakuza movies, but it's rewarding, and again, the cinematography is excellent.

[kingrat]

The List of Adrian Messenger is an entertaining mystery by Philip MacDonald. The movie is kind of fun. On one of his TV specials Bob Hope did a parody called "The Mess of Adrian Listinger."

 

The Organizer is one of the most entertaining films of the year for all who are willing to read subtitles. Marcello Mastroianni plays a professorly type turned union organizer. The nineteenth-century factory feels authentic, though it was re-created. The movie even has that oldest of cliches, the hooker with the heart of gold, and once again it works. The factory owner is cartoonish, but other than that the film makes no wrong moves.

 

 

[Bogie56]

Before we hit 1964 I would like to mention that I am going with the June 1964 Berlin Film Festival release date for The Pawnbroker.  In fact, Steiger won the 1964 Best Actor Award at this festival so it is clearly a 1964 award-worthy film.

The Train is 1964 too.

[Bogie56]

Continuing Lawrence's theme of actors playing directors, one of my selections for supporting actor runner up was Orson Welles, who played Max Buda a Hungarian film producer in The V.I.P.'s.  His fun characterization was no doubt based upon director, producer Alexander Korda.

[Bogie56]

Leading vs. Supporting Categories in 1964 …

 

I think Peter Ustinov rightfully belongs in the lead actor category for Topkapi.  In fact, I kept a record of what he said on TV Ontario’s Elwy Yost show many years ago regarding his Oscar … ”I don’t know who I was supporting.”  Though he probably has the largest role in the film his part was not that of the leader of the gang and Ustinov had long been considered a character actor.