1957 Oscar Viewing Project

One of the biggest regrets I had with finishing the blog was that I wasn't going to do one last season of ballots for the OVP.  The series that basically started this blog was going to get ignored, and while I cheated a bit by having the Halloween blogathon serve as a "placeholder" for the Oscar Viewing Project goodbye, that wasn't enough.  I'll be honest-October has been really challenging on a personal level (one of the main reasons that I'm ending the blog is because I had a wake up call about my personal life), but I have pushed myself in the past couple of days to finish the four remaining films I hadn't completed from 1957 so that they were done, and I can officially unveil the 27th completed season of the series (a truncated version, as I didn't have the bandwidth to write a full twenty articles, but at least I got something!).  For those who have enjoyed this (including me), I want you to know that I have started to transpose all of the previous OVP winners from past seasons onto my Letterboxd lists, and will continue to do the winners on there going forward, so if you want to continue to see what I'm picking (I'm ending the blog-the Oscar Viewing Project continues to see another day), you can find me here.  My brother is trying to help me figure out the best way to present the My Ballots (I didn't have time to finish that for 1957), but I promise as soon as he figures out a way to do this (he's better at such things than I am), I will continue posting those on Letterboxd as well.  But below, you will find the ranked from first-to-last choices for the 30th Academy Awards.

That's enough shop talk.  Now it's time to go back to an era of Sputnik & the Little Rock Nine, of Althea Gibson & Mamie Eisenhower.  And of course, let's remember the movies...

Picture

1. The Bridge on the River Kwai

2. Witness for the Prosecution

3. 12 Angry Men

4. Sayonara

5. Peyton Place

The Lowdown: The Bridge on the River Kwai has been a part of my life since I can't remember when-it was my grandfather's favorite movie, and one that played in the background (along with Patton and Tora! Tora! Tora!) on repeat after he had a stroke.  The only one of these movies that really approaches its grandeur is Witness for the Prosecution, which honestly is kind of a miracle and the best Christie adaptation I've ever seen.  12 Angry Men is very well-done, and a masterpiece but one that might (unfairly) have lost some luster it's been done so much since, and the other two are handsome-but-dull (Sayonara) or a total snooze (Peyton Place).

Director

1. David Lean (The Bridge on the River Kwai)

2. Billy Wilder (Witness for the Prosecution)

3. Sidney Lumet (12 Angry Men)

4. Joshua Logan (Sayonara)

5. Mark Robson (Peyton Place)

The Lowdown: Even more than the Best Picture field (if you hadn't noticed, these are carbon copies of each other), David Lean takes the lead here.  Oscar Winner Sydney Pollack once said that a director's job is "less artist, more damage containment expert" and that might be what is drawing me to Lean to a degree.  He has the more challenging job, particularly given that Wilder & Lumet are largely staying in the same locations, and are bringing to life staged plays, but it's more than that.  Think of the ending of The Bridge on the River Kwai, having so many storylines come together with staggering precision-you only get that from thinking meticulously, even in a gigantic epic.

Actor

1. Alec Guinness (The Bridge on the River Kwai)

2. Charles Laughton (Witness for the Prosecution)

3. Anthony Franciosa (A Hatful of Rain)

4. Marlon Brando (Sayonara)

5. Anthony Quinn (Wild is the Wind)

The Lowdown: This is entirely down to the British actors (Guinness & Laughton).  Franciosa (who is in lead, Shelley Winters' memory be damned), gives a good performance but is in an underwritten movie, while Brando is a fabulous actor in a stuffed shirt sort of role.  Guinness gets my vote over Laughton primarily because he's playing so specifically to this character.  Laughton's role is appropriately loud-and-boisterous, he's typecast but in the best way possible.  Guinness isn't initially who I would guess in 1957 for this role (he was better known for comic work in movies before this), but that works to his advantage as Colonel Nicholson is a man obsessed, whose madness toward the end as he realizes what he's done is a crucial component to the entirety of Lean's epic.

Actress

1. Anna Magnani (Wild is the Wind)

2. Joanne Woodward (The Three Faces of Eve)

3. Deborah Kerr (Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison)

4. Elizabeth Taylor (Raintree County)

5. Lana Turner (Peyton Place)

The Lowdown: Here's where I'm going to confess something-I have never gotten the hype around Joanne Woodward's performance in The Three Faces of Eve.  I think part of why she got this award (and so many plaudits since) is because it was such a revolutionary idea onscreen-a woman playing three characters in one.  But it isn't as impressive as some of her peers were, and while Woodward is a good actress, this isn't her best work, and she's only as high as she is on this list because this is a weak field.  Magnani stands out more for me-she's a more obvious actor compared to the organic Woodward, but the way she plays this woman is so three-dimensional and felt.  I love it.  Kerr is lovely-but-not-stretched in Heaven Knows, while Taylor & Turner both have their best (sultriest) instinct muted in their dull pictures.

Supporting Actor

1. Sessue Hayakawa (The Bridge on the River Kwai)

2. Red Buttons (Sayonara)

3. Russ Tamblyn (Peyton Place)

4. Arthur Kennedy (Peyton Place)

5. Vittorio de Sica (A Farewell to Arms)

The Lowdown: Hayakawa, at one point a major leading star of the Silent Era, made a comeback with this role very late in his career, and it's easily the best of this quintet.  The way that his Colonel Saito creates a humanizing aspect to his villain is years ahead of what you'd normally expect from such a part, and stands up against what Guinness & Holden are doing.  Buttons' heartbreaking work is a worthy runner-up, and I like that Russ Tamblyn got a nomination here (he's my favorite part of Peyton Place), but Hayakawa is the best choice of the bunch.

Supporting Actress

1. Elsa Lanchester (Witness for the Prosecution)

2. Miyoshi Umeki (Sayonara)

3. Carolyn Jones (The Bachelor Party)

4. Hope Lange (Peyton Place)

5. Diane Varsi (Peyton Place)

The Lowdown: Man is this a rough one.  Given 3/5 of these are in movies that underwhelmed me already, and The Bachelor Party is just an odd picture, thank the lord for Elsa Lanchester.  Her doddering in Witness for the Prosecution is marvelous, and would've made a fine winner (I would've found room for her costar Una O'Connor, and will in my My Ballot).  The rest, though, are uninspired in a field that could've been great had they invested more in musicals in 1957.  Umeki's groundbreaking win isn't the worst thing to happen to this category (there's an understanding in her work that I liked), and seeing Carolyn Jones outside of the Addams mansion is a change of pace, but man...Lanchester is the only truly acceptable winner of the bunch.

Original Screenplay

1. Funny Face

2. The Tin Star

3. I Vitelloni

4. Designing Woman

5. Man of a Thousand Faces

The Lowdown: It's weird, given the weak point of most of Fred Astaire's films is a cobbled together by scotch tape plot, that I'm giving his film this statue.  In a perfect world, you'd probably see a few of the Foreign Language Film nominees included in this lineup, but the only subtitled film of this bunch is Federico Fellini's I Vitelloni, where the screenplay is one of the weakest parts in an otherwise really attractive movie.  Funny Face is well-structured, and if you get past the fact that the 30-year age difference should be more of a plot point (let's be real, though, Fred Astaire & Audrey Hepburn are such ageless figures it's hard to think of them as anything more than ephemeral tricks-of-the-light), the only movie that comes close is The Tin Star, a well-structured morality tale that's admittedly a bit predictable and guided by strong work from Henry Fonda & Anthony Perkins.

Adapted Screenplay

1. The Bridge on the River Kwai

2. 12 Angry Men

3. Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison

4. Sayonara

5. Peyton Place

The Lowdown: The real battle here is between The Bridge on the River Kwai and 12 Angry Men, both impeccable screenplays.  12 Angry Men it's sometimes hard for me to tell if I should dock points for it clearly being a filmed play or if that works onscreen.  Since I can never quite tell, I'm going to go with Bridge, which has a stronger end game, and also manages to tell a lot of subplots without losing focus (harder than it sounds).  Kudos to Heaven Knows in third, particularly in the way that it handles the complicated (for 1957) romantic angles of the story that otherwise could've been abandoned by a different writer.

Foreign Language Film

1. Nights of Cabiria (Italy)

2. Gates of Paris (France)

3. The Devil Strikes at Night (Germany)

4. Nine Lives (Norway)

5. Mother India (India)

The Lowdown: In the early years of this category, you'd get masterpieces from renowned filmmakers like Fellini, which makes it really hard to judge in some ways because how do you compete with something like Nights of Cabiria, one of the all-time great pictures and featuring a beautiful performance from Giuletta Massini?  It's a pity, though, as there's some treasure trove films here too.  Gates of Paris is a wonderfully dark French crime film (with a romantic subplot that'll rip your heart out), while The Devil Strikes at Night gives you a really strong look at the rise of fascism from a film noir perspective. The only one of the bunch I couldn't get into was the unfathomably long Mother India, a well-regarded Bollywood picture that was at least two hours too long.

Score

1. The Bridge on the River Kwai

2. An Affair to Remember

3. Raintree County

4. Boy on a Dolphin

5. Perri

The Lowdown: Any of the Top 3 here would be a worthy prize (Boy on the Dolphin feels like it got nominated based on the composer, and Perri ranks as one of the sillier films to ever be cited for an Academy Award since it's just a children's nature documentary about a squirrel).  Even with the most famous cut of the score being a non-original piece (the "Colonel Bogey's March" is not original to the picture), I think that Bridge does the most with its music, and it will get my nod.  Either Affair or Raintree would make good choices, though, both of them lush & filled with a lot of romance (I'm still finalizing my My Ballot Awards, as I mentioned above, but as of this writing all three of these films would make my nominees).

Original Song

1. "Wild is the Wind" (Wild is the Wind)

2. "All the Way," (The Joker is Wild)

3. "An Affair to Remember," (An Affair to Remember)

4. "Tammy," (Tammy and the Bachelor)

5. "April Love," (April Love)

The Lowdown: A genuinely terrific group of songs-there's not a bad one in the bunch, and in many cases, we're getting some big-deal singers' signature tunes.  The Top 3, in particular, is pretty immovable, and my pick of "Wild is the Wind" might be a little cheat given my favorite version of the song is by Nina Simone (not, as sung in the movie, by Johnny Mathis, though Mathis is also marvelous).  It's such a creepy love ballad.  Sinatra's classic "All the Way" and Marni Nixon belting out the standard "An Affair to Remember" (through Deborah Kerr) are totally acceptable answers here too, though.

Sound

1. Pal Joey

2. Witness for the Prosecution

3. Sayonara

4. Les Girls

5. Gunfight at the OK Corral

The Lowdown: I will be honest-every single one of these films will be getting replaced when I do my My Ballot.  That's not to say there isn't good stuff happening (Pal Joey has some solid musical numbers and the dialogue is crisp, Witness has the great final courtroom scene & Marlene singing), but nothing here stands out in a big way.  The shootout in Gunfight, for example, is a disappointment (the best part of it is the Frankie Lane title song), and Les Girls is a great movie, but not one that has a lot of super memorable musical numbers (it works better on its plot).  The Bridge on the River Kwai is clearly missing.

Art Direction

1. Les Girls

2. Funny Face

3. Raintree County

4. Sayonara

5. Pal Joey

The Lowdown: Gorgeous sets abound here, but in particular for the Top 2 (in another year Raintree County's elaborate and epic southern looks would be a serious contender for the win, here it has to settle for the bronze).  I'm going to go with Les Girls for the statue because it plays more with the beautiful looks of Paris than Funny Face does, and the sets have a bit more color and personality, but honestly they're both so good this is splitting hairs.

Cinematography

1. Funny Face

2. An Affair to Remember

3. The Bridge on the River Kwai

4. Sayonara

5. Peyton Place

The Lowdown: This one comes down to the romances for me-this is the one area where I think Bridge is good but isn't necessarily breaking the bank except for the final sequence, and so I'd put this between Affair and Funny Face.  Funny Face probably benefits a bit from its plot-there film is literally about catching the exact right photo of Audrey Hepburn, and you get gorgeous scenes and fashion shots of her to accompany that.  I do like the intercontinental glamour and radiant CinemaScope beauty of An Affair to Remember, but if forced to pick, I'd end with Funny Face.

Costume Design

1. Funny Face

2. Les Girls

3. Raintree County

4. An Affair to Remember

5. Pal Joey

The Lowdown: With costume design, sometimes you get contests where you were never going to win.  There are really good nominees in this category (for my money, the best lineup Oscar pulled together in 1957), and some are extraordinary.  That exquisite orange & white dress Deborah Kerr wears in An Affair to Remember, the plunging bodices sported by a never-more-beautiful Elizabeth Taylor in Raintree County, the monochromatic swimsuits & matching chapeaus of Les Girls...all grand.  But when Audrey Hepburn in a strapless scarlet dress & matching scarf walks down the steps of the Louvre in Funny Face...that's what makes movies, movies-it simply has to win.

Film Editing

1. The Bridge on the River Kwai

2. Witness for the Prosecution

3. Gunfight at the OK Corral

4. Pal Joey

5. Sayonara

The Lowdown: I feel like too many of these categories are Bridge on the River Kwai facing off against Witness for the Prosecution with the latter coming up short.  This is true here, even though it's close-Bridge sometimes sags in the middle (maybe its weakest aspect even if the beginning and end are so well-conceived), and you can't deny that Witness builds its tension masterfully.  Still, the ending of Bridge is just too good to ignore, and neither Marlene Dietrich or Dennis Hopper's very effective final scene in Gunfight at the OK Corral can really compete with it.

Special Effects

1. The Spirit of St. Louis

2. The Enemy Below

The Lowdown: Our only category with only two nominees in the bunch, this is a battle between two war pictures.  The Spirit of St. Louis is really impressive when you keep in mind this is a special effects category, and so therefore the plane stunt effects and trick flying should be part of your calculation.  It helps that Jimmy Stewart was a pilot in WWII and actually knows what he was doing.  The Enemy Below is both a lesser movie, and honestly has lesser effects by comparison (Lindbergh gets my win).  It's not bad-the water effects toward the end all are strong & believable in a world without CGI, but it's nothing you wouldn't see in a dozen other war films of the era.

OVP: The Morning After (1986)

Film: The Morning After (1986)

Stars: Jane Fonda, Jeff Bridges, Raul Julia, Diane Salinger

Director: Sidney Lumet

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Actress-Jane Fonda)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

It's not often I give back-to-back 1-star reviews  (we gave out one yesterday for Bombardier if you missed it...there's a lot of articles on this blog, peruse at your leisure), but I haven't had the best luck with my random Oscar-watching in the past two weeks, and so well, here we are.  The Morning After is a movie that you might not have heard of if you didn't live through the 1980's.  Despite being a hit at the time, it hasn't really wandered into pop culture in the way we usually assume films of the 1980's that made this kind of cash have.  In fact, despite this receiving a Best Actress nomination, the phrase "the morning after" elicits pictures of a turned over boat to me rather than Jane Fonda & Jeff Bridges.  But the movie's Oscar nomination makes it mandatory viewing on this blog, so let's jump into it, shall we?

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place on Thanksgiving (if you want tertiary connections to random holidays in a movie which is all the rage on Twitter, this is a "Thanksgiving" movie), where Alex Sternbergen (Fonda), a washed-up actress, wakes up with a dead man in her bed, but she remembers nothing about him from the night before.  She calls her agent Jackie (Julia), who turns out to also be her estranged husband, and he advises her to go to the police.  She doesn't, and goes on the run, where she meets Turner (Bridges), a former police officer, and the only person who believes she's innocent.  Strange things continue to happen to Alex, though, as the body shows up again at the next place she visits, and she starts to doubt Turner's motives.  It's actually Jackie, though, who wants out so he can marry a wealthy socialite Isabel (Salinger), and they framed her for the murder.  In the end, Jackie is arrested (but not Isabel, who seems like she'll get away scot-free) and Alex & Turner seem like they will maintain their romance as the final credits fall.

The Morning After is the kind of movie you almost want to like it's so bad.  It has a few camp factors that in theory should work, after all.  Fonda (legend) scenery-chewing as an alcoholic movie star caught in a murder reads as fun.  The HBO series The Flight Attendant kind of took this plot wholesale, but with that series they were able to lead into the more delicious aspects of the story, and also made the main character (played by Kaley Cuoco) a blast by leaning into her quirks in a way that they don't seem to understand in The Morning After.

As a result, this movie is a trainwreck.  The mystery makes no sense (Alex is famous enough to make it on the front page of the paper in LA, but somehow doesn't get indicted in the clear evidence tampering she's doing throughout the movie?), and the score is weird-way too many sharp tonal changes that telegraph what's going on (and in some cases, telegraph to nothing-the score is aggressively unhinged).  All of the acting choices are bizarre as well.  Raul Julia is maybe the best, even if his character's motives are sporadic, and Jeff Bridges plays his cop like a serial killer for no apparent reason.  Worst of all is Fonda, neither convincing as an alcoholic nor as a washed-up actress.  She's too fit & too glamorous to play this role, and she doesn't understand it at all.  Not only is this the worst nominated performance she has on her Oscar scorecard, it might be the worst performance I've ever seen from her.

OVP: The Verdict (1982)

Film: The Verdict (1982)
Stars: Paul Newman, Charlotte Rampling, Jack Warden, James Mason, Milo O'Shea
Director: Sidney Lumet
Oscar History: 5 nominations (Best Picture, Director, Actor-Paul Newman, Supporting Actor-James Mason, Adapted Screenplay)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

If you look hard enough, the guy in the tan suit & striped tie in the top right
next to the woman with the perm is a very famous future movie star-
do you know who it is?

Few film genres were destroyed more resoundingly by television than the courtroom drama.  In fact, I'm still kind of stunned when a movie like Just Mercy shows up in theaters as it feels like a western or musical randomly getting a retread.  Television almost completely took over the genre, with everything from Perry Mason to Law & Order to NCIS picking up the pieces of a legal drama.  Films of this genre almost always feel worn or tired at this point, as a result, and when I recently caught a classic in the genre, The Verdict, it was a struggle to get by this genre bias, even as it was apparent that this was a quality film.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie focuses on Frank Galvin (Newman), a largely disgraced attorney who was once accused of jury tampering, in the twilight of his career.  He's an alcoholic ambulance chaser, someone who barely makes rent, and is given a bone when he is sent a medical malpractice case by his friend Mickey (Warden) that seems certain to settle out of court (read: an easy payday).  Frank, though, wants to take the case to court, and refuses the out-of-court settlement (to the chagrin of the victims' relatives), and has to go toe-to-toe with the hospital's legal defense team, headed by Ed Concannon (Mason), a cutthroat lawyer.  The case then follows as Concannon's team goes to great lengths (scaring off witnesses and hiring a woman, Laura, played by Rampling, to seduce Frank & feed him information).  In the end, though, a nurse that had been on-duty confesses that the hospital had put the patient under anesthesia even though she had recently eaten, thus causing her current medical predicament.  Frank wins the case, and is left wondering whether or not his relationship with Laura is worth saving.

The Verdict gains its reputation not necessarily from the uniqueness of its plot, but the quality in which it's executed.  This is, in fact, considerably better than you'd expect from even the best Law & Order episodes because it explores the soul of some of these characters.  Newman is fantastic in the lead role as Frank.  This was during the period where everyone was sort of wondering if Newman, a decades-long Hollywood favorite, would ever get to win his competitive Oscar (spoiler alert: he would, four years later, but this year he'd be bested by Ben Kingsley), and it's easy to see why such scuttle continued with a performance this solid.  Newman's work here is grounded in not making the alcoholism Frank's totality, but part of his life.  He's a high-functioning alcoholic-he's had a dwindling career, but he's still kept his career.  Newman makes that a side effect of his life, just sitting there on the outskirts, creeping in when he needs it not to the most.  It's great acting from a champion performer.

The film won three other nominations other than its Best Picture/Actor credentials, and all of them are well-earned.  Lumet's direction is succinct, rarely giving us a shot that isn't carefully-framed, while the script is brilliant, filled with strong speeches from Newman & Mason, as well as almost no scenes that are out-of-place (I'm shocked the editing wasn't nominated).  The relationship between Newman and Rampling doesn't quite gel properly, though to no fault of either actor (I don't know if I'd have nominated Rampling or not for this-I'd need to explore the year more-and she's one of my favorite performers, but there's something off in their chemistry, him too fire and her too ice).  James Mason was correctly cited for the film, and unlike Newman, would never win an Academy Award; he would die less than two years after the release of The Verdict.  This is a proper epitaph to the actor, though, with his distinctive voice ringing not just alongside a truly villainous character, but one who is a reminder of the audience's culpability in assuming authority is usually looking out for its best interests.  The Verdict succeeds because it finds a way to not just show an underdog tale, but why underdog tales are important in the first place.