OVP: Barefoot in the Park (1967)

Film: Barefoot in the Park (1967)

Stars: Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Charles Boyer, Mildred Natwick

Director: Gene Saks

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Supporting Actress-Mildred Natwick)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 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 Robert Redford: click here to learn more about Mr. Redford (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Robert Redford always looked like a movie star (he famously was confused when Mike Nichols said he couldn't be the lead in The Graduate because he was too good-looking, apparently being perplexed when Nichols said he wasn't believable as a guy who was turned down by a girl...the real-life Redford being truly unfamiliar with the concept).  However, it took him a while to get there.  In the 1960's, Redford became a mainstay in television guest spots, including roles on Maverick, Perry Mason, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and The Twilight Zone, even getting an Emmy nomination for The Voice of Charlie Pont, but film stardom wasn't really an option.  He started his film career in a guest spot in Tall Story (with Jane Fonda & Anthony Perkins), and became a second-or-third leading man in pictures like Inside Daisy Clover and The Chase.  It was in 1967 that Redford finally got to be a proper leading man and gain a strong foothold in Hollywood in Barefoot in the Park, a big hit (again opposite Jane Fonda) for Paramount that would lead to Redford getting A-list status for the next 50 years.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie follows newlyweds Corie (Fonda) and Paul (Redford) as they start to understand early married life together.  The beginning of the film is just them having sex for six days at the Plaza (having non-stop sex with a 30-year-old Robert Redford sounds like a good way to kill a week, so well done to Jane).  Afterward, though, they move into their fifth story walkup (without an elevator, a running gag in the movie), and the reality of domesticity starts to take over.  It turns out that Corie is not impressed with Paul's buttoned-up attitude, focusing on his job & not experiencing life, and she wants someone who is more adventurous, someone like their upstairs neighbor Victor Velasco (Boyer), whom Corie is trying to set up with her mother Ethel (Natwick), who is a bit shocked by everything involved, and likes her routine.  As the film goes, it turns out that both Corie & Paul need to give a little, but are clearly meant for one another, and the film ends with them reconciling on their rooftop after Corie saves Paul's life to a smattering of applause (and of course Victor & Ethel end up together too, because why not?).

The movie itself is a bit of a mixed bag.  The script is by Neil Simon, and (are we in a safe space here?)...I've never really gotten Neil Simon.  For much of the 1960's & 70's, his plays & films were a huge part of the cultural zeitgeist, but they feel bland and like they're commentating on things about romantic life that feel pretty prosaic and a weird mix of modern ideals & conservative values.  Maybe you had to be there to get it.  Like, it makes no sense that Corie is just learning about Paul being a "stuffed shirt" now, given they presumably dated before they got married (we learn zilch about what they're like before the wedding, which is an interesting writing choice but it doesn't really get us anything).

The stars, though, make up for it.  Fonda & Redford are sexy as hell, and honestly you kind of just want to spend the entire movie focusing on their randy interactions at the Plaza, with Fonda telling naughty jokes as Redford gets into the elevator being a plus.  The two of them, who had already starred in The Chase as co-leads before this, would go on to star in two more movies in the decades to come, and it shows-their chemistry is off-the-charts.  The supporting roles are less successful.  Boyer, at this point well into his career as a leading man and now taking smaller parts as an aging lothario, is as hammy as you'd expect, and so is Natwick.  This was the character actress's only Oscar nomination, and I have a personal policy of not being too mean about ragging on actor's only nominations, but this isn't earned.  She's two-dimensional, is basically comic relief that rarely provides comedy, and probably only got this because AMPAS wanted to award the film somewhere, and the leads were too sexy to honor just yet.

OVP: Camelot (1967)

Film: Camelot (1967)

Stars: Richard Harris, Vanessa Redgrave, Franco Nero, David Hemmings, Laurence Naismith

Director: Joshua Logan

Oscar History: 5 nominations/3 wins (Best Cinematography, Art Direction*, Scoring*, Costume Design, Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 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 Franco Nero: click here to learn more about Mr. Nero (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Franco Nero looked like a Hollywood movie star with his flawless bone structure and ocean-blue eyes, and after the success of Django, he was afforded the opportunity to be one.  But Nero's first language was not English, it was Italian, and when he came to Hollywood to play the role of Lancelot in the big-screen adaptation of the hit Broadway musical Camelot, he wasn't exactly an obvious choice.  Then again, nothing about Camelot came together easily when it came to casting.  The original intent was to reunite the two original Broadway leads, Richard Burton & Julie Andrews, but Burton priced himself out and Andrews was filming another movie, so director Joshua Logan had to go with backup plans, eventually settling on Richard Harris & Vanessa Redgrave, the latter a future screen-legend doing her only true big-screen musical.  The result was a mixed bag, as we'll discuss today.  The film made a fortune in 1967, the rare studio musical of the era to actually turn a profit, but it was given a lukewarm reception by critics, and reappraising it from decades later, I think the critics might have had the inside track over audiences of the time when it came to assessing Camelot.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is in many ways a bare bones look at the Arthurian legend, though starting largely in Arthur's adulthood.  We get the King (Harris) courting the beautiful Guinevere (Redgrave), a flighty young woman whose beauty & charm show no bound.  We occasionally get glimpses of Arthur's childhood tutelage from Merlin (Naismith), a figure that is so mythical the only person whom he speaks to the whole film is Arthur himself, but the real-world stakes of having a democratic rule of law (albeit one with an anointed king) start to come to a head later in the film when it's clear Guinevere is madly in love with Arthur's most devoted night Lancelot (Nero), something the king's illegitimate son Mordred (Hemmings) wants to take advantage of in hopes of disrupting Camelot (and giving himself a chance at the throne).  The film ends with Camelot as a concept ending, but Arthur bringing its ideals forward through a young boy he makes a knight before his impending death, his principles of justice and right before might carrying onward.

The movie is way too long.  This is true of a lot of musicals of this era, where they needed a full plot and a full set of musical numbers, and weren't able to trim in the way they had in the 1950's (this is probably because there were examples of over-long, highly-successful musicals at the time such as My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music whose box office receipts justified testing an audience's patience).  It is not helped that the score isn't as universally hummable as those two.  Camelot today has two songs that still exist in the lexicon: the title song, sung by Harris, and "If Ever I Would Leave You" (sung here by Gene Merlino, who dubbed Franco Nero's singing though Nero does his own speaking in the film), though it doesn't have the same resonance as Robert Goulet's cast recording does (he was the original Lancelot on Broadway).  The film isn't necessarily bad-bad.  There are moments it kind of works, like when it's trying to wrestle with the complicated legacy of doing right but having people take advantage of it (the Kennedy administration was called "Camelot" in large part due to the politics of this play emulating that of the late president, who was a fan of the show), but the cast is not strong enough to carry it in its weaker moments.  Harris & Redgrave can sing, but they don't have enough chemistry (Harris, in particular, feels miscast...the studio should've sprung for Burton who would've given the film more gravitas).  Nero is hard to judge here.  He seems like the kind of guy you'd risk getting burned at the stake for to have an affair with (he looks divine), but his acting is pretty stilted in English, and he doesn't do his own singing.

The film received five Oscar nominations and won three.  Of the bunch, the Art Direction & Costume Design nominations make the most sense.  The Art Direction, with its towering castles and in particular the very fun forest where Merlin resides, are ornate and while they aren't as spectacular as it might've been with full-on location shooting (they attempted it in Spain, but heat at the time made it impossible), it still works well.  Redgrave looks glorious in the film, particularly her gold-diamond pattern dress that is maybe the film's most recognizable look, and it offsets that most of the maidens-fare in the background all wear the same dress in different colors.  The sound & scoring nominations I'm ehh on...this isn't a great musical, but it's also one of the better ones in a field of bad musicals (i.e. there's a decent chance I give this film the Scoring OVP statue even if I'm in the middle, largely because there's not much else to go with).  And the cinematography nomination feels fine too-again, it's hurt by being too long, and by not having enough location shooting when you're competing against major steps-forward in the field ala Bonnie and Clyde.  All-in-all, one of the bigger musical gaps in my filmography probably was that way for a reason.

Le Samourai (1967)

Film: Le Samourai (1967)

Stars: Alain Delon, Francois Perier, Nathalie Delon, Cathy Rosier

Director: Jean-Pierre Melville

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Throughout the month of June we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

Film noir has existed basically since the early 1940's when it was invented, and there's never really been in a time frame where it didn't have at least some movies, but when we discuss noir, it had really two American heydays, roughly from 1941-59, the original run of Classical Hollywood noir, where it went out-of-style pretty much hand-in-hand with the studio system, and then the early-to-mid 1970's, when the genre made a comeback in the wake of the Watergate scandals.  But in the late 1960's, if you wanted to look at noir, you needed to leave the Hollywood system, and in most cases, head to France.  As we talked about last week, France was obsessed with the genre, making films like Elevator to the Gallows (link to my review of it, and all of the film noirs on this blog, at the bottom of this page).  In 1967, they made what might be the other best-known film noir to come out of the French New Wave, Le Samourai, starring Alain Delon and directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, who would make noir-inspired movies for much of the 1960's.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film starts with Jef Costello (Delon) keeping a small bird as a pet in a barren apartment.  We see quickly that he's deeply methodical, and isn't the kind of man who leaves anything to chance.  We learn this pretty quickly when his lover Jane (Delon) provides him an alibi for a killing he's committed.  We soon learn that Jef is in fact a contract killer, one who has never been caught before, but is rounded up by the police, and potentially in danger of being identified by a woman named Valerie (Rosier) he lets live at the club.  Valerie, though, doesn't identify him, but the Commissaire (Perier) can't let up, convinced (correctly) that Jef is guilty.  Jef runs into issues when the men who hired him to kill the initial target want him dead, afraid he'll give them up to the police.  This sets up a high-stakes showdown between the bunch, with Jef eventually dying in a standoff with Valerie, whom it looks like he's going to kill, but after the police shoot him (to save her) it turns out there were no bullets in his gun.

The film is shrouded in enigma, and in almost all ways feels more neo-noir as a result than a noir (neo-noir was given the ability to leave a lot of ambiguity without the pressures of the Hays Code, meaning we had to end with villains getting their comeuppance even when that didn't make sense to the plot), as we don't entirely know Jef's motivations, even in his final act.  In fact, the ending of Le Samourai has been long-debated, and Melville doesn't appear to have left a lot of answers.  I think it hearkens back to the title, where the Samurai (in this case, Jef), forced to atone for losing his perfect streak of murders because his employers want him dead & the women in his life are now suffering the consequences of his actions, commits a form of ritual suicide that should hopefully protect both Jane & Valerie (both of whom will be in trouble with the law as well if Jef is caught as they've perjured themselves).  But there's a lot of ways to interpret Le Samourai, which is maybe the point.

My friend Robin said of Alain Delon "you have to have ridiculously beautiful people next to Alain Delon or he looks like an alien" and this quote sums up the motif of Le Samourai precisely.  Delon is sometimes a wooden actor, one who is so unnervingly attractive that it's hard to concentrate (to Robin's point, putting him next to the equally staggering Delon & Rosier puts the rest of the cast on some level of parity, easing the mind of the audience), but this fits so well with Jef.  Jef is not meant to be understood, even in moments where he might share a little bit about himself (like his private conversations with Jane & Valerie).  The further we go in the movie, he does a good job of showcasing how he's unraveling...but never abandons the character work he's done to make Jef feel invincible.  I maybe wanted one or two bigger moments, or some explanation as to why the Commissaire loathed Jef so much, but Delon's work here is very specifically catered to the film, and Rosier steals every scene she's in as the elusive pianist.  Throw in gorgeous set designs (Paris in the 1960's, man...it doesn't get better), immaculate costumes, and dreamy cinematography and you've got a winner.

1940's: Act of Violence, The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Brighton Rock, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, The Fallen Idol, Force of Evil, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Ministry of Fear, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raw Deal, The Reckless Moment, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, Sorry, Wrong Number, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach

1950's: Ace in the Hole, Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Blue Gardenia, The Breaking Point, The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, The Crimson Kimono, Elevator to the Gallows, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Murder by Contract, Night and the City, Odds Against Tomorrow, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, The Prowler, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Long Goodbye, Night Moves, Nightcrawler

A Countess from Hong Kong (1967)

Film: A Countess from Hong Kong (1967)

Stars: Marlon Brando, Sophia Loren, Sydney Chaplin, Tippi Hedren

Director: Charlie Chaplin

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Tippi Hedren-click here to learn more about Ms. Hedren (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last week we talked about Tippi Hedren both in Marnie and in general her tumultuous relationship with our director-of-the-year Alfred Hitchcock.  Hedren's career after Marnie was rough, though, as she was under contract to Hitchcock (whom she refused to work with again), and who had final say in what films she was able to do, and he supposedly turned down several pictures that Hedren was interested in making.  She was finally released from her contract with Hitchcock & Universal in 1966, but her career has lost all of its momentum.  How do you follow up working with Hitchcock in two of his last great pictures?  Apparently, by appearing opposite the rare filmmaker who could rival Hitchcock's legend and track record on his final picture.  Yes, the first movie that Tippi Hedren made after working with her most iconic director was in the final film made by Silent Era genius Charlie Chaplin, A Countess from Hong Kong.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Ogden Mears (Brando), a wealthy man nominated to be the next US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, who visits a brothel that includes Natascha (Loren), a Russian countess who is now penniless after the Russian Revolution.  On his voyage back to America, he realizes that Natascha has stowed away on this ship in his cabin, with hopes of arriving in the United States and starting a new life.  Initially reluctant, he eventually acquiesces to hiding her, even marrying her off to his valet, who then becomes quite amorous toward his new fake bride.  When Ogden's wife Martha (Hedren) arrives on the ship in Hawaii, he must choose-will he stay with his wife, with whom he has an in-name-only marriage that is meant to further his political career, or will he chase after this new woman that he has fallen in love with (even if it could be the downfall of his career)?  Only someone watching their first movie wouldn't know where Ogden's allegiances end up.

A Countess from Hong Kong is regarded as more curiosity than actual discussed film today.  Chaplin hadn't directed a film in ten years at the time, and that movie had been a critical flop.  Countess would suffer the same fate, and though Chaplin would continue to tinker with scripts & ideas for the next year before his death in 1977, this was his his final film.  It's easy to see why critics & the public didn't respond to this.  While some of the comic bits play better with a bit of nostalgia (you can see the classic Chaplin eye for sight comedy in the way that Loren is continually stuffed into a bathroom every time someone comes to the door), he had not modernized his comic styling & it didn't play as well so far-removed from the Silent Era.  It didn't help that Brando & Loren have no chemistry together.  Both have very naturalistic acting styles, so I'm not saying this couldn't have worked, but Brando always struggled with comedy, and Loren doesn't have enough character to pick up the slack.  All-in-all, this is the kind of movie you'd forget pretty quickly if there weren't so many legends involved (Chaplin, for what it's worth, is only onscreen for a brief minute, as are his three daughters).

Hedren is also in the film for a short while.  According to Hedren, she later said that she felt Chaplin tricked her to say yes to the picture, promising a bigger part in the pitch, to which she said she would've done it just to say she'd have worked with Chaplin.  She's good in the movie, but it is indeed a cameo despite her high billing, and it would be a footnote of her filmmaking lexicon were it not for Chaplin, Brando, & Loren's involvement.  This would also be arguably the last time that Hedren would work with an "important" director for decades, and in terms of making a film with such prominent billing, it'd be the last time ever.  That didn't mean she didn't work though, and next week we're going to talk about a film that she spent the better part of a decade trying to make, whose subject would lead Hedren to her true passion-in-life.

OVP: Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967)

Film: Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967)

Stars: Julie Andrews, James Fox, Mary Tyler Moore, John Gavin, Carol Channing, Beatrice Lillie, Jack Soo, Pat Morita

Director: George Roy Hill

Oscar History: 7 nominations/1 win (Best Supporting Actress-Carol Channing, Art Direction, Costume Design, Score*, Song Score, Original Song-"Thoroughly Modern Millie," Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Julie Andrews-click here to learn more about Ms. Andrews (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last week, we started out our conversation about Julie Andrews with not Mary Poppins nor The Sound of Music (both of which I'd seen many times), but instead with Torn Curtain for our Alfred Hitchcock month, a movie that she felt an ill-fit for.  Andrews is a unique actress for modern audiences because she is so well-known for two beloved children's classics (and later had a bit of a renaissance with The Princess Diaries and voiceover work in the Shrek and Despicable Me franchises for a new generation of kids), but those two films kind of hide the fact that she was a big star for a time, and her career had ebbs-and-flows.  You could argue that the final major wave of her first, most successful period in film happened in 1967 with today's Thoroughly Modern Millie, the last big hit before Andrews would endure two extremely high-profile flops that would totally stall her film career...but more on those two pictures next week.  Today we're going to raise our skirts & bob our hair with Millie.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place in New York City in 1922, where Millie (Andrews) has decided to become a "modern," basically taking on the flapper aesthetic & getting a job as a stenographer which she hopes will result in her finding an "equal" as her husband (i.e. marry her boss).  In the beginning of the movie she meets Dorothy (Moore), a hapless aspiring actress who is always lost, and is the target of Mrs. Meers (Lillie) who is their landlord...who is also running a human trafficking ring by kidnapping girls staying with her who don't have families.  Millie is pursued by Jimmy (Fox), a poor paper clips salesman but is enamored by Mr. Graydon (Gavin), her gorgeous boss.  The film follows the love square between the four, and the occasional appearance of Muzzy (Channing), who is an eccentric wealthy widow who randomly shows up at opportune times throughout the movie.  In the end we find out that not only does Millie love Jimmy (and Dorothy loves Mr. Graydon), but that Jimmy is actually Dorothy's wealthy brother (and Muzzy's stepson).  Oh, and they end the prostitution ring.

Thoroughly Modern Millie is meant to skewer a lot of things, though it's rarely successful in this endeavor.  Mocking the rich, gender norms, and how we fantasize about both when we watch the movies, the film doesn't really have the edge to make that work, and we end up with a film that accidentally glamorizes what it's intending to mock.  This might be forgivable, as would the repetition & length (the story goes nowhere during the middle hour as Millie can't decide between the two men, even though one has no interest in her whatsoever), were it not for the racism that doesn't even feed the plot.  Lillie (in her final cinematic role as she was starting to suffer from Alzheimer's at the time), is a white woman bossing around a group of Asian men (Jack Soo & Pat Morita), and it's just...gross.  The way all of the Asian actors are used as props & stereotypes-even in 1967 they should've known better & it's so ancillary to the central plot it's ridiculous.  It also feels pretty eyebrow-raising to have something as serious as sex slavery be treated basically as an excuse for the main cast to do a series of acrobatic tricks in a mansion (we don't usually get people THIS evil in a musical, even the villains).

Andrews is fine here even if this isn't amongst her best work.  Unlike Torn Curtain she was perfect cast here-Millie is the kind of role that Andrews can nail, but the movie itself is dull, and Andrews doesn't get enough of a change-of-pace to help save the film from itself.  That task instead goes to Carol Channing, who in 1967 was best known for her "role of a lifetime" Broadway part in Hello Dolly!.  Channing is one of those singular talents on stage & screen that's hard to explain, an actress so specific it's difficult to ever see her playing anything other than her schtick.  I honestly don't have a lot of words here-her Muzzy shows up randomly, has little to do with the plot, & is absolutely insane.  One gets the sense that someone like Gwen Verdon or Shirley MacLaine might have been a better fit for this role, grounding it while also getting some of the humor, but Channing definitely comes in & upends the film. I want to like this performance because it's definitely something, but it's so unusual I don't really know what to do with it.

Otherwise, the rest of the Oscar nominations are a mixed bag.  The Art Direction is boring & overdone, the costumes are not much better (though I loved Andrews' iconic black-and-white flapper look), and the sound is okay (it feels like some of the scenes are a bit washed out, particularly the musical numbers that don't involve Channing).  The score is much better (somehow this movie is Elmer Bernstein's only Oscar), and the scoring is fun.  Best of the bunch is the title song, which is lyrically delicious ("they think is odd and Sodom and Gomorrah-ble" is among the sharpest lines in an original American musical), even though we don't really get a giant musical number around it like I would've hoped (most of the rest of the songs are standards, as this, "Jimmy," and "The Tapioca" are the only originals).  The song, played over the opening credits, promises a great movie that what follows cannot bother to deliver.

Maroc 7 (1967)

Film: Maroc 7 (1967)
Stars: Gene Barry, Elsa Martinelli, Leslie Phillips, Cyd Charisse, Denholm Elliott, Alexandra Stewart
Director: Gerry O'Hara
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Cyd Charisse-click here to learn more about Ms. Charisse (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Throughout the month of March, we have looked at four of the seminal films from the career of Cyd Charisse.  While I have questioned her abilities as an actress on occasion, there's no denying that all four of the movies we've profiled for Charisse are considered classics, and correctly so-there's much to lend to all of them.  Charisse, however, is our first actress (of four this year) to recieve 5 Saturdays in the same month, and so we get to continue on in her career past the MGM years.  I considered doing one of her final straight dramas like Party Girl or Twilight of the Gods, but on the advice of my brother, I went further into her filmography, into the 1960's, and found one of the most bizarre spy knockoffs I've seen in a while.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about Simon Grant (Barry, best known today for either his series of B-movies at Paramount in the early 50's or his stoic dramatic work in the 1960's in shows like Bat Masterson and Burke's Law depending on your genre preference), an undercover detective who seems to be a bit shaky on the law.  He's hired to infiltrate the jewel thief ring that is run by Louise (Charisse), a fashion editor by day and an impeccably-coiffed criminal by night.  In the process of his investigation into Louise, Simon begins to fall for Claudia (Martinelli), one of the fashion models working within Louise's ring, one whom he thinks could be persuadable to his own side.  Along the way, we see an increasingly ridiculous series of chase sequences interrupting ornate, gaudy modeling shoots with about a dozen women that somehow all look like Lois Chiles (even though none of them are in fact Lois Chiles).

The movie is clearly borrowing from the Sean-Connery style Bond films that were popular at the time, with pictures like the James Coburn Flint series being a huge coup for FOX.  Maroc 7, however, doesn't have the cheekiness of the Coburn films, and also doesn't have the budget, and is clearly more a way to make a quick buck off of a series of scantily clad women and a recognizable name (though she deserves above-the-title billing, this is very much a supporting role for Charisse) to make a buck for Paramount.  There's so much camp potential here (one of Charisse's henchman is an irritable, likely gay, photographer, for crying out loud), but only Denholm Elliott seems to realize that they aren't making an important film.  Instead, we have actors actually trying to land their parts without any irony, and none of them (save, again, Elliott) probably have the actorly heft to be able to pull off an A-picture to begin with.  As a result, it's kind of boring, and the characters are almost interchangeable.  You'd be forgiven for not even distinguishing key characters in the film, which is a problem because the film's final third, which involves two different actresses betraying our main character, plays flat because you honestly would struggle to even remember which characters they were playing.

The movie took place at the end of Charisse's filmography, and was the last movie in her career that she'd get star billing.  At this point, she'd been out of dancing for over a decade (MGM largely abandoning musicals to make action movies like Maroc 7, albeit higher-quality), and other than a part in the uncompleted Marilyn Monroe picture Something's Gotta Give, hadn't really done anything of note since the 60's began.  She's fine in this role, even though it's easy to see someone like Anne Bancroft having more fun with the part; Louise is meant to be effortlessly glamorous, and Charisse, now in her mid-40's, certainly still could do this in a series of elegant suits.  I leave Charisse's filmography weirdly conflicted about her as a performer-she's a great dancer, but not a particularly compelling actress.  However, either her studio or her agent or Charisse herself had impeccable taste in scripts, making her a star with iconic hit after hit (Maroc 7 notwithstanding) during the waning days of the Golden Age.  Monday we'll unveil our next star, someone who came before Charisse but has a rather cheeky connection to the actress that I'm hoping you enjoy, but in the meantime please sound off in the comments on your favorite Charisse films we've profiled, and if there's a really great one that might change my mind about her.

OVP: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967)

Film: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967)
Stars: Spencer Tracy, Sidney Poitier, Katharine Hepburn, Katharine Houghton, Beah Richards, Roy E. Glenn, Cecil Kellaway
Director: Stanley Kramer
Oscar History: 10 nominations/2 wins (Picture, Director, Actor-Spencer Tracy, Actress-Katharine Hepburn*, Supporting Actor-Cecil Kellaway, Supporting Actress-Beah Richards, Original Screenplay*, Film Editing, Art Direction, Original Score)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Sometimes when you're watching a movie you have to continually remind yourself that it was made almost fifty years ago.  The reality is that ideas in movies, particularly in films that were important socially, frequently become outdated and provincial the further you get from the issue.  The public evolves, and what was once groundbreaking no longer seems that way in the eyes of the audience.  It's why arguably the best social issue films are those that are as honest as possible, and in many ways skirt making it about "the issue" (Brokeback Mountain, for example, is hardly a "social issue" film at all, becoming more of a romance and a film simply about prejudice in general, which is something that unfortunately never seems to disappear).  Guess Who's Coming to Dinner doesn't have this foresight, instead focusing on the there-and-now.  That is forgivable (not all films have to be omnipotent) but seeing a dated plot combined with overacting and a script that can't decide whether it's funny or wants to have something serious to say is not forgivable, and this, one of the last four AFI's 100 Years films I had to see (I'll be done with the list in the next couple months or so-and yes, I picked a better-respected film to end the list), was a large disappointment considering its vaunted status as a film classic.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows John (Poitier) and Joanna (Houghton) as they decide to introduce themselves (they have recently been engaged) to their parents.  Joanna's parents Christina (Hepburn) and Matt (Tracy) are at first comically dumbfounded, and then after a while have a serious worry about the future of their daughter and her intended.  The same could be said for John's parents (Glenn and Richards).  In both cases the women are given to a more romantic impulsiveness while the men have a more practical sensibility.  The film continues with the same repeated argument over their happiness vs. their personal safety/future, before we get to the inevitable conclusion, with Matt providing a speech about how his love for Christina being a strong model for why the two should in fact get married.

The film is ridiculous for about every reason imaginable, but the first giant elephant in the room is that John and Joanna shouldn't get married, but it has absolutely nothing to do with race.  These two met each other eleven days prior, have a fourteen-year age gap, and have very few shared experiences.  Those are all perfectly reasonable objections, and one wonders why they made the story about them so impulsive-couldn't she have know him for a year or something like that?  I'm surprised in the entirety of the film that no one used that as a reason to object to the union-they haven't made it through an entire lunar cycle together, which is a sign that marriage should be off of the table.  The entire film seems predicated on the only objection being the race of the two individuals, when in fact that (even in 1967) shouldn't remotely be at the top of the list of parents should worry over.

The film also makes painstaking points to make the film more palatable to all audiences, but in the process declaws the entire film and makes it decidedly uninteresting.  The first is that Matt and Christina, the director insists, are not going to remotely be coming at this from a position of prejudice.  Perhaps Stanley Kramer wanted to play the Avenue Q "everyone's a little bit racist" card here, but it never comes across that way-we never seem to see Matt and Christina object because John is black, but only because their daughter and he will have a hard life.  It would have been more interesting if they'd spent some time with Matt focusing on the fact that if John were white, he'd be thrilled by the match.  And that's the other thing to take issue with in this movie-John is too perfect.  He's a wildly decorated medical doctor, frequently making trips to foreign countries to help needy children, an upstanding widower who is willing to sacrifice his own personal happiness for Joanna.  Forget the fact that he's too good for his flighty, impetuous fiance-he's too good for anyone.  I'm surprised Kate Hepburn didn't try to marry him herself.  The fact that they made him flawless helps the argument of why they should get married, but once again it sacrifices the real, which makes issue films dated-realism is key, and even if an issue becomes more for the history books than the headlines, a film will still be relevant if it remains honest.  Having John play the ultimate Manic Pixie Dream Guy is not doing that.

The film received ten Oscar nominations, a staggering number, though it's hard to explain why in hindsight.  The score is saccharine and overwrought, the screenplay has trouble with tone and consistently contradicts itself, the editing is nothing special (the most impressive part of it is the way that it tries to hide Spencer Tracy's clearly debilitating health), and the art direction is just a lush San Francisco home.  The film received a quartet of acting nominations, and I can't quite decide which one I support the most.  Arguably the most intriguing is Cecil Kellaway's as a family friend of Matt's who is trying to convince him the match is a sound one.  Kellaway, who had been nominated for an Oscar nineteen years earlier, is quite charming as a priest with a fondness for the bottle and who doesn't see what the hoopla is about, and while he's not giving great acting, his is the only comic portion of the film that doesn't feel glib.  Beah Richards, who made a career out of playing every African-American actor in Hollywood's mother at some point in her career, gets one gigantic speech to Spencer Tracy late in the film that feels wholly out-of-character and completely off-kilter (it's arguably the most out-of-place scene in the film), and the rest of the time she just sits and reacts to things-the role is a trite one, and Richards' delivery adds nothing to the role.  It feels like a throwaway nomination in a weak year for that category (though a strong one everywhere else-1967 being one of cinema's best years) for a longtime character actress.

The leading pair is hard to judge.  You don't get much more storied than Spencer Tracy and Kate Hepburn, particularly when they're together, and it's hard not to be impressed by the incredible backstory of the making of this film (with Hepburn and director Stanley Kramer putting their salaries on the line to get the studio to back the making of the film, as Tracy was so ill that he died several dies after shooting ended).  The tears in the final soliloquy may be Kate's best most in the film, but it's hard not to see them as tears for Tracy, not for her fictional Matt.  Otherwise they are trading on their most indisputable talents (Hepburn's ability with timing and Tracy's Broadway-engrained stage presence) with little else to lend itself.  Hepburn could play this role in her sleep, and yet frequently doesn't seem to get the motives of her character.  Considering she was up against Faye Dunaway's Bonnie Parker and Anne Bancroft's Mrs. Robinson, two of the most iconic characters in the movies, it feels like sentiment won her that second Oscar more than anything else, as she's been far better before and is, while always watchable, boring and listless in this role.  Tracy, whom I have less of a passion for than Hepburn, seems to float too much from opinion-to-opinion, relying heavily on the disjointed script without making any sort of personal assumptions about his own character or trying to do some of the heavy lifting.  As a result his Matt is a contradiction, and not a good one.

We'll end there, but I'm hoping you have thoughts on this film, one of the few "classics" I've never seen but I'm guessing you have.  If so, share in the comments!

Berserk! (1967)

Film: Berserk! (1967)
Stars: Joan Crawford, Ty Hardin, Diana Dors, Michael Gough, Judy Geeson
Director: Jim O'Connolly
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Occasionally you come across a film and realize that a certain modern movie or piece of art that you've been obsessing over was clearly an inspiration for the film.  That was my first reaction when I was watching Berserk!, a campy film from late in Joan Crawford's career when she was in her "Grande Dame Guignol" period.  The film, about a circus where random performers keep dying, seems like it was drawn right out of this season's American Horror Story, complete with the stoic bearded lady and the movie star ringmaster.  The problem for Berserk! is that it doesn't have enough knowledge of its own camp and enough sense to put most of its spotlight on its personal Elsa Mars, and so it falls flat when it should be a deliciously silly delight.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about a woman Monica Rivers (Crawford) who co-owns a circus with Dorando (Gough).  In the opening scene of the film, a tight rope walker randomly falls to his death, causing a panic in the circus as it appears to have been murder.  It also causes a record number of people to start coming out to the show, suddenly titillated by the prospect of potentially seeing someone murdered.  Monica and Dorando have differing ideas of what to do in this regard, with Monica intent on continuing the show while Dorando wants to close things down.

A new act suddenly appears on the scene when the tight-rope artist leaves, a handsome man named Frank (Hardin) who intrigues Monica both with his daring and his impressive physical prowess (Joan Crawford-eternally getting her man, even if there's a 25 year age gap between the two).  We also get the return of Monica's troublesome daughter Angela (Geeson) who wants to join the circus as well.  More murders ensue, with the eventual killer revealing herself in the stunningly and a-characteristically dramatic final act.

The film is easily at its best when it knows that it's being campy-that's kind of the point of a film like this.  It's never going to be great art (not even hiring Joan Crawford will ensure that), and it's not particularly scary (it's way too silly), so you should want to ratchet up the ridiculousness of the movie.  This is quite clear when we see, say, a ridiculously trampy magician's assistant like Matilda (Dors) throwing herself in vain at Frank, even though his loyalty lies with Monica (also, he's blackmailing her for part of the circus, so you know, money before sex, apparently).  It's less clear when we get the ludicrously bad ending, where the killer is revealed to be Angela, who wasn't even in the first half of the movie and is only killing so that she can get some attention from her mother.  Honestly-the entire film sets it up so that either Crawford or Hardin should have been the murderer, so it's a tad bit ridiculous that they didn't go with the easy answer here-the twist makes absolutely no sense.  The twist also makes the ending needlessly dramatic without any sort of comedy to it-Frank dies thanks to Angela killing him, Angela gets electrocuted by a random bolt of lightning, and then Monica goes to comfort her like she's Mildred Pierce trying to be martyr-of-the-year.

So the film is only occasionally fun, and as a result gets two-stars.  I do always admire the stamina and determination of someone like Joan Crawford when I see a film like this though.  This is a woman who, when she wasn't getting the parts she wanted from MGM, went out into Hollywood and started winning dance competitions in order to get a bigger name for herself, and once she became a major headliner in the late 1920's, she wasn't ever going to give that up.  Her 1960's period of filmmaking was principally in the horror genre after the massive success of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, which gave Crawford her third major bout of stardom, and she wasn't going to let crap scripts get in the way of the spotlight (it worked, too-this was a big hit in 1967).

I also want to comment on how bizarre the career of Ty Hardin was after this picture, since we're probably never going to get to him again (he was far more famous for his roles in television westerns than he was for his film work).  Despite essentially playing a himbo here and throughout most of his movie career, he eventually joined an arch-conservative group in the 1970's called the Arizona Patriots, a notoriously anti-semitic/anti-immigrant that wanted to bring "Christian patriots" back in charge of freedom in the country.  The FBI actually shut the entire organization down in the mid-80's since they were stockpiling weapons and Aryan pamphlets, but Hardin remains an activist for extreme-right causes (he's also been married eight times).

So, yes, a pretty silly movie with a pair of stars with decidedly different careers-what are your thoughts on Berserk!?  Do you like this period of Joan Crawford's career?  Do you think that the film would have gained by embracing the camp a bit more, or are you fine with where it ended up?  And did anyone else clearly see that Ryan Murphy appreciated this movie before making Freak Show?  Share your thoughts in the comments!