Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Days 199 and 200: All at Sea

So here we are, back again with another post featuring two films bound together by a common theme. This time I'm taking it to incredibly tenuous levels by focusing on two movies that are both set on boats. One is a remake of a previous Oscar winner, the other is a periodic drama focusing on a number of characters aboard a German ocean liner.

And we'll start with the latter film, Ship of Fools, which is based on a novel but feels like it's been adapted from a play. The film focuses on a plethora of characters aboard a liner that has departed from Mexico and is on the way to Germany. Several to camera monologues are performed by a dwarf named Glocken, who is regularly ostracised on the ship and spends his dinner times eating with the Jewish passengers. The majority of the film is seen through the eyes of the ship's Doctor Schumann, who is about depart the vessel as he has found out he is dying from a heart condition. Schumann is drawn to one of the latest passengers - a drug-addicted countessa from Spain who is bound for a Mexican jail. Schumann and La Contessa fall in love but both realise that their courtship cannot last. Aging divorcee Mary Treadwell is attempting to glam herself up but she discovers she isn't as young as she used to be, something former baseball player Bill Denny is also learning. Meanwhile younger couple Jenny and David are having issues as he feels like she doesn't appreciate his art and doesn't have as many ideas and beliefs as him. Finally we meet Rieber, a bigoted businessman who is a member of the Nazi Party and perfectly represents the feeling of some Germans in 1933.

I personally found Ship of Fools to be a mixed bag of stories, some that I liked more than others. I felt the relationship between Schumman and the countessa was perfectly played by Oskar Werner and Simone Signoret. This sort of tragic love story was at the heart of the film and I would've preferred to have seen the film focus on just that. Vivien Leigh, in her final film role, is brilliant as Mary a former beauty who is losing her looks, and I really liked the scene in which she put on make-up in front of the mirror while talking to herself. But I found other stories to be less engaging especially the one focusing on Jose Ferrer's Rieber and his ostracising of several of his fellow passengers. One of the better performances from me came from Michael Dunn who, as Glocken, has to narrate the story straight to the audience. The film certainly looked impressive, with the flamenco scene in particular catching my eye, but there's only so much you can do with a film set almost completely on a boat. Given the cast, I would've thought that Ship of Fools could've been better but there was just far too much going on. While I'm not surprised that it received a ton of Oscar nominations, I didn't enjoy it as much as I thought I would. I also found myself comparing it to previous Best Picture Winner Grand Hotel which this bore more than a striking resemblance to.

Talking of Best Picture winners from the 1930s, we have our first remake of one in the form of Mutiny on the Bounty. This version, director by Lewis Milestone, sees Captain Bligh and Fletcher Christian return but this time both characters seem slightly different. The story is the same, namely that a crew of men set off to Tahiti but on the way their Captain starts to act in a tyrannical fashion. As Captain Bligh wants to keep the water rations low, he starts to deprive his men of their basic rations and raises the ire of Fletcher. But in this version of Mutiny on the Bounty, Fletcher is presented as more of a fop who is influence into mutiny by his fellow shipmates. One seaman in particular, Mills, gets in Fletcher's ear and provokes him into fighting against his captain. One other big change is that Fletcher ultimately regrets his decision and tries to return to England but his plans our sabotaged by other mutineers. This version of the story also introduced a narrator in the form of horticulturist William Brown whose job it was to identify the breadfruit plants when the crew got to Tahiti. However, I didn't believe Brown would've been part of the mutiny and felt the only reason for his betrayal was so that he could recall the story on camera.

I personally wasn't much of a fan of this version of Mutiny on the Bounty than I was of the Oscar-winning 1935 original. Part of the reason for that is that a lot of the performances lacked the passion that was present in the previous cast. A case in point is Trevor Howard, who played Bligh, as he is a lot less menacing and therefore comes across as less of a brute than Charles Laughton. Indeed, Bligh was fairly friendly at times and most of his dastardly acts were at least explainable to an extent. I get the feeling that Fletcher Christian's change of character was due to the fact that Marlon Brando played him. Brando, who allegedly held up the production, obviously wanted to play more of a hero so in this version Fletcher literally goes down in flames. I fact I found the most compelling member of the cast to be Richard Harris as idealistic Seaman Mills. At almost three hours, the film is way too long and I honestly didn't really get into it until the second act. The film really gets going during and after the mutiny with all the cast excelling in their various roles. There's no denying that this version of Mutiny on the Bounty is more visually spectacular than its original but other than that there's nothing new here. I especially wasn't a fan of Brando here, and I feel that he's lost something since I last saw him in On the Waterfront and Sayonara.

Next time we continue on the sea - this time with Steve McQueen.

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.

Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day 70: Getting a Bit Windy

Back to the start of the decade now with the winner of the 1940 ceremony and possibly one of the most famous films of all time - Gone with The Wind. It holds a place in Oscar history as it is the first Best Picture filmed entirely in colour and also the first film to feature an Oscar winning turn by an African American performer but more on that later. The story follows Southern Belle Scarlett O'Hara who we meet at the start of the American Civil War, Scarlett is admired by several suitors but she is in love with the debonair Ashley Wilkes but she discovers that he is to marry his cousin Melanie. Simply out of spite Scarlett decides to marry Melanie's brother Charles but he is soon killed when the Civil War starts. At the same time Scarlett meets the dashing rogue Rhett Butler who seems to have offended everyone who comes into contact with him. As the men go away to fight in the war Scarlett promises Ashley that she will look after Melanie, the two of them soon move to Atlanta to tend to sick soldiers but then a pregnant Melanie gets sick and Scarlett helps to deliver her baby. Scarlett enlists Rhett's to help transport Melanie and the baby back to Scarlett's estate which she finds in a state and her father who has since succumb to dementia and then dies just after the war finishes. Scarlett struggles to keep her estate going and soon marries her sister's suitor the middle-aged Frank Kennedy with whose money she buys a saw mill and convinces Ashley to help her run it. After Scarlett is attacked Frank, Ashley and a returning Rhett go after the attackers and Frank is fatally injured in the scuffle. Scarlett and Rhett eventually marry and have a child but Rhett realises that she is still in love with Ashley and starts to drink heavily and then asks Scarlett for a divorce however she doesn't want the scandal so instead Rhett takes their daughter away to London. They return after Rhett realises Bonnie needs her mother but then Bonnie dies after falling off a horse and then Melanie dies during her second pregnancy. After seeing how distraught Ashley is when Melanie dies she realises that he could never have loved her in the way he did Melanie and finally decides that she is in love with Rhett. However at this point Rhett has had enough and when Scarlett asks what she will do without Rhett he utters the line 'frankly my dear I don't give a damn' and this is followed by the film's other famous line 'tomorrow is another day' when Scarlett realises that the only thing that is left in her life is her family's estate and that's what her priority has to be.

It has been a while since I saw Gone With The Wind and the DVD I rented came as two discs separated by the interval which the original audience would have got. Part One of the film is definitely it's stronger half with the opening scene at the barbecue where we get the feel of all of the four principal characters followed by the war itself. You get the feel of the epic scale of the picture as we get a shot of all the injured soldiers laid out across the land there also some very interesting camera techniques and the use of colour is expertly done. The film's second half is where things get a bit flabby as director Victor Fleming takes too long telling the story of the love quadrangle that takes place but the film picks up in its final part with the marriage and separation of Scarlett and Rhett and the deaths of Bonnie and Melanie. The production itself seemed to be very fraught with original director George Cukor being fired and replaced by The Wizard of Oz's Fleming while there was about 20 actresses in the frame for Scarlett but the role went to the then unknown British actress Vivien Leigh. Leigh's performance won her an Oscar and she did a good job portraying the incredibly complex Scarlett. Clark Gable was brilliant as Rhett but he lost out to Robert Donat and Olivia De Havilland was also nominated as Melanie but she also lost. The actress she lost to was Hattie McDaniel who portrayed the O'Hara's servant Mammy, McDaniel stole most of the scenes that she featured in especially the opening scenes which without her would've been awfully melodramatic. McDaniel laid down the legacy which saw other African American performers being accepted by the academy equally impressive was Butterfly McQueen as the jittery servant Prissy.

Although I do have a lot of love for what The Wizard of Oz did in terms of its special effects and use of colour there's no denying that Gone With The Wind is weightier in terms of its tone. Although, at three and a half hours it's a bit long, at the time the audience would've appreciated this and the cinema was much more of a communal event than it is now. Although I am yet to watch seven of the other films that were nominated against it at the moment I can definitely say that Gone with The Wind was a good choice to be the first winner of the 1940s ceremonies.