Song of the South (1947)

 

Good luck finding a copy of Song of the South to watch these days. It’s been unavailable in the United States for decades due to its patronizing and racist representations of African Americans, so your only choices are DVDs (or, worse, VHS tapes) from foreign countries. Thank heavens for that purchase a few years ago of a region-free Blu-Ray player. The film is an interesting mix of live action and animation, with the character of Uncle Remus (James Baskett, more on him later) telling some children the tales of Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox and Brer Bear. Most of the original Uncle Remus stories were collected and published by Joel Chandler Harris, and they typically are interpreted as coded messages about how African Americans were at times able to subvert the white power structure of the late 19^th Century. Brer Rabbit, who is the real star of the movie, is a trickster figure, and you can’t help but admire his ingenuity and cleverness in getting out of some of the scrapes he finds himself in. Actually, the three animated sequences featuring Brer Rabbit are really the best part of the film. The rest of the movie is about a young white boy whose father leaves the boy and his mother with the maternal grandmother in Georgia during the Reconstruction Era. I mean, I believe it’s supposed to be the Reconstruction Era, but a lot of what happens seems like Georgia is still behaving like African Americans are enslaved. Johnny (played by Bobby Driscoll) tries to run away from his grandmother’s home after his father’s abandonment, but he meets Uncle Remus and gets to hear “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” while hearing the first tale about Brer Rabbit easily outwitting Brer Bear to escape a trap, so Johnny decides to stick around. The part of this sequence that includes Baskett’s rendition of the Oscar-winning song is quite charming by itself; it’s just couched inside a film that treats Uncle Remus and the other black characters as people without any agency on their own. Johnny does manage to have quite a few adventures while in Georgia. He befriends a young black boy, Toby (played by Glenn Leedy), and a poor white girl, Ginny (Luana Patten). He also makes enemies of Ginny’s two older brothers, who could charitably be described as white trash, particularly since their entire existence seems to involve trying to bully and harm other children and animals. When we first meet them onscreen, they’re planning to drown a dog because it’s the runt of the litter! However, Uncle Remus always manages to find just the right story to tell, such as the one about Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby, so that Johnny can use what he learns from the tale in his own life. That means that Johnny is spending a lot of time away from the house and, of course, this doesn’t sit well with Johnny’s mother, who is played by the formidable Ruth Warrick from Citizen Kane and (much later) All My Children. She tells Remus that he cannot share any more stories, which prompts the old man to pack his stuff and leave for Atlanta. Then the most astonishing series of events happen: Johnny is hit by a bull while running after the wagon carrying Remus, and he’s only able to revive after Uncle Remus returns. It’s not his mother’s care or his father’s return or the doctor’s ministrations that do the trick; it’s the promise of more stories. Baskett became the first African American man ever to receive an Oscar, allegedly (although it’s a pretty well-accepted story now) after Walt Disney personally campaigned hard for Baskett to be honored. It’s just a shame that someone as talented as Baskett couldn’t have won for a better role in a better movie. Maybe it’s okay that the movie is difficult to watch in America nowadays and that the Disney organization is changing the old Splash Mountain ride that was inspired by Song of the South to something more, um, contemporary and not as steeped in historically racist narratives.

Oscar Wins: Best Original Song and Honorary Award to James Baskett “for his able and heart-warming characterization of Uncle Remus, friend and storyteller to the children of the world”

Other Oscar Nomination: Best Scoring of a Musical Picture

Gulliver's Travels (1939)

 

Gulliver’s Travels is a charming animated adaptation of Jonathan Swift’s famed novel. Well, actually it’s an adaptation of a portion of Swift’s book, the section where Lemuel Gulliver’s ship crashes near Lilliput, an island of tiny people. This film version was the first feature-length film released by the Fleischer Studios, who were best known for such cartoon characters as Popeye the Sailor and Betty Boop and who were clearly trying to compete with the Disney studio’s just-released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The Fleischer film begins in 1699 with a spectacular sequence involving the wrecking of Gulliver’s ship. The rolling sea and the crashing waves and the other elements of the storm are rendered beautifully. In fact, the entire film is drawn in such rich colors and with such careful attention to detail. For example, when the very small denizens of Lilliput are crossing a covered bridge, the light shines through the cracks between the boards. The film also features some nice comic moments, such as when the Lilliputians attempt to tie up Gulliver while he is unconscious on the beach after the shipwreck. How does he not wake up during all of the random activity that’s taking place on his actual body? The main or central plot involves a struggle between the kings of Lilliput and Blefuscu. They’re trying to arrange a marriage between Princess Glory of Lilliput and Prince David of Blefuscu, two impossibly good-looking young people who can’t help but be in love with each other (or seem to keep their hands off of each other), and everything is going well until they fight over which traditional song will be sung at the wedding. King Little of Lilliput prefers “Faithful,” the song that his people sing, and King Bombo of Blefuscu wants “Forever,” the song of his people. Inexplicably, this dispute leads to Bombo declaring war on Lilliput. I guess music is a big deal to the people on these small islands. Gulliver winds up being the savior here, as expected, interceding when Bombo’s ships attempt an assault on Lilliput. He also saves the princess and prince even though the prince is almost killed from the attempted use of Gulliver’s “Thunder Machine” (a pistol). You expect a happy ending in an animated film from this era, and so it’s comforting to see Gulliver sailing off into the sunset at the movie’s end in a boat that the Lilliputians have built for him. Perhaps there could have been a sequel involving the other sections of the novel that weren’t included in this film version. Gulliver’s Travels is also quite the musical film, featuring a series of fun songs, my favorite being “All’s Well,” sung by the town crier who discovers the “giant” on the beach. Another favorite is “It’s a Hap-Hap Happy Day,” performed by the residents of Lilliput while they are, um, grooming (?) Gulliver, making him more presentable after the shipwreck. It seems like the film skipped over quite a few elements involved in getting a man dressed and ready for meeting a king, but that’s probably best given the intended audience. The merging of “Faithful” and “Forever” into one song called, unsurprisingly, “Faithful Forever” – is not a particularly inspired choice even if it was nominated for the Oscar, but if it keeps the peace and everyone can be reunited as a result, so be it.

Oscar Nominations: Best Original Score and Best Original Song

Ben-Hur (1959)

 

As much as you might admire the scale of moviemaking involved, Ben-Hur is really an incredibly long, slow film. It won the Oscar for Best Film Editing (among its record-setting eleven wins), but since it clocks in at more than 3.5 hours, you have to wonder if it wouldn’t move a bit faster if about an hour (or two) had been sliced out of it. Honestly, only the chariot race sequence – which comes in the last third of the movie – is brilliantly edited. It’s full of energy, and the excitement of the race is clearly evident on the screen. The rest is not quite as thrilling.

Before we viewers can get to the chariot race, we have to slog through a couple of hours of a plot involving two former friends who seem to turn on each other through a strange sequence of events. Judah Ben-Hur (played by a rather wooden Charlton Heston) is a Jewish prince, and Messala (Stephen Boyd, a bit less stiff compared to Heston) is his Roman friend from childhood who returns to Jerusalem as the commander of a Roman contingent. Messala wants to know which Jews have refused to swear allegiance to Rome so that they might be punished. Ben-Hur refuses both to give up any names and to swear his allegiance to Rome. That’s only his first mistake in his interactions with Messala.

The sequence involving their reunion has been one of some controversy over the years. Allegedly, novelist Gore Vidal, one of the many people who were asked to help rewrite the script, told Boyd to play the part as though Messala and Judah were former lovers. The film’s director, the great William Wyler, and others involved in making the movie have disputed this assertion, Heston being the most vocal in his denouncing of Vidal’s claim. Of course, Vidal claims the idea was kept a secret from Heston, so how would Heston know what Boyd was told? Either way, it’s tough now not to look at the way that Boyd looks at Heston and not contemplate if he’s lusting after his “friend.” Having that as a possibility actually makes the interaction between Boyd and Heston and, by extension, Messala and Judah more intriguing.

During a processional of Roman soldiers – the film features several such processionals, and they’re all rather unnecessarily lengthy – some roofing tiles fall from where Judah and his sister are watching. The horses get scared and throw some riders, including the new governor of Judeah, so someone has to be punished. Ben-Hur is forced to serve on a ship’s galley as a rower, and his mother and sister are sentenced to prison, where they contract leprosy. Messala uses Judah as an example: even a formerly close friend has to suffer if he refuses to bow down to Roman rule. It still seems like a rather harsh sentence for watching some old guy fall off his horse without even getting seriously injured. However, all of this is played very seriously, particularly by Heston.

After three years as a galley rower, Heston’s Judah is, as the kids might say, “jacked.” Even in 1959 (or ancient times), rowing was a great upper body workout. This must be why Heston appears without his shirt (and wearing little else) during this sequence. It’s not a bad look for him, honestly. During a sea battle whose special effects have aged rather badly, Judah saves the Roman consul onboard, Arrius, and so grateful is Arrius that he adopts Ben-Hur. Isn’t Judah a grown man at this point? How can someone adopt a grown-up? The Romans just had different rules for everything, it seems.

Judah also trains to become a charioteer, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves and overlooking a few of the side trips that the film takes along the way. For example, earlier in the film, Judah has freed one of his slaves, Esther (a lovely Haya Harareet), so that she can marry. Of course, it’s quite clear that they have the hots for each other, so I’m not sure why he doesn’t just marry her himself. When he reunites with her, she, for reasons that make no sense, tells him that his mother and sister are dead instead of just saying that they’re now lepers and living in a cave. The truth would have been harsh, but certainly it would have been less painful.

I would like to point out that the book upon which the film is based is entitled Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (by Lew Wallace). This film is sometimes even referred to as a religious epic. However, the figure of Christ only appears four times that I was able to count, and each time that figure is somewhat muted. The film actually begins with Jesus’s birth and the arrival of the Magi or Three Wise Men, but the image of Jesus is rather obscured in the background. Later in the film, we only see the back of Jesus’s head and his hand as he gives Judah water (an interesting turnaround from Biblical accounts). Near the film’s end, a group of people are listening to Jesus preach what must be the Sermon on the Mount even though it is never clearly identified as such. We are also witness to the crucifixion (from a distance) followed by a cleansing rain that erases the leprosy from Ben-Hur’s mother and sister. It seems a bit disingenuous to identify this as a religious film when the most overt moment of religiosity is when Hugh Griffith’s Sheik IIderman gives Ben-Hur a Star of David before the big chariot race. Why an Arab would have in his possession a symbol of Judaism is a bit mysterious, though.

As I stated earlier, the chariot race is really the highlight of the film, and it appears in the final third of the movie. Messala is driving something called a “Greek” chariot with spikes extending from the wheels, very dangerous looking stuff. He tries to destroy Judah’s chariot and even attacks his former friend with a whip. However, he’s the one who winds up falling from his chariot and being run over by another competitor. The makeup people did a good job of showing how injured Messala is, but you can’t help wondering what such an effect would look like today. (Well, I suppose you could watch the 2016 remake, but I’m not sitting through this story again. Ever.) Messala tells Ben-Hur where his mother and sister are, and they are reunited with him just in time for Jesus to cure their leprosy.

Ben-Hur was the first film to earn 11 Academy Awards, a record that lasted until 1997’s Titanic won the same number. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King from 2003 joined that august company a few years later. Ben-Hur only lost in one category for which it was nominated: Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium. It’s a big movie, and everything is on such a large scale that it would be tough to ignore such a film when it came to awards recognition. There are enormous sets, tons of costumes and props, and elaborate processionals and celebrations. You sometimes need reminders like this film that Hollywood had to use actual locations and real people in the past, not computers and whatever passes for Artificial Intelligence these days in order to make big movies.

Oscar Wins: Best Picture, Best Actor in a Leading Role (Charlton Heston), Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Hugh Griffith), Best Director, Best Color Cinematography, Best Color Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Color Costume Design, Best Sound, Best Film Editing, Best Special Effects, and Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture

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

Gone with the Wind (1939)

 

Writing about Gone with the Wind poses an interesting dilemma. On the one hand, it’s one of the most accomplished epics in film history, with great performances and astonishing visuals that keep audiences returning to the movie again and again. On the other hand, it is clearly sympathetic to the Southern side of the Civil War, and its depictions of African Americans and Yankees and (at times) even Southerners are remarkably stereotypical and offensive. It’s like watching The Birth of a Nation. While you might admire the technical accomplishments of the film, it’s very tough to sit through some of the more objectionable material.

So how do you tackle an examination of such a film? I’d start by noting that I’ve always felt that the focus is less upon the Civil War and Reconstruction – although those pivotal historical periods are certainly important to the plot and provide its central context – and more upon the story of a remarkable woman, Scarlett O’Hara. It’s one of the greatest roles an actress could have, and Vivien Leigh is just perfection as one of the most complex and complicated and contradictory heroines in film. We watch as Scarlett marries two men she doesn’t love, the first as a means to make her purported lover jealous and the second to secure a safe financial future for herself and her family. When she finally does marry someone she should love (and ultimately does), she takes so many opportunities to sabotage her happiness by continuing to pine for Ashley Wilkes (a rather wan Leslie Howard) instead of just loving the man who loves her, Rhett Butler (Clark Gable, never better).

Everything in the movie indicates that Scarlett should be with Rhett, yet she keeps missing the cues that the universe seems to be sending to her. When her first husband, Charles Hamilton, dies from measles before he can even join a battle, her only fun as a very unrepentant widow is when Rhett shows up and “bids” to dance with her. Her second husband, Frank Kennedy, gets shot in the head when he and some of the other men are trying to scare the residents of a “shantytown” where Scarlett was attacked. (It seems pretty clear to me that Frank and the other men are a part of the Ku Klux Klan, but the film doesn’t directly state their affiliation.) Her way of mourning Frank’s death involves drinking heavily, not out of sadness over his death but more over the fact that she’s still young and already twice widowed.

Even the man Scarlett longs for throughout the movie is rather a disappointment. What, exactly, does she see in Ashley? He’s honorable and stoic and, well, boring. He’s not even especially handsome or dapper. I don’t get what his cousin-wife Melanie sees in him either. Howard is not the most expressive actor, which perhaps explains why he was one of few major performers in the cast not to be nominated for an Oscar. Gable’s Butler, by contrast, is fun and exciting and just enough of a “bad guy” to make him immensely more attractive. He certainly makes his intentions clear from almost the first time we see him on screen, and his roguishness is just the kind of spark that someone like Scarlett needs in her life.

The film’s Oscar-winning screenplay is filled with great lines throughout the story. “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” is justifiably famous, and “As God is my witness, I’ll never go hungry again” serves as a great finish to the first half of the film. Gable gets most of the best lines, honestly, and he knows just how to deliver them with the correct dose of smirk and slyness. If there’s a second place for best line delivery, it would have to go to Hattie McDaniel, who takes the stock character of Mammy and infuses it with knowing facial expressions and sharpness. She and Gable, Leigh, and Olivia de Havilland as Melanie Hamilton Wilkes were all nominated for their performances, and McDaniel and Leigh richly deserved their Oscar wins.

Given the film’s length – almost four hours if you watch the version with the entrance and exit music and the intermission and entr’acte music – there’s time to showcase some great visuals. The siege of Atlanta (and Rhett and Scarlett’s escape with Melanie and her baby and Prissy through the burning of much of it) is quite spectacular. Similarly, when Scarlett arrives at a makeshift hospital to get the doctor’s help in delivering Melanie’s baby, the reverse zoom that keeps expanding our view of the dying and the dead is an impressive accomplishment. We sometimes forget that CGI has not always been available, so the ability to wrangle huge numbers of actual people on screen is a skill that many directors could not manage, but Victor Fleming (plus George Cukor and Sam Wood, the other directors credited with working on the film for a time) works wonders with his crowds. There’s an energy and an excitement to those big moments.

The scale of the production was massive, and the production design must have been a monumental undertaking. The filmmakers needed the interiors and exteriors of several Southern mansions, and they needed to make the town of Atlanta just so they could burn much of it down. Even the little touches that help to create a clear sense of what the interiors of the homes would look like are carefully done. I’ve always marveled at the sequence involving the women having to take a nap in the middle of the afternoon just so they won’t be too tired for the barbecue later that evening. The number of beds and large fans alone is mind-boggling. I’d also like to mention the costumes by Walter Plunkett. Even though Costume Design wasn’t an Academy Award category when Gone with the Wind was made, he surely would have been a contender for the range of dresses that Scarlett alone has to wear.

The film does spend too much of its time discussing the “Southern way of life,” which is really just code for slavery. Before the Civil War begins, the white Southern characters (well, the men, primarily) discuss the possibility of their way of life disappearing. During the war and the Reconstruction period that followed, Ashley, in particular, expresses a sense of loss for the way things used to be. Gone with the Wind really does take that silly myth about “moonlight and magnolias” before the war and devotes far too much energy to trying to make us care that slavery has ended. Having read the Margaret Mitchell novel upon which the film was based – and which is even longer than the film, if you can believe that – I know that the filmmakers were being dutifully respectful to the text, but they ended up making a film that doesn’t particularly age well in those moments.

Likewise, most of the depictions of the people who were enslaved are very limited and resort too easily to stereotypes. It’s only through the talent of actors like McDaniel that some dignity emerges. Otherwise, we’re left with characters like Pork (Albert Polk) and Prissy (Butterfly McQueen), who have very little to work with in terms of the story to make much of an impression. The actor who plays Big Sam (Everett Brown) seems only to appear when Scarlett (the film’s primary white woman) needs rescuing. I’ve often wondered why Mammy, Pork, and Prissy continue to stay with their white former “owners” after the war ends. When Prissy sees the new mansion that Rhett builds for Scarlett in Atlanta, she says, “We’s rich now.” No, they’re not. They’re still basically enslaved, but their loyalty to their former masters is meant to suggest something (ridiculous) about how they were treated in slavery. Watching the film now is tough when you see how what the movie often does to its African American characters, but I have a feeling that even in 1939, it was tough to watch some of these particularly offensive moments. It is/was certainly a product of its time.

The film does a better job with some of its minor white characters. I’d single out Ona Munson’s performance as Belle Watling. Of course, the filmmakers couldn’t directly state that Belle is a prostitute in 1939, but it’s clear from the way that she’s dressed in red and heavily made up that she’s not a “nurse” in the traditional sense. Munson is so direct and fresh, though, that we start to sympathize with her. In her few moments on screen, we learn so much about her character’s life and what she’s endured. She’s a tough woman who manages to convey just how difficult it was for a woman during the time period Gone with the Wind covers.

And that’s a good point at which to return to Scarlett O’Hara. She has the instincts of a solid business owner. She, unlike her second husband, knows that the lumber business is where the money will be as the South starts to rebuild. She also manages to meet whatever difficulties she faces with a straightforward sense of purpose. She delivers a baby without a doctor’s assistance, she turns around the fate of Tara by making a shrewd business decision even at great personal cost, and she even kills a Yankee soldier who tries to steal from her. She also faces the loss of her beloved mother, the death of two husbands, and the accidental death of her only child. The film’s focus on the remarkable life of this central character is perhaps the key to its lingering impact.

Oscar Wins: Outstanding Production, Best Actress (Vivian Leigh), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Hattie McDaniel), Best Directing, Best Screenplay, Best Color Cinematography, Best Art Direction, and Best Film Editing

Special Award: John Cameron Menzies for “outstanding achievement in the use of color for the enhancement of dramatic mood in the production of Gone with the Wind”

Technical Achievement Award: R.D. Musgrave for “pioneering in the use of coordinated equipment in the production Gone with the Wind”

Other Oscar Nominations: Best Actor (Clark Gable), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Olivia de Havilland), Best Sound Recording, Best Special Effects, and Best Original Score

Superman (1978)

 

“You’ll believe a man can fly” was the famous tagline that advertised the film Superman, and you actually do believe it while watching the film. The visual effects had to be top-notch for this story to work, and the filmmakers did an excellent job (for 1978, of course) in keeping the wires invisible to us in the audience. Christopher Reeve plays the caped superhero with a bit of charm and his alter ego, Clark Kent, as if he were a bit of a doofus, so it’s entertaining to witness the actor’s range. His haircut doesn’t necessarily do him any favors, but he certainly fills out the suit nicely, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. The film is loaded with lots of famous faces: Glenn Ford as Pa Kent, Superman’s adoptive father; the great Jackie Cooper as Daily Planet editor Perry White; and perhaps most famously of all, Marlon Brando at Superman’s father back on Krypton. Starting the film with the explosion of Krypton – and a side story about Jor-El (Brando) sentencing three criminals to the Phantom Zone just to set up the sequel – does let the film play just a bit the mythology surrounding Superman. We get to see his discovery by the Kents after his spaceship crashes on Earth when Kal-El was still a baby, and there are a few scenes about what it was like to be a teen (Jeff East) with superpowers. We even get to watch the creation of the Fortress of Solitude. It’s not until Clark arrives in Metropolis and meets Lois Lane, his colleague at the Daily Planet, though, that the film really becomes intriguing, and that’s perhaps my biggest (and, really, only) complaint about the film. It just takes too long to get going. We have to wait almost 48 minutes to get a glimpse of “the” suit, and an hour before the villain even shows up. Gene Hackman plays Lex Luthor, one of the greatest villains in comic book history, but the plot here doesn’t seem quite… ambitious enough? Luthor wants to steal two missiles to set off a catastrophic earthquake along the San Andreas Fault in order to destroy California. Maybe I’m too old-fashioned, but the comic book villains tended to have much bigger evil on their minds, didn’t they? Luthor is assisted by Ned Beatty’s bumbling Otis and Valerie Perrine’s Eve Teschmacher, neither of whom is a fully developed character. Aside from Reeve, the actor who gets the best material is Margo Kidder as Lois Lane. There’s some nice, playful banter between Lois and Superman, and watching her fly alongside the Man of Steel is a nice interlude (although that poem or song or whatever she has to recite in her mind? – ugh). The big moments of special effects – Superman saving a damaged airplane, him reversing time by flying incredibly fast around the world, even the destruction of the planet Krypton – are probably the reasons that most people remember this film fondly. Well, that, and believing a man can, indeed, fly.

Oscar Win: Special Achievement Award for Visual Effects

Other Oscar Nominations: Best Sound, Best Film Editing, and Best Original Score

Street Angel (1927-28; 1928-29)

 

Street Angel earns an odd footnote in the history of the Academy Awards. Its star, Janet Gaynor, won an Academy Award for Best Actress in the first year of the Oscars for three films, one of them Street Angel. In the second year of the Oscars, the film itself was nominated for two other awards. Did all of the Oscar voters just forget that they had given the movie an Oscar the year before? Here Gaynor plays a poor young woman in Naples named Angela, who tries to turn to prostitution as a means to make some fast money. She needs the cash for medicine for her mother and for food. She’s caught by the police before she actually succeeds at solicitation, but she escapes and joins a traveling carnival as a way to evade a year in the workhouse. They sure knew how to make plot twists in those days, didn’t they? During her travels, Angela meets a poor but very talented painter, Gino, played by Charles Farrell, Gaynor’s costar from 7^th Heaven. They fall in love, but she spends too much of her time fearing that she will be found by the authorities and have to serve her sentence, and she doesn’t want him to know that she was arrested for solicitation. There’s a subplot involving a lovely painting that Gino does of Angela, but it’s an odd one. For some reason, the guy who buys the painting wants to change it so that it looks like an Old Master, and he can earn far more money reselling it. It’s some form of art fraud, I guess. The performances by Gaynor and Farrell are quite good, but most of the cast is stuck using stereotypical Italian hand gestures, and that gets weary after a while. The camera work in the film is outstanding, particularly when it follows a character through the part of Naples where much of the story is set. There’s also a lot of soft focus throughout the film, which keeps things pretty hazy even when there isn’t a fog settling in over the city. The film also makes very effective use of shadows, such as the larger-than-life ones that populate the entrance to the workhouse. It’s quite understandable why it was nominated for its art direction and cinematography. They’re the strongest parts of the film other than the acting by Gaynor and Farrell. You pretty much can guess how the film will end. Angela’s going to be caught, but there will be a reunion after an initial misunderstanding. Today this film is best known as one of the three for which Gaynor won the first award for Best Actress, but it is also a quite beautiful silent film. If the plot is a bit hackneyed or strange, it might have seemed quite fresh at the time of the film’s initial release.

Oscar Win (1927-28): Best Actress (Janet Gaynor)

Other Oscar Nominations (1928-29): Best Art Direction and Best Cinematography

Best Actress of 1927-28

Three women were chosen as Best Actress candidates in the initial year of the Academy Awards, but five performances were considered, giving the edge to the nominee who starred in three films that year (two of which were nominated for the top film awards). Watching their performances today is interesting because the style of performance for silent films differs so greatly from what contemporary actors do. Here are the nominees:

It’s very difficult to see what prompted Oscar voters to nominate Louise Dresser for her performance as Mama Pleznik in A Ship Comes In. Today it would most likely be considered a supporting performance since much of the film is about her character’s husband Peter, and even then it wouldn’t likely get much awards consideration. The film concerns a family of European immigrants coming to the United States and their integration into American society. Peter Pleznik (played with a great deal of vigor and joy by Rudolph Schildkraut, father of future Oscar winner Joseph Schildkraut) is optimistic about almost everything in his new home country. He makes a friend quickly, he gets a job soon after the family arrives, and he even feels like his son is becoming a real American by joining the military. Meanwhile, Dresser’s Mama sews clothes and bakes cakes and has nothing much of her own to do plot-wise. She does get to react to the news that her son is now a soldier, but seeing him in uniform just makes her walk very slowly and stay rather stone-faced. It’s an unexpected acting choice. When she runs after him as he leaves their home, she does hug and kiss him intently. All of that emotional work is shown as shadows on the wall, though, so we get no direct representation of Mama’s feelings. Likewise, when her husband is released from jail after being convicted of attempting to kill a judge – it’s just too preposterous a storyline to explain more fully than that – she tears up a bit when he returns home, but again the main reaction seems to be moving more slowly than usual. Her big scene is supposed to be when she learns that her son has been killed in battle, but she apparently hasn’t learned enough English in the years that they’ve been in the U.S., so even that realization becomes more muted. It’s similar to when she tries to convince the trial judge who sentences her husband that Peter couldn’t have done anything wrong. The judge cannot understand her, again making it seem as though she doesn’t speak English. When she buys a wreath for her son, the camera focuses on the woman who’s selling her the wreath. We mostly get the back of Dresser’s head during a scene that could have been a real showcase of emotions. The filmmakers just don’t do Dresser any favors; her actions are mostly limited to reactions to what others have done or said. I can’t truly say that it’s a bad performance; it’s not even enough of a performance to warrant much of an evaluation.

Janet Gaynor plays Diane, a poor young woman in early 20^th Century Paris, in the film 7^th Heaven. I’ve read many descriptions of her character that claim Diane is a prostitute, but I didn’t really notice much evidence of that in the movie. Gaynor plays Diane as naïve and weak at the start of the film, as she is under the control of her abusive sister Nana. When she is almost beaten to death by her sister, she’s rescued by Charles Farrell’s sewer worker Chico. He takes her to his apartment to save her from being arrested, and their love story begins to develop. At first, she’s very tentative and sad and hopeless around him, and he’s very enthusiastic and optimistic and loud. She wrings her hands a lot – I mean, a lot – during the first half of the movie, so I guess that’s supposed to indicate just how nervous and afraid she might be. It’s really Gaynor’s eyes that show her changes in character, though, not her hands. As Diane falls more in love with Chico and becomes braver, even her posture changes and her eyes show her feelings more directly. Gaynor’s big scene in the film comes near the end when Diane learns that Chico may have been killed in World War I. She’s able to convey both anger and sadness simultaneously in that scene, and her joy in learning that he’s still alive is clear. Gaynor was quite tiny next to Farrell in their scenes together, but she’s the one who got the awards attention for this performance and two others in the same year.

In her second nominated role, Gaynor plays Angela, a poor woman who’s charged with solicitation in Street Angel. She’s desperate for money to help her ailing mother, and when she sees how easily the local hooker, Lisetta (Natalie Kingston), makes money, Angela thinks she will give it a try. However, she’s terrible at it. None of the men she approaches seem interested – or even aware that she’s coming on to them. However, she swipes some food and gets charged with robbery while soliciting. She escapes custody on her way to the workhouse, though, and falls in with a carnival and later meets a talented but poor painter. For much of the plot, though, Gaynor’s Angela is afraid of being caught by the police. This leads to many sequences showing her worried face. She also tries to keep from being attracted to “vagabond” painter Gino (Farrell again), and her behavior is almost childlike at times in her attempts to get him to leave her alone. Her tantrum when he accidentally tears her costume is hysterical. Gaynor gets a range of emotions to portray in this film, and that ability to convey so many feelings was such a strength during the silent era. This may be the least challenging of her three roles for which she won the Oscar, but she still manages to combine an interesting physicality (Angela performs a balancing act while with the carnival) with that expressive face of hers.

The performance by Gaynor that is truly a revelation is as The Wife in Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. As I have written elsewhere, I didn't quite understand her charm or reputation in A Star Is Born, a film for which she would be nominated a decade later, but I get it here. She's shy and gentle and sweet. She can demonstrate great naivete, but she can also convey her growing knowledge of her husband’s plans to kill her. She shows great love for her husband in one scene and tremendous fear of him in another. She is also able to demonstrate how she begins to forgive him after they spend time together in the city and away from their home. When she goes missing during their return boat ride, you can also develop a sense of her own strength and ingenuity. Gaynor has a distinct kind of vulnerability that serves her well here. She seems almost childlike in the early scenes of the film, but you watch an evolution in her character as she gains a clearer sense of how she and her husband are going to be reunited and happy. Her character’s name (title, really) of The Wife makes her more enigmatic, perhaps, but it also allows us as viewers to project some pretty strong emotions onto Gaynor’s characterization. She’s not just a wide-eyed girl; she’s a tougher woman than she initially appears.

Gloria Swanson takes on the title role in Sadie Thompson with all the gusto and ferocity she can muster. It’s a magnificent performance, one of the best of the silent era of films. Her Sadie has arrived on the island of Pago Pago after fleeing San Francisco under suspicious circumstances. The film, especially in the character of Lionel Barrymore’s Alfred Davidson, suggests that she is a prostitute on the run from a potential arrest. She’s reportedly on her way to a new job in Apia but gets stuck in Pago Pago for at least a week and decides to have some fun while waiting for the ship to be ready. She flirts with a group of Marines who are stationed on the island and seems to fall in love with one in particular, Sgt. O’Hara. She spends her time hanging out in her room, entertaining (male) guests, playing jazz records, smoking, and chewing gum. No one can chew a piece of gum like Swanson; even though it’s a silent film, you can hear the smack of that gum chewing. She also walks with a deliciously confident, sexy swagger in the film’s first half. When Sadie inevitably comes into conflict with Davidson, the pompous reformer who tries to get her to go back to San Francisco to face her punishment, Swanson shows the discomfort and fear in Sadie’s eyes. She also knows how to deliver a slow burn with what we call “side eye.” Two scenes, in particular, elevate Swanson’s performance. She throws an epic tantrum when Davidson convinces the governor of the island to force Sadie to return to the United States. Later, she seemingly goes mad when, trapped in her room due to the torrential rain, she begins to imagine being jailed. After her supposed conversion to being a good, moral (read: Christian) person, she holds her body differently. Sadie now slouches, almost cowering when she comes into contact with anyone else, especially Davidson, a sharp contrast from the woman who left the ship at the beginning of Sadie Thompson. In many ways, the character of Sadie Thompson is an actress in her own right, as you find out at the film’s end, and Swanson takes full advantage of the opportunity to play the powerful range of emotions the movie demands. This performance ranks alongside her Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard and demonstrates just why Swanson was one of the greatest stars and actors ever captured on film.

Oscar Winner: With three solid performances, Gaynor won the first award for Best Actress. Find an actress nowadays who could do what is asked of Gaynor in 7^th Heaven, Street Angel, and Sunrise. It’s quite a feat, and she must have had an edge by starring in three films.

My Choice: Gloria Swanson in Sadie Thompson gives one of the greatest performances of the silent era. Here’s someone who understood the power that comes with silent film acting. Swanson would never win an Academy Award despite being nominated multiple times. I think she should have been the first winner.

The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1928-29)

 

The Hollywood Revue, also known as The Hollywood Revue of 1929, is one of the strangest nominees for Best Picture in the history of the Academy Awards. The film has no plot, no clear connections between its various scenes at all. It is, literally, what the title suggests: a revue. Various stars and novelty acts perform as if this were a vaudeville show. I suppose this was a clever way for MGM to test its newfangled sound equipment for the movies it would make in the future, but unless you’re intrigued by how Hollywood started making the transition out of the silent era, this film really just serves as a showcase for a lot of now-forgotten performers – a time capsule, if you will.

Jack Benny, who had a very long career as a comic master, and Conrad Nagel, an actor who is not as well known today as he should be, serve as sort of ersatz masters of ceremonies, but here’s the thing: they don’t actually introduce that many acts. From time to time, they show up to talk to a star in what is really more like elevated awards show banter, and then a different act will follow without giving us any sense of who these people are. For example, the great Buster Keaton shows up at one point and performs a very energetic if erratic dance dressed as either a harem girl or Cleopatra (complete with a sort of asp), but no one mentions that it’s Buster Keaton! That sequence also features a sort of undulating visual effect to make it appear that Keaton is performing underwater. I have no idea what is or was going on, but I was fascinated.

The opening dance number actually seems to be part of a minstrel act but without blackface, thankfully. Instead, one of the first camera tricks makes the image into its negative, sort of like watching a dance through a malfunctioning x-ray. We go from the positive image to the negative and then back again. It’s an intriguing choice to begin a musical film, but it’s not consistent with the content of the song or with the dance itself, so it doesn’t really contribute a great deal to our understanding of the film. It’s just a cute effect, and it doesn’t appear anywhere else in the film.

Similarly, twice during the film, performers either shrink or grow bigger thanks to camera effects. The first is when Nagel and singer Charles King (another performer whose star had dimmed since the early sound era) are talking about how actors cannot really sing as well as “true” singers can, only to have Nagel start singing “You Were Meant for Me” (a song associated with King and The Broadway Melody) to Anita Page, one of King’s co-stars from The Broadway Melody. King seems to shrink to tiny size as a result of his embarrassment for having been so wrong about actors like Nagel. Of course, the irony is that Nagel’s voice is dubbed. It’s not actually Nagel singing, it’s King himself!

The second time this effect gets used involves Bessie Love, another co-star of The Broadway Melody, Oscar’s second Best Picture winner. She’s so small, you see, that she can fit inside Benny’s pocket. She walks into his hand and, when he places her on the floor, she grows to her normal size – right before our very eyes. Camera tricks like this had been a staple of films for decades by this point, so the addition of sound doesn’t really make these moments any more spectacular than they might otherwise have been. By the way, Love then begins what can only be described as a very energetic, acrobatic dance with a troupe of male dancers that must have left her as exhausted as she pretends to be at its end.

The Hollywood Revue does feature some very good performances. Joan Crawford sings “Got a Feeling for You” and dances the Charleston in a way that reminds you just what an all-around talent she was. Her version of dancing is perhaps more, um, muscular than you might think is necessary, but she had a star quality even this early in her career. Unfortunately, the film’s camera can’t seem to keep her in frame. Her feet are sometimes not visible when she’s dancing, and the top of her head is not fully visible when she sits atop a piano at the end of her number. I will readily admit that these deficits could be the result of the print that I watched, but since so much of the version I saw had these kinds of mistakes, it’s hard to believe that they weren’t present in the best possible print.

Marie Dressler does a comic number dressed as a queen, and she’s just as prone to overreacting (or overacting) here as she ever was. Polly Moran is deadpan funny as a princess in that sequence, by the way. Laurel and Hardy, in their first appearance in a sound film, perform a magic act filled with comic mishaps, such as Laurel accidentally revealing how a trick works. Even Marion Davis appears, dressed as a bellhop amidst a group of male dancers in military costumes. Davies doesn’t have the strongest singing voice and she’s mostly an okay dancer, but she displays a great deal of enthusiasm. One of the most fun performances is an adagio dance with three men and a single woman. That woman is very strong and tough. She gets thrown around a lot and always seems to be up to the task.

Several of the musical numbers are reminiscent of the Ziegfeld Follies. The film’s “second act” begins with what is called a “Tableau of Jewels,” and it is staged like a hybrid of a Follies act and a Busby Berkeley number, with rotating sets and women in skimpy costumes. By the time a dancer (Beth Laemmle?) emerges from a large clam shell in a costume that barely has her nipples covered, you realize why the movie industry came under such scrutiny for its racy content back in the 1920s and 1930s.

The film features some very strange performances. Cliff Edwards (who was sometimes billed as “Ukelele Ike”) performs in front of a chorus of people (allegedly) playing ukeleles too, but to characterize what he does as singing would be, to put it kindly, a bit of an overstatement. This isn’t the Edwards voice that was used to such great effect as Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio and “When You Wish Upon a Star.” No, this is more like high-spirited caterwauling. Then there’s the appearance of William Haines, an early star who left Hollywood rather than pretend not to be gay. He does some sort of strange “comic” skit involving him tearing off parts of Jack Benny’s tuxedo to no apparent purpose. Then a comedy duo named Dane and Arthur show up, dressed for some unknown reason in sailor suits, and proceed to mess up Benny’s performance by trying to unroll a carpet.

I did like the novelty song “Lon Chaney’s Gonna Get You If You Don’t Watch Out,” a tribute to the great star of many horror films, but it’s staging is just bizarre. It begins with a group of ten women who are in bed. The singer Gus Edwards (not to be confused with Cliff) shows up and the pajama-clad women all gather around him to listen and be… frightened? Then various characters in monster masks and costumes, some of them clearly roles that Chaney played, enter and an unusual dance sequence begins that at one point features overhead shots like a Busby Berkely number. It’s such a shift from the other numbers and skits in the film that it really does seem out of place.

Perhaps the oddest (and worst) series of scenes, however, involves two trios of performers. First up are Charles King, Gus Edwards, and Cliff Edwards doing a number called “Charlie, Gus, and Ike.” They sing and play a gigantic xylophone and then start performing as stereotypical Italians (with Edwards in drag). It’s truly an awful song. Then Marie Dressler, Polly Moran, and Bessie Love, show up and sing a song called “Marie, Polly, and Bess,” which – as you might have guessed – is similar in content and quality to the song done by the men’s trio. Then both trios merge to sing together. It’s an unwatchable mess by that point.

The largest issue with Hollywood Revue is, however, the camera. It’s very static. Silent films had already mastered the moving camera, but to accommodate all of the new sound equipment and to reduce the noise generated by camera movement, films like this seem to have nailed the camera to a single spot and just filmed whatever was in front of it. This leads to a very dull series of choices. We see a few images in close up and a few where the shot is mid-range, but the most dominant view is the wide shot that allows for all of the dancers, for example, to be on screen at the same time. The most daring camera work comes in the final sequence when it pans from one star to the next so that we can see each individual for a second or two on screen. That’s about it for innovation. Of course, you could argue that having the camera remain stationary helps to replicate for the audience the experience of being in a theater watching vaudeville show. I’m not confident that was the intention, though.

Aside from being an early sound film, Hollywood Revue is also one of the first sound films to feature color instead of being completely black-and-white. A couple of sequences were shot in an early form of Technicolor. The first features movie stars Norma Shearer and John Gilbert in the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet and reciting the beautiful language of Shakespeare. Then Lionel Barrymore, playing the part of their “director” for the scene, tells them that the New York “office” doesn’t like the antiquated language, so they try it again in contemporary slang. There’s even a moment involving pig Latin! By the way, Gilbert sounds just fine; his voice is not at all high-pitched like the rumors have suggested. Why he didn’t become as big a star in the sound era as he had been in silent films was certainly not truly due to his vocal qualities. The next color sequence involves King singing “Orange Blossom Time.” This number includes a sort of ballet although it really seems more like the Rockettes than a ballet at times. That’s not a criticism, by the way; the dancers are very talented. It also features a group of women in swings descending from the heavens, their reflections gleaming in the shine of a highly polished floor. It’s quite an effect.

The final sequence of the film is also shot in color. The whole cast lines up in front of an ark (for some inexplicable reason) to perform “Singing in the Rain,” which would become the unofficial anthem of MGM over the years. They’re all wearing raincoats, but not all of them are doing a very good job of lip synching. We start with a wide shot of everyone before the camera starts panning to closeups of the individual faces. Then, as has happened throughout the film, the curtains close, ending our theatrical experience. Apparently, Hollywood Revue was filmed after hours so it wouldn’t interfere with any of the movies the stars were in during the day. I’m not certain it was truly worth the extra hours it took, and how it was deemed worthy of Best Picture consideration is certainly a head-scratcher.

Oscar Nomination: Outstanding Picture

Alien (1979)

 

Alien happens to be one of The Boyfriend’s favorite movies. He’s seen it dozens of times (so I’ve seen it many times as well), and he’s seen every film in the series (so far). We had the chance in early 2024 to see it in a theater for the first time, and seeing it on the big screen just reinforces my opinion of it being one of the most tense and claustrophobic horror/science fiction films of all time. Seven people are on board the spaceship Nostromo coming back to Earth when they receive a distress signal from an isolated – and, it turns out, quite inhospitable – planet. They detour to help and find some very bizarre architecture and a ton of large, mysterious eggs, one of which opens up and reaches into the helmet of John Hurt’s Kane and into his body. Thus, we are introduced to the title menace, at this point in the form of what’s become known as a “face hugger.” A bit later, after a false sense of security gets built up, we get to meet the “chest bursting” form of the alien, also thanks to Hurt and one of the grossest scenes in film, and I mean that in a good way. Things don’t exactly get better after that, as we in the audience start to watch a space version of “And Then There Was One.” Each member of the crew but one meets a particularly grisly ending, and although we now think of Sigourney Weaver as a movie star, when this film was made we had no sense that her Ripley would become such an iconic and heroic figure. Thanks to Weaver’s fearless performance, we now have one of the greatest female badasses ever to appear in a science fiction/horror film. At the time of filming, Hurt and Tom Skerritt (who plays Dallas) were perhaps the best-known actors in the cast, and the rest (Ian Holm, Harry Dean Stanton, Veronica Cartwright, Yaphet Kotto) were respected character actors. Everyone is well chosen here, and their group dynamic is one of the highlights of the movie. Aside from the monster itself – whose appearance is gradually revealed as the movie progresses until we get to see the full extent of its spectacular horrible appearance – the other truly great attribute of Alien is its production design. The spaceship is a maze of dark interiors, the depiction of which is clearly heavily indebted to the artwork of H.R. Giger (as is the monster’s look). The film’s visuals are also heavily influenced by 2001: A Space Odyssey; only two areas are brightly lit, and they’re communal spaces – for a reason. There are enough plot twists and shocking reveals aboard the Nostromo to make Alien interesting even if you’ve seen it dozens of times, and the fact that it keeps spawning sequels and prequels is just more evidence of how much of a cultural impact it’s had.

Oscar Win: Best Visual Effects

Other Oscar Nomination: Best Art Direction-Set Decoration

Best Picture of 1927-28

 

The Winner: Wings? Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans? Both of them?

The Other Nominees: Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness, The Crowd, The Racket, and 7^th Heaven

The Academy Awards had two categories for “Best Picture” in their first year. One was called “Outstanding Picture,” and the three nominees were The Racket, 7^th Heaven, and Wings. Wings, a tale of the friendship between fighter pilots in World War II, won. The second category was “Best Unique and Artistic Production,” and the nominees for that award were Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness, The Crowd, and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. Sunrise, the story of a couple finding their love for each other despite horrific events, won in that category. The designation of Best Unique and Artistic Production was deleted after the first year, and the Academy, in its infinite wisdom, now claims that Wings was the winner of the first Best Picture Oscar. Sure. I’m still going to consider all six movies, however, since they did choose two pictures to win different awards for “best” or “outstanding” that year.

My Choice: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans remains one of the most accomplished and powerful films of the silent era. Wings is great entertainment, certainly, but Sunrise represents the greater artistic achievement in so many ways.

7th Heaven (1927-28)

 

The film 7^th Heaven has a lot going on in its almost-two-hour run time. It’s a love story between two members of the lower classes in Paris in the early part of the 20^th century, but it’s also a war movie set during World War I. It’s also a commentary on making oneself better through hard work, the possibility that we might have to improve our lot in life. With all of that going on, the film still manages to be visually stunning and quite coherent in its characterizations of the poor and so-called downtrodden.

The two central characters are Chico (played by Charles Farrell) and Diane (Janet Gaynor, one of three award-winning roles she played that year). Chico is a sewer worker, but he has aspirations to be a street washer. He keeps telling everyone, himself included, that he’s a “very remarkable fellow.” Many online sources claim that Diane is a prostitute, but there’s little direct evidence of that in the film itself. She’s certainly poor and under the tyrannical control of her sister Nana (Gladys Brockwell, enjoying playing the part of a villain perhaps a bit too much). Nana terrorizes Diane and frequently beats her harshly with a whip.

Nana is particularly brutal to Diane after their rich aunt and uncle reappear after years away in a foreign country. The couple will take care of the girls, but the uncle wants to ensure that they’ve kept themselves “clean.” I think we all know what that means, but Diane cannot lie. They’ve not been “clean,” so perhaps that is where the implication of her being a prostitute comes from? In retaliation for losing them all the family riches, Nana beats her sister even after the young woman tries to escape to the street. That’s when Chico intervenes and rescues Diane. I suppose that’s what filmmakers of the day would have considered a “meet cute.”

Diane – who is at this point completely hopeless and full of despair – tries to kill herself with Chico’s knife, but he stops her. He also prevents her from being arrested by the police by claiming that she’s his wife. He takes her to his apartment so that she doesn’t wind up in jail like her sister, but he keeps warning her that she cannot stay with him forever. In his mind, this is only a temporary arrangement, at least at first. I think moviegoers back then were probably already guessing that the two of them were destined to be together. It’s not necessarily a new story although the setting and the particular characters are certainly distinctive.

Their journey to his attic apartment is where you can begin to appreciate the quality of the cinematography in 7^th Heaven. The camera follows them as they climb the stairs, and we get to see the different floors as they rise in the building. It’s a masterful pairing of cinematography and production design to provide such a moment. Chico’s apartment looks out over the rooftops of Paris. As he puts it, he lives “near the stars.”

Despite what you might expect, especially considering that most reviewers think she’s a prostitute, they don’t sleep together that first night – he’s quite the gentleman, as they say – but she makes him breakfast and helps him get dressed the next morning. You can tell that she’s already smitten with him. We watch as they slowly begin to acknowledge their attraction to each other. There’s a lovely moment when she mends his coat and then puts its sleeves around her as she’s sitting in a chair. It’s just charming, and Gaynor’s large expressive eyes make the scene even more charming. We get to see their love for each other increase until he causes her to cry happy tears when he lets her stay with him. Chico brings her flowers one day and a lovely dress, which turns out to be a wedding gown. He finally says he loves her after seeing how beautiful she is in the dress.

However, here’s where the narrative takes quite the sharp turn. He and his neighbor/co-worker have to go to war. Like, immediately. As in, the soldiers are starting to march through the streets of Paris, and you have to go join them or you’ll be considered disloyal. It’s a bit of a stunner to see how quickly the film pivots from this marvelous happy moment in their dismal lives. They “marry” in his apartment before he leaves at 11 a.m., and he promises that no matter where he is, he will pause at 11 every day to “talk” to her. I guess people used to say things like that when they were being separated by war.

The intercutting of the scenes of him at war with scenes of her at a munitions factory makes for some interesting juxtapositions. He’s being rather heroic, and she’s become stronger and less fearful after driving her awful sister away by beating Nana with her own whip. She’s also managed to fend off a soldier who keeps hitting on her at the factory. When it’s 11 a.m., we get to see their images superimposed as they speak to each other just as he had promised. It doesn’t matter that he’s in a foxhole and she’s in the factory; his fellow soldiers and her coworkers all know what’s going on at 11 each day. Visually, we’re able to see just how connected and close they remain emotionally even though they are far apart geographically.

7^th Heaven opts for somewhat of a Hollywood ending for Chico and Diane. She’s been told that he’s died in the war, but she refuses to believe it. When enough people tell her and she starts to think she’s lost him, she breaks down in tears. She’s sad and angry, and Gaynor gets quite the emotional scene. It’s probably a moment that like that clinched the Best Actress Oscar for this role. Of course, he arrives at their apartment at just that precise moment, and the lighting makes him seem almost ghost-like (or Christ-like, you pick). He’s alive, yes, but blinded. However, he claims that he won’t stay that way long because, as he’s stated repeatedly, he’s a “very remarkable fellow.” Having a catchphrase like that can do wonders for a somewhat underdeveloped character. It perhaps explains why Farrell tends to overplay his lines while Gaynor is much more subdued and subtle.

The film’s look, especially the scenes in the streets of Paris, is clearly influenced by German Expressionism. It was a common style at the time, as evidenced by some of the other films nominated for Oscars in that first year. The print that I watched did not seem to be fully restored, but you could tell that some of the images are almost as beautiful as those in Sunrise, another film from the same year starring Gaynor. Unfortunately, the version I saw also had a score that used the song “Manhattan” (“We’ll have Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island too…”) throughout the movie. Since the film is set in Paris, I kept getting distracted by music associated with another city and another continent. Apparently, 7^th Heaven was released with an original score and sound effects, but I certainly hope it wasn’t the one that I listened to.

Oscar Wins: Best Actress (Janet Gaynor), Best Directing of a Dramatic Picture (Frank Borzage), and Best Writing/Adaptation

Other Nominations: Outstanding Picture and Best Art Direction

Somewhere in Time (1980)

 

Somewhere in Time is beautifully shot even though it uses soft focus so much I did wonder if my eyesight might be going. It also has a lovely score that’s based somewhat on a “Variations on a Theme by Paganini” by Rachmaninoff. It features very likeable performances from Christopher Reeve as playwright Richard Collier and Jane Seymour as actress Elise McKenna. There’s even a nice, if brief, turn by Christopher Plummer as Elise’s manager. Despite all of the strong aspects of the film, however, the plot is astonishingly strange. While still a college student, Richard meets an old woman who gives him a watch and says, “Come back to me.” He doesn’t do anything about this strange behavior at the time – although you’d think asking her who she is would be of paramount importance – and time passes, quite a bit of time, actually, eight years. He goes to a hotel to work and falls in love with a photograph of Elise from 1912 that’s on display in the hotel museum. (Do lots of hotels have museums?) It turns out she was the old woman he encountered, and he starts doing research to find out as much as possible about her. Then, in a rather abrupt turn, thanks to finding a book on the subject among Elise’s possessions, he begins talking to an old professor of his about time travel because the professor – coincidentally – wrote the book Elise had. Richard gets some old money and, in essence, “wills” himself back to 1912 so that he can meet and fall in love with Elise. I realize that this is a fantasy romance, but it does seem to stretch credulity to think someone could just will themselves back in time. Wouldn’t we all do that in order to change the past, at least some of it? Richard and Elise have very little time together, less than two days, really, but she makes an improvised speech on stage during her performance that is clearly aimed at him and then she returns to make love to him after her manager tries to separate them. Unfortunately, Richard sees a penny from 1979 and that brings him back to the present because, of course, a penny would ruin everything romantic. Was everything that happened to him just a dream or was it a fantasy or did any of it really happen? Is it possible that someone like Arthur (Bill Erwin), now the bellman, could still be working at the same hotel for more than sixty years? The film raises a lot of questions that remain unanswered, and I know that it’s a romantic movie about meeting someone you’re destined to fall in love with and that’s enough for most viewers. I can’t blame them, I suppose, but when Richard starts to starve himself after coming back to the present, I knew where this is headed. I guess if you can will yourself back into the past (although that apparently works just the one time), then you can will yourself to die so that you can reunite with your long-dead loved one.

Oscar Nomination: Best Costume Design

Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

 

You shouldn’t need to watch the brilliant Anatomy of a Fall (original title: Anatomie d’une chute) to realize that trials don’t truly determine guilt or innocence. They tend to be more about whose story is more plausible or possible. Take it from someone who’s been called for jury duty far more than I deserved. This film – made by French filmmakers, but featuring French and quite a lot of English – winds up being as much of an examination of a marriage as an attempt to determine whether or not someone is responsible for a person’s death. What is most unsettling is that the film doesn’t provide a necessarily clear answer to the questions that it raises.

The scenario that begins the film is relatively simple. A famous writer, Sandra Voyter (the sublime Sandra Huller), is being interviewed by a young woman, but her husband is playing very loud and quite annoying music upstairs. The couple’s son, who is visually impaired, leaves with his guide dog (a delightful animal performance, frankly) to go for a walk in the woods near their isolated cabin home. It’s very difficult for the two women to continue talking, so the interviewer leaves. Sandra goes to lie down. When the son returns from his walk, he discovers his father dead in the snow. Whether he has fallen or been pushed is not immediately apparent.

What follows is an interesting examination of what might be considered evidence of an accidental death or suicide or murder. Much of the evidence that the police investigators gather is, frankly, rather inconclusive. It doesn’t completely look like his death is an accident, but where is the definitive proof that Sandra is responsible? She hires a French attorney, an old played by the impossibly handsome Swann Arlaud, to represent her since she’s German and needs someone who is more fluent in French than she is. She prefers using English since that was the “common” language she and her French husband used.

Sandra’s trial occurs a year after the fall, and it features several reenactments of what happened or what might have happened. Of course, it’s not easy to know whether what we’re seeing in the reenactment is what truly happened on not. We do get to hear an audio recording of a fight from day before the husband’s death. Apparently, their relationship had deteriorated so much that he had begun recording their conversations – no, that’s not odd behavior at all on his part, is it? A lot gets revealed during that audiotape. For example, we learn that the father is responsible for the son having optic nerve damage since he wasn’t taking care of the boy like he was supposed to. Sandra, as you might expect, was very upset at the time.

We also learn that Sandra is bisexual and had an affair with a woman during her marriage. This was apparently an area of serious contention between the couple, and he seems to have attempted suicide by overdosing on aspirin six months earlier. The audiotape of the argument shows just how relentless the deceased was in discussing what was making him unhappy. She was a successful writer, but he never seemed to be able to finish his work. She even took an idea of his and turned it into a book, and that no doubt made him even more jealous. He’s clearly frustrated with some of the choices that he’s made – or, at least, that is what we interpret from the flashback of the argument. Again, we do have to wonder if what we’re seeing is a completely accurate representation.

We do get some of the usual courtroom antics. The prosecutor is particularly tough on Sandra and the others who give testimony. He keeps raising scenarios that are plausible or possible or maybe even likely, but again, where is the evidence? Each side has their own “experts” to explain such matters as what the blood splatter reveals. That portion of the movie is really quite intriguing to watch since it does replicate rather accurately how the different sides often try to tear down the case being built by the opposition.

Sandra, however, is very tough. She’s also very smart and always has another take on what an alternative perspective on the evidence could be. She remains mostly calm and composed during the testimony, and she doesn’t back down when challenged. The audiotape reveals that she was the same way when arguing with her husband. The tricky part of playing the role of Sandra, which Huller does so masterfully, is that you have to seem both innocent and guilty at the same time. We’re constantly having to reassess what we know or what we think we know about what happened on the day of the fall and even throughout their entire relationship.

The trial depends, ultimately, on the testimony given by their son, Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner in a remarkable performance for such a young actor). He comes to a realization during the trial, and his testimony is central to the outcome. We see him in profile quite often during the trial sequences, as if to suggest that he keeps changing sides in his mind as to what to believe, and we see several moments where he interacts with his mother. It’s tough to determine, really, just how affectionate she is with him, but she does break down when he asks her to leave their home for the weekend so that he can think before his testimony. It’s a heartbreaking moment because she doesn’t know what he’s thinking at that point or what he will say. Which of those things most upset her is impossible to determine.

The performances in Anatomy of a Fall are all first-rate, and the screenplay keeps us guessing. The story goes that the film’s director and co-writer, Justine Triet, would never tell Huller whether or not her character was guilty, leaving her to perform the role with a high level of ambiguity. We as viewers have that same ambiguity. When the film ends, we’re not sure if justice has been served or not, but perhaps we remember that trials don’t always end with justice truly being served anyway.

Oscar Win: Best Original Screenplay

Other Oscar Nominations: Best Motion Picture of the Year, Best Achievement in Directing (Justine Triet), Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role (Sandra Huller), and Best Achievement in Film Editing

American Fiction (2023)

 

The central character in American Fiction is a writer and literature professor named Thelonius “Monk” Ellison, played by Jeffrey Wright. He’s placed on leave after offending students with discussions of race – well, the students seem to be offended by Ellison’s frankness and honesty regarding race, and that’s enough for the administrators to suggest that he take some time off from teaching and perhaps see his family back in Boston. The trip provides a series of revelations for Ellison. He learns that his latest book won’t get published because it’s apparently not “black” enough – whatever that means – but what is getting published by black authors is filled with stereotypes that seem to pander to the lowest expectations of white audiences. He starts having a rather powerful existential crisis.

In addition to his career woes, his beloved sister Lisa (played by the delightful Tracee Ellis Ross, who departs from the movie far too soon) dies from a sudden heart attack, and he must assume some of the caretaking duties for his aging mother (Leslie Uggams in a standout performance that should have gotten more awards attention). He’s likely to get little help from his brother Clifford (Sterling K. Brown), a plastic surgeon whose wife has just left him because she discovered that he’s gay. Ellison also begins a flirtation with Coraline (Erika Alexander), a woman who lives across the street from his mother’s home, but Coraline’s relationship status is, as they say, complicated.

That would be a lot for any one character (or real person) to handle, but American Fiction isn’t just interested in what happens to the people. It’s a very intriguing consideration of art versus commerce, of what you have to do in order to get your work published and into the hands of the public. After watching a packed seminar with the successful author Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), whose book is entitled We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, Ellison decides to write the worst possible book that he can imagine, a book filled with offensive stereotypes and language, and he uses the pen name of Stagg R. Leigh rather than his own name. If you know your musical history, you should be familiar with some of the implications of Ellison’s choice of pen name.

Of course, it sells. My Pafology (the book’s initial title, misspelling included) quickly becomes his most successful book, and he’s stunned that audiences are buying it in such huge numbers. The film seems to suggest that white audiences, in particular, seek out “black books” that represent the kinds of stereotypes that these readers feel are authentic. What is real, though, and what is authentic, in a world of fiction? Why do some books break through, and why do they sell when more artful books don’t? They’re all interesting questions that the film raises, but it doesn’t try to answer all of them, perhaps so that we as viewers can begin to examine our own predispositions when it comes to what we read.

One of the funniest sequences involves a film producer named Wiley (Adam Brody) trying to buy the rights to the book even before it’s been published. Ellison, thinking he can stop the craziness before it goes to far, changes the title of his book to Fuck. Even that isn’t enough to deter Wiley; he is willing to spend whatever it takes, it seems, to obtain the book, but he does want to meet the author, Stagg R. Leigh, in person first. Watching Wright, who has displayed such calm throughout all of his character’s setbacks, suddenly trying to pretend like he’s a gangster who’s on the lam provides some of the sharpest and funniest satire in the movie. He even becomes the subject of an FBI search as a result of some of the interviews he’s given as Leigh.

Another standout sequence involves both Ellison and Golden being asked to serve on the jury for the New England Book Association’s Literary Award, and if that organization’s name doesn’t suggest just how white such juries have tended to be, wait until you see the actual members of the jury. They themselves are some of the most hilarious stereotypes of the apparently well-meaning but still pandering white writers and readers. Fuck gets submitted for consideration, and now Ellison has to judge his own work. His conversations with Golden during the discussions over which book to award are very interesting because they reveal that both authors are figuring out ways to navigate what is expected of them as authors who are black and authors who want to be successful.

The film’s ending is a rather intriguing one. Wiley and Ellison are having a discussion over how the film version of the book should end, but the worlds of fiction and reality are quickly becoming blurred. In a sense, though, they’ve been somewhat blurred throughout the film. The film seems to be asking the same questions of its viewers as the plot has been asking about readers. How do you make a film that will reach a wide audience? Do you have to pander to stereotypes, or can you try to achieve something more artful? Looking at box office numbers each week might give you the answer if you’re interested in making money, but American Fiction asks what kind of cost is involved in just doing the work in order to make a lot of money.

What emerges from this film is an intriguing examination of the power that the liberal white elite still maintain over the world of publishing (and entertainment, more generally). The screenplay, which deservedly won the Oscar, was adapted from the novel Erasure by Percival Everett. It provides a showcase for some of the most talented actors working in film these days, and it makes (or should make) us think about our expectations regarding art and who makes it and how they are allowed to use their talents. It’s a fascinating film.

Oscar Win: Best Adapted Screenplay

Other Oscar Nominations: Best Motion Picture of the Year, Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role (Jeffrey Wright), Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role (Sterling K. Brown), and Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures/Original Score