1964 Oscar Viewing Project

If you've been following me on social media, you'll know that I have been working diligently on the 1964 screenings, and that this was the next year in my Oscar Viewing Project.  This is amazingly the 33rd Oscar Viewing Project, which means we are one-third done with the project (see links to the other 32 below).  As a reminder, for the Oscars, we see all of the nominees in all of the narrative, feature-length film categories, which in this year had many still split between Color and Black & White (something that happened from the late 1940's to the mid-1960's).  I have seen every single one of the below categories, and will be picking (in a vacuum) my favorites of the bunch.  Finding domestic box office records pre-1980 is surprisingly challenging, but the general consensus on the Top 10 highest-grossing domestic films of 1964 are:

1. My Fair Lady

2. Goldfinger

3. Mary Poppins

4. The Carpetbaggers

---From Russia with Love*

5. A Fistful of Dollars

6. Father Goose

7. A Shot in the Dark

8. A Hard Day's Night

9. The Night of the Iguana

10. What a Way to Go!

* - From Russia with Love was released in the UK in 1963, and is generally considered to be a 1963 film which is what we will consider it for the My Ballot, but it was first released in 1964 in the US, and would be in 5th place if it was considered a 1964 film.

With the exception of The Carpetbaggers (a now-forgotten 1960's bestselling novel & artifact of the sexual revolution that only could've been a film hit in the mid-to-late 1960's, which sounds intriguing in a smutty sort of way but I don't know if I'll get around to before the My Ballot) I've actually seen all of these movies already, including several that didn't get nominated for the Academy Awards.  In the weeks ahead, I'll be seeing a lot of 1964 films (follow along here for my weekly screenings), though, as I try to get a complete picture of the cinematic landscape outside of the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.

But now, it's time to go back to a time of Washington passing the Civil Rights Act, Muhammad Ali becoming the heavyweight champion of the world, and a car they're calling the "Ford Mustang" taking center stage at the World's Fair.  And of course, let's remember the movies...

Note: 7 Faces of Dr. Lao received a non-competitive Makeup statue in 1964, before the category was established.  I did see the film (as you'll see below), but wanted to make a note of that.  We'll do Makeup as a My Ballot category with five standard nominations, so you'll be able to see if I picked it then, but I will note for posterity that the makeup is very good (if, admittedly, a bit racist, which I'll talk about with its Visual Effects nomination).

Picture

1. Dr. Strangelove

2. My Fair Lady

3. Mary Poppins

4. Becket

5. Zorba the Greek

The Lowdown: One of those lists that proves the insanity of the Oscars-five films that only have the year they were made in common (even the musicals are shockingly different).  I am picking the sharp Kubrick-led black comedy, perhaps the quintessential black comedy, in a slight bid over My Fair Lady.  As you're going to find in this list, my childhood love of Eliza & Professor Higgins translated into adulthood, and I enjoyed the movie far more than most on Letterboxd & Film Twitter.  Really, though, any of the Top 4 (I wasn't really into Zorba) would be a fine addition to the Best Picture pantheon.

Director

1. Stanley Kubrick (Dr. Strangelove)

2. George Cukor (My Fair Lady)

3. Robert Stevenson (Mary Poppins)

4. Peter Glenville (Becket)

5. Michael Cacoyannis (Zorba the Greek)

The Lowdown: In one of the few years Oscar did this (and part of the reason I picked this year as there was so few films to catch up on), the Best Picture & Director lineups were exactly the same...and I'm going with the same order.  I think to at least some degree I'd have Mary Poppins & Becket closer to the #2 slot here than I would otherwise (I think that it's bizarre that a director so good with intimate films like The Philadelphia Story and The Women like George Cukor would win his sole directing Oscar for a gigantic musical...but that's Hollywood, I guess).  But yeah-Kubrick's going to win this, and I'm increasingly wondering if the "Kubrick gets the most OVP Directing statues" train is inevitable at this point.

Actor

1. Peter Sellers (Dr. Strangelove)

2. Peter O'Toole (Becket)

3. Richard Burton (Becket)

4. Rex Harrison (My Fair Lady)

5. Anthony Quinn (Zorba the Greek)

The Lowdown: This is an underrated race for the best this category has ever been, certainly one of the most impressive lineups-there is not just no bad performances in this list, there's no even "merely good" nominee in this list.  Instead, we have four great performances against a titanic one.  O'Toole and Burton, two of the most famous Oscar bridesmaids, will not be curing that here (O'Toole is now 0 for 3 for his eight nominations, Burton this is his first miss to date), as there's just no beating Peter Sellers taking on three very divergent roles in the absurdist Dr. Strangelove.

Actress

1. Julie Andrews (Mary Poppins)

2. Kim Stanley (Seance on a Wet Afternoon)

3. Sophia Loren (Marriage Italian Style)

4. Anne Bancroft (The Pumpkin Eater)

5. Debbie Reynolds (The Unsinkable Molly Brown)

The Lowdown: We will get into the Audrey Hepburn of it all with the My Ballot, as that's focusing on the year at large and this is just about Oscar's list (and I need to respect that).  But without Audrey, it's a competition between two totally different performances from Julie Andrews & Kim Stanley (I also quite like Sophia Loren this year, but not enough to threaten the two best).  I actually rewatched Mary Poppins specifically to see if it held up, and was beyond impressed with the way that she finds a gentle, but never cloying way to play the part.  It's kind of a miracle, as is her singing voice (as is Marni Nixon's...), and so it's an easy call.  Side note, but it's a damned shame this is the only performance Debbie Reynolds ever got an Oscar nomination for given she's a fine actress and this performance is so discardable.

Supporting Actor

1. Stanley Holloway (My Fair Lady)

2. Lee Tracy (The Best Man)

3. John Gielgud (Becket)

4. Edmond O'Brien (Seven Days in May)

5. Peter Ustinov (Topkapi)

The Lowdown: Honestly one of the weakest lineups in an otherwise stellar year for the Academy.  My love of My Fair Lady and its plentiful soundtrack extends to Holloway, who I think nails his "I'm Getting Married in the Morning" number, and while he is a bit over-the-top in other scenes, it is in a delightful way fitting of his picture.  I'm therefore going to give him the statue over stellar-if-not-the-best work from Tracy & Gielgud on the sidelines.

Supporting Actress

1. Agnes Moorehead (Hush...Hush Sweet Charlotte)

2. Grayson Hall (The Night of the Iguana)

3. Gladys Cooper (My Fair Lady)

4. Lila Kedrova (Zorba the Greek)

5. Edith Evans (The Chalk Garden)

The Lowdown: Similar to Supporting Actor, this isn't what I'd call the best nomination list.  My My Fair Lady love extends far, but not far enough to include Cooper, who is fine but hardly necessary (and in shockingly little of this movie-I'm surprised they noticed her).  You have to indulge some over-the-top work from the Top 2, but you still get some winning performers, and occasionally insight into their characters that the 1960's otherwise might not have allowed.  I'll go with Moorehead, I think a bigger presence in her picture.  Also, even in a weak lineup, isn't it a joy to see ten character actors nominated in the supporting categories instead of the obsessive "movie star slumming" we see today.

Foreign Language Film

1. Woman in the Dunes (Japan)

2. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (France)

3. Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (Italy)

4. Raven's End (Sweden)

5. Sallah (Israel)

The Lowdown: Two classics in this lineup, both of which dominated the Oscars...a year later (Oscar rules were weird in the 1960's & 70's, and we'll get into how we'll handle that when we hit the My Ballot in the next few weeks).  A shocking amount of these movies have weirdly similar plots (doomed, sometimes forced romances, and whether to stay in them), which makes them somewaht easier to compare, and for me Woman in the Dunes, one of the scariest films I've ever seen, is more adept than the flawless color perfection of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg or the surprisingly strong anthology film Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, so I'm going with that in a battle of classics.

Adapted Screenplay

1. Dr. Strangelove

2. Mary Poppins

3. Becket

4. My Fair Lady

5. Zorba the Greek

The Lowdown: Probably the only time in Oscar history where the Picture/Director/Adapted Screenplay lineups are all exactly the same films (and it's worth noting-had Dick van Dyke gotten in for Mary Poppins instead of one of the Becket boys, that'd have been the same for Best Actor, also all Best Pictures).  This doesn't quite match those lineups even if they once again have the same victor-Dr. Strangelove is a genius script, but its biggest competition ends up being Mary Poppins, which is a challenging adaptation (how do you not make Mary more conventional?), but a fine one, and it fights a lot of impulses other live-action Disney films of the 1960's would indulge.

Original Screenplay

1. A Hard Day's Night

2. One Potato, Two Potato

3. Father Goose

4. The Organizer

5. That Man from Rio

The Lowdown: Relatively weak lineup here, with the latter two having active plotholes that make these nominations (their only ones in 1964) feel all the odder.  It reads in some ways as weird to give this statue to A Hard Day's Night, a movie that frequently evokes being made just as the Beatles are randomly being screened, it's so spontaneous.  But that's not really the case-it just feels that way due to Alun Owen's fizzy script.  I therefore pick it over the showier (and more writerly One Potato, Two Potato), a racial drama that has largely been forgotten at this point but is worth your time if you've never heard of it.

Sound

1. My Fair Lady

2. Mary Poppins

3. Becket

4. The Unsinkable Molly Brown

5. Father Goose

The Lowdown: When it comes to Oscar, you have to remember that he likes what he likes, and in the Mixing category, even in the 1960's, what he liked was musicals which is why 60% of this category falls into that category.  For me, Molly Brown isn't worthy to be in the same sentence as the other two...so we won't do that.  Mary Poppins has the added advantage of incorporating animation into its sound sequences, and so if this was a contest between the two for editing, I'd be a bit more inclined to spread the wealth, but given it's solely Mixing (and we had to make sure that Marni Nixon felt organic to the story), I'm going to go with Eliza & her crew.

Sound Editing

1. Goldfinger

2. The Lively Set

The Lowdown: 1964 was only the second year that Oscar was distinguishing between Mixing and Editing (it's why 1963 will be the first year we do these separate categories for the My Ballot awards), but even then, it was very clear that he had his preferences, picking both the action-adventures and the car racing scenes (if only there was a submarine, this would truly feel in Oscar's wheelhouse).  For me, it's not just that Goldfinger is a much better picture (The Lively Set, for those who haven't heard of it, is a snore), but also it has considerably better special sound effects, as The Lively Set's race cars (experimental though they may be) do not compare to the explosions on display with 007.

Score

1. The Pink Panther

2. Mary Poppins

3. Hush...Hush Sweet Charlotte

4. Becket

5. The Fall of the Roman Empire

The Lowdown: Truly sensational work from Henry Mancini (give or take "Moon River," the best thing he's ever done), The Pink Panther comes in with its sole nomination and totally sells it.  With all due respect to the luxurious Charlotte, and the breathtaking high-flying antics of Mary Poppins, there's really no other option but to pick one of the most memorable movie tunes of all time (I had to check, and Oscar went with my second place, which is an understandable if not acceptable path...this should've been Mancini's). 

Scoring

1. My Fair Lady

2. A Hard Day's Night

3. Mary Poppins

4. Robin and the 7 Hoods

5. The Unsinkable Molly Brown

The Lowdown: Given the musical was on life support by 1964, it is bonkers how good the Top 3 is here (I've got a few more to see, but it'll take a tsunami to best one of these for my My Ballot).  The other two basically don't exist for me, and it's three musicals, with me weirdly picking the one that wasn't original, mostly because it does a superb way of expanding beyond the confines of a Broadway stage to really feel like it's taking up space...with truly loverly incorporation of these classic tunes.  But A Hard Day's Night or Mary Poppins would've been worthy had Oscar picked them (forgive the weird photo collage on this one...I forgot to include A Hard Day's Night and I'd already deleted my individual photos so didn't want to have to recreate this from scratch).

Original Song

1. "Chim Chim Cheree" (Mary Poppins)

2. "My Kind of Town" (Robin and the 7 Hoods)

3. "Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte" (Hush...Hush Sweet Charlotte)

4. "Where Love Has Gone" (Where Love Has Gone)

5. "Dear Heart" (Dear Heart)

The Lowdown: One of those categories where Oscar only chose good nominees...but my list is going to look much different because, quite frankly, 1964's Original Song options are absurd (thank the lord My Fair Lady wasn't an original).  For the win it's a hard bet between the top 4, with sentiment and a bit of magic giving Mary Poppins the win over Frank Sinatra and two lush ballads, in an era where those sorts of songs still became standards.  Really, though, any of the Top 4 is better than you'd guess and makes a strong choice for the win.

Art Direction (B&W)

1. Hush...Hush Sweet Charlotte

2. The Night of the Iguana

3. Zorba the Greek

4. The Americanization of Emily

5. Seven Days in May

The Lowdown: I mean, I'm a sucker for a gigantic swamp-ravaged mansion, particularly when you've got it surrounded by Olivia de Havilland & Bette Davis in a horror film.  The detailing in Hush...Hush Sweet Charlotte and the way that the ambience becomes almost part of the story (it certainly helps to aid the story) gives it the edge over The Night of the Iguana and Zorba the Greek, both of which have surprisingly more outdoor scenes (something that at this era usually precluded nominations here) than you'd expect.

Art Direction (Color)

1. My Fair Lady

2. Becket

3. What a Way to Go!

4. Mary Poppins

5. The Unsinkable Molly Brown

The Lowdown: Much more into this lineup, and honestly having a hard time between the Top 2 (all of them are good though).  I think I'm picking My Fair Lady because there's more personality in the set pieces (particularly the streets of London, which are gorgeous studio shot situations, as well as Professor Higgins' house), though I am in awe of what they're doing in the gigantic expansions of Becket.  I also love the ingenuity of What a Way to Go!, as we are so informed on the men in this picture through the sets themselves.

Cinematography (B&W)

1. Zorba the Greek

2. The Night of the Iguana

3. The Americanization of Emily

4. Hush...Hush Sweet Charlotte

5. Fate is the Hunter

The Lowdown: With the exception of Fate is the Hunter (which if you have been around this blog a long time you might remember I reviewed for our Saturdays with the Stars tribute to Nancy Kwan six years ago), this is a really strong list (I know I'm repeating myself in praising 1964's Academy Awards, but it's very true for both Cinematography lineups-Oscar outdid himself).  I like the sweaty heat of The Night of the Iguana, the sophistication of The Americanization of Emily, and the gothic horror of Hush...Hush Sweet Charlotte's involved lensing, but you can't compete with Anthony Quinn's dancing in Zorba the Greek.  It is the most indelible image of his long career for a reason-the playful way the team plays with long & close shots...it's something else.

Cinematography (Color)

1. Cheyenne Autumn

2. My Fair Lady

3. Becket

4. Mary Poppins

5. The Unsinkable Molly Brown

The Lowdown: All five of these are 4-star or higher achievements-this is one of the best lineups of Color Cinematography Oscar pulled together.  In terms of the actual win, My Fair Lady, Becket, & Cheyenne Autumn, all three very different takes on cinematography (one showing the majesty of a studio lot, the next lots of interior location shoots, and the next the grandeur of Monument Valley).  I have to pick Cheyenne Autumn if forced to choose.  It's large-scale, epic John Ford grandeur (when that was about to stop being a thing) at its very best, a beautiful tribute to a dying film genre, with every scene basically a painting. 

Costume Design (B&W)

1. The Night of the Iguana

2. The Visit

3. A House is Not a Home

4. Kisses for My President

5. Hush...Hush Sweet Charlotte

The Lowdown: This category features Kisses for My President, maybe in the Top 10 most disagreeable films I've seen for this project (at least pre-1967)...which still has better costumes than some.  Honestly, this field is a list of relatively decent contenders, but not necessarily any truly outstanding ones.  I think it's a competition between Night of the Iguana, a sexy batch of heat-sweltered looks from Ava Gardner, Richard Burton, & Sue Lyon, and then a gorgeous array of looks from Ingrid Bergman in The Visit.  I think I'll go with Gardner & Burton looks lusty over Bergman's fanciful wealth, but it's a close contest.

Costume Design (Color)

1. My Fair Lady

2. What a Way to Go!

3. Mary Poppins

4. Becket

5. The Unsinkable Molly Brown

The Lowdown: On the flip side, you have the Color categories, where literally all of these are outstanding, and at least a few I expect to make it to my My Ballot when all is said and done.  The best look, and probably what's getting it the win, is that Royal Ascot iconography of Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady (all the looks are good...but that scene is film history), which is a shame as the pink deliciousness of What a Way to Go! deserves a win just as much.

Film Editing

1. Becket

2. Mary Poppins

3. My Fair Lady

4. Hush...Hush Sweet Charlotte

5. Father Goose

The Lowdown: Potentially hot take, but when it comes to the three Best Picture nominees cited here (all of which, at this point, you should understand my love of to the point you can cut me some slack for not being a full-on stan), none of them seem like you could call them "film editing" standouts.  I think that Becket wins here in part because it has a stronger and better build in its expected tension than either Mary Poppins or especially My Fair Lady, and so I'm giving it the title, but in a year where Oscar was a monolith, I kind of wish they'd have gone with some different options here (you'll see a lot of different titles when I tackle this for the My Ballot).  Also, because this write-up made me look like I didn't like Father Goose, I want to be very clear for the record that I did (it's just not in the same league as some of these other movies...but I have deeply fond memories of watching it with my little brother and our beloved aunt-and-uncle when we were kids in their apartment in Wyoming).

Special Visual Effects

1. Mary Poppins

2. 7 Faces of Dr. Lao

The Lowdown: Both of these are intriguing options, but only one of them is legendary.  The way that Mary Poppins incorporates animation into the live-action scenes is not new (Disney had been doing this as far back as Song of the South), but it'd never been so seamless.  It felt like Andrews & van Dyke (and those two kids) had been popped into this world in a way that was sparkly but also believable.  7 Faces of Dr. Lao is really more of an achievement in makeup effects if we're being totally honest (and those are a bit racist given one of Tony Randall's characters is in yellowface), but some of the claymation figures, particularly the Medusa tentacles, are impressively ahead of their time.

Past Oscar Viewing Projects: 1931-32, 1948, 1957, 1972, 1981, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025

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

S.O.B. (1981)

Film: S.O.B. (1981)

Stars: Julie Andrews, William Holden, Richard Mulligan, Robert Preston, Robert Webber, Robert Vaughn, Larry Hagman, Marisa Berenson, Stuart Margolin, Loretta Swit, Shelley Winters, Robert Loggia

Director: Blake Edwards

Oscar History: The film has a weird awards history, getting nominated for a WGA Award, a National Society of Film Critics prize for Preston, and a Globe for Best Picture, but also being cited for a Razzie for  

Worst Director & Screenplay.  Oscar didn't want to get its hands on such a polarizing picture & skipped it all-together.

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 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 Julie Andrews-click here to learn more about Ms. Andrews (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last week we took a look at what would become a major cinematic renaissance moment for Julie Andrews, teaming up with her husband Blake Edwards for the smash-hit 10.  This would become a recurring theme for Andrews for the next several years, regularly leading Edwards films.  We've talked about a few of these on the blog (or some I've seen & not discussed...I watched movies before I started writing this blog, I have to admit).  The best and most successful of these films was Victor/Victoria, where Andrews plays a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman.  The film was a critical & commercial smash, and won Andrews her third (and to date, final) Oscar nomination.  But as we only watch film I'd never seen before, we're going to talk a different film from this era, the movie that tried the hardest to crack the veneer of Andrews' squeaky clean image: S.O.B.

(Spoilers Ahead) S.O.B. is a pretty cruel sendup of the Hollywood machine.  We have Felix Farmer (Mulligan), who has produced what is sure to be a major flop called Night Winds after an unparalleled string of successes, many alongside his wife Sally Miles (Andrews), an, Oscar-winning angelic figure for the movies who is in the middle of trying to leave him, as Felix has gone mad while producing the movie. The first third of the film Felix tries to commit suicide, frequently to comic effect (at one point he falls on Loretta Swit's brassy gossip columnist & puts her in a full-body cast for the remainder of the picture), until it occurs to him-if they recut Night Winds, they can make it pornographic and play off of the public's titillation if Sally goes topless.  After Felix buys back the film from the studio, Sally has no choice and does, indeed, go topless.  Afterward, though, the studio realizes that this gimmick might work & go behind Felix's back to get the movie back, driving him mad, and leads him to standing up the studio with a toy gun...after which, in a shock, he is killed by real bullets from the police.  Felix is therefore dead, but the movie thanks to all of the publicity becomes a huge hit, with Sally winning another Oscar for the film.

The movie is vicious in the way it skewers Hollywood, oftentimes watching people stripped of their humanity as they try to find some way to scrounge a buck on a picture.  No one, not even Andrews' Sally, is a saint in the movie, though she does come the closest of the bunch.  The film is very funny, filled with black humor, and Preston & Winters provide the best comic relief of the bunch (both are terrific as soulless figures that know their way around the edges of Tinseltown).  Andrews in the center is hardly at her best, even if she's clearly playing a fictionalized version of herself (she's called "Peter Pan" quite often, perhaps to make it seem like she might be Mary Martin or Cathy Rigby, but, come on...she's Mary Poppins), but she's good.  The movie is good.  It's not great (it's meandering & a bit too long at parts), but it's not Razzie-worthy in any respect.

Andrews would continue to make movies and is still quite active today, nearly 60 years after she became America's Sweetheart.  A botched vocal surgery would rob her of her brilliant voice, but an appearance as Queen Clarisse in 2001's The Princess Diaries revived interest in the actress, and since then she's been playing some version of the Julie Andrews persona in everything from Shrek to Despicable Me to Bridgerton for a new generation.  She, like many of the women we've profiled in recent months, was able to escape Hitchcock's shadow & is hardly considered part of his legacy by modern audiences.  That will not be true on Monday, when we start our penultimate star of the year, a woman who would be defined by Hitchcock...but a star who would have more to say about Hitchcock's modern legacy than any of his leading women.

10 (1979)

Film: 10 (1979)

Stars: Dudley Moore, Julie Andrews, Bo Derek, Robert Webber, Dee Wallace

Director: Blake Edwards

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Original Score, Original Song-"It's Easy to Say")

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

After the twin, high-profile flops of Star! and Darling Lili, Julie Andrews had gone from one of the biggest box office insurance policies in Hollywood to being something of a risk.  The films that she'd made in the 1960's that were such massive hits like Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music were out-of-fashion, and indeed it wouldn't be until decades later that high-quality musical productions would become trendy again.  She was offered the lead role in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, which she turned down initially before trying to get it back (it would go on to be a hit for Angela Lansbury), and had a failed TV project in 1978.  Throughout the decade, she only made two movies: The Tamarind Seed and 10.  The weird part about this part of her career, though, is that both of these movies were successes.  Tamarind Seed, though forgotten today, made a lot of money (though due to profit-sharing deals with Andrews & her director/husband Blake Edwards, the studio didn't make a lot of cash off of it), and 10 was a blockbuster.  So while this is considered a sleepy portion in Andrews' career in movies, the movies she did make were a big deal.  Of the two, 10 would be the more significant picture in her career (and the biggest hit she'd do with her husband), so we'll be profiling that for our tribute.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about George Webber (Moore), a brilliant singer-songwriter who is having a midlife crisis after his longtime girlfriend Samantha (Andrews) throws him a birthday party.  He is constantly thinking about sex & the meaning of life, and for him those two things collide when he sees a beautiful woman named Jenny (Derek) getting married, someone that he rates an "11" on a scale of 1-to-10.  The film shows initially George & Samantha being in a tumultuous relationship, but we soon learn that they need time apart, and they break up.  During this breakup, George travels to Mexico following Jenny and her fiancee on their honeymoon.  While there, he saves Jenny's fiancee from a shark, and while he's recovering the two become friends.  Jenny seduces George while listening to Bolero, but when he finds out that she's in an open marriage, and not the idealized version of womanhood he thinks she is, she breaks it off because he is in love with the vision of her, not with the real woman.  Afterward, finally growing up & realizing that Samantha is the love of his life, they reconnect, wiser & a bit fractured, but likely to remain together this time.

There are moments in 10 where Moore's scenes with Derek might be about something other than the male gaze & the misogyny that comes with it, but the film doesn't allow itself to focus on that, seeing Derek's free-thinking, sexually-liberated Jenny as a sign that Moore should become more conventional than the other way around.  This is a pity, because Derek, the least of these three actors in the long run of their careers, does something special here with Jenny, making her feel like a real woman after Edwards' camera had made the entire audience look at her as nothing more than the sum of her body parts.  She's not a great actress, but I get why she became a star from this movie as there's something magnetic that she brings to this specific part that's impossible to deny.

The rest of the film falls apart without this sort of insight.  Yes, Moore & Andrews are good (they usually are), but the sexism that runs through this is too much for me, and the comedy (where women are nothing more than props) is a gigantic yawn.  I bemoan the prudishness of modern cinema as much as anyone, but this is not the world we want to live in, where George has to find women to validate him.  I want a cinema more like Jenny's, complicated-but-free.

The film won two Oscar nominations, both of them quite good.  Henry Mancini does fine work with the score, though I'll be honest here-Revel is doing such heavy-lifting (the "Bolero" scene between Derek & Moore is the best part of the picture) that I'm surprised he was eligible.  The song "How Easy is That" comes at the exact perfect time, Moore & Andrews singing it as a duet toward the end of the movie.  It ties the film together nicely & is quite melodic.  This period of movies frequently had this kind of easy-listening tune toward the end of the movie & I didn't always feel it, but here it totally fits what we've seen before.  Next week we're going to finish off our month devoted to Julie Andrews a few years after 10, in one of the films that would bury once-and-for-all the squeaky clean demeanor that Andrews had been sporting since she first graced televisions as Cinderella.

OVP: Star! (1968)

Film: Star! (1968)

Stars: Julie Andrews, Richard Crenna, Michael Craig, Daniel Massey, Robert Reed

Director: Robert Wise

Oscar History: 7 nominations (Best Supporting Actor-Daniel Massey, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume Design, Scoring, Sound, Original Song-"Star!")

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 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 Julie Andrews-click here to learn more about Ms. Andrews (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We are hitting the halfway point in our month devoted to Julie Andrews by discussing what is seen as one of the nadirs of her career (the actual nadir would happen decades later when doctors would destroy her flawless singing voice in a botched surgery).  In 1968, after a string of enviable hits including Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music, Hawaii, and Thoroughly Modern Millie, it felt like Andrews could do no wrong, but in Hollywood even the brightest of stars can fall, and that happened that year with, well, Star!.  The film was wildly expensive, the kind of musical that had stopped consistently being profitable as early as 1954, but Andrews had managed to keep in the black.  This wasn't the case after 1967, both Star! and Andrews' next picture Darling Lili would be two of the biggest bombs in Hollywood in their era, and just a few years after she saved Fox with The Sound of Music, Julie Andrews was putting it back on the brink.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie, nearly three hours long, is weirdly thin on plot, so this is going to be a short paragraph.  Essentially, we have Andrews as famed vaudeville singer Gertrude Lawrence, who with her friend Noel Coward (Massey) became massive stage successes.  We see a traditional story where Gertrude starts out poor, but her immense talent & pluck get her noticed, and she moves on to bigger-and-better things.  Along-the-way, though, she develops a taste for extravagance, and despite making boatloads of money throughout her career, she's consistently broke.  The movie regularly cuts from Lawrence's spiraling romantic & financial life (she has multiple suitors before ending on Richard Crenna's Richard Aldrich), and weirdly the film finishes before both Lawrence's greatest triumph (playing Anna in the original run of The King & I) and tragic death at the age of 54 from liver cancer.

Watching Star!, I was struck at once by the fact that its reputation as a gargantuan bomb is unwarranted, but also that it totally makes sense that the movie was not a success.  After Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, Star! is merely okay.  There's pleasantness here (the musical numbers are nice, the costumes are grand, Andrews sounds good), but the plot itself is ridiculously underwritten.  There's no sense of who Lawrence is, and her troubles feel watered down to keep the film feel-good.  Also, her romantic life, which I suspect in real life was a bit messier (i.e. romantic relationships overlapping frequently with other men) is too convoluted with interchangeable beaus for me to be able to keep track of who was supposed to be winning her heart.  These are not insurmountable problems, but they are the kind that I get why audiences didn't show up.

The film won seven Oscar nominations, though Andrews herself was not one of them.  Daniel Massey got his only nomination (making him part of one of the very few father-son nomination teams with the acting Oscars, as his father Raymond was cited for 1940's Abe Lincoln in Illinois), and I actually was fine with this even if it's not a "great" performance.  Massey steals most of the movie, and is charming as Noel Coward, and does enough to underline why Noel is not one of Gertrude's lovers (he prefers the company of men) while not offending the censors of the day.  

The rest of the nominations follow a similar boat-not egregious, but hardly warranted.  The song "Star!" plays over the opening credits but is weirdly not one of the numbers we see performed (though its musical bridge comes up later in the picture), and it's good-but-not-great (it's the kind of song that sounds good but I dare you to hum it a few hours later).  The sound is good, though like the scoring it's more a case of it not being memorable-there are no real numbers in this other than perhaps the tried-and-true "Someone to Watch Over Me" that Andrews totally nails, and when you have peak Julie Andrews, you should be trying harder.  The cinematography is also nondescript-the concept of doing all of these staged sequences feels a bit of a cheat in this era, like they're just moving from sound stage to sound stage rather than feeling properly interactive with a larger audience (it never feels "real").  The best nominations were for Art Direction (all of the sets have their own flare, and I loved some of the crazy mansions these people occupy) and Costume Design (Lawrence, a famed clothes horse, comes across well in her opulent & growing attire in ways that Andrews is never achieve with her acting).  All-in-all, this is fine but forgettable, and though I wanted to save it, its most interesting calling card is that it was such an infamous flop.  Next week, though, Andrews will be starting a comeback in a surprise hit that would mark a second chapter in her film career.

OVP: Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967)

Film: Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967)

Stars: Julie Andrews, James Fox, Mary Tyler Moore, John Gavin, Carol Channing, Beatrice Lillie, Jack Soo, Pat Morita

Director: George Roy Hill

Oscar History: 7 nominations/1 win (Best Supporting Actress-Carol Channing, Art Direction, Costume Design, Score*, Song Score, Original Song-"Thoroughly Modern Millie," Sound)

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

Last week, we started out our conversation about Julie Andrews with not Mary Poppins nor The Sound of Music (both of which I'd seen many times), but instead with Torn Curtain for our Alfred Hitchcock month, a movie that she felt an ill-fit for.  Andrews is a unique actress for modern audiences because she is so well-known for two beloved children's classics (and later had a bit of a renaissance with The Princess Diaries and voiceover work in the Shrek and Despicable Me franchises for a new generation of kids), but those two films kind of hide the fact that she was a big star for a time, and her career had ebbs-and-flows.  You could argue that the final major wave of her first, most successful period in film happened in 1967 with today's Thoroughly Modern Millie, the last big hit before Andrews would endure two extremely high-profile flops that would totally stall her film career...but more on those two pictures next week.  Today we're going to raise our skirts & bob our hair with Millie.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place in New York City in 1922, where Millie (Andrews) has decided to become a "modern," basically taking on the flapper aesthetic & getting a job as a stenographer which she hopes will result in her finding an "equal" as her husband (i.e. marry her boss).  In the beginning of the movie she meets Dorothy (Moore), a hapless aspiring actress who is always lost, and is the target of Mrs. Meers (Lillie) who is their landlord...who is also running a human trafficking ring by kidnapping girls staying with her who don't have families.  Millie is pursued by Jimmy (Fox), a poor paper clips salesman but is enamored by Mr. Graydon (Gavin), her gorgeous boss.  The film follows the love square between the four, and the occasional appearance of Muzzy (Channing), who is an eccentric wealthy widow who randomly shows up at opportune times throughout the movie.  In the end we find out that not only does Millie love Jimmy (and Dorothy loves Mr. Graydon), but that Jimmy is actually Dorothy's wealthy brother (and Muzzy's stepson).  Oh, and they end the prostitution ring.

Thoroughly Modern Millie is meant to skewer a lot of things, though it's rarely successful in this endeavor.  Mocking the rich, gender norms, and how we fantasize about both when we watch the movies, the film doesn't really have the edge to make that work, and we end up with a film that accidentally glamorizes what it's intending to mock.  This might be forgivable, as would the repetition & length (the story goes nowhere during the middle hour as Millie can't decide between the two men, even though one has no interest in her whatsoever), were it not for the racism that doesn't even feed the plot.  Lillie (in her final cinematic role as she was starting to suffer from Alzheimer's at the time), is a white woman bossing around a group of Asian men (Jack Soo & Pat Morita), and it's just...gross.  The way all of the Asian actors are used as props & stereotypes-even in 1967 they should've known better & it's so ancillary to the central plot it's ridiculous.  It also feels pretty eyebrow-raising to have something as serious as sex slavery be treated basically as an excuse for the main cast to do a series of acrobatic tricks in a mansion (we don't usually get people THIS evil in a musical, even the villains).

Andrews is fine here even if this isn't amongst her best work.  Unlike Torn Curtain she was perfect cast here-Millie is the kind of role that Andrews can nail, but the movie itself is dull, and Andrews doesn't get enough of a change-of-pace to help save the film from itself.  That task instead goes to Carol Channing, who in 1967 was best known for her "role of a lifetime" Broadway part in Hello Dolly!.  Channing is one of those singular talents on stage & screen that's hard to explain, an actress so specific it's difficult to ever see her playing anything other than her schtick.  I honestly don't have a lot of words here-her Muzzy shows up randomly, has little to do with the plot, & is absolutely insane.  One gets the sense that someone like Gwen Verdon or Shirley MacLaine might have been a better fit for this role, grounding it while also getting some of the humor, but Channing definitely comes in & upends the film. I want to like this performance because it's definitely something, but it's so unusual I don't really know what to do with it.

Otherwise, the rest of the Oscar nominations are a mixed bag.  The Art Direction is boring & overdone, the costumes are not much better (though I loved Andrews' iconic black-and-white flapper look), and the sound is okay (it feels like some of the scenes are a bit washed out, particularly the musical numbers that don't involve Channing).  The score is much better (somehow this movie is Elmer Bernstein's only Oscar), and the scoring is fun.  Best of the bunch is the title song, which is lyrically delicious ("they think is odd and Sodom and Gomorrah-ble" is among the sharpest lines in an original American musical), even though we don't really get a giant musical number around it like I would've hoped (most of the rest of the songs are standards, as this, "Jimmy," and "The Tapioca" are the only originals).  The song, played over the opening credits, promises a great movie that what follows cannot bother to deliver.

Torn Curtain (1966)

Film: Torn Curtain (1966)

Stars: Paul Newman, Julie Andrews, Lila Kedrova, Hansjorg Felmy, Tamara Toumanova

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

Yesterday we kicked off our month devoted to Julie Andrews (click the link above for more, you know the drill), but while we usually talk about in our first article how a star became famous, Andrews' origin story might be one of the most well-known in Hollywood history, so this is probably a tale you already recall.  For the unfamiliar, after being a sensation in both television (Cinderella was seen by over 100 million people when it was broadcast by CBS in 1957) and theater (both The Boy Friend and My Fair Lady were absolute smashes), Andrews turned her eyes to Hollywood.  Initially she assumed she'd be cast as Eliza Doolittle in the big-screen adaptation of My Fair Lady, but that didn't happen as Jack Warner wanted a bigger star (Audrey Hepburn) to lead the movie, so instead she made her debut in Mary Poppins, which won her the Best Actress Oscar (Hepburn wasn't even nominated).  There was no sophomore slump for Andrews-the next two years she made the highest-grossing film of both 1965 (The Sound of Music) and 1966 (Hawaii). So at the point Andrews teamed up with Hitchcock (who did not want her initially for the part-he favored Eva Marie Saint) she was basically Hollywood's box office insurance policy, not just having yet to make a flop, but she was basically the monetary guarantee that someone like Dwayne Johnson is today.  As a result, Hitchcock was required by Universal to put Andrews in his picture (coming full circle on the Eliza Doolittle situation), which brings us to Torn Curtain.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place in the mid-1960's, where Dr. Michael Armstrong (Newman) is on a secret mission in Copenhagen where he receives covert instructions to contact π if he gets into trouble.  Armstrong is defecting to the Soviet Union, much to the shock of his fiancee Sarah (Andrews), who follows him to the Soviet Union & is then pressured to also defect, except she assumes this to be legitimate.  It turns out that Armstrong is trying to learn secret anti-missile secrets from the Soviets, and when he does he is found out, with the Soviets intending to kill both he & Sarah before they can flee back to the United States with this information.  π ends up being a group of people that use a decoy bus to get people out of the country, and with the help of this organization (and Lila Kedrova in a cameo as an exiled Polish countess), the two flee to America, their romance renewed & America stronger for another day.

The film itself, despite its relatively twisty plot, reads as pretty straightforward when you're watching it. Part of the problem is that it doesn't feel like it has a lot of Hitchcock's best flourishes.  It still looks great (beautiful stars, glamorous hotels...there's definitely a polish there), but it doesn't have the artistry that Hitchcock's films were known for.  I know we're cheating a bit by not featuring more of Hitchcock's greatest films (1954-64 is generally considered to be when he made his best pictures), as the confines of the rules of this series (I only watch "new to me" films) hurts that cause since I've seen virtually all of Hitchcock's films in that era, so we aren't going to focus on him in his glory, but as it's October (the year is winding down) we shouldn't forget that Hitchcock never really stopped making movies, even when the public started to lose interest.  Torn Curtain was not, as some describe it, a flop (it was a minor hit, though nowhere near the success of Psycho or The Birds), but it definitely represents a different era of creativity from Hitchcock.  I have not seen any film he made after this (we'll get to all of the rest of them in December), but I will admit this feels listless in the way some of the "director for hire" work we've been seeing Hitchcock made in Sunday Leftovers did, rather than peak creativity like he had just a few years earlier.

Part of the problem, I'm sorry to say, is the leads.  I love Paul Newman & Julie Andrews-both brilliant actors, I'd give them both Oscars at points in their careers-truly great stars.  But they don't work well together-there's not a lot of chemistry between Andrews' bright-and-bouncy screen aura & Newman's sex-driven, sensitive soul.  Andrews in general is not a great fit for Hitchcock.  I think the logic here must have been "Doris Day made it work, why can't Julie Andrews?" but that doesn't pan out-Andrews onscreen persona did eventually shift, but in the 1960's there was too much money to be had from not breaking it, and the character here doesn't really warrant it.  As a result, Andrews feels tonally out of place, and this is the rare dud for me from our Star of the Month.  Next week, though, we'll be getting into one of Andrews' most successful pictures, and a movie far more in her natural wheelhouse.

Saturdays with the Stars: Julie Andrews

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 Shirley MacLaine, an actress who got her big break in a Hitchcock film, but was able to have such a successful career that he is rarely name-checked other than an in a "did she know she worked with X?" sort of way.  This month, we're going to cheat a bit by going out of chronology (as I want to give this actress five Saturdays rather than next month's), and profile a woman who I think almost no one would normally associate with Hitchcock, whose public persona is in fact the antithesis of Hitch's icy blonde, and who is the first actress we'll look at as we wind down this series who made a movie with Hitch after his most significant filmic period from 1940-63 (Rebecca to The Birds, and especially 1956-63).  This month, our star is Julie Andrews.

Andrews was born in Walton-on-Thames in Surrey, England, to Ted and Barbara Wells, though she'd find out much later in her life that her father was not, in fact, her biological father-she was the offspring of an affair her mother had had with a family friend.  Her legal parents divorced when she was young, and she lived with her mother & stepfather, the latter of whom was abusive and attempted to molest Andrews when she was young (she had to fit a lock on the door to keep him out of her room).  A vocal instructor discovered Andrews' incredible range, which led to her becoming a touring star in theater companies (even performing for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth in 1948), before success in the West End led her to Broadway, My Fair Lady, and then Hollywood.

Julie Andrews' story is legendary & very well known, and we'll get into some of the more famous chapters throughout the month.  It goes without saying that I have seen many Julie Andrews movies, so we will not be reviewing Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music, Victor/Victoria, or The Princess Diaries this month as I want to watch new films from Andrews (though we'll discuss them for sure).  Instead, we're going to focus on some of the less-celebrated chapters of Andrews' career, particularly in the late-1960's and throughout the 1970's & 80's when she attempted to shed her squeaky clean demeanor with mixed results.

We will also focus on Torn Curtain, the only film Andrews made with Alfred Hitchcock.  As I mentioned above Andrews is probably the last person you'd expect to be cast in a Hitchcock film, and she wasn't the director's choice (he preferred either Eva Marie Saint or Samantha Eggar).  She also came after what is generally considered to be the most infamous years in terms of Hitchcock's complicated and frequently disgusting relationships with his leading ladies.  While he'd been known for berating his female leads prior to 1955 (Ruth Roman & Jane Wyman being two of the more well-known examples), after Grace Kelly, Hitchcock had ruthless & occasionally sexually inappropriate & cruel attitudes toward his leading ladies to get, what, in the end, would be some of his most brilliant pictures (not condoning, just pointing out the difficult conundrum for film fans here).  We're going to go back and look at one of the actresses who had a bad relationship with Hitchcock during these years in November, but it's worth noting that in the few public interviews Andrews has done about Hitchcock (Torn Curtain isn't a famous movie so she isn't often asked about it), she has stated she enjoyed the shoot & learned a lot about him.  The goal this month is for us to learn more about Julie Andrews, who had a long and frequently intriguing career between The Sound of Music and her 21st Century resurgence, including an unlikely detour with the Master of Suspense.