It's been a while........now where were we?

"Sorry I got held up....."

Coat!

The above is a quote from one of my favourite ever films - which is never otherwise going to appear on a blog about the Oscars. It was released in 1972, so wasn't going to get a look in with those Italian gangsters and Berlin nightclubbers! - but it has just appeared in Mark Kermode's list of the greatest films for children ever, which has made me very happy indeed! (It is also one of two films that feature the best coat in the history of coats ever - top of my list of movie memorabilia I would love to own. Where is it? Did Jenny Agutter get it back? Does one of Lionel Jeffries kids have it? Did one of Peter Sellers kids take it in revenge when Lynne died? I'm a bit obsessed....)

Anyway, it seemed an appropriate heading, because I've not blogged for a while and it's bothered me. I have three main excuses - one is feeble and the other two are linked.


Feeble Excuse 

Lots of A Level, lots of GCSE, too many late nights prepping and marking. The last thing I wanted to do when I finished was sit down and write more things.... Even I don't quite buy that one, but the fact that my last post was in March, when things really kicked in exam-wise, suggests that there's probably something in it. Anyway, it's the summer holidays now. So that excuse has gone!


Better Excuses....
Ok, these two are definitely linked - and sort of took over my whole mindset when ploughing through the next few films on the list.

Firstly, I was not looking forward to the 90s. The 70s had been great, the 80s were ok (and brilliant in
parts) and I was enjoying the personal nostalgia. However, the 90s was the decade that I really got into films. I bought Empire every fortnight, I went to the cinema regularly and several of my favourite films of all time are from the 90s. However, most of them didn't win Best Picture. And a lot of stuff that I either didn't really like or didn't really want to watch again did win.

Secondly, I started watching lots more films from the 30s and 40s and I would much rather be blogging about them instead - but I've got to finish this challenge first. The more the 90s films were annoying me (apart from a few gems) the more I watched the old stuff!

At the time of writing this, we've just watched 2005 (an absolute classic!) so I have a lot of catching up to do. Therefore - I need to get the following out of my system:


Six Other Classic Best Picture Nominees from the 30s and 40s:

Ok - here are my rules: 
1. Must have been nominated for Best Picture (so not Laura or Now Voyager!)
2. Must be something I hadn't seen before starting the challenge (so not 42nd Street or Top Hat or Double Indemnity!)

I've watched about a dozen or so that fit these criteria - here's my favourite six (I couldn't get it down to five). And, yes, they all star strong women doing feisty things! Something that is sadly lacking in the 90s (Kate Winslet in a ballgown with an axe is the feistiest it gets!).

In chronological order....


Jezebel (1938)

Lady in Red.....

We've watched a lot of Bette Davis since Margo Channing topped off the female-dominated 40s in grand style! This is not my favourite of them (after All About Eve, that's probably Now Voyager) but it's the only one that was nominated for Best Picture and it won Bette an Oscar.

A year before Gone With The Wind, Bette plays a mid-19th Century stroppy Southern Belle (Julie) that could give Scarlet a run for her money. In fact, the central maguffin for the first half of the film is a scarlet dress which she wears to deliberately cause a scandal. Although the film is in black and white, you can just tell how scarlet that dress is!

Anyway, Julie's scandalous behaviour scares off her suitable (but wet) suitor and then, with yet more inappropriate clothing, she behaves very badly again when he brings his new wife home a few years later. This would have been enough melodrama in itself, but then everyone starts dying of yellow fever and it all gets rather dark.....

It's a very 30s drama, with a dark and depressing edge that had generally gone by the middle of the 40s (maybe a consequence of WW2?). Without Bette it would probably have been too overblown and overacted, but she is superb as usual.

This one lost out to You Can't Take It With You - and was also up against The Adventures of Robin Hood. Never a real contender, but worth watching for Bette.


Gaslight (1944)

Paula suspects something

This film is now most notable for being the origin of the term "gaslighting" which is officially defined as "a form of psychological manipulation in which a person seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual, making them question their own memory, perception and sanity". And that's pretty much the plot of the film.

Paula (Ingrid Bergman) brings her new husband Gregory (Charles Boyer) to live in the house where her Aunt had been murdered several years earlier. Various things start to happen, she loses things and lets her husband down - things aren't going well between them. She starts to notice that the lights dim in the house at certain times with no explanation. When she questions this, Gregory tells her she's imagining things - and she starts to think she must be going mad.....

This is a great film in its own right. It's a good psychological thriller (there's also Joseph Cotten as the detective investigating the Aunt's murder) and has superb performances at its heart, including Bergman's Oscar winning triumph. It's also a really important film and, despite being old and in black and white, it should really be shown and watched more often - because, sadly, the concept of "gaslighting" is at least as relevant and prevalent now as it was when the film was made.

This is one of two films that are far superior to that year's winner, Going My Way (the other being Double Indemnity). Oh, and it's got Angela Landsbury in it too!


Mildred Pierce (1945)

Daughter Dearest

If we've got Bette Davis, there has to be Joan Crawford in there somewhere - so here she is, winning her Oscar (just the one, Joan, and don't you forget it!). I'm Team Bette all the way, but I don't begrudge her this one. By 1945, Joan was "box office poison" and, in real life, was already in full "mommie dearest" mode. This film marked the first kick start to her career, still more than a decade away from the psycho-hag films she ended with.

This is a great film. It's directed by Michael Curtiz (Casablanca) and, along with Joan, we also have an Oscar-nominated Eve Arden, a fabulously bitchy Ann Blyth (and a forever typecast Butterfly McQueen!). Thus showing yet again that the lack of good movie roles for women isn't a legacy of a bygone era, it's something that happened AFTER the golden age of Hollywood.

This is another psychological thriller - did Mildred shoot her husband, and if so, why? Told through flashbacks it's an almost perfect mix of whodunnit and whydunnit. The hard edge that Joan has works well here, as we wonder how far we are meant to be sympathetic towards her. The film shows family breakdown and family politics really well and, in Ann Blyth's Veda, a really complex and interesting relationship between mother and daughter (ironically, considering how Joan played her real life role of mother!)

Joan won the Oscar but the film lost out to Lost Weekend. Lost Weekend is the better film (my Billy Wilder bias only gets thrown when Joe Mankiewicz shows up!) but this one is also a corker!



The Razor's Edge (1946)

This is not going to end well.....

This is one that I knew very little about, but it sounded intriguing so I bought it! It's directed by Edmund Goulding, whose most famous film is the wonderful Grand Hotel more than a decade earlier. It's based on a Somerset Maugham novel and is quite a complicated (and arguably overlong) saga focusing on the complicated and failed relationships of a group of people - spanning several decades, at least three continents and the 1929 stock market crash. A lot goes on in two and a half hours, and I can't even begin to try and explain it here, so I won't try.

It has a cracking cast - Tyrone Power is very serious (and very good) with not a swash in sight to buckle. Gene Tierney is fabulously selfish and bitchy in the lead female role and Anne Baxter is also superb as their tragic friend, in the role for which she won her Oscar. Somerset Maugham appears as a character in the film (as he does in his own book) providing a clever narrative link - and it all ends tragically, yet wistfully, in the South of France.

Of course it's nowhere near as good as Best Years Of Our Lives, or It's A Wonderful Life (which it clearly isn't, at least not for the women in the film), but it's worth a watch, particularly for the performances of the three mentioned above.

(Apparently it was remade in the 80s with Bill Murray and Theresa Russell. Not even Bill Murray liked it. I'll give that one a miss!)


The Heiress (1949)

The joys and pains of love

It is quite remarkable to think that, at the time of writing this blog, the star of this film is still alive. 103 year old Olivia de Havilland made her first film 84 years ago, and won her Oscar for this film, 70 years ago. I'd never heard of it before we started our Oscar challenge, but I've now watched it twice and I really like it.

It's based on the Henry James book Washington Square and centres around Catherine, the nearly-not-quite-an-old-maid daughter of an overbearing father (played by Ralph Richardson). She is constantly compared unfavourably to her dead mother and is made to believe she is plain, awkward and lacking in personality. Along comes a young Montgomery Clift who falls for her - and she falls back. Dad reckons he's just after her money and does all he can to break up the relationship. Catherine's aunt Lavinia thinks otherwise, and does all she can to try and keep them together.

Catherine eventually decides her fate for herself.....and I'm not going to give the ending away!

Olivia is fabulous in this film. She is, of course, a beautiful woman in real life - and yet she manages to act plain and unattractive rather than being made up to look that way. This really adds to the idea that her misfortunes are all nurture rather than nature - and it's all about the acting. The way she walks, holds herself, looks at people, speaks apologetically etc. Wonderful stuff!

One of Andy's absolute favourites, All The Kings Men, won Best Picture that year. Probably the right decision, but this one is also a classic!


A Letter to Three Wives (1949)

Does what it says on the tin!

My last choice is also from 1949. Joseph L Mankiewicz proved himself a worthy rival to Billy Wilder across two years in which he won two Screenplay awards and two Best Director awards. The other two were for my absolute favourite Best Picture winner, All About Eve. However, he did the same thing the year before with this film which seems to have been nearly forgotten about - possibly because it didn't bag the big prize.

It's not as good as All About Eve (few things are) but it has a lot in common with it. There are three strong women as the focus of the film (with a fourth just as a voiceover, voiced by AAE's Celeste Holm) and their husbands play second fiddle in the plot, but are still strong enough characters to not be caricatures. Thelma Ritter is also thrown into the mix as a wisecracking housekeeper. So far, all things I love about AAE!

The plot is a clever one - as the title suggests, three wives all receive a letter from a friend of theirs, the unseen Addie Ross, who tells them all that she is running away with one of their husbands. The three women receive this letter just as they board a riverboat for a day-long school picnic. They spend the day wondering which husband it's going to be - leading to flashbacks of how each of them got to know their husbands and each other.

The rest of the film feels like a bit of a dress rehearsal for All About Eve. It's got the same feel to it, including great dialogue between women and other women, and women and their men. It's got a lovely mix of drama and comedy and characters that are likeable enough for you to be rooting for them, but not so much that you really care too much about their fate. It's not as slick as AAE and it does wander and drift a bit in the middle, but I really like it. It's a shame that it doesn't get seen more.


Well - that turned out to be very cathartic. I feel that I now have the strength to get back to Kevin Costner, Clint Eastwood, Mel Gibson etc..... Oh joy!