OVP: A Special Day (1977)

Film: A Special Day (1977)
Stars: Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni
Director: Ettore Scola
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Actor-Marcello Mastroianni, Foreign Language Film-Italy)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Sophia Loren-click here to learn more about Ms. Loren (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.


By the end of the 1960's, Loren's career was still in pretty good shape, but the actress seemed intent on slowing down.  Her second marriage (she was married twice to film producer Carlo Ponti) had resulted in the birth of her two sons, and Loren was content with making less movies as she raised them.  However, public demand for Loren didn't dissipate, even after her longtime director Vittorio de Sica died in 1974 (Loren appeared in his last film, The Voyage, and would star in eight movies helmed by de Sica, and they would act together in several more).  For our last film I wanted to pick what is critically the final really important film in Loren's career, at least as a leading woman, to date-A Special Day, an unusual movie from the late 1970's that while she received top billing, frequently is more associated with her costar Mastroianni due to his getting the Oscar nomination for playing opposite of her.


(Spoilers Ahead) The film takes place over the course of one day in May 1938, during which time Hitler made a state visit to Rome and appeared publicly with Mussolini.  The event drew incredible crowds, but within the fictional confines of this movie, two people stay home: Antoinetta (Loren), a taken-for-granted mother whose husband treats her like garbage & whose six children dismiss her, and Gabriele (Mastroianni), a former radio announcer who has been fired because he is gay.  The film unfolds with the two forming an unlikely bond (Antoinetta's myna bird has floated to his window, and they meet because she goes to his apartment to catch it), in the process discussing their lives, sexuality, and their divergent politics, which clearly shift over the film as Antoinetta, who makes scrapbooks devoted to Mussolini, starts questioning the indoctrination she's encountered during the fascist regime.

The film is my favorite "genre" (if that's the word for it) of movie, one where two strangers briefly meet, and though they are not together long (the police take away Gabriele toward the end of the picture to be imprisoned in Sardinia), they have a profound impact on each other's lives.  For the most part, it sticks to the best parts of this genre-we see them slowly reveal things they've thought but never said (not just Gabriele's sexuality, but also Antoinetta's broken marriage & dreams), while also forming a bond that neither will be able to shake.

The problem for the film (and for me), is not Loren, who I think is great in this part, but instead Mastroianni.  He's an actor that I richly admire, and thought totally should have won an Oscar nomination for 8 1/2 (and quite frankly, I haven't seen a performance better than his in 1963), but his performance as gay feels like it's being rewarded more for its "bravery" rather than its authenticity.  I didn't like that the crux of the film is the two making love, and while critics have tried to salvage this by saying it was about more than sex (and instead about two people being together in an unforgiving time), it makes it feel like his sexuality, which his character is about to pay an ultimate price for (likely his life, certainly his freedom), is so fluid as to be dismissed.  It's very much a "have your cake and eat it too" situation with the character's sexuality, and as Mastroianni doesn't bring any sort of dimension to his sexuality in the film, so I left kind of at odds with the character, and with the ending.  There are great elements of the film, and Loren is really good (it's likely because 1977 was such a strange Best Actor year that he got in instead of her, as also Best Actress was crazy competitive), but the ending kind of took away some of my love for the picture.

Loren would continue working & being in the public eye, though not always for things she wanted to be there for.  Five years after A Special Day she'd spend a brief stint in prison for tax evasion (charges that would eventually be cleared), and would turn down major TV roles, most notably the part of Alexis on Dynasty that would eventually revitalize Joan Collins' career.  She'd become the first celebrity to launch their own fragrance line (something everyone from Elizabeth Taylor to Paris Hilton has done in the years since), and become an "ageless icon" of fashion with her eyewear line.  She'd go on to the biggest hit of her career in Grumpier Old Men, get a Globe nod for Pret a Porter with Julia Roberts, costar in the all-star cast of Nine, win an Honorary Oscar, and have yet another potential comeback later this year with The Life Ahead.  Unlike Jayne Mansfield & Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren is an actress whose career came with a lot of chapters.  Next month, we're going to encounter the only possible person who could succeed Loren in our series, an actress whose career also had a lot of chapters, one of which involved Sophia.

OVP: Marriage Italian-Style (1964)

Film: Marriage-Italian Style (1964)
Stars: Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni
Director: Vittorio de Sica
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Actress-Sophia Loren, Foreign Language Film-Italy...though they were in different years; this is one of roughly a dozen foreign language films to get their FF nomination in a different year than one of their other nominations, though this is the truly rare time where the FF nod came after the acting nomination, as it was usually the other way around)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Sophia Loren-click here to learn more about Ms. Loren (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

I'm aware that we're now moving into our second film with Loren & Mastroianni (and our third where she's directed by Vittorio de Sica), which might feel a bit repetitive when it comes to Loren's career.  But while Loren was making movies of this era in the United States, most notably The Fall of the Roman Empire (for which she became the second-ever actress to receive a $1 million paycheck, after Elizabeth Taylor for Cleopatra), these weren't where she was getting the most creative juice.  Loren was oftentimes just asked to be unattainable & beautiful in American films, but it was in Italian cinema like Two Women and Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow that she was getting critical hosannas & working on movies that would be more lasting to her legacy (and thus more interesting in a retrospective of her work).  Marriage-Italian Style was also important to Loren's career because it was her second (and to-date, last) Oscar nomination, so missing it feels a bit of a miss considering we're only going to be profiling two Oscar-nominated actresses this entire season.  With that caveat, let's move into Marriage-Italian Style

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about the complicated romance between Domenico (Mastroianni), a cruel, successful businessman who has a penchant for prostitutes, and a prostitute he becomes infatuated with named Filumena (Loren).  The two start a decades long affair, with her eventually taking on more traditional roles similar to a wife, such as caring for his dying mother & helping run his shops, but never actually becoming his wife-he uses her, she puts up with it because she's in love with him & doesn't feel she can do better.  When he decides to actually marry a younger girl who works in his shop, Filumena fakes her own deathbed to convince him to marry her, and it works-she marries him, and in the best scene of the movie, reveals her plan to him (while contemptuously eating a plate of pasta).  As he tries to annul the marriage, she reveals another secret to him-she has three sons (proving that he's been away from her for extended periods of his life), only one of which is his, and she wants nothing in terms of money, but wants her sons to have his name, so that she can be acknowledged as their mother.

The film is weird, because in the first half, it's lensed as kind of a comic play, climaxing in the reveal of the deathbed hoax.  It also doesn't really work-Domenico is too much of an asshole for us to really care or even ever forgive him for what he did to Filumena, and part of me was hoping that he wouldn't so easily wriggle out of the marriage (even though eventually he'd get married to Filumena for real).  The tone of the film is also weird because the first seven minutes are told before a flashback, and are so somber you also would be confused about the tone of the film.  This makes this film feel sloppy in a way that neither of our two other entries with de Sica & Loren did, and makes this my least favorite of the three.

The movie works better as a drama, where Filumena & Domenico have to acknowledge their age and the failed nature of their relationship in order to find some sort of solace with their children.  This doesn't necessarily make for better acting (I feel like Loren is too reliant on madonna/whore tropes in this role, and doesn't have the nuance of Yesterday or the dramatic heft of Two Women, though she's still eminently watchable & nails that reveal scene so beautifully you'd be forgiven for not remembering anything else), but it makes for a more grounded, straight-forward script, which is what Marriage Italian-Style is in need of in order to figure out its purpose.

Next week, we're going to go later into Loren's career and talk about what happened after she moved beyond her peak fame in the 1960's, to a film made after de Sica's death, with the concluding review devoted to our August star.

OVP: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (1963)

Film: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (1963)
Stars: Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni
Director: Vittorio de Sica
Oscar History: 1 nomination/1 win (Best Foreign Language Film-Italy*...but in 1964 cause you know Oscar with foreign-language films)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Sophia Loren-click here to learn more about Ms. Loren (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Most actors who are primarily known for their work in other languages, when they win or are even nominated for an Oscar, struggle afterwards to equal that kind of success, and certainly don't go back to their native tongue for a similar international success.  Think someone like Juliette Binoche or Marion Cotillard, both of whom did critically-acclaimed work after their Oscar-winning turns, but never really captured the (American) cultural zeitgeist in the same way, and certainly their most well-known work to American audiences post-Oscar would be something like Chocolat or Inception rather than more challenging performances like Certified Copy or Two Days, One Night.

This wasn't the case in the 1960's, and Sophia Loren, more than any other actor, regularly challenged what would be considered commercial.  After her Oscar for Two Women, which she obviously won while speaking Italian, she would float for the next couple of decades between English and Italian roles, with a good deal of success.  This was evident with a movie like Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, a populist anthology comedy that won Best Foreign Language Film in 1964 at the Oscars, and was a big hit, as the 1960's was a time when audiences were flocking to foreign languages movies, which made figures like Loren or Brigitte Bardot proper international movie stars in a way we have never really seen since.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is actually three stories told back-to-back-to-back, and other than the two lead actors, the stories have little in common (other than the complications of love).  The first chapter, about a married couple who accidentally commits a crime, is easily the longest of the three, and (for my money) the best.  It has Loren & Mastroianni playing a poor couple who pulls a con on a furniture salesman, and in the process accidentally breaks the law.  However, there's a loophole where if a woman is pregnant or nursing, she can't go to jail.  To get around this, Loren's Adelina keeps getting pregnant before the deadline, and thus the couple has seven children over the course of eight years in what we'd now call a studio apartment.  It's hilarious, and honestly would have worked if they'd fleshed out a bit of the humor as a feature film.

The other two segments aren't quite as good.  The center one, where Loren (immaculately dressed by Christian Dior) is a cruel, rich, neglected wife of a millionaire industrialist on a car ride with her lover, isn't funny at all, and actually feels more like the sort of cerebral Fellini-esque movie we'd expect from Italian cinema during this era.  It's good, don't get me wrong, and intriguing, but it's not really thematic with the other two films & feels out-of-place (it's also pretty short).  The final sketch is silly fun (it's about Loren playing a prostitute who accidentally convinces her young neighbor to give up the priesthood in a fit of hormones), but it's the least successfully executed of the three, and Mastroianni's horn-dog trust fund kid isn't well-defined.

The movie features some wonderful acting from Loren-I think this might be my favorite performance from her so far this month.  Her ice queen in the second act is haunting, the sort of callous, cruel woman who only allows for one perspective (her own), and it's a great showcase against the exhausted mother of the first half and the final giddy prostitute, keeping men on a string with her "dumb but hot...but not really dumb" routine.  Mastroianni isn't as good in any of the three (though he can be forgiven considering he was giving the performance of a lifetime in 8 1/2 elsewhere in 1963), but this movie is a testament as to why Loren was so beloved in the 1960's-she could genuinely act.

Oscar's 15 Biggest Snubs

We're in the heat of Oscar season, and as someone who has been writing about the Oscars for seven years straight on this blog, I have written a lot of things about the Academy Awards.  I don't have access to insider information about the Oscars (even in an era of everything being on social media almost instantly, there's still something to be said for interviewing theoretical nominees or attending press events), so it's occasionally a slight challenge to come up with unique things to say about the Oscars, especially since we spend so much time in the past here and have done so many trivia articles through the years (plug time: if you're newer to this blog, peruse the tags on the side, especially "Lists" and "Official OVP Ballot" if you want to look at hundreds of different dissections of past Oscar races).

So color me surprised when I realized I've never done a list of the biggest Oscar snubs of all-time.  It's hard to corner down the biggest snubs ever in Oscars history, so we're going to focus today on the acting races, and a Top 15 list of performances.  This is obviously subjective, but below are the 15 best performances ever that I think most definitely should have been nominated for the Oscar, and in most cases, should've won the statue.

A couple of notes before you dive in.  First, you'll notice I don't repeat any movies, and that's on purpose.  A few of these films didn't get any Oscar love in any category, and so it'd be easy to put the entire ensemble on this list, but that'd be boring (I tried, and failed, to not duplicate actors as one person gave two performances I refused to ignore).  So Kim Novak or Charles Bronson, I see you and I'm sorry-know you'll also be nominated when the time comes.  Second, there are more men than women on this list, but that has less to do with qualitative dissections of film, and more to do with me agreeing more often with the Oscars on female performances than male.  And lastly, these are old movies.  While I could just as easily have come up with a list of 15 performances from the past decade Oscar should have noticed (and might well do that if I do any "Best of Decade" lists next year), only a couple of films on this list I think have had enough time to breathe for me to realize that they're "indisputable snubs."  With that said, dive in and fight me in the comments!

15. Andy Griffith (A Face in the Crowd)

A harrowing look at a man the world wants to just be simple, but instead is a malevolent, cruel creation, only someone who could portray "sweet as pie" like Andy Griffith could shock us all as Lonesome Rhodes (the obvious correlations to Trump 50 years before he'd become president are indisputable & petrifying).

14. Rita Hayworth (The Lady from Shanghai)

I wrote once that Rita Hayworth is the greatest actor of all-time to never be nominated for an Oscar, so you knew she'd show up here.  Her Rosalie is an enigma, the kind of woman that drives men mad...and while they're entranced she gets exactly what she wants.

13. Michael Stuhlbarg (Call Me by Your Name)

Yes, he should have gotten in for the speech alone.  But the speech wouldn't work without his subtle groundwork beforehand, watching his son endure love-and-loss in the same summer.  Stuhlbarg has been a reliable character actor for a decade now, but has never been so tender as CMBYN.

12. Orson Welles (The Third Man)

Harry Lime is everything we came to expect from Orson Welles.  Possibly the greatest actor of his generation (give or take Brando & Ingrid Bergman), Welles brings a devilish charm to Harry in The Third Man, almost making you forget that he's been gone for half of the picture, and once you realize what he's been up to, you understand why "devilish" is the right term for Welles' work.

11. Cary Grant (The Philadelphia Story)

Jimmy Stewart is a fine actor and lovely in The Philadelphia Story.  He's also giving the third best performance in the movie.  The best work in the film wasn't even nominated, with Cary Grant giving the finest acting of his long career, playing the most "Cary Grant" role ever, and defining the suave, delicious persona that would keep him a star for decades.

10. Marcello Mastroianni (8 1/2)

When I sit down with cinephiles, few directors inspire more argument than Fellini.  Hell, put me in front of a mirror and bring up Fellini, and I'll argue with myself.  But I will stand no assertion that 8 1/2 isn't perfect, and no performance in his filmography is as effective as Mastroianni's, breathing life into his wandering director.

9. Jeanne Moreau (Jules and Jim)

The two title characters can easily be pushed aside, because for anyone who has seen this movie, there is only Catherine.  A picture of romance, drama, comedy, and at parts even horror, Jeanne Moreau became one of the indisputable faces of the French New Wave with this gorgeous, chaotic free spirit.

8. Anthony Perkins (Psycho)

Perkins work in Psycho so often features on these kinds of lists, it borders on cliche.  But how do you deny such a fully-realized creation, a monster whose evil is easy to identify, but impossible to forgive?  Every detail in his performance comes to light with clarity upon repeat viewings, but you are still shocked by Norman's plans thanks to his handsome uneasiness.

7. John Wayne (The Searchers)

Anyone who says John Wayne can't act needs to watch The Searchers.  John Ford's magnum opus also puts the Duke in his most challenging and effective role, Ethan Edwards.  Wayne finds the heart in a cruel, inhuman (but all-too-real) man, wandering through the desert until he no longer understands what he's looking for...perhaps his own soul?

6. Katharine Hepburn (Bringing Up Baby)

Kate Hepburn was hardly at a loss for Oscar nominations-she was cited 12 times, and won 4.  That said, it still feels weird that the best thing Hepburn ever did in her career, her kooky Susan in Bringing Up Baby, somehow didn't get her nominated.  In the same year as her classic Holiday, was the Academy just not ready to admit they had a crush on the actress yet?

5. James Stewart (Vertigo)

If Cary Grant's going to take Best Actor in 1940, one could make a sincere argument that Jimmy Stewart should have won later for his Scotty Ferguson.  Vertigo was a financial disappointment, which is still no excuse for skipping the best work of this actor's career, as a man driven insane by lust, then heartbreak, and then just madness.

4. Brad Pitt (The Tree of Life)

Terrence Malick is always the star in a Terrence Malick picture-that's what the world-famous actors who sign up for his films are aware of when they take the job.  That said, Brad Pitt still manages to give one of the best auteur vessel performances I've ever seen as Mr. O'Brien, a man who would haunt his son's adulthood for decades in ways he couldn't understand.

3. Orson Welles (Touch of Evil)

Giving Stewart a run for his money is the other grand teton of 1958's Best Actor category, Orson Welles (I swear that's not a fat joke).  By this time Hollywood had no use for the former Boy Wonder, but that didn't stop him from making a movie like Touch of Evil, essentially the Unforgiven of film noir-his racist, corrupt detective pulled the mask off of what was lurking behind the Golden Age's treatment of the genre.

2. Henry Fonda (Once Upon a Time in the West)

Imagine casting Henry Fonda as a villain.  Nwo imagine him as a vicious man in black, with those piercing blue eyes staring down on a horrified Claudia Cardinale, and a ticking clock western where it's so well-structured you genuinely don't know who is getting out alive.  In a career where Oscar rarely called, this is Fonda's best work and more than earned him a trophy.

1. John Huston (Chinatown)

Huston's performance in Chinatown may be the best Supporting Actor performance, period.  His Noah Cross is a villain for the ages, able to conceal under his peculiar vocal cadence unmitigated evil, and justification for that evil as the movie unfolds.  Look at him, his head always turning, even as the credits role-Huston dazzles in Chinatown as if acting was what he was born for.