Tom Jones: film (1963) and book (1749)

Posted on 9 November 2019 by fromtheheartofeurope

Tom Jones won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1963, and picked up another three: Best Director (Tony Richardson), Best Substantially Original Score (John Addison) and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium (John Osborne). Five of the actors got nominations, which I think may be a record (I haven’t been counting) – Albert Finney in the title role for Best Actor, Hugh Griffith as Squire Western for Best Supporting Actor, and three (which is definitely a record) for Best Supporting Actress – Edith Evans as Miss Western, Diane Cilento as Molly Seagrim, and Joyce Redman as Mrs. Waters/Jenny Jones.

The other Best Picture nominees were America America, Cleopatra, How the West Was Won and Lilies of the Field, none of which I have seen. On the two IMDB rankings of 1963 films, Tom Jones does not rank highly, 32nd on one list and 22nd on the other. The only Oscar-winning film so far that does worse on these metrics is Cavalcade (25th and 40th). Seventeen films are ranked ahead of Tom Jones on both systems; I have seen four of them, From Russia With Love, The Sword in the Stone, The Pink Panther and It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. The other 1963 film I am sure that I have seen is Cliff Richard’s Summer Holiday, which is (rightly) ranked lower. The Hugo was not awarded that year.

Here’s a trailer.

It’s a Bildungsroman of Merrie England, based on a famous 18th-century novel, and starring good-looking up-and-coming English actors. I liked some aspects of it, but I was ultimately a bit dissatisfied – perhaps it fitted the 1960s Zeitgeist, by fitting that into an older boisterous tradition – and for the first time in ten years I’m adding this to my bottom ten films, just ahead of The Greatest Show on Earth (the plot is less boring and cinematography more interesting) and below Gone With The Wind.

We have just one actor here who has already been in an Oscar-winning film, Hugh Griffith as Squire Western. He blacked up as Sheikh Ilderim for an Oscar-winning performance in Ben-Hur four years ago; here he has perhaps rouged up as the alcoholic squire (he was apparently not acting the alcoholic bit).

This was the film debut for two actors who both went on to become significant in Doctor Who and (in one case) Game of Thrones. Both play bad guys here. Julian Glover is the nasty Lieutenant Northerton; two years later he was in Doctor Who as Richard the Lionheart, again in 1979 as Count Scarlioni in City of Death, and finally in GoT as Grand Maester Pycelle.

And David Warner, here the unpleasantly priggish young Blifil who almost gets Tom killed, has done several Doctor Who voice roles and appeared on screen as Professor Grisenko in the Matt Smith episode Cold War.

A bit more obscurely, James Cairncross is Parson Supple here, and also appeared twice in black-and-white Doctor Who, as Lemaitre in the William Hartnell story now known as The Massacre (which is lost from the archives) and also with Patrick Troughton as Beta, one of the Gonds in The Krotons (which survives).

There is a lot to like about this film, and I’m trying to identify why it didn’t really work for me. As with All The King’s Men, I watched it on Eurostar after a long day in London, which possibly didn’t help. In the end it comes down to two things, I think. First, there are lots of brilliant scenes and little bits and pieces, but it somehow doesn’t come together. The director, Tony Richardson, himself described it as “incomplete and botched in much of its execution”. Second, a lot of the characters simply are not very nice – Tom Jones himself is a completely irresponsible casual user of women, and we cheer his rescue from hanging at the end not because he is good but because he is innocent of that particular offence. Grotesques can be funny to watch but are usually difficult to relate to. Somehow the characters in the original book came over as more three-dimensional.

An awful lot of Oscar-winning film adaptations have erased or minimalised non-white characters from the original books that they are based on. This is the first one that I have noticed actually adding a non-white character, though it is a very small non-speaking and uncredited role – a boy servant in Lord Fellamar’s house in London.

Although three of the cast received Best Supporting Actress nominations, the film is not especially enlightened on the battle of the sexes – we are invited to admire Tom’s behaviour and the damage that he does is treated humorously. Having said that, the actresses all deserved their nominations. Here’s the famous erotic dining scene with Albert Finney in the title role and Joyce Redman as Jenny:

Diane Cilento absolutely smoulders as Molly:

And Edith Evans hits the mark as Miss Western:

But I actually think Susanna York was robbed of a nomination – even though she is the Good Girl, I think she carries it off awfully well and has very convincing chemistry with Albert Finney.

The cinematography is tremendously quirky. There are a lot of innovative cuts between scenes, stop-motion interludes, the opening sequence done as a silent movie (though in colour), occasional breaking the fourth wall. Micheal MacLiammoir’s voice provides a lovely warm narration. It’s a shame that it doesn’t really come together. The classic scene is the hunt, expanded from about three lines in the book to six minutes on screen – a tremendous bit of filming.

Finally, a couple of historical trivia: this was the last film that President Kennedy saw before he was assassinated; and the singer Tom Jones took his stage name from the title. You can get it here.

Next up is My Fair Lady, a film I know well.

I went back to reread the book as well (am slightly regretting this policy decision after both this and Lawrence of Arabia turn out to be very long). Second paragraph of third chapter:

And true it is that he did many of these things; but had he done nothing more I should have left him to have recorded his own merit on some fair freestone over the door of that hospital. Matters of a much more extraordinary kind are to be the subject of this history, or I should grossly mis-spend my time in writing so voluminous a work; and you, my sagacious friend, might with equal profit and pleasure travel through some pages which certain droll authors have been facetiously pleased to call The History of England.

When I read the book back in 2012, I wrote:

The classic novel of 1749, whose prose style is in places a bit tedious but also in places very funny. The plot is a basic romantic comedy, but it is enlivened by the authorial asides which open each of the individual books within the novel, and by the author’s grasp of character which must have inspired Dickens. There are also a couple of passages which pastiche Homer, Vergil and I think the King James Bible, and there must have been others that I missed.

Some social points of the 1740s that I found interesting: women had few enough rights, but in Fielding’s account retained an absolute right to accept or refuse an offer of marriage. Presumably coercion was a ground for divorce or annulment, and there must have been enough cases for it to be a real issue. I was also interested that Sophia’s father is depicted as having much the thickest West Country accent of any of the characters, despite being the local squire. A hundred years later, I guess all gentlemen of his class would have been assimilated into poshness by public school; but in the 1740s you only needed to communicate with the locals in your rural fastness. Mr Western of course has no time for education or politics (his sister, who serves as comic relief, is also the most politically aware character in the book). I was also struck by the relative lack of animus to the Irish (cf Shakespeare, who scores rather badly there):

Sophia heaved a deep sigh, and answered, “Indeed, Harriet, I pity you from my soul!—-But what could you expect? Why, why, would you marry an Irishman?”

“Upon my word,” replied her cousin, “your censure is unjust. There are, among the Irish, men of as much worth and honour as any among the English: nay, to speak the truth, generosity of spirit is rather more common among them. I have known some examples there, too, of good husbands; and I believe these are not very plenty in England. Ask me, rather, what I could expect when I married a fool.”

It was a bit of a slog in places but I am glad to have read it.

Slightly cheating here, as I haven’t finished rereading it yet, but I stand by what I previously wrote – Fielding’s characters are much more solid and three-dimensional than the grotesques of the film.

One bit of context worth noting is that the book is set firmly during the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, and its characters (including the soldiers) are widely dispersed along the spectrum of allegiance to King George or Bonnie Prince Charlie – and remember that this isn’t ancient history for Fielding and his readers, it was only four years before publication. Fascinating that a writer could depict loyalty to a treasonous (if defeated) cause in such a sympathetic light, and get away with it.

You can get it here.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

Lawrence of Arabia, and The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Posted on 19 October 2019 by fromtheheartofeurope

Lawrence of Arabia won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1962 (the first time the award had that precise title, which it retains to this day), and picked up another six: Best Director (David Lean), Best Original Score (Maurice Jarre), Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, Best Film Editing and Best Sound. Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif were nominated for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, and Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson for Best Adapted Screenplay, beaten in two of those three cases by To Kill A Mockingbird.

The other Best Picture nominees were The Longest Day, The Music Man, Mutiny on the Bounty and To Kill a Mockingbird, of which I have only seen the last. On the two IMDB ratings, Lqwrence of Arabia is second on one of the two IMDB rankings of 1961 films, and fourth on the other, To Kill A Mockingbird ahead of it in both cases and Harakiri and Lolita ahead of it on one. I have seen both To Kill A Mockingbird and Lolita, and also Dr. No, and I think possibly Five Weeks in a Balloon. In the end I think To Kill A Mockingbird is a better film, but perhaps the Academy voters preferred the story of a white saviour to an account of racism in the Deep South. That year’s Hugo Award went again to The Twilight Zone. Here’a a trailer for Lawrence of Arabia:

You will surely be aware that the film is the story of the Arab Revolt; how towards the end of the first world war, T.E. Lawrence persuaded the feuding Arab tribes to unite and smite the Turks, leading to the creation of independent Arab states in the Middle East. As usual, I’m going to start with the actors who are returning from previous Oscar-winning films. Here’s a nice scene with Jack Hawkins (Allenby), Claude Rains (Dryden) and Alec Guinness (Faisal), all of whom we have seen before. According to legend, people in the street mistook Guinness for the real King Faisal while filming on location. This seems improbable, as the real Faisal had been dead for almost thirty years, but the likeness is impressive.

Jack Hawkins was in both Bridge on the River Kwai five years ago and Ben-Hur three years ago. Here he has shaved the front of his head, and dyed the rest of his hair, to look a bit more like the real Allenby.

Claude Rains, of course, was in Casablanca almost twenty years ago:

And Alec Guinness was also in Bridge on the River Kwai, for which he won an Oscar of his own.

OK, the big thing to notice about this film is the almost complete gender fail. There is not a single woman among the credited cast, which is apparently unique among Oscar-winning films and unique for any film of this length. This is way worse than the book, which at least features a few women in the background as well as Gertrude Bell off-stage and precisely one named woman on-stage. Literally the only visible women in the film appear less than ten minutes from the end, European nurses in the Turkish hospital of Damascus. (There may be women in some of the Arab crowd scenes earlier, but completely invisible if so, and I’m not quite sure about the black attendants in the conference scene immediately after the hospital scene.)

Peter O’Toole and his character are both the best thing about the film and provided the point of greatest dissonance for me. I really found the amount of make-up slathered onto his face a bit of a distraction.

We haven’t seen this much make-up on a leading man since the very first film in this sequence, Wings, thirty-five years ago:

Though I have my doubts also about Laurence Olivier in Rebecca, aged 33 and playing a character at least ten years older:

The film is basically a character study of how Lawrence transforms himself from out-of-place British army officer to Arab commander, and it is tremendously well done, also showing that he is already a damaged person who is perhaps bringing that damage to others. O’Toole isfantastic in it, and the scene where he admires his own reflection in his dagger is particularly effective.

At the same time, it’s not exactly critical of the white saviour narrative. And technology is portrayed as a brutal interruption of the noble savages’ way of life, starting with the German plane buzzing the Arab encampment, and culminating with a couple of attacks on the alien trains sullying the desert. (This is a huge contrast with the book, a lot of which is about blowing up trains.) Actual details of geography and wider strategy are skipped over.

It’s interesting that even if Guinness is regrettably browned-up as Faisal, a number of the other Arab characters are actually played by Arabs or at least by non-white actors, most notably Omar Sharif (who was Egyptian) as Sherif Ali.

The flip side of the absence of women is that this is probably the gayest Oscar-winning film so far. There’s a very clear bromance between Lawrence and Sherif Ali.

And the friendship between Lawrence’s attendants Daud and Farraj is obviously close, if not as obvious as in the book (incidentally the actors were Brazilian and Maltese):

Well, the second best thing about the film is the cinematography. The desert scenes are truly gripping, and the film as a whole must have been a major inspiration for Frank Herbert’s Dune, the first part of which was published in December 1963. There are also some very clear resonances with a later Alec Guinness film, Star Wars. The sounds made by the camels are particularly memorable and have surely inspired desert creatures in many a subsequent film.

The absolute best thing about the film is the music of Maurice Jarre (father, of course, of Jean-Michel). Really, he manages to make the desert scenes memorable and support the drama of the other scenes, and turns the whole film into an epic experience. Give it a listen.

I’m struggling with where to place Lawrence of Arabia on my list. It looks and sounds fantastic. But it’s difficult to ignore the fact that it doesn’t just marginalise women, it erases them completely; and the White Saviour theme, and general approach to race, are impossible to ignore. So I’m putting it exactly half-way down my list, in 18th place out of 35, between Gigi and Marty. You can get it here.

Next up is Tom Jones, based on a classic novel which I read some years ago.

I went back and re-read The Seven Pillars of Wisdom,. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

This people was black and white, not only in vision, but by inmost furnishing: black and white not merely in clarity, but in apposition. Their thoughts were at ease only in extremes. They inhabited superlatives by choice. Sometimes inconsistents seemed to possess them at once in joint sway; but they never compromised: they pursued the logic of several incompatible opinions to absurd ends, without perceiving the incongruity. With cool head and tranquil judgement, imperturbably unconscious of the flight, they oscillated from asymptote to asymptote.

I first read it in 2008. I wrote then:

This is the story of how Lawrence helped the Arabs revolt against the Ottoman Empire in 1917-1918. Its greatest stength is its vivid description of the landscapes of Arabia, Syria and Palestine; I’ve never been to the desert, and apart from one long weekend in Jerusalem I don’t know that part of the world at all, so I found this tremendously compelling. I was left a bit more ambivalent about the human side of the story: on the one hand, Lawrence is aiding a subject nation to throw off their oppressor; on the other, his heroism is undermined – according to his own account, it should be said – by the brutality of the campaign, by his awareness that his British masters will certainly break their word to their Arab allies, and by the casual racism he himself displays toward them.

It’s a very manly book, for values of “manly” that overlap with “gay”. In the very first chapter, we have Arab lads “quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace”. It is a constant theme, and manly love merges intriguingly with Lawrence’s affection for the landscape. There is I think precisely one woman character of note, an old lady who Lawrence rescues from a train wreck (he blew up the train). Apart from her, there are several other memorable female personalities, but they are all camels.

The book falls rather neatly into two parts, the first half being the desert campaign starting from Mecca going up the coast to eventually capture Akaba (=Aqaba), the second half covering operations more closely linked to Allenby and culminating in the taking of Damascus and consolidation of a new Arab regime. I found it very odd that although Lawrence says he was present at the capture of Jerusalem, he reports almost nothing about this key event apart from an argument between the French diplomat Picot (of Sykes-Picot fame – Sykes too makes an appearance) and the British. Of course, he was not impressed by Jerusalem:

…a squalid town, which every Semitic religion had made holy. Christians and Mohammedans came there on pilgrimage to the shrines of its past, and some Jews looked to it for the political future of their race. These united forces of the past and the future were so strong that the city almost failed to have a present.

My grandfather, who was there about the same time for similar reasons, had a similar reactionmore impressed.

For all its faults (some mentioned above, but I’ll add another: it is too long) I found the book also tremendously enlightening in understanding the roots of today’s politics in the region. Lawrence himself is very aware of the contradiction between his responsibility to his country and his moral obligation to his Arab friends and allies, and his personal dilemma can be read also as a comment on the wider international situation. The ruling family of Mecca, who Lawrence helps put in charge of Syria, now rule Jordan (having also had a go at Iraq in the interim). The boundaries of states were mostly drawn at the convenience of the Great Powers, possibly even more arbitrarily than in Africa; it’s not surprising that they are perceived as having shallow roots.

Anyway, a bit of a slog in places (rather like the campaign it describes), but I’m glad I read it in the end.

Compared with the film, we get tremendous detail of geography and strategy, and also a lot more modern technology (he seems to spend most of the book blowing up trains). I was a little unfair about the lack of women in the book, especially in contrast with their absence from the film – there are actually quite a few others apart from Ayesha, daughter of Jellal el Lei, of Medina, the old lady on the train, though none of them is named, and the two other women who are identified by name are either elsewhere (Gertrude Bell, in Iraq) or dead (Tarfa, who “died the year of samh, in the Snainirat, of a puff-adder”). A soldier suffering from an eye inflammation is described as looking “feminine and tearful; a little, said Lloyd, like an abducted nun”. Yuck.

I was intrigued to see if Lawrence and my grandfather had ever been in the same place at the same time. My grandfather was the C.O. of the 6th Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, part of the 10th (Irish) Division which in turn was part of Chetwode‘s XX Corps which was part of Allenby’s Egyptian Expeditionary ForceHareira) during the Battle of Gaza and related campaigns in early November; at that time Lawrence was at the far east of the line, blowing up a train. The 6th Dublins participated in the capture of Jerusalem, where Lawrence says he missed the military action but was there for Allenby’s ceremonial entrance into the city on 9 December. Lawrence then mentions the Ottoman counter-offensive in late December, which my grandfather referred to as his final battle (“Our last stunt, when we counter attacked during Turks attempt to recapture Jerusalem, was I think our best effort”). So they probably never spoke to each other, but must have passed each other in the street or in the corridors of headquarters; my grandfather was promoted to lieutenant-colonel just before arriving in the Middle East in September 1917, and Lawrence reached that rank a few months later, in January 1918.

Anyway, it’s a long book, but you can get it here.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

West Side Story (1961)

Posted on 21 September 2019 by fromtheheartofeurope

West Side Story won the Oscar for Best Motion Picture of 1960, and picked up another nine: Best Director (Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins), Best Supporting Actor (George Chakiris as Bernardo), Best Supporting Actress (Rita Moreno as Anita), Best Art Direction, Best Set Decoration (Color), Best Cinematography (Color), Best Costume Design (Color), Best Film Editing, Best Original Score and Best Sound; it lost out only in Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium, to Judgement at Nuremberg. Jerome Robbins also won a special Academy Award, so you could count the total as eleven, level with Ben-Hur, Titanic and The Return of the King.

The other films that were nominated for Best Motion Picture were Fanny, The Guns of Navarone, The Hustler and Judgment at Nuremberg; I have seen none of them. West Side Story ranks top on one IMDB rating of 1961 films and fourth on the other, behind Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 101 Dalmatians and Yojimbo. I have at least seen 101 Dalmatians; the other two films from that year that I know I have seen are Tintin and the Golden Fleece, and The Young Ones. That year’s Hugo went to the second series of The Twilight Zone. IMHO West Side Story is the best of them. Here’s a trailer (not a contemporary trailer, unfortunately, I couldn’t find one):

This is a musical, the first Oscar-wining film based on a stage musical (we’ve had musicals in this series, and films based on stage plays, but this is the first to tick both boxes). I also note that of 34 Oscar winners so far, this is the tenth set in or around New York. (The nine others were The Broadway Melody, most of The Great Ziegfeld, You Can’t Take It with You, Going My Way, The Lost Weekend, most of Gentleman’s Agreement, most of All About Eve, On The Waterfront and The Apartment. But it will be another eight years until the next one, Midnight Cowboy, and four of the ones in between are set in England.)

As if you didn’t know, it’s based on the rivalry between two gangs in the Upper West Side of New York, one white (the Jets), the other Puerto Rican (the Sharks), with much of the plot taken from Romeo and Juliet including duels and balcony scene between Tony of the Jets and Maria, whose brother leads the Sharks; but what makes it justly famous is the music and dancing. In fact, I’m now going to talk quite a lot about the song “America”, in which the Puerto Ricans discuss the ups and downs of living in America rather than back home, so here it is – just watch it before you go on to read the rest of this, and appreciate Robbins’ spectacular choreography, and also the Oscar-winning performances of George Chakiris and Rita Moreno who lead the scene and Bernardo and his girlfriend Anita (Tony and Maria being elsewhere):

As so often, I’m going to start by talking about race. This is the thirty-fourth Oscar-winning film I have seen, twenty-six of which have been adaptations of other work, and the song “America” is the first case of commentary on race that has been deliberately made more incisive than the original version by the screenwriters. In the original stage version, it is sung by the Puerto Rican girls alone (the boys having left the scene), with Rosalia (in blue) the sole holdout for the view that life was better back home and the others trying to persuade her of America’s merits (and winning the argument). In the film version, it’s girls vs boys, with the girls (including Rosalia) advocating the good points of America and the Shark boys (again in blue) criticising the racism that they enounter as Puerto Ricans, and doing better in the argument than Rosalia does in the original version. Compare and contrast:

Stage version Film version
ROSALIA:
Puerto Rico
You lovely island
Island of tropical breezes.
Always the pineapples growing,
Always the coffee blossoms blowing…
ANITA:
Puerto Rico
You ugly island
Island of tropic diseases.
Always the hurricanes blowing,
Always the population growing
And the money owing
And the babies crying
And the bullets flying
I like the island Manhattan
Smoke on your pipe
And put that in! ANITA:
Puerto Rico
My heart’s devotion
Let it sink back in the ocean
Always the hurricanes blowing
Always the population growing
And the money owing
And the sunlight streaming
And the natives steaming
I like the island Manhattan
Smoke on your pipe
And put that in!
ALL EXCEPT ROSALIA:
I like to be in America!
OK by me in America!
Everything free in America
For a small fee in America! GIRLS:
I like to be in America!
Okay by me in America!
Everything free in America –
BERNARDO:
For a small fee in America!

ROSALIA:
I like the city of San Juan-
ANITA:
I know a boat you can get on.

ROSALIA:
Hundreds of flowers in full bloom-

ANITA:
Hundreds of people in each room!
ANITA:
Buying on credit is so nice!
BERNARDO:
One look at us and they charge twice!

ROSALIA:
I have my own washing machine!

INDIO:
What will you have though to keep clean?

ALL EXCEPT ROSALIA:
Automobile in America,
Chromium steel in America,
Wire-spoke wheel in America-
Very big deal in America- ANITA:
Skyscrapers bloom in America!
ROSALIA:
Cadillacs zoom in America!

TERESITA:
Industry boom in America!

BOYS:
Twelve in a room in America!

ROSALIA:
I’ll drive a Buick to San Juan-
ANITA:
If there’s a road you can drive on.

ROSALIA:
I’ll give my cousin a free ride-

ANITA:
How you get all of them inside?
ANITA:
Lots of new housing with more space
BERNARDO:
Lots of doors slamming in our face

ANITA:
I’ll get a terrace apartment –

BERNARDO:
Better get rid of your accent!

ALL EXCEPT ROSALIA:
An immigrant goes to America,
Many hellos in America;
Nobody knows in America
Puerto Rico’s in America. ANITA:
Life can be bright in America
BOYS:
If you can fight in America

GIRLS:
Life is all right in America

BOYS:
If you’re all white in America

ROSALIA:
When will I go back to San Juan-
ANITA:
When you will shut up and get gone!

ROSALIA:
I’ll give them new washing machine-

ANITA:
What have they got there to keep clean?
GIRLS:
Here you are free and you have pride
BOYS:
Long as you stay on your own side

GIRLS:
Free to be anything you choose

BOYS:
Free to wait tables and shine shoes

ALL EXCEPT ROSALIA:
I like the shores of America!
Comfort is yours in America!
Knobs on the doors in America,
Wall-to-wall floors in America! BERNARDO:
Everywhere grime in America
Organized crime in America
Terrible time in America
ANITA:
You forget I’m in America!

ROSALIA:
I’ll bring TV to San Juan
ANITA:
If there’s a current to turn on.

ROSALIA:
Everyone there will get big cheer!

ANITA:
Everyone there will have moved here!
BERNARDO:
I think I’ll go back to San Juan
ANITA:
I know a boat you can get on
(GIRLS: Bye Bye!)

BERNARDO:
Everyone there will give big cheer!

ANITA:
Everyone there will have moved here!

(The song also has some nostalgia for me because Roy Castle used it as the intro to the American secion of his TV show Record Breakers in the mid-70s.)

Having given the film version of West Side story a big plus mark for being more woke than the original stage show here (and note also that the police on both stage and screen are frank in their desire to see the Puerto Ricans go back home), it then has to be given two strong minuses for errors in the other direction. Firstly (and eerily relevant for Canadian politics right now) is that all of the “Puerto Ricans” are blacked up – including Rita Moreno, who actually is Puerto Rican. (She will be in next year’s Steven Spielberg remake, playing the role of Tony’s boss, the storekeeper. She will turn 88 this December.) Siblings Gus and Gina Trekonis appear on opposite sides, Gus in brownface as Indio, one of the Sharks, and Gina as Graziella, one of the Jet girls. (Both stayed in the entertainment industry, but neither in acting; Gus became a director, his credits including 22 episodes of Baywatch (he was also married to Goldie Hawn at one point), and Gina went into wardrobe and costume design.)

Also, the ethnic group that most famously inhabits the Upper West Side is practically invisible. If you squint, you can see half a dozen African Americans in the crowd scenes at the dance, but none of them gets to speak (or even sing).

It’s a romance set between young people from two fairly conservative backgrounds. But Tony and Maria both get a lot more character development than Romeo or Juliet. Both of them actually have jobs, for one thing. And the women, though in the minority, certainly have agency.

It’s also interesting that unlike in Romeo and Juliet, where the young people are continuing a feud started by their parents, West Side Story has introduced an element of generational conflict as well, with the older folks abent or mocked as in “Dear Officer Krupke”:

Let’s also note the character Anybodys, played by Susan Oakes, described in the script as a tomboy but who would certainly be coded genderqueer these days.

A couple of genre points. Of the two leading actors, Natalie Wood’s fate is alas all too well known, but Richard Beymer looked familar to me; and then I realised that thirty years on, he was Ben Horne, the local oligarch in Twin Peaks.

Glad Hand, the MC at the dance, is played by John Astin, who found fame a few years later as Gomez Addams in The Addams Family. (His adoptive son, Sean Astin, was Sam Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings.)

Anyway. What makes the film is the spectacular music and dancing. We’ve had Bernstein before (On the Waterfront), but this is just amazing. The most interesting musically is probably “Cool”, three quarters of the way through (NB the Jets get more of the good dances):

But it’s all good, starting with the opening:

Then “Maria”:

We’ve already covered “America”, which separates “Maria” from “Tonight” (a wise change frmo the stage version in which the two big romantic songs were consecutive):

The Shark girls get a great number with “I Feel Pretty”:

The “Tonight Quintet” clearly inspired a lot of similar scenes in musicals:

And “Somewhere” points to the tragic ending.

I enjoyed this a lot and am putting it right up in my top six, below Bridge on the River Kwai but above The Best Years of our Lives. You can get it here.

Next up, Lawrence of Arabia.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

The Apartment (1960)

Posted on 7 September 2019 by fromtheheartofeurope

The Apartment won the Oscar for Best Motion Picture of 1960, and picked up another four: Best Director (Billy Wilder), Best Original Screenplay (Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond), Best Editing (Daniel Mandell) and Best Art Decoration-Set Decoration, Black and White. Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine and Jack Kruschen were all nominated in the acting categories, but lost.

The other films that were nominated for Best Motion Picture were The Alamo, Elmer Gantry, Sons and Lovers and The SundownersThe Apartment ranks second on one IMDB rating of 1960 films and fifth on the other, with Psycho firmly at the top of both lists and the two other films I have seen from 1960, The Time Machine and Pollyanna, below but not too far below. This seems fair to me. Here is a trailer, which rather daringly starts with the final scene of the film:

It’s a comedy by Billy Wilder, but a comedy with some quite dark edges. (I was about to say that it was the only Wilder film to win the Best Picture Oscar; but I had forgotten about The Lost Weekend, which is not a comedy at all.) Our hero, played by Jack Lemmon, rents out his apartment to senior executives in his company for them to meet their lovers; he starts to fall in love with one of the lift operators, but it turns out that she is already having an affair with his new boss (and using his apartment). Hilarity ensues, but it is uncomfortable and sometimes painful, an very well observed. Rather to my surprise, it’s a black and white film – the last to win Best Picture in the twentieth century. It’s a bit surprising to me that black and white lasted so long – colour films have been winning the Oscar off and on since Gone With The Wind in 1939.

I also want to note that this is the first Oscar-winning film to refer to not one but two of its predecessors; at one point Grand Hotel is on television, and there’s a passing reference to Wilder’s own The Lost Weekend.

We have a few returning actors here who’ve been in previous Oscar winners; Joan Shawlee is Sylvia here, and was an extra seven years ago in From Here to EternityOn the Waterfront the following year; around the same time, Jack Kruschen, who plays the Jewish doctor in the neighbouring apartment here, was the Hispanic earthling who is the first to be exterminated in The War of the Worlds. While we’re on sf, Ray Walston, one of the executives who regularly uses the apartment, went on to become My Favourite Martian. But retuning to Oscar winners, and most notably of all, Shirley MacLaine, who was David Niven’s arm candy four years ago in Around the World in Eighty Days, is just fantastic here as the romantic co-lead to Lemmon.

But I am getting ahead of myself. What didn’t I like about the film? As usual, I’m afraid, it’s whitewashing. There are no African-American speaking parts, in a film set in New York in 1959-60. The only black person we see up close is the boss’s shoe-polisher.

After much scrutiny I did spot a few non-white faces in the Christmas party scene; that’s as visible as they get.

There is at least a Chinese restaurant with actual Chinese people running it, including playing the music.

Apart from that, I really enjoyed the film. There’s a single musical theme, “Jealous Lover”, which pops up over and over:

The office environment is brilliantly portrayed as a dehumanised settlement descending into debauchery at festival time (human sacrifices are discussed)

The story itself is an eternal one. I remember once lending my student room in Cambridge to a local friend who wanted to entertain her boyfriend from out of town for an afternoon without her family finding out. (Though I don’t think either of them was married to anyone else at the time.) I’m sure many people have had similar experiences, on one side of the equation or the other. The farce element of the plot is entirely generated by Jack Lemmon as Bud, most notably when he takes the blame himself for upsetting Fran to the point of attempting suicide. (As I said before, it’s pretty dark.)

Of the lead performances, Jack Kruschen is the most stereotyped as the doctor who despairs of his neighbour’s activities. But given the information he has, he is right to be angry; and he carries also a righteous rage against all men who mistreat women.

Still, I was surprised that he got the Best Supporting Actor nomination and not Frank McMurray as Sheldrake the boss, whose cool betrayal of his wife and casual exploitation of Fran (and, it turns out, of many other women) is spine-chilling.

The killer moment is when he offers Fran $100 as a “Christmas present”.

Jack Lemmon is always watchable, but he’s brilliant here as Bud, the downtrodden bureaucrat who has managed to get ahead by offering a special personal service to his bosses, and is then confronted with the ethical implications of what he has done.

But for my money, the show is stolen by Shirley MacLaine, whose Fran is an adult woman, entirely in charge of her own sexual destiny, who knows perfectly well that she is being exploited by Sheldrake and is working through the consequences for herself. For a comedy, it’s a heart-jerking performace. I think it’s a lovely touch that the closing scene sees her and Bud edging towards a relationship rather than deeply in lurve.

As I have said, I rather liked this, and I’m putting it well up the list, just ahead of last year’s Ben-Hur and behind All About Eve. You can get it here.

For the first time since 1952, eight years ago, this is an original screenplay rather than being based on a book or teleplay. Next up is West Side Story.

Ben-Hur: movie (1959) and book (1880)

Posted on 10 August 2019 by fromtheheartofeurope

Ben-Hur won the Oscar for Best Motion Picture of 1959, one of 11 Oscars in total, the others being Best Director (William Wyler), Best Actor (Charlton Heston), Best Supporting Actor (Hugh Griffith), Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Special Effects, Best Film Editing, Best Music – Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture (Miklós Rózsa) and Best Sound Recording. That remains a record, equalled only twice since (by Titanic and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King). It lost in only one category, Best Adapted Screenplay (to Room at the Top). It was the third film to win both Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, after Going My Way and The Best Years of Our Lives.

The other contenders for Best Motion Picture were Anatomy of a Murder, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Nun’s Story and Room at the Top, none of which I have seen. On the IMDB rankings, Ben-Hur places 7th and 3rd, with North by Northwest and Some Like It Hot ahead on both tables. Unusually, I have seen both of them, and I have to say that on reflection I liked both more. I have also seen the first part of Plan 9 from Outer Space, though I could not bear to finish watching it. That year’s Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation wen to the first series of The Twilight Zone. Here’s a trailer for Ben-Hur.

It’s an epic film set in Rome and Judæa at the time of Christ, who makes a couple of appearances in the film. The core plot is about a young Jewish nobleman who is unjustly condemned to the galleys, but makes a comeback as a champion chariot racer and defeats the Roman who betrayed his friendship. It’s based on a novel published in 1880, which was a best-seller in its day. The film was also a huge hit. My mother-in-law, a teenager when it came out, recalls a local cinema showing it on continuous loop, with the time that the chariot race would start on prominent display. She went with her friends to celebrate the end of their exams and claims that she can remember nothing about it except the chariot race.

She is the same age as the younger members of Monty Python, who were surely inspired by memories of their own teenage viewings of Ben-Hur when writing Life of Brian, though I guess Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth was fresher in their memories and also there are probably only so many ways you can do a film set in first-century Palestine. Here’s Pontius Pilate as portrayed by Frank Thring and Michael Palin in 1959 and 1979 (Thring’s version also has a slight speech impediment):

Before I get onto the things I liked and didn’t like about the film, I’m struck by the number of key players who have already appeared in Oscar-winning films. I have not been keeping count of others, but I think that the tally of six is the highest so far for actors playing a significant part. (I have completely missed Franklyn Furman, who was an extra in seven Oscar-winning films from 1937 to 1952.) Let’s start with the star himself, Charlton Heston, who was also the male lead seven years ago in The Greatest Show on Earth:

We have two repeats from two years ago, Jack Hawkins and Andre Morell, who both played British officers in The Bridge on the River Kwai and Roman noblemen here:

Jack Hawkins in **The Bridge on the River Kwai**

Andre Morell in **The Bridge on the River Kwai**

Going back a year, one of the gentlemen of the Reform Club in Around the World in Eighty Days becomes one of the Three Wise Men (with a rather striking resemblance to Ken Stott’s Balin in the Hobbit films):

Finlay Currie in **Around the World in Eighty Days**

Going back some more years, Sam Jaffe, who played the Einstein-lookalike character in Gentleman’s Agreement, is one of the few Jews actually playing a Jewish character in Ben-Hur (see below for the other one):

And Cathy O’Donnell, the youngest of the leading ladies in The Best Years of Our Lives thirteen years ago, comes back as Ben-Hur’s sister, in what was her last ever film role (though she did a few more TV appearances). Her brother-in-law, William Wyler, was the director. Now that she’s in colour, we can appreciate her lovely auburn hair.

Cathy O’Donnell in **The Best Years of Our Lives**

We are also getting to the point where some of these actors also had Doctor Who roles. Andre Morell, mentioned above, is best remembered in sf as Professor Quatermass in Quatermass and the Pit (made between Bridge on the River Kwai and Ben-Hur), but he also played Marshall Tavannes in the 1966 Doctor Who story The Massacre, of which sadly no footage survives, not even screenshots or the equivalent.

More usefully, Laurence Payne has an uncredited, non-speaking part here as Joseph, the father of Jesus Christ:

and went on to have three roles in Doctor Who, Johnny Ringo in The Gunfighters (1966), Morix in The Leisure Hive (1980) and Dastari in The Two Doctors (1986).

OK, so what is bad and what is good about the film?

It’s long. It’s the third-longest Oscar-winning film – we’ve already had the longest, Gone With the Wind, and the second-longest, Lawrence of Arabia, is just around the corner. A lot of the book has been cut, and the spectacle on the screen is just about enough to keep you interested, I admit. I’ll have to get used to this; I’m roughly a third of the way through this project, but I’ve already seen five of the ten shortest films (Marty, The Broadway Melody, The Lost Weekend, Casablanca and It Happened One NightAnnie Hall, Driving Miss Daisy, The Artist, The French Connection and Kramer vs Kramer).

As usual (Bridge on the River Kwai aside), non-white people are marginalised, but in this case not completely absent. There’s one African galley-slave:

Hugh Griffiths blacks up as Sheikh Ilderim, because that’s what Arabs look like (it won him an Oscar):

And much more impressively, Les Ballets Africains, the national dance group of Guinea-Conakry, perform at the banquet in Rome.

So we are a smidgeon of a step above the total invisibility of a lot of Oscar winners, but with points deducted for blackface.

The women characters are particularly poorly served; the most interesting woman in the book, Balthasar’s daughter Iras, is simply omitted. Haya Harareet (not only a rare Jewish actor playing a Jewish part, but actually Israeli) puts in a great debut performance as Esther, Simonides’ daughter and Ben-Hur’s love interest, but I cannot quite believe the chemistry between her and Charlton Heston:

Let alone between Ben-Hur and his unnamed, silent date at the Roman banquet, played by the uncredited Marina Berti:

The other two credited women characters are Ben-Hur’s mother (Martha Scott, only 11 years older than Heston) and sister (Cathy O’Donnell, as noted), who get afflicted with leprosy, cured and rescued.

On the flip side, this is the queerest film I have seen among Oscar-winners so far. The only one that comes close is the very first, Wings. Charlton Heston supposedly was never told that any homo-eroticism was intended in the relationship between Ben-Hur and Stephen Boyd’s Messala; I find that very difficult to believe. (NB Boyd, a Glengormley man, wearing brown contact lenses.)

And of course there isn’t the slightest hint of it elsewhere:

Heston’s own Oscar-winning performance carries the film, of course. He smoulders, suffers and learns.

It’s very much supported by the music of Miklós Rózsa, who we have encountered before in The Lost Weekend; it’s an extraordinary, expressive, convincing symphonic sweep which actually isn’t all that intrusive except when it’s diegetic.

And the whole thing looks very good. Supposedly the most expensive film ever made at that time, you can really feel the resources put into it with 10,000 extras, and the Italian studios at Cinecittà put to exceptionally good use. I have to say I was not overwhelmed by the sea battle scene (filmed in California), but the chariot race was every bit as good as advertised, and I can see why my mother-in-law’s local cinema featured it as the main attraction. This is only half of it – it’s well worth watching the whole ten-minute sequence if you see no other part of the film.

I’m ranking it 8th on my overall list, below All About Eve but above Around The World In Eighty Days. You can get it here.

Next in my sequence is The Apartment, of which I know nothing.

I had read the book back when I was a student, over thirty years ago; I re-read it after watching the film. Here’s the second paragraph of the third chapter:

“To a wayfarer in a strange land nothing is so sweet as to hear his name on the tongue of a friend,” said the Egyptian, who assumed to be president of the repast. “Before us lie many days of companionship. It is time we knew each other. So, if it be agreeable, he who came last shall be first to speak.”

The film improved massively on the book, which is rare but not unique. My biggest regret about the adaptation is that the most interesting character, Balthasar’s daughter Iras, who is Ben-Hur’s alternate love interest (the Naughty Girl to Esther’s Good Girl), is dropped from the film (as she is apparently from all the screen adaptations). But apart from that, the book is much more of a Shaggy God story, with Jesus healing Miriam and Tirzah (after a dramatic rescue from prison) much earlier, and Ben-Hur and Balthasar becoming active disciples of Christ in the years before the crucifixion (and it is Ben-Hur who gives the dying Christ his last drink via a sponge). The chariot race and downfall of Messala are also also much earlier in the book, and even if you haven’t seen the film you get a sense that it’s running out of steam in the last third or so, where Ben-Hur recruits an army of rebels who we don’t hear any more of after he throws in his lot with Jesus, and then the biblical stuff is reiterated in some detail. Gone With The Wind would have been a much better film if it had been as ruthless with its source material.

It’s interesting to note that Lew Wallace had not himself been to Palestine at that point in his life (he did go later, when he was American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire), so the very convincing descriptions of Palestinian landscapes and peoples are a combination of wide reading in the Library of Congress and observing the horse-crazy ethnically mixed environment of Santa Fe and New Mexico generally, where he was Governor while finishing the book. Indeed, I wonder if the relatively sympathetic treatment of Pilate comes directly of empathy from one colonial governor to another. New Mexico had been under US rule only a little longer in 1880 than Judæa had been under Roman rule at the time of Pilate.

Incidentally, Mary is explicitly fifteen years old at the time of the birth of Jesus in Wallace’s novel.

It’s not a bad book, it just takes itself a bit too seriously and goes on a bit too long. You can get it here.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

Gigi (1958), plus original book and bonus cat

Posted on 7 July 2019 by fromtheheartofeurope

Gigi won the Oscar for Best Motion Picture of 1958, and picked up another eight, Best Director (Vincente Minnelli), Best Adapted Screenplay (Alan Jay Lerner), Best Art Direction – Set Decoration, Best Cinematography (color) (Joseph Ruttenberg), Best Costume Design (Cecil Beaton), Best Film Editing (Adrienne Fazan, a rare woman winning one of the off-screen categories), Best Musical Score (André Previn) and Best Original Song (“Gigi” by Lerner and Loewe). Winning nine Oscars was a new record at the time (eight had been won by From Here To Eternity, On The Waterfront, The Best Years of Our Lives, Going My Way and Gone With the Wind), but this record was broken by Ben-Hur the following year. It should be noted that although none of the cast were nominated in the acting categories, Maurice Chevalier got a special award from the Academy.

The other contenders for Best Motion Picture were Auntie Mame, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Defiant Ones and Separate Tables. On the IMDB rankings, Gigi places 18th and 9th, with Vertigo, Touch of Evil, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Blob and The Fly ahead of it on both lists. Hugo voters chose “No Award”, the first year this ever happened, ahead of Dracula, The Fly and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. (This was also the year they No-Awarded Brian Aldiss for Best New Writer.) I have seen absolutely none of these; in fact the only other film I’m sure I have seen from 1958 is Jacque Tati’s Mon Oncle.

It’s a musical romance set in Paris in 1900. Gigi is a young girl who is being educated to be a rich man’s female companion by her grandmother and aunt. She grapples with her relationship with young Gaston, whose uncle Honoré is an old flame of her grandmother’s. It’s the third consecutive Oscar-winner based on a story first written in French (after Around The World in 80 Days and Bridge on the River Kwai, two films that are very different from each other and from this). It’s also the first musical we’ve had since An American in Paris, though there are a few more coming up. Here’s the Oscar-winning title song (with Spanish sub-titles, sorry), the moment when Gaston realises that she has grown up and he loves her.

As usual, starting with the bits I didn’t like so much, and as usual that list begins with whitewashing: there is not a single non-white face to be seen in the film, although Paris in 1899 was already pretty multi-ethnic (Severiano de Heredia served as the equivalent of Mayor of Paris in 1879-80 and as a minister in the French government in 1887) and Paris in 1958, when the film was made, even more so.

Apart from that, there’s not a lot to dislike. The story is actually somewhat subversive of gender politics; Gigi and her older relatives are navigating a world ruled by men, sure, but doing it at their own pace and according to their own rules; the climax is where Gigi puts Gaston in the position where he must ask her grandmother for permission to marry her. It’s not quite as in-your-face as the original – once again, Hollywood removes feminism from the text – but the fact that sex outside marriage is portrayed from the very beginning as a cheerfully accepted relationship choice is startling for 1958. I wrote previously that in both Wings and All Quiet on the Western Front, France is a place of wartime fascination and moral hazard, and the same is true for Casablanca, another war film. The Life of Emile Zola is set almost entirely in Paris, a place of superior achievement, the centre of the cultural world, with its own drama and internal dynamics which the audience is expected to recognise and relate to. The Paris of An American in Paris is much more wholesome, if also spectacular. But here we’re back to a combination of Zola’s colourful city with the divergent morality of the war films.

The two male leads are a little weaker (and this is another of the rare Best Movie winners where none of the cast were nominated in the acting categories) – Louis Jourdan is a bit underwhelming as Gaston, and Maurice Chevalier, a grand old man of stage and screen, distinctly over the top as Honoré. My heart sank a bit when I realised that he opens the film singing “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” – though in fact it’s a much less creepy song than the title suggests in these less innocent times.

The music in general is fine. The only other Lerner and Loewe musical I know is My Fair Lady (which we’ll be getting to in a bit) and basically it has more memorable songs. One of them is not “Say a Prayer for Me Tonight”, originally written for Eliza Doolittle but removed and given instead to Gigi. Here’s Leslie Caron singing it, with a heavily drugged cat. (This is a reconstruction – Betty Wand dubbed for Leslie Caron’s voice in the film.)

The three leading women are all adorable and watchable – Isabel Jeans as Aunt Alicia, Hermione Gingold as grandma Madame Alvarez, and especially Leslie Caron in the title role, at 26 convincingly playing a character ten years younger.

The women are poorly served by the score – there are twelve songs, eight of which are sung by men only and another three by Betty Wand dubbing Leslie Caron. But the one song which actually features one of the female leads in her own voice is I think the film’s most memorable, the duet between Hermione Gingold and Maurice Chevalier, “I Remember It Well”.

I have been in love with Leslie Caron ever since I first saw An American in Paris (also directed by Vincent Minnelli from a script by Alan J. Lerner), and hugely enjoyed her cameos in Damage (1992) and Chocolat (2000). I think she dominates the film, despite being the youngest of the lead performers.

Let me just remind you that she umpired a cricket match as Countess Mavrokordati in The Durrells only two years ago.

I liked Gigi and I’m putting it 14th out of 31 films so far, behind It Happened One Night but ahead of Marty. You can get it here.

Next up is Ben-Hur.

The book by the great French feminist writer Colette is very short. Here is the second paragraph of the third section:

– Tu as l’air d’un singe savant, lui dit Lachaille. Je t’aimais mieux dans ta robe écossaise. Avec ce col qui te gêne, tu ressembles à une poule qui a avalé du maïs trop gros. Regarde-toi.

‘You remind me of a performing monkey,’ Lachaille said to her. ‘I liked you much better in your old tartan dress. In that uncomfortable collar you look just like a hen with a full crop. Take a peep at yourself!’

It’s recognisably the same story, with some of the same jokes and lines, though there is no Honoré – completely invented for the film, and I guess to an extent for Chevalier. Gigi is explicitly not yet sixteen years old; obviously Hollywood could not go near there. Gigi’s mother, completely invisible in the film, makes a few appearances in the book (the father has been long absent):

As for her features, no one could yet predict their final mould. A large mouth, which showed beautiful strong white teeth when she laughed, no chin to speak of, and, between high cheekbones, a nose – ‘Heavens, where did she get that button?’ whispered her mother under her breath. ‘If you can’t answer that question, my girl, who can?’ retorted Madame Alvarez.

It’s a succinct sketch of Paris in 1899 from the point of view of women trying to get by in a man’s world.

I got it in combinations with a slightly longer book by Colette, La Chatte/The Cat, about a young woman who discovers that her new husband loves his cat more than he loves her. Here’s the second paragraph of the third chapter:

Avec précaution, il tourna la tête, entrouvrit les yeux et vit, tantôt blanche et tantôt bleu clair selon qu’elle baignait dans l’étroit ruisseau de soleil ou qu’elle regagnait la pénombre, une jeune femme nue, un peigne à la main, la cigarette aux lèvres, qui fredonnait. « C’est du toupet », pensa-t-il. « Toute nue ? Où se croit-elle ? »

He turned his head cautiously and opened his eyes a trifle wider. He saw someone moving about, now white, now pale blue according to whether she was in the narrow strip of sunlight or the shadow. It was a naked young woman with a comb in her hand and a cigarette between her lips, wandering about the room and humming. ‘What impudence,’ he thought. ‘Completely naked! Where does she think she is?’

It’s a bad sign when a newlywed husband is irritated at the sight of his wife naked. None of the characters in this story is pleasant, including the cat, but it’s well told, and reminiscent of a notorious recent Reddit thread.

You can get Gigi and the Cat here.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957); and book by Pierre Boulle

Posted on 1 June 2019 by fromtheheartofeurope

This review contains SPOILERS for both the film and the novel. The film has been out for 62 years, but if you haven’t seen it, do go and see it first before reading this.

The Bridge on the River Kwai won the Oscar for Best Motion Picture of 1957, and picked up another five, Best Director (David Lean), Best Actor (Alec Guinness), Best Adapted Screenplay (Pierre Boulle, with Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman, who actually wrote the screenplay, being awarded posthumous Oscars for it in 1984), Best Music, Scoring (Malcolm Arnold), Best Film Editing (Peter Taylor) and Best Cinematography (Jack Hildyard), with Sessue Hayakawa losing out to Red Buttons in Sayonara for Best Supporting Actor. The other contenders for Best Motion Picture that year were 12 Angry Men, Peyton Place, Sayonara and Witness for the Prosecution, none of which I have seen, though I have read the theatre script for 12 Angry Men and also the Agatha Christie short story on which Witness for the Prosecution is based.

IMDB users rank The Bridge on the River Kwai 5th or 2nd of the films of 1957, with 12 Angry Men top on both rankings and The Seventh Seal, Funny Face and Paths of Glory between the two on the popularity metric. There were a lot of famous films, these and many others, produced in 1957, but I have seen none of them at all apart from The Bridge on the River Kwai, which I had previously seen when it was on TV at Christmas time in 1981. Here’s a contemporary (post-Oscars) trailer:

I’ve never been to South East Asia, though I have a number of links there – my godfather and one of my uncles actually fought in the Burma campaign; my father was born in Malaysia; my niece was born in Vietnam; my aunt appears as an extra in The 7th Dawn, which is set in Malaysia a few years later and also stars William Holden along with my aunt’s schoolfriend Susannah York. (You can see my aunt dancing in the embassy scene about 38 minutes into The 7th Dawn, if you want to check.) I’d love to go.

Back to The Bridge on the River Kwai. It is a problematic film in terms of race and gender, but it is spectacular in its execution on every level, and I’m bumping it right to the top of my table, in fifth place just behind the greatest of all war films, All Quiet on the Western Front, and just ahead of the soldiers returning in The Best Years of Our Lives. Like last year’s Around The World In Eighty Days, it’s an adaptation of a French novel about an Englishman’s encounter with Asia, with the spectacular collapse of railway bridge near the end. There are also some important differences, of course.

Gender: There are five credited women in the cast and none of their characters are named – Ann Sears plays an anonymous “Nurse” whos is William Holden’s character’s love interest, and four Thai actresses, credited as Vilaiwan Seeboonreaung, Ngamta Suphaphongs, Javanart Punynchoti and Kannikar Dowklee are credited as “Siamese girls” – the partisans who accompany William Holden’s character through the jungle to the final confrontation. There is also an uncredited nurse (as opposed to the credited but unnamed nurse played by Sears).

Ann Sears had a better known younger sister, Heather Sears, and was married to Michael Holden, a British producer (not related to William Holden as far as I can tell).
Vilaiwan Seeboonreaung – วิไลวรรณ สีบุญเรือง – is better known in Thailand by her maiden name, Vilaiwan Wattapanich – วิไลวรรณ วัฒนพานิช, and has a Thai Wikipedia article listing dozens of films and TV appearances since 1950. Due to variant transliterations she has three different IMDB pages (Seeboonreaung, Vatanapanich and Vatapanich). She is clearly one of the most prominent Thai actresses.
Ngamta Suphaphongs – งามตา ศุภพงษ์ – had previously starred in a Thai blockbuster, Forever Yours, as a young woman married to a much older man, with the hit song Forever. If I understand this correctly, she went on to found the Music Faculty at Silpakorn University.
Javanart Punynchoti – whose name I have found in Thai as both ชวนารถ ปัญญโชติ and ยาวนารถ ปัญญะโชติ, differing by the first syllable of her first name and whether or not there is a middle vowel in her second name – was much the most difficult to track down; her name I think has been particularly mangled. Her son Arthur Panyachote is much better known in Thailand, both as a singer and gay rights activist.
Kannikar Dowklee – กรรณิกา ดาวคลี่ – had another starring role in The Stars Unfold / ดาวคลี่ (1959), in which she gets top billing. Otherwise I can’t find much about her.

Having said that, this extraordinarily minimal acknowledgement of half of humanity on screen is, believe it or not, a considerable advance on the original book, in which no women at all appear or are even referred to in passing. (There is a figurative reference to maternal love.) The fact that the Thai partisans are young women rather than men gives the march through the jungle and the destruction of the bridge a much more gritty feel.

Race: Let’s face it, this is a film about an Englishman encountering the Orient. The audience is expected to share the English and American characters’ views and perspective, and the Japanese and Thais are the Other. And yet… the fact is that the story is rooted in Pierre Boulle’s real life experience of working for the Japanese as a prisoner of war in Indochina. And Sessue Hayakawa’s Saito, who begins the film as the evil head of the PoW camp, evolves into a complex character whose relationship with Alec Guiness’s Nicholson defines the film. It should also be said that unlike in last year’s Around The World In Eighty Days, at least we have Japanese actors playing Japanese characters and Thai actors playing Thai characters. Again, it’s a better effort than the original book, where Boulle allows himself to slip into stereotypes of Japanese, English and Americans rather readily, and the Thais are even more anonymous. (As well as there being no women in the book, there are no French people either, nor any reference to France.)

There is one very dark-skinned extra whose only function is to operate the Japanese officers’ fan.

NB that the upper part of the Mae Klong river, which was crossed by the Burma Railway, was renamed the Khwae Yai in the 1960s by the Thai government to bring real and fictional geography into closer alignment.

Music: Here we have the great composer Malcolm Arnold at his best. This is the entire soundtrack album:

But of course what everyone remembers is the extraordinary scene in which the PoWs arrive, defiantly whistling “Colonel Bogey“, and at the end of the scene the orchestra swells into Arnold’s “River Kwai March”, conveying the sense of lost military glory so very vividly.

Script: A surprising number of memorable lines in the film are lifted directly from Boulle’s novel, including “an unfortunate disagreement for which I was not to blame”, “healthy competitive spirit”, “the elm piles of London Bridge have lasted six hundred years”, and “Our experience of missions dropping into this sort of country can be summed up as follows: if they do only one jump, you know, there’s a fifty per cent chance of an injury. Two jumps, it’s eighty per cent. The third time, it’s dead certain they won’t get off scot free.” But a great film has been made from a good book here, and the changes to the story made by Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman are crucial from the beginning – Shears is not a fellow-prisoner or impersonating an officer in the book – to the end – Boulle’s Nicholson does not have an epiphany and successfully prevents most of the sabotage before his death. In particular, a lot more is made of the commando raid in the film than in the book. These are all good dramatic choices. It is a matter of disgrace that Wilson and Foreman’s Oscar-winning writing was not recognised for almost thirty years.

Cinematography: I should have said last year that the new wide screen format enables a vast amount of spectacle to go on the screen. A less gifted team would allow some of this extra space to go to waste, but that’s not happening here. I am sure that someone more familiar with the respective landscapes of Thailand and Sri Lanka than I am would be able to point and laugh at the differences, but basically it all looks gorgeous, and although it was presumably all filmed on the same short stretch of the Kelani River in Sri Lanka, we get a great sense of a long journey.

And the most extraordinary scene of course is the final collapse of the bridge with the train tumbling off it (as previously mentioned, added from the book).

Alec Guinness: All of this is a huge achievement. But what keeps you watching to the very end of two hours and forty-one minutes, even if you already know perfectly well what is going to happen, is the performance of the leading man. (It is striking that Guinness is billed third, and Hayakawa fourth and below the line, in the publicity posters; were Hawkins and Holden really such box-office draws?) He takes us inside the mind of Nicholson, whose concept of duty drives him to build the best possible bridge, even though this could lead to the end of the British Empire, who is grasping the best he can at dignity for himself and for his men, and even for the Japanese to an extent, in appalling circumstances; and who at the end realises what he has done, and destroys it.

It’s a great film. You can get it here.

I will now watch The Incredible Shrinking Man, which won the Hugo that year, and then progress to Gigi, of which I know nothing except that it stars the glorious Leslie Caron.

I’m 30 films into this project now, so here are my rankings so far, with the most recent ten picked out in red. It’s been a good decade, with six of them in my top ten and only two in my bottom ten. That said, it’s going to take a pretty awful Oscar-winning film to break into my bottom five, all produced before 1936. See also my previous rankings of the first 10 and first 20.

30) The Great Ziegfeld (Oscar for 1936)
29) Cimarron (1930/31)
28) Cavalcade (1932/33)
27) Wings (1927/28)
26) Broadway Melody (1928/29)
25) All The King’s Men (1949)
24) Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
23) The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)
22) Gone With the Wind (1939)
21) Gentleman’s Agreement (1947)
20) Going My Way (1944)
19) How Green Was My Valley (1941)
18) Mrs Miniver (1942)
17) On The Waterfront (1954)
16) Grand Hotel (1931/32)
15) The Life of Emile Zola (1937)
14) Marty (1955)
13) It Happened One Night (1934)
12) You Can’t Take It With You (1938)
11) The Lost Weekend (1945)
10) Hamlet (1948)
9) From Here To Eternity (1953)
8) Around The World In Eighty Days (1956)
7) All About Eve (1950)
6) The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
5) The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
4) All Quiet on the Western Front (1929/30)
3) Rebecca (1940)
2) An American in Paris (1951)
1) Casablanca (1943)

As for the book by Pierre Boulle, here’s the second paragraph of the third chapter:

Ce fut la proclamation du colonel Saïto, stipulant que les officiers devraient travailler avec leurs hommes, et dans les mêmes conditions, qui suscita les premiers troubles. Elle provoqua une démarche, polie mais énergique, du colonel Nicholson, qui exposa son point de vue avec une sincère objectivité, concluant que les officiers britanniques avaient pour tâche de commander leurs soldats, et non de manœuvrer la pelle ou la pioche.

The cause of the initial disturbances was Colonel Saito’s proclamation stipulating that all officers were to work side by side with the other ranks and on the same footing. This provoked a polite but firm protest from Colonel Nicholson, who outlined his ideas on the subject candidly and methodically, adding in conclusion that the task of British officers was to command their men and not to wield a pick and shovel.

As already noted, the book is a good book but not as good as the film. I think it’s the first case of a straight adaptation where I have been able to say that quite so firmly. There are no women; the English, Americans, Japanese and Thais all play somewhat to national stereotype. On the other hand, the core narrative of Nicholson as English army officer, attached to his duty for entirely recognisable reasons, and Saito as his captor who ends up being effectively captured by his prisoner, is a firmly sound story and well told. As a French author, Boulle is able to keep an ironic detachment from the drama, and perhaps this ends up a bit less manipulative of the reader/viewer. Boulle’s ear for dialogue and character meant that many of his best lines were preserved for the screenplay (for which he won an Oscar, not entirely on his own merits, as noted above). It’s also a really short book. Strongly recommended. You can get it here.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

Around The World in 80 Days (1956); and book by Jules Verne

Posted on 19 May 2019 by fromtheheartofeurope

Around The World in 80 Days won the Oscar for Best Motion Picture of 1956, and picked up another four, Best Cinematography, Color (Lionel Lindon), Best Film Editing (Gene Ruggiero and Paul Weatherwax), Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture (Victor Young) and Best Writing, Best Screenplay, Adapted (John Farrow, S. J. Perelman, and James Poe). It was also nominated in Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Color; Best Costume Design, Color; and Best Director. Interestingly, none of the actors was nominated despite the all-star cast. The other contenders for Best Motion Picture that year were The King and I (which I have of course seen) and Friendly Persuasion, Giant, and The Ten Commandments (which I haven’t).

IMDB users rank Around The World in 80 Days 14th or 10th of the films of 1956. Ranked ahead of it in both cases are: The Ten CommandmentsThe KillingThe SearchersThe King and IThe Man Who Knew Too MuchForbidden PlanetInvasion of the Body SnatchersGiant. Of those, apart from The King and I, I have also seen Forbidden Planet. The only other 1956 film I think I have seen is Moby Dick. It’s a pretty good year; I liked all of them. Here’s a contemporary trailer.

I thought this was generally very good fun. In case you didn’t know, it’s the story of a chap called Phileas Fogg in 1872, who bets his London clubmates that he can travel around the world in eighty days. He brings with him his recently hired manservant, Passepartout, and also acquires en route an Indian princess who he saves from suttee and a detective who suspects him of bank robbery. The journey gives the excuse for lots of brief portrayals of exotic settings, both in the original 1872 book and spectacularly in the 1956 film. It’s not a deep film, but it’s very entertaining. I’m a bit of a fan of David Niven anyway, having greatly enjoyed his two autobiographies which I read as a teenager. I’ve also loved the book since I was a child.
As usual I’ll start with the bits of the film I didn’t like so much.

Whitewashing: as usual, I’m afraid. The lead female role is the Indian princess Aouda, played by the thoroughly Caucasian Shirley MacLaine (aged 22, in her third film). Though, of course, even in the original book we are told on first seeing her that Aouda is “as fair as a European”.

The film can hardly avoid Asian characters in the Indian, Chinese and Japanese segments – though of the credited actors, Robert Cabal, of European and Polynesian heritage, plays the unnamed Indian elephant driver; Philip Ahn, a Korean, plays a passer-by in Hong Kong). But there isn’t a single sub-Saharan African or African-American visible anywhere. (It is implied that Achmed Abdullah is North African; he is played by the Mexican Gilbert Roland.) It’s striking that in the scenes set in San Francisco, there is not a single non-white face to be seen – not in the election parade that starts this section of the film, not in Clancy’s saloon. The book, on the other hand, singles out Chinatown as one of the sights of San Francisco, and mentions that the hotel waiters were “negroes of darkest hue” – which is not brilliant, but in the film they are not there at all.

Stereotypes: Of course this is a film which relies on stereotypes for the humour of its (Oscar-winning) script, as indeed did the book. The French of the 1870s and the Americans of the 1950s are alike in finding English reserve and snobbery alien and mockable (and an excuse to look at someone else’s failings). I found it striking just how closely the film stuck to the book in this regard (with a couple of big additions, which I will get to, and the deletion of the scene with the Mormon preacher, which would have been less funny for 1950s Americans than for 1870s French readers). Oddly enough the weak point here is David Niven, who was a naturally warm and slightly vulnerable actor, and could not really carry off the impervious, on-the-spectrum Phileas Fogg.

The film does lampshade this, of course. In the closing seconds, Aouda appears at the Reform Club.

Fogg: My dear, I must ask you to leave these precincts at once. No woman has ever set foot in the club.
Aouda: Why not?
Fogg: Because that could spell the end of the British Empire.

(various crashes as Passepartout arrives through the window.)
The Governor of the Bank of England [Robert Morley]: This is the end.
(closing titles.)

Music: It’s inoffensive (though Oscar-winning) stuff, the catchy theme tune being a minor hit with the instrumental version from the film on the A side and Bing Crosby crooning it on the B side. Rule Britannia is of course the theme for the British sections, but I was very amused that the French sections raid Gershwin’s An American in Paris – no doubt from the film that had won the Best Picture Oscar only five years before.

Cast: There are 1302 named actors here. The number of cameos is breathtaking. You may have already spotted Marlene Dietrich running the San Francisco saloon. Here’s Noel Coward (who wrote the 1932-33 Best Picture) and John Gielgud as the head of an employment agency and Phileas Fogg’s recently sacked manservant.

Here’s Frank Sinatra playing the piano in Marlene Dietrich’s bar.

Here’s Buster Keaton as the train conductor in the Wild West.

I am not enough of a film buff to really appreciate them all, but it’s a remarkable array.

I think it’s also unfair that none of the cast were nominated in any of the acting categories. Cantinflas in particular shines as Passepartout (and was apparently given top billing, ahead of Niven, in Spanish-speaking countries where he was better known).

I do I’m afraid have my issues with Robert Newton, who is a bit too chunky for the cadaverous Inspector Fix (and of course died of alcoholism several months before the film was actually released).

Spectacle: The whole thing looks fantastic. The two early inserted sequences, not in the original book, are the balloon out of Paris and the bullfight. The balloon is utterly gratuitous to the plot, but allows the film to be in Paris and to have some amazingly well contructed shots. It’s a gorgeous sequence. (Of course, real balloonists would have needed to be more warmly dressed.)

Bullfighting is of course a terrible thing, but the point was that Cantinflas had actually been a bullfighter and was able to pull it off.

I’ve mentioned the establishment shot of San Francisco already. Everywhere is convincingly portrayed, the American bits best obviously. Passepartout is rescued from the Indians off-screen in the book but on-screen in the film:

And I had totally forgotten about the wind-propelled railcar in the book, which again looks great on screen.

This was very enjoyable. I’m putting it a quarter of the way down my list, just below All About Eve and above From Here To Eternity. You can get it here.

Next up is Bridge on the River Kwai, which is also based on a novel originally written in French but is a lot less funny.

This is of course not the only adaptation of Verne’s novel for the screen, though it is probably the best. You may remember the 2004 version with Jackie Chan getting top billing as Passepartout and Steve Coogan in second place as Fogg, also featuring Jim Broadbent as a villainous Lord Kelvin and Arnold Schwarzenegger as an Oriental prince. It varies just a little further from the book than the 1956 version did. Here’s a trailer:

Those of you who go back as far as I do may recall an Australian animated series in which Fogg is proving himself worthy of the love of Belinda, and Fix is an agent of his potential father-in-law. This opening sequence may jog your memory.

Back to the original novel, then. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Phileas Fogg se rendit aussitôt à la salle à manger, dont les neuf fenêtres s’ouvraient sur un beau jardin aux arbres déjà dorés par l’automne. Là, il prit place à la table habituelle où son couvert l’attendait. Son déjeuner se composait d’un hors-d’œuvre, d’un poisson bouilli relevé d’une « reading sauce » de premier choix, d’un roastbeef écarlate agrémenté de condiments « mushroom », d’un gâteau farci de tiges de rhubarbe et de groseilles vertes, d’un morceau de chester, — le tout arrosé de quelques tasses de cet excellent thé, spécialement recueilli pour l’office du Reform-Club. He repaired at once to the dining-room, the nine windows of which open upon a tasteful garden, where the trees were already gilded with an autumn colouring; and took his place at the habitual table, the cover of which had already been laid for him. His breakfast consisted of a side-dish, a broiled fish with Reading sauce, a scarlet slice of roast beef garnished with mushrooms, a rhubarb and gooseberry tart, and a morsel of Cheshire cheese, the whole being washed down with several cups of tea, for which the Reform is famous.

It’s striking that both “Reading sauce” and “mushrooms” are in English in the original French text. I can understand there not being a French equivalent for the former, but what’s wrong with “champignons”?

I last re-read the book in 2004, fifteen years ago, and wrote this:

After watching the dismal Steve Coogan/Jackie Chan film on the plane a couple of weeks ago, I realised I had the novel on my PDA and decided to re-read it. And, well, it’s good. There’s a little bit of the nerdishness recently satirised here, in that every means of transport is described in total detail. There are one and a half total implausibilities in the plot. But basically, this is a story of its time, full of the new wonders available in 1872 – the Suez Canal had been open for only three years, so had the rail link across the United States,and of course the whole point of the book is that the railway across India opened only that year. And this is an India only fifteen years on from the 1857 Mutiny – as far as we are from the fall of Communism; a Japan that has just experienced the Meiji restoration; a United States recovering from the Civil War, and doing its best to deal with the Mormons. And of course this is written by an author whose own native France has been devastated by a catastrophic military defeat the previous year, and is a determined attempt to look outwards and forwards.

The half implausibility I mentioned above is this. The whole basis of the story is that as a result of the trans-Indian railway being completed, our hero, Phileas Fogg, makes a bet that he can go around the world in eighty days. Well, when he gets to India, it turns out the railway hasn’t been completed; and he has to complete the rest of the journey by elephant, rescuing the beautiful Aouda on the way. Now come on; the whole basis of the bet was that the railway was there, and surely the gap between Kholby and Allahabad is sufficient cause to call the bet off?

The complete and total implausibility is the punchline of the entire book, where we are asked to believe that in the course of 26 days travel between the International Date Line and London, none of our leading characters had actually checked the date and realised that they were a day ahead of themselves. So they saw no newspapers and experienced no weekends in America or between Cork and Dublin or Liverpool and London; and the schedule of steamers in New York and railways in Ireland and England was utterly insensitive to the day of the week? Come off it! Of course the plot simply doesn’t work unless you are prepared to overlook this gaping hole in it, and most people do.

And how come all the bells in London strike at ten to nine anyway? Philip José Farmer had an explanation of this in The Other Log of Phileas Fogg, an otherwise completely forgettable effort. Apart from the points noted above, this is really fun and everyone should read it.

Re-reading it now I was even more struck by the cutting-edge aspects of the text. “Bungalows” are exotic buildings found only in India. The (American) Indian raid on the railway train is a cliche of the Western genre which had only recently come into existence (the dime novels Malaeska and Seth Jones both first appeared in mass circulation in 1860). I guess balloons out of Paris were still a painfully recent memory, or Verne would probably have put one in. It’s a short book with lots of fun spectacle. You can get it here.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

On the Waterfront, by Malcolm Johnson

Posted on 2 May 2019 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Whole truckloads of cargo disappear from the piers without a trace. Hijackers take their toll from shipments en route to and from the piers. Casual pilferage by individual thieves, awaiting only opportunity, sends the loss totals higher, but this form of theft is negligible compared with the highly organized stealing by the gangs. And here again the key to the business is thorough control of the union labor by the mobsters in power on the piers. They dictate the hiring of union members and see to it that the “right men” get the important jobs. The right men in most instances are members of the mob, usually ex-convicts.

Of all the material I’ve looked at which was adapted to Oscar-winning movies, this is the most altered in the adaptation. It’s not that surprising, really; the original material was a series of factual newspaper articles in the New York Sun in 1947 and 1948 about organised crime and the dock industry. In itself it is interesting enough. It’s a classic example of investigative journalism which does not hesitate to name names (though presumably some names are left out); it’s not a broad survey of social conditions on the docks, it’s a very specific investigation of how the shipping industry was being extorted by the leadership of the International Longshoremen’s Union, and the difficulties faced by the authorities in chasing them down. The cost of this extortion was, of course, passed on to the consumer, and the profits went directly to the union leadership, who forced the workers to compete for their small cut of the available labour.

The film of course must tell its own narrative, but I found it striking how little of the wider political context made it to the screen. Johnson’s journalism makes it clear how many of the criminal bosses got their start in the days of Prohibition (less distant in 1948 than Bill Clinton’s presidency is now), and the extent to which they were able to control local police forces. There is a particularly memorable chapter where leading mobster John Dunn got some mid-ranking army officers to intercede for him with the Parole Commission to insist on his early release from jail in 1943, only for Mayor LaGuardia to alert Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War, who put a stop to it. (It’s not in Johnson’s book, but it came out many years later that Dunn and his mobster colleagues had in fact been paid informants of the Office of Naval Intelligence, which was obviously interested in anything political going on in such a sensitive economic chokepoint.)

I also found it striking that Hoboken, where the film is so memorably set, was not the centre of the main action of the ILA up and down the West Side of Manhattan – though the Jersey side certainly doesn’t go unmentioned. From the film you would almost think that the docks were restricted to Hudson County. The book makes it clear what a big deal the docks were (and still are); New York Harbour was then the world’s busiest port, seeing about a quarter of all imports into the USA. (Nowadays it’s not even in the top 20 worldwide, and beaten by both South Louisiana and Houston in the USA, but there’s still a lot going on.)

Anyway, this is all something of a historical curiosity. The power of the ILA was broken in 1953, before the film came out, by the creation of the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor, which has inevitably developed its own problems with corruption; New Jersey is attempting to extricate itself from it (though has not yet succeeded). Father Corridan, the model for Father Barry in the film, gets a lot of the good lines. The actual union members themselves who successfully went on strike against their own leadership don’t get quite so much coverage, which is perhaps rather telling.

Anyway, mainly of interest to people who want a microstudy of a particular moment of American crime and labour hitory, or to aspiring film buffs like myself. You can get it here.

Marty (1955)

Posted on 23 March 2019 by fromtheheartofeurope

Marty won the Oscar for Best Motion Picture of 1955, and picked up another three, Best Director (Delbert Mann), Best Actor (Ernest Borgnine) and Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay (Paddy Chayefsky). Betsy Blair and Joe Mantell were nominated for Best Supporting Actress and Actor respectively, and it also got nominations for Best Art Direction-Set Direction and Best Black-and-White Cinematography. The other contenders for Best Motion Picture were Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, Mister Roberts, Picnic and The Rose Tattoo. I haven’t seen any of them.

IMDB users rank Marty 15th or 11th of the films of 1955. Six films are ahead of it on both rankings: Rebel Without A Cause, East of Eden, Lady and the Tramp, To Catch a Thief, The Night of the Hunter and The Seven Year Itch. The only one of those that I have seen is Lady and the Tramp. Others that I know include Guys and Dolls, The Ladykillers, and The DambustersKismet but have not yet watched the film. That’s unusually broad for me – I think the best year since 1942 (soon to be 1943 once I get to the Retro Hugos). Here’s a contemporary trailer, fronted by Burt Lancaster (who we saw two years ago) as the producer; it includes the one scene that perhaps has weathered the years least well.

It is mercifully short, at 91 minutes apparently the shortest film ever to win the Oscar for Best Picture (or equivalent) – that’s less than 40% of Gone With the Wind. It’s the story of the eponymous Marty, a New York butcher who thinks he will never find love, and then actually does. I found it a charming character study and portrayal of a place and time, beautifully shot; not utterly compelling, but convincing enough. I’m putting it between a third and halfway down my list, between It Happened One Night and The Life of Emile Zola (1937). (Technical note: a bit surprised to find yet another black-and-white film made this late.)

Whitewashing: To start with the usual complaint: the black population of the Bronx was not massive in the 1950s – 6.7% in the 1950 census, 11.5% in 1960 – and, sure, the story is mainly set in the Italian community, but I don’t think that excuses there not being a single black person visible in the entire film. (Just for reference: we’ve had two black speaking parts altogether since Gone With the Wind, 16 years ago.)

Plot: Although it’s a romance, I was pleased thatthe film ends before the story does; the last shot is of Marty phoning Clara to ask her out. We are fairly certain that she will say yes, but who knows where their future will lead?The chemistry between Ernest Borgnine and Betsy Blair as Marty and Clara is very watchable, and nicely filmed.

The two of them are also well located in their respective somewhat suffocating family backgrounds. (I note that Clara’s parents sleep in separate beds, per the Code.)

It loses marks, of course, for the gender stereotypes (though both main characters are shown as trapped by their parents’ and peers’ expectations), and there is one rather skeevy moment between the two principals. That aside…

Borgnine: As the central character, Borgnine is hugely convincing. He does a tremendous eye-roll in his first scene, as various women customers nag him to get married; his punching a street sign in joy after his accidental date with Clara is a lovely moment; and as well as the chemistry with Betsy Blair, he is great with Joe Mantell as his friend Angie and Esther Minciotti as his mother. I didn’t get anything like as vivid an impression of him in From Here to Eternity.

Cinematography: The best aspect of the film for me was its solid portrayal of the Bronx as a place. There are a couple of key moments here – one of them is the opening street scene, set on Arthur Avenue in Belmont, the Bronx. I’m glad to report that the butcher’s shop where Marty works is still extant, now Vincent’s Meat Market at no. 2374.

A more recent iconic video filmed around the same location: Lady Gaga’s Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say).

One scene that particularly intrigued me for its setting was the dance hall. Look at the top there – that’s actually a disco ball! I had no idea that they were around that early, but that only shows that I haven’t watched Casablanca closely enough, because there’s one visible in one of the flashback scenes.

Anyway, it is charming enough. You can get it here.

The film was based on a teleplay – the first such to win an Oscar for best Picture – so there’s no book to read and I don’t think the original script is available (though the shooting script for the film is online).

Next up, after a run of seven films with more or less contemporary settings, it’s back to the nineteenth century and Around the World in Eighty Days.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

On The Waterfront (1954)

Posted on 24 February 2019 by fromtheheartofeurope

On The Waterfront won the Oscar for Best Motion Picture of 1954, and picked up another seven, Best Director (Elia Kazan), Best Actor (Marlon Brando), Best Screenplay (Budd Schulberg), Best Supporting Actress (Eva Marie Saint), Best Art Direction-Set Decoration Black-and-White (Richard Day), Best Cinematography Black-and-White (Boris Kaufman) and Best Film Editing (Gene Milford). Three of the cast were nominated for Best Supporting Actor, but lost to Edmond O’Brien in The Barefoot Contessa. Leonard Berstein was nominated for Best Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture, but lost to Dimitri Tiomkin for The High and the Mighty. That record of eight Oscars was the same as the previous year’s From Here to Eternity, and also Gone With the Wind (though both had thirteen nominations to On The Waterfront‘s twelve). The other contenders for Best Motion Picture were The Caine Mutiny, The Country Girl, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Three Coins in the Fountain.

Both IMDB rakings, by score and number of votes, put it in 4th place for the year, with Rear Window and Seven Samurai ahead in both tables. The only other 1954 film that I think I have seen is The Belles of St Trinian’s. (I am not really a film buff.) It’s interesting that this is in black and white, fifteen years after Gone With the Wind. This trailer references Going My Way, which won ten years earlier:

It’s a gritty story of corruption on the docks of Hoboken, New Jersey, with Brando’s character a naïve young ex-boxer whose brother is the fixer for the local chieftain. The good guys eventually triumph, and the evil mr Friendly’s grip is broken. I’m ranking it almost exactly half way down my list of Oscar-winning films (13th out of 26, if you want to know); I think it takes a similar theme to How Green Was My Valley and indeed Going My Way, but does it somewhat better; on the other hand I enjoyed it a bit less than Grand Hotel. I would have put it below Mrs Miniver apart from one redeeming virtue which I’ll get to at the end.

All About the Men: Eva Marie Saint is luminous and effective as Edie Doyle, whose brother is killed by the mob in the first scene and who then becomes the love interest and inspiration for Brando’s character Terry Molloy. She absolutely deserves her Oscar. (Aged 94, she is still around as of this writing.) But she is the only credited woman actor of the entire film. (There are several uncredited women in minor speaking or non-speaking roles.)

Plot: I’m marking the film down a bit for the actual story. It’s pretty clear from early on what’s going to happen; the nice characters move along inevitable arcs of redemption at different speeds (apart from those who die trying), and the bad guy is irredeemable. My revolutionary soul is struck by the fact that while the evil unions are clearly portrayed as the problem, there is no corresponding critique of the economic system that keeps the longshoremen trapped in dangerous low-paying jobs. (Also the agents of state coercion are all good guys.) At least collective action does survive to the end. It’s a rather right-wing film, and I’m a little surprised to see so little commentary about this aspect of it online.

Whitewashing: This is normally my starting point, but in fact On The Waterfront is the first Oscar-winning film since Casablanca to have a black actor in a speaking part – Don Blackman as Luke, one of the longshoremen. I should add that as far as I can tell, there really weren’t a lot of non-white dockworkers in Hoboken in the 1950s. Even today the city’s black population is only around 4%. I’ll be interested to read the journalism on which the film is based (I have it on order), but this may be an unusual case where one black guy in a cast of several dozen is actually over-representative for the time and place (and that’s not a bad thing, let’s be clear). Don Blackman, born in 1912 (so 42 when the film was made) had only just ended his career as a professional wrestler, where he fought under the name “Black Panther” and briefly held a world championship. This was more than a decade before Stan Lee invented the character of the same name for Marvel. Several other cast members were former professional boxers and wrestlers.

Brando: Being a film ignoramus as I am, I think the only other films I’ve seen Brando in are Guys and Dolls and The Godfather, which I will get to in eighteen years’ time, plus of course Superman. His performance here is pretty electrifying. I complained above that Terry Molloy’s character arc is a bit predictable, but Brando is completely magnetic as he portrays a not terribly bright kid who is compelled to raise his game and do the right thing, depite the potential personal cost. I commented earlier on his spark with Eva Marie Saint; I was also struck by the relationship with his screen brother, played by Rod Steiger (playing the older sibling despite being a year younger than Brando in real life). This is probably also the point to say that Steiger, Lee Cobb as the evil Mr Friendly and Karl Malden as the uncertain priest Father Barry all got Best Supporting Actor nominations. The only other film to get three Oscar nominations in this category is, again, The Godfather.

Cinematography: As noted above, Kazan chose to make the film in black and white, and it gives a tremendous sense of atmosphere which perhaps we might not have had in full colour. (A few seconds of colour film survive from filming.) The town of Hoboken, never actually named, is convincingly brought to life in the location shooting. (I don’t think any of it was done in studio.) The camera tells the story as much as the acting, and it’s the main channel for the Biblical references which reinforce the plot.

Music: This is really impressive. I wish I had been keeping a separate scorecard for the best incidental music in these films; this is up there with William Walton’s Hamlet, Hugo Friedhofer’s The Best Years of Our Lives, Miklós Rózsa’s The Lost Weekend and the various arrangements in Grand Hotel, and possibly the best of them if you like Bernstein’s kind of thing (and I do). Listen for yourself.

So I was generally satisfied with the film, despite some grumbles. You can get it here.

Next up is Marty, of which I know nothing at all.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

From Here To Eternity: 1953 film, and book by James Jones

Posted on 19 January 2019 by fromtheheartofeurope

From Here To Eternity won the Oscar for Best Motion Picture of 1953, and picked up another seven, Best Supporting Actor (Frank Sinatra), Best Supporting Actress (Donna Reed), Best Director (Fred Zinnemann), Best Screenplay (Daniel Taradash), Best Cinematography (Burnett Guffey), Best Sound, and Best Film Editing (these last two beating The War of the Worlds). This equalled the record of eight won by Gone With the Wind fourteen years earlier. The other contenders for Best Motion Picture were Julius Caesar, The Robe, Roman Holiday and Shane.

IMDB ranks From Here To Eternity 6th on both popularity and number of rankings for the year. The only films ahead of it in both leagues are Roman Holiday and Disney’s Peter Pan. As mentioned previously, the only 1953 films which I am sure that I previously seen are Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot / Mr Hulot’s Holiday, and Le Salaire de la Peur / The Wages of Fear, The War of the Worlds and probably Calamity Jane. Here is a contemporary trailer, in which the only scenes from the actual film are some footage of soldiers on parade and the love scene on the beach. You will observe that it’s in black and white, after two winners in colour (An American in Paris and The Greatest Show on Earth):

To cut to the chase, I rather enjoyed this, and it’s grazing my top quartile, just below All About Eve (losing points for whitewashing) and just above Olivier’s Hamlet. It’s the story of three soldiers, and the women who love two of them, grinding out their individuality in the suffocating environment of the US Army base on Hawaii immediately before Pearl Harbour. No detailed spoilers, but it does not have a happy ending. I liked it a lot more than last year’s The Greatest Show on Earth, which is also a romantic drama set in a stressful professional environment; the plot is more substantial, the characters more sympathetic and the situation more interesting.

Whitewashing: I am sorry to have to do this yet again. It’s now ten years since we had an Oscar-winning film with a speaking part for a black actor. OK, there were not a lot of African-Americans in Hawaii (0.05% in 1940, rising to 0.5% in 1950) but the biggest single ethnic group then was the Japanese (37% in 1940 and 32% in 1950); there is not a single identifiably Japanese face in the film. The book (which I will get to below) portrays a vibrant multi-ethnic Honolulu and indeed a relatively diverse army. Hollywood erased that; the whiteness of Hawaii here is almost (but just about not quite) as bad as the all-white Deep South of All The King’s Men. The only visible non-whites in the film are coded as Chinese (7% of Hawaii’s population in 1940, 5% in 1950) or Hawaiians (15% in 1940, 14% in 1950).

Bowdlerising: Again, I want to save the book for proper commentary later, but even the casual viewer can tell that the New Congress Club, where Prew meets his lover Lorene/Alma, is a brothel that has been cleaned up for Hollywood (“soft drinks”, forsooth!!!). In fairness, the extramarital relationship of Warden and Karen is kept (it would be rather difficult to tell the story without it).

From here on, it’s all positive. The music is good, both George Duning’s incidental music and the contemporary songs which crop up, which include the memorable “Re-Enlistment Blues”:

The use of the buildings and landscape is very impressive, and one wonders how the locals felt about the re-enactment of Pearl Harbour only twelve years after the real thing; most of them would have remembered it well. The most notable use of landscape of course is in the film’s most famous single scene (which actually lasts less than a minute):

The plot (and again more on this later) has had a lot stripped out of 850 pages of novel to make 118 minutes of film, and therefore loses a lot of the complexity that the book has, but establishes its own structural integrity. This is partly because of the star quality of the leads; where the book concentrates on getting into the heads of the two main characters, Sergeant Warden and Private “Prue” Prewitt, the film also has two strong female leads and a third strong male, which means a rebalancing of the narrative which gives a slightly more balanced gender perspective.

One change that apparently was forced as part of the price of army co-operation was to ensure that the awful Captain Holmes (Philip Ober) should get his come-uppance in the end, rather than get promoted out of the way as happens in the book.

Of the leads, I actually found Montgomery Clift as Prewitt and Donna Reed as his girlfriend Lorene (whose real name is Alma) the least magnetic, though still pretty compelling. Prewitt’s character arc is a sadly downward one, as his defiance of the system fails to bring him any reward; and I was a bit mystified that Reed’s performance was one of the two that got the Oscar. Clift’s bugling (if it is him) does add to the soundscape.

Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr as Sergeant Milt Warden and Karen Holmes, the wife of his commanding officer, are gloriously sexy throughout. This is a publicity shot rather than an actual scene, but conveys the atmosphere well:

The standout performance, to my total surprise, is Frank Sinatra as Maggio. He’s a relatively one-dimensional character in the book, but in the film he’s partly a bromance partner for Clift’s Prewitt, and mainly the life and soul of the party, who really demonstrates how the military lifestyle fatally curtails his individuality. He hardly even sings in this. (The only other film I’d seen him in is Guys and Dolls.)

So basically I went into this with no expectations, and was very favourably impressed. You can get it here.

As is my habit, I also read the book on which the film is based. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:

He threw the cigaret in the flat iron pot painted red and black, the Regimental colors, and watched the tail end of the Company move out the truck entrance and out of sight, then stepped down onto the slick concrete of the porch and walked along it to the Supply Room’s open door.

As usual, I liked the book more than the film. I think the only parts that grated were where relatively unsophisticated soldiers engaged in deep conversations about Art and Literature which felt a bit like the author talking to his imaginary friends. As noted above, the character of Maggio is much less well developed and the women get relatively less viewpoint time than in the film. But in general it’s a lot more substantial, a lot more frank about sex and complex emotions; several particularly good subplots were cut from the script; the army of Jones’ novel may not have any black soldiers, but it does have Jews and Indians, unlike the army in the film; the Hawaii of the novel has a lot more non-white people than the Hawaii of the film. And it’s very well written, tensely close to the geography of 1941 Honolulu, to the point that one can follow Prewitt’s track from Alma and Georgette’s house to the fatal golf course quite readily on the mapping app of your choice. It’s a darker story than the film (which is already dark enough); Warden and Karen’s relationship is considerably more rocky on the page (there’s a grim passage where they sneak away for a romantic break and discover that they can’t actually stand each other’s company for more than an hour or so) and Prewitt’s final disintegration is recounted at length. I think it’s a rather old-fashioned book, in that it’s really all about the men, but it’s pretty gripping all the same. You can get it here.

Next up is On The Waterfront, of which I know very little.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)

Posted on 24 December 2018 by fromtheheartofeurope

The Greatest Show on Earth won the Oscars for Best Motion Picture and Best Story of 1952, and was nominated in three other categories, Best Costume Design, Best Director, and Best Film Editing. This is a rather low tally; in particular, I’m struck that none of the cast was nominated in the acting categories. (Though in fairness the same is true of last year’s An American in Paris, and also for Grand Hotel, All Quiet on the Western Front and Wings back in the early days.) The other contenders for Best Motion Picture were High Noon, Ivanhoe, Moulin Rouge and The Quiet Man.

IMDB ranks The Greatest Show on Earth 8th (popularity) and 9th (number of rankings) for the year. At the top of both leagues is the only other film from 1952 that I have seen, Singin’ in the Rain, one of my personal favorite films, which got a princely two Oscar nominations. (Best Score, and Best Supporting Actress for Jean Hagen as Lina Lamont. It didn’t win either of them.) Others that I have not seen and are ranked ahead of The Greatest Show on Earth on both systems are High Noon, The Quiet Man and Ikiru. Here’s a contemporary trailer:

I came into this a bit uneducated; I have seen none of Cecil B. De Mille’s other films – not The Ten Commandments, not Sunset Boulevard – and on top of that, watching on a small screen means that you lose out very much on the experience that first time viewers would have had. This was part of the reason it left me somewhat cold, and it’s going near the end of my table – ahead of Mutiny on the Bounty, because it’s more spectacular to look at, but behind Gone With the Wind because of lack of plot and decent acting.

Whitewashing: I know this may be getting tedious of me, but it’s now nine years since we had an Oscar-winning film with a speaking part for a black actor. Literally the only black people visible in two and a half hours are those putting up the Big Top 53 minutes in. Otherwise it’s an all-white affair. Several of the circus acts are based on non-European cultures, but performed entirely by white performers.

Plot: The film juggles (see what I did there?) two quite different core themes – the spectacle of the circus, and a romantic triangle between the three lead characters (with a couple of wrinkles, one of which is rather good). This means intrusive voiceovers at the beginning, the end and various points in the middle explaining to us why the animal cruelty and cultural appropriation we are seeing is so important, interspersed with heaving bosoms and glowering glances between the main protagonists. It’s really all laid on pretty thickly; no subtlety here. I have to admit I sometimes sympathised with the little girl in this frame:

The leads: I’ve mentioned this already. I found the three main characters melodramatically written and unimaginatively acted. The worst of the three is Charlton Heston as circus manager Brad, who glowers and smoulders in every scene; it’s not at all obvious why he and Holly are attracted to each other.

Just as one-note, but a bit less annoying, is Cornel Wilde’s sexy trapeze artist Sebastian, who does play a convincing charmer of women. Apparently Wilde was terrified of heights, so it’s just as well that his character gets injured and has to take time off from performance – though he seems game enough.

The most annoying of the three in terms of acting is Betty Hutton as Holly; every line is delivered with much drama and sighing. However I’m cutting her some slack because she does some genuinely impressive acrobatics, rather more than Wilde, which must have been a real strain.

Gender: Comes out rather better than you might have thought (though not helped much by Hutton’s performance). A consistent theme is women asserting their rights to make their own choices, including Hutton’s character’s choice between the two men she is attracted to. The costumes are spectacular rather than salacious.

The supporting cast: Having grumbled about the leads a lot, I will say that the next rank are much much better. The standout here, possibly the best part in the film, is James Stewart (who we saw 14 years ago in You Can’t Take it With You) as Buttons, a clown who turns out to have a tragic secret in his past, which is why he never takes off his make-up. His sidekick in the film, Emmett Kelly, is playing himself as one of the main performers of the Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus. (Buttons’ nemesis, FBI Agent Gregory, is played by Henry Wilcoxson who we saw ten years ago as the vicar in Mrs Miniver.)

Gloria Grahame as circus performer Angel also stands out, and gets most of the best lines in the film, culminating with “Listen, sugar, the only way that you can keep me warm is to wrap me up in a marriage license.” (Lyle Bettger, as her jealous boyfriend Klaus, not so much.)

Music: Lots of decent enough songs, not too taxing and featuring of course the title piece. (Some dubbing, particularly where Betty Hutton is apparently both acrobatting and singing at the same time.) There is a great cameo moment when Dorothy Larmour, playing Phyllis (another solid supporting role) is performing in the big top, and in the audience we see her co-stars from the “The Road To…” films, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, eating popcorn.

Cinematography: Even a grinch like me has to admit that the actual circus scenes are filmed very well, and must have looked really really good on the big screen. Apparently the film as a whole was tremendously well received back in 1952 and its winning the Oscar came as little surprise. There is, I must admit, a truly spectacular scene near the end when the circus train actually crashes.

This was not one of my favourites, and the fact that it did so well, and Singin’ in the Rain got nowhere, does not dispose me kindly to that year’s Academy voters.

Next up is From Here To Eternity, which I will possibly combine with the Retro-Hugo winning George Pal War of the Worlds. I’m twenty-five Oscar-winning films into this project now; at this rate (which I may not necessarily sustain) I’ll be up to the present day by the end of 2021.

All About Eve (1950)

Posted on 8 December 2018 by fromtheheartofeurope

All About Eve won the Oscar for Best Motion Picture of 1950, and was nominated in a total of fourteen categories, a feat which remained unequalled until Titanic in 1997 and still has not been beaten. It won five other Oscars: George Sanders won Best Supporting Actor, Joseph L. Mankiewicz won for both Best Director and Best Screenplay, and it also got Best Costume Design – Black and White and Best Sound Recording. All four female leads were nominated (the only time this has ever happened), Anne Baxter and Bette Davis for Best Actress and Celeste Holm and Thelma Ritter for Best Supporting Actress, but none of them won. The other contenders for Best Motion Picture were Born Yesterday, Father of the Bride, King Solomon’s Mines and Sunset Boulevard.

All About Eve is actually top of the IMDB popularity vote for films of 1950, and is fourth on the number of votes metric after Sunset Boulevard, Rashomon and Disney’s Cinderella. Cinderella, which got three Oscar nominations but no awards, was the only other film from that year that I had seen before this, though I have since also watched Destination Moon (which comes in 32nd on both IMDB metrics). All About Eve is one of the few Best Picture winners that also has a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes (the other two that I’ve seen so far are Rebecca and All Quiet on the Western Front). Here’s a modern trailer:

This is another one of those films I had not heard of before starting this project. It’s the story of an aging actress who is flattered by attention from a young fan, but then alarmed when the younger woman starts to infiltrate her professional and personal life. I liked it immensely, and it’s going near the top of my list, ahead of Hamlet from two years ago and just behind The Best Years of Our Lives from two years before that.

Whitewashing: To start with the negative, and it’s the usual story, there are only two or three black people visible in the entire film, a passer-by and two non-speaking cast members at the far end of a curtain call in a theatre scene (one of whom may be the same person as the passer-by, whose face we cannot see). This in a film set largely in New York theatre-land. (At least The Great Ziegfeld, back in 1936, actually had two black speaking parts even if they were rather awful; The Broadway Melody in 1929 was completely white.)

That’s the downside. There are lots of upsides. To start with, this was one of Marilyn Monroe’s first screen roles; she has only a small part, as an actress who is rising through the ranks, but already the camera loves her. George Sanders’ character, Addison DeWitt, actually says, “I can see your career rising in the East like the Sun”.

Although the film is dominated by the two leads, Bette Davis as Margo and Ann Baxter as Eve, there’s a good sense of ensemble from the cast and some nice camerawork pulling it together. I love the stairs set with Marilyn, above, and these two shots looking in different directions from the same scene in Margo’s dressing room, with first Gary Merrill as Margo’s boyfriend Bill, Celeste Holm as her friend Karen, Thelma Ritter as her maid Birdie (the two nominees for Best Supporting Actress) and Bette Davis as Margo all looking at Ann Baxter, out of shot as Eve; and the next shot shows us Thelma Ritter / Birdie and Bette Davis / Margo from behind, Ann Baxter / Eve facing them, and then Celeste Holm / Karen and Gary Merrill / Bill from vehind again. The message is that there is often more than one perspective from which to understand a story.

We saw Celeste Holm just three years ago in Gentleman’s Agreement, for which she did win an Oscar. Here she is again. So is George Sanders (on right of second pic below), who we met both in Rebecca ten years ago and in a more recent Retro Hugo diversion to Dorian Gray.

Anne Baxter really glows as Eve, muscling in on Margo’s life and then at the end discovering that she has a young female stalker of her own.

But the picture is totally owned – in a perfectly collegial way – by Bette Davis as the aging Margo, who gets most of the good scenes and most of the good lines.

Margo: Lloyd, honey, be a playwright with guts. Write me one about a nice normal woman who just shoots her husband.

Margo: Bill’s thirty-two. He looks thirty-two. He looked it five years ago, he’ll look it twenty years from now. I hate men.

Margo: Nice speech, Eve. But I wouldn’t worry too much about your heart. You can always put that award where your heart ought to be.

Lloyd Richards: What makes you think either Miller or Sherwood would stand for the nonsense I take from you? You’d better stick to Beaumont and Fletcher! They’ve been dead for three hundred years!
Margo: ALL playwrights should be dead for three hundred years!

And of course,

Margo: Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night!

It was an amusing coincidence that several of the early scenes are about catching a flight to San Francisco, and I was actually on a flight to San Francisco as I watched.

Next in the sequence of Oscar winners is an old favourite of mine, An American In Paris – but I actually watched it just over a year ago, and wrote it up out of sequence, so I will be going straight on to The Greatest Show on Earth, of which I know nothing. Knowing that An American In Paris is in colour, I am wondering if All About Eve will be the last film I watch for these purposes in black and white?

I also read the original short story, “The Wisdom of Eve” by Mary Orr, as so often first published in Cosmopolitan. The third paragraph is:

There was a crowd at the stage door. They were the usual autograph fans, all with little books open and fountain pens dripping ink. Some appeared to be intelligent theatergoers; they carried programs for Margola to sign and had obviously seen the play that evening. I could hear their enthusiastic comments through the tiny opening where I had lowered the car window to let my cigarette smoke escape. A few were boys in uniform with dreams of dating Margola—dreams that would not come true. There was only one person standing there I could not catalogue. She stood nearest the car, and I could see her face clearly in the light of the streetlamp.

It’s a nice character study, only a dozen or so pages long, which sets up the emotional dynamic just the same but has a very different ending – the narrator is Margo/Margola’s friend Karen, and Eve runs off with Lloyd, her playwright husband (as she threatens to but doesn’t in the film). It doesn’t add much to my appreciation of the film but I’m glad to have read it for completeness.

All The King’s Men: 1949 film and novel by Robert Penn Warren

Posted on 1 December 2018 by fromtheheartofeurope

All the King’s Men won the Oscar for Best Motion Picture of 1949, and Broderick Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge won Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress. The other nominated films were Battleground, The Heiress, A Letter to Three Wives and Twelve O’Clock High, none of which I have heard of.

On the two IMDB systems, it ranks 8th and 20th for the year. The Third Man, Kind Hearts and Coronets, White Heat, On The Town, and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon are all ranked ahead of it on both lists (none of them was nominated for Best Motion Picture; this was a year when Academy voters were notably out of sync with the judgement of history). I have actually seen The Third Man and Kind Hearts and CoronetsThe Third Man is one of my favourite films, but it did not get a single Oscar nomination in any category. I don’t think I have seen any other film from that year.

All The King’s Men is the story of Willie Stark, who progresses from county treasurer, to unsuccessful candidate for governor, to populist revolutionary governor, to assassination victim. It’s pretty obviously modelled on the career of Huey Long, who was governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932, and maintained political control of the state from the U.S. Senate from 1932 until his assassination in 1935, as he was preparing a presidential campaign. Stark, like Long, runs for governor and loses before winning on the second attempt, and is shot dead by the relative of a judge who was a political enemy, the assassin in turn being gunned down by his victim’s bodyguard(s).

Not to beat about the bush, I did not much care for All The King’s Men, and this won’t be one of my longer reviews. Perhaps it was a mistake to watch it on the Eurostar home after a long and tiring day in London; it’s mercifully short, less than two hours, but seemed a real drag at times. I went through three phases as I watched it.

At first I was seriously shocked at the whitewashing of the setting – it is clearly understood to be a portrayal of Huey Long’s Louisiana, which at the time had the second or third highest proportion of African-American inhabitants of any state of the Union (Mississippi has the most; Georgia has now slipped behind Louisiana to third but was in second place at the start fo the period when the film is set.) The book on which the film is based refers to African-Americans throughout (though the writer does not use that terminology), including three times in its very first paragraph, and includes a long chapter meditating on slavery and the Civil War. Yet literally everyone in the film is white, apart from one waiter on a train, whose face is not even seen clearly.

I know that I go on about this issue a lot, but this really is pretty egregious. The book, with plot firmly rooted in the race politics of the Deep South, was a best-seller, and most American cinema-goers of 1949 would have read it or at least been aware of it; the film has totally erased an entire ethnic group, a third of the population. There’s a word for that. It’s utterly shocking. (And it’s now seven years since we had an Oscar-winning film with a speaking part for a black actor.)

I got over this dissonance to a certain extent and began to actually rather like the film’s theme. There are not a lot of movies out there about the political process, and as far as I know this is the only Oscar winner which features elections quite so centrally. It’s my home territory, as it were, and I liked the mapping of Willie Stark’s political career, from county treasurer, to unsuccessful candidate for governor, to populist revolutionary governor, to assassination victim. His rapid adoption of populism as a political tool has obvious resonances today.

Having said that, I was not as impressed as the Oscar voters were with Broderick Crawford’s performance in the lead role. At the beginning of the film it’s fairly clear what’s going on: this is a chap from a not especially privileged background trying to make good as a public servant and a lawyer. But I didn’t feel that Crawford really got to grips with Stark’s transition into becoming a monster; as this reviewer comments, he’s rather a one-note actor. In general, as the film went on I felt increasingly that we were going through the motions to put the best episodes from the book on screen, and I lost the sense of connection between different parts of the narrative.

I felt that my disconnection was shared by the cast to an extent. There is a rumour that the director let the actors read the script just once and then took it away from them, forcing them to improvise while shooting. If so, I am not sure that this was a successful tactic; there are a lot of scenes that just feel under-rehearsed, with the actors’ arms hanging by their sides, which is never a good sign.

I did like Mercedes McCambridge’s Oscar-winning performance as election worker Sadie Burke, and John Ireland as the narrator and central character Jack Burden, both of them with a crush on Stark (which is understandable at the beginning of the film but less so as it goes on).

It should also be said that the actual photography is gorgeous, and while you can never quite believe that southern California is the Deep South, you can be persuaded that it is a distinct territory with its own characteristics, politics and landscape.

But basically this one didn’t work for me. The best film I’ve seen from 1949 remains The Third Man, and the best film I’ve seen about political campaigning remains Primary Colors.

I’m ranking All The King’s Men pretty low down my list, behind Mutiny on the Bounty but ahead of Broadway Melody. Most people who have seen it seem to have liked it more then me. You can get it here if you like.

Next up is All About Eve, which I know nothing about. I’ll also have a look at Destination Moon, which won a Retro Hugo for the relevant year.

As has become my habit, after watching the film, I read the novel on which it was based, published two years earlier and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. This is the second paragraph of the third chapter.

That was the way it had always been—when I had come home from school, when I had come back from camps, when I had come back from college, when I had come back from jobs—and that was the way it was that late rainy afternoon, on the borderline between winter and spring, back in 1933, when I came back home again, after not coming home for a long time. It had been six or eight months since my last visit. That time we had had a row about my working for Governor Stark. We always sooner or later got into a row about something, and in the two and a half years that I had been working for Willie it usually in the end came round to Willie. And if his name wasn’t mentioned, he stood there like a shadow behind us. Not that it mattered much what we rowed about. There was a shadow taller and darker than the shadow of Willie standing behind us. But I always came back, and I had come back this time. I would find myself drawn back. It was that way, and, as always, it seemed to be a fresh start, a wiping out of all the things which I knew could not be wiped out.

It’s a really good novel, and like Cimarron and Gentleman’s Agreement the screen rather failed to do it justice – in fact somewhat more so than in the other two cases. The narrator, Jack Burden, has a convincing Hemingwayish voice, and takes us through the career of Willie Stark from his beginning to his bloody end, explaining his motivations and actions partly in his own voice and partly through Burden’s fascinated gaze, and ends with a decent final chapter which wraps up all the plot threads left hanging by the central character’s death. The interlocking relationships of Stark’s political and sexual affairs make a lot more sense on the page than on the screen, especially as regards the personal links between Burden, the narrator, and Stark’s entourage and enemies. The descriptions of landscape and people are detailed and compelling. As mentioned above, there is an entire chapter on slavery and the Civil War, giving historical context to the dismal poltical environment in which Stark flourishes. The novel is still pretty white, but unlike the film there are actually black characters who actually say the occasional sentence. I must also admit that the women characters, though very well drawn, are not given a lot of agency, if anything a bit less than in the film.

I had not previously heard of Robert Penn Warren, America’s first Poet Laureate and the only writer to have won Pulitzers for both prose fiction and poetry, but I will keep an eye out for his other work. You can get this book here.

Going My Way (1944)

Posted on 14 July 2018 by fromtheheartofeurope

Going My Way was the highest earning film of 1944 in the American market; it won Best Motion Picture (the first tme that title was used for the award) and got another nine nominations and six awards, Barry Fitzgerald losing to Bing Crosby for Best Actor but winning Best Supporting Actor, Leo McCarey winning for Best Director and Best Original Motion Picture Story, Frank Butler and Frank Cavett winning for Best Writing, Screenplay and “Swinging on a Star” by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke winning Best Song. The other Best Motion Picture nominees were Double Indemnity, Gaslight, Since You Went Away and Wilson. The only one of those I have seen, oddly enough, is Wilson; the one other film from that year that I am sure I have seen is Arsenic and Old Lace, which did not get a single nomination in any Oscar category, but has definitely stood the test of time better.

Both IMDB ratings of films released that year put Arsenic and Old Lace second, after either The Conspirators or Double Indemnity, with Going My Way failing to make the top ten of either list (17th and 11th place respectively). Other films that outrank Going My Way on both lists include Laura, To Have and Have Not, Gaslight, Lifeboat, Meet Me in St. Louis, The Woman in the Window and Disney’s The Three Caballeros. Here’s a trailer from after the Oscars (which for some reason says it won eight rather than seven):

I honestly don’t think I had seen any of Bing Crosby’s films before, so this was a new one on me. Bing plays a youngish priest assigned to a New York parish to take the reins from a much older priest (played by Barry Fitzgerald, who we last saw as the boxing trainer in How Green Was My Valley). He wins the hearts of all through his musical talents, and saves the church from a rapacious mortgage owner by selling a hit song with the help of the church choir (who he has recruited from the ranks of the local delinquent teenagers) and his opera-singer ex-girlfriend. Alas, the church then burns down. And then he moves on to another parish.

It’s harmless stuff, and I guess the wartime mood was such in 1944 that this kind of feelgood escapism went down well with the public for reasons that we can understand. I didn’t find any of it awful, but I didn’t find any of it terribly memorable either. It’s pretty episodic, and you can tell in advance which way each of the episodes is going to go – apart from the destruction of the church at the end, which is a bit gratuitous.

The core is the relationship between the two lead male roles, both of whom played by actors of at least ten years’ difference in age with their characters – Bing Crosby was 41, but his ex-girlfriend from just before he became a priest is played by a 31-year-old; Barry Fitzgerald was 56, but his character has been a priest for 45 years. But they are mostly very convincing, and the chemistry develops well from suspicion to trust.

Crosby was already one of America’s favourite performers at this stage. “White Christmas” having come out several years earlier, and he does a nice warm unthreatening pastor, with a gift for music which is always used in context in the film – the songs are just songs, carrying little narrative burden.

Fitzgerald’s character actually has an arc, and the script successfully turns him from grumpy spoiler to humble patriarch.

The other performance that stood out for me was Risë Stevens as the opera singer, who does an electrifying Carmen half way through (and the following year actually did perform Carmen at the Met).

The choir actually includes one whole black kid.

I hesitated about whether to put this above or below How Green Was My Valley in my overall ranking. In the end I am putting it just below, due to its comparative lack of ambition.

Next up: The Lost Weekend, which I understand is about alcoholism.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

Casablanca, and Everybody Comes to Rick’s

Posted on 23 June 2018 by fromtheheartofeurope

Hooray! My run through the winners of the Oscar for Best Picture has brought me to what was already a favourite, Casablanca. It won the Oscar for Outstanding Motion Picture of 1943 (despite December 1942 general release). It got a total of eight Oscar nominations, winning also Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, a total of three.

Both IMDB ratings have Casablanca as the top film of 1942 (here and here), with Bambi second. For the Oscars, it was in contention with 1943 releases, for which IMDB voters rank Hitchcok’s Shadow of a Doubt top under both systems. I don’t recall seeing a single other 1943 film. (I guess I’ll be fixing that when it comes time to watch next year’s Retro Hugo nominations.)

Here’s a trailer:

You’ve probably seen it already, and if not, you really should.

I’m not going to run through my usual litany of things I liked and didn’t like (well, OK – one rather negative point is that for a film set in Africa, there are not a lot of actual Africans visible). I think it’s terrific in portraying a mood of desperation in Europe at the brink of totalitarian domination; of course by the time the film came out, the war had reached a turning point with the Allied conquest of North Africa, Guadalcanal, and the beginning of the slow agonising crumbling of the Eastern Front, and the story is one of maintaining morale for a long fight that is at least going in the right direction. It’s still brilliantly set up as good vs evil, with only Major Strasser firmly on the evil side; Renault is a bad man, but opts for good in the end.

Ingrid Bergman really glows. Part of the reason for this, I realised from TV Tropes (which is an excellent resource) is that she is often slightly out of focus, which makes her seem more luminous and attractive. I think that hers is the standout performance.

Bogart of course dominates the film, and has a much more credible character arc from defeated cynicism to newly rediscovered idealism than most movie protagonists do.

And the script! I’ll have more to say about this below, but it’s not surprising that this film got more coverage than any other in the American Film Institute’s list of the hundred most memorable lines in cinema. (It got six: “Here’s looking at you, kid”; “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”; “Play it, Sam. Play ‘As Time Goes By'”; “Round up the usual suspects”; “We’ll always have Paris”; and “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”) And there are some memorable exchanges as well.

Captain Renault: By the way, last night you evinced an interest in Señor Ugarte.

Victor Laszlo: Yes.

Captain Renault: I believe you have a message for him?

Victor Laszlo: Nothing important, but may I speak to him now?

Major Heinrich Strasser: You would find the conversation a trifle one-sided. Señor Ugarte is dead.

Ilsa: Oh.

Captain Renault: I am making out the report now. We haven’t quite decided yet whether he committed suicide or died trying to escape.

Captain Renault: I’ve often speculated why you don’t return to America. Did you abscond with the church funds? Run off with a senator’s wife? I like to think you killed a man. It’s the Romantic in me.

Rick: It was a combination of all three.
Rick: How can you close me up? On what grounds?

Captain Renault: I’m shocked! Shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.

[a croupier hands Renault a pile of money]

Croupier: Your winnings, sir.

Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much.

[aloud]

Captain Renault: Everybody out at once.

I could go on, but I won’t.

The scene that always gets me is the battle of the anthems, when Laszlo interrupts Die Wacht Am Rhein with the Marseillaise; I can’t watch it without sobbing. The emotional charge no doubt comes from the fact that at least ten of the speaking characters actually were played by refugees.

This all may help explain why it is quite so powerful:

Well, this is going right to the top of my list of Oscar winners. I don’t know if anything will come close.

Now, it’s generally forgotten that Casablanca was actually based on a play, Everybody Comes to Rick’s, by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison. The play had not been produced before the studio bought it, but it has been staged a couple of times in recent years. Here is the opening of the third scene (Act 2 Scene 2):

Place: The bar of Rick’s Cafe.
Time: That evening.
Once again we see Rick’s as it was in Act 1, Scene 1.
The room is brilliantly lit. There is laughter and chatter, but it is earlier in the evening than in the first act, and tho place is not so crowded.
The RABBIT is sitting at the piano, attired as he was in the first act, playing and singing softly. Rick’s table is unoccupied, but there is a reserved sign on the other left front table as usual. The RABBIT is obviously nervous and distrait. He continually glances at the door, and then mops his head with a handkerchief. Shortly after the CURTAIN RISES, the door opens and RICK, haggard and worn, enters. He is dressed as we last saw him, and his costume is incongruous in this gathering. The RABBIT immediately leaves the piano and goes to Rick, RICK pats him on the shoulder, and takes a drink at the bar. The RABBIT evidently wants to talk but RICK shoves him toward to piano, and climbs the stairs behind the bar. The RABBIT shakes his head worriedly, and returns to the piano. Shortly after RINALDO, also attired as he was in Act One, Scene One, enters. He glances around, openly searching for Rick, but upon failing to find him, goes to the piano and the RABBIT stops playing.
Rinaldo: Good evening, Rabbit.
Rabbit: Evening, Captain Rinaldo.

The similarities, especially near the beginning, jump out at any reader who knows Casablanca – some of Burnett and Alison’s lines survived unchanged to filming, which makes it a bit rough that they did not share in the Oscar for the screenplay. “As Time Goes By” was theirs. So were “Play it, Sam”; “We’ll always have Paris” and “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world…” At the same time, the film is a considerable improvement on the original. The battle of the anthems is there, but on stage the Germans are allowed to finish singing rather than be interrupted.

The character of Sam is crucially upgraded in the film as well. It’s odd, because of all characters his lines are possibly least changed (well, him and Ugarte); but the fact that he is just called “the Rabbit” in the theatre script and speaks in dialect is pretty demeaning. Dooley Wilson invests the part with considerable dignity, but so do the other actors.

Even more crucially, the female lead of the play is not a twenty-something Scandinavian but a thirty-something American, Lois Meredith, who got to know Rick in Paris in 1937 when both were cheating on their respective spouses; she has now ended up with Laszlo, and explicitly sleeps with Rick to try and get the letters (whereas we are left wondering a bit about Ilsa in Casablanca). Laszlo too is less heroic, his dispute with the Germans being about money as much as politics. Luis Rinaldo (rather than Louis Renault) and Rick himself are also much less attractive characters; it’s difficult to care as much about what happens to them as to their film counterparts. Also – complete spoiler – at the end, though Lois and Laszlo make their getaway, Strasser is not shot but instead arrests Rick for helping them escape, which makes one wonder what the point was.

It’s a bit cruel to say (as one critic did) that Everybody Comes to Rick’s is the worst play ever written, but it certainly isn’t up to the mark of its descendant. If you want to judge for yourself, you can download it from here.

My next Oscar-winner is Going My Way, of which I know nothing more than that it is a musical starring Bing Crosby.

Mrs Miniver, film and book

Posted on 21 April 2018 by fromtheheartofeurope

Mrs Miniver won the Oscar for Outstanding Motion Picture in 1942. It got a total of twelve Oscar nominations, and apart from Outstanding Motion Picture also won in Best Director, Best Actress (Greer Garson in the title role), Best Supporting Actress (Teresa Wright as Carol), and Best Black-and-White Cinematography, a total of six. The only other 1942 film that I am sure I have seen is Casablanca, which counts as 1943 for Oscar purposes, though I may also have seen Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon. My knowledge is about to improve, however, as this year’s Retro Hugos include six films from 1942 among the finalists. (Since you asked: Bambi, Cat People, The Ghost of Frankenstein, I Married a Witch, Invisible Agent and Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book.)

Both IMDB ratings put Casablanca top, and Mrs Miniver in the top dozen but not the top half-dozen – 7th on one system, 11th on the other. Bambi, Saboteur and To Be or Not To Be are also ahead of Mrs Miniver on both systems. Here’s a contemporary trailer:

I enjoyed it. I can see why it went down well at the time. It’s a heartfelt, uplifting, warm story of ordinary upper-middle-class English folk caught up in the Second World War. In the midst of everything, the Minivers’ son Vincent falls in love with the grand-daughter of the lady of the manor; and, in an unexpected twist, the girl rather than the boy is killed in an air-raid. Garson and Wright deserved their Oscars.

Least favourite bit: Walter Pigeon, as Mrs Miniver’s husband Clem, and Teresa Wright, as the granddaughter of the manor (and in due course the Minivers’ daughter-in-law) are not really trying very hard to do English accents. Clem of course might have been a Canadian immigrant, but Carol is supposed to be English aristocracy.

Also not great: the lower classes are there for comic relief. The American audience is expected to empathise with the minivers but giggle at the villagers and servants. (Having said which, Henry Travers got a nomination for his role as Mr Ballard the station-master and amateur rose grower.)

Odd social point: the Minivers sleep in separate beds. Was that as far as the film makers thought they could get away with, in terms of suggesting a marital relationship?

There are three great set pieces in the film, which is generally tightly written and filmed. The first is a long sequence in the middle where Mrs Miniver finds a stranded German airman in her kitchen; Clem is away on a mission (helping with the Dunkirk evacuation as it turns out) and she must use her wits to prevail. It’s electrifying. (The German is played by Helmut Dantine who pops up again in Casablanca.)

The second is shortly after, Mrs Miniver’s confrontation with Lady Beldon (played by Dame May Whitty, who also got an Oscar nomination but lost out to her screen granddaughter) over the suitability of the potential marriage of Vin and Carol. Social anxiety about the next generation’s marriages is of course a universal, but this is well done.

And the final scene, in which the vicar (Henry Wilcoxon) preaches defiance of the enemy in a ruined church, is a pinnacle moment of propaganda – never mind that if the church was so badly structurally damaged, the congregation would certainly have met to worship elsewhere. Here it is with Spanish subtitles.

Off-screen note: Greer Garson married Richard Ney, who plays her screen son here, the following year. It didn’t last.

In conclusion: It’s a wholesome enough film, whose propaganda elements are perhaps a little too obvious to ignore 75 years later. I’m ranking it just ahead of How Green Was My Valley, last year’s winner, and just below Grand Hotel, which has a slightly stronger (and more numerous) ensemble and does more interesting things with them. You can get it here.

The film varies much more from the book than any other adaptation I have seen so far in this series. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

The Miniver family had a passion for fireworks; and a fireworks display in a small London garden is an emasculate thing, hampered at every turn by such considerations as the neighbours, the police, and the fragility of glass and slate. So on Saturday morning they picked up Vin at Eton and drove across country to Starlings. Mrs. Miniver was relieved to find that public school had not made him too grand to enjoy playing road competitions with the two younger children. He was, like his father, a timeless person, uninfluenced by his own age and unconscious of other people’s. Judy was quite different. She was as typically nine now as she had been typically six, and three. Age, to her, was an important and exciting quality: she was never quite at ease with other children until she had asked them how old they were. As for Toby, he remained, in this as in most other matters, unfathomable.

The book is a series of brief newspaper sketches about the Miniver family, who are slightly better off than in the film (a house in London as well as in Kent, and a holiday place in Scotland). Most of the book takes place before the war (whereas most of the film is set after it breaks out). Vin is at Eton rather than Oxford. One or two incidents from the book survive into the film but the screenplay is generally new material.

It’s actually rather charming, somewhat reminiscent of Mrs Dalloway (which had been out for over a decade and must have been known to the author, Jan Struther, real name Joyce Anstruther). There is no plot to speak of, but there are some lovely observations of parenthood and marriage, and some less deep reflections on English society (as you would expect from a column in The Times). I think this was the author’s only prose fiction; she also wrote humorous poetry and essays. Despite being an agnostic, she wrote several hymns including Lord of All Hopefulness. It’s free here or you can get a hard copy here.

Next up in this series is Casablanca. But I need to get through the Hugo and Retro Hugo finalists first.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

How Green Was My Valley

Posted on 24 March 2018 by fromtheheartofeurope

How Green Was My Valley won the Oscar for Outstanding Motion Picture in 1941, the first of three years in which the award had that name. It got a total of ten Oscar nominations, and apart from Outstanding Motion Picture also won in Best Director (John Ford, for the third of four times), Best Supporting Actor (Donald Crisp as Gwilym Morgan), Best Art Direction (Black and White) and Best Cinematography (Black and White).

Infamously, the Oscar voters ranked it ahead of Citizen Kane, which is now universally ranked as the best film of 1941 (or indeed as the best film of all time by some), and also The Maltese Falcon, which is ranked second on both IMDB systems. Dumbo is third on both systems; How Green Was My Valley makes fourth place on one system but only seventh on the other. At present writing, the whole film is on Youtube here. Here is a contemporary (but post-Oscars) trailer.

I’m not going to make invidious comparisons with Citizen Kane, but I wasn’t especially blown away by this, and in my personal ranking of Oscar-winning films it’s going just above the midpoint, below Grand Hotel and above Gone With The Wind (which loses points for racism). A lot of other people like it more than I did, and I’m pondering why I bounced off it. I feel in the end that the tone is emotionally uneven; the overall story is one of family tragedy, as the younger generation are lost to industrial accident and emigration, and I didn’t feel that the freight of the plot was sufficiently reflected in the script or incidental music. Maybe tastes have changed (and maybe my tastes are just weird), but the various tragic events of the film seem to just happen and then life moves on to the next tragic event. Maybe real life is actually like that.

The choral music is good, but I found the orchestral music sometimes unreasonably chirpy; judge for yourself in this video (whose owner has disabled embedding).

It is a film that tries to grapple with the economic issues of the Great Depression: some of the miners go on strike, some are sacked because cheaper workers are available from the ranks of the unemployed elsewhere, the owner’s son gets his pick of the local girls, fatal accidents are all too common. Yet this is moored in a framing narrative which seems positive and nostalgic, suggesting that the problems all happened later than the time being remembered:

There is no fence nor hedge around time that is gone. You can go back and have what you like of it, if you can remember. So I can close my eyes on my valley as it is today, and it is gone, and I see it as it was when I was a boy. Green it was, and possessed of the plenty of the Earth. In all Wales, there was none so beautiful. Everything I ever learned as a small boy came from my father and I never found anything he ever told me to be wrong or worthless. The simple lessons he taught me are as sharp and clear in my mind as if I had heard them only yesterday. In those days, the black slag, the waste of the coal pits, had only begun to cover the sides of our hill. Not yet enough to mar the countryside, nor blacken the beauty of our village, for the colliery had only begun to poke its skinny black fingers through the green.

Another part of my problem is that the book is set over a period of several years in the lives of the Morgan family (father, mother, six sons and one daughter), so the viewpoint character, youngest son Huw, starts as a young schoolboy and by the end has turned down a university place to work down the mine. Huw is played by Roddy McDowell, in the first of his major screen roles. The film was released just after his thirteenth birthday so he would have been twelve while it was being made. I think it’s a tremendously assured performance, but the fact is that the plot needs him to be several years older by the end of the story.

I’m not going to be too curmudgeonly. The film looks fantastic (apparently they decided to do it in black and white when they realised that the colours of the California vegetation are insufficiently Welsh).

The performances are generally excellent, although (perhaps unsurprisingly) nobody sounds very Welsh. In particular, Donald Crisp and Sara Allgood are great as the Morgan parents Gwilym and Beth; he won an Oscar for it, and she was nominated.

Anna Lee (left) as daughter-in-law Bronwen and Maureen O’Hara (right) as daughter Angharad are very luminous (though apart from Huw the brothers are rather interchangeable). Indeed, the film gets rather good marks for the portrayal of women – Beth goes and confronts the men of the village on a political issue (though she is wrong and they are right) and poor Angharad marries the wrong man and is sympathetically treated by the script.

Walter Pidgeon is also tremendous as the preacher Mr Gruffudd, mentor to Huw and thwarted suitor of Angharad, though he (perhaps wisely) does not even attempt to disguise his New Brunswick origins.

A lovely Irish factoid which I found on IMDB (backed by the Irish Times): John Loder, who plays the oldest Morgan son, Ianto, and Arthur Shields, who plays the creepy deacon Mr Parry, had fought on opposite sides in the 1916 Easter Rising. Shields, then aged 20, was subsequently interned in Frongoch, getting an early involuntary exposure to Wales; Loder’s father, General W. H. M. Lowe, was the general to whom Padraig Pearse surrendered – indeed, Loder, aged 18, was present at the surrender and was detailed to accompany Pearse in the staff car that drove him to Kilmainham. About a third of the way through the film they confront each other – Loder is on the right of the first of these two shots. One hopes that they had got over any residual differences in the intervening 25 years.

And let’s finish, literally, on a high note: here is the performance of Cwm Rhondda which opens the film.

Next up is Mrs Miniver, of which I know nothing at all.

The book is much much better than the film. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

We learnt sums and letters, some history and the names of towns and rivers and where they were. Mrs. Tom Jenkins had come from Caernarvon where her father had been a book seller, so, of course, she knew a lot.

The characterisation of the Morgan siblings is much better; the politics makes a lot more sense; the change in the economics of mining over the decades of the story is well conveyed; the spoil tip, ever increasing in size, hangs over the village as an ominous threat (this in a book written thirty years before Aberfan); eveyone actually sounds Welsh. It is an effective portrayal of the violent, oppressive society where an unmarried mother is outcast while the father of her child gets sympathy (and even attending a theatrical performance can lead to disgrace). In one particularly chilling chapter, a young girl is murdered and the killer is quickly identified and lynched by the villagers. Llewellyn built a myth about himself from the book that may not have been entirely true, but considered as a Bildungsroman conveying a fictional time and place, I think it is a great book. You can get it here.

Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell

Posted on 27 February 2018 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

She [Scarlett’s mother, Ellen O’Hara] would have been a strikingly beautiful woman had there been any glow in her eyes, any responsive warmth in her smile or any spontaneity in her voice that fell with gentle melody on the ears of her family and her servants. She spoke in the soft slurring voice of the coastal Georgian, liquid of vowels, kind to consonants and with the barest trace of French accent. It was a voice never raised in command to a servant or reproof to a child but a voice that was obeyed instantly at Tara, where her husband’s blustering and roaring were quietly disregarded.

Having watched the film, it took me ages to get through the book, which at 1056 pages is the longest I have read since A Suitable Boy. I can see why it was such a best-seller in its day (it tops the Publisher’s Weekly lists for both 1936 and 1937, and won the Pulitzer Prize); it’s a great story of a strong woman in adverse times, which is both very feminist and also thoroughly racist.

Although it’s so long, it wears its length much better than the film. The second half in particular, once the war is over, gels much more effectively plot-wise, with Scarlett becoming tougher and tougher to the point where she steals her sister’s lover, uses forced labour in her mills, and puts profit above reputation by cultivating the occupiers of Atlanta. The O’Hara family background is given more detail, explaining the oddity of an Irish Catholic immigrant who is also a slaveholder (he won the land in a poker game). There is a lot more about the politics of the time (while making clear Scarlett’s own rather limited interest in that side of things). The film jumps between the high points of the second half of the story (skipping only the scene where Tara is raided by Union troops, which perhaps was a bit much for general distribution); it might have been better to concentrate more on a smaller number of plot strands. A couple of really interesting characters in the book are omitted from the film, notably Will Benteen, the Confederate veteran who ends up managing Tara and marrying Scarlett’s sister Suellen.

The book’s treatment of race and slavery is much worse than the film’s. Slavery was a good system, especially for the house slaves, and the field hands were too stupid to deserve anything better. Silly Northerners take Uncle Tom’s cabin seriously. The Ku Klux Klan are heroic gentlemen who act only to restore order when the Northern occupiers fail (and Scarlett’s carelessness is anyway responsible for them killing people). The end of slavery means a nastier and less civilised society (as personified in Scarlett’s journey from Southern belle to hard-nosed entrepreneur); the old days are gone with the wind.

You can get it here.

Rebecca (1940 film and 1936 novel)

Posted on 17 February 2018 by fromtheheartofeurope

Rebecca won the Academy Award for Outstanding Production of 1940, the last time the award had that name; I caught the end of The Great Dictator on TV once, but otherwise have not seen any of the other nominees. Rebecca got another ten nominations, but won only one, for Best Black and White Cinematography. Doing my homework for nominating and voting in the 1941 Retro Hugos, I watched Pinocchio, The Thief of Bagdad, The Invisible Man Returns and bits of Fantasia. (Worth noting that Pinocchio and Fantasia won the two Retro Hugos.)

Both IMDB systems have Rebecca third on their list of great films of 1940; one ranking has Pinocchio first and The Great Dictator second, and the other has the same two at the top but in the opposite order. It has a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes, though. Get the DVD here. Good quality excerpt. Here’s a contemporary trailer:

I normally like to run through previous appearances by the cast, but as far as I can tell none of them was in any of the previous Oscar-winning films. We will see some of them again, but it is striking that in many cases, the actors’ indivisual IMDB entries cite Rebecca as the most significant film of their careers. Not being a film buff, I haven’t seen much Hitchcock – just The Lady Vanishes, North by Northwest and Psycho. This is the only Hitchcock in the sequence of Oscar winners. In his cameo appearance, his face is invisible, as he walks past the London phone kiosk where Favell is finishing his call.

Edited to add: Two people have already mildly chided me for not saluting George Sanders, visible here, as the odious Favell. I will own that mistake; he is great too, though not as great as the leads.

I’m not going to enumerate the film’s faults (OK, i’ll mention one fault: the fake driving scenes), because I thought it was the best Oscar-winner I have seen so far. If you don’t know the story, it’s based on a popular novel of the day whose unnamed narrator marries a mysterious Englishman who owns a huge house in Cornwall, where his recently deceased first wife seems to still maintain her influence to deadly effect. The tension is superbly ratcheted up during the first half of the story, up until the disastrous fancy-dress ball, with the main characters very well delineated and music so manipulative that you barely notice it at the time. It’s not as enjoyable as the two Frank Capra comedies, but it’s very compelling and it lingers in the mind long after you’ve finished watching it. The return to black and white of course makes it even spookier.

Joan Fontaine, whose sister Olivia de Havilland was in Gone With The Wind last year, just glows as the nameless second Mrs de Winter.

We are told in the book that Maxim de Winter is 45, and Laurence Olivier at 33 is a bit too young and the make-up doesn’t quite conceal his age, but he is utterly convincing as a character – from smoulderingly standoffish and arrogant to dependence on his new wife.

The denouement of the film has a significant difference from the book.Rebecca died accidentally during an argument with Max, rather than him shooting her.The original revelation would I guess have been too much for Hollywood, another example of something from the source text being toned down for the screenplay. But the corrosive effect of Rebecca’s legacy on the relationship between the two central characters is the same, vivid and painful to watch.

Judith Anderson is spectacular as the creepy housekeeper Mrs Danvers. There’s a very strong suggestion that she was one of Rebecca’s lovers; it’s absolutely explicit both in the film and the book that she was infatuated, and the film Danvers is much closer to Rebecca in age than her original in the book.In the film, she dies in the fire that destroys Manderley, which is dramatically appropriate.Many years later she played the High Priestess T’Lar in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.

And while we are on SF links, it is pretty clear that the long driveway to Manderley, which the newly-wed de Winters approach in the rain, inspired the similar scene in the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Really great film. Next up is How Green Was My Valley, of which I know nothing at all.

I had previously read the novel back in 2004. Here is the second paragraph of the third chapter, in which the unnamed narrator is still working as a paid companion for an impossible rich American in Monte Carlo:

Funny to think that the course of my existence hung like a thread upon that quality of hers. Her curiosity was a disease, almost a mania. At first I had been shocked, wretchedly embarrassed when I watched people laugh behind her back, leave a room hurriedly upon her entrance, or even vanish behind a Service door on the corridor upstairs. For many years now she had come to the Hôtel Côte d’Azur, and, apart from bridge, her one pastime, which was notorious by now in Monte Carlo, was to claim visitors of distinction as her friends had she but seen them once at the other end of the post-office. Somehow she would manage to introduce herself, and before her victim had scented danger she had proffered an invitation to her suite. Her method of attack was so downright and sudden that there was seldom opportunity to escape. At the Côte d’Azur she staked a claim upon a certain sofa in the lounge, midway between the reception hall and the passage to the restaurant, and she would have her coffee there after luncheon and dinner, and all who came and went must pass her by. Sometimes she would employ me as a bait to draw her prey, and, hating my errand, I would be sent across the lounge with a verbal message, the loan of a book or paper, the address of some shop or other, the sudden discovery of a mutual friend. It seemed as though notables must be fed to her, much as invalids are spooned their jelly; and though titles were preferred by her, any face once seen in a social paper served as well. Names scattered in a gossip column, authors, artists, actors and their kind, even the mediocre ones, as long as she had learnt of them in print.

When I first read it, I wrote this:

I almost gave up halfway through, as the first half of the book was so relentlessly depressing, and I spotted what was going to happen at the fancy dress ball miles in advance. But then the twist almost in the next chapter took me completely by surprise, and so did the final twist at the end.

A heavily spoiler-ridden preface in my Virago edition by Sally Beauman (author of the “sequel”, Rebecca’s Tale) claims that du Maurier manages to avoid slipping into too much melodrama, a large claim that I can’t completely agree with. She also makes the inevitable comparison with Jane Eyre. Self-effacing orphan heroine tring to cope – check. Dominant husband with dark secret about his first wife – check. Embarrassing party – check. House burns down – check. Actually the nameless narrator of Rebecca is a much less interesting character than Jane Eyre, who at least stood up for herself now and then.

Re-reading it, I felt that the film version of the heroine is more gutsy than her paper original, and it’s largely due to Fontaine’s performance – she isn’t given much comfort from the script, which as noted above varies only slightly from the book. But it is enjoyably, tautly written, and still difficult to put down even when you know what is going to happen. You can get it here.

Gone With The Wind

Posted on 3 February 2018 by fromtheheartofeurope

Gone With The Wind won the Academy Award for Outstanding Production of 1939; for once, I have actually seen two of the other Best Picture nominees, Ninotchka and of course The Wizard of Oz. It won another seven competitive Oscars and two honorary ones, a sweep that was not exceeded for decades. I have actually seen two other 1939 films, which makes this by far my best year up to now – back in the early 1980s the BBC showed the Basil Rathbone The Hound of the Baskervilles and the less memorable The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

IMDB has this at the top of its 1939 list on one system, The Wizard of Oz winning on the other. Adjusted for inflation, Gone With the Wind is the top-grossing film of all time (narrowly ahead of the original Star Wars), and also apparently holds the record for cinema tickets sold in (at least) both the USA and the UK. (I can’t find figures for Ireland. Incidentally, the first ever cinema in Ireland was owned and operated by James Joyce, subsequently better known for other things.) Here’s a trailer.

I’m going to note here a couple of actors who are back again from other recent Oscar winners. I’ll get to Clark Gable later, but here’s Eddie Robinson as Scarlett’s aunt’s enslaved coachman, having been Rheba’s boyfriend Donald in last year’s You Can’t Take It With You. They have tried to age him up, not with total success.

And here’s Henry Davenport as Dr Meade, having been the night judge in You Can’t Take It With You and also the Chief of Staff of the French army in The Life of Émile Zola. I don’t know if there are other actors who managed to be in the Best Picture winner in three or more successive years; I’ll keep counting.

To get the most important bit out of the way: Gone With The Wind is racist and gives a positive account of slavery. This is made absolutely clear with the film’s opening statement.

The war is entirely portrayed as a struggle to preserve a whole romantic and chivalrous way of life, which is doomed because of its failure to invest in its own defence. Both Rhett Butler and Ashley Wilkes spot early on that the war will be lost; nobody ever states out loud that the reason for the war was slavery. All the Northerners are bad guys. All the black characters are happy in their relationship with their white masters. Most of them are disarmingly stupid (a particular shout to Butterfly McQueen, who must have been gritting her teeth as she delivered Prissy’s lines).

Apparently the NAACP were consulted on the script, and advised against the use of the word “darkie” instead of “nigger” and that the Ku Klux Klan should not be explicitly referenced (as they are in the book), so it could have been even worse. And also on the plus side, Hattie McDaniel was the first ever black actor to win an Oscar for her performance as Mammy, though she was of course excluded from the film’s launch in Atlanta and the role itself is not exactly liberating.

(Incidentally, Barbara O’Neil plays Scarlett’s mother despite being only three years older than Vivian Leigh.)

The second worst thing about the film is that it is simply too long. The book was of course hugely popular, and its many fans would have wanted servicing. Six of the twelve early Oscar-winners I have seen so far were based on books and another on a short story (two of the other five were adapted from stage plays, the remaining three were original material). Gone With The Wind deviates least from the printed original, and is the poorer for it. Its very length was part of the reason for its fame, of course, but it could easily have lost an hour and been better. The first half has a tremendous impetus as the Old South disintegrates, but once the war is over, the narrative thrust has gone, and we slip into a series of somewhat disconnected episodes from post-war life, ending with Rhett’s dramatic rejection (which one can anticipate from his very first scene). I think the last scene misses the target; surely Rhett has made the right decision, to leave Scarlett, and her fantasy that she can get him back (after their atrocious behaviour to each other during the marriage) is indulged a little too much.

The incidental music is great, but again just a little too much – I watched the full version with overture, intermission and end music, and actually the overture is a bit of a disappointment as overtures go.

Like Cimarron, we have the interesting case of a text that is racist but also somewhat feminist. A lot of this is tied up in the character arc of Scarlett and her three marriages. She starts the film as a very silly teenager, with an appalling crush on poor Ashley, who marries someone else on a whim (and is quickly widowed). But at the halfway mark, she transforms herself into a powerful economic operator in her own right, and it is here that she is at her most sympathetic – she depends on her second husband’s money to start her business, but it’s absolutely clear that she is the one making the decisions. Then the arc curves down again when she finally gets together with Rhett and it doesn’t work out; and at the end she is fantasising about his return to a marriage that she herself was never fully committed to. Basically, she does better, and the audience is encouraged to identify with her more, when she is not being hassled by the men who have led her society to war and disaster. Sure, a lot of the other women characters are stereotyped, but most of the men are gallant cardboard cutouts as well. And anyway Scarlett’s story is the story; one of IMDB’s glorious factoids is that Leigh’s 2 hours, 23 minutes and 32 seconds on screen is the longest ever performance to win an Oscar. (She was the second youngest winner of Best Actress at the time, and is still the tenth youngest out of 90.)

And that brings us to the one of the film’s core strengths: the very watchable smouldering chemistry between Vivien Leigh as Scarlett and Clark Gable as Rhett. (Some credit for this also belongs to the script, which was attributed to Sidney Howard who won an Oscar for it; sadly he was killed in a farming accident before shooting even started.) We’ve had Gable twice before, in It Happened One Night and Mutiny on the Bounty, and he was good in both of those, but he is excellent here, as a rogue who rises to the occasion when challenged. Here he has very strong support from Leslie Howard as Ashley and Olivia de Havilland as Melanie.

We should shout out to Olivia de Havilland, who at the age of 101 is the only surviving lead from any Oscar-winning film of the 1930s.

I have a couple of quibbles – Leslie Howard, at 46, is really too old to be Ashley, supposedly one of the neighbourhood kids, not much older than Scarlett (who is explicitly sixteen at the start of the film); he is also way too English, and indeed the white Southern characters generally fail to have very Southern accents. This is the one scene where all four leads appear together, when the women are tending Ashley after Rhett has brought him back from the definitely-not-Ku-Klux-Klan raid.

Finally, the film looks absolutely gorgeous. Of course, it’s obviously California rather than Georgia, from the vegetation and the landscape; and Margaret Mitchell objected that Tara was far too elegant; in the book is was “built according to no architectural plan whatever, with extra rooms added where and when it seemed convenient”. These are minor quibbles. The landscapes and architecture are beautifully realised but never get in the way of the human story; we go intimate and close, we pull out to look at the bigger picture, and in particular, as conflict loomed on the other side of both oceans, we see the horrors of war. We’ve had two outright war movies so far (Wings and All Quiet on the Western Front) and one where war was a distant but fatal prospect (Cavalcade); here we don’t have a single battle scene, but a stark contrast between the gung-ho young warriors who set off to battle and the (rather few) casualties who return. Rhett’s pragmatic rather than patriotic approach turns out to be the right way to go, and Scarlett succeeds when she adopts the same strategy.

I had not seen this before, and of course I doubt that it will ever be on general cinema release again, but it is just about worth the four hours of my life it took to watch (plus time to write this review).

Next on the list is Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, where I have actually read the book, if a long time ago.

(Still reading the book – will report on it in due course.)

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

The Life of Emile Zola (1937); Zola And His Times

Posted on 30 December 2017 by fromtheheartofeurope

The Life of Emile Zola won the Academy Award for Outstanding Production in 1938; there were nine other nominees, but I have not heard of any of them. It got nominations in nine other categories and won two, Joseph Schildkraut getting Best Supporting Actor for his role as Dreyfus, and the script winning Best Adaptation; deservedly so.

However, The Life of Emile Zola does not make the top ten of either way of counting IMDB votes. There is no doubt at all about the top film from 1937 in our civilisation’s collective memory: it is Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It received only one Oscar nomination, for Best Score, and did not win.

This is the official poster for the film. I find it a bit odd that in fact Paul Muni as Zola is bearded throughout the film, but cleanshaven here. (It’s a bit less odd that he doesn’t have the same impressive girth that Zola developed in real life – worth noting that William Powell also played a slimmed-down Flo Ziegfeld last year.)

The film, based on a biography by Matthew Josephson, is another biopic, this time of crusading French journalist and writer Emile Zola. As usual, I watched it on Eurostar – it’s great the way most of these are around two hours long, exactly the time it takes the train from Brussels to London, a technological feat unthinkable eighty years ago (let alone during Zola’s lifetime). The plot is very simple: Zola as a young writer in Paris exposes the dark side of the city in his novel Nana, inspired by meeting a young prostitute; the novel’s success, and the success of his other writing, makes him complacent; he is provoked to take up the case of Alfred Dreyfus, wrongly accused of espionage by the French Army, and after much turmoil and a prolonged courtroom case, wins, only to die in a domestic accident as Dreyfus is being freed. Here’s the trailer.

There’s not much to dislike about this. There is one pretty big issue, for which the film received some criticism both at the time and more recently. In historical reality, the case against Dreyfus was deeply tinged with anti-Semitism, because he was Jewish. The word “Jew” is not mentioned once in the film. Is this a deliberate cover-up, as some have alleged, to court German audiences, or for whatever other sordid reason?

I’m not so sure. It is worth noting that the Warner brothers themselves who ran the studio, William Dieterle who directed it, Heinz Herald who co-wrote the Oscar-winning script, Joseph Schildkraut who won the Oscar for playing Dreyfus, and the film’s star Paul Muni in the title role, were all Jewish. Herald had actually fled the Nazis when they came to power, and Dieterle and Schildkraut were also from Germany and may well have still had vulnerable friends and relatives in the country. I don’t feel it’s ever my job to second-guess the responses of the oppressed; I do think that anyone who gave the Dreyfus affair even half an extra thought after watching the movie would have worked out what was going on. The point is very clearly if silently made in the shot of the officers’ roll during the scene where the French military leadership decide to frame Dreyfus:

If I may have a slightly different quibble, the women in the film don’t get a lot to do, and despite the fact that Paris between 1865 and 1905 was already a pretty multi-ethnic society, we see only white faces.

However. It’s a great story. Muni is tremendously watchable as Zola, so is Schildkraut as Dreyfus, so is Vladimir Sokoloff as Paul Cézanne. We all hate injustice, and love to see someone standing up for what is right despite the consequences. Flo Seinfeld, the subject of the previous year’s Oscar-wining biopic, ran roughshod over the feelings of his lovers, friends and business partners for the sake of his somewhat dubious art; Zola here does the same, but for the sake of freedom and justice, and certainly I found it much more sympathetic. There’s nothing particularly spectacular or innovative about the way the story is told (some decent incidental music), but if it’s a good story you don’t really need that.

I’m going to divert into a reflection on the symbolism of France and Paris in these films. In both Wings and All Quiet on the Western Front, France is a place of fascination and moral hazard. The Life of Emile Zola is set almost entirely in Paris (apart from Zola’s brief exile in London, and Dreyfus’s imprisonment on Devil’s Island). It’s clearly presented as a place of superior achievement, the centre of the cultural world, with its own drama and internal dynamics which the audience is expected to recognise and relate to. The path to An American in Paris is clear.

One last note – the memorable minor key variation of the opening phrase of the Marseillaise, which I know well from Casablanca, is used here for the French defeat in 1870.

Now that I’ve got through the first ten winners of Best Picture and its historical predecessors, I think I can give a running total of my ranking of the films so far. I actually found this pretty easy, though with slight hesitation about the ordering of 6th/7th place and 3rd/4th/5th.

10) The Great Ziegfeld (Oscar for 1936)
9) Cimarron (1930/31)
8) Cavalcade (1932/33)
7) Wings (1927/28)
6) Broadway Melody (1928/29)
5) Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
4) Grand Hotel (1931/32)
3) The Life of Emile Zola (1937)
2) It Happened One Night (1934)
1) All Quiet on the Western Front (1929/30)

Next up is You Can’t Take It With You, of which I know nothing at all.

The Life of Zola is the first Oscar-winner based on a non-fiction book, the grandly titled Zola and his time: the history of his martial career in letters, with an account of his circle of friends, his remarkable enemies, cyclopean labors, public campaigns, trials and ultimate glorification by Matthew Josephson. I got it and raced through the 500 pages. As is often the case, the film is based on just a small section of the book (eg The Duchess is based on a chapter or two of Amanda Foreman’s biographyGame Change is based on a couple of pages of the book by Heilemann and Halperin). Here is the second paragraph of the third chapter:

The city was under a reign of terror conducted by the ruthless General Espinasse, ever since the attempt on the life of Napoleon III by three Italian “anarchists,” Orsini, Pieri and Rudio. The press was muzzled completely, and the enemies of the despot were banished or silent.

I found it very interesting, particularly as I have just read a book about Ulysses, to see the connection between Zola’s radical political activity and beliefs, and (what was more important to him) his breaking the conventions of novel-writing. I may even try some of his books some day – Germinal, Nana, Thérèse Raquin And his autobiographical first novel La confession de Claude all sound promising.

A lot of what’s in the film is invented – the quarrel with Cézanne didn’t really happen like that, Nana was not his first successful novel (not even his first successful novel about Nana), he was not dragged into the Dreyfus case by the tears of Lucie Dreyfus, he wasn’t offered membership of the Academy in 1897 (but kept begging for it), he died in his bedroom with his wife rather than alone in his study, and Dreyfus was not exonerated until several years after Zola’s death. These are necessary edits of the truth to make a good movie, I suppose. On the other hand, the real-life attempted assassination of Dreyfus in 1908, while he was attending the ceremony of Zola’s interment in the Pantheon, is a dramatic end to the book that is skipped in the film. The anti-Semitism inherent to the Dreyfus case is made absolutely clear, though I’m sure that the full facts will have been even worse.

The part of Zola’s life almost completely omitted from the film is of course his love-life. As a student in a garret in his late teens and early twenties, he lived with an unnamed girlfriend who then drops out of the narrative completely. (Wikipedia quotes Henri Mitterand to the effect that her first name was Berthe.) As well as his wife Alexandrine (with whom he had no children), he had a long-term lover, Jeanne Rozerot, who bore him a son and a daughter. When he died he left all of his estate to his wife and nothing to his children or their mother. (I’m glad to say that his widow acknowledged and adopted the children, who in turn adopted the surname Emile-Zola.) Josephson conveys this as part of Zola’s general passion for life in general, and is rather critical of his wife for being too dramatic about the situation. I think Josephson could have found a bit more sympathy for Alexandrine, and Zola’s treatment of his children does not speak well of him.

It’s rather an old-fashioned biography, but a cracking good read, and it’s particularly impressive that Josephson was able to boil down vast amounts of archival research in French for an American audience. It’s also copiously illustrated with cartoons and copies of manuscripts.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

The Great Ziegfeld (1936)

Posted on 16 December 2017 by fromtheheartofeurope

The Great Ziegfeld won the Academy Award for Outstanding Production in 1937; there were nine other nominees, Anthony Adverse, Dodsworth, Libeled Lady, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Romeo and Juliet, San Francisco, The Story of Louis Pasteur, A Tale of Two Cities and Three Smart Girls. I have not seen any of them. It got nominations in six other categories and won two, Luise Rayner getting Best Actress as Ziegfeld’s first wife Anna Held, and the “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody” sequence winning for best Dance Direction. IMDB users rate it a measly 19th of the films of 1936, with The Petrified Forest top and Modern Times second.

Ziegfeld must be the first person to appear in fictional form in two Oscar-winning films – “Francis Zanfield”, obviously based on him, is the crucial stage producer of The Broadway Melody. The film is about his life from early days in Chicago in the 1890s to the present day (making it the third Oscar-winning film to cover this time period, after Cimarron and Cavalcade). Made by agreement with his widow in order to clear the debts of his estate, it presents him as a single-minded showman who used up money and women with little regards for the consequences. I have to say that I found Ziegfeld an unattractive character, and did not really feel he was worth three hours of my company. Here’s a contemporary trailer, which, like the film, goes on a bit too long.

A few interesting actors (interesting to me, anyway) among the cast: Frank Morgan, who plays Ziegfeld’s rival and eventual funder Jack Billings, and dancer Ray Bolger, who plays himself, both turn up a few years later in The Wizard of Oz as the Wizard and the Scarecrow respectively. Several of the leads also appear in the previous year’s The Thin Man, which I haven’t seen. The only actor from the film who is still living, as far as I can tell, is Ann Gillis, who plays Ziegfeld’s young friend Mary Lou in an early scene. Born in 1927, she did very little acting after the second world war, and oddly enough her last recorded film role was Frank Poole’s mother in 2001: A Space Odyssey. (She is only ten years older than Gary Lockwood, who plays Poole and was born in 1937. Maybe she’s meant to be his stepmother.)

This is one of those films where I begin to see the strength of the argument that I should have tried a different film project. I was sufficiently underwhelmed that I’m not going to bother detailing the difficulties I had with it: in brief, there’s the usual erasure of minorities (Fanny Brice is Jewish and funny, and there are two black speaking parts, Libby Taylor as Flossie, Audrey’s uncredited maid and an unnamed second maid; there’s also a chap in blackface singing “If You Knew Susie”); the central character is not all that interesting, apart from his core commitment to objectifying women; his second wife, as played by Myrna Loy under the supervision of the person she was playing, isn’t all that interesting either; and the stage spectaculars, while spectacular, can’t completely make up for the absence of much in the way of plot.

To be a little more positive, Luise Rayner is funny and moving as first wife Anna Held, and was the first actor to win Oscars two years running (she won for The Good Earth the following year). Her crucial scene is here, where she congratulates Ziegfeld on his second marriage:

And although there is far too much of it, the dancing and singing is generally great. Here’s the Oscar-winning dance number, “A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody” – deeply creepy words, but watch the choreography and staging, from about 1:20 onwards:

The Bounty Trilogy, by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall

Posted on 13 December 2017 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter of Mutiny on the Bounty:

A month sounds an age to be crowded with more than forty other men on board a small vessel at anchor most of the time, but I was making the acquaintance of my shipmates, and so keen on learning my new duties that the days were all too short. The Bounty carried six midshipmen, and, since we had no schoolmaster, as is customary on a man-of-war, Lieutenant Bligh and the master divided the duty of instructing us in trigonometry, nautical astronomy, and navigation. I shared with Stewart and Young the advantage of learning navigation under Bligh, and in justice to an officer whose character in other respects was by no means perfect, I must say that there was no finer seaman and navigator afloat at the time. Both of my fellow midshipmen were men grown: George Stewart of a good family in the Orkneys, a young man of twenty-three or four, and a seaman who had made several voyages before this: and Edward Young, a stout, salty-looking fellow, with a handsome face marred by the loss of nearly all his front teeth. Both of them were already very fair navigators, and I was hard put to it not to earn the reputation of a dunce.

Second paragraph of third chapter of Men Against the Sea:

As I looked about me I was reminded of certain lonely coves I had seen along the Cornish coast, on just such nights, and I found it hard to realize how vast an ocean separated us from home.

Second paragraph of third chapter of Pitcairn’s Island:

Although the Bounty’s stores had been shared with the mutineers who remained on Tahiti, there was still a generous amount on board: casks of spirits, salt beef and pork, dried peas and beans, an abundant supply of clothing, kegs of powder and nails, iron for blacksmith work, lead for musket balls, and the like. There were also fourteen muskets and a number of pistols. The livestock consisted of half a dozen large crates of fowls, twenty sows, two of which had farrowed during the voyage, five boars, and three goats. The island being small, it was decided to free both the fowls and the animals and let them fend for themselves until the work of house-building was under way.

The Bounty trilogy by Nordmann and Hall was the basis of the Oscar-winning movie, Mutiny on the Bounty, particularly the first of the three books (a few scenes are taken from the second and third). As mentioned previously, I have read several other treatments of the story (and found David Silverman’s 1967 Pitcairn Island on the shelves the other day), but not for quite a long time, so the 1935 film was the freshest in my mind.

The three books are pretty distinct. The first, Mutiny on the Bounty, is narrated by Byam, the fictional midshipman played by Franchot Tone in the film; the Bligh of the book is if anything even more monstrous than the Bligh of the film, and the confusion of the mutiny itself – a ten-minute spurt of late-night impulse which had long-lasting effects – better conveyed. The Tahitians are referred to invariably as “Indians”, but otherwise treated as a dignified culture which the English sailors disrupt by their presence; the only cannibal joke is directed against the cheapskate purveyors of Portsmouth, who allegedly look out for black sailors to add to their mix.

However, it’s an anti-Semitic novel – an aspect completely dropped from the film. At Spithead, when we first encounter the Bounty, “sharp-faced Jews, in their wherries, hovered alongside, eager to lend money at interest against pay day, or to sell on credit the worthless trinkets on their trays” and the second in command declares that “I’d like to sink the lot of those Jews”. Samuel, Bligh’s clerk, is described as “a smug, tight-lipped little man, of a Jewish cast of countenance” and later explicitly as “a London Jew”. In fact, the real Samuel appears to have been from Edinburgh, where a George Samuel was a burgess in 1699; so this anti-Semitism is entirely gratuitously introduced to the historical record by Nordhoff and Hall. (As indeed are many of Bligh’s portrayed acts of tyranny.)

Given what is said about so many historical characters, it’s a bit odd that Nordhoff and Hall chose to disguise the real midshipman Peter Heywood as the fictional Alexander Byam.

One of the shock moments in the film is that when the Pandora comes to Tahiti to arrest the mutineers, it turns out that Bligh is in command. In the book, as in history, he was by then on another assignment elsewhere. Otherwise the film sticks pretty closely to the book.

I read Men Against the Sea during a particularly insomniac night; it’s the shortest of the three books, told in the voice of the (historical) surgeon’s mate of the Bounty, Thomas Ledward, explaining the epic 41-day, 6,500 km journey taken by Bligh and 18 others in an 7-metre long open boat from the site of the mutiny (near Tofua, one of the Tonga islands) to Kupang at the western end of Timor, avoiding the potentially hostile shores of Australia and other islands – one man was killed at the very beginning, on Tofua. It is an extraordinary feat of navigation, and Nordhoff and Hall succeed in spinning it out; the internal tensions among the 18 survivors are easy to imagine and well portrayed. The impact of their ordeal on the men’s digestive systems also is a disturbing but reasonable detail. Interestingly, Samuel is portrayed here as just another crew member; the previous book’s anti-Semitism has disappeared. The book ends with Ledward taking his leave of Bligh, who is on his way back to London. In real life, Ledward was one of the five crewmen who died very soon after they reached Batavia (where they all went shortly after arriving in Timor).

Pitcairn’s Island, unlike the other two volumes, has no narrator, apart from the last three chapters which are told by Alexander Smith aka John Adams. Of the fifteen men (nine English and six Tahitians) who landed at Pitcairn in 1789, he was the only survivor when the island was eventually discovered by the American ship Topaz in 1808; Smith/Adams himself gave several different accounts of what had happened during the remaining two decades of his life, and one of the women who moved there in 1789 eventually returned to Tahiti and gave her own account. It’s a messy story of violence, alcoholism, and sexual confusion, in an earthly paradise – Pitcairn has the natural resources to support a couple of hundred inhabitants, but even so the small settlement disintegrated fatally.

Nordhoff and Hall dramatise some parts – Fletcher Christian here lives for a few agonising days after the inevitable killing starts, whereas most historical accounts agree that he was one of the first to die – and undersell others – I would very much like someone to write the story from the Tahitian women’s perspective, given that they outnumbered the men by three to one after the first spate of killings, and by twelve to one from 1800 when the second last mutineer died. It’s also striking that the society was a very young one – Fletcher Christian was 24 when the mutiny took place, and 28 when he was killed; the other mutineers (and presumably the Tahitian men and women they brought with them to Pitcairn) must have been mostly the same age or even younger. Nordhoff and Hall fall back on the clichés of the veteran tars, the unsophisticated “Indians” or “Maori”, and their statesmanlike leader, rather than the possible truth of the confused young men and women in an extraordinary situation. But the moment of discovery of the island by the Topaz is particularly well done, and is almost worth the read in itself.

Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)

Posted on 2 December 2017 by fromtheheartofeurope

Mutiny on the Bounty won the Academy Award for Outstanding Production in 1936, the first year in which the trophies were officially called the Oscars. There were eleven other nominees, and again I’m not going to bother to list them. It got nominations in five other categories but did not win any, making it the third and so far last film to win the equivalent of Best Picture and nothing else – the other two were Broadway Melody and Grand Hotel. In four of the other categories it was beaten by The Informer, which sounds like it’s right up my street. IMDB users rate several other films of 1935 more highly, in particular A Midsummer Night’s Dream starring James Cagney.

I had never seen either this film or the 1962 remake with Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard, but I was of course familiar with the story – as a child I read R.M. Ballantyne’s heavily sanitised 1880 children’s novel The Lonely Island, and more recently Trevor Lummis’ 1997 historical account Life and Death in Eden (and I have a feeling I read David Silverman’s 1967 Pitcairn Island too). It’s a historical film, though based on novels by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, so the first to win the Oscar which was set outside the lifetime of any of the audience. The story, as you surely already know, is of the revolt of the sailors on the Bounty, a British exploration ship in the Pacific in 1787, against the tyrannical captain William Bligh; the mutineers set the captain adrift (and, against the odds, he survived), and settled briefly in Tahiti; some of them then fled much further afield, to Pitcairn Island, where their descendants still live, while the rest were arrested by the next British ship to pass Tahiti, and tried and convicted for mutiny back in London. Here’s the trailer:

Oh look, that’s Clark Gable again, this time as the mutineers’ leader Fletcher Christian – he’s the first actor to be in the Best Picture/Outstanding Production two years running, after last year’s It Happened One Night (which he himself also won an Oscar for). Another returning face is Herbert Mundin, who played Alfred Bridges in Cavalcade the previous year, and here plays seaman Smith (who in real life was the last surviving of the mutineers on Pitcairn after the others all died horribly; he changed his name to John Adams and gave his name to Adamstown, the only settlement on Pitcairn; in the film however his character doesn’t seem to be one of those that go to the island). Here they both are with Charles Laughton as Captain Bligh:

Frank Lloyd, the director, also directed Cavalcade; Irving Thalberg, the producer, was also the producer of Broadway Melody (and died, aged 37, in 1936).

I have to say that overall, I found the film moving me rather less than some of the others I’ve watched. Having said that, once again I’ll start with the bits I liked least and work up.

LGBT erasure: No evidence that this is true, but IMDB say that according to Hollywood legend, a shot of one of the sailors pairing off with a Tahitian boy as the other men are enjoying the company of the women was cut by censors. Seems entirely plausible to me.

Charles Laughton: All three of the leading men – Charles Laughton as Bligh, Clark Gable as Christian, and Franchot Tone as the fictional midshipman Byam – were nominated for the Best Actor award, leading directly to the establishment of the Best Supporting Actor category. I was not at all impressed by Laughton here, though in fairness the script gave him little to work with. Captain Bligh is a one-note tyrant, who is given the merest smidgeon of come-uppance at the end. Laughton conveys this with a fixed scowl and carpet-chewing. It would be quite fun for a supporting character but I prefer villains with more depth.

More Act-ING: The first few scenes, set in Portsmouth with a press-gang (anachronistic) and farewells to the female relatives, feel super awkward. Everyone gets into their roles in the end (apart from those we don’t see again) but it takes them a few scenes to settle in.

Sing-ING: We keep hearing lusty choruses of sailors singing in the background, but when we see them on screen it’s clear that singing is the last thing on their minds.

Script-ING: Now that I have read the book, the script sticks rather too closely to the written dialogue, and often sounds forced.

Gender: This is a manly film about manly men, with the few speaking women as love interests, mothers or sisters. (Though there are one or two comic pedlars in port.) There is little romantic tension – Christian and Byam pretty much fall straight into the arms of their Tahitian lovers. Byam then abandons his Tahitian partner to go back and face the music in England, and we never see what happened to her. However, the film scores rather better on…

Race: Cimarron was the only film so far in this series that credited non-white actors, and that in a way that was super-problematic. (Ira “Buck” Woods did not get a screen credit for It Happened One Night.) Here we have hundreds of Tahitians playing Tahitians, with Bill Bambridge, Hollywood’s leading Tahitian actor (though there can’t have been many) playing Hitihiti, the chieftain, and leading role credits given to two women of colour, Movita (a Mexican-American, who much later married Marlon Brando, and died only in 2015) and Mamo (not Tahitian either but at least Hawaiian). The Tahitians are a complex and real society, and it’s made clear that the British agenda is ultimately one of exploitation and betrayal. It’s not massive progress, but it’s the best we’ve seen so far.

The original novel is anti-Semitic; the Jewish character doesn’t make it to the screen version.

Liberty: I’m trying to decide whether the film is slightly subversive or just anti-British (after all, it’s set less than a decade after American independence). I lean to the first option; King George III at the end grants clemency to Byams, rather than reinforcing the authority of Bligh and the judicial system; Christian goes to set up a new Utopian society on Pitcairn (where of course in reality he was killed within four years). It’s a rather manly vision of liberty, but I think it’s there if you squint. Again according to IMDB, the film was banned in the Empire of Japan as it was feared it promoted revolution. Note particularly Byams’ speech to the court (actually the only memorable dialogue in the film):

I don’t try to justify his crime, his mutiny, but I condemn the tyranny that drove him to it. I don’t speak here for myself alone or for these men you condemn. I speak in their names, in Fletcher Christian’s name, for all men at sea. These men don’t ask for comfort. They don’t ask for safety. If they could speak to you they’d say, “Let us choose to do our duty willingly, not the choice of a slave, but the choice of free Englishmen.” They ask only the freedom that England expects for every man. If one man among you believe that – *one man* – he could command the fleets of England, He could sweep the seas for England. If he called his men to their duty not by flaying their backs, but by lifting their hearts… their… That’s all.

The other actors: And that brings me to the rest of the cast, who are much less annoying than Laughton as Bligh, even though the script is not terribly exciting. Clark Gable in particular is tremendously watchable.

Cinematography: But let’s face it, the spectacular thing about the film is that they built a replica of the Bounty, filmed on board including hurricanes, sailed it to the South Pacific, got 2,500 locals to perform for the camera, and it all looks really fantastic. The stars were shipped only as far as Catalina Island, where a replica Tahitian village was built; you would hardly notice, apart from the angle of the sun. (There’s a nice bit of evasion of the new Hays Code by cutting between Fletcher Christian and Maimiti sneaking off for some alone time in the trees, then villagers dancing vigorously, then back to the couple postcoitally snuggling.) At a cost of $2 million, it was MGM’s most expensive production to date, and the money thrown at it does show on the screen. (Including canoes shipped to Tahiti from Hollywood because the local ones didn’t look authentic enough.) Whatever my complaints about the acting and politics, it looks fantastic.

I am reading the books on which the film was based, and will report back when I have finished them.

The next in this series is The Great Ziegfeld, of which I have no expectations at all except that I suppose it is about Broadway musicals, so probably has some singing and dancing.

It Happened One Night (1934)

Posted on 25 November 2017 by fromtheheartofeurope

It Happened One Night won the Oscar for Outstanding Production in 1935. Eleven other films were in contention; I won’t bother listing them. Frank Capra also won the Oscar for Best Director, Clark Gable for Best Actor, Claudette Colbert for Best Actress and Robert Riskin for Best Adaptation (now Best Adapted Screenplay), a sweep which has been repeated only twice since (by One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and The Silence of the Lambs). It ranks top of the films of 1934 on IMDB. I cannot recall ever having heard of it before starting this project.

I really enjoyed it. This was the first Oscar-winning film that I felt I could inflict on my wife without having to make too many excuses for it being a creation of its own times. As usual, I’m going to take the bits I liked least first.

Alcohol: It’s rather extraordiary to today’s sensibilities to see Peter Warne very drunk on his first appearance, and both he and Andrews père get drunk, on their own, in later scenes. In a film made in 2017, these would be clear signals of alcoholism. It’s very difficult to comprehend how alcohol abuse could ever have been portrayed as a heroic characteristic to the extent that it is here. Daniel Grossvogel has an interesting comment on this in his book Marianne and the Puritan: Transformations of the Couple in French and American Films (p. 32 if you want to check):

[Peter] is also granted the generic masculine resort to drink: Hollywood long accepted as an unvarying semiotic that the male’s hard drinking was an instance of manliness – a tough remedy used as a form of valiant concealment. But whereas the manly hero remains sober even as he drinks, comedy makes Peter truculently tipsy rather than sorrowful.

Whitewashing:The story takes us from Miami to New York, ie through the heart of the Old South, and we see precisely one black character, a cook at the first stop played by Ira “Buck” Woods, in his first (uncredited) screen role; he went on to be a leading man in black cinema in the 1940s, though his most durable work is probably the vocals for Tom’s performance of “Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby” in the 1946 Tom and Jerry short Solid Serenade.

Landscape: California does not look much like the East Coast. There are mountains in the establishing scene with the yacht supposedly in Miami (which has no mountains). The roads are Western rather than Eastern. The railway train is branded “Southern Pacific”. Note how even the scenes supposedly set in New York do not use establishing shots of famous landmarks.

The Battle of the Sexes: I thought I really wasn’t going to like this aspect of the film at first. Ellie escapes the physical control of her father in the first scene, and almost immediately slips involutarily into Peter’s guardianship. But actually her plot line turns out to be one of emancipation and personal choice, ultimately supported by her father, ending with (very tastefully implied offscreen) glorious sex with Peter. The turning point in a way is when after Peter, having bragged about his hitch-hiking skills, fails to get them a lift, she succeeds immediately by showing her leg to the next driver.

Ellie: I proved once and for all that the limb is mightier than the thumb.
Peter: Why didn’t you take off all your clothes? You could have stopped forty cars.
Ellie: Well, ooo, I’ll remember that when we need forty cars.

I once hitch-hiked across a medium-seized country (Heilbronn to Berlin, and back) with a woman called Ellen with whom I had a slightly spiky relationship, but I hope I was less smug (I was only 19).

The Inspiration for Bugs Bunny: Yes, really. Clark Gable with the carrots.

The Contemporary Technology: The bus itself is rather a star – brilliant early twentieth-century creaky technology. I watched the film on a transatlantic flight where I had three seats to myself – United Airlines not being so popular these days – but I bantered a bit with the chap across the aisle about how British Airways (or basically any other airline) are much better. Back in the old days if you wanted to travel from Miami to New York you became part of a community for the day and a half (maybe two days, in the 1930s) of the trip. That little social laboratory is conveyed very well.

While we’re on the technology, let’s shout out for the autogyro in which Ellie’s imminently spurned lover arrived at their wedding. They were used a lot in the 1930s before helicopters overtook them. I remember one being featured on Blue Peter in the 1970s.

There’s a scene with Ellie’s father on a plane as well, and the use of telegraph and the print media to carry the news of her disappearance. (It was obviously a slow news week that week, if she made the front pages.)

The Music: Unless I missed something, the sound apart from the opening titles is entirely diegetic. Clark Gable mockingly sings “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf”, which had only come out the previous year. A group of passengers on the coach sing “The Daring Young Man On The Flying Trapeze” rather wonderfully. (Wikipedia says that Walter O’Keefe made the song popular in 1934, which would make it tricky to explain why it’s sung in a film largely made in 1933; Wikipedia is however wrong, as O’Keefe actually released it in 1928 and again in 1932. I can’t be bothered to correct Wikipedia; feel free to do so yourself.) Most joyfully, Frank Capra the director provides the third verse of “Flying Trapeze” in a cameo.

The Comedy: Once Gable and Colbert have got over the setup, they are a great double-act, the best scene perhaps being where they are interrogated by detectives looking for her and put on a convincing performance of being a squabbling married couple. There are some other great sparking moments, including Peter’s threat to undress in front of Ellie (apparently sales of undershirts in America plummeted as a result), and this exchange:

Ellie: Would you believe it? This is the first time I’ve ever been alone with a man!
Peter: Yeah?
Ellie: It’s a wonder I’m not panic-stricken.
Peter: You’re doing alright.
Ellie: Thanks. Nurses, governesses, chaperones, even bodyguards. Oh, it’s been a lot of fun.

I’m also going to shout out to Roscoe Karns, as creepy fellow-passenger Shapeley, who was also a senior officer in Wings and therefore (I think; I haven’t been keeping track) is the first actor to appear in two winners of the Best Picture Oscar or equivalent.

Basically this was a lot of fun, more than I expected it to be from the first fifteen minutes. Next up is Mutiny on the Bounty.

I tracked down the original story, “Night Bus”, in the anthology No, But I Saw The Movie, edited by David Wheeler. The original author was Samuel Hopkins Adams, and it was originally published in Cosmopolitan, though Dell then brought it out as a standalone a year later. He made his name thirty years before as a young journalist investigating patent medicine scams, and also wrote risqué novels in the 1920s. None of his work is in print but some of the stories (not this one) are available electronically through various means.

The film sticks surprisingly closely to the 50 pages, the biggest deviations being i) Peter is a chemist, not a journalist, with a new process that will make him rich and turns out to be a college friend of Ellie’s cousin; i) the bus passengers are stranded on an island when the river floods and Peter steals a boat to get himself and Ellie away, rather than driving across country; and ii) modern technology resolves the story when Andrews père records his conversation with Peter on a dictaphone and plays it back to Ellie to convince her of Peter’s character – no autogyro here. But the “walls of Jericho” punchline is in the original. Two weak points in the film script are explained better in the story – Ellie goes to the Windsor Hotel in Jacksonville to take a bath (also she owns the hotel), which is why they miss the bus; and the larcenous driver Danker is portrayed more as knave than fool. Also interesting to note that “Ellie” is short for “Elspeth” not “Ellen” in the original story, and her father has two very Scottish middle names. Was their Scottishness too difficult for Hollywood to handle in the 1930s?

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

Cavalcade: film and theatre script

Posted on 18 November 2017 by fromtheheartofeurope

Cavalcade won the Oscar for Outstanding Production in 1934 (the first year in which a printed publication, in this case Time, referred to the Academy Awards as the Oscars, though apparently Walt Disney was already talking about getting an Oscar in 1931). For once, I’ve actually heard of one of the other nominated films, 42nd Street. The others were A Farewell to Arms, I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Lady for a Day, Little Women, The Private Life of Henry VIII, She Done Him Wrong, Smilin’ Through, and State Fair. Cavalcade won two other Oscars, Best Director (Frank Lloyd) and Best Art Direction (William S. Darling). The time period of eligibility was the uniquely long 1 August 1932 to 31 December 1933, so that they could switch to calendar years from 1934 onwards. I think most people would agree that the eligible film from that period which has proved to have the most staying power was the original King Kong, which of course got no nominations at all.

Although it’s a Hollywood film, it’s based on a hit West End play by Noël Coward and all the actors are English. Rather like Cimarron from two years before, it’s a family saga, but this time set in London in the years from 1889 to 1933, consisting of a series of vignettes about the Boer War, Queen Victoria’s death, the Titanic, the First World War and the consequent social disruption of the 1920s. I find it really curious that a portrait of English life (or rather of Noël Coward’s concept of upper-class English life) had such drawing power in Depression-era America. Perhas it was received as a fantasy about what life is really like in Britain. As noted below, I thought the movie was considerably more upbeat than the play.

The only Coward play I had previously seen was Blithe Spirit, in Belfast when I was a teenager; I’m trying to track that down – could it have been the Glasgow Citizens Theatre production of 1985, starring Ciaran Hinds, transported across the North Channel? It is much more coherent and less lavish than Cavalcade. Edited to add: On reflection, I think I have the wrong city, and it was the 1985 Gate Theatre production in Dublin that I saw as a teenager.

Things to note, starting with the bits I didn’t like as much:

Whitewashing: This is my sixth Oscar-winning film and so far we have seen precisely one black speaking character (and a few Native Americans), in Cimarron. The non-white population of London wasn’t huge in the 1899-31 period, but it wasn’t zero either. Having said that, the jazz band in the climactic final scene (see video below) does include several black musicians, so we are scoring a bit better than Broadway Melody.

Staginess: As with the previous year’s Grand Hotel, this was adapted from a stage play, and not everything worked as well on the screen. In particular, oddly enough, I am sure that the occasional shift of scene between family life and the music hall (or other entertainment venue) was carried out much more smoothly in the theatre, even though it would have been much less naturalistic. I thought that Clive Brook, starring as Robert Marryot, particularly didn’t seem to catch the camera terribly well. It is of course a challenge to do a film-of-a-play, but my feeling is that Grand Hotel managed the transition better.

Class politics: The central characters in the film are the upper class Jane and Robert Marryot, and the Bridges family, where parents Alfred and Ellen start as the Marryots’ servants and daughter Fanny ends up as their son’s lover. Coward (and screen adaptors Reginald Berkeley and Sonya Levien) were trying I think to treat the relationship in a natural realistic way, but it still comes across as a bit forced in the early scenes, and the social disruption of the 1920s is shown rather than told. Having said that, Una O’Connor is solid throughout as Ellen Bridges, and Herbert Mundin hams it up very attractively as Alfred.

Coherence: As with Cimarron, it’s a bunch of scenes strung together over three and a bit decades of action, which is a serial violation of the classical unities. I think in general it’s carried off a bit better than Cimarron. There is a huge jump across the whole 1920s taking us from the end of the first world war to the present day (ie 1933), and a bit of a big jump between 1900 and 1908. There is a very silly filmed sequence of knights and ladies riding across a pleasant landscape to break up the scenes (a literal cavalcade, to match the title).

Gay visibility: A very very brief late scene is set in a gay club in London. This goes further than Wings, six years before, which had a gay couple in a Paris club and a rather chaste same-sex kiss.

Performance: The standout here is Diana Wynyard, then aged 27, playing Jane Marryot who starts the story aged 31 and ends it in her 60s. I found her very convincing as wife, mother, mistress of the household and Victorian woman adrift in the twentieth century. She gets all the best lines and best scenes, and she gets the most out of them. (Unfortunately I couldn’t find any videos of her parts which could easily be included here.) I’ve noted Herbert Mundin as Alfred Bridges already. Special shout outs also to Ursula Jeans as Fanny Bridges, and to John Warburton (who much much later appeared in a Star Trek episode) and Margaret Lindsay as the doomed lovers on the Titanic in this scene (apologies for spoiling the punchline there):

Music: Long long ago I saw the 1969 film Oh! What A Lovely War, which I now realise drew on the tradition of showing and telling the story of conscription and combat through music which Cavalcade must have been an early part of. Both film and play use music to be more critical of militarism than the wording of the dialogue given to the characters. Some of the songs are traditional, some are original to Coward. The high point musically (and there are no low points from that point of view) is at the end, with Ursula Jeans as the servants’ daughter Fanny Bridges, having achieved stardom on the stage and the love of her parents’ masters’ son, singing the chilling “Twentieth Century Blues”:

This is followed by the final scene of Jane and Robert Marryot seeing in the New Year for 1933, looking forward rather happily if with regret for their losses over the years. It’s a sentimental and mildly uplifting end for the film.

After some reflection, I went and sought out the original Coward play. This is the opening of the third scene:

Principals: JANE MARRYOT, MARGARET HARRIS, EDITH HARRIS (aged 10), EDWARD (aged 12), JOE (aged 8), ELLEN.

SCENE: The same as SCENE I [the Marryots’ drawing-room].

TIME: About five o’clock on the afternoon of Friday, May 18th, 1900. When the lights go up EDWARD and JOE MARRYOT and EDITH HARRIS are discovered playing soldiers on the floor. EDWARD is aged twelve, JOE eight, and EDITH HARRIS about ten.

JOE (shooting off a cannon): Bang –bang, bang, bang.

EDITH (giving a little squeak): Oh –oh, dear!

The original play (it says in my book) cost thirty thousand pre-war pounds and kept a cast and back-stage crew of three hundred employed at Drury Lane for over a year – a spectacular in the line of the more modern West End musical. It’s particularly impressive when you remember that these were the first years of the Great Depression. The play opened just before the 1931 election which saw former Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald returned to power at the head of a mostly Conservative coalition. It was received as a patriotic, nationalist piece in tune with the needs of the times, much to Coward’s dismay; he thought he was just writing a piece about the impact of the times on an ordinary (read upper-middle-class) family, and to my eye he was attempting to portray the inevitability of the dissolution of old social structures, and to challenge the audience to get to grips with how the world was changing.

I think he was right to be dismayed. The play is more cynical than the film. The theatrical Diana Wynyard repeatedly makes anti-war comments, and is repeatedly proved right. A couple of grim scenes from the play did not make it to the film – an early fake bucolic musical number, and a scene where the teenage Marryot sons engage in dissolute behaviour with their friends. And the ending is truly chilling. The two final scenes were flipped in the film. In the original, the Marryots see in 1930, much diminished in health and happiness. Jane’s final words are:

Now, then, let’s couple the Future of England with the past of England. The glories and victories and triumphs that are over, and the sorrows that are over, too. Let’s drink to our sons who made part of the pattern and to our hearts that died with them. Let’s drink to the spirit of gallantry and courage that made a strange Heaven out of unbelievable Hell, and let’s drink to the hope that one day this country of ours, which we love so much, will find dignity and greatness and peace again.

It’s a bleak end to her role in the play. In the film, the pessimistic impact is deadened by Robert repeating “Dignity, greatness and peace” back to her, and a crowed scene of revellers singing “Auld Lang Syne” before the final titles. In the orignal play, the final song, “Twentieth Century Blues”, comes after rather than before the Marryots’ New Year scenem with some difficult but bloodcurdling stage directions:

SCENE: A Night Club.

TIME: Evening –1930.

This Scene begins with a night club in which FANNY is singing, seated on a piano. The decoration is angular and strange, and the song she is singing is oddly discordant.

TWENTIETH CENTURY BLUES

VERSE

Why is it that civilised humanity
Must make the world so wrong?
In this hurly burly of insanity
Your dreams cannot last long.
We’ve reached a headline —
The Press headline –every sorrow,
Blues value is News value tomorrow.

REFRAIN

Blues, Twentieth Century Blues, are getting me down.
Who’s escaped those weary Twentieth Century Blues.
Why, if there’s a God in the sky, why shouldn’t¹ he grin?
High above this dreary Twentieth Century din,
In this strange illusion,
Chaos and confusion,
People seem to lose their way.
What is there to strive for,
Love or keep alive for? Say —
Hey, hey, call it a day.
Blues, nothing to win or to lose.
It’s getting me down.
Blues, I’ve got those weary² Twentieth Century Blues.

When the song is finished, people rise from table and dance without apparently any particular enjoyment; it is the dull dancing of habit. The lights fade away from everything but the dancers, who appear to be rising in the air. They disappear and down stage left, six ‘incurables’ in blue hospital uniform are sitting making baskets. They disappear and FANNY is seen singing her song for a moment, then far away up stage a jazz band is seen playing wildly. Then down stage JANE and ROBERT standing with glasses of champagne held aloft, then ELLEN sitting in front of a Radio loud speaker; then MARGARET dancing with a young man. The visions are repeated quicker and quicker, while across the darkness runs a Riley light sign spelling out news. Noise grows louder and louder. Steam rivets, loud speakers, jazz bands, aeroplane propellers, etc., until the general effect is complete chaos.

Suddenly it all fades into darkness and silence and away at the back a Union Jack glows through the blackness.

The lights slowly come up and the whole stage is composed of massive tiers, upon which stand the entire Company. The Union Jack flies over their heads as they sing ‘God Save the King’.

THE END

¹ The film version has “didn’t” rather than “shouldn’t”.
² The film version ends “escape those dreary Twentieth Century Blues“ rather than “I’ve got those weary Twentieth Century Blues”.

Given the necessary scale of the theatre production (drawing-room, crowds, music-halls and the Titanic), it has been staged only a handful of times since the original 1931 West End production (including the two film adaptations). It’s an ambitious and vicious piece which would reward a determined and talented director. I’d pay money to see it on stage.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

Grand Hotel (1932 film and 1930 book)

Posted on 4 November 2017 by fromtheheartofeurope

Grand Hotel won the Academy Award for Outstanding Picture in 1932, beating seven films I have never heard of: Arrowsmith, Bad Girl, The Champ, Five Star Final, One Hour with You, Shanghai Express and The Smiling Lieutenant. It did not win any other Oscars, though one of the stars won Best Actor that year for his role in another film. The standout films for the period of eligibility (LA release between August 1931 and July 1932) are surely the Boris Karloff Frankenstein and the Bela Lugosi Dracula, both of which I’m pretty sure I have seen.

It’s an ensemble piece showcasing the talents of MGM’s biggest stars – Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Lionel Barrymore, a couple of others – as residents of a Berlin hotel over a couple of days when their lives all change, narratives intersecting. It’s based on a play which was a massive Broadway hit, in turn based on a book which was a best-seller. I liked it a lot more than I liked Cimarron. It was the second Best Picture (or equivalent) win for MGM Studios and producer Irving Thalberg after Broadway Melody. Here’s a short trailer:

To go back to my previous practice of starting from what I didn’t like and moving forward:

Whiteness: I am sorry to say that yet again there is blatant whitewashing. There is not a single non-white face to be seen on screen. In the book, based on the author’s experiences of working in Berlin’s Hotel Bristol in the 1920s, the Grand Hotel barman is black (though does not speak and is not named) and there is also a jazz band (googling reveals a fair number of black musicians in 1920s German jazz bands). Now that I have started looking for it, I am finding the whiteness of this era of Hollywood increasingly annoying.

Staginess: The film opens with a couple of the important characters info-dumping their plot lines by way of very highly staged phone calls. In fairness, this also gives an excuse for some very nice cinematography of the phone exchange. Some may feel that John Barrymore’s Baron changes his affections awfully fast for the sake of packing a lot of plot into two days of story time, but great stories often involve unusual happenings (and this particular plotline is even more unusual in the book).

It’s all good from here. In particular I’m going to call out the music: there is a certain amount of Strauss, a little Grieg, a little jazz, but most strikingly Rachmaninoff’s piano concerto becomes the Leitmotiv of Garbo’s Grusinskaya, years before Brief Encounter. It’s not intrusive and always works to enhance the action.

Cinematography: The use of the hotel set as performance space is really impressive. I’ve mentioned the phones; the revolving doors, the stairs, the corridors (galleries overlooking the central atrium, handy for filming), the round reception desk. There is lots going on but it feels busy rather than cluttered. The Baron’s climb across the balconies is well done.

Writing: Some great lines, one of which defined the career of the actor who delivered it. Here are some more.

Baron Felix von Geigern: [looking down from the sixth-floor balcony over the front desk] You know, I’ve often wondered what’d happen to that old porter if somebody jumped on him from here.
Flaemmchen: I’m sure I don’t know. Why don’t you try it and find out?

Preysing: I don’t know much about women. I’ve been married for 28 years, you know.

Dr. Otternschlag: And what do you do in the Grand Hotel? Eat. Sleep. Loaf around. Flirt a little, dance a little. A hundred doors leading to one hall. No one knows anything about the person next to them. And when you leave, someone occupies your room, lies in your bed… that’s the end.

Also I love the way that at the end, after the action is over for our central characters, a newly-wed couple are checking in for more adventures.

The Acting: I confess that the only three stars of the six who I’d heard of were Greta Garbo, John Barrymore and Joan Crawford, and the only one I’d actually seen was Garbo (in Ninotchka). But this is the first Oscar winner in this sequence I have seen that gets more than one really good performance; for my money, all six are pretty good, with perhaps a mild reservation for Lewis Shine, who as Dr Otternschlag doesn’t get as much of a story arc as the other five, but is very watchable when he gets his lines (which tend to be vivid).

Both Lionel Barrymore, as the dying accountant Kringelein, and Wallace Beery, as his bullying (but secretly failing) boss Preysing, were pleasant discoveries. Both get quite a lot to do – Lionel Barrymore in particular takes his character from scary whimpering to a place of much greater serenity.

Greta Garbo is indeed very watchable as fading ballerina Grusinskaya, and one sees why she got top billing, combining pathos and passion with a little bit of comedy. This is the film where she says “I want to be alone.” (NB contrary to legend “want”is pronounced with a “w”, not a “v”.)

Joan Crawford is even better as stenographer and woman of the world Flämmchen. She gets to spark with all of the men, and conveys both self-interest and sexiness without ever taking off a rather unsexy outfit.

But the absolute revelation for me was John Barrymore as the Baron. Terrifically suave and sexy (possibly bisexual – look at the way he chats up Kringelein), yet hiding a facade of impoverished criminality. The most memorable visual scenes are his – climbing across the balconies, the love scene with Grusinskaya, the business with Kringelein’s wallet, the assault by telephone at the end. I’d watch another film with him in it.

Next in this sequence is Cavalcade, based on a Noël Coward play, which has the second lowest rating of Best Picture Oscar winners on IMDB (beating only Cimarron), so I’m not holding my breath.

The original book was a best-seller in the USA in 1931 though it did not top the list (that honour went to The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck). Because the author, Vicki Baum, was Jewish, it was among the books burned on the Opernplatz in Berlin in May 1933 and subsequently banned by the Nazis. As well as initiating women’s boxing in Germany, with Marlene Dietrich, she published a novel or two every year from 1919 to 1957 (this was her tenth), but the only other well known one is Life and Death in Bali/A Tale from Bali, which was also filmed. Baum moved to the USA to write the script for the Broadway adaptation and then screenplay for this film, and understandably stayed there rather than move back to Germany.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Nimmt man beispielsweise Herrn Generaldirektor Preysing von der Saxonia Baumwoll A.-G., nimmt man diesen braven, durchschnittsmäßigen Geschäftsmann als Muster, dann ersieht man bald, was die Männer seiner Kaste zwischen acht und zehn im Grand Hôtel treiben. Take, for example, General Manager Preysing of the Saxonia Cotton Company. Let us take this excellent and thoroughly average businessman as an example, and then we shall see what men of his class do between eight and ten in the morning at the Grand Hotel.

The film does not in fact stray very far from the book. Small differences: in the book, Flämmchen doesn’t appear until a quarter of the way through. We get much more insight into Preysing’s and Kringelein’s marriages. The brutal murder is carried out with a heavy ashtray rather than a telephone handset. The action does move outside the hotel now and then, notably to Grusinskaya’s theatre.

Big differences: the ages of several of the main characters. Grusinskaya, played by 27-year-old Greta Garbo on screen, is old enough to have an eight-year-old grandson in the book. The baron, played by 50-year-old John Barrymore, is in his twenties in the book. (As I said, their love affair is more unusual in the book than on screen; but great stories often involve unusual happenings.) 26-year-old Joan Crawford plays Flämmchen, who is explicitly nineteen in the book, though a very worldly wise nineteen:

Flämmchen had no exaggerated opinion of herself. She knew her price. Twenty marks for a photograph in the nude. A hundred and forty marks for a month’s office work. Fifteen pfennig per page for typing with one carbon copy. A little fur coat costing two hundred and forty marks for a week as somebody’s mistress.

The other change that was inevitable for a Hollywood film is to the appearance of Dr Otternschlag, played with mild scarring by Lewis Shine; compare the book’s chilling description:

His face, it must be said, consisted of one half only, in which the sharp and ascetic profile of a Jesuit was completed by an unusually well-shaped ear beneath the sparse gray hair on his temples. The other half of his face was not there. In place of it was a confused medley of seams and scars, crossing and overlapping, and among them was set a glass eye. “A souvenir from Flanders,” Doctor Otternschlag was accustomed to calling it when talking to himself.

Otternschlag gets more to do in the book, and Flämmchen arrives late as noted above, but otherwise the main characters balance out much as they do on screen.

And it’s a good readable story, the first “hotel novel”; apparently a massive hit during its original serialisation (to the point that readers wrote in to protest the killing off of one character in a reaction reminiscent of Torchwood fans’ reaction to the death of Ianto), very firmly moored in the context of late 1920s Berlin, grappling with modernity, with unforeseen and unspeakable horror yet to come (for those of us who know the city now, it’s a bit chilling to have the still intact Gedächtniskirche as a major landmark). Everyone has their arc, and we like and sympathise with all of them, even Preysing to an extent. It’s not deep and meaningful, but it’s well done and very entertaining; and the film does it justice. My edition has a very good introduction by Noah Isenberg which added to my enjoyment.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

An American in Paris

Posted on 1 November 2017 by fromtheheartofeurope

I broke my sequence of films that won the Oscar for Best Picture to leap forward to 1951 and an old favourite. An American in Paris beat four other films – Decision Before Dawn, A Place in the Sun, Quo Vadis and A Streetcar Named DesireQuo Vadis is the only other one that I was really aware of. IMDB rates the Disney Alice in Wonderland as the top film of 1951, with A Streetcar Named Desire second and An American in Paris eighth. I think the only films from that year that I have seen are An American in Paris, Alice in Wonderland and The Day The Earth Stood Still. Apart from Best Picture, An American in Paris won five other Oscars: Best Art – Set Decoration, Best Cinematography, Color Best Costume Design, Color, Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture and Best Writing, Story and Screenplay. Here’s the trailer:

The film is basically a rather skimpy romance plot, knitting together Gene Kelly as dancing and singing Jerry, Oscar Levant as pianist Adam, Leslie Caron as young dancer Lise, and support from Georges Guétary as French singer Henri, to showcase some of George and Ira Gershwin’s best music, including the title piece (which famously includes taxi horns in the orchestra).

I love this film very much, but I am still going to start by listing some of the bits of it I don’t love so much. My usual complaint: almost complete whitewashing, apart from a male dancer in West African costume during the ballet scene. Apart from that, the ballet itself maybe goes on a little too long. Jerry’s behaviour to Lise when they first meet is pretty stalkerish (though I would argue this is somewhat redeemed in that she rapidly becomes an equal in the relationship, and he gets the same treatment in reverse from Nina Foch’s Milo). The implication is that Henri is too old for Lise, and Jerry is not, but in fact Gene Kelly was three years older than Georges Guétary. The supposedly French kids in the “I Got Rhythm” scene are rather obviously American.

But I must say I can forgive almost all of this for the gorgeous cinematography, the energy and the music. Gene Kelly is at the height of his powers here, a year before Singin’ in the Rain (which incidentally got only two Oscar nominations and no wins; but has aged much better.) Here’s his hilarious opening sequence:

Leslie Caron was only 19 when this was made, and is a superb performer – she is in her mid-80s now and still at it, having umpired a cricket match on Corfu in The Durrells earlier this year.

Back in 1951, her choreography is at least as demanding as Kelly’s. As mentioned above, I very much like the way she becomes his equal in “Our Love is Here to Stay”:

I don’t know any of Oscar Levant’s other work, but it’s noteworthy that he actually knew and had worked with George Gershwin; it must have been eerie to be performing his long-dead friend’s music for what is essentially a comedy film. There is an interesting darkness in his perfomance as the soloist, conductor, orchestra and entire audience for Gershwin’s Concerto in F:

Well, it was great to revisit this. I would have eventually got to it again, between All About Eve and The Greatest Show on Earth, neither of which I know anything about. Meanwhile I’ve set my post on Grand Hotel to go live on Saturday.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

Stage version	Film version
ROSALIA: Puerto Rico You lovely island Island of tropical breezes. Always the pineapples growing, Always the coffee blossoms blowing…
ANITA: Puerto Rico You ugly island Island of tropic diseases. Always the hurricanes blowing, Always the population growing And the money owing And the babies crying And the bullets flying I like the island Manhattan Smoke on your pipe And put that in!	ANITA: Puerto Rico My heart’s devotion Let it sink back in the ocean Always the hurricanes blowing Always the population growing And the money owing And the sunlight streaming And the natives steaming I like the island Manhattan Smoke on your pipe And put that in!
ALL EXCEPT ROSALIA: I like to be in America! OK by me in America! Everything free in America For a small fee in America!	GIRLS: I like to be in America! Okay by me in America! Everything free in America – BERNARDO: For a small fee in America!
ROSALIA: I like the city of San Juan- ANITA: I know a boat you can get on. ROSALIA: Hundreds of flowers in full bloom- ANITA: Hundreds of people in each room!	ANITA: Buying on credit is so nice! BERNARDO: One look at us and they charge twice! ROSALIA: I have my own washing machine! INDIO: What will you have though to keep clean?
ALL EXCEPT ROSALIA: Automobile in America, Chromium steel in America, Wire-spoke wheel in America- Very big deal in America-	ANITA: Skyscrapers bloom in America! ROSALIA: Cadillacs zoom in America! TERESITA: Industry boom in America! BOYS: Twelve in a room in America!
ROSALIA: I’ll drive a Buick to San Juan- ANITA: If there’s a road you can drive on. ROSALIA: I’ll give my cousin a free ride- ANITA: How you get all of them inside?	ANITA: Lots of new housing with more space BERNARDO: Lots of doors slamming in our face ANITA: I’ll get a terrace apartment – BERNARDO: Better get rid of your accent!
ALL EXCEPT ROSALIA: An immigrant goes to America, Many hellos in America; Nobody knows in America Puerto Rico’s in America.	ANITA: Life can be bright in America BOYS: If you can fight in America GIRLS: Life is all right in America BOYS: If you’re all white in America
ROSALIA: When will I go back to San Juan- ANITA: When you will shut up and get gone! ROSALIA: I’ll give them new washing machine- ANITA: What have they got there to keep clean?	GIRLS: Here you are free and you have pride BOYS: Long as you stay on your own side GIRLS: Free to be anything you choose BOYS: Free to wait tables and shine shoes
ALL EXCEPT ROSALIA: I like the shores of America! Comfort is yours in America! Knobs on the doors in America, Wall-to-wall floors in America!	BERNARDO: Everywhere grime in America Organized crime in America Terrible time in America ANITA: You forget I’m in America!
ROSALIA: I’ll bring TV to San Juan ANITA: If there’s a current to turn on. ROSALIA: Everyone there will get big cheer! ANITA: Everyone there will have moved here!	BERNARDO: I think I’ll go back to San Juan ANITA: I know a boat you can get on (GIRLS: Bye Bye!) BERNARDO: Everyone there will give big cheer! ANITA: Everyone there will have moved here!


Peter Lorre (Ugarte): born László Löwenstein, in what is now Slovakia; became a film star in 1920s Berlin; being a Jew, moved to America in 1933 after Nazis took power.	Conrad Veidt (Strasser) – started acting in films 1916, married a Jew and moved to America in 1933 after Nazis took power.

Paul Henreid (Laszlo) – left Austria for England in 1935 after Dollfuss/Schuschnigg regime came to power; left England for USA to avoid detention as enemy alien in England (though Conrad Veidt spoke out for him).	Curt Bois (Pickpocket) – Jewish, left Germany in 1934 after Nazis took power.

Madeleine LeBeau and Marcel Dalio (Yvonne and Emil the croupier) – married in 1940 and fled Paris after the German invasion; Dalio was Jewish. He filed for divorce during the filming of Casablanca. She was the last surviving member of the cast until she died in 2016.

S.Z. Sakall (Carl the head waiter) – born a Hungarian Jew, became a Berlin film star in the 1920s, returned to Hungary in 1933 after Nazis took power, moved to America in 1940 after Hungary joined the Axis. All three of his sisters and his niece, as well as his wife’s brother and sister, died in concentration camps.	Helmut Dantine (Jan the Bulgarian roulette player) – Austrian anti-Nazi activist who was imprisoned in a concentration camp after the Anschluss in 1938; his parents got him released and sent to America, but they themselves died in concentration camps. I saw him a few weeks ago as the crashed German pilot in Mrs Miniver.

Leonid Kinskey (Sascha) and Gregory Gaye (banker) – both born in St Petersburg, and fled the Russian revolution.

From the Heart of Europe

Books, politics, languages and life

Tag Archives: oscars

Tom Jones: film (1963) and book (1749)

Lawrence of Arabia, and The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

West Side Story (1961)

The Apartment (1960)

Ben-Hur: movie (1959) and book (1880)

Gigi (1958), plus original book and bonus cat

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957); and book by Pierre Boulle

Around The World in 80 Days (1956); and book by Jules Verne

On the Waterfront, by Malcolm Johnson

Marty (1955)

On The Waterfront (1954)

From Here To Eternity: 1953 film, and book by James Jones

The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)

All About Eve (1950)

All The King’s Men: 1949 film and novel by Robert Penn Warren

Going My Way (1944)

Casablanca, and Everybody Comes to Rick’s

Mrs Miniver, film and book

How Green Was My Valley

Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell

Rebecca (1940 film and 1936 novel)

Gone With The Wind

The Life of Emile Zola (1937); Zola And His Times

The Great Ziegfeld (1936)

The Bounty Trilogy, by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall

Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)

It Happened One Night (1934)

Cavalcade: film and theatre script

Grand Hotel (1932 film and 1930 book)

An American in Paris