The Deep (1977)

 

The Deep stars Nick Nolte and Jacqueline Bisset as a pair of vacationing divers searching for treasure in Bermuda. Both Nolte and Bisset as David and Gail, respectively, are at the peak of their physical attractiveness in this film, and she, in particular, is the focus of a lot of the camera’s gaze, particularly when she emerges from the sea in a wet t-shirt, a sequence that was the subject of a lot of attention upon the film’s release. They’re mostly looking for jewels and other gold objects among the ruins of the Goliath, but it isn’t until they find an ampule of morphine that everyone else suddenly becomes interested in their dives. Louis Gossett Jr., sporting some of the largest butterfly-collared shirts in filmdom, wants them to locate the other 9,800 or so ampules of morphine reportedly on board the shipwreck, and he’s not above having his henchmen take Gail hostage and enact a strange voodoo-ish ritual involving the smearing of blood over her torso with a chicken foot in order to persuade the pair to help him find the drugs. It’s a strange moment tine the film, particularly the way it is intercut with comparatively calm moments with Nolte. In supporting roles, you have Robert Shaw, not as crusty here as he was in Jaws, as the local expert on diving and what you might find in wreckage, and Eli Wallach as a survivor of the Goliath’s shipwreck. Shaw keeps calling Nolte and Gail “Boy” and Gail “Girl,” and Wallach’s character is Adam Coffin, a pretty clear homage to Peter Coffin from Moby-Dick, so every character seems to need some little quirk to help you remember them better. Nick and Gail agree to help recover the morphine with the help of a giant suction hose, but then the hose sucks up a grenade and the explosion almost knocks the ship off the cliff on which it is precariously located, making the mission even more dangerous. Besides, there are sharks and a particularly nasty moray eel who tries to eat everything that comes within its path and who keeps reappearing at the most inopportune times. Most heterosexual male viewers will undoubtedly recall the wet t-shirt without also remembering the horrific scene where Bisset is strip searched by a group of thugs. It’s a shameful moment clearly designed to objectify Bisset even more than she already has been, and it serves no useful purpose to the overall trajectory of the plot. However, more worthy of attention is the beautiful underwater cinematography and the clarity of the images that we see – and a lot of the movie does take place underwater, after all. The Deep is shot very well and quite effectively, but only the film’s sound achievements were acknowledged by the Academy.

Oscar Nomination: Best Sound

Billy Rose's Jumbo (1962)

 

Billy Rose’s Jumbo doesn’t particularly break any new ground as a movie about a poor, small circus, but the depictions of everyday life among the circus performers and the performances themselves are stunningly shot and worth the couple of hours the story takes to unspool. “Pop” Wonder (Jimmy Durante, playing a usual Durante role) gambles away every day’s profits, leaving his daughter Kitty (a luminous Doris Day) to try keeping the circus afloat by asking for extensions from the many, many creditors the Wonder Circus has accumulated. Jumbo, an entertaining elephant, is the star attraction of the circus, and he’s wanted (very badly) by a rival circus. Enter Stephen Boyd, an enigmatic high wire acrobat who turns out to be the son of the owners of that rival circus. While he’s wooing Kitty (and having his singing voice dubbed in doing so), he’s also paying off the Wonder Circus’s rapidly mounting debts and acquiring larger and larger shares of its ownership. That’s really about it for the main plot, honestly, so the thinness of the story leaves generous amounts of time for watching the circus acts themselves. One of the centerpieces I especially enjoyed is a stunning number involving women dressed as butterflies. Unfortunately, a storm interrupts their part of the show, and the circus has to spend some time recovering and rebuilding from all the damage. The other highlight of the movie are all the lovely songs by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, most of which have nothing to do with the circus. Still, it’s hard to argue when you have Doris Day singing “My Romance” and “Little Girl Blue” and “This Can’t Be Love.” There’s even an astounding nine-minute musical number at the end entitled “Sawdust and Spangles and Dreams,” a sort of circus fantasia, if you will. Day, of course, sings beautifully, but the filmmakers do surround her in pink an awful lot. A less “girly” color palette would have suited her better. One of the other pleasures of the film is watching the great Martha Raye mugging her way through one of the broadest performances of her career – and that’s saying a lot. She plays a circus performer who’s in love with Pop Wonder, and watching her get shot out of a cannon is a sequence you won’t soon forget.

Oscar Nomination: Best Scoring of Music, Adaptation or Treatment

Best Cartoon Short Subject of 1936

 

The Country Cousin begins with the arrival of Abner Countrymouse in the city. He’s been invited via telegram by his cousin, Monty Citymouse, to enjoy the more refined metropolitan life. The film features no dialogue, just sounds, which is central to the plot since sounds could awaken the house cat. Visually, the two mice look very much alike; only their clothes differentiate them physically. However, Abner is quite a bumpkin. His manners are less refined, and he is seemingly incapable of being quiet. After Morty rejects the cheese from a mousetrap that Abner triggers, they begin dining on a table loaded with fine food. Morty has to shush Abner repeatedly, but once the country mouse drinks a glass full of champagne in order to cool his mouth from the taste of hot mustard, there’s little hope that he won’t wake up the cat eventually. Abner gets the hiccups, he tries to shush the radiator when it lets off some steam, and he even performs the mirror routine with his reflection in a purple gelatin, a very clever riff on Chico Marx’s routine. While he is still drunk, Abner kicks the sleeping cat, prompting a chase that leads him into an electrical socket, down a rain gutter, and into a can outside the house. He narrowly escapes people, trains, cars, roller skaters, various threats, and then decides to return to Podunk, which is forty miles away from the city. This short, one of the Silly Symphonies produced by Walt Disney, cleverly uses a series of visual gags and demonstrates the differences between Morty and Abner in their physical reactions. Abner obviously doesn’t really belong in a place like the city, and Morty’s recurring shushes only reinforce how out of place the country mouse is.

Watching The Old Mill Pond is quite an unnerving experience. It’s pretty clear early on that what is ostensibly about a show put on by frogs in the pond of the title is really a blackface revue. A frog that is meant to look and act like Cab Calloway serves as sort of an emcee for a variety show, but rather than being an homage or tribute, it does seem to be mocking the real-life people upon which some of these characters are based. Was having them portrayed as frogs some kind of bizarre blackface that was common at the time? Even if it were, would it have been flattering to the black artists depicted in this short cartoon? In addition to Cab Calloway and his orchestra, we see a frog who’s apparently meant to be Fats Waller and another group of frogs meant to be the Mills Brothers. Some frog diva (Ethel Waters? Really?) with backup dancers sings or performs something called “Jungle Rhythm,” and allegedly the representations include Bill “Bojangles” Robison and Stephin Fetchit too. The short begins and ends with a calm rendition of “Down by the Old Mill Stream,” something of a stark contrast to the raucous show going on behind the reeds of the pond. The Old Mill Pond is one of the Happy Harmonies shorts, meant to serve as competition to Disney’s Silly Symphonies, but it lost the Oscar to a Disney short this year and perhaps deservedly so.

Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor was the first color short in the Popeye series, and it includes a lot of the elements familiar to fans of Popeye cartoons. The encounter in the title occurs when Sinbad (Bluto?) sees Olive Oyl and sends one of his collection of beasts, a giant Roc, to wreck Popeye’s ship and capture Olive. There’s an undercurrent of competition between the two sailors from the start of the film, as Popeye and Sinbad both sing about how great they are. Popeye has to rescue Olive, who has been forced to dance for Sinbad, and the expected fight between the two men ensues. I, personally, have always found it hard to believe that Olive is so appealing that every man wants her. The trademarks are all here: Popeye’s mumbling and grammatically inaccurate speech (“I wants me girl”), his eating of a can of spinach to gain strength to defeat an opponent, and his inevitable victory. The Fleisher Studios cartoons did not have the same sharpness of detail that the Disney films of the era did. However, even with the muted palette of colors typical of the studio’s output, this short’s backgrounds are still quite beautiful. The story is intriguing for its unique details, too, such as the menagerie of beasts that Sinbad has accumulated: two-headed monsters, dragons, lions, serpents, and the Roc. These beasts fear him, but they obey his commands, leading to an interesting demise for the Roc. The bird takes Popeye to a volcanic island, only to be cooked like a turkey by the crafty Popeye. One of the highlights of a Popeye cartoon is the different ways that the filmmakers devised for him to defeat Bluto (or, in this case, Bluto-as-Sinbad). Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor introduces the twister punch, which involves Popeye twisting his own arm so that when he makes contact with Sinbad’s body, his opponent twists as well. It’s a clever addition to the canon, and it adds to the overall fun of this cartoon. Sadly, this was the only Popeye cartoon to be nominated for an Academy Award despite a lengthy and influential output.

Oscar Winner: The Country Cousin (Walt Disney was on a very hot streak back then.)

My Choice: Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor. Popeye is/was a cultural icon, and this was one of the best of the many cartoons featuring him. Plus, it’s more ambitious than its competitors.

Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927-28)

 

It’s not necessarily easy to determine if Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness is a documentary or not. It’s also not particularly easy to determine which, if any, of the scenes were staged or, more likely, reconstructed. It’s supposed to be a depiction of life in the jungles of what was then called Siam (not Thailand), but frankly, there are so many questions that arise from watching the film, that’s it’s not (again) easy to decide how much to believe as being true or accurate. It was filmed on location, so it does offer us a view into what life was like for residents of the northern region of Thailand – and perhaps, more importantly, how dangerous life was for them.

The film mostly follows one family’s adventures over the course of about a year. A man named Kru tries to make a home in the jungle with his wife (Chantui) and his children, including his eldest child, a boy named Nah. Most of the story revolves around them and their encounters with the wild animals of the jungle. In fact, the animals are listed as characters in the film (“Wild Beasts”) as is “The Jungle” itself. Even the other people in the film are noted as “Natives of the Wild.” This really isn’t a character-driven narrative. It’s an action-adventure-documentary-ish. A title card during the opening sequence of the film notes that the jungle always “wins,” and after watching the range of dangers that Kru’s family faces, it’s hard not to accept that judgment.

The family tries to build a house on stilts to offer some protection, and they start farming rice and collecting a veritable ark-load of animals around them. One of the highlights of the film is the footage of the various animals of the region. At some point during the movie, we witness cats and kittens, goats, a wolf, a dog and its pups, oxen, pigs, a little bear, a porcupine, a mongoose, an anteater (although it looks a lot more like a pangolin to me), a baby anteater, and so many others. I’ll get to the dangerous animals soon since they are central to the narrative. Of all of these pets, though, only the pups are kept inside the house in order to protect them from tigers, but the rest of the animals seem fated to have danger be a constant part of their existence.

Oh, and then there’s Bimbo, a white monkey who seems to be as much a part of the family as anyone else. Bimbo even gets his own dialog cards! It’s as if the movie really wants us to know what Bimbo is thinking as he steals the blanket from the baby’s crib or when he’s running for his life from a leopard or when he’s trying to hold on as an elephant destroys the family home with him inside. It’s tough being a monkey, obviously, and the film features Bimbo a bit more than it does Nah, the first-born son of Kru and Chantui. And, yes, he’s listed in the cast as well.

One of the first dangers that Kru and his family must face is a leopard that has gotten into the pen holding the goats. When it returns for a second meal, Kru traps it inside the pen and shoots it. Of course, that’s not the last leopard they will likely face, so Kru asks for help from the chief of the closest village. Thirty men set traps and pitfalls and snares and nets to catch leopards. They succeed in catching one leopard, but they also catch a tiger in a net and kill it as well. In fact, a lot of animals get killed onscreen throughout this film. It’s pretty deadly stuff, and it’s not easy to watch. And, as you might suspect, just because you kill one tiger or one leopard doesn’t mean that you’re done with being stalked by others. You might wind up escaping from yet another one by clambering into a boat and paddling away as quickly as possible, as Kru and his family have to do at one point later in the film.

Possibly the biggest danger emerges when it’s time for the harvest. The title animal, a “chang” or elephant, is leaving evidence of the return of a large herd to the area of the jungle where Kru lives and close to where the village is located. The villagers are reluctant to believe that the so-called Great Herd has returned after so many years, even after a baby elephant is caught in one of the pitfalls and proves very heavy to pull out of the pit. It’s also not easy to train a baby elephant or feed it. When its mother completely demolishes Kru’s home, he and his family return to the village to live and try to warn the rest of the impending arrival of the herd. Once the herd shows up and demolishes everything in sight, the villagers get the point and start setting a trap.

What a doozy of a trap it is, too. It features very high walls and an entrance designed to funnel the elephants into a central pen area. The villagers converge on the elephants with the men disguised as trees – which must have been very disconcerting for the elephants – and set fires and drive the large animals into the pen. Then, in a remarkably colonialist gesture, they force the elephants to work for them. You might suspect that this subjugation of the elephants won’t last, but by the end of the film, there’s no indication that it isn’t working.

By the time Kru and his family return to the jungle and build another house, you start to wonder if it’s truly worth all of the struggle. I mean, there are still leopards and tigers and elephants (oh my!) out there, just waiting for their chance to show up and mess with the lives of these humans who have invaded their space. Maybe it’s true, as the film says, that the jungle is unconquerable. It’s certainly tough to tame, and there’s always a new threat on the horizon. Why bother? The film doesn’t provide an answer to that question, though.

The film was directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, who would later collaborate on the 1933 version of King Kong. It’s only Oscar nomination came in that “Best Picture” category that lasted on the first year of the awards: Unique and Artistic Production. Perhaps it was Cooper and Schoedsack’s work with Bimbo on this film – he does get his own closeups, after all – that convinced them to make a movie about a giant ape a few years later.

Oscar Nomination: Unique and Artistic Production

Fellini Satyricon (1970)

I don’t know how exactly to describe Fellini Satyricon. It’s a visually stunning film that amazes a viewer with its unusual style, but it’s also very narratively confusing, given its episodic nature of storytelling. It’s enigmatic almost to the point at times of being impenetrable because of its very fragmentary structure that leaves out huge gaps of time and information between the vignettes that depict the journeys or adventures or what-you-will of two friends, who I assume are also former lovers. Encolpius is played by British actor Martin Potter; he’s the blond one. Ascyltus is played by Hiram Keller, an American actor with dark hair. I realize that’s a weak way to differentiate the performers and their roles, but it actually helped me sometimes. It’s quite the series of tales that we watch the two young men experience, and it’s also quite a gay-oriented story. Well, I guess the more appropriate word might be “queer.” There are so many almost-naked men and such short tunics in this movie and so much same-sex activity (implied and somewhat depicted) that it’s no wonder the great film critic and historical Parker Tyler called it “the most profoundly homosexual movie in all history.” The film starts with Encolpius and Ascyltus fighting over a young boy named Giton, who, frankly, isn’t appear to be worth all the fuss unless I’m missing something that wasn’t translated into subtitles. There’s some dispute as to whom he “belongs”; I couldn’t quite discern if the boy is a slave or just an object of lust, but Encolpius gets the boy back from an actor who farts a lot on stage. He and the boy spend some time together – I think you know what that means – but then the boy winds up leaving with Ascyltus anyway. Thus begins the wandering narrative of Encolpius. He meets a poet named Eumolpus, who takes him to a weird party with odd food and strange rituals and bad poetry. I was definitely not hungry after watching this sequence. Encolpius is later taken on a slave ship and married to a new master, who likes to wrestle his newly acquired slaves. The allegedly cute boy and Ascyltus are also on the ship, but how they got there is a mystery. Encolpius and Ascyltus next wind up at a house where a couple commits suicide after freeing all of their slaves. They have a three-way with a very beautiful woman, but here’s an example of where the skips in the narrative confound a viewer. We have no idea how they got to this house, nor they escape from it and get to the next place in the story, and the next place is very odd – which I realize is a matter of degrees when it comes to this film. Encolpius and Ascyltus help another man kidnap a demigod, Hermaphroditus, who heals people. Well, sometimes, they heal people. Most of the time they just seem sleepy and weak, which probably accounts for why the demigod dies from sun exposure so soon after being kidnapped. By the way, I didn’t realize that the word hermaphrodite came from the progeny of Hermes and Aphrodite until I watched this film, so I guess I did gain some cultural knowledge along the way. Up next for Encolpius is a battle with a minotaur. It’s some sort of joke the town plays on foreigners? I didn’t get the joke, nor did I understand why he’s forced to have sex with a woman who is rather condescending and nasty to him. He can’t perform with her – who could, really? – but then Eumolpus, whom I had assumed was dead already, shows up and takes him to the Garden of Delights to get his, um, equipment restored. If this sounds like a wild ride of a movie, you should understand that I’m skipping over a lot of moments that are just so bewildering that I am not even sure I understood what happened. I think a rich man basically challenges his heirs to cannibalize his corpse after he dies in order to inherit anything from him; apparently, the flesh was rather, shall we say, chewy? Not a pleasant image, to say the least. Contributing to the confusion is that only about maybe two-thirds of the film’s dialog had been translated into English subtitles in the print that I saw, and my Italian is, well, nonexistent. I think I’ll just remember the look of this film. The art direction, the makeup, the costumes – all are just extraordinary. I doubt the filmmakers were attempting realism of the time period of ancient Rome, so the outcome is just eye-popping. The visuals are just, well, visionary, like nothing you’ve ever seen on the screen before. No one’s movies look like those directed by Federico Fellini, and Fellini Satyricon is one of his most spectacular – in every sense of that word.

Oscar Nomination: Best Director 

Rear Window (1954)

 

Rear Window is an intriguing movie about the ethics of voyeurism, and if there were ever any major film director who was fascinated by voyeurism, it’s this film’s director, the master himself, Alfred Hitchcock. He and his crew chose to place the central character, L.B. “Jeff” Jeffries, in a wheelchair confined to his apartment for six weeks. Jeff, played by Jimmy Stewart with his typical acerbic smile, works for Life magazine so he’s accustomed to looking at people. The camera equipment for seeing other people at various distances lies conveniently around the apartment. Jeff’s favorite tool during his recovery, though, is a telescopic lens he uses to watch his neighbors. He’s nicknamed some of them, such as Miss Lonelyhearts, a woman who can’t seem to catch a break when it comes to dating, and Miss Torso, a model who gets lots of male attention. He also watches – “spies on” doesn’t quite seem to capture exactly what he does – a couple of newlyweds, a composer, a couple who likes to sleep outside on the stoop, almost everyone in the complex. His greatest interest, though, is with a salesman named Thorwald (played by the physically imposing and often glowering Raymond Burr), especially after Thorwald’s wife disappears after he’s seen making three trips out of the apartment in a rainstorm, and then there’s the matter of the large trunk held together by a rope. Jeff calls a detective friend of his, Wendell Corey’s Tom Doyle, but Jeff’s theory/explanation/conspiracy as to what happens just doesn’t make sense to Doyle. He does check on a couple of “leads” that Jeff gives him, but really, he just thinks Jeff is bored and his imagination is getting the best of him. Voyeurism can do that to you, I suppose. Interestingly, Jeff’s girlfriend, a model named Lisa, initially refuses to believe Jeff but later develops a theory of her own. Lisa is played by Grace Kelly, the epitome of style and elegance in the 1950s. When she becomes so intrigued by what might have happened to Mrs. Thorwald, she even sneaks into his apartment to do some searching (snooping?). Jeff, ever the voyeur, has to watch as Thorwald returns home and threatens Lisa. What is a helpless man to do in a situation like this? What is a helpless audience in the same situation to do? When Jeff realizes that Thorwald knows he suspects the salesman is a murderer, he’s pretty much incapable of escaping. I mean, I wouldn’t want to know that Raymond Burr is coming to my house to seek revenge, would you? Rear Window features some great tension at moments like this. It’s certainly one of Hitchcock’s most accomplished thrillers from when he was perhaps at or near his peak of his talents as a filmmaker. Some of his usual filmic touches are on display. We watch as the camera moves through Jeff’s apartment and around the courtyard so that we become voyeurs too, looking at or spying on everyone Jeff watches. Sometimes we look at Jeff, and sometimes we see what he sees. Hitchcock could easily make us feel uncomfortable, particularly when we engage in behavior that we see the characters doing against their better judgment. He also makes his usual cameo, here as a clock repairman in the composer’s apartment. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the performance of Thelma Ritter as Stella, the nurse sent by the insurance company to give Jeff a massage and encourage his healing. She is blunt, direct, and funny; she even speculates about how and where Thorwald might have cut up his wife’s body. The morbid nature of her curiosity doesn’t detract from the moment of great comic relief that she provides. By the end of the film, she and Lisa have joined us in the audience as being implicated in what happens. It’s a clever turn in a clever film.

Oscar Nominations: Best Director (Alfred Hitchcock), Best Screenplay, Best Color Cinematography, and Best Sound Recording

A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1970)

 

The main plot of A Boy Named Charlie Brown involves Charlie’s winning his school’s spelling bee and preparing for the national competition in New York. He only entered the school bee because he was goaded into it by Lucy and her fellow “mean girls” Violet and Patty, who thought it would be funny to see him fail. He wins, though, and sets out on a journey to learn a lot of spelling rules before his big moment in the national spotlight. However, a lot of the movie isn’t really about spelling. Instead, it presents aspects of the Peanuts comic strip with which we are likely very familiar: Lucy yanks a football away from Charlie Brown at the list minute, he fails in his attempt to get a kite to fly and not get “eaten” by a tree, Snoopy goes ice skating both as a hocky player and as a figure skater, Schroeder plays Beethoven on his toy piano, Charlie Brown seeks help at Lucy’s psychiatric booth, etc. A lot of it may be common images to fans of Peanuts and the many TV specials over the years, but the presentation of these moments can sometimes come in moments of pure animated fantasy. For example, Schroeder has an astonishing flight of fancy while playing Beethoven; it’s startling and beautiful and amazingly abstract. During a sequence involving the Star-Spangled Banner, the screen first becomes red and white, then blue and white, then back again. There’s a stained-glass effect during a basketball game, a split screen during a football game – it’s just visually dazzling. My favorite character in the strip, Linus, is his usual stalwart self, Charlie’s best friend and confidante. However, when Lucy gives Linus’s beloved blanket to Charlie Brown for good luck in New York, Linus begins suffering dizzy spells. The dance he performs with his blanket after their reunion is truly joyous. As for the national spelling bee itself, well, Charlie Brown keeps getting works right, primarily because they’re all words about failure and incompetence, concepts which he knows well. However, in the most Charlie Brown-ish of actions, he misspells the word “beagle.” Astonishing, really, that he can’t spell the word that describes his own dog, but he wouldn’t be the Charlie Brown we know if he didn’t fail, would he? There was no category for Animated Feature Film in 1970, so the Oscar nomination that the film received was for its music, including the title song written and “sung” by none other than Rod McKuen. In perhaps an unsurprising result, though, the score for A Boy Named Charlie Brown lost to Let It Be by the Beatles.

Oscar Nomination: Best Original Song Score