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.

When My Baby Smiles at Me

If I am honest, I don't really get Betty Grable. She and Dan Dailey made Mother Wore Tights (zzz) and then they made When My Baby Smiles at Me a couple years later, and it's the old burlesque-dancer-loves-burlesque-comic routine, and, y'all, it's old. I get annoyed because this old song and dance is literally a diegetic musical in which we are enjoying old burlesque numbers and laughing at old burlesque jokes (well, supposed to be laughing, anyway), and yet we're also supposed to understand that we should look down on burlesque as a form. These musicals traffic in nostalgia for burlesque, and ask us to enjoy it, while simultaneously insulting it (and insulting our intelligence). 

When My Baby is even worse than this because most of it is unhappy. Dan Dailey is a terrible alcoholic in this one, and Grable sends him off to Broadway to become a star but he has no support system in New York so he drinks himself into a stupor and, star though he is, gets too wasted to keep his job.

But When My Baby's high point is an extraordinary confrontation between Dailey and Grable and a bunch of their friends in which Dailey is absolutely fucking plastered and totally losing his mind about Grable marrying another dude. He's incredible in this sequence, and it's shocking and devastating and really awesome.

Of course, it all ends how you'd expect it to, but When My Baby sure does go to some dark places that I was not expecting.

Mother Wore Tights (1947)

Mother Wore Tights is cute. It's pretty standard fare, though, and the conflict – of which there is very little – involves one of the characters learning not to be such an asshole snob and accept that her parents are awesome even though they're vaudevillians. Still, Betty Grable is fun, and the whole thing works quite well.

The Greatest Show on Earth?

Cecil B. DeMille's 1952 movie The Greatest Show on Earth may be one of the strangest movies I've ever seen in my life. Stranger still, it kinda works. The Greatest Show on Earth is your standard melodramatic plot structure: girl (Betty Hutton) loves boy (Charlton Heston); boy loves work more than girl; girl finds new boy (Cornel Wilde); boy pretends he doesn't care; boy learns to love girl more than work; girl gets boy. This plot, which is totally ridiculous, but somehow totally intriguing, is interspersed with extremely long performance sequences featuring various circus acts. The movie is filled with elephants and horses, acrobats, tight-rope walkers, clowns, lions, you name it. The majority of these sequences has nothing to do at all with the romantic plot. There is also an intrigue plot, featuring a scheming guy in a suit. I never figured out what any of the guy-in-the-suit's machinations were about. It was totally incomprehensible as far as I am concerned. Making the whole combination even more strange, the movie is filled with documentary-style sequences where the audience learns about the circus and all that goes into producing this show. These documentary sequences are narrated by DeMille himself and are basically a commercial for the circus. The film even ends with a huge musical number exhorting everyone to come out and see the circus when it comes through town.

There is a little more to it: there's a huge train wreck near the end of the movie, that looks like it was done with model trains, and there is some good acting... by Gloria Grahame. (Funny, I just finished hating on her for her work in Oklahoma! and here I am loving her again.) The actor who plays Charlton Heston's rival (Cornel Wilde) is gorgeous. I'm not normally into really muscular guys, but for him I'd make an exception. Oh, and Dorothy Lamour is in this movie too for no reason at all. The film totally forgets about her after awhile and she is given no plot at all. And I forgot: Jimmy Stewart is in the movie too. He is a clown with a secret past. His plot is boring.

I'm telling you though, the movie is not half-bad. It's a weird patchwork of a movie and it's too long, but I rather enjoyed its histrionics.

And speaking of clichéd plots. Walter Lang's With a Song in My Heart is the true-life story of Jane Froman, played in the movie by Susan Hayward. Zzzzzz. Oh my lord it's boring. The worst part of it is that it's a musical, and Jane Froman's real voice is used for all the sequences (much like the producers of The Jolson Story did with their movie) but Jane Froman's music is boring. She'd take an interesting song and make it slow and flavorless, I swear. The plot is hideous, too. There's a husband who can't get a break and he spends the whole movie moping about it. Skip this one for sure.

I saw three more movies the last couple of days. Luis Buñuel's Robinson Crusoe is some of the most racist shit I've seen in a long while. Do not see this unless you feel like getting pissed off.

And I saw two gay movies: André Téchiné's Les Témoins (The Witnesses) is a story of Paris in 1984 during the free-love period right before the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic. Les Témoins is the story of a very young man and his platonic relationship with an older man and the older man's married friends. It's a very interesting, movie with an intelligent, queer sensibility, and the married couple (Sami Bouajila and Emmanuelle Béart) are both wonderful in it. I loved them both. The movie sort of loses speed near its end, but it's still worth catching. It's not on the heartbreaking level of Longtime Companion, but it's intriguing to see the Paris side of the war on AIDS anyway.

I also watched the 1919 silent film Different from the Others (§ 175) which is a pro-gay propaganda film from Germany directed by Richard Oswald, and engineered by Magnus Hirschfeld. It's interesting, but I didn't watch it to enjoy myself; I watched it to see what they were up to in 1919. It's a fairly standard thing: blackmail plot, gay suicide, etc. And there are (of course) long sequences where we hear about how gay people can't help it (they're born that way!) and how Paragraph 175 ought to be repealed. It's a pretty cool thing, all told. It's 1919 for heaven's sake!

A Not-so-brief Update

I am almost finished with my big project for the weekend, which was cataloguing all of my books into my home library database. It took me quite a while (I have a lot of books), but now I will be able to search all of my books to see whether I have something or not. This will also make referencing things much, much easier. I am going to be in school for another three years or so, so I needed to start this now before I amass another three years worth of books.

In other news, my second six-week summer session started today. I am teaching Introduction to Theatre for Non-majors with another grad student. We had 80 seats in the class and every single one of them filled up. I think the dean was expecting about fifty, but the class is evidently popular. It should be fun. It is mostly (i.e. 80%) filled with kids who will be freshmen in the Fall. They take a summer class before their first real semester and so they get acclimated to campus life and get a headstart on coursework. These kids are the best students ever. I had them last summer, too. They work hard and are on their best behavior. And they want to participate.

I've been watching a lot of movies, too. I just haven't felt like writing about them. I will be brief about most of them. Actually, for the less cinematically inclined among you, I will start with the high-interest stuff and move toward the obscure so you can tune out when you get bored:

Okay, so call me crazy (or cynical or bitter) (and maybe I need to see it again) but I was not head over heels for Andrew Stanton's WALL·E, the latest from Pixar. I know everyone else is nuts about it and all that, but... well. Let me start at the beginning. At the beginning, I loved it. The opening seconds are pure genius, with a shot of outer space and then Michael Crawford's voice ringing out loud and clear "Out There... there's a world outside of Yonkers!" I laughed out loud and couldn't stop. Why is this movie beginning with a clip from Hello, Dolly!? WALL·E is really sort of brilliant in that moment. It stays brilliant for a long time, too. But then our loveable robot takes a trip into space following his lady-love (do robots have genders? they do in this film). I started to get bored when the humans on the spaceship Axiom started to show up. They are these blobby humans living a Matrix-like existence, spending their whole lives tapped into the internet and laying around on moving recliners. The movie by this time became a kind of action movie that didn't have any more jokes left in it, only plot points. The movie's politics are questionable, too. I am not sure I even understand them. Does the film want us to all be farmers? Still, WALL·E is brilliant for at least half of its running time and its second half is harmless if less than stellar.

But I loved Tarsem Singh's new movie The Fall. Tarsem previously made the bizarre but visually stunning film The Cell. Remember that? If you do remember it, you remember that the film's subject matter was dark and dirty, but the art direction was eye-popping and unforgettable. The Fall is just as stunning, maybe more so. The story is told from the point of view of a little girl (Catinca Untaru) in a Los Angeles hospital in the 1920s. She befriends a movie star (Lee Pace) who has lost feeling in his feet because of a mysterious fall. The beautiful cinematic pictures that Tarsem creates are products of the young girl's imgination as the hospitalized man tells a story. It's an extraordinary film with tons of heart, but it's also very, very smart. The people in the film are real characters with faults and unhappinesses. I found it incredibly moving and astoundingly beautiful. Young Catinca Untaru is the cutest thing ever and the relationship between the young girl and the injured man becomes really powerful.

I also really liked David Schwimmer's silly comedy Run Fatboy Run. It's not very smart, but it's quite funny. It's another in the long line of men-who-learn-how-to-grow-up films for which Judd Apatow is now so famous. Still, Schwimmer's touch is light and the humor is often dry and clever rather than overtly silly. Best of all, Run Fatboy Run doesn't need to get cheap laughs from puke jokes or disability humor. Run Fatboy Run is totally worth watching. And I love that Simon Pegg.

So is it ridiculous that I've never seen James Cameron's 1984 movie The Terminator? Yes, yes it is. I haven't seen Part 2, either, but it is on its way from Netflix. Well, I ought to be forgiven for this oversight since I was very heavily into church at the time the movie came out and had no time for Linda Hamilton or killers from the future or naked men who travel through time. Anyway, I quite liked the movie, of course. It's really fun in a kind of horror-film-meets-sci-fi-film-meets-action-film kind of way. I am excited for Part 2.

I also really liked Grigori Chukhrai's 1959 film Ballad of a Soldier, which follows a nineteen-year-old Russian soldier in World War II as he travels back to his mother on a six-day leave. On his way he meets all sort of people and sees the effect of the war on the people of the Soviet Union. It's a beautiful, heartbreaking film, and the young man who plays the lead and the young lady who plays his girlfriend are truly lovely to watch.

John Ford's Arrowsmith (from 1931) has a lot of problems. It is one of the first films to portray black people in roles other than slave or servant roles, but it's still not a very good film. The movie stars Ronald Colman and Helen Hayes. Netflix says that it also stars Myrna Loy, but don't believe them. She is in it for about three minutes altogether. Arrowsmith follows a doctor named (conveniently) Arrowsmith and his wife as Arrowsmith invents and experiments and tries to cure cancer. He doesn't (naturally) but he does come up with some pretty good antibacterial stuff, and then he travels to the Caribbean to help people there who are suffering from the plague. Still, there isn't much to this movie, and it isn't very well made, either, although one can see the germs of what will be John Ford's greatness in some of the photography on the island.

We don't really need to talk about Walter Lang's Can-Can, either. It stars Frank Sinatra, Shirley Maclaine, Maurice Chevalier and Louis Jourdan and I quite liked it, but it is a fluffy musical with very cute costumes but not much for either memorable music or memorable characters.

What else? I thought Tony Richardson's film The Entertainer, based on the play by John Osborne, was quite good. I know I am often hard on Laurence Olivier and his boring Shakespeare performances, but he is great in this film.

I also really liked Hal Ashby's biopic of folk singer Woody Guthrie, Bound for Glory. David Carradine is the film's star and he's quite compelling as Guthrie. I dug the film's politics and its free spirit, too.

Lastly, I just watched the Hong Kong musical (which is more of a Hollywood film than anything else) Perhaps Love. All I can say is Perhaps Not. I rented this film, of course, because it stars the most gorgeous creature to ever walk on two legs: Takeshi Kaneshiro, but the film is a total mess. It operates on three levels. The present: on the film set of a big Honk Kong musical; in fantasy: in the musical itself; and in the past of the film's stars. Kaneshiro is beautiful, but the movie doesn't work at all and I was awfully bored. Perhaps Love was also never released in theatres in the U.S. and this shows in the subtitles used for the DVD release I watched. The English has obviously never been tried on English-speakers before. I don't speak Mandarin, but the English used for the subtitles was at times incomprehensible. This may be one of the reasons I liked this movie so little, but mostly I think it's because the movie was boring.