Elevator to the Gallows (1958)

Film: Elevator to the Gallows

Stars: Jeanne Moreau, Maurice Ronet, Georges Poujouly, Yori Bertin, Jean Wall

Director: Louis Malle

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

Throughout the month of June we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

The style of filmmaking known as film noir lasted from about 1940-60, with most films made after that considered to be "neo-noir" which we'll get into some examples of in a few days.  By the late 1950's, though, Hollywood was not interested in noir as a major filmmaking style.  Though Hitchcock paid homage to it in Vertigo, and Orson Welles made his in-the-wilderness opus Touch of Evil, neither of these films were hits (no matter how revered they might be today), and by-and-large noir was something that was relegated to lesser stars, lesser studios, and B-movie slots at the theaters.  What's fascinating about this is that arguably the most important new film movement of the era was becoming obsessed with the film noir structure: The French New Wave.  The French New Wave was a film style that dominated arthouse cinema in the late 1950's through the end of the 1960's, and was a clear predecessor to New Hollywood.  They also borrowed heavily from film noir, and one of the best examples of this was also one of the earliest French New Wave films, one that introduced us to two key figures in the movement: director Louis Malle & actress Jeanne Moreau.

(Spoilers Ahead-and this is a twisty film so I want to double underline the Spoiler Alert) The movie is about two lovers, Florence Carala (Moreau) and Julien Tavernier (Ronet).  Julien works for Florence's husband Simon (Wall), and together they plan the perfect murder, essentially concocting a locked room death for Simon where it looks like he committed suicide (when actually Julien killed him).  It goes off perfectly, except Julien forgot the grappling hook he used to climb in Simon's window, so he goes back into the office to retrieve it...and gets stuck in an elevator.  This sets off a chain reaction that includes a young couple joyriding in, and then impersonating, Julien in his car, and Florence confusing the joyride for being Julien with a young woman, setting off a jealousy in her as she thinks he's dumped her.  The young couple kill two Germans, and it soon becomes a bit of a puzzle-Julien's only alibi for the murder this young couple committed (while impersonating him) is for the murder that he did commit.

We've talked a lot this month about film noir's reliance on excessive plot, oftentimes shoving in extra twists & characters to ratchet up the suspense (and the body count).  This is kind of the fun of film noir-it has a gaucheness that's delicous to ruminate within.  But Elevator to the Gallows doesn't do that, and it's the better for it.  Every scene is leading to an eventual conclusion (when both Julien & Florence are caught, even while Florence's descent into her romantic fantasy remains impenetrable), and it locks together perfectly.  This is proof of a brilliant screenplay, but it also poses a risk-films that work too well come across as a ticking clock, something that risks being dull because it's too premeditated or obvious.

But Malle's approach makes Elevator to the Gallows a masterpiece, and he's aided by a fascinating, breathtaking turn by Jeanne Moreau in her breakout role.  The woman that Orson Welles once called "the greatest actress in the world" is impossibly beautiful, glamorous, and tragic as Florence, and Malle interrupts his perfectly calibrated movie with scenes of just her face.  Few directors had done something like this before, just focusing on an actress walking down the street, lit in Paris cafe lights, to accentuate the anguish she's going through, and hoping that her talent was able to fill in her mood, but Malle does & Moreau succeeds.  This is a spectacular pairing of director & actress (the two would become lovers in real-life and make another movie together soon after...titled The Lovers), and it creates one of the most moving films I've seen in a while.  Throw in a fabulous improvisational score by Miles Davis (that's remarkable in its simplicity and the way it gives us a sense of Paris in the 1950's), and you have a masterpiece.

1940's: Act of Violence, The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Brighton Rock, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, The Fallen Idol, Force of Evil, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Ministry of Fear, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raw Deal, The Reckless Moment, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, Sorry, Wrong Number, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach

1950's: Ace in the Hole, Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Blue Gardenia, The Breaking Point, The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, The Crimson Kimono, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Murder by Contract, Night and the City, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, The Prowler, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Long Goodbye, Night Moves, Nightcrawler

OVP: The Brothers Karamazov (1958)

Film: The Brothers Karamazov (1958)

Stars: Yul Brynner, Maria Schell, Claire Bloom, Lee J. Cobb, Albert Salmi, William Shatner, Richard Basehart

Director: Richard Brooks

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Supporting Actor-Lee J. Cobb)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Yul Brynner: click here to learn more about Mr. Brynner (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Yul Brynner is one of those true overnight success stories in Hollywood, someone who came in and was suddenly wildly in demand.  In the late 1950's, he couldn't do any wrong in terms of studio success.  Despite not looking like Rock Hudson or William Holden (he was very handsome, but as a balding man in his late thirties, one who spoke with an unmistakable Russian accent, he didn't fit a previously-known mold), he started in 1956 with the triple threat of The Ten Commandments, Anastasia, and The King & I (the latter winning him an Oscar, all of them being hits), and for the next couple of years he would enjoy a number of hits, even if there were a few flops like The Sound and the Fury and Surprise Package in the mix.  One of those hits we actually talked about for this series when we discussed the career of Gina Lollobrigida, Solomon and Sheba, but a second we haven't had a chance to talk through (even though it was Oscar-nominated) and is how we're going to kick-off our month devoted to Brynner: The Brothers Karamazov.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is 145 minutes long and based on an even longer Russian novel (which I've read!), so to summarize the plot into a paragraph is kind of insane.  Essentially you have three brothers (we learn eventually there's a fourth brother who was born illegitimately), each with a different approach to their father Fyodor (Cobb), in some cases cloying (Shatner's Alexey), in other cases defiant (Brynner's Dmitri) and still others a combination of the two (Basehart's Ivan).  The movie shows the shifting and complicating dynamics the three brothers have to faith, Russia, and to their father, specifically his taste for women and excessive fortune.  The major crux of Brothers Karamazov from a plot perspective is the murder of Fyodor and the subsequent trial of Dmitri, whom we know in the audience is innocent...but it's not clear how this will pan out in the movie (and indeed, they change the ending to make it a bit sunnier).

As I said, I've read the book, and as a result I know why this is considered a classic, and while it is a brilliantly-executed, intriguing plot (particularly the relationship between Dmitri and his father), what's captivating about the novel is the way that it gives a sense of Russia itself, decades before the Russian Revolution.  There are entire sections of the novel that are about establishing characters that are completely ancillary to the story (frequently almost poetic segways), and while that's fine (books are not movies, he said for the thousandth time even though some people refuse to hear it), it does mean that the movie has a different task-it has to take characters who are largely etched through their own soliloquies & side adventures, and draw them within the confines of the main plot.  This is harder to do than it sounds, and the movie doesn't have the connection to the material to pull it off.

It's not helped by a weird bit of casting.  Brynner as Dmitri makes sense, one of the few times he plays a Russian character onscreen during this era, and he is the best of the cast though he doesn't get enough to do, but the rest of the performers are not well-considered.  Maria Schell is too passive as Grushenka (the novel's best character), and honestly needs more charisma (Marilyn Monroe actively pursued this role, and I kind of want to see the film with her in it even though I cannot fathom Monroe doing a Russian accent).  William Shatner is a good actor (he has a reputation now as a bit hammy, but look at his episodes of The Twilight Zone for evidence), but comes across as completely American, and one who isn't entirely convinced by his life as a monk (even though he's supposed to be).  And Lee J. Cobb, getting an Oscar nomination, does so by scenery-chewing & overacting.  This isn't always unwelcome during the duller bits of the film, but it doesn't work and there were actors who were a lot better in 1958 who deserved this more.  That this long, boring epic based on a difficult-to-read Russian novel was a hit for MGM in 1958 is a testament either to Brynner's star power or to a public that was hungry for great literary epics during this time frame.

OVP: The Big Country (1958)

Film: The Big Country (1958)

Stars: Gregory Peck, Jean Simmons, Carroll Baker, Charlton Heston, Bul Ives, Charles Bickford

Director: William Wyler

Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best Supporting Actor-Burl Ives*, Score)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Gregory Peck: click here to learn more about Mr. Peck (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last week we talked a lot about Gregory Peck's long career in westerns, and how they were a large part of his persona throughout the 1950's.  This week, we're going to end our season with another western (it is our theme for a reason-he made a lot of them), but we're going to talk in terms of Peck's career around how, after a long decade of being leading man in a variety of films, he finally gained his stature as one of the "important" actors of his generation by securing an Academy Award for Best Actor, which to this point had alluded him.  Between 1960-64, Peck appeared in a lot of very big & well-received movies, including The Guns of Navarone, Cape Fear, and How the West Was Won, but it was not in a western but as a small-town lawyer that Peck found his signature role.  Playing Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, Peck got his Tom Joad, his George Bailey, his Sergeant York role that would define his career, and is usually the performance that he is name-checked with.  Decades later, Atticus would be named by the American Film Institute as the "Greatest Hero in American Film History" and would win him an Oscar in 1962 against the very stiff competition of Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia.  As I've seen The Big Country many times before, we are going to focus on the Oscar win of a different actor, Burl Ives, today with our film as we finish up our month devoted to Peck.

(Spoilers Ahead) A giant, nearly three-hour western from director William Wyler, The Big Country is an adaptation of a series of Saturday Evening Post stories by novelist Donald Hamilton.  This is a big movie, so I'll try to summarize enough to keep us grounded.  To start we have James McKay (Peck), a docile sea captain who is in the West to meet his spirited fiancee Patricia (Baker), whose father the Major (Bickford) owns much of the land in the area.  His rival, and by proxy Patricia's rival, is Rufus Hannassey (Ives), with whom he has a long-standing feud that we initially read as being Rufus's fault (after all, his daughter is engaged to our leading man), but as we continue we begin to understand that this is a complicated, shades-of-grey western where Rufus is just trying to get access to a water reservoir that is owned by Julie Maragon (Simmons), a kindly schoolteacher who is best friends with Patricia.  After a standoff between the Major & Rufus at Patricia & McKay's engagement reception, things escalate, with all sides starting to show their true colors.  Patricia, not liking McKay's more gentlemanly attitude, particularly after ranch-hand Steve Leech (Heston, in a rare for this era supporting role) insults him, calls off the engagement, and the film ends with the Major & Rufus killing each other in a standoff, with McKay & Julie ending up together and riding off to their own ranch & life in the west.

I really liked The Big Country, much more than I expected for a western that rarely makes it onto the pantheon of great movie western lists.  I thought the cinematography was astounding.  The fistfight scene between Peck & Heston, shot much in the dark, is glorious, and there's a clear love of the countryside that encapsulates the best of western photography.  The movie needed a bit more focus (there's maybe one too many plotlines keeping it away from being an all-timer), but I think the strangest thing for me was how good Ives was.  Ives' win here is generally considered by most Oscar historians to be something of a proxy win for his more notable work in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that year, which he'd been campaigned as lead for by MGM, but he's superb here as a man who understands the value of everything around him, and is much smarter and even mildly sympathetic compared to what you'd find for a traditional western villain of this era.  His views on honor, and the way he handles his whimpering son (loving him, but also not respecting him) is really smartly played, and adds levels to a movie that could've been paint-by-numbers.  It's a cool win, something I honestly didn't anticipate going into this movie given other reviews I've read of this picture.

Coming out of To Kill a Mockingbird, it's clear that Peck was ready to move onto a different chapter of his career, his time in Hollywood cemented by the city's highest honor.  While he'd make other movies, including roles in MacArthur and The Boys from Brazil, as well as in smaller parts in remakes of his films Cape Fear and Moby Dick, he'd never be in a movie as big as the ones from his 1940's to early 1960's heyday.  He would go on to a number of leadership roles in the industry, including as AMPAS President and Chairman of the American Film Institute.  He would become involved with politics, being a critic of the Vietnam War, and would campaign for a number of Democratic politicians, including US Senator Donald Stewart and Peck's own son Carey who ran for Congress in California in the late 1970's.  He even did voiceover work in the (successful) commercials made to stop the confirmation of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987.  Peck died of pneumonia in 2003 at the age of 87.

Next month, we're going to take a step back and take a look at an actress whose career started before Peck's and the one woman we're going to profile this year for Saturdays with the Stars, a performer who for a time in the 1930's & 40's would find success in the most unlikely genre imaginable given how her career started: the western.

Man of the West (1958)

Film: Man of the West (1958)

Stars: Gary Cooper, Julie London, Lee J. Cobb, Arthur O'Connell

Director: Anthony Mann

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Gary Cooper: click here to learn more about Mr. Cooper (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Gary Cooper never really stopped being famous, or working in major movies.  While other actors of his generation would eventually be relegated to television, this wasn't the case for Cooper, who worked pretty much until his death in 1961.  Cooper never escaped the shadow of Will Kane, his famed cowboy in High Noon, and played some version of him throughout the 1950's, including in today's film Man of the West, which was nearly his last western (we've actually discussed his final western, which is one of his best roles in my opinion, The Hanging Tree, a few years ago).  He was always forced to play the man-of-honor in the west, someone who was up against the odds.  Here, though, the seedier elements honestly make that conversation far more interesting, as Man of the West is that rare hybrid genre: the western noir.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about Link Jones (Cooper), who is a former outlaw that has gone on the straight-and-narrow and is tasked with bringing money to Fort Worth to hire a new schoolteacher for his town of Good Hope.  On the way, his train is hijacked, and he, another cowboy named Sam (O'Connell), and a saloon singer named Billie (London) are all forced off of the train, and start walking to town (the money for the teacher is still on the train).  At this point, Link goes to meet with his old gang, which happens to be his family, including his uncle Dock Tobin (Cobb), whom he abandoned years earlier.  He is blackmailed into rejoining the gang, and in the process his hope is to kill them for ruining so much of his early life.  He does this, eventually killing everyone in his old gang, with him riding off into the sunset with Billie.

The film plays with a lot of tropes, including the concept of honor.  Link is a good man.  This might be the only time that a man spends the night with another woman but doesn't have sex with her in a movie of this nature (Link knows in order to protect Billie from the men, he has to pretend she's "his woman" even though he's married and loves his wife).  As a result, the age gap between Cooper & London (who was was 25 years his junior) reads more as paternal than romantic, even though her character is clearly in love with him.  It also is a strange juxtaposition to Cooper as honorable-he seems to want to kill his relatives out of revenge, which is usually something that a hero must overcome, and in a way he does, but even so he does, in fact, kill all of them in the end (having his cake & eating it too).  This moral grey area would become increasingly a part of the western in the decade to come, with movies like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Once Upon a Time in the West, and eventually The Wild Bunch smashing tropes that The Virginian and Stagecoach had made gospel in Hollywood for decades.

The movie also looks & sounds incredible.  Shot on CinemaScope by cinematographer Ernest Haller (of Gone with the Wind fame), the Mojave Desert makes an implausible but gorgeous Texas in Man of the West, and a judiciously-used score means we get scenes that actually sound like the vastness of the west.  Think of the scene where Cooper approaches London's attacked wagon, and how you can hear the whistle of the wind instead of a score...that's smart, atmospheric stuff.  The art direction, the editing...it's weird this didn't get some sort of Academy mention.  Even the acting is good.  Cobb plays his villain in heavy-but-convincing old age makeup, and is superb.  I loved the way that you can't tell what he's thinking, and how that adds to his villainy.  London is also good as a woman in love with a man she can't have, and at least hinting that part of the reason she loves him is because she wants out of a life where she's only as valued as the leers of the men who want her for a night, a life she's resigned to as the end credits fall.

About the only thing I'm not totally sold on is our Star of the Month, Mr. Cooper himself.  I started this month with the caveat that Cooper is one of those rare major Golden Age stars that does little for me, and I end there despite trying four new films.  I get the appeal on some level.  There are silent moments in this movie where Cooper's clear blue eyes convey a sense of emotion, a brokenness that definitely has talent.  But his wooden physicality and his stilted line delivery just does nothing for me as we explore him in different genres, and particularly in a very good film like Man of the West.  All of this is to say, we're hedging our bets in February by picking one of my all-time favorite actors to discuss next month.

Murder by Contract (1958)

Film: Murder by Contract (1958)

Stars: Vince Edwards, Phillip Pine, Herschel Bernardi, Caprice Toriel

Director: Irving Lerner

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Throughout the month of June, in honor of the 10th Anniversary of The Many Rantings of John, we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

You'll notice at the bottom of this article that I have broken out the noir films into the 1940's, 1950's, & Neo-Noir.  This isn't to say that these are the only eras of noir.  Noir films existed, at least in some state, in the late 1930's though they were usually less reliant on the "dangerous woman, seedy underbelly, lots of plot" motif, and instead were more akin to the gangster films of the decade like Scarface or Little Caesar.  And it's not like noir totally evaporated in the 1960's...the neo-noir movement was more a thing of the 1970's but the genre didn't totally dissipate.  But by the late 1950's most of the stories had been told, as well as the big stars of the genre had either died or had aged out of it, and so it was on its last legs.  Really, when you think of noir you can kind of think of it as bookended between The Maltese Falcon and Touch of Evil, a 17-year run in Hollywood.  A lot of the elements of noir would not disappear as we entered the 1960's, though, but be absorbed by the French New Wave, specifically Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless.  While it's obvious that Welles and other filmmakers influenced Godard & Robert Bresson in the coming years, I don't know that I've seen a movie quite like Murder by Contract, whose approach feels exactly like a French New Wave film...except in English.

(Spoilers Ahead) Like a lot of the New Wave, the plot here isn't super concentrated (the biggest departure between film noir and some of the crime films of the New Wave was that the plots became lighter).  But essentially we have Claude (Edwards), a contract killer who is saving up to buy a house.  He is hired by an unseen crime boss to start doing killings, which he does mercilessly.  He is then assigned to kill Billie Williams (Toriel), whom initially he doesn't realize is a woman (the name is a clear misdirect), which he gets angered about because killing women "costs extra."  He has a consistent moral quandary before he finally does it...and then it turns out that he actually killed a policewoman-Billie is still alive.  At this point he thinks he's jinxed, but he still has to do it, knowing that his own life is on the line if he won't go through with killing her.  In the end, Claude does get into Billie's house, but he can't go through with it, with her begging him not to kill her, and in the chase out of her house, he is gunned down by the police.

The film's approach is unusual.  It has a narrator, which isn't rare in film noir (Laura, for example, has it), but it's not common either.  Claude is unusual as a leading man because he's gruff.  There's no real effort to be made to try to flesh him out as anything but ruthless.  Even when he won't kill Billie at first, it's not a moral quandary but a fiduciary one-he thinks he's being undervalued for his work.  It's also worth noting that in this movie, while the actress playing Billie is attractive, she's decidedly not the sex object like you'd assume in a film noir: it's Claude himself.  With thick hair, bulging biceps, & a face that kind of resembles a young James Caan, Edwards is hot in this movie, and the director leans into it.  There are extended scenes at the beginning where the actor is doing pushups in a white tank top, and later in the movie he pulls up for a swim on the beach in short shorts, resembling in some ways Daniel Craig in Casino Royale.  This switchup works really well...kudos to the casting director for finding the exact right fit for this film.

The movie, though not a hit in 1958, was highly influential not just on the French New Wave, but one American director in particular.  Martin Scorsese has spoken publicly about how this was one of the biggest influences on his career, and you can definitely see that in the pacing of the film, the way that Murder by Contract combines the mundane with the shocking.  The workout scene feels most reminiscent of what Scorsese would do with Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver, sexualizing this unlikely protagonist before the audience can understand if he's a "good guy" or a "bad guy."  All-in-all, this is a well-edited, surprisingly modern film that came out of Columbia's vault at the tail-end of the film noir trend.

1940's: The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Brighton Rock, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach

1950's: Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Blue Gardenia,The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Night and the City, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Long Goodbye, Nightcrawler

Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958)

Film: Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958)

Stars: Allison Hayes, William Hudson, Yvette Vickers, Roy Gordon

Director: Nathan Hertz

Oscar History: Never nominated

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

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

Horror films of the 1950's had a different task than the previous decades.  At the time, as the Cold War was waging across the planet, we encountered a number of different political motifs that would become staples in films of the era.  Allusions to both nuclear war & the Red Scare were everywhere.  3-D entertainment & drive-in movies were the rage, which meant that we saw more films trying to utilize these technologies to greater effect (reaching out into the audience).  And it wasn't just enough to make a horror film-you had to find a way to connect to the daily lives of the audience.  This is all to say that a movie like Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, which comes armed with a title that I couldn't turn down with this month's theme, plays differently in 1958 than it might have in 1944.

(Spoilers Ahead) As a UFO is spotted over the California countryside, we are given a depiction of a marriage completely on the rocks.  Nancy Archer (Hayes), who is a troubled woman with a large fortune, sees the UFO but no one believes that she saw it, blaming it on her drinking.  She tries to convince her cheating husband Harry (Hudson), who is gaslighting his wife in hopes of being able to get her committed so he can marry his girlfriend Honey (Vickers), and he goes along with her to the desert on the condition that she will give him control of her $50 million fortune if they find nothing.  When they are there, they see the satellite, but they capture Nancy...who then shows up in a later scene on the roof of her house, in a daze.  After a while, the doctors notice that Nancy is gaining in size, rapidly growing taller & larger.  They sedate & confine her, but she breaks free, and goes after her husband Harry, wanting revenge for his adultery.  The film ends with both Nancy & Harry dead, no ultimate explanation of what comes next with the aliens.

The movie itself is short, barely over an hour, but much of that run time we don't get a lot of time with the titular monster.  Nancy spends the first half of the picture mentally unhinged, a wealthy woman who is clearly unhappy in her marriage and whose husband is a louse.  Likely due to budgetary restraints, we don't get a lot of time exploring Nancy's reign-of-terror in the city itself, and we never get the grand scene on the poster where Nancy is standing (potentially without underwear on) in a miniskirt & bra, her vagina hovering over a freeway (my friend Cody floated that this idea may well have been some studio executive's sexual fantasy come to life...after watching the movie, I'm convinced he's right).

As a result, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman is a bit of a letdown, and you understand why there wasn't a sequel (though there were a number of "suddenly they're big" sorts of horror movies in the late 1950's, a side effect of the Cold War & fears of nuclear attack showing itself at the movies).  The characters are unlikable, they also don't behave like real figures, and there are enough holes in the plot that the fifty-foot woman could walk through them without ducking (like, what happened to the aliens?!?).  All-in-all, a letdown that never lives up to its potential delights.

Past Horror Month Reviews (Listed Chronologically): The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Love, The Raven, Werewolf of London, Dracula's Daughter, Son of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Mummy's Hand, The Invisible Woman, The Wolf Man, Cat People, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Invisible Agent, The Mummy's Curse, The Mummy's Tomb, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Phantom of the Opera, Son of Dracula, The House of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man's Revenge, The Mummy's Ghost, The Uninvited, House of Dracula, She-Wolf of London, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy, Revenge of the Creature, The Creature Walks Among Us, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Blob, The Masque of the Red Death

The Blob (1958)

Film: The Blob (1958)
Stars: Steve McQueen, Aneta Corseaut, Earl Rowe, Olin Howland, Stephen Chase
Director: Irvin Yeaworth
Oscar History: Never nominated
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

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

We are winding down our month devoted to Classic Horror with Halloween fast approaching, and have reached our penultimate movie this week.  The drive-in monster movies of the 1950's have not survived in the same sense as the Universal Horror films, especially of the early-1930's.  While the Lugosi & Karloff pictures have developed a famous, almost mythic place in Hollywood lore, the films of the 1950's feel campy, and are more-related to something you'd see at 2 AM on cable than you would get in a deluxe Blu-Ray package.  Which made the history of The Blob fascinating to me.  This is a movie that should, by all accounts, have ended up in the annals of camp classics, and in many ways it has, but it's also gotten some prestige treatment in the years since that defy its less-than-auspicious roots.  It has been released in a Criterion package, and it's one of the few monster movies of this era with a new creation that is easily name-checked if you're listing horror movie icons (we've all heard of "the Blob").  And, perhaps most surprising if all you know of it is the title, it stars one of the biggest actors of the 1960's in his feature film debut, Steve McQueen.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is centered around Steve (McQueen) and Jane (Corsaut), his girlfriend who while making out in his convertible see a meteorite crash in the distance.  When they drive to see what it is, they come across an old man (Howland) who is covered in some sort of gelatinous goo, and appears to be in great pain.  They take him to Dr. Hallen (Chase), who is stumped, but soon realizes that the goo is expanding into a Blob, and killing the old man.  Soon, the Blob has killed Dr. Hallen, and both Jane & Steve are running around the town, trying to convince the police that they aren't pulling a prank, and that the Blob is real; it keeps escaping before they can prove its existence to the "adults" (I say that in quotes because McQueen is pushing thirty in this film and looks it).  Eventually the Blob expands to the point where no one can deny it as it attacks the movie theater, and then a diner where Steve & Jane are.  In the diner, Steve realizes that the Blob is vulnerable to cold, and soon fights off the Blob, with the Blob being put in the Arctic to stay frozen & docile (yet another problem we're going to have because we ignored climate change).

The film is not flexing a lot of intellectual muscle.  It wasn't intended to be a hit when it came out (it was the B-movie to I Married a Monster from Outer Space until demand for The Blob bumped it to top billing for the double-feature), and there's very little to the plot other than a repetitive cat-and-mouse game with the blob, the adults, and the teens.  The creature and the effects of the film, even in 1958, felt a bit cheesy, & the acting is not something you'd brag about; while McQueen would go on to become an iconic movie star, you'd be forgiven if you were a studio chief watching this movie at the time & describing the actor as "handsome but flat."

Yet there is something here-I get why it became a classic.  The color photography for a horror film feels authentic & interesting.  Yes, it's cheesy, but the monster is kind of fascinating-it changes color throughout the film, making it almost seem (to a modern audience) like it's expressing mood or feeling, and thus isn't "just a blob."  It's bad, but it has strange parables to some of the scare tactics of the 1950's (in this case, no one believes the threat, which they assume is imaginary, until it's too late...which in hindsight reads as the reverse of some of the Red Scare), and while it's drier than it should be (I'd like more camp), it's a fun movie, to the point where I get why it was a hit with drive-in crowds.

Past Horror Month Reviews (Listed Chronologically): The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Love, Werewolf of London, Son of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Mummy's Hand, The Wolf Man, Cat People, The Ghost of Frankenstein, The Mummy's Tomb, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, The House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Revenge of the Creature, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Masque of the Red Death

OVP: Cowboy (1958)

Film: Cowboy (1958)
Stars: Glenn Ford, Jack Lemmon, Anna Kashfi, Dick York
Director: Delmer Daves
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Film Editing)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

It is a new week, but a week I'm really excited about (I get next week off from work!), and with each new week we get a theme for our weekday reviews, frequently with an Oscar tilt.  This week that is going to be Best Editing, a weird category for us to do a theme week on.  If you follow Best Editing at the Oscars, it's the category most likely to be the result of coattail nominations-indeed, three of our films this week are also Best Picture nominees.  However, to start out the week, we're going to focus on a film that pulled off a weird feat-it was only nominated for Best Editing.  I don't have the exact stats on this, but this is rare, and it made me curious about Cowboy, and why this largely forgotten Glenn Ford western got this one nomination of all things, when I caught it recently as it was leaving Criterion Streaming.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is short, way shorter than you'd expect (it comes in only at 92 minutes, which for a dramatic 50's Technicolor western, is brief).  It helps that we have only two really important characters: Frank Harris (Lemmon), a hotel employee who is desperately in love with Maria (Kashfi), the daughter of a Mexican cattle baron, and Tom Reece (Ford), a rough-talking cattle driver who wants to buy cattle in Mexico after his stint in the hotel from Maria's father.  However, when Tom loses his money in a poker game, Frank gives up his life savings to join the cowboy on his trip to Mexico, in hopes of impressing Maria's father.

This is all the basis of a pretty routine western-an unlikely bronco goes through the ropes of becoming a true cowboy, and thus earning the respect of his reluctant, seasoned partner.  That's not what Cowboy's going for though.  The reason that this got an editing nomination was because of the chase sequences (on train and on horseback) and the difficulty in filming with so many live cattle, and in that way it's fine & works (it's better than a lot of the 1958 nominees, TBH), but it's not revolutionary.  What's fascinating about Cowboy is how deceptively dark it gets in the way that we see Tom try to break sweet, lovable Frank.

We see this in a scene where, during a bit of rough-housing with a rattlesnake, one of the men on the trip die, and Frank is shocked that there isn't more anger for the death of someone on the crew, particularly from Tom.  I initially took this as being just hyper masculinity of the 1950's, but that's not what the writers are going for-Tom is meant to be too harsh, bordering on cruel, and we see that when Frank realizes that Maria has already been married by the time he gets to Mexico, and he becomes bitter, emulating Tom.  When Tom kills a number of cattle while trying to save Frank's life, Frank chastises him and tells him that the cattle are coming out of his share, and starts to treat the men cruelly.

This is really dark in the movie, much darker than you'd expect, and in half of this situation the casting department did an outstanding job.  Lemmon is such an awe shucks sweetheart that watching him become this monster is hard-to-watch, and a testament to the actor he was becoming.  Glenn Ford, though, isn't good at underlining this aspect of his performance, and I spent most of the time wishing we had a performer like Kirk Douglas or Henry Fonda who might have been better at playing the obvious angles of what the writers were attempting to do with the character.  The film isn't brave enough to punish Frank too harshly for his spiral (in the end, both men come away friends and jovial), but there's a really good movie lurking within Cowboy if the casting department and writers had been willing to indulge it.

OVP: Houseboat (1958)

Film: Houseboat (1958)
Stars: Cary Grant, Sophia Loren, Martha Hyer, Paul Peterson, Charles Herbert, Mimi Gibson, Harry Guardino
Director: Melville Shavelson
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Original Screenplay, Original Song-"Almost in Your Arms"
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

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

We're going to start our look at Sophia Loren's career a bit further along than when the general public might have become aware of Loren.  Loren had become something of a big name in Italy prior to 1958, with her breakout role in 1954's The Gold of Naples, directed by Vittorio de Sica, who had already made major international pictures like Shoeshine, Umberto D, and Bicycle Thieves (which is, for the record, one of my all-time favorite movies), and so headlining one of his films would've been a very big deal.  However, Gold of Naples is harder to find than you'd think considering the pedigree of both the director and his lead actress, and plus we're going to get to a collaboration between de Sica & Loren that was more pivotal to her career later this month.  So instead we're going to start with one of the films Loren made as a result of a widely-publicized contract with Paramount, which brought her to English-speaking cinema, and provided some early hits in her career, specifically today's feature Houseboat.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie focuses on Tom Winters (Grant), who works in DC at the State Department and whose estranged wife has recently died, leaving his children without a mother.  While the children want to stay with their Aunt Carolyn (Hyer), Tom refuses, taking them to his small DC apartment, and realizing pretty quickly that he'll need assistance raising them.  When his youngest son Robert (Herbert) runs away, he encounters a beautiful young woman named Cinzia (Loren), who is the wealthy daughter of a storied conductor.  Cinzia is mistaken for being poor, however, and Tom hires her as his housekeeper & a nanny to the children.  Besotted by the kids and wanting to get away from her oppressive father, she chooses to do so, and we get an opposites-attract relationship between both Tom & Cinzia until, inevitably, they fall in love and she becomes the permanent mother to the three children.

The film is one of many-such pictures that Grant made at the time.  Grant's career never really floundered throughout Classic Hollywood, though I'll argue that the standards of his romantic comedies went from all-time classics like Bringing Up Baby and The Philadelphia Story to merely fun movies that lack the sophistication of the work he was doing at the time with Alfred Hitchcock.  That said, Houseboat is a fun movie.  The script is bouncy (though repetitive), and the original song "Almost in Your Arms" is luscious and beautiful (sung by Sam Cooke of all people).  The film even won a Golden Globe nomination for actor Harry Guardino, a supporting part as the guy who owns the houseboat that the family lives in in the latter half of the picture, and who is lusting after Cinzia the whole film (side bar-I had no idea that Guardino was nominated for this performance, and honestly was stunned that such a routine performance in a stock role came so close to an Oscar nod considering this important precursor).

Loren, of course, is our star, and I don't want to skip out on conversing about her.  She's fun in this part.  Obviously English is her second language, and there's some growing pains between her trying to translate the gifts of Italian cinema (whose focus on realism in the era couldn't be more at-odds with Houseboat's feather-light romantic comedy) into a film like this, particularly against someone like Grant (with whom she'd just ended a real-life affair with on the set of The Pride and the Passion).  We're not going to spend a lot of time on Loren's career in Hollywood, as next week we'll move back to her films in Italy and largely stay there for the remainder of the month, but it's nice to have a counterweight into Loren's American career, particularly since I leave thinking she's just okay, and had I seen Houseboat in 1958, I would have liked her, but been stunned that she'd be less than three years away from winning an Oscar.

OVP: Separate Tables (1958)

Film: Separate Tables (1958)
Stars: Rita Hayworth, Deborah Kerr, David Niven, Burt Lancaster, Wendy Hiller, Gladys Cooper, Rod Taylor
Director: Delbert Mann
Oscar History: 7 nominations/2 wins (Best Picture, Actor-David Niven*, Actress-Deborah Kerr, Supporting Actress-Wendy Hiller*, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Score)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

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

Rita Hayworth's final years in show business were the stuff of nightmares for her personally.  She continued to act well into her forties, a time period many other actresses known principally for their beauty might have disappeared (it helped that Hayworth always looked younger than she actually was onscreen).  Her marriages during the 1950's were terrible even judging on her own crumby scale, with actor Dick Haymes squandering her money on his own debts, and producer James Hill, her final husband, emotionally abusing her, frequently in front of crowds, until she was to the point of tears (Charlton Heston once claimed that he was "ashamed" of not slugging Hill for how he treated Hayworth in front of him).  During this time, though, she made perhaps the last great film of her career, Separate Tables, that put her front-and-center with acting titans like Burt Lancaster & Deborah Kerr.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is an ensemble piece, the type that occasionally comes back en vogue and is favored by certain modern directors (Robert Altman, Paul Thomas Anderson, Garry Marshall).  The entire film takes place over a 24-hour period at a hotel, and the film gains its name from the fact that the residents sit at "separate tables" when they eat meals.  There are two driving catalysts in the film.  The first is a beautiful woman Anne (Hayworth) showing up late in the evening looking for a room, with clear links to John Malcolm (Lancaster) (it turns out they used to be married and are still very much in love, though they also haven't forgiven each other for the past), who is having an affair with the hotel's proprietress Ms. Cooper (Hiller).  The second is that the rather bombastic Major Pollock (Niven) has been involved in a scandal, indicating that he lied about his war record, and more damning, had sexual improprieties with women at a local theater.  Mrs. Railton-Bell (Cooper) insists that they drive Major Pollock out, bullying the other residents into agreeing with her, including her daughter Sibyl (Kerr) who has a fondness for Major Pollock.  The film ends with these stories being tied up.  Despite his offenses, the people want to keep a repentant Major Pollock on at the hotel, Sibyl stands up to her mother, and Anne & John tentatively reunite, with Ms. Cooper left to have the hotel and its guests be her insurance against not being lonely as she creeps into old age.

The film in a lot of ways reminds me of Grand Hotel more than the melodramas of the 1950's (think the Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams plays that dominated cultural discussions during the era).  The film lives-or-dies not just on our investment in the drama of the picture, but in the acting onscreen, and both are marvelous.  The film probably would have gained a wee bit from the original stage production, which gave more background to the Sibyl/Major relationship (this was also in the original script, but producer Burt Lancaster wanted more screen-time for his character, a decision that Delbert Mann claimed "cost Deborah Kerr the Oscar"); it also makes more sense if the Major is homosexual, which is what the original stage script insinuated.

However, these are small trifles to have with a movie this good.  The acting is terrific.  The film was nominated for three acting trophies, and at least the winners richly deserved these citations.  Hiller finds a sort of quiet steel in her character.  She never gets a great big scene where she confesses her loneliness & how she's certain that if she does the "right thing" by Anne, she'll likely lose her own happiness, possibly forever, but it's there in her tense posture and pleading eyes.  She wants John to stay with her, but knows that he'll never forgive her if he doesn't make the decision to leave Anne on his own, and so she must watch as he retreats to a woman whose beauty and advantage are things she's never been given.  Matching her is David Niven, giving arguably the shortest film performance ever to win a lead Oscar (different sites argue whether it's him or Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs).  He plays the Major as a man bereft of emotional connection, someone who has struggled to be taken seriously so he has invented reasons to do so.  His scenes with Kerr are odd (again, there needs more grounding here or for him to be gay to properly define their friendship as platonic or romantic), and Kerr occasionally overplays them, but I don't think I've seen Niven be this good before, and with a drama of all things!

As for Hayworth, she's spellbinding per usual.  Kerr won the Best Actress nod, but if they were going to go with someone from this film for that category it should have been Hayworth who gets the more difficult part and the more humiliating scenes.  She has to basically watch as John shoves her 40-year-old face under a lamp, showing the starts of aging on a woman who has demanded (and received) everything due to her looks for years, and the final scenes, where it's clear she's looking at either forgiveness or suicide as her options, are devastating, as is the ambiguity of what happens next for the couple.  While she'd make a few more pictures, including a Golden Globe-nominated turn in Circus World, and work in television shows like Laugh-In and The Carol Burnett Show, this was the last important film of her career, and once again, she went home empty-handed from the Academy.  By the 1970's, her alcoholism and years of emotional abuse were masking what would ultimately kill her: Alzheimer's Disease, of which she would die at the age of 68 in 1987.

Next month we will take a look at a woman who rivaled Hayworth's stardom for almost the entire run of both of their careers, and whose personal life & seismic beauty demanded far more headlines than her films ever did, but who (unlike Hayworth) the Oscars found room for just once...in what would lead to one of the most notorious chapters in the Academy's history.  Stay tuned to find out to whom I'm referring on Friday as we kick off another month of Saturdays with the Stars.

OVP: South Pacific (1958)

Film: South Pacific (1958)
Stars: Rosanno Brazzi, Mitzi Gaynor, John Kerr, Ray Walston, Juanita Hall
Director: Joshua Logan
Oscar History: 3 nominations/1 win (Best Sound*, Scoring, Cinematography)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Mitzi Gaynor-click here to learn more about Ms. Gaynor (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

I am frequently asked (oftentimes by myself while standing in front of a mirror) "what is the most high-profile classic American film that you've never seen?"  This year, thanks to "Saturdays with the Stars," I have officially removed two of my most common answers: Strangers on a Train, which we covered in our month devoted to Ruth Roman, and for our final episode of this season, South Pacific (I genuinely don't know what my answer to this question is now, as I saw Dracula last year and I'm running out of obvious classics that I'm missing...maybe something more modern like Die Hard?).  It's hard to underscore what a big deal South Pacific was in its era.  It was the top-grossing movie of 1958 (nearly double the next biggest competitor, Auntie Mame), and had run on Broadway for years before finally making it to the big-screen.  It's also impossible to underscore how much this meant for Mitzi Gaynor's career.  While she had been headlining films for nearly a decade by the time South Pacific came out, this was undoubtedly her "big break," the movie that might catapult her from leading woman to "star of the decade" sort of status.  Alas, for Gaynor, this was to be the peak, not the start of a new plateau, for her career though at least she has one immortal film on her resumé (more than most can claim).

(Spoilers Ahead) For those unfamiliar (I had seen a stage production of the movie), South Pacific centers on a military base in World War II near Tonga, and is based on the novel Tale of the South Pacific by James Michener.  The film is more of an ensemble than you'd expect from a musical, particularly a Rodgers & Hammerstein production (where side characters are there to bemuse, not to steal focus), but the main lovers are Nellie Forbush (Gaynor), a young nurse stationed there from Arkansas , and Emile (Brazzi), a Frenchman who owns a plantation in the region and once killed a man.  The film, unusually for a romance, starts in the middle of their affair, with them already in love (for a nearly three-hour movie it's weirdly plot-heavy, so this is for the best), describing how they met through "Some Enchanted Evening."  While they are falling in love, and deciding if they should spend their lives together on this remote island so far from Nellie's home, we also meet Lieutenant Joe Cable (Kerr), whom the enigmatic Bloody Mary (Hall) has designs on, and lures him, along with a randy, bumbling soldier Luther Bills (Walston) in hopes of Joe marrying her beautiful daughter, a young Polynesian woman named Liat (France Nuyen).  Racism rears its ugly head in the back half of the film as Joe refuses to marry Liat despite being in love with her, and Nellie does the same to Emile when she realizes that he has mixed-race children from a previous relationship with a Polynesian girl.  Emile then volunteers for a risky mission with Joe & Luther, during which Joe is killed, and eventually escapes, just in time for Nellie to have realized the err of her bigotry, and decide to live with Emile and help him raise his children.

Like I said, a lot of plot.  South Pacific is generally considered at once one of the best scores in the Rodgers & Hammerstein collective, and one of the most politically-charged books in their canon...and generally considered to be the most polarizing of all of their screen adaptations (though for my money Carousel is the weakest of the bunch).  The film is shocking in how progressive it is about race, particularly for a film that starts out with Juanita Hall, a biracial woman who is half-black but not Asian, in yellowface in the opening number.  The movie's best aspect to its plot is having blonde-haired Nellie, the sort of heroine we expect from these movies (pretty, strong-but-feminine, and of course white), try to explain her bigotry about her husband having had a mixed race relationship, but failing to do so.  Almost any other script of this era would have had Nellie be understanding from the start or had her be a bit crueler to have us expect this from her, but that's not how South Pacific rolls.  Instead, Nellie is shown to be the ugly one when she has to break up with Emile, though she comes to her senses later, the same as Joe is for denying his love for Liat.  In a number called "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught" (which southern legislatures tried to get banned from touring productions of the musical in the 1950's), Joe sings about how racism isn't something you're born with, but instead you learn to hate people because of whom your family hates.  It's a powerful number, and a powerful message inside a film that normally wouldn't have such a meaning.

That said, South Pacific is not my favorite Rodgers & Hammerstein movie.  While it feels less jarring now than it did in 1958 thanks to the likes of Steven Soderbergh & Clint Eastwood, the color lenses during the musical numbers add little to the film other than to wash out the stars.  It sounds like director Joshua Logan was hoping to soften the tropical scenes to make them seem more believable (despite filming in the Pacific), but it comes across as hokey.  In the context of the film, it feels like the movie is boxing in the most memorable moments rather than letting them wash over the audience.  The film also struggles in going from stage-to-screen.  For starters, the lip-syncing is jarring (particularly John Kerr's voice is absurd), as the powerful voices don't match the actors (only Gaynor & Walston of the main singers in the film are doing their own vocal work).  Additionally, the dance numbers aren't impressive at all.  The opening scene, where all of the sailors are half-dressed (literally one man has the name "Stewpot" written across his white crop top shirt), looks like a gay porn.  I'm not knocking this motif (for realz), but it's the biggest dance number in the whole movie & they barely move.  Having someone like Gaynor, who could hoof better than pretty much any woman in pictures at the time, starring in an epic musical and not having her do a major number is absurd.

The casting is also a bit questionable.  Brazzi is handsome and debonair, but he does not have chemistry with Gaynor.  Gaynor is probably the right choice for this film (I've heard criticisms of her being miscast), but I wish the film had grounded her casual racism a bit more before the big climactic scene (another case of not adapting the picture to the big-screen).  Gaynor, as we saw a couple of weeks ago with The Joker is Wild, was capable of big dramatic work, but it's hard to elevate a character like Nellie without a bit more nuance, and the script isn't giving us that & Gaynor isn't able to do this in her numbers, which are the fluffiest of the movie.  John Kerr is sexy AF as Joe (seriously-I audibly catcalled at the screen at one point), but he suffers a similar fate-probably the right casting, but the staging & transition to film doesn't work for this character.  Juanita Hall's work is so over-the-top that I don't really know how to judge her performance, only to say that the "Bali Ha'i" number is far more alluring on stage than it is here, but still impressive (it might be one of those numbers that's impossible to ruin).

The film won three Academy Award nominations in 1958.  It's surely a result of the film's polarizing effect that it didn't compete for Best Picture despite it being the highest-grossing film of the year; generally a film that looks and acts like South Pacific would have competed in the Best Picture & Actress categories based solely on that box office.  The Cinematography nomination is the one I'll quarrel with the most-the South Pacific looks great (even though it sure looks like they're filming in Hawaii, rather than Tonga), but the color filters are off-putting and add little to the picture, so I wouldn't have included this as a nomination.  The sound makes sense (everyone sounds great, particularly Giorgio Tozzi in "Some Enchanted Evening,"), but the casting department hurts this argument by having Brazzi & Kerr lip-syncing voices that they simply cannot mirror in their spoken performances.  The most-earned nomination is Scoring, which the film lost to Gigi (a picture that dominated the Oscars, though like South Pacific it didn't get its leading lady into contention), but as I stated above-the stage-to-screen translation doesn't work.  All-in-all, South Pacific has some truly glorious moments, but it's more a fascinating failure than it is an epic masterwork, or a celebrated classic like The Sound of Music.  I'm going with 3-stars as I liked it, but not higher as I understand its flaws.

The movie didn't score Mitzi Gaynor an Oscar nomination, instead only giving her a Golden Globe citation.  One wonders if an Oscar citation might have enticed her to stay in Hollywood a few years longer.  She only made three more movies after South Pacific, with her final farewell to Hollywood coming in 1963's For Love or Money with Kirk Douglas.  Gaynor would instead migrate to Vegas, becoming a genuine star in the nightclub circuit for years, achieving levels of fame there that she never captured on the screen.  Career highlights would include getting top-billing over The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show and receiving the longest standing ovation in Oscar history for her bubbly performance of "Georgy Girl" at the 1966 Oscars.  Decades later, she's still entertaining, and even has an active Twitter account where she shares memories of Hollywood's Golden Age.  We'll start our second season of "Saturdays with the Stars" on January 1st, but not before I give you one last little treat from this season on Monday.

OVP: Bell, Book, and Candle (1958)

Film: Bell, Book, and Candle (1958)
Stars: James Stewart, Kim Novak, Jack Lemmon, Ernie Kovacs, Hermione Gingold, Elsa Lanchester
Director: Richard Quine
Oscar History: 2 nomination (Best Art Direction, Costume Design)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

It's hard to watch a film like Bell, Book, and Candle without thinking about the pop cultural landmarks that would bookend the film: Vertigo and Bewitched.  The film, which stars Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart, has to elicit memories of the former simply by virtue of borrowing its two stars, while the film clearly was an inspiration to Bewitched creator Sol Saks, who borrowed this particular picture's witch marries a mortal and then has her trying to live a normal life while surrounded by a bevy of crazy relatives.  Unfortunately for all of us, Bell, Book, and Candle never really achieves the genius of Vertigo nor the constant laughs that came from Bewitched, and as a result we end up with a middling movie surrounded by clearly a great concept.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows Shep Henderson (Stewart), a hapless man who lives (unknowingly) next door to two witches, Gillian (Novak) and her Aunt Queenie (Lanchester).  Gillian finds out that Shep is dating her old college rival, and as a result she casts a love spell on Shep, but after a while Gillian herself falls in love with him, but after Shep learns of her trickery he wants nothing to do with her.  Meanwhile, we have Gillian's brother Nicky (Lemmon, back when he was still doing relatively minor roles at the beginning of his career) trying to make a buck with a mortal but self-proclaimed witch expert Sidney (Kovacs).  As the film progresses, considering it's a romantic comedy, Shep and Gillian eventually fall in love, even though this means that she loses all of her powers.

The film's faults are pretty numerous, but I will counter that the supporting cast tries their best.  It's easy to see why the likes of Aunt Clara, Endora, and Uncle Arthur from Bewitched all came about as a result of such a cast, as you can't really go wrong with Jack Lemmon, Ernie Kovacs, and Hermione Gingold, who is at her loudest and most elaborate in the very broad role as Bianca de Pass, a powerful and groovy witch.  The film's best moments involve these supporting players, and you can see why Lemmon became a proper matinee idol soon after movies like Bell, Book, and Candle, as he was stealing the movies away from the likes of Jimmy Stewart.

The problem here, though, is that the script is too dry when it comes to the leads, and neither of them are particularly well-suited to saving it.  It was during this time that Stewart would start to be cast for roles that were unsuitable for his age (the wonderful Man Who Shot Liberty Valance would be another one, but there Stewart found a way to cope), and in fact he never would have the role of a solely romantic lead after this film as he felt he was too old for the part.  While I question this (I would have still bought him falling in love with someone like Greer Garson or Kate Hepburn), it does feel like him stepping once again into the cliche of a man who hasn't started life at fifty is a bit of a stretch.  It also hurts that Stewart has pretty much zilch chemistry with Novak, and they feel like such polar opposites it's impossible not to snicker at the idea that she'd fall for him.  This works in Vertigo because of the angles their characters are playing and the madness of Scottie Ferguson, but the reality is that under normal circumstances these two just don't match.

The film received a pair of Oscar nominations, and it's easy to see why one of them happened.  The movie's Art Direction citation seems appropriate as it relies heavily upon witches' decor and is meticulous in trying to call out the various personalities of the apartments.  I felt a bit like they were relying too heavily on cliches, especially in the apartments (Gillian's shop makes sense), but the movie at least has an attention to detail, even if the witch-y touches feel a tad uninspired.  The costume design is considerably better, in my opinion, though I'm shocked Oscar noticed it since it's relatively subtle.  Novak wears a series of black outfits, of course, giving into the witch-angle once more, but here it's such a glamorous variety of black dresses, hoods, and one particularly fetching backless gown (that would still feel fresh and jaw-dropping on a red carpet today) that you can see why Novak become such a star in terms of fashion after movies like this and Vertigo.

Those are my thoughts on this disappointing, but clearly intriguing movie.  What are yours?  Do you agree that the leads feel mismatched, or are you still pining for more pairings since it elicits memories of Vertigo?  Who is your favorite of the supporting cast members here?  And furthermore, who are your favorites on Bewitched?  Share your thoughts in the comments!