Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day 157: Just Before Eve

For most film fans the name Joseph L Mankiewicz will be most familiar as the director and writer of All About Eve one of the most nominated Oscar films of all time. However one year prior to this success Mankiewicz won the directing and screenwriting awards for another film entitled A Letter to Three Wives. The three wives of the title are Jeanne Crain's Deborah Bishop, Ann Sothern's Rita Phipps and Linda Darnell's Lora Mae Hollingsworth who are all informed via a letter that one of their husbands has ran off with mutual acquaintance Addie Ross. The problem is that Addie's letter doesn't reveal which husband it is so all three women, who are about to board a boat to volunteer on a picnic for orphans, have to play the waiting game until they reach dry land. Addie Ross narrates the piece from beginning to end showing us around the neighbourhood and introducing the three women however she is never seen. In flashback we see the state of the three marriages and why the husbands may've run off with Addie. Firstly Deborah, who is married to Addie's first love Brad, a farmer's daughter who met her husband while they were both in the navy and is now nervous about meeting his friends whom she feel are in a higher class than herself. In the flashback we see her journey to her first dance with the other couples and getting so nervous that she drinks too much and ends up throwing up just as Addie turns up at the end. Next we see Rita's marriage to school-teacher George, played by Kirk Douglas, who writes for the radio and is often dominated by her boss who demands constant re-writes. George often feels emasculated by his wife who earns more than him and we flashback to a dinner party thrown in her boss' honour however she is so busy that she has forgot her husband's birthday something that Addie hasn't done giving him a record as a present. Finally Rita Mae's marriage to retail king Porter is depicted in detail showing her living in squalor next to the railway tracks and wanting to be a wife to someone of Porter's status but there is a hint that he himself is also taken with Addie as there is a picture of her on his piano. The end of the film reveals who it is that has run off with Addie and the consequences that this revelation has.

At first watching A Letter to Three Wives I felt that I was getting some soppy melodrama but once I learnt that Mankiewicz was involved and I was introduced to the characters I really got into it. I could really see elements of All About Eve in the film including the narration from someone who isn't necessary involved in all parts of the story as well as a strong female presence and the themes of advancing in social circles. Indeed the film also features two uncredited roles for All About Eve cast-members with Thelma Ritter playing the Phipps' home help Sadie who is very similar to the role of Birdie that she would play in Mankiewicz's next film while Celeste Holm was also present in voice form only giving an airy quality to the mysterious Addie. Of the six central performances I think Kirk Douglas was brilliant as the put-upon George a man who has to deal with his lot in life and the fact that his wife earns a lot more money than he does. Of the wives themselves Linda Darnell is both sexy and compelling as the woman who has come the furthest and who secretly loves her husband even though you wouldn't know it. The script is incredibly clever and the direction is masterful and while this film isn't as great as Mankiewicz's classic it is certainly a pre-cursor to what this man would produce the following year.

Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day 151: All About Bette

So I'm in catch-up mode with three films that I watched last year but haven't yet reviewed so will start off with the absolute classic that has stayed with me long after I finished watching it.

I'm talking of course of  All About Eve a glorious film and a classic which I ashamedly hadn't watched previously. It did win the Best Picture award in 1951 but shockingly only one acting award for George Sanders' memorable performance as the bitchy journalist. The film starts with Bette Davis' Margo Channing and Celeste Holm's Karen Richards both reminiscing about the first time they met Anne Baxter's Eve Harrington as she wins an award for her acting. Karen, the wife of a scriptwriter, introduces Eve to star actress Margo who eventually hires her as an assistant despite suspicions from her current helper Birdie played with vigour by the brilliant Thelma Ritter. As the film goes on Eve plants herself into Margo's life more with the actress now becoming paranoid it seems that Eve has now become Margo's understudy later garnering rave reviews after intentionally making Margo late for a performance. Eve then starts flirting with Sanders' Addison who thinks he's figured out but then she starts lying to him about an affair she is having with Karen's wife Lloyd. Addison finally unravels Eve's backstory and then the whole thing finally comes full circle when a girl like Eve comes to her doorstep claiming admiration for her. Everything is right about All About Eve which is evident from its fourteen nominations and only six wins. It's always obvious to wax lyrical about Baxter or Davis but for me it's Celeste Holm who holds everything together by not playing a person who is part of the showbiz set and who is genuinely taken with the young innocent Eve. This is a film that demonstrates the perils of fame and what some people will do to get ahead but is presented in a way that never alienates the audience by in the end letting the characters get their just deserts. Overall a brilliant film that deserves all the accolades it picked up at the 1951 ceremony.

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.