Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day 109: Nun of Your Business

If you ever find yourself in a tie-break at a quiz and the question is what is the first ever film sequel to be nominated for an Oscar, I have the answer - The Bells of St. Mary's. Never heard of it? Well it is the sequel to Going My Way, the winning film at the 1945 Oscar ceremony. A year later we meet Bing Crosby's Father O'Malley continuing improving the church system by moving to a flagging catholic school run by a bunch of nuns which is in dire need of repair. O'Malley clashes with the unrealistic views of the nuns who hope to convince local business owner Mr Borgadus to give them the new complex he is building to house the school. O'Malley's unconventional techniques also incur the wrath of the lead nun Sister Mary Benedict convincingly portrayed by Ingrid Bergman. We also follow the story of Patsy Gallagher whose daughter appeals to the Father to allow her to start the school as she doesn't know what to do with her. Obviously Patsy reforms her way and starts to improve her grades but Mary and O'Malley clash again when she fails her final exam and can't graduate. The ending involving Mary Benedict's removal from the nunnery is odd as it is really neither happy or sad but maybe the message just is that life goes on. Although they did succeed in moving St. Mary's after appealing to the good nature of Borgadus who was suffering from various illnesses and the next year would become an iconic figure as Clarence the Angel in It's a Wonderful Life.

Back to the Bells of St. Mary's a sequel to a film that I felt did not deserve to win the Best Picture Oscar over the tremendous Double Indemnity. But St. Mary's is only a sequel in the fact that it continues the adventures of the same characters, it doesn't really reference O'Malley's work in Going My Way and instead presents this as an entirely new story. Although it is very similar, Bing Crosby arrives at a Catholic institution the locals are suspicious but then won round and he ends up getting what he wants. After winning a Best Actor Oscar the year before, Crosby's performance really hasn't changed but that really doesn't matter. As an actor Crosby can instantly put me at ease as his style is very relaxed and that works well for the character. Ingrid Bergman was also nominated after a win for Gaslight the year previous, her sister Mary Benedict could be a clichéd stuck-up character but she can go toe-to-toe with Bing and they spark off each other with their very asexual chemistry. The film does suffer from being very overlong and also there are entire sequences that I felt could've been cut out but it is decent entertainment and if you like a good nun-based film you could do a lot worse.

Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day 108: Go To Hell?

Going into the future films in 1978 there is a film called Heaven Can Wait starring Warren Beatty which is a remake of a nominated film from the 1940s. Confusingly it isn't my next film, Heaven Can Wait, instead it is Here Comes Mr Jordan which I am yet to watch. This version of Heaven Can Wait sees Don Ameche as wealthy Henry Van Cleve a man who has recently passed away and has come to the 'down below', we're assuming it is hell and that Laird Creagar's character simply referred to as 'His Excellency' is Satan. Creagar doesn't believe that Van Cleve should be there so Van Cleve narrates his life story to 'His Excellency'. At first we the audience believe him to be a rogue, or a cad or a bounder from a young age he is corrupted by his young French governess Mademoiselle and given wine. He then steals the fiancée of his boorish cousin and elopes with her before cheating on her towards their tenth anniversary. But then things turn around and Van Cleve becomes both a loving husband and a good father, at one point trying to pay off the woman who is out to ruin his son's reputation. He loses his wife on the eve of their 25th anniversary and although he is swayed briefly by other women he never gives up loving her. It turns out the reason he doesn't think he belongs upstairs is that he doesn't want to run into his wife and other relatives as he thinks he's let them down therefore truly becoming a good person. 'His Excellency' points out that it won't be easy and he may have to stay on the outskirts in a small apartment but one day Van Cleve will be allowed entry.

Heaven Can Wait had a very promising start with Van Cleve's meeting with 'His Excellency' and his subsequent retelling of his adolescence. 'His Excellency's' office is very well designed almost in an avant-garde style and the first scene does promise almost a black comedy. But then after the Van Cleve character starts becoming a good person things start to lag and the whole segment after he loses his wife is very boring indeed. Despite that there are some good performances notably from Charles Coburn as Van Cleve's Grandfather the only person in his family with any sense, Alyn Joslyn as the horrible cousin and Ameche himself. It is also a very clever story a reversal of the pleading with St. Peter to be let into heaven by trying to convince Satan why you belong in hell. But overall I felt a little bit deflated and that the film didn't have enough faith in its darkly comic premise to follow through. Maybe this is the sort of film that could be remade, but then would the title have to be changed to avoid confusion?

Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day 107: Not Watching this for my GCSE Coursework

So if you've been following this haphazard adventure up to this point you do know that I have being using a YouTube channel to watch some of these films and one of my guilty pleasures is reading the comments that others have left under the video. Before starting the viewing of the latest film, the adaptation of Of Mice and Men that was nominated at the 1940 ceremony, I read the comments most of them seemed to be from teenagers copping out from reading the book and watching this movie instead but from what I could garner this adaptation was rather tame and left out some of the more risqué elements of the text. I have to say I have heard of the book and was aware of some elements of the plot but have never seen the story told in any form up to this point. For those of you like me that aren't aware of the plot it sees two friends - the smart and quick-witted George and the somewhat slow and bulking Lenny, go to work on a ranch in Southwest California after being chased out of their previous town thanks to an incident involving Lenny (something that is never fully explained in the film but in the book he has been accused of rape after stroking a girl's hair). George keeps Lenny happy by reciting the story of the ranch that they're going to own together one day in which Lenny can keep an eye on their rabbits and this dream almost becomes a reality when fellow ranch hand  Candy agrees to pitch in some money to help with the project. However Lenny gets them in trouble once again first by punching the boss' son Curly and then for accidentally killing Curly's wife while trying to stroke her hair. I won't spoil the ending but it things don't end well for the twosome and lets just say their dream never quite becomes a reality.

Of Mice and Men is a strange one to review as in the back of my mind I can see it more as a text than a film even though I've never read it and maybe that's because I've been influenced by those YouTube commenters. The story really never sags and there is some good interplay between the ranch-hands with moments of joy juxtaposed with some really sad moments including one with Candy's dog. Of the acting Lon Chaney Jr. does a magnificent job with Lenny coming across a simple man who is picked upon because of his size and his lack of brain power. A pre-Batman pre-Rocky Burgess Meredith gives George a sympathetic edge and a very real quality to him as well and Betty Field as Curly's wife Mae plays the vampy bitch with an air of style. But this is very much a re-telling of a story, there isn't much to say in terms of camera-work or sets which are fairly basic. I wasn't particularly moved by the ending but still thought there was some solid storytelling within the film overall a decent literary adaptation but not really a film that left a major impression on me.

Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day 106: Small Town Charm

After the Human Comedy set in the small town of Ithaca we return to small town life on the Oscar Challenge with Sam Wood's 1940 adaptation of Thornton Wilder's Our Town set in Grover's Corner, New Hampshire. In the early 1940s it seems that adapting plays to the screen still meant almost a scene for scene reconstruction of how they first played in the theatre. Like on the stage Our Town begins with the character of Stage Manager, here played by Frank Craven, who addresses the audience directly and introduces them to the characters and day-to-day activities in the small town. The film concentrates on two families - the Gibbs and the Webbs and in particular their two eldest children George Gibbs and Emily Webb played by William Holden and Martha Scott. You can kind of sense the film was a play to begin with as it seems to be divided into three acts the first with George and Emily's schooldays and their first attraction to each other, the second with them getting together properly and getting married and the final with Emily's death during childbirth and her appearing as a ghost looking back at her life. However some changes were made from the play when it became a film most notably is that Emily's death is just a dream in the film, something that didn't happen in Wilder's original work, presumably because Wood wanted the wartime audience to have a happy ending leaving the cinema on a high with Emily's words about really living still ringing in their heads.

Although as I previously stated there are some issues over the adaptation of the play in that it still feels quite stagy there are some nice touches most of them in the film's final act. Emily's presence as a ghost looking at her funeral is done very well she is shot with a bright light surrounding her wearing only white and as she is taken up to heaven, before waking up, the screen closes in around her so she is in black addressing the audience with her final speech. There are also some good scenes elsewhere the funeral itself with the camera focused on a lot of umbrellas at the grave is a nice touch and the wedding scene is also well done. But there are a few dodgy bits as well a scene at an ice cream parlour goes on far too long and also a scene during a choir rehearsal at a church seems misplaced. In terms of the acting I was surprised that the names that I recognised - Holden, Thomas Mitchell and Fay Bainter, didn't give memorable performances but instead it was Craven's Stage Manager and Scott's Emily who really made an impact during the film and Scott was rightly given a Best Actress nomination for her role losing out to Ginger Rogers in Kitty Foyle, another film directed by Wood. Overall a quaint adaptation which suffers from filmic limitations but is given life by a great central performance from its lead actress.

Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day 105: More from Charlie and Bill

Next up we have adaptations of two classic works of British literature from two classic British directors. First of all Charles Dickens' Great Expectations directed by David Lean and then Laurence Olivier's adaptation of William Shakespeare's Henry V. When writing about any of these films its always tempting to go into plot detail but with works of classic literature it feels like ret-reading old ground a lot of the time so instead I shall simply discuss the style and acting.

First up then Lean's Great Expectations which goes straight into the story as young Pip first encounters the convict Abel Magwitch and is forced to steel food and a file so that the convict can get away and have something to eat. These scenes between the startled Pip and the terrifying Magwitch are some of the film's best and the way they are shot and edited and the music that accompanies them all adds to the haunting mood and rightfully the film did win the Oscars that year for Art Direction and Cinematography. The Art Direction is also prevalent in the later scenes when Pip is invited to play at the house of Miss Havisham and her ward Estella whom Pip falls in love with. Lean again gets it just right showing this house as a large daunting place full of cobwebs and dust where the clocks are stopped to the time when Miss Havisham was stood up at the altar. About an hour into the film the action switches and Pip is now an adult played by John Mills, it is in these scenes that Pip goes to London to live with Alec Guinness' adorable Herbert Pocket and also romances the grown Estella. For me I felt that Mills was miscast as Pip, I felt that he seemed almost too old to be playing a 21 year old and also didn't really convey the fact that he'd made the transition from blacksmith's mate to gentleman in training. But Mills' performance is the exception rather than the rule as there are some fine performances in the supporting cast from Francis L Sullivan as the belligerant lawyer Mr Jaggers to Bernard Miles as the kindly Mr Joe and Finlay Currie as the terrifying Magwitch all these roles are played as they should be my only criticism is that I feel that Martita Hunt went a little overboard as Miss Havisham almost making her performance lapse into pantomime. As the final scenes come on and Pip finds out who it was that paid for him to become a gentleman and also of Estella's true parentage the film comes together with the final scenes playing out as they should. Lean abridges the book rightfully chopping out the bits that don't really contribute to the overall narrative and at the end producing a great piece of British cinema which was ahead of its time in many ways and was certainly deserving of the two technical Oscars that it won.

Similarly Olivier's Henry V was deserving of the Special Oscar it won for Laurence Olivier in his achievement of bringing this unique retelling of one of the Bard's most famous works to the screen, he was honoured as a director, producer and actor and excels in all three. This film was shot in Technicolor which, in 1944 when it was being shot, was still quite rare and the way the colour is used in this film also feels ahead of its time creating almost like a separate world as Henry V and his charges head to France. However the film actually starts as a performance in The Globe theatre as we see the audiences take their seats and Leslie Banks, as the chorus, welcomes us to the performance as the actors deliver the first couple of scenes from the stage before Henry and the English hit the sea to France to fight in the Battle of Agincourt. The Agincourt scenes themselves are spectacular, the exterior shots are obviously done in interior studios but at some times I had to sort of take a double back as they are so realistic but at the same time quite obviously fake. This contrast creates almost a surrealist feel and when two soldiers are surrounded by what is meant to be snow covering the French castle it feels out of the ordinary. Olivier makes a brilliant Henry V and his performance and the film as a whole are a lot better than Hamlet the film that won him the Oscar and took home the same prize. Henry V was seen as a morale-booster for the British army and therefore this Techincolor marvel was funded by the British Government and some of Olivier's speeches do have a certain morale-boosting resonance to them. This is getting away from just a filmed version of a Shakespeare play and using the medium of film to try and play around with the audience's expectations. I have to say my favourite parts are when the camera goes backstage to see the actors getting ready before taking the stage again at The Globe. As Henry and Katherine get married at the end of the film we return to the theatre with the audience clapping and I'd like to think that the post-war audience was doing the same thing.

O.K. that's your lot for this little update hopefully be back with more Oscar-ness soon.

Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day 104: Not Many Laughs

Today if you watched a film with the word comedy in it you would expect a laugh out loud romp, not so in 1944 and that year's Best Story Winner - The Human Comedy. The film deals with the adventures of the Macaulay family during World War II primarily focusing on the middle son Homer played by Mickey Rooney. I wasn't so sure about this film because of Rooney's previous performances in the two Spencer Tracey movies I'd seen him in, Captains Courageous and Boys Town, in which he'd either failed to make an impression or he'd gone over the top. However in The Human Comedy, in which he was nominated for Lead Actor, his wide-eyed innocence and over the top spirit were used well in the character of Homer. Despite the war raging and his brother fighting in battle he keeps a bright expression as he helps out his mother and goes to work at the telegram station. His relationship with the two other men he works with, Frank Morgan's Willie Grogan and James Craig's Tom Spangler, form some of the film's better scenes forming almost a surrogate family as the two men take the place of the father Homer has lost and the brother who is away. We also see the older brother, Marcus, at war conversing with a friend Tobey and reminiscing about how much he misses his hometown of Ithaca. While the youngest brother Ulysses is always seemingly getting into mischief but then he only seems to be about four. The whole thing is narrated by the deceased father of the Macaulay clan as he looks over to see that his family are alright.

Obviously shot and shown during the war this film would've been seen by people who were missing their loved ones while they were away fighting and it obviously gave them hope. There are some nice little scenes here including Spangler finding love and Rooney gaining the approval of his stern school mistress. However there are also some missteps for one part there is far too much singing and there is also a segment that lasts about ten minutes in which Ulysses and other boys from the town go to steal some apricots from an apricot tree, I'm sure this is what happened regularly in that neighbourhood but we still really don't need to see a blow by blow account of fruit theft. The end of the film is quite sad, but I suppose that's the point, things never go exactly as we plan them and if this set out to portray an accurate account of what life was like for families in the early 1940s in small town America then I think it did a good job and Rooney's performance in the last couple of scenes were deserving of his nomination, the film itself lost out to the far superior Casablanca but I think it was more than deserving of a place in that year's top 10 list.

Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day 103: Bergman Goes Bonkers

So we're back with a few updates from my recent delving into the archive for the Big Oscar Challenge. Now when you ask most people which film did Ingrid Bergman win her Best Actress Oscar for they would answer Casablanca. However she was not successful in her quest to be crowned Best Actress that year, Jennifer Jones in The Song of Bernadette triumphed, but one year later she got the prize for the film Gaslight. That film was also nominated for Best Picture and sees Bergman's Paula being sent to Italy following the death of her opera-singing aunt. She returns to the place of the murder years later accompanied by her new husband Gregory Anton. Soon Paula begins to think she is going mad, she hears sounds above her and when she goes out she ends up getting hysterical and mistakenly mislaying items to find them later on. Of course as the audience we know that it is Anton sending her barmy so he can go off and do whatever it is he is doing. Anton also employs a new maid Nancy, an incredibly young and sort of sexy Angela Lansbury, who is very stand offish towards her new mistress and her stubborn nature sends Paula even more nutty. Unbeknownst to Paula help is on its way in the form of Joseph Cotten's Cameron, a policeman who recognises Paula and links her to the crime at the house years before. Cameron enlists the help of Paula's nosy neighbour to try and gain access to the house and also uses junior policeman to try and get information out of Nancy during nightly hanky panky. Things come to a head when Anton finds out what Cameron has been trying to do and Paula discovers the truth about her new love. But, I won't spoil it for you if you haven't guessed.

Gaslight builds very strongly with the first half an hour getting the audience member hooked into the mystery surrounding Paula's aunt's death. Paula's meeting with her soon-to-be neighbour Miss Thwaites, played by the glorious Dame May Robson, is both comic and sinister in tone and sets up the central mystery of the film. However once Paula starts to go mad things feel a bit repetitive with Anton, played by the over-the-top Charles Boyer, blatantly making her feel more ill at ease than she already is. The best parts of the film's second half mainly come from Lansbury, nominated here for Best Supporting Actress, her turn as the young, flirty and obstinate Nancy are very fun to watch. Joseph Cotten also plays his part well even if he once again is playing the gallant hero trying to help the vulnerable Paula out of her life. For her part Bergman is very good but not as strong as she was playing in Ilsa in Casablanca and it's a shame that she won the Oscar here beating Claudette Colbert in Since You Went Away which was arguably a much better performance but Bergman still deserved the Oscar she didn't win the year before. Overall this is an interesting mystery thriller which gets a bit repetitive but is saved by some interesting performances.