There may not be a red carpet or a bevy of Hollywood stars present, just a bunch of coughing journalists, but tomorrow will see one of the more momentous events in the cinema calendar: the announcement of the Official Selection for the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. The general hubbub of anticipation has ramped up in recent weeks (here’s our own 20 Films We Hope To See In Cannes feature), with speculation and rumor flying back and forth about everything from the readiness of certain titles, to the health of certain directors, to completely spurious fabrications about biases and beefs that might prevent the selection committee, headed again by Festival President Thierry Frémaux, from picking certain films.
Tomorrow will see an end to, or at least a temporary ceasefire on, all that (you can read about the most recent speculations/confirmations here), but we will get to prematurely judge how “stacked” a lineup it is compared to the previous 68 iterations of this great cornucopia of cinema. To help you rate 2016’s selection as it happens, and to prove just what a high bar Cannes sets, here are the stories of 10 different years across Cannes’ history, each of which featured one of the festival’s best-ever competition lineups.
1946 — The 1st Cannes Film Festival
Notable Competition Titles: “Brief Encounter” (David Lean); “Beauty And The Beast” (Jean Cocteau); “Gaslight” (George Cukor); “Gilda” (Charles Vidor); “Notorious” (Alfred Hitchcock); “Rome, Open City” (Roberto Rossellini); “The Lost Weekend” (Billy Wilder); “Caesar And Cleopatra” (Gabriel Pascal); “The Battle Of The Rails” (René Clément)
September 20th, 1946, dawned bright and clear in the South of France and changed the cinematic landscape of the world forever. It was actually the second attempt at mounting a film festival in the Côte d’Azur destination — the first had been scheduled to begin on September 1st, 1939, the day that Hitler invaded Poland, and was called off after just one screening (William Dieterle‘s brilliant “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” starring Charles Laughton and Maureen O’Hara, since you ask). It’s highly ironic that one of the original Cannes organizers’ founding principles back in ’39 had been opposition to the Fascist influence that the cineaste community viewed as undermining the Venice Film Festival since its establishment in 1932.
But the war ended eventually. And although the shadow the devastating conflict cast over the inaugural selection is impossible to ignore, and though including this first year, in which all 44 selected features were In Competition (more than twice the current maximum) might seem unfair, the sheer proportion of stone-cold classics still marks the festival’s first year as surely one of the all-time greatest. This is not simply because it includes so many auteurs like Hitchcock, Lean, Cocteau, Rossellini, and Wilder (after all, every Cannes has its fair share of huge names), but because the films from those directors are among the best, if not the best, in their respective filmographies. Partly as a result of that, but also partly because of the post-war spirit of celebration and international co-operation rather than competition that the inaugural festival wanted to foster, the jury awarded 11 Grands Prix that year (this was before the Palme d’Or was introduced, when the Grand Prix was the festival’s highest award). And what’s maybe most interesting of all — perhaps a reflection that the Jury President Georges Huisman was a politician and a historian rather than a film professional — is that of the films listed above as the most renowned classics, many being U.K. or U.S. titles from émigré directors, only three were so honored (Rossellini, Wilder and Lean), with the remaining eight prizes going to films from Sweden, Switzerland, Mexico, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Russia, India and France.
1955 — The 8th Cannes Film Festival
Notable Competition Titles: “Bad Day At Black Rock” (John Sturges); “The Crucified Lovers” (Kenji Mizoguchi); “Rififi” (Jules Dassin); “East Of Eden” (Elia Kazan); “Gold Of Naples” (Vittorio De Sica); “Marty” (Delbert Mann); “The Country Girl” (George Seaton)
Presumably in response the festival’s ascending profile, 1955 saw the creation of the Palme d’Or as its highest honor, bumping the previous biggest accolade, the Grand Prix, off the menu for a few years, while the Special Jury Prize (which today is kind of the bronze medal) became, confusingly, the second-highest award. The first-ever Palme went to an American film — Delbert Mann’s “Marty,” starring Ernest Borgnine, which would also manage a unique double when it won the Best Picture Oscar too (Billy Wilder’s “The Lost Weekend” also took Best Picture along with the top prize in Cannes in 1946, but since it shared the latter with 10 other films, that feels a little less spectacular an achievement). The film, based on Paddy Chayefsky‘s Oscar-winning script, is kind of an anthem to blue-collar decency and co-stars Gene Kelly‘s then wife Betsy Blair, who had to overcome anti-communist blacklisting to land the role.
Indeed it’s hard to look at the English-language 1955 selection without referring to the Hollywood blacklist and the Red Scare era (and you should be listening to Karina Longworth’s “You Must Remember This” podcast series about it if you’re not). At least two of the titles were directly tainted by differing associations with the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings: One of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, director Edward Dmytryk, had his U.K.-backed version of Graham Greene‘s “The End of the Affair,” starring Deborah Kerr and Van Johnson, screen in competition, while Elia Kazan, director of the unassailable “East Of Eden,” which introduced James Dean to the world, would later come under fire for “naming names” before the committee. In fact, one of the careers he’s alleged to have damaged with his testimony was that of playwright Clifford Odets, whose play “The Country Girl” was adapted by George Seaton, starred Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly in a role that would later win her an Oscar, and occasioned Kelly’s attendance at the festival that year, where she met Prince Rainier. And nearly 60 years later, “Grace Of Monaco” opened the festival, so… yeah, hard to make out the moral of that story.
But of course, there was plenty of thriving cinema happening outside of the U.S. — De Sica’s “Gold Of Naples” is a highly enjoyable anthology film featuring an early Sophia Loren role (it’s here in our De Sica Essentials), if a little more lightweight than his neo-realist classics; Jules Dassin’s “Rififi” is sheer, taut heist-movie brilliance; while Kenji Mizoguchi’s “The Crucified Lovers” is difficult to find but one of the Japanese master’s best — reportedly even among Akira Kurosawa‘s favorites of Mizoguchi’s films.
