Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day 113: Moors Moors Moors How Do You Like it?

So far we've seen Laurence Olivier as Shakespearian figureheads Henry V and Hamlet as well as the lead in an adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca and in the next film on the list he plays another literary antihero in Wuthering Heights' Heathcliff. For those unfamiliar with the tale, who unlike me didn't do it as part of their A-Level English Literature course, the story involves a love story on the Yorkshire Moors between Heathcliff a gypsy orphan bought to live at the large establishment of the title and Cathy the daughter of the family he's bought into. However many things come between them including the death of Cathy's father, the hatred towards Heathcliff from Cathy's brother Hindley and Cathy's love of the finer things in life when she meets the nice but dull Edgar Linton of the neighbouring house The Grange who Cathy ends up marrying. Heathcliff goes and returns later on to exact revenge on all that have wronged him by buying Wuthering Heights from a drunken Hindley and marrying Edgar's sister Isabella to get back at both Edgar and Cathy. However the book and film differ from there on out, in Emily Bronte's novel there is whole other section involving the children of Hindley, Heathcliff and Cathy but the film ends abruptly with Cathy's death and Heathcliff haunted by Kathy's ghost. The whole story is narrated by Wuthering Heights housekeeper Nelly to The Grange's new occupant Mr Lockwood but I found that the voiceover technique was lacking and Nelly's voice was often drowned out by the score or by other character's voices. The film ends, not with the uniting between Cathy and Hindley's children, but with the ghosts of Cathy and Heathcliff walking off hand in hand together. In fact it wasn't Olivier or Merle Oberon who played Cathy in this scene as both had moved on to other projects so body doubles had to be used in this final scene.

And this wasn't the only thing that went wrong with the film as nobody seemed to get on. Producer Samuel Goldwyn wanted the final scene while director William Wyler thought it would seem a bit tacky this is why the body doubles had to be used. Goldwyn claimed that this was his project and Wyler was simply the director however Wyler didn't really seem to get on with his cast. Wyler and Olivier constantly clashed because Wyler wanted Olivier to retake scenes again and again while Olivier and Oberon didn't get on either especially during their love scenes together as Olivier wanted his new love Vivien Leigh to star alongside him. Goldwyn hoped that this would be the vehicle to launch the then unknown Oberon but at that year's Oscars it was Leigh who would win Best Actress for Gone with the Wind while Oberon didn't even get a nomination. Personally I thought the best scenes in the film were the ones in which Cathy and Heathcliff clash as you can actually see the hatred between Oberon and Olivier in these scenes. Like in Hamlet, I felt Olivier was miscast here I just didn't feel the pain that Heathcliff is meant to have over never probably having Cathy. My two favourite performances came from Flora Robson as Nelly and again from David Niven as the put upon Edgar. As someone who knows the story fairly well I think I was put off by the fact that there were so many omissions in this film that it was disturbing to see the book dealt with in this way. I just hope that the people who watch this actually read the book as well or they may well think that Wuthering Heights as a happy ending, which Spoiler Alert: it doesn't.

Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day 71: Mine All Mine

If I asked which of these films are the least well known - Hitchcock's Suspicion, The Maltese Falcon, Citizen Kane or John Ford's Welsh mining drama How Green Was My Valley. I think most people would say the final film in that list but however that was the film that won at the 1942 ceremony beating those other four films. I would've given it the benefit of the doubt but after watching it I don't think it really deserved the credit it got in terms of its five Oscars. The film deals with the Morgan family as narrated by the youngest son Huw who is recalling his childhood and the various entanglements that his siblings got into. The main theme is old vs. new as the stuck-in-ways old school miner father Gwilym refuses to go on strike his sons, who are fed up of being paid pittance, so the majority of them move out. We are also told the story of Huw's sister who falls for the local preacher who shows kidness to her younger brother, but as he is a man of God and because of the scandal it would cause she marries and older man. However the rumours of a relationship between the two, started by her new husband's housekeeper, sees the sister disgraced and the preacher move away. As Huw grows up he briefly loses the use of his legs after rescuing his mother from drowning but soon recovers and goes away to a school for upper-class boys. Due to his humble origins he is bullied by both the other pupils and the teachers and is taught to stand up for himself by members of his town. The film ends with a large mining disaster in which all members of the family band together to rescue the father from the mine. Although they do pull him out of the mine he dies soon after and Huw recounts his funeral before the adult Huw leaves his family home once and for all.

To give the film its dues, How Green Was My Valley is directed well by Ford who won the Oscar that year and it does have a coherent narrative. There are some impressive set pieces with the mother's drowning and the final mining accident well-crafted and the scenes of family life around the dinner table are also well done. There are also some decent performances Donald Crisp won Best Supporting Actor for his role as the family's patriarch and, as the preacher Mr Gruffyd, Walter Pidgeon was also mightliy impressive as was Supporting Actress nominee Sara Allgood as Huw's sister Beth. However the film just didn't wow me and I found it incredibly ordinary, Roddy MacDowall's Huw got the lion's share of the screen time and wasn't that interesting and the camera work was also fairly mundane. There was nothing very memorable about the film and almost seventy years on from its release it isn't heralded as a classic and isn't even considered one of Ford's best. Also a lot of members of the cast do struggle to get the Welsh accents down with some of them just using Irish instead. I think if nothing else that spoils the film because if you can't do Welsh why be cast as a Welshman in the first place?