The Last Emperor 1987

The Film:

This is not one I'm particularly looking forward to. I don't know a great deal about it, but what I've heard makes it sound very much like it's "not my sort of thing".

First of all, it's very long - over three hours in the version we've got. This isn't necessarily a bad thing (Gone With The Wind, The Godfather) - but it also gets praised for its sweeping cinematography and cast of thousands, which makes me think rather more of Lawrence of Arabia or Ben Hur.....

All the reviews I've read talk about how beautiful it looks - and all the pictures I've seen show a two year old emperor dressed up to the nines in front of several hundred troops of beautifully attired minions. It doesn't bode well. But I'll keep an open mind!

The Ceremony:

April 11th 1988 at the Shrine Auditorium. It was moved to the new venue mainly because it had a larger audience capacity. Everything bigger and better in the 80s! It was hosted by Chevy Chase and went on for three and a half hours.

The show was affected by the big Writers' Guild strike, which was about one month in to it's five month run. Some of the script for the event was already written, but the rest of proceedings were covered in less formal fashion by a variety of Stand-up Comedians.

Other Notable Winners That Night:

And very tasty it was too.....

None of the actors in The Last Emperor were even nominated, so the acting awards went elsewhere. Moonstruck took the female awards, for Cher and Olympia Dukakis. The male awards went to Michael Douglas for Wall Street (which was criminally overlooked for Best Picture!) and Sean Connery for the also shockingly overlooked The Untouchables.

Best Foreign Language Film went to a personal favourite, Babette's Feast - adapted from a novella written by none other than Karen Blixen (as seen a couple of years ago wafting aimlessly around Africa). It's a beautiful film and I am very fortunate to have spent an evening in excellent company sharing as close to the exact menu as is human(e)ly possible. (No actual turtles were consumed!)

The Animation award went to something else that I have a fairly strong nostalgic memory of. Probably from a retreat or something. It's called The Man Who Planted Trees and it's a beautiful thing:

Best Song:

There can't be many people in the western world that don't know this one. The number of people of about my age who had this as their first dance at their wedding must be pretty high. Here's Baby, definitely not in a corner:

What We Could/Should Have Been Watching:

Denzel Washington and Kevin Kline - what's not to like!

If ever there was a year to argue that the Best Picture List should be lengthened again, this is it. Until I actually watched The Last Emperor, I not only reckoned that it probably wasn't a worthy winner, but I had a whole different list of five nominees in my head.

The actual other four nominees are: Broadcast News, Fatal Attraction, Hope and Glory and Moonstruck. Nothing really wrong with that, but I would have gone for Wall Street, The Untouchables, Good Morning Vietnam, Babette's Feast and - the one that gets my vote - Cry Freedom. Attenborough's other big epic. I actually do think it's better than Gandhi. The two leads are both incredibly good, the story is compelling and really well paced - and the funeral scene is the reason I cry whenever I hear the South African National Anthem (it's happened several times at athletics events!)

Our Verdict:

Ahhh. Grasshopper!

Ok, I admit it. I was about as wrong as I could possibly be. In fact, I don't think the difference between my expectation of a film and what I actually thought of it has ever been so vast! With the greatest respect to Gordon Gekko, Eliot Ness and all the others mentioned above, I was so wrong in thinking they had all been robbed blind. Puyi is the rightful heir of all things Oscar in 1987!


I have absolutely no idea why the marketing for this film was the way it was - yes, it's gorgeous to look at, it's got massive crowd scenes, beautiful costumes and amazing cinematography. And it's got a small child dressed up to the nines - for about the first half hour or so of the three hours plus running time. But it's got all sorts of other, far more impressive and interesting things going on that I was never told about. And it is a fantastic film!

Not just a three-year-old in a dress.

Firstly, this is a film with a lot of heart. It follows the life story of Puyi from his birth through six extraordinary decades of personal discovery and political change. We see most of it through his eyes, and this really captures the feeling of constantly being a pawn in everyone else's political games. Puyi - at all stages of his life - is such a compellingly written and acted character that I got sucked into his story very quickly. For a character whose life was so extraordinarily different to that of most people watching the film, his struggles and reactions are very relateable.

Sumptuous film, complicated story - but ultimately
just about flawed characters in difficult situations

Because of this, the political story that runs alongside - and gathers pace as the film unfolds - is totally compelling! Although I profess to be fascinated by early 20th Century History, I know shockingly little about how events unfolded in the Far East. This film has gone a long way to fill those gaps for me. It could have ended up being very complicated, technical and wordy - but it didn't. Mainly because we saw things as Puyi did, but also because of a few other equally compelling characters that really made the film for me.

Peter O'Toole is, quite famously, the only Westerner among the main cast (another red flag before I watched film!). He did his job well, but was quite underwhelming. Apart from Puyi himself, it is the women who steal the show. Puyi's wife, "secondary consort" and cousin (the wonderfully named spy, Eastern Jewel) are all superb - again, both in the way their parts are written and how they are played. Between them they hold the second half of the film together - not because they are female characters providing some sort of light relief from the political shenanigans, but because they are right at the heart of all the political shenanigans. And they are brilliant!

Sisters (well, cousins sort-of) doing it for themselves.

In conclusion then - what a fantastic film! Which leaves me wondering what on earth was going on with the marketing? Nothing I had ever read or seen about The Last Emperor gave me any real reason to want to see it. I even decided to buy a cheap import DVD rather than the more expensive lavish BluRay, because I reckoned we'd probably never watch it again. How wrong I was! - anybody want a cheap import DVD version, because next time I want to watch it on remastered BluRay!