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