The 400 Blows (1959)

 

Director Francois Truffaut reportedly based The 400 Blows on his own childhood. The lead character of Antoine Doinel (played for the first time here by Jean-Pierre Leaud) is really a rather ordinary young boy who keeps getting into trouble with the school authorities and with his parents for what seem to be rather harmless actions. For example, he loses his recess time early in the film due to a “naughty” picture he’s caught with; it wasn’t his picture, and most of the other boys in the classroom had already seen it by the time it got to Antoine. Why wasn’t everyone punished? Because Antoine was the one who had the incriminating photo when the teacher turned around. To be honest, none of Antoine’s alleged crimes seem all that significant to us nowadays, at least not from my perspective. He writes some bad things on the wall after being punished by his teacher? He forgets to bring home flour from the store? He plays hooky from school with a friend and goes to the movies and to an arcade and to a centrifuge? None of these seem particularly serious, frankly, and he’s seemingly no worse than any of the other boys in his school. He just seems to get punished more. By the way, his punishment for one of his alleged crimes is conjugating? That’s a pretty severe way of getting someone to do that onerous task. We learn a bit more about his family dynamic as the movie progresses. His mother (Claire Maurier) is cheating on her husband with another man, and we realize that the man Antoine calls his father (Albert Remy) is actually his stepfather. Perhaps there’s always been tension between the three of them over their connections or disconnections. Antoine runs away from home after his stepfather slaps him in front of his classmates and stays with his friend who’s also been suspended. By the way, the reason Antoine was suspended was due to his being so inspired by a Balzac novel that he wrote a closing for his essay that was meant as a homage to the great French writer but was considered plagiarism instead. I always knew Balzac was trouble; it’s why I’ve tried to avoid reading his works. Of course, some of what Antoine does could be chalked up to youthful ignorance. He and his friend steal a typewriter from his father’s office (even though they’re apparently all marked) and try to sell it for some cash. They fail at this, so they try to return it only to see Antoine caught and then jailed for vagrancy and theft. He winds up in an observation center for juveniles, and we get to witness two remarkable sequences as a result. One is an interrogation or interview that was reportedly improvised, and you get to see Leaud at his most charming and vulnerable. The other is the final scene where an astonishing tracking shot follows him as he runs away from the detention center and winds up at the sea, a place he’s always wanted to visit. The film ends with a closeup of Antoine’s face as he stares at the camera. It’s one of the most famous endings in film history for a reason. What is going through his mind? What will happen to him next? As one of the earliest films in the French New Wave movement, The 400 Blows sets a high standard for excellence. By the way, I would like to note that the film itself pays tribute to the joy we receive from the movies. Antoine and his friend go to see a movie when they play hooky, and the whole family enjoys a night out at the cinema, talking about the film they saw on the way home. A charming film that reveals our love of the movies is quite an accomplishment.

Oscar Nomination: Best Story and Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen

A Quiet Place (2018)

 

A Quiet Place is a masterful film in so many ways. It truly deserved more Oscar attention than it received (a sole nomination for its amazing sound design), but popular opinion ensures that the film will be remembered long after the memories of award-show glory have gone. Set in a post-apocalyptic world where sound-sensitive monsters from another planet have attacked Earth and killed almost everyone, the film chooses not to focus upon that story directly, but instead it shows us how a family isolated on a farm has adjusted to this new and frightening reality. Emily Blunt and John Krasinski (who also directed), married in real life, play a couple whose primary goal seems to be the protection of their three young children. Everyone has to keep silent as much as possible, communicating when necessary via American Sign Language or waiting until their speech might be drowned out by a louder, more natural sound like a waterfall. The family has learned to be pretty much self-sufficient, but the dangers of their world appear early in the film. It’s a bold move on the part of the filmmakers to kill off the youngest (at the time) child near the start of the narrative, but it does quickly cement for us as viewers the very real dangers everyone must now deal with. Every little incident becomes a potential threat, so footsteps have to be carefully mapped and even the corn shifting in a silo could possibly lead to someone’s death. The monsters themselves are, oddly enough, incredibly loud, and the method for getting rid of them turns out to be a genius move. Blunt gives the best performance in the film, but everyone here is astonishingly good. Without the words that actors can use in most performances to convey emotion, everyone has to use their facial expressions more. The casting of Millicent Simmonds, an actress with hearing loss, as daughter Regan was an inspired choice, and her talent really influenced the performances of the others. A Quiet Place is not a silent film – it even has a musical score at times – but it does know how to use silence so effectively.

Oscar Nomination: Best Achievement in Sound Editing

Nosferatu (2024)

 

I suppose I understand the nominations in several technical categories for the most recent version of Nosferatu, the vampire film that keeps alternating with Dracula in terms of being remade. It is certainly stylish in its way, and the costumes and sets and general atmosphere of the film are all very evocative and contribute a great deal to the feel of the film. However, it seems to me that it’s almost all atmosphere and very little substance. I was, frankly, bored because I’ve seen this film before. It’s not really all that different from the classic 1922 version, and it even has moments when it seems to copy Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Francis Ford Coppola’s vampire film from 1992. It does seem to be a matter of style over substance. Other than giving Lily-Rose Depp’s Ellen Hutter more of an active role in the plot that previous iterations, I can’t really see what the point of the remake is. It’s certainly grosser and more disgusting than previous versions, particularly in the depiction of Count Orlock (Bill Skarsgard). Otherwise, it’s a lot of very attractive people (Nicholas Hoult, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin) and some rather odd people like Willem Defoe, who always seems nowadays to be acting in a different movie than the one he’s actually in. Is this really that much of a retelling? Other than giving us a bit more backstory with Ellen seeking help from a demon and a bit about some gypsies, what really sets this apart so much from other vampire movies other than in its more technical achievements. So, as I said, I get it, I guess, but why spend all that money just to tell a story with which we’re already familiar? I just think there were other choices perhaps more deserving of nominations, more original works than this retread of a movie we’ve seen many times before.

Oscar Nominations: Best Achievement in Cinematography, Best Achievement in Costume Design, Best Achievement in Production Design, and Best Achievement in Makeup and Hairstyling

Written on the Wind (1956)

 

When an actor or a movie star learned that they were going to be in a Douglas Sirk movie like Written on the Wind, they must have been very excited. They knew that they would always look their best in the movie because they would be wearing nothing but stylish clothing. They would never look scruffy or disheveled; everyone looks beautiful in a Sirk movie. They would also be performing on soundstages that displayed some of the most thoughtful and thorough attention to the details of set design. Everyone and every place looks just gorgeous in a Sirk-directed film, no matter how destitute or despairing the situation of the plot. Even the people who are supposed to be lower income are always impeccably dressed, and a dive bar looks like a rather reputable location, frankly. Such is definitely the case with Written on the Wind, one of Sirk's best films and an almost perfect example of the style he brought to his films. Look at how Lauren Bacall’s Lucy Moore Hadley and Dorothy Malone’s Marylee Hadley are dressed in this melodrama. There's not a single misstep in their costumes even if you wonder sometimes why anyone would go through all the trouble to wear one of those gowns or why they seem, um, overdressed at times. Rock Hudson’s Mitch Wayne (how butch is that name!) and Robert Stack Kyle Hadley are almost always in tailored suits and hardly ever look like they've broken a sweat even after a fight, and there are lots of fights. And the sets are just as fantastic. Who wouldn't want to live in homes like these or work in offices like these? Whether it's New York or Florida or Texas, no one has second-class surroundings. Why this film and others like it weren’t nominated for their exquisite production design is a mystery. Of course, beneath the surface of all these accoutrements that the wealthy display, there's a lot of psychological damage. The Hadleys, a family made rich from oil production, had plenty of demons, what with Kirk’s drinking and womanizing and Marylee’s rather wanton pursuit of every man in sight. She wants to bed Mitch, but they and Kirk grew up almost like siblings, so he’s never going to sleep with her. Of course, their lifelong closeness doesn’t keep Kyle from stealing Lucy away from Mitch before the poor geologist even has a chance. However, the causes of this kind of behavior are never visible if you only pay attention to the beauty of the surroundings, but Written on the Wind slowly lets you see the dangers underlying these beautiful people and their lovely clothes and their fantastic homes. Perhaps Sirk was trying to tell us something.

Oscar Win: Best Supporting Actress (Dorothy Malone)

Other Oscar Nominations: Best Supporting Actor (Robert Stack) and Best Original Song (“Written on the Wind”)

Blue Velvet (1986)

 

Some filmmakers have such a distinctive style that we've come to call that style by their name: Hitchcockian, for example, or even Spielbergian. The late, great David Lynch belongs in that kind of rare company, as anyone could tell you after watching Blue Velvet (1986), a most distinctively Lynchian film. The film begins (and ends) with images of seemingly placid small-town existence, but then we burrow under the ground (literally and figuratively) and discover some rather harsh truths about such calm exteriors. The plot is a relatively straightforward narrative. In fact, it's quite linear in its method of storytelling, but as the film progresses, events just seem to get weirder and stranger and odder as we learn more and more about what's going on in the seemingly peaceful town of Lumberton. The trajectory of the story just keeps seem to keep getting farther and farther away from whatever we would consider realistic. Sadomasochism, sexual violence, murder, drug use, voyeurism -- it's really quite a list of vices that the film depicts. What constitutes "normal" begins to shift and morph until, at times, you wonder how you wound up in such a surreal environment. All of this begins with the rather common event of a young man (Kyle McLachlan, at the peak of his beauty, as Jeffrey Beaumont) returning home after his father has been hospitalized. You might be expecting a different story than what emerges, though, when Jeffrey discovers a severed human ear on the ground near his family home. He goes to the police, reconnects with a teenage girl he once knew (the lovely Laura Dern as Sandy in a very early screen appearance), and begins plotting to find out whose ear he located. That leads him to a nightclub singer (Isabella Rossellini's Dorothy Vallens, a brave and shocking performance) and the man who may have kidnapped her husband and son: Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper, giving all he has to the role). Frank is the catalyst who upends the narrative beyond recognition, and the film veers into some even darker, even weirder directions after his first appearance. None of this is necessarily meant to make you feel comfortable, by the way. What can you make of what happens in Blue Velvet? So much seems to be -- shall we say? -- off-kilter. Lynch was also the screenwriter for the film and what you see on the screen is his vision of... something. It's not always easy to comprehend the meanings of some of the images you see and the sounds you hear. I mean, you'll never quite listen to Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" the same again after watching Dean Stockwell and then Hopper lip synch to it. The same is also true for Bobby Vinton's "Blue Velvet," performed here multiple times by Rossellini. Then again, perhaps Lynch is trying to suggest to us that we've been seeing and listening to everything the wrong way anyhow. Like I said at the beginning, Lynchian. Indeed.

Oscar Nomination: Best Director (David Lynch)

Sunset Boulevard (1950)

 

Sunset Boulevard is such a wonderful masterpiece of a movie and one of my favorite films of all time. It was released as Hollywood was experiencing yet another one of its many transitional moments. After the end of World War II, the movie business focused more on darker themes and more downbeat subject matter. This is the period of film noir, after all, and Sunset Boulevard certainly does demonstrate some of the key traits of film noir. The year of its release was also about twenty-two years or so since "talking pictures" had taken over as the dominant approach to filmmaking, and Sunset Boulevard takes on the subject of what happened to the stars of that era who didn't (or couldn't or weren't allowed to) make the transition from silent films to talkies. It's quite the tale of what happens when Old Hollywood clashes with New Hollywood.

Normal Desmond (played by Gloria Swanson in one of the most famous and magnificent performances ever committed to film) was a huge star in the silent era. However, she never made the transition to talking pictures, and she resents how the industry has left her behind. She lives alone in a huge mansion on Sunset Boulevard, which was, incidentally, the street for the location of the first film studio in Hollywood, with just her one servant, Max (famed director Erich von Stroheim showing he has acting chops too). A failed or failing Hollywood screenwriter named Joe Gillis (William Holden in a breakout role) accidentally interrupts their years-long solitude and becomes intertwined in Norma's plans for a return to movies. (Don't you dare call it a comeback. In the words of L.L. Cool J, she's been here for years.) 

What follows is certainly film noir, but it’s also a rather bitter indictment of the film industry. It’s also a drama and a crime film and, at times, a very dark comedy. The performances are all top-notch. You have to wonder how anyone could mix genres so smoothly, but director and co-writer Billy Wilder was certainly capable. He even managed to take the oddest approach to voice-over narrative – having a corpse tell the story of what happened to him during the previous six months that led to his murder – and make it somehow make sense.

There's so much wonderful movie trivia associated with this film. Both von Stroheim and Cecil B. DeMille (who appears as himself in the film) really did direct Swanson during the silent era. In fact, the film that Norma and Joe watch is Queen Kelly (1928-29), a Stroheim-helmed film that was considered a box office flop upon its initial release. DeMille actually did call Swanson "young fellow" as a term of endearment back when they were making their earlier films, and she was prone to calling him "chief." Wilder did film on the actual Paramount Studios, and yes, that's the gate that you would enter from Melrose Avenue (although there's a much bigger gate now that you have to go through first). Schwab's is still in Hollywood (albeit in a somewhat different location), and many an aspiring actor tried their best to be discovered there the way that Lana Turner allegedly was. The mansion itself is the old Jenkins-Getty mansion – yes, THAT Getty – and the pool was to appear on film again a few years later in a pivotal scene in Rebel Without a Cause (1955).

The film pays homage to the silent era with lots of references and appearances by stars of that period in Hollywood. The so-called Waxworks who play bridge with Norma are all famous silent screen performers: Anna Q. Nilsson, H.B. Warner, and the great Buster Keaton, none of whom were particularly active in filmmaking at the time, certainly not at the level of their fame during the silent era. The film also features lots of references to other actors from the era, such as Rudolph Valentino and Wallace Reid. They even manage to get references to such contemporary stars as Tyrone Power, Alan Ladd, and Betty Hutton into a scene involving a pitch meeting. Hedda Hopper, who also plays herself in the film, was a failed actress herself (just don't say that to her face) who became one of the most famous gossip columnists in Hollywood. 

Sunset Boulevard also features some of the most famous and most quoted lines in movie history:

•  "Audiences don't know somebody sits down and writes a picture; they think the actors make it up as they go along."
• "We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!"
• “They’ll love it in Pomona.” “They’ll love it everywhere.”
• “No one ever leaves a star. That’s what makes one a star.”
• "The stars are ageless, aren't they?"
• "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up."

I know that this film is a particular favorite of gay viewers, and those lines are at the ready for almost any occasion, but what movie lover doesn’t know these lines? It’s not restricted to those who view the film for its camp elements (although it certainly has those as well).

I have always found it interesting that the film reveals how much the transition to sound pictures affected performers, but not really anyone else. DeMille is still directing, the security guard at the Paramount gate is still the same, and the crew and supporting players seem to all be still active, don't they? It's a nice touch that during the scene in the movie studio, Norma's nemesis, the microphone, hits the feathers on her hat as it sails by. It's also quite intriguing that Wilder and co-writers Charles Brackett and D.M. Marshman Jr. chose to have the central performer be an actress rather than an actor. Perhaps they were commenting on the way that Hollywood treated/treats women as they age in the film industry. The montage showing Norma going through her beauty treatment preparations for a return to film would directly support that idea. Would a male actor need or want to undergo such scrutiny?

The film also comments upon issues of love and devotion. Max, Norma’s faithful servant, was a promising young director who gave up his career to be with the woman he married (before she divorced him for a second husband) and now keeps her distracted with fan mail that he sends to her. Joe begins to fall in love with Betty (Nancy Olson), the script reader who has aspirations to become a screenwriter herself, but he breaks her heart by telling her that he’s devoted to Norma and to being a kept man. There’s a lot of pain in these characters, and even with the darkness associated with their often-selfish behavior, it’s tough not to sympathize with them.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention one of my favorite aspects of the film, its production design. Norma Desmond’s mansion is spectacular. It’s filled with just what you’d expect someone from the silent era to include, like a tile dance floor because Valentino said that was better than using wood for the floor. Norma is also surrounded by pictures and portraits of herself, indications of just how narcissistic she is as well as how big a star she was, and watching her own films on her very own movie screen just cements that impression. Many years ago, I saw the stage production of the musical version of Sunset Boulevard (in Los Angeles before it made it to New York for its Broadway premiere), and the set received a standing ovation when it was revealed. It just perfectly recreated what we had seen in the film. The Oscar for art direction that the film received was well deserved.

Sunset Boulevard was nominated for eleven Academy Awards, winning three (Best Story and Screenplay, Best Black-and-White Art Direction, and Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture). All four of the principal actors were nominated for their performances, but sadly, none of them won. It was quite the year for Hollywood, what with All About Eve, Born Yesterday, Father of the Bride, King Solomon’s Mines, Caged, and so many more classics up for awards consideration. The three awards for Sunset Boulevard was second only to the six won by All About Eve. The film was among the first group of films selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress' National Film Preservation Board. It's regularly cited as one of the greatest films of all time and deservedly so.

Oscar Wins: Best Story and Screenplay, Best Black-and-White Art Direction, and Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture

Other Oscar Nominations: Best Picture, Best Director (Billy Wilder), Best Actress (Gloria Swanson), Best Actor (William Holden), Best Supporting Actress (Nancy Olson), Best Supporting Actor (Erich von Stroheim), Best Black-and-White Cinematography, and Best Film Editing

Disraeli (1929-30)

 

The film Disraeli depicts a key moment during the reign of Queen Victoria and Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. It has something to do with the purchase of the Suez Canal and ensuring British control of India in 1874. There are also Russian spies who are trying to find out what Disraeli and his government are doing, but to be frank, I’m not sure that any of this is all that interesting to a current audience. The film’s origins as a stage play are too obvious, and the quality of the print that I had access to was quite bad.

Today, Disraeli is perhaps best known for starring George Arliss, who became the first Best Actor Oscar winner to portray an actual person and the first British actor to win the honor. Since then, of course, neither of those is rare. Oscar voters have shown their preference for actors portraying real-life people, and British actors have certainly accumulated quite a lot of Oscar gold over the following decades. The rest of the cast of Disraeli is, comparatively, a bit amateurish, including Arliss’s own wife, Florence Arliss, playing Lady Beaconsfield, Disraeli’s wife. Oddly enough, she seems to be calling him Dizzy throughout the movie, or is she trying to say Dissy? I could never figure that out.

At the start of the film, Disraeli is already old and quite controversial. He’s denounced – to his face – by fellow politicians in the House of Commons and regularly spoken of in unfavorable terms in Hyde Park. He also has to deal with those Russian spies, one of whom he hires to be his personal secretary in order to keep tabs on the fellow and the other a very nosy woman who has access to the gossip of high society types. Disraeli pretends to be ill in order to get Mrs. Travers (Doris Lloyd) to reveal what she knows, and he’s able to turn the information around on her. That sequence might be the most entertaining in the entire film.

I don’t recall from my British history classes all of the fuss that the film makes about the Suez Canal’s importance to Great Britain and its empirical tendencies. It’s dismissed by one of the characters as being nothing more than an “Egyptian ditch.” Nowadays we understand the significance of such canals, but I’m not sure I ever fully understood from the film how securing the canal would give control of India to Great Britain and make Victoria the “Empress of India,” which seems to be Disraeli’s goal. Certainly, British expansionism was a key aspect of this period in their history, so the film is rather accurate in that respect, I suppose.

There’s a subplot involving Lord Charles Deeford (Anthony Bushell), a young and handsome and dull fellow, trying to woo Lady Clarissa Pevensey (Joan Bennett), who finds him just as boring as the viewers do. He’s certainly handsome, but he only becomes truly interesting when Disraeli dispatches him to help negotiate for British control of the canal. When he’s gone from the screen, she and we get a chance to forget how stuffy he is. His return, at least, guarantees success for Britain and a sense of how he might actually be smarter and more energetic and even useful than he initially appears.

I’m surprised – even though I probably shouldn’t be given when the film was made – that more wasn’t made of Disraeli’s Jewishness. Yes, the “old money” class of Britain certainly didn’t look favorably on him because he wasn’t “one of them,” but how much of their dislike of him might be attributed to antisemitism? The movie only mentions his Jewish identity a couple of times, and once is in connection to a Jewish banker who supposedly will help Disraeli secure the money to pay for the canal. Otherwise, the film remains rather silent on how the reactions to Disraeli might have been motivated by the feelings of British aristocracy to his ethnicity.

Like many stage productions that were adapted into films in the early years of “talkies,” Disraeli is really, truly quite talky (talkie?). Dialog takes clear priority over action, and the sets too often reveal the stage origins of the film. When you don’t have to change the sets as often, you could provide more furniture, for example, to represent better what Victorian homes and offices looked like. I mean, they weren’t known for this kind of rather comparatively austere minimalism.

The version of the film that I saw had a very hazy quality to its cinematography that I can’t quite determine where it was the result of deterioration or just how it was almost filmed originally. It almost looks out of focus at times. Some of the outdoor sequences are quite nice, but I didn’t understand the camera’s obsession with the swans and peacocks that populate the Disraeli home. The DVD (probably a bootleg copy) I watched was actually recorded from a Turner Classic Movies screening, so I’m wondering if we just don’t have access to a good print nowadays.

I’ve often said that you shouldn’t rely on a movie to provide historical accuracy. If you want what really happened, a book or a documentary might be more helpful than a fiction film. However, after watching Disraeli, I was left wondering if the actual events were truly this boring. If you need evidence that this is a fictional story, look at the Hollywood ending the film gives you. Disraeli’s wife is suddenly sick even though I don’t recall any sense that she’d been all that frail throughout the rest of the movie, but she makes an astonishing recovery just in time to join her husband to meet Queen Victoria at the film’s end.

Oscar Win: Best Actor (George Arliss)

Other Oscar Nominations: Best Picture and Best Writing