Varsity Show (1937)

 

Varsity Show is an Oscar nominee thanks to just one musical number that lasts about ten minutes. Its finale was nominated for Best Dance Direction, a category honoring choreographers that lasted for just three years (1935-1937). Of course, the finale is spectacular given that it was choreographed by the legendary Busby Berkeley. To get to the film’s end, though, you have to go through a very tepid narrative that keeps throwing somewhat ridiculous obstacles in the path of a group of students who just want to have a great annual show for the Quadrangle Club at Winfield College. The show they’ve been working on is very old-fashioned and dull, thanks to their faculty director, Professor Biddle (Walter Catlett, hamming it up to the film’s detriment). He doesn’t want any contemporary (i.e., swing) music in the show, so the students turn to a famous alumnus, Chuck Daly (Dick Powell, much the same as he was in almost every other film). Daly, now a theatrical producer, has just had one of his shows flop miserably in New York, and his friend/manager (Ted Healy, providing a few strong comic moments) convinces him to return to campus for a promised thousand dollar payday. Let the complications begin. First, naturally, they need to get rid of Biddle so that Chuck can take over direction of the show. Healy’s William Williams contracts mumps from a night with a coed, and he agrees to spread the mumps to Biddle. He shows up at the professor’s home, asking, “Can’t we kiss and make up?” Biddle’s reply is “I’ll make up. That’s as far as I’ll go.” They enter the home for a cup of tea, and we next see them in side-by-side beds. It seems like Biddle (and Williams) will go farther after all. The college then schedules a bunch of exams with the condition that any students who don’t pass cannot participate in the show. So everyone has to study hard in order to stay in the show. And so it goes… Even when the students get the bright idea to take over a theater in New York in order to make a hit for Chuck—perhaps the silliest plot turn of them all—the obstacles keep coming. The theater owner keeps going up the city’s and state’s hierarchy to get the students thrown out, but two waves of police officers and even the National Guard wind up being more interested in watching the rehearsal than in stopping the show. There are a couple of romances, just as you would expect in a musical from this time period, but they truly aren’t essential to the plot or even depicted organically. Chuck falls in love with Babs (Priscilla Lane), a college senior with a lovely singing voice, and even Williams gets a romance with a glasses-wearing female nerd, Cuddles (Mabel Todd, matching the hamminess of Healy as much as she can). Varsity Show features Sterling Holloway, later to be famous as the voice of Winnie the Pooh, in a supporting role, but he and the other players really don't add very much to the film. Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians provide lovely musical accompaniment to the various numbers throughout the movie, particularly shining in the finale. And about that finale? It’s ten minutes of marching band music, baton twirlers, synchronized dancing, and performers spelling out the insignia of various famous colleges, among them Yale and the University of Southern California (one of my alma maters). The finale also includes one of two performances by the singing-and-dancing duo of Buck and Bubbles. They are great, but then you realize that their numbers are shot so that they could be excised for showings in Southern theaters, which often did not permit scenes with talented African American performers except in servile roles. How sad that some moviegoers were not able to see these numbers, truly some of the best parts of the film overall. You can just watch the finale below, and you’ll truly see the highlight of Varsity Show.

Oscar Nomination: Best Dance Direction

RoboCop (1987)

 

RoboCop has a lot of villains. Set in a future dystopian Detroit, the film reveals a city filled with criminals and crime, a dangerous and deadly place to be a police officer. On his first day in a new precinct, Murphy (Peter Weller) gets brutally killed by a gang of criminals led by Kurtwood Smith’s Clarence Boddicker. (Yes, the guy who played the father on That 70s Show is a criminal mastermind/crime boss.) Murphy’s body is modified by OCP, a corporation that has taken control of the police department, and he becomes the cyborg RoboCop. He proves to be remarkably effective at police work, stopping a liquor store robbery, an attempted rape, and a tense hostage situation involving a political loser. Given that he’s a cyborg whose body is mostly metal and machine, he also can’t be easily hurt or killed either; he just needs to recharge now and then. During one of those recharging sessions, he has a series of flashbacks; his makers apparently didn’t erase everything. He remembers his wife and son, and more importantly, he remembers his murder. That sends him off on a quest to capture Boddicker and his accomplices, one of whom is played by Ray Wise before the TV shows Twin Peaks and Fresh Off the Boat, another of whom is played by Paul McCrane after the movie Fame but before the TV show E.R. The film actually includes quite a few reliable actors, including Nancy Allen as Murphy’s partner who witnesses his murder and tries to connect to him personally after he becomes RoboCop and Ronny Cox as the OCP executive whose failure to create a mechanical cop leads to the RoboCop program’s success, a move that makes him incredibly bitter and prone to a desire for revenge. In other words, he’s another villain. With all of its emphasis on crime, RoboCop is a very, very violent movie at times, and we aren’t spared from watching the grisly demise of several characters. Murphy’s death, for instance, is quite gruesome. It’s little wonder that the movie initially received an X rating due to its violent content; what we have now is the “softer” version, and it’s still quite shocking. The film is also much campier than I remembered from the last time I saw it decades ago. Weller’s deadpan reading of the line “Dead or alive, you’re coming with me!” alone is laugh-inducing each time he states it. The director, Paul Verhoeven, isn’t known for his subtle touch; his later films include Basic Instinct, Showgirls, and Starship Troopers, none of them exactly masterpieces of keeping their moments from being laughable. On a side note, RoboCop shares with Starship Troopers the use of commercials that are sometimes funnier or more interesting than the rest of the movie. The one for a vehicle called the 6000 SUX is especially hilarious. I will admit that it’s a bit surprising that the film wasn’t nominated for Best Visual Effects, especially in a year with only two nominees in the category: Innerspace and Predator. (You might still be surprised to learn that Predator was NOT the winner.) If there’s a “deeper” message to RoboCop, it might be the warning against corporations taking control over police departments, the military, hospitals, etc. Of course, we haven’t heeded that warning at all, given how much those functions have become increasingly privatized since 1987. You’d think after watching OCP’s first attempt at a fully mechanized robot cop (Cox’s invention), we’d know better. Watching the ED-209 malfunction and kill a OCP executive is what actually provides the opportunity for Miguel Ferrer’s Morton at OCP to create RoboCop (and become a higher-ranking executive and turn into yet another villain and be targeted by his former boss and…). Maybe it’s also trying to suggest that no matter how mechanized or mechanical we might become, it’s our humanity or whatever is left of it that might save us. I doubt many viewers gave the film’s narrative a great deal of deep thought; they just enjoyed the fun of watching Weller as the former cop who can’t be stopped now that he’s a cyborg. It is a shame that the actor’s face and those hypnotic eyes are covered up for most of the film.

Oscar Win: Special Achievement Award for Sound Effects Editing

Other Nominations: Best Film Editing and Best Sound

U-571 (2000)

 

The first ten minutes of U-571 are gripping and claustrophobic as we watch German sailors aboard a submarine enduring an attack of depth charges from a British destroyer. Their submarine gets disabled, and they are unable to defend themselves. It’s quite tense watching this opening sequence; it’s vaguely reminiscent of the great German film Das Boot from 1981. Unfortunately, after those initial moments, the plot starts to become rather preposterous. The Americans intercept the German sub’s distress signal and plan to get to the disabled sub before the Germans do. The goal is to capture an enigma code machine so that they can translate the messages being sent by the Germans. The plan involves using a submarine that’s been disguised to look more like a German one, including a Nazi emblem, and the sailors will also disguise themselves as Germans, putting on black leather jackets and carrying German guns. However, just as they capture the sub (far too easily, by the way) and get the German prisoners transferred to the American submarine and find the enigma machine (which looks very much like a plain typewriter, frankly), a German torpedo destroys the American sub. So the remaining American survivors (and one German prisoner, who you just know is going to try to sabotage their escape attempts) plan to use the disabled German sub to escape. They get into a torpedo fight with the resupply submarine that destroyed their American sub, and of course, in traditional Hollywood fashion, the German torpedoes miss (one of them just scrapes the hull), but the Americans destroy the German sub even though the firing mechanisms for torpedos on the disable sub were… well, disabled. The villains always are such bad shots in the movies made in America. As the Americans try to get the submarine to England, a German destroyer shows up and they have to dive to unsafe levels in order to avoid the potential danger from multiple depth charges. You should know how this ends, given that it’s an American movie about American sailors facing the Germans in World War II, and it’s already proven itself to be unrealistic. Both of the Oscar nominations for U-571 were for its sound achievements, and it really is a movie indebted to quality sound. The moments of fearful silence punctuated by the explosions of depth charges (punctuated by the visuals of those explosions) only enhance the power of those moments. Overall, the film is engrossing even though it stretches one’s disbelief. The plot also doesn’t help the actors much, though, putting them into situations whose resolutions are easy to anticipate. Matthew McConaghy plays Lt. Tyler, who at the film’s start is still upset over being denied command of his own submarine by his superior, played by Bill Paxton, because Lt. Commander Dahlgren doesn’t think Tyler is ready to risk the lives of the sailors he commands even if he has to do so for the greater good of the American effort during the war. You know what that means? Yes, he’ll have to take command of the submarine and he’ll have to quiet the resistance to his command and he’ll be awesome at commanding the submarine because he’s willing to risk the lives of the men under his command. If the rest of the movie were as compelling as the first ten minutes, which manage to avoid typical cliches of movies about submarines and war, U-571 would be a better film.

Oscar Win: Best Sound Editing

Other Nomination: Best Sound

Ad Astra (2019)

 

Visually, Ad Astra is quite a stunning film. It has been beautifully shot; the cinematography is superb. The film has been art directed to hell and back again, so the production design is also topnotch. However, watching Ad Astra is an exercise in tedium. I fell asleep while watching it in a theater, and I’ve fallen asleep both times I’ve watched it at home. It’s just a slow, boring movie. Maybe it’s time to stop making space films for a while, especially after this and First Man. Perhaps we just need a break until someone comes up with something more interesting to say about space travel? The plot of Ad Astra (Latin for “to the stars”) is rather straightforward. Major Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) has been asked to contact his father, the legendary astronaut H. Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones) about whether his Lima Project near Neptune has been causing some sort of bizarre power surges. This is, naturally, a mission with a lot of emotional resonance for Pitt’s younger McBride because his dad always was more excited about journeying into space rather than staying with his family. Yes, he’s got “daddy issues” because, of course, his father abandoned the family when Roy was a kid, and a lot of the film features Pitt’s voice-over discussing his feelings about his father and about his own fears over repeating his father’s patterns of behavior. Roy has to go to Mars to send a message to his father since that’s the closest communications system to Neptune—and why wouldn’t it be? The film does have a few moments of intense action that interrupt the boredom. When Roy lands on the moon to catch a transport to Mars, he and Col. Pruitt (Donald Sutherland), an old friend of his father’s, get attacked by some sort of weird space pirates who kill their military escorts. The trip to Mars gets interrupted by a distress signal from a Norwegian ship, where Roy and the captain face attacks from some murderous baboons. No, you read that right: murderous baboons. However, these kinds of moments are too rare and too brief. McBride spends an extended period of time on Mars trying to make contact with this father and learning that his father killed everyone on board his ship when they wanted to return to Earth rather than follow the elder McBride’s deranged ideas about his mission. The director of the facility on Mars, Helen Lantos (Ruth Negga), helps him to get onto the ship that’s going to try to stop his father. Sadly, the three other astronauts die within minutes of his arrival on board—not through him killing them, no. They die from a series of rather stupid mishaps. People disappear in this movie very quickly. Part of the problem with Ad Astra is that it takes remarkably talented performers like Sutherland and Negga and even Jones and relegates them to minor roles (almost cameos at times) with only a limited amount of screen time. Instead, we get a lot of time listening to Roy’s inner thoughts. While Pitt is always a welcome presence to gaze upon, his character is well known for his ability to control his emotions and never get upset. That’s tough to watch for almost two hours, no matter how high the quality of the cinematography or art direction or visual effects.

Oscar Nomination: Best Achievement in Sound Mixing

Romancing the Stone (1984)

 

Romancing the Stone is a great hybrid of romantic comedy and action-adventure film. It’s a sexy film with lots of gunfire, some physical comedy, and even a few crocodiles. It also marked the first movie pairing of Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas (with Danny DeVito along for the ride, as usual). They would later appear together in The Jewel of the Nile and The War of the Roses, but Romancing the Stone set a template for their future film interactions. They don’t like or even trust each other at first, but they begin to fall in love, and the film is as much about their relationship as it is the outline of the major plot. Turner plays Joan Wilder, a romance novelist living a pretty dull life with her cat. She’s not having any actual adventures; she just writes about them. Douglas is an actual adventurer, the perfectly named Jack Dalton, who smuggles exotic birds; he’s making his way through the jungle, one small town or village at a time. When Joan’s sister is kidnapped and taken to Colombia by the hapless brothers Ira (Zack Norman) and Ralph (DeVito), she crosses paths with Jack and attempts to enlist his help in rescuing her sister. She has to promise to pay him what she has left in traveler’s cheques once they’re both stranded in the jungle. Throughout the film, there’s a clear example of a McGuffin (one of Hitchcock’s favorite devices) in this treasure map to the location of a large emerald called El Corazon (“The Heart”), but really what matters here is the interaction between Turner and Douglas. It’s somewhat incidental that the map came from her murdered brother-in-law, and now everyone, including another drug lord named Col. Zolo, keeps looking for Turner because she’s in possession of it. Turner is very sexy here, and she becomes looser as the movie progresses and her inhibitions around Douglas’s Jack lower. She’s so delightful when she finds one of her fans in a small village, a local drug lord named Juan who helps them escape capture. Douglas, by comparison, was always a bit of a lech in his movies during this period. A look at his facial expressions seems to tell you his intentions with Joan. And that raises one of the central concerns of the film’s narrative: Does he love her, or is he just an opportunist? Has he started to have feelings for her, or does he just want to find the treasure of El Corazon himself? Romancing the Stone likes to tease viewers with the nature of their relationship, and it’s a delight to watch them bicker ruthlessly and then enjoy each other’s company.

Oscar Nomination: Best Film Editing

Jurassic Park (1993)

The most important factor in making Jurassic Park a huge success is how realistically the dinosaurs appear to be. If it weren’t for Steven Spielberg and the rest of the film’s crew using the best of computer-generated imagery, the film wouldn’t be as powerful as it is. Sure, we want to see imperiled humans—and if there’s a little bit of romance and perhaps some competing ideas for how to survive, so much the better—but if those humans are running from dinosaurs that look fake, then we’re going to be less invested in their outcome. And Jurassic Park didn’t win the Oscar for Best Visual Effects for nothing. Was it even a contest against Cliffhanger? Maybe The Nightmare Before Christmas had a shot, but it should have had the opportunity to be named Best Animated Feature, a category the Academy Awards wouldn’t create for another eight years, but that’s getting off topic. Jurassic Park is rather canny in its revealing of the first onscreen dinosaur, a brachiosaurus, about twenty minutes into the action. From that moment on, our attention is most enraptured when we get to see the dinosaurs in action, no matter the human cost involved. The plot is relatively simple, actually. Richard Attenborough’s John Hammond has populated a remote island near Costa Rica with dinosaurs. He and a team of scientists have extracted dinosaur DNA from insects preserved in amber and hatched a lot of dangerous beasts (and a few gentle ones). However, he has to demonstrate to the park’s investors that the island will be a safe location for a sort of amusement park. Hammond enlists the aid of Sam Neill’s Dr. Alan Grant, a paleontologist, and Dr. Ellie Sattler, a paleobotanist, to help him support his vision. The investors’ attorney brings along Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum being his most frustratingly Goldblum-ian), a mathematician in love with chaos theory. They’re amazed by what they see but also fearful of what could happen when humans and dinosaurs start to encounter each other. It doesn’t take long for a tour of the park, now including Hammond’s two grandchildren along for the ride, to go badly awry. The park’s chief computer programmer, Dennis (Wayne Knight, just as wonderfully unctuous here as he was Seinfeld), plans to steal some DNA samples for one of Hammond’s rivals, and he sabotages the security systems, and then the fun begins. The attack by the Tyrannosaurus rex is justifiably famous, a masterpiece of editing that places the viewer in a series of uncomfortable positions, sometimes as witness, sometimes as victim, sometimes as attacker. I’ve used it multiple times in my film studies classes. However, as scary as the T-rex is, the velociraptors are truly the stars of this first film of what became a hugely successful franchise. The raptors are clever and dangerous, and their attacks are relentless. They pop up at the most surprising of times, and it’s a visual delight to see them square off against the T-rex at the film’s end. Jurassic Park does feature a couple of moments of gentle sweetness. Neill’s Grant winds up caring for the children as they make their way back to the safety of headquarters even though he didn’t much like children at the film’s beginning. Yet those kinds of moments are overshadowed by ones like the scene where three raptors track down the children in the kitchen of the visitor center. Jurassic Park was Spielberg’s “other” film from 1993, his more famous artistic achievement being the Best Picture winner Schindler’s List. Pairing the two films does allow us to see the range of his talents, from well-crafted popular entertainment to serious-minded and thoughtful dramas.

Oscar Wins: Best Sound, Best Sound Effects Editing, and Best Visual Effects 

Casino Royale (1967)

 

The film version of Casino Royale from 1967 is most definitely not the serious-minded film with Daniel Craig from 2006. This adaptation is much sillier, a goofy parody of the four Bond films (with Sean Connery) that had already appeared during the 1960s. Sir James Bond (played with his usual debonair air by David Niven) has retired from service as 007, but spies from various countries—Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and France—have been disappearing, so he’s pressed back into service. What follows is a series of explosions, killings, quirky gadgets, and the usual barrage of other spy movie stereotypes, just what you might expect in a Bond film. However, Casino Royale also features some trippy psychedelic visuals and cameos by such movie luminaries as George Raft, Peter O’Toole, and Jean Paul Belmondo. Even a young and already stunning Jacqueline Bissett (billed as “Jacky Bissett”) gets a brief scene where she seduces one of the several James Bonds the film includes. Casino Royale also has extended performances from some great stars. My favorite performance is by Deborah Kerr, who plays M’s widow with the thickest of Scottish brogues and lots of homicidal daughters. Her part of the story involves an attempt to kill Bond after a night of drinking and haggis-eating and dancing and physical competition—pretty strange stuff overall—and that’s even before the day-after-the-funeral grouse hunt. In fact, many of the film’s narrative elements make no sense other than as a way to lampoon the more serious Bond films. For example, when Niven takes over Britain’s spy agency, he thinks they need to find a Bond who can resist women as a way to counteract the image being perpetuated by the “other” Bond films – well, actually, the weakness for sexy women seems to be linked to the disappearance of the spies. This moment does give a lot of beautiful women the opportunity to earn the title of “Bond girl” and for Terence Cooper to kiss a lot of them. Arguably, the most famous Bond girl of them all, Ursula Andress of Dr. No fame, gets recruited by Niven’s Sir James to get the author of a book on how to play baccarat, Evelyn Tremble (Peter Sellers) to help defeat Orson Welles’ Le Chiffre at the title casino. Welles’ character, you see, is funding SMERSH, the group responsible for kidnapping all of the spies from around the world. He’s also, inexplicably, performing magic tricks at the baccarat table, much to the amazement of the assembled crowd. Andress and Sellers seem to be having the most fun among the actors, Andress winking at her iconic status here as a rich and extravagantly wardrobed double agent who’s always a step ahead of the men she encounters and Sellers getting a couple of moments to wear costumes much like his famed character Inspector Clouseau from the Pink Panther movies. The film does add a nice touch in its inclusion of a younger actors to link characters to the more famous Bond franchise. Miss Moneypenny’s daughter (Barbara Bouchet) is now the new Moneypenny, and Sir James recruits his daughter with Mata Hari, Mata Hari (Joanna Pettet), to help him infiltrate the German school that trains female spies. Most important to the plot, though, is Woody Allen as Sir James’ nephew Jimmy. He only has a few minutes on screen, but his role is integral to tidying up as best it can the convoluted and scattered threads of the plot. By the time the American cavalry—on horseback—shows up, followed by a group of dancing Native Americans, a viewer might be exhausted from having watched an abduction by a spaceship and a gang of gun-toting women in minidresses. The visual overload is quite astonishing. Casino Royale could have easily been nominated for its costume design, which is gloriously mod, or its production design, which is spectacular, but it had to settle for just one nomination: Best Original Song for “The Look of Love,” which plays as the romantic theme when Sellers and Ursula Andress are seducing each other. (Well, to be fair, she’s doing more of the work.) It’s sung in the film by one of the greatest singers of all time, Dusty Springfield, and its inclusion is a true highlight. By the way, the instrumental theme, written by Burt Bacharach and performed by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, is also amazing.

Oscar Nomination: Best Original Song (“The Look of Love”)