OVP: The Conversation (1974)

Film: The Conversation (1974)

Stars: Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams, Frederic Forrest, Harrison Ford, Teri Garr

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Picture, Original Screenplay, Sound)

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

Harrison Ford's public persona has long been of a man who didn't really want to be a movie star.  A lot of this, I have long-suspected, is at least partially untrue (otherwise why do it, especially when he became bonkers rich & didn't really need to do it anymore...after all, his wife is also a talented actor who now rarely works).  But it is interesting that Ford's fame came relatively late.  The role that made him a movie star was Star Wars, which was released just days before his 35th birthday. For comparison's sake with some of his 1970's peers, Al Pacino at that age had several Oscar nominations and the Godfather franchise, Dustin Hoffman had been Ben Braddock & Ratso Rizzo, and Jack Nicholson & Peter Fonda had both boarded a motorcycle into legend.  Ford spent much of the 1970's balancing his time between small roles in movies and making furniture for people like Joan Didion, Valerie Harper, & George Lucas.  Ford's movie career, though, is really interesting because he appeared in a lot of interesting movies, among them Michelangelo Antonioni's controversial Zabriskie Point, and three Best Picture nominees: American Graffiti, Apocalypse Now, and today's film The Conversation.  For all of the talk about Ford at one point before Han Solo nearly quitting the industry to work as a high-profile carpenter, the more intriguing idea might be what he did in this film: taking on the role of distinctive, very handsome character actor in important auteur-driven features.

(Spoilers Ahead) The Conversation is a movie best headed into with you knowing as little as is humanly possible, so while I provide a spoiler alert on all of my reviews because I generally want to know as little as possible about all movies I'm going to, this one in particular it helps to go in blind so I'll reiterate that now.  The movie follows Harry Caul (Hackman), a man who runs a service that essentially follows people and records them for money (it is not lost on me that The Conversation, which competed with Chinatown for Best Picture in 1974, bears a striking resemblance to the Roman Polanski film as both are about private investigators who uncover more than they expected from a routine case).  Unlike Jake Gittes, Harry Caul does not advertise and is not well-known for his work.  He is, instead, anonymous to the point of unhealthy, keeping everything about him at a distance to the point his girlfriend (Garr) doesn't ever visit his apartment and he doesn't even have his own phone.  This is driven by wanting to avoid retribution, but also the very real threat of violence in his career.  Similar to Chinatown (again) there are allusions to a previous case throughout the film that the audience only understands to be too horrific to mention, and that haunt both detectives to the point they are constantly in fear of repeating it.

The Conversation is considered a landmark film, but because Francis Ford Coppola had it come out the same year The Godfather, Part II (one of the greatest movies ever made), it always feels like it doesn't get its due, and so I wasn't entirely sure what to expect headed into this-would it be a really handsome movie, one that stands up but can't compare with a picture as perfect as Godfather II, or would it be just as exceptional.  Again, similar to Chinatown, it's not clear until the last moments what's happening, and it's also not clear where The Conversation will land in that comparison.  But as the movie concludes, you realize it's also a true masterpiece.  We understand as the film ends that Harry has no idea what he's walked into, and what he's helped cause.  He assumes that the conversation between Frederic Forrest & Cindy Williams at the beginning of the movie is of a couple that might be having an affair, and becomes concerned when he uncovers (while listening to the clips that he initially won't hand over to a man known as "the Director's" assistant without first meeting the Director himself) that a part of the clips that he couldn't initially hear says "he'd kill us if he got the chance."  When he meets the Director (played by an uncredited Robert Duvall) he becomes worried for the young couple's safety as it's clear Cindy Williams is the Director's wife.  But as we learn in the waning moments of the film, he's missed something on the tapes-the emphasis in Forrest's reading of the word "us."

Because as the film ends, it's a case where Frederic Forrest has murdered Robert Duvall's husband with help from his lover, leaving all of the money (and secret organization he has) to Cindy Williams, and leaving them the opportunity to end up together.  The movie's sound work is legendary (and Oscar-nominated) for a reason, as not only is the entire setup with Hackman's Harry filled with us getting whirs & blurs from the recording equipment, but also the film tells in flashback narrative things the audience will have missed.  The film clearly inspired everything from The Usual Suspects to Severance (which borrows heavily from The Conversation's score), and you see why-this is a movie that shows paranoia is justified...and cannot be resolved.  We end the movie with Harry knowing he is being watched, knowing that he can't escape or be safely private...and having to give in to that to not go mad.

Harrison Ford's role is a key component & a crucial part of this story, even if he's only in about three scenes.  He plays the Director's assistant, and plays him with a level of bureaucratic cool that you kind of just assume he's a jackass (also according to most reports, Ford played him as gay which kind of comes across in the way he's super bitchy in a way you don't find a male character in the 1970's, even if there's no hint of this other than him wearing a stylish green suit in one scene that Ford bought with his own money), one who has gotten to this position through being absurdly handsome and honestly it's the sort of character you assume you don't need to pay attention to as the movie progresses.  Because I am writing this about Ford, though, I was paying attention, and it gives you a whole other angle here.  Ford's Martin Stett is the only figure in the film who 100% knows everything that's going on we learn as the film goes by-he works for the Director, but he's also clearly aware of the affair, and given that he's still working for Frederic Forrest & Cindy Williams in the end, it's possible he orchestrated all of this in connection with them.  The paranoia seeps into the actual film...was this all a setup to use Harry, kill the Director, and give the young couple everything they wanted?  Only Ford's Stett, who calls Hackman in the end to tell him he's being watched, knows for certain, and makes him the true antagonist of the picture.  Ford is good in this, and as we'll talk about next week, that layered acting ability didn't totally diminish when his visage started to adorn the postered walls of teenage boys, but as I said above-it's hard not to think of Ford in the same way we think of someone like Robert Duvall or John Cazale, someone who added extra layers to already great movies, as a supporting character actor, while watching The Conversation.

OVP: The Towering Inferno (1974)

Film: The Towering Inferno (1974)

Stars: Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Fred Astaire, Susan Blakely, Richard Chamberlain, Jennifer Jones, OJ Simpson, Robert Vaughn, Robert Wagner, Susan Flannery, Jack Collins

Director: John Guillermin

Oscar History: 7 nominations/3 wins (Best Picture, Supporting Actor-Fred Astaire, Art Direction, Cinematography*, Film Editing*, Score, Song, Sound)

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 Steve McQueen: click here to learn more about Mr. McQueen (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Steve McQueen's career hit its financial peak in 1974, when he starred with Paul Newman in today's film The Towering Inferno.  At this point, Newman & McQueen were two of the biggest names in movies, and there were quite a few arguments over who would get top billing in the picture (ultimately it was a draw, with McQueen's name first but Newman's name higher), but after this both would suffer career lulls.  Newman would rebound eventually in the 1980's with films like The Verdict and The Color of Money, the latter winning him his only competitive Oscar, but McQueen would never regain this position.  He'd make an ill-fated Ibsen film in 1978 (one that would basically disappear from public consciousness), and then a pair of pictures in 1980 (Tom Horn and The Hunter), both decent-sized hits that might have hallmarked a comeback, but that wasn't to be.  Just over three months after the release of The Hunter, Steve McQueen would be dead.

(Spoilers Ahead) But before we get into that, let's get into the height of his career, at least commercially.  The Towering Inferno was a landmark movie in terms of its box office in 1974.  In the previous years, films like Airport and The Poseidon Adventure had found a formula for success-put a bunch of famous stars, including at least a few studio system legends that can scoop up a supporting acting Oscar nomination, and place them in an insane disaster situation, one that will have at least a few of them die, but the audience can look on in horror as we wonder who from this insanely-stacked call sheet might be safe.  This film is no less than these, and arguably has the starriest cast  of the bunch, but is much more in the vein of Airport (which I did not enjoy) than The Poseidon Adventure (which I did enjoy, in large part due to Shelley Winters' solid work).  The film has the tallest building in the world on fire, and all of our characters, including architect Newman and firefighter McQueen, fighting to stay alive as more-and-more paths to the ground floor are forfeited.  Along the way, some live (including, surprisingly, conman Fred Astaire), and some die, most shockingly Jennifer Jones, who in a morbid twist would be flung from the top of a giant building in the movie two years before her daughter would commit suicide in exactly the same way.

If only the movie was any good.  Technically, this is impressive-the set design, effects, and especially the stunt work are out-of-this-world, but the film spends no time trying to develop the characters, giving us two-dimensional feats from genuinely talented actors.  It's not like someone like Faye Dunaway or Paul Newman can't add a bit of three-dimensionality to their work, but there's no call for it.  Our star of the month, Steve McQueen, feels almost ancillary to the plot of the picture even as he's supposed to be the hero.  Fred Astaire would receive his only competitive acting Oscar nomination for this movie, and man is it unnecessary-he barely has anything to do, other than shout for a dead Jennifer Jones toward the end of the picture.  It feels weird to live in a world where Fred Astaire (whom I love) never got a competitive acting nomination, but, like...over John Cazale in The Godfather, Part II or John Huston in Chinatown...let's not be ridiculous here.

As I said above, Steve McQueen would disappear from movies after this, having a bit of a nomad period where he just went out into the country in a motor home, in the process turning down parts in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Apocalypse Now that might've dramatically changed his legacy.  But his health by the late 1970's was in terrible shape, and he developed mesothelioma (likely due to asbestos exposure from his time in the Marines).  The National Enquirer, at that point most famous for its ongoing coverage of the death of Elvis Presley rather than the right-wing attack ads that it would become known for to modern supermarket shoppers, broke the story that McQueen was dying shortly before his death (he'd been trying to keep it a secret), and McQueen attempted a number of experimental procedures, including a surgery to remove a tumor from his liver in Mexico, a procedure he couldn't have performed in the United States because no doctor would do it (since it would kill him).  12 hours into the surgery, the American doctors were proven correct, and Steve McQueen died at the age of only 50 from a heart attack.

Next month, we're going to talk about a man who was good friends with McQueen, even if they also had something of a professional rivalry during McQueen's early stardom.  Like McQueen, he also would die young, but unlike McQueen, that death would cement his legacy in a way that would in many ways outlast any films he made in life...and would become the source of near constant conspiracy theory in the decades to come, in ways that would haunt his family for generations.

OVP: The Rock (1996)

Film: The Rock (1996)

Stars: Sean Connery, Nicolas Cage, Ed Harris, David Morse, John Spencer

Director: Michael Bay

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Sound)

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 Sean Connery: click here to learn more about Mr. Connery (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As I mentioned in our last entry on Saturdays with the Stars, Sean Connery's career got a new life in the late 1980's when he won an Oscar for The Untouchables and followed that up with a mammoth hit in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.  These two films set up the course for the remainder of his career-Connery would still star in major action films, but would take on an advisory role, frequently the vaunted elder who would mentor younger, more "age-appropriate" leads like Richard Gere, Wesley Snipes, and in today's film, Nicolas Cage.  These movies were hits.  Much was made (we'll get there in a second) about how Connery really ended his career with a sluggish slump into retirement, but this ignores that during the late 1980's, 1990's & into the 21st Century, when Connery was being knighted and being named the oldest man ever to achieve the title of "Sexiest Man Alive" from People Magazine, Connery starred in a number of smash hit movies like The Hunt for Red October, First Knight, The Rock, and Entrapment.  While other actors of his generation like Paul Newman and Marlon Brando had, by-and-large, been relegated to old man dramas (and in more cases than not, cemetery plots), Connery was a box office draw in the way that men decades younger than him were and was talked about as a still-relevant movie star.

(Spoilers Ahead) Perhaps this is best boiled down by talking about The Rock, the biggest hit he had during this era (the film would make $335M, adjusted for inflation that'd be $709M, which is basically impossible to do today without it being established IP).  The movie itself is made by Michael Bay, who at the time would've been short-hand for crap (or at least was headed in that direction), and in the past decade, has been saved by Millennial film fans (nostalgic for an era when IP wasn't the only way to make a movie) as being more worthy-of-praise than he was at the time.  The movie makes little sense, and not just because its politics so closely resemble Bay's rather sketchy takes on Libertarianism.  We have Brigadier General Frank Hummel (Harris) holding Alcatraz hostage in hopes of securing $100M for the families of those who died in top secret missions.  He is holding dozens of hostages on the island (tourists who have visited it), and the government sends in a team of agents, though they're quickly boiled down to just two: Dr. Stanley Goodspeed (Cage), a chemical weapons expert with little field experience, and retired Captain John Patrick Mason (Connery), the only man to ever successfully escape from Alcatraz.  The two team up to not only stop Hummel from detonating a chemical weapon that could destroy tens of thousands, but also to see if Mason can get his freedom, which is dangled as incentive but all involved know is just a ruse to get his help.

The real enemy in this movie, it's worth noting, isn't Harris's general, but instead FBI Director James Womack (played by John Spencer), and that's because you don't get a government that wants to help the people in a Michael Bay picture.  Even more so than Clint Eastwood, Bay's films are quintessentially glorious, tech-savvy propaganda for government incompetence.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing (lord knows there's a case to be made that government incompetence dominates our collective consciousness in the Trump Era, and has to a degree in every administration), but it also means that The Rock is a movie you don't really want to think about too much, as it becomes too ridiculous & frequently too absurd to consider it technically.  A lot of your mileage with the movie will depend on your take on Connery & Cage's unlikely friendship, and your tolerance for gratuitous violence.  The violence here is less artful and more just disgusting, and I will own that I don't think Cage & Connery work at all.  Connery's performances with Costner & especially Ford in the late 1980's worked better because there was a subtlety, a clear driving friction with which they can find common ground.  But Cage is not a subtle actor, and Connery can't seem to find any sort of chemistry with him...it just feels like they're making two different movies.

Connery would continue making films regularly until 2003.  He ended his career with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a bad superhero movie that made a lot of money, which hadn't been the case for some of Connery's most recent endeavors like Playing by Heart and The Avengers (for the record, not a superhero movie).  He retired, and with the weird exception of an animated adventure film, never made another movie despite entreaties to join later installments in the Indiana Jones & 007 franchises, dying in 2020 at the age of 90 from a combination of pneumonia & dementia.  Despite decades of trying to escape it, the first line of his New York Times obituary of course included the words "James Bond."

Next month we're going to talk about one of Connery's peers, someone who would dominate action films in the 1960's and especially the 1970's.  Like Connery he wouldn't really get the credit for being the fine actor that he was, but unlike Connery, he didn't seem to care, finding "selling out" a bit more palatable when one gigantic smash hit that changed his career's trajectory captured the public consciousness (and divided critics, both cinematic & political).

OVP: The Wind and the Lion (1975)

Film: The Wind and the Lion (1975)

Stars: Sean Connery, Candice Bergen, Brian Keith, John Huston

Director: John Milius

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Sound, Score)

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 Sean Connery: click here to learn more about Mr. Connery (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

To most filmgoers, certainly in the 1970's, Sean Connery was essentially James Bond.  While other actors at that point (Roger Moore, George Lazenby, even David Niven) had played the part, Connery was Bond...and he wasn't super happy about it.  Connery is not the last of the actors this year we'll profile who struggled with being taken seriously as a thespian having enormous success in the realm of action movies, but he might be the most perturbed of the bunch.  Connery is a good actor, one who even during the height of Bond was working with important directors like Alfred Hitchcock & Sidney Lumet, but all the public saw him as was 007.  Literally-Michael Caine (Connery's longtime friend) would tell an anecdote about how upset Connery would get when someone would call him James Bond rather than his real name in the streets.  So it's not surprising that after Diamonds are Forever, a massive hit for United Artists in the early 1970's, that Connery largely eschewed the role, and in 1975 made two films involving Huston (one as his costar, the other as director-star) that would stand up as attempts for Connery to be taken more seriously as an actor.  One of these, The Man Who Would Be King, would become a classic, while the other would be quickly forgotten.

(Spoilers Ahead) We're choosing The Wind and the Lion and not The Man Who Would Be King because I always choose "new to me" movies for this series, and not only have I seen The Man Who Would Be King, but I also genuinely love it, so I couldn't go in unbiased if I tried (if you haven't seen it, add it to the Watchlist).  The Wind and the Lion is a weird amalgamation of historical drama and at least (to a degree) a romantic film, based in part on a true event involving President Teddy Roosevelt.  The film follows the kidnapping of Eden Pedecaris (Bergen), a wealthy woman stying with diplomats in Morocco by Mulai Ahmed Er Raisuli (Connery), as a way to start a Civil War in his country, one that will result in the Sultan leading Morocco to be publicly shamed.  They bond in a bit of Stockholm Syndrome as Eden comes to understand Raisuli's plight, though this is told with long swaths of the film going back to DC where President Roosevelt (Keith) is in the middle of his 1904 presidential bid, and attempting to use the kidnapping as a way to win over voters to win the election.

The Wind and the Lion is a weird movie, made stranger by the fact that it's based in part on a true story (though in real life Bergen's character was a man, almost certainly changed to a woman to help aid the romantic angle, as this was in the era where a giant epic needed to have a beautiful woman for the lead to fall in love with).  Connery is actually playing a real person, one who (like Connery) would live long after the events of this film.  The problem is that the film feels cartoonish in the many cutaways to the White House.  The movie might've been able to skate by without much chemistry between Bergen & Connery (Bergen is an odd actress, in that I don't generally like her in straight dramatic roles, but she's so compelling as a classy comedic role & she's so insanely gorgeous that I always hope I will find the drama that works for me), but these diversions distract too much, and make it feel silly, even if I adored the Jerry Goldsmith score.

And Connery does work in this role, and it's not a coincidence that the actor would excel for many years in epics and David Lean-style films for the remainder of his career (even if Connery would sadly never work with Lean directly).  He plays the part with a sort of majesty, an inherent otherworldliness that he would bring to roles like The Man Who Would Be King and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, two of his finest roles that I've seen.  It's also probably why he would eventually be offered the part (and then turn it down) as Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings (given the deal that Connery got, had he taken the part it might've made him the highest-paid actor in cinema history (based on the rumors that have leaked about his offer and the percentage of the profits, he may well have made upwards of half a billion dollars from the part over the course of the series).

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: Captain Blood (1935)

Film: Captain Blood (1935)

Stars: Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Lionel Atwill, Basil Rathbone, Ross Alexander

Director: Michael Curtiz

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Picture, Sound Recording)...at least in terms of official nominations.  In reality, because of write-in awards, Captain Blood is usually regarded as having been nominated for Best Director, Adapted Screenplay, and Score (and nearly won the first two) because Warner's block voting allowed people to write in names that weren't actually nominated, so when we finally reach the 1935 OVP I'll have to make a judgment call on what to include...but only Best Picture & Sound are recognized by the Academy as official nominations.

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 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.

With some of the stars we've profiled in the past seven seasons, I've had a bit more time to really reflect on their careers and in some cases their careers were traditional enough that it was mostly just talking about that week's movie.  That...will not be the case with Errol Flynn, whose gigantic personal life is worthy of multiple biographies, and you can't really get to all of it in four articles.  So we'll break it up into four sections: his early career (and partnership with Olivia de Havilland), his peak stardom (and the juxtaposition between his big screen & real life personas), the sex scandal that dramatically changed his career (and changed in many ways the way that we talk about Hollywood scandal), and the bizarrely long list of things that were discovered about Flynn after his death, most of which is allegation since Flynn himself wasn't able to commentate on it.

(Spoilers Ahead) If you're going to talk about Errol Flynn's early stardom, you can't really do it without talking about Captain Blood, the 1935 film from Warner Brothers that turned him into a household name.  The film, seeing it for the first time (one of an increasingly small list of Best Picture nominees I've never caught before), is glorious.  It's a story about a young doctor named Peter Blood (Flynn), sold into slavery but bought by a clearly smitten woman named Arabella (de Havilland), and how he slowly works his way up in the ranks, specifically by treating the governor's gout.  In a bid to escape his bondage, he turns into a pirate (but an ethical one!), and storms the Caribbean, eventually finding Arabella captive (and buying her, thus paying his debt), before eventually, thanks to some honorable help to the English army, becoming governor himself, and wedded to Arabella.

The movie is silly, and it's a bit too dry in parts (when it wants to make sure you know that Peter is a fan of social justice, as this is a Warner Brothers movie), but you won't care for two reasons.  One, the production is scrumptious-gorgeous ships filled with detail, and special effects you kind of can't believe.  It's hard not to watch this and think of not just the Pirates of the Caribbean move, but also the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland, as it uses many of the same motifs, particularly the battle scene.  If you're a Disney adult, this needs to be added to your list as you won't regret it.

The other is that Flynn and de Havilland are divine together.  At the time they were not famous.  De Havilland was only 19, and Flynn (despite some bit work in film & theater) had not struck it big yet.  But their chemistry is palpable, and they're both so freaking gorgeous.  That's the thing with Flynn-save for maybe Buster Crabbe, he was (by modern beauty conventions) possibly the sexiest man in movies, and he looks it, even with a ridiculously hideous haircut.  You see Olivia de Havilland swoon over him, and you swoon over him too.

And that was what audiences in the 1930's did-they demanded more of Errol & Olivia.  Both actors have been pretty forthright that there was a romantic attraction to each other, but that they did not consummate the relationship.  At the time, Flynn was married to Lila Damita (who, proving how incestuous Old Hollywood was, had just finished an affair with Captain Blood director Michael Curtiz), and de Havilland (whose later Hollywood conquests would include Jimmy Stewart and a tortured affair with John Huston) was about to become one of the many flames of Howard Hughes.  But their professional relationship would create one of the most important duos of the Classical Hollywood era, starring together in eight films between 1935 and 1941, after which Flynn would encounter unfathomable scandal and de Havilland would become a pioneer against the studio system.  But when they were on, they were undeniable.  And in the best-regarded of their movies, The Adventures of Robin Hood, they created one of the most enchanting films ever made.

OVP: Altered States (1980)

Film: Altered States (1980)

Stars: William Hurt, Blair Brown, Bob Balaban, Charles Haid

Director: Ken Russell

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Score, Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 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.

Every genre of movie has a pretty wide berth when it comes to its description.  Think of something like "comedy" where everything from the films of the Three Stooges to the polished wit of Noel Coward to the black-hearted works of Yorgos Lanthimos are somehow under the same umbrella.  This is true of horror as well, as we see with Ken Russell's film Altered States.  This is definitely a horror film, fit snuggly into the concept of body horror, and one that was nominated for a pair of Oscars (as we've said, this is pretty rare for horror pictures, particularly when you're talking Best Score).  But it's also quite cerebral, and could easily be a thriller (or, honestly, just a SciFi Drama).  We will consider it, though, for the sake of our conversation this month, a horror film, and a pretty odd one.

(Spoilers Ahead) Ken Russell's films are quite heady so I''m going to give you a high-level look into the plot, but know that I'm missing some things.  We have Eddie Jessup (Hurt), a scientist who is studying schizophrenia but becomes obsessed with the concept of studying other states of consciousness.  The movie leans in on this as he moves into a sensory deprivation tank, and enjoys the secession from reality that it affords.  Years later, he is still obsessed with this concept, despite having domesticated a bit (he's married to his wife Emily, played by Brown, and has two daughters).  His marriage nearly in shambles, he goes to Mexico to study a tribe that has shared hallucinatory states, and is able to join them with a magical mushroom potion, one that he steals & brings home to study in the lab.  Continued time in the tank shows that he is manifesting or reverting to some sort of caveman state of being, one that is potentially killing him, but that he becomes addicted to experiencing so he can understand what is happening beyond himself.  The films ends with him nearly transcending to another plane, but because it's going to come at the cost of Emily, he decides not to do it, and they reunite, their marriage on the mend.

The film is one that I'd find really hard to love, but I also understand & respect those who are into.  It deals with a lot of larger concepts, and I don't think it works.  On some level it's clearly about the Frankenstein myth, with Eddie wanting to create something beyond himself, understanding mankind in a different level.  In doing this, it's noteworthy that he becomes estranged from his wife, who actually has created other life (their two daughters), which is the core of the Frankenstein myth-men are obsessed with this thing that women can do and they cannot.  I don't think, though, that Russell has enough to say about this-he shoots for the wider reachs of the universe, asking questions, but because these questions are unknowable, he can't really find the answers.

The film's two Oscar nominations I was in the middle on, even if the film looks pretty good (the creepy-crawly skin effects on William Hurt are well-done...and also kudos to Russell for making sure to have totally unnecessary male nudity in a genre where we almost always get that for women but not men).  The sound is intriguing, but it's also repetitive, and honestly, this would be much more in the "sound effects" category we'd get soon after this than the mixing I'm accustomed to (they were combined then).  The Score, a rare nomination for John Corigliano who would pull off one of the category's great upsets 19 years later for The Red Violin, is solid but again, not exactly to my tastes.  It's interesting, it fits the film, but it's not as iconic as you'd want from one of the rare entries into the horror genre nominated for Best Score.

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, Phantom of the Paradise, 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: Sound (1999)

OVP: Best Sound (1999)

The Nominees Were...

Robert J. Litt, Elliot Tyson, Michael Herbick, & Willie D. Burton, The Green Mile

Andy Nelson, Doug Hemphill, & Lee Orloff, The Insider

John Reitz, Gregg Rudloff, David Campbell, & David Lee, The Matrix

Leslie Shatz, Chris Carpenter, Rick Kline, & Chris Munro, The Mummy

Gary Rydstrom, Tom Johnson, Shawn Murphy, & John Midgley, Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace

My Thoughts: In the 1990's and early 2000's, the Sound Editing category was a sporadic number (either 2 or 3 nominations) while the Sound Mixing category stayed steady at five, so we are now back to 5-wide races, and here we will stay for the remainder of the 1999 Oscar Viewing Project.  The Sound Mixing category has gone through a lot of shifts through the years, from the 1940's where it felt like more a way to reward each sound department at each studio to the 1960's when it would shift into a conversation about musicals.  By the 1990's, though, there weren't really any musicals, and the ones that were were animated (and Oscar wasn't yet nominating them here).  Instead, they focused more on loud, on big epic sounds, particularly things like action-adventures and SciFi/Fantasy movies.

Case-in-point, we have The Matrix which blends both of those worlds.  We talked in our previous article (all links to past 1999 contests as well as past Sound Mixing races are at the bottom of this page) about how The Matrix uses machinations in their underground world to create this sort of sewer-like universe alongside the pretend one.  This is also reflected in the sound mixing, which uses the film's heavy soundtrack to full impact, incorporating it as almost another character.  You get drops in noise for key dialogue (think of Neo's conversation with the Oracle), and the way that the noise is always building to something (again, Neo's conversations with Agent Smith).  A really special & succinct vision, one the Wachowskis know how to do in creating their SciFi opuses.

Speaking of SciFi opuses, we of course have as The Matrix's chief competition for the Oscar Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, which probably would've swept the same Oscars that The Matrix took (save for the shock Film Editing trophy) without that movie taking hold of pop culture.  Again, this would be a really good choice.  Much of the sound mixing is important here because large swaths of the film are either animated or (in the case of the original Yoda) puppetry, so you have to match this up against live-action dialogue that's happening in real-time.  This has been a thing for decades (just look at Mary Poppins or Bedknobs and Broomsticks), but few have done it so well, making you feel like the characters that are next to these figures are real and having actual conversations.

I'll be honest-these two are the frontrunners for the reason: they're also the best.  That isn't to say there's not some decent work lying around in the remainder.  The Insider is a movie that uses a lot of conversations to get through, and like all Michael Mann movies, that's used for heightened tension.  Think of the phone conversation scenes, the rapid-fire editing allowing for clips, clicks, and noise between the two actors onscreen basically trying to stave off death.  But for me, a lot of this feels too invisible, with the filmmakers just doing their job.  I don't feel like we're getting something that calls out the sound mixing, just that it's good for what it is.

That said, it's better than The Green Mile.  The Green Mile is not a good movie (it had no business in the Best Picture field), and while the biggest problem with it is that it's too long, it's also a case where it is a bit too heightened, and that reflects in the sound mixing.  While The Insider uses its noise to give off a sense of when it's important, signaling to the viewer subtly what's about to happen, The Green Mile telegraphs with a blow horn.  Giant swells in the music, and dialogue that feels like it's dripping with saccharine comes across in the sound mix, trying to play on your emotions, but really it's just doing something to your digestive system.

The final nomination is The Mummy, a cheesy B-Movie that I have always had a fondness for.  The movie's sound editing is more impressive than the mixing, though the score is incorporated in an old-school 1960's vibe that I quite liked, and the dialogue is really well heard (even if it's cheesy).  I think it helps, as well, that the action scenes all work properly-there's no case where the many exploding sand dunes and crashed planes are causing you not to hear what's onscreen.  If I had some tweaks, I might have made a little less derivative approach to the resurrection scenes, which are all ones we've seen countless times before (it's practically the same speeches), but this is fun, and I'm glad Oscar nominated it in at least one category.

Other Precursor Contenders: The Cinema Audio Society did not yet split its categories between Live-Action and Animated in 1999, so we have a direct comparison here, though they definitely did their own thing.  The Matrix won, beating American Beauty, Any Given Sunday, Star Wars-The Phantom Menace, & The Sixth Sense.  At the BAFTA's, The Matrix also won, here besting American Beauty, Buena Vista Social Club (one of the few 1999 movies I still have left that I really want to finish before we get to My Ballot), and The Phantom Menace. In sixth place...it's gotta be American Beauty, right?  The Sixth Sense is a good guess, but horror is anathema to tech categories (even though it shouldn't be), and American Beauty won Best Picture...I'm going with the suburban drama.

Films I Would Have Nominated: This isn't a bad list (save for one), so it's hard to be too mad, but if I was going to put my spin on it, I'd definitely throw in The Sixth Sense.  The film's the best example of using jump scares and a spooky score to your advantage, and I think horror deserves its spot in the sound field.

Oscar’s Choice: The Matrix dominated all season, and this wasn't an exception-another trophy where it took out The Phantom Menace.

My Choice: And I'm going to join the Academy-the sound work in The Matrix is too good to ignore in my humbled opinion.  Behind it I'll select (in order) Star Wars, The Insider, The Mummy, and The Green Mile.

Those are my choices-how about you?  Do we all feel like the whole season got it right by selecting The Matrix, or do you want to sign up for a different picture?  Am I missing something with The Green Mile, or is this just a case of Oscar having bad taste?  And was it American Beauty or The Sixth Sense just out of reach?  Share your thoughts in the comments!

Also in 1999: Sound Editing, Original Score, Original Song, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume, Film Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup, Previously, in 1999

Past Best Sound Mixing Contests: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023

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: How the West Was Won (1963)

Film: How the West Was Won (1963)

Stars: Carroll Baker, Lee J. Cobb, Henry Fonda, Carolyn Jones, Karl Malden, Gregory Peck, George Peppard, Robert Preston, Debbie Reynolds, James Stewart, Eli Wallach, John Wayne, Richard Widmark, Spencer Tracy, Walter Brennan, Agnes Moorehead, Thelma Ritter, Russ Tamblyn, Raymond Massey, Mickey Shaughnessy

Director: Henry Hathaway, John Ford, & George Marshall

Oscar History: 8 nominations/3 wins (Best Picture, Original Screenplay*, Film Editing*, Sound*, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume Design, Score)

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.

We cannot do a month devoted to Debbie Reynolds without talking about one of the most famous scandals of the Classical Hollywood era, her relationship with Eddie Fisher.  Fisher was a major singer at the time, on-par with acts like Fabian and Elvis Presley in terms of his popularity, and even had his own hit television program.  The two were the equivalent of what today we'd think of as Zendaya & Tom Holland (or for you older people, Brad Pitt & Jennifer Aniston)-America's Sweethearts, the boy and girl next door who had married each other.  Their marriage was rocky when it wasn't on the front pages, though, with Fisher a serial philanderer, including an affair with Playboy Playmate Pat Sheehan.  But it was when he had an affair with Elizabeth Taylor, the rare celebrity at the time on-par with Reynolds & Fisher, that the entire world paid attention.  Taylor, who had recently been widowed after the death of producer Mike Todd, was best friends with Reynolds, but still ended up in bed with her husband.  The scandal was sensational, one of the biggest celebrity news stories of the decade, and it had bizarre implications for all involved.  Reynolds, of course, was canonized as the scorned woman, and would have five movies come out in 1959 alone.  Elizabeth Taylor, the mistress, normally would've been the one to pay the price in the public's eye, but she was fine career-wise.  Within a year she was clutching her first Oscar, and a few years later would become the highest-paid actress in film history (and the centerpiece of an equally-famous affair) on the set of Cleopatra.  Instead it was Eddie Fisher who actually paid a career price, with his show being cancelled and his music career largely being destroyed.  It's hard to grasp now, but at the time Fisher was as big of a deal as Reynolds & Taylor were...now, he's nothing but an asterisk compared to the two women, who famously years after they'd both left Fisher reconciled and even starred in a film written by Fisher & Reynolds' daughter Carrie.

(Spoilers Ahead) During the wake of the scandal, Reynolds got a lot of career mileage and a number of hit movies, one of the biggest being today's film How the West Was Won.  The movie is less a cohesive story, and more a series of vignettes that tell the tale of how the American West began as well as how it ended, but the centerpiece around the film is Reynolds, who despite not getting top-billing (it went alphabetically for all of the main stars) is the movie's main character as Lilith Prescott, a woman dragged to the wilderness by her parents (Moorehead & Malden), and then when they die, she ends up making the west her home, marrying a scoundrel (Peck) who ends up making good, and eventually settling in the West with her nephew (Peppard) after most of the rest of her family dies.  In the meantime, we get pirates (led by Walter Brennan), the growth of the railroad, and, oh yeah, the Civil War.  

The movie is BIG, and it's not afraid of it.  There's a reason it has three directors and 17 (not a typo, I counted) Oscar-nominated actors on the call sheet.  But the thing is-it's not very good.  None of the actors are giving particularly good performances, and given who they are, that's a crime.  The best in the cast might be...Wallach, only because he gets to play a villain?  Honestly, even that feels like a stretch to me.  It's more a cavalcade of cameos, each seemingly doing John Ford a favor by appearing in a movie that would be such a big hit it'd be a weird case of it being one of their signature movies of the 1960's despite only Reynolds being in very much of the picture.  It deals a lot with cliche, and trying to shove what would've been a miniseries today into a couple of hours of celluloid.

The film won eight Academy Award nominations, and they're a mixed bag, but definitely not all bad.  The movie's screenplay win is abject silliness (it barely runs together as a plot!), and the same can be said for the editors, who probably got this nomination because it was a novel concept to have unrelated stories start to blend this way, but just because it's unique doesn't mean it's good.  The art direction & costume nominations are better, but less inspired.  The art direction feels more a tribute to the beauty of nature in the film, which is definitely on-display (also, because this is shot in Cinerama there's a lot more art direction than you'd normally expect), and the costumes are fine though nothing stands out in particular.  It's the last three nominations that worked best and felt most-earned.  The film's cinematography, capturing the beauty of the west (lots of this was shot off a studio lot), and it also works really well in conjunction with the stunt and effects teams (the Civil War & river rapids sequences, in particular, are the stuff that makes you wonder why it's taken so long to get a Stunts Oscar).  This also works for the sound work, with a lot of the action set pieces feeling really in-your-face, and it works well with the film's high musical quotient.  And of course Alfred Newman's score, generally considered to be his best work, is spectacularly grand.  All-in-all, there's a lot of elements of a classic here...if only the movie itself were any good.

OVP: Sound (2023)

OVP: Best Sound (2023)

The Nominees Were...

Ian Voigt, Erik Aadahl, Ethan van der Ryn, Tom Ozanich, & Dean Zupancic, The Creator

Steven S. Murrow, Richard King, Jason Ruder, Tom Ozanich, & Dean Zupancic, Maestro

Chris Munro, James H. Mather, Chris Burdon, & Mark Taylor, Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One

Willie Burton, Richard King, Gary A. Rizzo, & Kevin O'Connell, Oppenheimer

Tarn Willers & Johnnie Burn, The Zone of Interest

My Thoughts: I am still getting used to the concept of the sound categories being combined.  I don't like it (that's why in the My Ballot we are continuing to look at the categories separately), but it does makes things a bit simpler in grading these pictures.  In different years, some of these movies would've been a challenge to suss out the difference between mixing & editing, understanding what made one aspect a bit stronger than the other (cause quite frankly, as a non-filmmaker, there are movies where I can't tell if something is an effect or not).  But with them combined, we have it easier in just lumping them together-all the sounds count the same.

A good example of this would be Mission Impossible.  This film uses a number of different practical stunts (Cruise actually jumped off of a cliff while riding a motorcycle, which is insane & you have to be the level of Tom Cruise famous to be able to get a studio to take that kind of an insurance risk with their leading man), and when it comes to practical stunts, it is a combination of actual sounds and ones that are being manufactured after the effect to punctuate gunshots, punches, & explosions.  The film is strong in its fight scenes (particularly the one on the train), but I feel like it over-relies on the score, and it feels a bit generic after seven movies when it isn't getting its "this is the reason we made the movie" sorts of action sequences (again, like the train) brought out into the open.

The Zone of Interest is another film that, honestly, it's hard to tell the editing from the mixing, and you'd be forgiven for not realizing that the movie has both.  What you wouldn't be forgiven for is understanding how special this film's sound is.  Honestly, if you wanted to have a textbook definition of how sound can truly influence a film, this is it.  While Mica Levi's dramatic, electronic score elevates the movie in sequences, it's really in the silence, when we overhear people literally dying across the wall while the main family is displaying domesticity right in front of us, that we get the juxtaposition in Glazer's banality of evil paradox.  Brilliant stuff, and totally makes the movie.

We didn't get a musical nomination in 2023, which is usually one of the mainstays of this category, but we did get a musically-inspired film in Maestro.  I have been somewhat tough on Maestro throughout these proceedings (if you're a fan of the film, that's not going to get better the further along we go so brace yourself), but I am not blind (or in this case, deaf) to its stronger attributes, and one of those is its sound mixing.  The way that we hear a loud, almost cannon-fire look at Bernstein's compositions (think of the famous scene where Bradley Cooper allegedly spent years learning how to compose to get a few minutes of screen time), you understand so much of the character through the overpowering genius of his music.  This is well-balanced throughout the rest of the film, where we get conversation that feels tinkling, like in a Douglas Sirk picture.

Loud being good isn't the case for all films, though.  I have long had an issue with Christopher Nolan's pictures and their sound design, with some being very strong, but occasionally him having the worst of offenders in movies like Tenet, where there are stretches of dialogue when you literally can't hear the picture.  Oppenheimer isn't that bad, but I will own that the overbearing score breaks the sound-it's too loud, and it's too much.  It causes some of the bigger explosions to feel like they're playing second fiddle to a cymbal crash, and in a movie where the "big explosions" are important to what's happening in the movie (we need to understand the destruction to get why this has haunted Oppenheimer), this is a risky ball to drop.

The final nominee is The Creator, a movie that would've been a threat to win Best Sound Editing in a different era (I think 2023 is one of those years that the Sound categories split their winners).  The movie's reliance on a futuristic world where robots coexist alongside (and are seen as toxic to) humanity is one that needs to have a constant whir of sounds that are not there, and this works really well.  The Creator is not a strong movie, but it is one that looks & acts like a prestige Science Fiction thriller, and that includes its strong sound design.  You get distinctive aural cues for the robots, and despite none of that being in reality, you never doubt the visual effects are real.  That's in part due to the perfect synchronicity with the sound.

Other Precursor Contenders: The Cinema Audio Society (focusing on Sound Mixing) splits its victors between Live-Action and Animated, so for Live-Action we have Oppenheimer beating Barbie, Ferrari, Killers of the Flower Moon, & Maestro, while Animated had Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse victorious over Elemental, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, The Boy and the Heron, and The Super Mario Bros. Movie.  The Golden Reel Awards (focusing on Sound Editing) also split between live-action and animated, with Oppenheimer (beating Ferrari, Gran Turismo, John Wick: Chapter 4, Napoleon, & The Killer) and Spider-Verse 2 (atop Elemental, Migration, & Mario) their winners.  The BAFTA Awards gave their statue to The Zone of Interest, here against Ferrari, Maestro, Mission Impossible, & Oppenheimer.  The Sound categories in 2023 have a shortlist (I always forget this because for years they didn't and also it's for some reason not on the Wikipedia page) and so we know that sixth place was either Barbie, Ferrari, The Killer, Killers of the Flower Moon or Napoleon...and I think the smart money would be on one of the two Best Picture nominees.  At the time I predicted Barbie (it has the musical elements that they tend to like), but Killers of the Flower Moon is a smart guess as well.

Films I Would Have Nominated: Like I said, we'll split out the categories between mixing and editing for my nominees, so we'll actually have seven films nominated for Sound in total.  One movie that will make both fields, though, and therefore would've had a guaranteed nomination in a combined category like Oscar's, is The Killer, which is a masterful look at how sound can inform the pacing of your film (also, all David Fincher films tend to sound good).

Oscar’s Choice: In maybe the classiest win of the night (and there were a lot of classy wins at the 96th Academy Awards), The Zone of Interest upset and got a victory over Oppenheimer, which was many people's presumed favorite.

My Choice: The only way you beat something like Oppenheimer for a gimme category like this is by being an all-timer, and that's what The Zone of Interest is-it's an extremely worthy first place.  Behind it, I debated between The Creator and Maestro, but ultimately picked the SciFi epic for second because I think it has the harder task and makes it more engrained into the movie.  Behind these three would be Mission Impossible, and then Oppenheimer.

Those are my choices-how about you?  I'm assuming anyone who has seen The Zone of Interest is giving it their vote...right?  Why do you think Oscar has moments of such discerning taste, and in other categories they just let the Best Picture winner stampede to the top?  And was it Barbie or Killers of the Flower Moon in sixth?  Share your thoughts in the comments!

Also in 2023: Original Score, Original Song, Production Design, Cinematography, Costume, Film Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup & Hairstyling, Previously in 2023

Past Best Sound Mixing Contests: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022