The Changeling (1980)

Film: The Changeling (1980)

Stars: George C. Scott, Trish van Devere, Melvyn Douglas, John Colicos, Jean Marsh, Madeleine Sherwood

Director: Peter Medak

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

All October long, The Many Rantings of John is running a marathon dedicated to the Horror classics of the 1960's-00's that I'm seeing for the first time this month.  If you want to take a look at past titles from previous horror marathons (both this and other seasons) check out the links at the bottom of this article.

A trend started in the 1960's, and continued until the 1980's, where aging movie stars decided to give horror a shot.  This became known for a lot of women as "hagsploitation" or "grand guignol" where once glamorous actresses like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Olivia de Havilland were put in caked on pancake makeup & tortured by each other (and more so the director), but it continued for decades longer.  One example of this would be The Changeling from 1980, with an aging George C. Scott (and a nearly gone Melvyn Douglas, who would be dead less than two years after this film was released).  Neither actor is known for their work in horror, certainly not in their prime but given limited options, they both gave it a shot here, and ended up with something unexpected.  The Changeling, one of the most important Canadian horror films ever made, was a film I hadn't really heard of before this month (it was actually a movie I substituted last minute when I decided another one of our choices was going to be too hard to find in good condition), but it's well-done, especially some of the bits at the end of the film, and worth your time if you (like me) were unfamiliar with it.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place in two halves.  The first half follows famed conductor John Russell (Scott) in the wake of the deaths of his wife and daughter after a horrific car crash.  He rents a mansion from a historical society in Seattle, and lives there despite no one having resided in the house for 12 years.  It turns out that there's a reason for that, as the house appears to be haunted, unexplained phenomena getting to John, particularly surrounding water, as he starts to see visions of a drowned boy in a bathtub, and he begins to investigate who the boy is.  It turns out he's Joseph Carmichael...which is a problem because Joseph Carmichael is still alive, an aging US Senator (played by Douglas) whom we learn was switched with a crippled & sickly boy as a child so that the healthy (fake) Joseph could inherit the family estate.  In the process, the sickly boy is murdered, drowned in a bathtub, and for much of the last thirty minutes it is clear the boy wants recognition of what was done to him, in the process needing to use John to get his fake brother to return to the house...where the true Joseph can have his revenge.

The movie is fascinating for a variety of reasons, not least of which is because the beginning has very little to do with the plot of the film.  There is no ghostly apparitions of John's wife and daughter in the house, and so it puts a fascinating spin on the haunted house story, where he is haunted by a literal ghost but also figurative ones, trying to understand what to do with his life after the unspeakable has happened.  I think this is really clever, and honestly something I didn't expect going into the movie-this red herring that also plays a B plot to the movie is a solid touch.

The film's many twists also generally work.  If there's a fault, it might be that they work too well.  Melvyn Douglas's character probably needs 1-2 more scenes with George C. Scott to really sell this, as you don't get a great sense of what his opinions are about what's happening.  It's possible that he's also an innocent victim here, being thrown into this circumstance as just a boy...but the ending wants him to suffer for these crimes.  That ambiguity doesn't quite work because you need a clear indication of whether or not the ghost is malicious or righteous.  That is, however, the only thing that doesn't work here, as the rest of the movie is a "start at 11 PM, and you'll be staying up past midnight" style horror movie classic.

1920's: The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera

1930's: The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula, Dracula's Daughter, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Invisible Man, Mad Love, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Raven, Son of Frankenstein, Werewolf of London

1940's: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Cat People, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Dracula, The House of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Invisible Man's Revenge, The Invisible Woman, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Invisible Agent, The Mummy's Curse, The Mummy's Ghost, The Mummy's Hand, The Mummy's Tomb, Phantom of the Opera, She-Wolf of London, Son of Dracula, The Uninvited, The Wolf Man

1950's: Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, The Blob, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Creature Walks Among Us, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, It Came from Outer Space, Revenge of the Creature

1960's: The Devil Rides Out, The Innocents, The Masque of the Red Death, Night of the Living Dead,Village of the Damned

1970's: The Amityville Horror, Black Christmas, Carrie, Dawn of the Dead, Don't Look Now, Halloween, The Hills Have Eyes, The Omen, Phantom of the Paradise, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, When a Stranger Calls, The Wicker Man

1980's: Altered States, Child's Play, The Evil Dead, The Fly, The Fog, Friday the 13th, Gremlins, Hellraiser, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Poltergeist, The Thing

1990's-Present: Arachnophobia, The Blair Witch Project, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Candyman, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Paranormal Activity, Scary Movie, Scream

A Woman's Secret (1949)

Film: A Woman's Secret (1949)

Stars: Maureen O'Hara, Melvyn Douglas, Gloria Grahame, Bill Williams, Mary Philips, Jay C. Flippen

Director: Nicholas Ray

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Throughout the month of June we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

One of the tangential themes of this month that we're encountering is a "filling in the gaps" with my filmographies, particularly of some of my favorite actors of the film noir genre, and few figures fit that bill quite the same as Gloria Grahame.  Grahame, an Oscar-winning actress with an honestly salacious & tragic life (she would be married to both her director of this film, Nicholas Ray, and his son Anthony), would star in a number of film noir classics, including In a Lonely Place and The Big Heat.  Our film today is one of her lesser-known works, and weirdly doesn't star Grahame, who spent much of her career alternating between lead & supporting parts in her movies.  Instead, it stars one of the most unlikely film noir femme fatales imaginable: Maureen O'Hara, in one of only two film noir roles the prolific actress would have in her career.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is largely told in flashback, after an opening scene where it looks like Marian (O'Hara) has shot Susan (Grahame), potentially to her death.  We learn a bit of their backstory, about how Marian once had it all-a promising career as a singer, all the while she was clearly in love with her pianist Luke (Douglas).  But when she loses her voice from an illness, she becomes involved with an aspiring young singer (Susan), and through her starts to live her failed dreams, becoming maddened by it, even as Susan wants to quit the industry after some success.  The film eventually ends with us realizing that Susan was attempting to kill herself, and in the scuffle she shot herself.  Marian, torn up by her selfishness over making Susan stay in the industry, takes the blame and would've gone to jail had Susan not been revived and confessed what really happened.

This confession is the best part of the movie not because of Grahame or O'Hara, but because of a pip of a performance from Mary Philips.  Philips, best-known today as Humphrey Bogart's second wife, was a character actress during the time and aces her role as a busybody amateur detective, whose husband (played by Jay C. Flippen) is the actual inspector on the case.  In a different era, this would've made a fantastic idea for a TV procedural, as the two have solid chemistry, and Philips steals every scene of the movie she's in as a Jessica Fletcher-type.  One of those little performances that shows up in the sides of film noirs that you can't help but admire.

If only Philips was adding to a better movie.  A Woman's Secret doesn't work, primarily because O'Hara is miscast.  O'Hara was not a poor actress, but she was occasionally a limited one, and it shows here as she really should've gotten the part given to Grahame, as she'd be better as the put-upon sainted character while Grahame would've sunk her teeth into the role of a woman driven mad with jealousy by giving another woman her dreams after they are stolen from her.  O'Hara, though, was the bigger star of the two at the time, and the studio never would've let them swap, so we get a promising concept (doesn't that plot sound good?), without enough execution.

1940's: Act of Violence, The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Born to Kill, Brighton Rock, Brute Force, Call Northside 777, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Cry Wolf, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, The Fallen Idol, Force of Evil, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Ministry of Fear, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, The Naked City, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raw Deal, The Reckless Moment, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, Secret Beyond the Door, Sorry, Wrong Number, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Stranger on the Third Floor, They Drive By Night, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach

1950's: Ace in the Hole, Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Blue Gardenia, The Breaking Point, The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, The Crimson Kimono, Elevator to the Gallows, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, Julie, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Lightning Strikes Twice, Murder by Contract, Night and the City, Odds Against Tomorrow, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, The Prowler, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Late Show, The Long Goodbye, Lost Highway, Night Moves, Nightcrawler, Le Samourai

The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979)

Film: The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979)

Stars: Alan Alda, Barbara Harris, Meryl Streep, Rip Torn, Melvyn Douglas

Director: Jerry Schatzberg

Oscar History: No nominations, though it was kind of in the conversation.  Streep & Douglas would go on to win the Oscars later that year for different performances, but won alongside Joe Tynan at major critics prizes as a sort of "let's honor all of their work" accolade that frequently happens from major critics prizes.

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

Well, after three years, it was bound to happen.  In a two-month period where life honestly overwhelmed me & I just couldn't handle it anymore (my job, the expectations of the holiday, the general unrest of Omicron, honestly my mental health itself), it makes sense that eventually I was going to miss a Saturday in our series. I'm not going to focus too hard on it, both because it was literally Christmas & because checking out was what was best for me (always remember-take care of yourself), but I am bummed our streak is over, and with such a unique star as Barbara Harris.  So I will be post-dating this for posterity, but today we will end our month looking at Barbara Harris, and indeed our year looking at the leading ladies of Alfred Hitchcock's movies, with a "Mondays with the Stars" segment.  

(Spoilers Ahead) The Seduction of Joe Tynan is a late 1970's political drama centering on Joe Tynan (Alda, who also wrote the film).  Tynan is a liberal New York senator who has made something of a name for himself, and clearly has presidential aspirations.  His wife Ellie (Harris) is ambitious as well, a smart woman who is studying psychology & is a proponent for analysis (which seems too "East Coast intellectual" for Tynan's staffers).  Tynan is getting pushed on the upcoming Supreme Court nominee from both sides.  On his right is longtime Senator Birney (Douglas), who knows the Supreme Court nominee will challenge him in the primary if he can't get him on the Court, while on his left is a lot of progressives, including Karen Traynor (Streep), an attorney who wants Tynan to make a stand against the nominee, in the process tanking a segregationist from making it onto the Court and setting up Tynan as a future presidential challenger.

This is the premise, and much of your opinion on what happens later will inform what you think of the movie.  I am not one of those people who judge movies of the past based on a new rubric; I think that is foolishness, and while I don't think we necessarily need to celebrate movies that clearly have aged poorly, I do think that we need to recognize that all things age one-way-or-another.  This is worth mentioning because the center of this movie is around Karen, a smart, capable woman in her own right, having an affair with Joe Tynan.  This doesn't appear to impact his vote (though he does, it's worth noting, side with Karen & eventually tanks the nomination), but what makes this remarkable isn't that Alda's screenplay has the beautiful woman in politics sleep with a powerful man, but that he does so while keeping her smart.  Streep's Karen is placid (Streep famously said that she was on "auto pilot" during this movie in the wake of the death of her longtime love John Cazale), but she's knowing.  She's done this before, and she knows not to put her heart too into the center.

Honestly, Joe Tynan is a bit dull as an overall movie (the direction is slow, and takes too many detours), but the script has a knowing glance at politics & it's filled with strong performances.  Alda is borrowing from Ted Kennedy in this part (it's hard not to see the Massachusetts senator in every policy speech), a deeply imperfect man who might well be perfect for America in 1980 (sadly, that didn't happen-I'd take a philandering liberal over Ronald Reagan any day), and he nails the well-meaning "still a man" role well.  Same could be said for Melvyn Douglas, who brings such instant stature you don't realize until late in the movie that he's clearly suffering from dementia, and has no business staying in politics longer.  There's a moment where he starts soliloquizing in French during a congressional hearing that is remarkably effective (it's the sort of thing that Aaron Sorkin would vastly overplay but here they get just right).

And best of all is our star of the month.  Harris could just be playing the neglected wife, but Harris (and Ellie) are too smart for such things.  She's a modern woman, and she won't take her husband back easily.  She also won't put herself into a closet without getting something in return.  Harris does, it's worth noting, take Joe back, but she does so with the real promise that he has to change...cause if he doesn't, she knows she can take him down.  It's a great, subtle part from an actress who would never really get an opportunity like this again.  She'd star in Hal Ashby's famously awful Second-Hand Hearts, which caused any momentum in her career to stall (she wouldn't make another movie for five years).  She would appear in films like Peggy Sue Got Married and Grosse Point Blank, but her heart wasn't really into it (she'd always kept film acting at a distance as it was), and she retired from acting to become a teacher at the turn of the century.  Harris died of lung cancer in 2018, one of the last of Hitchcock's living stars.

While it is just Monday, we will still have time before the new year (Saturday is the first of the year) to not only do a retrospective of our year devoted to Hitchcock, but also to take a peak at next season of the show, as yes, there will be a fourth season of Saturdays with the Stars (with a new theme!).  Stay tuned!

The Old Dark House (1932)

Film: The Old Dark House (1932)
Stars: Boris Karloff, Melvyn Douglas, Charles Laughton, Gloria Stuart, Raymond Massey, Lilian Bond
Director: James Whale
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

This month we are devoting all of our classic film reviews to Golden Age Horror films that I saw for the first time this year.  If you want to take a look at past titles (from this and other seasons of this series), look at the bottom of the page for links.

We shall rejoin the Sound Era today with The Old Dark House, an early pre-Code film, one from James Whale that in many ways anticipates his later picture The Bride of Frankenstein, which also stars Boris Karloff.  The film mirrors it in that it's kind of funny, and feels like it's supposed to be played for laughs even though it's relatively straight-faced in its approach.  The Old Dark House has a strange history as a film, and a happy one if you look at the ending.  The movie was considered lost for decades, but after William Castle remade it in the late 1960's, there was a concerted effort to find a copy of this all-star movie & bring it back to audiences, and eventually a copy was found, which is what we're enjoying today (I'm a film preservationist in my soul, so this makes me smile-all movies deserve to be seen!).

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is prototype of the classic haunted house motif.  A group of strangers are brought during a storm to a house: a married couple Philip (Massey) & Margaret (Stuart), their handsome bachelor friend Roger (Douglas), and later on in the film a chorus girl Gladys (Bond) and her companion William (Laughton, in his first Hollywood movie).  When they get there, they meet the Femm family, a gothic crew, complete with Morgan (Karloff), their near-mute, scarred butler, whom they seem to have a strange reluctance toward, and keep warning the visitors about.  It turns out that Morgan becomes rash & violent when he drinks, and he starts drinking with them trapped in the old house, and in the process he frees Saul (Brember Wills) from being trapped.  Saul is the true Femm family member to be afraid of (Morgan feels a combination of bad decisions & misunderstood), and is a murderer obsessed with fire.  Before he can kill the group & burn down the house, Roger is able to throw himself into danger, nearly killing himself by falling off of the balcony, but in the process saves all involved.  In the end, everyone (other than Saul) lives, and because it's Hollywood, Roger & Gladys end up engaged before the credits pull.

The movie is quite enjoyable, if completely silly.  The film plays the villains, with the possible exception of Morgan, as truly comic figures.  Saul is meant to be ridiculous, as are his relatives Horace & Rebecca (who resembles in some ways Grandmama from The Addams Family), and strangest of all is Sir Roderick, their 100-year-old father in the attic, who is played for some reason by a woman rather than a man (other than Whale's penchant for challenging heteronormative culture in his movies there's no explanation as to why the clearly female actor is playing the part, which may have been the point).  All of this makes the movie more fun, and with Stuart, Douglas, & Laughton all game for laughs, the movie is a delight.

The movie doesn't feature one of my favorite Karloff performances.  This was his first role to receive top-billing after his star-making work in Frankenstein (The Mummy would be released a few months later), and he's kind of playing the same character he would in his breakthrough part.  Morgan is mute, misunderstood but on some level a monster (he does unleash Saul on unsuspecting guests knowing the potential for danger, and seems to have a kind of rabid lust for Gloria Stuart's Margaret), but there's not as much soul in this character as Frankenstein's monster, and it feels like a carbon copy.  We're going to get to a less typical Karloff role later this month, but I'm curious if you've seen this movie where you'd rank this performance, as I think it's the rare film where the perpetual scene-stealer gets washed out in the movie.

Past Horror Month Reviews (Listed Chronologically): The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, Freaks, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Love, Son of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Ghost of Frankenstein, The House of Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Masque of the Red Death

OVP: The Candidate (1972)

Film: The Candidate (1972)
Stars: Robert Redford, Peter Boyle, Melvyn Douglas, Don Porter
Director: Michael Ritchie
Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best Original Screenplay*, Sound)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

After a week off, we are back with more film reviews this week, and we're also going to return to an Oscars theme week.  For our 2005 OVP write-ups, we're going to be discussing the sound categories this week, and so I thought it would be fun to complement that with a collection of "Best Sound" Oscar nominations on the blog.  Every weekday this week we will be discussing an Oscar Sound nominee that I watched (or in one case, re-watched) for the first time during quarantine.  This will be the only thing that these films may have in common-we're going to discuss dramas, animation, musicals, and action films, but all of them were Oscar-blessed.  The first film of this bunch is going to be 1972's The Candidate, a movie that feels quite prescient when we look at what would happen in the ensuing years in terms of politics.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie centers around the campaign of one man running for office, and what happens when he suddenly becomes viable.  Marvin Lucas (Boyle), is a Democratic operative who needs to find someone to take on Republican Senator Crocker Jarmon (Porter).  No Democrats want to run against the popular Jarmon, so Lucas is looking for someone who can be a sacrificial lamb so that the bottom half of the ticket doesn't get blown out.  He recruits Bill McKay (Redford), the handsome son of former Gov. John McKay (Douglas), to run for the seat, and promises him that he can run on his own issues-since he's going to lose, he can be as progressive as he wants to be without issue.  However, when polling shows the younger McKay is going to lose in a landslide (thus hurting the bottom half of the ticket), McKay has to moderate his stances to help the party.

You see where this is going, right?  The platitudes and banality of McKay's message starts to resonate with the voters (alongside the fact that he looks like Robert Redford), and what was once a lost cause election suddenly becomes one where Bill has a chance to win.  McKay is forced to abandon his principled stand on key issues, and even begrudgingly speak to his estranged father.  When McKay nearly abandons his moderate platform by insisting the campaign discuss poverty & civil rights, the campaign is able to distract the media by having Bill's father show up at the debate, endorsing his son in the process & giving them a shiny object to keep the real issues of the campaign away.  McKay ends up winning the election, but realizes (there's a famous quote at the end of the movie where Redford states "what do we do now?" to Boyle's campaign manager with no answer in reply) that in the process of the campaign he has lost anything that made him authentic, thus winning without it meaning anything.

The film in many ways foreshadows the ugliness of politics in the modern era.  The scene where McKay's father endorses his son to keep the heat off of what his son actually said (what actually will matter to the voters), is particularly compelling in a week where a congressman called one of his colleagues a "bitch" but the focus from the media was more on whether he'd publicly apologize or not, not whether or not he is fit for public office after such an outburst (spoiler alert: he's not).  The movie was written by Jeremy Larner, who worked for the Eugene McCarthy campaign in 1968, and so therefore knows of what he speaks, and also was clearly issuing an indictment of the then-modern Democratic Party for picking a more palatable middle-of-the-road candidate (Hubert Humphrey) over the outsider (McCarthy) that he had championed.  The script is great, knowingly looking at politics (even if it rarely gives us much to go off of in terms of lead performances, though Redford is a smart casting decision as an "empty vessel" that everyone can project their dreams off of given his universal handsomeness & natural affability), and is that rare movie that ages beautifully (if depressingly).

The film's sound nomination, though, is weird.  The 1970's if you look at the Sound categories oftentimes did this with prestige films, nominating films that we wouldn't normally consider a "Sound" nomination today, but instead just a movie they liked.  The film doesn't sound bad, but it also reads like a normal political drama, with sound occasionally coming forward in the crowd or debate scenes (but that'd been done before so this wasn't a new thing), but most of the movie is conversation, standard-issue.  Therefore while it obviously fits our theme (it was nominated!), it's a weird fit, especially considering its competition (The Godfather, Cabaret, The Poseidon Adventure) is much more what we'd assume would show up in a production category like this.

OVP: The Americanization of Emily (1964)

Film: The Americanization of Emily (1964)
Stars: James Garner, Julie Andrews, Melvyn Douglas, James Coburn, Joyce Grenfell
Director: Arthur Hiller
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Cinematography, Art Direction)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

For years, nestled between her two absolute classics Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, has been the movie that Julie Andrews proclaimed was her absolute favorite of all of her pictures, The Americanization of Emily.  The film, a hit back in its day but which has faded quite a bit from public consciousness compared to Andrews' two other squeaky clean family films, is a shockingly political and progressive film for 1964, with a pacifist viewpoint particularly from Garner's character.  Watching the classic western star play what many at the time (and even today) would have considered a coward is a truly interesting thing to view, and makes Americanization more than just a curiosity.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows Julie Andrews as Emily, a widow who is working in the war effort in World War II, and who has taken a dislike toward her employers, the recently arrived Americans, led by Lt. Commander Charlie Madison (Garner).  Emily is tired of war, and of losing men she loves in it (her husband, brother, and father have all died in war), and when it turns out that Charlie is someone who will never see the frontlines and is a man who seems to value personal survival more than bravery, she falls in love with him as he appears to be a safe option.  As this is a Hollywood movie, we of course soon find that Charlie will need to be on the main front, as part of a documentary production crew, as his commanding officer (Douglas) has gone a bit mad and is insistent that the first man killed at Omaha Beach be a sailor so that the Navy can get some solid press over the Air Force and the Army.  This results in Charlie nearly dying at Omaha Beach at the hands of his friend Bus (Coburn) who has gone insane with trying to ensure that a sailor dies, and the world thus thinks Charlie is dead, making him a hero and having Emily believe she lost another man to war.  The film ends in the most traditional of fashions, with Charlie deciding to accept his heroism rather than expose the silliness of his death, and living a long and happy life with Emily.

The film sounds relatively routine from most standpoints, of course.  We have a reluctant soldier driven to the frontlines, romanced by a beautiful woman who initially dislikes him, and in the end doing what is best for his country.  However, the film doesn't really play by those rules and it's actually quite shocking the ways that the picture takes on an anti-war attitude, particularly on the eve of the Vietnam Conflict.  After all, World War II is not one of the wars we typically identify as a war that people disagreed with entering.  In fact, almost every film about the war celebrates heroism and the dire needs to get into the battle for the sake of humanity.  The idea that someone could be against it is appalling, but it's worth noting that such a thing did exist.  People like Rep. Jeanette Rankin (who was threatened and forced into retirement for her vote) stood against the United States entering World War II, and the film is quick to point out that there is unnecessary pageantry and political posturing in even the most life-and-death of situations.  The movie's politics are what makes it particularly interesting (that, and seeing Julie Andrews play a deeply promiscuous woman, which always feels a bit staggering), as the actual picture itself doesn't break a lot of molds and feels pretty tired when it isn't focusing on its refreshing (even if you don't agree with them) political views.

The film won two Academy Award nominations, both gaining from its black-and-white status (at the time Cinematography and Art Direction categories were split between color and B&W).  The film's art direction is impressive, I will give it that.  The sets all feel relatively authentic, and there are scenes like the one at Omaha Beach where there's clearly been some detailing done into creating a relatively authentic-looking battlefield.  Plus, the film is focused very ardently on the many things that you can want in a wartime effort, and the boxes show the excess of Charlie's position quite nicely.  The cinematography isn't bad, but aside from the truly frightening dew that is cast over the Omaha Beach invasion, there's nothing landmark here.  We see a bit of shadow and the lighting for Andrews is good, but this isn't something that needed an Oscar nomination by any stretch of the imagination, and one assumes it was just because we were starting to run out of black-and-white pictures that the movie took the citation.

Those are my thoughts on the surprising Americanization of Emily-how about yours?  Do you also find it strange to see Julie Andrews playing someone saucy?  Are you shocked occasionally by a movie's politics?  And what other black-and-white films got their Oscar counts jacked by them keeping dual categories around too long?  Share your thoughts in the comments!

OVP: I Never Sang for My Father (1970)

Film: I Never Sang for My Father (1970)
Stars: Melvyn Douglas, Gene Hackman, Dorothy Stickney, Estelle Parsons
Director: Gilbert Cates
Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Actor-Melvyn Douglas, Best Supporting Actor-Gene Hackman, Best Adapted Screenplay)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Maybe it's the furniture.  There's something so distinctive about adult dramas of the 1970's-the mood is covered in grey, as if the screen has become exhausted from decades of technicolor, and is wallowing in self-pity.  It's something I've never truly loved, which is odd because there's few periods of film history that resonate more with me-perhaps it's because my favorite films of the era seem to breakout of this color scheme-Chinatown, The Godfather, Jaws-but it's always a tad bit jarring, as if you're visiting your great aunt's house and wondering why she simply won't redecorate.

(Spoilers throughout) This jarring juxtaposition, though, highlights what you have in common with the players onscreen, and there's a lot to see in yourself while watching I Never Sang for My Father, a film about when you realize that the balance of power within your relationship with your parents has started to lean toward your end, rather than visa versa, and what you lose in the process.  Gene Hackman stars as a dutiful son to a caring mother (Stickney) and a domineering and reductive father (Douglas), a once great man who has been compressed to anecdotes and rambling tales of his once great life.  When Stickney's character dies, you see that she's been the balancing act between the two, and Hackman must contend with the fact that he has little in common with his father, and that neither of them know that they love each other, or even if they do.

This is one of the great lost arts of the films of the 1970's that simply doesn't exist today.  There is an ending to the film (eventually Douglas and Hackman come to blows about their unrealistic expectations of each other, and go their separate ways, with Douglas dying offscreen), but there's no resolution.  Hackman or Douglas do not find absolution in airing their feelings toward another in a shouting match, but find more loss, more questions of why their lives didn't work out the way that they planned.  Only Alice (Estelle Parsons in a gut-punch of a performance), broken from years of exile from the family, has found closure in the family's many fractured relationships, by learning to hate her father and by proxy, hate the world.

Hackman and Douglas are both incredibly strong here, though I have to deduct a few points from Hackman for being ridiculously put in the Supporting Actor category when he's in every scene of the film.  Douglas, an actor that I adored in Hud, comes as close to taking out George C. Scott in the Best Actor race as one could without toppling him.  Both are men that know that their times have past-that they are relics that must make way for the new world, and for men who are more sensitive and whose ways they of which they neither understand nor approve.  Douglas's pleadings to his son to stay, to come and visit and go with him to the rotary club and not move to California, are less about seeing his son and more about seeing himself as a younger man, a man who was important and not fading into the background while the youth take control.  Everything revolves around his own youth, and his stories are not meant to bore or to entertain, but simply to remind both he and the listener that he was once a young man himself.  Douglas is just a force in the movie, and towers every scene as a man always in control.  His son, Hackman, allows him to tower again, not because he enjoys it, but in a vain hope to capture a childhood love that he knows he's supposed to have, but realizes in the dynamic title scene that will never come.  Robert Anderson's screenplay allows this uncomfortable bending, twisting their relationship until it snaps.  Their relationship will never be black and white like both hope, but like the movie, it is instead a collage of grey that neither can make clear.  It's in this grey that both actors excel best, and it is this grey that makes the film's tone so rich.  Or perhaps, it's just the furniture.