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Perkins, Tracy, and Olivier: "Best Actor" Oscar Acting in 1960

posted 4 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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The set-up.

There is an interview with Anthony Perkins, circa 1961, I think, and BEFORE Oscar nominations for 1960 films were announced(the Oscars were in April back then.)

Of his Oscar chances for Psycho, Perkins said "I think I'm going to be nominated. Janet, too."

Famous last words, spoke too soon. Janet Leigh WAS nominated for "Psycho" -- but as Best Supporting Actress(which seems more wrong with every passing year, doesn't it?) But Anthony Perkins was not.

I wonder if Perkins gave that interview while voting was still going on. An angry Oscar voter might think "Oh, yeah, he's so sure he's going to get nominated? Not by me!" But maybe Perkins said that after all ballots were in. In any event he was wrong. Hitchcock sent Perkins a telegram: "I am ashamed of your fellow actors." (The ones who vote for Best Actor.)

Hitchcock got a Best Director nomination for Psycho(his fifth and final. He didn't win.) He and Janet Leigh posed shaking hands together for a Variety "congratulations" ad, with a platform of that great big white-on-black slashed PSYCHO logo between them(Janet was atop it, her hand aimed down at Hitchcock's, who stood on the floor. Or maybe vice versa.) I expect that Hitchcock and Leigh felt sorry that Tony Perkins could not be in the photo with them. (They both lost; but Leigh was the ONLY Hitchcock player to be nominated for an Oscar in a Hitchcock film after 1946. Quite an achievement.)

The nominations for Best Actor, 1960 were:

Trevor Howard, Sons and Lovers
Burt Lancaster, Elmer Gantry
Jack Lemmon, The Apartment
Laurence Olivier, The Entertainer
Spencer Tracy, Inherit the Wind

And "on paper," you can see how Perkins got shut out. Any year in which Spencer Tracy("The Greatest American Actor") and Laurence Olivier(The Greatest British Actor) were in competition, their two slots were almost automatic.

Jack Lemmon already had a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Mister Roberts(1955) and had been creeping his way up to leading man status ever since. Wrote Time magazine about Lemmon in The Apartment: "Lemmon has been 'arriving' for several years now. With The Apartment, he can be said to have arrived." The Apartment would win Best Picture of 1960, Lemmon's anchoring of it HAD to be honored here.

Elmer Gantry was "the right role for the right actor at the right time" for Burt Lancaster -- he could play to his big toothy smile and his brooding anger at the same time, he could play big and flamboyant(as a phony Evangelist) and tough and dangerous and romantic at the same time. Tracy and Olivier already had Oscars(Tracy's were back to back); Lemmon was a bit "too new." Lancaster had "paid his dues" -- it was his year. He won. And Tony Perkins wasn't ever going to get LANCASTER's slot.

Which leaves Trevor Howard. I saw Sons and Lovers decades ago, I don't much remember it, so I don't much remember Howard's performance. I assume it was pretty good but -- in the year of the blockbuster Psycho, you'd think THIS slot is the one that Perkins could have taken.

(Note in passing: Psycho and Sons and Lovers, which opened in the same 1960 summer, were reviewed in the same column by one 1960 critic. He reviewed Sons and Lovers first and then opened on Psycho: "Psycho" could also be called "Sons and Lovers." It has a distinctive son in Anthony Perkins and two lovers in Janet Leigh and John Gavin.)

As "slots" go, I suppose other than Howard's slot, Perkins in a "fair world" could have been given Tracy's slot. When Tracy was told of his Oscar nomination for "Inherit the Wind" he said "I could use another award like I could use a hole in the head." OK...give it to Perkins.

And despite the prominence of Billy Wilder and The Apartment in 1960, I think Jack Lemmon's slot could be given to Perkins, too. Things weren't as bad in Lemmonland as they would GET to be in the later 60's and 70's, but his work as CC Baxter has a bit too much of that neurotic, "over-cute" comedy overkill. (He's good in the sad and serious moments, though.) Still, Perkins could have this slot as far as I'm concerned.

By sheer chance one of my streaming services in the past month has offered both "Inherit the Wind" and "The Entertainer" to watch . I watched all of Inherit the Wind, and the last 30 minutes of the Entertainer(maybe I'll finish it someday) and my intentions(given my visits to this Psycho board) were to look at them in the context of "the Psycho year" in general and Perkins performance in Psycho in particular.

The first thing I noticed with both Inherit the Wind and The Entertainer is this: thoughts of Psycho disappeared pretty quickly once I got deep into both of them. Part of "the magic of movies" is: you enter the world of the movie you are watching, I think. Its 1960 and certain things look like Psycho(the film stock, the Universal backlot and soundstages of Inherit the Wind)...but a lot does NOT look or feel like Psycho -- its its own world.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Much as with Anthony Perkins in Psycho, we have to wait awhile to get Spencer Tracy on screen in "Inherit the Wind." After an opening pan of a small city in Tenneesee(the Universal backlot -- the Fairvale Church comes into view down below) and a scene showing the arrest of the teacher (played by Dick York, that cartoonish looking mugger of an actor 4 years before Bewitched made him famous), the "stars" come into the story one by one. First: Gene Kelly, all super-cynicism and edge playing a reporter on the side of Darwin(but nastily so -- he finds the opposite sides to be rubes and literally names himself as intellectual). Second , Fredric March, ostentatiously bald (it looks like a cap) and ostentatiously tan as the out of town former Presidential candidate out to defend the Bible. We are forced to wait...and wait...and wait some more for Spencer Tracy to show up as "Drummond"(Clarence Darrow under another name) -- and for Darrow/Drummond to get insulted by the local townsfolk and told to "go back to from where you came."

The battle lines are drawn. Tracy specializes in being Spencer Tracy and its always a delight. Tracy's Oscar nomination here ties him up to (if not with) Tom Hanks and Jack Nicholson, modernly. Every performance COULD be Oscar nominated, but only the "important roles" are, and within those, only a few merit the win. Tracy(like Hanks) had won back-to-back in the 30's, he'd never win again. But he does a lot here.

Which brings me to this: "Inherit the Wind" is based on a Broadway stage play. A LOT of movies were, back then. And so Tracy got a whole lotta speechifying to do here, a whole lotta dialogue to memorize and then to spit out in speeds varying from low to superfast. And then March outdoes him, spending most of his time in the third act of the movie raging from on high, making a spectacle of himself and literally talking himself to...well..

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

And after watching Tracy pontificate for about 10 minutes, it hit me: You could put EVERY LINE spoken by Anthony Perkins in Psycho into one "batch" and it wouldn't match 10 minutes of Tracy's speechifying in Inherit the Wind. The ratio of words must be 20,000 to 1 (Tracy to Perkins.)

The actors who vote for Best Actor often nominate actors who show the technical ability to memorize pages of monologue and deliver them powerfully(without too many takes.) Its why actors who play lawyers often get nominated(James Stewart in Anatomy of a Murder) or win(Greg Peck in Mockingbird.) Script memorization is what separates the movie stars who can do Broadway plays(Al Pacino, Kevin Spacey) from those who can't(Nicholson, Cruise.) Given "memorization" as the great technical thing that actors can do that WE as laymen can't (and Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole on stage could do it DRUNK) ...of course that's gonna get you a nomination. Or a win(see also: Marisa Tomei's detailed speech about AUTO PARTS at the end of "My Cousin Vinny.")

Wikipedia says that Spencer Tracy was nominated for nine Oscars...a record he holds with Laurence Olivier(I THINK this is current -- Jack Nicholson got a few Supporting noms and one such win.)

Tracy's noms were:

San Francisco
Captains Courageous (WIN)
Boys Town(WIN)
Father of the Bride
Bad Day at Black Rock
The Old Man and the Sea
Inherit the Wind
Judgment at Nuremberg
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (Posthumous)

So...Tracy's final three noms were ALL in Stanley Kramer "message pictures" and that's where a "reliable Spencer Tracy" performance became something "more."

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

So back to Anthony Perkins. He had one Oscar nomination(Supporting) pretty early , for Friendly Persuasion(1956) and that nom gave him the bona fides (along with his looks) to star in a series of Paramount films in the fifties along with some loan outs(like to Warners for Tall Story right before Psycho.) With one Oscar nomination under his belt -- and for work less powerful than what he does in Psycho, and in a much less successful film -- perhaps Perkins DID have reason to be confident that he would be nominated.

But really, WHY was he so confident? A number of reviews of Psycho were dismissive(though I could find few full on pans; its "bad myth" to say that Psycho got bad reviews.) But three reviewers singled out Perkins, and here's how:

"Perkins performance is easily the best of his career." And he HAD a career. He worked a LOT in the 50's.
"The movie shines because of Perkins, and it would be less if he were not in it."
"The biggest surprise in Psycho is that Anthony Perkins IS an actor, after all"(That's a backhanded compliment, but a compliment nonetheless.)

I also suspect that (a) Perkins knew JUST what kind of historic blockbuster Psycho really was(even then), (b) Perkins knew that Norman Bates was a HELL of a character, already shocking people in 1960 and likely one for the ages;(c) perhaps Perkins figured that Hollywood would salute him for the bravery of taking the role in the first place and (d)Perkins likely KNEW how deep he reached inside to give this particular performance, the heights he hit with it.

Jack Palance said "The Oscar doesn't go to the best performance; it goes to the best CHARACTER." And I'd say that movie history supports that take. Rooster Cogburn. Atticus Finch. Forrest Gump. Erin Brockovich. Norma Rae. Mary Poppins.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

You'd think "Norman Bates" would be a "shoo in" character wins the Oscar choice , but 1960 was too early for Old Hollywood to accept a cross-dressing psychopath. Give them 30 years or so, and Hannibal the Cannibal Lecter would win Best Actor(with even less screen time than Norman gets) as would Kathy BATES as Annie Wilkes in Misery; with a nomination to Robert DeNiro in Bob Mitchum(unnominated)'s old psycho role in Cape Fear. And we've had a couple of Jokers win.

So in 1960, Norman Bates wasn't a "character who wins the Oscar." So back to Perkins' performance.

Here's where Hitchcock comes in. As many a critic and some actors noted, Hitchcock wasn't big on giving his actors long, long speeches to feed on. He liked to "use" them as subjects for camera moves and camera angles; big close-ups and high overhead shots -- all of which often put these actors in classics, but which did not give them much chance to emote.

But Hitchcock movies offered something else: the chance for acting WITHOUT words -- to use your face and your gait and your posture to act in ways that "outpaced" the dialogue vomited out in, say "Inherit the Wind."

I think Perkins deserved the nomination(and the WIN) for his final 60 seconds in Psycho alone. Mother does the talking but its Perkins face that contorts and broods and wrenches about in low level misery before his eyes meet ours and he elects to grin in an ever growing cadaverous leer that at once reveals he IS the monster in this movie, and that Mother has met him...for good.

Or how about: the travelling close-ups -- two of them -- as Norman pulls his head away from peeping at the naked Marion and walks along the motel porch and then up the hill to mother. What's going ON in that head of his? What do his expressions MEAN? And when he enters the house we get a young man gone from "defiance"(he's gonna tell Mama off!) to resignation (hands in pockets, he sadly heads back to the kitchen and sinks impotently into a chair at a table.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Or how about: the camera dollying in and up on Norman's razor thin, phantom-in-black figure, by the swamp, where Arbogast's car has clearly just been sunk. Norman isn't all the way to his end of the movie "horror reveal," but he IS different now...less sympathetic , more dangerous.

Or how about earlier at the swamp, as Norman watches Marion's car sink -- and then stop -- and silently mimes a certain amount of "quiet panic" even as he swallows his Halloween candy.

Speaking of which: while fending off Arbogast's questions (in a scene that MUST be great acting, because both actors are just so fun and involving to watch and listen to), the camera swings under Perkins bobbing throat as he swallows that candy, but it is the ACTOR who must match physical acting to a dynamic camera move.

All of this -- save the Arbogast chat -- is SILENT acting. And Perkins meets that challenge "for all time" in the 9 minutes that he discovers Marion's body in the shower, cleans up the crime, puts the body in a car trunk, clears out the motel room(don't forget the newspaper!), drives to the "surprise" swamp, and enacts the burial above. After the unseen yell "Oh, Mother God Blood! Blood!" Perkins has to "sell" this through his face alone. I think that the high point is the look on Norman's face when he realizes that he has blood on his hands.

Truth be told, neither Tracy in Inherit the Wind nor Olivier in The Entertainer nor Lemmon in The Apartment nor Lancaster in Elmer Gantry nor(I assume) Howard in Sons and Lovers was called upon to carry MINUTES of screen time without saying a word. These were the "talkies" and in those other movies, the characters talk.

But of course, Perkins DOES speak in Psycho and his two long speaking passages -- first with Marion and later with Arbogast -- are lessons in modulating a very twisted character so that he seems "normal" on the surface but keeps betraying abnormality.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Thanks largely to Hitchcock's structure of Psycho , Anthony Perkins got to act scenes that simply weren't afforded to the 5 actors who DID get nominated in 1960. I expect that Perkins knew just how HARD he worked to get the effects Hitchcock wanted, and to create a likeable character out of the most horrendous TYPE of killer yet put on the screen.

---

Oh, yes, Olivier. Well, I only saw about the last half hour of The Entertainer, but it was enough to get "the gist."
As with Inherit the Wind, Olivier was doing the screen version of a play - and you could tell it HAD been a play. I came along when Olivier was spinning off a big, long, never-ending speech while the other players on screen(including a very young Alan Bates) just stood there, enthralled(which was odd given that Olivier was playing a broken-down entertainer.)

Watching Oliver "do his thing" not long after watching Tracy "do his thing" I could see -- yes, if given the "right roles"(quality stuff, not a routine Western for Tracy or a useless cameo for Olivier) -- they were Golden at what they did. But it was all very show-offy, both actors.

I'm reminded that Hitchcock committed a few stageplays to film. "Dial M" gives Ray Milland some VERY long speeches to say at the beginning, but they are largely "mystery plotting"(as he entraps his hired killer into the plot and lays out the plan.) Rope rather trades off the speeches among the characters. But neither Dial M nor Rope quite had the "burden" that Inherit the Wind and The Entertainer(what I saw of it) had: putting an "important play with an important actor" on screen for posterity.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

This: whereas "Inherit the Wind" had the film stock look of Psycho,and much of the Universal soundstage look(though NOT the Universal sound effects like doors closing and horns honking in Psycho -- which are also in The Birds)...The Entertainer looked nothing like a Hollywood production.

It had that tatty, realistic, semi-documentary look that a lot of British cinema had in that era, whether drama (1960's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, with Albert Finney, which I have seen) or comedy(all manner of movies with Peter Sellers, Terry Thomas and Lionel Jeffries -- my parents took me to a lot of those at a local college campus art theater as a kid.

I saw one scene of the coastal city the story is set in -- with a parade marching in the street -- and I was reminded of the 1971 British crime thriller Get Carter(one of my favorites of all time) -- it was odd how the two films "joined up" with those scenes(though I believe that The Entertainer is set on a different coast of England than Get Carter!)

Despite its "important" themes, I felt that Inherit the Wind spun out of control near the end. It was as much a flop in 1960 as Psycho was a hit(wrote one wag: "Its a fine movie, but what kids are going to come watch two old men scream at each other for two hours." Indeed, I found a quote from none other than Spencer Tracy a few years into the 60's where he said "My kind of movie is finished. The kids now want to see Psycho." Yep, Spencer...Psycho then, Iron Man now. I've always figured that Tracy said that after SEEING Psycho, himself. But I dunno.

What I saw of "The Entertainer" seemed more realistic, down to earth and depressing -- the play's author was John Osborne, who would play the crime boss in ..."Get Carter" years later(he's sort of a more ugly James Coburn, but he has charisma.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

But, finally , this: Its pretty well said now that actually picking a "Best Performance by an Actor or Actress" is a fools errand of subjectivity. By the standard of pages of dialogue memorized and performed, Spencer Tracy and Laurence Olivier were "better" than Tony Perkins in their movies that year.

But...as Perkins clearly knew at the time("I think I'll be nominated"), he did something BIGGER than just memorizing pages that year...creating a character unlike any ever seen or heard on the screen before(even among the Hitchcock psychos of yesteryear) and he should have had a nomination.

And the win.