Missing (1982)

Missing, nominated for Best Picture of 1982, is a political thriller, and it's a shame that we don't have more movies like it. The story is sent in an unnamed Latin American country--it's actually Chile, by the way--and involves the search for an American man who has gone missing. His wife and his father join forces to try to locate him despite been stymied at every turn by the officials of the country and by the American diplomats who are allegedly there to assist Americans. It's primarily an indictment of the corruption and ineptitude that seemed to characterize our involvement in Latin America, particularly in the early 1970s when the story takes place.

The film begins with the return of Charlie Horman (John Shea) and his friend Terry Simon (Melanie Mayron), two Americans who have been visiting the coast. They come back to a city that has a curfew that begins even before sundown. They are asked to remain in a hotel for their own safety that first night rather than try to make it to Charlie's home. When they are finally able to return to his house, they find his wife Beth (Sissy Spacek) anxious to leave the country and return to the U.S. She is even more frightened when, after visiting a pregnant friend, she misses her bus home and is forced to spend a terrifying night hiding out from the roving military men who shoot anyone they see. When Beth returns home from her night on the streets, she discovers that her house has been ransacked and her husband has been taken into custody.

The political unrest is graphically depicted in the film. People are taken into custody on the streets in full view of others. People are searched, and bodies and blood litter the sidewalks. There are book burnings and always, always the sound of gunfire in the background. No one, not even Americans, it seems, is truly safe.

After news of Charlie's abduction reaches the United States, we see his father, Ed Horman (Jack Lemmon), meeting with government officials in Washington but getting no assistance. They just keep saying they'll try to help, but no one seems to offer anything tangible. He decides to fly to Chile himself to see if he can speed the investigation along. Initially suspicious of his son's activities--Charlie worked as a writer for a left-wing newspaper and the new government is decidedly right wing--Ed slowly begins to understand just how Beth has become so frustrated and bitter from her dealings with the American consulate and the local government and police representatives.

We see several scenes in flashback that attempt to fill in some of the gaps of what happened during the week of Charlie's disappearance. We get, for example, a sequence in a hotel where Charlie and Terry, on the day of the coup d'etat, learn from a former Navy officer what the American plans are for the country. We also find out what happened to two other American prisoners who were taken into custody. One of those men, Frank (played by Joe Regalbuto, perhaps best known for his work on TV's Murphy Brown), is later found dead in a room full of unidentified corpses. That scene, in particular, is gruesome, displaying as it does the sheer scale of the new government's efforts to suppress its opposition. Equally impressive is the scene where Beth and Ed are taken to a stadium where prisoners are being held. It appears that a full crowd has assembled for a soccer match, not that all of these people are being held captive. The film does a remarkable job of trying to show the scale of what was happening at the time.

As I said earlier, no one in the film ever says the name of the country, but Missing is based upon a true story of an American who disappeared in Chile in 1973 after the assassination of Salvador Allende, a Marxist who had been democratically elected as the president of the country. The coup that followed his assassination saw many people--Chileans and people from other countries--"disappear." The U.S., though the CIA and other government agencies, was later found to be heavily involved in the assassination and coup, and the film's director, Greek-born Costa-Gavras, always one to tackle controversial subject matter in his films, makes sure that photos of Richard Nixon appear throughout the movie. Those pictures serve as a constant visual reminder of the complicitiy of the United States in the activities that are depicted. The film also holds to the timeline of historical events as well by having Charlie's disappearance occur just one day after the actual coup took place.

Missing is an intense film, particularly the closer we get to finding out what happened to Charlie Horman. Costa-Gavras, who also co-wrote the screenplay, spares the viewers little of what happened in Chile. Ed and Beth visit several hospitals, for example, and we see the hundreds of people who have been wounded. When they visit the Italian embassy, we are allowed a glimpse of the hundreds of people who became refugees within their own country, seeking protection in whatever location they could find it. After all that he has seen and after hearing the constant gunfire almost every day he has been in Chile, Ed asks, "What kind of world is this?" It's a question that the film demands we answer.

Lemmon and Spacek, both excellent actors, are in top form here. Spacek's Beth knows how the system operates, and her world-weariness over the slowness of the bureaucracy seems well earned. Lemmon was such a stellar actor. He's perhaps best remembered for comedic roles, but Missing demonstrates just how good he was at dramatic parts as well. He allows you to see the transformation of Ed Horman from a man who suspects that his son has gotten into trouble because of radical politics to a man who realizes just how much his own country has been complicit in the disappearance of his son. It was also refreshing to see Melanie Mayron in the supporting role of Terry. I always loved Mayron on the TV series thirtysomething, but she was also great in numerous movies of the 1980s.

I have read that the filmmakers had to make Missing in Mexico without letting the studio know much about the plot or what they were filming. I can imagine they would have even more difficulty today, given the conservative nature of most of the studios. You would probably not find a major studio willing to put up the money for a film that is so overtly critical of our government's involvement in the affairs of other countries, and you probably wouldn't find stars the caliber of Lemmon and Spacek to be the leads. Thankfully, Missing is one of those brave efforts on the part of everyone involved that manages to document for us a specific moment in the past, one with which we should be familiar.

The Crowd (1927-28)

The Crowd is one of the true masterpieces of silent film. It's an epic film on many levels, yet the center of the film is the simple story of an ordinary couple living ordinary lives. The director of The Crowd, King Vidor, was a master at both the small, intimate moments of life and the large-scale use of numerous actors and sets. The Crowd is one of his finest accomplishments and an intriguing choice for the first year of the Academy Awards given that it is not a typical Hollywood film.

The film begins on July 4, 1900, with the birth of John Sims. John will grow up to be the chief character of the movie, and we follow him for much of his adult life. John (played as an adult by James Murray) moves to New York City at the age of 21, telling another man on the journey to the city that all he wants in an opportunity. He gets a job at Atlas Insurance Company writing down columns of numbers all day long, but he uses any spare time he can sneak to write slogans for contests. It’s mind-numbing work, and you can tell from the way that the camera, operating from a very high crane, zooms into John’s desk area that all of these workers are really treated as little more than drones.

One night, his buddy and co-worker Bert asks him to go with him on a double date. It's there that he meets Mary (Eleanor Boardman). They hit it off immediately, and he even asks her to marry him on their first date, a trip to the Coney Island amusement park. The film’s journey to Coney Island is visually quite stunning. We get to watch various rides that the two couples enjoy, particularly the Tunnel of Love, and we are witness to some very touching moments between couples on the subway ride home from the park. It’s interesting that the two main characters have the plainest of names, John and Mary, as if to suggest that there is nothing particularly special about them; they’re just regular people. They seem to be in love, though, and the early scenes of their romance are very sweet.

Things don't go as well after the wedding, though. Their first Christmas dinner reveals how little Mary's family thinks of John, who's always talking about his prospects. Mary's brothers, though, think he's never going to be successful. The Sims family then has a series of problems with the bathroom door not closing and the bad plumbing and the furniture (the Murphy Bed, in particular) and other items in the household. They begin sniping at each other, including one particularly vicious breakfast scene. It's only after Mary reveals that she's pregnant that they reconcile and John manages to get a small raise at work.

Five years pass--or so the title cards tell us--and the Sims family now includes a daughter as well. John finally wins $500 for a slogan that he's written, but while he and Mary are celebrating, their little girl is hit and killed by a truck. John loses his ability to concentrate at work, so depressed is he by his daughter's death. The film superimposes images of what’s on his mind while he’s trying to work, and it’s a very effective way to display the distractions. He quits his job at the insurance company, revealing his decision to Mary while they are on the boat for the company picnic. John takes a series of unsuccessful jobs, including one as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman, but he quickly walks away from most of the menial jobs. He just can’t seem to be a success even though he keeps reiterating throughout the film that all he needs is an opportunity.

The film was released in 1928, a year before the start of the Great Depression, but that doesn’t mean that economic conditions weren’t difficult for people like John and Mary even before the Depression. Like many other men of the time, John tries to get in line for jobs calling for 100 men, but he frequently gets shut out of even those hard-labor tasks. Mary's brothers try to give John a job, but he refuses what he considers to be charity. When the brothers arrive one day to take Mary away with them, he tells her that he's found a job he loves, wearing a clown costume and juggling balls to call attention to a sign he carries around his neck. Ironically, he and Mary had made fun of someone with the same job on their first date many years earlier.

This is a particularly bleak film in many ways. Almost every moment of success or happiness that the family enjoys is quickly undercut by another setback. Vidor, who co-wrote the screenplay as well as directed, chose to focus on what nowadays we might call the underclass of society, those people who are not often the subject of films because their lives are a constant series of struggles to survive. They are not "entertaining" to watch. The Sims family, in many ways, is just a set of faces in a crowd to most passers-by. Few would take note of them, and the film demonstrates just how isolated one can be even in a crowd of people such as you would find in New York City.

The visuals of the film are particularly striking. When John, at the age of 12, must ascend a staircase to his home on the day that his father dies, the staircase and walls form a pronounced V-shape, placing John as the center of the action, a role he takes on throughout the rest of the film. When he gets a job at the insurance company, the camera pans to his desk--he's clerk #137--allowing us to see the seemingly hundreds of other young men who are forced to do the mundane drudgework that insurance companies demand. The film had already panned up the side of the enormous building where he works, eventually stopping at the floor where the rows and rows and rows of desks are located. And there are numerous scenes of crowds of people, apparently most of them shots of actual people walking through the city. When Mary is in the hospital giving birth to their first child, John walks into a ward with dozens of beds throughout the room. A sequence at the beginning of the film shows crowds of people almost as swarms of insects. No one seems to be able to move against the flow of the crowd. The most spectacular crowd shot, though, is the end of the film. John and Mary have taken their son to the theater to see a show, and they're laughing and having a good time. The camera slowly pulls back to reveal hundreds of other people similarly laughing. It's astonishing to think how much coordination such a shot much have taken, considering how many people are within the frame.

The editing is also impressive. I’ll give just one example: John and Mary are on a train headed to Niagara Falls for their honeymoon. It’s their wedding night, and after they have finished their individual preparations for bed and are finally in the sleeper car together, the film cuts to a shot of the falls themselves. Yes, there are some moments of humor and lightheartedness scattered throughout the film, something to remind you that life doesn’t have to be dreary all the time. If you’re expecting a Hollywood ending, though, you’ll need to look elsewhere. The film does end with a happy event, but that doesn't mean that John and Mary’s struggles have ended.

The acting is still a bit theatrical at times, no doubt due in part to the rather hyperbolic dialog the performers are given. Boardman is quite lovely as Mary. She’s always forgiving of John’s mistakes and bad behavior, and she’s very encouraging of this dreams. Murray is always better when he’s playing sad moments. When John is defeated or feels lost, Murray manages to convey significant amounts of pathos. Silent film acting is certainly a different form of performing, and it can take some getting used to as a viewer.

Allegedly, MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer hated The Crowd, but he allowed Vidor to make the film because the director had already made so many successful films for the studio. Mayer felt the film was too depressing and that audiences would not pay money to see it. Even the final shot, allegedly made to have a happy ending for the movie (but not succeeding at the goal, ultimately), failed to impress him. However, the studio's production chief, the legendary Irving Thalberg, went ahead with the film, and now, thankfully, we have a movie that serves as a testament to just how accomplished, both visually and thematically, silent films were. The Crowd was among the first group of films to be nominated by the Academy, but the sound era was already well underway by the time the awards were distributed in 1928. Hollywood would almost have to start over, and much of the technical achievement of films like The Crowd would be lost in order to serve the new medium of "talkies."

Oscar Nominations: Best Unique and Artistic Production and Best Directing of a Dramatic Picture (King Vidor)

The Champ (1931-32)

The Champ is the story of an alcoholic ex-heavyweight champion boxer and his young son. The son, Dink, is played by Jackie Cooper, one of the most talented child actors in the history of film, and the father, whose actual name is Andy Purcell but who is called "the Champ" throughout the film, is played by Wallace Beery, one of the most unlikely of movie stars. The key to this movie's success is the interaction between the two of them; they make what has since become a somewhat cliched premise into a touching examination of the ways that parents and children try to care for each other.

When the film begins, Andy and Dink are running, trying to keep in shape for whatever fight might be in the future. The Champ lost his boxing title several years earlier because of his drinking and gambling, and now he just can't seem to pull it together to make a comeback. Whenever he gets enough money to go back into training, he gets drunk instead. In fact, one of the early scenes in the film involves Dink and one of his young friends trying to sober the Champ up so that he can meet with some fight promoters. Needless to say, he's still too drunk to impress the promoters, and he loses a shot at a match. It’s heartbreaking to watch Cooper’s reaction in this sequence.

What's amazing about this scene, though, is what happens after the promoters leave the dingy room where the Champ and Dink live. Dink gets his father undressed and puts him to bed before he starts to get himself ready for a night's sleep. You get a clear sense that this scene has played itself out over and over, that Dink has at a very young age become more of a caretaker for his father than his father is for Dink. Beery's Champ cares for his son, certainly, but he doesn't seem to be very knowledgeable about how to care for a young boy properly. He makes a lot of promises that he will reform his ways, but he falls quickly back into the patterns of his bad behavior whenever the opportunity (and money) permit.

After the Champ purchases a racehorse for Dink, a promise he's made to the boy for years, they enter the horse (now dubbed the Little Champ) into a race, only to meet another racehorse owner named Linda and her husband Tony Carleton. It turns out that Linda is Dink's mother. She and the Champ divorced years earlier, but the Champ received custody of the boy. Linda, now married to a wealthy man and with another child, a daughter, wants to give Dink a better home. The Champ, sensing that he might not be the best father figure, decides after a night of drinking and gambling that leads to him being arrested that Dink should go with Linda. He even lies to the boy, saying that he doesn't want Dink hanging around him so much and eating too much food that they cannot afford. Cooper plays this scene particularly well, crying as he promises he will be a better son and companion, and both he and Beery are teary-eyed by the end of it.

Dink jumps off the train in San Diego, leaving Linda behind, and rejoins his father in Tijuana. The Champ agrees to fight the Mexican heavyweight boxing champion, for which he would receive $20,000 for a win. The fight is particularly brutal, one of the more punishing bouts depicted on film. However, the Champ knocks out the Mexican fighter and wins, only to faint on the way back to the dressing room. It's there that he dies after a tearful discussion with Dink. Cooper's cries of "I want the Champ! I want the Champ!" are pretty heartbreaking to watch. He had been nominated the year before as Best Actor for the film Skippy, the youngest (at age 9) person nominated for an acting Oscar at that time. Unsurprisingly, he's still the youngest person ever to be nominated for Best Actor. He deserved another nomination for his performance in The Champ, but the Academy had limited the number of nominees in the category that year to only three.

What stands out the most about this film, written by the legendary Frances Marion, who also won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay of 1931-1932, is the father-son relationship. Beery and Cooper were in a couple of movies together, and they have an easy rapport with each other. The film was remade in 1979 with Jon Voight as the father and Ricky Shroeder as the son; Faye Dunaway played the role of the wife who left the champ years earlier. It's an inferior version of the original. The Beery-Cooper version has far more heart than the remake, and it earns our sympathy for the characters in a far more honest fashion.

There's one other moment that struck me when watching The Champ. One of Dink's friends is a young African American boy named Jonah, played by Jesse Scott. This film was made during a time of Jim Crow laws and legal segregation, yet Jonah and Dink are great friends and everyone accepts this as being completely unremarkable. Even more astonishing is an interchange between Dink and his mother when they first meet at the racetrack. He introduces her to Jonah and points out that his friend is "colored." She smiles and replies that Jonah is "kind of a pretty color." I know that such dialogue as that would be seen as hopelessly racist nowadays, but that must have been a truly radical statement in 1931. Marion always had a way of infusing her scripts with a sense of social justice. It's one of the many reasons that her films like The Champ still seem just as watchable today.

I’d also like to mention that the cinematography on this film is first-rate. It’s just a beautiful black-and-white film from an era with lots of great filmmaking. The close-ups feature remarkable clarity, and the lighting emphasizes the emotions a character is feeling. The horse race sequence is well shot and well edited, and so is the climactic boxing match. The expressions on Beery’s face during that match are vividly captured. You don’t normally think of a movie like The Champ as being an exceptional example of cinematography, but there were so many talented people working in Hollywood during those years.

Oscar Wins: Best Actor (Wallace Beery) and Best Original Story

Other Oscar Nominations: Outstanding Production and Best Director (King Vidor)

Mister Roberts (1955)

At the center of Mister Roberts, nominated for Best Picture of 1955, is a palm tree. It is carefully watered and tended by the captain of the U.S.S. Reluctant because it was given to him in honor of the hard work that he and the ship's crew provide to the rest of the Navy. Capt. Morton (James Cagney, using to full effect the lifetime of tough guy roles he'd perfected) wants a tight ship even if it is only a cargo ship that brings supplies to the warships actually doing battle in the Pacific Ocean during the waning years of World War II. Unfortunately, the men on the Reluctant, particularly the title character of Lt. JG Doug Roberts (Henry Fonda), have been trapped on board without liberty for too long. They need a break from all the work they've been doing, but Morton is adamantly opposed, wanting the men to concentrate solely on their duties.

Every infraction gets attention from the captain. If someone puts out a cigar butt in his beloved palm tree, the movie for the evening is cancelled. No one is allowed to be on deck without a shirt on. The rules are seemingly endless and frequently pointless, and Fonda's Roberts is tired of loading and unloading cargo; he wants to see some of the action on a destroyer. He longs to make what he considers to be a real contribution to the war effort. Each week he submits a request to transfer, and each week the captain forwards it without his approval, dooming it to failure. Roberts, frustrated in his efforts, has the support of the crew, though. They all want him to be happy because he has frequently demonstrated--and publicly, I would add--that he does not approve of the captain's bullying tactics or methods for keeping order.

Roberts makes a deal with Morton. In exchange for liberty for the men on board, he will stop writing his weekly letter and will follow whatever command Morton gives him without question or contradiction. It doesn't take long before Roberts becomes the face of the enemy to the crew, and they begin to shun him the way that they have tried to avoid the captain. Eventually, Roberts breaks and throws overboard the palm which Morton has so deeply prized. What follows is the revelation of the deal Morton and Roberts struck, and the men on board devise a way to get Roberts transferred to another ship so that he can actually serve in battle.

Made ten years after the end of World War II, Mister Roberts is not exactly a war movie. It's more of a gentle comedy about the rigidity of military command and about the lengths to which we will go in order to find some measure of happiness and peace of mind. There are, of course, serious moments here, particularly when the men are under the impression that Roberts is following Morton's orders in order to be promoted, but much of the film is rather good-natured fun.

Fonda is perfectly cast here. He was so talented at playing men who face those decisive moments in life, those moments when must confront life's divisive issues. He's forced here to choose the kind of man he is going to be: someone who follows the chain of command regardless of what those in command do or say or someone who's going to do what is the right thing regardless of what those in command think or believe. No one was better at serving as a moral compass than Fonda.

As I already mentioned, Cagney plays to his type here. He was perhaps always best as a tough guy, someone with ambition who knew what it would take to make it to the top. The scene where he takes out an admiral's cap and explains to Fonda's Roberts why the lieutenant must follow orders is an actor's exercise in restraint. Also along to play to his strengths is William Powell as the ship's doctor. Powell had a light comedic touch, and he was a master of timing and phrasing, both of them put to good use here. As Roberts' confidante, Powell shines in what was to be his final performance on film.

And then there's Jack Lemmon. Lemmon plays Ensign Pulver, an opportunist who takes advantage of every chance he gets to bypass his duties as laundry and morale officer (an odd combination, to say the least). Pulver has big plans to upset the captain, but he never quite sees any of this plans through to fruition. His plan to collect marbles and put them above the captain's bed so they disturb his sleep yields only five marbles. A huge firecracker needs to be tested first and destroys the laundry room. Pulver, of course, has no material to make another one. He even tries to smuggle a nurse from a neighboring island on board, only to see his plans fall apart when all of the nurses show up and expect a tour. Lemmon was playing his first major role on the movie screen and was chosen Best Supporting Actor for 1955. I would argue that he wins the award just for the closing line of the film. For how many great closing moments in film is Jack Lemmon responsible: Mister Roberts, Some Like It Hot, The Apartment...?

The film version of Mister Roberts was based upon the play in which Fonda had been starring for several years. It's still somewhat stage-bound, restricted as it is to the cargo ship for almost all of the action that takes place. Even the night the crew receives liberty, nothing is shown of what they do to the island. We hear that there is a lot of drinking and fighting and destruction of property and even the theft of a goat, but we are told all of this, not shown it, just the way it would have been handled on stage. Nevertheless, the film still stands on its own as solid entertainment. The stellar cast alone is worth watching, and the emotional impact of the final sequence, where Lemmon reads a series of letters to the other men on board, is powerful indeed.

Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

Dog Day Afternoon, a nominee for Best Picture of 1975, tells the story of a bank robbery that goes wrong in so many ways. Two would-be robbers, Sonny (Al Pacino) and Sal (John Cazale), attempt to hold up the First Brooklyn Savings Bank at closing time one hot August day. From the start, they seem destined to fail. A third robber, Stevie (Gary Springer), quits almost as soon as the robbery begins, claiming that he "just can't go through with it." And it all goes downhill from there.

The film was based upon a real-life incident that occurred in 1972, and the opening sequence gives a series of very telling images of New York in the early 1970s. Very quickly you are returned to that Vietnam era malaise, that time of Nixon era distrust of authority and power. Much of the action of the film is confined to just the bank interior and the street outside the bank, making Dog Day Afternoon very claustrophobic to watch, further contributing to the unease that the era recalls. You get a strong sense of the intensity of the pressure that the robbers, particularly Sonny, are facing.

Just a few of the sequence of events that mar what had been planned as a quick heist: By the time Sonny and Sal show up, the bank has already been emptied of its deposits for the day, leaving only $1100 in the vault. The security guard has asthma and has to be released almost immediately after the robbery begins. The cops overreact when the security guard is released, thinking that he is one of the robbers, and attack him as soon as he exits the bank. The smoke from when Sonny attempts to burn the register catches the attention of an insurance salesman across the street, and he is probably the one who calls the police. The boyfriend of one of the tellers being held hostage breaks through a police barricade and attacks Sonny. And on and on and on. It's a series of mishaps that could have easily been played for comedy, but director Sidney Lumet chose instead to present them as "realistic" events, allowing viewers a chance to see how the frustrations that Sonny and Sal feel continue to mount as the movie progresses.

Watching this film again almost single-handedly rescues Pacino's reputation for me. He has given so many ham-fisted performances over the years, most notably in Scent of a Woman, for which he finally (and undeservedly) won an Oscar for Best Actor. However, in Dog Day Afternoon, he's fantastic. He allows you to see all of the burdens that Sonny carries, the pressures of trying to make a living in a depressed economy, enduring a nagging wife and an overbearing mother and a resentful father, and perhaps the biggest revelation of all, his love for a pre-operative transsexual named Leon, whom the cops bring from the mental institution where he is being treated in order to make Sonny confront his "wife" in hopes of ending the stalemate. Watching the phone conversations Pacino's Sonny has, first with Leon and then with his female wife Angie, is pretty gripping. He's just talking on the phone, but it's difficult to turn away. The same is true for when he dictates his will to one of the tellers. The emotions he allows himself to display are deep and heartfelt, and it's one of his best performances in a long career.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention just how remarkably prescient this film was about the lure of fame. Sonny becomes a hero of the streets when hundreds of police officers show up, and he defies them with his shouts of "Attica! Attica! Attica!"--referring, of course, to the brutal put-down of a prison riot that had happened one year earlier. Each time he emerges from the bank to talk to either the police or the FBI, the crowd cheers. Sonny even starts to preen a bit before the cameras. It's as if he's gotten a bit too caught up in the drama himself and wants to provide a good show for everyone, and the crowed responds loudly to his efforts.

Well, I should clarify that the crowd cheers him for a while. Once news of Sonny's romance with Leon is made public--including a photo of Leon in a wedding dress--the tone shifts. The crowd begins making loud jeers and catcalls when Sonny frisks an FBI agent before allowing him into the bank to see the hostages. A group of gay rights activists, with several trans people in the front, appear to cheer Sonny on, and the crowd quickly divides into two camps. I don't believe the film is homophobic, as some have claimed over the years. It seems to me that the filmmakers are portraying the homophobic attitudes people of the time had. I know that sounds like a fine line I'm trying to draw, but the film itself doesn't seem to judge Pacino's Sonny, in particular. He is a bisexual bank robber who's trying to help his parents pay their rent and keep his wife and kids fed and collect enough money to pay for his lover's gender-reassignment surgery. He's allowed to be a complex character and, I might add, a rather sympathetic one at that.

I'd like to single out a couple of members of the supporting cast for special attention. Cazale, who had such a short career in film before his death at age 42, is quite effective as the weaker, more uncertain of the two robbers. Chris Sarandon plays Leon in a much more restrained fashion than you might have expected in a Hollywood film of the 1970s. Charles Durning plays the police detective Moretti, who's desperate to end the hold-up with no casualties, and James Broderick (Matthew's dad and later the patriarch on the TV show Family) is the FBI agent who takes over from Moretti and starts a game of cat-and-mouse with Sonny. I was also particularly impressed by the performance of Penelope Allen as Sylvia, the head bank teller. She's a no-nonsense kind of woman, the kind who returns to be with the other hostages because, as she puts it, "They're my girls. I'm going back in there." She's a treasure.

When Cazale's Sal complains that the news reports are identifying both of the bank robbers as homosexuals, Sonny replies that it's all just a "freak show" for them. In a way, that's really what Dog Day Afternoon does best: showing us just how quickly a circus can form around a single event, how frenzied the crowd can become, how overheated the emotions can be in a short period of time. The ending of the film has to be seen, not described, but it packs a pretty strong emotional punch after what has transpired in a little more than two hours on the screen. Dog Day Afternoon is another strong addition to the reputation of the 1970s as one of the greatest decades in filmmaking.

Oscar  Win: Original Screenplay

Other Oscar Nominations: Picture, Director, Actor (Pacino), Supporting Actor (Sarandon), and Film Editing

It Happened One Night (1934)

It Happened One Night, winner of the Oscar for Best Picture of 1934, is a charming romantic comedy starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert as two people who meet and fall in love under some strange circumstances. This film is often called one of the earliest screwball comedies. It is certainly the combination of verbal humor and farcical situations that are the source of its success. This was the first movie to win the top five awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay), and it deserved them all. In fact, it received every Oscar for which it was nominated, and that happens very rarely when there are multiple nominations. Only standout films are able to break into that special company, and It Happened One Night was the one that got there first in both cases.

Colbert is Ellie Andrews, a rich young woman who has defied her father and married an aviator. Her father (Walter Connolly) is holding her hostage on his yacht in Miami, and she jumps overboard and swims to shore with plans to escape to New York to be with her new husband, King Westley (Jameson Thomas). In an attempt to avoid the press, she buys a bus ticket for an overnight trip. She meets Gable's Peter Warne, a newspaperman who's a bit down on his luck, while fighting over the last seat on the bus. Gable inevitably discovers her identity and agrees to accompany her to New York if he can have the exclusive rights to her story, thereby getting him back his old newspaper job. She has very little money remaining after her luggage is stolen, and he plans to assist her until he can be reimbursed for his expenses.

What follows is a series of misadventures. Ellie is late returning to the bus one morning and is surprised to find that it has already left despite her telling the driver to wait for her; she's a bit uninformed about the way the "real world" tends to operate. She and Peter wind up spending the night together in an auto camp (an early form of a motel) when another bus gets stuck in the mud. They have to share a third night on a farm sleeping on piles of hay (separate ones, of course). Through all of this, they begin to like each other more and more, but of course, you knew that would happen, didn't you? All I can say is to remember that such a storyline wasn't yet a cliche in 1934.

The performances by Gable and Colbert (as well as the supporting cast) are great. Gable gets several drunk scenes and a few scenes where he's "allowed" to show his temper. When you put this performance next to his work in Mutiny on the Bounty and Gone with the Wind, you realize just how talented an actor Gable truly was, how much of a range he had. Colbert is his equal here, at turns maddeningly naive and then stunningly radiant. It's easy to see why any of the men in the movie fall in love with her. And the wedding dress she wears late in the film is quite the stunner after watching her in the same jacket and skirt for more than an hour.

Two famous scenes in particular are worthy of note. Everyone is already familiar with Peter's failed attempts to hitch a ride from one of the passing cars, only to have Colbert's Ellie raise her skirt and stop the first car that passes by. It still a funny scene, one that earns its laughs just as honestly now as it did then. You see it almost any time that a clip from the movie is show and deservedly so. It captures the gender politics of the film quite astutely. The other famous moment is the "Walls of Jericho" scene in the auto camp when Peter hangs a blanket between the two beds in order to give them a sense of privacy in the small room they share. To get the full effect of that moment, though, you'll have to stay for the end of the movie. However, I'd like to talk about the first time they are together with just a blanket between them. Legend has it that when Gable took off his shirt and revealed that he wasn't wearing an undershirt, sales of men's undershirts plummeted and never quite fully recovered. That's a pretty clear example of the power that the medium of film is capable of displaying.

Director Frank Capra was perhaps the most famous director in Hollywood during the Great Depression. What is admirable about this and other movies he helmed during that time is the attention that he gives to the poor people of the United States. Ellie may be rich, but during her trip to New York, she is surrounded by those who are less fortunate, and she has several instances where she has to realize that wealth does not make her better than other people. Even Peter has to point out to her that she doesn't know how to dunk her donut in coffee properly and that her father never even taught her how to ride piggyback the correct way. There's no overt class warfare in the film, but Capra never lets you forget that you're watching a movie about a member of the idle rich learning how to live like all of those people without money.

I can't say that I truly understand why the film is entitled It Happened One Night. The events happen over several nights. Well, actually, they occur over several weeks. However, that's a relatively small criticism when you've got such a delightful film overall. You'd be hard pressed to find many wrong notes in it, and true to the fashion of the time, you get the happy ending you deserve.

Doctor Dolittle (1967)

The title sequence for Doctor Dolittle is quite charming with its animated animals presenting the names of the filmmakers. An alligator opens its mouth, for example, to reveal the source material (a series of novels by Hugh Lofting), and three birds "bring" the names of the supporting cast to a perch. After that, however, the charm is pretty much non-existent. This was an expensive musical flop when it opened, and it's often cited as an example of how easily Academy members could be persuaded by vigorous studio campaigns to nominate behemoths like this. Studios benefited from (and still do) Oscar nominations, so Doctor Dolittle received eight of them, shockingly winning two awards (Best Special Effects and Best Original Song for "Talk to the Animals").

The story concerns the good doctor (played by Rex Harrison as if he were exhausted from doing the 400th touring company of My Fair Lady), a veterinarian in 1850s England, Puddleby-on-the-Marsh, to be specific. No one understands him and his affection for animals, well, no one human except for his friend Matthew Mugg (Anthony Newley), who delivers fish to women in the town for their cats and dogs to eat. Certainly, the magistrate, aptly named General Bellowes (played by Peter Bull as if either his last name or the character's last name is a stage direction), doesn't understand why Dolittle would put glasses on a horse so it could see better or try to preserve a fox from the brutality of the hunt after its mate has been slaughtered.

The magistrate's niece, though, Emma Fairfax (Samantha Egger), is another story. Initially, she too despises Dolittle because of the way he treats her uncle. Gradually, of course, she starts to understand the depth of his concern for the animals he treats, and despite a number of initial hints that she and Matthew are falling in love, she instead chooses the older (far, far older) man to be her love interest. He, naturally, is oblivious to her charms, even going so far as to sing a song entitled "I Think I Like You," a virtual rehash of the sentiments in "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face" from Harrison's earlier stage and film success. Why she doesn't stick with Matthew and leave Dolittle to his animals is a mystery the film never bothers to address.

I should mention that before Dolittle romances Emma (who is repeated called "Fred" by Newley's Matthew for reasons that are just too silly), he sings a love song to a seal ("When I Look in Your Eyes"). The seal, you see, needs to be rescued from a circus so that she can be reunited with her husband who's at the North Pole, which hasn't even been discovered yet by mankind. Dolittle knows about the seal's dilemma because he's been raising money by allowing the circus to display a rare animal called a Pushme-Pullyu, a sort of llama with heads at both ends. A friend of his in Tibet has sent him the Pushme-Pullyu because the friend knows that Dolittle wants to go in search of the Great Pink Sea Snail and needs to buy a boat for the journey. No, that’s not a convoluted plot for a children’s movie at all.

All of these plot machinations are possible because Dolittle has the ability to understand all kinds of animals, thanks to help of a parrot named Miss Polynesia (or something to that effect), who is almost 200 years old and speaks about 2000 animal languages. We learn about this from an oddly choreographed number to "Talk to the Animals" (which beat out "The Look of Love" from Casino Royale and "The Bare Necessities" from The Jungle Book for the Best Song Oscar—appalling). And, throughout the film, Harrison has to interact with all kinds of animals in order to translate for the rest of us. It must have been quite a feat to train and keep an eye on all of the various creatures who appear throughout the film.

Does this sound silly and/or muddled to anyone else? I recall as a child having a Doctor Dolittle coloring book with some of the more familiar scenes in it, such as the seal being garbed in a woman's hat with veil so that she could ride a coach to Bristol and be thrown into the sea. (That act gets Dolittle sentenced to an insane asylum for his claims that he can talk to animals.) And I'm sure that I saw the movie when I was younger as well, but I could barely stand to watch this time.

As an aside, I do think this movie is interesting as one of the earliest defenses of animal protection and animal rights. Dolittle explains (in song, no less) why he is a vegetarian (something like "one shouldn't eat his friends"). And he stands opposed to fox hunting, an English tradition that has been the subject of a great deal of controversy over its cruelty to the foxes, which are hunted for their fur. Those sentiments wouldn't be out of place even today. Of course, he does still participate in the training of animals for the circus, so he’s not perfect… and he does have a taste now and them for meat.

There are a couple of other intriguing moments. Richard Attenborough has a small part as Blossom, the head of the circus Dolittle turns to as a money-making venture. His song "I've Never Seen Anything Like It" is quite fun, with all of the circus folks and the animals joining in. And Newley gets to display his trademark vibrato on "After Today," arguably the best song of the score (which, admittedly, isn't saying much). I also particularly enjoyed the appearance of Geoffrey Holder as William Shakespeare X, or "Willie," the leader of Sea Star Island, the floating island Dolittle and his friends travel to in hopes of finding the sea snail. Not only does Holder seem like he's enjoying himself, he's actually quite spectacular looking in an orange wraparound brief-and-robe combo that is accented with shells. That's not a look many men could manage to pull off, but Holder does.

Still, there are far too many false steps in this movie to consider it one of the year's best of 1967 or any other year. The Pushme-Pullyu and the Giant Pink Sea Snail look too fake even to be campy (although they look brilliant compared to the octopus that looks like it stepped out of an Ed Wood film). Most of the music is pretty mundane as well, despite having been penned by Leslie Bricusse. Harrison seems to be having an awful time, and Newley keeps getting saddled with having to ask such odd questions as "What can you hope to get out of a conversation with a goldfish?" Presumably, that dialogue was meant to be funny in 1967, but I doubt it worked. Don't even get me started on the pacing of this film, as it takes almost two-and-a-half hours to unspool. I can't imagine many children sitting still for that long unless a lot more action takes place.

I would like to give credit to the production design team for the look of Dolittle’s home office and to the ship on which he and his friends sail in search of the Giant Pink Sea Snail. They’re marvelously done, and the various props really do make them seem like they belong in the Victorian era.

Yes, I've seen the Eddie Murphy remake and at least one of its sequels, but I don't think it's truly a remake so much as a reimagining. The film with Murphy doesn't borrow anything from this film except for Dolittle's ability to talk to and understand animals, and that was probably a good thing.

Oscar Wins: Best Special Effects and Best Song ("Talk to the Animals")

Other Oscar Nominations: Best Picture, Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Original Music Score, Best Original Song Score or Adaptation Score, and Best Sound