Rosemary's Baby (1968)

 

Rosemary’s Baby tells what could have been a very heartwarming story of a young couple (played by Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes) who move into an old New York apartment building with lots of history and some very gregarious neighbors. Of course, what the two new tenants don’t realize yet – and what we as viewers quickly start to suspect – is that these neighbors are quite strange. A couple of them, the Castavets (played to perfection by Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer), are really quite nosy and pushy. Gordon’s Minnie, in particular, likes to insinuate herself into Rosemary’s everyday life as much as possible, and Cassavetes’ Guy Woodhouse actually befriends Blackmer’s Roman Castavet almost immediately. I suppose if you rent an apartment that is now available because the previous tenant died (thankfully, not in the apartment, which is quickly established to the relief of the Woodhouses) and you also know that a young dancer who lived in the building fell to her death – unless, perhaps, it wasn’t a fall – then you might find comfort knowing that some older, seemingly kind people are looking out for you. Oh, if only it were that simple. What’s really going on starts to become clear when Farrow’s Rosemary has either a dream or a vision (or is it neither one?) of being raped by a demon while others watch. When she becomes pregnant, everyone starts making a fuss over her and tries to get her to drink some strange smoothies and go to a particular doctor and… it just never seems to end. Minnie shows up almost every day to check on Rosemary, who starts to look especially sick. No one, including her neighbor-endorsed doctor, wants her to worry, but Rosemary starts to think something might be wrong with the baby. Farrow’s thinness and famous (or infamous, as the case may be) short hairdo help to convey the potential illness perfectly. This may be the only film that includes a testimonial for the work of Vidal Sassoon. She gets little support in her concerns from her husband, who seems especially distant after she reveals she’s pregnant, and it’s only in the company of her friends from outside the building that she seems to get any sympathy. I suppose, though, that when you confess that you think you might have been impregnated after some sort of bizarre ritual performed by a coven of Satan-worshipping witches, your friends need to comfort you. Yes, that’s right. The building is filled with witches, and they’ve chosen Rosemary to carry the devil’s child so that they will then have someone evil to take over and cleanse the world. Well, “cleanse” might be the wrong word for what they have in mind, but you get the picture. We have several occasions when we have to wonder if Rosemary might be delusional or if she is right about the witches. When she notices that Roman has pierced ears – which is supposed to be a sign of a male witch, I guess – it only takes a book from a former landlord to convince her. I suppose it’s a good thing she didn’t go to a dockyard or the Village; all those pierced ears would have really freaked her out. Rosemary’s Baby is considered a horror classic, and it certainly builds in suspense as we learn more and more about the neighbors and their plans. I’m not sure I fully appreciate the enigmatic ending, though, since it’s unclear exactly what Rosemary might do with respect to her devil baby, but such endings were becoming more common at the time. The film raises some interesting questions about the bodily autonomy of women, and Rosemary is almost treated as little more than an incubator by so many people in the building. It also forces us to consider what we know about others in our lives and what kind of influence they might be having over us. Some aspects of the film are, naturally, dated, and we certainly have seen far more horrifying tales on the screen, but Rosemary’s Baby serves as quite a strong origin point for what many modern films do with female characters, in particular. I’m certain that’s not really a good thing, but I suppose you can never imagine just where or how a film’s impact might spread.

Oscar Win: Best Supporting Actress (Ruth Gordon)

Other Oscar Nomination: Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium

Napoleon and Samantha (1972)

 

Napoleon and Samantha is a children’s movie released by the Walt Disney company, but it has one of the weirdest plots imaginable for a film aimed at children. Johnny Whitaker plays Napoleon, who’s living in the woods with his grandfather (Will Geer, right about the same time he started playing the grandfather on The Waltons). They run across a circus clown one night who has a lion with bad teeth who only drinks milk. The clown, who’s been looking for a way to retire, unloads the lion on the youngster and his grandpa, who decide to keep it in their chicken coop. Apparently, the chickens are safe since the lion can’t eat meat. When Grandpa dies, Napoleon has to hire an out-of-work grad student named Danny (played by Michael Douglas, of all people) to help bury the old man. Napoleon lies to Danny about an uncle who’s going to come take care of him because he doesn’t want to get caught living alone and face being sent to an orphanage. Danny, who herds sheep when he’s not in grad school because that’s something that lots of people do while studying for an advanced degree, lives in isolated cabin (is there any other kind?) several mountains away. You know where this is headed, right? Napoleon decides to take his lion across miles of wilderness so that he can live with Danny—without having asked Danny if he could move in with a large feline. Jodie Foster plays Napoleon’s good friend Samantha, who naturally wants to make the journey with him despite his objections that there won’t be enough food for them both. They face some danger along the way, some of it nature itself such as a stream they have to cross or cliffs that one of them almost falls off. They also face natural predators like the cougar that tries to eat Samantha’s pet chicken that she’s brought along because… you can’t leave a chicken along with your guardian if you just received it as a gift the day before? Said guardian, Gertrude, is played by Ellen Corby, who played the grandmother on The Waltons, but she and Geer are never in a scene together, robbing us of a big-screen pairing to rival the small-screen one. There’s also a bear attack, but the lion always seems to scare off whatever comes near, which is surprising considering that it only seems to want to lie down all the time and rest. Surely, this is one of the most lethargic lions ever filmed. When they finally arrive at Danny’s cabin, he rightfully suggests that someone tell the people in town where they are, so he leaves the kids with this guy who just recently showed up out of nowhere, Mark, who’s wearing the trademark serial killer glasses that all filmmakers use for shorthand. Danny goes back to town, promptly gets arrested for child abduction, sees a Wanted poster with Mark’s face on it, and escapes on a motorcycle that leads to a remarkable chase up mountain roads that seem to have an awful lot of construction going on for such a small town. It’s a Disney film, so you know there’s going to be a happy ending after all, and there’s little suspense that things will turn out otherwise. Whitaker and Foster were both very good child actors, and Foster has had a long and distinguished career. This was her first major film role, and you can see why she kept getting hired for movies. There’s a natural charm and looseness to her performance. Whitaker would continue to make movies and TV shows, but I still know him best from Sigmund and the Sea Monsters. Hey, people have different career paths; some win two Oscars and others act next to someone in a costume that resembles a pile of leaves. Napoleon and Samantha also features lovely outdoor cinematography, which is not surprising when you consider that the producer was the great Winston Hibler, who was responsible for so many of the great Disney documentaries about the wilderness.

Oscar Nomination: Best Original Dramatic Score

Beetlejuice (1988)

 

If you’ve not seen the original Beetlejuice in a while – and I hadn’t seen it in decades until it was time to refresh my memory for the release of the sequel – you might have forgotten that Michael Keaton’s title character actually isn’t as much of a focus as you might think. A lot of the first half of the movie really involves the somewhat mundane lives of Adam (Alec Baldwin) and Barbara (Geena Davis) Maitland, a yuppie couple who are restoring a lovely but old-fashioned house in Connecticut until they die in an automobile accident and find themselves stuck in a sort of afterlife limbo. The Deetz family moves into the house, and Delia (the great Catherine O’Hara) decides to make it into the most postmodern nightmare of a house you could imagine. With the help of her clearly gay-coded “designer” Otho (Glenn Shadix, oozing with that bitchy gay demeanor for much of the film), she offends the aesthetic tastes of even the dead couple, who decide they need to find a way to rid their home of the Deetzes. They have just one issue: proto-goth child Lydia (Winona Ryder), who has the ability to see the couple even though they’re dead. Keaton takes over the plot about halfway through the film after his Betegeuse is hired (well, sorta?) by the couple to drive away the Deetz family. He’s a sort of “bio-exorcist,” someone who allegedly can frighten people in the real world away from a place like the Maitlands’ house, but really, he’s just a scam artist who wants to marry Lydia so that he will have the power to wreak havoc in the real world. Keaton brings such a crazy, insane, manic energy to the proceedings, a sharp contrast to the slower paced first half, that it’s probably good that we remember his character as having a bigger role than it actually does. He really does bring a level of spectacle that had been missing earlier in the movie. The film won an Academy Award for its makeup, and Keaton’s title character has to be a major part of that win. The edges of his face are masterfully done. However, it wasn’t nominated for its production design even though that too is spectacular. The house becomes such a focal point, which is appropriate since it’s the epicenter of so much of the film’s action, and the twists and turns in the bureaucratic halls of the afterlife are mesmerizing in their detail. The legendary Sylvia Sidney shines in a tiny part as the couple’s world-weary or afterworld-weary caseworker; that husky voice of hers is on full display in this film. Who knew the afterlife was so much like an overburdened social services administration? The original film is funnier than I initially remembered, and the running gag over trying to say (or not to say, as the case may be) the offensive demon’s name plays for solid laughs throughout the story. And any movie that puts the music of the great Harry Belafonte to this much effective use has to be applauded. You may never listen to “Day-O” or “Jump in the Line (Shake Senora)” the same again, and that’s a good thing.

Oscar Win: Best Makeup

The Zone of Interest (2023)

 

The Zone of Interest raises some very intriguing questions, such as how we can live so close (in the movie’s case, literally) to horrible atrocities but maintain some semblance of normalcy. Wouldn’t the awfulness of what we are close to begin to affect us? Wouldn’t we start to behave differently if we were constantly so close to terrible events and activities? What if we are complicit in the atrocities that are happening? Doesn’t that alter who we are and what we do? The film shows us what kind of effect living next door to a site of such evil might have, but it does so gradually. The Zone of Interest moves at a very leisurely pace, in some respects, but it grows increasing more tense as the film progresses.

The Hoss family lives next door to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. The father, Rudolf (played by Christian Friedel), serves as the commandant at the camp whose idea it is to exterminate the Jewish prisoners around the clock. He even oversees the installation of a new crematorium at Auschwitz that blazes throughout the night.  He seems rather cold and methodical at first, and he’s so efficient at his horrific occupation that he’s transferred to take command of all of the camps under Nazi control. He also demonstrates the more mundane aspects of life, such as turning off the lights and closing all the doors before going to bed at night. Those moments are often filmed at a rather astonishingly leisurely pace.

His wife, Hedwig (the great Sandra Huller, who had a great year in 2023 with this film and Anatomy of a Fall), keeps the household running efficiently, but she likes a comfortable life and doesn’t want to move away even though she and her children (two young boys, three young girls, including a baby girl) live next door to a concentration camp. She gets other benefits from being so close to the camp besides a nice house, though. Her husband sends her all kinds of clothing and other items taken from the Jewish prisoners. She keeps a fur coat (and a lipstick from its pocket) and gives other items to her servants. She’s rather distant and methodical about all of this herself, particularly when she’s overseeing the various upgrades to the house. She knows what’s on the other side of her garden wall, but she doesn’t acknowledge what is going on at the camp. In fact, she’s rather indifferent to his news about a promotion or his prowess at murdering other human beings.

Interestingly, we as viewers never see any of the camp or its activities. We can hear the screams and gunshots, but we aren’t witness to the killings themselves. Fires burn all the time, and we know what that means, but again, the filmmakers have chosen not to depict the atrocities on screen. The gunshots and furnaces are very disconcerting, as is the musical score, which is really very disorienting. It makes sense, though, for the music to bother us since we at least need to feel some of the anxiety that the characters should be feeling. Otherwise, we might think that this is a rather idyllic depiction of life in the country. The family goes swimming in the nearby river, they acquire a new canoe, and Hedwig even grows beautiful flowers and lots of vegetables in her garden. The garden happens to be on the other side of a wall from a concentration camp, but that doesn’t seem to bother the family members. We see just a few moments, such as when ashes start to flow down the river where Rudolph is fishing and his children are playing in the water, where the activities of the camp enter into their lives.

People in the family start to be affected by their proximity to the concentration camp. Again, how could you live next door and not be affected? Hedwig’s mother arrives for a visit, and she seems blasé about the prisoners next door, even wondering at one point if the woman she used to clean for might be one of them. (She missed out on purchasing the woman’s curtains in an auction of stolen property.) She begins coughing a lot almost immediately, perhaps from all the smoke in the air. At night, the sky is red from the fires, and it becomes too much for her. The fire and the smoke and the gunshots lead to her departing in the middle of the night; she leaves a note for her daughter and just disappears. The older son becomes much crueler as the film progresses, as if he has been given license by the awfulness of what’s happening at the camp. At one point, he locks his younger brother in the greenhouse and laughs at the boy’s predicament.

Rudolph, however, might be affected the most. Despite his claims during a medical examination that he’s well, he starts to dry heave after a party attended by Nazis and others. He tells his wife over the phone that he’s been calculating (or fantasizing) about how might be able to kill entire room full of people. It’s a chilling moment, and then he gets sick to his stomach. I don’t think this makes him sympathetic. It’s just another puzzling moment for us as viewers to ponder. Is his body trying to tell him something? He doesn’t seem to be listening to it or learning.

The film is based on a novel about real people and events. We all know about the horrors of the Holocaust, but this may be the first film to depict those horrors without showing them on the screen. You don’t get to see what actually happens in the camps, but do you need to at this point? That’s another one of those questions that are raised by the film. Is it awful enough that we witness Hedwig talking to her husband about what they’re going to do when the war ends? She’s obviously under the impression that the Germans are going to win, and she has plans for further renovations and improvements at her home.

I will readily admit that I don’t understand everything that occurs in the film. For instance, the movie features a couple of scenes where a young girl leaves apples for workers in the fields outside the concentration camp. It’s shot in what appears to be night vision, and it’s never entirely clear to me who she is or why she’s leaving the food. She always seems to appear in the movie when Rudolph is reading a fairy tale to one of his children. We also watch several women cleaning a Holocaust museum in the present day, presumably the camp at Auschwitz. We’ve seen some of the displays before, such as the massive number of shoes taken from the prisoners, so this sequence’s purpose in the overall film is unclear. The dog, Dilla, also steals the movie at times, probably because we need some relief from the intensity of everything else that’s happening on the screen. Perhaps the dog is meant to show someone or something innocent since it doesn’t know what’s going on and just wants to follow people around. Even that idea, though, comes with some questions about who could be truly innocent in circumstances like these.

The film starts (and ends) with a black screen and very disturbing music. We have no legend to tell us as viewers when or where we are as the film starts, and we have to figure out as details emerge that we’re actually witnessing Nazi atrocities. We also pause in the middle of the film and have a red screen accompanied by discordant music. Such moments don’t really allow you much of an opportunity to process how you’re feeling about what you’ve seen and heard. The music just puts you off any sort of quiet reflection.

Oscar Wins: Best International Feature Film and Best Sound

Other Oscar Nominations: Best Motion Picture of the Year, Best Achievement in Directing (Jonathan Glazer), and Best Adapted Screenplay

The Ten Commandments (1956)

 

Since it’s become an Easter tradition to show The Ten Commandments on network television, I probably don’t have to explain that it’s the story of the life of Moses, who led the Hebrews to their freedom from Egyptian rule. So many people have seen this film on television over the years, but I still don’t understand what it has to do with Easter. It’s a film that is truly spectacular in every sense of the word. You won’t see production design and costume design and scale of production at this level nowadays without a great deal of assistance from computer-generated imagery. In those days, they actually had to have lots of people and actual sets for much of what we see on the screen.

The film’s director, Cecil B. De Mille, serves as the narrator for The Ten Commandments, and he even does an introduction to the film that explains that it’s historically accurate, and he has the big books in front of him to prove it. I’m not sure that anyone needs a movie to teach them accurate history, but it’s probably more important that it gets the details right for the viewers who have spent time with their Bibles and know what happened to Moses there. Does the film truly follow the Biblical story of Moses? I don’t know; it seems to take a few liberties here and there for the sake of the visuals. Does it truly matter? Probably to some people, probably not to most. The hyperbolic voiceover narration frequently glosses over any sort of questions a viewer might have, so in the midst of the narrative, you’re just going to have to accept what happens.

The film begins with the prophecy that a man will be born who will deliver the Hebrews from bondage, so the pharaoh orders that all newborn Hebrew males be killed. Moses’ mother places him in a basket and sets him adrift in a river. He’s found, of course, by the daughter of the pharaoh, who raises him as her own child and as a prince of Egypt. Should that be Prince of Egypt? I’m not sure of the appropriate grammar for a film like this one. Charlton Heston plays Moses as an adult, and he’s just as stoic and wooden here as in Ben-Hur or, really, almost any movie that he starred in. I suspect he’s trying to treat the religious material with a great deal of seriousness, but it really does come across almost as camp. It’s not easy to feel a great deal of emotion for someone who comes across as so stolid all the time.

 

Yul Brynner plays Ramses, the actual son of the pharaoh and Moses’ rival for the throne and for the attentions of Anne Baxter’s Nefretiri. Brynner can really strut when he walks, and when you look as good in a skirt and a cape (and only a skirt and a cape) as he does, you’ve probably earned the right to strut. Heston shows up in roughly the same outfit at one point in the film, and sadly, he just can’t compete with Rameses’ hotness. Having the two of them side by side to compare, it’s all the more confusing that Nefretiri has the hots for Moses instead. Rameses certainly lets her know – more than once – that he’s very much interested in her, but her rebuffs make him all the more upset at the attention that Moses gets. It probably was the same for Brynner, wondering why Heston was always considered such a sex symbol. I hope his Oscar for Best Actor for The King and I this same year served as some consolation.

The Ten Commandments features lots of stars in smaller roles. It’s really a cast of thousands, and we get a few moments with some of these famous actors. The great Dame Judith Anderson is a servant who finds out the truth about Moses’ background and tries to use that information to stop Nefretiri from chasing after him. Baxter, though, didn’t play women who were too gentle, and Nefretiri has Memnet killed so that she can continue to pursue Moses. Vincent Price plays a master builder who spends a great deal of time talking about this amazing city that Moses is in charge of building for the Pharaoh Sethi (Sir Cedric Hardwick, imperious as he can possibly be). Most inexplicably, Edward G. Robinson plays Dathan, a Hebrew overseer who is consistently trying to undermine Moses and prevent him from fulfilling the prophecy of freeing the Hebrew people. I do like Robinson as an actor, and I think he was underappreciated by the Academy for several of the roles he played in films over the years, but his accent is so out of place in this film.

The film also features a subplot involving John Derek’s Joshua and Debra Paget’s Lilia as young lovers who keep getting separated from each other. Lilia actually winds up being enslaved by Dathan, and Derek keeps trying to rescue her. He often does so while shirtless, and he gives Brynner a serious challenger for who looks best wearing as few clothes as possible. These two characters are also responsible for Moses rescuing an older woman who’s almost crushed by a large stone that the Hebrew slaves are being forced to move in order to make this city for the pharaoh. Of course, Moses does the right thing, and he also order that food and water be given to the slaves. Little does he realize that he’s also Hebrew (and that the older woman is actually his mother).

Baxter’s Nefretiri tells Moses about his background, but she doesn’t care. She thinks they should continue to keep his secret, but he decides instead to join his people and starts working in the mud to make bricks. He wants to find his family, his heritage, so that he can understand himself better, I suppose, but of course, this just gets the attention of Sethi and Ramses. Sethi has always treated Moses as a sort of adopted son, and he certainly seems to like Moses much more than he does Ramses.

The film clocks in at almost four hours running time, so we have plenty of time for Moses to wander through the desert after Sehti banishes him from Egypt. He finds his wife Sephora (yes, that’s how it’s spelled in the film) among the seven daughters of a Bedouin sheik named Jethro. He becomes a shepherd, but he winds up seeing the Burning Bush while wandering around Mt. Sinai. By this point, Joshua has shown up in the desert to convince Moses that he’s the deliverer of the Hebrew people who was prophesied many years earlier. After hearing the voice of God in the Burning Bush say pretty much the same thing, Moses agrees to return to Egypt, where he tells Ramses, who is now the pharaoh and married to Nefretiri, to “let my people go.” Even after all these years, and despite the fact that Moses has married another woman and has grown some wild hair and a beard, Nefretiri still comes on to him. She’s still hot for him despite being married to Ramses and having a child with the pharaoh.

As proof that Ramses must release the Hebrews, Moses does a few parlor tricks like turning his wooden staff into a cobra and turning water into blood. The plagues show up, and he even notes that the first born son of every Egypt will die. That includes the pharaoh’s son, and after the boy’s passing, Ramses relents. The scenes where the Hebrews leave Egypt demonstrate the remarkable scale of moviemaking involved. Hundreds of people, plus sheep and cattle and other livestock, depart the city and make their way into the wilderness.

Of course, the sequence that is most famous (and the one that captured the film’s only Oscar, for special effects) is the parting of the Red Sea, and it’s certainly an amazing moment in the film. Ramses and his men are chasing after the Hebrew people in chariots, only to be stopped by a pillar of fire. That gives Moses time to call forth a storm and split the sea into two parts so that everyone can make their way between two walls of water. It’s still a moment that dazzles even with all of the advancements in filmmaking since its release. The only sequence that comes close to its grandeur is the carving of the titular document by fire. The wording is not in English, so I’ll accept that the commandments written on the stone tablet say what they are supposed to say. Of course, this is happening while there’s that weird, almost orgy-like creation of the Golden Calf (again, thanks to Robinson’s Dathan and his meddling) that Moses has to halt, but that’s what you get when you go to see a De Mille film.

It’s not that much of a stretch to consider this film a plea for greater acceptance of people of different backgrounds. It was released during the Civil Rights Era in the United States, and it talks a great deal about the mistreatment of Hebrews, which is clearly a form of racism, and there’s a lot of talk about why people should be able to live their own lives without being enslaved. The dehumanization of the Hebrew people is depicted in ways that show the parallels to the dehumanization that other categories of people have experienced throughout the centuries. If it accomplishes nothing else, if The Ten Commandments made some people a bit more tolerant, then it was worth all the money spent to recreate the events it depicts.

Oscar Win: Best Special Effects

Other Oscar Nominations: Best Picture, Best Color Cinematography, Best Color Art Direction, Best Color Costume Design, Best Sound Recording, and Best Film Editing

Best Picture of 1928-29

 

The Winner: The Broadway Melody

The Other Nominees: Alibi, The Hollywood Revue of 1929, In Old Arizona, and The Patriot

 

My Choice: The Patriot! Just kidding. It’s a lost film, so we have no idea how to judge its quality these days. To be honest, this is a very tough choice because this may be one of the weakest groups of nominees in the history of the Academy Awards. Each of them has flaws, some larger than others, but none of them are particularly ideal. The Broadway Melody has more of a storyline than The Hollywood Revue of 1929, but the fluency with the camera isn’t there yet. Alibi and In Old Arizona keep inserting singing and dancing into the plot just to make use of the newfangled sound equipment filmmakers were dealing with then, but that makes for some very distracting moments. I guess I’ll stick with the Academy’s choice for this year, The Broadway Melody. At least, the production numbers are fun and interesting to watch.

In Old Arizona (1928-29)

 

When you watch an older film like In Old Arizona, which was reportedly the first sound era Western and the first talkie to be filmed primarily in the outdoors, you get to see moments that are clearly not related to the plot and don’t necessarily add anything to our understanding of the characters or their behaviors. Those moments, however, do serve to demonstrate the novelty of that “new” invention for the movies: sound. For example, In Old Arizona features an early sequence where four guys are harmonizing the song “Bicycle Built for Two.” There are no bicycles in the film, and there’s no particular reason for these men to be singing together outdoors, and they don’t seem to show up again in the film, but it’s a way for you to marvel at how advanced the sound quality of the film is.

In Old Arizona features Warner Baxtor as the Cisco Kid, an Oscar-winning role he would play several more times in his career. We first meet the Kid as he robs a stagecoach and takes the Wells Fargo box with all of the money. He’s very apologetic and polite as he’s stealing from the stagecoach, and he doesn’t take anything from the individual passengers that he doesn’t give them something in return. It’s an interesting way to meet a character, and it allows us to see that, despite his penchant for taking stuff that doesn’t belong to him, he’s really a good person. The story upon which the film’s plot was based, apparently, treats the Cisco Kid as more of a villain, but he’s clearly meant to earn out sympathy even from the start of the movie.

Almost no one knows what the Cisco Kid looks like, which is rather tough to believe given how dazzling the costumes are that he wears. There’s a lot of work that’s gone into the stitching and details of the various clothes Baxter gets to don, and no other character in the movie is wearing such elaborate garb. Still, this kind of anonymity allows for some funny moments, such as when he’s at the barber shop and is surrounded by men talking about him and his various crimes and how dangerous he is and how they’re going to capture him. He even meets Sgt. Mickey Dunn (played, rather broadly and somewhat badly, by Edmund Lowe) in person, and they talk about women and haircuts and perfume. They also have an intriguing moment when they pat each other’s guns and talk about how big the “guns” are. The guns, of course, are strapped to belts around their waists, so you know the general area we’re talking about here. It’s very reminiscent of a similar scene in Red River, but it sadly doesn’t last very long.

Once Dunn learns from the blacksmith that he’s been talking to the Cisco Kid, the film shifts to being more about a love triangle. You see, the Kid loves a woman named Tonia Maria. He even sings, briefly, to her, perhaps one of the first instances of a singing cowboy in the movies. However, she’s astonishingly unfaithful to him; in fact, she’s getting rid of one of her lovers just as he rides up to her home. Tonia (played by Dorothy Burgess) falls very quickly into the stereotypical sexualized Latina. After she’s spent time with the Kid, she almost immediately goes to the bar in town and meets Sgt. Dunn. She flirts with him, but he initially rebuffs her advances, finding her amusing rather than attractive.

However, once Dunn realizes that she’s the Cisco Kid’s lover, he rides over to her house and starts wooing her. Naturally, he’s just leading her on so that he can find out more about where the Kid is, but she seems to fall for him very quickly. She’s offended when she finds out that he’s trying to earn the $500 reward for capturing or killing the Kid, but once he promises all of the money to her and tells her that he wants to take her back to New York to live, she makes an abrupt change in her emotions. The accent that Lowe uses throughout the film is quite horrible, by the way. It’s almost like a comic version of a New Yorker’s way of speaking.

The Cisco Kid overhears the plans that Dunn and Tonia make, including her desire to have Dunn kill the Kid rather than capture him. He’s heartbroken over this realization that she’s never really loved him (although she certainly liked the gifts he brought her), but he plans his revenge, and it’s a strange one. He intercepts a note she’s written to Dunn and changes it so that it seems he will be dressed up as Tonia and she will be dressed as the Cisco Kid. I’m not sure what prompts such an idea, but the alleged cross-dressing has its expected outcome. The Kid escapes after Dunn shoots and kills Tonia, who he thinks is the Cisco Kid wearing a white mantilla. I know, it sounds very odd, and it is very odd.

The film, being a product of its time, traffics in some offensive stereotypes about Mexicans and other Spanish-speaking people. Several sequences involve dialog that’s in Spanish, and it’s not translated for us on the screen. Instead, their speech ridiculed by the whites in the film. The white characters also use several derogatory terms for the Latinx people in the film (mostly women, by the way). Lest you think the film is only racist about the Latinx population, it also features a short image of two Asian characters talking rapidly during a sort of rally to get the townsfolks fired up about forming a vigilante posse to go after the Cisco Kid. Both of these characters are dressed like Hop Sing on the old Bonanza TV show. It’s tough to watch, but when even the central character of the Cisco Kid speaks with broken English despite the fact that his parents are both well educated, and one of them is from San Luis Obispo, you know the film isn’t going to treat all of its characters with dignity. Having white actors portray the Cisco Kid and Tonia Maria doesn’t help either, of course.

The film, as I mentioned earlier, was filmed mostly outdoors, and we are treated to some beautiful desert scenery. The opening sequence involving passengers boarding a stagecoach was clearly filmed at a mission (reportedly, the one at San Juan Capistrano), and lovely Joshua trees populate the landscape. The filmmakers have paid a great deal of attention to the look of the film, and even the interiors are shot with a good eye for art direction and set decoration. In Old Arizona harkens back to the early days of sound film and the various ways that the industry was trying to take what it had accomplished during the silent era and apply some of it to the new techniques of moviemaking. It’s good to see that the visual was not always abandoned at the service of the auditory.

Oscar Win: Best Actor (Warner Baxter)

Other Oscar Nominations: Outstanding Picture, Best Director (Irving Cummings), Best Writing, and Best Cinematography

Past Lives (2023)

 

Past Lives allows viewers to ponder questions that many of us may have about whether or not our lives would have been different had we taken a different path in a relationship in our past. “What might have been” is a powerful motivation for some people, and this film explores a relationship over a twenty-four-year period to raise that kind of question. Well, calling it a “relationship” might be a bit of a stretch since the two main characters aren’t actually together except for a short period of time when they are very young. Still, it makes for a compelling and emotional movie that will likely having you thinking about some of the people from your own past that you’ve always wondered about in terms of how happy you might have been had you made different choices.

The film has three distinct periods that it covers, and each of them is beautifully and sensitively handled. Twenty-four years in the past, in the year 2000, Na Young (later Nora) and Hae Sung are classmates in South Korea and just 12 years old. He clearly has a crush on her, and they even manage to go on what is ostensibly a “date” arranged by their mothers. However, they’re very competitive about their grades and sometimes hurt each other’s feelings. When she reveals that her family is immigrating to Canada, he’s clearly pained by the impending move. It’s a very emotional sequence, but you might imagine that the love shared by a couple of 12-year-olds couldn’t really matter all that much, right? Little are we prepared for what happens over the next couple of decades.

Twelve years later, she’s now living in New York (and played by the fantastic Greta Lee) and working as a writer, and he’s an engineering student in Korea (and played by the impossibly attractive Teo Yoo). She finds him on Facebook, that repository of past lives, and discovers that he’s been looking for her. They start to Skype with each other, and you can sense that their feelings for each other are intensifying. However, Nora decides to cut off communication with Hae because they cannot see each other in person, given that she wants to focus more on her writing and he’s about to go to China to learn Mandarin. She leaves for a writer’s retreat (how very literary of her), where she meets a guy named Arthur (John Magaro) and falls in love. Hae starts dating a woman in South Korea and hangs out with his friends, but you can sense that he’s lonely even when he’s with other people. He would clearly rather be with Nora. Did I mention that he’s not seen her since they were both 12?

Another twelve years pass and we’re presumably now in the present time. Hae Sung comes to New York for a week on vacation, and he wants to see Nora again. She’s married to Arthur although they don’t seem to have the happiest or most dynamic of marriages. They are, in that way that couples sometimes are, contented with and accustomed to each other. Hae is single and seemingly wants to reconnect with Nora, maybe just not in a romantic sense. Arthur is, understandably, a bit jealous. I mean, if you look at the actor who plays Hae, you could see why Arthur might be feeling—shall we say—inadequate? Arthur thinks that the story of these two childhood friends is an interesting one, but Nora insists that she doesn’t love Hae. There’s also a bit of a language barrier since Hae’s English is not strong and Arthur’s Korean is even weaker. That makes for some misunderstandings and some apologies for misunderstanding.

The camerawork on Past Lives is really quite extraordinary, and I’m not sure why it wasn’t recognized more for its cinematography and its editing. It’s a gorgeous movie. There are lots of closeups of the two leads, and that allows for some very emotional expressions by the actors. While Hae is in New York, the camera seems to linger just a bit longer than in the other two segments, perhaps to recreate that sense of wistfulness that permeates so much of the movie and that has intensified as it has progressed.

The film discusses a Korean concept called inyeon. Nora talks about it with Arthur during their time together at the writer’s retreat, actually. It’s something about how the past continues to influence us, but it also is about how connected we are or might be to other people. Maybe you see someone in the street, and you actually knew each other in a previous life and that’s why you’re in each other’s presence now. It’s an interesting concept, and you can see that the story is about how much perhaps the memories of Hae Jung still haunt Nora a bit and how much she is still on his mind. There’s no happy ending for these two, of course, since this isn’t a Hollywood movie, but it’s not necessary for us to have a sense of closure when there’s a concept like inyeon out there. You might be sad about the film’s ending, but in a way, all of the characters are somewhat sad and somewhat not. Why should we be any different from them at that moment?

The film was written and directed by Celine Song, and it’s a smashing debut for this filmmaker. It alternates between Korean and English, and it represents in some ways just how international filmmaking (and filmgoing) has become. Song was nominated for her screenplay, but she would have been a worthy addition to the list of nominated directors as well. The story is reportedly semi-autobiographical, but I don’t think we have to know which parts are “true” in order to sense the truthfulness of the emotions being portrayed.

Speaking of portrayals, Lee as the adult Nora is fantastic. She’s complex and thoughtful and reserved, but you can tell what her character is feeling from the way that Lee delivers her lines. Yoo is quite powerful as a young man whose emotions are so visible. You might not expect such a deep performance, but he’s likely to become a major international star if this role is any indication. Magaro’s Arthur is more significant to the final segment of the movie, but he manages to bring some humor and humility to the role, and when it’s just Arthur and Hae talking to each other, Magaro does a great job of demonstrating Arthur’s generosity of spirit. He knows that his wife needed to see Hae, and he also knows by that point that she will not be leaving their marriage.

We’re left at the end of Past Lives with questions that cannot easily be answered. How powerful is a first love? Does it affect you for the rest of your life? Are your other relationships somehow a reflection of what happened with that first love? As philosophical as Past Lives is, you don’t get answers to these kinds of questions, and we don’t really need them, do we? Isn’t it more satisfying to have that sense of mystery than to know definitively? This is a film that is very focused on emotions, and it’s about how we express our feelings and hash out our emotions with other people. There might have been a time in the past when the Academy Awards wouldn’t have noticed a film like this. I’m grateful that those days are, I hope, over.

Oscar Nominations: Best Motion Picture of the Year and Best Original Screenplay

Twister (1996)

The tornadoes in Twister certainly look realistic even though technology has improved special effects so much since the film’s original release in 1996. The movie follows a group of so-called storm chasers, led by Helen Hunt’s Dr. Jo Harding and Bill Paxton’s Bill Harding, as they try to get this gadget called Dorothy (which looks like a metal garbage can filled with silver balls) to get whisked away by a tornado. If they’re successful, the sensors inside Dorothy (obvious shout-out to The Wizard of Oz and its tornado) will provide all kinds of data from inside the whirlwind, and that could perhaps lead to a better and earlier warning system. Several of the attempts fail, and we know just how many copies of Dorothy there are: four. You can count down to the end of the film by keeping track of how many of these trash cans get lost or destroyed. Oh, and in order to make the plot seem more complex, Bill and Jo are in the midst of getting a divorce so that he can marry Jami Gertz’s Dr. Melissa Reeves, a reproductive therapist, who is one of the first characters on film that I can remember being obsessed with taking phone calls at the worst possible times. I’m not overly fond of how badly the film treats Gertz’s character, to be honest; she’s an outsider who is subjected to a lot of awful stuff in a short period of time. She barely misses being hit by a truck that’s falling from the sky, and she has to overhear her fiancé confess his love to the woman who is still officially his wife. She does get one of the funniest lines in the entire movie – “I gotta go, Julia. We got cows!” – but it’s all just too much for her, and you certainly can understand why. Gertz is also unfortunate in having Philip Seymour Hoffman as her scene partner too many times. Hoffman seems to be acting in another film altogether, and many of his line readings are far too odd to come across as realistic. The supporting cast includes other great actors like Alan Ruck and Jeremy Davies and Todd Field (best known now as a great film director). It even has Cary Elwes as a rival storm chaser who has corporate sponsorship and more high-tech equipment, but he doesn’t have the instincts that Paxton’s character has for tornado behavior. Money can’t buy everything. The film also features the great Lois Smith in the relatively small role of Jo’s Aunt Meg, whose house collapses in spectacular fashion after being almost leveled by a tornado. She’s a warm presence when she’s on the screen trying to feed all of Jo and Bill’s crew at her home surrounded by kinetic sculptures that clearly have something to do with a later plot point. Still, much of the focus is on Hunt and Paxton’s characters; they share an excitement over storms, and you know almost from the start of the film that they are destined to be together. They fight together through rain and hail and strong winds to get Dorothy to work, so why wouldn’t they have worked harder on keeping their marriage alive? We don’t really know much about why they broke up, but do we even really care? Don’t we just want to see how the visual effects artists can convince us that a drive-in theater showing The Shining is being destroyed? There’s a weird thrill to seeing Jo and Bill drive though a house that’s been dropped by a tornado and is directly in their path as they’re driving to the next stop. Those are really the best moments of Twister. By the way, I’ve also seen Twisters (2024), and its special effects are also top-notch. Even though it follows a few of the same plot beats as the original, the newer film does spend more time letting us get to know the characters and their histories.

Oscar Nominations: Best Sound and Best Visual Effects

That's a Wrap on 1927-28

When I started this project, I thought I would only view the films that had been nominated for Best Picture, but as I started to see opportunities, I expanded my search to see any film that had been nominated for any of the Academy Awards. It’s led me to some interesting finds and some frustrating outcomes. I was able to watch eighteen complete (or mostly complete) films that were acknowledged during the first year of the awards, and some of them are truly gems that I enjoyed a great deal. Here’s what I was able to see:

• Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness
• The Circus
• The Crowd
• Glorious Betsy
• The Jazz Singer
• The Last Command
• The Patent Leather Kid
• The Racket
• Seventh Heaven
• A Ship Comes In 
• Sadie Thompson
• Speedy
• Street Angel
• Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
• Tempest
• Two Arabian Knights
• Underworld
• Wings

Of course, success doesn’t come without a struggle. I’m not able to see quite a few of the other nominees because they’re lost or have been partially lost or are locked away in archives that aren’t particularly easy to access. Of the following films, I was only able to see a few minutes of The Way of All Flesh, which contains one of the Oscar-winning performances by Emil Jannings:

• The Devil Dancer
• The Dove
• The Magic Flame
• The Noose
• The Private Life of Helen of Troy
• Sorrell and Son
• The Way of All Flesh

So I got to watch about 72 percent of the first year’s nominees and winners, and considering how many films have been lost over the years – particularly ones from the silent era – that seems like a pretty good average to me. If they’re found and/or become more readily available, I’ll do my due diligence and watch them. Until then, I’m considering this my final post about the Oscar nominees of 1927-28.

By the way, the first Academy Awards had nominees and even one winner for whom there were no specific films mentioned. The eligibility period covered August 1, 1927, to July 31, 1928, and someone could be nominated for a single film or multiple films or, apparently, every film they completed that year. You can see this easily in the acting wins with multiple performances being mentioned. Janet Gaynor was honored for three films, and Emil Jannings for two.

However, what is more intriguing are the four nominations for individuals that don’t mention any particular film at all. For example, Joseph Farnham (sometimes just credited as Joe Farnham) won the Oscar for Best Title Writing. Here’s the thing: he wrote the title cards for at least eighteen films during the eligibility period, including The Crowd. However, whether he was considered for that film or for Laugh, Clown, Laugh or Telling the World or The Fair Co-Ed or for all eighteen films, we just don’t know. A fellow Best Title Writing nominee, George Marion Jr., has thirty credits listed for the same one-year period, including Oscar winners Underworld and Two Arabian Knights and Oscar nominee The Magic Flame. Again, was he being acknowledged for his work on one of those films or all three of them or other films or all thirty of the ones for which he has been credited with writing the intertitles? Perhaps this confusion is why the category only existed during the first year of the awards.

Another category, Best Engineering Effects, has two nominees with no specific film listed. However, a look at their credits reveals something quite interesting. Ralph Hammeras is credited with supplying what we now call visual effects to just one film during the eligibility window, The Private Life of Helen of Troy. Likewise, another nominee, Nugent Slaughter, is credited with just one film for visual effects during 1927-28’s eligibility period, The Jazz Singer. Now, why aren’t those single films mentioned as the reason for these two artists being nominated? The winner in the category, Roy Pomerory, got the award for his work on Wings, but his two competitors only worked on one film each during the year and have no films mentioned as leading to their recognition. Odd, isn’t it?

No one ever said Oscar history was simple and uncomplicated.

Tempest (1927-28)

 

One of the key delights of watching Tempest is seeing the great John Barrymore on film. He does, indeed, have a great profile, and he’s also a wonderful film actor. Why he was never considered for an acting Oscar remains a mystery. In this film, which is most definitely not an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Barrymore plays Sgt. Ivan Markov, a dragoon who is ambitious to receive a commission as an officer, an unlikely event given that he is a “peasant” and the officers all seem to be aristocrats. The film pivots on the transitional era from the tsarist era to the revolutionary era in Russia, and there’s even a socialist recruiter – for lack of a better phrase – who looks like a dried-up version of Rasputin and who sports a big gap where a tooth should be. Markov gets his commission on the day that he meets Princess Tamara (Camilla Horn), who just happens to be the daughter of the general who has been his champion (George Fawcett) and the fiancée of the captain who has been his biggest antagonist (Ullrich Haupt). She’s not particularly fond of Markov, thinking his status as a peasant is beneath her attention. He winds up in her bedroom, drunk, with a bouquet of flowers and a locket that he’s engraved “I Love You, Ivan.” Why he’s fallen in love with her is not quite clear; she’s been very condescending and exhibited nothing but disdain for him. And, yet, we all know that she’s probably either also in love with him or at least intrigued by him. These plots are easy to follow now that we’ve seen them replicated hundreds of times. Markove gets stripped of his commission and sentenced to prison as a result of his actions. Silent film actors had to master the art of closeups, and Barrymore was exceptionally good at facial expressions. For example, he’s much more subtle playing drunk than most actors tend to be. When his character is left behind, alone, in the prison after everyone else has been “recruited” for battle, he becomes more haggard and delusional. When Markov and the Princess find their roles reversed after the revolutionaries win, Barrymore is very tender and sweet in his scenes with Horn. Louis Wolheim plays Sgt. Bulba, Ivan’s best friend who gets himself kicked out of the army so that he can join his friend in prison and do hard labor. I know that Wolheim’s character is meant to be comic relief, but getting yourself sentenced to hard labor is going a bit far for a friendship, isn’t it? Tempest features a number of interesting camera tricks, such as when writing in Russian dissolves into English and when the camera looks through the bottom of the glass that Markov has emptied (again) at the Princess’ birthday party. The film is satisfying entertainment on many levels, and it’s certainly a good choice to watch if you’d like to see why Barrymore got so much attention.  

Oscar Win: Best Interior Decoration

Alibi (1928-29)

 

Alibi is a transitional film from the silent era to the sound era, and it manages to include some of the worst and the best elements of both periods of moviemaking. The sound quality at times is so bad that I couldn’t quite tell the name of a character, but at other times, we are able to hear a little bird chirping in a cage. The camera moves in ways that were common for silent films, with zooms and pans and such, but it also remains remarkably static when filming what seem to be an endless number of dance numbers involving chorus lines. The industry’s initial issues with sound recording and camera movement would be worked out eventually, so we have films like Alibi to thank for letting us see how rocky the transition was during those years.

The plot involves a gangster named Chick Williams (the handsome Chester Morris) who’s released from prison, only to fall back into his criminal ways. Of course, he tells his girlfriend (and future wife) Joan Manning that he’s completely clean. She was even with him on the night that some members of his gang committed a robbery and killed a police officer. In other words, she’s his alibi. Given that she’s also a policeman’s daughter and is also romantically entangled with a police detective, having such a solid alibi would seemingly clear Chick from any suspicion.

However, Joan’s father and the detective still suspect Chick’s involvement. Chick claims that the police planted guns on him in order to send him to prison for the last crime, and Joan (played ably by Eleanor Griffith) seems convinced enough that she agrees to marry Chick over her father’s objections – oh, and over the objections of her other boyfriend, the police detective, too. The police become very dogged in their attempts to find a connection between Chick and the murder of the police officer. Doing so, of course, gives Chick ample opportunity to claim that he’s being framed again.

The film displays a visual flair that was common among some of the best silent films. There are all sorts of interesting camera angles and intriguing uses of lighting to highlight (and obscure) objects on the screen. The styling is very Art Deco, and both the interior and exterior sequences are dazzling to observe. We also get lots of images of watches during the film, so many close-ups of watches, but they’re all important to the question of whether or not Chick could have made it to the scene of the robbery during the intermission of the play he attended with Joan. We even zoom in on a set of fingerprints at one point. It’s a shame that some of the visual acuity would be lost in the first years of sound films because of the difficulties associated with making sound pictures, but you can watch Singin’ in the Rain (1952) if you want a more entertaining depiction of that transition.

Alibi also keeps interrupting the plot with those aforementioned dance numbers. They don’t really contribute anything to the storyline, but I suppose it’s a way to use music and the sounds of tapping feet to demonstrate sound techniques. It’s also perhaps useful to place the action of the story in the night club where the gangsters hang out. However, given how badly the dance sequences are staged and how rigid the camera is during those numbers, it makes you wonder if they were truly significant enough to stay in the completed film. It might be better just to concentrate on the crime drama unfolding on the screen.

The film is based upon a play entitled Nightsticks, and I never knew until I watched this film that the police during that era used their nightsticks as signals to each other. Watching them tapping a distress call to other police officers was rather enlightening. Also, I was not aware that the police used Tommy guns. The Motion Picture Production Code would ban images of such weapons just a few years after the release of Alibi, so it’s intriguing to see them on the screen.

Joan Manning Williams is an intriguing character; she’s caught between a criminal and a police detective, making for a most unusual love triangle for the time period. She almost immediately believes Chick because, of course, she was with him on the night of the fatal robbery. She also loves him more than she does the police detective, or is she really more intrigued by his reputation as a gangster? Maybe she’s fallen in love with him because she sees someone whose life has been tragically altered by police suspicion? It’s never easy to tell, and Griffith is very good at playing with the ambiguity.

Interestingly, the police have infiltrated Chick’s gang with an undercover agent played by Regis Toomey. I think Toomey’s character is called Danny McGann when he’s a police officer, and he’s Billy Morgan when he’s with the gang, or maybe it’s the other way around. Again, the plot and the sound quality don’t do the audience many favors in this regard. Toomey has to play a drunk for much of the picture, and he’s very adept at it. When we as viewers realize that his character has also been performing as a drunk for most of the movie, it’s a nice meta moment, as people like to say. Toomey also gets quite the extended and effective death sequence for a supporting character after Chick shoots Danny/Billy in an attempt to escape.

The film’s ending is typical of crime films from this era. The bad guy has to pay with his life for the crimes he’s committed. Joan accidentally tips off the police as to Chick’s whereabouts, and he gives a big speech about what happened on the night of the killing—just so we as an audience get a sense of closure, I guess. There’s a standoff between him and the detective, but in what seems like the silliest scenario imaginable, Chick flicks off the light switch and escapes to the roof of the building. He dies by falling when he tries to jump from rooftop to rooftop. It’s not the most elegant way to get rid of a murderer, certainly, but it’s an effective enough way to end the movie.

Oscar Nominations: Outstanding Picture, Best Actor (Chester Morris), and Best Art Direction

The Holdovers (2023)

 

The Holdovers features three central characters who are all dealing with the repercussions of their pasts. The film gives us an interesting take on how the past continues to affect us, how it still influences our behaviors whether or not we are aware of its power over us. The three main characters are all stranded at a Northeastern prep school called Baron Academy over the winter break, and they form an odd but emotionally compelling combo as they learn about each other and how to interact with each other. It’s intriguing that the filmmakers have chosen as one of their central characters a teacher of Western Civilization, the study of the past, since so much of this film is truly about uncovering and confronting the past.

The title refers to the prep school students whose parents leave them behind at Christmas time. It’s 1970, and Angus Tully (well played by Dominic Sessa) has a mother who would rather go on a honeymoon with her new husband instead of bringing her son home for Christmas or taking him with her. He and four other students are held back at the campus, and their much-hated classics/history teacher, Paul “Walleye” Hunham (Oscar nominee Paul Giamatti), is given the unenviable job of overseeing their safety during the break. Mary Lamb (Oscar winner Da’Vine Joy Randolph) has the thankless task of cooking for the holdovers.

Hunham makes the students, all males (as if that needed to be said about a private school back in the 1970s), get up early and exercise. He also forces them to study during what they hoped would be a time to play around and have fun. The film does make a nod to the diversity that was beginning to appear in these kinds of prestigious schools; one of the kids is Korean, and another is a long-haired Mormon football player. However, the worst of the guys is Teddy Kountze (Brady Hepner), who acts like a jerk to everyone, including the younger boys who are feeling very homesick. Angus is more sympathetic to them, despite his attempts to appear tough in the face of the sadness of being abandoned by his mother. When the rich father of one of the boys shows up in a helicopter to take everyone on a ski trip, only Angus is unable to reach his mother for permission, so he gets stuck with Hunham and Lamb.

When the remaining three people start watching television together and eating together, they also start talking to each other, and we learn some rather surprising details about their lives. Each of them is a bit of a misfit, and each of them has issues. Giamatti’s Hunham, for example, has a strange disorder that makes his body smell… well… fishier as the day progresses. He also failed the son of a prominent donor to the academy, which is the reason for why he was given the job of supervising the holdovers. Mary has lost her son Curtis, who was killed in Vietnam shortly after graduating from Barton, and she still hasn’t recovered from his death.

And then there’s Angus, who has been telling everyone that his father has passed away. The truth is that he’s been confined to a mental institution, and Angus desperately wants to see him again. He feels like his mother has abandoned both himself and his father, and during an alleged educational “field trip” to Boston, he has a very sad reunion with his dad. He also dislocates his shoulder during an act of defiance against Hunham’s attempts to control his behavior, but this actually winds up helping the two men bond over their shared inability to make friends. Neither one of them feels particularly well-liked, and that serves as a way for them to start liking each other.

Each of the three main characters has possibilities. It does seem like the school secretary played by Carrie Preston might like Bunham, but perhaps she’s just feeling sorry for him. (We do find out as the film progresses.) Angus quickly finds the secretary’s niece interesting, but she might just be a bit of a fling once she finds out about his family. Mary has an admirer in the school’s janitor, but she initially seems too wrapped up in her grief to give him the attention that he (and she) deserves. All three of them seem capable of love (or whatever approximation of love you want to consider), but they’re not ready for it yet, it seems.

The Holdovers has its moments of levity. I wouldn’t want to give the impression that the entire film is so melancholy. The ending, in particular, allows Hunham to have a moment of both closure and delight after he’s fired from his job. No, we don’t know what is going to happen to him next, but he’s feeling a bit of joy at his ability to find a way to be victorious after all. For someone who has been beaten down by life several times, it’s a fun moment. Maybe he’s going to write that book he always claimed he would, or maybe he’ll be able to find a teaching job somewhere else. Who knows? We’re not left with closure for the other main characters either although Mary seems to be more adjusted to her son’s death and Angus feels now that he is not destined to be like his father.

I’m surprised that only Giamatti and Randolph got much major awards attention for their acting. They are certainly deserving, but Sessa’s performance as Angus is a delicate balance of youthful anger and naivete mixed with a healthy does of underlying sadness. He was nominated and did win a couple of critics’ awards, but he’s certainly as good as many of the men nominated for Best Supporting Actor. The film also didn’t get much attention for its production design or costumes, but it does a marvelous job of evoking the time period in which it is set. It’s not always easy to capture the feel of that transitional moment from the 1960s to the 1970s, but The Holdovers is able to do it well.

When you watch a film like this, you have to consider what the Academy voters might have noted that led to it being nominated for the award for Best Motion Picture. It’s likely that its tale of failed ambitions or lost dreams might resonate with many of the people in the entertainment industry. Perhaps their lives might not have turned out quite as they had expected or even wanted. Maybe, though, it’s the way that the three central characters are portrayed, not just by the actors themselves but by the overall script. There’s a great deal of sympathy here for those who feel like outsiders, who feel like everyone else has their life in order, but who also think that they’re never going to have friends or people they can rely on. If a student with depression, an alcoholic teacher, and a grieving cafeteria supervisor can become what constitutes a surrogate family, even if it’s only for a few weeks, maybe the world is more filled with hope than we might initially imagine.

Oscar Win: Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role (Da’Vine Joy Randolph)

Other Oscar Nominations: Best Motion Picture of the Year, Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role (Paul Giamatti), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Achievement in Film Editing

Best Actor of 1927-28

Initially, the Academy nominated three men for Best Actor in the first year of the awards, but after one of them (Charlie Chaplin) was removed for consideration, it became a two-person race. Both of the remaining nominees were mentioned for performances in two movies each. That would never happen again in Oscar history.

 

A copy of The Noose is preserved at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, so unless the museum partners with someone to release a copy of this film, Richard Barthelmess’s performance as Nickie Elkins is almost impossible to see these days. Elkins is a criminal who learns that his mother, whom he has never met, is the wife of the governor. He tries to protect his mother from the machinations of his father, a gangster who tries to blackmail the governor. Barthelmess was one of the founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and was nominated for two of his performances during the first year of the awards.

Barthelmess plays the title role in The Patent Leather Kid, a film about the aftereffects of World War I on those who served in battle. Barthelmess’ character, who is referred to most often as “The Kid,” is a boxer, a particularly handsome and conceited one, but a talented one nonetheless. He falls for a rather tough-talking woman called Curly (played with gusto by Molly O’Day) and takes her away from her boyfriend at the time, a guy named Breen who’s going to show up later in the plot. The Kid, as played by Barthelmess, is clearly afraid of being drafted to serve in the military, and when he gets his draft notice, he winds up serving under Lt. Hugo Breen (Lawford Davidson). Barthelmess lets us see the fear that the Kid has underneath all that bravado and bluster, and it’s easy to see how much he truly cares for Curley, who’s also in France working as a nurse. In the wake of his friend Puffy’s death – I know, Puffy? – the Kid saves Breen’s life and manages to destroy a German stronghold, only to have the building collapse on top of him. Thanks to Curley’s pleadings, the doctor agrees to operate even though he thinks the Kid’s prognosis is dire. Of course, he’s probably never going to box again due to his injuries, but the film leaves that question unanswered. I’m not sure why the character named Puffy has to have a stutter that must then be replicated on the intertitles, making them harder to read, and I’m certainly confused as to why the one African American character has to be nicknamed Molasses although he does collect a lot of medals during the war. By the way, I thought the character was known as the Patent Leather Kid because of his penchant for wearing a leather trench coat and/or for having leather elements on his boxing robe. However, after reading some reviews online, I’ve come to realize that it’s his slick hair that earned him the nickname. Perhaps this was covered at some point in the film, but to be honest, the print that I was able to see was so bad, I couldn’t even tell at times who was on the screen. There’s one print of the film at the Library of Congress and another one at an archive in Wisconsin, and I hope they’re in better shape than the versions available on YouTube.

Charles Chaplin’s performance as the Tramp in The Circus was removed as a nominee before the first Academy Awards were handed out, but the film serves as a delightful reminder of just how deft Chaplin was at physical comedy. Whether he’s trying to walk a tightrope while several monkeys are interfering with his ability to move or even keep his pants on or he’s trying to learn a routine for the clowns involving barbers fighting over a client, his Tramp is always an active, engaged presence. The quieter moments are lovely too, such as when he’s making himself a meagre breakfast or listening to the woman he’s fallen in love with confess her love for someone else. There’s a great deal of sadness underpinning the more outrageous and happy moments. This film features the Tramp in a series of circus acts, but one of the most memorable sequences involves him and a pickpocket for whom he’s been mistaken. They’re running away from the police and wind up in a fun house early in the film. They have to pretend to be automatons, and Chaplin gets to hit the pickpocket over the head and laugh several times. It must have been quite funny to Chaplin to get to play someone who makes everyone else happy without knowing how or why he does so. This would be the only nomination Chaplin would receive for his acting, and it’s the only nomination for one of the most iconic characters of the silent era. Sadly, the Academy no longer considers it a nomination since Chaplin instead received an honorary award for acting, writing, directing, and producing the film.

Emil Jannings plays Grand Duke Sergius Alexander in The Last Command, the commanding officer of the Russian army during the 1917 Revolution and a cousin to the czar (don’t we spell it tsar now?). Although he only plays one character here, Jannings actually has to give two rather different performances in the role. As the younger Grand Duke, the one who falls in love with a revolutionist and keeps her as his lover, Jannings has to be arrogant and quick-tempered and demanding. He also does a lot of “business” with his cigarettes during the extended flashback to the 1917 era. However, he is also tender and emotionally sensitive in his interactions with Natalie Dubrova (played by Evelyn Brent, his equal on the screen). His heart seems to ache when he fears she’s betrayed him, which actually happens several times. In the framing sections of the film, those set in Hollywood a decade after the revolution, Jannings plays an old man who has been weakened by Natalie’s death and his escape from Russia. He has to keep shaking his head throughout these sequences, a consequence (according to the Grand Duke) of an unpleasant experience in his past. We know what that experience is, of course, from watching the film, but seeing him walking in a stupor at the film’s beginning is not quite as powerful as seeing him do the same after we have watched the extended flashback sequence. Jannings also gets a very long death scene at the film’s end after he seems to regain a bit of his former strength. It’s not quite a dual role that he plays in The Last Command, but it is certainly two very distinct performances, and perhaps that explains his win for the very first year of the Oscars.

Only about 5 ½ minutes still exist of  Jannings’s performance in The Way of All Flesh. We have, basically, just two scenes from the film, both of them featuring interactions between August Schilling (Jannings) and his son August Jr. (Donald Keith), who thinks his father has died years earlier. The first of the two remaining fragments shows the elder Schilling, now a beggar, discovering that his now-grown son has become an acclaimed violinist. He buys the cheapest possible balcony ticket to watch his son play and is moved to tears when the younger Schilling plays a “cradle song” taught to him by his father. The second intact scene is the film’s ending, where the two men are in front of the family’s home during a snowstorm. The younger man, still unaware that he is face-to-face with his father, offers the old man a warm drink and then a dollar before returning inside to celebrate Christmas with the family. The film’s frequent use of close-ups in these two scenes gives the audience an opportunity to concentrate upon Jannings’ face. He wears a lot of old-age makeup in the role, but his eyes truly convey emotions so powerfully. He doesn’t need to speak in order for the audience to sense the anguish and remorse and sense of loss that Schilling feels. Even his posture, primarily demonstrated by a stooped, shambling walk, shows how much pain he feels. Sadly, the rest of Janning’s Oscar-winning performance is lost, a fate suffered by large numbers of silent films that were made on flammable nitrate stock.

Oscar Winner: Emil Jannings left Hollywood soon after he received the first Oscar for Best Actor for his performances in The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh. His thick German accent reportedly made him unemployable during the Hollywood sound era. After starring in several Nazi propaganda films, Jannings was never to act again after the end of World War II.

My Choice: Charlie Chaplin gives an iconic performance as The Tramp in The Circus. I’d choose him over the other talented nominees. It’s odd that he received an honorary award for this film; it would have been interesting to see if he won any of the categories for which he was nominated. He was a multi-hyphenate before we even coined the world.