OVP: Norma Rae (1979)

Film: Norma Rae (1979)

Stars: Sally Field, Ron Leibman, Beau Bridges, Pat Hingle, Barbara Baxley

Director: Martin Ritt

Oscar History: 4 nominations/2 wins (Best Picture, Actress-Sally Field*, Adapted Screenplay, Original Song-"It Goes Like It Goes"*)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 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 Sally Field: click here to learn more about Ms. Field (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Sally Field's career began in television, and was inspired by another America's Sweetheart we profiled this year, Sandra Dee.  Field was the titular girl-next door in the television version of Gidget, but the show only lasted one season due to poor ratings (it would do better in syndication).  Field then took on what would end up being the biggest early success of her career and a setback for Field in the long run, playing Sister Bertrille in The Flying Nun, a hit for ABC that lasted three seasons.  Field couldn't escape the role, though, and was cast in a series of cutesy parts and girl-next-door roles.  It's possible that this is where Field would've stayed, but under the mentorship of Lee Strasberg (and thanks to the insistence of Joanne Woodward, her costar), she was able to land the lead role in Sybil, a TV movie that won her acclaim and an Emmy Award (beating not just Woodward, but other "reputable" actresses like Jane Alexander & Julie Harris).  Field alternated in the late 1970's between commercial fare like the box office smash Smokey and the Bandit and serious-minded cinema, including today's film, which won her her first Oscar, Norma Rae.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place in a southern community (it's never confirmed, but you get an Alabama/Mississippi vibe from the surroundings), where Norma Rae Wilson (Field) works at a cotton mill and is frequently speaking out to management about the treatment of the workers, particularly her parents, who also work at the mill.  She meets a union organizer named Reuben (Leibman), who is pushy but well-informed, and trying to get the textile mill to unionize to fight back against the low wages & unfair treatment.  During this time, she meets and marries Sonny (Bridges), a sweet-but-simple (think himbo energy) coworker of hers, and they combine their families.  Norma Rae eventually joins Reuben's crusade, fighting for union rights for the textile workers, even though it's putting her life and reputation at risk.  Despite pitfalls, including a lot of pain to her marriage and her father dying from exhaustion, she is able to create the union, and hopefully in the process make her town better.

There aren't a lot of Best Actress-winning performances that I've never seen (I checked-I've caught 88% of the winners at this point), and this is one of the most-heralded that I have left.  I was curious how it would abide, and I was pleasantly surprised.  Field is excellent as Norma Rae.  I figured she'd play against type, trying still to shed the Flying Nun veneer, but she also grounds this work.  Her Norma Rae is not everything you'd expect.  She's defiant, but also quite charming and gregarious...it makes sense that a union organizer would be someone people genuinely like (otherwise why would they join her...JD Vance aside, politicians tend to be likable), but that doesn't usually happen in movies like this.  She grounds her work, making her feel like someone who gets things wrong, but isn't ashamed of being a sinner.  I think she takes this in different ways that other actresses would've and indeed Field wasn't the first choice here.  Jane Fonda, Jill Clayburgh, and Marsha Mason all turned down the role...and all famously lost at the Oscars to Field when she beat them (something that had to particularly sting for Clayburgh & Mason, who would never win an Academy Award).

The movie's most famous scene is the one where Field stands up in the factory, and holds up a placard saying "UNION" in big bold letters.  I have seen this still picture so frequently, and yet the actual scene itself played fresh.  Again, this is a testament to the filmmakers who understand subtlety, but the way that it slowly, steadily, uses the sound design of each machine turning off, the workers taking a stand next to her as they understand she's giving up everything to give them a better life, and it's time for them to stand with her, is incredibly moving.  The film is very much a product of the 1970's (the lovely song theme, the way the camera wants to show realism, the sexual politics at play), but that scene with the "UNION" is for all-time, a reminder that we never can give up the fight to ensure that the dignity of work is protected and respected.

OVP: The Electric Horseman (1979)

Film: The Electric Horseman (1979)

Stars: Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Valerie Perrine, Willie Nelson, John Saxon

Director: Sydney Pollack

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Sound)

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 is, of course, an iconic movie star and film director (we'll get into the film direction part of his career next week).  But if you think about his impact on Hollywood, there's a word that comes to mind more than any other that's part of his legacy: Sundance.  This is of course the name of his character in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but it's also the name of the film festival that Redford helped to launch.  Redford bought land in Utah with some of his salary from Butch Cassidy, and would even film a portion of Jeremiah Johnson on this land.  In 1978, though, Redford would use his connections with Utah to found the Sundance Film Festival.  The initial festival was focused on previously-made movies, but by the 1990's the festival had grown, eventually becoming the most important film festival in America.  In recent years, it has become an important launchpad for major Oscar contenders like Manchester by the Sea, Call Me By Your Name, and the Best Picture-winning CODA.

(Spoilers Ahead) Redford didn't have a specific film tied with his early days at Sundance, so I instead am going this week with a western from around the time that Redford was founding Sundance (and just before he'd become a film director), The Electric Horseman.  The film has Redford as Sonny, a washed-up former rodeo champ who spends most of his days now as a spokesmodel for a breakfast cereal.  Sonny is a drunk, a shell of his former self, and also about to get fired during a large corporate merger.  He's also being harangued by an ambitious young reporter named Hallie (Fonda), who is trying to get a story about Sonny, and she gets one when he steals the horse he is a co-sponsor of the cereal with, trying to free it since it's being mistreated by the corporation.  They set off an adventure across the country, intent on letting the horse free before the corporation can get it back, and of course along the way...they find love.

The Electric Horseman is maybe the silliest concept for a movie I've seen in a while.  If the plot above makes no sense, that's because the movie doesn't hold up to this level of scrutiny.  Why, exactly, does a cereal company care so much about one horse, and also why will this throw off a potential merger deal?  These are questions that you shouldn't ask if you want to enjoy the film, which is quite enjoyable, to be fair.  Fonda & Redford, whom we already saw had chemistry in Barefoot in the Park, are at the peak of their star charisma in this movie.  Both had spent the past decade being some of Hollywood's most reliable leading players, and there's something about seeing two iconic stars play off each other that's breathtaking.  This is what was lost when we moved to making superheroes into movie stars rather than actors-getting to view an actual superpower, cause you don't get more radiant than Redford & Fonda at their celebrity peaks.

The film received one Oscar nomination, for Best Sound.  I don't really get this-the sound recording isn't all that interesting, and you could argue there was more opportunity to lean in on the sound design a bit earlier in the film, with the clanging in the casinos and the opening rodeo sequences.  But I do wonder if it got nominated on the richness of Willie Nelson's voice.  Nelson was making his film debut as an actor after a decade of being one of the faces of the Outlaw Country era, and would go on to star in a number of films in the next couple of years (right around the same time that Dolly Parton, his occasional collaborator, was becoming a movie star).  He recorded five songs for this, including a solo version of "Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys," and if that's what the Academy was interested in...I can hardly blame them (Willie Nelson being long one of my favorite singers).

When a Stranger Calls (1979)

Film: When a Stranger Calls (1979)

Stars: Charles Durning, Carol Kane, Colleen Dewhurst, Tony Beckley

Director: Fred Walton

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

All October long, The Many Rantings of John is running a marathon dedicated to the Horror classics of the 1960's-90's that I'm seeing for the first time this month.  If you want to take a look at past titles from previous horror marathons (both this and other seasons) check out the links at the bottom of this article.

Earlier this month we talked about Carrie, which along with The Exorcist was a genuinely big deal with not just the box office but also mainstream awards, getting an Oscar nomination for both of its leading women.  Today, we're going to talk about a woman who was Oscar-nominated, but not for her horror film. Carol Kane is most-known to modern audiences for her roles in The Princess Bride and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, but in the 1970's she was a regular in independent cinema, getting an Oscar nomination for Hester Street and having a prominent supporting role in Woody Allen's masterpiece Annie Hall.  In 1979, though, she was playing a teenager, very much in the vein of Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween for our film today, When a Stranger Calls, one of the most unusual horror films we're going to talk about this month because, well, it's not exactly a horror film.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes part in three acts.  The first shows Jill Johnson (Kane), a young woman who is babysitting and getting harassing calls from a crank caller who is telling her to "check the children."  Eventually she calls the police, and they trace the call...and it turns out, of course, that it's coming from inside the house.  The movie then takes a strange departure months later when John Clifford (Durning) is investigating not the crime (which was solved) but finding the killer Curt Duncan (Beckley) who has escaped from a mental asylum, and is now harassing a young woman named Tracy Fuller (Dewhurst), whom he met at a bar and is obsessed with.  While Clifford gets close to finding him, he escapes after attacking Tracy (more in a second).  This gets us to the third chapter, where an adult Jill is putting her own kids to bed, and gets a call at a restaurant saying "check the children"...indicating her own kids are in danger.  Though she comes home to no one, she knows better, and soon finds the man has killed her husband and is in her bed.  She nearly dies...before Clifford kills Duncan, having broken into the house, tracking him and fulfilling his promise to the parents of the original kids that he would avenge their children's deaths.

The movie is unusual for a variety of reasons, but let's get to first why it fits into this month.  The movie's opening scene is about as perfectly executed as a movie can get.  Claustrophobic (it does cutaways, but exclusively stays on Jill), we see her growing fear of what this man is capable of, and how he clearly wants to kill her (Scream clearly had this movie in mind when it filmed its iconic opening with Drew Barrymore).  Even if you know it's coming (this is based on a pretty famous urban legend, and was a story I heard before I'd ever heard of the movie), it's still staggering to hear "the call is coming from inside the house," and honestly...it would've been 5-stars had it been a short film, with Jill realizing what happened to her.  The ending is also creepy, particularly the scene where she realizes that Duncan is literally in her bed lying next to her (not, as she assumes, her husband-I honestly didn't see it coming).  Kane is superb in this movie, Grade-A horror acting & deserves her spot in the pantheon of "final girls."

But that's not really what most of When a Stranger Calls is about, as this isn't Jill's story.  For about an hour of the movie, she totally leaves the film, and we are left with Durning's cop, clearly tortured by the murder of these children, with him tracking down Duncan.  It's odd, particularly when you include Colleen Dewhurst's Tracy, who has almost as much screen-time as Kane, but whose fate is left unknown (we don't return to her after she's attacked by Duncan, but apparently alive in that scene).  It's a weird message for the movie that they're both willing to discard this woman in pursuit of their own obsessions, and as a result When a Stranger Calls reads in most places like a classic 1970's thriller more than a horror film.  Still, it's pretty good even with tonal issues, and the horror bits are edge-of-your-seat dynamite.  Highly recommend.

Past Horror Month Reviews (Listed Chronologically): The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Love, The Raven, Werewolf of London, Dracula's Daughter, Son of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Mummy's Hand, The Invisible Woman, The Wolf Man, Cat People, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Invisible Agent, The Mummy's Curse, The Mummy's Tomb, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Phantom of the Opera, Son of Dracula, The House of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man's Revenge, The Mummy's Ghost, The Uninvited, House of Dracula, She-Wolf of London, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy, Revenge of the Creature, The Creature Walks Among Us, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, The Blob, Village of the Damned, The Innocents, The Masque of the Red Death, Night of the Living Dead, The Wicker Man, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Carrie, Dawn of the Dead, Halloween, The Amityville Horror

OVP: The Amityville Horror (1979)

Film: The Amityville Horror (1979)

Stars: James Brolin, Margot Kidder, Rod Steiger

Director: Stuart Rosenberg

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Score)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

All October long, The Many Rantings of John is running a marathon dedicated to the Horror classics of the 1960's-90's that I'm seeing for the first time this month.  If you want to take a look at past titles from previous horror marathons (both this and other seasons) check out the links at the bottom of this article.

Horror films, while they are oftentimes inspired by real-life figures or events, rarely underline this for myriad reasons.  For starters, while ghost stories are common (you ever have conversation lagging at a dinner party, just ask if anyone there has ever seen a ghost, and suddenly you'll have hours of conversation), they aren't something that a legal team can substantiate, so by-and-large when you see a horror movie, it's at best inspired by a real-life incident, and to a large extent that's true of The Amityville Horror...but the beginning of the movie is very real.  Unlike virtually every other film we're profiling this month, Amityville talks about an actual murder, that of Ronald DeFeo, Jr's entire family, at the beginning of the movie, and then talks about real-life figures George & Kathy Lutz, who claim they lived in a house of horrors in Amityville, NY.  The movie itself, though, doesn't necessarily prove that real life is stranger than fiction, and while it makes for interesting drama, is one of our duller horror entries this month.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie tells the tale of George (Brolin) and Kathy Lutz (Kidder), an attractive young couple who live in a house with their three children, all kids from Kathy's first marriage.  The house is cheap because it was home to a series of murders many years prior, but the family, strapped-for-cash, can't turn away such a real estate steal.  The house, though, starts to impact them both.  Kathy's friends and family, including her clergyman Father Delaney (Steiger) become violently ill when they are at the house, and the longer he stays there, the more sullen & disheveled George gets.  The film seems to imply that George is turning into Ronald DeFeo, Jr., the man who killed his family, and wants the audience to think that George might inflict the same impact on Kathy & her children.  In the closing act, he does attempt to kill one of the kids as demons start to possess the house, but he stops short, with the family fleeing the house, never to return.

The movie is, I'm going to be honest, of questionable taste, particularly considering the series of tasteless sequels that it would inspire.  After all, Ronald DeFeo, Jr., who is a character in this presumably fictionalized story, was a real-life killer who had actual victims.  Putting that aside (but it needed to be said), the movie's best attributes are the non-horror elements.  Brolin & Kidder play a sexy couple (Brolin increasingly getting shirtless, disheveled, walking around in tighty-whitey's, and entering peak "daddy" mode as the movie progresses works really well, and is definitely carried forward in the remake where Ryan Reynolds enters his peak abs era), but they also struggle in terms of how George folds into an already established family, particularly one with financial troubles.  Virtually every corner of the movie is talking about the Lutz's money woes, and it brings an element of realistic drama into the movie that you don't always get from horror flicks.

But the film's horror quotient is so limited that it frequently goes from sturdy into dull.  The setup for jump scares feels fruitless, there's very little payoff with people like Steiger's Father Delaney, who is ancillary to the point of being in a different movie, and it isn't as masterful as most of the other horror classics of the era.  Carrie was about the way we torture young women who can't conform, Halloween was about evil lurking in the suburbs...but The Amityville Horror doesn't have enough depth to really be about much.  It's not a bad movie (the first hour is good if it leads nowhere, and I liked the Oscar-nominated score, even if it's repetitive & a little bit derivative to some other classic horror music like Halloween or The Innocents), but with a tacked-on ending & the limitations of real life...it's not really a classic.

Past Horror Month Reviews (Listed Chronologically): The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Love, The Raven, Werewolf of London, Dracula's Daughter, Son of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Mummy's Hand, The Invisible Woman, The Wolf Man, Cat People, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Invisible Agent, The Mummy's Curse, The Mummy's Tomb, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Phantom of the Opera, Son of Dracula, The House of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man's Revenge, The Mummy's Ghost, The Uninvited, House of Dracula, She-Wolf of London, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy, Revenge of the Creature, The Creature Walks Among Us, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, The Blob, Village of the Damned, The Innocents, The Masque of the Red Death, Night of the Living Dead, The Wicker Man, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Carrie, Dawn of the Dead, Halloween

The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979)

Film: The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979)

Stars: Alan Alda, Barbara Harris, Meryl Streep, Rip Torn, Melvyn Douglas

Director: Jerry Schatzberg

Oscar History: No nominations, though it was kind of in the conversation.  Streep & Douglas would go on to win the Oscars later that year for different performances, but won alongside Joe Tynan at major critics prizes as a sort of "let's honor all of their work" accolade that frequently happens from major critics prizes.

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 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 Barbara Harris-click here to learn more about Ms. Harris (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Well, after three years, it was bound to happen.  In a two-month period where life honestly overwhelmed me & I just couldn't handle it anymore (my job, the expectations of the holiday, the general unrest of Omicron, honestly my mental health itself), it makes sense that eventually I was going to miss a Saturday in our series. I'm not going to focus too hard on it, both because it was literally Christmas & because checking out was what was best for me (always remember-take care of yourself), but I am bummed our streak is over, and with such a unique star as Barbara Harris.  So I will be post-dating this for posterity, but today we will end our month looking at Barbara Harris, and indeed our year looking at the leading ladies of Alfred Hitchcock's movies, with a "Mondays with the Stars" segment.  

(Spoilers Ahead) The Seduction of Joe Tynan is a late 1970's political drama centering on Joe Tynan (Alda, who also wrote the film).  Tynan is a liberal New York senator who has made something of a name for himself, and clearly has presidential aspirations.  His wife Ellie (Harris) is ambitious as well, a smart woman who is studying psychology & is a proponent for analysis (which seems too "East Coast intellectual" for Tynan's staffers).  Tynan is getting pushed on the upcoming Supreme Court nominee from both sides.  On his right is longtime Senator Birney (Douglas), who knows the Supreme Court nominee will challenge him in the primary if he can't get him on the Court, while on his left is a lot of progressives, including Karen Traynor (Streep), an attorney who wants Tynan to make a stand against the nominee, in the process tanking a segregationist from making it onto the Court and setting up Tynan as a future presidential challenger.

This is the premise, and much of your opinion on what happens later will inform what you think of the movie.  I am not one of those people who judge movies of the past based on a new rubric; I think that is foolishness, and while I don't think we necessarily need to celebrate movies that clearly have aged poorly, I do think that we need to recognize that all things age one-way-or-another.  This is worth mentioning because the center of this movie is around Karen, a smart, capable woman in her own right, having an affair with Joe Tynan.  This doesn't appear to impact his vote (though he does, it's worth noting, side with Karen & eventually tanks the nomination), but what makes this remarkable isn't that Alda's screenplay has the beautiful woman in politics sleep with a powerful man, but that he does so while keeping her smart.  Streep's Karen is placid (Streep famously said that she was on "auto pilot" during this movie in the wake of the death of her longtime love John Cazale), but she's knowing.  She's done this before, and she knows not to put her heart too into the center.

Honestly, Joe Tynan is a bit dull as an overall movie (the direction is slow, and takes too many detours), but the script has a knowing glance at politics & it's filled with strong performances.  Alda is borrowing from Ted Kennedy in this part (it's hard not to see the Massachusetts senator in every policy speech), a deeply imperfect man who might well be perfect for America in 1980 (sadly, that didn't happen-I'd take a philandering liberal over Ronald Reagan any day), and he nails the well-meaning "still a man" role well.  Same could be said for Melvyn Douglas, who brings such instant stature you don't realize until late in the movie that he's clearly suffering from dementia, and has no business staying in politics longer.  There's a moment where he starts soliloquizing in French during a congressional hearing that is remarkably effective (it's the sort of thing that Aaron Sorkin would vastly overplay but here they get just right).

And best of all is our star of the month.  Harris could just be playing the neglected wife, but Harris (and Ellie) are too smart for such things.  She's a modern woman, and she won't take her husband back easily.  She also won't put herself into a closet without getting something in return.  Harris does, it's worth noting, take Joe back, but she does so with the real promise that he has to change...cause if he doesn't, she knows she can take him down.  It's a great, subtle part from an actress who would never really get an opportunity like this again.  She'd star in Hal Ashby's famously awful Second-Hand Hearts, which caused any momentum in her career to stall (she wouldn't make another movie for five years).  She would appear in films like Peggy Sue Got Married and Grosse Point Blank, but her heart wasn't really into it (she'd always kept film acting at a distance as it was), and she retired from acting to become a teacher at the turn of the century.  Harris died of lung cancer in 2018, one of the last of Hitchcock's living stars.

While it is just Monday, we will still have time before the new year (Saturday is the first of the year) to not only do a retrospective of our year devoted to Hitchcock, but also to take a peak at next season of the show, as yes, there will be a fourth season of Saturdays with the Stars (with a new theme!).  Stay tuned!

10 (1979)

Film: 10 (1979)

Stars: Dudley Moore, Julie Andrews, Bo Derek, Robert Webber, Dee Wallace

Director: Blake Edwards

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Original Score, Original Song-"It's Easy to Say")

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.

After the twin, high-profile flops of Star! and Darling Lili, Julie Andrews had gone from one of the biggest box office insurance policies in Hollywood to being something of a risk.  The films that she'd made in the 1960's that were such massive hits like Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music were out-of-fashion, and indeed it wouldn't be until decades later that high-quality musical productions would become trendy again.  She was offered the lead role in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, which she turned down initially before trying to get it back (it would go on to be a hit for Angela Lansbury), and had a failed TV project in 1978.  Throughout the decade, she only made two movies: The Tamarind Seed and 10.  The weird part about this part of her career, though, is that both of these movies were successes.  Tamarind Seed, though forgotten today, made a lot of money (though due to profit-sharing deals with Andrews & her director/husband Blake Edwards, the studio didn't make a lot of cash off of it), and 10 was a blockbuster.  So while this is considered a sleepy portion in Andrews' career in movies, the movies she did make were a big deal.  Of the two, 10 would be the more significant picture in her career (and the biggest hit she'd do with her husband), so we'll be profiling that for our tribute.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about George Webber (Moore), a brilliant singer-songwriter who is having a midlife crisis after his longtime girlfriend Samantha (Andrews) throws him a birthday party.  He is constantly thinking about sex & the meaning of life, and for him those two things collide when he sees a beautiful woman named Jenny (Derek) getting married, someone that he rates an "11" on a scale of 1-to-10.  The film shows initially George & Samantha being in a tumultuous relationship, but we soon learn that they need time apart, and they break up.  During this breakup, George travels to Mexico following Jenny and her fiancee on their honeymoon.  While there, he saves Jenny's fiancee from a shark, and while he's recovering the two become friends.  Jenny seduces George while listening to Bolero, but when he finds out that she's in an open marriage, and not the idealized version of womanhood he thinks she is, she breaks it off because he is in love with the vision of her, not with the real woman.  Afterward, finally growing up & realizing that Samantha is the love of his life, they reconnect, wiser & a bit fractured, but likely to remain together this time.

There are moments in 10 where Moore's scenes with Derek might be about something other than the male gaze & the misogyny that comes with it, but the film doesn't allow itself to focus on that, seeing Derek's free-thinking, sexually-liberated Jenny as a sign that Moore should become more conventional than the other way around.  This is a pity, because Derek, the least of these three actors in the long run of their careers, does something special here with Jenny, making her feel like a real woman after Edwards' camera had made the entire audience look at her as nothing more than the sum of her body parts.  She's not a great actress, but I get why she became a star from this movie as there's something magnetic that she brings to this specific part that's impossible to deny.

The rest of the film falls apart without this sort of insight.  Yes, Moore & Andrews are good (they usually are), but the sexism that runs through this is too much for me, and the comedy (where women are nothing more than props) is a gigantic yawn.  I bemoan the prudishness of modern cinema as much as anyone, but this is not the world we want to live in, where George has to find women to validate him.  I want a cinema more like Jenny's, complicated-but-free.

The film won two Oscar nominations, both of them quite good.  Henry Mancini does fine work with the score, though I'll be honest here-Revel is doing such heavy-lifting (the "Bolero" scene between Derek & Moore is the best part of the picture) that I'm surprised he was eligible.  The song "How Easy is That" comes at the exact perfect time, Moore & Andrews singing it as a duet toward the end of the movie.  It ties the film together nicely & is quite melodic.  This period of movies frequently had this kind of easy-listening tune toward the end of the movie & I didn't always feel it, but here it totally fits what we've seen before.  Next week we're going to finish off our month devoted to Julie Andrews a few years after 10, in one of the films that would bury once-and-for-all the squeaky clean demeanor that Andrews had been sporting since she first graced televisions as Cinderella.

Mad Max (1979)

Film: Mad Max (1979)
Stars: Mel Gibson, Joanne Samuel, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Steve Bisley, Tim Burns
Director: George Miller
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

It's unusual for me to see a sequel to a film without having seen all of its predecessors.  I generally like to think of a film series in the same way I do a television series, and even if I have a rough idea of where we started, I think it's important to see all of the installments.  However, when Mad Max: Fury Road came out I definitely upped this particular series on my Netflix list, and over the next few weeks I'll be catching both this and The Road Warrior as a way of finishing up the 1999 Entertainment Weekly "100 Greatest Films" list.  After watching the initial film, it's kind of shocking to see where this universe graduated to, as the first film, while definitely bizarre, has a grounded-in-reality aspect to it that disappears by the time we hit Fury Road, thanks in no small part to the low, low budget action that is on-display here.

(Spoilers Ahead) Between this and Fury Road, I am left to understand that the actual plots of Mad Max films are largely ancillary to what is going on on screen, but here goes.  We're in a post-apocalyptic future, one where motorcycle gangs rape and pillage the countryside, and where cops are the only line-of-defense for the people, most of which are not actually present for this film (it's the rare police film that doesn't show much of the actual people they're defending).  Max (Gibson) is one of the best cops, though he's one that wants to quit the force to spend time with his girlfriend Jessie (Samuel) and their infant son Sprog.  He eventually does quit after his partner is burned alive, but he and his girlfriend are pursued by a particular gang of roving motorcyclists, headed by the Toecutter (Keays-Byrne).  After the motorcyclists brutally kill Jessie and Sprog, the film becomes a revenge fantasy, with Max killing off every member of the gang one-by-one.

Gibson is the only actor in this cast who eventually became famous from these films (though Keays-Byrne did play the villain Immortan Joe in Fury Road, albeit one that is seemingly in no way connected to the Toecutter).  At the time he was a virtual unknown, with his only work of any note being on the soap opera The Sullivans.  This film made him a celebrity, and it's easy to see why.  Gibson today is easily dismissed because of his heinous offscreen politics, but for two decades he was a movie star for a reason-he is swaggering, game, and consistently magnetic with little character development as Max, and I can't wait to see him in The Road Warrior, by all accounts the superior of the two films.  It also has to be said that there's a strangeness to the fact that the eventually quite bigoted Mel Gibson almost certainly caused a sexual awakening in countless young gay men as Max, clad head-to-toe in leather and looking almost impossibly handsome with his pillowy lips and cold blue eyes.

The movie is violent, with brutal rapes happening at least twice in the picture (in what I'd assume would be odd for a movie made in 1979, the sexual assaults are perpetrated against both men and women), and it's a bit crude.  The budget for it was very light (which, with its $100 million gross at the time, made it the most profitable movie ever made until Paranormal Activity), with most of the sequences clearly involving mannequins or dummies, but Miller's prowess behind the camera cannot be denied, and the chases sequences are shockingly good for such a tiny amount of cash.  That said, the movie itself feels a bit strange to me, and not in the way I was hoping.  I always think when you're universe-creating that you walk a fine line into being indulgent, and frequently a movie that cares little for the plot veers into madness, with the bad guys becoming interchangeable and the violence being glorified.  The movie initially deeply polarized critics (as with most things that become popular, this has been white-washed through history and it's now hailed as a landmark film), and I kind of get it. The movie does, occasionally, seem to worship the rape and murder onscreen, and kind of glosses over Max's sadistic revenge options, eventually culminating in him killing one man in a Rube Goldberg-style device that involves him trying to outrun a lighter/pile of gasoline by cutting off his leg with a hacksaw (for real, this is how the movie ends).  As a result, I didn't like it even if I can admire the technical prowess Miller needed to have to get this movie made at all.

OVP: Agatha (1979)

Film: Agatha (1979)
Stars: Vanessa Redgrave, Dustin Hoffman, Timothy Dalton, Helen Morse, Celia Gregory
Director: Michael Apted
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Costume Design)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

One of the more enjoyable parts of the Oscar Viewing Project is that you get to see movies you didn't know existed.  Usually, for me, this is some random comedy from the midst of the Studio System that got nominated for Best Score and suddenly I'm toe-tapping alongside Marion Davies or Eleanor Powell much to my delight.  Occasionally, though, there's something more recent like Agatha which peaks out as a movie that I'm staggered I didn't realize existed, mostly in this case because I'm such a fan of Agatha Christie.  I own everything she's ever written (and can see it from where I'm typing this now), and have read most of it, and yet I never realized that this biography, starring Vanessa Redgrave & Dustin Hoffman at the peak of their fame, existed.

(Spoilers Ahead) It should be noted that the film itself doesn't take place over Christie's illustrious career, but at perhaps the most mysterious moment of it-the famed disappearance of the mystery novelist that attracted massive media speculation (it was on the front page of the New York Times) at the time.  After all, the world's most famous mystery writer suddenly disappears in a moment that seems plucked from the plot of one of her books?  How could the public not eat that up?  Since that story to this day remains shrouded in enigma (the Christies were pretty mum on the situation with Agatha ignoring the event entirely in her autobiography, and at the time claiming Agatha had amnesia though they divorced soon after), this is a series of made-up events, and in many ways they lean heavily into the idea that this could be one of Christie's novels.  After all, we have Agatha largely playing a Gone Girl situation here, disappearing into a Turkish Bath (truly random coincidence-I was in Hot Springs, Arkansas last week so I actually got to see a bathhouse similar to that used in this movie for the first time!), and attempting to frame her husband's mistress for murder, while in the process attempting suicide (she's unsuccessful in both attempts).

The film features Christie (Redgrave) as a woman of deep introversion, almost socially-awkward and Hoffman as Wally Stanton, an American reporter trying to get a major scoop on the world's most famous writer suddenly disappearing in the midst of a scandalous divorce.  The two actors clearly care about these characters deeply, particularly Redgrave who puts a tenderness around the author that is lacking in the script (which realizes pretty early on that the actual plot, devoid of side characters, is far too thin and so stretches the movie to the point of tedium).  Both are fine actors, but they have zilch chemistry with each other, and cannot seem to connect at all, making their fictional romance exceedingly dull to watch.  The movie at its best shows the mind of Christie, the way that she tries to pick up things from those passing by to create her characters, or the way her plan is never said out loud, so you have to deduce it the same way you would if you were reading her novels.  Unfortunately, these are only short bursts in the film, and the rest is terribly dull.  This isn't really a lost treasure other than in describing its plot; the movie itself is best left forgotten, particularly considering all of the truly great work Hoffman and Redgrave did in the late 1970's.

The movie's Oscar nomination was for Best Costume Design, and while it's easy to see why the Oscars honored it (and a nice nod to Shirley Ann Russell, who had been doing showy work for a decade at that point and never been cited by AMPAS), there's nothing special here.  The suits are fine, but nothing memorable, and the dresses worn by Redgrave aren't particularly insightful.  Yes, she wears frocks and furs as if she's covering up something, but that's about the most basic reading one could make into such a character, and quite frankly may be due more to Redgrave than anything else. Otherwise, this is a case of another period film scoring a citation in a year that was oddly bereft of such opportunities.

OVP: A Little Romance (1979)

Film: A Little Romance (1979)
Stars: Laurence Olivier, Theolonious Bernard, Diane Lane, Arthur Hill, Sally Kellerman, Broderick Crawford
Director: George Roy Hill
Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best Original Score*, Best Adapted Screenplay)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

There once was a time, ladies and gentlemen, before child-acting was a sea of precocious tots trying to become the next Jodie Foster or Dakota Fanning.  Children were less about being precocious and pre-naturally smart and relatable to adults, and more about just being children onscreen.  This was one of the first things I was struck by in George Roy Hill's A Little Romance.  Theolonious Bernard (who eschewed acting after this and now is a dentist in Western France) and Diane Lane (in her film debut-as you might be aware, she never took up dentistry) are admittedly precocious and incredibly smart, but there's still a sense of childlike wonder in their performances that occasionally becomes missing in today's films.  It's pitiable that most of the adult actors in the film (save for one) become cartoons, but Bernard and Lane's romance is actually quite sweet and enjoyable, lifting this film even when it doesn't know what to do with itself.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows Daniel (Bernard), a cinema-loving French teenager who lives with his cabbie father as he begins to woo Lauren (Lane), an equally brilliant girl who is from a wealthy American family living in France.  Daniel frequently borrows lines from movies and tries to impress her with Humphrey Bogart and Robert Redford and is persistently charming despite being a massive dork, and she falls for it hook, line, and sinker.  One of the cuter aspects about this movie is that we don't see a struggle for them to fall for each other-they're pretty much perfect together, but like Romeo and Juliet (an analogy mentioned multiple times), they're pulled asunder by fate and in particular Lauren's snobbish mother.

The film's best moments are always the two of them together-it's sweet to watch them discover love and kissing and shared interests (as well as interests that are less shared), and the two have mad chemistry.  Lane would make such a huge splash after this film that she ended up on the cover of Time magazine, and while this film occasionally veers into the super cute, sometimes you need that in a movie, and I quite enjoyed it.

The adults in the film, however, leave something to be desired.  Arthur Hill as Lauren's stepfather seems to only be in his relationship to try and be a father, rather than to stick with Lauren's obnoxious and odious mother (Kellerman), who seems plucked out of a Disney movie stereotype.  Neither actor is particularly strong in their role (between this and MASH, Sally Kellerman is not getting a great reputation on this blog as an actress).  Worst of the major actors in the film though is Olivier, who is of course a legendary actor but is pretty dreadful as a sympathetic pickpocket whose accent always feels far too affected and whom Daniel is constantly jealous of despite foolishly acknowledging he's well into his seventies and that it's completely out of character for the teen.  Olivier minces, ticks, and is pretty much every angle of bad overacting in the movie, and though he's always had a penchant for scenery-chewing, this is probably the worst I've seen from him.  The only adult actor in the film who is any fun is Broderick Crawford, who plays a boorish version of himself, and has a great scene with Daniel where he argues over whether he punched Ward Bond or Richard Widmark in Sin Town (of course Daniel was right and it was Bond, not Widmark).

The film received a pair of Oscar nominations.  The first was for Adapted Screenplay, and here I give it a mixed review, mostly because the film's cute dialogue between the two children is juxtaposed against the really awful way that the adults are written and handled, which damn near ruins the movie (and quite frankly the Daniel/Lauren scenes work more due to chemistry than writing).  The second is Georges Delerue's score, which shockingly won the Oscar despite Jerry Goldsmith's Star Trek and Henry Mancini's 10 (both considered more iconic today than A Little Romance).  The score is great, but to be honest I'm flummoxed as to how it was eligible for an Oscar considering that the best parts of the score (such as the bike ride scene) are actually by Vivaldi, not Delerue.  Normally when you seamlessly put a classical composer into your score that automatically disqualifies you (look at, say, Alexandre Desplat and The Tree of Life), and I suspect that more people were voting for Vivaldi than Delerue when he topped Mancini and Goldsmith.  As a result, I give this an okay, knowing that while the music fits the film well, it's doing a lot of borrowing from another source to get to that purpose; this is great for a composer (do whatever works best for your movie, and the classical nature of the score works with such romantic scenes), but when you're judging an original score Oscar it doesn't seem an appropriate nomination.

There you have it on A Little Romance-have you caught the film?  If so, what were your thoughts?  Do you think that Delerue's Oscar was inappropriate based on later readings of the score?  Do you find the film cute or cloying?  And what did you think of Olivier in one of his final film roles?  Share in the comments!