Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Days 420-422: Days of Future Past Part Six

Welcome once again to our time-travelling trip through the decades as we attempt to fill in the gaps of the challenge.

First of all apologies for jumping around the timeline a bit but at the last minute I managed to get my hands on a copy of 1931 nominee Five Star Final. Although the film was released around the same time as Trader Horn, I found that the newspaper drama felt a lot more contemporary. Mervyn La Roy's film focuses on editor Joseph Randall who finds himself under pressure to increase the distribution of his tabloid. He's talked in to producing a series of articles focusing on the twentieth anniversary of a murder committed by the notorious Nancy Voorhies. Little does he know that Nancy is now happily married and has a daughter who herself is about to tie the knot. The revelation in the papers soon spoils the family's happiness and results in both Nancy and her husband Michael committing suicide. What I initially thought was going to be a drama in the same vain as previous early nominee The Front Page turned dark very quickly. The double suicide coupled with the general reaction to the event meant that Five Star Final was one of the earliest examples of a press satire. It was quite easy to deduce that Five Star Final's origins lay on the stage however LaRoy at least went out of his way to use the cinematic techniques available to him. Most notably he employed some clever editing during a sequence in which Nancy is desperately trying to get Randall to drop the story about her family. As Randall, I thought Edward G. Robinson was brilliant as he conveyed his character's guilt perfectly and his final speech was brilliantly delivered. Although The Front Page is definitely of its time I think it holds up a lot better than the three films in the previous post and I found it to be an incredibly easy watch. It's also no surprise to learn that the film was one of the two that made Robinson a star and I'm only surprised that he hadn't been a big name before Five Star Final was released.

We now move in the right direction for probably the last 1930s film I'll review for as part of this blog. The Citadel is an interesting film that almost feels like three episodes of a miniseries featuring Robert Donat's trainee Doctor Andrew Mason. The first part of the film looks at Mason's training in a small Welsh town in which he meets resistance from the senior doctor's wife but at the same time is able to help out several villagers. The second part of the movie looks at Mason's move to a Welsh mining village and his marriage to beloved schoolteacher Christine. Once again Andrew faces opposition, this time from the miners who don't want him to change the way they've been doing things for years. Andrew refuses to punch their unfit for work cards and wants to explore the troubling coughs that the miners develop. Eventually frustrated he leaves Wales for London but he struggles to find patients for his burgeoning clinic. The final third of the film looks at Mason's corruption at the hands of the Harley Street set and the fact that he makes a lot of money from doing very little. I personally found the general structure of The Citadel to be quite frustrating as, just as one plot starting to develop, director King Vidor changed the action to another location. The one memorable moment of the film comes halfway through when Mason helps rescue several people from a collapsed mine. However, the film then gets a little dreary as we see Andrew become more and more enchanted with the superficial London lifestyle. I have to say that the point The Citadel was making was quite an obvious one and I found the ending completely anticlimactic. In fact the only thing that saved it was the central turn from Robert Donat who certainly showed qualities that would later see him cast in his Oscar-winning role in Goodbye Mr. Chips. Aside from Donat though there was very little about The Citadel that was memorable and at the end of the day it feels like yet another also-ran nominee.

But describing our next film; The Yearling as an also-ran nominee would almost be giving it too much credit as its one of the most inconsequential pieces of cinema I think I've ever seen. Set in 1878, The Yearling follows the adventures of the Baxter family - former Civil War soldier Penny, his withdrawn wife Ora and their son Jody. Throughout the film Ora's emotional state is explained away by the fact that she'd lost all of her other children and only Jody remained. I have to say if I was in Ora's position I'd be a little annoyed to as Jody is especially annoying. Films like The Yearling only work if the cute child star isn't annoying and unfortunately in this movie that isn't the case. It's particularly annoying as the majority of the film deals with Jody's relationship with a young fawn named Flag who he tries to raise. But, when the time comes to set him free, Jody doesn't take it and instead experiences proper loss for the first time. Whilst I can see what director Clarence Brown was trying to achieve with The Yearling the results are incredibly mediocre. Aside from Claude Jarman Jr's cloying performance as Jody, the cast are uniformly forgettable. Most surprising was the fact that Jane Wyman, who was so superb in Johnny Belinda, made little impression in her role as Ora. To be fair to Wyman the role didn't require much of her apart from sitting sour-faced whilst performing some menial task. Though Gregory Peck tried his best to make us warm to Penny, I found him a little too squeaky clean and didn't think he came down hard enough on his son. Surprisingly The Yearling was nominated for seven Oscars including for the performances given by Peck and Wyman. The fact it won in the colour cinematography and art direction categories leads me to believe that its main appeal to the Academy was its bright colours. Indeed, when films were primarily still shot in black and white, I'd feel that The Yearling would definitely stand out in the crowd. But it's a film that hasn't aged well and at the end of the day I don't think it would've been nominated at all were it not for the fact that it had been filmed in colour.

The only good think about watching The Yearling was the fact that it was the last Best Picture Nominee of the 1940s that I was yet to watch. To that end the next post looks at my completion of both the 1950s and 1960s.

Big Oscar Challenge Day 95-96: Catch-up Part 5

But for every light-hearted film the 1940s, unlike the decade that came before, definitely gave a lot of bleaker moments. For example John Ford's adaptation of  John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath focuses on a family who are going through joblessness and depression and have to hit the road in order to find a better life. Henry Fonda's lead performance as Tom Joad is particularly effective but he lost out to a lesser performance from Stewart in The Philadelphia Story. Ford won a deserved Best Director Oscar and the film also won a Best Supporting Actress for Jane Darwell for playing the Joad matriarch desperately trying to keep her family together.

The Grapes of Wrath didn't win Best Picture but won that did triumph was The Lost Weekend which looks at an author who is unable to control his alcoholism and goes on a bender. The Lost Weekend did seem like a bit of an odd choice because of its lead being a bit of an anti-hero and to an extent never finding redemption but a cracking script and Ray Milland's lead performance both see the piece becoming a classic. Milland, the script and director Billy Wilder all also won Oscars but the brilliant cinematography failed to capture glory despite it being one of the things that made the film great.

Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Days 85-87: Catch-Up Part 1

So over August and September I watched 17 films for the Big Oscar Challenge which I sort of abandoned to start watching films for the end of 2010 list. Before I restart the Challenge I'm going to just briefly write about the films I watched back then we start with the first five.

First up was Johnny Belinda which was the 100th film I watched for the challenge and was nominated for Best Picture back in 1949. The film is one of a few in Oscar history to be nominated for all four acting Oscars but won only one of them. That was for Jane Wyman who was absolutely excellent as Belinda, a girl who was born deaf and dumb and was kept separate from the small town community and instead was raised by her father and aunt on a farm. Belinda is befriended by Lew Ayres' new town Doctor who realises that she is smarter than anyone has given her credit for but then tragedy strikes when Belinda is raped by Locky the local town hero. When Belinda gets pregnant the Doctor is suspected as being the father and to protect Belinda he marries her and plans to take his new family out of town. However while the Doctor is away Locky kills Belinda's father after he finds out what Locky did and then the town plan to take Belinda's baby Johnny away after they decide she is an unfit mother. Belinda is then arrested after killing Locky who is trying to take Johnny away but she is saved by Locky's wife Stella who found out about what Locky did to Belinda. I felt the film was absolutely excellent, the four main players - Wyman, Ayres, Agnes Moorhead as Belinda's aunt and Charles Bickford as her father all thoroughly deserved their Oscar nominations as did the film itself. This was a film all about small town suspicion and gossip and what we can do out of spite for example Stella doesn't speak up earlier as she is jealous of Belinda's relationship with the Doctor who she has always been in love with. The film was one of a strong bunch that lost out to Olivier's Hamlet and it's become increasingly obvious that that film shouldn't have won the Oscar at the final ceremony of the 1940s.
After Rebecca and Spellbound, the other two Hitchcock films that have been nominated for Best Picture - Suspicion and Foreign Correspondent were the next two films I watched. The former is the better of the two and stars Joan Fontaine as the dowdy daughter of a wealthy General who is swept of her feet by Cary Grant's dashing cad and they are quickly married. As Fontaine's father and later Grant's cousin are both found dead, she starts to suspect he has killed them so he can get money to continue his gambling ways. In the end it turns out that Fontaine's Suspicion was unfounded as Grant was away when both the murders occurred. This was possibly one of Hitchcock's better studio pictures as it is based on a simple premise and features two superb lead performances and Fontaine was rewarded with the Best Actress Oscar becoming the only performer to ever win an Acting Oscar in a Hitchcock film. The film is another of the superior offerings that fell to the odd mining drama How Green was My Valley.

While I enjoyed Suspicion, I found 1941 nominee Foreign Correspondent a little bit too much with the premise based around political intrigue slightly far-fetched. It stars Joel McCrae, who is pretty decent as the Hitchcock everyman, as a New York reporter who goes to uncover the growing power of Adolf Hitler's Nazi party. As you would expect he is soon thrown into a conspiracy when a Dutch diplomat is killed. While I enjoyed McCrae's performance I thought the film as a whole lacked a certain something especially as it was directed by Hitchcock. But I don't think Alf minded that much as Foreign Correspondent was nominated for Best Picture in the same year as Rebecca won.