Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day 164: Lonely Hearts

There were mixed responses to the fact that The Artist won Best Picture at last Sunday's Oscar awards as some sort is as a great film while others thought it was a fad. However isn't the greatest marker of an award winning film longevity? So films I have watched such as Gone with the Wind and Casablanca are still watched today but others such as 1956 winner Marty is now a film that barely anybody knows which is a shame. Ernest Borgnine also won the Best Actor Oscar for playing the titular character a heavy-set butcher who is the only bachelor in his family with all of his younger brothers and sisters having flown the nest after getting married. The opening scene shows us perfectly of the community's feelings about Marty as his customers, who he is perfectly civil to, tell him he should be ashamed of himself for not having got married yet. His mother convinces him to go with his friend to a ballroom where he feels out of his depth and none of the girls want to dance with him because of his size. He then gets approached by a caddish fellow who wants to pay him to look after his plain date because he has had a better offer. Marty is disgusted by this offer but later approaches Clara and the two begin dancing and spend the night walking around the city. They discover they have a lot in common as they are both looked down on by the opposite sex so essentially they find solace in each other. However Marty's friends and mother who all meet Clara try and disuade him from calling her the next day but mainly for their own selfish reasons so the question is will he try and make a date with the only girl who has ever made him happy?

Even though I'd never heard of it you can see the influence in Marty through a lot of films featuring male protagonists from The Apartment, which would win Best Picture five years later, to the Oscar nominated male menopause movies of Alexander Payne. At the heart of this film is the central performance from Ernest Borgnine who is able to convey Marty's friendliness and also his heartbreak in equal measure we get the feeling that this is a decent guy who is just misunderstood by a lot people. However Borgnine would be nothing without director Delbert Mann or especially screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky who also got Oscars for this piece. Of the other cast members I thought Betsy Blair was a great Clara some would call her mousy but she really comes out of herself after her initial meeting with Marty. I also enjoyed Esther Mincotti and Augusta Ciolli as Marty's mother and aunt with these two old Italian women representing a different time and the two scenes in which they both feature are terribly moving and funny in equal measure as I suppose is the film itself. I suppose there are many reasons that Marty hasn't stood the test of time maybe because it's a fairly quiet film and it's one of the shortest Best Picture winners of all time but perhaps some people feel it dated. But for me this is a great little character study and maybe go as far as to say that this is a forgotten gem which got me wondering will we be saying the same thing about The Artist in 56 years time?

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.