The DVD Report #184: November 30, 2010

The screen adaptations of Broadway’s 1962 and 1963 Best Play winners battled it out for the 1966 Oscars.

Paul Scofield repeated his Tony award winning role of Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons and nabbed an Oscar for his brilliant portrayal.

The film recounts the story of More, Lord Chancellor of England, and his conflict between loyalty to his king, Henry VIII, and his conscientious objection to Henry’s naming himself Supreme Head of the Church of England in order to precipitate divorce from Catherine of Aragon and marriage to Anne Boleyn. Seen at the time of its release as an uncanny rumination on the contemporaneous objection of draft age American men to the Vietnam War, the film was the perfect metaphor for its time. However, to paraphrase its title, it is truly a film for all time. Every era has its uncompromising moralists who may not be truly appreciated in their own lifetimes. Indeed, it wasn’t until 1886, 301 years after his beheading, that Thomas More was beatified by the Catholic Church and not until 1935 that he was canonized. He was eventually added, as well, to the Church of England’s calendar of saints in 1980.

The film, directed by Fred Zinnemann, features magnificent cinematography, art direction, set design and costumes as one might expect, but its true value is in Bolt’s articulate screenplay and the performances, particularly of Scofield’s sad eyed, world weary saint in the making, Wendy Hiller as his uncomprehending wife and Robert Shaw as a young and vibrant Henry VIII, quite a revelation after all those years in which portly Charles Laughton was everyone’s idea of what the randy king looked like. Susannah York, Leo McKern, Nigel Davenport, John Hurt and Orson Welles are also memorable and Vanessa Redgrave makes a brief appearance as Anne Boleyn.

The film was nominated for eight Oscars and won six, including Best Director and Screenplay. Shaw and Hiller had to settle for nominations.

With an even more impressive thirteen Oscar nominations, Mike Nichols’ film of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? gave Zinenmann’s masterpiece quite a run for its money, but ended up coming short of A Man for All Seasons’ haul with five wins of its own.

Elizabeth Taylor, who six years earlier ostensibly won an Oscar because the world thought she was on her deathbed, won a second one this time clearly on merit. Her frumpy, foul-mouthed, middle-aged professor’s wife was far and away the most impressive thing she had ever done on screen, or would do again. Richard Burton, her then real life husband, had his greatest screen role as well as her put-upon husband. Unfortunately he was up against an even greater actor in an even greater role in Scofield and there would be no husband and wife wins this year.

George Segal as a younger instructor and Sandy Dennis as his mousey wife also scored in the film’s only other principal roles. Both were nominated in support, with Dennis winning her category.

The film, with its barrage of four-letter words put a major dent in Hollywood’s Production Code, from which it never recovered.

Another film which flaunted the Production Code was Lewis Gilbert’s Alfie, although since this was a British film it didn’t actually count as Hollywood biting the hand that slapped it for so many years.

Michael Caine starred as the Cockney philanderer who questions his seemingly carefree existence. Shelley Winters, Millicent Martin, Julie Foster, Jane Asher, Shirley Anne Field and a superb Vivien Merchant were the women in his life. The film was nominated for five Oscars including Best Picture, Actor and Supporting Actress (Merchant).

If Alfie was the year’s best adult comedy, and it was, then Norman Jewison’s The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming was the year’s best family comedy. An hilarious send-up of the Cold War, Alan Arkin and John Phillip Law starred as Russian sailors whose submarine runs aground in New England. Carl Reiner, Eva Marie Saint, Brian Keith, Paul Ford and Tessie O’Shea were among the inhabitants they encounter.

The film was nominated for four Oscars including Best Picture and Actor (Arkin).

Fresh on the heels of his second Oscar win as Best Director for 1965’s The Sound of Music, Robert Wise produced and directed another dream project, the film version of Richard McKenna’s novel, The Sand Pebbles. Set in the revolution torn China of 1926, Steve McQueen had one of his best roles as a loner sailor who befriends a Chinese coolie (Mako) and a lady missionary (Candice Bergen). Jerry Goldsmith’s haunting score, McQueen and Mako’s performances and the film itself accounted for four of the film’s eight Oscar nominations. Richard Attenborough as another troubled sailor and Richard Crenna as the ship’s captain also turned in fine performances.

Among the films Oscars recognized, in addition to the Best Picture nominees, were The Professionals, A Man and a Woman, The Shop on Main Street, Blow-Up, Morgan!, Georgy Girl, Fantastic Voyage, Born Free, Seconds, The Fortune Cookie, Hawaii and You’re a Big Boy Now,but not The Shameless Old Lady or 7 Women.

Nominated for three Oscars, two of them for Richard Brooks for writing and directing, The Professionals was a rip-roaring western about four adventurers (Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan and Woody Strode) hired by Texas millionaire Ralph Bellamy to rescue his young wife (Claudia Cardinale) from Mexican bandit Jack Palance. All the performers are at the top of their game and Conrad Hall’s Oscar nominated cinematography is a pleasure to behold.

A huge international hit, Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman, a simple romance that is about just that, a man and a woman, the film won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film and Original Screenplay. It was also nominated for Best Director and Actress (Anouk Aimee). There was a sequel exactly twenty years later called A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later with the same stars, Aimee and Jean-Louis Trinitgnant, again written and directed by Lelouch.

The prior year’s Best Foreign Film award went to Jan Kadar’s The Shop on Main Street. Eligible this year for nominations in other categories based on its L.A. release date, the Czechoslovakian film brought a Best Actress nomination to veteran Polish stage actress, Ida Kaminska as a Jewish shopkeeper unaware of the war around her. Josef Kroner plays her Christian overseer. The two make movie magic together.

The first major English language film to feature casual nudity, presenting yet another blow to Hollywood’s Production Code, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up was the legendary Italian director’s first film in English. David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave and Sarah Miles star in the story of a photographer who witnesses a murder. Nominated for two Oscars for Best Director and Original Screenplay, Antonioni was named the year’s Best Director by the National Society of Film Critics.

Vanessa Redgrave also made a splash in Karel Reisz’s Morgan!, a slapstick comedy which made a star of David Warner as her dreamer ex-husband. Vanessa was nominated for an Oscar for her scintillating performance, but it was not the definitive role that was her sister Lynn’s in Silvio Narizzano’s Georgy Girl.

Lynn Redgrave shared the New York Film Critics Award for Best Actress for Georgy Girl with Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and was Liz’s only serious competition for the Oscar. She plays the homely but vivacious friend of swinging Londoners Charlotte Rampling and Alan Bates, who has a fling with her middle-aged employer, played by James Mason. The film was also nominated for Best Supporting Actor (Mason), Best Song and Best Black-and-White Cinematography.

Nominated for five Oscars, and winner of two for its inventive Art Direction and Special Effects, Richard Fleischer’s Fantastic Voyage is one of the screen’s most unusual science fiction films and one of the best. It concerns a small crew in a shrunken submarine injected into the bloodstream of a wounded diplomat and the crew’s efforts to save his life. Stephen Boyd, Raquel Welch, Edmond O’Brien, Donald Pleasance, Arthur O’Connell, William Redfield and Arthur Kennedy starred.

John Barry’s soaring music accounted for Born Free’s two nominations and wins for Best Score and Best Song. The true story of Joy and George Adamson who raised a lion cub in Kenya, The Adamsons were played by the real-life married couple, Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers.

Rock Hudson had one of his best roles in John Frankenheimer’s very scary Seconds in which he plays the surgically altered version of John Randolph given a new lease on life. But has he? It was nominated for James Wong Howe’s splendid black-and-white cinematography.

Walter Matthau finally became a star as Jack Lemmon’s shyster lawyer in Billy Wilder’s The Fortune Cookie, but not too much of a star that he couldn’t be nominated in support and win. The film received three other nominations.

George Roy Hill’s sprawling epic, Hawaii, was nominated for seven Oscars including one for first and only time actress Jocelyne Lagarde as the Queen of the Islands who all but steals the film from Julie Andrews and Max von Sydow.

Veteran stage actress, Geraldine Page, a major film star from 1961 to 1964 swallowed her pride and her dignity to play the silly overprotective mother of a horny teenager in Francis Ford Coppola’s You’re a Big Boy Now. The transformation won her a nomination in support.

Two films that got no respect from Oscar then, and get no respect from DVD companies now, are The Shameless Old Lady and 7 Women.

The Shameless Old Lady is a poignant French film from a story by Bertolt Brecht about an old lady who learns she has six months to live and spends the time she has left dong all the things she’s always wanted to do. The wonderful 83 year-old French character actress, Sylvie, who won the National Society of Film Critics Award for her performance, is simply magical. It is not available on DVD anywhere.

John Ford’s last film, 7 Women,is about a group of female missionaries in revolutionary China and the atheist doctor who joins them in their stand against a barbaric Mongolian warlord and his men. Anne Bancroft had one of her best roles as the doctor who uses sex the way a gunslinger would use a gun and Margaret Leighton is almost as good as the shrill head missionary. Flora Robson, Mildred Dunnock, Betty Field, Anna Lee, Sue Lyon and Eddie Albert provide strong support. Despite the film’s splendid pedigree, Warner Bros. has yet to issue a DVD of it.

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

New DVD releases this week include The Twilight Saga: Eclipse and the dual disc Blu-ray debut of Walt Disney’s Fantasia and Fantasia 2000, which are also being reissued on standard DVD.

-Peter J. Patrick (November 30, 2010)

The DVD Report #183: November 23, 2010

Conventional wisdom says that The Sound of Music was such a huge hit in 1965 because everything else around it was dark and dreary and generally disappointing. Maybe so, but that doesn't explain the film’s enduring popularity with succeeding generations in all parts of the world.

Rodgers and Hammerstein had tackled many bold subjects in their long careers, from mixed marriage in Show Boat (Hammerstein) to unapologetic raging sexuality in Pal Joey (Rodgers) to racial prejudice in South Pacific and spousal abuse in The King and I, the latter two together. By the end of the 1950s, shortly before Hammerstein's death from cancer, they had nothing left to prove. The result was their most relaxed effort. While the stage version of The Sound of Music was good, it was the film version that became their masterwork.

Often sentimental, but never cloying, the tale of the postulant nun who becomes a nanny and then a wife and mother was only the first part of Maria Von Trapp's intriguing life story, but it was enough for us to get a look at one of the Twentieth Century's most amazing personalities.
Never mind that the real Maria looked more like Peggy Wood (who plays the Mother Abbess in the film) than Julie Andrews, Julie and she were kindred spirits and Julie beguiles from beginning to end.

Nominated for ten Oscars, it won five, including Best Picture and Director, Robert Wise. Both Andrews and Wood were nominated, but lost to other performers.

Another 1965 film that had lots of fans at the time was David Lean’s film of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Eschewing much of the political turmoil that made the book an international best-seller, Lean focuses on the romance between Zhivago and Lara (Omar Sharif and Julie Christie). The results are mixed, but the film’s glorious score and breathtaking cinematography, both of which won Oscars, are unforgettable.

Like The Sound of Music, Doctor Zhivago was nominated for ten Oscars and won five. Tom Courtnay as Christie’s militant husband was the only actor singled out for a nomination.

A must-read novel of the day, Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools was made into an all-star cast film by Stanley Kramer. The tale of a fateful voyage from Mexico to Germany on board a German ship in 1933 provided stellar roles for Oscar nominees Oskar Werner, Simone Signoret and Michal Dunn, as well as Vivien Leigh, Lee Marvin and Heinz Ruhmann. Leigh as a disillusioned matron, Signoret as a drug-addicted countess and Werner as the ship’s doctor come off best.

Nominated for eight Oscars, Ship of Fools won two for its black-and-white art direction and cinematography.

A social observation of its time, John Schlesinger’s Darling is remembered today as the film that won Julie Christie her Oscar in a close race with the other Julie (Andrews). If the trappings of the swinging London of the sixties seem somehow quaint now, Christie’s stunning performance as a model who sleeps her way to the top, still holds up. Laurence Harvey and Dirk Bogarde co-star.

Darling was nominated for five Oscars and won three, including one for its screenplay.

A matter of taste, then as now, Fred Coe’s film of Herb Gardner’s quirky Broadway play, A Thousand Clowns, somehow managed to snag Oscar’s fifth slot.

Jason Robards starred as a verbose non-conformist raising impressionable nephew Barry Gordon, with Martin Balsam in an Oscar winning performance as Robards’ disapproving, conventional brother. It was the film’s only win out of four nominations. Barbara Harris also starred.

Other films receiving Oscar’s attention this year include The Eleanor Roosevelt Story; Woman in the Dunes; The Collector; A Patch of Blue; Cat Ballou; The Spy Who Came in From the Cold; The Pawnbroker; Othello; The Agony and the Ecstasy; Shenandoah and The Flight of the Phoenix,but not Young Cassidy.

I don’t usually comment on documentaries, but The Eleanor Roosevelt Story, written by Archibald Macleish and narrated by Macleish, Eric Servereid and Mrs. Francis Cole, is a special case. The National Board of Review singled it out the year’s Best Picture. Oscar endorsed it as the year’s Best Documentary.

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) was born into wealth and privilege, the niece of future president Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909), so documentary footage of her entire life was available to the filmmakers. Her future husband, Franklin Roosevelt (President from 1933-1945) was her fifth cousin. A lifelong crusader for human rights, particularly women’s rights, she was appointed delegate to the UN General Assembly (1945-1952) by her husband’s successor, Harry Truman, who called her the First Lady of the World. At the time of her death she was chair of John F. Kennedy’s Presidential Commission on the Status of Women. Her unique life was more dramatic than anything fictional filmmakers could make up.

A nominee for Best Foreign Film the previous year, Hiroshi Teshigahara became the first Japanese director nominated for Best Director when his Woman in the Dunes became eligible for Oscar consideration in other categories this year. It’s an eerie, haunting, horror film like no other, about an entomologist trapped in a sand dune with a woman he slowly realizes he will be forced to spend the rest of his life with. Eiji Okada and Kyoko Kishida starred.

The English language equivalent of Woman in the Dunes may well have been The Collector from John Fowles’ novel about a butterfly collector who decides to expand to human conquests. William Wyler won his twelfth and final Oscar nomination his meticulous direction. Terence Stamp was the collector and Samantha Eggar his terrified captive. Eggar and the film’s screenplay were also nominated.

Elizabeth Hartman was a captive of another kind as the blind daughter of a cruel and abusive mother in Guy Green’s A Patch of Blue. She meets Sidney Poitier, a kindly stranger who befriends and tries to help her. The performances of Hartman and Poitier, as well as Wallace Ford as Hartman’s alcoholic grandfather and Shelley Winters her foul-mouthed prostitute mother, are extraordinary. Winters won her second Oscar in support, while Hartman accounted for one of the film’s other four nominations.

Lee Marvin won a rare Oscar for playing comedy in a dual role as a famous gunslinger and his brother with a missing nose in Elliot Silverstein’s Cat Ballou. The film, which also starred Jane Fonda, was nominated for an additional four Oscars.

Marvin’s competition, in addition to his Ship of Fools co-star Oskar Werner, included Richard Burton, Rod Steiger and Laurence Olivier.

Burton had one of his best screen roles as an aging British spy in Martin Ritt’s film of John Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Oskar Werner as his Russian counterpart and Claire Bloom as a woman caught in the middle were equally fine. The film was also nominated for its art direction.

Steiger, who also won kudos this year for his villainous role in Doctor Zhivago, had his most acclaimed role ever as the concentration camp survivor who holds the key to a preventing a current injustice in Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker. The gritty drama also provided Geraldine Fitzgerald and Brock Peters with strong supporting roles.

Olivier’s film of Shakespeare’s Othello, directed by Stuart Burge, was an acting tour-de-force, winning all four of the film’s stars Oscar nominations. Although Maggie Smith’s Desdemona is probably the best thing about it, her starring role was unceremoniously relegated to the supporting categories along with fellow nominees Frank Finlay and Joyce Redman.

Smith was also the best thing about the non-nominated Young Cassidy, John Ford’s penultimate film. Replaced by Jack Cardiff, due to illness, the film is an actor’s showcase, not only for Smith, but also for Rod Taylor, Julie Christie, Edith Evans and Flora Robson. Taylor plays struggling Irish playwright Sean O’Casey, inexplicably renamed Cassidy for the film. Smith is the librarian who loves him. Never released commercially on home video, it deserves a long overdue DVD release.

Among the performers who were left out of the crowded Best Actor category this year were former winners Rex Harrison and James Stewart, both of whom may have been nominated in less competitive years.

Harrison played the Pope to Charlton Heston’s Michelangelo in Carol Reed’s film of Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy. Although the film centers on the artist, it’s the Pope who has all the best lines and Harrison delivers them with panache. The film was nominated for five Oscars, but none for any of its actors.

Although we didn’t know it at the time, Stewart has his last two great screen roles this year, first as a farmer caught in the middle of the Civil War in Shenandoah, directed by Andrew V. McLaglen, then as the pilot of the downed airplane in Robert Aldrich’s The Flight of the Phoenix.

Shenandoah was nominated for Best Sound, while The Flight of the Phoenix was nominated for Best Editing and Best Supporting Actor, Ian Bannen, who took the slot many had expected to go to Hardy Kruger. Kruger actually gave the film’s best performance as the technical expert who clashes with Stewart, but his refusal to accept a Golden Globe nomination hurt his chances, throwing the nomination Bannen’s way. Bannen had been a Golden Globe nominee for Best Newcomer.

All films discussed have been released on DVD in the U.S. except A Thousand Clowns and Young Cassidy.

New DVD releases this week include the “complete” version of Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece, Metropolis, on both DVD and Blu-ray and the Blu-ray release, several weeks ahead of the DVD release, of Criterion’s mammoth America Lost and Found: The BBS Story,consisting of Head; Easy Rider; Five Easy Pieces; Drive, He Said; The Last Picture Show; The King of Marvin Gardens and A Safe Place.

-Peter J. Patrick (November 23, 2010)

The DVD Report #182: November 16, 2010

Jack Warner paid the then astronomical sum of $5,000,000 for the screen rights to Lerner and Lowe’s smash Broadway musical, My Fair Lady. His dream star cast consisted of Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant and James Cagney in the roles created by Julie Andrews, Rex Harrison and Stanley Holloway. Both Grant and Cagney turned him down, but Hepburn accepted the challenge for $1,000,000 of the film’s purported $17,000,000 budget. She was joined by original stars Harrison and Holloway.

An event film, it won eight of the twelve 1964 Oscars it was nominated for. Although a faithful recreation of the stage show as opposed to an opened up screen presentation, it is nevertheless and eye-popping extravaganza of the type they don’t make anymore. The sets and costumes are spectacular, especially when seen on a large screen and in a properly color restored version. Unfortunately many people who’ve never seen the film on a large screen and have bad memories of color faded TV showings of the film, tend to dismiss it as one of Oscar’s lesser winners. Anyone who thinks so, needs to see it again in the proper light.

Among the film’s wins were those for Best Picture, Actor (Harrison) and Director (George Cukor). Both Holloway and Gladys Cooper were nominated for their supporting performances, but lost. Hepburn was not nominated, and had she been, would likely have lost anyway to Julie Andrews, who after being ignored by Warner had a triumph of her own in Mary Poppins.

Although it garnered more nominations than My Fair Lady – thirteen - Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins won fewer actual Oscars – five. Julie Andrews’ win for Best Actress was among the most popular in Oscar history. Not only had she wowed audiences with her practically perfect nanny in the Disney film, she also scored impressively in the World War II comedy-drama, The Americanization of Emily. By the time the Oscars rolled around, the world had already seen her in the then highest grossing film of all time, 1965’s The Sound of Music.

While Andrews was the undisputed star of Mary Poppins, the film was by no means a one-woman show. Dick Van Dyke, David Tomlinson, Glynis Johns, Karen Dotrice, Matthew Garber, Jane Darwell and many others added to the fun.

Nominated for an impressive twelve Oscars, Peter Glenville’s film version of the stage hit, Becket, won only one – for Edward Anhalt’s adapted screenplay. Richard Burton starred as (St.) Thomas `a Becket, the Bishop of Canterbury and Peter O’Toole co-starred as his nemesis, King Henry II, a role he would reprise to even greater effect in The Lion in Winter four years later. Both were nominated for Best Actor while John Gielgud was nominated for Best Supporting Actor as King Louis II of France.

Anthony Quinn, who had been Broadway’s Becket to Laurence Olivier’s Henry, had the greatest role of his career as the enigmatic Zorba the Greek. His fierce portrayal was so brilliant that audiences thereafter had a hard time distinguishing between the actor and the character he was playing. He was forevermore being accused of playing Zorba the “this” or Zorba the” that” as in Zorba the Pope in The Shoes of the Fisherman.

Based on Nikos Kazantzakis’ celebrated novel, Michael Cacoyannis’ film paired Quinn with Alan Bates, Irene Papas and Lila Kedrova as the other principals. Nominated for seven Oscars, it won three, including one for Kedrova’s heartbreaking portrayal of the aging courtesan. Shockingly, Manos Theodorakis’ pulsating score, which was for many the film’s highlight, wasn’t nominated. Kedrova won a Tony for reprising her role in the Kander and Ebb musical version, Zorba, again opposite Quinn, twenty years later.

Perhaps the film that has stood the test of time better than any other nominated for Best Picture of 1964 is Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The Doomsday satire was released at the height of the Cold War and was so effective at showing the absurdities on both sides of the issues that similarly themed dramatic films such as Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe failed to ignite the intended outrage from audiences.

Nominated for four Oscars, including Best Actor Peter Sellers and Best Director, the film had already won Kubrick the Best Director award from the New York Film Critics, and Kubrick, Terry Southern and Peter George the Best Screenplay award from the Writers’ Guild. It would go on to win BAFTAs for Best British Film and Best Film from Any Source.

Among the memorable films of 1964 nominated for Oscars in other categories were The Chalk Garden; The Night of the Iguana; Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte; Séance on a Wet Afternoon; The Pumpkin Eater; The Unsinkable Molly Brown; A Hard Day’s Night; Topkapi; Seven Days in May and The Best Man.

Deborah Kerr had her last two major screen roles in Ronald Neame’s The Chalk Garden based on Enid Bagnold’s play, and John Huston’s The Night of the Iguana from Tennessee Williams’ play. Alas, she failed to be nominated for either.

In The Chalk Garden, she plays a convicted murderer, who under another name, is hired by unsuspecting grand dame Edith Evans to act as governess who Evans’ miscreant grand-daughter, played by Hayley Mills. Mills’ father John plays Evans’ butler. Evans won an Oscar nomination reprising her London stage role. She was a replacement for fellow Supporting Actress nominee Gladys Cooper who originated the role on Broadway, but had to bow out due to overtime on My Fair Lady and her commitment to the TV series, The Rogues.

Kerr plays an itinerant quick sketch artist traveling with her aged poet grandfather in The Night of the Iguana. Co-starring Richard Burton, Ava Gardner and Sue Lyon, the film won a nomination for Grayson Hall as a shrill lesbian tour director. How she was nominated, while Kerr and Gardner, both of whom are at the top of their game, were not, is beyond me. The film won for Dorothy Jeakins’ black-and-white costume design.

Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, having proved successful box office adversaries in Robert Aldrich’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, were scheduledto be re-united for the director’s follow-up horror flick, Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, but Crawford fell ill and had to be replaced. After months of delays, the film was finally made with Olivia de Havilland filling in for Crawford. The film was delayed for so long that co-star Barbara Stanwyck had to back out to start work on TV’s The Big Valley and was replaced by Mary Astor. Agnes Moorehead, playing Davis’ slovenly maid, was on the verge of quitting the film to start work on her TV series, Bewitched, when the film resumed production. Thelma Ritter had been tapped to step in.

Lucky for Moorehead, the film brought her a nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

Two American actresses put on British accents and won Best Actress nominations for their efforts. Kim Stanley, who won the New York Film Critics award for hers, played a bogus psychic and kidnapper to stunning effect in Séance on a Wet Afternoon. Bancroft, who won a Golden Globe as the year’s Best Actress – Drama, portrayed the mother of nine undergoing a nervous breakdown to chilling effect in Jack Clayton’s The Pumpkin Eater.

Debbie Reynolds campaigned hard for the screen version of Meredith Willson’s The Unsinkable Molly Brown and won the part over Shirley MacLaine, who was equally desperate for the role. Nominated for six Oscars, Reynolds plays the real life survivor of the Titanic whose theme song is “I Ain’t Down Yet”.

The winds of change were blowing in the music world and in the way music was presented on screen. If My Fair Lady, Mary Poppins and The Unsinkable Molly Brown were symptomatic of what worked in the past, then The Beatles’ A Hard Day Night was clearly a representation of things to come.

Built around a “typical day” in the lives of the Beatles – John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, Richard Lester’s uproarious comedy also featured Wilfrid Brambell as George’s grandfather. It was nominated for Best Scoring – Adaptation or Original and Best Original Screenplay.

Jules Dassin’s caper comedy, Topkapi, gave us Melina Mercouri, Maximilian Schell, Peter Ustinov and Robert Morley involved in the theft of a jeweled dagger from a museum in Istanbul. Ustinov won his second Oscar for his sweaty performance.

Two marvelous films about the Presidency accounted for two of Ustinov’s competitors.

Fredric March was the beleaguered President who stands up to would-be military dictator Burt Lancaster in John Frankenheimer’s tense film of Fletcher Knebel’s best-seller, Seven Days in May. Kirk Douglas and Ava Gardner co-starred and former Oscar winner Edmund O’Brien was again nominated for his portrayal of March’s trusted friend, a U.S. Senator, who puts his life on the line for his President.

Henry Fonda and Cliff Robertson were the front-runners at the Presidential convention in Franklin J. Schaffner’s The Best Man. Thirties leading man Lee Tracy won an Oscar nomination for his comeback performance as a feisty former President modeled after Harry Truman. Margret Leighton, Edie Adams and a marvelous Ann Sothern were also featured.

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

New on DVD this week: the Oscar bound The Kids Are All Right with Annette Bening and Julianne Moore and the Blu-ray debuts of the 1935 Oscar winner, Mutiny on the Bounty with Charles Laughton and Clark Gable and the ahead- of-its time 1955 masterpiece, The Night of the Hunter, directed by Laughton with Robert Mitchum and Lillian Gish.

-Peter J. Patrick (November 16, 2010)

The DVD Report #181: November 9, 2010

1963 has a reputation among revisionist critics as being the weakest year in Oscar history, with the Oscar winning Tom Jones one of the least deserving Best Picture winners of all time. Balderdash! It’s one of the best, but I guess you had to be there to really appreciate it.

The bawdy British comedy from Henry Fielding’s 18th Century novel seemed like a breath of fresh air to audiences starved for something funny and a little bit risqué. Tony Richardson’s inventive direction, Walter Lassaly’s breathtaking cinematography and John Addison’s tingly score all supported John Osborne’s clever screenplay in the service of an extraordinary cast led by Albert Finney and Susannah York. Hugh Griffith, Edith Evans, Joan Greenwood, Joyce Redman and Diane Cilento were the standouts in the huge supporting cast, but truthfully everyone in the film excelled.

One key component of the film’s success was its costumes, but there would be no award for them from Oscar, BAFTA or any other awards giver of the day. The reason is simple. There was no costume designer. The film’s budget was so miniscule that they had to make do with rented costumes throughout the production.

Nominated for ten Oscars, it won four for Best Picture, Director, Screenplay and Score.

One of the year’s biggest surprises was the joyous Lilies of the Field from director Ralph Nelson, known primarily for his hard-hitting TV work. Based on a book by William E. Barrett, the film provided Sidney Poitier with one of his best roles as an itinerant handyman who builds a chapel for a group of East European nuns led by Lilia Skala. Poitier proved a popular Oscar winner despite stiff competition from both Albert Finney in Tom Jones and Paul Newman in Hud. The then rather obscure character actress, Lilia Skala, was also nominated for her performance. In all, the film received five nominations including Best Picture, Black-and-White Cinematography and Adapted Screenplay.

Two-time Oscar winner Elia Kazan had his most critically acclaimed film in years with America Amerca, based on the director’s uncle’s struggles to emigrate to America from Turkey.

Greek actor Stathis Giallelis was extraordinary in the lead and won the Golden Globe for Best Newcomer – Male, an honor he shared with Albert Finney for Tom Jones and Robert Walker, Jr. for the long forgotten The Ceremony.

The film was nominated for four Oscars and won one for Best Black-and-White Art Direction. Kazan himself was the nominee in the three categories it lost: Best Picture, Director and Screenplay. The film, which has long been missing on DVD, is being released today as part of a massive Elia Kazan set that includes fourteen other films, most of which are reissues.

An ambitious undertaking, MGM’s How the West Was Won follows four generations of the fictitious Prescott family from the Erie Canal in the 1830s to their settled home in the West fifty years later. The film, which was shot in Cinerama, required theatrical presentation on screens three times the normal size. The film employed the services of four directors: Henry Hathaway, who shot most it; George Marshall who handled the scenes regarding the building of the railroad; John Ford, who directed the Civil War scenes and an unbilled Richard Thorpe who handled the transitional sequences.

The film’s cast was a who’s who of acting giants of the day including James Stewart, Gregory Peck, Debbie Reynolds, Carroll Baker, George Peppard, Carolyn Jones, Walter Brennan, Karl Malden, Agnes Moorehead, Thelma Ritter and in extended cameos, John Wayne and Henry Fonda. Spencer Tracy narrated. Raymond Massey, Oscar nominated for playing Abraham Lincoln twenty-three years earlier in Abe Lincoln in Illinois, played the 16th President for the fifth and final time on screen.

The film was nominated for eight Oscars and won three for Editing, Sound and Original Screenplay.

For a notorious flop, Twentieth Century-Fox’s Cleopatra did alright at the Oscars. Nominated for nine awards including Best Picture, it won four for Color Cinematography, Art Direction and Costume Design and for Special Effects. The historical epic, which starred Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and Rex Harrison, directed by two-time Oscar winner Joseph L. Mankiewicz, nearly bankrupted the studio. In fact if it hadn’t been for the phenomenal success of The Sound of Music two years later, Fox would have had to shut down.

Trounced by the critics and generally ignored by the public, Cleopatra clearly had no business being in the race for Best Picture. Although I like both Lilies of the Field and How the West Was Won, those two films’ Best Picture nominations were also questionable when you consider that there were at least three films more deserving of the honor.

The year’s best western was not How the West Was Won but Hud. The year’s best religious themed film was The Cardinal, not Lilies of the Field. The year’s best film made in Rome was 8½, not Cleopatra.

A great modern western, Martin Ritt’s film of Larry McMurtry’s novel, Hud provided Paul Newman with one of his signature roles as the ruthless young man who tarnishes everything he touches. Newman won his third Best Actor nomination and Patricia Neal won Best Actress for her wise housekeeper. Melvyn Douglas won the first of his two Best Supporting Actor awards as Hud’s stern but principled father and Brandon de Wilde should have been nominated for his portrayal of Hud’s hero-worshiping nephew.

The film won a third Oscar for James Wong Howe’s evocative Black-and-White Cinematography. It had been nominated for a total of seven.

Otto Preminger’s film of Henry Morton Robinson monumental best-seller, The Cardinal, earned the director his third nomination for Best Director. In all, the film was nominated for a total of six Oscars, including one for John Huston’s wily old bishop and the title character’s mentor.

The film begins with the elevation of Stephen Fermoyle (Tom Tryon) to Cardinal, and flashes back to how to he got there. The film is a microcosm of world events in the first half of the Twentieth Century as Fermoyle rises from humble parish priest to confidant to Cardinals in Vienna and Rome, featuring everything from the terror of the Ku Klux Klan to the rise of Nazis. Tryon, Huston and Burgess Meredith as Tryon’s first pastor are excellent. Leon Shamroy’s cinematography is stunning. He was nominated for an Oscar but lost to himself for the ridiculous Cleopatra. Shockingly not nominated, Jerome Moross’ score is one of the best of a year of remarkable film scores.

One of Federico Fellini’s best loved films, 8 ½ features Fellini’s alter-ego, Marcello Mastroianni as a director trying to get through a film he has little interest in, while retreating into a fantasy world where the women in his life appear larger than life. Fellini’s use of music, as well as his swirling camerawork and the performances of various women from Anouk Aimee to Claudia Cardinale to Sandra Milo stand out. The film won Oscars for Best Foreign Film and Best Black-and-White Costume Design. The film was nominated for five Oscars in all, including two for Fellini himself for Direction and Original Screenplay. They accounted for two of his twelve career nominations, all of which he lost.

Among the other high profile films of 1963 garnering at least one Oscar nomination were The L-Shaped Room; This Sporting Life; The Great Escape; Love With the Proper Stranger; The Leopard; The V.I.P.s; Charade and The Birds.

Leslie Caron won her first Oscar nomination in nine years for her uncompromising performance as the young French woman who has an affair with a British writer while pregnant with another man’s child in Bryan Forbes’ The L-Shaped Room. The film featured fine supporting work by Tom Bell, Brock Peters and Cicely Courtneidge.

The British kitchen sink drama, This Sporting Life, directed by Lindsay Anderson, secured acting nominations for Richard Harris as the angry young rugby player and Rachel Roberts as his widowed landlady with whom he has an affair.

A rousing World War II action film, John Sturges’ The Great Escape made Steve McQueen a superstar. Co-starring James Garner and Richard Attenborough, the box office smash was nominated for its special effects.

McQueen’s other major film this year, the romantic comedy, Love With the Proper Stranger, directed by Robert Mulligan,was nominated for five Oscars including one for Natalie Wood as Best Actress.

Luchino Visconti’s acclaimed historical drama, The Leopard,featuring Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale in 1860s Sicily, was nominated for its sumptuous color costumes.

A potboiler with little to recommend it, Anthony Asquith’s The V.I.P.s does give us two very good reasons to sit through the year’s other Taylor-Burton pairing – two gals named Maggie. Rising star Maggie Smith had her first major screen role as a secretary secretly in love with her boss and veteran actress Maggie (Margaret) Rutherford won a much deserved Oscar for her delightful pill-popping duchess. Rutherford had become a sensation in her early 70s starring in a series of Miss Marple films.

A reviewer at the time opined that when Audrey Hepburn was a little old lady, her three decades older co-star Cary Grant would still be playing romantic leads. Sadly, Grant retired shortly thereafter and Hepburn didn’t live to become a little old lady. Happily, though, we have Stanley Donen’s Charade in which they both shine. It was nominated for its title song.

Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds was one of his most popular films. Though dramatically weak, its final scenes are among the most terrifying in any film. It was nominated for its special effects.

All films discussed, except for The L-Shaped Room, Love With the Proper Stranger and The Ceremony have been released on DVD in the U.S. The L-Shaped Room is available in an excellent Region 2 release from the U.K.

Among the week’s new DVD releases are Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Charlie St. Cloud.

-Peter J. Patrick (November 9, 2010)

The DVD Report #180: November 2, 2010

There was a newspaper strike in New York at the end of 1962 which prevented the New York Film Critics for the first and only time in their history from bestowing their annual awards. Thus, Oscar’s most reliable precursor was missing. No matter, David Lean’s spectacular Lawrence of Arabia was the obvious front-runner from the get-go.

David Lean’s epic tale of the controversial British WWI hero, Lawrence of Arabia,proved to be a towering achievement in every department – from Lean’s painterly canvas, beautifully realized by Freddie Young’s cinematography - to Maurice Jarre’s magnificent score - to the performances, particularly of Peter O’Toole as Lawrence and Omar Sharif as Sherif Ali, but also those of Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Arthur Kennedy, Jack Hawkins, Donald Wolfit, Claude Rains, Jose Ferrer and others.

Nominated for ten Oscars, Lawrencewon seven, including Best Picture and Director.

Two of the three Oscars Lawrence lost, went to Robert Mulligan’s film of Harper Lee’s beloved Pulitzer Prize winning novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, which won three of the eight awards altogether.

Gregory Peck finally won his Best Actor Oscar on his fifth nomination for his portrayal of Atticus Finch, the quietly effective small town lawyer and father to impressionable Mary Badham and Phillip Alford. Horton Foote won for his adaptation over Lawrence’s Robert Bolt. A bit of trivia: Bolt’s collaborator, blacklisted Michael Wilson wasn’t recognized by the Academy until 1995 when his name was added to the list of that film’s nominations.

Mockingbird works on several levels. It’s an uncanny exploration of childhood, it’s a civil rights lesson and it’s a thriller as Peck defends a poor black man (Brock Peters) falsely accused of raping a white woman. Robert Duvall makes a memorable screen debut as the mysterious Boo Radley. The film’s eight nominations included one for Mary Badham, who at ten became the youngest performance nominated for a supporting actress Oscar. She held the record until nine year old Tatum O’Neal’s nomination and win for Paper Moon eleven years later.

Joining those two masterworks on Oscar’s list of Best Picture nominees for 1962 were Darryl F. Zanuck’s mammoth recreation of D-Day, The Longest Day; the highly anticipated screen version of Meredith Willson’s rousing Broadway smash hit musical, The Music Man; and MGM’s troubled remake of Mutiny on the Bounty.

The pinnacle of his career, Twentieth Century Fox honcho Darryl F. Zanuck’s The Longest Day was nominated for five Oscars and won two – for Best Black-and-White Cinematography and Best Special Effects.

It took three million men and five thousand ships to effect the Normandy invasion, and Zanuck’s recreation seems to have duplicated the feat. The scenes of the invasion are staggering and memorable. This is one of the times that an all-star cast is used to excellent effect. John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton, Robert Ryan, Jeffrey Hunter, Rod Steiger, Red Buttons, Richard Beymer, Robert Wagner, Curt Jurgens and more are each given a chance to shine in one of Hollywood’s best war films.

On Broadway it beat West Side Story at the Tonys. On screen, it proved just as irresistible. Nominated for six Oscars, Morton Da Costa’s film version of The Music Man won one – for Best Adapted Score. Robert Preston, long a reliable character actor in films, became a major Broadway star with his portrayal of the con man who beguiles a small Iowa town. His performance in the film is spellbinding. He is superbly supported by Shirley Jones, Ronny Howard, Pert Kelton, Paul Ford and Hermione Gingold.

Nominated for seven Oscars, MGM’s remake of Mutiny on the Bounty was a troubled production from the start. Marlon Brando’s on set shenanigans and his affected portrayal of Fletcher Christian caused one director to quit and co-star Trevor Howard (as Captain Bligh) to almost quit. The film’s technical aspects, however, are first rate. Robert Surtees’ cinematography and Bronislau Kaper’s score are the film’s real stars.

Among the films garnering Oscar’s attention in other categories were The Manchurian Candidate; The Miracle Worker; Sweet Bird of Youth; Days of Wine and Roses; What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?; Long Day’s Journey Into Night; Gypsy; David and Lisa; Billy Budd; Bird Man of Alcatraz and Lolita.

Conventional wisdom says that The Manchurian Candidate was not successful on its initial release, that it wasn’t until its 1987 reissue that it became a hit. That’s not exactly true. I saw it with a packed house when it opened in October, 1962. BAFTA nominated it for one of the year’s Best Film(s) from Any Source. The Directors’ Guild and the Golden Globes nominated John Frankenheimer and the National Board of Review and the Globes gave heir Supporting Actress award to Angela Lansbury. Oscar nominated Lansbury and the film’s screenplay. The film also had a successful TV showing in 1963 but was pulled out of circulation after the assassination of President Kennedy.

The film, in case you’ve been living under a rock, is about an American POW (Laurence Harvey) trained by his Korean captors to be a dormant assassin. The film ends with a political assassination. Lansbury, 36 at the time of filming, played then 33 year-old Harvey’s control freak mother to devastating effect.

Lansbury lost the Oscar to Patty Duke, who along with Best Actress winner Anne Bancroft, provided half of one of the greatest acting duos in screen history as Helen Keller and her teacher, Annie Sullivan. Both actresses were repeating roles they honed to perfection on the Broadway stage in The Miracle Worker, roles created by Teresa Wright and Patty McCormack for TV’s Playhouse 90. The film received a total of five nominations including one for director Arthur Penn.

Bancroft’s competition, among the fiercest in Oscar history, included Geraldine Page, Lee Remick and long time Oscar favorites Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn.

Page was nominated for Richard Brooks’ film of Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth in which she plays an aging actress whose latest gigolo (Paul Newman) runs afoul of the mayor of the town they’re visiting during a promotional tour for her latest film. Ed Begley as the mayor won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor and Shirley Knight as his daughter, Newman’s first love, was nominated as Best Supporting Actress.

Remick was nominated for Blake Edwards’ film of Days of Wine and Roses, which like The Miracle Worker,had originally been a highly acclaimed TV production. Remick and Jack Lemmon played the alcoholics originally played by Piper Laurie and Cliff Robertson. Nominated for a total of five Oscars, it won for its title song by Henri Mancini and Johnny Mercer.

It was no secret that Hollywood legends Bette Davis and Joan Crawford hated one another, but now in their mid-50s, neither one was the box office star they once were. Director Robert Aldrich fed off the tension between the two and the public came in drove to see the fireworks as a grotesquely made up Davis menaces wheelchair bound Crawford as her more glamorous actress sister in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Nominated for a total of five Oscars including Best Supporting Actor Victor Buono, the film won for Best Black-and-White Costume Design.

Katharine Hepburn was named Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival while her co-stars Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards (Jr.) and Dean Stockwell shared the Best Actor award for their amazing work in Sidney Lumet’s film of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Only Hepburn as the drug addicted mother was singled out by Oscar.

Another star of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Rosalind Russell, had one of her best roles in Mervyn LeRoy’s film of the Jule Styne-Stephen Sondheim musical, Gypsy, and in fact, won her fifth Golden Globe for it. She was not nominated for an Oscar, but the film did receive three technical nominations.

The husband and wife team of Frank and Eleanor Perry received Oscar nominations, he for directing David and Lisa, she for writing the groundbreaking film about mental illness. Keir Dullea and Janet Margolin were the young stars.

Terence Stamp in the title role of Peter Ustinov’s film of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd emerged as a star and an Oscar nominee for his compelling performance. Ustinov, Robert Ryan and Melvyn Douglas co-starred.

Thelma Ritter received her sixth nomination for Best Supporting Actress as Burt Lancaster’s overbearing mother in Bird Man of Alcatraz, a record that still stands. Lancaster, Telly Savalas as a fellow convict, and the film’s black-and-white cinematography were also nominated.

Vladmir Nabokov won an Oscar nomination for adapting his controversial novel, Lolita, which was filmed by Stanley Kubrick with a curious performance by Peter Sellers and interesting ones by James Mason, Shelley Winters and Sue Lyon in the title role of the child seductress.

Among the films Oscar ignored were The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner; A Taste of Honey, Victim and Advise and Consent; the last three dealing with homosexuality, now apparently a fit subject for the screen, but not the staid Academy.

John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance has long been acknowledged as one of his best films. At the time, however, the film was greatly criticized for the casting of James Stewart and John Wayne, then in their mid-50s, as young men. Get past the obvious and it’s an engrossing tale of legend vs. truth. Lee Marvin, Vera Miles and Edmond O’Brien co-star.

Tom Courtenay became an overnight sensation as the rebellious juvenile delinquent in Tony Richardson’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, which also gave Michael Redgrave one of his best roles as the reform school governor who champions the lad.

Richardson’s even more acclaimed A Taste of Honey made a star of Rita Tushingham as the daughter of slatternly Dora Bryan, who is impregnated by a back sailor and helped through her pregnancy by a homosexual friend (Murray Melvin). The film won BAFTAs for Best British Film, Actress (Bryan), Screenplay and Most Promising Newcomer (Tushingham). Melvin was also nominated for Most Promising Newcomer and the film was nominated for Best Film from Any Source.

Exhibited in the U.S. without a code of approval, Basil Dearden’s Victim was a groundbreaking film about blackmail that led eventually to changes in British law. Dirk Bogarde, in his mpst acclaimed role, is the attorney who "comes out" to break the cycle of blackmail running rampant against gays at the time. Sylvia Sims as his wife and Dennis Price as an aging actor are also excellent. Nominated for two BAFAs, including one for Bogarde, Dearden made the film as a whodunit to attract wide audiences to his anti-discrimination film just as he had done with Sapphire, his earlier film which exposed the ugly underbelly of racial prejudice rampant in London at the time.

Otto Preminger, no stranger to controversy, actually avoided it with his take on homosexual blackmail in Advise and Consent by getting the Production Code committee to approve its inclusion as long as it was "in good taste".

Don Murray was the blackmailed U.S. Senator in a cast that included Henry Fonda, Charles Laughton, Walter Pidgeon, Franchot Tone, Lew Ayres and Burgess Meredith among others. BAFTA posthumously nominated Charles Laughton for his brilliant portrayal of a wily Southern Senator, but not Oscar.

All films discussed have been released on DVD in the U.S. except A Taste of Honey and Sapphire. Sapphire is due in January as part of a Dearden set which will also include a re-mastered Victim.

Among this week’s new DVD releases are Toy Story 3 and the Blu-ray debuts of The Sound of Music; The Bridge on the River Kwai and White Christmas.

-Peter J. Patrick (November 2, 2010)