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