Past Lives (2023)

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twister (1996)

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

Oscar Nominations: Best Sound and Best Visual Effects

That's a Wrap on 1927-28

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No one ever said Oscar history was simple and uncomplicated.

Tempest (1927-28)

 

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

Oscar Win: Best Interior Decoration

Alibi (1928-29)

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Holdovers (2023)

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best Actor of 1927-28

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hillbilly Elegy (2020)

 

A lot of people have probably now seen Hillbilly Elegy because the author of the book on which it is based, J.D. Vance, was chosen to be the Republican nominee for Vice President of the United States. The film covers two periods in Vance’s life: his teenage years when his mother (Amy Adams, not an obvious choice but ably doing what she can with a part that mostly calls for her to be an awful mother to her children) was beginning to show signs of the various addictions that would torment her for much of her (and his) life. He winds up living with his Mamaw (Glenn Close) for a period of time, and she attempts to give him some stability and support, just not without a few profane words and some tough love along the way. The other segments of the movie show J.D. as a law student at Yale who’s trying to interview for a summer internship, but he’s struggling because apparently no one in his family ever taught him which fork to use at dinner and everyone else he’s competing with seems to be from a rich family, which I guess would be true for a lot of the students at Yale Law School. However, his mother’s addictions have overtaken her life again, and she has overdosed on heroin, seemingly right in the middle of a big important dinner with the partners at the law firm who will determine his future. Timing is everything. He faces the difficult choice of staying at Yale with his girlfriend and seeing if he can get the internship or returning to his home to try to help his mother. It’s not an easy choice – well, it shouldn’t be an easy choice – but the film does make the entire family out to be one of the most dysfunctional ones ever put on the screen. How or why these people still have a bond with each other is cause for puzzlement. We even get some brief flashbacks to his mother’s childhood, when Vance’s Mamaw and Papaw were hardly on the best of terms themselves thanks to his grandfather’s alcoholism. I mean, Mamaw sets her husband on fire at one point, so you know the Christmas card isn’t going to have a picture of smiling relatives. I’ve read the book on which this film was based, and the movie doesn’t quite cover everything as accurately as it could, but to cram so much awfulness into a couple of hours must not have been easy. Other than a nomination for Close as Vance’s grandma, the film was recognized for its Makeup and Hairstyling, which had to cover multiple decades and attempt to make both Adams and Close look more like ragged hillbillies than the beautiful people that they are. It’s not the most fun movie to watch, and I doubt it is really as inspirational as everyone seems to think (or hope) that it is, but the performances by Adams, Close, Gabriel Basso as the college-aged Vance, and Freida Pinto from Slumdog Millionaire in her far-too-few scenes as Vance’s girlfriend Usha are certainly noteworthy. The film, thankfully, doesn’t delve too deeply into the political aspects of Vance’s book; it just concentrates upon his life story without adding the commentary for which the book has been both praised and criticized.

Oscar Nominations: Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role (Glenn Close) and Best Achievement in Makeup and Hairstyling

The Last Command (1927-28)

 

The Last Command is really a long flashback within a movie about the making of a movie. William Powell plays a Russian director who’s casting a film about the Russian Revolution of 1917 (or, at least, that what it appears to be about). He finds a photo of an older Russian actor who claims to be the former Grand Duke and cousin to the czar (tsar?), and he’s played by Emil Jannings, who won the first Academy Award for Best Actor for this role and another role in a movie that has sadly been mostly lost, The Way of All Flesh. Grand Duke Sergius Alexander shows up for casting and gets his costume in a delightfully funny sequence about how appallingly extras were treated in Hollywood at the time, but then he has a flashback when someone asks him to stop shaking his head so much, a tic he says he developed after something bad happened to him in his past. During the Revolution, he was a very powerful leader, and he uses his position to, in essence, imprison a woman who is considered to be a revolutionist (the beautiful Evelyn Brent as Natalie Dobrova). She’s friends with Powell’s Leo Andreyev, so now we know why the director was so anxious to cast Alexander in the role of a general. Much of the flashback then follows the relationship between the Grand Duke and Natalie, as she slowly begins to fall in love with him, or perhaps she’s falling in love with the power that he holds or the many expensive gifts he can obtain for her. That’s never quite clear, but I suppose you can criticize the imperialist waste of money until someone gives you a strand of pearls, and then maybe you reconsider. By the time they’re on a train that gets hijacked by the revolutionists, she lies (or says she lies) to protect him and allow him to escape. He does so just before the train crashes and, presumably, kills everyone on board. When we return to the present day, the Grand Duke is treated more delicately by Andreyev than you might have imagined, but he’s clearly not over Natalie even though a decade has passed. He walks around in a bit of a stupor for much of his time at the studio. Recreating a battle sequence for the camera triggers some aspect of the Grand Duke’s memory of his past and he either goes mad or gives the greatest performance ever on screen… right before he dies. Either way, Jannings gets quite the extended death scene as Alexander, and we’re left wondering if revisiting his past was too much for him. It’s an oddly touching movie considering that the subject is a domineering Russian tsarist/czarist who forces a woman to be his lover. The primary appeal is watching Jannings’ Oscar-winning performance, of course, but Brent is so intriguing to watch that you have to wonder why she wasn’t considered for Best Actress, especially when you remember that she also played “Feathers” in the Oscar-winning Underworld the same year. Interesting side note: Both of those films were directed by the great Josef von Sternberg, who was one of the great visual stylists of the early film era.

Oscar Win: Best Actor (Emil Jannings)

Other Oscar Nomination: Best Writing / Original Story

Glorious Betsy (1927-28)

 

Glorious Betsy was adapted from a relatively unsuccessful play about an interesting historical moment involving Napoleon Bonaparte. Well, it’s really more about Bonaparte’s brother Jerome and his marriage to an American woman named Elizabeth Patterson. She’s nicknamed Glorious Betsy for reasons that are not particularly addressed in the film, but given that she’s a rather flirtatious Southern belle with plenty of suitors around her at all times and she’s played by the luminous Dolores Costello, you can just use your imagination. What Betsy doesn’t realize is that her French tutor is Jerome Bonaparte, so she treats him rather harshly (always a sign that a woman in a movie is in love with the man) and makes a big talk about meeting Napoleon’s brother and perhaps falling in love with him. Jerome (played by Conrad Nagel) has a habit of skipping town just when something big is about to happen that he doesn’t like; that’s how we wound up in Virginia in 1804 posing as a tutor. When the Patterson family departs for Baltimore for a party at their home there in Jerome’s honor, Betsy’s tutor shows up and demands that she agree to marry him, no matter who he is. Of course, viewers know that he’s about to reveal himself at the party as the famed Frenchman’s brother, so we just grin as she finally agrees after a series of melodramatic denials. Here’s the catch: Napoleon has already arranged a marriage for his brother to a princess from Wurttemberg (Catherina Fredericka or something similar), and he refuses to acknowledge Betsy as Jerome’s wife or even let her set foot on French soil. Napoleon (played by Pasquale Amato with a very stoic face) boards the ship bringing his brother and Betsy to France, and Betsy pleads her case to no avail. Napoleon needs the arranged marriage for political advantage. Defeated, Betsy must return to the United States, where she becomes the subject of a great deal of gossip. If they only knew that she was also pregnant with Jerome’s child, the rest of society would truly have something to talk about. At first, she refuses to let her husband know, but after the marriage is annulled by Napoleon and the wedding to the princess nears, she shares this little tidbit about him having a son. This being a Hollywood ending, Jerome, as is his habit, ditches the princess and heads back to America to be reunited with Betsy. Of course, that’s not what happened at all in real life. The real Jerome married the princess and stayed in Europe. I’ve mentioned before, though, that one should never turn to the movies for history lessons. The movies are good at drama, but often that drama isn’t historically accurate. Glorious Betsy was originally a part-silent/part-talkie movie, and you can tell that some sequences are meant to demonstrate talking and singing. However, the sound discs (Warner Bros. Vitaphone) have been lost, so we only have a mute print available. The talking/singing portions are relatively brief, though, so it’s not difficult to imagine some of what might have been said. Unfortunately, the current prints have intertitles that are often too dark to read, and this poses as much of a difficulty as trying to lipread during the sound passages. I’ll only mention in passing that since this film is set, at least in part, during the antebellum South, some actors appear in blackface, and particularly ugly blackface in one instance. It’s horribly disconcerting when you realize this, and it makes what is otherwise a perfectly innocuous little movie into something rather sad and pathetic.

Oscar Nomination: Best Writing / Adaptation