SWC75
Bored Historian
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Jerry Lewis again hosted in something of a manic state. He kept imitating Ed Sullivan, who had gained a lot of bad publicity for doing a poll of of his fans as to whether Ingrid Bergman should be forgiven for her affair with Roberto Rossellini, (she won 2,500 votes to 1,500). The ceremony introduced two trends that continue to this day: long commercials, (for Oldsmobile), and long acceptance speeches, (such as the one by Dorothy Malone for Best Supporting Actress, with Jack Lemmon pointing to his watch in front of her face.
Unlike 1955, when "Marty" won best picture, it was a year of big, long, expensive productions: Mike Todd's "Around the World in 80 Days", Cecil B. DeMille's "The Ten Commandments" and George Stevens' "Giant", a word that defined the year. On fan wrote DeMille "Loving the Bible, the viewing of your ultimate production convinced me more than ever of the high purpose of mankind's creator." The Academy voters were less enthused and vote Todd's film the Best Picture Oscar. Todd thanked them for giving him an Oscar "in my first time at bat". It would also be his last, as he died in a plane crash 360 days later.
Just as enthused as Todd was best actor winner Yul Brynner, whose "whole bald head flushed in deep red", although you can't tell on the black and white TV. In his next film he would be directed by the Best Supporting Actor, Anthony Quinn, ("The Buccaneer" and Jean Lafite). Meanwhile Buddy Adler, the winner of the Irving Thalberg Award, found his Oscar was made of plastic because they'd run out of the bronze ones.
The Academy "welcomed back" Ingrid Bergman by voting her the best actress Oscar. But she wasn't there. She was in Paris and her former, (and future) co-star Cary grant accepted the award for her. Cary never did win an Oscar himself, (the rare Hollywood Icon who didn't), but used the occasion to get as much camera time as he good, going on and on about how much affection everyone there had for Ingrid. He seemed to be trying to win it for himself. But not everyone was pleased. One editorial said "She is still Ingrid Bergman, the woman who forgot her moral obligation to her family and her public...They have a strange code of morals in Hollywood."
Hollywood did have political standards and their application helped turn the writing awards into a fiasco. One nominated film, "Friendly Persuasion" , had a screenplay written by the blacklisted Michael Wilson. The Academy passed a rule that no one who refused to testify before a Congressional Committee could win an Oscar. They forgot to tell anybody before the nominations came out and, when Wilson was nominated, they allowed his screen play to be nominated but added a note "Writer ineligible for nomination under Academy bylaws." The voters voted for Robert Rich, the author of the screenplay of a bullfighting epic called "The Brave One". Jesse Laskey Jr. of the Writer's Guild accepted the Oscar for Mr. Rich, who was unable to attend because, (unbeknownst to the Academy), he did not exist. "The Brave One" had been written by Dalton Trumbo, another blacklisted writer.
But that wasn't all. "High Society", Grace Kelly's last film before becoming the Princess of Monaco, had been nominated as an original screen play when it was obviously a musical version of the Katherine Hepburn vehicle of 1940, "The Philadelphia Story", and thus hardly original. But that was a minor mistake compared to the authors credited: Elwood Ullman and Edward Bernds, who had written the script not for this film but for a Bowery Boys picture which had also been named High Society. When the error was pointed out, the Academy did what all stupid people do in these situations: they announced it was not an error, that they intended to nominate the Bowery Boys film. They were no doubt relieved when Ullman and Bernds, recognizing the ridiculousness of the situation, withdrew their names from consideration. But for a while there, they were in competition with, among others, Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote "The Proud and the Beautiful". Appropriately Sartre, a famous existentialist and the rest of them lost to person who didn't exist.
The winners of the best adapted screen plays were James Poe, John Farrow and S. J. Perelman. Poe and Farrow had done most of the writing but Todd had fired Farrow and thought having Perelman's name on the script would give the production more prestige so he only credited Perelman in the movies' credits until the Writer's Guild stepped in. In new York, Hermione Gingold accepted Perelman's Oscar with a comic statement written by him and delivered in the most hoighty-toighty manner she could muster. Perelman said he had only agreed to write the script "under the expressed understanding that the film would never be shown."
Mike Todd with his real prize:
