Oscar-Winning Movies at Rolfing Library

Best Picture winners  |   Best Actor/Best Actress winners  |   Best Director winners   |   Best Supporting Actor/Actress winners  |  Best Foreign Film winners

Resources on integrating film and faith

Everett's recommendations

As Rolfing’s resident movie buff, Everett Meadors (MAR, 2006) encourages you to check out these past Oscar winners.

It Happened One Night

This 1934 picture won Oscars for best adapted screenplay, best actor (Clark Gable), best actress (Claudette Colbert), best director (Frank Capra), and best picture. Colbert plays as young socialite who's just gotten impulsively married. Her family blocks the marriage and to escape their opposition she jumps off the family yacht in Miami and tries to get back to her husband in New York. Gable plays a down-and-out reporter who blackmails her into letting him travel with her in hopes of a big scoop. As they progress through difficulties up the coast they steadily fall in love before having to deal with her father and ersatz husband. Aside from being a fun story the movie is very interesting for the social attitudes it portrays. Gable's drunkenness and his assertion that Colbert's character "needs is a guy that'd take a sock at her once a day, whether it's coming to her or not." pass completely without critique in a way that would be impossible today. Legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon has used the movie on occasion as an example of the way societal attitudes towards what is permissible can change, comparing Gable’s behavior and the couple’s modesty to what we see in films today.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

This 1948 film won Oscars for best supporting actor (Walter Huston), best director (John Huston), and best adapted screenplay. It stars Humphrey Bogart and Tim Holt as Americans down on their luck in Mexico who hook up with Huston's old prospector to look for gold in the mountains. They have to contend with the elements, an interloper, bandits and their own greed. Bogart's Fred C. Dobbs scoffs at the old man's warnings about gold fever even as he descends into his own madness. It's a great study of camaraderie and what good fortune can do to men. It's also the source of the famous line, "Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges."

On the Waterfront

This one came out in 1954 and won Oscars for Best Actor (Marlon Brando), best supporting actress (Eva Marie Saint), best director (Elia Kazan), best original screenplay, and best picture. Brando is Terry Malloy, a former boxer who "coulda been a contender," but who now works in the shipyards and for the mob. Eva Marie Saint is his neighbor and Karl Malden is a priest, together they challenge Terry to speak up to the police to help fight the corruption on the docks and take down Lee J. Cobb's crime lord. You could watch the movie just to see Saint's face or to hear Malden's sermon urging the workers to take action on their own behalf against the mob and so prevent new crucifixions, or to see Malloy, beaten by the boss's goons struggling to work in the face of the ostracism of his peers. It's been argued that movie is Kazan's defense for having named names in the McCarthy hearings, whether that's true or not, it's a powerful story of man's struggle to fight against his past and do what he thinks is right.

New movies

Keep track of new movies the library acquires on the New Media blog.