Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actress 1958

The Contenders:

Rosalind Russell: Auntie Mame
Elizabeth Taylor: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Susan Hayward: I Want to Live! (winner)
Deborah Kerr: Separate Tables
Shirley MacLaine: Some Came Running

The Rest of Them Walked

Film: Some Came Running
Format: DVD from Somonauk Public Library through interlibrary loan on laptop.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but when I hear the name “Vincente Minnelli,” I think of musicals. I tend to forget about films like The Bad and the Beautiful and instead remember things like An American in Paris and the regrettable Gigi. It’s not merely his success with musicals that causes me to think of Minnelli as a musicals director. It’s that even his non-musicals that I’ve seen tend to have quite a bit in common with that genre. Take a film like Some Came Running. There’s a larger-than-life quality to this film despite the fact that the film itself is not of earth-shaking importance.

And that’s really the thing about Some Came Running. It’s a small story about small passions and people, but it plays out like a grand drama. Normally this would put the film in danger of being overblown, but somehow, this one works. Small lives writ large. It works, but not nearly as well as large lives writ large. The draw isn’t so much the drama, but the cast and the novelty of the first on-screen pairing of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin.