skimpole

The 2016 choices are months away, and I haven't seen most of the nominees as of yet. But I will say that while the frontrunner for Best Supporting Actor is good, there is one clearly better choice that wasn't even nominated.

I have a clear idea of my best actresses for 1981, but my supporting list is vaguer. Does anyone remember whether Caitlin Clarke in Dragonslayer counts as supporting?

This week I saw five movies. A Patch of Blue never struck me as a promising idea for a movie, with its blind girl falling for Sidney Poitier (because no white woman would if she actually saw him?). The element of liberal self-congratulation is all too evident. In retrospect the contrast between sober Poitier and white trash Shelly Winters is counter-productive. It wasn't poor white women of questionable morals that were holding African-Americans back in 1965. It also emphasizes racism as a vice of the stupid, instead of an ideology encouraged by the powerful. Poitier is creditable, Hartmann less so. Princess Tam-Tam is a more interesting movie: Josephine Baker does a nice job, before the white couple get back together. Destination Tokyo continues my so far strictly limited search for great 1943 movies. Some of the submarine action scenes are good. On the other hand the army bonding, morale and human interest elements are generally banal. And although it doesn't go full racist (at one point the crew agree they are fighting for Japanese children), saying Japan doesn't have a word for married love will insult anyone who has seen movies by Ozu, Mizoguchi and Naruse. Fallen Angel is a good Preminger movie, with its thoroughly competent direction, and its ending, so different from the moralism one might expect from noirs. Pacific Rim has the virtues and vices of a Guilermo del Toro film. It has an interesting misc en scene. The concept is interesting, though having Godzilla like monsters destroying major cities is not, post 9/11, in the best of taste. The main characters do a lot of unimaginative war movie guff about lost loved ones, potential rivalries, growing love affairs, and self sacrificing rhetoric. Also there's a lot of CGI slow motion special effects that left me indifferent. More interesting are two quarreling scientists and their disturbing speculations, as well as a good final shot.

Actor Robert De Niro, Raging Bull Jack Nicholson, The Shining Edward Woodward, Breaker Morant John Hurt, The Elephant Man Gerard Depardieu, Mon Oncle D'Amerique Runner-ups: Tatsuya Nakadai (Kagemusha), Gunter Lamprecht (Berlin Alexanderplatz), Art Garfunkel (Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession), Kris Kristofferson (Heaven's Gate), Roger Pierre (Mon Oncle D'Amerique), Dan Aykroyd (The Blues Brothers), John Belushi (The Blues Brothers), Paul Le Mat (Melvin and Howard), Robert Atzorn (From the Life of the Marionettes), Donald Sutherland (Ordinary People), Woody Allen (Stardust Memories), Gerard Depardieu (The Last Metro), Bob Hoskins (The Long Good Friday), Jacques Dutronc (Every Man for Himself), Walter Matthau (Hopscotch), Timothy Hutton (Ordinary People), Lee Marvin (The Big Red One), Alan King (Just Tell me What you Want), Eusebio Poncella (Arrebato), Tommy Lee Jones (Coal Miner's Daughter), Actress Shelly Duvall, The Shining Gena Rowlands, Gloria Sissy Spacek, Coal Miner's Daughter Catherine Deneuve, The Last Metro Nicole Garcia, Mon Oncle D'Amerique Runner-ups: Hanna Schygulla (Berlin Alexandeplatz), Theresa Russell (Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession), Ali MacGraw (Just Tell me What you Want), Dyan Cannon (Honeysuckle Rose), Chistine Buchegger (From the Life of the Marionettes), Mary Tyler Moore (Ordinary People), Charlotte Rampling (Stardust Memories), Helen Mirren (The Long Good Friday), Glenda Jackson (Hopscotch), Nathalie Baye (Every Man for Himself) Supporting Actor Philip Stone, The Shining Joe Pesci, Raging Bull Harrison Ford, The Empire Strikes Back Leslie Nielsen, Airplane! Gottfried John, Berlin Alexanderplatz Runner-ups: Danny Lloyd (The Shining), Scatman Crothers (The Shining), Anthony Hopkins (The Elephant Man), Lloyd Bridges (Airplane!), Harvey Keitel (Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession), Takashi Shimura (Kagemusha), Bryan Brown (Breaker Morant), Jack Thompson (Breaker Morant), Peter O'Toole (The Stunt Man), Jason Robards (Melvin and Howard), Christopher Walken (Heaven's Gate), Robert Stack (Airplane!), John Hurt (Heaven's Gate), Henry Gibson (The Blues Brothers), Peter Graves (Airplane!), Joe Turkel (The Shining), David Mansfield (Heaven's Gate), Joseph Cotton (Heaven's Gate) Supporting Actress Barbara Sukowa, Berlin Alexanderplatz Mary Steenburgen, Melvin and Howard Cathy Moriarty, Raging Bull Anne Bancroft, The Elephant Man Isabelle Huppert, Every Man for Himself/Heaven's Gate Runner-ups: Myrna Loy (Just Tell me What you Want), Wendy Hiller (The Elephant Man), Barbara Bilingsley (Airplane!), Amy Irving (Honeysuckle Rose), Lorna Patterson (Airplane!), Carrie Fisher (The Blues Brothers), Sarah Holcomb (Caddyshack), Beverly D'Angelo (Coal Miner's Daughter) Not seen: Tribute, Resurrection, Private Benjamin, Inside Moves -------Just to remind everyone, my actual best actress of 1980 is Natassja Kinski for Tess, while Peter Firth would be my second choice for best supporting actor. -------Anne Bancroft didn't get a nomination for her two most famous roles, but she has one now!

Actor: Albert Finney, Murder on the Orient Express (1974) Actress: Nastassja Kinski, Tess (1979) Supporting Actor, Robert Duvall, The Godfather (1972) Supporting Actress, Ingrid Thulin, Cries and Whispers (1972) Juvenile Performance, Ana Torrent, The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)

I think Moriarty is clearly supporting. She doesn't actually speak until almost 25 minutes in the movie. De Niro is clearly the lead, Pesci is clearly supporting. Pesci clearly has more screen time in the movie, and his relationship with De Niro is arguably more important than Moriarty's. Moriarty never has a scene without De Niro nor Pesci, but Pesci does. Pesci's last scene with DeNiro is the penultimate scene in the movie and carries a clear emotional weight. By contrast, Moriarty's last two scenes are both less than a minute long where first she tells him she's leaving him, and second, somewhat anticlimactically, he charges into her home to try to take the jewels off his championship belt. Perhaps most striking of all, Pesci is more important that Moriarty in what should be her big scene, in which De Niro accuses her of adultery and assaults her. (He starts by interrogating Pesci, and the scene climaxes with him bursting into Pesci's home while he's having dinner and assaults him.)

More great quotations from 1979 Apocalypse Now Colonel Walter E. Kurtz: What did you expect? Are you an assassin? Captain Benjamin L. Willard: I'm a soldier. Colonel Walter E. Kurtz: You're neither. You're an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill. Manhattan Not everybody gets corrupted. You've got to have faith in people. Being There Life is a state of mind. Monty Python's Life of Brian "If you have enjoyed this film, why not go and see La notte"?

This seems odd. They didn't win their awards for movies that were said to be from 1980. They won their award for 1979 movies that were awarded in 1980, just like the Oscars and the Golden Globes.for that year.

I saw four movies this week. City of Pirates is certainly a strange movie, since it doesn't really have either pirates or a city. It's more a strange, fantasy surrealistic movie. It's kind of hard to describe, so I'll have the Lincoln Centre do it in its recent description for its Ruiz retrospective: "Propelled by a ferocious creative energy and blending folk legends, surrealist poetry, children’s adventure stories, and Hollywood horror movies, City of Pirates follows a decidedly nonlinear narrative about a sleepwalking virgin (Anne Alvaro), a ten-year-old boy (Melvil Poupaud) who claims to have raped and murdered his entire family, and the lone inhabitant of an island castle (Hughes Quester) who shares his body with an imaginary sister. Funny, frightening, and enigmatic, City of Pirates is like a cross between Peter Pan and Friday the 13th told with a wildly baroque visual style that suggests both Georges Méliès and Sergio Leone." Clearly not for everyone, I found it worth watching. Escape from Alcatraz is a good, skillful prison escape movie Siegel and Eastwood are highly competent, though the movie is not in the class of A Man Escaped or Le Trou. Johnny Belinda doesn't say anything particularly profound about Nova Scotia, where it takes place. As it happens I watched it because Jane Wyman won the oscar for it. I honestly didn't think I would be very impressed by it, and I wasn't. Wyman basically looks pretty and do sign language competently. Lew Ayres gives a more interesting performance, though I wouldn't consider it oscar worthy. After Pulp Fiction came out, several unimaginative filmmakers made gory copies with black humour for a few years until critics got tried of it. What distinguishes Romeo is Bleeding is that it was made before Pulp Fiction came out. As Jonathan Rosenbaum points out, this isn't a movie where style replaces content. It's one where stylishness replaces style. There's some unusual camera work and misc-en-scene. But the dialogue, characters and situations are indifferent. It's perhaps not surprising that Oldman's crooked cop isn't too bright. But the villains he's fighting aren't much smarter. The failure to really build the relationship between Oldman and Annabella Sciorra is particularly damaging.

And Abramova is my choice for juvenile performance of the year.

Actor Peter Sellers, Being There Woody Allen, Manhattan Anatoli Solonitsyn, Stalker Jim Henson, The Muppet Movie Alexander Kaidanovsky, Stalker Runner-ups: Jack Lemmon (The China Syndrome), Phil Daniels (Quadrophenia), Ken Ogata (Vengeance is Mine), Roy Scheider (All That Jazz), Martin Sheen (Apocalypse Now), Nicol Williamson (The Human Factor), George Burns (Going in Style), Sean Connery (The First Great Train Robbery), Klaus Kinski (Nosferatu), Christopher Plummer (Murder by Decree), Sam Neill (My Brilliant Career), Dennis Christopher (Breaking Away), James Woods (The Onion Field), Kelly Reno (The Black Stallion), Donald Sutherland (The First Great Train Robbery), Malcolm McDowell (Time After Time), Art Carney (Going in Style), Brad Dourif (Wise Blood), Mel Gibson (Mad Max), Peter Falk (The In-Laws), George Hamilton (Love at First Bite), Jeff Bridges (Winter Kills), David Bennent (The Tin Drum), Klaus Lowitsch (The Marriage of Maria Braun), Clint Eastwood (Escape from Alcatraz), Actress Natassja Kinski, Tess Sally Field, Norma Rae Diane Keaton, Manhattan Jane Fonda, The China Syndrome Hanna Schygulla, The Marriage of Maria Braun Judy Davis, My Brilliant Career Runner-ups: Diane Lane (A Little Romance), Mary Steenburgen (Time After Time), Isabelle Adjani (Nosferatu), Vanessa Redgrave (Agatha), Lesley-Anne Down (The First Great Train Robbery), Jill Clayburgh (Luna) Supporting Actor Marlon Brando, Apocalypse Now Robert Duvall, Apocalypse Now Peter Firth, Tess Frank Oz, The Muppet Movie John Cleese, Monty Python's Life of Brian Michael Lonsdale, Moonraker Runner-ups: Eric Idle (Monty Python's Life of Brian), Melyvn Douglas (Being There), Nikolai Grinko (Stalker), Leigh Lawson (Tess), James Mason (Murder by Decree), Maximilian Schell (The Black Hole), Jack Warden (Being There), Michael Douglas (The China Syndrome), Michael Murphy (Manhattan), Ron Leibman (Norma Rae), Rentaro Mikuni (Vengeance is Mine), Ben Vereen (All That Jazz), Terry Jones (Monty Python's Life of Brian), David Goelz (The Muppet Movie), Ernest Borgnine (The Black Hole), Dennis Hopper (Apocalypse Now), Charles Durning (The Muppet Movie), Robert Morley (The Human Factor), Frederic Forrest (Apocalypse Now), Mickey Rooney (The Black Stallion), Lee Strasberg (Going in Style), Austin Pendleton (The Muppet Movie), Dennis Quaid (Breaking Away), Bruno Ganz (Nosferatu), Wilford Brimley (The China Syndrome), Michael Palin (Monty Python's Life of Brian), Anthony Perkins (Winter Kills), Sting (Quadrophenia), Derek Jacobi (The Human Factor), Steve Martin (The Muppet Movie), Richard Hunt (The Muppet Movie), Laurence Olivier (Dracula), Patrick McGoohan (Escape from Alcatraz) Supporting Actress Shirley MacLaine, Being There Mitsuko Baisho, Vengeance is Mine Mariel Hemingway, Manhattan Ann Reinking, All That Jazz Natasha Abramova, Stalker Runner-ups: Alisa Freindlich (Stalker), Iman (The Human Factor), Leslie Ash (Quadrophenia), Erzsebet Foldi (All That Jazz), Suzanna Hamilton (Tess), Susan Clark (Murder by Decree), Barbara Barrie (Breaking Away), Teri Garr (The Black Stallion), Not seen: Starting Over, Chapter Two, The Rose -------You'll notice that the Actress and Best Supporting Actor categories have six nominations. That's because for the purposes of this exercise Tess is considered a 1979 film, while in my alternate oscars I consider it a 1980 film. In my alternate oscars Kinski is the winner of the 1980 best actress and Sally Field is the 1979 one. Firth would be a nominee in both years. -------When I started this exercise, I didn't think either Brando or MacLaine would win anything. Well thank heaven for supporting awards.

In the Mood for Love was tied for 24th on the Sight and Sounds 2012 greatest movies of all time poll. Mulholland Drive was #28, and the one other movie from this century to make the top 50.

Here's the first week: http://www.tcm.com/schedule/weekly.html?tz=MST&sdate=2017-04-01

Here are the English Language movies from 1930 to 1991 that have clearly improved over time (twenty five years being I think good enough for perspective) The Man I killed Hallelujah I'm a Bum Sylvia Scarlett Make way for Tomorrow Helzapoppin' I Walked with a Zombie The Three Caballeros Detour Yolanda and the Thief From the Day Forward Monsieur Verdoux Good Sam The Small Back Room The Set-up Colorado Territory Thieves Highway Alice in Wonderland (Disney animated version) The Prowler The Steel Helmet Limelight My Son John The Lusty Men The Marrying Kind The 500- Fingers of Doctor T Pickup on South Street Johnny Guitar The Night of the Hunter The Man from Laramie It's Always Fair Weather Invitation the Dance The Sweet Smell of Success Vertigo Touch of Evil Murder by Contract A Time to Love and a Time to Die Wild River The Young One The Manchurian Candidate Heaven and Earth Magic The Trial (Orson Welles) Help! Chimes at Midnight Ice Tora! Tora! Tora! Deep End The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes The Ballad of Cable Hogue Zabriskie Point A New Leaf Avanti Winter Soldier Pink Flamingoes The King of Marvin Gardens Badlands O Lucky Man! The Friends of Eddie Coyle Scarecrow Monty Python and the Holy Grail The Rocky Horror Picture Show Providence Killer of Sheep The Shout Quadrophenia The Human Factor The Shining Time Bandits Cutters Way Four Friends Pink Floyd: the Wall Blade Runner The Man with Two Brains The King of Comedy My Brother's Wedding Twice upon a Time Videodrome Once upon a time in America The Cotton Club Love Streams Brazil Clue Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer Absolute Beginners She's Gotta Have it Down by Law Inner Space Housekeeping Distant Voices, Still Lives Enemies: a Love story Queen of Hearts Mountains of the Moon

I would point out that in 1980 two Australians films were nominated for relatively minor awards: Breaker Morant (adapted screenplay) and My Brilliant Career (costume design). My Brilliant Career is clearly a 1979 film. Breaker Morant appears to be a 1980 film: IMDB says it debuted that year. It's just that some websites, including TCM, have it as a 1979 film. If there's any evidence that it actually was a 1979 movie, it would be good to have it before tomorrow.

There could be more quotes from this year: Come back! Come back and fight! Dogs aren't dangerous! (Watership Down) I won't give up, even if it is too late. (Autumn Sonata)

I want to talk about my choice for the movie that won best Actress Autumn Sonata, where Liv Ullmann became the first actress to win three lead oscars in my alternate oscars, and Ingrid Bergman won the last of her nominations. But rather than have me talk about, here's Farran Smith Nehme's essay for the Criterion collection: Autumn Sonata (1978) cuts deep into a woman, even if she recoils from it. We are all some mother’s daughter, whether we were cherished or abandoned, spoiled or abused. Both of the film’s stars, Liv Ullmann and Ingrid Bergman, had daughters as well as celebrated careers. But when Bergman left her husband for Roberto Rossellini, she went years without seeing her daughter from her first marriage. As for Ullmann, just the year before she had written, “Success in one’s profession and trying to write a book do not compensate for domestic shortcomings as obvious as mine.” She was referring to her relationship with her daughter, Linn, whose father was Ingmar Bergman. The director later said that when he conceived Autumn Sonata, he considered no other actresses for the two main roles. He didn’t say why, nor did he need to. Filmed by Sven Nykvist in the haunting palette sug­gested by its title, Autumn Sonata uses Bergman’s signature technique of tightly focused close-ups in an almost claus­trophobically small setting to tell the story of a daughter, Eva (Ullmann), who invites her mother, Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman), for a visit. Charlotte is a famed pianist whose glamorous life hasn’t included a visit to her daughter in seven years. In that time, Eva has married a minister, Viktor (Halvar Björk); has had a son, Erik, who drowned before his fourth birthday; and has been caring for her sister, Helena (Lena Nyman), who is dying, slowly and horribly, from a degenerative disease. Charlotte arrives, vivacious as ever, and seems to think that her debts have already been paid. That isn’t the case. Bergman’s closely observed account of how one daughter’s disabling rage builds to a devastating all-night confron­tation with her mother was created during his self-imposed exile from his native Sweden. In 1976, that country’s most famous filmmaker had been picked up by the police for tax evasion. He was released after five hours, and the courts eventually dismissed the case, but the lèse-majesté had been more than he could bear. From his exile, he had already made The Serpent’s Egg (1977), which didn’t find much success. And after Autumn Sonata—filmed in Norway, Ullmann’s home country, in about fifteen days—he would also make From the Life of the Marionettes (1980) outside Sweden. In retrospect, this part of his career seems as much like a long, slow transition from screen to stage as an exile. Autumn Sonata’s close quarters and big confron­tations seem to anticipate the director’s later focus on the theater. And it was also his last work made expressly for the cinema; From the Life of the Marionettes, Fanny and Alexander (1982), and Saraband (2003) were made for television. But Autumn Sonata also connects back to Bergman’s earlier seventies films. Up until the tax contretemps, he had been spending the decade making some of the best films of his career. And Autumn Sonata represents another variation on the intimate family miseries of his other pinnacles from that period—preoccupied with physical and moral frailty, like Cries and Whispers (1972), full of recriminations for crimes the other person doesn’t recollect committing, like Scenes from a Marriage (1973). For Autumn Sonata, Bergman built his screenplay around exposition. Each revelation about Charlotte comes like another page of the indictment. She wasn’t just absent on tour for much of Eva’s childhood, leaving the girl to keep vigil with her father (Erland Josephson); Charlotte had an affair that resulted in her leaving both husband and children for eight months (the child Eva, shown in flashback, is played by Linn Bergman). She didn’t just leave Eva and her son-in-law alone; Charlotte didn’t show up for Eva’s pregnancy or her one grandchild’s birth (“I was recording all the Mozart sonatas. I hadn’t one day free,” she reminds Viktor). Evidently, Charlotte never came even after Erik died, although no one bothers to throw that at her. There’s so much else to choose from, like putting Helena in a home and never visiting. The amount of harm that Charlotte has inflicted over one not-terribly-long lifetime could fill a miniseries. Indeed, this sort of story line recurs in classic Hollywood melodrama, where a selfish mother is the worst kind of villainess, like the parasitic Gladys Cooper in Now, Voyager, nagging Bette Davis into a wreck who winds up physically resembling Ullmann in Autumn Sonata, right down to the wire-rim glasses. Watch Autumn Sonata and other movie mothers may start to drift through your mind: Mary Astor, the pianist in The Great Lie, leaving her baby behind with Davis, then embarking on a world tour because (no other reason is plausibly suggested) she’s a heartless ****; Davis—now the bad mom—in Mr. Skeffington, abandoning her lovelorn husband and daughter so she can pursue flirtations, lunches, and shopping; Lana Turner lighting up more for her show business pals than she does for her daughter in Imitation of Life (which Charlotte’s phone call to her agent echoes). It may seem quixotic to bring up these films when discussing the resolutely un-Hollywood Ingmar Bergman. But these old studio tropes reflected attitudes, they did not produce them, and those attitudes cross borders more readily than even cinema itself. In Autumn Sonata, there’s the essence of many a maternal melodrama, concentrated by telescoping events into a couple of days, and deepened by Bergman’s ability to find reasons within reasons for what people do. Surely, too, the director knew what he was getting when he insisted on Ingrid Bergman for his Charlotte. Cast a Hollywood star and she brings to a role memories of her past films, as well as her public image. The actress didn’t play mothers during her peak years in Hollywood—scandal cut short her career before she got old enough to do so. But she understood that playing Charlotte meant tapping into her own choices and the reams of newsprint from the 1950s accusing her of being unfit for motherhood. And there’s another tidy irony here, one that would scarcely have escaped her director’s notice. Ingrid Bergman’s American stardom began with Intermezzo: A Love Story (1939), a remake of her Swedish hit. She plays a pianist who falls deeply in love with a married violinist played by Leslie Howard . . . and gives him up for the sake of his child. She’d made splendid movies with her husband Roberto Rossellini (they appear to be the roles that impressed Ingmar Bergman the most) and had had a triumphant return to Hollywood with her Oscar for Anastasia (1956). But from the 1960s on, despite another Oscar (for 1974’s Murder on the Orient Express, a diverting movie but a role she could have nailed from inside a steamer trunk), Bergman focused on stage work because the movie roles were mostly fluff. Perhaps that’s why, in 1973, when she was presiding over the jury at Cannes, she found time to slip a note into Ingmar Bergman’s pocket, reminding him that when they’d last met, he’d said he would give her a part. In Images: My Life in Film, Ingmar Bergman wrote that he’d come up with a near-complete outline for Autumn Sonata in one day, after a period in which his accumulating woes had left him temporarily bereft of ideas. The primary difference between it and the finished film is that after the fight, in his original conception, “the daughter gives birth to the mother.” How this might have looked on-screen is an intriguing mystery, but it’s one Bergman himself couldn’t solve, and he abandoned the idea. Autumn Sonata contains no such mystic scenes, but it’s not without its odd touches. Bergman opens by breaking the fourth wall, to have Eva’s husband, Viktor, tell the audience about his wife, whom we see serenely writing at her desk. Eva is mousy and plain, Ullmann’s considerable beauty hidden by the clothes and hair of a woman twice her age. She seems gentle, but there is calculation beneath the facade. Eva knows that Charlotte will be confronted with precisely what she prefers to avoid: the past. If the film is a chamber piece, as is often said, it’s one played against the sound of a buzz saw coming from far offstage, the thrum of years of pent-up agony. When Charlotte arrives, she sweeps in with matched luggage, wearing a chic pantsuit and letting her daughter carry her bags into the house. Much has happened to Eva in the seven years since she last saw her mother, but it’s Charlotte who can’t go for more than a few sentences of conversation without turning matters to herself. Eva tells of holding musical evenings for her parishioners, and Charlotte rushes to mention that she has given five school concerts and they were wildly successful. Charlotte is a performer, but she’s on her best behavior until Eva reveals that Helena is there. Then Charlotte is openly aggrieved; she has just escaped the presence of death, when her lover, Leonardo, passed away after a long illness. In Autumn Sonata, like in Cries and Whispers, death is constantly in the house—in the photographs of little Erik, in Helena’s ravaged body. It’s no wonder a person as self-absorbed as Charlotte backs away; a child’s mor­tal­ity is the ultimate reminder of your own. Still, Charlotte is not a performer for nothing. She steels herself to see Helena, and when she does, her charm is once more in place. Lena Nyman’s presence as Helena is interesting. She made her name starring in I Am Curious—Yellow, the late-sixties film that enshrined Sweden as a world capital of self-indulgence; as Helena, she is there to remind Charlotte of the cost of self-indulgence. Her expression on seeing her mother—pure joy so intense it seems to cause her physical pain—is the most heartbreaking moment in the movie. And Ingmar Bergman is too great an artist to go the route of utter villainy with his character by suggesting that Charlotte is unaffected. Next she’s shown alone and pacing around her room, full of emotions she doesn’t want to have, planning an early end to her visit so she can avoid them. Neither is the so-far-saintly Eva above signaling some resentment. She sarcastically predicts to Victor that her mother will show up in the appropriate widow’s weeds. Instead, Charlotte sweeps in wearing a flowing red dress. Dinner is dispensed with in one cut, the better to empha­size the aftermath. Eva shyly lets herself be persuaded to play Chopin’s Prelude no. 2 in A Minor. She renders it softly and hesitantly, seemingly with a missed note here and there. Bergman’s camera lingers on Charlotte, her face at first indulgent, then gradually more and more discontented. We expect a mother to be supportive, and Eva’s yearning for approval is so tangible it almost seems to be sitting on the bench between them. But it’s inconceivable to Charlotte that, presented with a medio­cre performance, she should do anything other than try to improve it. Chopin, she tells Eva, is about “feeling,” not “sentimentality.” Unqualified praise for your child’s best efforts falls firmly in the latter category. Painful as this scene at the piano is, it is not entirely about maternal callousness. Ingmar Bergman, wrote journalist Simon Hattenstone, “used to say, almost boast, that he didn’t know the ages of his children, that he measured the years by his movies, not his offspring.” And throughout this film, Charlotte begins reminiscences by citing what she was playing—Mozart, Beethoven’s First, Bartók. It’s hard to say how much Bergman’s own paternal attitudes are being invoked here; a man who puts art above his children is considered normal in a way that a woman is not. Clearly, though, when Bergman shows repeatedly that Charlotte does not know what it is to be a mother, he is also showing that neither does Eva understand what it is to be an artist. That gap becomes a chasm later in the evening, when the fight begins with the simplest of questions from Eva: “Do you like me?” Here Ullmann’s performance gains its fullest force; her face screws up uncannily like a child’s, but she’s so devastated it’s impossible to mock. “I was a doll you played with when you had time,” Eva continues. Charlotte protests; she felt guilty, her work was suffering and it made her life seem meaningless. Here, at last, one may feel some real sympathy with Charlotte’s bitter laugh. Eva’s fury is relentless now, and Charlotte never seems more human than when she confesses, “I’ve always been afraid of you . . . I was afraid of your demands.” Eva answers that she had no demands, but that is clearly not true. She swerves to another time, before Helena’s illness got worse, when Charlotte and Leonardo visited, and Helena fell in love with her mother’s lover. (Imitation of Life, indeed.) Somehow, Eva has worked this out to be her mother’s fault, although how could anyone believe that maternal duty extends to sharing your man with your daughter? “I caused Helena’s illness?” asks Charlotte. “Yes, I think so” is the reply. It’s unfair, childish logic, but then the whole conversation has been a regression. As the scene finally closes, Charlotte is asking Eva to hold her; we don’t know if Eva does, nor do we know if they are capable of reconciling. The movie cycles back around to Eva writing another letter to her mother, convinced she’s driven Charlotte away. Bergman, for his part, wrote that “their hate becomes cemented.” Autumn Sonata was Ingrid Bergman’s swan song in thea­trical movies; when she filmed it, she already had the cancer that would kill her. Her Charlotte ended up as a triumph of emotional rawness, but director and star fought bitterly during rehearsals. He said she’d mapped out every facial expression in the mirror and was stuck “in the 1940s.” It seems clear she was grasping for any­thing that could soften Charlotte. The actress pleaded for a joke or two. No jokes, she was told. (Autumn Sonata, outside of some wan sallies from Charlotte, is indeed a joke-free zone; Scenes from a Marriage, arguably a depiction of even greater emotional damage, is a laugh riot in comparison.) They clashed over whether Charlotte had been absent from her children for seven years, as the director wrote, or five years, as his star insisted, which does sound less biblically harsh. “So to keep me quiet,” wrote the star in her memoirs, “he cut it to five—even though I noticed seven came back in the finished picture.” He won that battle, and by the time cameras rolled, he’d won the war. The finished film exposes not only a mother’s mistakes but also her searing terror of what those mistakes have wrought. Actress told auteur, “Ingmar, the people you know must be monsters.” With Charlotte, Ingmar Bergman got the fully human and ultimately tragic monster that he wanted.

There is a theatrical version of this, and although imdb says it was 1979, looking around yesterday on the internet mentions a theatrical release somewhere in Europe in 1978.

For the purposes of the tally it's Death on the Nile. Ultimately it's always for the first film I mention.

I saw five movies in the first week of the year. Train to Busan is a perfectly competent Korean thriller about a train attacked by the equivalent of zombies. Supposedly it demonstrates the value of altruism over selfishness. One might cynically suggest that more of the passengers would have survived, had the characters not put so much effort trying to rescue the two most sympathetic characters (an adorable little girl and a very pregnant woman). I would also point out that is a movie whose "pleasure" consists of watching large numbers of people die, including a whole carriage full of people in a way that is both contrived and manipulative. Green Room in which the sympathetic characters are menaced by neo-Nazis has similar problems. Patrick Stewart takes an understated role as the villain. But one can't help point out that there are several egregious problems with his strategy. And seeing whether any of the five, later six, sympathetic characters survive is a dubious enterprise. The oddest thing about Heaven Can Wait is that is received so much acclaim. While certainly a nice little comedy, that's largely because it was based on a nice little comedy made 37 years earlier. The cast does a creditable job. James Mason, playing the Claude Rains role, does the best. One suspects it got so many nominations was because Beatty was a big star. Which makes me think that The Alamo, notwithstanding its Best Picture nomination, must be a much more irritating movie. In Jackson Heights is a fine documentary about the diverse Queens neighborhood. The main problem is that the subtitles (much of the talk is in Spanish) are often against a white background. One wonders why both TCM didn't play Wiseman in their month of documentaries Finally Captain America: the Winter Soldier is actually an effective action movie, with Chris Evans doing a good job as the patriot while Robert Redford is an effective villain. The sequences are very fluid and it's also witty as well.

If MacLaine was supporting in Some Came Running, where she had an oscar nomination for lead, was Sinatra's final love interest, and whose death is the conclusion of the film, shouldn't she be supporting in Being There? All the other characters except Sellers are clearly supporting, she doesn't have much more screen time or any better insight into his character than the others, and she does little to advance the action. Julie Christie didn't have much screen time in Heaven Can Wait, but at least she was the love interest, and a motivation for Beatty's character. MacLaine, by contrast, only thinks she's the love interest..

Actor Peter Ustinov, Death on the Nile Robert De Niro, The Deer Hunter Alan Bates, The Shout John Hurt, Watership Down/The Lord of the Rings Dustin Hoffman, Straight Time Runner-ups: Donald Sutherland (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), Elliott Gould (The Silent Partner), Christopher Plummer (The Silent Partner), Francois Truffaut (The Green Room), Tom E. Lewis (The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith), Warren Beatty (Heaven can Wait), Alan Bates (An Unmarried Woman), Gregory Peck (The Boys from Brazil), Laurence Olivier (The Boys from Brazil), Harvey Keitel (Blue Collar), Peter Falk (The Cheap Detective), Christopher Guard (The Lord of the Rings), Christopher Reeve (Superman), Bill Hunter (Newsfront), Volker Spengler (In a Year of 13 Moons), Richard Gere (Days of Heaven), Antonio Sequeiria Lopes (Doomed Love) Actress Liv Ullmann, Autumn Sonata Ingrid Bergman, Autumn Sonata Goldie Hawn, Foul Play Jill Clayburgh, An Unmarried Woman Brooke Adams, Days of Heaven/The Invasion of the Body Snatchers Runner-ups: Olivia Newton-John (Grease), Nathalie Baye (The Green Room), Margot Kidder (Superman), Diano Ross (The Wiz), Susannah York (The Silent Partner), Susannah York (The Shout), Melanie Mayron (Girlfriends), Nancy Allen (I wanna Hold your Hand), Diane Keaton (Interiors), Cristina Hauser (Doomed Love), Marilyn Jones (The Scenic Route) Supporting Actor John Cazale, The Deer Hunter David Niven, Death on the Nile Christopher Walken, The Deer Hunter John Hurt, Midnight Express/The Shout James Mason, Heaven can Wait Runner-ups: John Savage (The Deer Hunter), George Dzunda (The Deer Hunter), Harry Andrews (Watership Down), Chuck Aspegren (The Deer Hunter), Sam Shepard (Days of Heaven), Jack Warden (Death on the Nile), Leonard Nimoy (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), Gene Hackman (Superman), Richard Briers (Watership Down), George Kennedy (Death on the Nile), Michael Graham Cox (Watership Down), Denholm Elliott (Watership Down), Nipsey Russell (The Wiz), Charles Grodin (Heaven can Wait), Jeff Goldblum (The Invasion of the Body Snatchers), Robert Morley (Who is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?), James Mason (The Boys from Brazil), Chris Haywood (Newsfront), Zero Mostel (Watership Down), Dudley Moore (Foul Play), Ned Beatty (Superman), Jackie Cooper (Superman), Jack Warden (Heaven can Wait), Tim Curry (The Shout), Harry Dean Stanton (Straight Time), Luigi Omaghi (The Tree of Wooden Clogs), Omar Brignoli (The Tree of Wooden Clogs), Michael Caine (California Suite), Supporting Actress Maggie Smith, Death on the Nile/California Suite Meryl Streep, The Deer Hunter Linda Manz, Days of Heaven Theresa Russell, Straight Time Angela Lansbury, Death on the Nile Runner-ups: Lena Nyman (Autumn Sonata), Mia Farrow (Death on the Nile), Veronica Cartwright (The Invasion of the Body Snatchers), Mabel King (The Wiz), Bette Davis (Death on the Nile), Valerie Perrine (Superman), Dyan Cannon (Heaven can Wait), Stockard Channing (Grease), Theresa Saldana (I Wanna Hold your Hand), Didi Conn (Grease), Julie Christie (Heaven can Wait) Not seen: Coming Home, The Buddy Holly Story, Same Time, Next Year, Comes a Horseman -------Rather strikingly, there is an actor in each category who wins a collective award. -------This is the first year Meryl Streep gets a nomination. How long will it take her to win an award?

We're doing favorite performances of the year since 1930, and we're now up to 1978. I almost nominated Wyman for All that Heaven Allows. I have never seen Johnny Belinda, and I will next week when it's on TCM. I can't say I'm optimistic about the movie. Despite its many nominations, I haven't really heard much that suggests that is truly a great movie as opposed to a well regarded film of the time.

Having just watched it last night, I'm not sure Christie gets that much more screen time than Cannon. It's certainly Beatty who dominates the proceedings.

I actually liked the movie. I thought the action sequences were effective, I thought Robert Downey made a charming Tony Stark, (unlike the rather bland people who have replaced the original Star Trek cast). There was also some thought (not a lot) given to the moral dilemma at the core of the movie. But then I have a fairly good knowledge of the Marvel Universe.