Showing posts with label Bob Fosse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bob Fosse. Show all posts
Saturday, 5 April 2014
Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day 290: A Very Meta Musical
Those of you who've followed this challenge from the very beginning know that the musical genre has been well-represented in the Best Picture category. From 42nd Street and Top Hat to Fiddler on the Roof and Hello Dolly! each decade has had two or three all-singing all-dancing nominees. The Oscars love of musicals reached its peak in the 1960s where four of the ten winners came from the genre. However, as the 1980s approached audiences lost interest in the musical and so it seems did Oscar. One man who was still very much involved in musicals both on stage and screen was Bob Fosse, who won a Best Director award for helming Cabaret in 1973. Fosse was also in charge of All that Jazz, the last musical film to be nominated for Best Picture for a shocking twenty-two years. The musical itself was also heavily based on the director's own life as it featured many scenes based on real-life events involving Fosse. In fact the film as a whole is based on Fosse's attempts to direct a production of Chicago while at the same time editing the Dustin Hoffman film Lenny. Fosse is represented in the film by legendary musical director Joe Gideon whose personal life is dominated by three women - his ex-wife, his current girlfriend and his young daughter. Gideon's current work life is interspersed with scenes from his childhood which are presented in haunting scenes involving a mysterious woman played by Jessica Lange. It is later revealed that these scenes are hallucinations that Joe has while being treated in hospital for angina, whilst Lange's character is a representation of the angel of death. As Joe's health deteriorates, these surreal musical numbers increase and they eventually build up to a massive finale which shows Joe ascending to heaven in a suitably over-the-top fashion.
Hectic is the best way to describe All that Jazz which skips between Joe's real life and his death sequences with reckless abandonment. While watching the film, I was constantly thinking how Fosse felt directing his own life story in this way. All the relationships in All that Jazz are incredibly similar to Fosse's down to the fact that he and his ex-wife continued to work together following their separation. I was glad to learn that All that Jazz won the award for Best Editing at the Oscars as to me that's one of the film's most notable elements. The film's unique style didn't always work for me and at times I rather wished it would calm down just a little bit. But luckily the energy of the cast, coupled with some great musical numbers, meant that All that Jazz just about made sense. At the heart of the cast is the brilliant Roy Scheider, who holds everything together superbly and brilliantly conveys why people still love Joe despite the fact that he's really quite horrible. Scheider is utterly convincing throughout as the womanising, pill-popping director whose inability to stop working was finally the death of him. I also found Jessica Lange to be spell-binding as Angelique, the woman who was almost weighing up Joe's life before his death. The scenes between Scheider and Lange were some of my favourites, primarily as because they felt incredibly different from what was going on elsewhere. To an extent they reminded me of the scenes between Liza Minelli and Joel Grey in Cabaret and I do feel as if Fosse was trying to recreate this style. Tragically Fosse himself died of a heart attack eight years later but at least he leaves behind him a legacy of brilliant films and some rather tremendous Broadway shows. Although almost too knowing for its own good, All that Jazz is a fitting send-off for the musical genre which wouldn't see again for another decade and a half.
Next time we look at an all-action hero who used appeared in two very different Best Picture Nominees in the 1980s.
Thursday, 6 February 2014
Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Days 247-249: Don't Hassle the Hoffman
Dustin Hoffman was an actor we first came across during the 1960s section of this blog. Back then he had just made his first breakthrough, as Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate, and this role catapulted him into the big time. Throughout the 1970s, Hoffman starred in three Oscar-nominated films and was nominated for Best Actor in two of them.
The first of these films was in fact the first Best Picture winner of the decade, John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy. Though Hoffman was nominated for Best Actor, he lost to his co-star Jon Voight who gave a career-defining performance as hustler Joe Buck. The naive and emotionally-scarred Joe, starts the film as a Texan dishwasher who feels his only success is in pleasuring women. He decides to journey to New York in order to become a male prostitute but finds it tough to seek out clients and even finds himself paying out money to one of the women he has liaison with. He is later duped by Hoffman's conman 'Ratso' Rizzo who introduces him to what he believes to be a pimp, but is in fact an extreme Bible basher. Joe later seeks out Rizzo but the latter offers an olive branch when he invites Joe to live in the squat he calls home. The rest of the film sees the pair build up a friendship of sorts as they navigate their way through New York and attempt to survive on what they can find. Towards the end of the film, Rizzo's health begins to deteriorate just as Joe is beginning to build up somewhat of a client base. Instead of keeping an appointment with a wealthy woman, Joe decides to help his friend by buying them both bus tickets to Florida. The final scenes are rather emotional as the simple Joe, who has up to now worn nothing but a cowboy outfit, changes his look just as his friend loses his life.
Earning the honour of being the only X-Rated film ever to win the Best Picture award, Midnight Cowboy is a work of pure genius. The film is hard to watch at times but it is always brilliantly executed and contains some wonderful pieces of visual flair. John Schlesinger seems keen not to make Midnight Cowboy just a standard film and so the editing is great throughout as he inserts flashbacks and fantasy sequences into the narrative. The flashback scenes are particularly harrowing as we witness Joe and his girlfriend being raped and her later being carted off to an institution. I do feel that Midnight Cowboy was the film that ushered in a change to the Best Picture category, especially considering the previous year's winner was Oliver! Another of Midnight Cowboy's distinguishing features is its use of music with both John Barry's score and Harry Nilsson's 'Everybody's Talking' both sticking in the mind long after the film has finished. But to me the film belonged to two men - Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, whose partnership makes Midnight Cowboy the masterpiece that it is. Voight brings an innocence to Joe Buck that is incredibly endearing but also makes it clear that this is a man who has gone through an enormous amount of suffering in his life. Voight's wide-eyed innocence is perfectly counter-balanced by Hoffman's quick-talking as the charismatic 'Ratso' Rizzo. Hoffman is absolutely outstanding at making us sympathise with a man who could easily have come off as incredibly unlikeable in the hands of a lesser actor. Voight and Hoffman really make you care about Joe and Rizzo and I was really emotional when the final credits rolled.
Whilst Hoffman may have been overshadowed by Voight in Midnight Cowboy, the next Oscar-nominated film he appeared in was almost a showcase for his supreme talent. The film was Lenny, in which Hoffman starred as controversial stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce. The narrative structure of the movie sees the film begin with one of Bruce's later stand-up routines, as we see he has become a burned-out performer, before flashing back to where it all began. The film spends a lot of time concentrating on the relationship between Lenny and his stripper wife Honey, who hadn't been together long before tying the knot. However, it's a destructive relationship which falls apart due to his philandering and her problems with addiction. But their relationship does provide a child, who Lenny is forced to care for and so considers becoming a more family-friendly comic. Ultimately he finds that this is something he's unable to do as he delights in his controversial routine which is laden with profanities throughout. It is Lenny's mouth that later gets him in trouble when he is arrested for use of foul language and decides to defend himself. The final act of the film basically depicts Lenny's fall from grace and his ultimate untimely death from an overdose.
Lenny is an incredibly different film from a lot of what I have watched so far, in that it feels incredibly intimate and at the same time tells an incredibly broad story. As it's shot in black-and-white Lenny looks different from any other film released that year while in addition it employs several unique narrative devices. In addition to the non-linear nature of the plot, a lot of the film is made up of interviews with the characters who are giving their accounts of Lenny's life following his death. This way of telling the story allows screenwriter Julian Barry to let all of the characters get their perspectives across. Obviously the only character who isn't featured in these interviews is Lenny himself however the character looms large over every single scene. The dark nature of the film is intensified through the brilliant direction of Bob Fosse, whose attempts at editing the film are covered in a later entry to this blog. I feel that a lot of the stand-up scenes in Lenny are incredibly similar to the scenes in the club in Cabaret. The only difference is Lenny is performing a comedy routine rather than as a big musical number. Just like with Ratso, Lenny is another character that is hard to like but somehow Dustin Hoffman gives you reason to care about him. Hoffman is incredible during the stand-up scenes and proves what a magnetic screen presence he is when it is just him and a microphone on stage. Similarly great is Valerie Perrine, as Bruce's wife Honey, who gives a sympathetic performance as the stripper with an addictive personality. While Lenny is quite a self-indulgent film at times, there's no denying its a gripping biopic with a tour-de-force central performance. To me it signified that Hoffman was an actor who could turn his hand to anything and was one who wasn't afraid to shy away from more offbeat projects.
However, the final film in this triple bill is definitely the most traditional of the three. All the President's Men is an incredibly wordy biopic of how two Washington Post reporters ended up exposing serious corruption in Richard Nixon's government. Based on the book written by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the film stars Robert Redford and Hoffman as the two reluctant partners on a case that appears initially low-key. The beginning point of the film sees new recruit Woodward being tasked with reporting on a courtroom story about five men who broke into the Watergate Offices. But soon this small story grows legs when Woodward discovers connections with the CIA and he feels that there is more to the tale than meets the eye. Though Woodward is portrayed as quite an intelligent young man, he still has a lot to learn about story layout and so is paired with the more experience Bernstein. Whereas Woodward is fairly level-headed, Bernstein is a lot more off-the-wall and this clash in personalities occasionally causes arguments. But eventually the men gain mutual respect for one another as they uncover some shocking secrets while at the same time struggling with the fact that most of their reports are based on unknown sources. Although some of the senior workers at the paper are not fans of the pair's procedures, they have the blessing of executive editor Ben Bradlee, who vows to stick with them even when the paper finds itself criticised. Though their story led to the resignation of Nixon, the film really doesn't hammer this point home and instead shows us a collection of headlines as its closing scene.
I feel one of the best things a biographical film can do is make you wonder what's going to happen next, when you already know the answer. That's what I felt throughout All the President's Men and I feel a lot of that can be attributed to William Goldman's Oscar-winning script. The film itself was a pet project of Redford who bought the rights to Woodward and Bernstein's book and had Goldman write a draft of the script. Though the script when through several drafts, the final product was incredibly outstanding and I feel that its dialogue-heavy nature influenced a lot of young screenwriters at the time. Indeed both this film and Network, which was released in the same year, had lots of scenes with men sitting around in rooms talking but somehow made them incredibly thrilling to watch. Though certainly the most dynamic member of the cast, Hoffman delivered his most toned down performance of this triple-bill. Hoffman's Bernstein is portrayed as being intrepid, if a little over-eager, and somebody who was always on the lookout for the next story. He is perfectly counter-balanced by the much cooler Redford and I feel the two make a great double act. At the time of the film's release, Redford was the biggest draw at the Box Office but here shared top billing with co-star Hoffman. However, neither was even nominated for Best Actor and the only acting award the film received was for Jason Robards for his compelling supporting turn as Ben Bradlee. Though All the President's Men isn't as dark as either Lenny or Midnight Cowboy, it was gripping throughout and was bolstered by two incredibly frantic performances. In addition I think its script has influenced a lot of the film and television that I love today and for that it deserves a large amount of praise.
Next time we take a trip back in time and head to Russia.
The first of these films was in fact the first Best Picture winner of the decade, John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy. Though Hoffman was nominated for Best Actor, he lost to his co-star Jon Voight who gave a career-defining performance as hustler Joe Buck. The naive and emotionally-scarred Joe, starts the film as a Texan dishwasher who feels his only success is in pleasuring women. He decides to journey to New York in order to become a male prostitute but finds it tough to seek out clients and even finds himself paying out money to one of the women he has liaison with. He is later duped by Hoffman's conman 'Ratso' Rizzo who introduces him to what he believes to be a pimp, but is in fact an extreme Bible basher. Joe later seeks out Rizzo but the latter offers an olive branch when he invites Joe to live in the squat he calls home. The rest of the film sees the pair build up a friendship of sorts as they navigate their way through New York and attempt to survive on what they can find. Towards the end of the film, Rizzo's health begins to deteriorate just as Joe is beginning to build up somewhat of a client base. Instead of keeping an appointment with a wealthy woman, Joe decides to help his friend by buying them both bus tickets to Florida. The final scenes are rather emotional as the simple Joe, who has up to now worn nothing but a cowboy outfit, changes his look just as his friend loses his life.
Earning the honour of being the only X-Rated film ever to win the Best Picture award, Midnight Cowboy is a work of pure genius. The film is hard to watch at times but it is always brilliantly executed and contains some wonderful pieces of visual flair. John Schlesinger seems keen not to make Midnight Cowboy just a standard film and so the editing is great throughout as he inserts flashbacks and fantasy sequences into the narrative. The flashback scenes are particularly harrowing as we witness Joe and his girlfriend being raped and her later being carted off to an institution. I do feel that Midnight Cowboy was the film that ushered in a change to the Best Picture category, especially considering the previous year's winner was Oliver! Another of Midnight Cowboy's distinguishing features is its use of music with both John Barry's score and Harry Nilsson's 'Everybody's Talking' both sticking in the mind long after the film has finished. But to me the film belonged to two men - Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, whose partnership makes Midnight Cowboy the masterpiece that it is. Voight brings an innocence to Joe Buck that is incredibly endearing but also makes it clear that this is a man who has gone through an enormous amount of suffering in his life. Voight's wide-eyed innocence is perfectly counter-balanced by Hoffman's quick-talking as the charismatic 'Ratso' Rizzo. Hoffman is absolutely outstanding at making us sympathise with a man who could easily have come off as incredibly unlikeable in the hands of a lesser actor. Voight and Hoffman really make you care about Joe and Rizzo and I was really emotional when the final credits rolled.
Whilst Hoffman may have been overshadowed by Voight in Midnight Cowboy, the next Oscar-nominated film he appeared in was almost a showcase for his supreme talent. The film was Lenny, in which Hoffman starred as controversial stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce. The narrative structure of the movie sees the film begin with one of Bruce's later stand-up routines, as we see he has become a burned-out performer, before flashing back to where it all began. The film spends a lot of time concentrating on the relationship between Lenny and his stripper wife Honey, who hadn't been together long before tying the knot. However, it's a destructive relationship which falls apart due to his philandering and her problems with addiction. But their relationship does provide a child, who Lenny is forced to care for and so considers becoming a more family-friendly comic. Ultimately he finds that this is something he's unable to do as he delights in his controversial routine which is laden with profanities throughout. It is Lenny's mouth that later gets him in trouble when he is arrested for use of foul language and decides to defend himself. The final act of the film basically depicts Lenny's fall from grace and his ultimate untimely death from an overdose.
Lenny is an incredibly different film from a lot of what I have watched so far, in that it feels incredibly intimate and at the same time tells an incredibly broad story. As it's shot in black-and-white Lenny looks different from any other film released that year while in addition it employs several unique narrative devices. In addition to the non-linear nature of the plot, a lot of the film is made up of interviews with the characters who are giving their accounts of Lenny's life following his death. This way of telling the story allows screenwriter Julian Barry to let all of the characters get their perspectives across. Obviously the only character who isn't featured in these interviews is Lenny himself however the character looms large over every single scene. The dark nature of the film is intensified through the brilliant direction of Bob Fosse, whose attempts at editing the film are covered in a later entry to this blog. I feel that a lot of the stand-up scenes in Lenny are incredibly similar to the scenes in the club in Cabaret. The only difference is Lenny is performing a comedy routine rather than as a big musical number. Just like with Ratso, Lenny is another character that is hard to like but somehow Dustin Hoffman gives you reason to care about him. Hoffman is incredible during the stand-up scenes and proves what a magnetic screen presence he is when it is just him and a microphone on stage. Similarly great is Valerie Perrine, as Bruce's wife Honey, who gives a sympathetic performance as the stripper with an addictive personality. While Lenny is quite a self-indulgent film at times, there's no denying its a gripping biopic with a tour-de-force central performance. To me it signified that Hoffman was an actor who could turn his hand to anything and was one who wasn't afraid to shy away from more offbeat projects.
However, the final film in this triple bill is definitely the most traditional of the three. All the President's Men is an incredibly wordy biopic of how two Washington Post reporters ended up exposing serious corruption in Richard Nixon's government. Based on the book written by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the film stars Robert Redford and Hoffman as the two reluctant partners on a case that appears initially low-key. The beginning point of the film sees new recruit Woodward being tasked with reporting on a courtroom story about five men who broke into the Watergate Offices. But soon this small story grows legs when Woodward discovers connections with the CIA and he feels that there is more to the tale than meets the eye. Though Woodward is portrayed as quite an intelligent young man, he still has a lot to learn about story layout and so is paired with the more experience Bernstein. Whereas Woodward is fairly level-headed, Bernstein is a lot more off-the-wall and this clash in personalities occasionally causes arguments. But eventually the men gain mutual respect for one another as they uncover some shocking secrets while at the same time struggling with the fact that most of their reports are based on unknown sources. Although some of the senior workers at the paper are not fans of the pair's procedures, they have the blessing of executive editor Ben Bradlee, who vows to stick with them even when the paper finds itself criticised. Though their story led to the resignation of Nixon, the film really doesn't hammer this point home and instead shows us a collection of headlines as its closing scene.
I feel one of the best things a biographical film can do is make you wonder what's going to happen next, when you already know the answer. That's what I felt throughout All the President's Men and I feel a lot of that can be attributed to William Goldman's Oscar-winning script. The film itself was a pet project of Redford who bought the rights to Woodward and Bernstein's book and had Goldman write a draft of the script. Though the script when through several drafts, the final product was incredibly outstanding and I feel that its dialogue-heavy nature influenced a lot of young screenwriters at the time. Indeed both this film and Network, which was released in the same year, had lots of scenes with men sitting around in rooms talking but somehow made them incredibly thrilling to watch. Though certainly the most dynamic member of the cast, Hoffman delivered his most toned down performance of this triple-bill. Hoffman's Bernstein is portrayed as being intrepid, if a little over-eager, and somebody who was always on the lookout for the next story. He is perfectly counter-balanced by the much cooler Redford and I feel the two make a great double act. At the time of the film's release, Redford was the biggest draw at the Box Office but here shared top billing with co-star Hoffman. However, neither was even nominated for Best Actor and the only acting award the film received was for Jason Robards for his compelling supporting turn as Ben Bradlee. Though All the President's Men isn't as dark as either Lenny or Midnight Cowboy, it was gripping throughout and was bolstered by two incredibly frantic performances. In addition I think its script has influenced a lot of the film and television that I love today and for that it deserves a large amount of praise.
Next time we take a trip back in time and head to Russia.
Sunday, 28 July 2013
Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Days 212-214: Sounds of the Seventies
Throughout each decade of Oscar-winning films, there have always been a handful of musicals that have done particularly well. The majority of these have been glossy big-budget spectaculars that have had fairly light storylines. But, as we approach the 1970s, the themes of the musicals are getting a lot darker and one in particular contains a handful of songs that are incredibly sinister rather than being particularly uplifting.
We start though with a film musical that feels incredibly old-fashioned and has a comic element which lends itself to the screwball films of the 1930s and 1940s. That film is Hello Dolly!, which was nominated for Best Picture at the 1970 ceremony, and stars Barbara Streisand as widowed matchmaker Dolly Levi. Dolly arrives in Yonkers supposedly to meet up with wealthy store-owner Horace Vandergelder who is to travel to New York in order to meet up with and marry hat-store clerk Irene Malloy. However, instead of matching the pair, Dolly seemingly wants Horace for herself so arranges for his two clerks to hook up with Irene and her assistant Minnie. On arrival in the city the clerks, Cornelius and Barnaby, pretend to be wealthy gentlemen in order to ensnare Irene and Minnie. Meanwhile, Horace's niece Ermengrade has also travelled to New York in order to prove to her uncle that artist Ambrose is a good enough match for her. In New York, Dolly arranges a number of deceptions in order to keep all the parts of her plan a secret until she is able to put the offer of a proposal on the table at one of her favourite restaurants. Obviously the obstinate Horace wants everything to stay the way it was but eventually comes around to everything that Dolly has set up.
I don't think it's insulting to say that Hello Dolly! is definitely an old school musical by late 1960s/early 1970s standards. The whole thing feels very staged with a lot of the action fairly static and confined to a certain set. In fact, a lot of it put me in mind of The Music Man, which was made seven years earlier, as both have that old school feel to them. At the same time, there's no denying that Hello Dolly! is an incredibly enjoyable musical and I have to say that I got fairly swept up in it. Gene Kelly sits behind the director's chair and you can see his stamp all over the well-choreographed set pieces. Indeed, the two scenes that stay in the memory are the extravagantly filmed parade, which is accompanied by the iconic 'When the Parade Passes By' and the culmination of all the plots in the restaurant scene. The restaurant scene is also the place in which we hear the film's title track and the famous duet between Streisand and Louis Armstrong. Talking of Streisand she's perfectly cast as the interfering widow who is full of life but at the same time is struggling to move on from her first husband. Walter Matthau is the ideal foil for her schemes as he perfects his grumpy old man character while Frank Spencer himself - Michael Crawford plays the idiotic Cornelius with great aplomb. In addition to the signing and performances, Hello Dolly! is beautifully designed with some brilliant costumes to boot. While it's never going to win any awards for subtlety, when it comes to an all-singing all-musical visual spectacular they don't come much better than this film.
Two years later, the next musical film arrived with Fiddler on the Roof - which documents the lives of one Jewish family living in Tsarist Russia in the early 20th century. Our narrator throughout the film is Tevye, played by Chaim Topol, a simple man who often bemoans the fact that God has given him five daughters. One of the film's unique narrative devices is the fact that Tevye regularly breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience directly. Tevye tells us about the small Jewish community that lives constantly in fear of the larger Christian community that neighbours the village. The Jews and the Christians live in peace but we get the impression that our characters are constantly under threat from attack. The bulk of the film's story sees Tevye's three eldest daughters all find love and marry someone they love, rather than someone who has been chosen for them by the town's matchmaker. Eldest daughter Tzeitel wishes to marry her poor childhood sweetheart Motel while second daughter Anatevka later accepts a proposal from idealistic Ukrainian scholar Perhick. Though Teyve's wife Golde disapproves, he manages to talk her around while at the same time the younger generation prepare to change the way things are done. However, the second half of the film gets bleaker as Teyve's community is moved from their homes by the Christians, while he also disowns third daughter Chava after she secretly marries one of the Christian boys. Though ultimately the entire community is moved from their homes there is a sense that things will only get better.
Of the three musical films I'm writing about, I would say that Fiddler on the Roof is definitely the least memorable. Indeed, probably the strongest element of the entire film is Topol's lead performances as he really makes a connection with the audience right from the beginning of the picture. His warmth and passion for the character really makes you believe in Tevye's motivations and you feel for his plight throughout his story. There are only a few songs that are truly memorable with 'If I were a Rich Man' and 'Matchmaker' being the two prime examples. In addition, there are a number of interesting set pieces most notably the scene at Tzeitel and Motel's wedding where Perhick encourages the men and women to dance together. However, at almost three hours in length, the film really started to drag and I felt the bleak aspect of the final third of the movie really added to this fatigue. While Fiddler on the Roof isn't a bad film by any stretch of the imagination, it wasn't one that I truly connected with in the way that I did with the final musical on the list.
That musical, released a year after Fiddler on the Roof, is Cabaret a film that is loosely based on the Broadway production of the same name. I say loosely as director Bob Fosse discarded many of the songs from that film and got lyricists Kander and Ebb to write new songs. In addition to the song changes, Fosse scrapped many characters and brought in some new ones to freshen up the tale. He also changed the lead character of Sally Bowles to an aspiring English movie star who couldn't really sing to an aspiring American movie star with an amazing voice. In the film, Sally meets young Englishman Brian Roberts who has come to Berlin to teach English. Sally, who is a lead attraction at the seedy Kit Kat Club, builds an attraction to Brian as both rent rooms in the same rundown apartment block. Though the pair begin a relationship, Sally's head is soon turned by rich baron Maximilian who can offer her the finer things in life. Eventually all three spend a weekend at the baron's family home where both end up having sexual encounters with the rich German. The film's backdrop is the rise of the Nazi movement in Berlin in the early 1930s as the Jews are attacked and a subplot involving a friend of Brian's explores religion and love. Meanwhile, Sally discovers she's pregnant and wonders whether or not to keep the baby.
As opposed to the other two musical films on the list, all of the songs in Cabaret are performed rather than used as an alternative to dialogue. The vast majority of these songs are performed in The Kit Kat Club by either Sally or the shadowy Emcee, the film's narrator and host at the club. The character of Emcee is an interesting one as he doesn't interact with any of the characters apart from Sally and that's only through the method of song. Though Emcee's songs do reflect the plot of the film, we see that they are all being performed to a club full of punters. Instead of being particularly uplifting, these songs are often sinister in nature talking about money-grabbing, sharing sexual partners and being unlucky in love. The tone of the film is perfectly exemplified in one scene in which Emcee and his backing group perform a dance routine that mocks the Nazi regime. To me, the film is one of the best examples of the screen musical as every song adds to the plot rather than detracting from it. From the opening bars of Willkommen to Sally Bowes' glorious love song 'Maybe This Time' to the final bursts of its title track, Cabaret's musical score is extraordinary. The film was incredibly successful at the 1973 Oscar ceremony, winning eight awards and earning the distinction of being the most-rewarded movie at the Oscars not to win Best Picture. Among the award-winners were Liza Minnelli who was absolutely captivating as the lovelorn and eccentric Sally Bowes. Meanwhile Joel Grey also picked up a supporting actor statuette for his role as the sinister yet entertaining Emcee. Bob Fosse's outstanding direction was also honoured as were the film's stunning cinematography, score, sound, art direction and editing. As you can tell I really enjoyed Cabaret and, in any normal year, it would've won Best Picture but it did come up against one hell of a contender.
Next time we'll look at the rise of the epic disaster movie with two Oscar nominated examples of the genre.
We start though with a film musical that feels incredibly old-fashioned and has a comic element which lends itself to the screwball films of the 1930s and 1940s. That film is Hello Dolly!, which was nominated for Best Picture at the 1970 ceremony, and stars Barbara Streisand as widowed matchmaker Dolly Levi. Dolly arrives in Yonkers supposedly to meet up with wealthy store-owner Horace Vandergelder who is to travel to New York in order to meet up with and marry hat-store clerk Irene Malloy. However, instead of matching the pair, Dolly seemingly wants Horace for herself so arranges for his two clerks to hook up with Irene and her assistant Minnie. On arrival in the city the clerks, Cornelius and Barnaby, pretend to be wealthy gentlemen in order to ensnare Irene and Minnie. Meanwhile, Horace's niece Ermengrade has also travelled to New York in order to prove to her uncle that artist Ambrose is a good enough match for her. In New York, Dolly arranges a number of deceptions in order to keep all the parts of her plan a secret until she is able to put the offer of a proposal on the table at one of her favourite restaurants. Obviously the obstinate Horace wants everything to stay the way it was but eventually comes around to everything that Dolly has set up.
I don't think it's insulting to say that Hello Dolly! is definitely an old school musical by late 1960s/early 1970s standards. The whole thing feels very staged with a lot of the action fairly static and confined to a certain set. In fact, a lot of it put me in mind of The Music Man, which was made seven years earlier, as both have that old school feel to them. At the same time, there's no denying that Hello Dolly! is an incredibly enjoyable musical and I have to say that I got fairly swept up in it. Gene Kelly sits behind the director's chair and you can see his stamp all over the well-choreographed set pieces. Indeed, the two scenes that stay in the memory are the extravagantly filmed parade, which is accompanied by the iconic 'When the Parade Passes By' and the culmination of all the plots in the restaurant scene. The restaurant scene is also the place in which we hear the film's title track and the famous duet between Streisand and Louis Armstrong. Talking of Streisand she's perfectly cast as the interfering widow who is full of life but at the same time is struggling to move on from her first husband. Walter Matthau is the ideal foil for her schemes as he perfects his grumpy old man character while Frank Spencer himself - Michael Crawford plays the idiotic Cornelius with great aplomb. In addition to the signing and performances, Hello Dolly! is beautifully designed with some brilliant costumes to boot. While it's never going to win any awards for subtlety, when it comes to an all-singing all-musical visual spectacular they don't come much better than this film.
Two years later, the next musical film arrived with Fiddler on the Roof - which documents the lives of one Jewish family living in Tsarist Russia in the early 20th century. Our narrator throughout the film is Tevye, played by Chaim Topol, a simple man who often bemoans the fact that God has given him five daughters. One of the film's unique narrative devices is the fact that Tevye regularly breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience directly. Tevye tells us about the small Jewish community that lives constantly in fear of the larger Christian community that neighbours the village. The Jews and the Christians live in peace but we get the impression that our characters are constantly under threat from attack. The bulk of the film's story sees Tevye's three eldest daughters all find love and marry someone they love, rather than someone who has been chosen for them by the town's matchmaker. Eldest daughter Tzeitel wishes to marry her poor childhood sweetheart Motel while second daughter Anatevka later accepts a proposal from idealistic Ukrainian scholar Perhick. Though Teyve's wife Golde disapproves, he manages to talk her around while at the same time the younger generation prepare to change the way things are done. However, the second half of the film gets bleaker as Teyve's community is moved from their homes by the Christians, while he also disowns third daughter Chava after she secretly marries one of the Christian boys. Though ultimately the entire community is moved from their homes there is a sense that things will only get better.
Of the three musical films I'm writing about, I would say that Fiddler on the Roof is definitely the least memorable. Indeed, probably the strongest element of the entire film is Topol's lead performances as he really makes a connection with the audience right from the beginning of the picture. His warmth and passion for the character really makes you believe in Tevye's motivations and you feel for his plight throughout his story. There are only a few songs that are truly memorable with 'If I were a Rich Man' and 'Matchmaker' being the two prime examples. In addition, there are a number of interesting set pieces most notably the scene at Tzeitel and Motel's wedding where Perhick encourages the men and women to dance together. However, at almost three hours in length, the film really started to drag and I felt the bleak aspect of the final third of the movie really added to this fatigue. While Fiddler on the Roof isn't a bad film by any stretch of the imagination, it wasn't one that I truly connected with in the way that I did with the final musical on the list.
That musical, released a year after Fiddler on the Roof, is Cabaret a film that is loosely based on the Broadway production of the same name. I say loosely as director Bob Fosse discarded many of the songs from that film and got lyricists Kander and Ebb to write new songs. In addition to the song changes, Fosse scrapped many characters and brought in some new ones to freshen up the tale. He also changed the lead character of Sally Bowles to an aspiring English movie star who couldn't really sing to an aspiring American movie star with an amazing voice. In the film, Sally meets young Englishman Brian Roberts who has come to Berlin to teach English. Sally, who is a lead attraction at the seedy Kit Kat Club, builds an attraction to Brian as both rent rooms in the same rundown apartment block. Though the pair begin a relationship, Sally's head is soon turned by rich baron Maximilian who can offer her the finer things in life. Eventually all three spend a weekend at the baron's family home where both end up having sexual encounters with the rich German. The film's backdrop is the rise of the Nazi movement in Berlin in the early 1930s as the Jews are attacked and a subplot involving a friend of Brian's explores religion and love. Meanwhile, Sally discovers she's pregnant and wonders whether or not to keep the baby.
As opposed to the other two musical films on the list, all of the songs in Cabaret are performed rather than used as an alternative to dialogue. The vast majority of these songs are performed in The Kit Kat Club by either Sally or the shadowy Emcee, the film's narrator and host at the club. The character of Emcee is an interesting one as he doesn't interact with any of the characters apart from Sally and that's only through the method of song. Though Emcee's songs do reflect the plot of the film, we see that they are all being performed to a club full of punters. Instead of being particularly uplifting, these songs are often sinister in nature talking about money-grabbing, sharing sexual partners and being unlucky in love. The tone of the film is perfectly exemplified in one scene in which Emcee and his backing group perform a dance routine that mocks the Nazi regime. To me, the film is one of the best examples of the screen musical as every song adds to the plot rather than detracting from it. From the opening bars of Willkommen to Sally Bowes' glorious love song 'Maybe This Time' to the final bursts of its title track, Cabaret's musical score is extraordinary. The film was incredibly successful at the 1973 Oscar ceremony, winning eight awards and earning the distinction of being the most-rewarded movie at the Oscars not to win Best Picture. Among the award-winners were Liza Minnelli who was absolutely captivating as the lovelorn and eccentric Sally Bowes. Meanwhile Joel Grey also picked up a supporting actor statuette for his role as the sinister yet entertaining Emcee. Bob Fosse's outstanding direction was also honoured as were the film's stunning cinematography, score, sound, art direction and editing. As you can tell I really enjoyed Cabaret and, in any normal year, it would've won Best Picture but it did come up against one hell of a contender.
Next time we'll look at the rise of the epic disaster movie with two Oscar nominated examples of the genre.
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