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.

Lloyd's of London (1936)

With the apostrophe in the title or without, Lloyd's of London is a film about the daring, dangerous, exciting world of nineteenth-century insurance.

This is an epic, sprawling movie by Henry King, and although its plot goes in a million places, King really does nothing to communicate to the audience just how exciting this is supposed to be, so much of the film's excitement falls flat. There are some excellent spy scenes, a two-day boat ride from France to England during the Napoleonic Wars, some delightful adulterous comings and goings, and the film even begins with a fun bit in which two kids spy on a bunch of fraudulent would-be pirates.

But I'm not kidding when I say this film is about insurance, and Lloyd's of London is more interested in communicating to its audiences the virtues of the insurance trade in England – apparently keeping the British navy afloat (I'm skeptical) while making sure that trading vessels were able to come to England to provide food for people who would have starved otherwise (oh?). All of this, apparently, was made possible not by the ships themselves but by wealthy insurers at Lloyd's, risking all they have for the good of England... and only occasionally becoming obscenely wealthy. Lloyd's invents a childhood friendship between Lord Horatio Nelson (Laurence Olivier's character in That Hamilton Woman) and this insurance man at Lloyd's of London, a deep bond that is pure fantasy but that the film uses to illustrate how deeply intertwined the British navy is with British financiers and British merchants (although the film would like us to believe that none of these people was a colonialist).

Lloyd's of London is notable also for starring a 22-year-old Tyrone Power in his first starring role. (He is the star, even if, as you can see from the poster, he is billed fourth). This movie proved to Twentieth Century Fox that Power could carry a picture, and that he was good enough to be the amazing star he would turn out to be. The top-billed talent here is Freddie Bartholomew, who plays Power's character as a child. The movie opens with him, and he is as charming and delightful as he is in all of his movies.

I watched this sprawling epic on YouTube, where you can clearly see that the film's title is Lloyd's of London and not Lloyds of London.

The Black Swan (1942)

The Black Swan is a delight! I love a good swashbuckling adventure film, and this one is one of the best. It's funny to me that most of these pirate movies Hollywood are actually films about nationalism. The English, the Spanish, the Americans. Of course, this is a WWII film, and so the question really is about betrayal and who you can trust, and alliances. In any case, this is a lot of fun, and Tyrone Power is just great – aside from being impossibly handsome.

David and Bathsheba (1951)

David and Bathsheba is a really interesting biblical movie. (It's boring, don't get me wrong; I am not here to say that it is a good movie.) But although this movie looks like your typical swords-and-sandals epic – it has the lush score by Alfred Newman, the beautiful Leon Shamroy cinematography, the insanely enormous cast, beautiful art direction, big stars – but what is interesting about this movie is that this movie is skeptical of a Christianity/Judaism that is invested in laws and punishment and destruction. It is also skeptical of priests who interpret the desires of gods. Henry King's film doesn't go quite so far as to say that the priests in David and Bathsheba are corrupt and self-seeking – although it certainly could have taken this tack if it wished – but this is a skeptical film, one that asks its audiences to think ethically about punishment, cruelty, desert, and judgment.

Susan Hayward as Bathsheba

David and Bathsheba conflates a series of events in Hebrew history – the affair of David and Bathsheba and the civil war of Absalom against his father – but more than anything this is a kind of character study of David himself. The film spends long minutes exploring David's face while nothing else happens. We watch David carefully as he makes decisions, as he wars with himself, as he debates the nonsense spoken by the priest of Israel.

As I say, this is a really weird film. It is in the film's third act when we flashback to Samuel's anointing of David as a shepherd boy and then to David's battle with Goliath. Of course, this means that we follow David as a young man (i.e. not Gregory Peck) at the end of the film rather than the film's star, Gregory Peck, whom we have been following for the movie's first ninety minutes.

Despite this poster's promises, Gregory Peck wears a shirt at all times.

The film justifies David and Bathsheba's affair from the beginning. They like each other, an Bathsheba's husband does not love her. He does not even care about her, and is not the least interested in what she thinks. In the end, even the film's god blesses David and Bathsheba's relationship. It is, as I say, a film made by a skeptic. The conflict in the film is that David has forgotten the ways of the god and has broken the Mosaic law. The film doesn't really believe this, but tries to make us believe this in act two by introducing a prophet none of us likes. Then in act three, David argues with Bathsheba about those laws. One of the great moments in the movie is in the third act, when David tells Bathsheba that the god he knew as a boy, in the trees and rocks is not the god of vengeance that the priests preach. (In act two the film watches a beautiful woman get stoned to death for adultery. It's a sequence that judges this kind of law very harshly, but it doesn't seem to treat those laws in an orientalist fashion. In other words, David and Bathsheba doesn't call Mosaic law backward or barbaric as such. Instead, it is asking audiences to judge these laws for themselves, and to be skeptical of unjust law in general.)

But what David does at the end of the film is in fact defy the Mosaic law and go talk to the god directly. Once he does this – once he remembers the god – the god forgives him and it rains in Israel. What the film is saying is that laws against adultery aren't important (it has said that throughout the film). Each man must make the ethical choices that accord with his own beliefs. As long as the individual remembers the god, believes in him, pays homage to him, then his behavior is immaterial – or at least mostly immaterial. Even David's murder of Uriah the Hittite, Bathsheba's husband, is apparently forgiven by the rain that the god sends at the film's end.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952)

I am not totally sure why I was as bored by The Snows of Kilimanjaro as I was, but it struck me as an extraordinarily static film with only melodramatic content. Its much vaunted cinematography and its beautiful images of Africa and its fauna were only there for decoration, and what they were decorating wasn't interesting at all. It's a shame, too, because I basically Ava Gardner is perfect in everything. Truth be told, she is also great in this, but the film is worthless.

State Fair

I hadn't actually realized the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical State Fair was based on an original film. Anyway, this is it. And Henry King's film is charming from start to finish. And this movie also had some pretty great shots for 1933: the roller coaster rides were a highlight.

In Old Chicago

Watched this old flick from 1937. Henry King's In Old Chicago is a kind of un-integrated musical flick about Ma O'Leary and her boys Dion and Jack. One is a gambler and runs a club in the seedy part of town (where all the buildings are made of pine... oh the foreboding) and the other is the mayor and a straightedged kind of guy. Ma O'Leary is played by Alice Brady and it's a lovely performance. The other actors are Tyrone Power (so pretty) as Dion, the gambler, his love interest Alice Faye (of course) who is a night club singer and his partner, and Don Ameche, who plays the brother. Power, Faye and Ameche would all come together again for the following year's Alexander's Ragtime Band (read my review of that here).

Anyway, the plot of In Old Chicago is not really important, but Alice Fay sings a bunch of songs (including "In Old Chicago," bizzarely sung in Old Chicago). These are interspersed with Irish-styled family songs sung around the O'Leary hearth. While these songs are mostly forgettable, the high point of the film is the big fire in 1871. It is directed splendidly. There are seemingly thousands of people on this set, and the fire looks real: none of this easy, fake-looking CGI stuff from nowadays. Of course, Mrs. O'Leary's cow knocks over a lantern, and that's how the fire starts, but there are amazing explosions and the fire burns the entire city. The shots of this are truly awesome. The movie goes total cheese in its final moments, but the big fire in this movie makes In Old Chicago worth the rental.

Wilson

Yesterday I heard a very moving story on All Things Considered about adoption. I left Avjet around 5:30p and was just arriving at Hollywood and Highland when the story ended. So cool. I love that show. I was driving into Beverly Hills to see a film in the Academy's "Great to Be Nominated: Part Two" series. It's a selection of restored films (one for each year) that didn't in the Best Picture Oscar but got a Hell of a lot of nominations: The Grapes of Wrath, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 7th Heaven, The Song of Bernadette, etc.

Last night's film was Wilson, the only film in Part Two that I hadn't seen. It was about early Twentieth century prez Woodrow Wilson, he of WWI, the League of Nations, and the 40-hour work-week. And it was THREE HOURS LONG. I swear I thought dawn would be breaking when we all left that theater.

I want to say something brief about old people, since most of the audience at these Academy screenings is over sixty. Old people always are the first to arrive to things: they either have nothing to do anyway and so being early is relatively simple, or they have some sort of built-in resistance to tardiness that comes with retirement. Old people also want to sit on the aisles of a theater (usually because they want to be sure they can easily get up to go the bathroom during the feature). The combination of these two truisms is what I witnessed last night at the screening: a theatre all of whose aisle seats were filled first and whose center seats were cumbersomely filled much later. I looked out over the theatre and just laughed.

As for Wilson, I have a new respect for him and I have forgiven him for World War I, but I wouldn't recommend the feature--not that you'll have an opportunity to see it anyway. I've been actively trying to see the picture for a couple of years and this is the first opportunity I've had. It never plays on TCM and it's not on DVD.

Off to work. Cheers, y'all.

Licking the Inside

I went to the Academy tonight to see another really old musical.  This is back when those crazy Hollywood folk were just figuring out musicals.  Tonight I saw Alexander's Ragtime Band with Tyrone Power (hubba hubba), Alice Faye, Don Ameche and Ethel Merman.  Alice Faye was fabulous.  She reminded me a lot of Simone Signoret.  Don Ameche and Ethel Merman were cool too.  The script was written by Irving Berlin (!) and included twenty-six (!) of his songs in 111 minutes of film.  (That's shorter than I, Robot if you're keeping score.)  It was really fun.  Lots of dancing, tons of singing, the ghost of a plot, but some fairly good acting.  That Tyrone Power was never known for his acting ability, but he's very good in this one.  I even had a tear at one point.  I hastily wiped it away, though, so you needn't worry about me weeping openly in the middle of Beverly Hills.  I looked fucking hot tonight, perhaps that is what made the night feel like such a success.

I randomly ran into John Bastow, this guy who was in my department at university, when I was at Hairspray on Friday night.  He was there with some older woman (I think.)  I didn't get a good look because you know I hid my face and walked away as quick as can be.  Not that I don't like the guy, but I just hate seeing folk I know when I'm out on the town.

I bought oreos on the way home tonight.  I love indulging in things like that.  They were only $2, too!  Good times.