Best Picture #27: On the Waterfront (1954)

This is one of Marlon Brando's two defining roles (the other being Don Vito Corleone in the Godfather). It's an interesting set of bookends, since in this movie he's a guy on the peripheral of the mob and he ends up taking a stand against them. If I'd just heard his "I coulda been a contender" line as a soundbyte, I would have guessed it was from the Godfather and not this movie. As many years separate the roles, he sounds exactly the same even though here he is young, charming and handsome.
In some ways this movie reminded me of Call the Midwife, which takes place on the London docks instead of the New Jersey docks. The work is the same, as it how it's doled out, the presence of unions, the poverty of the workers and how easily they're exploited.
I am not a massive fan of mobster movies, but as such things go this one wasn't too bad. We were supposed to sympathize with the mob, just the guy awakening to the real danger and then trying to claw his way out.
Watched: October 14, 2018

Poppies & Roses Discounted June 25-July 1!

Head on over to Amazon and pick up your copy!

The ebook has been out for a year, and what a year it's been! I've gotten so much positive feedback; it's good to know I made the right call in making it available.

Enjoy!

Best Picture #26: From Here to Eternity (1953)

OK, this one was not my taste at all. I can't stand stories that are just about unlikeable people making bad/stupid decisions. And that's pretty much what this is. It follows a company of men stationed in Hawaii in the year leading up to Pearl Harbor, and 90% of the drama centers around...whether or not one of them enters some inter-Army boxing tournament. Yes, really. There's also relationship drama because he falls in love with a prostitute but neither of them really wants anything permanent but they have that niggling early 20th century "we should get married if we want to keep having sex" urge, and the company's sergeant is secretly sleeping with the captain's neglected wife, blah blah blah. Also we kill off Frank Sinatra without him singing once. Several other characters get to sing, but not him. That in itself should be listed among the movie's biggest sins. How do you have Frank Sinatra in a rather lengthy supporting role and not have him sing?
All of this hot mess gets interrupted, and you (the audience) knew it was coming given the year and location, by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It's like waiting for the Titanic to hit the iceberg (but that's a different and much more interesting Best Picture). Then it's all "oh shit we're being invaded" and everyone gets trigger happy. The End.
Thank goodness.
While this one wasn't a bad movie, per se, it left a bad taste in my mouth. I honest to goodness started laughing when the boxer asks his prostitute girlfriend to marry him and her line literally is, "Now why would you go and say a thing like that and spoil everything?" It wasn't supposed to be funny, but that's how hilariously fucked up these people are.
Watched: August 9, 2018

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