1948 Oscar Viewing Project

I put this on Twitter, but one of my goals going forward is to have at least one Oscar Viewing Project ballot or one Oscar My Ballot each month until I have finished the project.  Because I just finished being on vacation (I was in Florida, having a blast in DisneyWorld), we're going to actually get a couple of these this month, both from 2024 in a few weeks AND from 1948 today.  Yes, I have officially seen all of the nominated films of 1948, and thus we are going to discuss the movies of this year.  We generally start with a look at the box office from a given year, but I will note that pre-1980 box office numbers are hard to find accurately, as it wasn't as consistently reported in trade papers before then.  Additionally, certain types of films (like, say, Disney films) tend to have been re-released in theaters more frequently than others (hence how movies that were considered flops initially like Bambi would eventually end up in the black).  That said, this is what Wikipedia has for the top domestic grossers of 1948, so we'll use it as a jumping off point (with a grain of salt):

1. The Red Shoes

2. Red River

3. The Paleface

4. Johnny Belinda

5. Easter Parade

6. The Three Musketeers

7. The Snake Pit

8. The Emperor Waltz

9. Homecoming

10. Sitting Pretty

As you'll see below, Oscar didn't start taking a really big detour from what was popular with audiences until the 1990's, as 9/10 of these movies are ones I not only saw, but would've seen in connection with the OVP, the sole exception being Homecoming with Lana Turner & Clark Gable (which I'll see for the My Ballot that year).  Other top grossers that year that sometimes are listed on the Top 10 include Sorry, Wrong Number with Barbara Stanwyck, Yellow Sky (which I have seen despite no nominations because I love westerns) with Gregory Peck, and A Date with Judy starring a young Elizabeth Taylor.  As you can see, Oscar wanted to embrace what was popular, particularly in a year of upheaval for Hollywood, as the theatrical monopolies had ended, and 1948 was a weak year at the box office.  With that context, I want you to go back to a different time, to a time of Truman defeating Dewey, of the creation of both Israel and the frisbee.  And of course, let's remember the movies...

Note from John: When I did this series during the time when I wrote individual articles, and had this blog be a daily part of my life, I made a point of highlighting each nominee in my many write-ups.  While I will be writing these every time I complete a year (like I said above, hopefully monthly going forward), I can't make that time commitment, either in terms of number of articles or in terms of giving each nominee their due with a mention, anymore.  I promise, though, that I have given each nominee their due under the confines of the specific category while making my rankings (and of course I've seen every single nominated picture discussed below), including giving higher rankings to movies I didn't like if the craft was better than ones I did like (Oscar should consider that).  Hopefully you enjoy the trimmed-down, but still devoted to the original concept version of the OVP we'll have going forward!

Picture

1. The Red Shoes

2. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

3. Hamlet

4. The Snake Pit

5. Johnny Belinda

The Lowdown: I actually did a podcast devoted to this specific topic (if you go to the Gilded Films podcast site, you can find both of their episodes on 1948, as I'm the guest on both of them) so feel free to listen if you want a voice reveal (and some great convo on this contest).  For me, it's not a difficult decision on the winner here.  The Red Shoes is just on another level.  There are really good movies here (honestly-there is no bad movie in this quintet, though I do frequently have to re-remind myself that I like Johnny Belinda as Oscar liked it way more than me), but the sheer modern scale of The Red Shoes here is unbeatable, besting worthy defenders like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Hamlet.

Director

1. John Huston (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre)

2. Laurence Olivier (Hamlet)

3. Anatole Litvak (The Snake Pit)

4. Jean Negulesco (Johnny Belinda)

5. Fred Zinnemann (The Search)

The Lowdown: With The Red Shoes out of the race, I've got a much closer contest, pitting John Huston & Laurence Olivier for the top spot against each other, much like in real life (weirdly, both were directing themselves, as both of their pictures in the collage are from them acting in their movies, though Olivier was the lead while Huston had a bit cameo).  I actually like Olivier's Hamlet more than most modern critics, as I think it's moody and just a little bit creepy (it's easy to see how the Coen Brothers were inspired by this when they did their telling of Macbeth), but Treasure of the Sierra Madre is one of those movies it's impossible to deny Huston's impact, giving us a perfect decrescendo into hell with Humphrey Bogart.  Kudos also to Antaole Litvak who also had a lot of modern touches (rare for a social issues picture) in The Snake Pit.

Actor

1. Laurence Olivier (Hamlet)

2. Montgomery Clift (The Search)

3. Clifton Webb (Sitting Pretty)

4. Lew Ayres (Johnny Belinda)

5. Dan Dailey (When My Baby Smiles at Me)

The Lowdown: Bogart's snub in 1948 was a big deal, some calling it the biggest of its kind since Bette Davis was looked over for Of Human Bondage in 1934.  It's insane, given how good he is (he'll be on my My Ballot for this year) that he was missed, but looking at just Oscar's choices, I'm going with the same selection as the Academy, giving Laurence Olivier (an actor I am very hit-or-miss with) a pretty easy victory.  Olivier might be too old for this part, but he leans in really well with the uncomfortable Oedipal overtones that Shakespeare provides his prince for his mother Gertrude, and while Clifton Webb is delicious & Monty Clift has a terrific star-is-born turn, this is a case of an actor's "time" also being for some of his best work.  I will also say that Dan Dailey getting Humphrey Bogart's nomination here is both perplexing (like...why?) and bordering on a war crime he's so bad.

Actress

1. Olivia de Havilland (The Snake Pit)

2. Barbara Stanwyck (Sorry, Wrong Number)

3. Jane Wyman (Johnny Belinda)

4. Irene Dunne (I Remember Mama)

5. Ingrid Bergman (Joan of Arc)

The Lowdown: No one is as bad as Dan Dailey of the 20 nominations (an embarrassingly terrible performance), but Best Actress is not a great lineup compared to the guys despite having generally better actors.  Irene Dunne is playing I Remember Mama like she's channeling Loretta Young (not a compliment), and Ingrid Bergman once again proves that for one of the best actresses of her generation, Oscar nominated her for the wrong roles.  The win is between de Havilland, whose really raw performance adds to The Snake Pit's accuracy-to-life, and Barbara Stanwyck as a truly vicious femme fatale who totally nails the film's rough ending.  Stanwyck is the opposite of Bergman (she tended to get nominated for her best work, this being the least of her four nominated turns but still solid), but I'm going with de Havilland given she provides more accuracy.  Jane Wyman, the actual winner, uses physicality well in her role but doesn't add enough beyond being great casting given her giant saucer eyes are so crucial to filling in gaps in the underwritten plot.

Supporting Actor

1. Walter Huston (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre)

2. Charles Bickford (Johnny Belinda)

3. Cecil Kellaway (The Luck of the Irish)

4. Jose Ferrer (Joan of Arc)

5. Oscar Homolka (I Remember Mama)

The Lowdown: Both of the supporting turns I'm going with the actual Oscar winner, and while I'm usually cognizant that I have a bias toward the actual victors (because, unlike the 2000's & 2010's, the winners here have been the "winners" my whole life), unlike Olivier (where Clift or Webb would make acceptable victors), the supporting winners are heads-and-shoulders above the rest (again, both will make my My Ballot list).  Huston's turn as a weathered gold miner is so calculating, and filled with such meaningful backstory in the way he portrays it, I wish that he'd worked with his son on ten more pictures.  The only thing that comes close to it is Charles Bickford's concerned father in Johnny Belinda, but even there it's not close to what Huston is bringing to a better movie.

Supporting Actress

1. Claire Trevor (Key Largo)

2. Agnes Moorehead (Johnny Belinda)

3. Barbara bel Geddes (I Remember Mama)

4. Ellen Corby (I Remember Mama)

5. Jean Simmons (Hamlet)

The Lowdown: Finishing out the acting races is Claire Trevor.  Trevor is one of those actresses who rarely played leading roles despite leading lady beauty, but she was also better suited for character work, as she understood the assignment in westerns & noir.  In Key Largo, she gets one really critical scene where she belts out a torch song to her own humiliation (it's a hard scene to watch, but it makes the movie), but she's good throughout.  No one else is in the same hemisphere as her.  Even second place Agnes Moorhead (not as good as Bickford, despite being a more reliable actor otherwise) is only in second because I didn't have anywhere else to turn and I like her as a rule.  This is all Trevor.

Motion Picture Story

1. The Red Shoes

2. Red River

3. The Naked City

4. The Search

5. Louisiana Story

The Lowdown: A quick reminder that Motion Picture Story is technically about the concept of the movie, which is a writing gift, but it's not (for example) about the specific dialogue in the picture.  This helps a movie like The Naked City, which is really better as an idea than a picture itself (though I liked it), but I have to dock points for something like Louisiana Story, whose almost documentary-like naturalism gets in the way of the actual tale it's attempting (or is it...this is a weird movie, speak up if you've seen it in the comments).  My top prize goes to The Red Shoes, which is really gifted in the way it uses its romances almost as a red herring, over Red River (which, conversely, uses its ambition as a red herring to cover some of its romances).

Screenplay

1. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

2. The Snake Pit

3. The Search

4. A Foreign Affair

5. Johnny Belinda

The Lowdown: 1948 is the most recent year where the Screenplay categories were not split out between adapted & original screenplay, and so we have four adapted films against the original The Search.  I actually wish I could give this to The Snake Pit, because it's the sort of picture that Oscar generally loves and I generally don't (social issue pictures are not my jam), but it's done so well I could actually find some common ground between us...but in this case both Oscar & I are siding with the work of John Huston in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, one of the truly great studio film screenplays of the era (no notes-even the Hays Code couldn't ruin this one).

Score

1. The Red Shoes

2. Hamlet

3. Johnny Belinda

4. The Snake Pit

5. Joan of Arc

The Lowdown: Movies are rarely gusty enough to do what The Red Shoes does with its score.  Look at a film like Tar, for example, which is about classical music and thus uses actual classical music throughout the picture to instruct that.  But The Red Shoes literally spends so much time talking about how it is written for a classic ballet, but instead of Tchaikovsky or Prokofiev, it's literally original music.  The chutzpah...and that they land it, making it sound like a genuine classic...it's impossible to deny, though the moodiness of Hamlet or the windswept grandeur of Johnny Belinda both would've made fine wins (this is the best of the many Johnny Belinda nominations, and the one that I'll come closest to duplicating with my My Ballot even though I won't actually).

Scoring

1. Easter Parade

2. Romance on the High Seas

3. The Pirate

4. The Emperor Waltz

5. When My Baby Smiles at Me

The Lowdown: Similar to Motion Picture Story, I'm not entirely sure how to grade this, and it's more difficult as we'll actually have this for the My Ballot for 1948 (we will not do the same for Motion Picture Story).  But I'm going to look at this as the best overall musical in terms of the way it's staged, sung, & conducted in the picture itself (with perhaps a bonus point or two for truly original song scores).  With that in mind, you can't really beat Easter Parade, with Judy & Fred sounding lovely, particularly with him taking on "Steppin' Out With My Baby" and our first real Ann Miller MGM musical.  Romance on the High Seas benefits from a young Doris Day, and The Pirate has a beautiful choreography from Gene Kelly, but neither are as good as what Easter Parade is achieving.

Original Song

1. "It's Magic" (Romance on the High Seas)

2. "Buttons and Bows" (The Paleface)

3. "The Woody Woodpecker Song" (Wet Blanket Policy)

4. "For Every Man There's a Woman" (Casbah)

5. "This Moment is Magic" (That Lady in Ermine)

The Lowdown: Yes, for those who grew up watching his cartoons, the title song from Woody Woodpecker performed by the Kay Kyser Orchestra, was Oscar-nominated (the only time in the history of the Best Original Song category where a short film was nominated).  But while it's a cute little ditty, I have to go with "It's Magic" as it does a really incredible job of establishing Doris Day as a star in the picture.  "Buttons and Bows" is also a standard, but it has less to do with the success of the film (and let's be honest, is more of a standard than a classic, if that makes sense).

Sound

1. Moonrise

2. The Snake Pit

3. Johnny Belinda

The Lowdown: One of the big reasons that the Oscar Viewing Project will take me so long is that, just a few years earlier, the Sound categories were popping out a dozen or so nominees each year, and then by 1948 they randomly became only a three-wide affair.  The quality here is better, though, with only a trio of nominees, and gives us the single finest "hidden gem" nomination of this bunch: Moonrise.  Moonrise is a dynamite picture (if you've never seen it, please add it to your Letterboxd Watchlist as it's masterful), and it's also a cool nomination.  The film features one song moment (though it's not a musical one), that is executed perfectly, and it also works really well with the circus motif to create strong background noise to heighten tension.  Oscar gave the statue to the also solidly authentic work in The Snake Pit, but for me it's all about Moonrise.

Art Direction - Black & White

1. Hamlet

2. Johnny Belinda

The Lowdown: For the record, we will not be separating between Black & White and Color for my My Ballot's (though we will have five nominees, so for this at least we'll have more than Oscar).  The win here is easy for me-Olivier's Hamlet is a really cool combination of stage play and realism (again, much like the Coen Brothers' lauded turn with Macbeth), and totally upstages anything that is done in Johnny Belinda.  Honestly, the real credit from staging in Johnny Belinda is believably making California look like Prince Edward Island (if there was an Oscar for location scouting...this is the one it should've won).

Art Direction - Color

1. The Red Shoes

2. Joan of Arc

The Lowdown: Both very worthy nominees (say what you will about the end product of Joan of Arc, it surely looks terrific), but much like Moira Shearer, I cannot deny The Red Shoes.  Even the title cards for the movie are crafted to match the set, as if they are somehow part of the movie itself, everything so careful, beautiful, and deliberate.

Cinematography - Black & White

1. A Foreign Affair

2. Johnny Belinda

3. The Naked City

4. Portrait of Jennie

5. I Remember Mama

The Lowdown: Back to the arbitrarily chosen nominee count, Oscar went with the naturalism of The Naked City, which is understandable.  Shot entirely on location in New York, the movie uses real life so well it's hard not to fall for the gimmick (this is one of the hardest My Ballot quintets I'll have ever had to assemble, for the record, as I don't know that any of these will end up on it, and normally the Top 3 would be gimme choices).  I'm instead going to pick the naturalism on display in A Foreign Affair to reward, where Marlene Dietrich is shot in actual war-torn Berlin as if she was back with von Sternberg (compliment).  At some point someone needs to explain to me how I Remember Mama got a nomination in this category when much better options existed (hell, if you just stick to movies Oscar was already watching, you have Moonrise or The Snake Pit right there!).

Cinematography - Color

1. Joan of Arc

2. The Three Musketeers

3. Green Grass of Wyoming

4. The Loves of Carmen

The Lowdown: There's literally room for one more nomination, and in one of those situations where I have to assume there was a paperwork mistake (like Roddy McDowall accidentally going lead for Cleopatra), The Red Shoes was cut from this, which it definitely should've won.  With that out of the way, I have a moment to honor its competitor Joan of Arc, though honestly not by much-this is not just the best lineup of this list, it's also one of the best lineups I've seen Oscar assemble during the Classical Hollywood era...every single one of these I gave 4/5 stars in my personal rankings (which is hard to get as I grade on a curve).  Even The Loves of Carmen in last place has a wonderfully vibrant motif (and Rita Hayworth has rarely looked so lovely).

Costume - Black & White

1. Hamlet

2. B.F.'s Daughter

The Lowdown: Despite costumes being in movies since the dawn of time, it took until 1948 for the Academy to bother rewarding the men & women who made them (this is the first year of the category).  For Black & White, I will go with Hamlet, which gives us not just lovely frocks for Jean Simmons to prance about in, but we also get some attention-to-detail loveliness in the menswear (guys like wearing pretty things too).  BF's Daughter gets nominated almost entirely for a stunning white-and-gold dress that Barbara Stanwyck wears about halfway through (hopefully this link works, but you can see it here) which is breathtaking...but nothing else in the movie compares so it can't really be on the same level as Hamlet.

Costume - Color

1. Joan of Arc

2. The Emperor Waltz

The Lowdown: Similar to how we constantly talk about John Williams in Best Score and whether or not I'm giving him another Oscar (he was nominated so often), we'll be doing the same for Edith Head.  In our second profiled year of Head's 35 competitive nominations (we did 1957 here) Head won, but while I was intoxicated by Joan Fontaine's glorious green dress with matching hat in The Emperor Waltz, it was the only look that really stood out to me, and so I'm more inclined to the many armored outfits of Ingrid Bergman wore in Joan of Arc instead.

Film Editing

1. The Red Shoes

2. Red River

3. The Naked City

4. Johnny Belinda

5. Joan of Arc

The Lowdown: Fun fact-The Red Shoes will not be sweeping the My Ballot awards in the way you're thinking right now because, well, there are a lot of really good movies in 1948 that Oscar chose to ignore that I'll get into.  But I cannot deny with this specific lineup that the Powell & Pressburger film shouldn't take the cake.  The way that the ballets are structured and shot, jumping the line between reality and fiction, are made in the editors' room, even against solid naturalism in The Naked City and the gigantic cattle drives of Red River.

Special Effects

1. Portrait of Jennie

2. Deep Waters

The Lowdown: The early years of the special effects categories are odd because while effects have always been a part of the movies, that doesn't mean that they were as common as they are now (where even crowd work in a rom-com is likely done at a computer).  Portrait of Jennie takes out Deep Waters both because Deep Waters doesn't really have a lot of effects to champion (just a gigantic storm sequence late in the picture), and because of the way it uses the film's cinematography as a tool with the color lensing in the water effects at the end of the movie to give us an ethereal beauty.

Saturdays with the Stars Season 3 Finale

Two of our stars, Shirley & Grace

With this past week's viewing of The Seduction fo Joe Tynan, we are officially done with our third season of "Saturdays with the Stars."  I really like to find a moment before I start the new season (which, unlike past seasons, I haven't told you the theme of & will be doing so in the coming days, as we will indeed do a fourth season starting on Saturday) to discuss the season, talking about what I learned, and also focusing on some of the best of the year's movies/performances.

When I decided to do this theme, I wanted to see how it would turn out picking twelve women who had really nothing in common other than Alfred Hitchcock.  You couldn't find stars as divergent in the way that cinematic history or even contemporary audiences treated them as, say, Maureen O'Hara & Barbara Harris or Shirley MacLaine & Margaret Lockwood.  Hitchcock wasn't always successful with his leading ladies, but it does show what a versatile director he was that he continually tried new things, occasionally making masterpieces but just as often strange curiosities.

It also showed, especially in our month devoted to Tippi Hedren, how Hitchcock's legacy is at once peerless in quality but blemished by the director himself.  Hitchcock was a complicated man, one who brought the downfall of a career or two (Hedren's career, as we discussed, never flourished the way it might have with a less authoritarian mentor), but who also clearly made some of the best films ever made.  What was great about this year was not just focusing on him, but getting to see unknown chapters in these twelve women's lives (I love that I stick to the rule of seeing only films I haven't seen before, because it means every week I get to see a new facet of an actor I thought I knew well, but frequently have my perceptions changed).  As I continue to watch deeper and deeper cuts from Old Hollywood (after three seasons devoted to it on the blog, it seems like watching fresh viewings demands getting into the rafters of these icons' IMDB pages), I am reminded once again how this period of Hollywood has countless movies & careers left to explore.  Thank you so much for playing along!

Favorite Performance from Each Star

January: Madeleine Carroll-The General Died at Dawn

February: Sylvia Sidney-Sabotage

March: Margaret Lockwood-Cast a Dark Shadow

April: Maureen O'Hara-Rio Grande

May: Carole Lombard-Twentieth Century

June: Anne Baxter-The Luck of the Irish

July: Ingrid Bergman-Autumn Sonata

August: Grace Kelly-Dial M for Murder

September: Shirley MacLaine-The Children's Hour

October: Julie Andrews-Thoroughly Modern Millie

November: Tippi Hedren-Marnie

December: Barbara Harris-Who is Harry Kellerman and Why is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?

5 Favorite Actresses of the Year (Alphabetical, and based solely on the films we watched as a collective & not on the rest of their careers)

Ingrid Bergman

Barbara Harris

Margaret Lockwood

Carole Lombard

Shirley MacLaine

5 (err-6, I couldn't corner down) Favorite Performances of the Year (Alphabetical)

Ingrid Bergman, Autumn Sonata

Ingrid Bergman, Journey to Italy

Margaret Lockwood, Cast a Dark Shadow

Margaret Lockwood, The Wicked Lady

Carole Lombard-Twentieth Century

Shirley MacLaine, The Children's Hour

10 Favorite Films of the Year (Alphabetical)

Autumn Sonata

Cast a Dark Shadow

The Children's Hour

Dead End

Dial M for Murder

Journey to Italy

The Lady Vanishes

The Trouble with Harry

Twentieth Century

The Wicked Lady

Top 10 Performances of the Year (Not By Our Leading Ladies)

Diane Baker, Marnie

John Barrymore, Twentieth Century

Dirk Bogarde, Cast a Dark Shadow

Humphrey Bogart, Dead End

Sean Connery, Marnie

Audrey Hepburn, The Children's Hour

George Sanders, Journey to Italy

Claire Trevor, Dead End

Liv Ullmann, Autumn Sonata

John Williams, Dial M for Murder

OVP: Autumn Sonata (1978)

Film: Autumn Sonata (1978)

Stars: Ingrid Bergman, Liv Ullmann, Lena Nyman, Halvar Bjork

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Actress-Ingrid Bergman, Original Screenplay)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 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 Ingrid Bergman-click here to learn more about Ms. Bergman (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last week, we were discussing Ingrid Bergman and her infamous affair with Italian Roberto Rossellini, which resulted in one of the most successful (creatively) periods of her career, even if it also meant that she was essentially a pariah in Hollywood.  This didn't last though-scandal can destroy a career, but Ingrid Bergman wasn't an actress that could be brought down that easily.  In 1956, she made an unexpected comeback in Fox's smash hit Anastasia, which won her her second Oscar and made her employable in Hollywood again.  Bergman would then have a remarkable third act in her career, making a series of films that were consistently successful opposite major leading men like Cary Grant (Indiscreet), Robert Donat (The Inn at the Sixth Happiness), Rex Harrison (The Yellow Rolls-Royce), and Walter Matthau (Cactus Flower).  Bergman, always beautiful & sexual, but more in a timeless way than an "of her moment" beauty was able to buck much of the problems that other actresses of her generation had in staying relevant & continuing to gain roles.  She won a third (ill-advised, but that's a conversation for a different day) Oscar for 1974's Murder on the Orient Express, and then made today's film, which would be her last theatrically-released movie, and one in her native tongue.

(Spoilers Ahead) Autumn Sonata is something of a chamber play where Eva (Ullmann) has invited her famous, concert pianist mother Charlotte (Bergman) to stay with she & her husband Viktor (Bjork).  Initially, we get the sense that Eva is a bit mousy, intimidated by her mother's beauty & success, and her mother's forceful nature keeps Eva from being too forthright with her.  We also learn that she is keeping a secret from her mother, that her disabled sister Helena (Nyman) is staying with them, which upsets Charlotte who does not like to witness her other daughter's handicap & difficult life.  As the movie progresses, though, we see a switching of the power dynamic in their relationship.  Eva becomes more forceful, challenging her mother on the years of neglect she endured growing up, with Charlotte's singleminded approach to her career (and her laissez-faire attitude toward her marriage to Eva's father), as well as later hardships such as Charlotte's insistence that Eva get an abortion when she was 18, the death of Eva & Viktor's son who died years earlier (without any consoling from Charlotte), Eva's loveless marriage, and allegations that Charlotte's recently-deceased boyfriend had molested Helena.  The movie takes a look at these two women as broken, not able to find any sort of absolution within each other, even if the other one appears to be the root cause of much of their anguish.  The film ends on an ambiguous note, with Charlotte leaving for another concert, and Eva, potentially contemplating suicide but likely not going through with it, once again reaching out to her mother, understanding that their relationship might not be over yet.

Ingmar Bergman is my favorite film director, and this is one of his better-known films that I'd never seen.  A lot of the signatures are there, including some that others dismiss about the director's work (his preoccupation with anguish, family, & (in particular) death), as well as the the things that I love about his work.  Bergman is fascinated by closeups, and finding a way to frame the camera on an actor's face, waiting for nothing more than time to give away more secrets of their feelings.  With Bergman & Ullmann, he gets that.  There are scenes where he looks at Bergman, every inch the movie star, and waits as emotion or exasperation in Charlotte's eyes start to fall forward, a woman who has given so much pretense, so much performance, she doesn't entirely know how to play the next moment if she's just expected to be herself, not read what's on the page.  Bergman understands this about Charlotte, and both she and Ullmann give master class performances as a mother/daughter who are anguished by the past, but cannot move past it in order to find a future.  I'm going with a 4-star, mostly because I don't use halves on TMROJ (this would be a 4.5 on Letterboxd), principally because I thought the framing device with Viktor didn't work, but the acting is all extraordinary-it's a pity that this wasn't Bergman's late third-act Oscar and not Orient Express, and it is the best work she was ever nominated for.

Bergman was battling the breast cancer that would eventually kill her while she was filming Autumn Sonata.  Despite this, this wasn't her last film (though it was the final one to be released theatrically).  She would star in A Woman Called Golda in 1982, winning a posthumous Emmy before her death at 67.  She would also make a number of public appearances, including giving Alfred Hitchcock his AFI Life Achievement Award.  Bergman was an actress who starred in multiple Hitchcock movies, and nearly had a marriage destroy her Hollywood career, before returning triumphant.  Tomorrow, we'll kick off a new star and month with a different actress who became Hitchcock's muse, one who did escape his shadow, but only through a marriage that would end her Hollywood career.

Journey to Italy (1954)

Film: Journey to Italy (1954)

Stars: Ingrid Bergman, George Sanders

Director: Roberto Rossellini

Oscar History: No nominations

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 Ingrid Bergman-click here to learn more about Ms. Bergman (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last week, we took a look at Ingrid Bergman's career headed in 1949, when she made Under Capricorn, her final film with Alfred Hitchcock, and I talked about a major change that was about to happen in Ingrid Bergman's career.  This week, we're going to head straight into that moment, and with it one of the biggest scandals of Hollywood's Golden Era.  Ingrid Bergman had been married to Dr. Peter Lindstrom for 13 years in 1950, and while they lived somewhat distanced lives, he was the first husband of a movie star whose public image had become synonymous with virtue.  This all changed when Bergman had an affair with Roberto Rosselini on the set of their film Stromboli together, and became pregnant with his child, despite still being married to Lindstrom at the time.  This entire story was broken by Louella Parsons in an unusual betrayal of the Hollywood system (keep in mind, at the time, that Bergman was one of the most important stars in Hollywood & Parsons was famous for minding what was best for the industry, which in this case would've been just letting Bergman claim the child was Lindstrom's), and it made Bergman a pariah.  You'd have to go back to the Silent Era to find a star of Bergman's stature who was put in this kind of scandal, and at the hands of one of the industry's most ardent supporters.  Suffice it to say, it temporarily destroyed Bergman's career, and even led Sen. Edwin Johnson of Colorado to publicly push for a ban of Bergman's film, calling her a "powerful influence of evil."  As a result of the scandal, the only director who was willing to work with Bergman was her new husband, Rossellini, and for the next six years she stayed off of a major studio set, until she returned triumphantly in Anastasia (we'll talk about that next week when we conclude our look at Bergman).

But before we get to the remainder of Bergman's career, we're going to look at the films she made with Rossellini, oftentimes overlooked because they are atypical to her screen presence, but generally celebrated by cinephiles.  She made five feature-length movies with him (none of which I've seen), and I selected Journey to Italy which is considered by many to be both the best of the five films they made together, and possibly the greatest of Rossellini's movies, period.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Alex (Sanders) and Katherine Joyce (Bergman), a couple who are visiting an Italian villa that Katherine recently inherited from her Uncle Homer.  The two were married hastily, have no children, and are clearly going through a bit of a rough patch in their union-Alex is callous & catty, not caring to the sensitive Katherine, who has unresolved feelings for a deceased poet friend.  As the movie goes on, we see the two of them start to drift apart, becoming much crueler to each other as they separate during their "vacation" in Italy, with Alex enjoying the company of multiple women, and Katherine going sightseeing throughout a 1950's Italy.  As the movie goes, they hastily decide that they want to divorce, but Katherine begins to have doubts after seeing an excavation of Pompeii and a religious parade.  In a moment of quick about-face (perhaps a miracle in the face of the religious figures in the parade), they agree that they love each other, and the film spins on a dime toward a happy, manufactured ending.

Journey to Italy is difficult to describe mostly because it's very subtle (it was a clear influence on the French New Wave), but it's really compelling.  I adore movies that are seemingly about nothing, and then as the movie progresses you begin to understand it's about everything.  The film is sly in the way that it lets Alex & Katherine's petty jealousies and competitions start to underscore the serious damage in their relationship, and I admired the way that one of them realized it before the other (but not in a cute way).  Katherine suddenly realizing that she's about to lose the man she loves (despite his faults), and it might be over something silly, is so real.  How often have we looked back on relationships & realized that a fight was about nothing, but the damage it did was colossal?  Rossellini picks up on this, and while the ending feels a bit too much (I don't know if I didn't think they should end up together, but I do think the epiphany of the moment feels a bit cloying for the cynical Alex), that's the only thing I disliked.  I found Journey to Italy mesmerizing.

Some of the best attributes of the film are in the cinematography, and the way that Rossellini shows (without saying it too loudly) what a post-WWII Italy is like.  Filmed less than a decade after the death of Mussolini, we see the ravages of the war, particularly in a galling scene with a series of skulls out in the open.  Though they are from centuries before, death & the way that it continually invites itself back (not just with the skulls, but also with the unearthed remains in Pompeii) show us the ghosts of WWII, and the thousands of young Italian men who didn't come back home, and are lost even as Italy moves forward (there's a sequence where Bergman sees a cavalcade of pregnant women, all there ready to replace & move on from the men that they had just lost).  Filmed with crystal-clear photography & a very mobile camera (the final scene of the picture is shot from a rising crane), it's these kinds of insights littering the background that inform the main storyline, about two people fighting over nothing, while we're constantly reminded of the lessons of "past battles."

Both of the leads are terrific.  Sanders brings the perfect streak of cruelty (he always played the same version of the same sarcastic British snob) to his Alex, someone who is more willing to move on than Katherine, even if he clearly loves her on some level.  Bergman gets the harder part, since she has to shift gradually without it feeling too sudden when she has her epiphany, and she nails it.  While the film wasn't a hit at the time, it's easy to see why cinephiles (such as Martin Scorsese) would later pick this film up as a favorite-there's so much grace & pain in the way she moves around, suddenly watching these relics and understanding that she'll someday be one of them...and that risking a relationship with the man she loved wouldn't be worth it, even if it came with some personal cost.  This, of course, was a lesson that Bergman had already learned in real life.  Next week, we'll finish our look at our Star with one last iconic performance from an actress who would continue to dominate the cinematic landscape for decades after a scandal that seemed certain to kill her career.

Under Capricorn (1949)

Film: Under Capricorn (1949)

Stars: Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotten, Michael Wilding, Margaret Leighton, Cecil Parker

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

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

I had an unexpected trip this morning & afterwards a nap that took longer than expected, but if I was able to keep this streak going through pneumonia & 104-degree temperatures three years ago, I'm definitely not going to stop it today simply because of a four-hour car ride.  And so we're going to get a late night (but still Saturday!) check-in with our Star of the Month, Ingrid Bergman.  Last week we talked about Bergman's unparalleled level of box office & awards supremacy with Joan of Arc, which had the actress playing a literal saint, something she was expected to do offscreen in the eyes of the public.  We're going to take a step back from that today with Under Capricorn, the third and final film that Bergman made with our mascot for the year, Alfred Hitchcock.  The pairings last two films had been large successes, both commercially & critically, and are considered two of the better films Hitchcock made before his most celebrated run in the 1950's.  However, I've seen both of those films (Notorious being one of my personal favorite films from Hitchcock), and as we only see films I haven't seen before for this series, we're going to look at the least-known of the Bergman/Hitchcock pairings, one that is probably less known for a reason...

(Spoilers Ahead) Under Capricorn is a strange movie in that in a lot of ways it's not really about anything, but if you want to summarize it into a plot, it's focused on a love triangle (though at least one character is hoping it'll be a square).  Set in Australia, the film has Charles Adare (Wilding), the second cousin of the local governor Sir Richard (Parker), meeting a childhood friend in the form of Lady Henrietta (Bergman).  Henrietta was once a lady-of-society, but inexplicably she married a man of no fortune named Sam (Cotten), who killed her brother & spent years in prison.  The two have found some financial footing in Australia, but Henrietta has become an alcoholic, and only entrusts Milly (Leighton), her maid, to do the work of running the household.  Charles begins to help Henrietta recapture some of her old stamina & glamour, but it comes at a cost-they're falling in love with each other.  A fateful night reveals this truth, but also another one-that it was Henrietta who killed her brother, not Sam, which is why they are bound together forever as he gave 7 years of his life for her crime.  Meanwhile, Milly is fired, & we find out she is using witchcraft (including leaving a shrunken head in Henrietta's bed, and it reads as problematic as it sounds to a modern audience) to try & keep her drinking so that Sam will leave his wife for her (a plan that kind of just disappears).  In the reveal of the affair, Sam accidentally shoots Charles, and is supposedly going to be hanged for it, until Henrietta says that it was she who killed her brother many years earlier, and Charles eventually lies to save Sam, saying the shot was no one's fault.  The three end on good terms, with Charles returning to Ireland.

That might sound like a lot of story, but it's really not as it plays out.  The stakes remain low-the first 70 minutes of the movie virtually nothing happens, and it meanders way too much, to the point of tedium.  When Sam shoots Charles, the stakes somehow don't increase.  The Hays Code requirements of the time indicate that Bergman's Henrietta isn't going to leave her husband, who is a relatively decent if short-tempered man, for the wealthy playboy (however well-meaning), and so the twists are kind of foregone.  This is a pity, because Margaret Leighton's maid could have left us with some genuine thrills, as she's by-far the best character in the movie, but nothing happens there-her dismissal feels underwhelming, almost as if Hitchcock had lost track of his most interesting character.  As a result, Under Capricorn, despite a pretty strong pedigree, falls flat-it has some moments of fun as a melodrama, but it doesn't stand up to the other Bergman/Hitchcock collaborations.

Bergman is one of the last actresses to have a properly uncomplicated relationship with Hitchcock that we'll look at this year.  Hitchock's treatment of women was sketchy at best and horrifying at worst (and horrifying was increasingly the case as his career continued).  We're not going to gloss over that as the series continues, but I do want to point out that at least for Bergman, this was a partnership that she seemed to enjoy & a friendship that lasted beyond their three pictures.  At his AFI tribute, which she hosted, she called Hitchcock an "adorable genius" and in his acceptance speech he referred to her as "Queen Ingrid."  Hitchcock & Bergman wouldn't work together again after this, despite both making films for a few more decades.  We're going to get into the why of that next week as we encounter one of the most, well, notorious scandals in the history of Classical Hollywood.

OVP: Joan of Arc (1948)

Film: Joan of Arc (1948)

Stars: Ingrid Bergman, Francis L. Sullivan, J. Carrol Naish, Ward Bond, Shepperd Strudwick, Gene Lockhart, John Emery, Leif Erickson, Cecil Kellaway, Jose Ferrer

Director: Victor Fleming

Oscar History: 7 nominations/2 wins (Best Actress-Ingrid Bergman, Supporting Actor-Jose Ferrer, Costume Design*, Cinematography*, Film Editing, Art Direction, Score...the film also won an Honorary Award for "distinguished service to the industry in adding to its moral statue in the world community," an Oscar producer Walter Wanger refused to pick up in protest of the film missing out in the Best Picture category)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

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

Last week we started our time devoted to Ingrid Bergman with For Whom the Bell Tolls, her first Oscar nomination.  As this series is focused on only films I haven't seen, we're going to skip over some crucial movies in Bergman's filmography today, but I want to give you an idea of where we were at at this point in her career.  By 1948, Bergman was one of the biggest & most celebrated stars in Hollywood.  She'd won her Oscar for 1944's Gaslight, and had massive hits in the form of Spellbound, The Bells of St. Mary's, Saratoga Trunk, and Notorious (two of which were directed by our mascot for the year, Alfred Hitchcock, but we'll talk more about them next week).  Basically, at this point in Bergman's career, she was untouchable-one of the most important stars in Hollywood, and the most beloved.  It made sense, therefore, for her to play a literal saint onscreen in Victor Fleming's Joan of Arc...and it would set up what would become one of the most crushing moments in celebrity worship a few years later when all of this would come crashing down as Bergman endured one of the biggest celebrity scandals of the Golden Age.  We'll get to that in the coming weeks...but first, let's look at Joan of Arc.

(Real Life Doesn't Need Spoiler Alerts) The film is a biopic loosely based on the life of Joan of Arc (Bergman), a teenage girl (Bergman was 33 in the film, playing someone who was 19...and she doesn't look nineteen so this plays as a bit ridiculous, yes) who sees visions of saints that say she must unite France and crown the Dauphin (Ferrer) as the king, uniting him against the British.  She inexplicably does this, using a private conversation with the Dauphin to convince him that he should put his army in her command.  After a series of victories, the Dauphin was crowned King Charles VII of France, but this comes at a price as he begins to argue with Joan, who thinks it is God's will that she unite France & drive the English out of Burgundy.  When she is captured, Charles does little to help her, and she is sentenced to death, burning at the stake.  It's worth noting that the film starts with Joan canonized (so even if you don't know what's coming, you know history celebrates her), which in 1948 was a fairly recent event-Joan of Arc wasn't canonized until the reign of Pope Benedict XV in 1920.

The film itself is kind of a textbook definition of what the Joan of Arc story is-there's not a lot of differentiation from what we know today, and in many ways this might have been one of the main ways the story infiltrated the American subconscious, particularly for non-Catholic viewers.  As a result, it's historically interesting but the plot reads as routine to a modern audience.  It doesn't help that Bergman is once again playing a sainted character with little variation.  Joan is steadfast & devout, which might make for appropriate conversation in a CCD class, but doesn't work in a two-and-a-half-hour movie.  Joan of Arc is proof once again that the Oscars rarely understood what made Bergman so captivating onscreen.  AMPAS regularly skipped over some of Bergman's most interesting work (Casablanca, Notorious) in favor of pious women who make use of Bergman's gorgeous, rich speaking voice but have little to say with it (not just Joan, but also For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Bells of St. Mary's, Anastasia, and Murder on the Orient Express).

The rest of the nominations are a mix.  The Cinematography, Art Direction, & Costuming are all great.  The lighting is good-we see an evolution from what really made Song of Bernadette sing here to have Bergman shot in a near perfect alabaster, as if some scenes are plucked out of an oil painting, and the set decoration is impressive if not quite differentiated enough to be truly mesmerizing (you're not going to be confused into thinking this isn't a soundstage).  The scoring is run-of-the-mill, which might work in a different year but 1948 had a lot of really excellent music so this just sort of sits there (it's hard to remember even moments after you see the picture).  The editing, well, it's long & repetitive, and it doesn't really know what to do with most of its scenes with men-in-power trying to take Joan down, particularly Ferrer's work as the Dauphin.  Ferrer as an actor is the opposite of Bergman-he generally seemed to overplay his hand, but here he might be a bit too subtle to make his king standout, and I left shocked that they noticed him (this was his screen debut).  There's something there, I'm not going to deny it (it's clear that Ferrer has a plan-of-action with his Dauphin, a weak-willed man of privilege who has no concept of how to be a great leader the way that Joan seems to be able to muster with no training), but a solid intuition below the surface cannot overcome that it just doesn't present onscreen.

OVP: For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943)

Film: For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943)

Stars: Gary Cooper, Ingrid Bergman, Akim Tamiroff, Katina Paxinou

Director: Sam Wood

Oscar History: 9 nominations/1 win (Best Picture, Actor-Gary Cooper, Actress-Ingrid Bergman, Supporting Actor-Akim Tamiroff, Supporting Actress-Katina Paxinou*, Cinematography, Art Direction, Film Editing, Score)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 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 Ingrid Bergman-click here to learn more about Ms. Bergman (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As we mentioned when we introduced our month devoted to Ingrid Bergman, the actress got her start in Swedish cinema in the earliest part of her career, but moved to Hollywood in 1939.  She didn't speak English well, and initially assumed that Intermezzo would be her only American film before returning back to Sweden.  However, Intermezzo was a big hit, and David O. Selznick decided to continue to invest in Bergman's career, keeping her in Hollywood to make additional films.  While Intermezzo would've been a fine place for us to start our look at Bergman's career (I've never seen it, I will admit), we're going to start a few years in, when she was a bit more established, but in the wake of Casablanca, was about to become an all-timer level star.  Casablanca, despite winning the Best Picture trophy in 1943, wasn't the film that won Bergman her first Academy Award-it was instead the picture we're going to start our month with, an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls.

(Spoilers Ahead) For Whom the Bell Tolls is a bit of a "bottle episode film" in that most of the action takes place during the Spanish Civil War in caves near a key bridge that will help to cutoff support for Franco's mission.  Robert Jordan (Cooper), an American language teacher, is tasked with blowing up the bridge to help the anti-fascist cause, and there he meets a group of guerrilla fighters, led by Pablo (Tamiroff) and Pilar (Paxinou).  Pablo is skeptical of helping Robert, but both Pilar and a young woman named Maria (Bergman) overrule him, and begin to help the cause.  In the end, after a lot of detours (more in a second), they are able to blow up the bridge, but at a price-Robert dies in the endeavor, and Maria (whom he has fallen in love with) must leave him behind to take on Franco's men in order for them to have a chance to escape.

That's basically the plot...of a nearly three-hour movie.  For Whom the Bell Tolls was noteworthy to me less as an early indicator of what Bergman could achieve or for being a major Oscar player, and more because it went on forever with nothing happening.  The movie's plotting is egregiously slow, as if they wanted to add an extra season onto a film, and it doesn't really serve a purpose.  Hemingway's novels, for those who are fans (I am not), are about introspection, about men fighting against the elements and themselves, but this movie doesn't service any of that.  It's just three hours of intense toxic masculinity, peppered with female characters that are badly underwritten.

The film won nine Oscar nominations, and some of the tech ones I can get behind to a degree.  The cinematography is beautiful, though it's more because I am a fan of early Technicolor than because it's doing a lot of interesting things (the moonlight is lovely, but at this point I feel like you need more from the film).  Same with the score-yes, it's solid, but it's also not particularly impressive on its own merit (which is weird because this was the first film score to ever be recorded by itself on a vinyl record).  The remainder I was less-involved with, as the editing is nonexistent (seriously-this movie is too long even by our modern "all movies are too long" attitude), and the art direction...it's just a bunch of caves!

The acting is overall pretty bad.  Cooper, who I know many people have allergies to, is not someone I dislike (he's obviously handsome, and occasionally interesting though so far I've preferred him in comedies), but he does nothing with this role.  He plays Robert as wallpaper drying, as if he is trying to read a line from a cue card.  Paxinou & Tamiroff were both nominated (Paxinou even won), but these are one-note performances on the periphery of the picture (both actors are in brownface). Tamiroff does his usual "evil villain" schtick, bringing little to the overall role, while Paxinou gets something to do in her speech about her youth & long-gone beauty (this is surely what won her the Oscar), but it's not enough.  And it's not important enough to the overall movie-for a film that is three hours long it doesn't give any character much growth.

Which leads us to Bergman.  Bergman is one of my favorite actresses, and I'm used to Oscar not picking her best roles, but it's absurd to me that they say her play Ilsa Lund and thought "huh, let's pick that movie where she complains about being ugly because her hair is short for three hours, even though she's still the most beautiful woman in the world."  Bergman is listless and unable to lift this up-there's no fire in this performance, none of the organic signature that would mark her best work.  I cannot comprehend why they picked this, one of her least performances, over her best work in Casablanca, and I am going to try & remember this when I defend the Academy next time against someone who says "they nominate the wrong performances"...because this is a textbook case.

Saturdays with the Stars: Ingrid Bergman

Each month of 2021 we will be taking a look at the leading ladies of some of Alfred Hitchcock's many celebrated classics; we'll be doing this series chronologically to when they first entered Hitchcock's filmography.  Last month we took a look at the career of Anne Baxter, a woman who towed the line between supporting & lead performer, and had to wait 13 years to finally break into one of Hitchcock's parts.  This month, we're going to cheat a little bit and go back in time.  While Baxter technically follows this actresses' movies with Hitchcock, July has five Saturdays, and if I'm going to pick one of the most important stars of all-time who could easily fill a year's worth of discussion on this blog, I'm going to at least give myself five films to traverse her career with.  This month, our star is Ingrid Bergman.

Bergman was born in Stockholm, and was named after Princess Ingrid of Sweden.  Her childhood was tragic, with both of her parents dying before she reached adulthood, as did the aunt she lived with after she was orphaned.  Despite this tragedy (or perhaps because of it), she went into show business, first in theater (joining the same theater company that Greta Garbo, the other classic Swedish beauty of the era, had attended some years earlier), and started making films in Sweden, one of which, Intermezzo, was commissioned by David O. Selznick to be remade in the United States, and he brought Bergman back to Hollywood to play the same part.  This movie was a huge hit in 1939, and launched Bergman's career in the United States.

Ingrid Bergman is perhaps too big of a star for a series like this.  Her career would span genuinely decades, not just with her making movies, but also making truly important films.  Bergman would be nominated for seven Oscars in her career, win Globe nominations for three additional films (plus an important TV movie), and yet those aren't even the films that you automatically name-check with her.  She wasn't, for example, nominated for Casablanca, undoubtedly her most beloved film (and quite probably the greatest film ever made), nor for her experimental work with Roberto Rossellini.  We will scratch the surface with multiple important films that I haven't seen of Bergman's (I have, for the record, watched all three of the films that she won Oscars for, and have seen Casablanca more times than I can count so these will not be amongst this month's pictures), but know that Bergman might be the first star that not only could I feature her a different month, I could do so without you feeling like I was phoning in the films.

It makes sense to feature a Hitchcock film when discussing Bergman's career.  Notorious, in particular, is considered one of the best films of the 1940's and of both of their careers, and Spellbound is a classic (Gregory Peck has never looked more beautiful).  However, I've seen both of those movies so we're going to feature Bergman in our theme with the least well-known of her three films with Hitchcock, Under Capricorn.  Bergman is one of the last actresses we're going to profile who had an historically strong relationship with Hitchcock, rather than a complicated one, and Under Capricorn is the sort of film that might have been hurt by the personal life of its star in eventually being a classic, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a hidden gem.  Either way, this month we're going to take a look at some gargantuan movies that have long been on my cinematic to do list for Ingrid Bergman.

OVP: The Bells of St. Mary's (1945)

Film: The Bells of St. Mary's (1945)
Stars: Bing Crosby, Ingrid Bergman, Henry Travers, Joan Carroll
Director: Leo McCarey
Oscar History: 8 nominations/1 win (Best Picture, Director, Sound*, Actor-Bing Crosby, Actress-Ingrid Bergman, Film Editing, Score, Song-"Aren't You Glad You're You")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

We're continuing on our Best Actress races today with The Bells of St. Mary's, one of the rare movies to get major acting nominations (and a Best Picture nomination) as a sequel (I might do an article on this someday, but it's actually hard to define what is and isn't a sequel when it comes to Best Picture nominees...though Bells of St. Mary's qualifies under any metric).  The movie is a followup to Going My Way, which we watched a few months back, and features a third consecutive nomination for one of its stars, Ingrid Bergman.  Bergman was one of the biggest names in Hollywood at the time, and with Casablanca and Gaslight behind her, one of the most bankable.  Bells of St. Mary's might not have been the creative peak of her career, but it was inarguably the financial peak of her career.  The film was the #1 movie of 1945, and adjusted for inflation is still on the Top 100 most successful movies ever.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film largely leaves behind most of the characters we know from Going My Way, save for Father O'Malley (Crosby), who has been assigned to a teaching parish in a dilapidated old school building that is under threat of being condemned.  The church is run by Sister Mary Benedict (Bergman), who desperately wants a businessman, Horace Bogardus (Travers), in the neighboring brand-new building, to donate the space, potentially making it so that the school can stay, but he has his designs on buying the school from the church to put up a parking lot.  While other things happen, specifically with a young woman who struggles in her school and family life (played by Joan Carroll), this is the heart of the story.  In the end, the church does get the building (it's old Hollywood, come on), but Sister Mary Benedict doesn't get to see it as she's transferred to a dry climate to help with her tuberculosis, and she & Father O'Malley become friends rather than friendly adversaries.

The film is very, very sweet & pleasant.  This kind of works in the sense that it's a holiday picture (there's a sequence where the children put together a ragtag Christmas pageant), and no one wants something too complicated during the holidays.  But it also has almost no proper plot because it's so averse to struggle or conflict.  Everyone, even Travers' businessman, is really kind & loving, and there's no sense of struggle in what will happen in the end.  Even Sister Mary Benedict's illness, which couldn't be blamed on anyone, seems certain to be cured in the end, and so there's no resolve.  The movie is thus egregiously boring even if it's difficult to dislike.

The film's seven Oscar nominations are all, therefore, a disappointment.  The editing is lousy as the story oftentimes feels strung together by vignettes rather than any central plot, and the Sound (which won the Oscar!) has nothing remarkable about it other than a few musical numbers from Crosby, including the forgettable "Aren't You Glad You're Here?"  Crosby doesn't complicate his work as Father O'Malley, and neither does Bergman as Sister Mary Benedict.  This feels like less of a sin from Crosby (a limited actor) but Bergman was scoring home runs during the 1940's (she'd be making Notorious, for crying out loud, just months after this film was released), so this feels like a wasted citation for the actress.  Overall, the movie doesn't impress-it's not spiteful or wrong, and it has its heart in the right place, but it's difficult to understand how this became a classic when it's hard to remember previous scenes even while you're watching the film.

OVP: Anastasia (1956)

Film: Anastasia (1956)
Stars: Ingrid Bergman, Yul Brynner, Helen Hayes, Akim Tamiroff
Director: Anatole Litvak
Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best Actress-Ingrid Bergman*, Score)
(Not So) Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

As y'all know, I've been doing a bit of cleaning out of my DVR in recent weeks, and I decided on Thursday & Friday evenings that I was in the mood to both clean out the DVR and to watch something familiar to me, so I watched a trio of movies that we'll get to this week that are going to get the rare "Not So" in front of the Snap Judgment Ranking.  This is normally reserved for when I decide to re-watch a movie and put my thoughts for posterity on this blog, and more often it's for movies I've seen a dozen times.  This isn't the case for the films this week.  While I have seen Anastasia, I haven't seen it more than once, and it's been maybe 20 years since I last watched the picture, so while certain scenes of it are firmly in my memory, there are other sequences where I completely had forgotten they'd even existed.  Eventually we'll get to the 1956 OVP, and the main reason I wanted to re-watch this is the odd juxtaposition of my love for Ingrid Bergman (one of my all-time favorite actresses) and the fact that so many of her Oscar-winning roles are "meh" in my memory.  Anastasia was her second trophy, and one that came after a huge hibernation period (where, arguably, she had her most creative acting starring in five films with her then-husband Roberto Rossellini).

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is a highly fictionalized look at the life of Anna Anderson (here called Anna Koreff, but it's impossible to not see this clearly being about Anderson herself).  Anna (Bergman) is a woman who has been in-and-out of mental hospitals, and remembers little about her childhood.  She bares something of a resemblance to what the Grand Duchess Anastasia might have looked like in adulthood, and General Bounine (Brynner) smells an opportunity.  Along with his associate Boris (Tamiroff), they set about to train Anna to become the Grand Duchess, grilling her with facts, but as they continue they start to question if, in fact, she is the Grand Duchess, as she continues to know things that make them question whether or not she's real.  In the end, Anna never truly proves herself to be who she claims she is, but she convinces the Dowager Empress (Hayes), the Grand Duchess's grandmother, that she is her granddaughter, only to then leave her behind, realizing that she's in love with Bounine, and the two run off together, the Dowager Empress content in the knowledge that at least one member of her family is still alive, and now happy.

There's a weird sort of conundrum here.  The mystery of what happened to the Romanovs, and if in fact the youngest princess did escape and survive the Revolution, was one of the great unsolved mysteries of the 20th Century, something we assumed would never be conclusively proven.  This was certainly the case the first time that I saw this movie in the mid-90's.  However, in 2007, DNA testing was done that proved conclusively that the Czar, his wife, and their five children had all died (they found the body of what was assumed to be Anastasia and her brother Alexei, the final missing two, though it's possible that the other body was of Anastasia's sister Maria) were found and proved that this mystery had a rather sad, humdrum ending; there was not, in fact, a little girl out there who was actually a princess & didn't know it, but instead that little girl died during the Russian Revolution.

In some ways this diminishes this film and some of its grandeur.  We know that Anna Anderson wasn't Anastasia, and while you can suspend belief in the film, it takes something away from Bergman's work if you try to keep this grounded in historical accuracy at all.  The performance isn't great-my memory was correct.  She's fine, and regal, and looks great in a dress, and the one scene between she and Hayes where she has to convinced the Grand Duchess that she could in fact be her granddaughter is the best in the movie (random aside, but it's weird that Bergman won here when Hayes, who is better in the movie, didn't even get nominated considering she was staging something of a comeback at the time on the big screen).  But there's not enough beneath the eyes of this character-there's no sense of what Anna actually believes, which feels off to me.  The score, the only other nomination (again-where were the Costume nominations for this movie?!?) is much better, and thankfully doesn't just rely upon Russian cliches to fill out the music.