Schurmy Classics - 1957
Part I: The Technical Awards
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| 12 Angry Men |
Welcome to Schurmy Classics, a leaner, stripped down version of the Schurmys. Or at least that what they are supposed to be in theory. The 1977 edition is exactly that. This one, however, grew and grew and while it is not quite as massive as the regular edition, they certainly aren't lean. This should be obvious by the part i in the title of this post. There will be three parts. The technical awards today, the genre awards tomorrow and the major awards two days from now. For those of you unfamiliar with the Schumys they are the most important movie awards known to man that exist solely on Google Docs. You can find them on the sidebar. Warning, attempting to read the full text of a Schurmy Award document will cause a rift in space-time resulting in an you experiencing an unfathomable skip forward in time losing precious days from your existence. You should probably go for it though, you weren't going to do anything with that time anyways. This post will still be here when you get back, Google has assured me it will still be up after their AI rises up and takes over the world.
For this second edition of Schurmy Classics I decided to pick one of the best years in film history, 1957. It is the year wherein Hollywood (and the British system) put out classics such as
12 Angry Men, Witness for the Prosecution, Paths of Glory, and
An Affair to Remember. The Western was still going strong with
3:10 to Yuna, Gunfight at the OK Corral, The Tin Star, Forty Guns and
The Tall T. Horror fans saw the release of classics of the genre like
The Incredible Shrinking Man and
Night of the Demon. Media satires were being formed in
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and
A Face in the Crowd. The classic film noir was in its twilight years but saw the release of one of the greatest examples of the genre with
Sweet Smell of Success. The continued decline of the Hayes Code saw films tackle darker sides of society such as addiction, mental illness and pretty much everything else as in
A Hatful of Rain, The Three Faces of Eve and
Peyton Place. There were two Fred Astaire musicals in
Funny Face and
Silk Stockings and enjoyable romantic comedies like
Designing Woman and
Love in the Afternoon. And that is without even mentioning the frankly ridiculous number of foreign masterpieces from the year. This was intended to be a shorter project but as I got more and more into it I kept finding films I wanted to watch and needed to watch. This year is so good that
The Bridge on the River Kwai does not make my top 10. It does show up several times in the technical awards though so you can expect to see it in today's section.
A full list of films watched for this project and thus taken into consideration for awards can be found on my
Letterboxd account.A quick note for the really anal people who may have actually noticed something: Films are taken under consideration if their first release of any kind occurred in 1957 as opposed to the modern Schurmy standard of using North American theatrical release for consideration. This decision was made to make it incredible simple to determine eligibility of films and you only noticed this because I'm pointing it out.
