Supporting Actress Sundays: 1961

Nick'sFlickPicks is a little groggy today after a screechy, squealy, hour-long, dead-of-night altercation with a bat flying around our apartment. I, not the bat, did most of the squealing, but I still came out ahead. Note to future victims of pteropine invaders: Resolve™ Carpet Cleaner streams far enough from the can that you can daze the bat from two or three yards away, allowing you to catapult it out of a window with a broom and a dustpan...but not before the bat makes exactly the same face at you that Angela makes in the last shot of Sleepaway Camp.

The point being: I was extra happy to have something scintillating to wake up to today, specifically the 1961 Supporting Actress Smackdown, chez StinkyLulu. Like all the best Smackdowns—and this one might be my very favorite so far—Nathaniel has furnished a clipreel of the nominees, and Tim R. has added some follow-up commentary on his own site.

Two more things to know about this edition of SAS: it's just about as gay as can be, with Judy Garland, The Children's Hour, two Tennessee Williams adaptations, and West Side Story in competition, and the five nominees, no matter how diverse the quality of their own performances, all share the distinction of being better than someone who is truly terrible in each film: to wit, pugnacious little Karen Balkin as the bad seed in The Children's Hour; jittery Montgomery Clift as a sterilization victim in Judgment at Nuremberg; Warren Beatty as a soul-crushingly accented Italian gigolo in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone; Geraldine Page offering the fussiest possible imago of a "repressed" character in Summer and Smoke; and Richard Beymer somehow landing the lead in West Side Story despite his inability to sing, dance, or act.

That truly hellacious catalogue of thespian miscalculation—and, believe it or not, two of them scored Academy nominations, plus a Golden Globe for Page—makes Bainter, Garland, Lenya, Merkel, and Moreno look like quintuplet Stanislavskis... though, as you'll read, at least two of these women need no extra help in this department. Meanwhile, thanks for another good time, guys!