Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Days 423-424: Days of Future Past Part Seven

After several posts focusing on the early days of Oscar this catch-up segment goes into the late 1950s and 1960s to look at a few nominees that had previously evaded me.

William Wyler has been a regular face on this blog and is the only director to helm three Best Picture winners in Mrs. Miniver, The Best Years of Our Lives and Ben-Hur. Although Wyler has directed many iconic pictures he's also been involved with some less memorable offerings. Friendly Persuasion definitely fits into that latter category as its the quintessential example of middle-of-the-road film-making. The film focuses on the Birdwells; a Quaker family living in Southern Indiana during the American Civil War. Over the course of the two and a bit hours, the family are constantly chastised for their reluctance to fight for their land. This story is an interesting one and the scenes in which the eldest Birdwell child Josh considers his fate are some of the film's most memorable. The problem with Friendly Persuasion is that the first hour is fairly devoid of plot and at times is quite episodic. There are some interesting set pieces including one at a state fair and some of the final scenes in which Josh fights for the home guard. The main issue I had with the characters in general though was the fact that none of them seemed to be happy Quakers with the possible exception of matriarch Eliza. It appeared that they'd rather fight, play music and dance than sit in a prayer hall for hours on end and to be honest I don't blame them. Whilst Wyler does make use of the fine locations afforded to him, I feel he left it too late to really pull the trigger on the film's grittier moments. I did find that Gary Cooper and Dorothy McGuire gave fine depictions of parents Jess and Eliza however the younger actors portraying their children were a little wooden. It was also odd seeing Anthony Perkins playing the sympathetic Josh knowing that four years later he'd portray a cinematic icon in Psycho's Norman Bates. Ultimately Friendly Persuasion wasn't a bad film but it was stunningly mediocre which is a surprise seeing as it comes from the normally reliable Wyler.

Moving on two years now we finally have a bit of light relief in the form of Auntie Mame, Morton Da Costa's adaptation of the play version of Patrick Dennis' novel. As I've noted in the past, it's very rare that a comedy film actually features in the Best Picture field and so it was a refreshing change to experience some laughter during this challenge. Despite being two and half hours I found that Da Costa's film flew by thanks in part to the fantastically large performance that Rosalind Russell put in as the titular matriarch who loomed large over the screen. The basic plot of the film sees Mame become guardian to her nephew Patrick after his stuffy father dies unexpectedly. From there on the two form an odd couple relationship with Patrick becoming the straight man to Mame's audacious character. The progression of the film sees Patrick grow up and get engaged whilst Mame marries, is widowed and eventually writes her autobiography. I wasn't surprised to learn that Auntie Mame was originally a stage play as each scene is quite easily signposted. In fact, Da Costa doesn't shy away from the film's roots and has the house lights dip when the location of the scene changes. I felt Russell was magnificent throughout the course of the film as she devoured every line magnificently and balanced the comedy of the film with its more tragic elements. Russell was well supported by a fantastic ensemble most notably Forrest Tucker as Mame's first husband and Peggy Cass as dowdy secretary Agnes Gooch. Auntie Mame is also incredibly well-designed with the costumes being a particular highlight as were the many decorative sets. I'm surprised to learn that Auntie Mame didn't win any of the Oscars it was nominated for and I feel it really should have snapped up at least one. However a film that makes people laugh is rarely an awards contender and I think the film should just be happy that it's cheered me up after a run of particularly mediocre fare.

Skipping forward another two years we have a completely different sort of film in The Sundowners, an Australian-set adventure starring Robert Mitchum. Fred Zinneman's film, an adaptation of Jon Cleary's book, introduces us to the Carmody family, a trio of sheep-herders who trek across Australia's back country. Mitchum's patriarch paddy is joined by his wife Ida and their son Sean as they take small jobs, camping through the night before moving on to their next destination. The film looks at the change in mood amongst the family as Ida wants to find somewhere for the family to live with Sean agreeing with her. However, Paddy is dead against it and wants to continue living a nomadic lifestyle for as long as possible. The Carmodys, alongside refined English acquaintance Rupert, end up spending some time at a sheep station where they get to re-evaluate their priorities. Going into The Sundowners I wasn't expecting a great deal so I enjoyed what was an enjoyable film about what it takes to be a family. Deborah Kerr's performance was particularly powerful as she portrayed Ida as a woman who was sick of moving round and wanted to a have a home of her own. For her role in the film, Kerr was nominated for her sixth and final Oscar and I think it's a shame that she didn't win at least one. Peter Ustinov was fantastic in the supporting role of Rupert whilst Glynis Johns, who I only knew from Mary Poppins, gave a scene-stealing turn as landlady Mrs Firth. However, the most prominent aspect of The Sundowners are the fantastic Australian exterior shots which boost the authenticity of the picture. Although it's not an outstanding piece of work, I found The Sundowners an easy watch which was bolstered by some fine performances and an interesting ending.

Next time is the final Days of Future Past post as the blog takes a quick European tour.

Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day 165: Burning Love

We travel from the blood-soaked fields of World War 2 to Ancient Rome under Emperor Nero for our penultimate 1950s film Quo Vadis. The film is very similar to previous entries on this list such as The Ten Commandments and The Robe in so much as they try to utilise the new technicolor methods to create a vivid story while at the same time referencing parts of The Bible. In this case we have Rome just after the death of Jesus, although Peter features quite predominantly throughout, where the Christians are living in private and here are represented by Deborah Kerr's Lygia. Playing opposite Kerr is Robert Taylor as Marcus Vinicius a returning Roman soldier whose uncle Petronius is one of Nero's most trusted advisors and who becomes intrigued with Christianity through is infatuation with Lygia. When the slightly crazy Nero, played by the brilliant Peter Ustinov, decides to burn Rome and blame the Christians people start to believe that he has gone loopy while Potronious goes so far as to kill himself. Both Lygia and Marcus are arrested and then are married by Peter before he himself is crucified upside down. Nero's wife, who has been knocked back by Marcus, decides to teach the couple a lesson by setting Lygia up to be gored by a bull in the coliseum and chaining Marcus up so he has to watch. Eventually Nero is overthrown and has one of his slaves kill him as he is too cowardly to take his own life so the film ends with Lygia and Marcus able to leave Rome as we see Peter's staff and here his words being spoken to those who are lucky enough to have survived Nero's tyrannical reign.

Always when writing these reviews I try and think what I will most remember about this film after having watched it and in the case of Quo Vadis there are two points. Firstly the epic scale of it all as this is very similar to a Cecil B Demille picture complete with an entire sequence with Rome burning to the ground and then another scene featuring live animals trying to attract Nero's prisoners in the coliseum. The other memorable aspect of Quo Vadis is Peter Ustinov's performance as Nero, for which he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, playing this evil man in quite a child-like manner changing his ideas on a whim and often being manipulated by his devious wife whom he finally cottons onto and kills just before the end scene. It is Ustinov you always look forward to seeing because Robert Taylor is such a wooden actor and you don't believe for one minute that he is the great Roman soldier in fact he just seems like another beefcake actor while Deborah Kerr here is on poor form possibly being ill-served with a role in which she doesn't do much than follow other men's leads. So all in all this is a colourful romp through Ancient Rome which lasts far too long, its running time is almost three hours, but has a great performance from Ustinov. While this isn't a great film it does highlight a time where film-makers were using techniques to recreate these epic stories so in those terms Quo Vadis is an interesting film to watch if not just in a historical context.

Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day 155-156: Opening the Book

This time on the Oscar Blog two films that were based on popular novels and both that won awards for cinematography and editing as well as the second winning many more.

But we start with King Solomon's Mines, a nominee from the 1951 ceremony, which was based on the novel by H Rider Haggard. Obviously this version, which starred Raymond Massey as the explorer Allan Quatermain wasn't the first adaptation of the book or the last but was arguably the most successful due to its exterior locations which at the time would've surprised audiences. The main story sees Quatermain tasked as guide to John Goode and his sister Elizabeth Curtis played by Deborah Kerr so that they can hope to find her husband who went on a mission to discover the mines of the title. During their time the trio come across a menagerie of African wildlife, a British fugitive and are almost trapped in a cave by a dastardly African king. The end of the film sees rebel forces try and overthrow the king while the whereabouts of Elizabeth's husband are also revealed. King Solomon's Mines is quite a stilted film and indeed the directorial style of Compton Bennett and Andrew Marton is rather basic. Some of the scenes between Elizabeth and Allen feel very cold and there is no chemistry between the pair who are supposed to be your romantic coupling. Massey isn't a particularly commanding lead so it isn't surprising that he wasn't the original choice for the role while Deborah Kerr tries her best but doesn't get a lot to do other than look frightened by what's going on. Instead the real star here is location scout Eva Monley who picked some of the best African backdrops to host the film which to a 1950s audience would seem quite new and exciting as would all the African rituals and the numerous beasts that the trio run into throughout their adventures. As a postcard from Africa it does the job fairly well but I didn't find it very exciting and though it wasn't particularly long it still felt baggy and lagged in several places.

But if King Solomon's Mines was baggy I think that Around the World in 80 Days, the winner at the 1957 ceremony, must be described as incredibly overlong. The whole film clocks in at a whopping 183 minutes which includes an intermission and a lengthy and well-produced end credits sequence which in fact is one of the best things about the film. It even has a convoluted start with journalist Edward R Murrow showing footage of George Melies' A Trip to the Moon and linking it together with the stories of Jules Verne. We all know the basic story of the film which sees Phileas Fogg wager with his fellow reform club members that he cannot navigate around the globe in eighty days. He sets off on a mission with his new manservant Passepartout as they journey around the world on different forms of transport including balloons, steam liners and trains which are constantly breaking down. The film also introduces a romantic aspect as the pair rescue Shirley MacLaine's princess from being burnt alive while in India and she forms a romantic attachment to Fogg while he is also being chased around the globe by Robert Newton's Mr Fix a Scotland Yard detective who believes Fogg to have stolen from the Bank of England. That's about all the plot as the film jumps from set-piece to set-piece a lot of which feature Passepartout fooling around whether it is at a bull-fight or performing on stage he is given more spotlight than Fogg mainly because he is being portrayed by Latin American comedian Cantinflas who was one of the main draws of the film. To be fair Cantinflas is a lot more engaging than David Niven, who plays Fogg, almost acting as a sort of modern day Charlie Chaplin and he does indeed steal the film. This version of Around the World was conceived by producer Michael Todd, the third husband of Elizabeth Taylor, who fancied himself as a bit of Cecil B De Mille type and had a grand vision of what he wanted this film to look like. Indeed this film is heavy on scenery if light on plot with all the different locations being well-scouted and well-shot so I do think it deserved that cinematography Oscar. The film also has a cavalcade of cameos from Frank Sinatra playing the piano to Buster Keaton as a train conductor there were about fourty appearances of this nature so after a while this began to get a bit tiresome. Whether it deserved the Best Picture Oscar we will discover when I come to the end of the 1950s but this is a film that looks stunning and has a great slapstick performance from Cantinflas even if it is far too long and has too many unnecessary elements to it I feel that certain elements will stick in my mind long after I have watched the film something that can't be said about King Solomon's Mines. So out of these two films I would say that Around the World in 80 Days is definitely the superior of the two but I don't think that's a particularly hard battle to win.

Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day 153-154: Musical Madness

As we've seen in the 1950s thus far that the rise of Technicolor and cinemascope meant that a lot of big epics were being made as they now looked spectacular on the screen. Another genre that saw a rise was that of the musical and two big named musicals were nominated for the Best Picture Oscar in 1955 and 1957 respectively. First up is Seven Brides for Seven Brothers a jolly musical film that features plenty of physical violence and the multiple abduction of women by the roguish brothers of the title. It kicks off with Howard Keel's Adam journeying from his mountaintop farm to find himself a wife a task he carries off with ease hooking up with the innocent Millie and taking her back to his house to live with his six brothers. Millie tries to hammer some civility into these boys and it works for a while as she gets them clean and learning proper courtship rituals but when they are provoked at a barn raising contest they lose their temper and get into a fight losing their girls in the process. Adam convinces his brothers to go and kidnap the women and indeed the townsfolk can't rescue them after an avalanche meaning that the girls and Millie end up taking the house banishing the brothers to the stables. However as is often the case the girls soften as the snow begins to thaw and as the title would suggest there is a mass wedding ceremony to end the film. Obviously as you can tell I really wasn't taken with the brutish nature of this film nor did I think that Millie did a particularly good job civilising the men or keeping the women from them. What I did like however were the songs and also the use of Technicolor in particular the pastel colours that the men wore and how they interlinked with the dresses that their intendeds were also wearing. The songs, of which Bless Your Beautiful Hide is the most famous, are also fairly catchy and there are some great little set pieces including the aforementioned barn-raising however as a film I didn't think it was particularly well constructed and I didn't warm to any of the characters.

The same cannot be said for The King and I which makes you feel for even the brutish King of Siam before it comes to its conclusion. This time we find Deborah Kerr as a widowed English teacher travelling to Siam with her young son to become the teacher to the children and wives of the king. Obviously when I think of this film it is Yul Brynner's King who tries to change his attitude to women and his subjects after meeting Kerr's Anna. In the more innocent 1950s I don't think you could use the term sexual tension but that really was what these two displayed as they went on in their shouting matches and eventually came to a mutual understanding. Obviously Anna becomes disgusted after the king won't let his 'present' the young Tuptum leave with her lover so she leaves the king but when he falls ill she journeys back. For me The King and I draws you in with its two lead performances with Brynner winning an Oscar for Best Actor with other awards going to the costumes, music and art direction. Someone who missed out on an Oscar here was Kerr whose strong yet warm Anna anchors the film but then Kerr still holds the record for the most nominations for an actress without a win despite the fact her male co-stars such as Brynner, Frank Sinatra and David Niven seem to come away with the statues. Again there are some great set pieces with Getting to Know You and Tuptum's show for the English being the highlights but for me romance doesn't get any more perfect than Brynner and Kerr's routine in Shall we Dance. Obviously my favourite of the two musicals by a country mile and one that lost out on the Oscar to a film which some say was undeserving but as I'm yet to see it I will reserve my judgment for now.

Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day 150: More from Monty

As we've seen in our trip through the 1950s we've had a lot of stars straddle films I've done retrospectives of the fifities films of both Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando in the former's collection we found A Place in The Sun. That gently links into this next section as we look into the work of the male lead of that film, Montgomery Clift's, other work.

We kick off with just what I need, another play adaptation, this time thankfully there's enough exterior shots to counteract the scenes of people talking in rooms. That film is The Heiress and once again we find the lead actress Olivia De Havilland once again winning the Best Actress award for her tremendous performance as Catherine Sloper the titular woman of the title. The story has a simple premise would a charming young man who mishandles his money be interested in a dowdy heiress for anything more than her cash. That's the situation that Catherine finds herself in after being charmed by Clift's Morris Townsend who visits her house various times and eventually proposed much to the horror of her father played by Ralph Richardson. Richardson's character firstly quizzes Morris' family members before taking his daughter off to Europe, these scenes are especially bought alive by the film medium, realising he can't change her mind he decides to disinherit her therefore only giving her a small amount of money and when Morris finds this out he leaves her on the evening that the couple were meant to elope. It is here that De Havilland comes into her own as she becomes bitter not allowing her father to speak to her and spurning Morris' advances when he returns despite realising he now loves her she wants to humiliate him the way he did her and therefore ends up sad and alone. I did enjoy The Heiress it didn't outstay its welcome and all the leads acted their parts well. De Havilland's performance in the latter scenes were truly spectacular and she did more than earn her Oscar. Montgomery Clift does as he's told playing charming but sinister and playing on his screen idol persona to try and trick the audience into thinking that he really does love Catherine while Ralph Richardson's stoic routine lends itself well to the father. William Wyler brings the play to life and shoots outside as much as possible to give the film a life of its own all in all a good actors film but nothing spectacular.

We come now to another Best Picture winner from the 1954 ceremony starring Clift alongside Burt Lancaster and Oscar winners Frank Sinatra and Donna Reed that film is From Here to Eternity. Covering the same sort of time as 1940s nominee Wake Island, From Here to Eternity looks at army-life in Hawaii just in the run-up to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour. Clift plays Private Pruitt a soldier who has been transferred to his new unit for his boxing prowess however when he refuses to box his Captain gets the other officers to bully him and put him doing manual labour his only friend being Sinatra's Private Maggio. Meanwhile Lancaster's Sergeant Ward is romancing the Captain's wife played by Deborah Kerr their romance includes the famous beach sex scene which is the iconic plateau of the film but which had to be toned down for the censors so it wasn't implicit that the sexual act actually took place. Kerr and Lancaster's romance is thwarted by the fact that she hates it on Hawaii and he vows to earn his Captain's stripes so they can return to the States. Pruitt also falls in love with a girl he meets in a club named Lorene, later revealed to be named Alma, at first he is frustrated with the fact that her work comes first but eventually the two move in together. When Maggio goes AWOL to get drunk he is court martialled and beaten by the warden he eventually escapes but dies from his wounds this causes Pruitt to attack and kill this officer and get wounded himself and going AWOL at Alma's house. It is at this time that the Pearl Harbor attacks take place and Ward takes charge with the Captain being sacked for giving preferential treatment to his boxers. Realising that he will always put the army first Kerr leaves him and returns to America alone meanwhile Pruitt dies trying to make it back to base having been shot by one of the other soldiers. Kerr and Reed's Lorene meet in the film's final scene each realising who the other is as they throw their lays out to sea meaning that neither will ever return.

Occasionally when doing this blog I bemoan the choices of Best Picture but thankfully in 1954 the academy got it spot on with this film. There are no less than five stunning performances with Sinatra stunning me the most as the jovial Maggio who is suddenly brutally attacked and dies a tragic death. Clift is also good here playing a little against type as the stubborn Pruitt but his love scenes with Reed were obviously there for his fans to woo over him. Lancaster is particularly good holding everything together as he's the likeable man torn between love and duty. The almost completely exterior shooting means that this film also boasts great scenery and realistic backdrops and I have to say I was caught off guard by the Pearl Harbour attacks as I'd obviously left my sense of history at the door. Overall a great film and a worthy Best Picture winner and as we've seen here Montgomery Clift definitely made his mark on 1950s film by being both suave and vulnerable in both of these classics.

Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day 143: I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside

Recently on this blog I seem to have been doing a lot of moaning about the adaptation of plays into films as they almost always are restricted by the amount of interior scenes they have to have. However this didn't seem to bother me with Separate Tables which was based on a Terrence Rattigan and was set entirely in the Beauregard Hotel in Bournemouth. Like Grand Hotel, which won the Best Picture Oscar in the 1930s, it features various interweaving plots in the same establishment and features an ensemble class which includes David Niven, Deborah Kerr, Rita Hayworth and Burt Lancaster. However Separate Tables is extremely British as most of the inhabitants are long-term residents of the Guest House and are mostly there to escape life. Niven, who won Best Actor for his performance there, plays a character known as the Major and strikes up a friendship with Kerr's Sibyl something her overbearing mother doesn't agree with. When the mother finds out that Niven isn't a Major and that he has indecently exposed himself at a cinema she rallies the residents to get him out of the Beauregard. Running alongside this is Lancaster's drunk former soldier having a secret relationship with Hotel Manager Miss Cooper, played by Best Supporting Actress winner Wendy Hiller, which  is complicated when Hayworth's model turns up who just happens to be Lancaster's ex-wife. The two stories then unravel with Miss Cooper deciding that Lancaster is better off with Hayworth and Sybil standing up to her mother by getting all of the other long term residents to stick up for the Major.

Although earlier I made a comparison to Grand Hotel, Separate Tables has a lot of similarities to our own Fawlty Towers. It is a seaside hotel with several long-term residents one of whom is a Major, or at least says he is, and most of the others are mature women apart from Kerr, Lancaster and a Professor type character. The whole ensemble nature of the film means that you never get bored of one story for too long and the fact that the entire piece is set within the Beauregard didn't bother me either. I thought all of the actors did really well I especially thought Kerr was brilliant as the somewhat mental agitated Sybil who's relationship with her bullying mother changes at the end of the film, Kerr was in fact nominated for Best Actress here but was the only cast member not to win. Although I did love David Niven here I feel that he wasn't in the film long enough to get the Best Actor prize and maybe he should've been entered into the Supporting one instead. Hayworth just exudes glamour and she has some great on screen chemistry with Lancaster here but the best performance comes from Wendy Hiller as Miss Cooper stoic yet passionate when she wants to be she is the archetypal owner who keeps things ticking over for her long-serving residents. Witty, warm with well-drawn characters I feel this is a film that deserves a lot more recognition because if wasn't doing this challenge I don't think I'd ever have watched it.

Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day 135-136: Mostly Marlon

So after my Elizabeth Taylor retrospective we have four films from Marlon Brando an actor who was considered to have changed the way actors were perceived on films. Once upon a time you had the classic 'film star' such as Fred Astaire, Mickey Rooney or Cary Grant but then Brando was a new breed of actor who really got into the character and developed the phrase method acting. Here is part one of two blogs looking at the four Brando films nominated for the Best Picture prize.

We finished the last instalment of the Oscar blog with a Tennessee Williams adaptation and we start our Marlon Brando retrospective with another Williams story - A Streetcar Named Desire. For those of you unaware with the story it sees the demure but emotionally fragile Blanche Dubouis journey to New Orleans to stay with her sister Stella and Stella's husband the brutish Stanley played by Brando. As time goes on Brando continues to resent Blanche's domination of Stella's time and her relationship with his friend Mitch so he starts to dig dirt on why she had to leave her old home. The final confrontation with ends in Stanley raping Blanche before she is carted off to a mental institution is very well done by director Elia Kazan by taking the camera around the expressions of all the characters and using the strong score to play the emotions of the two sisters with Stella finally seeing the light and leaving her husband with their new baby. As someone who read the play as part of my English literature A-Level I have to say that everybody involved did their best to recreate what this story should be. The set direction was rightfully given an Oscar for providing the claustrophobic atmosphere of both Stanley and Stella's apartment to the small area in which the characters inhabit. Vivien Leigh had previously played Blanche on the stage in London and bought both star power and incredible timing as a character who slowly loses her mind throughout the film. Kim Hunter is great as the tortured Stella while Karl Malden also stole the show in his couple of scenes as the hapless Mitch who wants to tame Blanche but realises that is impossible. Leigh, Malden and Hunter all won Oscars for their performances indeed the only person who didn't win an acting Oscar was Marlon Brando. However Brando won something else a new found fame for his great turn as Stanley he plays a man who was raised to behave a certain way and is almost tortured every time he hurts Stella and she leaves him briefly. He is brutish but at the same time doesn't go over-the-top and most importantly he becomes the character this isn't Marlon Brando as Stanley this is Stanley and you can really believe it. One more thing about the film is Alex North's great score who went against type composing short pieces of music to reflect the trauma of the characters but unfortunately he didn't win the Oscar but he did set a precedent in terms of film music as maybe Brando did with character development.

After his Oscar nomination for Streetcar, Brando was nominated for Viva Zapata at the next Oscar ceremony and then again at the Oscar ceremony held in 1954. However nobody quite expected that role to be in an adaptation of William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. The film saw a lot of Shakespeare pros take the parts that they'd already taken on stage for example British theatrical legend John Gielgud played Cassius and James Mason who also had Shakespearian experience was Brutus here. Even producer John Houseman had Caesar experience having been involved in the classic Orson Welles Mercury Theatre production but by this time Welles and Houseman had fallen out and Welles wanted nothing to do with this production. However Brando's casting as Marc Anthony was met with scepticism to the point of Paul Scofield being on standby if Brando's screen test bombed however Brando was so good that Gielgud offered him the lead in the production of Hamlet he was directing, Brando turned this offer down. I'm really not going to retype the plot of Caesar as we all know the first half sees many of his followers conspire his demise and the second half sees Anthony's rise. While we're on Anthony Brando was brilliant even though he had very little to do in the first half of the film from the 'Friends, Romans, Countrymen' speech onwards he captures the imagination being able to deliver Shakespeare's lines with all the precision of a pro and the doubts that the 'mumbler' wouldn't be able to perform were cast aside here. I'm not sure if it was good enough to be Oscar nominated but maybe the Academy were so surprised by Brando's performance that he got the nod just for doing something different. Aside from Brando the ensemble cast are all terrific especially Mason's Brutus and Louis Calhern's Caesar. I also have to applaud the set design for giving us something grandiose and recreating ancient Rome brilliantly and also for handling the crowd scenes very well.