1948 Oscar Excursion

I realized a couple of weeks ago that most of the films I had yet to see for Academy Award season 1948 had appeared on YouTube within the last year. Most of these movies are from 20th Century Fox, so perhaps that – and copyright expiration – has something to do with it. I haven't looked into it, so that's just an assumption, but there they were!

By chance I had just seen The Three Musketeers, and then Charles Walters' Easter Parade and Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair appeared on the Criterion Channel. I somehow also managed to watch When My Baby Smiles at Me. It felt like a sign, so I made it a point to see the rest of these 1948 movies. I had, of course, seen the big winners that year a long time ago: those were Hamlet, Johnny Belinda, The Red Shoes, The Snake Pit, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but there was a good chunk still yet to see.

Most of these movies are musicals, actually, which made viewing all that much more silly. Casbah, directed by John Berry, was a musical version of the Pepe le Moko story, in which a well-known and attractive criminal can't leave a particular district in Morocco or he'll be arrested. In this version, Pepe sings. This is pretty silly, but the central song is good, and the film's star, Tony Martin (who I don't think I'd seen before), is pretty great. Pepe le Moko is a melodrama anyway, so making it into a musical doesn't change much. Peter Lorre also stars, and he's delightful and weird as always. 

Yet another musical was Ernst Lubitsch's That Lady in Ermine, a movie that was finished by Otto Preminger. It stars Betty Grable (whose popularity baffles me), Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (dreamy), and Cesar Romero (who somehow always plays second banana to the leading man even though he's leading-man handsome). That Lady in Ermine is, frankly, an insane film. It's a musical, of course, and it's one of the weirdest musicals I've seen. It's irrepressibly silly and definitely charming, but it's really wacky. In it, all of the paintings in some castle in Hungary or wherever we are come to life. They're the ancestors of this queen (Grable) and they sing and protect the castle from an invading soldier from next door (Bohemia? Czechia? I've forgotten). The That in the title is really weird, too. I don't think anyone refers to her with this phrase the whole movie. Anyway, this one I don't recommend. 

The Emperor Waltz, a second film directed by Billy Wilder this year, is a musical starring Bing Crosby (who plays an American salesman) and Joan Fontaine (who plays a non-singing noblewoman in Austria). Well, weirdly, their dogs also fall in love. This is another very silly musical. It didn't quite work for me, though. Bing croons through the movie, and that's fine and all, but because Joan Fontaine (who I otherwise love) doesn't sing, things feel out of balance. The central couple doesn't feel right for each other, even if the dogs do.

Norman Z. McLeod's The Paleface is a Bob Hope–Jane Russell comedy set in the wild west. It's very stupid. I laughed occasionally, but Jane Russell... kinda sucks? Like, she's supposed to be funny, but she's really not a comedienne (I think I've only seen her in this, so maybe I'm wrong). Also, much of this film's humor hinges on Indians, killing Indians, making fun of Indians, and basic colonial activities. It was really hard to enjoy any of it. Worse still, the song for which this film was nominated and won is the least good of the five nominated songs. It's called "Buttons and Bows" and Hope sings it while accompanying himself on a ukulele. It's so weird that this won.

Robert Z. Leonard's B.F.'s Daughter is a war-melodrama that's really just all about masculinity and money. The basic plot is that a young idealist marries a very, very rich woman, who just basically pays for things. He makes good and starts making his own money, but he begins to resent her wealth, and she doesn't understand why. The basic politics of the film are that class warfare is a terrible idea because rich men can be very good men, too. Wealthy capitalists can also risk their lives to save their country (the U.S., of course), and it's important to be nice and polite, even when the people you're talking to are raising rents and making their money off of the backs of the destitute and exploiting the labor of the working class. So, actually, I hated this movie, despite the fact that it stars Barbar Stanwyck and Van Heflin. 1948 was the first year to have a Costume Design category, and Stanwyck's gowns in this are incredible, so maybe it was worth it for that.

On the vaguely liberal front, Henry Koster's The Luck of the Irish is about a political sellout who, like, learns to come back to his roots and not be a political sellout because of the magic of a – get ready for this – hard-drinking leprechaun played by Cecil Kellaway (who was nominated for best supporting actor). The politics here are not specific at all, so we actually don't know what the main character (Tyrone Power, lovable as always) has sold out about or to what values he returns. Either way, the whole thing is fun and silly, and I enjoyed myself, even though I must confess that half the time I had no fucking idea what that Irish-accented leprechaun was saying.

Charles Vidor's The Loves of Carmen is the Carmen story, starring the gorgeous, fabulous, can't-say-enough-good-things-about-her Rita Hayworth and the oh-so-handsome Glenn Ford. This was what it always is... a tale of jealousy and love where everyone is doomed. The unfortunate part about The Loves of Carmen is that it rather looks as though it was made on the cheap. There aren't enough big, splashy scenes of cities or raids or anything like that, despite the plot rather needing them. We spend too much time in caves hiding out. The Loves of Carmen is, of course, a musical, though all the songs are diegetic. Carmen is a singing and dancing performer, and it's Rita Hayworth, so all of that stuff is wonderful.

But now for some much more interesting/better films:

Deep Waters, directed by Henry King, is a drama about a troubled orphan boy played by Dean Stockwell! This is a movie about lobstermen in Maine or somewhere up in the northeast, and the lobstermen are Dana Andrews and Cesar Romero. The men befriend this boy and let him work as an apprentice, but the government – in the person of the woman who Dana Andrews loves – is afraid of the water, and thinks this is bad for the young boy. So the government disallows this and then he gets in trouble. The whole thing is a little family drama, but it feels innovative and interesting, and the relationship between Dean Stockwell and Dana Andrews and Cesar Romero is fascinatingly sketched. This film also stars an always-wonderful Anne Revere, as a no-nonsense foster mother with a heart of gold. I really enjoyed this and recommend it.

Another fascinating 1948 film is documentarian Robert Flaherty's Louisiana Story. This is a film set in Cajun country Louisiana, and it's ostensibly about oil drilling there, but it is really about this Cajun boy. We follow him and his pet raccoon around as he confronts and explores this giant piece of machinery that is disrupting his home and life. He fights a gator, he fishes, etc. Much of Louisiana Story has the paternalist gaze that's so easy to see in Flaherty's Nanook of the North, in which we sort of laugh at how charming and child-like this "foreigner" is. But I think this is the tradeoff with Flaherty's movies. His gaze is paternalistic and superior, but what he captures is really special. This movie is free on Amazon Prime, although the print is pretty rough. There were several films from this period that starred small boys in pseudo-documentaries that were actually fiction films – I'm thinking of 1952's Navajo and 1949's The Quiet One. I found all three of these movies worth watching.

I'm saving the best for last: Walter Lang's Sitting Pretty is a domestic comedy set in the suburbs. In it, a harried housewife with three kids is desperately in need of a housekeeper and accidentally hires... a man! He's played by Clifton Webb and his name is Mr. Belvedere, and he's incredible. In any case, Mr. Belvedere turns out to be a great housekeeper. And everyone loves him. I won't spoil any more of this movie, because you should absolutely watch it, and it's on YouTube. It's a delight from start to finish and very, very funny. Clifton Webb was nominated for Best Actor for this movie, too! And here's the real rub: it's very obvious, from the very beginning, that Mr. Belvedere is a gay man. This is not so much coded as it is completely and totally clear. Sitting Pretty would actually make no sense if Mr. Belvedere wasn't gay. There is, for example, an entire silly plot where the man of the house, Robert Young, is totally skeptical of the idea of Mr. Belvedere staying at home in the house with his wife while he travels for a couple of days. The women in the film are in hysterics laughing about this. As if Mr. Belvedere is a sexual threat. It's hilarious! He has to be gay for the entirety of the comedy to work. This film is wonderful, and you should see it.