OVP: The Green Years (1946)

Film: The Green Years (1946)

Stars: Charles Coburn, Tom Drake, Beverly Tyler, Hume Cronyn, Gladys Cooper, Dean Stockwell, Jessica Tandy

Director: Victor Saville

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Supporting Actor-Charles Coburn, Cinematography)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

I got asked recently whether it was hard to write reviews of bad movies, and I answered honestly that it wasn't.  Bad movies can be fascinating even if they're bad, because of the ways that they're bad.  A bad movie has a perspective, it has something to say & it just totally gets lost in saying it.  The harder reviews (for me) to write are movies that just sort of sit there.  These kinds of movies exist every year, but they do show up in a specific style in the 1940's, when the world had endured a difficult war & people wanted to see pleasant things with limited conflict.  The most famous examples of this type of film are Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's, which are not so much movies as a series of motifs that have very little conflict & clear answers to every problem that comes along.  I don't enjoy these types of movies because while I get why they exist, they are not compelling in retrospect, and unfortunately for me, The Green Years falls into this category.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is centered around Robert Shannon (Stockwell as a boy, Drake as an adult), an orphan who must live with relatives, and becomes attached to his great-grandfather Alexander Gow (Coburn), an unkempt fellow who serves as an unlikely role model for the straight-laced young lad.  The movie expands upon their relationship, and the complicated day-to-day life of this poor Scottish family as they enter the modern age & World War I, and shows how Robert becomes a doctor against the odds.

Like I said, the film doesn't really have much there-there's no proper conflict to the film.  Hume Cronyn is meant to play the villain, but really all he does is sit there hoarding nonexistent fortunes, and most of the plot is "we're poor, and who will get the money?"  There are major moments of pain (including two out-of-the-blue deaths, one a bit galling as a classmate of Robert's is run over by a train, thus giving Robert a scholarship opening to go to medical school), but they don't register & the film doesn't know how to capitalize on them.  It's not helped by the fact that Drake & Beverly Tyler's romance is a dud, and you don't want to spend any time with the main characters.  I'm going with the rare 1-star not exactly because it was bad, but because it has so little risk, and even that risk doesn't pay off.

The film won two Oscar nominations, for Best Supporting Actor & Cinematography.  Coburn could play this part in his sleep, and while it's fun, there's nothing much to it.  He's playing this role simply as a warm old man who is cantankerous...and yet is generous from the get-go with this orphaned boy.  He's supposed to be cantankerous, but they don't even bother to have him thaw to the boy as the film progresses.  The Cinematography is a nonstarter for me as well-nothing distinguishes the mostly interior scenes, and there's barely any closeup shots that work well.  Overall, it's the type of movie that you won't remember, which makes it an even greater sin than merely being bad.

OVP: Best Friends (1982)

Film: Best Friends (1982)
Stars: Goldie Hawn, Burt Reynolds, Ron Silver, Jessica Tandy, Barnard Hughes, Audra Lindley, Keenan Wynn
Director: Norman Jewison
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Song-"How Do You Keep the Music Playing?")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Admittedly I should probably be getting political today, again (and am on my Twitter page, so follow me if you don't), but my lovely travel plans for the weekend got cancelled and I'm bummed from that, so instead I am spending the weekend cleaning out my DVR in preparation for the 31 Days of Oscar that is about to bestow itself upon us all as a radiant sign of hope (my DVR, TCM, and I have a bit of a war every year over how many movies I can fit on it, and I always lose in not getting as many as I want, but I'm at least giving myself a running chance right now).  Therefore in the next week (and likely over the next month or so), in addition to politics, Oscar articles, and modern movie reviews, expect to see some pretty eclectic films come forward that have been cited by the Academy but may not be as headliner as they once were.  We'll start that list with 1982's Best Friends, starring Goldie Hawn and Burt Reynolds.

(Spoilers Ahead) It's always something I have to acclimate to when I'm revisiting movies from a previous era who were the "movie stars" of the time that didn't necessarily gain immortal status, which is always that way with Reynolds in particular, but it's worth recalling Burt Reynolds at this time was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood (career misfires, then Evening Shade, then Boogie Nights, then more career misfires, would soon follow), as was Hawn, who had enough of a role in my childhood that I don't have to remind myself of her screen presence (she's one of my favorites).  The film shows them as Paula and Richard, two successful screenwriters, friends and lovers, who decide on a whim that it's time they get married.  The film then shows them as they move into a more domestic role while meeting their parents, considerably more eccentric than they are used to in their work-powered Los Angeles existence.

The film is one of those love stories that has aged and dated badly.  The idea of marriage "changing everything" is a bit more alien now when romantic couples regularly live together without getting married, and the idea of going from a career woman to a "wife" is a bit prosaic (you can be both!), but there are cute moments in the film.  The parents (Tandy, Hughes, Lindley, and Wynn) are all caricatures of human beings, but they get some fun lines in (particularly a bawdy Tandy, miles away from what she would soon bring to Miss Daisy), and Hawn and Reynolds are both incredibly watchable movie stars.  It all feels, though, like we're expecting too little from their characters-are they so sheltered that they can't put up with the insanity of their spouse's family for a week?  I think expecting patience out of two grown adults, particularly considering that the in-laws are by-and-large quite kind (if indeed pushy) shows a plot point that I'm missing-were we expected to think that people had less patience in 1982?  Couple that with a late scene that, while at the time probably wasn't nearly as heinous as it is now, but wouldn't fly in a movie in 2017 (Reynolds smashes open a window and pushes Hawn's head through the opening so she can "get some air," a violent scene that wouldn't be fitting today in a scene where they're about to reconcile), made me not like the movie, even if I did in fact enjoy it more in the middle than the script was giving me options to do.

The movie received a sole nomination for Best Song, one of many creations from Alan & Marilyn Bergman to be such cited, and it's actually quite lovely.  James Ingram, a solid good luck charm in the 1980's and 1990's for Oscar, performs the song with Patti Austin, and it's a lovely 80's power ballad, better than you'd remember even if a bit overly sappy.  The song features throughout as a melancholy love theme, only properly playing over the end credits but also appear in snippets throughout.  It's not a bad nomination, for the record, though I doubt when we get down to it in the OVP that Oscar made the wrong call going with An Officer and a Gentleman.  We shall see then, though.

Those are my thoughts on this romantic comedy from 1982-how about you?  Anyone have a fond memory of this, and if not, share your favorite film moments of Reynolds or Hawn?  And also, which of James Ingram's many soundtrack-sourced love ballads is your favorite?  Share below!

OVP: The Seventh Cross (1944)

Film: The Seventh Cross (1944)
Stars: Spencer Tracy, Signe Hasso, Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Agnes Moorehead
Director: Fred Zinnemann
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Supporting Actor-Hume Cronyn)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Spencer Tracy is one of the sturdiest of the Golden Age actors, and oddly doesn't have a filmography that screams "legend" in the way that Clark Gable or Humphrey Bogart do.  Sure, the Tracy/Hepburn films are well-known, but Adam's Rib or Woman of the Year aren't part of the lexicon the way that Gone with the Wind or Casablanca are.  And yet, Tracy is a legend, well-regarded, and an Academy superstar.  He received a stunning nine nominations in his career, and I will admit right now that I have yet to see a one of them, so we will be visiting all nine in the upcoming months/years/decades (don't really have a time table yet on this project, but with 2,228 films to go, it'll be a while).

So I was very glad that last month on Turner Classic Movies it appeared that they were doing Spencer Tracy month, and while most of my recordings got eaten by a very hungry TiVo while I was on vacation, I did manage to save this small film from 1944 by Fred Zinnemann.  Zinnemann, a director who got his films Oscar-nominated almost every time he went out, was a methodical director-a man who  could get at the hearts of his characters and their minute actions-look at The Search or From Here to Eternity or Julia-these are films that are about the obstacles people need to undertake to make their lives better, and The Seventh Cross, one of the lesser known movies in his filmography, does just that.

The film is about George Heisler (Spencer Tracy), one of seven men who have escaped from a concentration camp.  Slowly but steadily, Heisler is the only man left standing amongst the seven, as all of them are brought back to the concentration camp, and killed on one of the seven crosses in the yard (hence the title).  The film follows Heisler as he slowly works his way through a small German city, trying to figure out a way to connect with his friends and get a passport out of the city.  After being rejected by the woman he loved before his arrest, who is now married and threatens to turn him over to the Gestapo, we are given a cavalcade of odd characters (including Moorehead, in a strangely small role considering she was an Oscar nominee two years earlier and would be again in 1944), before Heisler finally calls on an old couple that he knew (Cronyn and Tandy), who risk everything to get him to safety, which he eventually does reach, but not before Cronyn realizes that he needs to become political and involved, and of course Heisler gets a brief amount of romance (though nowhere near the amount indicated in the film's posters and promotions) with the lovely Signe Hasso.

The movie is noteworthy for a couple of reasons, not least of which is the date it was made.  Like Casablanca, the war was still going on when this film was made, and it's one of the few films to feature the concentration camps to be made during the era.  It's shocking the amount of detail that they are able to get into for a film that had minimal first hand accounts (though it is based on a book, so that is likely the main source, but still).  It's also fascinating to see the great chemistry that Tracy, playing an introverted character, can still muster with his costars.  I loved the way that he slowly realizes the amount of risk people are willing to go to save him, and the realization at the end that he will be living his life to help them, save them if necessary, comes across less as melodramatic and more as a legitimate reaction a person would have to such a turn of events.

Cronyn was the film's sole Oscar nomination (oddly Tracy didn't land it, despite his Meryl Streep-like track record with the Academy), and this was the only Oscar nomination he received in his entire, decades-long career.  It seems appropriate that he received the nomination opposite his beloved wife of over 50-years Jessica Tandy, as he always had his best chemistry onscreen when the original Blanche Dubois is by his side.  Cronyn's work is strong-it reminded me a little of the work of Harold Russell two years later in The Best Years of Our Lives, in that they are both very earnest, and slowly realize their own limitations and what they would be best at in the world.  Cronyn's work isn't quite of the same level as Russell's (admittedly, Russell gets meatier material to work with), but it's definitely the sort of strong character work that the supporting nominees in the 1940's usually enjoyed.

It's a fairly straight-forward film, so that's where I'll leave it, but some questions to ponder before you go-what did you think of The Seventh Cross (if you've seen it)?  What's your favorite Tracy performance, and why do you think he doesn't enjoy the stature of a Gable or a Bogart?  And what's your favorite pairing of Cronyn/Tandy?