OVP: An American Dream (1966)

Film: An American Dream (1966)

Stars: Stuart Whitman, Janet Leigh, Eleanor Parker, Barry Sullivan, Murray Hamilton, Joe De Santis

Director: Robert Gist

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Song-"A Time for Love")

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

I watch two channels in my house with such constant abandon they might as well be my roommates: Food Network & TCM.  The latter I know every host, and I know what kinds of films they will like (and what they will & won't say about movies).  Ben Mankiewicz is the biggest name on the channel since Robert Osborne's passing, and while Mankiewicz will never be Osborne (no one will), he has his own charms & I've grown fond of him.  I also can tell when he's introducing a movie that he doesn't like (Osborne this was much harder to deduce), but I've never seen Mankiewicz introduce a movie quite like An American Dream (based on the novel by Norman Mailer) recently, where he essentially called it trippy and quoted a truly terrible review of the film...essentially daring the audience to hate watch what they were about to see.  Doing this at the beginning of the movie is something TCM simply doesn't do, and honestly, I was shocked...but proving their marketing department is onto something, was intrigued enough to stick around.  As a result, I got to see one of the weirdest, straight-up messed up movies I have seen in a long time-a film that fails at both camp & competence, and takes three Oscar nominees on the rides of their careers.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Stephen Rojack (Whitman) who is a TV commentator and former war hero who is married to Deborah (Parker), a drug-addled alcoholic who he likely married for her money, and who won't grant him a divorce even though their marriage is hell.  During a fight, Rojack throws her out a 30-story window to her death.  He claims it was a suicide, and without more proof, the police have nowhere to go, but they do make a point of introducing Rojack to a mobster named Ganucci (De Santis) whom he's badmouthing on TV and he meets Cherry McMahon (Leigh) a nightclub singer & a former flame of Rojack's.  This results in Rojack being hunted down by the mob, trying to stop his television campaign for justice, while he & Cherry rekindle their love.  The film ends with Cherry inexplicably double-crossing Rojack (right after he's gotten away with the murder of his wife as they have no evidence), and as a result he dies, gunned down by the mob as the credits roll.

The film is a mess.  The first fifteen minutes you almost get the sense that it might be a really campy, fun mess, as Eleanor Parker is bonkers as a strung-out, drunk heiress, never more than ten feet away from her bed, and in differing stages of undress.  You almost feel like you're watching a horror film the way she torments Stuart Whitman.  But after she dies, the movie becomes sporadic in a dull way, if that makes sense.  Whitman's character's motives are never clear (some scenes he is begging to confess, others he is trying to cover his tracks), and the treatment of Janet Leigh's character is totally sporadic as well.  Leigh is clearly meant to be a prostitute, but (as written by men) that's meant to mean that she doesn't have any morals, which is why she betrays the man she seems to love in the end.

The film was nominated for one Academy Award, for Best Original Song.  While the song is in the middle of the movie (not an end credits scene), it has little to do with the film.  Leigh lip syncs to it in her nightclub, and it stretches forever, but it's not memorable or catchy, and while the team of Mandel & Webber had just won the year before for The Sandpiper (that's likely why they were so soon on the Academy's radar, even for this stinker), the song itself is a snore & doesn't even have the manic energy of the actual catastrophe of a movie.

OVP: Above and Beyond (1952)

Film: Above and Beyond (1952)
Stars: Robert Taylor, Eleanor Parker, James Whitmore, Larry Keating
Director: Melvin Frank & Norman Panama
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Motion Picture Story, Score...though for some reason the nominations were for 1953 even though the film was released in November 1952, hence the tag below)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

One of the unusual aspects of films based on real-life, living figures is that while we assume the chapters of that person's life that are important are over if they have a movie being made about them, that's not technically the case, and is weirdly not the case for Above and Beyond, the second in our weeklong look at Oscar nominees for the writing categories.  This film, made in 1952, hosted recent history as its subject (the Manhattan Project and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan), had only happened seven years prior.  As a result, the characters played in the film by Robert Taylor, Eleanor Parker, and James Whitmore were all alive in real life, and in the case of two of them, still making major decisions in their lives that would make this movie complicated in the years that follow.  First, though, let's ground ourselves in the plot.

(Spoilers Ahead) As I mentioned, the film is about the top secret Manhattan Project, the codename for the military mission that planned the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II.  The military leader in charge of the operation is Col. Paul Tibbets (Taylor), a serious man who is chosen for his disciplined approach, and who is advised by his friend Maj. Bill Uanna (Whitmore), someone even more somber than Tibbets.  Tibbets has a young family, including a wife Lucy (Parker) and two sons, one who is only an infant.  In order to keep the secrecy of the mission, all of the military men's families are moved onto the base, and as a result, Lucy is in close quarters with her husband & children, but struggles to understand why Paul is so strict with everyone, and so secretive with her.  As the film progresses, their marriage becomes strained, to the point where she actually leaves him right before the bombing.  After the successful attacks in Japan, the couple is reunited, their past squabbles discarded...

...or so we think.  In real life, Paul & Lucy Tibbets did reconcile after a rough patch in their marriage during the planning of the Hiroshima attacks, but that didn't stick.  Paul's devotion to his career was something that Lucy couldn't ignore, and they eventually truly divorced in 1955, and Paul remarried the next year to a French woman, with whom he had a third son (I can't find anything about whether or not Lucy remarried).  As a result, this is one of the only films I can think of where the couple centered in the love story ended up breaking up after the movie was made (unlike something like First Man where we know that they'll breakup in real life but they just didn't show that onscreen).

If only the actual film was as interesting as this strange tidbit.  Above and Beyond is a boring, sloppy movie.  The film's story getting nominated is a joke, because it's arguably the picture's least successful element.  The entire romance plotline is repetitive & ridiculous (the military and bombing sequences are much better).  Parker is given a flighty, underwritten woman to play, and she fails miserably in grounding Lucy.  Every scene Lucy seems to have no rational concept as to why her husband might keep the military secrets from her, and is upset at every little inconvenience in her marriage despite begging Paul to have her come to stay with him.  This apparently is a little true to real life according to reports I found online, but it makes the Lucy character ridiculous, and you understand that their marriage is not the kind that could support a military career as it's too clingy & needy.  There's really no saving the film, though, from the Lucy character, and Parker doesn't even try to keep her grounded.  The film's score was also nominated, but it's a snore-it's just commonplace war movie cliche (drums, brass, and musical cues that are completely unoriginal to a war movie).