kingrat

1968: According to William Mann's biography of John Schlesinger, George Roy Hill fully expected to win the Best Picture award for Butch Cassidy, and was shocked when Midnight Cowboy won. I love the schizophrenia of the 1967-1970 nominations: Bonnie and Clyde and Doctor Dolittle; Hello, Dolly! and Midnight Cowboy, etc. This is when old Hollywood is in its death throes, whether it realized it or not. In 1967 the hip crowd favored Bonnie and Clyde, which was expected to win, but the old guard united behind In the Heat of the Night. I'm guessing that 1968 was the revenge of the new guys, uniting behind Midnight Cowboy to knock off Butch Cassidy. 1967: Two for the Road received mixed reviews and wasn't nearly the hit that The Graduate was. Everyone saw The Graduate. The Graduate seems a bit dated to me, but it was absolutely cutting edge in 1967--which may be two sides of the same coin. 1965: I'd say the best films were King Rat and The Hill, which received generally favorable reviews but didn't become big hits and evidently weren't pushed by their studios at Oscar time.

Mary Meredith (the painter's wife) and Carmen (his model and mistress) never fully appear in The Uninvited, although they are perhaps the most important characters.

Me, too, Joe! The Collector is indeed available on DVD. I bought it on sale from either Amazon.com or deepdiscount.com, but, wouldn't you know it, haven't gotten around to watching it. I did see Psyche 59, Return from the Ashes, and The Walking Stick and liked all three. Perhaps TCM will repeat these because of all the favorable posts here. Patricia Neal fans will definitely enjoy seeing her play a woman blinded in a mysterious fall (Psyche 59). Everyone in that film has a love/hate relationship with everyone else. The title is never explained. Return from the Ashes has a stunning first scene that I won't spoil for you. Ingrid Thulin is a rich Jewish doctor who returns from a concentration camp to learn that her husband (Maximilian Schell) has been having an affair with her stepdaughter (Samantha Eggar). The film develops along the usual noirih lines, except that the genders are switched. Maximilian Schell is playing the standard femme fatale role. The Walking Stick was surprisingly good. Eggar plays a woman who has a crippled leg as a result of polio. David Hemmings is the penniless artist who falls in love with her--really good love story--and then asks her to do something against her moral principles. Who knew that Samantha Eggar Day would turn out so well? That's why we watch TCM.

Ms. B is not alone in her take on Capra, though he has many fans. I love The Bitter Tea of General Yen, a great film, and really like Lost Horizon. It Happened One Night and Arsenic and Old Lace are well-done comedies. As has been pointed out, Arsenic is atypical of his style. You Can't Take It With You has some funny scenes but hasn't worn as well. When Papa Sycamore says he hasn't paid his taxes because he doesn't know what the government does with the money, I want to tell him that after the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, he'll know. The real split of opinion is over the Capra "core"--I won't call it "corn" yet: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, It's a Wonderful Life. Watching them, I get the feeling that I ought to like them better, that if I were a better, less cynical person I would like them better. And yet the "bell rings/angel gets his wings" stuff in Wonderful Life makes me cringe; the preachiness of Meet John Doe does not appeal; Mr. Deeds who writes poems on postcards and plays the tuba is just too studiedly cute; and so on. On the other hand, James Stewart's big scene in Mr. Smith is excellent, and players like Stewart, Stanwyck, Jean Arthur, and Claude Rains do everything they can, which is a lot, to make this work. What interests me most about these core films is how close under the surface lie class warfare, depression, and suicide. In three of these four films a character is saved from killing himself. Mr. Smith, Mr. Deeds, and John Doe all become expropriated by the forces of money and greed. Capra would never give us an ending like A Face in the Crowd, but his films point the way toward Kazan's film. Over and over Capra tells us that the rich must learn from the common people. This also applies to comedies like It Happened One Night and You Can't Take It With You. I don't really like these core Capra films, but they're not merely sentimental. They do raise serious political, social, and economic issues. At the same time I'd love to have seen more Capra films like The Bitter Tea of General Yen.

I'm recording several of these unusual titles. It would have been great to see The Molly Maguires again, one of Martin Ritt's best films, with the only Richard Harris performance that I really like. Must check out Psyche 59--never heard of that one--for Patricia Neal. The Walking Stick is based on a novel by Winston Graham, who also wrote Marnie. The Collector is one of William Wyler's least known films, but it's always had its enthusiastic admirers.

From France alone, my favorites would include: The Wages of Fear Children of Paradise Forbidden Games The Mother and the **** Les bonnes femmes Un couer en hiver The Fire Within (Le feu follet) Jules and Jim It occurs to me that this is not the jolliest list of films! By the way, Plein Soleil (aka Purple Noon) is based on Patricia Highsmith's novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. These two are fun to watch together. Alain Delon and Maurice Ronet or Matt Damon and Jude Law? Then again, why choose?

1947: I believe the Academy considered GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT more serious than CROSSFIRE. GA was based on a best-selling novel, and this never hurts. Academy voters were probably less tuned into the stylishness of CROSSFIRE than we are. You could also argue that BLACK NARCISSUS should have carried off several of the top prizes, including Best Picture. 1948: The Oscar favorites were JOHNNY BELINDA and THE SNAKE PIT, with their stars dueling for Best Actress. HAMLET was a surprise. To many people today, HAMLET is much less successful than Olivier's other Shakespeare films, RICHARD III and HENRY V.

Clore, we are absolutely on the same page, right down to liking Wendell Corey and Wesley Addy, who establish a certain believable core to their characters and who aren't stuck with Odets' ghastly pseudo-profundities. Odets doesn't grasp that one look from Ida Lupino can convey more than ten pages of dialogue, and his reputation for plays like Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing meant that producers and directors didn't trim or eliminate his speeches the way they would a script by a less famous writer.

Ruth Chatterton was with Mary Astor in DODSWORTH Mary Astor was with Humphrey Bogart in THE MALTESE FALCON Humphrey Bogart was with Walter Brennan in TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT Walter Brennan was with Anna Lee in HANGMEN ALSO DIE Next: Robert Donat to Stephen Boyd

When an actor plays a hammy, over-the-top character, that requires more control, not less. Steiger gives us a combination of Method shtick, which may have seemed fresh in 1955, and old-fashioned emoting. He has potentially the best role in the film and does the least with it. Jarrod, you're right to mention that the producer is supposed to have homosexual tendencies, which means we need to add THE BIG KNIFE as another example of left-wing homophobia. The list includes Rossellini's OPEN CITY and GERMANY, YEAR ZERO; Costa-Gavras' Z; and Dalton Trumbo's script for SPARTACUS.

Skimpole, in all likelihood the 1940 award to REBECCA was helped by the enormous popularity of Daphne DuMaurier's novel and the general sense that the filmmakers had done a great job of making it into a movie. David Thomson's biography of Selznick has an excellent defense of REBECCA. He argues convincingly that Selznick brought a new emotional depth to a Hitchcock film. Though more of us would probably choose THE GRAPES OF WRATH, REBECCA certainly deserved serious consideration.

Rod Steiger is a ham, and THE BIG KNIFE is a turkey. Dialogue for a play and dialogue for a movie are entirely different things. I'll bet you could cut 45 minutes of Clifford Odets' (alas) deathless prose, and that would improve things somewhat. "Peritonitis of the soul" may have sounded profound or poetic at the time, but to me it's just pretentious. The Aldrich films I like best are the westerns VERA CRUZ and ULZANA'S RAID and the action movies THE DIRTY DOZEN and THE FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX. He seems out of his element in something as stagebound as THE BIG KNIFE. As is some of Rod Steiger's other films--though not ON THE WATERFRONT, where he has firm guidance from Kazan--his acting is all on the surface. Watching THE LOVED ONE and THE BIG KNIFE on successive evenings has lowered my opinion of Steiger's work. In THE BIG KNIFE he's too phony to be really scary. Odets was so respected as a dramatist that directors seem to have filmed his plays without making much adjustment for the medium. To me, in THE BIG KNIFE, THE COUNTRY GIRL, and CLASH BY NIGHT Odets is the dominant personality, not the directors or some very talented actors. Oddly enough, I really like the one film Odets directed, NONE BUT THE LONELY HEART, where he adapted a novel by Richard Lllewellyn, author of HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY. As the source of a movie, a novel usually provides a richer, more detailed world for its characters than a play does, and none of Odets' own plays has a structure as powerful as the mother and son in NONE BUT THE LONELY HEART each falling into criminal ways to provide money for the other.

Jackie, there's actually a connection between the Cukor LITTLE WOMEN and GWTW because Douglass Montgomery (Laurie) tested for Ashley Wilkes and was considered a possible choice if they couldn't get Leslie Howard. And yes, yes, yes, for your comments about Melanie being like Scarlett's mother. To me this is the heart of the film: Scarlett idolizes her sweet, self-sacrificing mother, but has no intention of being like that herself. When she sees this in Melanie, a contemporary, she can't stand it. Ellen O'Hara and Melanie incarnate the ideals of womanhood in their society. Scarlett represents the impulses (except for the sexual ones!) that have to be stifled to live up to this ideal of perpetual humility and self-sacrifice. Jo's tomboyishness and her intellectual and artistic abilities may not fit easily with her society, but LITTLE WOMEN clearly tells us that Jo is right in what she wants. Scarlett, on the other hand, without even recognizing it radically opposes what the strictures of Southern society will allow to its women.

Movie Prof, judging from Stephen Boyd's (bad) attempt at an accent, I'm guessing Burt Lancaster was the model. Am about halfway through THE OSCAR, which fully deserves its Bad Movie We Love status. The hairdos are hysterical, big and bouffant. All the women in the audience will want to order the tiger-striped stripper outfit that Jill St. John wears in her first scene.

Will have to try sitting through the 1990s version, since some of you like it, but I turned it off on TV once Susan Sarandon, disastrously miscast as Marmee, began preaching about equal rights for women. I love the Cukor/Katharine Hepburn version, perhaps my favorite Hepburn performance and one of Cukor's best films. Joan Bennett is a hoot, too. The 1949 version is better than its reputation. Mary Astor is the best Marmee and Peter Lawford is the perfect Laurie. June Allyson is no Katharine Hepburn, but here as elsewhere I find that she's a better actress than I expect.

Jackie, what a great list of films. Haven't seen NIGHT AND THE CITY, THE STRANGE AFFAIR OF UNCLE HARRY, or NIGHTMARE ALLEY, but now I definitely want to see them. I completely agree about the importance of the visual, yet the need for emotional appeal if the film is going to connect. BTW, I like the script of LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN. In A WOMAN'S VIEW Jeannine Basinger describes it as a woman's film with a male protagonist, which is another interesting way of looking at it. It's one of the very few color films with a noir feeling, and what a femme fatale. Other films that might make my list are Dassin's BRUTE FORCE; Dmytryk's MURDER, MY SWEET and CROSSFIRE; and Negulesco's THREE STRANGERS and NOBODY LIVES FOREVER.

I also wish that WHEN THE LEGENDS DIE (1972) had been included; I sometimes feel like the only person who's seen this fine little film that features quality performances by Richard Widmark and Frederic Forrest. But I'm looking forward to the films that are scheduled.

For those of you who haven't seen it or haven't seen it recently, be sure to check out KING RAT this May. I'm more than a little fond of this film, as you might expect. Though I've seen TOKYO STORY, that's a film that definitely belongs on the TCM foreign film schedule. So of the movies I'm looking forward to seeing for the first time include: SO WELL REMEMBERED MARTY ANNA CHRISTIE (the German version, also with Garbo, said to be better than the American version) DEVIL'S DOORWAY INTRUDER IN THE DUST THE STRAWBERRY BLONDE LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA RUN OF THE ARROW WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD? WHAT PRICE GLORY? THE BIG PARADE PAISAN

I prefer Hitchcock's remake of THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (Jimmy Stewart, Doris Day) to his 1930s original and prefer AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER to LOVE AFFAIR, mainly because there's more comedy in the remake. All in all, I prefer the 1950s SHOW BOAT to the Irene Dunne 1930s version, as much as I like Dunne's performance.

I thought I wouldn't watch or tape nearly as many films this month, but the backlog of tapes seems just as large as ever. Some terrific TCM premieres in February, such as Seconds, Kitty, The Snake Pit, and Alexander's Ragtime Band.

Mick LaSalle (author of the excellent pre-Code book COMPLICATED WOMEN), whose column started this thread, makes one big factual error: THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS was not seen as a "traditional horror film" or it would never have won the Oscar. Indeed, the Best Picture award to THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS helped to establish the horror film as a mainstream genre, which it had never been prior to THE EXORCIST and JAWS in the 1970s. Those pictures got Best Picture nominations, which was a big step toward respectability for the genre, clinched by the win for Jonathan Demme's film. Academy voters felt they were being edgy by voting for a horror film. The film that most influences subsequent filmmakers is not necessarily the best film by any means, though it's interesting to take a year-by-year look at what films turned out to be the most influential. Incidentally, though LaSalle may not care for REBECCA, David Thomson makes an excellent case for REBECCA in his biography of David O. Selznick, arguing that Selznick brought greater emotional depth than any previous Hitchcock film had had. But I don't want to say anything against LaSalle: anyone who disses BRAVEHEART is OK by me.

The special effects are great. As for the love story, well, the special effects are great. If you downed a shot every time Kate Winslet squeals "Jack!", you'd die of alcohol poisoning. Billy Zane deserves some kind of consolation award for faithfully doing every ridiculous thing the director wanted him to do.

I want to join you in praising THE 7TH DAWN, a very good film that I'd never even heard of until TCM showed it a couple of times in the last six months. For those unfamiliar with THE 7TH DAWN, it's about Malaya after WWII when the Communists were trying to take over. Holden's wartime pal becomes a dedicated Communist. Holden is wise, world-weary, everything that the role demands. All Holden fans should try to see it.

DUEL IN THE SUN is one of my guilty pleasures, too. It's sort of like Italian opera without the music. Or the Italian. The acting styles are all over the place, yet somehow that doesn't wreck the film. One of the little touches that works: Butterfly McQueen as Vashti wants to get married, but there's no man around that this society would see as suitable for her. This is a comic echoing of Pearl's predicament.

Deepdiscount has a number of Fox films on sale through March 2. At $6.98 are such titles as THE RAINS CAME, VICKI, WHIRLPOOL, and MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD. At $8.98 are such titles as PRINCE OF FOXES, THE MAGUS, and the unforgettable SEA WIFE (Joan Collins as a nun!). For more intellectually demanding fare (not), you can get several complete seasons of THE GIRLS NEXT DOOR at bargain prices!