Best Picture #25: The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)

I am really glad The Greatest Show on Earth turned out to not be the direct predecessor of The Greatest Showman. Other than being about the circus, they are completely different. The circus in The Greatest Show on Earth is well-established and huge. A large portion of the movie is just footage of the acts. I can see the appeal, since it brought the excitement and atmosphere of the circus to the moviehouses. We were entertained almost in spite of ourselves (and in spite of its ridiculous length, this being a film directed by the guy who also did the epic Ten Commandments and also starred bombastic Charlton Heston).
The plot, if it can be called that, is pretty basic. Behind-the-scenes interpersonal drama in a very large circus; love and rivalries blossom and fade between the acts and the individual performers. The draw for the most part is watching the acts perform (done for the most part by actual Ringling Bros/Barnum & Bailey acts). That in itself might have been enough to put it in Oscar contention since it brought the magic of the circus much closer to everyday life and in bright, flashy colors. There is also a very dramatic train wreck towards the end that even though it's obviously done in miniatures is still very impressive and looks less fake than some CGI.
This is supposed to be one of the least deserving Best Picture winners. There is some merit to this, since it beat out High Noon and Singin' in the Rain, both of which have endured longer in the public consciousness, and director Cecil B. DeMille's best-known work now is of course The Ten Commandments, which itself did not win Best Picture. But Best Picture awards don't measure what stands the test of time, they are in many ways a litmus test for the atmosphere of the day, and this movie was the highest grossing film of 1952. For us at least, this is definitely not one of the worst Best Pictures we've seen yet; some, like Broadway Melody, The Great Ziegfeld, Cimarron, and All the King's Men, have been downright painful to sit through. This was big, bold, and entertaining.
Watched: June 12, 2018

Best Picture #24: An American in Paris (1951)

...holy heck Batman it's in color! Our first color Best Picture since Gone with the Wind (#12), and our first musical since Going My Way (#17). Starring Gene Kelly as the titular character, this movie is a veritable feast for the senses. It's in the same category as the more contemporary Mamma Mia and We Will Rock You, taking the canon of a popular musical group and building a story loosely around it, in this case the Gershwins. So all the music was very familiar, using such classics as "I Got Rhythm" and "S'Wonderful." A lot about this film's look and sound became iconic for the movie musical genre. La La Land in particular pays very heavy homage to it.
The plot runs like a typical rom com that dates back to Shakespeare and beyond. Two men find themselves in love with the same woman. She was already dating one, but finds she really wants to be with the second. Meanwhile the second guy, a starving painter, finds himself the object of the attentions of yet another woman, this one rich, who wants to fund his art. Obviously complications ensue. Therefore everybody's miserable and are obliged to sing and dance to express their love for the person they can't have, and for their careers in the arts.
I really didn't find myself rooting for either guy. There are things about both of them that make me uncomfortable in their relationship with Lise, the lead female. Jerry, the American, takes the "won't take a clear no for an answer and does stalkery things like call and show up at her work until he wears her down" route of courting. This is why guys think if a woman says 'no' she means 'keep trying until I say yes.' With Lise's actual boyfriend Henri, a popular singer, there are some creepy child-grooming connotations to their history where her parents gave her to him to raise because they were in the French Resistance during the war (and presumably died), she crushed on him and then he eventually fell for her. So when she fell out of love with him, she felt she couldn't leave the relationship because she owed everything to him. Ick ick ick for both of them, even though both of their feelings for her are sincere and it's not supposed to be creepy.
While we enjoyed this way more than the last two Best Pictures, we still weren't completely grabbed. It is a classic for good reason, however, and if you liked La La Land (or were disappointed by the ending) you should give this one a spin.
Watched: May 27, 2018

Best Picture #23: All About Eve (1950)

All About Eve started out so promising. The opening narration (given by the velvety pipes of Shere Khan, George Sanders) is a hilarious piece of witty exaggeration. Unfortunately, nothing else in the movie is anywhere near as funny. It's another film-about-show-business, which we haven't seen since The Great Ziegfeld (#9). The basic plot is that a young woman, Eve (Anne Baxter), insinuates herself into the inner circle of a temperamental stage actress (Bette Davis) she admires. At first everyone likes and trusts her, but slowly like dominoes falling they all suddenly have separate revelations that she's actually a conniving snake out to supplant the actress and take everything from her because...reasons. It doesn't seem to be personal. It's basically ambition. Some of the early characters realizing this was confusing because they were acting on practically no evidence, they would just take a sudden hard turn into disliking the newcomer. Eventually we the audience are clued in for real as to Eve's true colors, but it takes awhile and in the meantime it makes everyone who dislikes Eve look delusional. Bette Davis is renowned for this performance as a persnickety actress terrified of aging, and while the performance is excellent the character is a whiny, insecure, unlikable bitch in 4/5ths of her scenes.
Then at the end things take a hard turn for the sinister and I actually exclaimed aloud "what the shit am I watching?" We're supposed to think it's Eve getting her comeuppance for all of her lies and manipulation by finding the tables turned and I imagine that's exactly what audiences in 1950 thought. To my 21st-century post-several waves of feminism eye, it raises my hackles because it looks very likely she's about to be turned into a virtual slave to George Sanders' character, sexual and otherwise, when he blatantly says she 'belongs to him' and if she doesn't obey his every whim he'll air all her lies. Since he's a respected theater critic he has the forum and audience in which to do so. There's blackmail, and then there's Blackmail. Yes, Eve had been shamelessly and callously manipulating people for her own ends but no one deserves to be blackmailed this hard. It would have been enough for her to be called on her lies, maybe have her and George Sanders prepare to manipulate and blackmail each other endlessly, and then have the final scene where another young woman appears to be preparing to do to her what she did to Bette Davis' character. That would have satisfied my need for poetic justice without bringing the creepy coercion factor quite so high.
(As a sidenote, this movie also marks an early supporting role for Marilyn Monroe, easily recognizable by that mole.)
Watched: May 20, 2018

Best Picture #22: All the King's Men (1949)

God, what a depressing movie. That's really all there is to say about it.
OK, in all seriousness. It's a movie version of a book by the same name that only lightly fictionalized the rise in the 1930s of Huey "Kingfish" Long. Never heard of him? He doesn't get talked about much today, but he was a highly controversial figure in the mid 20th century. As corrupt a politician as they come, he used his ill-gotten influence to get a lot of badly needed infrastructure built in Louisiana during the Great Depression (as well as to amass great personal power and wealth, as one does when one is a corrupt politician). Obviously he was a populist, though ostensibly a Democrat, and was notable for appealing to black and white demographics in the highly segregated South (though as an interesting sidenote there is not a single black character in the movie, not even as an extra). Long made it all the way to the US Senate and was eyeing a presidential run when he was assassinated by the relative of a political enemy. He was an interesting enough man that Ken Burns make an entire documentary about him. (This is a dude whose other documentaries usually have big, sweeping titles like "The National Park Service" and "The Civil War.")
The movie follows all of this quite closely, leaving out only that "Willie Stark" was elected to national office, choosing to have him assassinated at the Louisiana state courthouse in Baton Rouge rather than on the steps of the US Capitol Building as happened to his real-life counterpart (in those days security wasn't so tight and you actually had a prayer of assassinating a Senator with a handgun). The story here is told from the perspective of an idealistic journalist who becomes part of "Stark's" closest staff and watches him go from well-meaning backwater lawyer to towering dictator who even resorts to having people killed to get them out of the way, corrupting everyone around him (including the narrator) along the way like a cancer.
There was apparently a poorly received attempt at a remake about ten years ago, which does and doesn't surprise me. The star-studded cast should have been able to make it work, but the subject matter is difficult to handle at the best of times and I don't think the climate in 2007 was really right for asking the "corrupt politician who gets stuff done: OK/Not OK?" question. Its predecessor is certainly way down on my list of favorites in the Oscar movies we've watched thus far.
Watched: April 8, 2018

Best Picture #21: Hamlet (1948)

As a disclaimer going in, I should say that Hamlet is by far not my favorite of Shakespeare's plays. I read it in its entirety and saw the Kenneth Branaugh version in high school. I was not particularly impressed then, though I had an out-there theory that Gertrude actually murdered Ophelia.
In any case, this version is a classic because the legendary Laurence Olivier stars in the title role. If you start to google his name, the next word suggestion that comes up is 'Hamlet.' We'd previously seen him as the male lead in Hitchcock's Rebecca, where I have to say his performance was much more sympathetic and compelling.
Hamlet is the gold standard of Shakespearean male roles, the one every classically trained actor aspires to. In this case, however, the entire thing was kind of like a game of golf: likely far more interesting to participate in than it was to watch. Hamlet is supposed to be one of Shakespeare's most complex characters, but everything about the Olivier version of him, and for that matter the play itself, is treated with absolute straightforwardness in this adaptation. Every line is pronounced with solemnity and gravitas, as if all the actors are metaphorically bowing before the genius that created this masterwork and not really thinking about the material beyond that. This is especially evident in the first half, when there is absolutely no emotion at all in any delivery and all the actors sort of gaze out into the middle distance as they speak rather than look at each other. Things get more interesting after Ophelia dies; Olivier finally seems to realize his character is supposed to be tormented occasionally rather than perpetually serene (you can't really tell the difference in the early scenes where he's supposed to be pretending to be mad and him the rest of the time), and the rest of the cast take their cue from him and occasionally give us a facial twitch.
The thing about dramatic tragedies, and Shakespeare understood this given the script he wrote, is that the interest for the audience is watching the train wreck. It's about deeply flawed people bouncing off each other, unable to overcome their flaws, until they're eventually destroyed by them. This movie is so obsessed with the awesomeness of Shakespeare as a writer that it forgot that the lines the actors are speaking are either conversations or inner monologue, not Pronouncements From on High. The characters are archetypes without any kind of subtlety or life given to them by the performance, nor is there any indication that anything the characters say might be anything other than unvarnished truth about how they feel; the important thing is just the words. It's a different way of looking at Shakespeare, the culmination of centuries of blind worship, and as a 21st century viewer used to adaptations of his works that have pulled him off his altar and given him back to the people, as it were, I found this painfully straightforward version dull and off-putting.
As a sidenote, the camerawork in this movie is occasionally bizarre to the point of being distracting. There's a scene where Claudius is plotting with Laertes (why do all these supposedly Danish people have Latin names, Mr. Shakespeare?) and the camera pans in and out on them slowly up a staircase for no apparent reason.
In conclusion, I will leave you with my favorite adaptation of Hamlet. I had to watch this again as a consolation for sitting through this snoozefest, because god. *Someone* should find humor in all of this. The funniest thing that happens in the Olivier version is that Peter Cushing (aka Grand Moff Tarkin) takes a random pratfall at one point.

The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Abridged)--Hamlet

Watched: March 13, 2018

Best Picture #20: Gentleman's Agreement (1947)

Wow, Gentleman's Agreement is just begging to be remade for the 21st century. But which marginalized group to pick? In a way, I think, it wouldn't matter. Discrimination plays out in an almost universal way no matter which group it's against--I recognized a lot of the tactics used here against Jews that are also employed employed against nonwhites and anyone who doesn't identify as straight and cisgender. In that way, this movie is terribly relevant to today, this exact moment in time, as "nice" people who don't think of themselves as racist or sexist or homophobic have to take a good, hard look at their behavior and the behavior they condone in others. If you don't speak up or take a stand, you're part of the problem, no matter how innocent you think yourself.
The plot is pretty straightforward. A celebrated journalist (Gregory Peck, aka the future Atticus Finch. What is it with this guy and civil rights films?) comes to New York City from California and is asked to write a series on antisemitism. He hits on an idea: he'll pretend to be Jewish. Perfect! Then he'll get an inside look. Since he's new in town, nobody will know any different. He quickly discovers all the subtle and not-so-subtle ways Jews are discriminated against. Daily he has to deal with what we today would call "micro-aggressions," in addition to people just outright snubbing him. His girlfriend's nice WASP family, for instance, can't stand that they'll take flack from their nice WASP neighbors and even his girlfriend urges him to "come clean" with them so as to avoid people looking down their noses at her for dating a "Jew." (The fact that he's nonpracticing and not even culturally Jewish is irrelevant. If you're of Jewish extraction, you're treated as inferior. End of story.)
This movie is almost cute in its righteous indignation, from a 21st century perspective. Immediately post-Holocaust, the Jewish cause was the cause celebre and people were feeling deeply sympathetic, enough to examine their own previously breezy anti-Jewish attitudes. Today, we've now seen countless civil rights movements asking for a change in attitudes towards everyone who isn't a white heterosexual Christian male. We're still in the middle of a huge cultural shakeup. I actually think a lot of people today could benefit from watching this film, as preachy as it gets.
Watched: February 17, 2018

Best Picture #19: The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

The Best Years of Our Lives was pretty good. Its biggest downside is its length--almost three hours. But I actually think more people should watch it, especially combat veterans.
The story centers around three WWII veterans who are returning home and happen to meet on the plane flying back. They share their fears and dreams about returning to civilian life. One is a decorated bombardier who has no other marketable skills and a young wife he married hastily before being shipped out to Europe. One is an infantry sergeant who has a wife and grown children, and is a successful loan officer at a bank. One is a Navy engineer who left behind a high school sweetheart, and while a former football quarterback had his hands burned off when his ship was attacked and now wears prosthetic hooks. He isn't sure his sweetheart will want to marry him now that there are things he can't do for himself.
The movie then continues to follow these three and their families as they try to readjust. They have varying ups and downs at this, and they cope very differently. But I think modern veterans and their families will relate to their struggles--a lot of it reminded me of things I've heard about coming home after combat from people who have experienced how tough that adjustment period is. Especially for the ones who were wounded and now have to figure out a different normal. The actor who played the sailor who lost his hands actually was a disabled veteran with prosthetic hands. You could tell they weren't faked in part because of how deft he was with them. He won Best Supporting Actor for his performance.
For obvious reasons this movie was very popular in 1946. It was the next big "blockbuster" after Gone With the Wind--the movie everybody saw and talked about. It's all but forgotten today, but we enjoyed it and I think it deserves a revival.
Watched : December 26, 2017