Best Supporting Actress 1957

1927/28 through 1997

Best Supporting Actress 1957

Carolyn Jones - The Bachelor Party
3
12%
Elsa Lanchester - Witness for the Prosecution
12
48%
Hope Lange - Peyton Place
3
12%
Miyoshi Umeki - Sayonara
3
12%
Diane Varsi - Peyton Place
4
16%
 
Total votes: 25

ITALIANO
Emeritus
Posts: 4076
Joined: Mon Jan 06, 2003 1:58 pm
Location: MILAN

Post by ITALIANO »

Big Magilla wrote:
ITALIANO wrote:
Reza wrote:Voted for Lanchester.
It IS allowed not to vote like Big Magilla.
I think people know that or Patty McCormack, among others, would have gotten more votes in previous years.
My post wasn't directed generally at people.
Big Magilla
Site Admin
Posts: 19318
Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 3:22 pm
Location: Jersey Shore

Post by Big Magilla »

ITALIANO wrote:
Reza wrote:Voted for Lanchester.
It IS allowed not to vote like Big Magilla.
I think people know that or Patty McCormack, among others, would have gotten more votes in previous years.
Big Magilla
Site Admin
Posts: 19318
Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 3:22 pm
Location: Jersey Shore

Post by Big Magilla »

Reza wrote:My top 5:

Kay Kendall, Les Girls
Elsa Lanchester, Witness for the Prosecution
Kay Thompson, Funny Face
Hope Lange, Peyton Place
Cathleen Nesbitt, An Affair to Remember
I love Kay Kendall in Les Girls but it's one of those performances that teeters between lead and supporting and lands on the lead side for me.
ITALIANO
Emeritus
Posts: 4076
Joined: Mon Jan 06, 2003 1:58 pm
Location: MILAN

Post by ITALIANO »

Reza wrote:Voted for Lanchester.
It IS allowed not to vote like Big Magilla.
Reza
Laureate Emeritus
Posts: 10031
Joined: Thu Jan 02, 2003 11:14 am
Location: Islamabad, Pakistan

Post by Reza »

Voted for Lanchester.

My top 5:

Kay Kendall, Les Girls
Elsa Lanchester, Witness for the Prosecution
Kay Thompson, Funny Face
Hope Lange, Peyton Place
Cathleen Nesbitt, An Affair to Remember
ITALIANO
Emeritus
Posts: 4076
Joined: Mon Jan 06, 2003 1:58 pm
Location: MILAN

Post by ITALIANO »

Nobody from Peyton Place should have come close to an Oscar in my opinion, with the possible exception of Lana Turner whose only nomination I can sort-of understand. The movie itself is entertaining but the performances - the men's especially - far from impressive. I know that Diane Varsi was, for a short time, supposed to become the next big star; still her performance here, while competent, is never very exciting (though when you play the writer's point of view there's nothing much you can do). Hope Lange has a better, though rather conventional, role, and she provides a certain honesty to it; plus, her character is the emotional centre of the movie. A good but not especially interesting acting turn.

Miyoshi Umeki probably wasn't a bad actress, and the subplot she's part of is the best element of Sayonara, but it's true that the main reason she won was guilty feeling.

Elsa Lanchester will certainly win in this poll - she's after all the most popular of the nominees. Hers is definitely a likable performance, and her role the comic relief of the movie; but Oscar-caliber? I doubt, honestly.

Many years before giving an actress a showy, one-scene, Oscar-winning role, Paddy Chayefski had done more or less the same with Carolyn Jones in The Bachelor Party. True, strictly speaking it wasn't just one scene - but then the same can be said of Beatrice Straight's - and Jones DIDN'T win, but she's still easily the best of the five nominees. Chayefski is hated here, and for reasons I can vaguely understand; he certainly wasn't the great writer the Academy, the critics, and himself thought he was. But The Bachelor Party is one of his best efforts, and a good movie, bitter in a way not many American movies of that period were. And Carolyn Jones's may be a walk-on in terms of screen time, but the long monologue she has is a very funny, yet painful, spoof a certain type of girl which was quite common, in those days, not only in New York but also in Milan, in London, etc - the "existentialist", full of confused notions of French literature, philosophy and music, a modern-day bohemienne, a would-be intellectual a bit too eager to proclaim her sexual freedom.
All this in just a few minutes of non-stop talking - lines which were quite frank for the standards of period, and an actress good enough to create, through them, a whole character, and a touching one - and then disapper from the movie.
Big Magilla
Site Admin
Posts: 19318
Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 3:22 pm
Location: Jersey Shore

Post by Big Magilla »

Elsa Lanchester in a role written especially for the her for the film version of Witness for the Prosecution - the character wasn't in the original play - had her best screen role since Bride of Frankenstein and should have easily won the Oscar.

Timing, however, is everything, and twelve years after the end of World War II, a big budget Hollywood film featuring a sympathetic performance by a Japanese born actress, Miyoshi Umeki, who was touching in her small but important role in Sayonara, was the right person at the right time to become the first Japanese, indeed the first Asian, to win an Oscar. Of course they could have accomplished the same feat by awarding the Supporting Actor trophy to Sessue Hayakawa in The Bridge on the River Kwai but the former matinee idol was apparently yesterday's news while Umeki had recently impressed TV audiences with her year-long stint on TV's Arthur Godfrey Show (1955-1956).

Hope Lange, a young actress of enormous range, gave what was easily the best performance in Peyton Place as rape victim Selena Cross and was deserving of a nomination, though not a win.

Diane Varsi, though much admired at the time, doesn't make nearly as strong an impression and owes her nomination to the popularity of the film.

Carolyn Jones has little more than a walk-on in The Bachelor Party, one of Paddy Chayefsky's more insufferable treatises on middle-aged male angst. The joke at the time was that she won the nomination for going from blonde to brunette, the reverse process of what paid off for Dorothy Malone the year before. The difference was, though, that Malone had a role she could really sink her teeth into. Jones didn't.

The performances I think should have nominated instead of those of Varsi and Jones were those of Cathleen Nesbitt as Cary Grant's grandmother in An Affair to Remember and Kay Thompson as the fashion editor in Funnny Face.

Also worthy of consideration were Sybil Thorndike as the dowager queen in The Prince and the Showgirl and Una O'Connor recreating her Broadway triumph as the hard of hearing housekeeper in Witness for the Prosscution, her 83rd and final film.

Lanchester easily gets my vote.
Post Reply

Return to “The Damien Bona Memorial Oscar History Thread”