Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actress 1961

The Contenders:

Audrey Hepburn: Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Piper Laurie: The Hustler
Natalie Wood: Splendor in the Grass
Geraldine Page: Summer and Smoke
Sophia Loren: Two Women (winner)

No Innocents in War

Film: Two Women
Format: DVD from Freeport Public Library through interlibrary loan on laptop.

When I deal with rarities, or at least films that are difficult to find, I take what I can get. In the case of Two Women, this means being forced into a dubbed version of the film instead of the version in the original Italian. I’d rather watch a film in its original language, but given the difficulty of tracking this one down, well, a dubbed version is better than nothing. It does make me wonder, though, why this film is so difficult to find. Sophia Loren won the Best Actress Oscar for this in 1961, the first time the award was handed out for a non-English performance. It would have been nice to see it in the version that was awarded.

I knew pretty much what I was getting into when I saw Vittorio De Sica’s name flash across the screen as the director. That name means neo-realism and a plot that doesn’t go anywhere happy. Expecting a Vittorio De Sica film to be happy for anything more than a few minutes at a time is like expecting a Busby Berkeley dance number in the middle of a Hitchcock film.