OVP: The Towering Inferno (1974)

Film: The Towering Inferno (1974)

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

Director: John Guillermin

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

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Steve McQueen: click here to learn more about Mr. McQueen (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

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

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

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

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

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

OVP: Duel in the Sun (1946)

Film: Duel in the Sun (1946)

Stars: Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten, Gregory Peck, Lionel Barrymore, Herbert Marshall, Lillian Gish, Walter Huston, Charles Bickford, Harry Carey, Butterfly McQueen

Director: King Vidor

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Actress-Jennifer Jones, Supporting Actress-Lillian Gish)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

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

As we discussed last week, Gregory Peck's initial career took off like a rocket, with huge hits such as The Yearling, Spellbound, and The Valley of Decision making him a household name pretty much overnight.  The late-1940's, though, were something of a disappointment.  He starred in another Hitchcock film, The Paradine Case, which was a big flop, as well as the western Yellow Sky and the romance The Great Sinner, neither of which set the box office on fire.  While Twelve O'Clock High and The Gunfighter would bring life back to his career, during this time frame he only had two really notable films.  The first was Gentleman's Agreement, which won the Best Picture Oscar (and got Peck his third nomination) and was a massive success, but one that I've seen before so it wasn't eligible for this series.  The second was one I had heard legend of after reading about movies for 25+ years, but somehow had avoided actually watching: David O. Selznick's infamous follow-up to Gone with the Wind, the soap opera western Duel in the Sun, our movie for today.

(Spoilers Ahead) Based on the novel by Niven Busch, Duel in the Sun is the story of a young biracial woman named Pearl Chavez (played by the very much not biracial Jennifer Jones), the daughter of a white father and a Mexican mother.  After her father (Marshall) kills her mother for having an affair, she's sent to live with his childhood sweetheart (and second cousin) Laura Belle (Gish) on a giant ranch she lives on with her husband Senator Jackson McCanless (Barrymore) and their two sons the proper Jesse (Cotten) and the lascivious Lewt (Peck).  This sets up an inevitable love triangle between the two men and Pearl, with her drawn to Jesse's decency, but clearly there is a hormonal attraction between she & Lewt that cannot be denied in the Texas heat.  Along the way, she tries to find ways of escaping Lewt, including marrying Sam Pierce (Bickford), but Lewt kills Sam, making him a fugitive from the law, but still Pearl can't stop her desire for him.  When it becomes clear that Jesse can save her, even after he's shot by Lewt trying, Pearl understands that the only way that she'll break free of Lewt is to kill him, which she does...but in the process, she also ends up in his arms, their desire in life to be together impossible to deny, even as they're literally murdering each other.

Duel in the Sun was not, it has to be said, Gone with the Wind.  Selznick's obsession with equalling his previous film's success, particularly with the woman he was obsessed with & having an affair with at the time, Jennifer Jones, is kind of the stuff of Hollywood legend.  This was a deeply troubled shoot, and cost nearly $8 million to make & promote, which was basically unheard of at the time, and so despite a solid box office, it barely broke even.  The problem, of course, was that it wasn't Gone with the Wind (nothing is, quite frankly, though Titanic probably comes close enough to earn comparison)-chasing that dragon is the stuff of heartache, even for the man who initially produced it.  The film is tackier, it's less enthralling, and no aspect of the production quite lives up to that film.

If you get past that comparison, though, it's not a bad movie even if it's clearly a "bad" movie.  The film rarely makes a lot of sense, but it goes off of impulse, all id and no ego.  But it's entertaining throughout.  The score is fun, the cinematography is really horny but it works (the cameramen are obsessed with the gorgeous Jones & Peck in all of their carnal lust).  The acting is bizarre, but not boring.  Jennifer Jones, whom I've seen enough of at this point to be able to say she wasn't a very good actress, makes so many choices, swinging for the fences in every scene, but it kind of works with the unbalanced nature of the script.  Save for Beat the Devil, this is undoubtedly Jones' most intriguing performance (at least of what I've seen), and while she's not Oscar-worthy, she certainly is something.  Lillian Gish is a bit bland in the only film that she'd be nominated for an Oscar for (it's a pity it wasn't for The Wind or The Night of the Hunter instead), likely getting it with one deathbed confessional, but overall playing a kindly matron in one of Oscar's worst Supporting Actress lineups.  Butterfly McQueen is playing basically the exact same character she got in Gone with the Wind, channeling Prissy as if that will get Selznick literally back to his original movie (she's the only principle actor to appear in both films).

And as for Gregory Peck?  His casting is...a choice.  I've talked about this a bit, but it's strange that Peck would become most associated with To Kill a Mockingbird, a film where he exudes absolute no sex appeal, because his exaggerated face (big eyes, pouty lips) and lanky frame were used to make audiences thirsty in the mid-1940's, and that's definitely the case here.  He looks hot in Duel in the Sun.  The only problem here is that Peck is not meant to be playing a "sexy math teacher" vibes like he'd play in most of his films of this era, but instead is supposed to be a dangerous "bad boy you make out with under the bleachers" sort of vibes, a forbidden sexiness that you know is wrong but you can't help it.  Peck, though, is not good at this-he's too inherently decent, and playing a villain here who also has to turn you on...it just doesn't work.

Beat the Devil (1953)

Film: Beat the Devil (1953)
Stars: Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida, Robert Morley, Peter Lorre
Director: John Huston
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.


We are not, sadly, going to start where I wanted to start with Gina Lollbrigida's career.  One of the heartbreaking things for classic film fans in the age of streaming is that with the focus on the new, and with the same streaming platform randomly trading back-and-forth something like Back to the Future II or Cliffhanger, we end up in a situation where certain movies are never brought forward for streaming, and are almost impossible to find on home video.  Thus is the case for Lollobrigida's first breakthrough role, Bread, Love and Dreams, which despite starring two major Italian actors (Lollobrigida and Vittorio de Sica), winning the Silver Bear at Berlin, and being an Oscar nominee (Best Motion Picture Story), is next-to-impossible to find even an affordable copy.  Hopefully someday Criterion takes pity on us here, but until then, we're going to start with Lollobrigida's first major English-language film, Beat the Devil.


(Spoilers Ahead) Beat the Devil sounds in many ways like the sort of standard-fare we'd expect uniting Humphrey Bogart with John Huston.   Bogie plays Billy Dannreuther, a broke (but formerly rich) American who is working with a group of criminals, led by Paterson (Morley), who are trying to buy up uranium-rich land in North Africa for cheap, scoring an easy buck.  Paterson has had a man who was suspected of going after the same property killed, and Billy and his wife Maria (Lollobrigida) are trying to keep their heads down.  Suddenly a British couple make their acquaintance: Harry (Edward Underdown) and his wife Gwendolen (Jones).  The two accidentally set off the alarms of Paterson when Gwendolen, who is soon madly in love with Billy and starts having an affair with him, brags about her husband but is overheard by Paterson's accomplice Julius (Lorre), who assumes that Gwendolen's lies are true.  They set off on a boat together, where "destiny lends a hand" allowing Harry, of all people, to purchase the land that Gwendolen lied about him buying (almost completely by accident), her running back to him, Billy & Maria getting nothing, and Paterson & his cronies ending up in jail.

This sounds like boilerplate film noir, but it doesn't play that way in the movie.  For starters, you might not know this if this is the first time you've seen a movie like this (you should watch The Maltese Falcon and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre before tackling Beat the Devil), is that it's funny, and not because it's so-bad-it's-hilarious-it's meant to be funny.  Beat the Devil was not a hit at the time, but has developed a cult following in the years since primarily because it's one of the first straight-up camp spoofs, not in the way Abbott & Costello would do with the Universal monsters, but instead in a subtler way.  The villains are played as buffoons, and frequently you'll have what in a noir would be an obvious twist (a guy like Harry never lives through a traditional noir), go the complete opposite direction.  The best example of this is toward the end, when it looks like Paterson is about to get away with a lenient cop, and then Gwendolen shouts out the entire criminal plot, accusing Paterson of murder, and she isn't put in danger nor does the cop doubt her.  The penultimate scene has virtually no climax-just what would likely have happened in real life, rather than the expected chase or bullet Bogie will have to take for the female lead to protect her.

Lollobrigida supposedly hated making this movie, complaining that Bogart & Huston made fun of her.  Indeed, the production of this film is kind of legend (one of several "Bogie & Huston want a vacation" sort of films they made together, and one where Truman Capote was writing the script as they went along), so it's fare to assume that this was rough on Lollobrigida, acting in a language that wasn't her primary for the first time.  It shows in the script, too-Lollobrigida is fine, but ancillary, and isn't asked to do more than look beautiful.  It's actually Jennifer Jones (who I'm not really a fan of), who gets the best part in the whole movie, totally selling the blonde, air-headed beauty & underlining the camp of the film better than any other actor.

OVP: Love is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955)

Film: Love is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955)
Stars: William Holden, Jennifer Jones, Torin Thatcher, Isobel Elsom
Director: Henry King
Oscar Nominations: 8 nominations/3 wins (Best Picture, Actress-Jennifer Jones, Costume Design*, Score*, Original Song-"Love is a Many-Splendored Thing"*, Cinematography, Art Direction, Sound)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

This week we are looking at five random Best Actress nominees, all films that I saw for the first time while on quarantine.  Yesterday we started with Barbara Stanwyck's first nomination for Stella Dallas, and today we jump some twenty years into the future with Jennifer Jones' final nomination (of five) for Love is a Many-Splendored Thing.  I don't entirely know why I have always been fascinated by the concept of this movie.  It might be the cumbersome title (with the grammatically correct but still unusual hyphen sported in the middle of it), or it could be the omnipresent grandeur of the title song (even if you've never seen this movie, you probably have already started singing it in your head).  But I genuinely had no idea what it was about, and maybe my intrigue stemmed from a genuine love of romantic epics.  Regardless, it got me my very first Best Picture nominee from 1955 (only one ceremony left and I'll have seen a nominee from every single Oscar Best Picture field), and of course going with the theme, we have Jennifer Jones' swan song with an Academy that was quite generous with her considering the scope of her career.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place during the Chinese Civil War, and focuses almost exclusively on the relationship with Han Suyin (Jones), a Eurasian doctor who works in Hong Kong, and an American war correspondent Mark Elliott (Holden) (it's weird, quite frankly, how there is literally no side story in this film-can anyone think of an epic of this time period that would have done something like that other than Lawrence of Arabia?).  The two are clearly in love, though Mark is married, and Suyin is certain that she will never love again after her husband passed away years before the story.  Making matters more complicated is the racism of it all-it's considered inappropriate for the biracial Suyin to marry Mark, and the white people who pull the strings (and can decide if Suyin gets employed) make sure to let her know this as the movie progresses.  In the end, it doesn't matter-Mark dies covering the war, and Suyin mourns him on the hilltop they first fell in love, and last said goodbye.

There's a lot to unpack with a movie like Love is a Many-Splendored Thing, because racism is definitely going to poison most of the enjoyment you might get out of the picture.  The reality is that Jones, in real life, is not of any Asian descent-she is entirely of European descent, and therefore is in yellow face here.  This is pretty disqualifying for modern audiences (as it should be), but even if you're going to try to view it within its time, it's hard to do that because Jones' ethnicity is really the only thing the film has any interest in with her character, and Jones is quite frankly not a good enough actress to make us vest in her as a performer even if her character is a stereotype.  Almost every scene is her pointing out that she's Eurasian, as if to constantly remind the audience that white Jennifer Jones isn't supposed to be white, and as a result the comments she makes about Chinese culture, and about the difficulties she faces as an Asian woman...it's rough, and pretty disgusting.

On a technical level, though the film is impressive looking.  The cinematography's great-I loved the outdoors shot (in a rarity for the 1950's, chunks of the film were shot on-location, and it shows), and the lavish houses are incredible even if they're mildly ridiculous.  The sound work is good, the costumes are meticulous & lovely, and the score, is well, wonderful.  The song is sung by an orchestral choral in the film, but would be covered by everyone in the years that followed (most successfully the Four Aces), and it's gorgeous.  It's so effective, in fact, that you'll think that you just saw a better movie than you did.  Then you'll see a still photo of Jones in the movie, and be reminded that, yeah, this is problematic even for a film trope that is always problematic.

OVP: Love Letters (1945)

Film: Love Letters (1945)
Stars: Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten, Ann Richards, Cecil Kellaway, Gladys Cooper, Anita Louise
Director: William Dieterle
Oscar History: 4 nominations (Actress-Jennifer Jones, Art Direction, Score, Original Song-"Love Letters")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Jennifer Jones is not really whom you'd consider my favorite actress of the 1940's.  Her pie-eyed optimism and constant saintliness (I'm aware I still need to see Duel in the Sun, where supposedly this image should be shattered) was in direct contrast to the femme fatales, the Bette Davises and Joan Crawfords and Gene Tierneys that populated this era and my heart.  She certainly was one of Oscar's however, as she managed to scoop up five nominations, including four consecutively from 1943-1946. Love Letters is smack dab in the middle of her nominations count at number three, and was when she was one of the biggest names in Hollywood.  Under the watchful eye of her soon-to-be-husband David O. Selznick, she stars as an amnesiac (possible murderess) in this potboiler that is scripted by (of all people) Ayn Rand.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film tells the tale of Alan Quinton (Cotten...doesn't that feel like the name of every one of Joseph Cotten's characters though?) writing love letters for his caddish fellow soldier in a war that is so inconsequential they don't even bother to say which one it is (it's World War II, for the record) and we learn soon that he has fallen in love with the woman, named Victoria, whom he has been pulling a Cyrano toward.  The war ends, and we learn that the caddish soldier has died and that Alan's fiancee Helen (Louise) can't handle his PTSD and that he is clearly in love with a woman he has never met, and instead he goes off into the world, living at his aunt's house and meeting a woman named Singleton (Jones) who is clearly in love with him even as he pines for Victoria, whom he discovers has died and murdered her husband.  Singleton cannot handle this, and though Alan soon figures out that Singleton is indeed Victoria, he cannot tell her because she has amnesia and everyone thinks the shock will hurt her.  The film eventually shows that the caddish soldier was killed by her grandmother after he drunkenly hurt her granddaughter Victoria, and then Alan and Victoria, like all good 1940s romances, end up living happily ever after.

It's all as melodramatic as it sounds, and never once does it veer into a particularly compelling series of performances to make up for the sincere lack of surprise (it's quite obvious to anyone who has seen a movie before that headliner Jennifer Jones, who is far too misty to not have something going on in her head, is clearly the woman he initially fell in love with and not some other actor).  Jones and Cotten were constantly playing romantic leads in the 1940s (three of her five Oscar nominations, in fact, were for falling in love with Cotten though he never once would be noticed by the Academy, making him one of the weirdest snubs in their long history considering the pedigree of his pictures), but I see very little chemistry here to explain why.  Jones is too glass-eyed and willing to throw herself on the tracks for my taste and her character is banal and uninteresting.

The film received three other nominations on-top of Jones baffling citation, though only one of them really stands out as something that deserved the accolade.  The film has a wonderful score, written by Academy favorite Victor Young, soaring throughout and adding a dreaminess to the mystery that Ayn Rand tries to inject into the film to keep the plot running and not just making the film an hour long.  The original song, which is entirely instrumental in the film, lends credence as to why Young deserved a nomination though considering we don't get the words to the Dick Haymes hit it feels a little self-indulgent that we get a second nomination for Young's score when one would have been sufficient (it feels like mad cheating to include the film as a song nominee when words were only added later as part of a radio-friendly hit-this would never pass the music branch's tough muster now).  The film's third nomination is for art direction, and while we get many dusty old English country houses, I never actually believed we weren't on a Hollywood sound-stage, which is a pretty hard knock against a nomination in this category.

Those are really my thoughts on the disappointing Love Letters, for which I'd had much higher hopes.  I'm now just one performance (Ingrid Bergman in The Bells of St. Mary's) away from finishing off the 1945 Best Actress lineup-do you have a favorite amongst them?  What are your thoughts on Love Letters' three other Oscar mentions?  And why do you think Joseph Cotten was never AMPAS' cup-of-tea?  Share your thoughts below in the comments!