The DVD Report #171: August 31

After two years of shocks, the 1953 Oscar went to the film everyone expected to win – Fred Zinnemann’s production of James Jones’ novel about life at Pearl Harbor just before the Japanese attack in From Here to Eternity.

The film, which won eight of the thirteen Oscars it was nominated for, was a critical and box-office hit featuring memorable performances by Montgomery Clift as the sensitive hero, Burt Lancaster as his tough sergeant, Deborah Kerr as the company commander’s nymphomaniac wife, Frank Sinatra as Clift’s buddy and Donna Reed as Clift’s prostitute girl-friend, here called a “dance hall girl”. All were nominated for Oscars, the latter two winning. For Sinatra, it was a comeback after several years of decline in which his career took a back seat to then wife Ava Gardner. For Kerr and Reed, it was a career changer in that although they would go back to playing good girls for the remainder of their careers, neither would ever be thought of again as only capable of playing “nice” ladies.

Next in popularity, William Wyler’s Cinderella romance, Roman Holiday was nominated for ten Oscars and won three including Best Actress, Audrey Hepburn. It was her first major film and she beguiled even the harshest critics with her charm and ease as the runaway princess who shares a brief romance with reporter Gregory Peck.

The film also won for Edith Head’s Black-and-White Costume Design and for Dalton Trumbo’s Screenplay, credited to another writer due to Trumbo’s blacklisting.

One of the screen’s most popular and most durable westerns, George Stevens’ Shane was nominated for six Oscars including Best Picture and two Supporting Actors, Jack Palance and ten year-old Brandon De Wilde, but not star Alan Ladd or co-stars Jean Arthur and Van Heflin. The story of a stranger who helps a family, then rallies a town against the bad guys, the film’s best screens were those involving Ladd and the hero-worshiping De Wilde. Who can ever forget De Wilde’s plaintive wailing of film’s last line, “Shane! Come back!”

The film’s sole win was for Loyal Griggs’ breathtaking Color Cinematography.

One of the most popular of the many so-called sword and sandal epics of the 1950s, Henry Koster’s film of the first portion of Lloyd C. Douglas’ monumental epic, The Robe, angered many at the time as it did not contain the entire novel. The rest of the story would appear a year later in the inferior Demetrius and the Gladiators.

What The Robe had that many others of its ilk didn’t have was a convincing portrait of religious conversion in the person of Richard Burton, whose performance accounted for one of the film’s five nominations. As the Roman Tribune tasked with carrying out Christ’s crucifixion, he is transformed by his possession of the robe that Christ wears on his way to the cross.

Jean Simmons, Victor Mature and an outstanding Jay Robinson as the mad emperor, Caligula, co-star in the film that won Oscars for its Color Art Direction and Costume Design.

Rounding out the Best Picture nominees was Joseph L. Mankiewciz’s film of Julius Caesar, the most successful Shakespearean adaptation to date that wasn’t produced and directed by Laurence Olivier.

Oscar voters of the day were most impressed with Marlon Brando’s portrayal of Mark Antony and gave him his third Best Actor nomination in succession. The BAFTAs gave Brando their Best Foreign Actor award while giving John Gielgud (Cassius) their Best British Actor award. The National Board of Review preferred James Mason (Brutus) to both of them.

Louis Calhern (Caesar), Edmund O’Brien (Casca), Greer Garson (Calpurnia) and Deborah Kerr (Portia) were also starred in the film that won an Oscar for its Black-and-White Art Direction.

The year’s Best Actor Oscar went to the only actor not nominated for a film that also up for Best Picture - William Holden for the prisoner of war drama, Stalag 17.

Wrongly suspected of being the camp informant, Holden’s cynical hero was typical of the roles he played from the late forties to his death in 1982. The film also won nominations for Billy Wilder’s direction and for Robert Strauss’ supporting role as the film’s comic relief.

The three women vying for Best Actress against Hepburn and Kerr were Mrs. Sinatra – Ava Gardner in Mogambo, French import Leslie Caron in Lili and unknown Maggie McNamara in The Moon Is Blue.

Mogambo was unusual in that it was a remake of 1932’s superior Red Dust, directed by John Ford who did not usually do remakes, as a favor to Clark Gable who also starred in the original opposite Jean Harlow and Mary Astor. Gable, looking older but not especially wiser, was nevertheless well paired with his two new co-stars, Gardner and Grace Kelly, both of whom were nominated for Oscars – Kelly in the supporting category. Gardner is especially good as the roving prostitute, excuse me, showgirl, now that the Production Code was in full force.

In one of her three Hollywood signature roles, the others being in the still to come Gigi and Fanny, Leslie Caron was a treasure as the naïve country girl who becomes a carnival worker who falls in love with the puppets she works with, not realizing it’s really the gruff puppeteer, Mel Ferrer, she loves. Ferrer and Jean –Pierre Aumont are also in top form in the film which was nominated for six Oscars and won one for its Score. Oddly the film’s unforgettable theme song, “Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo” was not nominated.

Jaw-droppingly bad and painful to watch now, Otto Preminger The Moon Is Blue was considered a big deal back then because of the puncture wounds it gave the Production Code in using then taboo words like “virgin” and “pregnant”. It all seems pretty silly now as do the performances of William Holden, David Niven and Ms. McNamara, who may well be the most obscure Best Actress nominee of all time. She only made three more films and appeared in several episodes of long forgotten TV series.

The year’s most popular actress, aside from Oscar winner Hepburn, was probably Jean Simmons who starred in three Oscar nominated films, and who won the National Board of Review award for Best Actress for all three performances.

In addition to The Robe,she starred as Ruth Gordon in The Actress with Spencer Tracy and Teresa Wright as her parents, and Young Bess as Elizabeth I with Stewart Granger, the equally prolific Deborah Kerr and Charles Laughton reprising his Oscar winning role as Henry VIII.

The Actress was Oscar nominated for Black-and-White Costume Design, while Young Bess was nominated for Color Art Direction and Costume Design.

Doris Day apparently didn’t merit Oscar consideration either for her marvelous performance in David Butler’s Calamity Jane,but the film was nominated for Scoring and Sound and won for Day’s marvelous warbling of “Secret Love”.

Nominated for three Oscars including one for its Score, Vincente Minnelli’s The Band Wagon is generally, and rightfully, considered Fred Astaire’s best musical, at least the best one in which he did not co-star with Ginger Rogers. Instead he’s paired with the enticing Cyd Charisse, eh hilarious Oscar Levant and Nanette Fabray and the acerbic Jack Buchanan. Oddly the film’s theme song, the exhilarating “That’s Entertainment”, like the equally memorable “Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo” from Lili, was not nominated for an Oscar.

Nominated only for Thelma Ritter’s gutsy portrayal of a police informant, Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street remains one of the best remembered films of the year. Although Ritter’s performance is indeed the film’s highlight, Richard Widmark and Jean Peters also give career high performances under Fuller’s stark, uncompromising direction.

Nominated for its Story and Screenplay, Anthony Mann’s The Naked Spur was perhaps the best of the Mann-James Stewart westerns, featuring flawless performances by Stewart, Robert Ryan, Janet Leigh and Ralph Meeker.

Completely ignored by Oscar, Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat did win the Edgar Allan Poe Award as the year’s best mystery. Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame and Lee Marvin were at full steam on all four burners. If you’ve seen it, you get the pun. If you haven’t seen it, you should.

Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess was also ignored by Oscar, but was a runner-up at Cannes earlier in the year. Montgomery Clift gave his second memorable performance of the year as the priest torn between helping the police and the sanctity of the confessional after he hears a killer’s confession. Anne Baxter and Karl Malden co-star.

All films discussed have been released on DVD in the U.S.

New on DVD this week are the British gangster film, Harry Brown and the 1951 British post-war film noir, Hell Is Sold Out.

-Peter J. Patrick (August 31, 2010)

The DVD Report #170: August 24, 2010

Perhaps the least regarded Oscar winning Best Picture winner of all time, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth was a huge commercial success in its day. In fact, it was the biggest box office hit of 1952, one of the rare occasions when the Oscar went to the then most popular film.

To be fair, the acrobats and clowns and other circus folk were shown to their best advantage on screen up to that point. The real Barnum and Bailey, Ringling Brothers Circus performers were used in support of the Hollywood cast, and seeing, or rather not seeing, a huge star like James Stewart hiding behind clown makeup was intriguing. The film courted Production Code problems with its sympathetic view of euthanasia but DeMille surmounted the problem by having his mercy killer himself die.

The biggest problem with the film, especially to today’s audiences, is the dreadful lead performances of Betty Hutton and Cornel Wilde. Wilde had always been a bit of a stiff but never more so than here, and Hutton, with her oversized personality, overwhelmed her character. The two made a bizarre couple.

Another problem which is much more obvious now than it was then is the cheesy special effects. It’s quite obvious that miniatures are being used in the climactic train fire sequence. If you’ve never seen a real circus or a film about the circus you might enjoy the film just as people of the time did, but it’s more than likely you’ll come away scratching your head wondering how this ever won a Best Picture Oscar. Its only other Oscar was for Original Story.

Holding up much better through the years, Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon was widely publicized as the favorite film of former U.S. President Bill Clinton when he was in the White House. It’s easy to see why the film appeals strongly to Presidents and other men who find life lonely at the top. It’s about a lone hero, played by Gary Cooper in his second Oscar winning role, who is abandoned one by one by his friends and in the end has only the support of his wife, the emerging superstar, Grace Kelly. In addition to Cooper’s performance, Dimitri Tiomkin’s Oscar winning score and Elmo Williams and Harry Gerstad’s Oscar winning editing which tells the 90 minute tale in real time, were the film’s major assets.

Lloyd Bridges, Katy Jurado and Tex Ritter register strong support, the latter singing the film’s Oscar winning theme song “Do Not Forsake Me, O My Darlin’” throughout.

An instant classic and a TV staple, particularly around St. Patrick’s Day, John Ford’s The Quiet Man was the legendary director’s ode to his native Ireland.

John Wayne, in one of his best performances, plays a retired prizefighter who returns home to Ireland where he courts the lovely Maureen O’Hara against the wishes of her loutish brother, Victor McLaglen. Local moneyed widow Mildred Natwick has her cap set for McLaglen all under the watchful eyes of Barry Fitzgerald, Ward Bond and other colorful characters. The film won Oscars for Ford, his fourth as Best Director, and Winton Hoch and Archie Stout for their outstanding color cinematography. The other actor from that perfect cast to be nominated was former Best Actor winner Victor McLaglen (The Informer) in support.

Just as The African Queen had been rushed into one Los Angeles theatre in order to qualify for the preceding year’s Oscars, John Huston’s latest, Moulin Rouge was afforded the same opportunity. This time the plan worked even better. The film about the life of French painter Henri Toulouse-Lautrec made it into the Best Picture race as well as six other categories. Former Best Actor winner, Jose Ferrer (Cyrano de Bergerac) was again nominated playing an even more tortured soul and newcomer Colette Marchand pulled off a supporting nod as one of his paramours. The film won for its color art direction and costume design.

The fifth nominee was Richard Thorpe’s film of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, MGM’s year-end blockbuster with Robert Taylor, Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Fontaine and George Sanders heading the cast of the swashbuckler.

Conventional wisdom says that MGM blew it, that the film they should have promoted for best picture was Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain but that’s revisionist thinking.

Singin’ in the Rain has since become the most beloved of original film musicals, but that’s only after the film’s TV showings and theatrical revival of the early 1970s. At the time it was a modest hit yielding just two nominations for Jean Hagen’s hilarious supporting performance and scoring of a musical. MGM did have a substantial awards getter on its hands with Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful. The film about a ruthless Hollywood producer won five of the six Oscars it was nominated for including one for Gloria Grahame as Best Supporting Actress. Grahame was on screen for maybe ten minutes but she also had key roles this year in The Greatest Show on Earth and Sudden Fear. The film also starred Best Actor nominee Kirk Douglas, Lana Turner, Dick Powell and Walter Pidgeon.

Veteran stage star Shirley Booth made her film debut at the age of 54 repeating one of her signature stage roles in Daniel Mann’s film of William Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba and walked off the year’s Best Actress Oscar. Booth’s slovenly housewife is an excellent portrayal but the film seems off kilter due to the miscasting of 38 year-old Burt Lancaster as her alcoholic husband. Oscar nominated Supporting Actress Terry Moore and Richard Jaeckel as Booth’s boarder and her lover fared much better.

Booth’s toughest competitor for the year’s female acting honors was Susan Hayward pulling out all the stops to play singer Jane Froman in Walter Lang’s With a Song in My Heart, but the film’s musical scoring accounted for its only Oscar win out of five nominations. The film did better at the Golden Globes where it won Best Picture – Musical or Comedy and Best Actress – Musical or Comedy.

Marlon Brando solidified his star status with the title role in Elia Kazan’s not on U.S. DVD Viva Zapata!, a biography of the Mexican revolutionary. Although Brando’s Best Actor nomination accounted for one of the film’s five nods, only Anthony Quinn as his brother emerged triumphant as the year’s Best Supporting Actor.

Another biography garnering a significant number of Oscar nominations was Charles Vidor’s Hans Christian Andersen with Danny Kaye, Farley Granger and Zizi Jeanmaire which was nominated for six Oscars including Best Song “Thumbelina” but lost them all.

Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece, Rashomon, which won an honorary award the year before as the most outstanding foreign language film released in the United States based on its New York release, was eligible this year for all other awards based on its Los Angeles release. It was nominated only for its black-and-white art direction.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s not on U.S. DVD 5 Fingers with James Mason and Danielle Darrieux was the year’s most successful spy drama. It was nominated for Best Director and Best Screenplay, this one written by Michael Wilson, not Mankiewicz himself.

Anthony Mann’s Bend of the River with James Stewart, Arthur Kennedy and Rock Hudson and Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious with Marlene Dietrich, Arthur Kennedy and Mel Ferrer were the year’s outstanding westerns.

George Cukor’s Pat and Mike starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn was the year’s most successful domestic comedy. It garnered an Oscar nomination for Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin’s Story and Screenplay.

Charles Crichton’s The Lavender Hill Mob and Alexander Mackendrick’s The Man in the White Suit, both starring Alec Guinness,were the year’s most successful British comedy imports. Guinness was nominated as Best Actor for Mob which won an Oscar for Best Story and Screenplay, while Man was nominated for Best Screenplay.

This week’s premier DVD release is Three Silent Films by Josef von Sternberg. Included are restored versions of Underworld, The Last Command and Docks of New York, all with a choice of accompanying musical scores. Also being released on both standard DVD and Blu-ray is Oliver Parker’s 2009 version of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, a film that failed to have a U.S. theatrical run.

-Peter J. Patrick (August 24, 2010)

The DVD Report #169: August 17, 2010

One of Oscar’s biggest upsets ever occurred at the 1951 awards when An American in Paris beat both A Streetcar Named Desire and A Place in the Sun to capture the award for Best Picture.

Fashioned around George Gershwin’s music of the 1920s and 30s, Vincente Minnelli’s An American in Paris hadn’t even been on the Oscar radar. It was an MGM production and MGM had thrown support behind the costlier Quo Vadis, also in the Best Picture race against Warners’ Streetcar and Paramount’s Sun.

A perfectly charming and delightful film, An American in Paris features a superb cast headed by Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, Oscar Levant, Georges Guetary and Nina Foch. The ballet that ends the film may go on a bit too long, but who can resist Kelly serenading Caron with “Our Love Is Here to Stay” or teaching the kids to sing with “I’ve Got Rhythm” or Geutary, in his best Chevalier imitation, singing and dancing to “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise”? It’s sheer bliss most of the way. Nominated for eight Oscars, it won six.

With twelve and nine nominations, respectively, the year’s two critically acclaimed dramatic films, A Streetcar Named Desire and A Place in the Sun were expected to take home the lion’s share of the awards and neither came away empty-handed. Streetcar won four including Best Actress (Vivien Leigh), Supporting Actor (Karl Malden) and Supporting Actress and Place won six including Best Director (George Stevens).

Tennessee Williams’ second major play and the second to be filmed after 1950’s not on DVD The Glass Menagerie, Streetcar remains the best film version of any of his plays. Marlon Brando, in only his second film, reprising his Broadway triumph as the loutish Stanley Kowalski, changed the face of screen acting with his largely internalized performance. Vivien Leigh, who played the role of faded belle Blanche DuBois in London, is simply incredible as the tortured soul who might be an older version of Leigh’s Scarlet O’Harahad she lived in a different era. Kim Hunter is equally memorable as the young woman torn between her love for her husband and support for her sister.

Previously filmed as the not on DVD An American Tragedy, the title of Theodore Dreiser’s famed novel, A Place in the Sun has a different structure than Josef von Sternberg’s earlier film which emphasizes the relationship between the protagonist (Phillips Holmes in the earlier version, Montgomery Clift in the later one) and his low-class pregnant girlfriend (Sylvia Sidney/Shelley Winters) over the social climbing youth’s fascination with a society girl (Frances Dee/Elizabeth Taylor) but the climax of both films is the murder trial that ends the film.

The other major difference is that the boy’s mother (Lucille LaVerne/Anne Revere) plays a larger role in his life in the earlier version. That’s mainly because Oscar winning Revere (National Velvet), a direct descendant of Revolutionary War hero Paul Revere, was blacklisted in the Communist witch hunts of the day and most of her scenes were cut. All that remains is a brief telephone scene between her and Clift.

In gestation for more than a decade, Mervyn LeRoy’s film of Henryk Sienkewicz’s 1895 novel, Quo Vadis finally reached the screen with a cast headed by Robert Taylor, Deborah Kerr, Leo Genn and Peter Ustinov. Taylor is stiff as the Centurian and Kerr is not used to best advantage as the Christian convert he loves, but Genn (Petronius) and Ustinov (Nero), both nominated in support are superb. Finlay Currie, one of the best character actors of the day (People Will Talk, The Mudlark) is also excellent as St. Peter. It was nominated for eight Oscars, but won none.

The fifth nominee, Anatole Litvak’s Decision Before Dawn was nominated for only one other Oscar: Best Editing. One of the most obscure films ever to be nominated for Best Picture, it owes its nomination to the big push given it by Fox studio head Daryl F. Zanuck. Richard Basehart and Gary Merrill had top billing, but third billed Oskar Werner is the main character, a German prisoner of War indoctrinated by the Allies into spying against the Nazis in World War II. It’s a decent programmer, but hardly a film of Best Picture caliber, especially in light of the fact it was nominated over The African Queen, Strangers on a Train, Detective Story and Fox’s own The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Acting on the theory that if you can’t beat them, join them, Fox later obtained the distribution rights to A Streetcar Named Desire when it was re-released in 1958 and held the original home video rights to The African Queen, originally released by United Artists. Rights to Streetcar have since reverted to Warner Bros. and Paramount now holds controls The African Queen.

Completed in time to be rushed into one Los Angeles theatre to qualify for the 1951 Academy Awards, John Huston’s film of C.S. Forester’s The African Queen might have gotten more than the four nominations it did if more Academy members had seen it early on. It was nominated for Best Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay.

Katharine Hepburn’s portrayal of the high-minded spinster with a voice like Eleanor Roosevelt was the first of several old maids she would play throughout the decade to greater acclaim than she had ever known and Humphrey Bogart’s portrayal of the pragmatic river rat who helps her escape the Nazis brought him something he never expected to have – an Oscar.

Bogart’s win over Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift was as popular as it was unexpected. The actor whose only previous nomination was for Casablancawas finding his cynical, devil-may-care persona more in keeping with the times. A pity there would only be a few more films before his death at 57, but decades later new audiences are still discovering him and that’s a good thing.

Paramount, which has been the stingiest of the studios in releasing their classics to DVD, have put out both a standard DVD and Blu-ray release of The African Queen that is one of the best of the year.

Nominated for its thrilling black-and-white cinematography, Alfred Hitchcok’s Strangers on a Train, his most successful film in five years failed to receive any other nominations, not even for one of its strong leads, Farley Granger and Robert Walker.

Jane Wyman won the Golden Globe for Curtis Bernhardt’s tearjerker, The Blue Veil over both Vivien Leigh in Streetcar and Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen but few have seen the film in the last forty years. The film, originally released by RKO, deserves a DVD release on the basis of its cast alone.

Charles Laughton, Joan Blondell (also Oscar nominated as a Broadway musical comedy star), Richard Carlson, Agnes Moorehad, Don Taylor, Audrey Totter, Everett Sloane and Natalie Wood also star in this story of a woman who loses her husband to World War I and their son shortly after birth, who then spends her life caring for other people’s children.

Fox, which early on, had been one of the most prolific releasers of their classic films on DVD, has in recent years become almost as bad as Paramount with putting anything new out. They are constantly re-releasing the same films in new packaging, but haven’t had anything new to offer in years. Of their major 1951 releases, only The Day the Earth Stood Still, Fourteen Hours and People Will Talk have been released on DVD. Kind Lady, The Mudlark, The Mating Season and The Model and the Marriage Broker have not.

Although it won a Golden Globe as the Best Film Promoting International Understanding, Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still failed to win a single Oscar nomination, yet has stood the test of time more than any other Fox film of the year. It has more than 34,000 votes on the IMDb. whereas Zanuck’s baby, Decision Before Dawn has fewer than 1,000. Do yourself a favor and celebrate the life of Patricia Neal by watching or re-watching her in one of her most luminous performances ASAP.

Nominated only for its black-and-white art direction, Henry Hathaway’s Fourteen Hours stars Richard Basehart in his National Board of Review winning performance as a suicidal young man and Paul Douglas as the sympathetic cop who talks him down. Barbara Bel Geddes, Agnes Moorehead, a Jeffrey Hunter and Grace Kelly also turn in memorable performances.

The Writers’ Guild nominated Joseph L. Mankiewicz for his screenplay for People Will Talk but Oscar ignored this fine social comedy-drama with Cary Grant, Jeanne Crain, Hume Cronyn and Finlay Currie.

A remake of a 1935 film with Aline MacMahon and Basil Rathbone, John Sturges’ 1951 version of Kind Lady provided Ethel Barrymore with one of her best lead roles as the too trusting old lady who is held hostage by a gang of thieves led by Maurice Evans, Angela Lansbury and Betsy Blair. It’s wonderfully atmospheric and Lansbury and Blair are terrific. It was Oscar nominated for its black-and-white costume design.

Also nominated in the same category, Jean Negulesco’s The Mudlark is one of several films about Queen Victoria. The title character is a street urchin played by Andrew Ray, who sneaks into the place and is befriended by the aging, melancholy queen played by an unrecognizable, but still magnificent, Irene Dunne. Alec Guinness as Disraeli and Finlay Currie as John Brown are also excellent.

The talents of Thelma Ritter were evident from her first unbilled appearances in Miracle on 34th Street and A Letter to Three Wives. After her Oscar nomination for All About Eve, Fox gave her the starring roles in two 1951 films, The Mating Season and The Model and the Marriage Broker, but not star billing.

Gene Tierney and John Lund had the over-the-title billing in The Mating Season. Ritter, as Lund’s mother who poses as a maid in the newlyweds’ home was fourth billed below Miriam Hopkins as Tierney’s mother. Billing be damned, Ritter was the film’s major asset and everyone knew it including her fellow actors who gave her the film’s only Oscar nomination in support.

Ritter moved up to third billing with George Cukor’s The Model and the Marriage Broker, but she was still billed below the title. Only Jeanne Crain as the model was billed above, with Scott Brady as the guy she fixes Crain up with, and Ritter given co-star billing. Like Kind Lady and The Mudlark,it was received its only nomination for its black-and-white costume design.

Nominated for its color art direction as well as its screenplay, Max Ophuls’ La Ronde was the year’s most controversial film. An eye-popping delight, it wouldn’t shock anyone today but was banned in numerous U.S. cities at the time due to its winking at sexual promiscuity as eleven characters cheat on their significant others one by one, coming full circle back to the original couple. Anton Walbrook, Simone Signoret and Simone Simon were among the players in the film that even sophisticated New Yorkers weren’t allowed to see until 1954.

No matter what they did, Paramount couldn’t make a hit of Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, not even changing the name of the film to The Big Carnival. Now regarded as one of Wilder’s best, the cynical story of news exploitation wasn’t completely overlooked in its day. The National Board of Review named Jan Sterling as the year’s Best Actress for her portrayal of the uncaring wife of a man trapped in a cave and Oscar recognized its screenplay.

An equally cynical film with the same star, Kirk Douglas, William Wyler’s Detective Story fared better with the public and with Oscar, scoring four nominations including Best Actress Eleanor Parker as detective Douglas’ wife with a secret and Lee Grant as a shoplifter. William Bendix and Joseph Wiseman also provided strong support.

Arthur Miller’s Broadway triumph, Death of a Salesman featured Oscar nominated performances from Fredric March, Mildred Dunnock and Kevin McCarthy. On the surface March seems too strong as the weak title character, but he is moving nonetheless. Dunnock and McCarthy, repeating their stage roles, are spot on.

Among the year’s major musicals, George Sidney’s remake of Show Boat was the most successful. Although dramatically it can’t hold a candle to the superior 1936 version, it is beautifully photographed and nicely played by Kathryn Grayson, Ava Gardner, Howard Keel, Joe E. Brown and William Warfield. It was nominated for its color cinematography and scoring of a musical.

The week’s new DVD releases include James Ivory’s The City of Your Final Destination and the Blu-ray debut of Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 film of Hamlet.

-Peter J. Patrick (August 17, 2010)

The DVD Report #168: August 10, 2010

The 1950 movie year was one of the best ever. It provided many pleasures, not all of which were recognized by Oscar.

Oscar nominations, as expected, were dominated by the year’s two best films, both about the underbelly of show business.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve, which skewers the Broadway theater world, opens with an awards ceremony, the catalyst for various characters to look back at the start of the winning actress’s career only a year earlier with a jaundiced eye. Billy Wilder’s even more cynical Sunset Boulevard opens with the narrator, a Hollywood writer turned gigolo, floating dead in the Beverly Hills pool of a faded silent screen star.

Setting a new record for nominations, All About Eve received fourteen, winning six including Best Picture, Direction, Screenplay and Supporting Actor, George Sanders as a vicious columnist. Among those it didn’t win were four other acting nods for Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Celeste Holm and Thelma Ritter. Director/writer Mankiewicz became the first, and only to date, back to back winner in both categories.

Davis, whose career had been on the downturn for the last few years, re-emerged at the height of her prowess as a fading star who is undermined by her protégée, Baxter. Holm is her best friend and Ritter, the faithful maid who is the only one to see through Baxter’s façade at first meeting. Gary Merrill and Hugh Marlow co-star and Marilyn Monroe makes a brief but memorable appearance as an aspiring actress “from the Copacabana school of acting.”

We know at the start of Sunset Boulevard that William Holden’s character is dead, which firmly places it in film noir territory. We spend the rest of the film learning what led to his death in the mansion of demented once famous silent screen star Gloria Swanson whose butler Erich von Stroheim was once a famed Hollywood director.

Nominated for eleven Oscars including Best Direction, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress (Nancy Olson), the film won three for Story and Screenplay, Art Direction and Scoring. Swanson, who came out of retirement for the film, is a revelation and has some of the best lines ever given an actress including the immortal “I am big, it’s the pictures that got small.”

Davis and Swanson were the front-runners for Best Actress. Davis had won the New York Film Critics Award and Swanson the National Board of Review and Golden Globe, but Oscar went in a different direction, giving the award to newcomer Judy Holliday as the dumb blonde who outwits her gangster boss. Broderick Crawford and William Holden were her co-stars in George Cukor’s Born Yesterday, also nominated for Best Picture, Direction, Screenplay and Black-and-White Costume Design.

Vincente Minnelli’s much loved Father of the Bride was also in the race for Best Picture as well as Best Actor (Spencer Tracy) and Screenplay as was the remake of H. Rider Haggard’s African safari tale, King Solomon’s Mines,which won the other two Oscars it was nominated for, Best Editing and Color Cinematography.

Shockingly left out of the Best Picture race were two films whose directors had been nominated for Best Direction: The Third Man and The Asphalt Jungle.

Often cited as the best British film ever made, as well as one of the top 100 American films on the American Film Institute’s list, Carol Reed’s film of Graham Greene’s The Third Man is both. It was filmed in Austria with British financing, but tinkered with in Hollywood for American consumption. The American release version substitutes British co-star Trevor Howard’s narration for that of American Joseph Cotten who also stars with Orson Welles, Alida Valli and that ubiquitous zither music. It won an Oscar for its impressive Black-and-White Cinematography and was also nominated for its Editing.

John Huston’s heist classic, The Asphalt Jungle was nominated for four Oscars including Best Supporting Actor Sam Jaffe who stands out in a cast that also provides memorable roles for Sterling Hayden, Louis Calhern, James Whitmore, Jean Hagen and in another bit, Marilyn Monroe.

Nominated only for its witty screenplay by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, George Cukor’s Adam’s Rib was easily the best of the nine films Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy made together. The classic tale of married attorneys on opposing sides of a case also provided strong supporting roles for Judy Holliday, David Wayne, Jean Hagen, Tom Ewell and Hope Emerson.

Completely overlooked by Oscar, Robert Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coronets, perhaps the best of Britain’s Ealing Studio comedies, was recognized by the National Board of Review which gave its best actor award to Alec Guinness playing nine characters who are systematically murdered by Dennis Price.

Another comedy of note, Henry Koster’s film of Mary Chase’s Harvey provided Best Actor nominee James Stewart with one of his most endearing roles as the soft-spoken alcoholic whose best friend is an invisible six foot tall rabbit. Josephine Hull won the Supporting Actress Oscar as his exasperated sister.

Stewart also had memorable roles this year in Broken Arrow and Winchester ‘73.

Nominated for three Oscars, Delmer Daves’ Broken Arrowwas one of the first westerns to deal sympathetically with the American Indian as emphasized by Best Supporting Actor nominee Jeff Chandler’s portrayal of Cochise.

 The first of seven Stewart films, six of them westerns, directed by Anthony Mann, Winchester ’73 is also renown for being the first film for which its star negotiated a share of the profits in exchange for a lower than usual salary. It made Stewart one of the richest actors in Hollywood.

Several other westerns including Annie Get Your Gun, Rio Grande, Stars in My Crown, Devil’s Doorway, The Gunfighter and The Furies made 1950 one of the most profitable years in the genre.

Nominated for four Oscars and winner of one for Scoring of a Musical, George Sidney’s film of Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun is sadly most famous for the firing of Judy Garland in the starring role of sharpshooter Annie Oakley. I say sadly because that emphasis underscores the marvelous performance of Betty Hutton who was justly nominated for a Golden Globe but not an Oscar. Hutton may not have been as forceful a singer as Garland but she sings quite nicely all the same, thank you, and her natural spontaneity is perfect for the role. Howard Keel is also terrific as her co-star and Louis Calhern makes a delightful Buffalo Bill, substituting for Frank Morgan who died during filming.

The third film in John Ford’s cavalry trilogy, Rio Grandeis notable for providing Maureen O’Hara a role that is even stronger than John Wayne’s as the two fight for the soul of their 17 year-old son, played by Claude Jarman, Jr. The Writers’ Guild nominated its screenplay, but Oscar unfairly ignored it.

In one of his best roles, Joel McCrea plays a country preacher in the days just after the Civil War in Jacques Tourneur’s Stars in My Crown, a still under-rated gem with an outstanding supporting performance by Dean Stockwell, one of the era’s best child actors.

Robert Taylor also had one of his best roles as a decorated American Indian returning to his roots after the Civil War in Anthony Mann’s Devil’s Doorway, a Writers’ Guild nominee that like Rio Grandeand Stars in My Crown was unfairly overlooked by the Academy.

Nominated for Best Motion Picture Story, Henry King’s The Gunfighter provided Gregory Peck with one of his best roles as well, as a notorious gunman who can’t shake his reputation.

Anthony Mann’s third western this year was the bizarre Barbara Stanwyck-Walter Huston starrer The Furies which was nominated for Best Black-and-White Cinematography. Judith Anderson co-stars as a once beautiful woman who is disfigured by stepdaughter Stanwyck.

Adventure films were represented by Cecil B. DeMille’s biblical epic, Samson and Deliah with Victor Mature and Hedy Lamarr, nominated for five Oscars and winner of two for its Color Art Direction and Costume Design; Jacques Tourneur’s Robin Hood light The Flame and the Arrow with Burt Lancaster and Virginia Mayo, nominated for its Score and Color Cinematography; Disney’s remake of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island with Bobby Driscoll and Robert Newton as Long John Silver and Victor Saville’s film of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim with Errol Flynn and Dean Stockwell in the title role.

One of the first, and still the best, of the female prison films, John Cromwell’s Caged was the most nominated of the year’s social issues dramas. It was nominated for three including Best Actress Eleanor Parker as an innocent woman who hardens under the system and Hope Emerson as the harsh prison matron as well as Best Story and Screenplay.

Social issues were also explored in some of the year’s best films including Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets with Richard Widmark and Paul Douglas about the search for a killer infected with the pneumonic plague, an Oscar winner for Best Motion Picture Story; Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s No Way Out with Richard Widmark, Linda Darnell and Sidney Poitier about racial bigotry in a hospital, an Oscar nominee for Story and Screenplay; Mark Robson’s Edge of Doom with Dana Andrews and Farley Granger about the murder of a priest and Fred Zinnemann’s The Men with Marlon Brando and Teresa Wright about a paraplegic World War II veteran, nominated for Story and Screenplay.

Not an awards getter in its day but revered now as one of the best films noir ever, Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place provided Humphrey Bogart with one of his best roles as a Hollywood screenwriter who may or may not be a murderer and Gloria Grahame has never been better than as the B actress who comes to love him.

Louis Calhern and Jose Ferrer recreated their respective stage roles in The Magnificent Yankee and Cyrano de Bergerac, winning Oscar nominations for their efforts, the latter winning the category.

Although both films betray their stage origins, both are more than worth seeing. Calhern plays Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Ann Harding his beloved wife in The Magnificent Yankee, which was also nominated for Best Black-and-White Costume Design. Ferrer may be the whole show in Cyrano de Bergerac whose popularity has long since been eclipsed by the 1990 French remake with Gerard Depardieu, but his magnificent performance more than makes up for any of the film’s shortcomings.

All films mentioned except Stars in My Crown, Edge of Doom and Samson and Delilah have been released on DVD in the U.S., although the latter is available on an import that will play on U.S. machines.

I can’t really recommend any new DVD releases this week as there aren’t any I’ve seen, but if you’re interested, new releases include Date Night and The Jonses.

-Peter J. Patrick (August 10, 2010)

The DVD Report #167: August 3, 2010

By the end of World War II audiences had had enough of films about the war, but by 1949 Hollywood rightfully concluded that enough time had passed to make the topic marketable again. Three hugely successful films about the war figured heavily in the 1949 Oscar race. Two of them (Twelve O’Clock High and Battleground) were in fact nominated for Best Picture along with the film version of a stage classic (The Heiress), a contemporary suspense drama (A Letter to Three Wives) and the film version of a Pultizer Prize winning novel about political corruption (All the King’s Men). The latter, which was the film with the strongest pedigree, won.

Nominated for seven Oscars, Robert Rossen’s film of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men won three. It took home awards for Best Picture, Actor (Broderick Crawford) and Supporting Actress (Mercedes McCambridge).

Crawford played a thinly disguised version of Louisiana Governor Huey Long and newcomer McCambridge was the political operative who helped guide his career. With real life political corruption and assassinations even more unsettling than those portrayed in the film, audiences discovering it in the intervening years have not been as impressed as contemporaneous audiences were. A 2006 remake with an all-star cast opened to negative reviews and died a quick death at the box office.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz’ A Letter to Three Wives, which won the director an Oscar for writing as well as directing, has fared much better over the years. Audiences discovering the film for the first time today are as enthusiastic about it as their parents and grandparents were when they first encountered this film about three women who receive a letter from a fourth telling them she has run off with one of their husbands. Jeanne Crain, Ann Southern and especially Linda Darnell excel as the three women and Paul Douglas, Kirk Douglas and Jeffrey Lynn are fineas the husbands as are Connie Gilchrist and Thelma Ritter as Darnell’s mother and her card playing friend. Celeste Holm is the voice of the woman who wrote the letter.

William Wyler’s The Heiress was the film version of the play of the same name by Augustus and Ruth Goetz based on Henry James’ Washington Square. The highly atmospheric film provided Olivia de Havilland with another strong role resulting in her second Oscar for Best Actress in four years. De Havilland plays a plain, naïve, terribly shy young woman taken in by dashing Montgomery Clift who may be after her money. Ralph Richardson, in a brilliant Oscar nominated turn as her abusive father and Miriam Hopkins as her talkative aunt are the other principal players.

The film also won Oscars for its exquisite black-and-white art direction and costume design as well as for Aaron Copland’s haunting score. It had been nominated for Best Director and Black-and-White Cinematography as well.

Eschewing the blood and guts that tend to dominate war movies, Henry King’s Twelve O’Clock High is a thinking man’s examination of the war. It’s framed by Best Supporting Actor winner Dean Jagger’s clear-eyed look at the men he served with years earlier. Gregory Peck, in the role that many consider the best of his career, is the young Air Force general undergoing enormous stress from having to send men into harm’s way. Gary Merrill, Hugh Marlowe and Millard Mitchell provide fine support.

In addition to Jagger’s win, the film was singled out by Oscar for its sound. King and Peck had to settle for nominations. Peck’s performance proved so trenchant that he won the New York Film Critics award for Best Actor the following year as the film had not been released in New York prior to the end of 1949. It was the first and only time to date that a film had won that award the year after its Oscar eligibility.

More familiar ground was covered by William A. Wellman’s Battleground. Dramatizing the plight of the ordinary foot soldier during the Battle of the Bulge, the film presented a new realism to audiences weaned on the rah-rah gung ho dynamics of films made during the war. Van Johnson, John Hodiak, Ricardo Montalban, George Murphy, Marshall Thompson, Jerome Courtland, Don Taylor and others all marched under the watchful eye of Supporting Actor nominee James Whitmore.

The film had also been nominated for its Direction and Editing and won for Story and Screenplay and Black-and-White Cinematography.

Nominated for four Oscars including Best Actor (John Wayne), Story and Screenplay, Editing and Sound, Allan Dwan’s Sands of Iwo Jima was for many years the best known of the year’s big three war films. That’s because it played incessantly on TV, Wayne’s portrayal of the stalwart sergeant providing the impetus for many enlistments over the years, funny because Wayne himself sat out the real war.

Good as Wayne is in the film, and he is good, he was even better in John Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, generally considered the best of the three films that formed Ford’s cavalry trilogy.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon won the only Oscar it was nominated for – Best Color Cinematography.

There was a fourth major war film released in 1949, Mark Robson’s Home of the Brave, with a screenplay by Carl Foreman based on Arthur Laurents’ play. The play had been about anti-Semitism in the military, but with that subject already played out and the new hot button racial prejudice, the central character was changed from Jewish to black. He’s played by James Edwards who, years before Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte, became the first young, good looking black male lead in films. Douglas Dick, Lloyd Bridges, Frank Lovejoy, Steve Brodie and Jeff Corey co-starred.

Films dealing with race relations were almost as high profile as films about the recent war in 1949. Joining Home of the Brave were Lost Boundaries; Intruder in the Dust and Pinky.

The only one of these to figure into the year’s Oscar nominations was Pinky.Directed by Elia Kazan, the film’s strongest suit was the acting of the three leads, all of whom were nominated for Oscars.

Jeanne Crain was the proud nurse who passed for white in the North but returns to the deep South to visit grandmother Ethel Waters and stays to nurse the once powerful town matriarch, Ethel Barrymore, in her final days. That Crain, previously seen mostly in musicals and light comedies, was able to hold her own in scenes with the two Ethels, was something of a revelation for audiences of the day.

Telling the true story of a light-skinned couple, a prominent doctor and his wife, who passed for white for more than twenty years before their secret was revealed, Alfred L. Werker’s Lost Boundaries is a mostly by-the-numbers biopic until the big reveal when all hell breaks loose, but once it does and the emphasis shifts from leads Mel Ferrer and Beatrice Pearson to son Richard Hylton, the film comes startlingly alive.

Best of the lot, however, is Clarence Brown’s thrilling Intruder in the Dust in which a boy (Claude Jarman, Jr.) and an old Lady (Elizabeth Patterson) come to the aid of a falsely accused black man (Juano Hernandez) in rural Mississippi. The film’s signature scene is the one in which the elderly Patterson talks down a lynch mob. Somehow or other, this film, which had Oscar written all over it, had to settle for two Golden Globe nominations, two Writers Guild nominations and two Bafta nominations, winning the latter’s U.N. Award.

Other films of note included Carol Reed’s of the loss of childhood innocence, The Fallen Idol, which was nominated for two Oscars – one for Reed and one for Best Screenplay by Graham Greene and Henry Koster’s Come to the Stable, which was nominated for seven Oscars including three for its actors: Loretta Young, Celeste Holm and Elsa Lanchester.

Both Vittorio de Sica’s The Bicycle Thief and Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero advanced the Italian neorealist cinema of the late forties, the former winning a Special Oscar for Best Foregin Film.

All films discussed except Home of the Brave; Intruder in the Dust and Come to the Stable are available on DVD.

New films out on DVD this week include Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer with Ewan McGregor and Pierce Brosnan; the Oscar nominated French film, A Prophet and Kim Novak and Errol Flynn box sets. The Novak set, The Kim Novak Collection,includes re-mastered versions of Picnic, Pal Joey and Bell, Book and Candle as well as new to DVD releases Jeanne Eagels and Middle of the Night. The Flynn set, TCM Spotlight: Errol Flynn Adventures,includes Desperate Journey; Edge of Darkness; Northern Pursuit; Uncertain Glory and a re-mastered Objective Burma!

-Peter J. Patrick (August 3, 2010)