The Private Life of Helen of Troy (1927-28)

 

Only about thirty minutes of The Private Life of Helen of Troy exist in the British Film Institute archive, perhaps just one third of its total running time. Adapted from a novel by John Erskine, the film version takes on the famed mythological figures of the Trojan War. IMDB details the plot: “Queen Helen of Troy, in response to her husband Menelaus’ lack of interest in her, elopes with Paris to Sparta. Menelaus, egged on by his henchman, starts a war with Paris, finally effecting the return of Helen. The time-honored custom demands that he have the pleasure of killing her, but her seductive loveliness restrains him.” It seems like the film covers much of what we already know from Homer’s and Virgil’s accounts. The cast includes Maria Corda as Helen of Troy, Lewis Stone as Menelaus, and Ricardo Cortez as Paris. The category for which it was nominated, Best Title Writing, existed only for the first year of the Academy Awards. Sound films were so ubiquitous by the second ceremony that the category was deemed no longer necessary. Title writing is a lost art, of course, but giving viewers a sufficient amount of interesting and useful information on a film’s intertitles made a huge difference. The recipient of the nomination, Gerald Duffy, was the first person to be nominated posthumously for an Oscar. He had died almost eleven months before the first ceremony.

Oscar Nomination: Best Title Writing

The Dove (1927-28)

  

It might be best to describe The Dove as a partially lost film. Four of the film’s nine reels are in the Library of Congress, and they are not even consecutive reels. The film is based upon a play by Willard Mack and stars Norma Talmadge, Noah Beery, and Gilbert Roland, all of them major performers of the silent film era. IMDB summarizes the plot very tersely: “A despot falls for a dancing girl. After she rejects him, he has her other beau framed for murder.” So many of the plots of these lost films sound like they are very melodramatic, don’t they? It was one of the fashions of the times, I suppose. William Cameron Menzies won the first Oscar for Best Interior Decoration, later known as Art Direction and now known as Production Design, for The Dove and for Tempest. He would be nominated again in the same category the following year and would later receive a special Oscar for his use of color in Gone with the Wind.

Oscar Win: Best Interior Decoration

The Magic Flame (1927-28)

Two of the three films for which George Barnes was nominated for Best Cinematography in the first year of the Academy Awards are considered lost. In addition to The Magic Flame, he was also nominated for The Devil Dancer (also a lost film) and Sadie Thompson (most of which still survives). IMDB describes the plot of The Magic Flame in terms that are vague but quite intriguing: “A love triangle involving two members of a travelling circus and an aristocrat has serious consequences for all three individuals.” The three points of that love triangle are played by some big names in early films: Ronald Colman and Vilma Banky. Colman plays both Tito the Clown and the Count, both of whom are in love with Banky’s trapeze artist Bianca. Colman would later win an Oscar for A Double Life and have a long successful career after the transition to sound films. Banky had costarred with Colman in several films and twice with Rudolph Valentino, but she did not make the transition to talkies. Only eight of her twenty-four films are believed to have survived, and another three may exist in fragments, including The Magic Flame. However, it may actually be completely lost at this point. A few reels of the film may survive at either the Museum of Modern Art or the International Museum of Photography and Film at the George Eastman House, but there’s no evidence of a complete version. In fact, there’s even a dispute over whether several reels are available at the George Eastman House. Given the status of many films from this era, it’s quite likely that The Magic Flame is another lost silent film.

Oscar Nomination: Best Cinematography 

Sorrell and Son (1927-28)

 

An almost complete copy of Sorrell and Son and a trailer for the film are now preserved in the Academy Film Archive. However, unless the Academy makes the film more readily accessible, it will remain another rarely seen film from the first year of the awards. The plot, according to IMDB, is based upon the novel of the same name by Warwick Deeping: “Stephen Sorrell, a decorated war hero, raises his son Kit alone after Kit’s mother deserts husband and child in the boy’s infancy. Sorrell loses a promising job offer and is forced to take work as a menial. Both his dignity and his health are damaged as he suffers under the exhausting labor and harsh treatment he receives as a hotel porter. But Sorrell thrives in the knowledge that his son will benefit from his labors. Sorrell has allowed the boy to believe his mother dead, but when the mother shows up, wanting to re-enter the young man’s life, Sorrell must make hard decisions.” That sounds like quite the soap opera. The cast is impressive: H.B. Warner plays Stephen Sorrell, Anna Q. Nilsson plays Dora Sorrell, and Kit is played by Mickey McBan as a child and Nils Asther as an adult. The film’s sole nomination is for a category that existed only during the first year of the awards, Best Directing of a Dramatic Picture. After the first year, there would only be one category for directing, and the Academy would no longer acknowledge that filming different genres can take different sets of skills.

Oscar Nomination: Best Directing of a Dramatic Picture (Herbert Brenon)

The Devil Dancer (1927-28)

 

The Devil Dancer is presumed to be a lost film, one of many from the silent era that we are no longer able to enjoy. According to IMBD, the film’s plot goes as follows: “An English explorer disturbed by the practices of an isolated tribe attempts to rescue a native girl he has become fascinated with.” It sounds like some rather colonial attitudes being represented here, but the film was recognized by the Oscars for its cinematography, not its writing. In fact, its photographer, George Barnes, accounted for 75 percent of the films nominated that first year for Best Cinematography: The Devil Dancer, Sadie Thompson, and Tempest. Barnes would receive a total of eight Academy Award nominations in his career, winning for 1940’s Rebecca. Of course, he lost in the first year of the Oscars to the cinematographers of Sunrise, certainly one of the most beautifully filmed silent movies. The Devil Dancer stars Gilda Gray as the title character (also known as Takla), Clive Brook as Stephen Athelstan, and Anna May Wong as Sada. There’s also a character known as “The White Woman,” played by Barbara Tennant, so that doesn’t bode well for the likelihood of a non-colonial attitude toward the non-white characters (or to women either if they’re only known by one trait or characteristic). Gray apparently was best known for popularizing the dance known as the “shimmy.” Brook would later co-star with Marlene Dietrich and Wong again in Shanghai Express; he also played Sherlock Holmes three times after making a successful transition from silents to talkies. Wong was the first Chinese American movie star and was always underused (or misused) and underappreciated in Hollywood. It would be fascinating to see what Wong (and the rest of the cast) did with what sounds like a less-than-promising premise.

Oscar Nomination: Best Cinematography

Cliffhanger (1993)

 

Cliffhanger was nominated for three technical Oscars (Sound, Sound Effects Editing, and Visual Effects) but lost all three of them to the juggernaut that was/is Jurassic Park. The stunt work in Cliffhanger is spectacular, top-notch, but it’s tough to compete with those amazingly realistic-looking dinosaurs. The plot involves the search for $100 million in uncirculated U.S. currency that was stolen from a Treasury Department plane. Sylvester Stallone plays Gabe Walker and Janine Turner (still best known for TV’s Northern Exposure) plays Jessie Dieghan, two rangers who rescue people trapped in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Gabe has taken eight months away from the job after letting a friend, Sarah, slip from his hand during an attempted rescue; the friend’s boyfriend, Hal Tucker (Michael Rooker, who will always be Daryl’s older brother on The Walking Dead to me), blames Gabe, and Gabe has carried the weight of Sarah’s death to the point of wanting to quit his job. Jessie convinces Gabe to join Hal in responding to a distress signal, not realizing that John Lithgow’s Eric Qualen and his band of international thieves want them to find the three cases of money now lost in the mountains after a failed theft attempt and after their own plane has crashed, leaving them stranded with just a honing device to help them find the missing cases. Qualen, working with turncoat U.S. Treasury agent Richard Travers (Rex Linn), and his cohort are very sadistic and easily angered. They always seem ready to kill someone for no significant reason; they even kill Ralph Waite’s Frank, a helicopter pilot who has merely tried to rescue them, and one of a pair of young guys who are just out to ski and jump and have some fun in the mountains. Stallone’s Gabe systematically sabotages the efforts by Qualen’s group to retrieve the money. He makes certain that something goes wrong with each case, and it’s fun to watch so much money get blown up or set on fire or tossed into a helicopter’s blades and shredded. The villains are universally evil and heartless, only interested in getting their money, not matter the human cost that it takes. They’re almost cartoonish in their brutality, but that violence is graphically depicted onscreen. It’s an adventure movie, really, with the money only serving as the maguffin for the plot. It’s the stunt performers who get the most attention. Aside from the scenes of people scaling numerous mountains, Cliffhanger also showcases a transfer of people and the cases of money from one plane to another in midair – well, I should say the attempted transfer of the money since that’s what sets the main portion of the plot in motion. It’s possible that you’ll be able to predict the outcome of the movie by the time you’ve watched the first half (or even third), but that doesn’t detract from the overall impact of the visual effects.

Oscar Nominations: Best Sound, Best Sound Effects Editing, and Best Visual Effects

BUtterfield 8

 

Butterfield 8 would probably not warrant much of our attention these days if it weren’t for the performance of Elizabeth Taylor, who won the Oscar for Best Actress, as Gloria Wandrous, a woman who likes to have fun in the company of men. It’s not a particularly good film, and the dialogue is especially cringe-inducing. For example, one character tells Laurence Harvey’s character about Gloria, “Oh, she’s…she’s frantic! Isn’t she like a rocket off the Earth? Who should know better than yours truly? Ooohh, mother, help me! I’d have left home for that. Nah… she’s got a traveling itch; she’s like a flea. Hop, hop, hop from one dog to another. She bites you, and she’s gone. She picks you up, and she drops you.” Such misogynistic talk permeates the film, and the attitude that it represents accounts, perhaps, for how the film’s plot punishes Gloria but not Liggett (Harvey), the married man who treats both his wife and his mistress, whom he allegedly loves, horribly. Of course, Harvey almost always played a cad in his movie roles, and Butterfield 8 is no exception. The film’s title, which should technically have the first two letters capitalized but autocorrect says otherwise, is the number for the phone service she uses for receiving and sending messages from her numerous male friends and from the agency for which she models clothes. Despite the obstacles – he’s married, she wants to define the terms of her relationships herself – they fall in love after spending a week together. They also have a lot of sex in a lot of places, at his apartment, in a motel room, on a boat, even in the backseat of her car – none of which are shown on the screen, of course. Still, that would be pretty risqué stuff for 1960. An argument over Gloria’s taking of Liggett’s wife’s mink coat leads to the end of their relationship, and Taylor’s reactions to Harvey’s emoting during the sequence at a restaurant and then outside his apartment are marvels of restraint. Remarkably, she won for what is a very subtle performance, not the kind of acting for which actors typically receive awards. The rest of the cast is filled with some strong but short performances by great character actors: Mildred Dunnock as Gloria’s mother, Kay Medford as the owner of the motel where Gloria and Liggett spend time together, and Betty Field as Mrs. Thurber, a friend of Gloria’s mother who has some great repartee with Taylor’s Gloria over the morality of her behavior. Dina Merrill also has some solid moments as Emily Liggett, the wife who seems to know more about what’s going on that she admits. In an unexpected twist, Eddie Fisher, Taylor’s husband at the time of filming, plays her long-time friend Steve Carpenter, a composer who loves and supports Gloria even though he has a girlfriend who doesn’t understand why he stands by a woman like Gloria. Butterfield 8 was also Oscar-nominated for its cinematography, but I don’t see anything about the camerawork that is particularly outstanding. The set design, particularly Liggett’s spectacular apartment, and costume design, especially the many outfits that accentuate Taylor’s beauty, should have gotten some recognition instead. I wondered at times if this film were truly meant to be camp or if it could be considered camp by now, but is some bad dialogue alone sufficient to be camp?

Oscar Win: Best Actress in a Leading Role (Elizabeth Taylor)

Other Oscar Nominations: Best Color Cinematography

Tenet (2020)

 

I’ll be honest: I didn’t quite follow the so-called science of Tenet. Several characters in the film attempt to explain “inverted entropy,” but my lack of interest in physics or whatever branch of science is involved prevented me from comprehending. Maybe it would have all played better had I had the opportunity to see the film in a large theater rather than at home since I might have felt a bit more immersed in the world of the film. However, I’m not sure that you have to really understand the “science” in order to understand that much of the film is about trying to stop a Russian oligarch, Andrei Sator (played by Kenneth Branagh in his most over-the-top mode), from obtaining a device that would allow him to reverse time itself and perhaps destroy Earth and all of its people. The film’s central character, known simply as The Protagonist (John David Washington)—a stunningly stupid name, really—is a former CIA agent who is now trying to stop Sator from gaining the maguffin of what appears to be a little trinket box. Washington’s character works with Neil (Robert Pattinson of Twilight fame), who meets The Protagonist in the future but has returned to the past to help him. Or something like that. Again, it’s a bit of a puzzle, and I’m certain that more careful viewers were able to follow all of the plot twists. I just found them unnecessarily muddled. Instead, I concentrated more upon the spectacular sequences that undoubtedly won the film the Oscar for Best Visual Effects. The opening sequence in a Kyiv opera house involves the rescue of an asset in the midst of the attempted theft of the entropy device. Later in the film, The Protagonist and Neil attempt to swipe the (a?) device from a very secure storage facility at an airport, and they use a full-sized plane to create a distraction. A sequence involving a series of fire trucks and police cars and passenger cars flipping over dazzles, especially when you twist back and watch events (and the vehicles) reverse themselves. Tenet features a lot of travel to beautiful locations, much the same as a James Bond film: Kyiv; Mumbai, India; Oslo, Norway; and the Amalfi Coast in Italy. Still, some of the aspects of the plot don’t quite hold up under intense scrutiny. I realize that The Protagonist reaches out to Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), Sator’s estranged wife, because that’s a convenient way to get into contact with Sator himself, but the business involving a faked Goya painting didn’t contribute anything to my understanding of the plot. Likewise, The Protagonist’s story about trying to help Sator get access to a large enough amount of plutonium to make an atomic weapon seems like a distraction given that Sator has much bigger plans than just one nuclear device. Tenet will probably be forever known as the biggest movie to be released (eventually) during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it suffered a great deal as a result. Many more of us might have experienced the big screen visuals and been even more impressed. It’s certainly a very stylish film in many ways, and aside from its impressive visual effects, it also features very sharp editing. Perhaps a revival screening in the future can turn me around, but the narrative doesn’t rise to the level of the visuals in Tenet.

Oscar Win: Best Achievement in Visual Effects

Other Oscar Nomination: Best Achievement in Production Design