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 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 34: She's Just a Devil Woman

One good thing about this project is that it is getting me watching a lot of the older stars of the screen that I'm not really aware of for example I have become enamoured with both Charles Laughton and Lionel Barrymore's acting skills and the beauty of Claudette Colbert. Here though for the first time is Bette Davis, the main thing I know about her is that are eyes are somewhat worthy of a song, and to be fair they are quite startling. In 1939 the film Jezebel was nominated for Best Picture but it lost to You Can't Take It With You. However it also saw Davis win back-to-back Best Actress statuettes, her first win was for the film Dangerous which wasn't nominated for Best Picture so won't be watched by me in the near future. In Jezebel she plays Julie a strong-willed Southern Belle living in New Orleans who is to be married to Henry Fonda's banker Pres. Julie likes to be different riding around on a horse that Pres doesn't want her to and wearing red to a ball that she should wear white to. The scene at the ball is very effective indeed as Pres forces Julie to dance in the dress and we can see how uncomfortable she feels. Pres and Julie separate and he goes up North returning a year later with a new wife. Julie then tries to egg on new admirer Buck to quarrel with Pres but he has to leave to help his Doctor friend deal with the outbreak of yellow fever and Pres' brother ends up duelling with Buck and fatally shooting him. Pres eventually has to go to an island when he himself is diagnosed with yellow fever and Julie convinces Pres' wife that it should be Julie that goes with him and not her. The end of the film sees Pres and Julie leaving for what is essentially a leper colony.

Davis more than justifies her Best Actress win in this picture playing a character that no man dare get involved with. From the minute she rides in on her horse we know that she means trouble and she is a free-thinking woman especially for the time the film is set (1850). She owns every scene she's in and even makes Henry Fonda look inferior which is a hard task. By the end of the film you wonder why anyone would want Julie as one of her men is shot dead and the other is on his death bed. Apart from Davis' performance the most striking thing about Jezebel is the score which is always seems to imply some kind of danger or some scheming of Julie's. The supporting cast are all adequate but there is no standout this is almost a one woman show and a very effecting film however I think audiences at the time preferred the light-hearted You Can't Take It With You to this very dark and ultimately depressing tale, another great character study from William Wyler.