The Ten Commandments (1956)

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oscar Win: Best Special Effects

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

Best Picture of 1928-29

 

The Winner: The Broadway Melody

The Other Nominees: Alibi, The Hollywood Revue of 1929, In Old Arizona, and The Patriot

 

My Choice: The Patriot! Just kidding. It’s a lost film, so we have no idea how to judge its quality these days. To be honest, this is a very tough choice because this may be one of the weakest groups of nominees in the history of the Academy Awards. Each of them has flaws, some larger than others, but none of them are particularly ideal. The Broadway Melody has more of a storyline than The Hollywood Revue of 1929, but the fluency with the camera isn’t there yet. Alibi and In Old Arizona keep inserting singing and dancing into the plot just to make use of the newfangled sound equipment filmmakers were dealing with then, but that makes for some very distracting moments. I guess I’ll stick with the Academy’s choice for this year, The Broadway Melody. At least, the production numbers are fun and interesting to watch.

In Old Arizona (1928-29)

 

When you watch an older film like In Old Arizona, which was reportedly the first sound era Western and the first talkie to be filmed primarily in the outdoors, you get to see moments that are clearly not related to the plot and don’t necessarily add anything to our understanding of the characters or their behaviors. Those moments, however, do serve to demonstrate the novelty of that “new” invention for the movies: sound. For example, In Old Arizona features an early sequence where four guys are harmonizing the song “Bicycle Built for Two.” There are no bicycles in the film, and there’s no particular reason for these men to be singing together outdoors, and they don’t seem to show up again in the film, but it’s a way for you to marvel at how advanced the sound quality of the film is.

In Old Arizona features Warner Baxtor as the Cisco Kid, an Oscar-winning role he would play several more times in his career. We first meet the Kid as he robs a stagecoach and takes the Wells Fargo box with all of the money. He’s very apologetic and polite as he’s stealing from the stagecoach, and he doesn’t take anything from the individual passengers that he doesn’t give them something in return. It’s an interesting way to meet a character, and it allows us to see that, despite his penchant for taking stuff that doesn’t belong to him, he’s really a good person. The story upon which the film’s plot was based, apparently, treats the Cisco Kid as more of a villain, but he’s clearly meant to earn out sympathy even from the start of the movie.

Almost no one knows what the Cisco Kid looks like, which is rather tough to believe given how dazzling the costumes are that he wears. There’s a lot of work that’s gone into the stitching and details of the various clothes Baxter gets to don, and no other character in the movie is wearing such elaborate garb. Still, this kind of anonymity allows for some funny moments, such as when he’s at the barber shop and is surrounded by men talking about him and his various crimes and how dangerous he is and how they’re going to capture him. He even meets Sgt. Mickey Dunn (played, rather broadly and somewhat badly, by Edmund Lowe) in person, and they talk about women and haircuts and perfume. They also have an intriguing moment when they pat each other’s guns and talk about how big the “guns” are. The guns, of course, are strapped to belts around their waists, so you know the general area we’re talking about here. It’s very reminiscent of a similar scene in Red River, but it sadly doesn’t last very long.

Once Dunn learns from the blacksmith that he’s been talking to the Cisco Kid, the film shifts to being more about a love triangle. You see, the Kid loves a woman named Tonia Maria. He even sings, briefly, to her, perhaps one of the first instances of a singing cowboy in the movies. However, she’s astonishingly unfaithful to him; in fact, she’s getting rid of one of her lovers just as he rides up to her home. Tonia (played by Dorothy Burgess) falls very quickly into the stereotypical sexualized Latina. After she’s spent time with the Kid, she almost immediately goes to the bar in town and meets Sgt. Dunn. She flirts with him, but he initially rebuffs her advances, finding her amusing rather than attractive.

However, once Dunn realizes that she’s the Cisco Kid’s lover, he rides over to her house and starts wooing her. Naturally, he’s just leading her on so that he can find out more about where the Kid is, but she seems to fall for him very quickly. She’s offended when she finds out that he’s trying to earn the $500 reward for capturing or killing the Kid, but once he promises all of the money to her and tells her that he wants to take her back to New York to live, she makes an abrupt change in her emotions. The accent that Lowe uses throughout the film is quite horrible, by the way. It’s almost like a comic version of a New Yorker’s way of speaking.

The Cisco Kid overhears the plans that Dunn and Tonia make, including her desire to have Dunn kill the Kid rather than capture him. He’s heartbroken over this realization that she’s never really loved him (although she certainly liked the gifts he brought her), but he plans his revenge, and it’s a strange one. He intercepts a note she’s written to Dunn and changes it so that it seems he will be dressed up as Tonia and she will be dressed as the Cisco Kid. I’m not sure what prompts such an idea, but the alleged cross-dressing has its expected outcome. The Kid escapes after Dunn shoots and kills Tonia, who he thinks is the Cisco Kid wearing a white mantilla. I know, it sounds very odd, and it is very odd.

The film, being a product of its time, traffics in some offensive stereotypes about Mexicans and other Spanish-speaking people. Several sequences involve dialog that’s in Spanish, and it’s not translated for us on the screen. Instead, their speech ridiculed by the whites in the film. The white characters also use several derogatory terms for the Latinx people in the film (mostly women, by the way). Lest you think the film is only racist about the Latinx population, it also features a short image of two Asian characters talking rapidly during a sort of rally to get the townsfolks fired up about forming a vigilante posse to go after the Cisco Kid. Both of these characters are dressed like Hop Sing on the old Bonanza TV show. It’s tough to watch, but when even the central character of the Cisco Kid speaks with broken English despite the fact that his parents are both well educated, and one of them is from San Luis Obispo, you know the film isn’t going to treat all of its characters with dignity. Having white actors portray the Cisco Kid and Tonia Maria doesn’t help either, of course.

The film, as I mentioned earlier, was filmed mostly outdoors, and we are treated to some beautiful desert scenery. The opening sequence involving passengers boarding a stagecoach was clearly filmed at a mission (reportedly, the one at San Juan Capistrano), and lovely Joshua trees populate the landscape. The filmmakers have paid a great deal of attention to the look of the film, and even the interiors are shot with a good eye for art direction and set decoration. In Old Arizona harkens back to the early days of sound film and the various ways that the industry was trying to take what it had accomplished during the silent era and apply some of it to the new techniques of moviemaking. It’s good to see that the visual was not always abandoned at the service of the auditory.

Oscar Win: Best Actor (Warner Baxter)

Other Oscar Nominations: Outstanding Picture, Best Director (Irving Cummings), Best Writing, and Best Cinematography

Past Lives (2023)

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twister (1996)

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

Oscar Nominations: Best Sound and Best Visual Effects

That's a Wrap on 1927-28

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No one ever said Oscar history was simple and uncomplicated.

Tempest (1927-28)

 

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

Oscar Win: Best Interior Decoration