Braveheart, and Blind Harry’s Wallace

Posted on 12 June 2021 by fromtheheartofeurope

Braveheart won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1995, and four others: Best Director (Mel Gibson), Best Cinematography, Best Make-up, and Best Sound Effects Editing. It lost in five categories, two to Apollo 13. The Hugo that year went to the Babylon 5 episode The Coming of Shadows.

I have seen very few films made in 1995, a year when my PhD and my brief political career were simultaneously peaking. Of the other Oscar nominees, I have seen Apollo 13 and Babe, but not Il Postino or Sense and Sensibility. Other 1995 films that I have seen: Goldeneye, The American President, Johnny Mnemonic (which is set in 2021), the wonderful Tank Girl, the brilliant Ian McKellen Richard III, and I think that’s it. Apart from Johnny Mnemonic, I liked all of them more than Braveheart. IMDB users disagree with me and have it third on one ranking and fourth on the other, behind Se7en in both cases.

Edited to add: My sister writes in to remind me that I did in fact see Sense and Sensibility at the time and told her that to my own surprise I liked it. She also points to this piece about Sense and Sensibility which includes a reflection on the contrast with Braveheart.

Here’s a trailer.

This being the sort of film it is, there are loads of actors who have also been in Doctor Who, but I’m going to start with one who wasn’t. Edward Longshanks, aka King Edward I of England, is played here by Patrick McGoohan, much more famous as The Prisoner.

There are a couple of Whovians. The biggest Who name is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-huim moment in Braveheart, where Bernard Horsfall asks Mel Gibson a pointed question about the Balliol claim to the Scottish throne. (In real life Wallace was on Balliol’s side rather than the Bruces’.) Horsfall was in several Doctor Who stories, in The Mind Robber (Second Doctor, 1968), a Time Lord in The War Games (Second Doctor, 1969), Taron in Planet of the Daleks (Third Doctor, 1973) and Chancellor Goth (possibly the same Time Lord as previously) in The Deadly Assassin (Fourth Doctor, 1976).

Rupert Vansittart plays rapey Lord Bottoms here; he went on to be General Asquith (or rather the Slitheen disguised as General Asquith) in the 2005 Doctor Who story Aliens of London / World War Three.

Michael Tierney here is the evil magistrate who kills Braveheart’s girl; a few years earlier he was an assistant to Honor Blackman in the 1986 Doctor Who story Terror of the Vervoids.

I spotted one actor who had been in a Hugo-winning film: Michael Byrne is Michael Tierney’s sidekick here, and was the main Nazi in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Noting also that Brian Cox, playing Argyle Wallace here, provided an Ood voice in Doctor Who but was not on screen. (I’m a little surprised that Alun Armstrong has never been in Who.)

OK folks, I’ll be brief: this is a violent and also silly film. Clichés abound. Great use of (mostly Irish) scenery, gallant (but occasionally treacherous) Scots, repulsive English, seductive French women, funny Irish sidekick, sanguinary combat, swirling music, culminating in Wallace’s Christ-like martyrdom. I’m rating it ahead of Platoon, my worst Oscar winner ever, because at least the characters are distinguishable and nearly interesting. I can see how it appeals to those Americans who like historical parallels to how they imagine their own revolution, and to anyone who likes a good romantic nationalist tale (which sometimes even includes me, which is why I’m not putting it at the very bottom of my list; I am neutral veering to positive on Scottish independence). But really, it’s the most utter tosh. I’m putting in 59th place out of 68, two places above last year’s Forrest Gump, just above Patton, which is more boring, and just below Mutiny on the Bounty, which carries off its clichés better.

(My observation that a parallel can be drawn between Wallace and the American War of Independence is not at all original, and was probably not original when Robert Burns invoked Wallace in his Ode on General Washington’s Birthday in 1794.)

Incidentally this is the first Oscar-winning film since Chariots of Fire, fourteen years before, to be set in Britain and the first mainly set in Scotland (Chariots of Fire of course had a number of Scottish scenes; we had Wales back in 1941). Since then we’ve had three in Asia (Gandhi, Platoon and The Last Emperor), two in Continental Europe (Amadeus and Schindler’s List) and Out of Africa. I’ll do an overall tally when we reach #70 in the sequence.

This is the second Oscar-winning film to be based on a work of epic poetry. (The first, fifty years earlier, was The Best Years of Our Lives.) The original 15th-century text of Blind Harry’s The Actes and Deidis of the Illustre and Vallyeant Campioun Schir William Wallace is readily available online, but like most people these days I satisfied myself with the 18th century translation by William Hamilton of Gilbertfield, available in a nice edition introduced by Elspeth King with impressive woodcut illustrations by Owain Kirby. You can get it here.

The opening sentence of Book III, Chapter II of Hamilton’s version is as follows, cross-referenced with the lines it is adapting from Blind Harry’s original.

When Wallace now had vanquish’d in the Field
The Traitor false, that had his Father kill’d,
And Brother also, that brave and worthy Knight,
With many more, that all were Men of Might;
He caus’d provide, and distribute their Store,
To go on new Exploits, and purchase more.
In Clyde’s Green-Wood they did sojourn three Days;
No South’ron might Adventure in those Ways,
Death did they thole, durst in their Gate appear;
And Wallace’ Word did Travel far and near.

Quhen Wallace had weyle wenquist to the playne
The falss terand that had his fadyr slayne;
His brothyr als, quhilk was a gentill knycht,
Othir gud men befor to dede thai dycht;
He gert dewyss, and prowide thar wictaille;
Baith stuff and horss that was of gret awaille,
To freyndis about preualye thai send,
The ramanand full glaidlye thar thai spend.
In Clydis wode thai soiornyt twenty dayis,
Na Sothren that tyme was persawyt in thai wais,
Bot he tholyt dede that come in thar danger:
The worde of him walkit baith fer and ner.

King warns in her introduction that “As far as the battle scenes and the incidents of killing are concerned, Braveheart is a work of restraint and good taste when compared to Blind Harry’s original text.” She’s not wrong. I must admit that the poem has a cracking pace, even with some unfortunate McGonagallisms. Like the film, it’s a bit vague on geography, but very clear about who the good guys and the bad guys are. Unlike the film, it’s mercifully discreet about Wallace’s horrible death. I’m afraid it did read like one incident of biffing the English followed by another of biffing traitorous Scots and so on, but I can see why people liked it.

Next up: The English Patient.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

Forrest Gump

Posted on 29 May 2021 by fromtheheartofeurope

Forrest Gump won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1994, and five others: Best Actor (Tom Hanks), Best Director (Robert Zemeckis), Best Visual Effects, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Film Editing. It lost in seven categories, two each to Ed Wood and Speed. The Hugo that year went to the final episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

For once – I think uniquely – I have seen all of the other nominees for Best Picture. They were Four Weddings and a Funeral, Pulp Fiction, Quiz Show and The Shawshank Redemption. I have also seen Star Trek: Generations, Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult, The Madness of King George, the great Macedonian film Before the Rain, Kate Beckinsale’s gorgeous debut Uncovered, and Peter Capaldi’s Oscar-winning Franz Kafka’s It’s A Wonderful Life. I liked all of these much more than I liked Forrest Gump. IMDB users show a rare unity between the two ranking systems, with both lists putting Forrest Gump third after The Shawshank Redemption in first place and Pulp Fiction in second, followed by Léon: The Professional in fourth and The Lion King in fifth (they diverge after that). Here’s a trailer.

A huge cast, but I spotted only no actors who had been in Doctor Who or previous Oscar winners, and a couple from Hugo winner, one a pretty big one: Robin Wright is the female lead, Jenny Curran, here, and seven years ago had the title role in The Princess Bride.

The other was Brett Rice, here the college football coach, four years ago a reporter in Edward Scissorhands.

I’ll be brief. The film is about Alabama-born Forrest Gump, who has a learning disability but gets into hilarious scrapes including encounters with three American presidents and much of the counter-culture of the 1960s, before getting back together with the girl he has always loved, who promptly dies. The end. Perhaps because of my family situation, I don’t find learning disabilities particularly funny, and perhaps because I am Irish, I don’t like people’s accents being used as markers of their stupidity, as Gump’s deep Southern drawl is here.

The film is not as sound on race as it thinks it is. Sure, Gump’s best friend Bubba is black, and Gump himself plays a sympathetic role in the integration of the University of Alabama. I noticed however that the population of his home town of Greenboro seemed to be entirely white, and Bubba’s family are in another part of the state. I also felt that a false equivalence was being drawn between the excesses of the Left and Right during the 1960s, where my heart is firmly with the former. I also thought the sequence of Gump running across America near the end was pointless and frankly not very good cinema, apart from the excuse to have some nice landscape shots.

Tom Hanks is OK as the lead, but as noted above I did not really appreciate the character. I thought Gary Sinise was very good as his friend Lieutenant Dan Taylor. (The following year, both were in Apollo 13, Hanks the lead again, Sinise as Ken Mattingly who gets bumped off the flight at the last moment.)

Now that I’ve got to Sinise, the one thing about the film which I thought superb: the special effects. Sinise’s character’s legs are amputated; the actor’s legs were not, but were removed from every frame in post-production. 1500 extras were filmed several times over to provide a crowd stretching along the National Mall. Forrest Gump meets three presidents, and John Lennon. I thought this was audacious and successful.

But it did not salvage the rest of the film for me. I’m putting it way down at the bottom of my list, 60th out of the 67 Oscar-winners I have seen so far, just below Patton and just above All The King’s Men.

As usual, I read the original novel as well. It is mercifully short. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

All this was durin the month of August, which in the state of Alabama is somewhat hotter than it is elsewhere. That is to say, that if you put a egg on top of your football helmet it would be fried sunnyside up in about ten seconds. Of course nobody ever try that on account of it might get Coach Bryant angry. That was the one thing nobody wish to do, because life was almost intolerable as it was.

I thought the book even worse than the film (with the exception that the ending is a bit better, Forrest and Jenny don’t actually get back together and he makes his peace with that). A particularly offensive section involves him being recruited for NASA for a space mission with a woman astronaut and an orang-utan; they crash on a tropical island where they are nearly eaten by cannibals. The film made some odd choices but leaving this out is understandable.

Next up is Braveheart, which is the second Oscar-winner to be based on a work of epic poetry.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

Schindler’s List

Posted on 15 May 2021 by fromtheheartofeurope

Schindler’s List won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1993, and six others: Best Director (Steven Spielberg), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score (John Williams), Best Film Editing, Best Cinematography and Best Art Direction. It lost in another five categories, all to different films, including one to that year’s Hugo winner, Jurassic Park.

That year’s other Best Picture nominees were In the Name of the Father and The Piano, which I have seen, and The Fugitive and The Remains of the Day, which I haven’t. Apart from the two just mentioned, I had seen another six films made that year: Jurassic Park, Groundhog Day, Philadelphia, The Three Musketeers, Much Ado About Nothing and Dave. I must say I really like them all, but I do think that the Oscar voters made the right choice. IMDB users rate Schilndler’s List top film of 1993 on one system and second to, bizarrely, Dazed and Confused (a film I don’t think I had even heard of) on the other. Here’s a trailer.

I spotted no actors who had previously been in a Hugo-winning flm, or in Doctor Who, and only one actor who had previously been in an Oscar winning film. It is Ben Kingsley, here the most prominent Jewish character, accountant Yitzhak Stern, and eleven years ago in the lead role in Gandhi.

In case you didn’t know, it’s the story of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist during the second world war, who rescued over a thousand Jews from extermination at Auschwitz. It is based on a Booker Prize-winning novel. I think it is the only Booker winner to also be an Oscar winner; I count four based on Pulitzer winners (You Can’t Take It With You, Gone With The Wind, All the King’s Men, and Driving Miss Daisy).

It’s also almost entirely in black and white. The last film in black and white to win the Oscar was The Apartment in 1960. Schindler’s List is the most expensive black and white film of all time, and also the highest earning. It’s a tremendous device to make us feel simultaneously distanced and involved in the action, especially combined with the handheld camera documentary style filming. Life happened in colour in the 1940s, of course, in Eastern Europe as everywhere else. But our historical memory of the period in general is in black and white. The colour Nazis of Spielberg’s earlier films Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade are a bit comical. These Nazis are not, just as the black and white Nazis of Casabalanca are not. And the film’s exceptions to the black and white rule are all the more memorable as a result.

I have to say that it’s a rather male film. The women are not as central to the action as the men. I was interested that one vivid incident, when the engineer Diana Reiter is shot dead for offering structural advice, was based on fact. It is also interesting that the real Diana Reiter was 40 when she died, and she is played by 26-year-old Elina Löwensohn.

We’ve had several Oscar-winning films which looked at Jewish identity and anti-semitism in different times and places. (The Life of Emile Zola, Gentleman’s Agreement, Ben-Hur, Annie Hall, Chariots of Fire, Driving Miss Daisy; the word “Jew” is not mentioned in Casablanca, but the subtext is very present.) Schindler’s List is at its heart the story of Schindler and his antagonist Goeth, and only then of the people he saved, but it is such a long and wide film that we get a much much better exploration of these issues than in any of the others. The story is brought home to us directly at the very end, where the real survivors saved by Schindler, accompanied by the actors we have just seen playing them on film, honour Schindler’s grave in Jerusalem.

Apart from that caveat, the film is indeed a masterpiece, telling a grim story at length (still leaving out a lot of what’s in the book), exploring the ambiguity of Schindler who did things that are normally considered bad (fraud, theft, forgery) to ameliorate something much worse (genocide). The settings are convincing. The music is unforgettable. Here’s Itzhak Perlman playing it in concert.

It’s also carried by Liam Neeson in the central role. Schindler is complex but I think not ambiguous; he enjoys the pleasures of life, but is also shocked and repelled by what is happening to the people around him, and is in the position where he can make a small difference to some.

It’s difficult to know what else to say. I’m putting it right at the top of my rankings, in fifth place overall, just behind Chariots of Fire, but ahead of Rebecca.

I also went and read the novel by Thomas Keneally, first published as Schindler’s Ark and then retitled Schindler’s List to capitalise on the film. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

With some hundreds of other captured Polish officers from Przemyśl, Pfefferberg was on his way to Germany when his train drew into his home city of Cracow and the prisoners were herded into the first-class waiting room, to remain there until new transport could be provided. His home was ten blocks away. To a practical young man, it seemed outrageous that he could not go out into Pawia Street and catch a No. 1 trolley home. The bucolic-looking Wehrmacht guard at the door seemed a provocation.

It’s a great book, and the great film that was made from it inevitably cut out some important details. The core of the story is still the same – the sensualist Schindler, who succeeds in saving a few lives, with perhaps more of an emphasis on the people he saved as well as the people he opposed and the women he loved. But the book has time to show us the overall context. There’s an interesting cameo in an early chapter from a policeman who complains that the entire railway system is being diverted to transporting Jews, rather than the soldiers who might actually help win the war. It made me wonder briefly if the Germans could have won the war if it had not been accompanied by a policy of genocide. But of course, if there had been no policy of genocide, there would probably have been no war.

There’s another interesting moment in the book when Schindler goes to Budapest to brief the Jewish Relief Organization on what was happening to Jews in Poland. This again is based on fact. In these days of instant news, which I guess we’ve had more or less since the 1960s, we forget just how difficult it was to get information, even about mass murder to which there were hundreds or thousands of witnesses. By 1943, the first reports were already out there – the New Republic broke the story in December 1942, rumours had reached Anne Frank and her family in hiding a few months before that. But Schindler was able to provide a dangerous and direct link between the Zionist relief funds and the surviving Jews in his part of the world. I find this particularly brave. Budapest was not home territory, the Zionists were not people who he knew, in the same way that Poland and the Sudetenland were.

But the most striking difference between book and film is the detail of suffering which the book can describe but the film cannot. Actors in 1992 were able to convincingly portray the terror and trauma of fifty years earlier. They could not portray malnutrition and disease. It’s a comprehensive and convincing account of what life was like both inside and outside the camps, when horror and tragedy were everyday occurrences. Really very much worth reading, whether or not you see the film. You can get it here.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

Unforgiven

Posted on 24 April 2021 by fromtheheartofeurope

Unforgiven won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1992, and three others: Best Director (Clint Eastwood), Best Supporting Actor (Gene Hackman) and Best Film Editing. It lost in five other categories to five different films (including Clint Eastwood’s nomination for Best Actor)

That year’s other Best Picture nominees were The Crying Game and Howard’s End, which I have seen, and A Few Good Men and Scent of a Woman, which I haven’t. I had not seen Unforgiven before, but I had seen a dozen other films made that year: Basic Instinct, Batman Returns, Wayne’s World, Sister Act, The Crying Game, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Player, Howard’s End, Damage, Bob Roberts, Noises Off… and Peter’s Friends. Apart from Batman Returns, which really lost me by trying to make a large number of penguins look menacing, I really like them all, including Unforgiven, though I would not put it at the top of my list. IMDB users rate it second and seventh on the two systems, Reservoir Dogs ahead of it in both cases. Here is a trailer.

We have several actors returning from previous Oscar-winning films, and one who was also in two Hugo winners (one of which also won the Nebula). We’ll start there, with Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman as Little Bill, the nasty sheriff, and Ned Logan, the nice black cowboy.

It’s a while since we’ve seen Gene Hackman, but he was Lex Luthor in Superman (1978), the blind man in Young Frankenstein (1975) and one of the lead cops in The French Connection (Oscar 1971). He has aged well.

We saw Morgan Freeman only three years ago as the guy who was Driving Miss Daisy:

It’s a lot longer since we last saw Anthony James, who is brothel-keeper Skinny Dubois here and was the killer in In the Heat of the Night (1967). (Sorry for spoilers, but the film has been out since the year I was born, and it’s my 54th birthday on Monday.)

When first drafting this I missed the first woman of colour to be in two Oscar winners. Morgan Freeman’s character’s wife, Sally Two Trees, is played eloquently and silently by Cherrilene Cardinal, who as Tantoo Cardinal was also Black Shawl in Dances with Wolves.

I see a couple of other returnees in the smaller parts too, though none of the women.

Unforgiven is the third Western to win the Best Picture Oscar, after Cimarron (1930-31) and Dances With Wolves (1990), and the first one that I really enjoyed. Yes, it has its flaws, but this time I found the good points outweighing the bad points. I’m putting it a third of the way down my list, between two other films about crime and law in the USA with historical settings – ahead of The Sting, but below The Godfather.

So, on the negative side: it’s still a pretty violent film. Only nine people are actually killed, but it starts with the horrific mutilation of Anna Thomson’s Delilah and ends with a bloody shootout, with Richard Harris’s English Bob getting beaten out of town and Morgan Freeman’s Ned tortured to death in the meantime. Sure, this drives the narrative, but I don’t have to like it.

And while it’s only one of the three Westerns to have a major role for a black actor, and Morgan Freeman is really really good, one cannot help but feel that it somewhat sanitises the African-American experience of the West – yes, even with his grisly end.

Apart from Sally Two Trees, the other women characters are all sex workers, which is the first time we’ve seen that profession on screen since The Deer Hunter (1978) and the first time they’ve had a positive portrayal since One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). There is a debate about whether Unforgiven passes the Bechdel test: the first two steps are easy, but in the one scene where the women are all talking together, they are discussing raising money to get revenge on the men who hurt Delilah, so I think that is a fail. Still, the plot is driven by women who collectively plan and fund a mission, even if the focus of the story is on the men who implement that mission.

As usual with Westerns, the scenery is breath-taking (and my eye cannot detect the difference between Canada and Wyoming); and the music is good too, without being distracting.

I also enjoyed the subplot with English Bob’s top-hatted biographer, W.W. Beauchamp, played by Saul Rubinek, reminding us that most of what we think we know about the West is romanticised fiction.

But what carries the film is of course the performances of Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman. (I was actually a little less swept away by Gene Hackman, though Oscar voters were more impressed.) My most recent memory of Clint was his frankly embarrassing performance at the 2012 Republican National Convention, where (in case you have forgotten) he talked to an empty chair pretending that it was President Obama. It’s good to be reminded that he was a really great actor in his day, twenty years earlier. And as I mentioned already, while I have some difficulty with the way Freeman’s character is written, I have none at all with the way he performs. One has the sense of fully rounded personalities, real people in a real environment dealing with real life, as opposed to the cruder dichotomy of Dances with Wolves (and the confused truncation of Cimarron).

So basically I enjoyed this a lot more than I had expected.

The Hugo that year went to “The Inner Light”, from the fifth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The other finalists were Aladdin, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Batman Returns (the only one I have seen) and Alien³. But in this project I am covering cinematic releases only, so we will skip the Hugos this year and go straight on to Schindler’s List. I may take a weekend off.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

The Silence of the Lambs

Posted on 10 April 2021 by fromtheheartofeurope

The Silence of the Lambs won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1991, and four others: Best Director (Jonathan Demme), Best Actor (Anthony Hopkins), Best Actress (Jodie Foster) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Ted Tally). It lost Best Film Editing and Best Sound, the latter to Hugo winner Terminator 2: Judgement Day. So far it is the third and last film to win Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, Best Picture, and Best Screenplay, after It Happened One Night (1934) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

That year’s other Best Picture nominees were Beauty and the Beast, Bugsy, JFK and The Prince of Tides. I have not seen any of them, and had not seen the winner before either, the first year since 1970 for which that is the case. I have seen thirteen other films made that year, listed here roughly in IMDB order: Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Cape Fear, Thelma & Louise, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, The Fisher King (actually only got part way through this one), The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear, The Commitments, Highlander II: The Quickening (there should have been only one!), Soapdish, Operation Condor (a Jackie Chan film which I watched because the female co-lead, Eva Cobo, is my twin), Enchanted April and Prospero’s Books. I liked all of these except The Fisher King and Highlander II, but I think The Silence of the Lambs is a worthy Oscar winner in that company.

Unusually, IMDB users rate the film top on both systems. (The last film to top both lists was Alien, from 1979; the other Oscar-winners to top both lists were One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1975, Casablanca back in 1943 and All Quiet on the Western Front way way back in 1929/30.)

Here’s a trailer.

None of the cast had been in Hugo-winning films or in Doctor Who. There is a surprise crossover with a previous Oscar-winner: Roger Corman, much much better known as a director and producer. Here he plays the Director of the FBI; seventeen years ago, in The Godfather, Part II, he was one of the senators ineffectively quizzing the Corleones. He turned 95 last Monday. (Trivia: the office where he is filmed as FBI Director was at the time the real-life office of Elizabeth Dole, the U.S. Secretary of Labor.)

This is a film about the relationship between novice FBI Agent Clarice Starling, played by Jodie Foster, and imprisoned serial killer Hannibal Lecter, played by Anthony Hopkins. The actual plot is barely relevant, but it concerns Starling’s pursuit, advised by Lecter, of another serial killer, and Lecter’s concurrent escape from custody. We had four Oscar-winners in a row in the 1970s which were about crime and law enforcement (The French Connection, The Godfather, The Sting and The Godfather, Part II), but this is the first one since then.

I really liked it. Thrillers are not my genre in general. I find screen violence very icky. There are some other problems which I will get to below. But its’s well-made, well-paced and looks and sounds utterly convincing. I’m putting it in tenth place in my overall league table of Oscar winners, ahead of Rain Man (which has a less convincing plot) and behind One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (which is a little less icky).

Having said that, there are problems. Trans (and indeed queer) people can justifiably feel aggrieved that the killer who Starling is chasing is depicted as a man trying to become a woman. The script mumbles that real trans people are not like that at all, but I fear that point will be lost on most viewers. (The book is a lot clearer on this.) However, as I said before, the actual hunt for the serial killer is background to the central business of Starling and Lecter.

All the main characters are white, but there are a sprinkling of black actors, most notably Kasi Simmons as Starling’s best friend Ardelia Mapp. Simmons has gone on to a very successful career as a director.

I thought Howard Shore’s music was pretty good. We will be hearing from him again when I get to The Lord of the Rings.

The supporting actors are all good – I’ve called out Kasi Lemmons above, but also worth noting Scott Glenn as Clarice’s boss Jack Crawford, Anthony Heald as Lecter’s banal guardian Chilton, and Brooke Smith as potential victim Catherine Martin.

But the film is utterly made by the dynamic between Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins in the four (only four!) scenes that they have together. Hopkins is a convincing monster, always several steps ahead of the game, compellingly horrible. (More trivia: with twenty-four minutes and fifty-two seconds of screen time, Hopkins’ performance in this movie is the second shortest to ever win an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, with David Niven in Separate Tables (1958) beating him, at twenty-three minutes and thirty-nine seconds.)

And Jodie Foster is impossible to take your eyes off as Starling. A neat directorial trick: when characters are talking to her, they often talk directly to the camera, but when she is talking to them, she is always looking slightly off-camera, meaning that we directly experience her point-of-view, but not theirs, hence encouraging us to more readily identify with her. She carries the weight of the narrative; we learn lots about her and perhaps also reflect about how we would react when put into a similarly stressful situation. She is completely fascinating.

The film’s key moments are the four conversations between the two, which are just masterpieces of acting and cinematography. This is the last of them.

I had not seen this film before, but it’s been one of the better discoveries of this project.

As usual, I read the book as well. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

Dr. Hannibal Lecter himself reclined on his bunk, perusing the Italian edition of Vogue. He held the loose pages in his right hand and put them beside him one by one with his left. Dr. Lecter has six fingers on his left hand.

It’s impossible to read the book now without seeing Foster and Hopkins in your mind’s eye, but this is not necessarily a bad thing of course. A couple of plot points which are really important did not make it to the screen – the illness and death of Crawford’s wife, much of Starling’s back story, Lecter’s pun on the colouring agent for feces, and the explanation of the serial killer’s psychology and strategy. Starling is if anything an even more three-dimensional character on the page. It’s just as well paced, and if anything it’s even better than the film. You can get it here.

Next up is that year’s Hugo winner, Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

Dances with Wolves

Posted on 20 March 2021 by fromtheheartofeurope

Dances With Wolves won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1990, and six others: Best Director (Kevin Costner), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Film Editing, Best Cinematography, Best Original Score, and Best Sound Mixing. That year’s Hugo winner, Edward Scissorhands, was nominated in one category, Best Make-up, where it lost to one of the two other contenders.

That year’s other Best Picture nominees were Awakenings, Ghost, The Godfather Part III and Goodfellasthink I’ve seen The Godfather Part III but don’t remember much about it. IMBD users rank Dances With Wolves top on one system but only 9th on the other, behind Goodfellas, Home Alone, Edward Scissorhands, Back to the Future Part III, The Godfather: Part III, Die Hard 2, Total Recall and Pretty Woman.

I’ve seen twelve films made in 1990, The Godfather: Part III and Dances with Wolves, also (in rough IMDB order) Edward Scissorhands, Pretty Woman, Total Recall, The Hunt for Red October, Wild at Heart, Presumed Innocent, Postcards from the Edge, Cyrano de Bergerac, Truly Madly Deeply and Nuns on the Run, which has a particular place in my heart because it was filmed around where my aunt lived in Chiswick. I also have a deep love for Red October and Total RecallDances With Wolves. Anyway, here’s a trailer.

None of the cast had been in previous Oscar, Hugo or Nebula-winning films, or in Doctor Who.

To cut straight to the point: this is, as Anne succinctly put it, worthy but dull. It maybe didn’t help that I ended up watching the 4-hour extended version (almost as long as Gone With the Wind) rather than the original 3-hour theatrical presentation. But all the white people except our hero are bad, all the Pawnee are bad, and all the Sioux are good and if they do happen to do bad things it’s for very understandable reasons. I mean, it should go without saying that the exploitation, displacement and mass murder of the original inhabitants of the Americas by European-descended settlers is a terrible thing. But I think it might be possible to tell a more interesting story about it, and Costner and Blake have not tried very hard.

It’s a better film than Cimarron, the only other Western (so far) to win the Best Picture Oscar, but that’s not saying a lot. One area where Cimarron does score better is that at least its women characters have some agency (even if most of the feminism of the original book has been surgically removed). Here Mary McDonnell in the lead female role just smoulders a bit. You can tell she is smouldering, because unlike all the other women, she doesn’t do much with her hair.

I should not be too unfair to her, but I will note that the role was surely intended for a younger actor; McDonnell is the same age as the actors playing her adoptive parents. But I guess the same is true of Costner’s own role, and he was hardly going to recast himself.

I am going to grumble about two more things, and then I will say a couple of nice things too. First, Costner’s voice-overs of Dunbar’s diary entries are crashingly monotonous and dull. It’s rather surprising, given how much the film was obviously a labour of love, that he slipped up on this rather crucial element. Maybe delivering those lines so boringly was intended to distract attention from the implausibility of the diary as a plot device, but if so it doesn’t work.

Second, I’m sorry, but as soon as the wolf appears, we know a) that it symbolises Dunbar’s coming into harmony with the pre-European environment and b) that it’s going to be killed by another white man at the end.

OK, to be positive. I often whine about the music for these films but this time it seemed a good fit with the spectacular scenery. (And the scenery really is spectacular.) So, good marks there.

The film is about a white guy getting to grips with a non-white culture, but it’s an honest effort to portray that culture as real and valuable, and perhaps better than what replaced it. And I think it’s really worth acknowledging the fact that a large part of the dialogue is in Lakota. I see a scurrilous story that Lakota is a gendered language and that only the female version was taught to the actors, with the result that grizzled warriors are engaging in girl-talk, to the amusement of real Lakota speakers. TBH that seems a bit too good to be true, and even if it is, I’m giving Costner full marks for trying: it’s important for native English speakers to be reminded that other languages are not necessarily foreign.

So, all in all, I’m putting it just ahead of the halfway mark in my list, above Out of Africa but below Lawrence of Arabia, films with which it shares some common themes.

The film is ostensibly based on a book, which I also read. Here’s the second and third paragraphs of the third chapter:

Had it not been for the lettering, crudely gouged in the beam over Captain Cargill’s late residence, Lieutenant Dunbar could not have believed this was the place. But it was spelled out clearly.
“Fort Sedgewick.”

The book was actually written with a view to making a film out of the story, which is why the film cleaves more closely to the original plot than almost any other adaptation. The biggest difference is that the Good Indians are Comanche in the book but Sioux in the film, apparently for production reasons. I found the prose pretty clunky, especially in the early chapters, but it is a mercifully quick read. You can get it here (in omnibus with its sequel).

OK, next up is The Silence of the Lambs, but before that, Edward Scissorhands.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

Driving Miss Daisy

Posted on 6 March 2021 by fromtheheartofeurope

Driving Miss Daisy won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1989, and three others: Best Actress (Jessica Tandy as Miss Daisy, at 81 the oldest ever winner), Best Makeup, and Best Adapted Screenplay. It lost in five categories, all to different films; that year’s Hugo winner, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, won one (Best Screen Editing) and lost two.

That year’s other Best Picture nominees were Dead Poets Society, which I have seen, and Born on the Fourth of July, Field of Dreams and My Left Foot, which I haven’t. IMDB users rank Driving Miss Daisy 16th on one system and 32nd on the other, which is a tick worse than Out of Africa and the lowest aggregate placing for any Oscar winner since Tom Jones.

I have seen 13 other films made in 1989, as final year studies and student politics started to sap my time. They are (in rough IMDB order): Dead Poets Society, Batman, When Harry Met Sally, Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Ghostbusters 2, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Henry V, Shirley Valentine, Scandal, The Tall Guy and Jesus of Montreal. I have to say I’d rank Driving Miss Daisy behind all of them except the woeful Star Trek V.

None of the cast had been in previous Oscar, Hugo or Nebula-winning films, or in Doctor Who.

Well, this didn’t especially grab me and I don’t have a lot to say about it. There’s nothing particularly wrong with it, and a couple of things that are right, but I’m putting it a bit below half way down my league table, below The Last Emperor but above Rocky. It’s a gentle character study of an old lady and her slightly less old chauffeur, over the years from 1948 to 1973, set in Atlanta; she’s Jewish and he is black. (NB this is the second Oscar-winning film largely set in Georgia; the first of course was Gone With the Wind.)

I felt it slightly pulled its punches on social commentary; Hoke has witnessed a lynching, long ago; the Werthans’ synagogue is bombed; he is deeply offended by the manner in which she invites him to hear Martin Luther King speak; but these are two people (three counting her son, who is played by Dan Aykroyd and is the other major character) who are destined to get along, without massive drama or, frankly, much of a character arc. The soundtrack is particularly annoyingly upbeat and would have been appropriate theme music for a not-too-taxing soap opera.

So, on the more positive side, this is the first Oscar-winning film with an African-American lead since In the Heat of the Night, 22 years earlier, which makes it, er, the second ever. (We’ve had two Oscar-winning films with Asian leads in the last decade, in 1982 and 1987.) Morgan Freeman is always watchable and delivers a solid and convincing performance here. It’s also worth noting that it’s one of the least funny roles in Dan Aykroyd’s career, and he too carries it off well.

The movie belongs to Jessica Tandy, who is engagingly sympathetic even at her most crotchety, and particularly in her fading final scene, and deserved her Oscar.

I went and found the original play by Alfred Uhry. The opening of the third scene is:

Lights fade on them and come up on Daisy, who enters her living room with the morning paper. She reads with interest. Hoke enters the living room. He carries a chauffeur’s cap instead of his hat. Daisy’s concentration on the paper becomes fierce when she senses Hoke’s presence.
Mornin’, Miz Daisy.
DAISY: Good morning.
HOKE: Right cool in the night, wadn’t it?
DAISY: I wouldn’t know. I was asleep.
HOKE: Yassum. What yo’ plans today?
DAISY: That’s my business.

The play is a three-hander with Daisy, Hoke and Boolie the only visible characters, so we lose Boolie’s wife Florine, the cook Idella, etc (they and others are referred to but not seen). This of course makes for a tighter script, but I feel that the film built solidly on what was already a decent enough (and Pulitzer-winning) story, and of course could show us what Atlanta actually looks like in a way that can only be conveyed less directly on stage. Apart from that, all the good lines from the film are here, and I think it’s possibly the script least changed from the original material of any of the films I have seen. You can get it here.

I’ve already done this year’s Hugo winner, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, so it’s Dances With Wolves next. I thought it was was a load of rubbish when I first saw it; let’s see if I have mellowed in the last 30 years.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

Rain Man

Posted on 13 February 2021 by fromtheheartofeurope

Coincidentally, it was an appropriate week to watch Rain Man, as it turned out. On Thursday, we had a brief court hearing, done informally and swiftly but none the less fully official, to assign guardianship rights for U to us, now that she has turned 18 – six years, almost to the day, after we done the same for B. Belgian law used to have a concept of prolonged minor status for people in the same position as us and our daughters; as a result of a European Court of Human Rights ruling, it has been changed to guardianship, where the court gives us full responsiblity for exercising all decision-making power for the girls. They are both legally adult, and it’s reasonable to have a proper process for depriving them of the rights that most adults have, but which they will be unable to exercise. First time around in 2015, the magistrate (like us) was new to the process and navigated his way through it with care; six years on, he is an old hand and knew exactly what to do.

When I first watched Rain Man, soon after it came out, autism was not a particularly well known issue and of course I had no idea of how it would affect my own life. Once it did become part of my life, the legacy of Rain Man both was and wasn’t helpful; on the one hand, it gave people a cultural reference point when I explained about our family situation; on the other hand, the specifics of Raymond Babbitt as portrayed often raised expectations that our daughters might have savant-type mathematical skills, or even just be able to talk. Still, on balance the existence of the film has been more helpful than not.

Rain Man won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1988, and also three others: Best Director (Barry Levinson), Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen (Barry Morrow and Ronald Bass) and Best Actor (Dustin Hoffman). That year’s Hugo Winner, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, also won four (one a special award), beating Rain Man for Best Film Editing. (I’ll get to it next.)

That year’s other Best Picture nominees were The Accidental Tourist, which I have not seen, and Dangerous Liaisons, Mississippi Burning and Working Girl, which I have. IMDB users rank Rain Man 2nd on one system and 11th on the other, with Die Hard ahead of it on both lists.

I have seen 17 other films made in 1988, not quite as many as last year. They were: Beetlejuice, Die Hard, Big, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Naked Gun, A Fish Called Wanda , Mississippi Burning, Dangerous Liaisons, Working Girl, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Big Blue, Earth Girls Are Easy, Gorillas in the Mist, Without a Clue (1988) and The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey. I have fond memories of most of these, though I don’t really get the general love for Beetlejuice.

Here’s a trailer for Rain Man.

There is only one returning actor from previous Oscar-winning films, but it’s a big one: Dustin Hoffmann won his second Best Actor Oscar here, his first being for Kramer vs Kramer and having just missed in Midnight Cowboy. The three roles are utterly different from each other, and all three are great performances.

Incidentally, I was struck by how many of the smaller parts are played by people who have no other film appearances recorded in IMDB.

In case you didn’t know, it’s the story of self-centred young Charlie Babbitt from the Midwest, living in LA, who discovers that his dead father has left most of his estate to the autistic older brother who he had completely forgotten. They journey across America together and Charlie finds redemption. I have complicated feelings about this film for reasons that should be fairly obvious.

To start with the usual, there is precisely one significant black character, Ray’s main carer Vern, who is clearly his main relationship in his residential home, played by Michael D. Roberts.

And the plot, we have to admit, is a bit contrived. If I were running a place like Walbrook, I’d have put some security protocols in place to decrease the chance of relatives turning up out of nowhere and absconding with the residents. Ray’s autism is finely tuned to get them where they need to be. The least realistic part of his portrayal is the way in which Charlie is able to calm him down very very quickly when he has a meltdown; if only it were that easy in real life! The other very atypical part is Ray’s ability to count cards in Las Vegas, which wins Charlie just exactly enough money to pay off his debts and get luxury hotel rooms for them both. (Hoffman’s insistence on the character having savant skills apparently led to the original director quitting the film.)

It’s a film about two white brothers, so not surprisingly it’s a Bechdel fail; there are several named women characters, but I don’t think we see them talking to each other at any point. However, Valeria Golino is lovely as Charlie’s girlfriend Susanna, who calls him on his selfishness and also finds ways to connect to Raymond.

The music by Hans Zimmer, who went on to The Lion King, is atmospheric and haunting.

It also gave The Belle Stars a lift when their song Iko Iko, a favourite of Hoffmann’s, was included in the soundtrack.

While I have my concerns about the plot, I don’t have so many about the two leads. Tom Cruise was only 26, but had already achieved stardom with Top Gun. It’s actually quite rare to have an Oscar-winning film with such a strong arc for the main character; I think the last was The Godfather. The scenes where he makes the connection between Raymond and his own childhood memories are very moving.

But the film belongs to Dustin Hoffmann. Having complained above about some aspects of the scripting of his character, he performs beautifully and convincingly. He particularly catches the way many autistic people carry themselves, with hands clutched protectively close; and he catches the disjointed speech and thought patterns of those who are a bit more able than our girls very well as well. Despite the problematic aspects, it’s a brilliant portrayal.

So, it’s going in my top ten, just behind One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which deals with similar issues but I think has a better constructed plot, and ahead of Terms of Endearment which has slightly less oomph.

Next up is Driving Miss Daisy, but before that it’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

The Last Emperor, and Puyi’s autobiography

Posted on 6 February 2021 by fromtheheartofeurope

The Last Emperor won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1987, and also eight others: Best Director (Bernardo Bertolucci), Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, Best Sound and Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium. This was a clean sweep of all the categories in which it was nominated; I have not checked but I don’t think there are many Best Picture winners for which that is that case. That year’s Hugo winner, The Princess Bride, was nominated in one category (Best Original Song) and lost (to “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” from Dirty Dancing, a good call by the voters).

That year’s other Best Picture nominees were Fatal Attraction, which I have seen, and Broadcast News, Hope and Glory and Moonstruck, which I haven’t. IMDB users rank The Last Emperor 19th on one system and 20th on the other, which is pretty poor for an Oscar winner.

1987 is my best year yet for films, no doubt reflecting the fact that it was my first calendar year as a student with a steady girlfriend. I count 23 films made that year that I have seen, in IMDB order roughly as follows: Predator, The Untouchables, Dirty Dancing, RoboCop, Spaceballs, The Princess Bride, Raising Arizona, Empire of the Sun, Fatal Attraction, The Living Daylights, Good Morning Vietnam, The Witches of Eastwick, The Last Emperor, Three Men and a Baby, Roxanne, WithNail and I, Babette’s Feast, Cry Freedom, 84 Charing Cross Road, The Dead, The Belly of an Architect, Wish You Were Here and A Month in the Country. I have positive memories of almost all of these, but like IMDB users I don’t find The Last Emperor particularly standing out from the crowd. Here’s a trailer.

Chinese actors here play Chinese characters and Japanese actors play Japanese characters (we have not always been so lucky). This does limit the number of returning faces from previous Oscar- or Hugo-winning films; in fact I think there is precisely one, but it’s a significant one, Peter O’Toole as Reginald Johnston, twenty-five years after Lawrence of Arabia.

This is a gorgeous film to look at, but I did not always find it easy to follow exactly what was happening. The core narrative is sound – a little boy who has incomprehensible power thrust upon him, but grows up to find that his power is limited and that he is in fact the pawn in others’ political games; and he then achieves some personal redemption after losing everything. But the plot is delivered more in spectacle than in emotion; it’s quite difficult to relate to Puyi (and indeed this is partly the point). I certainly lost track of the intricacies of the short-lived state of Manchukuo, and the role of the Japanese was not completely clear. And Puyi’s love life is told rather than shown; he gets cute girls as his wives and concubines, but it’s never very clear what he makes of them or what we are supposed to make of them. I do have a soft spot for Joan Chen as the number one wife, whose love life is more interesting than his; she shares my birthday (though a different year).

I think the (Oscar-winning) music is OK but not great – it feels liek what non-Chinese audiences expect Chinese music to be like (actually written by a Japanese composer of course).

But I have to concede, as I said earlier, that it’s a glorious film to look at: the imperial scenes, contrasted with the fake glamour of Manchukuo and the gritty reality of the People’s Republic, are a real feast for the eyes. It’s not surprising that it did so well in the more technical Oscar categories. The Chinese authorities allowed Bertolucci to film in the Forbidden City itself, and it was a good investment.

This is the sixth biopic to win an Oscar (I’m no longer counting A Man for All Seasons in that category), and I rate it third after Gandhi and Lawrence of Arabia, but ahead of The Life of Emile Zola, Patton and The Great Ziegfeld.

After some deliberation, I’m putting The Last Emperor almost exactly half way down my list of Oscar winners (and these are mostly very good films, so half way down is still not bad). My totally definitive listing of the first 60 (the most recent decade in red) is as follows:

60) Platoon (1986)
59) The Great Ziegfeld (Oscar for 1936)
58) Cimarron (1930/31)
57) Cavalcade (1932/33)
56) Wings (1927/28)
55) Broadway Melody (1928/29)
54) All The King’s Men (1949)
53) Patton (1970)
52) Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
51) The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)
50) Tom Jones (1963)
49) Gone With the Wind (1939)
48) Ordinary People (1980)
47) Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
46) Gentleman’s Agreement (1947)
45) Annie Hall (1977)
44) Going My Way (1944)
43) The French Connection (1971)
42) My Fair Lady (1964)
41) How Green Was My Valley (1941)
40) Mrs Miniver (1942)
39) On The Waterfront (1954)
38) The Godfather Part II (1974)
37) In the Heat of the Night (1967)
36) Grand Hotel (1931/32)
35) The Life of Emile Zola (1937)
34) Marty (1955)
33) The Deer Hunter (1978)
32) Rocky (1976)
31) The Last Emperor (1987)

30) Out of Africa (1985)
29) Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
28) Gigi (1958)
27) It Happened One Night (1934)
26) You Can’t Take It With You (1938)
25) The Lost Weekend (1945)
24) Hamlet (1948)
23) From Here To Eternity (1953)
22) Around The World In Eighty Days (1956)
21) Ben-Hur (1959)
20) The Sting (1973)
19) The Godfather (1972)
18) Oliver! (1968)
17) The Apartment (1960)
16) All About Eve (1950)
15) The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
14) Amadeus (1984)
13) Gandhi (1982)
12) West Side Story (1961)
11) A Man for all Seasons (1966)
10) Midnight Cowboy (1969)
9) Terms of Endearment (1983)
8) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
7) The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
6) All Quiet on the Western Front (1929/30)
5) Rebecca (1940)
4) Chariots of Fire (1981)
3) An American in Paris (1951)
2) The Sound of Music (1965)
1) Casablanca (1943)

A somewhat meh decade, with half of them better than average and half worse; a new entry for the bottom 10 for the first time since 1970; but four out of ten in the top quartile, and two in the new top ten.

Next up in this sequence is Rain Man.

I also read Puyi’s autobiography, published as The Last Manchu: The Autobiography of Henry Pu Yi, Last Emperor of China. The second paragraph of the third chapter of my English translation (translator unattributed, interestingly) is:

我虽然有过这么多的母亲，但并没有得过真正的母爱。[…] 我六岁时有一次栗子吃多了，撑着了，有一个多月的时间隆裕太后只许我吃糊米粥，尽管我天天嚷肚子饿，也没有人管。

But even though I had so many “mothers” I never knew any motherly love. One day when I was five I ate too many chestnuts and developed stomach trouble. For over a month, Lung Yu allowed me to eat only a thick congee soup. Even though I cried for more solid food and said I was hungry, no one paid any attention.

(The English translation omits a couple of sentences in the Chinese text about the young Puyi’s bowel movements, which I think is not unreasonable.)

I generally enjoy biographies and autobiographies, and this was no exception. Obviously we lack the visual texture of the film, but we get a lot more political analysis and also some more interesting characters – Puyi’s father is a major if ineffectual presence in the earlier part, for instance, and Yasunori Yoshioka, Puyi’s Japanese minder during the Manchuria period, is devastatingly depicted. (They communicated in English, as Puyi spoke no Japanese and Yoshioka’s Chinese was poor.) Interesting to note that Reginald Johnston was not yet 40 when hired by the imperial household; Peter O’Toole was 55 in 1987.

One really important point that is left out of the film entirely: Puyi and his family were Manchu rather than Han. This is a major source of tension between the imperial court and the rest of China for the first half of the twentieth century, and then weirdly provides Mao with a good reason to keep the former emperor and his family around rather than eliminate them, in order to keep the border tribes happy.

It’s also interesting that Puyi is a much less pleasant character in his own book than in the film. (Though even the book omits his worst behaviour.) Of course, this is partly because as a result of his process of reorientation (what we might now call brainwashing), he felt the need to admit to his former faults as a human being. The film needs to portray him as an innocent to whom things happen; the book makes it clear that to the extent that this was true, he found it deeply frustrating.

You don’t get many autobiographies by former emperors, and you can get this one here. It’s not clear to me if this was ghost-written – I’ve seen attributions to Puyi’s brother Pujie, and also to Lao She, author of Cat Country; but actually I have little difficulty in accepting that he probably wrote most of it himself – he writes a lot about writing, which suggests that it was an activity he enjoyed and was possibly good at. Edited to add: I really did not dig very far on this point; it’s fairly well recorded that the ghostwriter was Li Wenda of the People’s Publishing Bureau, although Puyi’s widow successfully sued him for the full copyright on the book (it had originally been split between ex-emperor and ghostwriter). Pujie (who lived to 1994) and Li Wenda were brought in as advisers for the film.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

Out of Africa, film (1985) and book (1937)

Posted on 9 January 2021 by fromtheheartofeurope

Out of Africa won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1985, and also five others, Best Director (Sidney Pollack), Best Screenplay – Based on Material from Another Medium, Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Original Score (John Barry) and Best Sound. Meryl Streep and Klaus Maria Brandauer lost in the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor categories. That year’s Hugo winner, Back to the Future, got four Oscar nominations and won one (Best Sound Editing, where it beat Out of Africa).

The other Best Picture nominees were The Color Purple, Kiss of the Spider Woman and Prizzi’s Honor, which I have not seen, and Witness which I have. IMDB users put it pretty low down for an Oscar winner, 15th on one ranking and 32nd on the other, which is the lowest for any Oscar winner since Tom Jones. Other films I’ve seen from that year (in rough IMDB order, which largely coincides with my own rating): Back to the Future, The Breakfast Club, Brazil, A Room With a View, Witness, Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment, National Lampoon’s European Vacation, Spies Like Us, Revolution, Defence of the Realm. Like IMDB users, I would rank Out of Africa on a par with Witness, and agree that Back to the Future is the best. Here’s a trailer for Out of Africa (I actually think it’s not a very good trailer):

Well, we have a few returnees from earlier Oscar-winning films, and also a couple of actors who appeared in Doctor Who over the years. Top of the list, obviously, is the film’s star, Meryl Streep, playing Karen Blixen on whose memoirs the film is based. She was Joanne Kramer in Kramer vs. Kramer in 1979, and Linda in The Deer Hunter in 1978.

And next up is Robert Redford as her lover Denys Finch-Hatton, who we previously saw in front of the camera as Johnny Hooker in The Sting in 1973, but he also directed Ordinary People in 1980.

Michael Gough is Lord Delamere here, and had been in Doctor Who twice, as the celestial Toymaker in the 1966 First Doctor story that we now call The Celestial Toymaker, and as Time Lord Councillor Hedin in the 1983 Fifth Doctor story Arc of Infinity. (He was also married to Anneke Wills.)

Going back a bit further, Rachel Kempson, who is Lady Belfield here, was Squire Allworthy’s sister Bridget in Tom Jones in 1963.

Graham Crowden, here her onscreen husband Lord Belfield, was High Priest Soldeed in the notorious 1979-80 Fourth Doctor story The Horns of Nimon.

Shane Rimmer, the decaying estate manager Belknap, has been in an Oscar-wining film (Gandhi, as a news reporter), two Hugo-winning films (the original Star Wars and Dr Strangelove, both times as a pilot), and Seth Harper in the 1966 First Doctor story that we now call The Gunfighters. In sf lore he is of course best known as the voice of Scott Tracy in Thunderbirds.

There are a couple of others who I cannot quite believe were never in Oscar- or Hugo-wining films, or in Doctor Who: Klaus Maria Brandauer, Leslie Phillips, Michael Kitchen (whose character’s African partner is played by Iman, later to marry David Bowie).

Well. I was not blown away by Out of Africa, and I’m ranking it just below the halfway mark in my listing, below Lawrence of Arabia but ahead of Rocky. The biggest problem with it is the racial portrayals: this is a drama about white people in Africa, and the actual Africans are basically scenery. The non-white communities are barely differentiated – the original book makes a point of distinguishing between the Kikuyu, Masai and Somalis, plus of course the Indian community, and it’s clear that Nairobi is a very mixed community; all Africans are the same on screen, and anyone who matters in Nairobi is white. 10 minutes in, we get a gratuitous shot of four young topless African women; Meryl Streep’s body remains decorously covered throughout her love scenes. Malick Bowens, as the protagonist’s right-hand man Farah, is given higher billing in the credits than several of the names I mentioned above, but not given very much to do.

I have to say that I thought the plot and script were also rather dull. Girl meets boy, girl marries his brother and then meets another boy, the last boy dies. There are no real surprises; you know that the Blixens’ marriage is going to be a disaster because we are told so in the third of 160 long minutes in the film, and as soon as Robert Redford appears you pretty much know his character arc.

But I have to give it better marks on gender. I have a poor track record with Meryl Streep’s films, but she is a good performer, and Karen Blixen is an impressive heroine who deals with men on her own terms and runs the coffee plantation single-handed. She defends herself with firearms and flies a plane. The film even passes the Bechdel test, with a couple of educational conversations between Karen and her young neighbour Felicity.

John Barry’s music is rather good, and the cinematography justly deserved an Oscar; the physical landscape is breathtaking anyway, but somehow they have caught it at its most attractive, and the music (which is frankly a bit gushy for the romantic scenes) is well suited to rolling landscapes.

But again, it goes on for 160 minutes, and there is not really enough plot to sustain that length. The makers clearly bet correctly that enough viewers would salivate at the thought of Robert Redford and/or Meryl Streep and/or both to make it a commercial success; but the IMDB voters of today have not sustained the verdict of the Oscar voters of 1986.

I was fully aware that the film is based on more than one book, again because we are told so very early in the credits.

However, it was marketed as a dramatisation of Blixen’s original memoir with the same title from 1937, which I found a quick and very absorbing read. The second paragraph of the third part is:

When Denys Finch-Hatton came back after one of his long expeditions, he was starved for talk, and found me on the farm starved for talk, so that we sat over the dinner-table into the small hours of the morning, talking of all the things we could think of, and mastering them all, and laughing at them. White people, who for a long time live alone with Natives, get into the habit of saying what they mean, because they have no reason or opportunity for dissimulation, and when they meet again their conversation keeps the Native tone. We then kept up the theory that the wild Masai tribe, in their Manyatta under the hills, would see the house all afire, like a star in the night, as the peasants of Umbria saw the house wherein Saint Francis and Saint Clare were entertaining one another upon theology.

Blixen is no anthropologist, but she makes a serious effort to engage with Kenya and the people on their own terms and to describe it respectfully to her European audience. She goes fairly deeply into religion, which is not mentioned on screen at all. As already noted, she carefully distinguished between the different African and non-African groups, and it’s clear that her Kenya is very racially mixed, and that the days of white rule, only a few decades old, are already numbered.

It’s not actually a novel. It’s a collection of short reflective pieces, all of course linked, four of the five sections pursuing their own internal thread (though the penultimate sections is a grab-bag of vignettes). I think perhaps a third or a quarter of what’s in the book made it to the screen. The core plot of the film, her romance with Finch-Hatton, is not at all explicit in the book, though it’s pretty obvious what is going on from the number of times his name is mentioned, and it’s almost a shock when her husband is mentioned for the first time on page 193 of 283. There is not a lot explicitly about racism, but here’s one of the short pieces in full:

The Elite of Bournemouth

I had as neighbour a settler who had been a doctor at home. Once, when the wife of one of my houseboys was about to die in childbirth, and I could not get into Nairobi, because the long rains had ruined the roads, I wrote to my neighbour and asked him to do me the great service of coming over and helping her. He very kindly came, in the midst of a terrible thunderstorm and torrents of tropical rain, and, at the last moment, by his skill, he saved the life of the woman and the child.

Afterwards he wrote me a letter to say that although he had for once, on my appeal, treated a Native, I must understand that he could not let that sort of thing occur again. I myself would fully realize the fact, he felt convinced, when he informed me that he had before now, practised to the élite of Bournemouth.

And there is some gorgeous description, especially of the landscape. Here’s the description of her first plane flight with Finch-Hatton (the subject of the film clip I used to illustrate the music above):

We flew in the sun, but the hillside lay in a transparent brown shade, which soon we got into. It did not take us long to spy the buffalo from the air. Upon one of the long rounded green ridges which run, like folds of a cloth gathered together at each peak, down the side of the Ngong mountain, a herd of twenty-seven buffalo were grazing. First we saw them a long way below us, like mice moving gently on a floor, but we dived down, circling over and along their ridge, a hundred and fifty feet above them and well within shooting distance; we counted them as they peacefully blended and separated. There was one very old big black bull in the herd, one or two younger bulls, and a number of calves. The open stretch of sward upon which they walked was closed in by bush; had a stranger approached on the ground they would have heard or scented him at once, but they were not prepared for advance from the air. We had to keep moving above them all the time. They heard the noise of our machine and stopped grazing, but they did not seem to have it in them to look up. In the end they realized that something very strange was about; the old bull first walked out in front of the herd, raising his hundredweight horns, braving the unseen enemy, his four feet planted on the ground – suddenly he began to trot down the ridge and after a moment he broke into a canter. The whole clan now followed him, stampeding headlong down, and as they switched and plunged into the bush, dust and loose stones rose in their wake. In the thicket they stopped and kept close together: it looked as if a small glade in the hill had been paved with dark grey stones. Here they believed themselves to be covered to the view, and so they were to anything moving along the ground, but they could not hide themselves from the eyes of the bird of the air. We flew up and away.

There’s also a lovely anecdote about a young Swede teaching her Swahili, who is embarrassed by the fact that the Swahili for “nine” (tisa) sounds like the Swedish for “pee” (tisse), and convinces her that there is in fact no number nine in Swahili until someone puts her straight. I sympathise a little. I have known a number of baronesses in my time, and I don’t recall ever saying the word “pee” in front of any of them.

One other point that I noted while researching this post: they were all younger than we see on screen, the men much younger. When Karen married Baron Blixen in 1914, she was 28 and he was 27. She first met Denys Finch Hatton in 1918, when she was 33 and he was 31. Meryl Streep was 36 when the film was made, Klaus Maria Brandauer 42 and Robert Redford 49. Knowing the real ages of the protagonists does change the way you understand the story, I think.

Kenya is not a country I know much about – I changed planes in Nairobi three times in my South Sudan days, with long stopovers but no tourism each time, and the only other books I’ve read that explore it in any detail are also autobiographies, by Barack Obama and Vince Cable. Unlike the other two, this book made me want to know more. You can get it here.

My next Oscar-winning film is Platoon, but I’ll watch Aliens first.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

Amadeus

Posted on 12 December 2020 by fromtheheartofeurope

Amadeus won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1984, and also seven others, Best Director (Milos Forman), Best Actor (F. Murray Abraham as Salieri beating Tom Hulce as Mozart), Best Adapted Screenplay (Peter Shaffer), Best Costume Design, Best Art Direction, Best Makeup and Best Sound, losing in Best Cinematography and Best Editing to The Killing Fields. That year’s Hugo winner, 2010, got five Oscar nominations but lost all of them (two to Amadeus).

The other Best Picture nominees were A Passage to India, which I have seen, and The Killing Fields, Places in the Heart and A Soldier’s Story, which I haven’t. IMDB users put it 3rd on one ranking but only 12th on the other. Other films I’ve seen from that year (in rough IMDB order): The Terminator, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Ghostbusters, Dune, This Is Spın̈al Tap, Beverly Hills Cop, Police Academy, Romancing the Stone, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, 2010, Streets of Fire, Repo Man, The Woman in Red and A Passage to India, fourteen of them, the most for any year so far. I have particular nostalgia for Beverly Hills Cop, which was the first film I went to see with an actual girlfriend. But really The Terminator is the most memorable film of that year, up against some tough competition. Here’s a trailer for Amadeus.

It’s the story of the rivalry between Antonio Salieri, court composer to Emperor Joseph II, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, told as flashbacks from Salieri’s old age in a mental hospital, reflecting on his responsibility for Mozart’s early death. It’s based on a famous stage play, which I actually saw in Belfast in 1983 – the Birmingham Repertory production, starring Keith Michell as Salieri, Siôn Tudor Owen as Mozart and Kay Adshead as Constanze.

I didn’t find any actors here who had been in previous Oscar-winning films. There is one who has been in three Hugo-winners, but wihtout his face being visible in any of them: this is Kenny Baker, who played R2D2 in the orginal Star Wars trilogy, recognisable for once.

There’s also a fairly major Doctor Who crossover, Simon Callow, who plays impresario Emanuel Schikaneder here (and was in fact Mozart for the original theatrical run of Amadeus), and came to the third story of New Who, The Unquiet Dead, in 2005 to play Charles Dickens.

And it’s not my usual fandom – in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever watched an episode of the show – but Lorl, the Mozarts’ maid who is really working for Salieri, is played by 18-year-old Cynthia Nixon, later to achieve fame and fortune as Miranda in Sex and the City (and more recently a candidate for Governor of New York).

To begin with the usual, I think I actually did see a couple of black faces in the background, which if so is better than Terms of Endearment, Ordinary People, Kramer vs. Kramer or Annie Hall, all of which are set in times and places which were a lot more ethnically diverse than 18th-century Vienna. (Vienna has had African migrants, if sometimes not many, since it was founded by the Romans two thousand years ago.)

It’s a story about two men, and a very male play; it’s notable that in many of the court scenes, women are completely absent, and barely speak when they are present. However I’ve noted the young Cynthia Nixon above, and the third biggest role is definitely Constanze, here played by the glowing Elizabeth Berridge. I’m sorry to say that I found her accent grating on me at first, but I got into it by the end, and she gives depth to a part that is more complex than it first seems.

The whole thing looks gorgeous. 18th-century Vienna is a rich setting to begin with; Communist-era Prague, where it was filmed, still looked plausibly enough like a cityscape of the period; as well as the imperials court itself, you have several theatrical performances which are in and of themselves well over the top; generally it’s the best feast for the eyes since Oliver!.

And of course, the film is sustained throughout by the music of Mozart, performed by Neville Marriner and the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields, glorious two hundred years ago and glorious now.

As mentioned above, it’s the story of two men. Mozart teeters on the verge of being to self-centred and vulgar to be really interesting (and my vague memory of the Belfast performance in 1983 is that it fell off this particular cliff-edge). The film makes more of his relationship with his father than the play did, and perhaps that gives him a bit more depth. And anyway, the film isn’t about Mozart as much as it is about Salieri’s obsession with him, culminating in the scene where Salieri helps the dying Mozart write the Requiem.

And F. Murray Abraham richly deserved his Oscar; his Salieri is fundamentally a monster, but knows it and struggles with the guilt of it. Elizabeth Berridge has a couple of fantastic scenes with him too, of which this is the more SFW.

So in general, I’m putting it quite high up my ranking – not quite in the top ten, but just behind Gandhi and ahead of The Best Years of Our Lives.

I got hold of the current version of the play script as well – not the original one, or the film screenplay; Peter Shaffer explains at length in a foreword how he has repeatedly reworked the final scene between the two protagonists. The opening of the third scene, with the start of Salieri’s monologue, is:

[Music sounds softly in the background: a serene piece for strings by Salieri. SERVANTS enter. One takes away the dressing-gown and cap; another places on the table a wig-stand bearing a powdered wig; a third brings on a chair and places it at the left, upstage.
At the back, the blue curtains rise and part to show the EMPEROR JOSEPH II and his COURT bathed in golden light, against a golden background of mirrors and an immense golden fireplace. His Majesty is seated, holding a rolled paper, listening to the music. Also listening are COUNT VON STRACK; COUNT ORSINI-ROSENBERG; BARON VAN SWIETEN; and an anonymous PRIEST, dressed in a soutane. An old wigged COURTIER enters and takes his place at the keyboard: KAPELLMEISTER BONNO.]

SALIERI: [In a young man’s voice: vigorous and confident]. The place throughout is Vienna. The year – to begin with – 1781. The age still that of the Enlightenment: that clear time before the guillotine fell in France and cut all our lives in half. I am thirty-one. Already a prolific composer to the Habsburg court. I own a respectable house and a respectable wife- Teresa.

[Enter TERESA: a padded, placid lady who seats herself uprightly in the upstage chair.]

(Teresa doesn’t get much in the stage play, but doesn’t appear in the film at all.)

The biggest difference between film and play is the framing device. The film is told as a flashback from Salieri’s time in a mental hospital, immediately following his suicide attempt; the framing for the play is set immediately before. Also the stage Salieri talks much more to the audience, and is attended by the Venticelli, two characters who seem to dance in and out of the margins between Salieri’s imagination and the real world. And I think the idea that The Magic Flute critically annoyed the Masons is soft-pedalled in the film. It’s a gripping script, though I think challenging and expensive to perform. You can get it here.

Next film is 2010, that year’s Hugo winner; next Oscar winner is Out of Africa, of which I know nothing.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

Terms of Endearment

Posted on 5 December 2020 by fromtheheartofeurope

Terms of Endearment won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1983, and also four others, Best Director (John L Brooke), Best Actress (Shirley MacLaine beating Debra Winger), Best Supporting Actor (Jack Nicholson beating John Lithgow), and Best Screenplay from another medium (John L. Brooks again). That year’s Hugo winner, Return of the Jedi, got a special award for visual effects (deservedly).

The other Best Picture nominees were The Big Chill, which I have seen, and The Dresser, The Right Stuff and Tender Mercies, which I haven’t. It’s not super popular among IMDB users, who currently rank it 17th for the year on both systems. Other films I’ve seen from that year (in rough IMDB order): Return of the Jedi, Trading Places, Octopussy, The Meaning of Life, Blue Thunder, The Big Chill, Local Hero, Educating Rita, To Be or Not to Be and Heat and Dust. I have a fond nostalgia for almost all of these (except Heat and Dust, which I remember as rather dull), but Terms of Endearment is better than most of them. Here’s a trailer.

Sometimes when I look for links with previous Oscar winners I’m scrabbling a long way down the cast list. Not this time; Shirley MacLaine, here the central character Aurora Greenway, was also the lead actress in both The Apartment in 1960 and Around the World in Eighty Days (1956), an impressive 27 years ago. We’ve had longer intervals (33 years for Howland Chamberlain) but not at this level.

And on the other side of Aurora’s garden fence, we have Jack Nicholson and Danny De Vito, both of whom were also in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest eight years ago.

I have rather bounced off the last few Oscar winners with a contemporary domestic setting (Ordinary People, Kramer vs. Kramer, to an extent The Deer Hunter and also Annie Hall). But I have to admit I really enjoyed Terms of Endearment. The first 94 minutes are funny, well-observed and nicely written dynamics of a combustible mother-daughter relationship, and their shifting love lives; and then we get the Plot Twist, and the remaining 38 minutes are much less funny but equally well observed and nicely written. Somewhat to my surprise, I’m putting it in my top ten, behind One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest but ahead of Midnight Cowboy.

To note the one negative, and I’m afraid it’s the usual plus a little extra: no non-white faces are visible anywhere in the film (largely set in Houston, which waas and is 25% African-American), and also the book’s exploration of the less well off parts of town through Rosie, Aurora’s maid, has been completely removed. So we are left with a story about white middle class people.

But the trade-off is that we get a much more female perspective than is usual. The last Oscar-winner where the lead actress was also the central character was The Sound of Music, nineteen years ago in 1964; the only other Oscar winner where the central dynamic is between two women, with men largely as decoration, rather than the other way round, is All About Eve, 33 years ago in 1950. And it’s superbly carried off by Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger as Aurora and Helen. I don’t think I had seen Winger in anything else (I see that she had a blink-and-you-miss-it appearance in E.T., but I blinked and missed it).

It’s a good story. At first I thought that Aurora’s self-obsession would get old rather fast, when she explodes with rage about becoming a grandmother:

But then the development of both mother and daughter is delicately done, with each having their love affairs, Aurora with Jack Nicholson’s randy astronaut next door and Helen with the bank manager in Iowa played by John Lithgow (with a real feeling of sense of place for both Houston and Iowa/Nebraska). These four performances all got Oscar nominations, but in only two categories, won as noted above by MacLaine and Nicholson.

And the most memorable scene of many is Winger’s as Helen, saying her goodbyes.

The music is well-judged and not intrusive (and, now that it’s a few days since I watched the film, it’s a bit earwormy).

But if you want a break from the original music, here is a lovely lovely fanvid of the film, with key scenes cut to Carole King’s “I Feel the Earth Move”.

Anyway, an unexpected pleasure.

One glorious bit of trivia: the cast and crew bought writer and director John L. Brooks a copy of Matt Groening’s Life Is Hell as a gift. Brooks loved it, and contacted Groening to explore how they might work together. And so The Simpsons came to be.

The film is based on a novel by Larry McMurtry, best known for Lonesome Dove, though I have not read any of his other work. The second paragraph of the third section of the book is:

Then she jumped. Her mother had begun immediately to honk at the Volkswagen, and the Cadillac had a very loud horn. Hearing it unexpectedly gave everyone, Emma included, apprehensions of emergency. Against such honking the little green car had no chance—the Cadillac swept it aside as easily as an ocean liner might sweep aside a canoe. The driver, assuming that catastrophe had overtaken someone, turned into a driveway and didn’t even honk back.

The book has some major differences with the film – in fact, I can’t think of another case where a novel has been adapted for an Oscar-winning movie with such big differences, apart perhaps from Mrs Miniver (which is not really a novel). The first 360 pages of 410 are all about Aurora, with the plot of the film which covers over a decade, originally scheduled just over the hot summer on 1963. There is no astronaut; instead an older retired general, and the Danny De Vito character gets a lot more page space than he did on screen. Only on page 361 do we switch to Helen and her life in Iowa, and the Plot Twist comes on page 391 with less than 5% of the book to go (there is no New York scene, which I think an improvement – the one bit of the film that did not really work for me). I hugely enjoyed it. Aurora’s character is monstrous, fascinating and funny on the page; I think it was wise to balance her character much more with Helen’s for the screen adaptation, but it works well on the page. You can get it here. (It is not yet available electronically.)

Next up in the Oscar-winners sequence is Amadeus.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

Gandhi: film and Fischer biography

Posted on 15 November 2020 by fromtheheartofeurope

Gandhi won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1982, and also seven others, Best Director (Richard Attenborough), Best Actor (Ben Kingsley in the title role), Best Original Screenplay (John Briley), Best Art Direction (beating Blade Runner, that year’s Hugo winner), Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design and Best Editing. So far only Gigi (9), West Side Story (10) and Ben-Hur (11) have won more. Blade Runner was also nominated for Best Visual Effects, but lost to E.T.

The other films up for Best Picture were E.T. and Tootsie, which I have seen, and Missing and The Verdict, which I haven’t. IMDB users rank it 5th of the year on one list but only 22nd on the other. Apart from Blade Runner, the other films from that year that I have seen are Wrath of Khan, The Wall, Fanny and Alexander, Airplane II, The Year of Living Dangerously, Fitzcarraldo, Night Shift, The Draughtsman’s Contract and Who Dares Wins. Apart from the last, these are all films I very much enjoyed, or maybe that’s just my uncritical fifteen-year-old self. Here’s a contemporary trailer for the US market, leading with future President Bartlett.

This is the fifth or sixth biopic to win Best Picture (after The Great Ziegfeld, The Life of Emile Zola, Lawrence of Arabia, Patton and maybe A Man for All Seasons which was adapted from a stage play). It was two in a row for British directors and a largely British cast, though as it turned out this was a blip rather than a trend. I saw it in the cinema when it first came out, and felt that it held up very well. I had been prepared for it by hearing the BBC radio play, No Ordinary Light, also about the life of Gandhi, by Hallam Tennyson and starring Sam Dastor.

I won’t list the actors who appeared in Gandhi as well as in earlier Oscar-winning or Hugo-winning films, let alone Doctor Who; there are just so many of them. Basically every moderately well-known British actor aged between 40 and 70 seems to have been transported to India to play one or other clueless imperialist. Three have reappeared from last year’s Chariots of Fire – John Gielgud, Ian Charleson and Richard Griffiths. Three also appeared in the only other Oscar-winning film set (partly) in India, Around the World in Eighty Days – Gielgud again, Trevor Howard and John Mills (though all three are only in the London bits of the earlier film).

No fewer than nineteen of the cast also appeared in Doctor Who, chronologically from Ron Howard, an extra in a crowd scene here and also in The Ark (1966), to Colin Farrell who plays a clerk here and was in this year’s Who story Orphan 55. Shane Rimmer was in Doctor Who and Dr Strangelove. John Savident was in Doctor Who and A Clockwork Orange. Jack McKenzie and John Ratzenberger were in The Empire Strikes Back. John Boxer was in Bridge on the River Kwai.

So for my photo comparisons this time, I’m going to switch fandoms to Secret Army. Bernard Hepton, star of the show as Albert Foiret, turns up here as the GOC, and Terrence Hardiman, who plays doomed Luftwaffe Major Reinhardt in the third series, makes a brief appearance here as Ramsay MacDonald.

Well. This is a film about a famous man, and the women get a look-in only in so far as they are important in his life; plus it has to be said that while the real-life Gandhi was very firm for his time on the emancipation of women, the film is rather less so. It easily clears the first leg of the Bechdel test, but I am not sure that we ever see two named women having a conversation, and if they do I am sure that it’s about the central character. Rohini Hattangadi, aged 27, is tremendously convincing as Kasturba Gandhi from young mother to old age, but doesn’t get a lot to say.

However, it’s undeniable that just four years after the unapologetically racist The Deer Hunter won the Oscar for Best Picture, here we have a film which is unambiguously about racism, oppression, and the ultimate defeat of white supremacy. I guess that many viewers were able to explain it away as a movie about things happening to other people in other countries. For myself, watching it in Belfast in 1982, there were strong local resonances: discriminatory legislation, hunger strikes, British soldiers firing indiscriminately into a crowd. (Also, Lord Mountbatten.) The Amritsar sequence is possibly the most effective seven minutes of the film.

The film generally looks brilliant. With the full support of both Columbia Pictures and the Indian government, one should hope so too. The 300,000 extras in the funeral scene are the largest number ever assembled for a film.

And it’s a convincing portrait of a remarkable man. It errs of course on the side of Gandhi’s saintliness (more on that below), and cannot conceal the fact that having spearheaded the cause of Indian independence, he was left behind by political developments on the ground; his answer to tensions between Hindus and Muslims was to refuse to eat until they stopped fighting, which did not work as a long-term solution. Still, he was much more often right than wrong. Ben Kingsley (born Krishna Pandit Bhanji) truly inhabits the role; occasionally you can see Ben Kingsley looking at you out of Gandhi’s face, rather than the other way round, if you see what I mean.

Anyway. The film is a bit hagiographic, and a bit long, and a bit male, so even though it looks great and its heart is (mostly) in the right place, I’m not putting it right at the top of my list but about a fifth of the way down, between West Side Story and The Best Years of Our Lives.

Next up: Return of the Jedi and Terms of Endearment, in that order.

The Oscar for Best Original Screenplay was not completely fairly awarded this year, as the screenplay was not particularly original. The film is pretty strongly based on Louis Fischer‘s 1950 biography of Gandhi, the second paragraph of whose third chapter is:

In an out-of-doors group picture of the 1890 Vegetarians’ Conference at Portsmouth, Gandhi was wearing a white tie, hard white cuffs and a white dress handkerchief in his front pocket. His hair is neatly dressed. He used to spend ten minutes every morning combing and brushing it.

Written soon after Gandhi’s death, it is largely positive but does not gloss over some of the negative aspects of Gandhi’s beliefs and behaviour. He was a terrible parent to his sons, emotionally distant and borderline abusive. He was also an anti-vaxxer who believed that all illness could be healed by meditation and diet. As noted above, he lost touch with his own political movement towards the end. One also has to wonder what Kasturba really thought; we don’t hear much from her between their marriage as horny young teenagers to her death sixty years later.

However, Fischer as a journalist does very well at explaining the situation of both South Africa and colonial India to the general reader, and making it clear just how important Gandhi was to the political developments of both. In particular, he stresses Gandhi’s commitment to non-violence even more than the film does. And I think it’s fair to say that without a Gandhi-like figure, India would certainly have become independent, probably somewhat sooner, but at a much greater cost of lives lost in conflict.

I was also interested to learn that Gandhi’s family were always political – his grandfather served as prime minister of Porbandar, the small state where he was born, and his father was successively prime minister there and in three other states, Rajkot, Wandaner and Bikaner. The book does get a little unmoored at the end when Fischer appears in his own narrative and gives us verbatim notes of his (many, long) conversations with Gandhi, but in general I found it readable enough.

You can actually download a scanned PDF of Fischer’s book from the Gandhi website, but it has a lot of misreading errors, and if I were you I would get it here.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

Chariots of Fire

Posted on 31 October 2020 by fromtheheartofeurope

Chariots of Fire won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1981, and also three others, Best Original Screenplay (Colin Welland), Best Costume Design and Best Original Score. Raiders of the Lost Ark, which also won that year’s Hugo, won five Oscars (one of which was a special award) to Chariots of Fire‘s four.

The other Oscar-nominated films were Raiders of the Lost Ark and three I haven’t seen, Atlantic City, On Golden Pond and Reds. IMDB users rank Chariots of Fire astonishingly low, 14th on one list and 29th on the other, lower than last year’s Ordinary People which itself was the lowest agrregate rating since Tom Jones. Apart from Chariots and Raiders, I seem to have seen only four other films from that year, An American Werewolf in London, Time Bandits, Tarzan the Ape Man (the one with Richard Harris and Bo Derek, where the actor originally hired in the title role was fried and replaced by his stunt double, with dismal results) and Diva. For once, I am in profound disagreement with IMDB users, and total agreement with Oscar voters; I’d put Chariots of Fire firmly at the top of that list. Here’s a trailer, with a very annoying American voice-over.

In case you don’t know, it’s the story of two British runners at the 1924 Olympic Games, one Jewish and one deeply Christian, who both find themselves struggling against the English establishment as well as against their notional international competitors. I was surprised by how emotionally I reacted to it. To an extent it’s the film’s associations for me – I remember going to the cinema with my father to see it, when he would have been exactly the same age that I am now; and a few years later watching it again with Shirley Hart and Colin Wilkie, who died earlier this month. Since then, of course, it has extra nostalgia for me because of the Cambridge scenes. My college was Clare, not Gonville and Caius, but I knew enough people there to have happy memories of the courts. Also one could occasionally see Stephen Hawking trundling in or out. Even putting all of that aside, it’s a beautiful film, it looks good, it sounds good, and I felt better after having watched it.

I did not find any actors in Chariots of Fire who had previously been in other Oscar-winning films, which is a bit astonishing. I found two who had been in a previous Hugo winners. More obviously, Ian Holm, who is the coach Sam Mussabini here and was the android Ash in Alien two years ago.

Less obviously, Jeremy Sinden, here the President of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society but also the rebel pilot Gold Two in Star Wars.

Less astonishingly there are several crossovers with the Whoniverse (though the last of these may surprise you). To start with two appearances in Who, Peter Cellier, the snooty head waiter at the Savoy, was also to play Andrews, the head of security at Heathrow Airport, in the 1982 Fifth Doctor story Time-Flight.

More obscurely and with a much longer gap, Eric Liddell’s friend Sandy McGrath is played by Struan Rodger, who went on to provide the voice of the Face of Boe in the Tenth Doctor stories Gridlock (2006) and New Earth (2007), the voice of Kasaavin in the Thrteenth Doctor story Spyfall (2020) and appeared on screen as Ashildr’s butler Clayton in the Twelfth Doctor story The Woman Who Lived (2015).

Nicholas Farrell is of course Aubrey Montague here. In Torchwood: Children of Earth (2009), he plays the British prime minister, Brian Green.

Cheryl Campbell plays Eric Liddell’s sister Jennie here, and in 2010 played alien conspiracy theorist Ocean Waters in Vault of Secrets, a Sarah Jane Adventures story.

And last but definitely not least, Nigel Havers is of course Lord Andrew Lindsay here and appeared as Peter Dalton, manipulated by the sinister Trickster into marrying the title character in The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith (2009) and still looking good.

OK, to start with the usual: one black person is visible in the entire film, an American athlete who does not speak, is not named and doesn’t appear to be credited.

And the women’s roles are clearly second rank to the men’s: Eric’s sister and mother, Harold’s girlfriend and her fellow performers. Having said that, both Jennie and Sybil are anchors to the real world, with all its flaws, for Eric and Harold; their presence makes it clear that while their commitment to their athletic pursuits comes at a cost. (Er, let’s not mention the Mikado.)

All right. But there’s some interesting stuff going on here all the same. Harold is constantly dealing with microaggressions about his Jewishness; I think Chariots of Fire presents this more effectively in a quarter of the story line than Gentleman’s Agreement did in an entire film.

It’s also interesting that Eric’s commitment to religion is shown almost entirely positively. It’s actually rather rare to have a film that shows religion in a positive light. The only other Oscar-winner where it is a really important theme is the otherwise forgettable Going My Way (1944) (with maybe half a point for The Sound of Music). I must say I was particularly moved by Eric’s first race, knowing as I now do that he would die in a prisoner of war camp aged 45, and that Ian Charleson who plays him would die even younger, at 40, the first British celebrity to make it public that his death was due to AIDS.

And anyway the film looks and sounds just fantastic. In case you need to be reminded, here’s the main theme. It is amazing how the 1980s tehcno synth almost always matches and carries the 1920s setting.

With famous interweaving by Mr Bean and Sebastian Coe for the Olympics opening ceremony in 2012:

And look, here’s the B side of the original single, Eric’s theme again.

As I said, I found this an unexpected pleasure, and I am putting it right at the top of my table, behind An American in Paris but ahead of Rebecca , so currently in fourth place overall.

Next year’s Oscar winner was Gandhi, but the Hugo winner is more popular on IMDB, so it’s Blade Runner next.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

Ordinary People (1980 film and 1976 book)

Posted on 24 October 2020 by fromtheheartofeurope

Ordinary People won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1980, and won three others, Best Director (Robert Redford), Best Supporting Actor (Timothy Hutton, the youngest ever winner in this category, as Conrad, presented by his co-star) and Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium (Alvin Sargent). It had only two other nominations, Judd Hirsch as Dr Berger also in Best Supporting Actor and Mary Tyler Moore, beaten by Sissy Spacek for Best Actress.

The other Oscar-nominated films were The Elephant Man, which I have seen, and Coal Miner’s Daughter, Raging Bull and Tess, which I haven’t. Ordinary People is 15th and 20th on the respective IMDB lists, which is the worst collective ranking for any Oscar winner since Tom Jones. Apart from The Elephant Man, the other 1980 films I have also seen are The Empire Strikes Back (which won the Hugo), Airplane!, The Blues Brothers, The Elephant Man, Flash Gordon, 9 to 5 and Fame. I liked all of them more than Ordinary People. Here’s a trailer.

This is the story of an Illinois family which has been torn apart by the accidental death of the older of the two sons and the attempted suicide of the younger. (I think this is the second Oscar-winner set in Illinois, after The Sting.) Like Kramer vs. Kramer, last year’s winner, it features a mother walking out on her husband and son, though in this case she leaves at the end, not the beginning.

There are no crossovers with previous Oscar winners, previous Hugo winners or Doctor Who. It’s rare that I can say that. There are some actors who we will see again in the future, notably Adam Baldwin who plays one of the swim team.

OK, so what did I not like? Our old friend race again: 30% of the population of Lake Forest, Illinois are black (including Mr T), but none of them appears in the film that I can remember, certainly none has a speaking role. And with gender, as I said above, it’s just like last year: a story of the growth of the father and son with the mother walking out. And to be honest they are not just “ordinary” people, they are rather dull people as well.

I made one unfair judgement while watching it which I have had to retract after doing further research. When the incidental music started, I thought, oh no, Pachelbel’s bloody Canon in D again.

But it fact it turns out that Ordinary People was the first really popular film to use it as background music, as unpacked in this somewhat jargony but still funny article by Robert Fink. So I can’t really make this a genuine complaint.

The leads are all strong, even if I did not think all that much of their material. Can I be right in having childhood memories of being shooed out of the room when The Mary Tyler Moore Show came on TV? In any case, she is very strong as Beth, whose self-centredness becomes the detonator for the family.

Likewise ~~Kiefer~~ Donald Sutherland and Timothy Hutton as father and son Calvin and Conrad, both of whom manage to convey quit a lot with few words.

The best role for me was Judd Hirsch as the psychiatrist, friend, mentor and challenger for Conrad and also for his father. He was in the middle of his very successful run as the protagonist of the TV series Taxi at this point — a very different character. Often other people’s therapy sessions are about as interesting to hear about as other people’s dreams (see Annie Hall), but here it’s well written and drives the narrative.

And Elizabeth McGovern is luminous as Conrad’s girlfriend Jeannine.

But in the end, I just didn’t care for the characters or the story all that much, and it’s going three quarters of the way down my list, below last year’s Kramer vs. Kramer but ahead of Gone With the Wind.

I also read the original book by Judith Guest. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

Abruptly he jumps up, walks to the end of the circular drive. Another thought nags at him, threatening to surface. He shrugs it off. Something unpleasant. Facing the house, he stares up at his bedroom window. In the early morning, the room is his enemy; there is danger in just being awake. Here, looking up, it is a refuge. He imagines himself safely inside; in bed, with the covers pulled up. Asleep. Unconscious.

As is often the case, I liked the book more than the film, but not a lot more. We get a lot more detail about the early life of Calvin, the father, who turns out to have been an orphan (mentioned only in passing in the film) which certainly gives him more depth and perhaps gives him more resources to deal with tragedy than Beth has. Jeannine is a more complete character (and she and Conrad have discreetly narrated sex in the last chapter). Beth herself remains unsatisfactory. You can get it here.

I’ve already seen that year’s Hugo winner, The Empire Strikes Back, and wrote up the following year’s Hugo winner, Raiders of the Lost Ark, a few months back, so next up will be Chariots of Fire.

Kramer vs. Kramer

Posted on 10 October 2020 by fromtheheartofeurope

Kramer vs. Kramer won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1979, and won four others, Best Director (Robert Benton), Best Actor (Dustin Hoffman), Best Supporting Actress (Meryl Streep) and Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium (Robert Benton again). Justin Henry, god bless him, remains the youngest ever Oscar nominee at the age of 8.

The other Oscar-nominated films were Breaking Away, which I have seen, and All That Jazz, Apocalypse Now, and Norma Rae, which I haven’t. IMDB users rank Kramer vs. Kramer 6th on one list and 7th on the other. Alien, which won the Hugo Award, tops both lists, and Apocalypse Now and Mad Max are also ahead of it on both. Apart from Alien and Breaking Away, I’ve seen seven other films made that year: Monty Python’s Life of Brian, Moonraker, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, The Muppet Movie, Zulu Dawn, The Prisoner of Zenda (the Peter Sellers version) and The Warriors. To be honest I would put Kramer vs. Kramer in the lower half of that pack. Here’s a trailer.

It’s the story of a New York advertising guy whose wife leaves him, with the result that he needs to develop hitherto unused childcare skills; and then she demands custody of their son in a bruising courtroom battle. She wins, but then in a twist ending decides he can keep the kid after all. The script is by Robert Benton who also got a credit for Superman last year.

We’ve seen a few faces here before starting with the two leads. Dustin Hoffman is Ted Kramer here, and was Ratso in Midnight Cowboy ten years ago.

Meryl Streep is Joanne Kramer here, and was Linda in The Deer Hunter last year.

Going back a good deal further, Howland Chamberlain is the divorce court judge here, and way back in 1946 was the department store owner Mr Thorpe in The Best Years of Our Lives. (Born in 1911, he was only 35 then, but played it older.)

Incidentally, one of the child actor extras grew up to be a TV editor and worked on Heroes, The Vampire Diaries and Lovecraft Country.

OK, so, our usual suspects: not a single black speaking part, in a film set in New York (the 16th of 52 Oscar-winning films set there). And in these days of Men’s Rights Activism, the plot is basically a dramatisation of their raison d’être. Ted and Louise are not terribly nice people; but we get much more of Ted’s viewpoint and we are clearly meant to sympathise with him. I didn’t find the music or the cinematography terribly exciting. There is of course a real drama to the courtroom sequence, and Streep in particular is very impressive here, but I can’t really be bothered to write much more about it. MAD Magazine, as so often, had a better ending.

I’ve thought long and hard about where to put it on my personal ranking. In the end it’s going three quarters of the way down, below Gentleman’s Agreement, also a New York drama about real issues but whose heart is in the right place, and above Gone With the Wind, which is also a family drama but with overt rather than covert racism.

The original novel by Avery Corman is actually somewhat better. (Incidentally, this is the first Oscar-winning film based on a novel since The Godfather in 1972.) The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

Billy was two. Joanna’s mother would have said he wasn’t any trouble. He was sometimes stubborn or slow, but he was emerging as a person, moving from the primitive state of sticking cottage cheese into his ears into a semi-civilized being you could take to a Chinese restaurant on a Sunday.

It scores over the film by taking us into Joanna’s mind and showing us the reasons for her actions; there’s also some good colourful incidental detail which is missing from the film (the housekeeper, the grandparents, Ted’s love life). We have the same twist ending though.

Right. Next up is Ordinary People, of which I know nothing at all. But first, The Empire Strikes Back.

The Deer Hunter

Posted on 19 September 2020 by fromtheheartofeurope

The Deer Hunter won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1978, and won four others, Best Picture, Best Director (Michael Cimino), Best Supporting Actor (Christopher Walken), Best Sound, and Best Film Editing. Robert de Niro and Meryl Streep lost as Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress, and it also lost Best Original Screenplay and Best Cinematography.

The other films up for Best Picture were Coming Home, Heaven Can Wait, Midnight Express and An Unmarried WomanThe Deer Hunter top film of 1978 on one ranking and fourth on the other. The other films from that year that I have seen are Grease, Superman (which won the Hugo, so I’ll come to it next), the Ralph Bakshi animated Lord of the Rings, Watership Down, The Wild Geese and Revenge of the Pink Panther – an interesting selection, of which Grease has somehow worn the years more lightly than the rest. Here’s a trailer for The Deer Hunter:

It’s the story of three friends from a Pennsylvania steel town, who all go to fight in Vietnam and all have their lives fundamentally changed by the war. I had seen it once before, on late night TV as a teenager (the BBC showed it on New Year’s Day 1985), and read the (rather flat) novelisation a couple of years ago. I have to say I found it a mixed bag rather than a masterpiece, also on the long side (more than three hours, ninth in order of length) and I’m putting it a bit more than half way down my list, between two other blue-collar films, Rocky and Marty.

Returning actors from previous Oscar-winning films: John Cazale is the friend who doesn’t go to war here, having been Fredo Corleone in both Godfather films. I was really struck by the brittle and slightly desperate energy he displays in his early scenes here, a step up from Fredo. Reading up on the film, I discovered that he knew he was dying when The Deer Hunter was filmed, and did not live to see the final product.

We saw Robert de Niro, playing Mike here, in the second Godfather film as the young version of Don Corleone.

I know it has nothing to do with the film, but here’s Bananarama celebrating Robert de Niro:

And Christopher Walken, who plays the tragic Nick here, was creepy Duane last year in Annie Hall.

OK, while we’re on classic music videos, here is Christopher Walken’s performance in Fatboy Slim’s Weapon of Choice:

So, what did I not like about the film? It’s too long, as noted above. The violence is graphic, and I find that difficult to watch – not just the war scenes, but I’m not a big fan of hunting for sport. It’s also hugely racist. It’s a story about white people being damaged by Asian people, with no interrogation of what the Asian people might actually think or what the Americans are doing in someone else’s country in the first place. The Vietnamese are all either evil men or sex workers. (The French guy is evil too.) Even in the scenes set in the USA, there are no speaking black characters (one or two extras in the background). It is far too unbalanced for me to enjoy very much.

A peculiar annoyance – is it just me? – is that the lovely John Williams track “Cavatina” seems to me completely mismatched in tone to the actual film.

So, I have to admit that in general the film looks very good and convincing. It shouldn’t work – the Pennsylvania scenes are mostly filmed in Ohio, West Virgnia and the Rockies, and the Vietnamese scenes in Thailand – but it does. It’s amusing to note that the Vietnamese river scenes were filmed on the real River Kwai in Thailand, whereas Bridge on the River Kwai was filmed in Sri Lanka. All the crowd scenes are particularly effective – the wedding, the crowded Vietnamese bars, the desperate last days of Saigon. The hospital scene where Mike finds Steve is gut-wrenching.

I’ve noted John Cazale’s performance above; Christopher Walken and Robert de Niro are also utterly compelling, and so is Meryl Streep, who apparently wrote most of her own lines on top of dealing with Cazale’s terminal illness.

Anyway, a mixed bag for me. I guess this was a much rawer topic in 1978, only a few years after the end of the war in real life (and indeed real news footage is used at one point), and Cimino managed to tickle the Academy voters as they wanted to be tickled (the lore of the film includes his successful efforts to manipulate the process). But this was one of the films that has not really lasted.

Next up in this sequence, Kramer vs Kramer.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

Annie Hall

Posted on 12 September 2020 by fromtheheartofeurope

Annie Hall won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1977, and won three others, Best Director (Woody Allen), Best Original Screenplay (Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman) and Best Actress (Diane Keaton in the title role). Woody Allen lost Best Actor to Richard Dreyfus in The Goodbye Girl. Star Wars won six Oscars to Annie Hall‘s four.

Star Wars and The Goodbye Girl were also up for Best Pictures; so were Julia and The Turning Point. I have only seen one of those. Star Wars of course won the Hugo and a special Nebula, and is top of both IMDB rankings, with Annie Hall second on one system and seventh on the other. I have seen twelve other films made in 1977, which beats last year’s record. They are: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Saturday Night Fever, The Spy Who Loved Me, The Rescuers, Pete’s Dragon, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (many many times), Capricorn One, Jabberwocky (which has a particular romantic association for me), Candleshoe, Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo, ABBA: The Movie and The Year of the Hare, this last being a lovely Finnish film which I caught once on late night TV and was absolutely captivated by. To be honest, I would not rank Annie Hall as high up that list as some (Star Wars definitely belongs at the top). Here’s a trailer.

Annie Hall is the story of the love life of New Yorker Alvy Singer, played by writer/director Woody Allen, in particular his on/off relationship with Annie Hall, played by Diane Keaton. I had seen it years ago and found it mildly funny. I’m afraid this time I rather bounced off it, and it’s going three quarters of the way down my table, between two other New York films, ahead of Gentleman’s Agreement (which also tackles anti-semitism, but is even less subtle) and Going My Way (which has better music). Incidentally, this is roughly the 15th of the 50 Oscar-winning films set in and around New York, far more than any other location, or indeed continent.

Returning actors from previous Oscar and Hugo-winning films: well, we start at the top, as both Woody Allen and Diane Keaton starred in the Hugo-winning Sleeper four years earlier.

Diane Keaton was also in both The Godfather and The Godfather II:

A welcome reappearance from an earlier Oscar-winning film is “It Had to Be You”, sung early on by Keaton as Annie Hall, somewhat for laughs:

We had this before in Casablanca:

But in general I found the film falling rather flat. It’s a film about a Jewish guy in which almost all the speaking characters are white. (Allen doesn’t cast black actors.) It really doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test – there is no scene in which two named women talk to each other (Mom Hall and Alvy’s mother are not named, and anyway what we can make out of the conversations over the dinner table seems to be about men.)

Fundamentally, I found Alvy, who we understand to be Allen’s interpretation of himself, just not a very engaging character. There are some funny lines – a few very funny lines – but this is someone who thinks he is much more interesting than he really is, and whose failed relationships are largely his own fault because in the end he cares more about himself than about the other people in his life. We are supposed to find this sympathetic and interesting, but I just found it sad and rather boring.

Fair play to Diane Keaton, who, given the chance to re-enact her own relationship with Allen in a fictionalised way, takes it and runs with it and is much the most sympathetic character in the film. I am glad that she got away.

Also on the plus side, the camerawork is very good, and evokes the different settings of New York and California well (except, as noted above, that there seem to be no black people in either), and it’s fun to see cameos from before-they-were-famous Jeff Goldblum, Christopher Walken and (blink and you’ll miss her) Sigourney Weaver.

The elephant in the room, of course, are the allegations about Allen’s private life which inevitably affect how we now look at all of his work. My stomach turned at the scene where young schoolboy Alvy goes to the girl at the next desk and kisses her against her will, so that she jumps up in distress; the film then cuts back to an adult Alvy sitting in the middle of the class. Sorry to be brutal, but this is nothing other than the central character sexually harassing a six-year-old and the film playing it for laughs.

I’ll give the McLuhan moment significant points for being one of the very funny moments in the film, and indeed one of the funnest moments in all of cinema. Unfortunately McLuhan himself muffs the line (or else it was badly written, but I think he mre likely misremembered it): what on earth is meant by “You mean my whole fallacy is wrong”? Surely the one defining thing of a fallacy is that it is, in fact, wrong?

OK, that was not as bad as Patton, but it didn’t work as well for me as it did for the voters of 1978.

So, that’s half a century of Oscar-winning films, three years after I started this project with Wings in September 2017. Here is my official and definitive ranking, the most recent ten in red – half of them in the top half, half in the bottom half, two in the top ten, which I guess is a relatively even distribution.

50) The Great Ziegfeld (Oscar for 1936)
49) Cimarron (1930/31)
48) Cavalcade (1932/33)
47) Wings (1927/28)
46) Broadway Melody (1928/29)
45) All The King’s Men (1949)
44) Patton (1970)
43) Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
42) The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)
41) Tom Jones (1963)
40) Gone With the Wind (1939)
39) Gentleman’s Agreement (1947)
38) Annie Hall (1977)
37) Going My Way (1944)
36) The French Connection (1971)
35) My Fair Lady (1964)
34) How Green Was My Valley (1941)
33) Mrs Miniver (1942)
32) On The Waterfront (1954)
31) The Godfather Part II (1974)
30) In the Heat of the Night (1967)
29) Grand Hotel (1931/32)
28) The Life of Emile Zola (1937)
27) Marty (1955)
26) Rocky (1976)

25) Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
24) Gigi (1958)
23) It Happened One Night (1934)
22) You Can’t Take It With You (1938)
21) The Lost Weekend (1945)
20) Hamlet (1948)
19) From Here To Eternity (1953)
18) Around The World In Eighty Days (1956)
17) Ben-Hur (1959)
16) The Sting (1973)
15) The Godfather (1972)
14) Oliver! (1968)
13) The Apartment (1960)
12) All About Eve (1950)
11) The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
10) West Side Story (1961)
9) A Man for all Seasons (1966)
8) Midnight Cowboy (1969)
7) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
6) The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
5) All Quiet on the Western Front (1929/30)
4) Rebecca (1940)
3) An American in Paris (1951)
2) The Sound of Music (1965)
1) Casablanca (1943)

Next up: The Deer Hunter (Oscar) and Superman (Hugo), both of which I have seen.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

Rocky

Posted on 29 August 2020 by fromtheheartofeurope

Rocky won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1976, and won just two others, Best Director and Best Film Editing. All the President’s Men and Network both won four. I don’t think (though will check later) that any other Best Picture winner was beaten by two other films in the total number of statuettes it brought home.

All the President’s Men, Network, Bound for Glory and Taxi Driver were also nominated for Best Picture. I have only seen the first of these. I have seen eleven other films released in 1976, which is (so far) a record for me: Carrie, The Outlaw Josey Wales, The Pink Panther Strikes Again, The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Eagle Has Landed, Bugsy Malone, Silver Streak, At the Earth’s Core, The Shaggy D.A., Treasure of Matecumbe and Don’s Party.

Don’s Party is way down the IMDB ratings, which I think is a real shame; it’s a wee jewel of a film, adapted from a play about a group of friends watching the Australian election results coming in on election night in 1969. One of the leads is played by Ray Barrett, who voiced John Tracy in Thunderbirds and was also Bennett/Koquillion in the Doctor Who story we now call The Rescue (he is credited under a false name in the first episode to avoid revealing that the two characters are in fact the same; sorry if that is a spoiler for a Doctor Who story from 55 years ago).

Hugo voters, given the choice of Carrie, Logan’s Run, The Man Who Fell to Earth and Futureworld, incomprehensibly voted for No Award, and there was no Nebula for that year. Anyway

Anyway back to Rocky; it is second behind Taxi Driver on both IMDB ratings (here and here) but ahead of the rest; and, with some reluctance, I think I’d rate Rocky as the best of those that I have seen. Here’s a trailer.

Incidentally, the stall owner who throws Rocky an orange at the beginning of the trailer apparently had no idea that a movie was being filmed and that he would be in it.

Rocky is the story of a part-time boxer and occasional hoodlum who gets the unexpected break of fighting the world heavyweight champion in his home town of Philadelphia, written by and starring Sylvester Stallone. (I think this is the first Oscar-winning film we’ve had in Philadelphia, which is incidentally where my grandmother was born. Compare 14 Oscar winners out of 49, so far, set in and around New York, only 160 km away.) There are a vast number of legends about the film, including the story of the orange mentioned above. Other glorious legends include that the poster showing Rocky wearing the wrong shorts, and his robe being too big, were actual mistakes made by the props department that the film then lampshaded; and that the reason he and Adrian have a solo date at the ice rink is that the 300 extras who had been booked failed to show up, so they had to improvise on the spot. I found it a charming character-driven film, but I still don’t like boxing much, so I’m putting it just about halfway down my table, ahead of Marty (which is quite similar in a lot of ways) but behind Laurence of Arabia.

There are a few returnees from previous Oscar-winning films, most notably Talia Shire, who was in both The Godfather and The Godfather II, films made by her real-life brother, playing the on-screen sister of Al Pacino and the daughter of Marlon Brando and Robert de Niro (surely a marriage made in heaven). Here she is Rocky’s girlfriend Adrian, who becomes sexy when she takes her glasses off. (Try it, girls. Or not, as you please.)

The two others I spotted don’t really merit pictures. Bill Baldwin is the fight announcer on the left during the big fight, and is the unseen TV movie announcer in The Apartment. Al Silvani (credited here as Al Salvani) is the cut man who tends (if that is the word) to Rocky during the big fight, and was an extra in From Here to Eternity.

So, to go through my usual list. Rocky is a film about a white man, and there are three named women characters, two of whom are in only one scene each, and the other is played by Talia Shire. (In her first scene she and her boss, both women, talk to Rocky, which I don’t think passes Bechdel Two.) Talia Shire is a versatile actor and does a lot with not much here.

On race, it’s a different matter: the whole setup of the film is for the culminating fight between Rocky and the champion Apollo Creed, played by Carl Weathers (currently to be seen in The Mandalorian). Creed is supported by a vibrant black community in and outside Philadelphia, with Joe Frazier turning up as himself at the start of the fight. Creed literally wraps himself in the American flag as he makes his entrance.

The music is good, but not obtrusive, and the theme song ridiculously catchy. And I think the cinematography is really very effective, telling a simple story simply and effectively.

Plus I have to salute Stallone’s acting. This project mattered a great deal to him, but he manages to free Rocky of the burdens of producing and writing the film and portray a not very bright guy who is put in a situation where he has to rise to new challenges, and succeeds in meeting his own expectations, while undergoing heavy physical abuse. I thought the ending of the film was well delivered.

IMDB says that the two pet turtles Cuff and Link actually belonged to Stallone (as did the dog) and were still alive and well as recently as last year. That made me smile.

Well, next year is the year of Annie Hall.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Posted on 15 August 2020 by fromtheheartofeurope

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1975, and picked up the other four of the magic five – Best Director (Miloš Forman), Best Actor (Jack Nicholson as McMurphy), Best Actress (Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched), and Best Screenplay Adapted from Other Material, the first film to do this since It Happened One Night in 1934. It lost four – Best Supporting Actor (Brad Dourif as Billy Bibbit), Best Original Score, Best Cinematography and Best Film Editing.

The other Oscar-nominated films of 1976 were Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws and Nashville; the only one I have seen is Jaws. Other films of the year which I have seen are Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (many many times), The Return of the Pink Panther, Love and Death and One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is one of my favourite films, but I have no hesitation in admitting that One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is the best of them (IMDB users agree, on both ratings). Here’s a trailer.

In case you did not know, it is the story of a petty criminal who gets himself referred to the state psychiatric hospital, and leads the other inmates in various acts of empowering rebellion against the oppressive nurses, until a final reckoning with a tragic ending. I confess that because of my close personal connection with the subject of people living in institutions, I postponed watching this for a few weeks. Against my expectations, I found myself really liking it, and I’m putting it 7th in my overall list, behind Bridge on the River Kwai but ahead of Midnight Cowboy. In some ways I thought it was better than the book (which as usual I reread after watching the film).

I did not find any actors who had previously appeared in Oscar-winning films. I found one who had been in a Hugo-winning film – Marya Small, now known as Mews Small, who is Candy here and was Dr Nero, in charge of brainwashing Woody Allen, in Sleeper.

To start with the less good points, it’s our old friends race and gender. This is a story about white men having problems with women and with non-white men. The patients are all white (apart from one Native American who barely speaks – more on that when we get to the book). The orderlies are black. The evil nurses are women. The good women are sex workers. The film is a bit more balanced than the book in giving us the nurses’ point of view; but it’s even less balanced than the book on race. An extraordinary bit of erasure is that one of the psychiatrists, Dr Sonjee, is played by a real psychiatrist, Prasanna K. Pati, who is simply not credited anywhere despite getting several spoken lines in the film. (I see claims that he is the only person of Oriya origin to have appeared in an Oscar-winning film, though I would be surprised if there were nonw at all in Gandhi.)

Having said that, kudos to Dr P.K. Pati and even more so to Dean Brooks, who was in fact the real-life director of the Oregon State Hospital at the time the film was made, and plays his own fictional counterpart Dr Spivey. Several other staff – and indeed apparently patients – at the hospital were involved with the production of the film, either in front of or behind the camera, but here let Dean Brooks stand for them all. I was talking to a psychiatrist friend the other day, who told me that as a student her class had had to watch the film to be sensitised to popular culture perceptions of their chosen profession; it does not show them in an unambiguously good light, and they would have known this going in. (This is a step further than The French Connection, in which a very small part was played by the same guy who had done it in real life, and the policemen on whom the two central characters were based themselves appeared as secondary characters, all very heroic in each case.)

The soundscape and landscape are both well done here. The music, with use of bowed saw and stroking wineglasses, is eerie and extraordinary.

And the cinematography is generally compelling – my favourite scene, as it is for may viewers, is the fishing expedition:

Though this is possibly one of the few scenes that isn’t improvised – the immersion of the cast and crew in the culture of the real hospital, with cameras on all the time and sometimes catching the actors flashing their own character instead of their parts, makes for an extraordinary viewing experience.

The tragic ending is signalled way in advance, but all the more effective for the way it is done, and I am glad that the film-makers did not cop out and stayed true to the book in that regard. Tremendous stuff.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of the original novel is:

“What, Miss Ratched, is your opinion of this new patient? I mean, gee, he’s good-looking and friendly and everything, but in my humble opinion he certainly takes over.”

When I first read the book in 2010, I wrote:

This is a pretty tough book, in many ways: the violence and abuse perpetrated by the staff of the mental institution where the story is set is uncomfortable to read (and I have a daughter who is permanently institutionalised, so it cuts rather close to home). Also I was rather dismayed by the racism and sexism of the story: the only black characters are the brutal male nurses (though the narrator is half Native American); the main female character is the Big Evil Nurse (the other women depicted are two prostitutes and the Little Good Nurse, who comes in only at the end). It was probably not Kesey’s intention, but I could see white American men who believe that they are being oppressed taking comfort and inspiration from this novel.

Having said that, it would be the wrong message. The book is about disorder and development – disorder in two senses, the mental disorders that many of the patients suffer and the disorder and subversion that McMurphy brings to the ward, and the opportunities he offers for his fellow inmates to develop n new directions. There is a tremendously cathartic couple of chapters about a deep-sea fishing expedition which almost summarises the entire book. The violent conclusion leaves several key characters dead but gives others the means of liberating themselves. So in the end I was glad to have read it, though I will not come back to it any time soon.

The crucial difference with the film is that the Native American patient is the narrator and viewpoint character of the entire novel, whereas he is one of the supporting cast in the film – an important one, but largely silent; and the fact that the focus therefore moves away from him makes the film all the whiter. (It was apparently this specific change that Ken Kesey cited as his reason for never watching the film.)

Next up is Rocky, for which I have no expectations; but I will watch the Hugo-winning A Boy and His Dog first.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

The Godfather II (1974)

Posted on 4 July 2020 by fromtheheartofeurope

The Godfather II won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1974, and picked up another five – Best Director (Francis Ford Coppola), Best Supporting Actor (Robert De Niro, beating Michael V Gazzo and Lee Strasberg for their roles in the film), Best Adapted Screenplay (Francis Ford Coppola, Mario Puzo) Best Art Direction, and Best Original Dramatic Score. Al Pacino last Best Actor and Talia Shire lost Best Supporting Actress. Is five nominations in the acting categories a record?

The other nominees for Best Picture were Chinatown, The Conversation, Lenny and The Towering Inferno. I have only seen the last of these. IMDB users rate The Godfather II top of both rankings for the year. The other 1974 films I have seen are mostly sf or thrillers: The Man with the Golden Gun (James Bond), Young Frankenstein (Hugo and Nebula winner), Death Wish, The Towering Inferno (as mentioned), Zardoz and Dark Star. I have an unfashionable affection for the last two of these. Here’s a trailer for The Godfather II. (Warning: the first minute of four is spent telling you how good the film is before showing you any of it.)

I had seen it once before, long ago, and I have to say I liked it more the first time. Of course, I have been distracted over the last few weeks by the very welcome relaxation of the quarantine rules here in Belgium, and partly for that reason I found myself watching it in several chunks rather than all the way through, which may have impacted my concentration. And it’s a long film – the fourth longest to have won Best Picture. (I have already seen the three longest – Gone with the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia and Ben-Hur. Next in length is The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.) My judgement is that I’m putting it a bit more than half-way down my list, below In the Heat of the Night but above On The Waterfront.

This being a sequel, there are a number of repeat performances from the first film. Al Pacino is sort-of in the title role as Michael (except that there are two Godfathers here, Michael and Young Vito):

John Cazale returns as his brother Fredo:

Talia Shire as their sister Connie:

Robert Duvall as consigliere Tom Hagen:

Richard Bright as hitman Al Neri:

And most of all Diane Keaton, who reprises her role as Kay having meantime been Luna in last year’s Hugo-winner, Sleeper.

Michael V. Gazzo, playing Pentangeli here, was an extra in On The Waterfront, but I can’t be bothered to find him now.

The Godfather II is both sequel and prequel to The Godfather, with Al Pacino taking the story of Michael Corleone and his family forward as he attempts to move his business out of New York and into Nevada, and at the same time we get in flashback the story of Vito Corleone, played by Robert de Niro, arriving in New York from Siciliy and clawing his way up to the top. (Apparently Marlon Brando and Robert de Niro were the first and arguably the only actors to win separate Oscars for playing the same role.)

My usual note: no speaking parts and very few non-speaking parts for actors of colour. It’s a story about a father and a son, with the women (and other men) in their lives orbiting around them.

I have to say that I was really not gripped by the 1950s-1960s sections. Michael is a fundamentally unpleasant character, and it’s difficult to sympathise with him. Kay, his wife, tries to break away but in the end she loses. There are some good set-pieces – the Cuban revolution is particularly memorable – but a lot of the rest is people running around and shouting or shooting at each other. The Senate hearing scenes are particularly lacking in oomph.

The 1917-1920s segments (which are very loosely based on the relevant parts of the original book) work much better for me. There’s a clear narrative drive and we see Vito changing and being changed by his circumstances. The cinematography is done very well, and convincingly conveys the period. De Niro is really impressive in that almost all of his dialogue is in Sicilian, which he apparently had to learn specially. Where Michael evokes awful fascination in the parts set later, Vito generates some empathy from the viewer despite the violence that he wreaks on others.

The music remains fantastic, and this time it did win the Oscar it deserved last time.

Well, sorry that this did not grab me as much as I expected. Next up is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which will not be cheerful viewing. I’ll do the 1974 Hugo and Nebula winner Young Frankenstein first.

The Sting

Posted on 30 May 2020 by fromtheheartofeurope

The Sting won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1973, and picked up another six – Best Director (George Roy Hill), Best Writing, Original Screenplay (David S. Ward), Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing and Best Music, Scoring Original Song Score and/or Adaptation. Robert Redford lost Best Actor to Jack Lemmon in Save the Tiger (which I admit I haven’t heard of), and The Sting was also nominated for Best Cinematography and Best Sound, losing to The Exorcist and Cries and Whispers respectively. Worth noting that Julia Phillips was the first woman to collect the Oscar for Best Picture (in the 46th Oscar ceremony).

The other nominees for Best Picture were American Graffiti, Cries and Whispers, The Exorcist and A Touch of Class. I have not seen any of them. IMDB users rank The Sting 2nd or 8th of the films of 19732, depending on the system. The Exorcist is above it on both rankings. The other 1972 films I have seen are an odd assortment: Nebula winner Soylent Green, Live and Let Die, The Day of the Jackal, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Three Musketeers (the version where Spike Milligan is married to Raquel Welch), Charlotte’s Web (the original animated version – accept no substitutes) and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (the one with Tom Baker before he was Doctor Who). I haven’t yet seen Sleeper, which won both Hugo and Nebula. I think The Sting is the best of those that I have seen. Here’s a trailer.

Criminality continues at the Oscars, as this is the seventh Best Picture winner in eight years to be centred around law-breaking (stretching a point for A Man for All Seasons). Robert Redford (as Johnny Hooker) and Paul Newman (as Henry Gondorff) are hustlers in 1936 Chicago who set out to defraud a major crime boss from New York. I like it a lot, and I’m ranking it just behind last year’s The Godfather and ahead of Ben-Hur, in the top third (but just outside the top quarter) of my league table. In particular I should note that I rather bounced off last year’s Hugo winner, Slaughterhouse Five, which was had the same director, George Roy Hill, but I really like The Sting. (I had seen both previous to my current award-winner project.)

A couple of returning faces to note from previous Oscar-winning films. Robert Shaw is Doyle Lonnegan, the New York crime boss who is the mark of the eponymous sting. Seven years ago, he was Henry VIII in A Man for All Seasons.

Ray Walston is J.J. Singleton, one of the key oeprators of the sting here; twelve years ago he was one of Jack Lemmon’s clients in The Apartment.

A less prominent character, Larry D. Mann is the train conductor here and was the racist councillor Watkins in In the Heat of the Night.

I did not spot any crossovers with Hugo-winning films, or with Doctor Who.

As noted above, I enjoyed this. It looks very good, and I’m certainly not familiar enough with either Illinois or California to spot which locations from the latter are pretending to be the former. The feeling of small spaces – on the train, in the bars or apartments, and finally in the fake betting shop – is very well conveyed.

Going through my usual list, it’s actually not bad on representation of women and people of colour. Even though fundamentally it’s a story about the three white men played by Newman, Redford and Shaw, it’s notable that the Chicago scenes show a more diverse team behind the sting, with Eileen Brennan’s Billie in a key (if supporting) roles; and there is the subplot of Dimitra Arliss’s Loretta, which ends with a very unexpected twist.

Two key plot developments are driven by Hooker’s loyalty to his partner Luther Coleman (as played by Robert Earl Jones, father of James Earl Jones). The sting itself is vengeance for Coleman’s death, and Hooker’s collaboration with the FBI is driven by their threats against Coleman’s widow. The fact that a white guy might be instinctively loyal to a black friend and his family is depicted as in no way problematic (perhaps beyond realism). I note also that the early visit to the Colemans’ home is the only portrayal of normal family life in the film; the white people are too busy engaging in crime (and that includes the white women). Unfortunately we don’t see much of the Colemans after Luther is killed, 23 minutes into a 129-minute film. We do hear a lot of ragtime music.

The narrative is carried by Newman and Redford, who are great individually and an even better double act. Both of them have to take on different identities during the film, as their main characters pretend to be other people. Redford is particularly watchable as the more action-oriented of the two.

On first time of watching, I was genuinely shocked by the ending, which I had not seen coming at all; it’s one of the greatest twists I can think of in movie history. The second time round, even knowing what was to come, I was on the edge of my seat. The story is actually a bit far-fetched – it requires Hooker and Gondorff and their team to execute a complex plan with split-second timing – but the film is clear that this may not actually work and that the stakes are very high.

But the best remembered features of the film are the music and the title cards that introduce each narrative section. Every child of my age who attempted to learn the piano either foundered on the rocks of The Entertainer (as I did) or used it as a fundamental stepping stone to greater things.

The use of ragtime in the film is iconic and also anachronistic. The Entertainer was written in 1902; The Sting is set in 1936; but thanks to the film it’s impossible for me to dissociate ragtime from the 1930s. (Incidentally, more time has passed since The Sting was made – 48 years – than had elapsed between the setting and the making of the film – 36 years.) Here’s the full soundtrack – well worth a listen in the background of whatever you are doing next after you read this.

Well, that was fun. Next Oscar-winning film is The Godfather II, which I saw once before, long ago; before then I’ll write up Soylent Green and Sleeper. You can get The Sting here.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

The Godfather: film and novel

Posted on 17 May 2020 by fromtheheartofeurope

The Godfather won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1972, and picked up another two – Best Actor, which was declined by Marlon Brando in protest at the treatment of Native Americans at Wounded Knee (and elsewhere); and Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium. James Caan, Robert Duvall and Al Pacino were all nominated for Best Supporting Actor, but lost to Joel Grey as the MC in Cabaret. There were three other categories where The Godfather lost to Cabaret, which still holds the record for the most Oscars for any film that did not also win Best Picture.

The other Best Picture nominees were Cabaret, Deliverance, The Emigrants and SounderCabaret is the only other of the nominees that I’ve seen. 1972 is not a good year for my cinematic education; I am pretty sure that the only other two films I’ve seen from that year are Slaughterhouse-Five (which I’ll get to next, as it won the Hugo) and the very odd Lee Marvin/Sissy Spacek film Prime Cut. I’d rate The Godfather as the best of them, though Cabaret is also very good. IMDB users also rank it top film of 1972 on both rankings.

Here’s a trailer.

We are in the middle of a crime wave at the Oscars at the moment, having just had The French Connection, Midnight Cowboy, Oliver! and arguably A Man for All Seasons, with The Sting and The Godfather II coming next. It’s the story of Vito Corleone, boss of a massive organised crime network, and his son Michael who eventually takes over the family business. There is an awful lot of graphic violence. It’s another story about white men. But it’s really well told – I am struck by just how different I found it to Patton, made by the same director only two years before – and I’m putting it in the top third of my list, just below Oliver! but ahead of Ben-Hur. I had seen it once before, but I enjoyed the return visit.

The major returning actor from a previous Oscar winner is Brando himself, who also won Best Actor eighteen years ago for the lead role in On the Waterfront. Here he is iconically and convincgly made up to look like a Mafia grandfather and godfather. (The actors playing his sons are between six and sixteen years younger than him.)

Another returnee from On the Waterfront is Rudy Bond, who is Cuneo here (one of the other Mafia dons), and played Moose (one of the longshoremen) in the earlier film.

Sonny Grosso, whose story was the basis for last year’s The French Connection and also appeared in it, plays to type again and is a briefly seen New York cop, but not seen clearly enough for me to put a picture here. And we have an actor from a Hugo-winning film, Sterling Hayden who is Captain McCluskey here and was General Jack D. Ripper in Dr Strangelove.

There are also a fair number of actors here who we will see again in future Oscar-winning films – not least (but not only) because the sequel comes up in two years’ time.

This is yet another film about white men, as was Patton. I was feeling ill the day I watched it, so I did not keep track as closely as usual, but I don’t think that there were many visible non-white faces and I don’t think there were any non-white speaking parts. To an extent the Italians and Jews, and even perhaps the Irish, are to be understood as non-Anglo-Saxons, but it’s not quite the same thing. Going back for another look, I did spot the stable hand who shows off the unfortunate Sultan.

The women are entirely present in terms of their relations with the men – the film obviously passes Bechdel One, in that there is more than one named female character, but I am not sure that it hits Bechdel Two (do any of them have an audible conversation with each other?) and definitely not Bechdel Three (the conversation is not about a man). Having said that, Michael’s two wives are both pretty memorable. Simonetta Stefanelli absolutely glows in her few scenes as Apollonia, and Diane Keaton’s Kay is sort of an Anglo-Saxon viewpoint character (we will of course see her again soon).

And yet, it’s a really well put together film. The plot is complex, with a lot of characters running around shooting each other, mostly in New York but also farther west and in Italy, but I found no difficulty whatsoever in keeping track of it all. The script is lucid and the cinematography adds to the story without distracting from it. “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse” is an unforgettable line (used in several variations). The acting nominations were all well deserved – Brando as the title charcter, Al Pacino and James Caan as his sons Michael and Sonny, and Robert Duvall as the conigliere Tom Hagen. Brando in particular carries his character’s extra years effortlessly.

And the music is just tremendous. Here’s a vid with the orchestral suite (including most of the good bits) set to some of the Sicilian scenes from the film:

Despite its flaws, I think this is a better film than Cabaret – the characters have more depth, there is more going on and the story is told better – and it deserved the Oscar that year. You can get it here.

Next up: The Sting.

I had also read the book long ago, and went back to it for comparative purposes. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

It was a short ride, not more than twenty minutes and when they got out of the car Hagen could not recognize the neighborhood because darkness had fallen. They led him into a basement apartment and made him sit on a straight-backed kitchen chair. Sollozzo sat across the kitchen table from him. His dark face had a peculiarly vulturine look.

The book is a cracking good read. The film sticks pretty closely to the parts of the original story that it wants to tell, but there are two significant (and enjoyable) sections that are not in the film – the adventures of Johnny Fontane in Hollywood, and the back story of Vito Corleone in Sicily and his early years in New York (though I think the latter thread informs the Robert de Niro sections of the sequel film). The book has space to go a bit deeper into the political economy of organised crime, in particular the role played (or not) by the police. It’s also a bit better on the women characters (though this is not saying a lot), and has much more explicit sex than I remembered from reading it as a teenager. I can’t pretend that it’s a very deep read, but it’s a very interesting juxtaposition with last year’s The French Connection which also looked at organised crime in New York, from a rather different perspective. You can get it here.

The French Connection, film (1971) and book by Robin Moore

Posted on 2 May 2020 by fromtheheartofeurope

The French Connection won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1971, and picked up another four – Best Director (William Friedkin), Best Actor (Gene Hackman), Best Adapted Screenplay (Ernest Tidyman) and Best Film Editing (Gerald B. Greenberg). Roy Scheider lost Best Supporting Actor to Ben Johnson in The Last Picture Show, and it also lost to Fiddler on the Roof in two other categories.

The other Best Picture nominees were Nicholas and Alexandra and the Hugo-winning A Clockwork Orange, both of which I have seen, and Fiddler on the Roof and The Last Picture Show, which I haven’t. IMDB users rate it third and fourth for the year on the two systems, with A Clockwork Orange and Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory ahead on both counts and Dirty Harry on one. From 1971, I am pretty sure that I have also seen Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, Diamonds are Forever, Bedknob and Broomsticks, the Monty Python compilation And Now for Something Completely Different, and the Dad’s Army film. To be honest I’d rate The French Connection in the middle of that pack.

Here’s a contemporary trailer.

The film is based on the true story of the 1962 police interception of a massive heroin shipment coming into New York from France, smuggled inside the bodywork of a car. Interesting to note that we are experiencing a crime wave in the Oscars at this epoch – the lads in Midnight Cowboy live on the edge of the law, the lads in Oliver! are definitely on the wrong side, In the Heat of the Night is a murder investigation and A Man for All Seasons climaxes with the protagonist’s trial and execution. Looking ahead, we have The Godfather next year, The Sting the year after, and The Godfather Part II the year after that. (Arguably there is criminality also in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest the following year.)

I’m afraid that The French Connection did not really grab me. I’m putting it two thirds of the way down my table, below My Fair Lady and above another New York film, Going My Way. (Still ahead of last year’s Patton.) It’s an unspohisticated story of two not very interesting policemen biffing the bad guys and occasionally also the good guys with whom they disagree. It does have a couple of really brilliant moments, which I will get to.

There is only one actor returning from a previous Oscar-winning film (and no Hugo or Doctor Who crossovers). It is Bill Hickman, playing FBI agent Mulderig here, fresh from his role as Patton’s driver last year. Hickman of course was best known in his career as a stunt driver, and he got to deploy those skills in The French Connection.

Once again this is a film about white men. The black characters are criminals. The women are arm candy, even if Arlene Farber rather glows in her small part as Angie Boca – on the other hand, Doyle’s girlfriend, whose bottom makes a brief but memorable appearance at 38 minutes in, isn’t even named let alone credited. There is an exception to these sweeping generalisations: an appearance from Fayette Pinkney, Valerie Holiday and Sheila Ferguson, better known as The Three Degrees, performing “Everybody Gets to Go to the Moon” in the crucial scene in the Copacabana nightcub (which was in fact one of their regular gigs when the film was made in 1971, but not in 1962 when the events of the film took place as they hadn’t been founded yet):

The film has a rather odd intersection with reality. Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, the two policemen on whom the protagonists Jimmy Doyle and Buddy Russo, the two central characters, were based, both actually have acting roles in the film, Russo a small part as FBI agent Klein, but Eddie Egan looms rather larger as Doyle’s supervisor Simonson. In one scene, Egan as Simonson comes to blows with Gene Hackman as Doyle, a weird case of someone fighting with their own on-screen portrayal. I can’t get a good screenshot of the tussle, but here’s Hackman as Doyle (left) and Egan as Simonson (right) immediately before.

And here is Grosso as Klein (left) supporting Schneider as Russo (right) towards the end. (Grosso died only a couple of months ago.)

A number of small parts are played by people who actually worked in those roles in real life – most notably, Irving Abrahams, who plays the NYPD mechanic who takes the famous car apart, was in fact the NYPD mechanic who had disassembled the car at the centre of the real drugs case on which the movie is based, so in effect he is playing himself. I cannot think of many other non-celebrity cases like this – the chemist Don Suddaby in Lorenzo’s Oil is the other one that comes to mind.

I will admit that the main actors are very watchable – if anything, I thought Roy Scheider slightly better as Russo than Gene Hackman as Doyle, though Hackman is admittedly given more to do.

Also a shout out to Fernando Rey whose French is not really all that good but rises to the occasion as chief baddie Alain Charnier.

What makes the film is the cinematography. The documentary style of filming gives it all an air of gritty reality, and in particular the action scenes that dominate the second half of the film are very exciting and very well done. Here’s the climax of the famous chase:

It’s also mercifully short – at 104 minutes, shorter than any film we’ve had since Marty in 1955 (and Marty is the shortest of them all), sandwiched between two very long ones (both Patton and The Godfather are over 170 minutes). You can get it here.

I also read the original book by Robin Moore. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

Still, it is not easy to get a warrant to tap a phone. There must be sufficient reason to believe, established by precedent and tangible evidence, that the telephones to be wired are used by suspected felons or conspirators and could lead police either to their apprehension or to prevention of additional felonies. It must also be shown that the telephones themselves are used to further illicit enterprises. This last point can be a bit tricky to substantiate, but, depending upon the cirumstances and the applicants, most judges will issue the warrants.

The book purports to be a journalistic account of the original heroin bust of 1962, but is clearly very fictionalised – verbatim dialogue and other incidental details inserted wholesale into the text, plus (perhaps more important) the third of the three detectives who actually solved the case is written out of history. It is very good on the detail of the heroin trade (largely absent from the film). It’s also racist, sexist and homophobic. You can get it here.

Next up: The Godfather.

Oscar winners:

Midnight Cowboy

Posted on 14 March 2020 by fromtheheartofeurope

Midnight Cowboy won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1969, and picked up another two for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay (a relatively low tally, and exceeded that year by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). It lost in four other categories – both leads were nominated for Best Actor, Sylvia Miles for best Supporting Actress, and also for Best Film Editing.

The other Best Picture nominees were Anne of the Thousand Days, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Hello, Dolly! and Z. IMDB users rate it second on both systems, with Easy Rider first on one ranking and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid first on the other. The Hugo that year went to the (real) Moon landings. There were a lot of good films that year; I have not seen any of those mentioned so far, but I have seen The Brain, Oh! What A Lovely War!, The Bed-Sitting Room, Luis Buñuel’s The Milky Way and A Boy Named Charlie Brown (the one with the dramatic spelling bee). Midnight Cowboy is better than any of them.

Here’s a contemporary trailer.

New York is by far the most popular setting for Oscar-winning films, though this is actually the first for eight years, since West Side Story – the longest gap we’ve had. (Seven years separate The Broadway Melody and The Great Ziegfeld.) It’s the story of a young Texan who tries to make his fortune in New York in the swinging Sixties, and makes friends with a local; but both of them are chewed up and spat out by the naked city, and they end up heading to Florida with one of them dead on arrival.

I’m not going to write a lot about it. I liked it very much, and it’s going in my top ten (ahead of A Man for All Seasons, but behind The Bridge on the River Kwai, since you ask). There are no returning actors from previous Oscar-winning films, and none who also appeared in Doctor Who. The film is about the friendship between two white male characters, but the women characters are on the whole empowered. Literally the first thing the protagonist does after the credits finish rolling is to greet his black colleague. There is a strong visibility, if not always positive, of gayness. It’s a story of broken dreams, and decline and fall, and it’s told very well.

I think there are three things to mention in particular.

First, the music. My god. I had a real double-take moment about halfway through when this came up on the soundtrack:

For me and for many people of my age and a bit younger, this is the theme tune for the BBC children’s nature programme Wildtrack.

I now know that all the hip adults in the room were nudging each other and muttering, “That’s the music from Midnight Cowboy!”

Before I get onto the two stars, the two women who stood out for me were Brenda Vaccaro as Shirley, the girl with whom Joe actually manages to perform after a false start, and Sylvia Miles as Cass, his first New York lover. This is not a feminist film, but these two roles are actually pretty empowered women. Cass got an Oscar nomination for it.

The only other film I’ve seen Jon Voight in is Catch-22, though of course I’ve seen his daughter in a few things as well. He is billed as the star here, and certainly his is the character with the most interesting arc, but I think his co-lead puts in the more memorable performance. It’s a high threshold though, as Voight manages to put in a thoroughly convincing performans as a wannabe cowboy with or without his clothes on.

I should say here that the received wisdom about the film is that it’s about a “male prostitute”. This is simply not on. First of all, I think we say “sex worker” these days. Secondly, he’s not actually very good at it. The first woman he has sex with in New York actually gets him to give her money, the young man with whom he has a sexual encounter refuses to pay him, and when he finally does get paid for sex he finds he is impotent. Joe describes himself as a hustler; I think I would call him a wannabe hustler, given his lack of success.

Dustin Hoffman simply rules as Ratso, the disreputable chap who becomes Joe’s friend and eventually more or les dies in his arms. He gets the single most memorable line of the film – “I am walking here!” – and he’s the one your eye is drawn to in their scenes together.

Incidentally there are a number of good websites detailing the New York locations of the filming. Here’s one with various other incidental details about the film.

All of the music is good, so is the acting, but the cinematography is the best. The Texas flashbacks, Joe’s miserably unsuccessful attempts to trade sex for money, New York as a place that consumes its inhabitants, and the Andy Warhol party, and the final scene on the bus, all superb viewing. The plot is simple and told visually as much as by the script.

As I said, one of the good ones. You can get it here.

Next up is Patton, of which I know nothing, but I guess it is about the general.

As usual, I went and read the novel on which the film is based, Midnight Cowboy by James Leo Herlihy. The second paragraph of the third chapter is :

She was known as Chalkline Annie, suggesting the order that had to be maintained in order to serve efficiently the large numbers of boys to whom in a single half hour she made her body available.

It’s a rare case where it’s actually rather difficult to decide which is better between the book and the film (which sticks closely to the last two-thirds of the book). The book does give us a lot more details of Joe’s early life (mostly in fact in New Mexico rather than Texas) and takes us deeper inside his head. The descriptions are vivid and somewhat unssettling. On the other hand, that tight-third narrative gives us a more restricted view of events than the camera can do, and the fact is that Joe is not all that interesting or nice a person to spend time with. It’s a memorable (and short) read all the same. You can get it here.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

Oliver!

Posted on 22 February 2020 by fromtheheartofeurope

Oliver! won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1968, and picked up another five: Best Director (Carol Reed), Best Musical Adaptation Score, Best Art Direction, Best Sound and a special award for choreographer Onna White. It lost in five other categories.

The other Best Picture nominees were Funny Girl, The Lion In Winter, Rachel, Rachel and Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet. IMDB users have not rated it as highly as Oscar voters did, placing it 11th on one system and 18th on the other 2001: A Space Odyssey, Once Upon a Time in the West, Rosemary’s Baby, Planet of the Apes, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Bullitt, Night of the Living Dead, Where Eagles Dare and Hang ‘Em High. It’s a good year for my cinematic education; apart from 2001, I have also seen The Lion In Winter, Romeo and Juliet, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Where Eagles Dare, Barbarella, Yellow Submarine, Lady in Cement, The Girl on a Motorcycle, and Winnie-the-Pooh and the Blustery Day (many many times).

Youtube claims that this is an original trailer:

We’ve had a run of Oscar winners set in some version or another of Merrie England: Around the World in Eighty Days, Tom Jones, My Fair Lady and A Man for All Seasons (OK, that last not quite so merrie). We have also had quite a number of musicals – The Broadway Melody, Going My Way, An American in Paris, Gigi, West Side Story, My Fair Lady (again) and The Sound of Music. This is the last of either for a while; catching the end of the Zeitgeist perhaps. As if you didn’t know, it’s an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist, about an orphan boy who is seduced into a life of crime but finds respectability and happiness.

The curtailing of the original title and extra exclamation mark has been mocked elsewhere – The Tall Guy features a musical adaptation of The Elephant Man called, inevitably, Elephant!, and Simon Brett’s novel Star Trap more obscurely has a musical adaptation of She Stoops to Conquer with the title Lumpkin! There were not really all that many musicals of the time with names in that format; a quick check comes up with Blitz! (also by Lionel Bart), Carnival!, Donnybrook!, and Twang!! (again by Bart, with two exclamation marks, and a complete fiasco).

We have one actor here returning for a third Oscar-winning role: Hugh Griffith, who was Squire Western in Tom Jones and Sheikh Ilderim in Ben-Hur, here plays a drunken but unnamed magistrate (Mr Fang in Dickens’ novel).

A couple of other appearances of note. Harry Secombe, of the Goons, plays Mr Bumble the Beadle. Many years later his grand-daughter was briefly our au pair. (She gave showbiz a try, but is now working in academic administration.)

And another familiar face, Mr Sowerberry the undertaker, is played by Leonard Rossiter, later famous as Reggie Perrin but previously seen in this same year’s Hugo winner, 2001: A Space Odyssey, as a Russian scientist.

Mrs Bumble is played by Peggy Mount, who shows up twenty years later in the surreal Doctor Who story The Greatest Show in the Galaxy as a stallkeeper.

And to my delight one of the paupers doling out the gruel is played by Roy Evans, who pops up everywhere, as an alien delegate and two different doomed miners in Doctor Who, as a baker in Here Come the Double Deckers! and as a doomed slave in the second season of Blake’s 7.

I’m putting Oliver! between a quarter and a third of the way down my list of Oscar winners, below The Apartment but above Ben-Hur. It’s generally very entertaining, but I am a bit bothered by the anti-Semitism of Fagin and the rather passive title character. I should also note that apparently Shirley Bassey, who reached number two for 5 weeks on the United Kingdom charts with “As Long As He Needs Me” in 1960, was one of the original candidates for Nancy, but was thought to be too black (there is not a single visible minority actor in the film – Tom Jones, filmed five years before and set a century earlier, did better). Having said that, Shani Wallis is very very good as Nancy in the film.

Though Oliver Reed is a bit one-note as Bill Sykes, and it’s not at all clear what Nancy can see in him.

Despite one’s reservations about the Fagin character, Ron Moody makes him really interesting and the performance was enough to get him offered the role of Doctor Who the next year (he turned it down; Jon Pertwee took it).

Here he is, picking a pocket or two.

And despite the annying passivity of the title character, Jack Wild as the Artful Dodger turns in the best performance of a child actor we have seen since the young Roddy MacDowell in How Green Was My Valley (though there haven’t been a lot – the kids in The Sound of Music and Going My Way, and that’s about it).

The whole thing does look very convincing, and in particular, the music is very catchy (I remember playing selections from it with the Belfast Youth Orchestra back in the day) and the choreography is spectacular. “Consider Yourself” is the one that stuck in my mind from seeing this as a teenager.

But the other one that really struck me was “Who Will Buy”, Oliver’s reorientation song at the beginning of the second act. I feel that it somewhat jars the overall mood of the film a bit, but again is is just spectacular to watch, and it is very interesting musically.

So yeah, the last musical and last film set in Merrie Englande for a while, after a run with quite a lot of them. You can get it here.

I went back and reread the book. It is long. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

Let it not be supposed by the enemies of “the system,” that, during the period of his solitary incarceration, Oliver was denied the benefit of exercise, the pleasure of society, or the advantages of religious consolation. As for exercise, it was nice cold weather, and he was allowed to perform his ablutions every morning under the pump, in a stone yard, in the presence of Mr. Bumble, who prevented his catching cold, and caused a tingling sensation to pervade his frame, by repeated applications of the cane. As for society, he was carried every other day into the hall where the boys dined, and there sociably flogged as a public warning and example. And so far from being denied the advantages of religious consolation, he was kicked into the same apartment every evening at prayer-time, and there permitted to listen to, and console his mind with, a general supplication of the boys, containing a special clause, therein inserted by authority of the board, in which they entreated to be made good, virtuous, contented, and obedient, and to be guarded from the sins and vices of Oliver Twist: whom the supplication distinctly set forth to be under the exclusive patronage and protection of the powers of wickedness, and an article direct from the manufactory of the very Devil himself.

When I first read it in 2010, I wrote:

One of several classic Dickens books which I had not previously read, and which eventually worked to the top of my list. I am sure that it was spell-binding social commentary in 1838, but the character of Oliver seemed to me much too good to be true. Any child coming from that sort of brutal institutionalised background would have pretty serious psychological issues; in fact all Oliver need is a comfortable bed and a cuddle and he turns into an angel. The implication is that Oliver, as a Good Boy, is therefore part of the deserving poor, and the Artful Dodger and so on, as Bad Boys, are part of the undeserving poor, a distinction I find rather invidious – copper-fastened at the end by the fact that Oliver does inherit wealth, but on condition of his goodness rather than his absolute rights as his parents’ son. There seems little room for redemption, and Nancy, the fallen woman who tries to redeem herself, gets killed off. The portrayal of Fagin must surely have appeared gratuitously anti-Semitic even by 1838 standards. I’m glad that I have read and enjoyed later Dickens, because I think if I had started here I would have written him off.

What struck me forcefully this time is that the interval of the film/musical, well over half-way through, comes at a point which is only 20% into the book. So (to save you the maths) the original plot is compressed roughly six times as much in the second act as in the first. And it’s a wise choice by Lionel Bart; there are various tedious sub-plots around Oliver’s true identity and the bad guys comin’ to get him, and it’s not really all that interesting.

Anyway, you can get it here.

In the Heat of the Night: film (1967) and novel (1965)

Posted on 18 January 2020 by fromtheheartofeurope

In the Heat of the Night won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1967, and picked up another four: Best Actor (Rod Steiger as police chief Gillespie), Best Film Editing, Best Sound Mixing and Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium. It lost Best Director to The Graduate, and also lost Best Sound Effects to The Dirty Dozen.

The other Best Picture nominees were Bonnie and Clyde, Doctor Dolittle, The Graduate and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (which of course also starred Sydney Poitier). The only one I have seen (I think) is The Graduate. In IMDB ratings of all 1967 films, In the Heat of the Night ranks 7th on one system and 14th on the other. Six films beat it in both systems: The Jungle Book, The Graduate, Cool Hand Luke, The Dirty Dozen, Bonnie and Clyde and You Only Live Twice. Apart from The Graduate, I have also seen The Jungle Book and You Only Live Twice. From 1967, I have also seen the first Casino Royale, Half a Sixpence, Who’s Minding the Mint and the Joseph Strick Ulysses. I am a bit mystified by IMDB’s love for The Jungle Book, which I remember as average Disney with implicit racism which surely would not pass muster today. On the other hand, I have good if vague memories of The Graduate and You Only Live Twice, and the first Casino Royale is at least fun. Here’s a trailer for In The Heat of the Night.

This is the first murder mystery to win the Oscar for Best Picture. (Unless you count Hamlet.) The twist is that the murder takes place in a bigoted Southern town, and a black detective from Philadephia who happens to be passing is brought in to solve the crime. I have to say that I did not especially warm to it. I watched it first on Eurostar after three tiring days in London, and then tried it again flying home after a tiring weekend in Glasgow, so my energy was not at its highest, but I must record that it failed to really grab me, and I’m putting it a touch below the halfway mark of my rankings, ahead of On the Waterfront (which also features Rod Steiger) but behind Grand Hotel.

We have one returnee from a previous Oscar-winning film – Rod Steiger, who was nominated as Best Supporting Actor in On The Waterfront, where he pays Marlon Brando’s older brother (despite being younger), and won the Best Actor award this year for his performance as Gillespie, the police chief.

I normally run through the aspects of these films in order, from the things I liked least to the things I liked most. In this case, the basic problem is that a successful detective story requires you to have distinct characters who are interesting enough that you care who is the actual murderer. I did not reach that point here, in either of my two viewings. This is a film about white men with harsh accents yelling at each other, and occasionally being thrown into jail, or taking a break from yelling at each other to yell at the black guy. The plot is fairly simple, but I actually found it difficult to follow. Though I was impressed by the cutting-edge tech used to record the murderer’s evental confession.

There are odd bits of cinematography that jolted me out of willing suspension of disbelief. Here’s one – a murder suspect is attempting to flee across state lines from Mississippi to Arkansas. What’s wrong with this picture? The sun is on the right, and Arkansas is west of Mississippi, so that means the sun is firmly in the north. (Not to mention the fact that the nearest bridges to the real Sparta, Mississippi, are two and a half hours’ drive away, so the police chief is well outside his jurisdiction.)

It’s a film that doesn’t have a lot of space for women either; the three female characters are the Grieving Widow (Lee Grant), the Town Slut (Quentin Dean) and, a little more interesting, the Town Abortionist (Beah Richards), but none of them gets an awful lot to do; the Grieving Widow does at least insist that the black guy should be kept on the case. Of course, that’s still three more speaking female characters than in Lawrence of Arabia (the film, that is; the original book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, has several well-characterised female camels).

On the other hand, you do have to admit that this is the first Oscar-winning film since Gone With the Wind to tackle race, and the first at all to be on the right side of the issue. This is largely (though not entirely – see above re Beah Richards, and there are others as well) carried by the superb performance of Sydney Poitier, as Virgil Tibbs, the Californian detective who is dragged unwillingly into a tacky murder committed by tacky people in a tacky town, and builds an uneasy and unsatisfactory relationship with the police chief.

He has the single best line of the film:

Gillespie: “Virgil”? That’s a funny name for a nigger boy to come from Philadelphia. What do they call you up there?
Tibbs: They call me MISTER TIBBS!

And he gets another iconic scene (watch to the end), where incidentally the butler is played by Jester Hairston, writer of the Christmas carol “Mary’s Boy Child”:

Even so, I confess I am not totally satisfied with the film’s take on race. Steiger’s Oscar for Best Actor kind of sums it up; the story ends up being about the white guy on a journey to become comfortable with his own racism, rather than about the black guy who has to deal with these bigots day in and day out. I suspect I might find Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, made the same year with the same lead actor, more satisfactory.

I can’t finish without saluting Ray Charles’ title song.

And so we reach another decade, with my rankings of the last ten films (in red below) among the forty Oscar winners so far as follows – not a bad decade, with half of the most recent ten in my top third overall, and seven of them in my top half. But there were some disappointments, and In the Heat of the Night was one of them.

40) The Great Ziegfeld (Oscar for 1936)
39) Cimarron (1930/31)
38) Cavalcade (1932/33)
37) Wings (1927/28)
36) Broadway Melody (1928/29)
35) All The King’s Men (1949)
34) Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
33) The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)
32) Tom Jones (1963)
31) Gone With the Wind (1939)
30) Gentleman’s Agreement (1947)
29) Going My Way (1944)
28) My Fair Lady (1964)
27) How Green Was My Valley (1941)
26) Mrs Miniver (1942)
25) On The Waterfront (1954)
24) In the Heat of the Night (1967)
23) Grand Hotel (1931/32)
22) The Life of Emile Zola (1937)
21) Marty (1955) 20) Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
19) Gigi (1958)
18) It Happened One Night (1934)
17) You Can’t Take It With You (1938)
16) The Lost Weekend (1945)
15) Hamlet (1948)
14) From Here To Eternity (1953)
13) Around The World In Eighty Days (1956)
12) Ben-Hur (1959)
11) The Apartment (1960)
10) All About Eve (1950)
9) The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
8) West Side Story (1961)
7) A Man for all Seasons (1966)
6) The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
5) All Quiet on the Western Front (1929/30)
4) Rebecca (1940)
3) An American in Paris (1951)
2) The Sound of Music (1965)
1) Casablanca (1943)

As I usually try and do, I got and read the book that the film was based on, In the Heat of the Night by John Ball. Here’s the second paragraph of the third chapter:

Until Gillespie arrived in town, Sam Wood had been rated a big man, but Gillespie’s towering size automatically demoted Sam Wood to near normal stature. The new chief was only three years his senior—too young, Sam thought, for his job, even in a city as small as Wells. Furthermore Gillespie came from Texas, a state for which Sam felt no fraternal affection. But most of all Sam resented, consciously, Gillespie’s hard, inconsiderate, and demanding manner. Sam arrived at the conclusion that he felt no liking for the Negro [Tibbs], only rich satisfaction in seeing Gillespie apparently confounded. Before he could think any further, Gillespie was looking at him.

As is so often the case, almost everything about the book is better. Our setting is in South Carolina rather than Mississippi; Tibbs is from California, not Philadelphia; the murder victim is not a local industrialist, but an Italian conductor brought in to run a music festival to make the crappy little bigoted town a more popular place, with a supporting cast of sympathisers including an attractive daughter. Also, we get more inside the heads of the protagonists, and it’s the junior police office Sam Wood who Tibbs develops the relationship with, rather than his boss as in the film. Here is a didactic but well-written exchange between them:

Sam thought carefully for a minute before he asked his next question. “Virgil, I’m going to ask you something you aren’t going to like. But I want to know. How did they [the LAPD] happen to take you? No, that isn’t what I mean. I want to ask you point-blank how come a colored man got all those advantages. Now if you want to get mad, go ahead.”
Tibbs countered with a question of his own. “You’ve always lived in the South, haven’t you?”
“I’ve never been further than Atlanta,” Sam acknowledged.
“Then it may be hard for you to believe, but there are places in this country where a colored man, to use your words for it, is simply a human being like everybody else. Not everybody feels that way, but enough do so that at home I can go weeks at a time without anybody reminding me that I’m a Negro. Here I can’t go fifteen minutes. If you went somewhere where people despised you because of your southern accent, and all you were doing was speaking naturally and the best way that you could, you might have a very slight idea of what it is to be constantly cursed for something that isn’t your fault and shouldn’t make any difference anyhow.”
Sam shook his head. “Some guys down here would kill you for saying a thing like that,” he cautioned.
“You made my point,” Tibbs replied.

It’ss the first of six novels and four short stories, and I think I will keep an eye out for the rest. You can get it here.

Incidentally, this is my first blogpost about a book that I read in 2020. More to come.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

A Man for All Seasons (1966)

Posted on 4 January 2020 by fromtheheartofeurope

A Man for All Seasons won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1966, and picked up another five: Best Director (Fred Zinnemann), Best Actor (Paul Scofield), Best Adapted Screenplay (Robert Bolt), Best Cinematography – Color and Best Costume Design – Color. Robert Shaw was nominated as Best Supporting Actor for Henry VIII, and Wendy Hiller as Best Supporting Actress for Alice More, but were beaten by Walter Matthau and Sandy Dennis respectively.

The other Best Picture nominees were Alfie, The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, The Sand Pebbles and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – I have seen none of them. The IMDB rankings have A Man for All Seasons ranked 9th by one system and 20th by the other; the clear winner among IMDB voters, top of both lists, is The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Other films ranked ahead of it on both systems are Persona, Blow Up, Andrei Rublev, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Fahrenheit 451, The Battle of Algiers, and Manos: The Hands of Fate. The only one of those I have seen is The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which is one of my favourite films (and did not get a single Oscar nomination). Other 1966 vintage films that I have seen include A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, One Million Years BC, Carry On Screaming, and Daleks Invasion Earth 2015 AD. I will agree with IMDB voters that A Man for All Seasons is better than any of them except The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Here’s a trailer (post-Oscars):

I liked this a lot. It’s the story of Sir Thomas More, author of Utopia, and Chancellor of England under Henry VIII. The King assumes power over the Church in order to facilitate his marriage with Anne Boleyn; More cannot approve, and is tried and executed. The script is witty and also moving, and a big story is told without a huge budget (at $2 million, $16 million in today’s prices, less than any Oscar winner since Marty). I’m putting it in my top ten, at #7 as the list stands, below The Bridge on the River Kwai but above West Side Story.

I don’t think there are any actors returning from previous Oscar-winning films. The closest is Wendy Hiller, who was Eliza in the 1938 Pygmalion I watched recently, and is Alice More here.

However, I also like to track crossovers with Doctor Who, and we have a pretty big one: Richard Rich, the bad guy who betrays More, is played by John Hurt, who played the War Doctor forty-seven years later. It’s the only case of a TV Doctor with a speaking role in an Oscar-winning film (Patrick Troughton and Peter Cushing are both in Olivier’s 1948 Hamlet, but Troughton doesn’t speak and Cushing wasn’t a TV Doctor).

There are a few more. Cyril Luckham is Archbishop Cranmer here, and went on to play the White Guardian in Doctor Who:

David Collings is a King’s Messenger; he was in Doctor Who three times, in the Fourth Doctor stories Return of the Cybermen, heavily made up as the Vogan leader Vorus, and The Robots of Death, less heavily made up, as the homicidal Poul; and also heavily made up again as the title character of the Fifth Doctor story Mawdryn Undead. (He’s also Blake’s new sidekick in the very last episode of Blake’s 7.)

The Tower of London is full of Who; the jailer on the left is John Nettleton, who much later is the Reverend Ernest Matthews in the surreal Seventh Doctor story Ghost Light, and the Governor of the Tower is Martin Boddey, who plays the awful British civil servant Walker in the Third Doctor story The Sea Devils a couple of years later

There are several others who I wasn’t able to get a decent shot of from the film – Eric Mason is the executioner (but we don’t see his face), Graham Leaman and Trevor Baxter are extras, and probably I have missed some. There are also a lot of actors who I know from 1970s and 1980s TV as well – most obviously Leo McKern as Cromwell, but also Nigel Davenport, Corin Redgrae, Colin Blakeley and not forgetting Orson Welles as Wolsey.

I’m going to acquit the film of my usual charge of whitewashing. Thanks to the work of Onyeka and Miranda Kaufmann, we now know that there were a lot of black people around in Tudor London; but in 1966 this was not common knowledge. (John Blanke was identified in an academic journal as a royal trumpeter for Henry VII and Henry VIII in 1960, but I can forgive the film-makers for not being regular readers of the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library.)

It’s a rather male story (indeed, it’s a rather Thomassy story – More, Cranmer, Norfolk and Cromwell all shared the same first name). But the two major women are both very well drawn and portrayed. I’ve mentioned Wendy Hiller above; I’m developing a real crush on my aunt’s friend Susannah York; we saw her in Tom Jones a couple of years back, and here she is great again as More’s daughter Margaret.

And let’s not forget Yootha Joyce, later to achieve fame as Mildred of George and Mildred, who is the sinister petitioner Averil Machin.

The film is dominated by Paul Scofield as More, fully deserving of his Oscar. I see that he did surprisingly few films for an actor of his stature. I do remember him from Quiz Show as the father of the dodgy contestant, but I had forgotten that he was also the French king in Branagh’s Henry V.

He gets most of the good lines here. And they are good and memorable lines, applicable to the present day as much as to 1530.

Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!

Wolsey: You’re a constant regret to me, Thomas. If you could just see facts flat-on, without that horrible moral squint… With a little common sense you could have made a statesman.

More: Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world… but for Wales?

More is a very attractive heroic figure. I suspect that the story was tremendously influential on the parents of the people I used to hang around with at Fisher House as an undergraduate: telling the story of genteel resistance to the Reformation on a point of principle. A Man for All Seasons is far from the first theatrical treatment of the story – William Shakespeare contributed a scene to a 1590s script which was not performed until 1964. Here’s the key speech, urging compassion for refugees, which has chilling resonances for today:

Much more recently, Jeremy Northam’s portrayal of More in TV’s The Tudors has generated a host of fanvids.

I should finish by noting the excellent cinematography of the film. As noted above, it was made on a virtual shoestring, and the various localtions do a lot of work, economically put together to make the visuals propely compliment the story. Georges Delerue’s music doesn’t quite rise to the level of being a star in its own right, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

It’s the third Oscar winner in five years to be set in Merrie Englande (after Tom Jones and My Fair Lady). Next up is In The Heat Of The Night, of which I know nothing at all. It’s less than two hours long, so I’ll hope to watch it on Eurostar next week. After that it’s back to Merrie Englande with Oliver!.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

The Sound of Music (1965) and The Story of the Trapp Family Singers (1949)

Posted on 28 December 2019 by fromtheheartofeurope

The Sound of Music won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1965, and picked up another four: Best Director (Robert Wise), Best Music (Irwin Kostal), Best Sound Recording and Best Film Editing. Doctor Zhivago also won five Oscars that year, beating The Sound of Music for three of them.

The other Best Picture nominees were Darling, Doctor Zhivago, Ship of Fools and A Thousand Clowns, none of which I have seen. For once, IMDB users agree with the Oscar voters, with The Sound of Music on top of one ranking and second to For A Few Dollars More on the other. I haven’t seen For A Few Dollars More, but I have seen a half-dozen other films from 1964: Thunderball, Help!, The Ipcress File, Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines, Dr Who and the Daleks and The Monkey’s Uncle (mostly from Saturday TV in the olden days). I must say I am aligned with both the Oscar voters and IMDB users; The Sound of Music is the best of the lot. In the improbable case that you are not familiar with it, here’s a trailer.

You know what it’s about, but I’ll remind you anyway. Julie Andrews plays trainee nun Maria, who is sent as governess to Captain von Trapp (who has some surprisingly mature children for a man of his apparent age). She erodes his gritty reserve and they fall in love. Then, in a swerve from family drama to global affairs, Nazi Germany annexes their country, von Trapp escapes conscription into the Third Reich navy and they flee across the mountains to Switzerland.

And, well, it’s just brilliant (such a relief after I found that My Fair Lady had aged rather badly). There’s one minus point that I will come to, but in general I loved rewatching it. It’s going right to the top of my list – well, in second place behind Casablanca, which is also about resisting the Nazis and has a more compelling plot, but ahead of An American in Paris, which despite the lovely music, doesn’t do much for its women characters. In particular, I appreciated the emancipatory lyrics of “Climb Ev’ry Mountain”, not a revolutionary song, but still one which calls for self-belief and personal ambition. It is the climax of the film, of course, but it’s introduced by the Reverend Mother challenging Maria to live for herself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKuqySkqhHw

(The Liberal Democrats have a version of this which applies to election campaigns.)

We have two returnees from previous Oscar-winning films. Anna Lee, who played Bronwen in How Green Was My Valley twenty-three years ago, is Sister Margarethe here. (She has barely changed!)

And Norma Varden, whose husband got pickpocketed in Casablanca twenty-one years ago, returns as Frau Schmidt, the Captain’s housekeeper.

One important returner who we have not in fact previously seen is Marni Nixon, who dubbed the principals in both West Side Story and My Fair Lady, but here is allowed to appear in the flesh (because Julie Andrews did not need to be dubbed).

I mentioned that there is one negative point. I’m afraid it’s our old friend whitewashing. To my surprise, the original book recalls a very friendly encounter between the von Trapp family while they were still in Austria and the great American singer Marian Anderson. OK, the film considerably truncates the family’s singing career in Austria, but it should be noted that one of the elements of the story that was thus excised was an actual meeting with a black woman musician. (More than half of the book is about their lives in America, and they have plenty of encounters with people of colour.)

But otherwise, it’s sheer joy. I’m going to give a particular shout-out to Charmian Carr, aged 22 and playing 16-year-old Liesl, who is by far the best performer of the kids but lets the others all get their turn, apart of course from her own song.

Incidentally the real eldest daughter, whose name was Agathe not Liesl, was gay and ran a kindergarten in Maryland for many years with her partner.

And there’s the completely bonkers “Lonely Goatherd”, which certainly gave me as a child the completely false idea that you could knock together a puppet show perfomance in a wet afternoon.

The settings of Salzburg and the Alps are mercilessly exploited. Here’s the picnic scene in Do-Re-Mi (where the kids are wearing clothes that Maria has whipped up from curtains ovenight):

The best songs get repeated in a slightly different context. “My Favourite Things” marks both turning points for Maria’s relationship with the children, when she bonds with them and when she comes back.

The songs can also distract from just how well the film is directed and acted. I give you the dance of Maria and the Captain (my friend points out that Maria is the only one at the party who doesn’t have a full-length dress), illustrating also the talents of Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer in the lead roles:

And “Something Good”, a less memorable song, gets some memorable cinematography:

And I must say that my curmudgeonly cynical soul was moved to tears at the moment when the Captain’s heart is melted by his children’s singing.

It’s all fantastic, really.

The Sound of Music has totally permeated our culture. Here’s a flashmob at Antwerp Central station perfoming Do-Re-Mi to the bemusement of commuters:

Here’s Lady Gaga with an extraordinary performance of selections from The Sound of Music at the 2015 Oscars – particularly worth it for the moment at 4:29 just after she finishes, looks into the wings and realises what’s happening next.

Also in 2015, infamous Slovenian industrial rock group Laibach performed two concerts in North Korea, including mostly songs from The Sound of Music, which is used for teaching English in the DPRK. There is of course an album, and several songs are available on Youtube (including the title song and “Lonely Goatherd”). The littlest of the girls in their “So Long, Farewell” is the daughter of a friend of mine (she’s also in “My Favourite Things”).

Well. My next Oscar-winning film takes me back to Merrie England with A Man for All Seasons. I don’t anticipate it being as much fun.

Maria von Trapp’s relationship with the movie was complex and intimate. Famously, she was not invited to the premiere, even though she and two of her daughters make a brief cameo appearance in “I Have Confidence”.

However, she was sufficiently laid back to teach Julie Andrews how to yodel.

The movie was based on her book, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, which came out in 1949. Here’s the second paragraph of the third chapter:

Desperate, I looked for help.

Actually only the first part of the book deals with their time in Austria; the rest is about their experiences in America. Neither book nor film explains much about Maria’s own background – apparently both her parents died by the time she was ten, and various other arrangements did not work out; she did get a professional teaching qualification before entering the convent.

The major change to the story is the telescoping of time. Maria and Georg married in 1927, when he was 47 and she was 22 (when the film was made, Julie Andrews was 29 and Christopher Plummer 35); over the next ten years the family became noted performers, especially when most of their money was wiped out in a bank crash and they needed the income; Maria had three more children to add to the seven from the first marriage; the turning point when they decided to flee was after they were invited to sing for Hitler on his birthday after the Anschluss, and knew that they could not bring themselves to do it but also could not stay in the Reich if they said no. And they fled to Italy, where Georg von Trapp had citizenship due to havig been born in Zara when it was Austrian (it was then Italian and is now the Croatian city of Zadar).

Most of the story about her romance with Georg von Trapp is consistent between the book and the musical/film, and a lot of the little details about life in the Trapp household are taken from the book. Maria’s rival for Trapp’s affections is described as “Princess Yvonne”, a distant cousin of the first Mrs Trapp, and by implication of Austro-Hungarian nobility. I have done a bit of detective work on this. The first Mrs Trapp was born Agatha Whitehead, into a family of British naval engineers who moved to the Austro-Hungarian coast (now in Croatia) – her grandfather invented the torpedo, and his son carried on the work. Her mother was an Austro-Hungarian aristocrat, who would have had many eligible nieces and cousins I suppose; also her father’s sister married Georg von Hoyos, her cousin was the diplomat Alexander von Hoyos, and there are plenty of candidates on that side as well (I see an Ilona who would be the right age and is almost “Yvonne”). Incidentally Georg von Trapp was a submarine captain, and personally sank eleven Allied ships in the first world war, six of them British; we don’t hear much about that.

The book is frank about the problems of impoverished gentility and very direct about the plight of refugees trying to get permanent status in the USA – it is of course inhumanly difficult now, but it wasn’t all that easy back then even for nice white people. Maria is also very up front about her personal piety and devotion to the Catholic faith – it’s entirely consistent with the story of her vocation, and it’s an element that is only alluded to as background colour in the film.

It’s a celebrity memoir, written for fans, but also I feel putting down on paper the stories that Maria had told her friends and family over many years. She finishes with reflections on the fundraising that the family had done for humanitarian relief in Austria after the war ended, an emotional but also super-organisational task, and on Georg’s death from lung cancer in 1947 on the Vermont farm that the family set up as first a refuge and then a business, and which is still run by the grandchildren. Their legacy remains strong. You can get the book here.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

My Fair Lady (1964), Pygmalion (1938) and the original script by Bernard Shaw

Posted on 7 December 2019 by fromtheheartofeurope

My Fair Lady won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1964, and picked up another seven: Best Director (George Cukor), Best Actor (Rex Harrison as Higgins), Best Cinematography (Harry Stradling), Best Sound, Best Adaptation or Treatment Score (André Previn), Best Art Direction and Best Costume Design (Cecil Beaton). Stanley Holloway and Gladys Cooper were nominated in supporting roles as the protagonists’ parents (Eliza’s father and Higgins’ mother), beaten by Peter Ustinov in Topkapi and Lila Kedrova in Zorba the Greek respectively.

The other Best Picture nominees were Becket and Zorba the Greek, which I have not seen, and Dr. Strangelove and Mary Poppins, which I have. On the two IMDB rankings of 1964 films, My Fair Lady rates 5th on one list and 7th on the other. Dr. Strangelove, Mary Poppins, Goldfinger and A Fistful of Dollars are ranked ahead of it on both lists. 1964 is one of my better years for films: apart from Dr. Strangelove and Mary Poppins, I have also seen Goldfinger, Zulu, A Shot in the Dark, A Hard Day’s Night, Topkapi, Carry On Cleo, and The 7th Dawn (in which my late aunt can be seen dancing at around the 38 minute mark). The Hugo went (as previously discussed) to Dr. Strangelove. Here’s a trailer.

When I was thirteen, I really loved this film. It was a time when our parents’ circle included such linguistic luminaries as Melissa Bowerman (whose daughter I caught up with last month, for the first time in nearly 40 years), Bob Kirsner, Piet Zoetmulder and Mario Alinei, not to mention C.J. Bailey, and I was myself fascinated by how languages evolve and change (a fascination that has not completely left me). And here was a film about my personal obsession, and one with wonderful music and acting as well. I more or less knew it by heart.

And wow, it hasn’t aged well at all. What struck me hard, watching it again for the first time in decades, is just how bad Higgins’ misogynistic treatment of Eliza is – constant negging, undermining and pretty close to gaslighting. And the film is not redeemed by the ending – Higgins shows no sign of remorse or repentance, just continuing desire for Eliza; and yet she comes back to him anyway, after a brief moment of defiance – as an abused partner returns to the devil they think they know. One can only imagine the response she would get if she posted about her situation to r/relationships or Captain Awkward. I’m afraid that despite the spectacular delivery and glorious music, I’m demoting it to three-quarters of the way down my list, below How Green Was My Valley, which also has quaint Brits singing, but gets the gender and class stuff much better, and above Going My Way, whose merits and demerits are both fewer in number.

Before I get into the nitty gritty, I have to be a complete language nerd about one particular line. In the first song, Rex Harrison as Higgins sings, “Norwegians learn Norwegian; the Greeks are taught their Greek.”

I have been wondering a bit about this line. Of course, Lerner and Lowe probably chose Norwegian and Greek as the two examples mainly for rhythm and rhyme. There are not a lot of alternatives. Other languages with more speakers than Norwegian, whose names both describe the people who speak them and are pronounced as amphibrachs include “Bengali”, “Korean”, “Somali”, but I guess that “Norwegian” fits the cultural context of “My Fair Lady” better. (You could also consider “Ukrainian”, “Romanian”, “Hungarian”, “Albanian”, “Bulgarian”, “Armenian” and “Mongolian”, but a lot of people would pronounce them with four syllables, while I think most English speakers would elide the “i” in “Norwegian”.) And the only other language I can think of which would rhyme with “speak” is “Creek“. (One could stretch a point for “Arab-eek” or “Amhar-eek”, or with a bit more geographical outreach “Tajik”, but “Greek” is an understandable choice.)

But the interesting thing about the line “Norwegians learn Norwegian; the Greeks are taught their Greek” is that in 1956, when the musical of My Fair Lady was made, and in 1964, when the film came out, it was not true. At least, not completely. Both Greece (at the time) and Norway are classic examples of countries in a state of diglossia, where there were actually two versions of the official language. Anyone learning Norwegian even today must choose between Bokmål and Nynorsk (Bokmål is a bit like Danish; Nynorsk is a bit like Bokmål). And until 1974, anyone learning modern Greek had to choose between the nineteenth-century Καθαρεύουσα and the (literally) demotic δημοτική (which is now the only standard). It is ironic that the two languages Lerner and Lowe chose for Professor Higgins’ line are the two European languages of which the statement was least accurate at the time they were writing.

I strongly suspect Lerner and Lowe were unaware of this wrinkle. More likely, if there is another reason beyond euphony, they chose Norwegian as a mild homage to Ibsen, whose dramatic influence on Shaw is well attested, and Greek as a reference to the original source of the Pygmalion myth which Shaw drew on for the plot and title of his play.

Moving swiftly on, we have a couple of repeat actors who have been in previous Oscar winners – in fact, the two who got Best Supporting Oscar nominations but did not win were both in Laurence Olivier films. Stanley Holloway was the Gravedigger sixteen years ago in Hamlet. In 1964 he was 73, but really could pass for at least a decade younger.

And Gladys Cooper, aged 76 in 1964, was Beatrice Lacy, the sister of Olivier’s character Maxim de Winter, in Rebecca, twenty-four years ago.

(Here’s a trivia question for your next pub quiz: what do Rex Harrison, the actor Richard Harris, the disgraced Conservative cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken and Aitken’s cousin Peter have in common? The answer is that they all married the same woman, Elizabeth Rees-Williams, who is still with Jonathan.)

Anyway. I was so struck by the misogyny of the film of My Fair Lady that I went back and watched the 1938 Pygmalion, starring Leslie Howard (in Gone With The Wind the following year) and Wendy Hiller, for which George Bernard Shaw won an Oscar for Best Screenplay (making him the first person to win both an Oscar and a Nobel Prize; he has now been joined by Bob Dylan and arguably Al Gore). You can see it in full here. I also consulted the original 1913 theatre script – written 25 years before the 1938 film and 51 years before My Fair Lady hit the screens.

It’s really striking that in the original play, Higgins is clearly directed to be “entirely frank and void of malice that he remains likeable even in his least reasonable moments”, whereas Harrison’s portrayal is not at all likeable at any time; and even more striking that the 1938 version actually tones down Higgins’ chauvinism from the original script, some of the nastier passages about Eliza removed entirely and some of the epithets he uses softened. Both are still pretty bad, but the 1964 film is the worst. The 1938 film, like the musical and the 1964 film, has Eliza returning to Higgins in the end, but given that he has not been as nasty to her it’s a bit more plausible. Shaw, of course, disapproved and wrote a long postscript to the original play, explaining how Eliza successfully manages her relationships with Higgins and Pickering after marrying Freddie.

Part of it also, I think, is the age of the leading men. Rex Harrison was 56 in 1964; Leslie Howard 45 in 1938, and playing young. Harrison’s Higgins is mature and arrogant; Howard’s Higgins discovers that he still has something to learn. (Note also the completely different dynamic for Robert Powell, aged 37, in the BBC’s 1981 adaptation of the original play, which incidentally brings back Mona Washbourne, who plays Mrs Pearce in the 1964 film, for the same role 17 years later.) I have to say also that Audrey Hepburn’s Eliza seems to have much less gumption and depth than Wendy Hiller’s, which contributes to the negative dynamic. Beautiful though Hepburn is, I don’t think she was trying terribly hard here, and I can’t really blame her.

(More trivia for Brussels people – Audrey Hepburn was born at Rue Keyenveld 48, just off Rue du Prince Royal between Louise and Porte de Namur metro stations. It’s a few doors down from Les Brassins which you may have been to. There’s a plaque on the wall.)

One rather sad note – the ambassador hosting the ball (a scene which incidentally was originated by Shaw for the 1938 film) was played by Henry Daniell, who died suddenly the night after his scenes were shot. So we are seeing an actor with literally hours to live.

Also, before I get onto happier topics, I’ll just note that there is not a single non-white face in London in either 1938 or 1964. Tom Jones, set a century and a half earlier, scores better.

OK. To happier things. This film has some wonderful songs, and one or two utterly stunning visuals. My absolute favourite sequence is the Ascot scene, from start to finish, designed by Cecil Beaton, new to the musical and not in either of Shaw’s treatments (which have Eliza’s first faux pas taking place at a tea party chez Mrs Higgins). Here’s the start, mixing 1960s fashions with 1900s reserve:

followed by the actual race:

But it’s a tough call between that and “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly”:

Or indeed the two Stanley Holloway songs, “With A Little Bit of Luck” and “Get me To The Church on Time” (and again, remember, he’s 73):

And the whole thing looks beautiful. So there’s a lot to enjoy, provided you can tune out the message sent about 51% of the human race, and the entrenchment and endorsement of the patriarchy.

You can get the 1964 My Fair Lady here, the 1938 Pygmalion here, and the original script here.

Next up is The Sound of Music. I hope it has aged better.

From the Heart of Europe

Books, politics, languages and life

Tag Archives: oscars

Braveheart, and Blind Harry’s Wallace

Forrest Gump

Schindler’s List

Unforgiven

The Silence of the Lambs

Dances with Wolves

Driving Miss Daisy

Rain Man

The Last Emperor, and Puyi’s autobiography

Out of Africa, film (1985) and book (1937)

Amadeus

Terms of Endearment

Gandhi: film and Fischer biography

Chariots of Fire

Ordinary People (1980 film and 1976 book)

Kramer vs. Kramer

The Deer Hunter

Annie Hall

Rocky

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

The Godfather II (1974)

The Sting

The Godfather: film and novel

The French Connection, film (1971) and book by Robin Moore

Midnight Cowboy

Oliver!

In the Heat of the Night: film (1967) and novel (1965)

A Man for All Seasons (1966)

The Sound of Music (1965) and The Story of the Trapp Family Singers (1949)

My Fair Lady (1964), Pygmalion (1938) and the original script by Bernard Shaw