1962 The Year in Movies

The Oscars are notoriously wrong in hindsight. Studio politics, aesthetic trends, and cultural ephemera often trumped an honest objective assessment of any given year’s crop of pictures, and let’s not forget that the whole thing was devised as a PR stunt by MGM’s boss, Louis B. Mayer.

Here I submit my own version of what “should have been” for the year 1962. 

(Why 1962? To quote John Belushi: “Why not?!”)  

Note that since I am writing the rules here, there is no restriction to five nominees per category.  This is especially relevant for supporting roles – there are so many good roles in a given year, sometimes several within a certain picture – that it really seems a disservice to slight the great character actors of history.

1962 was a great year for dramas, especially for strong male performances in adventure settings. What a crop of actors– the cast of Advise and Consent and The Longest Day alone represent most of the great actors of the golden era. Add in the other movies: Lancaster, Brando, O’Toole, Duvall, Sinatra…what a crop.  

John Frankenheimer and Otto Preminger took the lead in the short-lived era of taut yet cynical political thrillers with The Manchurian Candidate and Advise and Consent. It seems no coincidence that they stood side by side with two of the greatest looks at lost American innocence, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and To Kill a Mockingbird, as the US felt the cold war and civil rights movements heating up.  We were no longer the young dogfaces storming Normandy alongside the bold leaders of The Longest Day, but had we really let those leaders evolve into the cynical schemers who walk the halls of Congress in Advise and Consent?  Were we Tom Donaphan, watching the west disappear under the veneer of civilization, or Scout Finch, seeing that there were heroes everywhere if we are just willing to recognize them? 

Were we still agents of our own destiny adventurers like Lawrence of Arabia (yes, I know he’s English), or the Birdman of Alcatraz, for whom every day was an opportunity for learning and growing? Or were there sinister forces at play behind the scenes, calling the shots, as The Manchurian Candidate and Dr. No would have it?

I think of attorney Atticus Finch reluctantly letting his children see that he is a crack shot with a rifle as being a direct heir to attorney Ransom Stoddard reluctantly picking up a gun to stop Liberty Valance.  America in 1962 was at a reckoning, where it had to acknowledge that the idealism of law books must sometimes be protected with the reality of force, that liberty and protection must somehow always be jostling for position, but that at root we are a good people. 

The women’s roles, though fewer, also leaned to the dramatic: no screwball comedies or light-hearted musicals here: Ann Bancroft and Gene Tierney play two of the toughest characters you’ll ever meet, but I’m sure that Mary Badham’s Scout could lick ’em both.  Between Angela Lansbury and Thelma Ritter, domineering Oedipal mothers will never be the same.

But wait– there is a light-hearted musical in the mix, one of the great musicals of all time: The Music man.  This is the exception that proves the rule.  Shirley Jones is charming, and Robert Preston is a lovable roué, but even from sixty years’ hindsight the movie seems anachronistic, a last gasp of a genre whose time has passed. In keeping with the theme, one more wistful look back at past happy times.

Now onto the movies…