[Your favorite adapted/original screenplay]

Now it is 2003.  Here is Best Adapted Screenplay:

Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, The Lord of the Rings:  the Return of the King, based on the novel of the same name by J.R.R. Tolkien

Hwang Jo-yoon, Lim Joon-hyeong, Park Chan-Wook, Oldboy. Based on the manga of the same name by Nobuaki Minegishi and Garon Tsuchiya

Brian Helgeland, Mystic River, based on the novel of the same name by Dennis Lehane

Shari Springer Berman, Robert Pulcini, American Splendor, based on the graphic novel of the same name by Harvey Pekar and the graphic novel Our Cancer Year by Pekar and Joyce Brabner

Larry Doyle, Looney Tunes:  Back in the Action, based on the Warner Brothers cartoon series

 

And here is Best Original Screenplay:

 

Andrew Stanton, Bob Peterson, David Reynolds, Finding Nemo

Jim Sheridan, Naomi Sheridan, Kirsten Sheridan, In America

Abbas Kiarostami, Crimson Gold

Lars Von Trier, Dogville

Thom Andersen, Los Angeles Plays Itself

 

I have not seen Dirty Pretty Things (original)

[Your Favourite Foreign Language Films]

theyshootpictures.com top 1000 movies for 1981

The Woman Next Door  Francois Truffaut, France #688

Das Boot  Wolfgang Petersen, West Germany #893

Too Early, Too Late  Jean-Marie Straub/Danielle Huillet, West Germany #928

Jonathan Rosenbaum's top 1000 movies

La toit de la baleine  Raul Ruiz, Netherlands
*Too Early, Too Late  Jean-Marie Straub/Danielle Huillet)
The Vulture  Yaki Yosha, Israel

An asterisk (*) means the movie is one of Rosenbaum's top 100 movies.  Note dates are not exact.

[LEAST & MOST FAVORITE of the week...]

I saw five movies over the last two weeks, four this week, one the week before.  Let's start with the first of these Spectre.  Unlike Skyfall, in which the first rate action sequences was actually tied to a plot that made some sense and had genuine emotional weight, this movie returns to the old action movie tropes.  In particular, Bond is allowed to say alive for no clear reason.  A clumsy attempt to introduce "Luke, I am your father," gravitas reads like a clumsy attempt to introduce "Luke, I am your father" gravitas. And granted it's amazing what Republicans will let Donald Trump get away with, the big plan is too obvious for alarm bells not to start ringing before hand.

The original The Longest Yard does showcase some of Burt Reynolds' charm and Robert Aldrich's skill.  On the other hand, it's about football, which I find the least interesting game in the world.  And if doing their best in the first half of the game only gets them within a couple of points of the other team, how can they throw the game for much of the second half, only to come back all the way in the end?  At Eternity's Gate isn't a bad movie.  But it suffers, like Lust for Life. in that I never doubted that Vincent Van Gogh was being played by a major American actor.  Also, it tends to showcase Van Gogh the erratic genius.  Maurice Pialat's Van Gogh is not an easily available film to see, but it's the better movie.

So the two movies of the fortnight are Girl with Hyacinths and Mirai.  The first is a 1950 Swedish film that has nothing to do with Ingmar Bergman.  But it is an intelligent, well acted and beautifully photographed film about a young woman who commits suicide and the neighbors who inquire after her.  Mirai tells a simple story, about a three year old boy who is not happy by the arrival of his baby sister.  Gradually he gets over it, and while the adventures he apparently encounters from family members past and present are not at Miyazaki's level, they are charming enough.

[Your Favourite Foreign Language Films]

1. Pixote  Hector Babenco, Brazil

2. The Woman Next Door  Francois Truffaut, France

This is my smallest list since 1943.

[Your favorite adapted/original screenplay]

Now it's 2002.  Here is Best Adapted Screenplay:

Ronald Harwood, The Pianist, based on the memoir of the same name by Wladyslaw Szpilman

Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Stephen Sinclair, Peter Jackson, The Lord of the Rings:  the Two Towers, based on the novel of the same name by J.R.R. Tolkien

Liana Dognini, Lynne Ramsay, Morvern Callar, based on the novel of the same name by Alan Warner

Patrick McGrath, Spider, based on his novel of the same name

Jean-Claude Grumberg, Costa-Gavras, Amen, based on the play The Deputy: A Christian Tragedy by Roth Hochhuth

 

And here is Best Original Screenplay:

 

Hayao Miyazaki, Spirited Away

Anatoli Nikiforov, Alexander Sokurov, Russian Ark

Paul Thomas Anderson, Punch-Drunk Love

Abbas Kiarostami, Ten

Aki Kaurismaki, The Man Without a Past

 

I don’t think I’ve seen My Big Fat Greek Wedding (original) and I haven’t seen About a Boy (adapted)

[MY STILL SOMEWHAT EARLY PREDUIX OF THE 2018 OSCAR NOMINEES-(SAVE & COMPARE???)]

Out of curiosity, why do you think Mary Poppins Returns has a chance?  Neither of us have seen it, and it's not getting a lot of critical love.

[Holiday wishes: films you'd like to see on TCM in the new year]

11 hours ago, TopBilled said:

I'm in favor of this idea.

I actually updated this list earlier this year: 

Here are the movies from theyshootpictures.com top 500 that have never been on TCM: 

#39  Blade Runner (1982, Scott)

#68  Shoah (1985, Lanzmann)

#61  Mulholland Drive (2001. Lynch)

#94  The Shining (1980, Kubrick)

#100  Satantango (1994, Tarr)

#102  Once Upon a Time in America (1984, Leone)

#107  The Mother and the W*or* (1973, Eustache)

#116  Star Wars (1977, Lucas)

#118  E.T.  the Extra-Terrestrial (1982, Spielberg)

#123  L'Age D'Or (1930, Bunuel)

#124  Don't Look Now (1973, Roeg)

#131  Yi Yi (2000, Yang)

#149  Histoire(s) du Cinema (1998, Godard)

#151  The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (1964, Pasolini)

#156  Come and See (1985, Klimov)

#159  L'Argent (1983, Bresson)

#161  The Passenger (1975, Antonioni)

#168  Mouchette (1967, Bresson)

#169  Dekalog (1989, Kieslowski)

#178 Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974, Rivette)

#179 The Travelling Players (1975, Angelopoulos)

#182  Spring in a Small Town (1948, Fei)

#192  The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974, Hooper)

#194  Fargo (1995, Coen)

#196  The Thin Red Line (1998, Malick)

#201  Cache (2005, Haneke)

#202  Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975, Pasolini)

#204  Le Samourai (1967, Melville)

#208  A City of Sadness (1989, Hou)

#209  Schindler's List (1993, Spielberg)

#211  Breaking the Waves (1996, Von Trier)

#217  Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981, Spielberg)

#218  Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967, Godard)

#220  Wavelength (1967, Snow)

#223  The Big Lebowski (1998, Coen)

#231  The Colour of Pomegranates (1968, Parajanov)

#232  Black God, White Devil (1964, Rocha)

#236  El Verdugo/The Executioner (1963, Garcia Berlanga)

#238  Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004, Gondry)

#240  The Tree of Life (2011, Malick)

#246  Magnolia (1999, Anderson)

#247  The Thin Blue Line (1988, Morris)

#251  Tropical Malady (2004, Weerasethakul)

#253  Floating Clouds (1955, Naruse)

#258  Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988, Davies)

#273  Love Streams (1984, Cassavetes)

#274  Memories of Underdevelopment (1968, Gutierrez Alea)

#282  The Empire Strikes Back (1980, Kershner)

#283  An Autumn Afternoon (1962, Ozu)

#284  Kings of the Road (1976, Wenders)

#286  The Matrix (1999, Wachowski)

#287  Underground (1995, Kusturica)

#292  All About My Mother (1999, Almodovar)

#295  Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980, Fassbinder)

#296  The Thing (1982, Carpenter)

#309  Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937, Hand)

#310  Terra em Transe (1967, Rocha)

#313  Dawn of the Dead (1978, Romero)

#314  The Puppetmaster (1993, Hou)

#315  The Time to Live and the Time to Die (1985, Hou)

#321  Listen to Britain (1942, Jennings)

#325  Eyes Wide Shut (1999, Kubrick)

#328  The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976, Cassavetes)

#330  City of God (2002, Meirelles)

#332  In the Realm of the Senses (1976, Oshima)

#333  The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936, Renoir)

#335  El (1952, Bunuel)

#339  Lost Highway (1997, Lynch)

#343  Happy Together (1997, Wong)

#344  Werckmeister Harmonies (2000, Tarr)

#348  Through the Olive Trees (1994, Kiarostami)

#353  Last Tango in Paris (1972, Bertolucci)

#354  Landscape in the Mist (1988, Angelopoulos)

#355  In a Year with 13 Moons (1978, Fassbinder)

#360  Tie Xi Qu:  West of the Tracks (2003, Wang)

#362  Quince Tree of the Sun (1992, Erice)

#363  Teorema (1968, Pasolini)

#366  The Tenant (1976, Polanski)

#378  The Celebration (1998, Vinterberg)

#380  If.. (1968, Anderson)

#381  Dogville (2003, von Trier)

#384  Brokeback Mountain (2005, Lee)

#387  The Shawshank Redemption (1994, Darabont)

#389  Army of Shadows (1969, Melville)

#392  1900 (1976, Bertolucci)

#396  Fight Club (1999, Fincher)

#397  The Cloud-Capped Star (1960, Ghatak)

#398  Carrie (1976 De Palma)

#399  Wall-E (2008, Stanton)

#403  Raise the Red Lantern (1991, Zhang)

#404  Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979, Jones)

#406  Out 1:  Noli me Tangere (1971, Rivette)

#407  Chelsea Girls (1966, Warhol)

#414  Dead Ringers (1988, Cronenberg)

#417  The White Ribbon (2009, Haneke)

#418  A Moment of Innocence (1996, Makhmalbaf)

#419  Barren Lives (1963, dos Santos)

#427  Land Without Bread (1932, Bunuel)

#428  A nos amours (1983, Pialat)

#429  Opening Night (1977, Cassavetes)

#430  Talk to Her (2002, Almodovar)

#431  Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010, Weerasethakul)

#434  The Hour of the Furnaces (1968, Getino, Solanges)

#435  The Gleaners and I (2000, Varda)

#437  The Sound of Music (1965, Wise)

#441  Yellow Earth (1984, Chen)

#442  Punch-Drunk Love (2002, Anderson)

#447  The Turin Horse (2011, Tarr)

#450  Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000 Lee)

#452  The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005, Puiu)

#454  Platform (2000, Jia)

#456  Toy Story (1995, Lasseter)

#457  Halloween (1978, Carpenter)

#461  Muriel (1963, Resnais)

#465  The Road Warrior (1981, Miller)

#466  Elephant (2003, Van Sant)

#467  Boogie Nights (1997, Anderson)

#470  The Wind Will Carry Us  (1999, Kiarostami)

#471  Fantasia (1940, Various Directors)

#474  Oldboy (2003, Park)

#478  Safe (1995, Haynes)

#479  Short Cuts (1993, Altman)

#482  All That Jazz (1979, Fosse)

#483  La Region centrale, (1971, Snow)

#485  Naked (1993, Leigh)

#486  Les Vampires (1915, Feuillade)

#491  India Song (1975, Duras)

#493  The Lives of Others (2005, von Donnersmarck)

#495  Pinocchio (1940, Sharpsteen & Luske)

#497  Lost in Translation (2003, Coppola)

#498  The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974, Herzog)

#500  Melancholia (2011, von Trier)

[Your favorite adapted/original screenplay]

Now it's 2001.  Here's Best Adapted Screenplay:

Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, The Lord of the Rings:  the Fellowship of the Ring, based on the novel of the same name by J.R.R. Tolkien

Daniel Clowes, Terry Zwigoff, Ghost World, based on the graphic novel of the same name by Clowes

Rob Festinger, Todd Field, In the Bedroom, based on the short story “Killings” by Andre Dubus

Steven Spielberg, A.I:  Artificial Intelligence, based on the short story “Supertoys last all Summer Long” by Brian Aldiss

Michael Haneke, The Piano Teacher, based on the novel of the same name by Elfriede Jelinek

 

And here is Best Original Screenplay:

 

David Lynch, Mulholland Drive

Alejandro Amenabar, The Others

Julian Fellowes, Gosford Park

Guillaume Laurent, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Amelie

Wes Anderson, Owen Wilson, The Royal Tenenbaums

 

I have not seen Monster’s Ball (original), while Memento was nominated the previous year

 

[Your Favourite Foreign Language Films]

theyshootpictures.com top 1000 movies 1980

Berlin Alexanderplatz  Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany #295

Kagemusha  Akira Kurosawa, Japan #448

The Age of the Earth  Glauber Rocha, Brazil  #736

Sauve qui peut (la vie)  Jean-Luc Godard, France #778

Mon Oncle D'Amerique  Alain Resnais, France #899

Jonathan Rosenbaum top 1000 movies

La memoire courte  Eduardo de Gregorio, France/Belgium
Mon oncle d'Amerique  Alain Rensais, France

[The Problem with Charlton Heston]

Graham Daseler on Marc Eliot's biography, from the October 11, 2017 Times Literary Supplement:

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/charlton-heston-daseler/

Charlton Heston was not a protean performer, like Marlon Brando or Paul Newman, playing someone new in every film: to see one Heston performance is, more or less, to see them all. He didn’t play romance especially well. Humour seemed to be completely beyond him (a deficit that, oddly enough, made him perfect for the role of Cardinal Richelieu in Richard Lester’s campy adaptation of TheThree Musketeers). As with John Wayne, there is something feline about him. Yet whereas Wayne is ever at ease – a lion stalking unchallenged across the savanna – Heston is the opposite, always tense, like a caged tiger waiting to spring free. This is, one suspects, why directors so often put him in chains, whether as a prisoner at the court of Rameses in The Ten Commandments (1956), a galley slave in Ben-Hur (1959), a human caught in an inverted zoo in Planet of the Apes (1968), or the captive of albino zombies in The Omega Man (1971).

What Heston lacked in versatility, he made up for in his status as an icon. Thomas Jefferson, William Clark (of Lewis and Clark), Andrew Jackson, Moses, Michelangelo and Gordon of Khartoum – these were the sort of men he portrayed. One reason he couldn’t, like Brando or Newman, play anyone is that he didn’t seem like just anyone. He was too big for that. “If God came to earth”, a journalist once quipped, “most moviegoers wouldn’t believe it unless he looked like Charlton Heston.” Even at its most subdued, his voice rumbles. During the making of The Ten Commandments, Cecil B. DeMille did not know at first whom to use for the voice of God, until it struck him that the right man was already on set. When Moses speaks to the Almighty, in the scene of the burning bush, it is Heston’s own voice that answers back.

Heston was born John Charles Carter on October 4, 1923. (Charlton is what his mother took to calling him as a boy; the “Heston” he picked up later from his stepfather.) He grew up in Michigan, where his father worked in a sawmill. It was a Nick Adams-like childhood, full of hunting, fishing and tramping through the woods. All his life, Heston would idealize his early boyhood, writing, over sixty years later, of “the great mossy cathedrals of hundred-foot pines” near his home and of splitting logs into “stacks of sweet-smelling kindling” so his mother could cook dinner. Then, when he was ten, his parents divorced. His mother remarried and, after a series of moves, they ended up in Chicago, where Heston, a country bumpkin to the other children, felt awkward and out of place. He didn’t see his father again for ten years. Marc Eliot, in his biography, Charlton Heston: Hollywood’s last icon, makes the case that this divorce was the central event in Heston’s life. “The little boy lost everything”, Eliot writes, “his dog, his beloved woods, his real dad, even his name.”

Possibly as a result of that divorce, Heston clung tightly to his own wife and children. He was married to the same woman for sixty-four years, almost always took his family with him when he went on location, and preferred nights at home with his children to Hollywood parties. One need only turn to his acting journals to see what an adoring husband and father he was, even if he could at times be rather self-congratulatory about it. “I doubt if I can be both a family man and a totally dedicated artist”, he mused in one entry. “I’d rather be the former.” And yet it was his parents’ divorce that also drove him to be an actor: “What acting offered me was the chance to be many other people. In those days, I wasn’t satisfied being me . . . . Kids of divorced parents always feel that way – that, on some subconscious level, they’re responsible”.

Not particularly popular in school – “shy, skinny, short, pimply, and ill-dressed” is how he would later describe his adolescent self – he was, by his own admission, a lonely and self-loathing teenager. Then one day, on a lark, he tagged along with a friend who was trying out for a school play. That, Heston would later write, was when “I began my life”. He met his wife, Lydia, at a theatre class during his freshman year at Northwestern. They were married three years later, just as Heston was about to ship out for the Aleutians in the Army Air Corps. (He enlisted after Pearl Harbor but wasn’t called up until 1944.) Lydia was an actor, too, and early in their marriage it was anyone’s guess which one of them would have the more successful career. She got an agent first after they moved to New York, but he caught a bigger break when he was cast in a live-television production of Julius Caesar, leading to a string of roles on Studio One, a CBS anthology series committed to bringing highbrow drama – everything from Shakespeare to adaptations of Turgenev and George Orwell – into American living rooms. Over the coming years, as Heston’s acting career accelerated, Lydia let hers slow to a crawl.

Although he saw himself as a committed New York stage actor, he went to Hollywood to appear in Dark City (1951), a decent, gritty film noir about a hustler who gets marked for death after he chisels the wrong guy in a card game. It foundered at the box office. He was in Cali­fornia to try out for a part he didn’t get when, on his way out of the Paramount parking lot, he happened to see Cecil B. DeMille standing on the steps of the building that bore his name. Though he’d never met DeMille before, Heston smiled and waved as he drove by. “Who was that?” DeMille asked his secretary. She reminded DeMille that he’d seen Dark City the previous week but hadn’t liked it. “Ummm, I liked the way he waved just now”, DeMille replied. He was, as it happened, casting The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) but had been unable to fill the part of the circus manager, Brad Braden, a character none too obliquely based on DeMille himself. No actor, thus far, had been quite handsome or masculine or commanding enough to suit his tastes – until, that is, DeMille saw Heston drive past. “We’d better have him in to talk”, the director said.

Yet Heston wasn’t DeMille’s first choice to play Moses four years later. Nor was he William Wyler’s first choice to play Ben-Hur three years after that. Wyler, as well as everyone else at the studio, wanted Marlon Brando for the part. But Heston got them both, and they remain the defining films of his career. The Ten Commandments played to Heston’s strengths – his deep, sten­torian voice and his effortless aura of authority – while turning his limitations as an actor into assets. Moses is not a complex character, and he becomes less complicated as the movie goes on. In the first part of the film, he is driven by simple, understandable desires: his love for a woman, Nefertiti (Anne Baxter), and his wish to succeed at his job, building an Egyptian city. In the second, he is driven purely by his devotion to God. His other motivations fall away, and with them vanish all outward displays of emotion other than mighty determination. One reason it is so difficult now to picture anyone else as Moses is that a more versatile actor – a Brando, a Burt Lancaster, a Kirk Douglas – would have tried to do too much, making him more nuanced, more human. Moses isn’t a nuanced character. He is a religious icon rendered on celluloid.

Ben-Hur was more of a stretch. Wyler was a hard director to please, notorious for taking and retaking even the simplest shots, sometimes dozens of times, until the actors achieved what he wanted. What that was, Wyler himself couldn’t always say. For one scene, he had Heston repeat the line “I’m a Jew!” sixteen times before he was satisfied. Heston wasn’t the least bit discouraged. “Willy’s the toughest director I’ve ever worked for”, he wrote in his diary during the shoot, “but I think he’s the best.” Wyler harnessed Heston’s intensity better than any director had before or would after, keeping his character’s angst at a simmer without ever – save for the silly scenes with Jesus – letting it boil over into hamminess.

Ben-Hur won Heston an Oscar for Best Actor, and it secured his reputation as one of Hollywood’s leading stars. It also set a perilous standard to follow. After establishing himself with such cinematic bombast, Heston had trouble accepting projects that offered anything less, leading him to appear in a whole series of echoey epics: El Cid (1961), 55 Days at Peking (1963), The War Lord (1965), Khartoum (1966).

He also fell prey to one of acting’s most pernicious vices: the need to be loved by his audience. To empathize with one’s character is one thing; to admire him entirely another. And to insist that the audience admire your character – not just as a dramatic creation but as a human being – is a particularly self-defeating form of vanity. A good actor must be willing to play scoundrels, morons and cowards. This Heston was not willing to do. Quite the opposite, in fact. “I’ve always been proud of the chance I’ve had to play genuinely great men”, he boasted in his autobiography.

That Heston never quite reached Wayne’s level of superstardom has less to do with talent than timing. Wayne and his coevals – Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper and Clark Gable, among others – had the good fortune of pursuing their careers at the height of the studio system, ensuring that they were well supplied with good scripts, as well as good directors to guide them. It is no coincidence that the most fruitful decade of Heston’s career was the 1950s: the tail end of the studio era. During this period, he was directed by DeMille (twice), Wyler (twice) and Orson Welles – just to name the giants – as well as King Vidor, Rudolph Maté and William Dieterle. In subsequent decades, the directors’ names became considerably less august – Heston worked with Sam Peckinpah before his prime and with Carol Reed well after his.

Yet Heston took acting very seriously. As Eliot details, Heston built his characters from the outside in, spending weeks researching the types of clothes they might wear and the props they might carry before ever stepping on a set. When preparing to play historical characters, as he so often did, Heston made first for the library. Before appearing in The Ten Commandments, he read twenty-two books on Moses, in addition to the Old Testament. And he actively sought out directors whom he felt he could learn from, including on stage, to which he remained uncommonly devoted. “I must somehow get at Olivier, or get him to get at me”, he confided to his diary, during rehearsals for The Tumbler. “He must not be satisfied with competence. If I’m ever to reach anything special creatively, it surely must happen with this part, this director.” The play closed on Broadway after five performances.

Heston rated himself alongside Olivier and Brando, not Tracy and Wayne. As a result, he often chose roles for which he was not ideally suited. When the negative reviews of The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965) began coming in, Heston was at a loss to understand what had gone wrong. “This is beginning to bug me a bit”, he wrote in his diary. “I’m good in this film. If it doesn’t register, there’s something bloody wrong somewhere.” The something that Heston can’t quite put his finger on is himself. His Michelangelo is as lifeless as a block of Carrara marble, devoid of both the artist’s famous melancholy, as well as the kind of creative lust that would allow a man to spend four years teetering 65 feet above the ground with paint dripping into his eyes to decorate a ceiling.

A year later, Heston was crestfallen when Paul Scofield got the lead in A Man for All Seasons: “It’s too bad; I know I could do it better. Really I do”. Unfortunately for him, he eventually did get to appear in a television adaption of the play, thus making comparisons between his Thomas More and Scofield’s not only possible but inevitable. Externally, at least, Heston’s is the bigger performance – everything about it is bigger: his voice, his movements, the expressions on his face. Scofield plays More with monk-like serenity, except for a single, brief uncorking of his temper when More reproves the court that has just finished trying him. One might as well be comparing a Vermeer to a child’s drawing. After Richard Rich has testified against him, More asks Rich about the pendant around his neck. On being told that it is the chain of office of the Attorney General of Wales, More says to Rich, “Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. But for Wales?”. Heston delivers the rebuke like a comedy club one-liner, flinging the pendant down on Rich’s chest with disgust. Scofield says it sadly, in the manner of a doctor delivering a fatal prognosis, scorning Rich and yet pitying him at the same time.

As an actor, Heston was best served by movies like The Big Country, The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959), Will Penny (1968) and Midway (1976), which capitalized on his commanding presence on screen while calling for Spartan displays of emotion. The best screen performance Heston gave, as well as the one he admired the most, was his portrayal of the cowboy Will Penny in the film of the same name. Penny is a man of few words, with few friends and even fewer possessions, a cowhand bouncing from job to job, his best years already behind him. Unlike other Heston characters, though, Penny seems at ease with his life. The coiled tension that is usually so marked in his performances is, in Penny, nowhere to be found. At one point, a younger cowboy picks a fight with Penny, only to end up in the dirt. When he complains that Penny doesn’t fight fair, Heston replies, “You’re the one that’s down”. Another actor might have delivered that line with menace or offered it as a taunt, but Heston says it matter-of-factly, unimpressed. He’s been around too long to get worked up over such horseplay.

When it came to politics, Heston liked to quote his friend Ronald Reagan, stating that he hadn’t left the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party had left him. This kind of bumper-sticker explanation was no more credible coming from Heston than it was coming from Reagan. Early in his life, Heston was not only a liberal but, in fact, more liberal than most Democrats of the time. In 1961, against the wishes of MGM’s nervous publicity department, he hung a sandwich board from his shoulders reading “ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL” and, with an old pal from New York, marched through the streets of Oklahoma City protesting against the segregation of the city’s restaurants. Two years later, when Martin Luther King Jr led his March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Heston walked in the front row, directly behind King. While Marlon Brando urged the Hollywood contingent, which included Sidney Poitier, Paul Newman, Harry Belafonte and Burt Lancaster, to make some kind of provocative demonstration (like chaining themselves to the Jefferson Memorial), Heston argued that such action would only distract from King’s message, making them look like a bunch of spoiled, self-aggrandizing radicals. The group, sensibly, listened to Heston rather than Brando. Most surprising – at least for those who remember him, years later, as president of the National Rifle Association – he lobbied for the passage of the 1968 Gun Control Act, which remains one of the more stringent firearms laws passed in the United States.

What changed? Heston was turned off by the more wild-eyed antics of the Left in the late 1960s and early 70s, and he was clearly not entirely comfortable with the country’s changing social and sexual mores. His diary entries from this period begin to be dappled with curmudgeonly asides about Gloria Steinem, “ball-cutting” Barbara Walters and the large number of anti-government films being made. He was, likewise, never able to relinquish his support for the Vietnam War – in this instance, though, he was right about America’s shifting political landscape. The Democratic Party did move away from him on Vietnam. In 1960 and 1964, he voted for Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, respectively, both pro-war Democrats. When, in 1972, he was presented with a choice between Richard Nixon and George McGovern, who pledged to end the war immediately, he chose the warrior Nixon. But there was always something essentially conservative at Heston’s core, as his distaste for radical action during King’s march on Washington showed. William Wyler caught this in The Big Country in which Heston plays the foil to Gregory Peck’s idealistic protagonist. The film, though ostensibly a western about two rival families and the outsider who comes between them, is really a parable about the two opposing sides of American political thought, with Heston’s conservative on one side and Peck’s liberal on the other. Peck plays a boat captain from the east, come west to marry his sweetheart. Though personally unafraid of violence, he is committed to using it only as a last resort, preferring to broker a deal that will benefit both families. Heston plays the hard-boiled, no-nonsense foreman of the Terrill ranch, Steve Leech, who insists that violence must be met with violence – that, in a land without laws or policemen, order can only be maintained through strength. Since the movie was directed by Wyler and produced by Peck, both lifelong Democrats, the liberal naturally wins the ideological argument. Tellingly, though, when Peck and Heston finally have it out, in an epic battle of moonlit fisticuffs, neither one wins, pummelling each other till they can barely stand but never scoring a knock-out.

He was approached on more than one occasion, both by Democrats and Republicans, to run for one of California’s Senate seats. He seriously considered the matter in 1969 but, ultimately, found it impossible to give up his true passion: “The thought of never being able to act again, go onstage, or wait for the first take was simply unbearable”. During the 1980s, however, as his acting career dimmed, he increasingly served as a spokesman for various, mostly conservative, political causes. Like many who moonlight in politics, he was sometimes more passionate than informed. In a CNN debate with Christopher Hitchens in 1991, Heston, arguing in favour of military intervention against Iraq, revealed that he was only roughly aware of where the country was located. (He named Russia and Bahrain as contiguous countries.) After the gun massacre at Columbine High School, in which twelve students and one teacher were killed, Heston, who was then president of the National Rifle Association, declared, “If there had been even one armed guard in the school he could have saved a lot of lives and perhaps ended the whole thing instantly”. There had been an armed guard at the school.

It is this role, as president of the NRA, that now defines Heston’s political life, as well as casting a shadow over his acting career. Few today recall his advocacy for Civil Rights or for the National Endowment for the Arts, but nearly everyone can remember him waving a musket over his head and growling, “From my cold, dead hands!” In the light of the mass shooting in Las Vegas, the worst in recent American history, this is particularly damaging. Heston’s voice, his stage training and his screen persona made him an excellent spokesman for the organization, and gave him the chance to stand before a roaring crowd again.

For all his passion for politics and obvious affection for his family, Heston was a thorough­ly self-involved individual. His acting diaries, as well as his autobiography, In the Arena (1995), beam with self-admiration. Eliot’s failure to remark on such a defining trait, in a biography that runs to nearly 500 pages, is unfortunate, if not uncharacteristic. Eliot prefers to describe rather than to dissect, leaving critical exegesis to others, and also, unfortunately, making numerous factual errors. Most of these mistakes are what you might call unforced errors, minor inaccuracies that are tangential to the story of Heston’s life. In the first page of the prologue, Eliot states that Heston was the longest-running president of the Screen Actors Guild, forgetting that Barry Gordon served a year longer. Later, when discussing Heston’s collaboration with Orson Welles on Touch of Evil (1958), he writes that Welles’s previous film, Man in the Shadow (1958), gave Welles his “first appearance in a Hollywood film in nearly ten years, following 1948’s dis­astrous The Lady from Shanghai”. What about Prince of Foxes (1949), The Black Rose (1950) and Moby Dick (1956)?

Less forgivable are the errors Eliot makes about his subject’s life, especially since so many of them can be flagged simply by consulting Heston’s acting journals, published in 1976. These include everything from getting dates wrong (Eliot writes that Gore Vidal arrived on the set of Ben-Hur on April 29, 1958 when he actually arrived on April 23) to taking a full 20 lbs off Heston’s weight, to stating that nobody, not even Heston, thought Planet of the Apes was going to do well at the box office. In fact, in a journal entry from October 31, 1967, three months before the film’s premiere, Heston wrote, “We saw APES today, with no score, no looped dialogue, and an unbalanced print. I liked it enormously. I think it may find a bigger audience than anything I’ve done since BEN-HUR”. (He was right about that.)

Eliot goes most awry when he relates the story of what was probably the greatest crisis in Heston’s long marriage. It occurred in the spring of 1973, as Heston was preparing to go to Spain to appear in The Three Musketeers. Lydia had for several years been suffering from increasingly severe migraines, which made her irritable, leading the couple to bicker. This culminated in a blow-up on April 27 that Heston touchingly described in his diary entry that day:

This turned out to be one of the very worst days of my life. Everything was wrenched out of joint. For the first time in my life, I believed Lydia would leave me. I spent some bleak hours trying to find some adjustment to it. She didn’t in the end and I don’t think she will, but it isn’t yet over, and may not be for some time. I can’t live without her, as I well know, and it seems she can’t live without me. We must begin with that . . . and end with it, too, I guess.

Eliot’s comment on this: “Heston had to catch a plane, which was probably a blessing”. But Heston didn’t leave for Europe until May 18, three weeks later. Before he left, Lydia underwent a thyroid operation, hoping it would allev­iate her migraines. Afterwards, Heston sat at her hospital bedside, recording his apprehensions in his diary. Yet Eliot makes it sound as if he was in Spain during this whole episode. This is both an inexplicable confusing of the facts and an unfair account of Heston’s marriage. Heston didn’t arrive in Madrid until well after Lydia’s surgery, and yet Eliot makes it sound as if he was off bending the elbow with Oliver Reed while his wife was all alone in Los Angeles, going under the knife.

Eliot also tends to assert more than he could ever know about his subject. “He was jolted out of his chair and, red-faced with rage, decided he had to enlist.” “He threw his arms around her, and pulled her so close he could feel her belly pressing into him.” And maybe worst of all: “Heston had to pinch himself to make sure he wasn’t dreaming”. The impression given by all this – both the errors of fact and the unfounded projections of emotion – is that Eliot would rather be writing a novel than a biography.

Heston lived an extraordinarily rich and exciting life, in no need of dressing up. He served in the Second World War; starred in his first film before he was thirty; marched with Martin Luther King; played tennis with Rod Laver; argued politics with Dwight Macdonald on the White House lawn; travelled to South-East Asia at the height of the Vietnam War; served as an emissary to China and East Berlin; had an acting career that lasted for more than five decades, combined with a marriage that lasted for more than six; and won an Oscar. “I have work, health, happiness, love”, Heston jotted in his diary in 1965. “What else is there?”

Talent. That was the one gift denied Heston, and it was the gift he craved the most. What Heston’s career before the camera reveals is that acting ability – at least of the kind that Heston so desperately wanted – cannot be achieved through hard work alone. If it could, Heston would have been the greatest actor of his generation. He had all the obviously essential qualities: a handsome face; an athletic body; a rich, resonant voice; intelligence; discipline; and ambition. He also worked tirelessly, in defiance of his limitations. When Stephen Macht, who acted onstage with Heston in A Man for All Seasons, asked him why he kept coming out night after night, despite the fact that the critics panned him so mercilessly, Heston smiled. “Because”, he said, “one day I will get it right.”

[Your Favourite Foreign Language Films]

1.  Berlin Alexanderplatz  Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany

2.  Kagemusha  Akira Kurosawa, Japan

3.  From the Life of the Marionettes  Ingmar Bergman, Sweden

4.  Mon Oncle D'Amerique  Alain Resnais, France

5.  The Age of the Earth  Glauber Rocha, Brazil

[Films of 2018]

Curious about the 2018 Festival Premieres that are still waiting for general release?  Here's a convenient list:  https://www.indiewire.com/2018/12/best-films-2019-reviews-1202026907/

[Your Favourite Foreign Language Films]

 1.   The Confession (1970)  Constantin Costa-Gavras, France

 2.   The Mirror (1975)  Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union

 3.   Cries and Whispers (1972)  Ingmar Bergman, Sweden

 4.   The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)  Luis Bunuel, France

 5.   Celine and Julie Go Boating  (1974)  Jacques Rivette, France

 6.   The Traveling Players  (1975)  Theo Angelopoulos, Greece

 7.   Solaris (1972)  Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union

 8.   The Enigma of Kasper Hauser  (1974)  Werner Herzog, West Germany

 9.   Aguirre:  the Wrath of God  (1972)  Werner Herzog, West Germany

10.   The Phantom of Liberty (1974)  Luis Bunuel, France

11.   The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)  Victor Erice, Spain

12.   Scenes from a Marriage (1974)  Ingmar Bergman, Sweden

13.   Stalker (1979)  Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union

14.   The Ascent (1977) Larissa Shepitko, Soviet Union

15.   Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)  Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France

16.   La Maman et la Putain (1973)  Jean Eustache, France

17.   Red Psalm (1972) Miklos Jancso, Hungary

18.   The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978)  Ermanno Olmi, Italy

19.   My Little Loves (1974)  Jean Eustache, France

20.   The Conformist (1970)  Bernardo Bertolucci, Italy

21.   Two English Girls (1971)  Francois Truffaut, France

22.   Alice in the Cities (1974)  Wim Wenders, West Germany

23.   The Battle of Chile (1979)  Particio Guzman, Chile

24.   Day for Night (1973)  Francois Truffaut, France

25.   Perceval le Gallois (1978)  Eric Rohmer, France

26.   Moses and Aaron (1975)  Jean-Marie Straub, Daniele Huillet, West Germany

27.   Autumn Sonata (1978)  Ingmar Bergman, Sweden

28.   Cria Cuervos (1976) Carlos Saura, Spain

29.   The Little Theatre of Jean Renoir  (1970)  Jean Renoir, France

[Your Favourite Foreign Language Films]

theyshootpictures.com top 1000 movies 1979

Stalker  Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union #58

Arrebato  Ivan Zuleuta, Spain  #595

The Marriage of Maria Braun  Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany #625

The Tin Drum  Volker Schlondorff, West Germany #712

Vengeance in Mine  Shohei Imamura, Japan #757

From the Clouds to the Resistance  Jean Marie Straub/Daniele Huillet, Italy  #971

From Jonathan Rosenbaum's top 1000 movies

*Percival de gallois  Eric Rohmer, France
*Stalker  Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union
Ticket of No Return  Ulrike Ottinger, West Germany

Movies marked with an asterisk (*) are on Rosenbaum's top 100 list.  Note that dates are not exact.

[Your Choice For 1964 Best Actor Oscar]

16 hours ago, Swithin said:

I think the 1964 Best Actor winner -- Rex Harrison -- was the worst choice in the history of the Oscars.

 

How odd.  I would think of all the Oscars given that year, Harrison's was the most defensible.

[LEAST & MOST FAVORITE of the week...]

Another three movies this week:  Murder in the Private Car contains a very bland heroine (Mary Carlisle), racism in the form of a pathetic black servant played by an actor who was apparently not allowed a surname, and a murder plot that has no ingenuity and is idiotically over-elaborate.  In its defense, I would point out Charles Ruggles is amusing spouting malapropisms and there is an exciting climax involving a runaway railroad car.  I watched Thank God It's Friday because Leonard Maltin suggested it was the worst movie ever to win an oscar (for best song).  Even if you don't like disco, you might think a movie with both Donna Summer and the Commodores would be slightly better.  (Then again, people also thought having ELO and Gene Kelly would make Xanadu a good movie.)  But the half a dozen or so plot threads are handled very dully, not helped by the fact the characters are neither very funny, interesting or even likeable.  And if you think Hollywood treated Debra Winger shabbily, apparently this was a problem at the beginning of her career as well.

 

Thou Wast Mild and Lovely is the movie of the week.  It comes from the director of last week's Butter on the Latch.  It helps by being more concentrated in its focus.  Basically it's the story of a farm laborer, the farmer he works for, and the attractive young farmer's daughter.  A bit before the halfway mark we learn the laborer has a wife, who shows up for the climax.  Visually striking, its simple story is told thoughtfully and with a genuine sense of desire.  Interestingly enough, this was New Yorker critic Richard Brody number two movie of 2014, after The Grand Budapest Hotel.

[Your Choice For 1964 Best Actor Oscar]

Sellers totally.

[Your Favourite Foreign Language Films]

1. Stalker  Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union

2. The Battle of Chile  Patricio Guzman,  Chile/Cuba/France

3. Vengeance is Mine  Shohei Imamura, Japaan

[Best Party Scene]

We could do a thread on Christmas parties: 

A reminder that Fanny and Alexander appears late on the evening of the 23rd.

[February 2019 schedule is up]

In September I started a thread of movies I'd like to see for Oscar month: 

Foreign film nominees:

Pharoah

The Battle of Neretva

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

Black and White in Color

Seven Beauties

Coup de Torchon

Colonel Redl

The Nasty Girl

Open Doors

The Scent of Green Papaya

Costume Design

Ludwig

Fellini's Casanova

Caravans

Velvet Goldmine

Cinematography

King Rat

Day of the Locust

Matewan

A Little Princess

Kundun

The Thin Red Line

 

Among other categories, I'm actually interested in Ragtime and Coming Home, which I've never seen.  I suppose at one point I'll also have to see The Turning Point which shares, along with The Color Purple, of being the biggest loser in Oscar history (11 nominations and no wins). 

 

Well no such luck.  On the other hand I do get to see Alan Arkin's first two Academy nominations.

[The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's Class of 2019]

6 hours ago, RBG FAN said:

I must be getting old. I either don't know (or don't want to know) these people.

With one sixties artists, two seventies-eighties artists, three eighties artists and one nineties artist, I'm thinking you may not like this type of music.

[The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's Class of 2019]

5 hours ago, jakeem said:

The British group Roxy Music was fronted in the 1970s and 1980s by Bryan Ferry, who also excelled as a solo singer and songwriter. Another founding member of the group was Brian Eno, who became a prolific recording artist and music producer.

 

About bloody time.  Notwithstanding having only one top 40 American hit, one of the most important rock bands.

[Primetime lineup for Wednesday still a mystery?]

So are we any closer to knowing what's going to be on TCM's lineup tonight?  Well not really.  But at least we know the films they're going to choose from:  https://www.npr.org/2018/12/12/675384976/jurassic-park-the-shining-and-23-other-movies-added-to-national-film-registry

Here's the full list of the 2018 additions:

• Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)
• Broadcast News (1987)
• Brokeback Mountain (2005)
• Cinderella (1950)
• Days of Wine and Roses (1962)
• Dixon-Wanamaker Expedition to Crow Agency (1908)
• Eve's Bayou (1997)
• The Girl Without a Soul (1917)
• Hair Piece: A Film for Nappy-Headed People (1984)
• Hearts and Minds (1974)
• Hud (1963)
• The Informer (1935)
• Jurassic Park (1993)
• The Lady From Shanghai (1947)
• Leave Her to Heaven (1945)
• Monterey Pop (1968)
• My Fair Lady (1964)
• The Navigator (1924)
• On the Town (1949)
• One-Eyed Jacks (1961)
• Pickup on South Street (1953)
• Rebecca (1940)
• The Shining (1980)
• Smoke Signals (1998)
• Something Good – Negro Kiss (1898)

[Your favorite adapted/original screenplay]

Now it is 2000.  Here is Best Adapted Screenplay:

Darren Aronfosky, Hubert Selby Jr., Requiem for a Dream, based on the novel of the same name by Selby

Bela Tarr, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Werckmeister Harmonies, based on the novel The Melancholy of Resistance by Krasznahorkai

D.V. DeVincentis, Steve Pink, John Cusack, Scott Rosenberg, High Fidelity, based on the novel of the same name by Nick Hornby

Terence Davies, The House of Mirth, based on the novel of the same name by Edith Wharton

Kim Myung-Gon, Chunhyang, based on the folk tale The Chunhyangjeon

 

And here is Best Original Screenplay:

 

Christopher Nolan, Memento

Agathe Bluysen, Peter Watkins, La Commune (Paris 1871)

Agnes Varda, The Gleaners and I

Wong Kar-Wai, In the Mood for Love

Kambuzia Partovi, The Circle

 

[Your Favourite Foreign Language Films]

From theyshootpictures.com top 1000 movies

In a Year of 13 Moons  Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany  #355

The Tree of Wooden Clogs  Ermanno Olmi, Italy #433

From Jonathan Rosenbaum's top 1000 movies:

La chambre verte  Francois Truffaut, France
*Doomed Love  Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal
France / tour / detour / deux / enfants  Jean-Luc Godard / Annie Marie Mieville, France
From the Cloud to the Resistance  Jean-Marie Straub / Danielle Huillet, Italy
Genese d'un repas  Luc Moullet, France
Les rendez-vous d'Anna  Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France/West Germany

An asterisk (*) indicates that the movie is one of Rosenbaum's top 100 movies.  Note that dates are not exact.