skimpole
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Posts posted by skimpole
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MIRA NAIR: Mississippi Masala
MIKIO NARUSE: Floating Clouds
GREGORY NAVA:
JAN NEMEC:
MIKE NEWELL: Four weddings and a funeralJEFF NICHOLS:
MIKE NICHOLS: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
CHRISTOPHER NOLAN: Memento
PHILLIP NOYCE: Newsfront
VICTOR NUNEZ:
LAURENCE OLIVIER: Henry V
ERMANNO OLMI: The Tree of Wooden Clogs
MARCEL OPHULS: The Sorrow and The Pity
MAX OPHULS: The Earrings of Madame De
NAGISA OSHIMA: Death by Hanging
IDRISSA OUEDRAOGO:
FRANCOIS OZON:
YASUJIRO OZU: Late Spring -
GUSTAV MACHATY:
ALEXANDER MACKENDRICK: Sweet Smell of Success
JOHN MACKEZNIE: The Long Good Friday
JOHN MADDEN: Shakespeare in Love
GUY MADDIN: The Forbidden Room
DUSAN MAKAVEJEV: WR: Mysteries of the Organism
MOHSEN MAKHMALBAF: A Moment of Innocence
KAROLY MAKK:
TERRENCE MALICK: Badlands
LOUIS MALLE: My Dinner with Andre
DJIBRIL DIOP MAMBETY: Hyenes
DAVID MAMET: The Spanish Prisoner
JOSEPH L. MANKIEWICZ: All About Eve
MICHAEL MANN: Heat
CHRIS MARKER: Sans Soleil
ELAINE MAY: Mikey and Nicky
DAVID & ALBERT MAYSLES: Gimme Shelter
PAUL MAZURSKY: Enemies: A Love Story
NORMAN Z. MCLEOD: Monkey Business
LEO MCCAREY: Duck Soup
JOHN MCTIERNAN: Die Hard
PETER MEDAK: Let Him Have it
FERNANDO MEIRELLES: City of God
JEAN-PIERRE MELVILLE: Le Samourai
SAM MENDES: Skyfall
JIRI MENZEL: Closely Watched Trains
OSCAR MICHEAUX: Within our Gates
TAKASHI MIIKE: Audition
NIKITA MIKHALKOV: A Slave of Love
LEWIS MILESTONE: All Quiet on the Western Front
GEORGE MILLER: Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior
TSAI MING-LANG: Vive L'Amour
ANTHONY MINGHELLA: The English Patient
VINCENTE MINNELLI: The Band Wagon
HAYAO MIYAZAKI: Spirited Away
KENJI MIZOGUCHI: The Life of Oharu
MARIO MONICELLI: The Organizer
LUKAS MOODYSSON:
MICHAEL MOORE: Roger and Me
NANNI MORETTI: Caro Diaro
ERROL MORRIS: The Thin Blue Line
ROBERT MULLIGAN: To Kill a Mockingbird
F.W. MURNAU: Sunrise-
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I think Danny Peary in Alternate Oscar mentions that at times Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins is more a supporting than a lead performance. Does anyone agree? (Because that would make my best supporting actress much much easier.)
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James Quandt on the Criterion edition of Muriel:
Designated merely as “he” and “she” in Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and A, X, and M in Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Alain Resnais’s characters finally assume names in his third feature, Muriel, or The Time of Return (1963), whose very title tellingly exchanges a place for a person. That the eponymous woman remains unseen in the film, conjured only by a recounted memory, suggests that the filmmaker’s inclination to enigma and abstraction—often too simply attributed to the scripts by Marguerite Duras (Hiroshima) and Alain Robbe-Grillet (Marienbad) in the previous two films—continues in Muriel. But what Resnais himself called the “dreamlike” aura of Marienbad is here replaced by a new tactility, a much vaunted materialism that can be ascribed to both his intensified political resolve, which had caused conflicts with Robbe-Grillet, and to the documentarist tendencies of Muriel’s scenarist, Jean Cayrol. This precision is immediately evident in the opening volley of shots, which inventories, in over twenty lightning-quick jump cuts, a gloved hand, a teakettle, a chandelier, a tapestry, a cigarette, a clock. Ironically, this catalog reflects vestiges of the chosisme, or “thingness,” that Robbe-Grillet developed in his novels, in which inanimate objects sometimes predominate over plot, setting, and character, and protagonists are defined by the items they own. In which case, antiques dealer Hélène, played with restive intensity by Delphine Seyrig, is by nature precarious, as everything she possesses is for sale; even the china on which she serves dinner has been sold. Her future has been mortgaged, and her past increasingly recedes into uncertainty. “Can’t we be done with the past?” Hélène cries in exasperation, but the time-trapped characters in Muriel, forever announcing their imminent departure but staying on in a kind of willed immobility, can never elude their histories, even as they fabricate new ones (Hélène’s old lover, Alphonse), conceal them with bidden amnesia (Hélène), or attempt to expiate them with violence (her stepson, Bernard).
....Little is secure or fixed in Muriel, certainly not Hélène’s existence, prone as she is to compulsive gambling and escalating anxiety, or Alphonse’s histoire, finally revealed, as the double meaning of that word indicates, as fiction. (The duplicitous roué checks the newspaper like a hunted criminal in a mystery, which Muriel unquestionably is, replete with many homages to Hitchcock.) As Alphonse, who lies even when he is alone, describes his exclusive club in Algiers, Resnais captures the glances that ricochet around the quartet of characters—Alphonse’s shifty, Hélène’s vague, Françoise’s piercing, Bernard’s absent—their looks concatenated by the latter’s slow crunching of potato chips on the soundtrack.
....Hélène’s grasp of that history is tenuous, personal, banal. She associates Folkestone with a hotel in which she and Alphonse once stayed, cannot remember if the number of Boulogne inhabitants killed in World War II was 200 or 3,000, and later confides that a local chef has been deported and that if he had died, his seafood recipe would have been lost forever. Her vagueness seems a matter not of mere imprecision but of intentional disregard: “My memory’s so awful. I forget everything!” she exclaims, cultivating her own absentmindedness. The film’s relics and ruins emphasize its interleaved themes of memory and reconstruction: as did A and X before them, Hélène and Alphonse attempt to reconstitute their past together; Boulogne rebuilds after the war; Bernard revives the story of Muriel’s torture despite his fellow soldier Robert’s admonition to quell it.
....The temps d’un retour, as Alphonse returns to Hélène (and Muriel returns to reality in Bernard’s telling), becomes a temps d’un départ at film’s end, as the characters flee, decamp, and scatter—save for Hélène, who runs dazedly through the streets, arriving too late at the now disused train station. “Ça change,” the stationmaster comments, but for all her frenzied motion, Hélène remains entombed by the past, unable to change or escape. The film’s finale, which answers the initial montage with a Resnaisian tracking shot that explores Hélène’s apartment with a spatial continuity that the splintering jump cuts strenuously denied, introduces another arrival, that of Simone, who navigates the nest of portals, dramatically throwing open doors as if to disclose the untoward, but finding only detritus.
Another of the film’s twice-told tales concerns Hélène’s and Bernard’s shared but contrary recall of a bombing during the war that left a hole in the roof through which rain (her version) or snow (his) fell. What they most remember is the white ash left by the fire. Just as Hélène’s tormented “Do I look my age?” recalls Emmanuelle Riva’s cri de coeur “I was so young once!” in Hiroshima mon amour, the ash evokes the glimmering cinders that settle on intertwined flesh in Hiroshima’s opening images. In Muriel, the incinerated remains become for the forgetful Hélène and the obsessively remembering Bernard nothing less than the ashes of time.
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One of my favorite movies, and certainly one of my favorite movies about history is The Leopard. Among its many. many, virtues is its profound picture of history. Its portrait of unification Sicily unsentimental and profound, in striking contrast to Gone With the Wind and Gangs of New York which both take place at roughly the same time. But crucial to its success is Lancaster's remarkable performance. And here I turn over to Roger Ebert's review:
"The Leopard" was written by the only man who could have written it, directed by the only man who could have directed it, and stars the only man who could have played its title character. The first of these claims is irrefutable, because Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, a Sicilian aristocrat, wrote the story out of his own heart and based it on his great-grandfather. Whether another director could have done a better job than Luchino Visconti is doubtful; the director was himself a descendant of the ruling class that the story eulogizes. But that Burt Lancaster was the correct actor to play Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, was at the time much doubted; that a Hollywood star had been imported to grace this most European--indeed, Italian--indeed, Sicilian--masterpiece was a scandal.
It was rumored that Lancaster's presence was needed to make the epic production bankable. And when the film finally opened in America, in a version with 40 minutes ruthlessly hacked out by the studio, and with a soundtrack unconvincingly dubbed into English, it was hard to see what Visconti and Lancaster had been thinking of. "Unfortunately Mr. Lancaster does have that blunt American voice that lacks the least suggestion of being Sicilian," wrote Bosley Crowther in the New York Times. Visconti himself was blunt: "It is now a work for which I acknowledge no paternity at all," he said, adding that Hollywood treated Americans "like a public of children."
"It was my best work," Lancaster himself told me sadly, more than 20 years later. "I bought 11 copies of The Leopard because I thought it was a great novel. I gave it to everyone. But when I was asked to play in it, I said, no, that part's for a real Italian. But, lo, the wheels of fortune turned. They wanted a Russian, but he was too old. [According to one account, it was Nikolai Chersakov, star of Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, but he was too drunk.] They wanted Olivier, but he was too busy. When I was suggested, Visconti said, 'Oh, no! A cowboy!' But I had just finished 'Judgment at Nuremberg,' which he saw, and he needed $3 million, which 20th Century-Fox would give them if they used an American star, and so the inevitable occurred. And it turned out to be a wonderful marriage."
When we talked, the original film--uncut, undubbed--had scarcely been seen since the time of its European release in 1963. But in 1980, four years after Visconti's death, the cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno supervised a restoration; at 185 minutes his version is still shorter than the original 205 minutes, but it is the best we are ever likely to see, and it is magnificent.
What's clear at last is that Lancaster was an inspired casting decision. An actor who always brought a certain formality to his work, who made his own way as an independent before that was fashionable, he embodies the prince as a man who has a great love for a way of life he understands must come to an end. He is a natural patriarch, a man born to have authority. Yet as we meet him, he is aware of his age and mortality, inclined to have spiritual conversations with his friend Father Pirrone, and prepared to compromise in order to preserve his family's fortunes.
We see him first leading his family at prayer. That is also the way Lampedusa's novel begins, and one of Visconti's achievements is to make that rare thing, a great film of a great book. Word comes that there is a dead soldier in the garden. This means that Garibaldi's revolution has jumped from the mainland to Sicily, and the days of the ancient order are numbered.
The prince has a wife named Maria Stella, who he dutifully honors more for her position than her person, three daughters of only moderate loveliness and a feckless son. He looks to his nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon) to embody the family's noble genes. Tancredi is a hothead who leaves to join Garibaldi, but a realist who returns as a member of the army of the victorious Victor Emmanuel.
Because of land reforms that he can clearly see on the horizon, the prince believes it is time for the family to make an advantageous marriage. He moves every year with his household from the city to the countryside to wait out the slow, hot summer months, and in the town of Donnafugata, he is welcomed as usual by the mayor, a buffoon named Don Calogero (Paolo Stoppa). This mayor has suddenly become rich through lucky land investments, and feels that wealth has given him importance, an illusion that the prince is willing to indulge, if it can lead to a liaison between the mayor's money and the prince's family.
He invites the mayor to dinner, in a scene of subdued social comedy in which Visconti observes, without making too much of a point of it, how gauche the mayor is and how pained the prince is to have to give dinner to such a man. The mayor has brought with him not his unpresentable wife but his beautiful daughter Angelica, played by Claudia Cardinale at the height of her extraordinary beauty. Tancredi is moonstruck, and the prince swallows his misgivings as arrangements are made to go ahead with the marriage.
All of this would be the stuff of soap opera in other hands, but Lampedusa's novel sees the prince so sympathetically that we share his regrets for a fading way of life. We might believe ideologically that the aristocracy exploits the working class (Visconti was a Marxist who believed just that), but the prince himself is such a proud and good man, so aware of his mortality, so respectful of tradition and continuity, that as he compromises his family in order to save it, we share his remorse.
There is another factor at work. The prince is an alpha male, born to conquer, aware of female beauty if also obedient to the morality of his church. He finds Angelica as attractive as his nephew does. But Visconti doesn't communicate this with soulful speeches or whispered insinuations; he directs his actors to do this all with eyes, and the attitude of a head, and those subtle adjustments in body language that suggest the desired person exerts a kind of animal magnetism that must be resisted. Observe how Lancaster has the prince almost lean away from Angelica, as if in response to her pull. He is too old at 45 (which was old in the 1860s) and too traditional to reveal his feelings, but a woman can always tell, even though she must seem as if she cannot.
The film ends with a ballroom sequence lasting 45 minutes. "This is a set piece that has rarely been equaled," writes the critic Derek Malcolm, and critic Dave Kehr called it "one of the most moving meditations on individual mortality in the history of the cinema." Visconti, Lancaster and Rotunno collaborate to resolve all of the themes of the movie in this long sequence in which almost none of the dialogue involves what is really happening. The ball is a last glorious celebration of the dying age; Visconti cast members of noble old Sicilian families as the guests, and in their faces, we see a history that cannot be acted, only embodied. The orchestra plays Verdi. The young people dance on and on, and the older people watch carefully and gauge the futures market in romances and liaisons.
Through this gaiety the prince moves like a shadow. The camera follows him from room to room, suggesting his thoughts, his desires, his sadness. Visconti is confident that Lancaster can suggest all of the shadings of the prince's feelings, and extends the scene until we are drawn fully into it. He creates one of those sequences for which we go to the movies: We have grown to know the prince's personality and his ideas, and now we enter, almost unaware, into his emotions. The cinema at its best can give us the illusion of living another life, and that's what happens here.
Finally the prince dances with Angelica. Watch them as they dance, each aware of the other in a way simultaneously sexual and political. Watch how they hold their heads. How they look without seeing. How they are seen, and know they are seen. And sense that, for the prince, his dance is an acknowledgment of mortality. He could have had this woman, would have known what to do with her, would have made her his wife and the mother of his children and heard her cries of passion, if not for the accident of 25 years or so that slipped in between them. But he knows that, and she knows that. And yet of course if they were the same age, he would not have married her, because he is Prince Don Fabrizio and she is the mayor's daughter. That Visconti is able to convey all of that in a ballroom scene is miraculous and emotionally devastating, and it is what his movie is about.
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In Onibaba, are the mother in law (Nobuko Otawa) and the daughter in law (Jitsuko Yoshimura) both lead roles, or is one lead and the other supporting?
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1963
A much shorter list than years past. This year also features the most films that I straight out disliked, despite liking the cast. There are a couple entries (Shirley MacLaine and Debbie Reynolds, where I didn't care for their film, but I liked them).
Well it's good that somebody remembered Cary Grant.
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I saw four movies this week. Love and Friendship starts with a rush of information that might confuse viewers. I'm not really an Austen fan: often I think it's gentry-porn. On the one hand there is the view, which I suspect the conservative Stillman supports, that love is a reward one gets for obedience to conventional norms. But on the other hand Tom Bennett is a hoot as a nitwit suitor. I'll have to remember him when consider Best Supporting Actors for the year. And Kate Beckinsale is very good as the ingenious and unscrupulous protagonist. It's encouraging that she isn't ruined at the end of the movie. Abraham Lincoln is D.W. Griffith's take on the 16th president. Its flaws become more evident as the movie proceeds. For a start, you can't cover his entire life in 95 minutes. Nor does it do a good job of explaining the politics of the period, as if discussing politics would detract from preventing a patently political event like a civil war. So instead we get a few sound bites of Lincoln's most famous lines. The Ann Rutledge myth is played out too long: one of the advantages of Young Mr. Lincoln was the economy it spent on the subject. But it's worth a look. The Wailing is a Korean horror movie, which asks what if Clancy Wiggum found himself in a real horror movie? The result become progressively more interesting and watchable hampered only by a weak ending. Like the show Lost the forces of good are critically hampered because the person who knows everything is unnecessarily and unhelpfully vague. I'll see you in my Dreams is the kind of competent movie one would think Hollywood would better know how to make. Its fairly low profile is due to its subject matter: it's about a retired widow who decides to take a more active life after she has to put her dog down. She then has two friendships with people of the opposite sex, which are handled intelligently if not profoundly. (A scene where she and her trio of female friends take some marijuana proceeds exactly as every other scene of the subject does). It benefits from a good lead performance by Blythe Danner.
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Actor
Burt Lancaster, The Leopard
Gunnar Bjornstrand, Winter Light
Michel Piccoli, Contempt
Marello Mastroanni, The Organizer
Steve McQueen, The Great Escape
Runner-ups: Cary Grant (Charade), Toshiro Mifune (High and Low), Paul Newman (Hud), Marcello Mastroianni (8 1/2), Tatsuya Nakadi (High and Low), Jean-Pierre Karien (Muriel), Nino Manfredi (El Verdugo/The Executioner/Not on your Life), Kazuo Hasegawa (An Actor's Revenge), Anil Chatterjee (The Big City), Dirk Bogarde (The Servant), James Fox (The Servant)
Actress
Delphine Seyrig, Muriel
Brigitte Bardot, Contempt
Ingrid Thulin, Winter Light
Jeanne Moreau, Bay of Angels
Madhabi Mukherjee, The Big City
Runner-ups: Audrey Hepburn (Charade), Ingrid Thulin (The Silence), Sophia Loren (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow), Gunnel Lindblom (The Silence), Maria Ribeiro (Vidas Secas), Elizabeth Taylor (Cleopatra), Julie Harris (The Haunting),,
Supporting Actor
Alain Delon, The Leopard
Rex Harrison, Cleopatra
Richard Attenborough, The Great Escape
Melvyn Douglas, Hud
Donald Pleasance, The Great Escape
Runner-ups: James Garner (The Great Escape), Walter Matthau (Charade), David McCallum (The Great Escape), Romolo Valli (The Leopard), George Kennedy (Charade), Jean-Baptise Thierree (Muriel), James Coburn (The Great Escape), Peter Sellers (The Pink Panther), Roddy McDowall (Cleopatra), Max von Sydow (Winter Light), Jack Palance (Contempt), Gordon Jackson (The Great Escape), Robert Shaw (From Russia with Love),
Supporting Actress
Claudia Cardinale, The LeopardPatrica Neal, Hud
Anouk Aimee, 8 1/2
Suzanne Pleshette, The Birds
Claudia Cardinale, 8 1/2
Runner-ups: Gunnel Lindblom (Winter Light), Nita Klein (Muriel), Veronica Cartwright (The Birds), Jessica Tandy (The Birds), Ethel Merman (It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World), Martha Wentworth (The Sword in the Stone),
Not seen: Lilies of the Field, The L-Shaped Room, Irma La Douce, Love with the Proper Stranger, Twilight of Honor, Captain Newman, M.D.-------Lancaster's performance is one of the truly great ones in movies, notwithstanding the fact that it's not his actual voice.
-------For the first time, none of the Best Actress nominees are from Hollywood, or in English. The two nominees I've seen, Neal and Roberts, are arguably supporting. As for the other three, TCM Canada refused to show The L-Shaped Room, Irma may be one of Wilder's least respected movies and Love with the Proper Stranger sounds extremely unpromising, an exploration of unplanned pregnancy with a sentimental ending.
-------1963 was not a bad year for movies, but it was not a good year for Hollywood, or for the Academy's judgement. Danny Peary in his Alternate Oscar refused to give a winner this year.
-------Cleopatra doesn't really have a very good reputation. Notwithstanding its best picture nomination, people were clearly tired of extravagant epics being forced on them by Hollywood hype. And one very obvious contrast with Spartacus is that the latter movie has a very good reason why we should care about the title character. I actually don't think the Mankiewicz is that sympathetic for Cleopatra over Octavian, just as we're not simply to take Lawrence's side in Lawrence of Arabia. The difference is that Cleopatra desperately needed to make its money back, and so the movie is forced to depend on Taylor's star power. Nevertheless of the four nominees I've seen, this is the one I prefer.
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The first time I saw Lolita, I was struck by the odd vocal characterization by Peter Sellers as Quilty. It wasn't until years later that I learned that he was imitating Stanley Kubrick's own voice, which made the performance all the more humorous to me. It ranks among the other fun performer-as-filmmaker turns along with Ward Bond as the John Ford-like John Dodge in The Wings of Eagles, Dustin Hoffman as a Robert Evans-like producer in Wag the Dog, and Robert DeNiro as Martin Scorsese as the Devil in Angel Heart.
One could also mention Burt Lancaster using Visconti as a model for his performance in The Leopard. More about that next week.
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Shouldn't we have a December schedule by now?
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I saw three movies this week. April and the Twisted World is a French animated film. It imagines a world that changed as a result of scientific meddling in 1870, and when the narrative proper begins in 1931, scientific development has been delayed because someone has been kidnapping the world's scientists. The solution to this mystery isn't that innovative or clever, and because a side effect of this alternate world is that the world is ravaged by pollution, this is a steampunk movie in which everything is covered in unpleasant shades of grey and brown. Finding Dory is a genuinely good movie, even though there was no pressing need to make a sequel to the original. Much of the underwater scenes are genuinely beautiful and the plot shows considerable ingenuity trying to get the fish protagonists getting from one place to another in the aquarium where most of the action takes place. But the movie of the week is My Golden Days, a sort of amplification of an earlier, much admired Desplechin film not availabe on DVD. It takes some time for the movie to get started, with an anecdote about the protagonist's exciting adventure in Soviet era Minsk while on a school trip. But once the main plot of his teenage affair with the striking, nervous, not entirely confident Esther starts, the value of the movie becomes more apparent.
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Peter O'Toole, Lawrence of Arabia
James Mason, Lolita
Gregory Peck, To Kill a Mockingbird
Chishu Ryu, An Autumn Afternoon
Ralph Richardson, Long Day's Journey into Night
Runner-ups: Tatsuya Nakadi (Harakiri), Jack Lemmon (Days of Wine and Roses), Oskar Werner (Jules et Jim), Jean-Paul Belmondo (Le Doulos), Alain Delon (L'Eclisse), Henri Serre (Jules et Jim), Leon Niemczyk (Knife in the Water), Zygmunt Malanowicz (Knife in the Water), Anthony Perkins (The Trial), Kolya Burlyayev (Ivan's Childhood/My Name is Ivan), Toshio Mifune (Sanjuru), Tom Courtenay (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner), James Stewart (The Man who Shot Liberty Valance), Marlon Brando (Mutiny on the Bounty),
Actress
Jeanne Moreau, Jules et Jim
Anna Karina, Vivre sa Vie
Katharine Hepburn, Long Day's Journey into Night
Jolanta Umecka, Knife in the Water
Lee Remick, Days of Wine and Roses
Runner-ups: Anne Bancroft (The Miracle Worker), Anna Magnani (Mamma Rosa), Corinne Marchand (Cleo from 5 to 7), Monica Vitti (L'Eclisse), Silvia Pinal (The Exterminating Angel),,
Supporting Actor
Alec Guinness, Lawrence of Arabia
Peter Sellers, Lolita
Omar Shariff, Lawrence of Arabia
Laurence Harvey, The Manchurian Candidate
Jason Robards, Long Day's Journey into Night
Runner-ups: Dean Stockwell (Long Day's Journey into Night), Jack Hawkins (Lawrence of Arabia), Henry Fonda (Advise and Consent), Akira Ishihama (Harakiri), Arthur Kennedy (Lawrence of Arabia), Evgeny Zharikov (Ivan's Childhood/My name is Ivan), Orson Welles (The Trial), Anthony Quinn (Lawrence of Arabia), Eijiro Tono (An Autumn Afternoon), Jack Klugman (Days of Wine and Roses), Walter Pidgeon (Advise and Consent), Jose Ferrer (Lawrence of Arabia), Claude Rains (Lawrence of Arabia)Supporting Actress
Shelley Winters, Lolita
Angela Lansbury, The Manchurian Candidate
Mary Badham, To Kill a Mockingbird
Patty Duke, The Miracle Worker
Shima Iwashita, Harakiri, An Autumn Afternoon
Runner-ups: Janet Leigh (The Manchurian Candidate), Jeanne Moreau (The Trial), Ursula Andress (Dr. No), Valentina Malyavina (Ivan's Childhood/My Name is Ivan), Mariko Okada (An Autumn Afternoon),
Not seen: The Music Man, Divorce Italian Style, David and Lisa, Birdman of Alcatraz, Sweet Bird of Youth, Billy Budd-------Alec Guinness finally gets one of my Oscars, and while one might cavil at having an Arab played by an English (Scots?) actor, in my view director/actor chemistry counts more than historical accuracy.
-------Two girls enter the always weak Supporting Actress category. Yet if I had to choose a juvenile performer for the year it would be Burlyayev well behind in the Actor runner-ups.
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Are March and Lancaster the leads in Seven Days in May, or could Lancaster be supporting? There isn't any reason to doubt that Douglas is supporting?
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NEIL LABUTE: Possession
GREGORY LA CAVA: Stage Door
JOHN LANDIS: The Blues Brothers
FRITZ LANG: M
CLAUDE LANZMANN: Shoah
DAVID LEAN: Lawrence of Arabia
PATRICE LECONTE:
ANG LEE: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
SPIKE LEE: She's Gotta Have it
MIKE LEIGH: Secrets and Lies
CLAUD LELOUCH:
SERGIO LEONE: Once Upon a time in the West
IRVING LERNER: Murder by Contract
MERVYN LEROY: I Am a Fugitive from a Chain GangRICHARD LESTER: Help!
BARRY LEVINSON: Diner
RICHARD LINKLATER: Dazed and Confused
HAROLD LLOYD: Safety Last
KEN LOACH: Kes
KONSTANTIN LOPUSHANSKY:
JOSEPH LOSEY: The Go-Between
ERNST LUBITSCH: Trouble in Paradise
GEORGE LUCAS: Star Wars
SIDNEY LUMET: Murder on the Orient Express
BAZ LUHRMANN: Strictly Ballroom
DAVID LYNCH: Mulholland Drive -
KON ICHIKAWA: An Actor's Revene
SHOHEI IMAMURA: The ballad of Narayama
HIROSHI INAGAKI:
OTAR IOSSELIANI:
JORIS IVENS: A Tale of the Wind
JAMES IVORY: The Remains of the Day
PETER JACKSON: The Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the RingKEN JACOBS: Tom Tom The Piper's Son
STEVE JAMES: Hoop Dreams
MIKLOS JANSCO: Red Psalm
DEREK JARMAN: Caravaggio
JIM JARMUSCH: Dead Man
JEAN-PIERRE JEUNET: A Very Long Engagement
NORMAN JEWISON: Jesus Christ Superstar
ZHANG KE JIA: A Touch of Sin
WEN JIANG:
JAROMIL JIRES:
ALEJANDRO JODOROWSKY: El Topo
ROLAND JOFFE: The MissionBONG JOON-HO: Memories of Murder
NEIL JORDAN: The Crying Game
KAREL KACHYNA: The Ear
JAN KADAR & ELMAR KLOS: The Shop on Main Street
MIKHAIL KALATOZOV: The Red Tent
LAU KAR-LEUNG:
WONG KAR-WAI: Chungking Express
LAWRENCE KASDAN:
MATTHIEU KASSOVITZ: La Haine
PHILIP KAUFMAN: The Right Stuff
AKI KAURISMAKI: The Man without a Past
ELIA KAZAN: Wild River
BUSTER KEATON: Sherlock Jr.
NACER KHAMIR:
ABBAS KIAROSTAMI: Certified Copy
KIM KI-DUK: Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring
KRYSTOF KIESLOWSKI: A Short Film About Killing (Dekalog #6)
TEINOSUKE KINUGASA: A Page of Madness
TAKESHI KITANO: Sonatine
ELEM KLIMOV: Come and See
DIMITRI KIRSANOFF: Menilmontant
MASAKI KOBAYASHI: Harikiri
SATOSHI KON:
ANDREI KONCHALOVSKY:
NIKOS KOUNDOUROS:
BARBARA KOPPLE: Harlan County, USA
ALEXANDER KORDA: The Thief of Baghdad
HIROKAZU KORE-EDA: After Life
ROBERT KRAMER: Ice
STANLEY KRAMER:
STANLEY KUBRICK: 2001: A Space Odyssey
AKIRA KUROSAWA: Seven Samurai
EMIR KUSTURICA: Underground-
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BLAKE EDWARDS: The Pink Panther Strikes Again
ABEL GANCE: Napoleon
RODRIGO GARCIA:
PHILLIPE GARREL: The Naked Child
COSTA-GAVRAS: The Confession
ERNIE GEHR: N/A
JEAN GENET: Un Chant D'AmourHAILE GERIMA:
ALEXEI GERMAN: Hard to Be a God
RITWIK GHATAK: The Cloud-Capped Star
MEL GIBSON:
TERRY GILLIAM: Brazil
JEAN-LUC GODARD: Breathless
MICHEL GONDRY: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
DAVID GORDON GREEN: George Washington
PETER GREENAWAY: Drowning by Numbers
PAUL GREENGRASS:
D.W. GRIFFITH: Intolerance
ULU GROSBARD: Straight TimePATRICIO GUZMAN: The Battle for Chile
LASSE HALLSTROM: My Life as a Dog
ROBERT HAMER:
MICHAEL HANEKE: The Piano Teacher
KAZUO HARA: The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On
TSUI HARK: Once Upon a time in China
HAL HARTLEY:
WOJCIECH HAS: The Saragossa ManuscriptHENRY HATHAWAY: Peter Ibbetson
HOWARD HAWKS: His Girl Friday
TODD HAYNES: Carol
MONTE HELLMAN: Two-Lane Blacktop
WERNER HERZOG: Fitzcarraldo
GEORGE ROY HILL: The Sting
WALTER HILL: The Long Riders
ALFRED HITCHCOCK: North by Northwest
WERNER HOCHBAUM:
AGNIESKA HOLLAND: Europa, Europa
RON HOWARD: Splash
HOU HSIAO-HSIEN: Three Times
ALLEN AND ALBERT HUGHES:JOHN HUGHES: Ferris Bueller's Day Off
JOHN HUSTON: The Man who Would be King
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I don't want to raise the whole Stanley Kramer thing again, but if you did have to choose a performance from Judgment at Nuremberg, why wouldn't you choose Lancaster's?
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'tis absolutely exasperating how film makers consistently allow themselves to be deceived by the standards of beauty and fashion of their own time periods! Even BARRY LYNDON, a movie that works extra hard to present an accurate image of the 18th century, is ruined by the fact that its leading lady, Marisa Berenson, totally looks like a 1970s playgirl who chooses to go to the disco dressed up in 18th century petticoats.
Really? I wouldn't think there would be that many discos in mid seventies rural Ireland where much of the movie was shot. How should Berenson have looked?
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I watched seven movies last week. Zardoz certainly shows that John Boorman had talent, even if the conceit, a world of sexless immortality which must embrace death to truly live, isn't particularly profound. It's a pity that such imagination and money were used to make such an ultimately trivial point. Choose Me is an interesting romantic movie, with Keith Carradine, Genevieve Bujold and Lesley Anne Warren playing a somewhat unstable romantic triangle. It has more bite than The Enchanted College which doesn't quite work. Part of the problem is that Dorothy McGuire and Robert Young aren't the most attractive couple. Another problem is that McGuire's character isn't really as ugly as the other characters rudely point out. Only by idiotic Hollywood standards is she "homely." And then there's the Pollyanish (literally the glad game) nature of the conceit. Zootopia on the hand shows a trend of slowly improving Disney animated movies. One particularly good scene has the rabbit heroine, who up to then has suffered from being the smallest in the police academy, chasing a villain and finding herself a King Kong figure in a city of shrews. Unfortunately Disney animated movies still have some way to go: the basic metaphor involves former prey fearing former predators, and this is supposedly like racism. Except predators do inherently feed on prey, which means the fear is entirely rational in a way racist ones are not. (Nor is it clear what the predators feed on, which means that the claim that they have transcended their predator past looks more like political correctness than sincere principle.) Also, you'll guess who the villain is once there's a false reveal. The Corn is Green is blessed with a striking performance by Bette Davis, which holds it together. I wouldn't have nominated it for Best Actress in 1945, but her performance is patently superior than those by John Dall and Joan Lorring, who were nominated. Captain America: Civil War is actually fairly effective as a super-hero movie, with the conflict between the heroes not being unreasonable and the actual fights shown with some energy and brio. It's also amusing in places. Heaven Knows What is a grueling addiction picture, with a former addict as the protagonist. I must say that the addiction movie is a genre with fairly limited appeal to me. Either the protagonist realizes he or she has a problem and eventually realizes it after an hour or two, or he or she doesn't. There's Trainspotting which offers style, some classic songs and decides to turn into a heist movie for the last third. In this case, the protagonist clearly needs help, clearly is not going to get it, and is involved in masochistic relationships where she also needs help. The movie is certainly genuinely unpleasant.
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Jonathan Rosenbaum has commented that Cary Grant would have been better than the actual lead in both Ninotchka and Love in the Afternoon, and it's hard to disagree.
Fanny and Alexander is one of very greatest movies, but imagine it with Max von Sydow as the stepfather, Liv Ullmann and Ingrid Bergman just living long enough to be the grandmother!
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I've wondered that about Lemmon myself. My only guess is there may have been some unpublicized disagreement between them, such as Lemmon wanting too much money.
Or maybe Lemmon was busy making another movie.
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Actor
Paul Newman, The Hustler
James Cagney, One, Two, Three
Toshiro Mifune, Yojimbo
1960 movie nominated in 1961 Marcello Mastroianni, La Dolce Vita
Clark Gable, The Misfits
Substitute for Mastroianni
Dirk Bogarde, Victim
Runner-ups: James Stewart (Two Rode Together), Marcello Mastroianni (La Notte), Max von Sydow (Through a Glass Darkly), Gunnar Bjornstrand (Through a Glass Darkly), Richard Widmark (Two Rode Together), Franco Citti (Accattone), Sandro Pansero (Il Posto), Ganjiro Nakamura (The End of Summer), David Niven (The Guns of Navarone),
Actress
Anouk Aimee, Lola
Marilyn Monroe, The Misfits
Delphine Seyrig, Last Year in Marienbad
Anna Karina, A Woman is a Woman
Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's
Runner-ups: Jeanne Moreau (La Notte), Sophia Loren (Two Women), Harriet Andersson (Through a Glass Darkly), Silvia Panel (Virdiana), Piper Laurie (The Hustler), Deborah Kerr (The Innocents), Natalie Wood (West Side Story), Rita Tushingham (A Taste of Honey),
Supporting Actor
Sacha Pitoeff, Last Year in MarienbadGeorge C. Scott, The Hustler
Montgomery Clift, The Misfits
Fernando Rey, Viridiana
Jackie Gleason, The Hustler
Runner-ups: George Chakiris, (West Side Story), Tatsuya Nakadai (Yojimbo), Marc Michel (Lola), Horst Buchholz (One, Two, Three), James Lanphier (Flight of the Lost Balloon)
Supporting Actress
Rita Moreno, West Side Story
1960 movie nominated in 1961: Anita Ekberg, La Dolce Vita
Anouk Aimee, La Dolce Vita
Setsuko Hara, The End of Summer
Thelma Ritter, The Misfits
Substitute for Ekberg and Aimee
Annie Duperoux, Lola
Margarita Lozano, Viridiana
Runner-ups: Sylvia Syms (Victim), Yoko Tsukasa (The End of Summer)
Not seen: Fanny, The Mark, Summer and Smoke, Pocketful of Miracles, The Children's Hour, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone-
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1957
- 12 Angry Men
- The Seventh Seal
- Throne of Blood
- Wild Strawberries
- The Nights of Cabiria
- The Sweet Smell of Success
- Letter from Siberia
- The Snow Queen
- Paths of Glory
- White Nights
Runner-up: The Incredible Shrinking Man
1958
- Vertigo
- Ivan the Terrible, Part Two *
- A Night to Remember
- Touch of Evil
- The Music Room
- Mon Oncle
- Murder by Contract
- Ashes and Diamonds
- Elevator to the Gallows
- The Magician
Runner-ups: A Time to Love and a Time to Die, Man of the West, Equinox Flower
1959
- North by Northwest
- The World of Apu
- The 400 Blows
- Some Like it Hot
- Pickpocket
- Anatomy of a Murder
- Rio Bravo
- Hiroshima Mon Amour
- India
- Moi, un Noir
Runner-ups: Ballad of a Soldier, The Letter Never Sent, Imitation of Life, The Tiger of Eschnapur, Black Orpheus
1960
- Breathless
- Psycho
- Shoot the Piano Player
- Le Trou
- Zazie in the Metro
- The Virgin Spring
- L’Avventura
- Wild River
- The Apartment
- Peeping Tom
Runner-ups: The Bad Sleep Well, Strangers when we Meet, Rocco and his Brothers, Late Autumn, The Naked Island
1961
- Last Year in Marienbad
- One, Two, Three
- The Misfits
- Lola
- Yojimbo
- West Side Story
- The Hustler
- La Dolce Vita
- Victim
- A Woman is a Woman
Runner-ups: Il Posto, The Young One, The End of Summer
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Your Favourite Performances from 1929 to present are...
in Your Favorites
Posted
Actor
Peter Sellers, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Rex Harrison, My Fair Lady
Bendt Rothe, Gertrud
Peter Sellers, A Shot in the Dark
Henry Fonda, Fail-Safe
I was very strongly tempted to nominate John Lennon as well, but decided that you couldn't get a nomination for playing yourself.
Runner-ups: Vincent Price (The Masque of the Red Death), Sean Connery (Marnie), Innokenty Smoktunovksy (Hamlet), Enrique Irazoqui (The Gospel According to Saint Matthew), Dick van Dyke (Mary Poppins), Richard Harris (Red Desert)
Actress
Nina Pens Rode, Gertrud
Anna Karina, Band of Outsiders
Catherine Deneuve, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Monica Vitti, Red Desert
Julie Andrews, Mary Poppins
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Supporting Actor
George C. Scott, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Wilfrid Brambell, A Hard Day's Night
Sterling Hayden, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Stanley Holloway, My Fair Lady
Burt Lancaster, Seven Days in May
Runner-ups: Slim Pickens (Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb), Mauricio do Valle (Black God, White Devil), Ebbe Rode (Gertrud), Walter Matthau (Fail-Safe), Tatsuya Nakadai (Kwaidan), Gert Frobe (Goldfinger), Wilfrid-Hyde White (My Fair Lady), Baard Owe (Gertrud), Herbert Lom (A Shot in the Dark), Keenan Wynn (Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb), Mikhail Nazanov (Hamlet), Larry Hagman (Fail-Safe), Peter Ball (Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb), Harold Sakata (Goldfinger), Peter Ustinov (Topkapi), Edmond O'Brien (Seven Days in May), Takashi Shimura (Kwaidan)
Supporting Actress
Emaneula Paola Carboni, Red Desert
Keiko Kishi, Kwaidan
Diane Baker, Marnie
Anastasiya Vertinskaya, Hamlet
Tatyana Bestayeva, Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors
No Runner-ups.
Not seen: Zorba the Greek, The Pumpkin Eater, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, Seance on a Wet Afternoon, The Best Man, The Chalk Garden, Hush...Hush Sweet Charlotte
-------Sophia Loren just doesn't get any luck. This is the third time she's a runner up with no nomination. Tatsuya Nakadai has also been a runner-up three times, but he will be nominated in the future.
-------Granted that I haven't seen three of the nominees, the Best Supporting Actress category was unusually weak. It's often weak, but in previous years I could say I genuinely admired the winners. Of all my winners, this year's may be the shortest.
-------Not to be rude, but this year there is fairly gap between the winner and the second place finisher in both the actor and actress category. This year wasn't close.