The High and the Mighty (1954)

 

Can we go back to the kind of air travel depicted in The High and the Mighty? No, not the part where the engines start failing and everyone has to start rethinking whether their life has turned out as they had hoped. Not that, no. Just the part where there are only seventeen passengers and big, wide seats and hot food cooked on the plane. I mean, I could do without the smoking on the plane, but the rest of it looks awfully luxurious compared to the cramped seating of contemporary flights. Of course, that’s not the point of the movie at all because this is a doomed flight from Honolulu to San Francisco, and everyone on board has some kind of issue that they’re grappling with that requires them to become quickly introspective. With a 2.5-hour running time, The High and the Mighty has plenty of space to share something about everyone on the plane. Even when each guest checks in at the desk in Honolulu, we get a little bit of insight into what their character is like. John Wayne, the primary star of this all-star cast, is a pilot haunted by the plane crash that killed his wife and son; we get some pretty vivid flashbacks of that event. In fact, we get flashbacks into the lives of several of the people on the plane, just enough to give us a taste of their lives on the ground. We have a couple who have been on their honeymoon and seem determined to join the Mile High Club even though they’re sitting in the first row of the cabin in full view of the other passengers and frequent view of the crew members in the cockpit. Another couple, Phil Harris and Ann Doran, have had a series of misadventures on their trip, and the issues with the plane seem destined to continue their bad luck. The great Laraine Day plays Lydia Rice, an heiress married to a man she doesn’t support emotionally. The rest of the players seem to represent particular stereotypes. For example, a young Korean woman on the plane keeps talking about badly she speaks and writes English even though the letter she’s writing to her brother is poetic. A painter named Flaherty is a scientist with regrets about his role in developing missiles. Another passenger is horribly afraid of crashes, and another one is terminally ill and treated very tenderly by the rest of the people on the plane. Two of the performers did get attention from the Academy Awards, and both seem to play a variation of the same role: the aging ingénue who has to face up to changes in her life. The first, Jan Sterling, plays the winner of a magazine’s popularity contest who’s on her way to meet her potential fiancé for the first time, and the second, Claire Trevor, plays an aging party girl who gets chummy very quickly with David Brian’s Ken Childs, a playboy accused of having an affair with the wife of another passenger. There’s even a young boy on board flying by himself from his father in Honolulu to his mother in San Francisco. Yes, it’s all a bit Peyton Place in the sky, and it’s clear this film heavily influenced later movies like Airport. Even the crew members have their issues. Robert Stack plays the pilot who is very experienced and has a sense that something might be wrong with the plane almost from takeoff, but he freezes when he needs to act. Willy Brown plays navigator Lenny Wilby, who doesn’t seem willing to admit to himself (or anyone else, for that matter) that he’s married to a very unfaithful woman who sounds like she might be drunk a lot of the time and not especially loving toward her husband. We have lots of confessions that come to light and many moments of coming to terms with their potential deaths as the film progresses and the problems with the plane seem to keep increasing. We get lots of shots of the pilots in the cockpit talking to the people on the ground trying to figure out how to rescue the passengers and crew, and the tension does begin to mount more heavily and effectively in the last half hour or so. Are they going to make it to the coast and a landing strip? Would the filmmakers really kill off all of these stars, including John Wayne? How did that kid sleep through all of the drama that was happening on board, even the sequence where everyone throws their luggage out of the rear door in order to lighten the load and save some gas? And he slept through the tense moments when the jealous husband tries to shoot Childs with a gun? That’s a very good sleeper. The High and the Mighty was filmed in widescreen CinemaScope, and the movie’s cinematography is truly beautiful. It’s great at capturing what it’s like to be on a plane, especially what it’s like to see so much of the world out of the small windows of a plane. The plot is certainly melodramatic and verges on becoming a soap opera, but we get enough insight into almost everyone on the plane to have a little bit of genuine empathy for almost all of them.

Oscar Win: Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture

Other Oscar Nominations: Best Director (William Wellman), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Jan Sterling and Claire Trevor), Best Film Editing, and Best Original Song (“The High and the Mighty”)

Marooned (1969)

 

Marooned is a rather excruciatingly slow movie about three astronauts trying to return to Earth after their mission to a space station has been cut short. Richard Crenna, Gene Hackman, and James Franciscus portray the astronauts who are unable to fix a malfunction on the spaceship Ironman One that’s preventing them from reentering the Earth’s atmosphere. Retrofiring or something like that won’t work, so there’s talk almost immediately about how the three are likely to die in space. There are some possibilities to rescue or save them, such as having some experimental craft that’s never been fully tested swing by and pick them up, or maybe the Russians can help them out if they will cooperate with their American rivals for space exploration. Oh, and there’s not enough oxygen for all three of them to make it home anyways, but they try to stay quiet and sleep as much as possible to conserve the oxygen they do have, and watching people sleep does make for such a compelling movie experience, doesn’t it? Gregory Peck plays the NASA leader back on Earth who has to remain stoic as he subtly suggests that one of the men sacrifice himself for the other two. The astronauts’ wives also show up three times during the course of the film, basically to give pep talks to their doomed husbands. Lee Grant plays the wife of Crenna’s Jim Pruett, and she’s the most matter-of-fact and seasoned wife; Grant knew how to make the most of a few moments of screen time. A young Mariette Hartley plays the wife of Hackman’s Buzz Lloyd, and how she manages to deal with his weirdness after a spell of oxygen deprivation is a master class in keeping one’s emotions mostly in check. Nancy Kovack’s Teresa, wife to James Franciscus’ Clayton Stone, gets the least amount of screen time and less of an opportunity to demonstrate much range here. The women aren’t the focus, but it would make for a much more interesting movie if some of the other sequences were shorter and we had a chance to know more of each woman’s backstory. The plot involves a lot of talking, most of it in technical jargon, and the story seems to unfurl almost in real times when it moves its slowest. It’s only about 134 minutes long; it just seems much longer. Marooned was released only four months after the moon landing, and it must have freaked a lot of people out by tapping into both the excitement and fears about space travel. The Oscar-winning special effects are pretty cool, especially the moments when the astronauts are floating around outside of the ship. The cinematography is also nice and clear, and the production design creates a very realistic simulation of both the spaceship and the control center back on Earth. Interestingly, an edited version of the film from 1991, now entitled Space Travelers, was lampooned on Mystery Science Theater 3000, the only Academy Award-winning film to achieve such a dubious distinction. What did the MST3K critics most note about the film? Its slow-moving plot…

Oscar Win: Best Special Visual Effects

Other Oscar Nominations: Best Cinematography and Best Sound

The Deep (1977)

 

The Deep stars Nick Nolte and Jacqueline Bisset as a pair of vacationing divers searching for treasure in Bermuda. Both Nolte and Bisset as David and Gail, respectively, are at the peak of their physical attractiveness in this film, and she, in particular, is the focus of a lot of the camera’s gaze, particularly when she emerges from the sea in a wet t-shirt, a sequence that was the subject of a lot of attention upon the film’s release. They’re mostly looking for jewels and other gold objects among the ruins of the Goliath, but it isn’t until they find an ampule of morphine that everyone else suddenly becomes interested in their dives. Louis Gossett Jr., sporting some of the largest butterfly-collared shirts in filmdom, wants them to locate the other 9,800 or so ampules of morphine reportedly on board the shipwreck, and he’s not above having his henchmen take Gail hostage and enact a strange voodoo-ish ritual involving the smearing of blood over her torso with a chicken foot in order to persuade the pair to help him find the drugs. It’s a strange moment tine the film, particularly the way it is intercut with comparatively calm moments with Nolte. In supporting roles, you have Robert Shaw, not as crusty here as he was in Jaws, as the local expert on diving and what you might find in wreckage, and Eli Wallach as a survivor of the Goliath’s shipwreck. Shaw keeps calling Nolte and Gail “Boy” and Gail “Girl,” and Wallach’s character is Adam Coffin, a pretty clear homage to Peter Coffin from Moby-Dick, so every character seems to need some little quirk to help you remember them better. Nick and Gail agree to help recover the morphine with the help of a giant suction hose, but then the hose sucks up a grenade and the explosion almost knocks the ship off the cliff on which it is precariously located, making the mission even more dangerous. Besides, there are sharks and a particularly nasty moray eel who tries to eat everything that comes within its path and who keeps reappearing at the most inopportune times. Most heterosexual male viewers will undoubtedly recall the wet t-shirt without also remembering the horrific scene where Bisset is strip searched by a group of thugs. It’s a shameful moment clearly designed to objectify Bisset even more than she already has been, and it serves no useful purpose to the overall trajectory of the plot. However, more worthy of attention is the beautiful underwater cinematography and the clarity of the images that we see – and a lot of the movie does take place underwater, after all. The Deep is shot very well and quite effectively, but only the film’s sound achievements were acknowledged by the Academy.

Oscar Nomination: Best Sound

Billy Rose's Jumbo (1962)

 

Billy Rose’s Jumbo doesn’t particularly break any new ground as a movie about a poor, small circus, but the depictions of everyday life among the circus performers and the performances themselves are stunningly shot and worth the couple of hours the story takes to unspool. “Pop” Wonder (Jimmy Durante, playing a usual Durante role) gambles away every day’s profits, leaving his daughter Kitty (a luminous Doris Day) to try keeping the circus afloat by asking for extensions from the many, many creditors the Wonder Circus has accumulated. Jumbo, an entertaining elephant, is the star attraction of the circus, and he’s wanted (very badly) by a rival circus. Enter Stephen Boyd, an enigmatic high wire acrobat who turns out to be the son of the owners of that rival circus. While he’s wooing Kitty (and having his singing voice dubbed in doing so), he’s also paying off the Wonder Circus’s rapidly mounting debts and acquiring larger and larger shares of its ownership. That’s really about it for the main plot, honestly, so the thinness of the story leaves generous amounts of time for watching the circus acts themselves. One of the centerpieces I especially enjoyed is a stunning number involving women dressed as butterflies. Unfortunately, a storm interrupts their part of the show, and the circus has to spend some time recovering and rebuilding from all the damage. The other highlight of the movie are all the lovely songs by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, most of which have nothing to do with the circus. Still, it’s hard to argue when you have Doris Day singing “My Romance” and “Little Girl Blue” and “This Can’t Be Love.” There’s even an astounding nine-minute musical number at the end entitled “Sawdust and Spangles and Dreams,” a sort of circus fantasia, if you will. Day, of course, sings beautifully, but the filmmakers do surround her in pink an awful lot. A less “girly” color palette would have suited her better. One of the other pleasures of the film is watching the great Martha Raye mugging her way through one of the broadest performances of her career – and that’s saying a lot. She plays a circus performer who’s in love with Pop Wonder, and watching her get shot out of a cannon is a sequence you won’t soon forget.

Oscar Nomination: Best Scoring of Music, Adaptation or Treatment

Best Cartoon Short Subject of 1936

 

The Country Cousin begins with the arrival of Abner Countrymouse in the city. He’s been invited via telegram by his cousin, Monty Citymouse, to enjoy the more refined metropolitan life. The film features no dialogue, just sounds, which is central to the plot since sounds could awaken the house cat. Visually, the two mice look very much alike; only their clothes differentiate them physically. However, Abner is quite a bumpkin. His manners are less refined, and he is seemingly incapable of being quiet. After Morty rejects the cheese from a mousetrap that Abner triggers, they begin dining on a table loaded with fine food. Morty has to shush Abner repeatedly, but once the country mouse drinks a glass full of champagne in order to cool his mouth from the taste of hot mustard, there’s little hope that he won’t wake up the cat eventually. Abner gets the hiccups, he tries to shush the radiator when it lets off some steam, and he even performs the mirror routine with his reflection in a purple gelatin, a very clever riff on Chico Marx’s routine. While he is still drunk, Abner kicks the sleeping cat, prompting a chase that leads him into an electrical socket, down a rain gutter, and into a can outside the house. He narrowly escapes people, trains, cars, roller skaters, various threats, and then decides to return to Podunk, which is forty miles away from the city. This short, one of the Silly Symphonies produced by Walt Disney, cleverly uses a series of visual gags and demonstrates the differences between Morty and Abner in their physical reactions. Abner obviously doesn’t really belong in a place like the city, and Morty’s recurring shushes only reinforce how out of place the country mouse is.

Watching The Old Mill Pond is quite an unnerving experience. It’s pretty clear early on that what is ostensibly about a show put on by frogs in the pond of the title is really a blackface revue. A frog that is meant to look and act like Cab Calloway serves as sort of an emcee for a variety show, but rather than being an homage or tribute, it does seem to be mocking the real-life people upon which some of these characters are based. Was having them portrayed as frogs some kind of bizarre blackface that was common at the time? Even if it were, would it have been flattering to the black artists depicted in this short cartoon? In addition to Cab Calloway and his orchestra, we see a frog who’s apparently meant to be Fats Waller and another group of frogs meant to be the Mills Brothers. Some frog diva (Ethel Waters? Really?) with backup dancers sings or performs something called “Jungle Rhythm,” and allegedly the representations include Bill “Bojangles” Robison and Stephin Fetchit too. The short begins and ends with a calm rendition of “Down by the Old Mill Stream,” something of a stark contrast to the raucous show going on behind the reeds of the pond. The Old Mill Pond is one of the Happy Harmonies shorts, meant to serve as competition to Disney’s Silly Symphonies, but it lost the Oscar to a Disney short this year and perhaps deservedly so.

Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor was the first color short in the Popeye series, and it includes a lot of the elements familiar to fans of Popeye cartoons. The encounter in the title occurs when Sinbad (Bluto?) sees Olive Oyl and sends one of his collection of beasts, a giant Roc, to wreck Popeye’s ship and capture Olive. There’s an undercurrent of competition between the two sailors from the start of the film, as Popeye and Sinbad both sing about how great they are. Popeye has to rescue Olive, who has been forced to dance for Sinbad, and the expected fight between the two men ensues. I, personally, have always found it hard to believe that Olive is so appealing that every man wants her. The trademarks are all here: Popeye’s mumbling and grammatically inaccurate speech (“I wants me girl”), his eating of a can of spinach to gain strength to defeat an opponent, and his inevitable victory. The Fleisher Studios cartoons did not have the same sharpness of detail that the Disney films of the era did. However, even with the muted palette of colors typical of the studio’s output, this short’s backgrounds are still quite beautiful. The story is intriguing for its unique details, too, such as the menagerie of beasts that Sinbad has accumulated: two-headed monsters, dragons, lions, serpents, and the Roc. These beasts fear him, but they obey his commands, leading to an interesting demise for the Roc. The bird takes Popeye to a volcanic island, only to be cooked like a turkey by the crafty Popeye. One of the highlights of a Popeye cartoon is the different ways that the filmmakers devised for him to defeat Bluto (or, in this case, Bluto-as-Sinbad). Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor introduces the twister punch, which involves Popeye twisting his own arm so that when he makes contact with Sinbad’s body, his opponent twists as well. It’s a clever addition to the canon, and it adds to the overall fun of this cartoon. Sadly, this was the only Popeye cartoon to be nominated for an Academy Award despite a lengthy and influential output.

Oscar Winner: The Country Cousin (Walt Disney was on a very hot streak back then.)

My Choice: Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor. Popeye is/was a cultural icon, and this was one of the best of the many cartoons featuring him. Plus, it’s more ambitious than its competitors.

Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927-28)

 

It’s not necessarily easy to determine if Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness is a documentary or not. It’s also not particularly easy to determine which, if any, of the scenes were staged or, more likely, reconstructed. It’s supposed to be a depiction of life in the jungles of what was then called Siam (not Thailand), but frankly, there are so many questions that arise from watching the film, that’s it’s not (again) easy to decide how much to believe as being true or accurate. It was filmed on location, so it does offer us a view into what life was like for residents of the northern region of Thailand – and perhaps, more importantly, how dangerous life was for them.

The film mostly follows one family’s adventures over the course of about a year. A man named Kru tries to make a home in the jungle with his wife (Chantui) and his children, including his eldest child, a boy named Nah. Most of the story revolves around them and their encounters with the wild animals of the jungle. In fact, the animals are listed as characters in the film (“Wild Beasts”) as is “The Jungle” itself. Even the other people in the film are noted as “Natives of the Wild.” This really isn’t a character-driven narrative. It’s an action-adventure-documentary-ish. A title card during the opening sequence of the film notes that the jungle always “wins,” and after watching the range of dangers that Kru’s family faces, it’s hard not to accept that judgment.

The family tries to build a house on stilts to offer some protection, and they start farming rice and collecting a veritable ark-load of animals around them. One of the highlights of the film is the footage of the various animals of the region. At some point during the movie, we witness cats and kittens, goats, a wolf, a dog and its pups, oxen, pigs, a little bear, a porcupine, a mongoose, an anteater (although it looks a lot more like a pangolin to me), a baby anteater, and so many others. I’ll get to the dangerous animals soon since they are central to the narrative. Of all of these pets, though, only the pups are kept inside the house in order to protect them from tigers, but the rest of the animals seem fated to have danger be a constant part of their existence.

Oh, and then there’s Bimbo, a white monkey who seems to be as much a part of the family as anyone else. Bimbo even gets his own dialog cards! It’s as if the movie really wants us to know what Bimbo is thinking as he steals the blanket from the baby’s crib or when he’s running for his life from a leopard or when he’s trying to hold on as an elephant destroys the family home with him inside. It’s tough being a monkey, obviously, and the film features Bimbo a bit more than it does Nah, the first-born son of Kru and Chantui. And, yes, he’s listed in the cast as well.

One of the first dangers that Kru and his family must face is a leopard that has gotten into the pen holding the goats. When it returns for a second meal, Kru traps it inside the pen and shoots it. Of course, that’s not the last leopard they will likely face, so Kru asks for help from the chief of the closest village. Thirty men set traps and pitfalls and snares and nets to catch leopards. They succeed in catching one leopard, but they also catch a tiger in a net and kill it as well. In fact, a lot of animals get killed onscreen throughout this film. It’s pretty deadly stuff, and it’s not easy to watch. And, as you might suspect, just because you kill one tiger or one leopard doesn’t mean that you’re done with being stalked by others. You might wind up escaping from yet another one by clambering into a boat and paddling away as quickly as possible, as Kru and his family have to do at one point later in the film.

Possibly the biggest danger emerges when it’s time for the harvest. The title animal, a “chang” or elephant, is leaving evidence of the return of a large herd to the area of the jungle where Kru lives and close to where the village is located. The villagers are reluctant to believe that the so-called Great Herd has returned after so many years, even after a baby elephant is caught in one of the pitfalls and proves very heavy to pull out of the pit. It’s also not easy to train a baby elephant or feed it. When its mother completely demolishes Kru’s home, he and his family return to the village to live and try to warn the rest of the impending arrival of the herd. Once the herd shows up and demolishes everything in sight, the villagers get the point and start setting a trap.

What a doozy of a trap it is, too. It features very high walls and an entrance designed to funnel the elephants into a central pen area. The villagers converge on the elephants with the men disguised as trees – which must have been very disconcerting for the elephants – and set fires and drive the large animals into the pen. Then, in a remarkably colonialist gesture, they force the elephants to work for them. You might suspect that this subjugation of the elephants won’t last, but by the end of the film, there’s no indication that it isn’t working.

By the time Kru and his family return to the jungle and build another house, you start to wonder if it’s truly worth all of the struggle. I mean, there are still leopards and tigers and elephants (oh my!) out there, just waiting for their chance to show up and mess with the lives of these humans who have invaded their space. Maybe it’s true, as the film says, that the jungle is unconquerable. It’s certainly tough to tame, and there’s always a new threat on the horizon. Why bother? The film doesn’t provide an answer to that question, though.

The film was directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, who would later collaborate on the 1933 version of King Kong. It’s only Oscar nomination came in that “Best Picture” category that lasted on the first year of the awards: Unique and Artistic Production. Perhaps it was Cooper and Schoedsack’s work with Bimbo on this film – he does get his own closeups, after all – that convinced them to make a movie about a giant ape a few years later.

Oscar Nomination: Unique and Artistic Production

Fellini Satyricon (1970)

I don’t know how exactly to describe Fellini Satyricon. It’s a visually stunning film that amazes a viewer with its unusual style, but it’s also very narratively confusing, given its episodic nature of storytelling. It’s enigmatic almost to the point at times of being impenetrable because of its very fragmentary structure that leaves out huge gaps of time and information between the vignettes that depict the journeys or adventures or what-you-will of two friends, who I assume are also former lovers. Encolpius is played by British actor Martin Potter; he’s the blond one. Ascyltus is played by Hiram Keller, an American actor with dark hair. I realize that’s a weak way to differentiate the performers and their roles, but it actually helped me sometimes. It’s quite the series of tales that we watch the two young men experience, and it’s also quite a gay-oriented story. Well, I guess the more appropriate word might be “queer.” There are so many almost-naked men and such short tunics in this movie and so much same-sex activity (implied and somewhat depicted) that it’s no wonder the great film critic and historical Parker Tyler called it “the most profoundly homosexual movie in all history.” The film starts with Encolpius and Ascyltus fighting over a young boy named Giton, who, frankly, isn’t appear to be worth all the fuss unless I’m missing something that wasn’t translated into subtitles. There’s some dispute as to whom he “belongs”; I couldn’t quite discern if the boy is a slave or just an object of lust, but Encolpius gets the boy back from an actor who farts a lot on stage. He and the boy spend some time together – I think you know what that means – but then the boy winds up leaving with Ascyltus anyway. Thus begins the wandering narrative of Encolpius. He meets a poet named Eumolpus, who takes him to a weird party with odd food and strange rituals and bad poetry. I was definitely not hungry after watching this sequence. Encolpius is later taken on a slave ship and married to a new master, who likes to wrestle his newly acquired slaves. The allegedly cute boy and Ascyltus are also on the ship, but how they got there is a mystery. Encolpius and Ascyltus next wind up at a house where a couple commits suicide after freeing all of their slaves. They have a three-way with a very beautiful woman, but here’s an example of where the skips in the narrative confound a viewer. We have no idea how they got to this house, nor they escape from it and get to the next place in the story, and the next place is very odd – which I realize is a matter of degrees when it comes to this film. Encolpius and Ascyltus help another man kidnap a demigod, Hermaphroditus, who heals people. Well, sometimes, they heal people. Most of the time they just seem sleepy and weak, which probably accounts for why the demigod dies from sun exposure so soon after being kidnapped. By the way, I didn’t realize that the word hermaphrodite came from the progeny of Hermes and Aphrodite until I watched this film, so I guess I did gain some cultural knowledge along the way. Up next for Encolpius is a battle with a minotaur. It’s some sort of joke the town plays on foreigners? I didn’t get the joke, nor did I understand why he’s forced to have sex with a woman who is rather condescending and nasty to him. He can’t perform with her – who could, really? – but then Eumolpus, whom I had assumed was dead already, shows up and takes him to the Garden of Delights to get his, um, equipment restored. If this sounds like a wild ride of a movie, you should understand that I’m skipping over a lot of moments that are just so bewildering that I am not even sure I understood what happened. I think a rich man basically challenges his heirs to cannibalize his corpse after he dies in order to inherit anything from him; apparently, the flesh was rather, shall we say, chewy? Not a pleasant image, to say the least. Contributing to the confusion is that only about maybe two-thirds of the film’s dialog had been translated into English subtitles in the print that I saw, and my Italian is, well, nonexistent. I think I’ll just remember the look of this film. The art direction, the makeup, the costumes – all are just extraordinary. I doubt the filmmakers were attempting realism of the time period of ancient Rome, so the outcome is just eye-popping. The visuals are just, well, visionary, like nothing you’ve ever seen on the screen before. No one’s movies look like those directed by Federico Fellini, and Fellini Satyricon is one of his most spectacular – in every sense of that word.

Oscar Nomination: Best Director 

Rear Window (1954)

 

Rear Window is an intriguing movie about the ethics of voyeurism, and if there were ever any major film director who was fascinated by voyeurism, it’s this film’s director, the master himself, Alfred Hitchcock. He and his crew chose to place the central character, L.B. “Jeff” Jeffries, in a wheelchair confined to his apartment for six weeks. Jeff, played by Jimmy Stewart with his typical acerbic smile, works for Life magazine so he’s accustomed to looking at people. The camera equipment for seeing other people at various distances lies conveniently around the apartment. Jeff’s favorite tool during his recovery, though, is a telescopic lens he uses to watch his neighbors. He’s nicknamed some of them, such as Miss Lonelyhearts, a woman who can’t seem to catch a break when it comes to dating, and Miss Torso, a model who gets lots of male attention. He also watches – “spies on” doesn’t quite seem to capture exactly what he does – a couple of newlyweds, a composer, a couple who likes to sleep outside on the stoop, almost everyone in the complex. His greatest interest, though, is with a salesman named Thorwald (played by the physically imposing and often glowering Raymond Burr), especially after Thorwald’s wife disappears after he’s seen making three trips out of the apartment in a rainstorm, and then there’s the matter of the large trunk held together by a rope. Jeff calls a detective friend of his, Wendell Corey’s Tom Doyle, but Jeff’s theory/explanation/conspiracy as to what happens just doesn’t make sense to Doyle. He does check on a couple of “leads” that Jeff gives him, but really, he just thinks Jeff is bored and his imagination is getting the best of him. Voyeurism can do that to you, I suppose. Interestingly, Jeff’s girlfriend, a model named Lisa, initially refuses to believe Jeff but later develops a theory of her own. Lisa is played by Grace Kelly, the epitome of style and elegance in the 1950s. When she becomes so intrigued by what might have happened to Mrs. Thorwald, she even sneaks into his apartment to do some searching (snooping?). Jeff, ever the voyeur, has to watch as Thorwald returns home and threatens Lisa. What is a helpless man to do in a situation like this? What is a helpless audience in the same situation to do? When Jeff realizes that Thorwald knows he suspects the salesman is a murderer, he’s pretty much incapable of escaping. I mean, I wouldn’t want to know that Raymond Burr is coming to my house to seek revenge, would you? Rear Window features some great tension at moments like this. It’s certainly one of Hitchcock’s most accomplished thrillers from when he was perhaps at or near his peak of his talents as a filmmaker. Some of his usual filmic touches are on display. We watch as the camera moves through Jeff’s apartment and around the courtyard so that we become voyeurs too, looking at or spying on everyone Jeff watches. Sometimes we look at Jeff, and sometimes we see what he sees. Hitchcock could easily make us feel uncomfortable, particularly when we engage in behavior that we see the characters doing against their better judgment. He also makes his usual cameo, here as a clock repairman in the composer’s apartment. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the performance of Thelma Ritter as Stella, the nurse sent by the insurance company to give Jeff a massage and encourage his healing. She is blunt, direct, and funny; she even speculates about how and where Thorwald might have cut up his wife’s body. The morbid nature of her curiosity doesn’t detract from the moment of great comic relief that she provides. By the end of the film, she and Lisa have joined us in the audience as being implicated in what happens. It’s a clever turn in a clever film.

Oscar Nominations: Best Director (Alfred Hitchcock), Best Screenplay, Best Color Cinematography, and Best Sound Recording

A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1970)

 

The main plot of A Boy Named Charlie Brown involves Charlie’s winning his school’s spelling bee and preparing for the national competition in New York. He only entered the school bee because he was goaded into it by Lucy and her fellow “mean girls” Violet and Patty, who thought it would be funny to see him fail. He wins, though, and sets out on a journey to learn a lot of spelling rules before his big moment in the national spotlight. However, a lot of the movie isn’t really about spelling. Instead, it presents aspects of the Peanuts comic strip with which we are likely very familiar: Lucy yanks a football away from Charlie Brown at the list minute, he fails in his attempt to get a kite to fly and not get “eaten” by a tree, Snoopy goes ice skating both as a hocky player and as a figure skater, Schroeder plays Beethoven on his toy piano, Charlie Brown seeks help at Lucy’s psychiatric booth, etc. A lot of it may be common images to fans of Peanuts and the many TV specials over the years, but the presentation of these moments can sometimes come in moments of pure animated fantasy. For example, Schroeder has an astonishing flight of fancy while playing Beethoven; it’s startling and beautiful and amazingly abstract. During a sequence involving the Star-Spangled Banner, the screen first becomes red and white, then blue and white, then back again. There’s a stained-glass effect during a basketball game, a split screen during a football game – it’s just visually dazzling. My favorite character in the strip, Linus, is his usual stalwart self, Charlie’s best friend and confidante. However, when Lucy gives Linus’s beloved blanket to Charlie Brown for good luck in New York, Linus begins suffering dizzy spells. The dance he performs with his blanket after their reunion is truly joyous. As for the national spelling bee itself, well, Charlie Brown keeps getting works right, primarily because they’re all words about failure and incompetence, concepts which he knows well. However, in the most Charlie Brown-ish of actions, he misspells the word “beagle.” Astonishing, really, that he can’t spell the word that describes his own dog, but he wouldn’t be the Charlie Brown we know if he didn’t fail, would he? There was no category for Animated Feature Film in 1970, so the Oscar nomination that the film received was for its music, including the title song written and “sung” by none other than Rod McKuen. In perhaps an unsurprising result, though, the score for A Boy Named Charlie Brown lost to Let It Be by the Beatles.

Oscar Nomination: Best Original Song Score

Eskimo (1934)

It’s probably important to note that Eskimo is not a documentary. It’s based upon two novels by a Danish explorer familiar with the Arctic and, presumably, Alaska where the movie is set. The film does provide some anthropological interest in its depictions of aspects of life in a small village – activities like salmon fishing, duck hunting, walrus hunting. However, once you realize that, clearly, many of these scenes were shot using rear projection, and that the actors are nowhere actually near the walrus or the polar bear, the film becomes more of a rather tawdry tale of revenge. Mala (played by Native American actor Ray Mala) is the best hunter in his village, and many take advantage of his prowess to keep them alive in the harsh climate. It doesn’t take long, though, for the film to throw us a curve by showing that Eskimo husbands let close friends have sex with their wives. I mean, I guess they really have to be close friends and it’s only when the friend is lonely because they’ve been widowed or something, but still, that’s a strange custom, not one very supportive of women’s desires. It becomes even stranger when Mala goes with his wife Aba (the lovely Lulu Wong Wing) to a trading ship that’s been trapped in the ice. He meets a white captain (played in an intriguing bit of casting by Peter Freuchen, the author of the novels that were the source of the plot), who trades a rifle for furs and then rapes Aba after demanding that Mala let her stay on the ship for the night. Despite promises that he will not molest Aba again, the captain rapes her again while Mala is gone on a whale hunt with the sailors. When she leaves the ship, the ship’s mate accidentally shoots and kills her by mistake, thinking that she’s a seal lying on the frozen ground. Mala harpoons the captain – you knew that his skill at harpooning whales would come in handy later – and then returns home to his children and village. Mala remains haunted for a long time over Ada’s death and his killing of the captain, but he feels renewed when he gets a new name (Kripik), which no one seems to remember to call him, and a visiting friend gives him one of his wives so that Mala will no longer be alone. If that’s not enough of a melodramatic plot, the Mounties show up and start investigating old cases, particularly ones involving native people. They learn about Mala’s killing of the captain and try to question him, but he doesn’t quite understand their intentions. He manages to escape by injuring his hands pulling them through handcuffs. He tries to return home, but the weather is particularly brutal. He has to start eating his sled dogs in order to survive, and he's almost killed by a wolf when he’s near death. It’s a wild movie in terms of one character’s arc. The ending is a bit of a happy one even though it initially seems like Mala and his new wife Iva (Lotus Long) may be committing suicide by leaping onto an ice floe. Eskimo was filmed using the native language Inupiat with intertitles translating into English. The pronoun usage, though, is still tough to understand, at least initially. “One” means “I,” and “someone” means “you.” Reading the intertitles takes some effort because the grammatical structure is different, but given all that happens to Mala and his family, some pronoun confusion is the least of our concerns as viewers. On a final note, here’s a bit of Oscar trivia: Eskimo was the first film ever to win an Oscar for editing; the category was added to the list of honors for 1934 films.

Oscar Win: Best Film Editing

55 Days at Peking (1963)

 

Several decades ago now, I was teaching a five-night-a-week English as a Second Language class in Monterey Park. Most of the students were recent immigrants from China and Taiwan and other Asian countries although someone from Saudi Arabia or Mexico would occasionally sign up. On Friday nights, we were given permission to watch American movies and practice conversational skills in English with the students. One Friday, I showed 55 Days at Peking, a film set against the backdrop of the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, to the class and they became so angry with me. They were adamant that the movie was completely inaccurate in its portrayal of what truly happened. Well, of course, it isn’t accurate. It’s a Hollywood movie that depicts an episode of Chinese history from the perspective of those who were trying to exert influence in China: England, the United States, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, etc. – in other words, the very people that the Boxers were rebelling against. The central character, of course, is an American, Marine Maj. Matt Lewis, played by Charlton Heston with his usual woodenness. He did always think he was more charming than he actually was, didn’t he? Sometimes I think the only reason to watch a Heston movie is for the inevitable shirtless scene. Ava Gardner plays a Russian baroness, a beautiful woman with a past, which means that all of the other women hate her because their husbands can’t help but admire the Baroness Natalie Ivanoff’s beauty. Well, who could resist Gardner? She was always a good actress, but she isn’t given much to do here except try to escape from China, fail, and then tend to a wounded soldier. Oh, she and Heston do get to share a hotel room because there’s no other place for him to stay, but sadly, not enough is made of that tantalizing possibility. David Niven plays the leader of the British contingent in China, Sir Arthur Robinson, which means he’s also the de facto leader of the foreign legation. He and his wife question why Great Britain (and everyone else) is in China, and there’s lot of talk of leaving, but do colonial powers ever truly leave an area? The most embarrassing bit of casting is having British actors in yellowface. Dame Flora Robson plays the Dowager Empress, who mostly just sits around and speaks in odd metaphors. She has two advisors, the prince (who openly supports the Boxers trying to rid China of Western influence) and a general. The prince is played by another British actor, Sir Robert Helpmann, and Leo Genn, yet another Brit, plays the general. Yes, such casting was common at the time, but it’s still grating to see it on the screen. The film features outstanding production design, marvelous costumes, lovely cinematography – all depicted on a rather grand scale. At the level of an epic, it works well enough, I suppose, but the film is a bit soulless since it’s clearly taken what might charitably be characterized as the wrong side of the battle to support. The battle sequences themselves are well staged, but your natural sympathies might be on the side of those who are being occupied. The film has to have Robinson’s son get shot in order to get some emotion going. By the time Heston’s Lewis has to tell an Asian girl that his American father has been killed, you start to wonder if the only way to make the viewer care for the Western side of the story is to harm a child. When Lewis has the brilliant idea to use the sewer system to get in and out of the palace grounds to destroy some ammunition – something none of the Chinese had apparently ever considered? – you have to acknowledge that maybe my students all those years ago were right to be angry with me. Come to 55 Days at Peking for the spectacle but avoid trying to learn any accurate historical information. Consider yourself warned.

Oscar Nominations: Best Original Song (“So Little Time”) and Best Substantially Original Score

Black Hawk Down (2001)

 

Black Hawk Down is pretty unsparing in its depiction of the brutalities of war. There’s a lot of death and a lot of gore and a lot of blood in this movie, which was based on a particularly terrible day in Mogadishu in 1993. The American military attempts to capture and/or kill a warlord who’s decided to call himself the president during the Somali Civil War, and one bad, horrible thing after another happens. A helicopter crashes after being damaged in battle, another is shot down by a rocket grenade, a new soldier falls from a helicopter – it’s just a series of disasters. Troops are sent to rescue the survivors from the helicopter crashes, but they face some very well-organized Somalis, who keep them from reaching the target locations. The film features lots of young actors, many of them quite talented, but no one gets much screen time. Perhaps it’s a reminder not to become too attached to someone in a war zone like this. Josh Hartnett is billed first as newly-in-command Staff Sergeant Matt Eversmann, but his is just one of many stories we witness, however briefly. Eric Bana is an enigmatic sniper, and he’s always intriguing when he pops up the screen. Blink, though, and you might miss performances by Hugh Dancy, Ioan Gruffudd, Tom Hardy, Orlando Bloom, Ty Burrell, and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. The film, based on a true story, of course, seems to place the blame for the errors on bad leadership decisions. Sam Shepard plays Major General William F. Garrison, and he and the other leaders of the mission just don’t seem to want to listen to honest assessments of the situation; their decisions lead to a lot of dead and wounded in a single, disastrous day. There’s an old saying that all war films are anti-war films because if you truly and (somewhat) accurately portray what happens in wartime, viewers become more opposed to it. I’m not as familiar with the historical events surrounding the U.S. involvement in the Somali Civil War as I could or perhaps should be, and there has been some criticism of this film for its inaccuracies. (Why do people go to see fiction films expecting a history lesson?) Still, even if its accuracy is flawed, watching Black Hawk Down leaves the viewer wondering just how much the raid accomplished and if it was worth the cost in human lives. Director Ridley Scott and his crew deciding to place us in the midst of all of the death and destruction of wartime certainly seems to suggest that they think it wasn’t.

Oscar Wins: Best Film Editing and Best Sound

Other Oscar Nominations: Best Director (Ridley Scott) and Best Cinematography

The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1966)

 

In retrospect, it’s tough to imagine more unlikely director for The Gospel According to St. Matthew (originally known as Il vangelo secondo Matteo and originally released in 1964), a surprisingly faithful adaptation of the Book of Matthew, than Pier Paolo Pasolini. It’s not that he isn’t a great director – he is – but he was also a self-identified atheist. And, yet, he and his crew have created a beautiful film that hews closely to the original words of the Bible. Well, to be fair, the subtitles are almost verbatim from the King James Version of the Bible, and I can’t vouch for the Italian that the performers speak. The film follows the story of Christ from his birth to his resurrection. He’s played here by a beautiful young Spaniard, Enrique Irazoqui, who portrays Jesus as a sort of angry young man with an unfortunate unibrow. By the way, is it a requirement that actors who play Jesus be beautiful? I’ve tried to think of a single cinematic Jesus who was homely or even just average-looking, but to no avail. Give that Pasolini was also public about his being gay, the many close-ups of Irazoqui highlight the young man’s features as he addresses the disciples and speaks what will later be known as the Gospels. Jesus gets confronted and questioned a lot in this movie, and he’s always ready with an answer even if not everyone else, including his disciples, fully understands the meanings and implications of what he says. All of the performers in the movie are non-professionals, and they have some great faces, some lovely, some less so, some with lots of what used to be called “character.” They get close-ups too, so that we can see their reactions to Jesus’s words. The film has a very pared-down style; it doesn’t go for the hyperbole of many (Hollywood) Biblical dramas. Even Jesus’s walk on water is presented very matter-of-factly. The exceptions are the so-called Massacre of the Innocents on the orders of King Herod, who tried to ensure the death of Jesus as a baby, and the crucifixion of Christ. Both of those sequences are difficult to watch. The Gospel According to St. Matthew is gorgeously shot in black-and-white among ruins that evoke the period. It also features some very eclectic and not period-appropriate music, ranging from expected classical pieces to songs by Odetta and Blind Willie Johnson. One of the things that most impressed me about the film was its use of silence. Many times, we are treated to visuals without any dialogue, and they are stunning in their impact. As unexpected a choice for director as Pasolini might have been, he certainly understood the power of cinema to create the right mood for a film like this one.

Oscar Nominations: Best Black-and-White Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Black-and-White Costume Design, and Best Scoring of Music, Adaptation or Treatment

Best One-Reel Short Subject for 1938

 

The Great Heart relates the history of Father Damien, a Belgian priest who arrived in Hawaii in the mid-19^th Century and started working with lepers. Well, he wasn’t actually a priest yet when he arrived, but since he was the only one who was willing to break the taboo on touching lepers, he became the priest to a leper colony on the island of Molokai. The lepers who were isolated there initially resist his efforts to help as well as his attempts to get them to worship. He does get their attention when he destroys the places where they drink too much alcohol and engage in what a priest might consider bad behavior, stuff like dancing and, as the narrator puts it, “love-making” (even though an astute viewer certainly knows what that euphemism means). Father Damien (played by youthful-looking Tom Neal, sometimes in less-than-realistic old-age makeup) and a few others slowly start making improvements to the island, but when he changes the opening of his sermons from “my brethren” to “we lepers,” revealing that he too has become infected, the news of his illness generates lots of donations and other assistance—plus greater attention to the plight of those afflicted with leprosy. Carey Wilson, the narrator of this short, displays a sense of earnestness that borders on the hyperbolic at times. When he asks, “Your heart is undaunted, isn’t it, Damien?”, you want to remind Wilson that Father Damien has been long dead and buried and probably cannot answer such an excessive question. I did learn from this film that one of the effects of leprosy is that the body feels no pain due to a loss of nerve sensation; that’s actually how Father Damien learns of his infection, being unable to feel the heat from the water in which he is soaking his feet. Thousands died from the horrible disease, but this film does take it pretty easy on its viewers by never showing the faces of any of the lepers, just their backs or their silhouettes. The implication is that it’s perhaps just too hideous a disease to witness closely in person. That is, unless (as Wilson puts it) you have a “great brave young heart” like Father Damien. I suppose by the end of the story of his life and all of the sacrifices that he made, the hyperbole might be earned – just a bit.

That Mothers Might Live details the realization by a 19^th-Century Hungarian physician, Dr. Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, of the need by medical professionals to wash their hands before treating patients. It begins with his concern that so many women were dying in hospitals after giving birth. Dr. Semmelweis (played by Sheppard Strudwick) even writes a book, The Prevention of Childhood Fever (the film’s shorter version of the actual title, Etiology, Concept, and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever), detailing the need for antiseptic measures to limit the spread of germs and prevent puerperal fever, but he is, of course, initially ostracized by the medical community. We all know now that his ideas later caught on and are considered standard medical procedure, but it took decades for his ideas to slowly catch on throughout Europe. This short is a nice, illuminating tribute to a somewhat forgotten medical pioneer, and it reaches quite an emotional climax with Emmelweis’s increasing mental instability and his death in an asylum. However, the filmmakers made a rather strange choice: Strudwick and the other actors do not speak on camera. Voiceover narration by John Nesbitt (most famous nowadays for his narration of the MGM series The Passing Parade) provides the dialogue, all in a rather melodramatic, even hyperbolic, at times, tone. Why weren’t the actors allowed to speak their lines? Was it cheaper just to have a narrator say everything? It’s quite distracting to watch as the actors recited dialogue only to hear Nesbitt’s voice instead. This choice doesn’t detract too much from the overall strength of the storyline, but it is odd nonetheless. (By the way, The Great Heart makes the same choice for voiceover narration rather than the actors speaking their lines. It must have been a thing in the 1930s.)

I’ve had no luck finding information on Timber Toppers, the third nominee for Best One-Reel Short Subject. All that’s available online is that it runs 10 minutes, was directed by Tom Cumminsky, and was released by 20^th Century Fox. It’s not available for streaming, not even on “those websites” that specialize in films that are not available elsewhere. Presumably, it’s about the timber industry since “timber topping” is a term associated with the production of lumber, but that’s hardly enough to judge the quality of a short film. Oddly enough, no one even states whether or not it’s a lost film. Since that’s the case, I have not choice but to add it to my list of movies I’m likely never to see in order to complete this project.

Oscar Winner: That Mothers Might Live

My Choice: Since I’ve only seen two of the three and both of those were melodramatic and over-the-top, I’d pick That Mothers Might Live as a toss-up. They both deal with individuals who made a difference in the treatment and care of others, but Dr. Emmelweis might have had a somewhat larger and profound impact. Both That Mothers Might Live and The Great Heart tread some of the same territory, though, and use some of the same storytelling methods.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)

 

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is a darker, far scarier sequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark. Much of the humor of the original Indiana Jones film has been somewhat abandoned for the sake of some very intense stuff, including several onscreen deaths. This time around, Jones (played reliably by Harrison Ford again) has to retrieve a sacred stone and all of the children that were taken from an Indian village by members of a strange cult that has overtaken the palace of a very young and way too impressionable Maharaja. Among the potential joys of being captured by this cult are perhaps having your heart removed from your body while still alive and maybe also being sacrificed to an intense pool of lava, both of which are shown directly on screen. The intensity of some of these images eventually led to the creation of a new motion picture rating, PG-13, because the Motion Picture Association of America deemed them inappropriate (but after the movie’s release, naturally, and only after the uproar from some parents) for younger audience members. Ford, the main draw here, is his usual sardonic, smart, tough, swaggering self, but he’s never safe for long, which is good for a role like this. He’s ably supported this time by Ke Huy Quan as Short Round. Quan gives such a great performance that it's difficult to believe that he was only about 12 years old at the time of filming and that this was his first acting role. I’d call it one of the best child performances in movie history, but really it’s great regardless of the actor’s age. On the other hand, though, is the performance of Kate Capshaw as Willie, a nightclub singer that Jones rescues in the film’s Shanghai opening. Frankly, her character is so annoying throughout the movie that it’s tough to see why Indy is attracted to her at all. She does a lot of yelling and screaming, and the volume is just too high most of the time. The danger quotient in this sequel was certainly ramped up, but the adventures seem to be less… adventuresome? There are two scenes that do stand out, however, one involving a rope bridge – those things are never safe in movies, are they? The other involves a race through underground mines in tiny carts; it’s like a roller coaster ride you’d never want to try yourself. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom doesn’t quite rise to the heights achieved by Raiders of the Lost Ark, but then again, how could it top a classic?

Oscar Win: Best Visual Effects

Other Oscar Nomination: Best Original Score

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

Raiders of the Lost Ark is two hours of genuine, glorious fun at the movies. Conceived by filmmakers and friends George Lucas and Steven Spielberg as an homage to those old serial films where the heroes were in danger after about twenty minutes so that there would be a cliffhanger to bring everyone back to the theaters next week, Raiders presents almost non-stop action, putting its hero, Indiana Jones (the great Harrison Ford in a role that would come to define him) in harm’s way almost every couple of minutes. Any movie that travels from Peru to the United States to Nepal to Egypt to Greece with this much flair and style is worthy of awards recognition. It’s as globe-trotting a movie as any James Bond film.

Ford’s portrayal of the now iconic archaeologist/adventurer is in the manner of a somewhat typical American hero, a product of his time. He consistently worries, it seems, more about himself than others, and he’s accustomed to taking things from others that he wants. There’s a glint in his eye when he sees something shiny, some beautiful artifact from the past that could be “saved” from whatever allegedly primitive tribe possesses it at the time. Ford brings the right mix of charm and bravado to the role. His Indiana Jones is sexy, even stylish, a bit too hot-headed for his own good, and yet (almost) always worthy of being cheered on.

The opening sequence of the film is justifiably famous. Jones is retrieving a golden idol – aren’t all such idols golden? – from Peru, but he has to face a series of obstacles to escape from the location where it has been sequestered. By the time he’s escaped multiple boobytraps and outrun a giant boulder, you know what kind of movie you’re in for. This sequence doesn’t really have much to do with the main plot, of course, but it does establish a style for the film overall. And it sets off what turns out to be a very action-packed sequence of events. Before film’s end, we’ll have witnessed a chase involving lots of large baskets, boats trying to outpace each other, a hazardous race involving a series of Nazi vehicles, even a sequence aboard a submarine.

Set in 1936, Raiders of the Lost Ark depicts attempts by the Americans and the Nazis to locate the Ark of the Covenant, which supposedly contains the Ten Commandments. It also reportedly contains great power for whomever possesses it, but you should know a maguffin when you see one. Yes, the Ark in the movie is truly golden and beautiful, quite a spectacular piece of design work, but it’s not really the object itself that makes us watch the film. We as viewers may be momentarily intrigued by this golden box, but the thrill of watching the film is from the chase, the search, not truly the finding. That the ark itself doesn’t really turn out to be quite what the Nazis thought it would be is even more delightful although watching it work its powers on them provides some pretty grisly moments.

Ford is solid and reliable here, a perfect fit from this type of leading man role, and he’s truly the star here. The film also features some memorable supporting performances, chief among them Karen Allen as Indy’s former flame, Marion. She’s tough, feisty, a match for almost anyone. She’s the daughter of Jones’ mentor, and when Jones arrives at her bar in Tibet, her trouble begins, but she demonstrates that’s she more than up to the task of an adventure herself. John Rhys-Davies plays Sallah, a reliable friend of Indiana Jones, and his presence in the film brings some nice comic moments. (The film actually has lots of very funny moments, but they’re almost all throwaways in service of the main adventure plot.) Paul Freeman plays the oily French archaeologist who’s in league with the Nazis. Even the great Alfred Molina shows up in the opening sequence in Peru. Alas, he doesn’t make it past the prologue, but you can see why he has had such a career in films just from his few moments of screen time.

I don’t want to give the impression that the only reason to see Raiders of the Lost Ark is its action sequences, but they are such an outstanding aspect of the film. I’m sure that’s what sold so many tickets. But the film is truly top-notch in all categories: cinematography, editing, art direction, costume design, visual effects, the stunt work (especially the stunt work), and on and on. Even the romantic original music by the legendary John Williams gifts us with an instantly recognizable motif for Indiana Jones in only seven memorable notes. Notice how many nominations it received in the technical categories, and how many wins it achieved in them too. The film takes us to such beautiful and exciting locations, and we are immersed in the world of the film even though it keeps shifting locales.

That being said, naturally, it’s the sense of adventure and excitement that bears repeated viewings. I’ve already mentioned Indy running from a boulder in the opening sequence, but the film has a lot of memorable moments, such as when he shoots a guy with a large saber just to save time in his quest to find the missing Marion. We find out about his fear of snakes in quite possibly the worst imaginable way. There’s a crazy sequence involving a fistfight with a big Nazi on top of and underneath and around an airplane that’s buzzing around waiting for takeoff. Even the film’s final shot does a wonderful job of showing us the depths of American bureaucracy in an amusing way. I also like some of the small moments, such as when a young woman in Dr. Jones’ archaeology class flirts with him by writing suggestive messages on her eyelids (and then a young male student leaves him an apple – a little provocative). Great movies tend to be filled with moments like these that can be discussed and dissected and, really, just warmly remembered.

By the way, as happened with the Star Wars films, the makers (or the distributors?) of Raiders of the Lost Ark have fallen prey to renaming the film now that several successful sequels have been released. However, a fan of the movie is never going to call it Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark just because the other movies in the series use his name first (Indiana Jones and the… whatever it is). To those who saw the film in its original release, it’s still going to be Raiders of the Lost Ark, just as it should be.

Oscar Wins: Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Sound, Best Film Editing, Best Visual Effects, and Special Achievement Award in Sound Effects Editing

Other Oscar Nominations: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Cinematography, and Best Original Score

The Oscar (1966)

 

The Oscar features one of the most ruthless and arrogant and nasty leading characters ever put on film (and this was in the same year as Alfie!). Some claim that this intensely bad movie is camp, but honestly the main character is so despicable, it’s hard to enjoy the rest of the movie or find any humor in the awful situations in which the characters find themselves. Stephen Boyd plays Frankie Fane, an actor who is one of the five nominees for Best Actor. Boyd, as I have mentioned elsewhere in talking about Fantastic Voyage (also released in 1966) was certainly a handsome fellow, but in this film, he’s a hothead, prone to violence, rude to women, always ready with his fists and a sharp tongue. It's supposed to be a sort of rags-to-riches tale about how Fane makes his way from essentially nothing to being a star. It would be easier to sympathize with Frankie’s rise to fame, though, if the character wasn’t such an ass to everyone he meets (and discards) along the way. The singer Tony Bennett plays Frankie’s best friend Hymie Kelly; they used to work in seedy joints with a stripper played by Jill St. John. Bennett provides the voiceover for the film, but he was reportedly so displeased with his performance that he never acted again, returning to the career at which he was one of the best, singing. The cast is full of former Oscar winners and nominees in small parts. Broderick Crawford plays a small town sheriff, Ed Begley is the owner of one of the strip joints the three worked together, Ernest Borgnine plays a private detective Frankie inexplicably hires to help him get the sympathy vote from Academy members. Edith Head, who was Oscar-nominated for her costume design for the film, also makes a cameo appearance; it’s tough to believe there were no other films with costume design more worthy than this stinker. The film eventually becomes a who’s-who of Hollywood stars. It becomes a guess game of “who is that?” Milton Berle does a fine job in a dramatic role as Frankie’s agent, Joseph Cotton is the head of a movie studio who’s initially reluctant to hire Fane, and Elke Sommer plays his love interest, a designer named Kay Bergdahl who he cheats on almost immediately after they finally marry.  Even Hedda Hopper, sans one of her famed hats but with piles of hair instead, shows up just in time to watch Frank be rude to his “date,” Jean Hale’s Cheryl Barker, an actress chosen by the studio to make Frankie get some publicity. Of course, Frankie is mean to every single person in the film, including his friend Hymie and his wife Kay, the last two people who seem to care about him. His acting career fades quickly because no one wants to work with him. When Fane reaches what he considers his lowest point, working to get a part in a TV western, he’s nominated for the title award and thinks he’s about to see a career rebound. It’s all rather silly stuff, particularly since the role for which Fane is nominated is basically just his awful self. By the time Cotton’s studio chief makes an impassioned speech about how important the Academy Awards “really” are, you’re rooting for any of the other Best Actor nominees to win (and for this film to be over). It’s quite a list of talented nominees, really, including Burt Lancaster, Richard Burton, and Frank Sinatra. It’s up to Merle Oberon, of all people, to announce Sinatra as the eventual winner, and then everyone else in the movie, all of whom strangely seem to be in the audience for the awards ceremony, takes great joy in Frankie’s defeat. If his character weren’t so unlikeable, the audience might wonder what happened to him after his loss, but at this point, the less we see of Frankie Fane, the better. How something as silly as The Oscar, with its cast of former stars and B-list performers and its reliance on the language of beatniks, got any awards attention is a mystery to me.

Oscar Nominations: Best Color Art Direction-Set Decoration and Best Color Costume Design

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)

 

The Man Who Knew Too Much is one of my favorite films by Alfred Hitchcock. I know that it’s considered a “minor” masterpiece of his, but the story, the performances, the effective use of music—all of them and other elements combine to make such an entertaining film. I find it tough to resist. Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day play Ben and Jo McKenna, who are in Morocco for a vacation with their son Hank (Christopher Olsen) when the young boy is kidnapped. A stranger named Louis Bernard (Daniel Gelin) gets killed in the streets of Marrakesh and leaves Stewart’s Ben with a whispered clue before he dies. Soon it becomes apparent that the McKennas are caught up in some bizarre international intrigue based upon a misunderstanding of who they are, something that ultimately involves an ambitious ambassador who wants to move up in the hierarchy of his home country. Really, though, those details hardly matter. In a Hitchcock films, it’s not really about the plot; it’s about the suspense that can be created. What strikes me about most Hitchcock films is how he often lets the audience know much more than the characters do. It helps to increase the tension and make us far more anxious when we can figure things out faster than the characters can. We figure out who the villains are and what they’re up to while Ben and Jo are trying to figure out, for example, who or what Ambrose Chappell or Ambrose Chapel is and what he/it has to do with Hank’s disappearance. I also love how Hitchcock can focus in on a particular moment or image, such as when Stewart is thumbing a phone book while someone else is on the phone. He needs to find his son and he needs to get information to his wife, but he can’t let the other characters in the scene know too much. Stewart was one of Hitchcock’s favorite actors, and he’s pretty tightly wound here. You can always sense that he could lash out at someone in an instant. Day, always such a welcome presence on the screen, introduces a song in the film that would become her signature recording, “Whatever Will Be (Que Sera, Sera),” first as a song that she sings to Hank in order to get him to go to bed. Later it takes on even more psychological impact when it serves as the means to find Hank after his kidnapping. It’s clever of Hitchcock to use Day’s talent as a singer to make a plot point even more poignant. Music plays another integral role in the film’s plot when Jo and Ben have to try to stop an attempted assassination at the Royal Albert Hall. An orchestra is performing “Storm Cloud” by Bernard Hermann, Hitchcock’s favorite composer, and the crash of the cymbals at a key moment during the performance is supposed to be a cue for the would-be assassin. The sequence just goes on and on, and we are in our own form as terror as we watch Jo, helpless to stop what’s coming, listen and anticipate the fatal note. It’s quite a sequence in both its use of music and in the superb editing for which Hitchcock’s films are known. The Man Who Knew Too Much also has its fair share of those little touches of Hitchcockian humor. For example, one of the conspirators in the kidnapping asks, “Don’t you know that Americans dislike having their children stolen?” Well, of course, they do. It’s also hilarious that Stewart at one point has to climb out of a bell tower in order to escape being trapped. By the time we watch the camera move up a flight of stairs to where Hank is being held prisoner, you know you’re still in the hands of a master filmmaker. He saves one of his best moments for last. When Ben and Jo return with Hank after what must have been many hours away from the friends they’ve left in their apartment, all Ben says is “Sorry we were gone so long, but we had to pick up Hank.” Of course, they did; that’s the whole point of the movie, after all, isn’t it?

Oscar Win: Best Song (“Whatever Will Be [Que Sera Sera]”)

Air Force (1943)

 

Air Force is a solid piece of World War II era propaganda made by Hollywood. It’s filmmaking designed to make the audience support our wartime efforts and to revile, in this case, the Japanese enemy. The battle sequences are staged very effectively, and they often demonstrate the kind of American might that was having success at destroying Japanese warships. Much of the film follows the crew of the “Mary-Ann,” a B-17 bomber plane that arrives in Hawaii just after the attack on Pearl Harbor, then travels to Wake Island just after it has been attacked, and journeys to the Philippines just after another attack – perhaps you can detect a trend here. They always seem to be flying into a dangerous situation despite being warned against landing or flying out of an area to head to another dangerous location. It’s a lot of takeoffs and landings for one film to depict. Most of the characters are “types” more than realistic portrayals of actual people. Whether you want to call them archetypes or stereotypes is up to you. When you have characters called “Irish” and “Tex” and “Minnesota,” you know that you’re probably not going to have the depth of characterization that more actor-driven movies might have. The opening credits don’t even mention the names of the characters; John Ridgely plays The Pilot, Gig Young plays The Co-Pilot, Arthur Kennedy is The Bombardier, etc. We do get some bits of information about most of the men in the “Mary-Ann.” For example, the gunner failed his pilot training but is actually quite a good pilot. There’s a fresh recruit that you just know isn’t destined to last for too long. There’s an old-timer whose son is carrying on the family tradition of military service. Because we only get brief insights into the backgrounds of these men, it is tough to really speak much about the performances, but John Garfield as the gunner Joe Winocki stands out (just as you would expect an actor of Garfield’s talent to do) as does Harry Carey as Robbie White, the experienced crew chief. The film features only a few minor female characters because this is truly a film about men in wartime and what they have to endure in battle and afterwards. (For some comic relief, there is a dog named Tripoli, who barks whenever someone says the word/name “Moto.” It’s rather cringe-inducing after a while, though, a “joke” that truly doesn’t stay fresh for long.) The film spends quite a bit of time in the cockpit with the men gently teasing each other, such as when the pilot and co-pilot rib their passenger, a fighter pilot who prefers to fly the smaller planes, over which kind of pilots are the best. The plane itself endures a lot. It keeps getting shot at and damaged, and more (longer) repairs are needed each time it lands. Air Force also isn’t afraid to depict one of the typical outcomes of war: death. An extended battle sequence late in the film is particularly brutal in that respect, particularly in its depiction of the defeated Japanese. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the cinematography; it’s first-rate and really shows a mastery of the use of light to illuminate faces in those flights at night.

Oscar Win: Best Film Editing

Other Oscar Nominations: Best Original Screenplay, Best Black-and-White Cinematography, and Best Special Effects