This year's winner is about as far away from last year's winner as you can get. We go from a low-budget, black and white, 90 minute sleeper with minimal cast and sets and a story that takes place over less than two days to this great monstrosity of film. It's long, loud, colourful, expensive and boasts a cast of thousands. Whether "monstrosity" is a negative term or just a description of the size of the thing remains to be seen.I've definitely seen this film before. And I've seen chunks of it several times. It's one of those Boxing Day / Easter Sunday / Bank Holiday Monday afternoon films from my childhood.
However, it's a long time since I've seen it. I'm sort of looking forward to seeing it again - and I'm also dreading the thought that it will have dated badly in many different ways. I'll cope fine with the 50s special effects, but there just seem to be far too many potential cultural pitfalls in a 50s Hollywood version of circumnavigating the globe. I know that Shirley McLaine is the Indian Princess and just the thought of that is making me nervous....
As the poster says, proceedings took place on March 27th 1957 on both coasts as in previous years. Jerry Lewis was in Hollywood and Celeste Holm did the honours in New York.It's the first year that all the Best Picture nominees were in colour and they were all big-budget epic films that earned a lot at the box office. This was clearly a taste of things to come in the industry.
It was the first year that Best Foreign Language Film was a competitive category rather than an honorary award and it was won by Fellini's La Strada. This award is credited with helping to start the rise in interest in foreign films (particularly European films) that reached a high point in the 1960s.
Other Notable Winners That Night:
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| Cary Grant doing his best Ingrid Bergman impression! |
Best Director didn't go the same way as Best Picture this year - George Stevens (deservedly, imho) took that one for Giant.
Yul Brynner won Best Actor for The King and I (which baffles me when you see who he beat to it - Rock and Jimmy, Kirk Douglas and Laurence Olivier!) and Ingrid Bergman won the second of her three Oscars, for Anastasia. Anthony Quinn and Dorothy Malone are the other two winners on the picture.
Dalton Trumbo won his second Oscar (but the first to be officially credited to him) for Best Story. And unusually - but still deservedly - Best Screenplay went to a film with practically no dialogue whatsoever, the 35 minute short The Red Balloon. (I have a strong memory of watching this when I was very young and I was mesmerised by it!)
Best Song:
A bit of Doris Day again this year, with one of the songs she became most famous for - Que Sera Sera from The Man Who Knew Too Much. I think this is one of the best deserved winners in this category ever, because it is a perfect example of a song becoming an unexpected and crucial plot point. And Hitchcock needs to take a fair bit of the credit for that! I'd better not say any more, in case you haven't seen it.....
What We Could/Should Have Been Watching:
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| Rock and Liz - it'll never work..... |
However, there is also a personal favourite of mine that I really wish we'd watched so that I could share it with Andy - I'll have to find three and a half hours another time to do that.
I love Giant. It's not dissimilar in tone and scope to Gone With The Wind but I think I like it more. Rock, Liz and Jimmy are all fab and there are some great iconic scenes. I get the appeal of ATW80D but I definitely prefer this one. It earned George Stevens the Best Director award - but it's a shame that James Dean wasn't nominated for Supporting Actor instead of sharing the nomination for Best Actor with Rock. I think he might have won in that category (and he's fab in this!)
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| He'd better get on his horse and get out of town! |
We also probably should have been watching The Searchers - or at least acknowledging its existence. It's now generally considered to be one of (if not the) greatest Westerns of all time. And it didn't get a single nomination in any category.
Our Verdict:
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| Whatever the venue, the rules of etiquette must be followed! |
I wasn't expecting a great deal from this one - and thought I would spend most of the three hours duration mumbling and grumbling about Rock Hudson and John Wayne. However, I actually really enjoyed it. It was far more fun than I'd remembered from my childhood and, on the whole, I bought into the story and the characters and the time just flew by.
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| Buster Keaton - probably my favourite cameo |
The cameos were great - I spotted the big ones (although there were many more who were either big in 50s only, or who were much older than in their heyday and not so recognisable. Noel C and Johnny G are great fun in one of the early scenes, Frankie S is very much "blink and you'll miss it", Marlene hams it up brilliantly (in a costume we saw in the museum in Berlin this summer!), as does Cesar Romero as a bit of light relief from all the bullfighting. But I think my favourite is a 60something Buster Keaton in full sound and colour as the train guard.
Cameos aside, David Niven and Cantinflas are great at holding the whole thing together, and the story flows well and keeps a good pace. Except for in Spain, where the flamenco sequence is a bit longer than it really needed to be - and the bullfighting just goes on and on and on. I don't know whether my 21st Century sensibilities have dulled my interest or if it really was as overlong as it felt, but about 10 minutes in I kind of wanted the bull to just run him through and be done with it.
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| An over-excess of bullfighting |
The 1870s world seen through 1950s eyes could have been a culturally-misappropriated disaster for a 21st Century viewer but, actually, it was nowhere near as bad as I was expecting. Especially as we journeyed through Spain, India, Hong Kong, Japan and the Wild West. You certainly couldn't make the film in a similar way today, but it was far more watchable than I feared it would be.
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| Not a Japanese person |
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| Not an Indian princess |
There are some very "interesting" casting choices however. I don't think anyone was expected to think that Cantinflas was really supposed to be French, so we can ignore that one. But I shudder to think of the conversation that the casting team had when deciding that the slightly sinister-looking Slovakian Peter Lorre would make a perfect Japanese cabin steward! The young Shirley McLaine actually does a better job than she gives herself credit for as the Princess (she has said herself many times that she was miscast and pretty awful in the role), but she just looks like a white American who's been on a beach holiday. There is nothing remotely Indian about her.
However, I can overlook all of this - because I reckon the film does everything it set out to do, if not more. It was an ambitious project in many different ways and yet it works, not just as a star-spotting exercise or even as something pretty to go "wow" at on a big screen. It's interesting, exciting, funny, impressive in parts - and a much better way to spend a cold wintery Sunday afternoon than I thought it would be.
And right at the end, when it's nearing the three hour mark and Fogg has returned and claimed his reward, we get another little five minute treat in the form of the closing credits. It's one of the earliest examples of long ending credits, particularly ones that are worth watching in themselves. These are brilliantly animated by the master of credits Saul Bass and they tell the story of the whole film whilst pointing out many of the cameos we've just seen.
You get a bit of them about two minutes into this sequence (and the whole hour of Saul Bass credits shown here is worth watching some time!):
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