Written on the Wind (1956)

 

When an actor or a movie star learned that they were going to be in a Douglas Sirk movie like Written on the Wind, they must have been very excited. They knew that they would always look their best in the movie because they would be wearing nothing but stylish clothing. They would never look scruffy or disheveled; everyone looks beautiful in a Sirk movie. They would also be performing on soundstages that displayed some of the most thoughtful and thorough attention to the details of set design. Everyone and every place looks just gorgeous in a Sirk-directed film, no matter how destitute or despairing the situation of the plot. Even the people who are supposed to be lower income are always impeccably dressed, and a dive bar looks like a rather reputable location, frankly. Such is definitely the case with Written on the Wind, one of Sirk's best films and an almost perfect example of the style he brought to his films. Look at how Lauren Bacall’s Lucy Moore Hadley and Dorothy Malone’s Marylee Hadley are dressed in this melodrama. There's not a single misstep in their costumes even if you wonder sometimes why anyone would go through all the trouble to wear one of those gowns or why they seem, um, overdressed at times. Rock Hudson’s Mitch Wayne (how butch is that name!) and Robert Stack Kyle Hadley are almost always in tailored suits and hardly ever look like they've broken a sweat even after a fight, and there are lots of fights. And the sets are just as fantastic. Who wouldn't want to live in homes like these or work in offices like these? Whether it's New York or Florida or Texas, no one has second-class surroundings. Why this film and others like it weren’t nominated for their exquisite production design is a mystery. Of course, beneath the surface of all these accoutrements that the wealthy display, there's a lot of psychological damage. The Hadleys, a family made rich from oil production, had plenty of demons, what with Kirk’s drinking and womanizing and Marylee’s rather wanton pursuit of every man in sight. She wants to bed Mitch, but they and Kirk grew up almost like siblings, so he’s never going to sleep with her. Of course, their lifelong closeness doesn’t keep Kyle from stealing Lucy away from Mitch before the poor geologist even has a chance. However, the causes of this kind of behavior are never visible if you only pay attention to the beauty of the surroundings, but Written on the Wind slowly lets you see the dangers underlying these beautiful people and their lovely clothes and their fantastic homes. Perhaps Sirk was trying to tell us something.

Oscar Win: Best Supporting Actress (Dorothy Malone)

Other Oscar Nominations: Best Supporting Actor (Robert Stack) and Best Original Song (“Written on the Wind”)

The Ten Commandments (1956)

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oscar Win: Best Special Effects

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

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)

 

The Man Who Knew Too Much is one of my favorite films by Alfred Hitchcock. I know that it’s considered a “minor” masterpiece of his, but the story, the performances, the effective use of music—all of them and other elements combine to make such an entertaining film. I find it tough to resist. Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day play Ben and Jo McKenna, who are in Morocco for a vacation with their son Hank (Christopher Olsen) when the young boy is kidnapped. A stranger named Louis Bernard (Daniel Gelin) gets killed in the streets of Marrakesh and leaves Stewart’s Ben with a whispered clue before he dies. Soon it becomes apparent that the McKennas are caught up in some bizarre international intrigue based upon a misunderstanding of who they are, something that ultimately involves an ambitious ambassador who wants to move up in the hierarchy of his home country. Really, though, those details hardly matter. In a Hitchcock films, it’s not really about the plot; it’s about the suspense that can be created. What strikes me about most Hitchcock films is how he often lets the audience know much more than the characters do. It helps to increase the tension and make us far more anxious when we can figure things out faster than the characters can. We figure out who the villains are and what they’re up to while Ben and Jo are trying to figure out, for example, who or what Ambrose Chappell or Ambrose Chapel is and what he/it has to do with Hank’s disappearance. I also love how Hitchcock can focus in on a particular moment or image, such as when Stewart is thumbing a phone book while someone else is on the phone. He needs to find his son and he needs to get information to his wife, but he can’t let the other characters in the scene know too much. Stewart was one of Hitchcock’s favorite actors, and he’s pretty tightly wound here. You can always sense that he could lash out at someone in an instant. Day, always such a welcome presence on the screen, introduces a song in the film that would become her signature recording, “Whatever Will Be (Que Sera, Sera),” first as a song that she sings to Hank in order to get him to go to bed. Later it takes on even more psychological impact when it serves as the means to find Hank after his kidnapping. It’s clever of Hitchcock to use Day’s talent as a singer to make a plot point even more poignant. Music plays another integral role in the film’s plot when Jo and Ben have to try to stop an attempted assassination at the Royal Albert Hall. An orchestra is performing “Storm Cloud” by Bernard Hermann, Hitchcock’s favorite composer, and the crash of the cymbals at a key moment during the performance is supposed to be a cue for the would-be assassin. The sequence just goes on and on, and we are in our own form as terror as we watch Jo, helpless to stop what’s coming, listen and anticipate the fatal note. It’s quite a sequence in both its use of music and in the superb editing for which Hitchcock’s films are known. The Man Who Knew Too Much also has its fair share of those little touches of Hitchcockian humor. For example, one of the conspirators in the kidnapping asks, “Don’t you know that Americans dislike having their children stolen?” Well, of course, they do. It’s also hilarious that Stewart at one point has to climb out of a bell tower in order to escape being trapped. By the time we watch the camera move up a flight of stairs to where Hank is being held prisoner, you know you’re still in the hands of a master filmmaker. He saves one of his best moments for last. When Ben and Jo return with Hank after what must have been many hours away from the friends they’ve left in their apartment, all Ben says is “Sorry we were gone so long, but we had to pick up Hank.” Of course, they did; that’s the whole point of the movie, after all, isn’t it?

Oscar Win: Best Song (“Whatever Will Be [Que Sera Sera]”)

The Red Balloon (1956)

 

The Red Balloon (Le Ballon Rouge) is a rarity among Oscar nominees. It’s a short film that was nominated and won in the category of Original Screenplay, but it wasn’t even nominated in the shorts category. There’s actually very little dialogue in the film except when the main character, a young Parisian boy, talks to the large balloon of the title. The film, which is only thirty-four minutes long, covers three days in the friendship between the boy and the balloon. He discovers it on the first day while on his way to school and quickly discovers that the balloon will follow him and only him. It even waits for him while he’s in school when the headmaster chastises him for bringing it or outside his family’s apartment when his mother refuses to allow it inside. This spectacular quality, of course, makes others jealous, and a group of seemingly older boys begins trying to steal the balloon. They succeed on the third day when the young boy, having been kicked out of church because he brought his balloon with him, leaves it momentarily outside a shop. They attempt to burst the balloon, which is almost as large as the boy, with stones and sticks, prompting an army of balloons from across Paris to descend upon and surround the grieving boy. It’s difficult to watch this sequence, which ends with the boy being lifted up by dozens of colorful balloons so that he can float above the city, without thinking that the filmmakers of Up were obviously inspired by this film. The Red Balloon is a charming film, one often called a children’s fantasy, but it also speaks to the common ways that we are intentionally or unintentionally cruel to each other as well as to the joy and delight that we can derive from our relationships even when no one else can quite understand us. Anyone who watches the film will be captivated by the story and the series of delightful moments (such as when the boy and his balloon meet a little girl with her blue balloon) that it encapsulates. That, too, makes it a rarity.

Oscar Win: Best Original Screenplay

The King and I (1956)

I have always loved The King and I, which was nominated for Best Picture of 1956. It's one of the greatest of the film musicals, in my opinion, and I've always managed to stay completely engrossed each time I watch it (even though I know how it's going to turn out). This is an almost perfect film, from the performances to the production and costume design to the glorious music. To see it again it is one of the highlights of this project.

An English widow travels with young son in tow to Siam to become the teacher of the King's many children. She, of course, must learn to adjust to the very different way of life in Siam (what is now called Thailand), but she also manages to help the king and others in Siam adjust gradually to the ways of the English and "the West" as well. The King (played to the hilt by Yul Brynner after several years in the role on Broadway) always seems to understand just a bit more than he ever reveals to Anna; the grin on his face shows how pleased he is with his cleverness.

Deborah Kerr has a part that allows her to shine here. She is at turns funny, warm, gentle, and then firm, dogmatic, demanding. Yet she always is generous as a performer, interacting with her fellow actors in such a collegial way. Watching her with the King's children, in particular, is such a delight. Their performance of "Getting to Know You" is almost everyone's favorite scene. Kerr was good in almost every role she played, and it's in this film that you see how gifted she was at what is on the surface a "lighter" part.

There is an intriguing subplot involving Tuptim, a newly arrived slave from Burma who is expected to become another of the King's wives. She is in love with someone from her native country and manages on several occasions to express her outrage at the treatment of women and others who are enslaved in Siam. The most vivid expression of her outrage, of course, is her adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin to a Siamese setting. I doubt that the film (or the musical upon which it is based) is all that faithful to Siamese culture, but it is a dazzling centerpiece of the film anyway. And Tuptim is played by the amazing Rita Moreno, a multi-talented performer who had not yet managed to be recognized for the star quality that she exhibits even in this small part.

The songs are amazing, some of the best Rodgers and Hammerstein work ever. My particular favorites are "Hello, Young Lovers" (especially the great Mabel Mercer's later version of it) and "We Kiss in a Shadow" and "Something Wonderful." However, few musical sequences on film are as grand as watching Brynner and Kerr performing (well, Kerr dancing, but Marni Nixon singing) "Shall We Dance?" When the King takes Anna's hand for the part of this scene where they are not singing but only dancing, well, you can't do much better than that.

Do make sure that you see this film in its widescreen version. A pan-and-scan version of the film cuts off so much that you don't want to miss. I think that pan-and-scan versions should be banned, but I suppose too many people don't realize just how much of a movie they are sometimes missing when the sides are chopped off of a widescreen film like The King and I.