OVP: Babes in Toyland (1961)

Film: Babes in Toyland (1961)

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

Director: Jack Donahue

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

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

Underworld USA (1961)

Film: Underworld USA (1961)

Stars: Cliff Robertson, Dolores Dorn, Beatrice Kay, Paul Dubov

Director: Samuel Fuller

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 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.

American noir post-Touch of Evil generally struggled to find something new to say.  The genre had been going for two decades at that point with relatively little changes to the formula other than increasingly obvious sex & violence, and after Welles basically perfected the genre in 1958, there wasn't a lot more to say until the run of 1970's when a post-Watergate America was briefly more intrigued by the prospect of movies like Chinatown and Night Moves (where no one trusted anyone).  But noir, now in the form of a type of early neo-noir, existed in the 1960's even if it wasn't a very big deal, and one of the films from that era that generally gets tagged onto the "best of" lists of the genre is Underworld USA starring Cliff Robertson & Dolores Dorn.  We're going to kick off the four "neo-noir" films we will do to finish up June with this picture, one that borrows more from the movies of the 1930's than the 1940's to get through its subject.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is a tale of revenge, with Tolly Devlin witnessing his father's brutal murder as a child, and after ending up in prison (and now an adult, played by Robertson) he comes across one of the men who killed his father, gets the names of the other three men, and kills him (to be fair, he was about to die anyway so at least at this point there's a redemption arc remaining even if they don't take it).  He finds out they are all high-level gangsters, and so he works his way into their organization, becoming an informant for the police as well as romancing (though not treating very well) a money-runner named Cuddles (Dorn).  He kills the men responsible for his father's death, but in the meantime sells his soul to the mob, and in order to save Cuddles' life, ends up sacrificing his own.

The movie, as I mentioned, is much more akin to the 1930's than the 1940's.  While there are elements of noir here (namely there's a beautiful blonde woman named Cuddles, which Raymond Chandler himself would've been proud of creating), it's far closer to the gangster films of the early 1930's, with lots of disposable characters and women playing a largely cursory role in the plot (whereas in traditional noir, women are a key focus, which is why I like it).  Gangster films can be good, but they aren't my jam, especially pre-Godfather, and it shows here in the way that there's not enough personality to the side men in Robertson's life.

Overall, I wasn't a fan of this picture.  This was probably somewhat groundbreaking for giving a realistic depiction of how hard it was to go against the mob (in 1961, that would've still been a big deal), with the police hapless to help people like Tolly & Cuddles when they provided evidence.  But the acting is a bit wooden save for Beatrice Kay, doing her best Thelma Ritter impression as Tolly's mother-figure, and while I liked the bleakness of the film (that's part of what makes noir so mesmerizing), it didn't give us enough to actually care about Tolly's journey into hell.

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, Elevator to the Gallows, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Murder by Contract, Night and the City, Odds Against Tomorrow, 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

The Innocents (1961)

Film: The Innocents (1961)

Stars: Deborah Kerr, Michael Redgrave, Peter Wyngarde, Megs Jenkins, Martin Stephens, Pamela Franklin

Director: Jack Clayton

Oscar History: Though it was cited for Best Picture at the BAFTA Awards and starred the still-AMPAS friendly Kerr, Oscar didn't give The Innocents any nominations in 1961.

Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 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 going to shift gears for our final film of the month (and a Happy Halloween to all as we hit this threshold!) away from Universal Studios and even monster movies & instead watch a supernatural thriller from Fox.  Unlike most of the movies from this month, which featured either prominent figures from B-movies (Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney, Jr.) or a litany of unknown contract players, The Innocents stars a true, Grade-A movie star.  In 1961, Deborah Kerr was just getting off of the peak years of her fame, having enjoyed six Oscar nominations (though no wins), and her most iconic role as Anna in The King & I.  As a result, The Innocents, from Oscar-nominee Jack Clayton (fresh off of his success on Room at the Top) has a level of prestige not found on most of the movies we've watched this month.  It also feels like it occupies an unusual space between out-and-out classic (it has a Criterion edition, after all), and deep cut (this is the sort of film certain types of cinephiles know about, but there's a reason I hadn't seen it before-it's not a movie that's regularly name-checked).  I was intrigued by the rapturous reviews I found for it from people I follow on Letterboxd, and so thought it would be the perfect finish to Season 3 of our Halloween Horrors series on the blog.

(Spoilers Ahead-And I mean it!) The movie starts with Miss Giddens (Kerr) interviewing with a man simply known as "the Uncle" (Redgrave) about a job as a governess.  Giddens is inexperienced, but the Uncle has only one request for babysitting his niece Flora (Franklin) and nephew Miles (Stephens)-that she doesn't disturb him about any issues involving the children, whom he neglects & cares little for.  When she gets there, she finds out from Mrs. Grose (Jenkins), the housekeeper, that the previous governess Miss Jessel died, as did a man who worked there named Peter Quint (Wyngarde).  Miss Giddens begins seeing the ghosts of Jessel & Quint, and becomes obsessed with the idea that they are influencing the children.  Miss Giddens is certain that Quint was the reason, from beyond the grave, that Miles was expelled from school, and becomes determined to prove that Quint & Jessel, who were lovers in life, have possessed the children from beyond the grave to continue their relationship.  Things come to a head when Miss Giddens, clearly driven a bit mad by the idea, sends away everyone except for Miles, and confronts him about the expulsion.  Miles confesses that Quint taught him the insults & jokes that he played to get expelled, but when he says his name (and Quint's ghost seems to appear), it does the opposite effect of what Miss Giddens assumed it would do-it doesn't free Miles, but instead kills him.  The film ends with a stunned, now driven-mad Miss Giddens cradling a dead Miles as the credits roll.

The film is shocking in a variety of ways, but perhaps the most pressing is that it's genuinely terrifying.  No, there isn't a great deal of gore, but the psychological horror here that we normally don't attribute to horror films from before say, Night of the Living Dead or The Exorcist is on full-display, and it is terrifying as we continue forward.  It helps that we get little reprieve from the house before Miss Giddens gets there, the claustrophobia & paranoia suffocating her, but also making it difficult for the audience to sort out if this is a true ghost story or just a repressed woman becoming obsessed with the perceived sins of two dead lovers.  The movie had me clawing at my seat in the final moments, and hats off to a wordless Peter Wyngarde for haunting my nightmare for the next few weeks.

It's also shocking because it's gorgeous.  The cinematography, done by the legendary Freddie Francis (who would win Oscars for Sons and Lovers and Glory), is just staggeringly good.  We see a lot of extended shots of the camera moving & following a walking Miss Giddens, to the point where it almost feels like she's running circles by the end of the movie, and the night sequences are moody & filled with fiendish ambience.  Honestly-Francis not getting an Oscar nomination for this work is a criminal act, as is them skipping out on the creepy score from Georges Auric, who compliments it with a chilling original song "O Willow Waly" which has later been appropriated for other trailers (and was a hit for the Kingston Trio), and you know is getting on my "My Ballot" shortlist.

The performances are all excellent as well.  Franklin & Stephens are appropriately creepy as the two children, never giving a hint as to what the truth is (we leave the film with enough ambiguity about what happened as to not know if they were possessed or if this was all within Miss Giddens' imagination), which is a tricky act for a pair of young performers to pull off.  Megs Jenkins is also quite strong as Mrs. Grose, a woman so desperate for friendship she can't stop Miss Giddens' assumptions about the children until it's too late (and also, we never entirely know what she believes or what she chooses to hope isn't true...it's a good bit of character work).  Best-of-all, though, is Deborah Kerr.  I have a couple of gaps in my film-watching with her, admittedly, but I've never seen her be this good before & didn't know she was capable of playing this kind of controlled, difficult part.  She plays Miss Giddens first as super sweet, but there's something sinister as the film goes, when she becomes more reckless, determined at any cost to prove her assertions.  It's the sort of horror work that the Academy regularly skips out on, but I wish they'd have made an exception for someone they had nominated for far less in previous years.

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, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, The Blob, The Masque of the Red Death

OVP: The Children's Hour (1961)

Film: The Children's Hour (1961)

Stars: Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine, James Garner, Miriam Hopkins, Fay Bainter, Karen Balkin, Veronica Cartwright

Director: William Wyler

Oscar History: 5 nominations (Best Supporting Actress-Fay Bainter, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume Design, Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Shirley MacLaine-click here to learn more about Ms. MacLaine (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

I once saw an interview with Shirley MacLaine (a recent one, so late in her career) where she basically had never experienced what it was like not to be the "headliner" on a set.  While MacLaine has taken on supporting roles, this is kind of right-she's always been a name on the billboards, even after The Trouble with Harry wasn't a huge success.  This was certainly accurate between 1955 & 1961, where we pick up our conversation with MacLaine as she accelerated her fame playing in a number of popular films.  She had leads in Around the World in 80 Days, Some Came Running, and The Apartment, all of which were moneymakers that gained significant Oscar glory (including two nods for MacLaine), and she basically became the sole female member of the Rat Pack (give or take Angie Dickinson) starring in Ocean's Eleven.  I, as I mentioned previously, am a Shirley MacLaine super-fan, though, so I've seen all of these movies & we can't use movies for this series I haven't already seen.  Instead, we're going to go to another major movie, one that was less financially successful but has grown in stature in the years since due to its groundbreaking subject matter, made at the tale end of the Studio System, The Children's Hour.

(Spoilers Ahead) Longtime friends Martha (MacLaine) and Karen (Hepburn) run an all-girls boarding school together.  Martha is excited that the school is finally starting to see a profit, but Karen is considering giving up the school to marry her longtime beau Joe (Garner).  When a spoiled young girl named Mary (Balkin), is punished, she decides to twist an offhand comment by Martha's aunt Lily (Hopkins) about both teachers being lesbians (Mary not entirely understanding what that means), to get out of the school when she tells her oblivious grandmother Amelia Tilford (Bainter) what happened.  Mrs. Tilford tells everyone about this alleged homosexuality, and soon every parent has taken their daughter out of the school, leaving the women destitute, and initially unaware as to why.  When they confront Mrs. Tilford, she repeats what Mary said, and the women (knowing that it's false), sue for libel.  But Mary blackmails a fellow classmate Rosalie (Cartwright) into vouching for her, and they lose the case, becoming national pariahs.  Afterward, confronted by Joe's doubts about their relationship, Karen leaves him, wanting him to have a different life than with her.  Rosalie eventually confesses to the lie, and Mrs. Tilford tries to apologize, but it's too late.  At this point, Martha has confessed her secret shame that she is, in fact, a lesbian & in love with Karen.  Knowing that there's no way for them to be together, and that her life (in her mind) will never be put back together, Martha hangs herself, leaving Karen to try & live in a world without her.

The movie is powerful, and it's quite shocking how they are able to keep much of the homosexual references in the film.  While there are some things that are said off-hand or off-screen (Mary's accusation is whispered so the audience can't hear it, the whole court case is just mentioned but not viewed), you do understand not only what the underlying issue is (that these women are accused of being lovers), but it's said out loud.  In 1961, this was pretty groundbreaking (consider that Basil Dearden's Victim, which was the first English-language film to use the word "homosexual" hadn't even been released yet in the United States when this movie came out), and the film feels shockingly progressive in the way the women treat not only each other but how the actresses handle playing women whose sexuality is either queer or strong ally.

This is in part driven by a great cast.  Bainter is the Oscar nominee of the bunch, and she acts her character perfectly.  She plays her character not as someone who aspires to be a villain, but as someone who could never think of herself as one, and that isn't her intention.  She plays her early scenes politely, and has correct doubt about the veracity of Mary's claims before finally succumbing to the tawdry gossip.  This makes her character more interesting, and more frustrating-she's not someone who intended to destroy two people's lives (like Mary is, and oh is Balkin good at making you hate her), but instead someone who did it without considering that's what she was doing.

But the rest of the cast deserved to be in the Oscar conversation.  Garner gets a tough role, this paragon of handsome masculinity, who is thrown asunder that there might be this woman (whom he loves) who prefers another woman to him.  I didn't love his eventual confession that he had doubts (mostly because it felt like an easy ploy to get rid of him in the script), but he does play those doubts well.  Hopkins is superb as a careless, cruel side character who sees the world only from her point-of-view-this is the definition of a strong supporting performance, someone who otherwise would've faded into the background but here she mesmerizes because she lets us see the ugliness to apathy, how she could've saved her niece but through prejudice & self-preservation simply couldn't bring herself to do so.

And our leads are grand.  I think I prefer MacLaine slightly here, if only for her final moments where she has to confess a love she's hidden her whole life, but both are good.  There's an authentic understanding to their friendship (you get the feeling that Martha's confession is not news to Karen, even if she has a modicum of surprise to it), one that occasionally happens when a straight person knows that the gay person in their life might be in (romantic) love with them, but where they love the person too much to ever acknowledge it for risk of the friendship.  I thought both women nailed the parts, and am shocked that Oscar didn't choose to cite at least one of them for these roles (Hepburn was Holly Golightly that year, so that wasn't going to be bested, but MacLaine should've been in the running for a nomination in 1961).

The remaining Oscar nominations are not quite as deserving as Bainter's, though they aren't without mention.  The sound is fine, moody & clear, but not all that memorable.  The cinematography is much more striking; the use of closeups is worth mentioning (think of the startled look on Mary's face when the jig is up), and I thought it set a somber tone, particularly in the outdoors sequences.  The same could be said for the art direction-the movie does a good job of making the school feel increasingly claustrophobic (also a trick of the cinematographer).  We initially think of the school as large, but as the movie continues & it becomes the only home of the teachers, we begin to understand how tiny it is, seeing how little privacy these women are afforded, first from the students & now from the world.  The only nomination I feel like was a bit of a miss was costume-these are fine, but there's nothing out-of-the-ordinary that's being done here, and this feels a bit like one of those "tail end" of the Black & White categories (several Oscar categories, including costume, were separated between Color and Black & White until the mid-1960's), where they were trying to find prestige black-and-white films in a world dominated by color ones.

OVP: Claudelle Inglish (1961)

Film: Claudelle Inglish (1961)

Stars: Diane McBain, Arthur Kennedy, Will Hutchins, Constance Ford, Claude Akins, Chad Everett

Director: Gordon Douglas

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Costume Design)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

In the early 1960's, film was starting a pretty steady migration from black-and-white & color being used interchangeably to the latter being predominant; by the end of the decade, black-and-white films would be used sparingly, to the point where they'd be a novelty for the most part in the 1970's.  This resulted in some oddities in the Oscar categories, like Costume Design, which distinguished between black-and-white and color for their nominations until 1966.  One of these oddities was Claudelle Inglish, a largely forgotten early 1960's melodrama about sexuality in a small town that got a nomination for costume design.  This was a recent random "cleaning out my DVR" screening, and will be today's film on the blog.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie focuses on Claudelle Inglish (McBain), a lovely young teenage girl who is the daughter of a poor sharecropper Clyde (Kennedy) and his miserable wife Jessie (Ford).  Claudelle wants to escape the horrendous marriage between Clyde & Jessie, the latter of whom has been resentful for years that Clyde never provided more money for their family.  Claudelle seems to want to repeat her mother's mistake when Linn (Everett), a handsome local boy, begins courting her, but there's a catch.  Linn is drafted into the army, and Claudelle, trying to secure his affections, sleeps with him before he goes off.  While he doesn't die in the army, he does marry another girl, making Claudelle heartbroken.  Claudelle decides (inexplicably) that the best revenge against Linn is to become a "bad girl" wearing makeup & provocative dresses while sleeping with all of the local boys if they buy her presents.  Jessie & Clyde don't know what to do with their suddenly sexually-awakened daughter, but she draws the attention of Clyde's boss ST Crawford (Akins) a man twice Claudelle's age who tries to court her, but she rebuffs him, despite her mother's insistence that she should seek out a wealthy man.  The film ends with Claudelle learning the error of her ways too late, after two of her beaus fight, with one killing the other, and Claudelle being murdered by the father of the slain boy...whom she had also slept with just the day before for a free dress.

Claudelle Inglish is not a good movie, even if it's a pretty titillating one.  McBain inhabits Claudelle with a clear movie star beauty (you can see why every guy in town is taken with her), but she's rarely more than pretty in the lead role, and she doesn't entirely know how to understand Claudelle & what's happening to her.  It doesn't help that she's saddled with a sanctimonious script that assumes that the only joy that Claudelle could get out of sex is getting pretty things from boys & trying to scorn Linn (who has no idea what is happening to Claudelle) rather than, you know, enjoying sex.  It's not that this isn't realistic (being a bit sexually adventurous after a breakup is something many have experienced), but we leave having very little understanding of Claudelle & the cruelty she inflicts as the film goes by, and they don't entirely know how to explain why she'll sleep with, say, the shopkeeper whom she has little interest in sexually for a new dress but not ST Crawford.  This lack of consistency is rough, and about the only person who feels like they're genuinely interesting is her mother Jessie, who repeatedly doesn't understand why her daughter won't use her beauty to trap wealth (rather than revenge), which is what she wishes she could do with it.

The film's Oscar nomination is not really earned, even if it's not a bad nomination.  Claudelle's wardrobe shifts dramatically as the film progresses, specifically a gorgeous white trousseau that initially is meant to be a wedding dress but eventually becomes a marker of both Claudelle and Jessie's adultery, as they wear it to entice men.  The rest of the costumes never stack up to this simple, chic gown, and so this nomination is mostly predicated on how drawn you are to this specific garment, which is great, but...one dress shouldn't warrant an Oscar citation.

OVP: The Mark (1961)

Film: The Mark (1961)

Stars: Stuart Whitman, Rod Steiger, Maria Schell, Brenda de Banzie

Director: Guy Green

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Actor-Stuart Whitman)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Film, even period movies or fantasy pictures, is always a reflection of the era that it came from.  Production styles, specific actors, technological limitations...all of these things make up a movie & its inner-world.  But "issue films" are obviously more reflective not just of their time, but also of Hollywood attempting to understand a specific issue.  This occasionally creates really magical cinema.  A picture like Intruder in the Dust, for example, takes a pointed look at racism & how it can infect our minds for reasons we don't really understand.  And then there's a film like The Mark, whose handling of a taboo subject instead wanders into dicey sexual politics that make you look at it from a modern lens with skeptical eyes.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Jim (Whitman), a man who has recently been released from prison after essentially abducting a young girl with intent to rape her.  He spends much of the film trying to reintegrate into society, partially through the help of his therapist Dr. McNally (Steiger), and part of this goes well.  He gets a decent job, and even starts romancing a woman named Ruth (Schell), but after a different child is abducted and Jim is questioned by the police (Jim is innocent & has an alibi), a tabloid reporter exposes Jim's previous conviction, upending his life with Ruth (who has a young daughter) and causing him to lose his job.  The film ends with Jim & Ruth essentially trying to work things out, though Ruth is still unsure how she will handle the situation of trusting Jim with her daughter, also a key figure in her life.

The film tries to tackle its subject head-on, focusing more on our perceptions on rehabilitation, and if we think a criminal can be rehabilitated.  However, since Jim is essentially convicted of attempting the worst crime imaginable, it tests even the most ardent of believers in reform in assuming that he can get better.  It's difficult to watch the film mostly because it over-simplifies Jim's crime (and the psychological aspects of it) by assuming that Jim is essentially just an ordinary guy who made a mistake, but it's not like he stood up a bank or something (his crime would require a more serious psychological disturbance), and the film doesn't really handle that well.  The movie doesn't feel prepared in the early 1960's to tackle the reality of the heinousness of Jim's crime, and as a result it feels disjointed, trying to drown the viewer in psychobabble rather than admit that Jim's reform is unlikely (and even if it's possible, it's not worth the risk to Ruth's daughter to have him be a part of her life during that reform).

Whitman won an Oscar nomination for The Mark, the only one of his career, for his work as Jim, but while I understand why, it's not earned.  Whitman's performance is very stoic, almost monolithic, in trying to make Jim seem like as ordinary of a man as possible (though a man tortured by his past).  Nominating an actor for playing a disturbed person & playing them as seriously and sympathetically as possible isn't new (this is something the Academy regularly awards), but it doesn't make the acting good.  There's little nuance and no personality in the work that Whitman is doing, and as a result his Jim remains a two-dimensional character in a film that desperately wants him to be more fully-fleshed.  Whitman's performance is, in fact, part of the reason The Mark can't lift off-so afraid the film is of giving Whitman more complexity that it sort of just exists.

OVP: Flower Drum Song (1961)

Film: Flower Drum Song (1961)
Stars: Nancy Kwan, James Shigeta, Miyoshi Umeki, Benson Fong, Jack Soo, Juanita Hall, Reiko Sato
Director: Henry Koster
Oscar History: 5 nominations (Best Cinematography, Art Direction, Costume Design, Sound, Scoring)
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 Nancy Kwan-click here to learn more about Ms. Kwan (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Most actors in Nancy Kwan's position would have scrambled to know how to follow a film like The World of Suzie Wong.  A 21-year-old who made a massive hit that suddenly made her a household name would always struggle in such a situation, but Kwan had become a star in a Hollywood where Natalie Wood or Debbie Reynolds were the big names on marquees; there weren't a lot of roles for an Asian-American actress in Hollywood without Hollywood trying color blind casting, which even today they're not great at, and in 1961 was almost non-existent.  Luckily for Kwan, there was in fact a film that would be perfect for her that went into production shortly after Suzie Wong, the big-screen adaptation of the hit Broadway musical Flower Drum Song, the latest from Rodgers & Hammerstein.  Considering her quick celebrity at the time, Kwan was hired almost immediately after Suzie Wong was released in the part of Linda, thus for the time-being avoiding what we'd seen from actresses of color like Lena Horne or Dorothy Dandridge who couldn't get parts immediately after their breakouts, and instead being treated like most actors after they had a breakout hit-that is, get them in something else quickly to cash in on the new name.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is a musical love square of sorts, and takes place in San Francisco.  The first player in the square is Mei Li (Umeki), a mild-mannered girl from Hong Kong who has stowed away & is coming to marry Sammy Fong (Soo), a rambunctious nightclub owner who is contracted to marry her despite them having little in common.  This is a problem because Sammy is in love with Linda (Kwan), a dancer in his club who is mad he hasn't proposed, and therefore starts pursuing Wang Ta (Shigeta), the son of a wealthy traditional father (Fong) who wants his son to marry someone like Mei Li...and eventually when it's clear that Sammy is trying to go back on the contract, he does just that, arranging for their wedding.  The film thus has about two hours of back-and-forth, including a weird interlude with a fifth wheel, Helen (Sato), that's never really resolved (side note-this is the biggest issue with the film's plot that we never understand what happens to her, and I figured out why when I realized that the book has Helen kill herself, which would've been too much of a bummer in a Rodgers & Hammerstein musical...but why not just cut her entirely?), with eventually Mei Li & Wang Ta together and Sammy & Linda getting married in a double wedding.

As you might expect, the film is a teensy bit dated, but not as much as you'd think.  The most egregious sin in the film would be that Juanita Hall as Madame Liang is in yellowface, though she's the only actor that is doing so (is it weird to anyone else that Hall's two most famous film roles have her playing an Asian-American actress, her other being Bloody Mary in South Pacific, despite her being African-American in real life?), but otherwise the film takes more care than you'd expect to not be derogatory about Asian-Americans, or to indulge in too many stereotypes.  Flower Drum Song was the first major American film to feature a predominantly Asian cast, and it was unfortunately not the harbinger of more (really only The Joy Luck Club in 1993 or Crazy Rich Asians in 2018 could boast a similar cache), so it was refreshing that I didn't have to cringe too much during this film because of dated portrayals

By far my favorite performance in the movie was Kwan's.  She gets the best role, even if Umeki is the more traditional heroine part (and despite "Suzie Wong" getting the lead, Umeki gets more substantial screen-time).  Her ballet roots show off in her dance numbers, she's fun & flirty in the part, giving the film (which drags at times from trying to underline to a predominantly white audience specific aspects of Asian-American culture) a sense of bounce & light.  She also gets the movie's best musical number, the only song from the film that you'd know (this is one of the few Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals with a little-known score): "I Enjoy Being a Girl."

The film was not the hit that Suzie Wong was.  You'll read some accounts of the film being a flop, which doesn't appear to be the case (it seems to have roughly broken even), but it certainly wasn't the gargantuan success that more recent Rodgers & Hammerstein big-screen adaptations The King & I and South Pacific had been.  Critics also were mixed on the film, particularly wondering why it was so decadent, but as far as Kwan's career it still felt like a smart move.  We'll get to what happened next in her stardom throughout October, but between Suzie Wong and Flower Drum Song, her career looked in as good as shape as any Asian-American star had ever seen in 1961.

The film won five Academy Award nominations (losing all of them to West Side Story).  I do tend to agree with some of the critics when it came to the aesthetic choices in the film.  While some of the art direction is gorgeous (I love the sort of wavy, watery set during Helen's ballet sequence), there are other sequences that feel gaudy and out-of-place (what was hell with the beat poetry scene that lasts for five seconds?).  Occasionally the art direction has a sense that the budget was too large, the same with the costumes.  The best look might have been Kwan's mini-towel dress during "I Enjoy Being a Girl" since it's such a fresh look, but during other sequences (like her fan dance number), it borders into tacky.  The musical numbers are in a similar situation-"I Enjoy Being a Girl" and "Chop Suey" are both super fun, but some of the others are routine, and in the case of the ones featuring Umeki, dull (the same goes for the sound work, which varies wildly throughout the film along with the musical numbers).  Cinematography makes sense considering all of the color on display, but again the indulgence of the film overwhelms some scenes (though, again, the Helen Ballet sequence may be superfluous to the plot, but it's brilliantly-rendered).

Come September (1961)

Film: Come September (1961)
Stars: Rock Hudson, Gina Lollobrigida, Sanda Dee, Bobby Darin, Walter Slezak
Director: Robert Mulligan
Oscar History: No nominations
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 Gina Lollobrigida-click here to learn more about Ms. Lollobrigida (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

I'm an expert on the Oscars, but while I know a lot about other awards shows (more than the average person), I sometimes struggle with older categories in those awards shows, even Oscar's rebellious younger brother the Golden Globes.  Gina Lollobrigida definitely won a Golden Globe in 1961, and that's why we're going to end her career here, with a film from 1961.  I initially thought she actually won it for this film, but reports online are conflicting on if she won for a film at all, as it was the "World Film Favorite" trophy or the Henrietta Award, which didn't come for a specific movie, but instead was voted on by the public.  So technically Lollobrigida might have won just because she was popular, but it's worth noting that of the two films she made that year, one of them was critically-lambasted & a huge bomb (Go Naked in the World), while the other (Come September) made the Top 10 highest-grossers of the year & was well-received.  So, while she didn't win for Come September technically, practically it's easy to call this a victory for the film.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is a romantic comedy between two different generations.  The older half is led by Rock Hudson's Robert Talbot, a handsome American businessman who in September of every year comes to Italy and stays at his gargantuan villa, run by Maurice (Slezak).  While there, he meets with Lisa (Lollobrigida), a beautiful Italian woman who otherwise makes sound decisions, but can't help always falling back with Robert, even though he never marries her (and she has a reputable British husband lined up in the film's opening scenes).  We find out later, though, that Maurice has rented out the villa as a hotel while Robert is gone (he comes before September this year), thus Robert's house is filled with a group of young American women, including Sandy (Dee), who quickly falls in love with a musician, Tony (Darin), whom Robert has a generational rivalry with, as Robert quickly adapts a paternal attitude toward Sandy.  As happens in romantic comedies, the four couples have their fair share of misdirections & game-playing before ultimately ending up together, albeit with Maurice, at least, not learning his lesson (he rents out the villa once again in the film's final scene to a group of nuns).

The movie is cute, if really dated.  Romantic comedies of this era you kind of have to suspend belief.  We're no longer in the 1930's, where the wordplay was sparkling and the couple were oftentimes on equal footing.  Here, Robert is a lug, and despite looking like Rock Hudson, doesn't really deserve Lisa, as he only is interested in her once a year for her body.  However, their romance is more intriguing than the younger generation's, as Bobby Darrin is still learning his ropes as an actor, and while Dee's Sandy is better, she's a bit too strawberries-and-cream, especially compared to Lollobrigida's Lisa, who is a more intriguing onscreen protagonist (Lollobrigida is best-in-film as a woman who is just crazy horny for Robert, and that's why she falls for him rather than just "wanting love") than the younger actress.

Like I said, we're going to leave Gina in 1961 for this series, but the actress definitely didn't end her career here.  She worked steadily throughout the 1960's, but Loren's stardom did eclipse her rival's (and certainly Loren's ability to be nominated for Oscars didn't hurt her modern cinematic reputation), and her stardom never really stayed at the same level as it had internationally as it did from Beat the Devil to Come September, with the one exception being 1968's Buono Sera, Mrs. Campbell, for which Lollobrigida was nominated for a Golden Globe (truly nominated for it).  After that, she all but disappeared from acting (though she did have a high-profile guest run on Falcon Crest), but not from public consciousness.  She had a serious career in photojournalism in the 1970's, even landing an interview with Fidel Castro of all people during that time frame, and became famous for her philanthropy, selling most of her legendary jewelry in 2013 to benefit stem cell research.  She also has made headlines for the bizarre relationship she had with Spanish businessman Javier Rigau y Rafols, who at one point claimed they were married (and Lollobrigida said that they weren't).  These sorts of stories still dominate Italian tabloids, making Lollobrigida someone that attract headlines at the age of 93, 70 years after she first started making them.  On Thursday, we'll start a new month, and move completely into the 1960's with a pioneering sex symbol who briefly became a major name in Hollywood.

OVP: Two Women (1961)

Film: Two Women (1961)
Stars: Sophia Loren, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Eleanora Brown

Director: Vittorio de Sica

Oscar History: 1 nomination/1 win (Best Actress-Sophia Loren*)

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.

As I mentioned last week, we're going to spend the remainder of our time with Sophia Loren in her native tongue of Italian.  While Loren would continue making films in English for the rest of her career (and indeed, even made Nine not that long ago), the bulk of the most important work of her career was made in Italian.  That she was able to stay a proper international movie star may have had something to do with the movie we're going to discuss today, which is historic in our entire season on Sex Symbols.  While we have had actresses who were met with acclaim (both in their time and later) and have had people like Marilyn Monroe & Jayne Mansfield who have won Golden Globes, we have never had an actress in this series who had been nominated for an Academy Award, let alone had won one (and indeed, Loren will be the only Oscar winner in our series this year).  This marks a question mark over whether or not she should be included at all-this is a series focused on women whose careers were marked by not just their incredible beauty, but also that that beauty frequently overshadowed the actual content of their work.  With an Oscar, Loren certainly received the top accolade in her industry, and thus respect in a way that none of the other women in this season ever did.

But if you think of Loren today, it's not in the context of her films, but in the context of her beauty and in particular her physique.  More than Elizabeth Taylor, more than Grace Kelly, more than Joan Crawford (all women of their eras whose onscreen beauty was synonymous with their personas), Loren never really escaped the sex symbol trappings, though she redefined them, and never had a role that would be as iconic as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf or Rear Window or Mildred Pierce that would make her connected to a movie rather than her public persona.  The question that should be asked here is "why?"  Why doesn't Two Women have the sort of stature to be able to keep Loren from being treated as a serious actress in contemporary discussions of her work, rather than the earth goddess sex symbol she's so often commented as.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film takes place at the tail end of World War II, where Cesira (Loren) is a widowed shopkeeper living with her 12-year-old daughter Rosetta (Brown) in Rome.  Afraid of the bombings and the attacks on her shop, she leaves the city, setting off to the city of her youth, where she can live with her family.  Along the way, she and her daughter face hardship and hunger, as well as the imploding politics of Mussolini's Italy, as the Italians are clearly about to lose the war.  When they get to this city, they find themselves living in a barn, and befriended by a local communist named Michele (Belmondo).  Cesira falls in love with him, in her own way, as does he, but when a group of German soldiers take him prisoner (and we learn later, kill him), Cesira leaves with her daughter back for Rome, hoping for a saner life in the city.

This is when the movie's most famous and staggering scene takes place.  Cesira & Rosetta are attacked and gang-raped in a church by a group of Moroccan soldiers.  It is, considering the film's release in the early 1960's (in some countries in 1960, others in 1961), pretty graphic.  We obviously don't see a large amount of nudity (though there is a woman's bare breast shown in a much earlier moment in the film), but the violence is pretty graphic.  You see the horrified looks on both women's faces, and it's something that even by modern standards feels truly horrifying.  The scene carries weight for the rest of the film as Rosetta starts to defy her mother and act out, before the final scene where she emotionally lets go of the pain she's carrying and cries in her mother's arms, finally getting to behave like the younger girl we met at the beginning of the film.

The movie is rough, and unfathomably sad.  It's hard to sometimes tell with a movie this depressing if it's good or if it's just serious.  What certainly can be taken away is that Loren is excellent in this movie.  Despite being too young for the part (it was originally supposed to have Anna Magnani cast in the main role, who would have been twice Loren's age at the time), Loren never feels miscast as the mother, carrying a weight to her performance of a woman who has lived enough for a dozen lifetimes.  She plays Cesira as Mt. Everest, a woman who cannot be moved by pretty much anything, but we see the cracks in her demeanor as the movie wears on, we see more of the soft, vulnerable woman who sleeps with her married lover in the film's opening scenes.  Loren's work here isn't as immortally chic as Audrey Hepburn's in Breakfast at Tiffany's nor as complicated as what Natalie Wood is doing in Splendor in the Grass, but it's a bravura performance and it's easy to see why this was the movie that finally won a performer an Oscar in a foreign-language, even though it's not a good enough film to become Loren's signature work.  Next week we'll continue our look at the way Loren used the momentum of the Oscar win in her career.

OVP: Paris Blues (1961)

Film: Paris Blues (1961)
Stars: Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Sidney Poitier, Diahann Carroll, Louis Armstrong
Director: Martin Ritt
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Scoring)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

This week for our review theme we're focusing on movies that were Oscar-nominated for their music in some capacity.  Today we're venturing into the early 1960's, with Martin Ritt doing one of his less memorable outings with Paul Newman.  The film, despite the blockbuster cast (look at that call sheet!) is not really remembered for anything at all today, and in 1961 the film itself wasn't really noteworthy for anything either.  It wasn't the mammoth hit that The Hustler was for Newman that same year, and so if it's noted for anything today, it's for its nominated score, which of course we'll get to, but first let's talk about a pretty drab movie that common sense would dictate would be more famous than it is simply because of its four leads.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about two Americans living in Paris named Ram (Newman) and Eddie (Poitier).  They are musicians who work at a Paris hotspot, and Ram meets Connie (Carroll), whom he is initially quite infatuated with, but she's not having it; however, her friend Lillian (Woodward) is smitten and insists that they go to the club.  Quickly the couples pair off-Ram & Lillian in their own storyline, Eddie & Connie in theirs.  Lillian & Ram are focused on commitment-she wants to settle down, but he struggles with this & wants to continue seeing if he can be a truly great musician, while Eddie refuses to go back to America with Connie because he doesn't see the opportunities there for a black man that he can receive in France in the 1960's.  The film continues with one of the jazz musicians (Eddie) giving up his life here to pursue love with the woman he's met, while the other (Ram) admitting that he isn't ready to give up on his dream to go after Lillian, and deciding to stay in Paris.

There's so much about Paris Blues that should work.  The acting is great (I will admit right now that I don't love Joanne Woodward in most things, this included, but the other three leads are strong), and the cinematography is superb.  You get to see Paris as if it's almost in frozen photographs, it's so crisp and period-specific.  But the script doesn't have any urgency, and it shies away from the most obvious thing to a modern audience-Paul Newman's Ram should definitely be dating Diahann Carroll's Connie, not the stoic Lillian.

You almost get that-there's an opening scene where Ram is trying to pick a surprised Connie up, essentially dismissing the idea of her white roommate in favor of him dating her.  This is, quite honestly, a better movie.  Forgetting that Woodward & Newman have minimal chemistry in this film (like I said-Woodward doesn't seem to get her character here and underplays her), it would have made for a more interesting tale if it was Carroll's uptight Connie with Newman's rascally Ram, and then have Poitier's stoic Eddie having complicated conversations about racism with Woodward's Lillian.  This is, according to interviews Poitier would do later, what the filmmakers initially wanted to try with the movie, but the censors wouldn't have it.  As a result, you get a pretty lazy read on an interesting quartet of figures, despite the actors largely doing their part to keep us intrigued.

The film's score isn't classic jazz in the sense that it feels fresh for the era, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have its moments or have a legendary source.  It just sort of gets lost in the picture, and doesn't feel as innovative as you'd expect both considering the context of the film and in particular the composer.  Paris Blues stands apart as the only Oscar nomination that Duke Ellington would ever win (the film would lose to West Side Story).  Like so much of Paris Blues, the songs in the film are competent but disappoint, clearly having the makings of some better sound that might have come to light in a better movie.

The Misfits (1961)

Film: The Misfits (1961)
Stars: Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, Thelma Ritter, Eli Wallach
Director: John Huston
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 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 Marilyn Monroe-click here to learn more about Ms. Monroe (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Few films have productions as steeped in lore as The Misfits.  If you study film history at all, The Misfits shows up in a lot of texts about this era.  It was, as we'll discuss below, the final film of two Hollywood legends.  It also had pretty much everyone on the set at each other's throats, from Clark Gable & John Huston quarreling throughout the shoot (weirdly in the first & only film that they ever made together) to Marilyn Monroe & screenwriter Arthur Miller's marriage falling apart on the set of the movie they were making together to of course the continued "slow suicide" of Montgomery Clift after his car accident.  Pretty much everyone on the set suffered from some form of alcohol abuse, and production delays abounded.  But what of the film itself?  I have weirdly, despite having read about this movie for most of my life (and having written in college a 120-page paper about American cinema in the 1960's), never actually gotten around to seeing it, and if I was going to do a month devoted to Marilyn Monroe, there was no way I wasn't going to plug this gap in my film-watching.

(Spoilers Ahead) The Misfits is a little hard to explain in a conventional way, but let's give it a shot.  The picture starts with Roslyn (Monroe) getting a divorce in Reno from her husband for emotional neglect (her husband is played by Oscar nominee Kevin McCarthy in a truly 1-minute cameo, if not less).  She is staying with a local landlord named Isabelle (Ritter), and being as she's played by Marilyn Monroe, Roslyn quickly gets attention from the men of the town, including two cowboys: Gay (Gable), a rough-and-tumble guy and his driver best friend Guido (Wallach).  Roslyn & Gay move in together in Guido's house, even though it's not entirely clear that they are romantically linked (it's treated in many ways throughout the movie not as a love story, but more as a father getting a chance to raise the surrogate daughter that he gave up for his cowboy ways), though Guido clearly lusts after Roslyn.  At a rodeo, they meet Perce (Clift), a dumb rider who nearly kills himself and decides to join up with Roslyn, Gay, and Guido as they wrangle mustangs in the desert.  Slowly, Roslyn understands the cruelty of these men's lives as she sees them basically track and nearly murder a bunch of wild mustangs.  She calls them out on it, and in the dark with Perce she frees them, angering Gay.  Guido, still obsessed with her, tries to make a move but she says he's heartless, and it turns out she's right-he encourages Gay to leave her, but instead, after an extended shoot where he tries to tame a stallion, he lets them loose, driving off into the sunset with Roslyn, their future uncertain but knowing they love each other.

The Misfits is a strange film.  Honestly-I didn't really know what to expect considering its place in film lore and its position in the early 1960's, when even westerns that would be conventional like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance would challenge some of the assumptions we have about heroes and villains.  It's more avant-garde than you'd think.  While yes, at its center this is the story of one man (Gable) struggling with modernity, aided in that struggle by a beautiful woman (Monroe)-basically the plot of most westerns-we also realize that it's Monroe's Roslyn who was right the whole time, not just about him needing to give up this life, but that perhaps this life wasn't necessary to begin with.  The film is brutally violent in scenes (the mustang wrangling is disturbing, particularly since with John Huston in the director's chair, there's no assurance those horses weren't injured at some point), and sex permeates the movie.  Aside from a scene where Monroe is topless (you see her from the back), you have Eli Wallach's Guido lusting after Monroe in a way that I don't remember seeing in a movie like this, at least not very often.  It feels carnal, and is a big payoff for the later scene where Monroe tells him off.

Because honestly-this movie is fantastic.  You can quibble over whether certain sequences go too long, or whether it's too much mood, but I loved it.  The script is tight-Miller was writing it as he went along, but it doesn't show as his vision comes together in the end.  The direction is glorious-Huston enjoys the action sequences the most (and they're thrilling if also gut-wrenching), and the score is divine.  Best of all is the acting.  Wallach, as I mentioned, is out-of-this-world good; if this movie hadn't been considered a disappointment at the box office, it's easy to see him getting an Oscar nomination.  Ritter is great as ever; there's this weird, odd scene in the center of the movie where she opines about the husband who left her for her best friend, and everyone is confused about why she's happy to see them, but it works.  Ritter's face & gestures indicate an understanding of love, even love that's lost or mistreated, that I found so moving.  And then there's Clift, who finds an authenticity in his rodeo clown that feels genuine.  Clift occasionally feels like he's about to forget his lines (and indeed, that might have been the case-if I had to pick a weakest link in the cast, he'd be it though he's still solid), but at least he picked a character where that is convincing.

Gable & Monroe are sensational in the leads.  Even with the box office disappointment, I'm kind of stunned Gable didn't get a posthumous Oscar nomination for this-it might be the best performance he's ever given (give or take Rhett Butler), and I like Gable in a lot of movies.  As he's worn down, you find a man who has long since lost his youth & his reason for even existing, but he keeps on living, and has to find a way to acknowledge that he's still living.  It's so profound, and while Gable is an A+ movie star at his best, I didn't really know he was this good of an actor.  The same has to be said for Monroe.  This could be another dumb blonde where men do crazy things to sleep with her, but it's not.  She finds something there in this lost soul, a woman who has something to say but doesn't understand how to get it out.  Monroe, deeply introverted in real life, rarely played such characters onscreen (there are actually very few introverts in Classical Hollywood cinema), but here it suits her grandly. This is possibly Monroe's best performance too (give or take Sugar Kane), and it's a bummer she didn't think so (Monroe disliked the movie & her work in it).

The film, as I mentioned above, was the end of the road for two Hollywood legends.  Gable died 12 days after shooting of a heart attack.  He wasn't that old all-things-considered (the film would be released on his 60th birthday, a few months after shooting), but you can tell that decades of smoking & drinking had worn down the matinee idol.  Monroe, 24 years his junior, also would never complete another film.  Though she had started shooting the (yet-another-troubled-shoot) film Something's Got to Give, Monroe died before it was completed, of a drug overdose, a potentially intentional one.  We've discussed the many conspiracies surrounding Monroe's death before (click the link if Hollywood true crime is your jam), but in the light of just watching The Misfits, it feels especially tragic, and adds a sense of anguish to the final scenes of Gable & Monroe driving off into the sunset that John Huston never could have intended.  Here we have two of the true legends of cinema, uniting for the only time, in some of their best ever work, and soon to die tragically young.

That ends our month devoted to Marilyn Monroe, the quintessential sex symbol in a year-long series devoted to cinematic sex symbols.  As we'll see in July, though, we aren't entirely abandoning Marilyn-her legacy will be felt next month, both in terms of heightened, sexualized glamour...and unfortunately, even more tragedy.

4 Mini Reviews

As I mentioned yesterday, we will be doing three days of mini reviews as I catch up on the movies I saw in 2018 (and today one FilmStruck movie I never got around to reviewing) in an effort to wrap up 2018 before we will start doing OVP's from that year in the next few months.  As a result, here are four additional films I saw in 2018, that, while interesting, I will be giving an abbreviated review to rather than a full one as I'm a bit behind & am tired of being behind on my film reviews.

(Spoiler Alert: If you haven't seen Smallfoot, Red Sparrow, Paddington 2, or 1961's Victim, please skip over those sections & come back later when you have!)

Smallfoot (dir. Karey Kirkpatrick)

Yes, yes, we're all aware that Zendaya is Meechee, but the better question is-is this movie any good?  The question is hard to answer, as there are moments of charm in this kind of dismissible animated feature that, like seemingly all animated features, still grossed over $200 million.  Centering on the unlikely friendship between a Yeti (Channing Tatum) and a documentarian (James Corden) trying at first to exploit his new friend & then protect him, it's cute that they focus on this from the Yeti's perspective, having the humans be the "imaginary creature," but the joke gets old after a while, and no one in the voice talent is particularly good in their role, with Tatum's earnestness being the best fit for the role.  The songs are lackluster, and there's too much plot for a 96-minute movie, making the entire Percy-redemption storyline feel a bit combed over.  (Ranking: 2/5 stars)

Red Sparrow (dir. Francis Lawrence)

Jennifer Lawrence had been taking an interesting tact post-Oscar win, using her massive celebrity to greenlight movies like Joy and Mother!, which got a wider audience than they ever could have hoped to get without her face across the posters.  There's unfortunately nothing noble about her Red Sparrow, though, as this is a completely commercial play, and not an enjoyable one (or that successful of one).  The spy thriller moves along at a glacial pace (it's 140 minutes long, and could have dropped a half hour without any speed bumps), and is easy to see coming.  All of the twists are apparent to anyone who has seen a movie like this before, and the film relies heavily on extreme violence and sex to titillate the audience, but it just feels gross after a while.  Even with actors as pedigreed as Jeremy Irons & Charlotte Rampling filling out the supporting class, there's little to redeem here and Lawrence's considerable movie star charisma can't save such a dud.  Here's to hoping that she either works with better blockbuster directors going forward or returns to the arthouse soon. (Ranking: 1/5 stars)

Paddington 2 (dir. Paul King)

The best movie on this list by a country mile, Paddington 2 takes the lovely, calm tone of the first film and perfects it, with a better villain.  Hugh Grant made my personal ballot for Best Supporting Actor in 2018, and with good reason-he's marvelous as a vain, conniving washed-up actor who is desperate to find a hidden treasure by way of a pop-up book (a beautifully constructed sequence).  The film fills out the cast with a cavalry of Royal Shakespeare Company actors, but it's Grant and Ben Whishaw's Paddington, so calm, so of a different era, yet totally at home in such a film that makes this movie special.  I'd say "they don't make them like this anymore," but clearly they do, and it's refreshing & a bit shocking to find out that a movie like Paddington 2 has an audience.  Bravo to Paul King, who manages to avoid what could have been pablum and pulls together a sweet tale without ever making it sugary. (Ranking: 4/5 stars)

Victim (dir. Basil Dearden)

Considering the landmark position Victim has in LGBT cinema, it's kind of crap that I am not writing a full review on this one, but let's be real here-this is a basic suspense film that's only proper calling card is featuring a gay main protagonist.  The film, centering around the blackmail scheme of a barrister who has had a romantic (but non-sexual, cause heaven forbid he get laid) relationship with a man twenty years his junior.  The barrister is played by Dirk Bogarde, who famously was well-loved in Britain but never became proper star in the United States (probably because he was gay in real-life & didn't downplay this to the degree that would have been acceptable in 1960's Hollywood, making this film all-the-more-shocking), but I wasn't blown away at all by his work here-he plays his repressed homosexual as a constant reassurance to the straight audience that he "isn't like" the deviants that are immediately coming to mind.  This is my way of pointing out that while this was aggressively progressive at the time (it's the first English-language film to use the word "homosexual"), it has aged poorly, to the point where you really have to focus on the non-gay elements to see if it works...and it doesn't, as the suspense is marred down by antiquated politics & a thin plot.  I try to grade based on the era, rather than our current one's, but even by that metric this is just 2/5 stars.

OVP: Bachelor in Paradise (1961)

Film: Bachelor in Paradise (1961)
Stars: Bob Hope, Lana Turner, Janis Paige, Jim Hutton, Paula Prentiss
Director: Jack Arnold
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Song-"Bachelor in Paradise")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Trying to find common ground between the Oscar Viewing Project and the Best Original Song category is a difficult thing for me on occasion.  In the case of things like musicals, it's fairly easy to rationalize needing to see the film-the song is made or broken based on what I'm seeing in addition to what I'm hearing, and I have long felt that a film should get some points (for or against) when it comes to how they incorporate a song, not just for how great it is.  "Moon River," for example, one of this film's competitors at the 1961 Oscars, is not just a song that is sung over the credits; it's also a song that Audrey Hepburn beautifully and enchantingly sings on her New York balcony, drawing in the viewer. This film's title song (also written by Henry Mancini) just plays over the opening credits and basically just sits there even then, so the rest of the film has little attachment to the music.

This wouldn't be a problem under normal circumstances-I watch movies because I love movies, not just because Oscar found them attractive-but Bachelor in Paradise is tired, sexist, and far too long for a film that can't quite decide if it's a comedy or a melodrama, but fails at both.  The film talks about a Lothario named A.J. Niles (Hope), a playboy who bed-hops around the world and writes about it in sensational books, but then runs afoul of the IRS and is forced to live in suburbia and write a book about America.  The premise seems ripe for good laughs (it does star Hope, after all), but it descends into wildly antiquated ideas about femininity and what it takes to have a successful marriage.  Hope teaches classes to the ladies of the neighborhood how to light the fire back in their marriages; the lesson essentially boils down to that old Jerry Hall quote about being a maid, chef, and whore.  Just when you think it hasn't gotten any worse, he makes a crack about Susan Hayward vs. Gina Lollobrigida and you've sunk deeper.

As the film is supposed to be a comedy, you know that there's an epiphany coming for Hope's character, and like any good film from this Classical Hollywood format, he falls in love with a local woman (a real estate agent named Rosemary, played by Turner) who has sworn off men.  Turner is in a weird conundrum with this performance-she's clearly far, far too beautiful to successfully play a cinematic spinster, but she's also a woman of a certain age and the script is calling for her to be more standoffish in the role.  Think Shirley Jones in The Music Man, except instead of singing goodnight to her someone, she just avoids alcohol and seems frustrated at every turn.  Turner is not an actress that I've taken a strong shine to, but even I know that she can be better than this: completely pent-up, wild character swings without any sort of reason.  The script is doing her no services here (let the woman land a punchline once and a while!).

It's also worth noting that while Turner is about the right age for her character, Hope is not.  Hope consistently played the leading man in comedies, but he wasn't Laurence Harvey-the guy got the girl by being the funny one, not the hot one.  A lady loves to laugh, and Hope could do that.  Except that in this film the nearly 60-year-old Hope has women throwing themselves at him with utter abandon the second he enters the screen.  It makes absolutely no sense when you look at it objectively, and it seems that a more alluring actor would have been a better choice for the role (perhaps someone in Turner's age group?).

About the only thing that I truly enjoyed about the film was the supporting performance of Paula Prentiss.  Prentiss, unknown to most audiences today, was a consistent presence in films of the 1960's.  Tall with a spectacular speaking voice, she lit up every scene she was in during Bachelor, rising well above her sexy next-door-neighbor routine to give us a more well-rounded individual.  The rest of the movie was in desperate need of some of those real life touches, but she's not in enough of the picture to save the movie.

What are your thoughts about Bachelor in Paradise?  Was I overly critical or right on the nose?  Do you have a favorite Paula Prentiss movie?  And where does "Bachelor in Paradise" rank in the Henry Mancini discography?  Share in the comments!