If a Man Answers (1962)

Film: If a Man Answers (1962)

Stars: Sandra Dee, Bobby Darin, Micheline Presle, John Lund, Cesar Romero

Director: Henry Levin

Oscar History: The film was nominated for Best Picture-Comedy and Best Supporting Actor (Romero) at the Globes...this was in a time when the HFPA was much less predictive than it is now, so take its "almost got nominated for an Oscar" status with a huge pillar of salt, but worth noting

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2024 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the women who were once crowned as "America's Sweethearts" and the careers that inspired that title (and what happened when they eventually lost it to a new generation).  This month, our focus is on Sandra Dee: click here to learn more about Ms. Dee (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We've seen so far this season that much of the "America's Sweetheart" angle of fame comes not just from the movies or this "girl next door" angle but also from romance.  Mary Pickford had Douglas Fairbanks, Debbie Reynolds had Eddie Fisher, June Allyson had Dick Powell...you'll see the further we get in during our last four months how this is an omnipresent aspect of the trope, because we want to see the "Sweetheart" end up with her dream guy on-and-off-screen.  For Sandra Dee, that prince charming was Bobby Darin.  Married from 1960 to 1967, which coincided pretty much perfectly with the peak of Dee's fame, they were one of the major It Couples of the 1960's, though their marriage was tough on Dee.  Darin has been in love with actress Connie Francis right before the wedding (Francis literally found out about it on the radio-Darin hadn't bothered to call her-and confessed later that it made her suicidal), and Dee would later say about her marriage that Darin was a "conniving SOB."  But at the time, the partnership was a tabloid sensation & brought both success-Darin would record four Top 10 hits during their marriage and become an Oscar nominee, and the two of them would make three films, including Come September which we covered in a past Saturdays with the Stars season when we talked about Gina Lollobrigida.  Today, we're looking at their second film, If a Man Answers.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie falls into a trope we've seen from Sandra Dee a lot this season-a beautiful young girl who doesn't really know what to do with her sexuality and the insane impact she has on men.  She at one point early on, after her father insists she get married, gets engaged to three men at once because she felt pressured from her father to find a groom, but couldn't pick between them so she said yes to all three.  She eventually settles for a photographer named Gene (Darin), but Dee's Chantal doesn't know how to navigate the complicated politics of being married, frequently worrying about him ruining her career as a model (he doesn't want his wife to be seen in skimpy outfits, even though he was happy about it before the marriage), and then about him cheating with some of the models he sees her with.  She starts taking advice from her mother (Presle), first treating him the way you'd treat a dog (which honestly works and results in some of the film's biggest laughs), and then convinces him she has a lover, who is fake, but shows up in the form of Robert Swan (Romero)...though we learn later that this is Gene's playboy father who has been mentioned but not seen the whole picture.  In the end, they find that these games are good for their marriage, and continue doing them.

The movie itself doesn't quite work, but it should.  Dee is delightful as Chantal, playing her the way you'd kind of expect Kate Hudson to, but with a bit more sweetness.  You instantly get why she was America's Sweetheart, and a powerful box office draw.  She's not a great actress, but she has beauty-and-presence, and honestly those are just as important in a movie as great acting can be.  The way she flirts, at first an accidental coquette and then eventually you realize it might all be intentional, is solid, well-timed work, and I liked her for it.

I think the problem is I didn't buy Darin as much.  It's hard not to think about what another actor of the era who was a bit more traditionally handsome (Darin's cute, he's not beautiful in the way that Dee is), and more importantly, with better comedic chops might have done here.  I've seen Darin act in other films-he's quite good in Captain Newman MD, so he's capable of more, but someone like Robert Redford would've been a better fit for the part as written.  I also want to point out that Stefanie Powers is quite good in this movie as a lusty, bratty high school friend of Chantal's who wants to bed Gene.  Powers is still alive today (and best-known for her work on the 1980's mystery TV series Hart to Hart), but in the early 1960's was one of those actresses who felt like she was almost going to break out into lead roles, playing opposite not just Sandra Dee, but also John Wayne, Glenn Ford, & Lana Turner, but never graduated to that kind of success until she moved to television.

Ride the High Country (1962)

Film: Ride the High Country (1962)

Stars: Randolph Scott, Joel McCrea, Mariette Hartley, Ron Starr, Edgar Buchanan

Director: Sam Peckinpah

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Randolph Scott: click here to learn more about Mr. Scott (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Throughout this month, we've tried a different approach to the career of Randolph Scott, discussing much of his early career, while the actual films we've watched have been exclusively the iconic Budd Boetticher movies that Scott made late in his career, generally considered to be some of the most important pictures of the actor's long stardom, and some of the signature westerns of the era.  We're going to finish this month looking beyond Scott's partnership with Boetticher with him working in another western (one of the only stars this year we'll devote entirely to westerns and no other genres) with his work in the film of another great western director, Sam Peckinpah, who seven years later would make his most famous film, The Wild Bunch, which would largely redefine the western genre by bringing true violence to a genre that had largely kept that offscreen.  Peckinpah's film would in many ways mark the end of the Classic Hollywood western, but in 1962 he was working within its framework with one of the genre's most important stars...a cowboy who was about to walk into the sunset.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about two former friends and partners who have lived in very different circumstances.  Steve Judd (McCrea) is an aging lawman, one who is clearly destined soon for retirement, but who is pretty reputable and is hired by a bank to transport gold to California.  He enlists the help of Gil Westrum (Scott), who is now a charlatan in a traveling act pretending to be a famous sharpshooter but who is really a carnival conman, who works with his hotheaded sidekick Heck Longtree (Starr).  It's pretty clear early on that Gil, despite his past friendship with Judd, wants to steal the gold for himself, and will do so in a double cross with Heck, but fate steps in when they hole up with a farmer and his daughter Elsa (Hartley), and Heck initially falls for Elsa, though after some romance he attempts to rape her (we'll get into it in a second, but he's stopped by Gil & Judd) and she runs off to the arms of a local ruffian who marries her, but when she won't have sex with him right away on their wedding night, he passes out and her brothers then attempt to rape her, until Judd & Heck stop them and bring her back to her father.  While on the way, Gil attempts the double cross, but Heck has decided to abandon the plan, taking a prison sentence because he's seen the error of his ways.  Gil initially doesn't agree, and tries to escape, but knowing that the brothers will come back for Elsa, Heck, & Judd, he returns, and in one last stand he & Judd kill the brothers...but in the process, Judd dies.  Gil, now back to the side of justice, vows to Judd on the latter's deathbed that he will bring the gold to California and honor his commitment.

As we've seen throughout this year, one of my favorite motifs in westerns is "the one last ride" concept, and it works remarkably well here.  Scott & McCrea are both longtime figures in the western, and while I've talked this month about (headed into this month) my reluctance with Scott as a leading man, he does well here.  It helps that this is his final film (and what a way to go out) has gorgeous western skies & a lovely score.  The whole cast is good, though the best of the bunch is Mariette Hartley.  Hartley has a tricky part, playing a woman who has to be "in love" with two men she's pitting against each other, not realizing in both the cases the men are bad news & she's over-her-head.  It's nice that the film acknowledges the violence her character endures-this is not sugarcoated or romanticized, though it has to be said she clearly will "end up with" a reformed Heck at the end of the movie.  It's definitely further than you'd expect a film at the tail-end of the Hays Code to have gone with the subject matter.

Scott, as I mentioned, never worked in movies again after this, despite being alive for another 25 years.  He and his longtime wife Patricia retired after this, living off of the string of investments that Scott had made at the peak of his fame that had made him a fortune.  Scott would spend his retirement relatively uneventfully, getting involved in political fundraising for Ronald Reagan (Scott was an ardent Republican), golfing, attending church (he was an ardent supporter of Billy Graham's church), and about the only clear movie star thing he did was go to Dodgers games with his best friend Fred Astaire.  He died in 1987 at the age of 89.  Next month we're going to shift gears away from someone like Randolph Scott, whose career would become synonymous with westerns throughout his decades above the title card, and move to an actor who came onto Hollywood's scene in a splash in the mid-1950's in about every genre you can think of except for westerns...but by the end of his career this was where he would find his most consistent work.

OVP: Sweet Bird of Youth (1962)

Film: Sweet Bird of Youth (1962)

Stars: Paul Newman, Geraldine Page, Shirley Knight, Ed Begley, Rip Torn, Mildred Dunnock, Madeleine Sherwood

Director: Richard Brooks

Oscar History: 3 nominations/1 win (Best Actress-Geraldine Page, Supporting Actor-Ed Begley*, Supporting Actress-Shirley Knight)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

We live in a world where remakes fall like rain onto our cinemas.  It's near impossible to find a property that isn't being redone, remade, & updated for a new generation.  Even pictures once considered hallowed, impossible ground like West Side Story are getting a new look.  But for some reason, one of the more obvious choices for remakes has not been happening on the big-screen: the plays of Tennessee Williams.  These are well-known properties (certainly in the same way that A Star is Born is), ones that are regularly brought back to Broadway, but they aren't getting a new generation of considerations from modern directors.  This is a pity, because the works of Tennessee Williams are not just timeless, they're also stories that weren't able to be as shocking as the original source material (which dealt frankly with sex & sexuality) due to the Hays Code in the 1950's & 60's.  A perfect example of this is Sweet Bird of Youth.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie follows Chance Wayne (Newman), a once golden boy of St. Cloud, Mississippi, who shows up in town in a fancy car with flashy money alongside an aging film star Alexandra del Lago (Page...who true to form for Hollywood is just one year older than Newman in real life).  Chance is trying to trick Alexandra into giving him a film contract, but she's on the run from a failed comeback bid, and doesn't feel she has anything to lose in associating with a clear gigolo.  Meanwhile, Chance is also trying to connect with Heavenly (Knight), his childhood sweetheart whom he's still in love with, much to the chagrin of her father Boss Finley (Begley), a local powerbroker who puts a hit out on Chance.  It turns out when Chance left town last searching for fame & fortune, he left behind a knocked-up Heavenly, who then had an abortion which left her infertile.  Boss Finley wants revenge, so Chance is trying to leave town again with Alexandra...but then she gets a call that tells her her comeback was a triumph, giving her her career back.  Now with something to lose, Alexandra refuses to honor her contract with Chance, insisting that she'll take him on but only as her assistant & lover.  Chance, despite facing likely death, refuses, and goes to meet Heavenly, who forgives him for leaving her & they run off together, with Boss Finley left agog at losing his only daughter to such a man.

Like all of Williams' films, this is a highly-stylized form of acting, the kind you need to have a high tolerance for if you're going to muscle through it (if you aren't a fan of melodramas, this is going to be where you tap out).  But I generally love Williams' plays, and this is no exception.  I think few authors have done a better job of not only talking about loss, but about the things we all lose-love, sex, youth.  There's something haunting about watching beautiful Paul Newman being read by everyone in town.  He bet hard on himself, and it cost him-he is never going to be the golden boy again, and he has squandered that status.  If you're past the age of 28, you've had that moment-where you think about things that not only you didn't do, but the unfairness of regret in that you know now how you'd handle it in retrospect.

The film won three Oscar nominations, each with varying degrees of success.  Page, who is not my favorite as a general rule, owns the screen here.  This is the best thing I've ever seen from her, and it's wonderful because she's so out of place compared to everyone around her.  For starters, she's actually gotten the brass ring, and squandered it-that's something Chance never got the opportunity to have, and in a true moment of unfairness that plays marvelously, she gets a second chance when her comeback attempt is a smash success while he never has one.  Based off of Tallulah Bankhead (who was friends with Williams in real life), Page nails this sort of "life cannot touch me" part with real gusto.  The only bummer about this part is that she barely shares the screen with her-then lover Rip Torn, who is far sexier than I realized he'd be circa 1962 (he did not age like Paul Newman, let's put it that way).

The same can be said for both the winning Begley and the not-nominated Newman.  Begley is fascinating in a side part, taking on the type of role that Burl Ives played in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof of someone who, like Alexandra, has had a gifted life, and who therefore doesn't think the world can truly touch him.  He owns every scene, and not only does he own it, but he also imbues it with a sense of history-we know that he's been torturing this town for years, and running it with a tyrannical fist.  Why Newman, a year after his second Oscar nomination, couldn't get a citation for a fully-fledged, totally real Chance is beyond me...perhaps jealousy over his beauty (or perhaps homophobia since reading-between-the-lines you get the strong sense that Chance is more Tab Hunter than Robert Redford in terms of golden boys).

The only nomination I don't understand is Shirley Knight's.  Knight is a good actress, perhaps one that leans into theatrical more than necessary in her later work, but a good actress nonetheless.  But as written, her Heavenly is a bore, and inconsistent from scene-to-scene, never really knowing what she wants.  This might read correctly in theory (a rich young woman who has never had to make a decision before will struggle with a big one against her father's wishes), but it doesn't play that way in the film.  She's not even the best supporting actress in the film-Madeleine Sherwood as Boss Finlay's battered lover is far more knowing than Knight is to her part.

OVP: The Longest Day (1962)

Film: The Longest Day (1962)
Stars: John Wayne, Richard Todd, Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton, Sean Connery, Henry Fonda, Red Buttons, Peter Lawford, Eddie Albert, Jeffrey Hunter, Stuart Whitman, Rod Steiger, Leo Genn, George Segal, Paul Anka, Fabian, Roddy McDowall, Tommy Sands, Curd Jurgens, Frank Finlay, Sal Mineo, Richard Beymer, Robert Wagner, Alexander Knox, Edmond O'Brien, Mel Ferrer, Arletty
Director: Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton, & Bernhard Wicki
Oscar History: 5 nominations/2 wins (Best Picture, Art Direction, Editing, Cinematography*, Special Effects*)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Does size matter?  That's the question looming over much of The Longest Day, our last film in a week dedicated to Best Editing nominees.  The Longest Day might well have deserved a nomination for least edited film, considering it clocks in at three hours long, and it's honestly very difficult to review, as we'll find below.  The film was gargantuan at the time, one as you see above that's filled with star cameos (we'll get into this in the review), and one that cost upwards of $8 million at the time, but earned that back 4x over to a sum of $30 million (the modern day equivalent of about $250 million, a blockbuster by any standard).  The movie is certainly big, and something to behold-the war film is realistic, frequently showing unfathomable aerial and maritime shots, and it's an achievement, without a doubt.  The question I kept coming back to as I watched the (VERY) long war movie is...is it any good?

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is told in a somewhat documentary style (at least by 1960's standards), with characters identified with name plates rather than more expositional dialogue, and focuses on the lead-up to D-Day.  The planning & battle are really the central characters in the movie; no character takes on the role of "lead" in the film, though certain actors like John Wayne & Robert Mitchum are in more of the movie than most of the cast-of-characters (today everyone would be marketed as a supporting actor here, but I suspect these two would've been lead if the film had scored acting nominations).  Again, especially in a pre-The Wild Bunch era, the film is merciless in its body count, even if the effect of the violence isn't what it would be in later war classics simply due to keeping the obvious bloodshed off screen.

For a three-hour movie, you'd expect a longer summary paragraph, but The Longest Day is unusual because it doesn't really have a proper narrative story.  The film's script is its weakest asset not just because there's no character development, but also because other than D-Day, there's no real story.  To a modern audience member, The Longest Day is weird because I don't have the "I lived through it" mentality that most people in 1962 would have of the sheer size & scope of D-Day (even if you weren't at Normandy at the time, most would've lived through the war, read about this in the newspaper, and heard from people they knew who were at Normandy).  As a result, you have to be a student-of-history to know a lot of the names flashing up onscreen, and while I knew some of them, I didn't know all, and with no character development or better grounding of the D-Day invasion's place in the war, the movie lacks a bit of context, and occasionally even purpose.

The star cameos by this point in the 1960's had become a recurring theme in epic films (look at Around the World in 80 Days or Pepe for other examples), and this would prove to be the biggest for this trend.  There are so many it becomes kind of like a game of "Where's Waldo" with certain faces.  You're like "oh, there's Mel Ferrer" or "I think that's Red Buttons," but the shocking thing about it is how many of these cameos are onscreen for mere seconds.  I had to rewind to confirm the Sean Connery scene, and Roddy McDowall's face is onscreen for roughly a minute.  This makes the movie one I'd theoretically re-watch just to confirm I caught all of the cameos, but it also means you aren't really emotionally-invested in the characters onscreen, just in awe of the cast.  It's too much-the film feels bloated and sort of a "so what" by the end of the picture.

And so I'm going with 2-stars here, which I honestly didn't think I would pick.  The Longest Day is very watchable, and the technical achievements are impressive.  The visual effects are glorious, extensive, and surely cost a fortune, particularly the aerial & maritime shoots.  Ditto the cinematography, which shot from the air, land, or sea is fascinating & beautiful-this is one of the last black-and-white films of the era to really capture a sense of majesty in the camerawork (it seems like most of the best cinematographers had moved to color photography by this era).  The editing is easy to mock because of the film's length, but it has extended longshots (also a nod to the cinematographer) on the beach that gave the film a smoother focus, and while you don't care about the characters, you're never bored-there's always "more, more, more" coming at you visually.  Best of the bunch is the art direction, meticulously recreating multiple battle scenes, war rooms, and seemingly a whole, destructed town.

But technical achievements, while novel at the time, don't make a strong movie, and in many ways this feels like Transformers or Armageddon with a better cast-it's large, advanced, and surely meant a lot at the time, but in retrospect it feels bloated, without any sense of passion, and is using the memory of one of the 20th Century's most important days to coast on not having anything to say.

OVP: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)

Film: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)
Stars: Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Victor Buono
Director: Robert Aldrich
Oscar History: 5 nominations/1 win (Best Actress-Bette Davis, Supporting Actor-Victor Buono, Cinematography, Costume*, Sound)
(Not So) Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

I promise tomorrow we'll do someone other than Meryl Streep or Bette Davis to finish off our Best Actress week, but I had this in my drafts folder, and couldn't skip the opportunity for such symmetry.  On Tuesday we did the first nomination for Bette Davis, today we're going with the last one.  What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is cheating a little bit with our theme this week, as I have seen the movie before, though it's been at least 20 years, as I saw it as a teenager, and while I remembered it relatively well (probably better because of watching the TV series Feud more than anything else), there were whole chapters of the movie that I had completely forgotten, including the ending, so it was terrific to revisit this movie years later, and reflect on the last great chapter in the careers of two of my favorite Golden Age actresses, Bette Davis & Joan Crawford.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place over three different time eras.  The first is when both Blanche (as an adult, Crawford) and Jane (as an adult, Davis), are children, and Baby Jane is a star on the vaudeville circuit.  The little girl is spoiled rotten, and indulged by her father, and treats her entire family with contempt.  As adults, though, the roles are reversed-Jane is an unsuccessful actress in movies, only allowed to make pictures because the studio doesn't want to upset her sister Blanche, who is a big star.  At the peak of her career, Blanche is in a car accident (and we're meant to assume for most of the picture that it's Jane who was driving, as this has passed into urban legend), and is paralyzed, destroying her career.  We then retreat to the present day, where Blanche & Jane live together in an old house, with Jane living off of Blanche's money & mistreating her sister, who isn't able to stop Jane from abusing her (basically by starving, psychologically torturing, and eventually tying up Blanche to prevent her from selling the house and institutionalizing her mentally unwell sister).  The film has a subplot involving a conman named Edwin (Buono) trying to bilk Jane as an accompanist for her ridiculous attempts at a comeback, which combines the two stories when Edwin discovers Blanche bound-and-tied.  The film ends with Blanche confessing that it was she who was driving the car, and trying to run over Jane for her years of cruelty, and in the process ruined both of their lives.  Jane, now fully insane, dances for onlookers as the police arrive.

The movie has entered a whole different level of lore in recent years thank to Ryan Murphy's Emmy-winning series Feud, which chronicled the bitter real-life rivalry between Crawford & Davis, and the filming of this movie and its spiritual sequel Hush...Hush Sweet Charlotte, so it's intriguing to go back to the movie after all of these years and find out it's really good.  There's a certain level of camp that is unavoidable here (hell, movies like Baby Jane basically invented modern camp), but that doesn't mean that it doesn't feel real.  The story is petrifying-you spend most of the movie not sure if Blanche will make it out alive or not, and intrigued by what Jane might do next.  You also have a lot of great throwbacks to Davis & Crawford's careers (this was the final important movie of either of their careers, though they'd both continue working for the next few years, and in Davis' case, the next few decades), including footage of them as younger actors.

The Oscar nominations were all pretty well-earned as well.  The costume work is intriguing, particularly the garish ways that Davis turns Baby Jane into almost a creature dressed as a little girl (this surely would've been a Makeup nominee had that category existed yet).  The sound work is fine, if not quite as inventive; the movie's best sound effect trick is the sort of screeching moment of the car accident between two unknown figures, and then the opening credits come forward announcing a different kind of movie than you might have expected before.  The same can be said for the Cinematography, which has some iconic shots (the final sequence being the most obvious, though Ernest Haller does a good job of making us feel like we're peering into the lives of famous people gone to hell in a way others might not have been able to achieve).

The film won two acting nominations.  I'm always stunned by how young Victor Buono was when this movie was made (he was only 24), and he has a menace to his character even if ultimately it doesn't feel like he has a full-enough grasp on who his character is.  I liked his chemistry with Davis (which ultimately won him this nomination), but his motives other than greed remain unclear, and you are left wondering why he is the way he is.  The script doesn't help here, but neither does Buono.

Davis famously won her 10th and final Oscar nomination for her work here, and was expected to win the Oscar (how she didn't is a story most of you probably know if you've made it this far in this review, but let's just say it's epic).  She's great-she makes Baby Jane a concoction of horror & sympathy all at once, and while she was applauded at the time for letting her vanity go (she makes herself older & uglier to sell the part), it's really the way that she underlines how Baby Jane wasn't allowed to grow up, and the trauma of having success at such a young age, that really sells this movie.  Crawford just missed with the nominations (you have to assume she was sixth place), but is very good in a subtler role.  Yes, she looks awfully glamorous for a shut-in (Crawford, ever vain from being "the most beautiful woman in movies," would try to make herself look better against the wishes of director Bob Aldrich), but she finds great moments in the movie to hint at the woman she might have become without Jane, and to provide hints of the sort of person who would destroy their sister's life for their own mistake.  I loved that scene where she's watching an old movie, complaining, but all-the-while knowing that she looked great & succeeded in a way that her sister never could.  Baby Jane is a legendary movie not because of the offscreen feuds (lord knows countless movies have had costars who despised each other), but because that rivalry didn't stop a truly mesmerizing movie from taking place.

OVP: Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Film: Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Stars: Peter O'Toole, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins, Omar Sharif, Jose Ferrer, Anthony Quayle, Arthur Kennedy
Director: David Lean
Oscar History: 10 nods/7 wins (Best Picture*, Director*, Actor-Peter O'Toole, Supporting Actor-Omar Sharif, Adapted Screenplay*, Original Score*, Cinematography*, Art Direction*, Film Editing*, Sound)
(Not So) Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

In college, I majored in Film History, and in order to graduate with honors, I had to do a thesis paper that literally constituted one year of my life focused on the transition period from Classical Hollywood to New Hollywood cinema.  While I saw dozens of films for the project (in fact, that's the reason I started to subscribe to Netflix in the first place), the central thesis of the paper was focused on four movies: The Graduate, Bonnie & Clyde, The Manchurian Candidate and (in particular) Lawrence of Arabia.  I'm not going to get into the why's and how's of what I argued about these films (if you're curious, go into the comments or slip into my Twitter DM's and I'll share), but suffice it to say I know these movies very, very well, and Lawrence has remained a part of my life ever since in large part because I spent a year focusing on every minute detail of the film, because while I compared the 1962 classic to the three other pictures, it was Lawrence that was the guts of my argument.  So engrained is the film into my psyche, that when I made my bucket list at the age of 25, I only included one "see X film on the big screen" as a requisite for the list, and that was the tale of a complicated World War I colonel.  Thanks to TCM, I got to make this dream a reality last Sunday, and while I've written literally 100 pages worth of thoughts on the film, I haven't shared any of them on this blog, so let's get a review out there for posterity, shall we?

(Spoilers Ahead...though seriously-you've never seen Lawrence of Arabia?) The film is 220 minutes long, so trying to summarize it into one paragraph as explanation feels to do it a disservice.  Suffice it to say the film is told in flashback (though it's one extended flashback, so you'd be forgiven for forgetting such a framing device) as we see in the opening moments that a seemingly ordinary man on a morning drive on his motorcycle has been killed, and then suddenly we're at St. Paul's Cathedral, where the man is storied enough to have a bust of him in a place where he literally sits on the ashes of kings.  We learn that Lawrence was a complicated man, as even those who knew him don't really have a way to explain him, and then we are transported into the life of TE Lawrence, as played by a young, beautiful Peter O'Toole.

The film is considered one of the quintessential, undisputed classics of Hollywood cinema for a reason-literally everything works in Lawrence of Arabia, and particularly on the big screen (just an FYI-you can totally see this on Wednesday still in select theaters, and while this isn't a paid plug at all, here's a Fathom Events link if you're interested as I am always willing to shill for a movie this good). The score, sets, cinematography-it's all marvelous.  Freddie Young won one of his three Oscars for lensing this movie, and it shows in the care he brings to the big screen.  The deserts look scorched, blistering in the sun, and he has a remarkable expertise not only with a wide shot, but with the occasional closeup of O'Toole or Omar Sharif's Ali.  The editing is flawless-Anne Coates (who recently died) finds little New Hollywood touches to put into a classic film like Lawrence; look at the way that instead of having an Old Hollywood dissolve between scenes she copies the French New Wave with quick, abrasive cuts between critical scenes, underlining the continued madness of Lawrence, especially in the second half of the film where he's forced to confront his narcissism, latent homosexuality, and bloodlust to varying degrees of failure.  From a sheer craft perspective, the movie rivals pictures like Gone with the Wind and Titanic in getting everything right-few films look as good on all cylinders as Lawrence of Arabia; it's not often that a movie gets ten Oscar nominations and you argue it's too few, but Lawrence gets there (it easily could have gotten an 11th nomination, but if legend is to be believed Phyllis Dalton wasn't submitted by the studio for Costume, and therefore missed out on a certain Oscar).

When an epic is this hot, it's easy to forget the acting, but that would be an insult.  The cast list (all men-Lawrence famously doesn't have any speaking parts for women, who only show up in the occasional crowd scene), reads like a who's who of character actors of the era.  Sharif was the one who won the Oscar nomination for Supporting Actor, and if they were only going to go with one that's probably the right call (Sharif is breathtakingly noble, striking & debonair but never someone who isn't believable as Lawrence's struggling conscience), but you have a smorgasbord of other great turns here.  There's Alec Guinness (in problematic brown face, so the fact that he wasn't cited might be for the best), charming as ever as Prince Faisal, or Anthony Quinn's proud Auda, struggling with modernity.  Even small parts like Jack Hawkins' General Allenby, Jose Ferrer's predatory Turkish Bey, and Claude Rains' glib Mr. Dryden make the film work-this is an epic movie with the casting care of a stage play, every part meticulously fitting to its inhabitant.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the onscreen marvel of Peter O'Toole's Lawrence.  O'Toole is one of the great actors of his generation, but he was never better than in his breakout role.  He instills layers of the character with the mannered walk and sky-blue eyes (you don't need to stretch the imagination to realize that this man was both gay and probably into some kinky shit, as is evidenced by real-life...even though in 1962 showing such a thing would've been impossible onscreen).  There's a madness that sets into his eyes, and a lesser actor wouldn't have been able to use sentences like "I'm extraordinary" without some sort of wink to the audience to show he's in on the joke.  The fact that O'Toole doesn't do that puts this up there with George C. Scott in Patton as a look at what war and death does to a man's sole, and how absolute power can corrupt even the most well-intentioned of leaders.  Lawrence is perfect, but Lawrence himself is a man of great fault, a person who has earned the title of hero, but also of the modern-day reality that comes with such a distinction.

Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962)

Film: Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962)
Stars: Corinne Marchand, Jose Luis de Vilallonga, Dominique Davray, Antoine Bourseiller
Director: Agnes Varda
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

The death in March of film icon Agnes Varda made me take a bit of a look at my own film-watching habits, and meant that eventually I was going to need to make a confession on this blog-I've never seen an Agnes Varda film.  This felt unforgivable, and while I was on a date recently with a film buff, he picked Cleo from 5 to 7 as the movie we should stream off of Criterion, and I wholeheartedly agreed, finally getting rid of my lack of knowledge of this remarkable women's filmography, and starting with one of the earliest narrative pictures on her resumé.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place from, as the title indicates, 5-7 PM, and focuses on Cleo (Marchand), a superstitious woman who has had her tarot card reading over the opening credits (the only sequence in the movie shot in color), and we learn from this that Cleo assumes the test results from her doctor will reveal she has cancer.  Cleo, a pop singer, believes the fortune teller despite others assuming she's a foolish hypochondriac, and goes throughout the rest of her afternoon as she waits for her test results alternating between euphoria and despair.  Along the way we see her interact with her lover, her maid, friends, and just sort of have the type of lazy, French afternoon that was common in the New Wave, with us seeing a politically-charged Paris in the background of a seemingly vain, silly woman.  Throughout the film we hear on the radio discussions of the war in Algeria, as well as newscasts regarding President John F. Kennedy & the Vienna Conference.  Toward the end of the film, Cleo meets Antoine (Bourseiller), a soldier who is on leave from the war in Algeria, and we get a type of anti-war speech from the young man, claiming that he's worried he's going to die for nothing in the conflict.  Antoine goes with her to talk to the doctor, whom they run into by accident after pursuing him in his office, and the doctor nonchalantly tells Cleo that she does have cancer, but that he expects her to make a full recovery.  Cleo, now content with the knowledge that her worries were right, understands that there is still time left, and seems genuinely happy for the first time in the film sitting with Antoine even though they both face uncertain futures.

The movie is not for someone who doesn't have a patience for the French New Wave.  The claims that nothing of significance happens is wrong, of course (this is true of most films), but you'll have to look below the surface to find some of the meanings of the film, and if you don't appreciate spending a languid afternoon in Paris circa 1962, you're not going to have a good time.  But the movie is gorgeously-shot, and the camerawork is interesting, with us seeing random background action in wide shots that make the film almost feel like a documentary (which of course would be one of Varda's specialities).

But the film has something to say, both about war and about women.  The movie captures the conflicted ideas of the Algerian War, which some saw as a legitimate civil war while others saw as a far past-due time for France to decolonize.  Antoine's speech toward the end of the film is moving because he finds himself in the middle, not sure if he's helping or hurting France by fighting in the war, and wondering if putting his life in danger will ultimately make any difference.  This would echo future conflicts in Vietnam and Iraq, where it was questionable whether or not the goals of any side would ultimately be achievable.

Feminism is also a major part of the conversation.  Cleo is frequently dismissed by the men in her life as silly, as someone who is too vapid to have an understanding of her own self.  She's seen as ornamental, an assumption underlined by how often she's surrounded by mirrors in the picture, and more an object than a real flesh-and-blood person.  Varda sides with Cleo, though, in the end, when her worries and realizations that something is wrong ultimately prove to be accurate-Cleo does, indeed, have cancer, and so the worry was about something tangible.  In this instance, we see Cleo stop caring about the people around her, finally deciding to live for herself rather than convincing others to take her seriously, but it shows that the people around her should take Cleo (and women in general) seriously as their concerns & beliefs are valid and true.  All-in-all, it's an easy film to love, even if you might not always adore Cleo (a complicated protagonist), but it stays with you because Varda has something meaningful to say about war, sexism, and mortality.

OVP: Birdman of Alcatraz (1962)

Film: Birdman of Alcatraz (1962)
Stars: Burt Lancaster, Karl Malden, Thelma Ritter, Neville Brand, Betty Field, Telly Savalas
Director: John Frankenheimer
Oscar History: 4 nominations (Best Actor-Burt Lancaster, Supporting Actor-Telly Savalas, Supporting Actress-Thelma Ritter, Cinematography)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times, but it never stops being true: biopics are rarely successfully executed onscreen, particularly from the aspect of a screenplay.  The films that make it to the screen are of famous people, frequently famous people who are living or who have people who know their life and have admiration for their lives.  As a result, to avoid libel, we get whitewashed instances of a person onscreen being far more puritanical and noble than they actually were in real-life.  Still, though, it's hard to remember a time this was more true than in Birdman of Alcatraz, the sort of film that literally takes a murderer and turns him into a martyr.  The film, from acclaimed-director John Frankenheimer, has to be one of the most bloated endeavors I've seen from such a usually polished director, and I left disappointed and actually hoping for a remake.

(Spoilers Ahead) The reason for this is that there's actually an interesting story here.  Robert Stroud (Lancaster) is a man who was convicted of murder, avoided the death penalty, and then spent decades of his life in solitary confinement.  He doesn't go mad during this time, though, but instead becomes an ornithologist of sorts, keeping dozens of birds in his jail cell, studying them, and eventually becoming quite noted in the scientific community.  He eventually gets to leave Alcatraz, which is the ending of the film, meeting his biographer.

In the middle, though, he ends up being the kindest, gentlest of convicts that you ever did meet.  Fellow inmates of Stroud's later complained that Frankenheimer and Lancaster owed them an apology for the sugarcoating of a convicted murderer.  Played by Lancaster he becomes a struggling Mr. Smith of the penal system.  It doesn't help matter that Lancaster, who is admittedly a fine actor, can't really damp down his stage-actor sensibilities.  He reads every line from Stroud like he's doing the final act of King Lear, earnest and tough grit and poise.  It's impossible to imagine an inmate with Stroud's roots becoming so instantly posh and sensitive, and yet that's what Lancaster does to him.  Even worse is the way that Karl Malden, the prison's warden, is made out to be the villain of the tale.  Malden, who also has that noble-actor thing down pat, can't help but feel extremely wooden in the role, seeming like someone who must always be at his absolutely most perturbed, never allowing for any sort of sympathy for Stroud, even though in the film he's basically a saint.

The film won four Oscar nominations, with the Cinematography actually being quite good in the film-the lighting is very strong in certain scenes, and it helps that Burnett Guffey (the man who won an Oscar for lensing Lancaster a decade earlier in From Here to Eternity) knows when his big moments to shine (like the prison break and the light-filled scene on Fisherman's Wharf) are, and he takes them.  The actors, though, are all playing rough facsimiles of their cliched selves.  Lancaster doesn't know how to temper his performance, so his Stroud is only strong when he's doing something virile and noble, and not when he's trying to show any sort of shading.  Telly Savalas is scene-stealing, and I get where this nomination came from (he's showy in a way that no one else is), but unnecessary to the plot and ultimately pretty two-dimensional, even for someone whom the script demands be a simpleton.  Weirdest of all is Thelma Ritter, a supporting actress par excellence, who is given a massively BAIT-y role (hence the nomination, her sixth), but does nothing with it.  She's supposed to be the mother-from-hell, but in reality she underplays all but her final scene, and there's little to nothing in this performance, and the script doesn't care about her enough to project onto her.  Is she jealous, a publicity hound, or part of an Oedipal situation we can't understand since it's 1962?  It's hard to say, and Ritter doesn't play it as any.

All-in-all, then, this is a disappointing film.  There's too many talented names attached for it not to succeed on occasion, but when you have Burt Lancaster, Thelma Ritter, and John Frankenheimer together you should do better than just succeed on occasion.  If you've seen it, weigh in-are you as underwhelmed as I am?  And if you haven't seen it, at least let me hear your favorite performances from the frequently Oscar-cited Lancaster and Ritter.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

Film: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

Stars: John Wayne, James Stewart, Vera Miles, Lee Marvin, Edmond O'Brien, Andy Devine

Director: John Ford

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Costume Design-Black-and-White)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

We’ve moved into the Studio System in my film class, and no one screams studio system quite like John Ford.  Sturdy, classic, and all-American, Ford’s movies are monuments in the film industry, wildly-studied, beloved, Oscar-endorsed, and possibly a tad overrated.  By 1962, though, Ford hadn’t won an Oscar in a decade and was making what would be regarded as his last major picture.  Though revered as a classic today, the film wasn’t well-received in 1962 (when you had the options for grander and edgier fare like Lawrence of Arabia or The Manchurian Candidate), and just barely makes the OVP cut with one Oscar nomination (we’ll get there in a minute).  Since then, it’s been rescued by critics who have read into its symmetry as a film and the darker readings of the story.  As a result, I was curious going in where I’d land.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows a number of classic western tropes, not least of which is its stars: few actors (save perhaps Gary Cooper and Roy Rogers) scream classic American western like John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart.  The film opens with Sen. Stoddard (Stewart) visiting the town of Shinbone (this is such a John Ford movie) with his wife Hallie (Miles).  The senator, who is a frontrunner to be the next Vice President of the United States, is questioned for his reasons to come to town, and in a moment of a politician suddenly being completely honest (only in a movie, and probably only with Jimmy Stewart), he recounts how he first came to Shinbone and the story behind the man whose funeral he is in town to attend.

The film then flashes back to Sen. Stoddard being stuck up in a stagecoach robbery, being beaten badly by a masked man named Liberty Vallance (Marvin) who comes into town trying to get justice against Vallance, only to find that he’s an outlaw no one can control.  He befriends Hallie, her parents, and a gunslinger who is clearly Hallie’s intended named Tom Doniphon (Wayne).  Slowly, he becomes involved in teaching Hallie (and most of the town) how to read and begins to fall for Hallie, much to Tom's chagrin.

The film then tries to balance this burgeoning feud/romance with political unrest in this part of the country (I didn't actually catch if they ever mentioned what state they were in, though it's clearly a Mountain Range territory), where the "people" want the territory to become a state and the powers-that-be want it to become a territory.  Stoddard becomes one of the delegates to the convention, beating Liberty Vallance in the process and making Valance, a far better shot than the greenhorn Stoddard, seething with anger.

The film then moves on to the title sequence, where Valance comes within an inch of killing Stoddard's mentor, a drunken newspaper editor (O'Brien), before Stoddard apparently shoots Valance.  Only a fool, though, doesn't realize that it was clearly Tom from a different angle (Ford would never disregard his biggest star in the climax of the movie).  This shot manages to define Stoddard's career-he becomes a territorial delegate in large part due to his sudden notoriety, then enjoys a remarkable career as governor and senator until he comes within a hair's breadth of the White House.  In the end of the film, the newspaperman who has heard the entire story decides to maintain the legend, and Stoddard decides to not pursue the Vice Presidency, instead retiring back to Shinbone.  The film ends on a dour note, with Stoddard getting preferential treatment not for his stature as a statesman, but instead due to his famed (and false) gunfight.

The film's best moments are these slightly sour, darker touches.  Many critics discarded this film when it was first released because it was so traditional and starred such well-known and "beyond their prime?" stars (the film was a box office smash, though), but they clearly weren't paying a lot of attention.  The movie shows how sad life can be for someone like Stoddard, who can never escape the shadow of a lie he perpetuated when he was younger.  This is a man with an unrivaled career (three-term governor, two-term senator, ambassador, and potential future president), but he will always be defined by something that he never did and a lie he can never un-tell.  Sergio Leone famously called this is his favorite Ford film because "it was the only film where Ford learned something about pessimism."  He's certainly right, and not just from the dour ending.

Probably an even darker example than the ending is Vera Miles character and the way she reacts to Tom in the present-day scenes.  Hallie clearly has never gotten over Tom through all of the years-she remembers the way he gave her a flower and pines over the old days.  It's not a stretch of the imagination to assume that Hallie has spent her entire life rethinking her decision to go with Stoddard, and that years ago she realized that she made the wrong decision but couldn't go back.  Wayne has less screen-time than Stewart and perhaps even Miles, but he looms so large over the film that you can feel his ghost in Hallie's memory.

The movie does have some problems, of course (I couldn't bring myself to add that final star).  Stewart and Wayne, though obviously the actors that Ford had in mind for these roles, are way too old to be playing these characters.  Stoddard and Tom were probably in their late 20's/early 30's in the flashback scenes, yet both actors were well into their fifties during production (this was juxtaposed even worse by casting the age appropriate 31-year-old Miles as the girl between them).  It's a pity this film wasn't made twenty years earlier when they would have been more age appropriate (and Ford could have cast Claire Trevor like he clearly envisioned the role).

The film also toes the line pretty heavily between mocking western tropes and succumbing to them.  For the record, this is the film Peter Griffin is mocking incessantly when he keeps using the phrase "pilgrim" in conjunction with John Wayne, as Tom refers to Stoddard by this term of endearment almost every other sentence.  The film suffers a bit from this overuse of cliche, even if it's trying to prove a point.

The movie provided Edith Head with one of her two nominations from that year, the other being in the color category for My Geisha (Head received so many nominations in part because Costume was at the time separated between color and black-and-white).  She lost both trophies, missing out for Liberty Valance to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane (can you imagine a modern film like Baby Jane getting nominated for, much less winning best costume today?).  Her work here is decent, though Head had done much better.  It's interesting to see how she handles Stewart in particular, regularly dolling him in perfectly-fit clothes (I doubt very much they had a trip to the tailor after he was robbed at gunpoint), though she keeps Wayne in roughly the same outfit, staying true to the character.  We've got another Head film being reviewed tomorrow, so we'll get to see how she matches the star to the look (her specialty), but this was a solid, if not spectacular installment in her massive Oscar nomination haul.

How about you-have you seen Liberty Valance, and where do you land on the film?  Do you think Head deserved the nomination?  Do you feel that Stewart and Wayne were too old for their parts?  Anyone wish that someone would write another classic western and have Miles in a supporting role?  Share in the comments!