Best Actress Nomination

Wait Until Dark. I'd like to have seen Alan Arkin been nominated.

I think she was great in Two for the Road, which was generally a great film, which just wasn't on the US radar. It has a pseudo-documentary style, and it also is non-linear (like Memento, except it isn't a mystery). It's about really ordinary people, and seems to have a rambling quality, but it's full of symbolism, and even the rambling style is symbolic, because it's about a road trip in an area of Europe, where there isn't a neat highway system. It's actually extremely well-thought out, and yet it looks spontaneous. There's really no bigger compliment to an actor to be told "You just looked like you were being yourself."

I think she was quite good in Wait Until Dark as well, but I think she suffers from a badly adapted script. I think she took the role before she knew what the screenplay would look like, and took it based on the stage play. It seems like sometimes she's wrestling to be the Susy the way the character was originally written-- with a sense of humor and pluck, like in the darkroom when she jokes about getting chopped up not just into pieces, but tiny pieces, but keeps getting forced into the most awful some-people-should-have-low-self-esteem melodrama. The "Do you really love me Sam?" scene replaces a scene in the play where they tease each other on even ground, and their love is clear and unspoken. I want so much to see her play THAT scene instead.

I think if the screenplay for Wait Until Dark had stuck closer to the stage script, she would have done better, and possibly won the award.

The thing is, the award that year went to Katharine Hepburn, for one of her weakest performances ever, in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, which is remembered mostly because Hollywood liberals go to pat themselves on the back for making it, and not because it was any good. It's as banal as an episode of The Love Boat. The nomination and award were completely political, so I don't know how good Audrey Hepburn would have had to be to beat it.

The other competition in 1967 was Anne Bancroft in The Graduate, Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde, Edith Evans in The Whisperers. Personally, I can't stand the movie The Graduate, and I wouldn't have wanted to see Anne Bancroft win for that. I think Faye Dunaway was egregiously, sinfully miscast as Bonnie Parker, and honestly, I think Dame Edith Evans is the one who should have won, but narrowly. I really do think with a better script, Audrey Hepburn would have been better. I think it's really doubtful Dame Edith Evans would ever have won, just because British films rarely win major awards. (Cf., the 1986 Academy Awards: Platoon beat A Room with a View for Best Picture.)

(BTW: Faye Dunaway was years too old to play Bonnie Parker, while Sondra Locke, Bernadette Peters, Veronica Cartwright, Haley Mills, Sissy Spacek, Mary Beth Hurt and Meryl Streep were the right age. So were lots of great actresses who were probably too tall, but that was better than too old, like Helen Mirren [although, no one in the US had heard of her], and Susan Sarandon. Dunaway was ridiculous; she was younger than Warren Beatty, and still managed to look like his mother. In real life, Bonnie Parker looked startlingly like Helen Hunt.)

She should have won for WAIT UNTIL DARK.

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