Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actor 1965

The Contenders:

Lee Marvin: Cat Ballou (winner)
Laurence Olivier: Othello
Rod Steiger: The Pawnbroker
Oskar Werner: Ship of Fools
Richard Burton: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

For Sale

Films: The Pawnbroker
Format: DVD from NetFlix on The New Portable.

One of the reasons that I discuss Oscar categories here the way I do is because of the way that Oscar functions. The Pawnbroker is a good example of this. I haven’t yet looked at the Best Actor race for 1965 because I didn’t have this review up, but it’s a consensus that Rod Steiger should have won this Oscar. Instead, it went to Lee Marvin because the Academy (rightfully) wanted him to have an Oscar, but in this case, he got it for Cat Ballou. Steiger didn’t win here, so he won in 1967, preventing Paul Newman from winning for Cool Hand Luke, which eventually led to Newman winning for The Color of Money. This is why I do what I do.

The Pawnbroker is the story of Sol Nazerman (Steiger), who runs a pawnshop in New York. As the film progresses, we learn that Nazerman is a Holocaust survivor and that he lost his entire family in the concentration camps including both of his children and his wife. Now, he has done everything he can to shut himself off from all emotion. Sol Nazerman has learned that emotions are a weakness and cause pain, and now he cares only about money. This is despite the fact that the pawnshop tends to put more money out than it takes in, something Nazerman’s owner Rodriguez (for lack of a better word, played by the butter-voiced Brock Peters) appreciates, since it makes the pawnshop a tax write-off.