OVP: The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939)

Film: The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939)

Stars: Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Donald Crisp, Alan Hale, Sr., Vincent Price, Harry Stephenson, Nanette Fabray

Director: Michael Curtiz

Oscar History: 5 nominations (Best Art Direction, Cinematography, Visual Effects, Sound, Scoring)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Errol Flynn: click here to learn more about Mr. Flynn (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Errol Flynn lasted as a movie star for decades, but as one who was pretty much unimpeachable in terms of his box office, this period lasted roughly from 1935-1942, at which point he was oftentimes the biggest star on the Warner Brothers lot, give or take Bette Davis & James Cagney.  During this time, Flynn was married to the same woman, actress Lila Damita, but he had a history of womanizing.  Like Gary Cooper before him, he had an affair with Lupe Velez, and would get drunk off of William Randolph Hearst's vodka.  This reputation as a party boy was in stark juxtaposition to the men he'd play onscreen, frequently honorable scoundrels, or in the case of today's movie, a truly honorable man stuck in an impossible situation between two women.  This would also pair Flynn with both of the actresses that he'd be most associated with in his career: Olivia de Havilland, whom he would have a largely amicable relationship with, and Bette Davis...with whom he would not.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is a glossy historical melodrama, one where facts should not get in the way of a good monologue.  Private Lives is about an aging Queen Elizabeth (Davis, in de facto kabuki makeup), who is clearly desperately in love with the handsome, popular Earl of Essex (Flynn), but cannot have him in the way that she wants because it would put at risk her power.  She instead constantly finds herself at odds with him, usually in open court, and has fights with him, using her lover as a pawn in a number of battles, oftentimes risking his life as punishment for not returning her love in the way that she wants, because he's also power-hungry.  This all happens while the beautiful Lady Penelope (de Havilland) is also pursuing the Earl, which in the film's final moments we're led to believe was nothing, and that Elizabeth was his own true love.  Of course, at that point Elizabeth has publicly demanded the Earl's head for trying to be her equal, and there is no way out for the Queen, doomed to forever remain unmarried & unloved (except by England).

This is territory we've been to cinematically-Elizabeth's inability to find love because she is not beautiful and demands power instead has been informed by everyone from Helen Mirren to Glenda Jackson to Cate Blanchett to Margot Robbie (even Bette would go to this well twice).  Davis, at the peak of her power and beauty, wears intense makeup that makes her look, well, hideous (and years older than she was), in some ways foreshadowing her later triumph in Baby Jane Hudson.  But the movie, despite looking divine (the costumes, art direction, & cinematography are all a triumph, though why it got a special effects nomination at the Oscars is beyond me...the Scoring nomination is a bit cheeky given there's a song sung by Olivia de Havilland's character written by the actual Walter Raleigh, here played by Vincent Price in an early role), is kind of a snore.  Davis overacts to the rafters (with diminishing returns), de Havilland is fun but too small of a part, and Flynn's performance is a bit underwhelming.  Flynn is so grand in swashbuckling roles, but (as we'll see in the coming weeks), he was a somewhat limited actor when it came to going beyond that ken.  He is breathtakingly beautiful in this-it takes an actress as confident as Davis to appear in this kind of makeup against Flynn, who looks like a Raphael painting in some scenes, and risk being thought ugly, but I don't think he can land some of the scenes, save for the last 15 minutes, when he's betrayed by Davis & they both seem to be in a much better movie.

Offscreen, Davis and Flynn were not close in the same way that he was with de Havilland, and it's hard to pinpoint the exact nature of their relationship given that Davis would outlive him by decades, and therefore be able to go on talk shows (and discuss in memoirs) what she thought of him, and regularly change her mind.  She seemed to not like his ethics as an actor (finding he preferred celebrity more than the serious craft that Davis believed screen-acting), and also thought it beneath her to share billing with him in the film (you'll note, watching it now, that Davis, not Flynn, gets top billing, which makes sense in retrospect given her legend, but at the time would've been a genuine debate as both were equally valuable to Warner Brothers).  Davis wanted Laurence Olivier, who wasn't famous enough to get a role like this in 1939 (Wuthering Heights had not come out when production was in motion), and at one point (according to Hollywood legend) actually slaps Flynn for real in one scene, rather than faking it as would be typical on a production, which caused Flynn to become ill.  Davis, though, had kinder words about Flynn than I do in this movie, conceding that she thought him very good years after the fact while watching the movie, and telling de Havilland "he can act!"

OVP: Phantom of the Paradise (1974)

Film: Phantom of the Paradise (1974)

Stars: Paul Williams, William Finley, Jessica Harper, George Memmoli, Gerrit Graham

Director: Brian de Palma

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Original Song 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-00'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.

We're going to start our month of horror in the mid-1970's, and with a filmmaker not necessarily known for horror so much as for making thrillers: Brian de Palma.  De Palma, of all of the hero-worshipped 1970's auteurs, is not a director that I love.  I get why he's special-there's clearly something happening in his movies that is interesting, and he's definitely got a distinctive style...but it's not for me.  I honestly didn't know when I picked Phantom of the Paradise for our premiere film that this was directed by de Palma.  Why I picked it was because, keeping with our theme, it's Oscar-nominated (though not true for all of them, there will be a number of Oscar-cited films this month as a parting blog nod to the Oscar Viewing Project).  The film, along with The Rocky Horror Picture Show, may stand apart as the only two rock horror musicals in film history, a combination that could only happen in the mid-1970's.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is a send-up of both The Phantom of the Opera and The Picture of Dorian Gray set in a nightclub.  Winslow Leach (Finley) is a talented songwriter, but his works are stolen by Swan (Williams), the diabolical owner of the nightclub called the Paradise who spends most of his time bedding the women who audition for him.  Winslow is framed for drug possession, and is sent to jail where he has his teeth removed, and upon escaping disfigures himself further when he gets stuck in a record press.  Now deformed, he wears a mask (like the Phantom of the Opera), and begins to haunt the Paradise, trying to get revenge for his stolen music.  He eventually strikes a deal with Swan, that will allow the girl he met & wanted to sing his songs, Phoenix (Harper) to be the headliner, but he also realizes he has a devil's pact with Swan.  Swan has sold his soul to the devil so he can remain youthful forever, and Winslow can't die until Swan does, so they're trapped forever...until of course Swan is exposed as the monster he is (aka the Dorian Gray angle), and they both perish on the stage of the Paradise.

Here's the deal-even for a horror movie in the 1970's, this movie makes no sense.  It's preposterous, it frequently changes its plot with expositional dialogue each scene, and every scene feels like it's sort of telegraphing what comes next.  De Palma is not a subtle director, and this is not a subtle script.  It also isn't a particularly well-acted one.  Paul Williams is a fascinating choice for the bad guy, and is the best part of the movie, but it's more curious than actually good when you think about his performance itself.

But for what it is, it's not bad.  It's certainly a movie you won't stop watching, and it's brief & moves along given how thick with plot it is.  The film's song score was Oscar-nominated in part because this was a weak year for the category, but it's not an embarrassing moment for the Academy.  The best song is "Old Souls" sung by Harper, whose voice sounds shockingly like adult contemporary crooner Anne Murray (seriously, listen to it and tell me I'm wrong).  This becomes something of a theme for the film, and had every song handled with this kind of care, this would be a rocking soundtrack to a weird movie.  As it is it's just a fine soundtrack to a weird movie.

Past Horror Month Reviews

1920's: The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera

1930's: The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula, Dracula's Daughter, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Invisible Man, Mad Love, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Raven, Son of Frankenstein, Werewolf of London

1940's: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Cat People, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Dracula, The House of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Invisible Man's Revenge, The Invisible Woman, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Invisible Agent, The Mummy's Curse, The Mummy's Ghost, The Mummy's Hand, The Mummy's Tomb, Phantom of the Opera, She-Wolf of London, Son of Dracula, The Uninvited, The Wolf Man

1950's: Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, The Blob, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Creature Walks Among Us, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, It Came from Outer Space, Revenge of the Creature

1960's: The Devil Rides Out, The Innocents, The Masque of the Red Death, Night of the Living Dead,Village of the Damned

1970's: The Amityville Horror, Black Christmas, Carrie, Dawn of the Dead, Don't Look Now, Halloween, The Hills Have Eyes, The Omen, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, When a Stranger Calls, The Wicker Man

1980's: Child's Play, The Evil Dead, The Fly, Friday the 13th, Gremlins, Hellraiser, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Poltergeist, The Thing

1990's-Present: Arachnophobia, The Blair Witch Project, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Candyman, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Paranormal Activity, Scary Movie, Scream

OVP: Babes in Toyland (1961)

Film: Babes in Toyland (1961)

Stars: Ray Bolger, Tommy Sands, Annette Funicello, Ed Wynn, Tommy Kirk

Director: Jack Donahue

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Scoring, Costume Design)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

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

Disney has long had a way of knowing exactly which stars it needed to keep in its orbit before they left, and Annette Funicello was no different.  After the end of The Mickey Mouse Club, the series' breakout hit was still under contract, and used throughout a variety of Disney properties, including Zorro and Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color, as well as today's film Babes in Toyland, her second (of four) theatrical films with Disney.  She also became something of a jukebox star during this time frame, coming out with several hit songs including "Pineapple Princess," "O Dio Mio," and "Tall Paul," the latter a Top 10 hit and the biggest tune of her career.  Babes in Toyland is a pretty good encapsulation, though, of why Funicello would eventually need to escape the Mouse House, given the 19-year-old star wasn't being asked to stretch her abilities much within the Disney universe.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie (tangentially a Christmas movie, which feels nice given today is the day the Hallmark ornaments are announced, a tradition to pour over in my family, so I'm fully Christmas in July) takes place in a land of make believe, one that is still fully capitalistic as we have the villainous Barnaby (Bolger) trying to wed the beautiful Mary Contrary (Funicello) even though she is engaged to Tom Piper (Sands).  The reason he wants to marry her is that she is set to inherit a large fortune, something she is unaware of, and will go to her when she becomes betrothed (and he intends to steal the fortune).  He does this first by trying to have Tom killed (but his henchmen are unsuccessful in doing this), and then in having him shrunk when they reach the Toymaker (Wynn) and his assistant (Kirk) in the forest while looking for Mary's sheep.  Mary & Tom, though, defeat Barnaby, save Christmas (by having enough toys built for the holiday), and end up blissfully wed.

The movie has a lot of plot holes, more than you'd expect even from a live-action Disney film in the 1960's.  We never discover what Mary thinks of being an heiress, what happened to Barnaby, or what happened to the sheep.  The film feels like from scene-to-scene it's a patchwork picture, and I'll be honest-it's not a great movie.  I think it has a lot of heart, and there are warm performances (it's easy watching this to understand why Funicello would take on the role of America's Sweetheart so well-her song "I Can't Do the Sum" is the musical highlight of the picture), and the art direction is lovely (better than the Oscar-nominated costumes, though those also have their moments like Mary's yellow dress), but it's too juvenile.  Your mileage with this movie as an esteemed holiday classic will largely depend on if you had a copy of it on VHS in your parents entertainment center growing up or not...watching it cold as an adult, you see the songs are only okay, and that Tommy Sands as a lead is a bit charmless.

On the flip side, I quite liked Tommy Kirk, who along with Ed Wynn steals most of the picture.  Kirk would work with Funicello eight times in his career, but this is the last of the films we'll track with the two of them this month, so I thought it would be appropriate to discuss his unusual (and sad) career path to end this week.  Kirk is best-known today for his role as the young boy in Old Yeller, but he was a major star for Disney in the late 1950's and early 1960's.  He had mammoth hits in The Shaggy Dog and The Misadventures of Merlin Jones, a movie that was such a big hit that Disney essentially had to unfire him to make the sequel, as Kirk had been caught having gay sex at a Burbank swimming pool, and Walt himself personally fired him after the discretion.  Kirk, though, was gone from Disney after the sequel was also a hit, and while he would work in several of the beach party films (including a couple opposite Annette Funicello), his career was washed up by the end of the decade, and years of drug abuse (and his public sexuality, which was made known in the early-1970's after Disney had initially covered it up in the wake of Merlin Jones success) meant that by the 1970's one of the top box office draws of the 1960's was working as a waiter in Los Angeles.  Thankfully, a successful small business (and access to residuals from his many Disney films being released in syndication and on home video) meant that Kirk eventually got to have a happy ending to his life, and was made a Disney Legend in 2006 from the studio that had once fired him.

OVP: The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964)

Film: The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964)

Stars: Debbie Reynolds, Harve Presnell, Ed Begley, Jack Kruschen, Hermione Baddeley

Director: Charlie Walters

Oscar History: 6 nominations (Best Actress-Debbie Reynolds, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume, Scoring, Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 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 Debbie Reynolds: click here to learn more about Ms. Reynolds (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

By 1964, Debbie Reynolds had been America's Sweetheart for about a decade, and similar to the two other women that we've talked about this season (Audrey Hepburn & Doris Day) who reigned alongside her with that crown, she was about to have that title (and her position as a box office queen) put into question.  But before that, Reynolds got something that clearly meant a lot to her: an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.  Reynolds is generally considered to be a really winning screen presence, but I'll be honest-I don't see a lot of people praising her for her acting ability, or at least that's not the leading reason that people talk about her.  She is oftentimes praised as "charming" on the big-screen, or that she is a damned fun celebrity, but save for Singin' in the Rain, none of her movies during this time frame enjoys a really solid critical reputation, and she's far more in Day's ballpark than Hepburn's when it comes to acclaim.  I had seen parts of The Unsinkable Molly Brown years earlier, but had virtually no memory of it (to the point where I decided it should count as a "never seen it" qualifier for this series), and was curious for the one Oscar nomination that Reynolds did get, was the public (and to some degree me, who likes her but doesn't think of her as a "great" actress in the same way as peers like Hepburn or Elizabeth Taylor) underestimating her?

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Molly Brown (Reynolds), a woman who grew up from nothing and then became a fixture in high society at the turn-of-the-century, though it has to be said that this is a highly fictitious telling of her life story.  She starts as a backwoodsman, raised to be a tomboy by her adopted father Seamus (Begley), but she soon falls in love with Johnny Brown (Presnell), a lazy drunk and mining prospector who tries to woo her first on his own terms, and then on her terms (she wants to be a wealthy society woman).  They strike it rich, becoming "new money" but are not accepted by Denver's elite.  To get around this, she befriends multiple royals while galavanting around Europe with Johnny, and comes back with these royals in tow.  She now has the friends to make it in polite society, but Johnny isn't happy, and they grow apart.  While aboard the Titanic, she keeps spirits alive on a lifeboat, and is proclaimed a hero by the town, and comes back to Johnny, their love rekindled, now with them being themselves once more.

The movie is overstuffed, overlong, and far too silly for my tastes.  The beginning of the film is basically just Calamity Jane, complete with the adorable Reynolds with her face covered in dirt and her hair cut short.  But this part, like most of The Unsinkable Molly Brown, lasts too long.  The entire film is basically just a series of mishaps between Molly & Johnny, trying to understand why they won't be accepted in polite society, and changing everything about themselves to get there.  It's not that different than The Beverly Hillbillies, which makes the Oscar nominations feel weird, though they aren't all bad.  The cinematography is oddly good, particularly in the singing scenes (in many ways it recalls some of the outdoor singing shots of Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music), and the costumes & art direction are splendidly colorful and over-the-top (the grand staircase in the mansion is particularly gauche and features heavily into Molly's return from Europe).  But the music isn't strong, either in terms of sound or in terms of it being memorable (I saw it yesterday, and I can't remember one number from it), and Reynolds...she's not great.  Reynolds worked best in MGM musicals because she was spunky and you liked watching her fall in love.  But this film shows her limitations-she can't elevate a bad movie, and she swings for the rafters too much.  This very much feels in the vein of Pillow Talk and The Blind Side, where an actress who had charmed audiences (and the box office) for years gets her thank you from the Academy, even if it isn't earned.

There is one really weird part of The Unsinkable Molly Brown, though, and it's the complete lack of her time on the Titanic.  If you asked any modern audience member, the only thing they'd know about Molly Brown is her surviving the Titanic, and I'll be real-I suspect that would've been the case in 1964 as well.  Yet in the film's 135 minutes, just over two of those minutes take place during the Titanic sinking.  All you see is Reynolds walking the deck during the iceberg hit, one shot of the ship sinking, and Molly keeping everyone on the lifeboat alive.  It's such a tiny part it honestly feels like a joke...as if they ran out of money during production and didn't save anything for the most famous part of her life.  Reynolds is actively bad in the lifeboat scenes as well...trying to shame the women crying on the ship as their husbands are dying just a few hundred meters away.  It's such a strange scene, and worth noting if you're watching this movie because you're an amateur Titanic historian looking for more movies about the subject...because man is it weird & far shorter than it should've been in a movie that otherwise stretches too long.

OVP: The Glenn Miller Story (1954)

Film: The Glenn Miller Story (1954)

Stars: James Stewart, June Allyson, Harry Morgan, Charles Drake, George Tobias

Director: Anthony Mann

Oscar History: 3 nominations/1 win (Best Original Screenplay, Sound*, Scoring)

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 June Allyson: click here to learn more about Ms. Allyson (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

In 1953, coming off of Remains to Be Seen, a crime musical that flopped badly at the box office, June Allyson was dropped from her contract with MGM.  This wasn't the end of June's career, though.  Allyson smartly made her first post-contract movie with her costar in the MGM hit The Stratton Story Jimmy Stewart in The Glenn Miller Story, which was a critical & commercial success (and our film today).  Allyson would reteam successfully with Stewart the following year in Strategic Air Command, and Alan Ladd in The McConnell Story (another war picture) the same year.  She'd even return to MGM for one last musical at the studio in The Opposite Sex (a musical remake of The Women that also has Joan Collins & Ann Sheridan) in 1956, but that would bomb badly, and by 1957 she'd be ready for a new chapter, which we'll get into next week.  But first, let's talk about one of the films that helped keep Allyson a leading woman throughout her late thirties, The Glenn Miller Story.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is a (somewhat) accurate depiction of the life of Glenn Miller.  Miller might not be super well-known to the general public today, but in 1954 if you asked "who is Glenn Miller?" they would've looked like you in the same way  people would look at you today if you asked "who is Rihanna?"  Miller was a wildly successful big band leader in the 1930 & 40's, and we see that in this film as Jimmy Stewart plays him from his unsuccessful beginnings, including his unusual courtship of his wife Helen (Allyson), to eventual success, recording such standards as "Moonlight Serenade" and "Chattanooga Choo Choo" which would become the first-ever certified gold record.  The film ends where Glenn Miller's life did, with his plane going down during World War II into the English Channel, his final resting place still unknown to this day.

The movie is a part of my least-favorite subgenre, the musician biopic, one that has been pounded into the ground in recent years thanks to the success of the film Bohemian Rhapsody (we've got an upcoming one about Amy Winehouse while a Bob Marley biopic is still playing in most theaters).  So color me as surprised that I loved this movie.  It helps that Glenn Miller is one of my favorite recording artists.  My friend Drew, after I told him I was cooking while listening to Glenn Miller the other day said "how old are you???" but there's something about Miller's orchestrations that feed my soul.  Every moment of actual music in this picture is heaven.

But it's honestly the film itself that makes it work (I didn't like Respect with Aretha Franklin and I love Aretha's music).  I think it's primarily because of the way the film is constructed.  We don't need Miller to struggle with fame or a drug addiction-his story feels refreshing, particularly since it's unique (how many music superstars have died for their country?), and because Stewart & Allyson have a lot of fun with it.  Their courtship is silly & delightful, even if they're both too old for these parts, and as the film progresses, they do a really good job of showing us how bittersweet this love story's ending is going to be, knowing that it will end too soon, but that Miller's music will live on with countless lovers in the decades that follow.  Stewart is excellent (I love the way he conducts, showing that he loves Helen in a way that's different than being in love with music, but when they connect, it fills his heart), but Allyson is strong too.  Allyson didn't get enough credit as an actress during her career, but she's very good here, and the last few minutes, when she goes on a facial journey listening to her husband's arrangements, a special song just for her (for the last time), is beautiful.  Really well done on her part.

The film won three Oscar nominations, and two of them are impossible to argue with; I wasn't as enamored with the screenplay just because it was sometimes confusing at the beginning as to what Helen exactly saw in Glenn, but that's only a quibble because there's an Oscar at stake as it's otherwise solid.  But the scoring is divine-all of the Glenn Miller musical choices, particularly "Moonlight Serenade" and the way they show its evolution, are spectacular.  And the sound...I honestly was surprised how well this went.  I'm not one of those "it's a musical-it must have good sound!" people primarily because it downplays how great it can sound when you get it right-the sound here is rich, full, and captures all of the melancholy grandeur of Miller's music.  The scene where he plays while the enemy planes are dropping bombs near a still-enraptured audience...death be damned if the music is that enchanting.  What a terrific choice for an Oscar win.

OVP: A Star is Born (1976)

Film: A Star is Born (1976)

Stars: Barbra Streisand, Kris Kristofferson, Gary Busey

Director: Frank Pierson

Oscar History: 4 nominations/1 win (Best Original Song-"Evergreen," Cinematography, Scoring, Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 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 Kris Kristofferson: click here to learn more about Mr. Kristofferson (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Few films live in such storied annals as A Star is Born, a film that has been told 4-5 times depending on how you handle What Price Hollywood?.  It is the quintessential Hollywood story, the public name-check when we talk about the entertainment industry.  But specific to our film today, few productions have the kinds of legendary tale as that which comes from the 1976 A Star is Born, one of the most infamous film shoots in movie history.  Written by the journalist It Couple of the 1970's (John Gregory Dunne & Joan Didion), the shoot involved pretty much everyone hating each other.  Kris Kristofferson, then a huge star, hadn't been the first choice for the film (Streisand wanted Elvis Presley, who honestly would've been an interesting choice had that come about even though Kristofferson is the better actor of the two), and by the end of the production loathed both his leading lady and director Frank Pierson.  You've got Barbra Streisand having an affair with colorful 1970's mega-producer Jon Peters (who had just gotten a divorce from Lesley Ann Warren), and using her position as the most powerful person on the set to run roughshod over director Pierson, including getting final cut which may explain how the ending ends with a seven-minute long shot of Streisand.  A production where all of the cast isn't speaking (except the ones who are fucking each other), by the end of it can sometimes become a grand situation if the movie is good (look at Hell's Angels, now considered Howard Hughes' finest movie), but if it sucks, it becomes a Don't Worry Darling-style fiasco.  And A Star is Born sucks.

(Spoilers Ahead) This story is as engrained in Hollywood lore as you can get, so I don't know that I need a spoiler alert, but for those of you somehow unfamiliar, this is the story of John Norman Howard (Kristofferson), a washed-up rock star, who is more familiar with the bottle than the Billboard charts by the time the movie opens.  He meets, at a bar, a young singer named Esther Hoffman (Streisand), who is clearly a talent, and becomes smitten with her.  Eventually, he's producing one of her albums, and she's clearly headed to the top of the charts, and they even get married.  But there's a problem-John's demons are not only still there, but they're exacerbated by his jealousy over his wife's success, and she wants him to join in on it, rather than letting him slip into the background or not fight for what he's got.  In the end, this is the marriage (and John's) undoing, as he dies in a drunk driving accident, though unlike some of the other movies, it's not entirely clear that this is intentional or not.  Esther is now alone, but a fully-transcendent star, one who understands that she'll forever be linked with the man who fell before her.

This has been told very well (Judy Garland, Constance Bennett), solidly (Janet Gaynor), and poorly (Lady Gaga) before.  But this is the worst of the versions, because even with the others, specifically 2018's (I don't think Lady Gaga has proven capable of being a dramatic actress, and I think she's bad in the movie when she's not singing, but she gets coverage because Bradley Cooper is good and also because Gaga is a strong singer who gets one truly fantastic scene with "Shallow") there was something crackling between the two lead actors.  Gaga & Cooper, March & Gaynor, and especially Mason & Garland...there's heat.  But this film has zilch sexual chemistry between Streisand & Kristofferson, to the point where you genuinely don't understand why he fell for her.  This makes the film over-long, boring, and honestly...the leads give bad performances, particularly Streisand, who plays Esther less as an organic character onscreen and more as Barbra Streisand as herself.  Nothing about this works; honestly, I read a comment about how this feels an hour longer than the Garland version even though it's much shorter, and that summarizes my feelings exactly.

The film won four Oscar nominations, but it only earned one of them.  The sound is fine, but not spectacular (the concert scenes in Nashville a year earlier did a much better job of giving you a sense of talking at a performance, and of framing the musical numbers), and the cinematography is a similar situation, needlessly glossy & framed in a way that stops it from being romantic or creative.  The nomination for Best Scoring makes sense given the sales on the soundtrack were insane (I'm surprised it didn't win), but with one exception, none of the songs are either any good or performed organically-unlike Gaga's A Star is Born (where Gaga as a songwriter wrote plausible hits), it's not clear why the public latched onto either John or Esther as performers...save for "Evergreen."  One of the most iconic numbers of Streisand's discography, the song becomes the love theme for the movie, and while the movie's romantic overtones are never believable, lost in a song "as soft as an easy chair" you'd be forgiven for assuming this is a classic (because "Evergreen" is).

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.

OVP: Return of the Seven (1966)

Film: Return of the Seven (1966)

Stars: Yul Brynner, Robert Fuller, Julian Mateos, Warren Oates, Claude Akins, Jordan Christopher

Director: Burt Kennedy

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Scoring)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 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 Yul Brynner: click here to learn more about Mr. Brynner (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

During the first few years of Yul Brynner's career, he managed to defy expectations.  While quite good-looking, he didn't have the conventional, prototypical good looks of a Rock Hudson or Paul Newman, but he was a constant box office presence who managed in five years to win an Oscar, star in multiple film classics, and a slew of blockbusters.  But after The Magnificent Seven, Brynner's career took a pretty steep and largely unyielding slide.  Though he continued to star in major studio films opposite big names like Tony Curtis, Marlon Brando, & Kirk Douglas, most of his movies of the 1960's were flops, and as we'll discuss next week when we close our month with him, this continued well into the 1970's.  One of the few exceptions to this rule was Return of the Seven, with Brynner returning to not only the western, but to his character of Chris Adams for his one undisputed hit of the era.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie follows a very similar plot to The Magnificent Seven.  Here, a group of men in a small Mexican village are forced to join a gang of marauders, leaving the women behind to fend for themselves.  One of the men kidnapped is Chico (Mateos), who was one of the survivors of The Magnificent Seven.  When his wife goes to find Chris (Adams) and Vin (Fuller), they pledge to help her, but first must recruit a group of four other men to replace the deceased members of the original seven (including Sheriff Lobo himself Claude Akins and Jordan Christopher, who was in the band The Wild Ones, who recorded a flop record in 1965 that The Troggs would make legendary a year later called "Wild Thing").  The men go and stop the marauders, and while some live, Chris, Vin, & Chico end their story in the same place, with Chico left behind while Chris & Vin ride off into the sunset.

The movie has almost none of the magic of the original, and part of that starts with the cast.  The only returning member from the original movie is Brynner, and it shows.  Without Steve McQueen, James Coburn, & Charles Bronson, a lot of the movie star charisma is gone, and this feels cheap.  The plot is a ripoff of the original movie, almost more of a remake than a proper sequel, and you spend half of the movie trying to realize that the character played by Robert Fuller is Steve McQueen's character.  It's cheap, and quite frankly a bad movie.

It also weirdly got an Oscar nomination for Best Score.  Elmer Bernstein's original score was a classic, a genius invention & one of the essential tunes of the movie western.  This movie...uses the same score, getting nominated for a re-recording in the Best Scoring category (since it wouldn't have been eligible for Score).  It's indistinguishable from the original's main themes...except the plot is so similar there's not even new themes for the music to interpret.  Honestly, it's a really weird nomination, and while 1966 isn't a year known for musicals, I'm confident they could've found something more inspired.  As a result, this isn't going to fare well for our OVP, even if the music is good on its own.

OVP: Tin Pan Alley (1940)

Film: Tin Pan Alley (1940)

Stars: Alice Faye, Betty Grable, Jack Oakie, John Payne

Director: Walter Lang

Oscar History: 1 nomination/1 win (Best Scoring*)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on John Payne: click here to learn more about Mr. Payne (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We're going to start our month devoted to John Payne by taking a look at his pre-war films.  Payne's career didn't start at Fox, but for all-intents-and-purposes it might as well have.  He made a few films at Warner Brothers in the 1930's, but none of them amounted to anything, and by the end of the decade he was finding himself going back to New York to work on Broadway.  His contract with Fox, though, would dominate most of the 1940's, and at the beginning of that time, it was really focused on musicals.  We oftentimes think of MGM as the home of most of the musicals of this era, and indeed, they made most of the classic ones.  But Fox was making a massive business at the time in musicals, and Payne could sing.  The only problem for Payne was when it came to Fox & musicals, there were only two names that mattered: Alice Faye and Betty Grable.  Both of these women we've actually explored in past seasons of Saturdays with the Stars (which makes me stunned I haven't seen this film), but it's a good indication of the kind of career that Payne was enjoying heading into World War II...playing second fiddle to more important female stars on the Fox lot.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about two business partners, Harry Calhoun (Oakie) and his handsome songwriting pal Skeets Harrigan (Payne), who have a hit song that they need a singer for, and they meet a sister vaudeville act in Katie (Faye) and Lily Blane (Grable).  Skeets and Katie hit it off right away, forming a romance, but obstacles keeps getting in the way, first Skeets' ambition (at one point "accidentally" dropping a glass of wine on Lily so that Katie would get to sing their song) and later by true accident (when a more famous singer coopts the hit song that Skeets promises to Katie).  When World War I breaks out, Harry & Skeets enlist, but can't help wanting to get back to see their girls one more time, and in the process, Katie unceremoniously dumps her fiancee, and instead rejoins Skeets, with promises of more success (and surely love) in their future after the war.

Fox musicals, unlike MGM musicals, are not exactly high-budget works of art, but instead they are an excuse to have excellent singers belt out classics.  None of the four leads are having their voices dubbed (which was more common in MGM musicals as well), and some of them (specifically Faye, whom I am a huge fan of) are genuinely superb singers.  This one doesn't have as many memorable songs as you'd hope, with the best being "Moonlight Bay" sung by Faye, and there's not a lot stringing them together other than a bit of Hollywood propaganda (lots of patriotism).  As a result, that Oscar statue, even in a year of less-than-inspired competitors, feels a bit cheap (just give Pinocchio two music statues-it more than deserves it!).

Payne is fine here.  As I mentioned above and in our biography kickoff earlier this week, Payne's career as a film star wasn't bereft of leading roles, but it was frequently a look at an actor who largely was there to make his more popular leading ladies look good.  He does that here, looking handsome, but largely just being a place for Alice Faye's soulful eyes and heavenly voice to project onto...in many ways he resembled someone like Robert Taylor who was gorgeous, but didn't have a lot of opportunity to act.  This was most of his career before the war, appearing as a romantic lead for Faye and Sonja Henie in hit Fox musicals.  Next week, we're going to stick with a similarly-plotted film, one that even has one of this week's leading ladies, and talk about how World War II offered Payne a new role...though it might well have hurt his career.

OVP: Star! (1968)

Film: Star! (1968)

Stars: Julie Andrews, Richard Crenna, Michael Craig, Daniel Massey, Robert Reed

Director: Robert Wise

Oscar History: 7 nominations (Best Supporting Actor-Daniel Massey, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume Design, Scoring, Sound, Original Song-"Star!")

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 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.

We are hitting the halfway point in our month devoted to Julie Andrews by discussing what is seen as one of the nadirs of her career (the actual nadir would happen decades later when doctors would destroy her flawless singing voice in a botched surgery).  In 1968, after a string of enviable hits including Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music, Hawaii, and Thoroughly Modern Millie, it felt like Andrews could do no wrong, but in Hollywood even the brightest of stars can fall, and that happened that year with, well, Star!.  The film was wildly expensive, the kind of musical that had stopped consistently being profitable as early as 1954, but Andrews had managed to keep in the black.  This wasn't the case after 1967, both Star! and Andrews' next picture Darling Lili would be two of the biggest bombs in Hollywood in their era, and just a few years after she saved Fox with The Sound of Music, Julie Andrews was putting it back on the brink.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie, nearly three hours long, is weirdly thin on plot, so this is going to be a short paragraph.  Essentially, we have Andrews as famed vaudeville singer Gertrude Lawrence, who with her friend Noel Coward (Massey) became massive stage successes.  We see a traditional story where Gertrude starts out poor, but her immense talent & pluck get her noticed, and she moves on to bigger-and-better things.  Along-the-way, though, she develops a taste for extravagance, and despite making boatloads of money throughout her career, she's consistently broke.  The movie regularly cuts from Lawrence's spiraling romantic & financial life (she has multiple suitors before ending on Richard Crenna's Richard Aldrich), and weirdly the film finishes before both Lawrence's greatest triumph (playing Anna in the original run of The King & I) and tragic death at the age of 54 from liver cancer.

Watching Star!, I was struck at once by the fact that its reputation as a gargantuan bomb is unwarranted, but also that it totally makes sense that the movie was not a success.  After Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, Star! is merely okay.  There's pleasantness here (the musical numbers are nice, the costumes are grand, Andrews sounds good), but the plot itself is ridiculously underwritten.  There's no sense of who Lawrence is, and her troubles feel watered down to keep the film feel-good.  Also, her romantic life, which I suspect in real life was a bit messier (i.e. romantic relationships overlapping frequently with other men) is too convoluted with interchangeable beaus for me to be able to keep track of who was supposed to be winning her heart.  These are not insurmountable problems, but they are the kind that I get why audiences didn't show up.

The film won seven Oscar nominations, though Andrews herself was not one of them.  Daniel Massey got his only nomination (making him part of one of the very few father-son nomination teams with the acting Oscars, as his father Raymond was cited for 1940's Abe Lincoln in Illinois), and I actually was fine with this even if it's not a "great" performance.  Massey steals most of the movie, and is charming as Noel Coward, and does enough to underline why Noel is not one of Gertrude's lovers (he prefers the company of men) while not offending the censors of the day.  

The rest of the nominations follow a similar boat-not egregious, but hardly warranted.  The song "Star!" plays over the opening credits but is weirdly not one of the numbers we see performed (though its musical bridge comes up later in the picture), and it's good-but-not-great (it's the kind of song that sounds good but I dare you to hum it a few hours later).  The sound is good, though like the scoring it's more a case of it not being memorable-there are no real numbers in this other than perhaps the tried-and-true "Someone to Watch Over Me" that Andrews totally nails, and when you have peak Julie Andrews, you should be trying harder.  The cinematography is also nondescript-the concept of doing all of these staged sequences feels a bit of a cheat in this era, like they're just moving from sound stage to sound stage rather than feeling properly interactive with a larger audience (it never feels "real").  The best nominations were for Art Direction (all of the sets have their own flare, and I loved some of the crazy mansions these people occupy) and Costume Design (Lawrence, a famed clothes horse, comes across well in her opulent & growing attire in ways that Andrews is never achieve with her acting).  All-in-all, this is fine but forgettable, and though I wanted to save it, its most interesting calling card is that it was such an infamous flop.  Next week, though, Andrews will be starting a comeback in a surprise hit that would mark a second chapter in her film career.

OVP: Phantom of the Opera (1943)

Film: Phantom of the Opera (1943)

Stars: Claude Rains, Nelson Eddy, Susanna Foster, Edgar Barrier

Director: Arthur Lubin

Oscar History: 4 nominations/2 wins (Best Sound Mixing, Art Direction*, Cinematography*, Scoring)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

This month we are devoting all of our classic film reviews to Golden Age Horror films that I saw for the first time this year.  If you want to take a look at past titles (from this and other seasons of this series), look at the bottom of the page for links.

The Universal Monster canon, in its original run, largely went from 1931 with Dracula through the mid-1950's with Creature from the Black Lagoon.  I have been saying all month that we're finishing off the series, and to a degree we are-we're seeing all of the films that are connected to the classic monsters in a significant, tangible way, but we're not hitting every Universal monster movie with a vampire or a werewolf-that'd be impossible.  This is best illustrated not by our film today, which is almost always considered part of the "Universal Monster canon," and indeed it's the last "origin" film about one of their horror figures during this era, but by the fact that Universal didn't start with horror in 1931.  They had been doing it for years earlier, their most successful films being with Lon Chaney, Sr., whose wizardry with screen makeup is legendary and gained him the nickname "man of a thousand faces."  His most successful creation was as The Phantom of the Opera, a story that has been told through the decades repeatedly on screen & stage.  Today we're going to get to one of those iterations, and the only one that ever won an Academy Award.

(Spoilers Ahead) You know the story of Christine Dubois (Foster), a young soprano who has a mysterious benefactor who turns out to be (surprise!) the Phantom of the Opera (Rains) by heart even if you weren't a little gay boy humming along to the OBC version of "Masquerade" in your room.  But if you've somehow been living under a rock, we actually get more backstory here than we usually do, with us learning that the Phantom, who eventually haunts the opera and starts killing people in the Paris Opera house, is Erique Claudin, a broke violinist whose shaking hands have made it impossible for him to perform anymore, who in a jealous rage after his concerto is stolen from him, is disfigured by a vat of acid, and lives in the shadows of the Paris Opera, on the run from the law.  During a scene where he drops the chandelier (we get the chandelier drop, don't you worry), he runs off with Christine, but they don't escape together-the Phantom is crushed by falling rocks, and Christine gets away with all of his voice lessons, money, and her newfound fame (while the Phantom is dead).

If you think that description sounds cheeky, it's meant to be.  Phantom is a great guilty pleasure musical for me-I love it unabashedly, and know every song by heart.  But I'm also aware that there's a silliness to it, and this movie leans in on that motif hard.  For starters, there's basically two Raoul's (the actual one played by Barrier, as well as a hammy baritone played by Nelson Eddy), and both are unnecessary.  Foster is also as thrilling as dried paint as Christine, a character who is difficult to bring to life even for the best actors.  Rains is the best of the cast (duh), but he underplays Erique so much in the first half of the film that he feels like a weird 180 into being an actual "monster" in the second half of the picture.

The film, as I mentioned above, won two Oscars and an additional two nominations.  Of the four, the best is Art Direction, which is gorgeous.  We don't get the moody ambience we usually get from the Phantom's catacombs, but the recreations of the Paris Opera House are meticulous & well-designed, the chandelier is appropriately gaudy, and the additional drawing rooms paint the screen well.  The cinematography is beautiful (Technicolor in the 1940's often was), but it isn't as creative as I would've expected from an actual winner of this trophy, and I left less-impressed by this nomination than Oscar was.  The Scoring is ehh (it's hard not to compare pretty much anything that isn't Andrew Lloyd Webber favorably here), and the sound is okay (nothing great, though considering the dearth of nominees that Oscar nominated so far that I've seen, it's probably going to come out in the top half).  All-in-all, the Art Direction is the ticket for me, and the rest are just AMPAS being enamored with a classic cinematic tale that feels lifeless despite its inherent thrills.

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 Tomb, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, The House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Revenge of the Creature, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Blob, The Masque of the Red Death

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.

OVP: The Sky's the Limit (1943)

Film: The Sky's the Limit (1943)

Stars: Fred Astaire, Joan Leslie, Robert Benchley, Robert Ryan

Director: Edward H. Griffith

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Scoring, Original Song-"My Shining Hour")

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Oscar in the early 1940's tended to nominate a lot of movies, mostly due to a quirk in the music categories, where the number of nominees was bizarrely large.  You'd see fields of songs stretch to 15-20 strong, and as a result there are a lot of movies that have been nominated simply for their music that otherwise would've been long-gone in the AMPAS pantheon.  This occasionally means that we get films that aren't impressive, cited for songs that aren't all that good.  That's not the case here-The Sky's the Limit, as we'll discuss below, has a solid song nominated for best Original Song, a nod that Oscar shouldn't at all be ashamed of.  The strange part of it is...the movie features one of the best-loved songs of the entire decade, one of the most important songs of Fred Astaire's career, which was eligible for this film, but somehow didn't get the inclusion over the less iconic ballad.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place during World War II, where flying ace Fred Atwell (Astaire) comes home on a ten-day leave a national hero with a ticker-tape parade.  Fred is supposed to be on a tour boosting national morale, but he wants to have fun (and meet some girls) so he sneaks away from the trip and meets Joan Manion (Leslie) at a nightclub.  She's a singer there, and so Fred, tired of being always identified with his hero persona, lies to her and pretends to just be a roustabout.  She attempts to get him a job, which of course he doesn't want because he has to go back to the front soon, but their unlikely chemistry sparks into love, and soon Fred must decide if and when he's going to tell Joan that he loves her and that he is, in fact, a war hero.

The movie is a relatively run-of-the-mill piece of wartime propaganda, a standard romance whose appreciation of it will depend entirely on your latitude with the two stars.  I personally adore Fred Astaire, and will watch him in anything, so I liked the movie even if the film's plot is absurd.  It's silly after a while that when Astaire's Fred starts to fall for Leslie's Joan that he doesn't just come out and tell her that he's a pilot, after all, he's going to have to eventually & leaving her behind feels a bit bizarre.  But it's short & sweet & to the point, and a fun way to spend a Sunday morning while you're folding laundry.

The film's two Oscar nominations are bizarre, though, as I mentioned above.  The film was nominated for Scoring, which is logical (it is a musical), though it doesn't have a lot of interesting dancing for an Astaire picture (only a couple of numbers with Leslie), and only three really significant songs.  One of them, "My Shining Hour" is pleasant & reprised, with Leslie & Astaire dancing wordlessly to it  It's lovely, truly-there's nothing wrong with this nomination...

...except that this movie features "One for My Baby," which I assumed initially was already a standard that Astaire had had put into the film (this happened a lot in this era).  That wasn't the case-"One for My Baby," a ballad that has been popularized by everyone from Frank Sinatra to Bette Midler (who famously sang it on the final Johnny Carson episode of The Tonight Show) was written specifically for Astaire for this film, meaning it was eligible for the Oscar.  The number is dynamite in the film, with a lovelorn Astaire singing it to a bartender, knowing he can't be with the girl he loved because he's shipping out, and while I get that "My Shining Hour" is a good song & great within the confines of the film, this is arguably the most important song of Astaire's career, and I don't honestly get how "One for My Baby" didn't get the Oscar citation.

OVP: Jezebel (1938)

Film: Jezebel (1938)

Stars: Bette Davis, Henry Fonda, George Brent, Donald Crisp, Fay Bainter

Director: William Wyler

Oscar History: 5 nominations/2 wins (Best Picture, Actress-Bette Davis*, Supporting Actress-Fay Bainter*, Cinematography, Scoring)

(Not So) Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Only twice in Academy history has an actor scored five consecutive Oscar nominations, something that not even Meryl Streep herself can boast (Streep did, it's worth noting, go 5-for-6 from 1978-83, but didn't score anything in 1980).  The second of these two performers is Greer Garson, whose run is generally ignored today by cinephiles (somewhat unfairly, as Garson had the ability for great work, even though she was clearly overrated).  The other performer, though, was part of a legendary Oscar tour: Bette Davis.  From 1938-42, Davis was cited for Jezebel, Dark Victory, The Letter, The Little Foxes, and Now Voyager, all of which are still considered to be triumphs, and combined they encompass a lot of what gave Davis the "greatest actor of her generation title."  Today we are going to discuss Jezebel, which is the first of these nominations and a movie that I hadn't seen in some 25 years until I chanced upon it this past weekend, the one film of this quintet she translated that nomination into an actual victory.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Julie Marsden (Davis), a spoiled, beautiful young southern belle who at the beginning of the film is mad that her beau Preston Dillard (Fonda) won't come to her dress fitting.  She decides to enact revenge on him by wearing a red dress to a local dance where all of the unmarried girls wear white, much to the chagrin of everyone around her, including her Aunt Belle (Bainter).  Though Pres protests, she goes to the dance dressed in red, and quickly realizes the error of her ways when she's shunned by virtually everyone, and becomes a pariah.  After this dance, Pres dumps her, and goes north.  When he returns, she's ready to placate him, but he's already married to Amy (Margaret Lindsay), a northerner who feels like an outsider to Julie, and competition she must squash.  She goes about this by dating Buck Cantrell (Brent), who is madly in love with her, and who consistently fights with Pres.  This goes awry when Pres's brother (Richard Cromwell) challenges Buck to a duel, and in the process Buck dies.  Later in the film, there is a pandemic breaking out, and soon Pres becomes infected.  Julie wants to treat him, fighting with Amy, and eventually convincing her that Julie will be better for Pres, that Amy won't have the strength to fight for him the way she will.  The film ends with Julie, defeated but ready to finally repay Pres for her slight, headed into an unknown future where they may well both die of the disease.

As I mentioned above, I had seen Jezebel, but it had been a really long time since I watched it; it was surely something I recorded off of AMC with a VHS tape when I was a child at the beginning of my Oscar-watching.  I did remember it better than I expected, I will say, particularly the fuss over the red dress, Bainter's title character speech, and the defiant Davis headed off with a handsome, scruffy Hank Fonda into near-certain death.  What I didn't recall, and quite frankly this might be because I hadn't seen it yet, was how similar it feels to Gone with the Wind.  Jezebel the film preceded Gone with the Wind, and the play on which it is based preceded Margaret Mitchell's novel.  But it's hard to watch this film & not think of it as a lesser chapter compared to the magnum opus, and not just because most movies feel dwarfed by Gone with the Wind, the Grand Teton of what Hollywood can do when everything goes for the widest possible angle.

After all, in Gone with the Wind there's a section where Scarlett also has to wear a red dress, albeit less of her own volition & more because she's being punished for (trying to take) another woman's man, which Julie eventually attempts in this film.  So much of the plot is ripped wholesale it almost feels unfair to punish Jezebel, but in Wyler's film it all feels so slight compared to Gone with the Wind, and the few ways that the later Fleming film should be improved, specifically around racism, are not addressed in a movie like Jezebel.  If anything, Julie uses the slaves in her film more as props than Scarlett did, at one point singing with them gaily as she starts to lose her grip on her sanity, in a scene that feels uncomfortably like she's using a group of black people as metaphors to indicate her straying from reality.

The movie also doesn't really know how to treat the central romance, and Julie herself.  Unlike Scarlett, who has a sense of purpose not with Rhett or Ashley or the war, but to her home (to Tara), Julie doesn't really have that guiding light.  She's obsessed with Preston, but we don't entirely know why other than he's the one thing she can't have.  It doesn't feel like they're actually in love, particularly since Preston Dillard is a massive dud of a character.  This is weird to say about Henry Fonda (if you've read this blog long, you know I'm a fan-this is not an actor I criticize frequently, if at all), but he is totally wrong for this part.  The two reportedly had an affair in real life, but Davis & Fonda have zero chemistry onscreen, and he feels all wrong for this part.  There's no charisma, and while Davis is knee-deep in an authentic southern accent, the Nebraska-born Fonda does little to buckle his home-spun Midwestern cadence.  The result is a central romance that never takes off, and feels like a total failure, quite frankly-Fonda is actively bad in this movie.

Davis is good, though upon revisit she's not as good as I remembered, mostly because I've seen a lot more of her work in the years since and I know what she's capable of doing.  Few actresses of this era (perhaps no major stars of this era, period) committed to a role like Bette Davis, and that's certainly the case here.  She plays Julie to the hilt, but she doesn't give her quite enough purpose.  Yes, it's marvelous to behold: her soliloquies are wonderful, the way that she glances at Fonda as he forces her to dance, suddenly becoming aware that she's in over-her-head and as a rich, privileged girl this isn't a feeling she's used to, her gigantic saucer eyes somehow stretching wider...that's breathtaking and the kind of minute character work that Davis is so freaking excellent at.  But there are other scenes later in the film that don't feel quite right.  The callous way that she basically sends her "one true love's" brother off to his death feels like a weird editing choice, and she can't sell the final moments with Amy...there's not enough to her relationship with Preston to make her pleading work.  Davis is very good, but this is not the best performance in her run, and it's hard to compare this with the heights she was about to hit with The Letter and Now Voyager, some of her best work without coming away with a slight whiff of "she's been better."

The film's other nominations, save for Best Picture (you already saw the star rating-you know where I landed) were totally earned (and for the record, while I'm not done with most of the viewings from 1938, Davis is in the running for me for both an OVP & a My Ballot nomination).  Fay Bainter was the first performer ever nominated in both lead and supporting in the same year, and she got this award in part as a consolation prize for not besting Davis.  It's not as showy of a role as I remembered, though she does get that great scene about "a woman called Jezebel" that would've been her Oscar clip if such things existed in 1938.  She's good, subtle, the sort of woman who knows that her niece is beyond her control & she's not entirely certain how much effort she wants to put in anymore-it's a strong role that stands out because of the stellar actress behind it.  The Max Steiner score is marvelous, combined with some Strauss & Stephen Foster to give us a full southern push (Steiner reportedly won the job of scoring Gone with the Wind based on this picture), and the cinematography, particularly in the last ten minutes is moody & wonderful.  Kudos also have to go to the costume designers (Davis is exceptionally glamorous, and that red dress, really bronze in real life, is a showstopper), and art directors, neither of whom had this category in 1938 but surely would've been in the running.  But overall, Jezebel is a movie that's fine, and might even be good, but it's impossible to escape the weight of what was to come the following year & redefine the southern saga for always in Hollywood.