EricJ

Wilder reportedly threw out much of the original play of The Seven Year Itch since it didn't fit his image of what he wanted to use Marilyn and Tom for--You can throw out the play if you're making a theatrical comedy, but you can't make a hit Broadway musical and throw out the freakin' SONGS!! (Reminiscent of a line from one comedy, where a high school drama club says "We're doing the Non-Musical Version of 'Grease'--We couldn't get the song rights.") I remember hearing an instrumental of the titular Broadway tune on some elevator Muzak when I was a kid, and couldn't identify it for years until it turned up as the incidental music for Wilder's opening of the movie. And it was another decade or two before I even found out the name of the song.

MissW leaped on the "foreign" thing for quick Merkan-culture bashing, but it's not "foreign", it's INDIES (mostly caused by fans and voters now using the National Board of Reviews list to pick their Draft Day choices from) that have been causing the rumblings of mutiny among Oscar fans. And for what lit that particular match in the fire, I triple-dog-dare you to sit all the way through Terence Malick's Tree of Life, and why everyone thought that was "soulful" and "visionary" to take Picture away from "Hugo" and "The Artist"--Boyhood in '14 was only icing on the cake. (And at this point, I'd normally do my standard default Bugs Bunny joke about "Tree of Life", but I'll save it for any thread-drift. )

To take example, let's just dissect the issue and say that, for one, it's getting harder and harder to tell the "Secret persecuted gay relationship" indie Picture nominees apart, after Moonlight, Carol and The Imitation Game. Yes, every actor or filmmaker within the community feels they "have" to make one (does Ian McKellen make movies about anything else anymore?), and every, er, sympathetic voter or critic has to demand that it become forefront in our Oscar attention, but that doesn't mean a market isn't being glutted. For any indie genre. Before you leap on that, that's not THE issue I'm complaining about, but let's take that as one cherrypicked microcosm symptom and start there. The one year we had Oprah championing black-empowerment and telling the public "If you don't vote for 'Selma' for Picture, you're racist!" was bad enough, but when it was compiled by Harvey Fierstein saying "If you don't vote for 'Imitation Game' for Picture, you're intolerant!", that's when Oscars' indie-obsession started getting a little too calculated and noisome. ...Remember, they can still be in British or American English and STILL be placid or overbearing enough to drive away our interest.

I mentioned the movie's "motif" use of Khachaturian's "Sabre Dance" throughout the movie ('cause it's, like, Russian, get it?) over in the Classical Music thread--And by the time they bring it out again for the wild car chase in the climax, you realize, no other movie DESERVES to use it on the soundtrack quite as well. If the only other image we associate with "Sabre Dance" is somebody frantically keeping twelve plates spinning on the Ed Sullivan show, that's exactly what Wilder's comedy is doing. 😵 I always said that Rumpole of the Bailey was "Witness for the Prosecution: the Series". And Laughton would have made a good Horace Rumpole, if the books had existed in the 40's.

Before video, the only place I'd ever heard this movie described was in Michael Medved's original "Fifty Worst Films", and no, I didn't believe it was real.

Fresh in my mind from another thread, I'm sticking up for One, Two, Three as my pick--A perfect example of what the Three Stooges displayed in "You Nazty Spy", namely that our most powerful Yankee weapon is to hit a banana-cream pie in the face of fascist dictators. The Zuckers' "Hot Shots, Part Deux" proved that you could go gleefully lowbrow against Saddam Hussein, but Billy Wilder had Nikita Kruschev to deal with in 1961. And even if the Farrelly Brothers had done a Cold War comedy, they couldn't have gone more enthusiastically inappropriate and politically-incorrect than Billy Wilder manages to take Russia and East Berlin apart, and James Cagney is yankee-doodle-dandy enough to keep up with the brassy speed of Wilder's farce. 😆 (Some Like It Hot is okay, but it needed an actress fast enough to keep up with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis--Marilyn is nice, but speedy sardonic zingers aren't her comic specialty. At least Seven Year Itch fell more within her speed for comedy.)

Or, that we've had "Art" indies rammed up our collective Oscar behinds for the last decade, we've stopped seeking them out because we've stopped being able to tell them apart. In any other five-nomination year of the 80's or 90's, Roma would be the Critical Darling that would invariably lose to the populist favorite (which is why every single culturally-paranoid regional NBOR critic would give it Best of the Year to thumb their nose at "the superhero movie"), but now that we've gotten EIGHT of them a year at the Oscars, every year, for the last ten years, "Fatigue" is the polite way of putting it. Any other way would be censored by the Mods.

Or as Benny Hill parodied: (actress storms off of failed commercial) "Who do I have to sleep with to get OFF this job??" (Benny follows offstage) "...Er, if you've got a moment, I could tell you? "

Gags only took the project because, oo, Barbara Streisand! (And, ironically, not so much because of Judy Garland.) Barbara Streisand later became power-mad in the late-70's to early 80's after her Star is Born and Funny Lady, going from producing to directing "Yentl", and eventually getting a Best Director/Picture nomination for "Prince of Tides". I don't see Mr. G going on to the same influence in the industry. Mr. G is sort of like the rainbow Quentin Tarantino, parasitically attaching "herself" to every single cult fan-influence "she" grew up with, and demanding the same love and more attention for it. And I say that not only as a Hatsune Miku fan who wishes Gags would mind "her" own danged business, but also as a Muppets fan who had to watch Gags do three separate TV specials with the Muppets just because the Disney movie had frustratingly cut out "her" big number with Miss Piggy.

Or which, in the late 80's pre-Mandela days, we referred to as the "Concerned White South-African journalist" movie. (Of which there were technically only two, but when we got Patricia Arquette as the Concerned White Myanmar Journalist in "Beyond Rangoon" (1995), we decided to call it an even three.) As for Crash, that was more the West coast's early-00's reaction to 9/11, where LA wanted that same NYC feeling of everyone banding together to work for a better world in these new scary times, although they could feel safe at a distance that nobody had tried to blow up their buildings. Creating the new genre of intersecting-anthology stories of upper-class yuppies shocked by a sudden event, learning to come to grips with their own values, escape their contented sheltered lives, become aware of their place in a society around them, and awaken a need to work together, but the new genre of "Conscience porn" didn't last much beyond "Babel" and "Little Children". I remember an interview about what a good Oscar host should do mentioning not David Niven as an example, but the time Billy Crystal introduced an aging Hal Roach for his life-achievement award--Roach rambled on about his silent-Hollywood reminiscences a bit awkwardly too long, but the microphone had accidentally cut out, and you could barely hear a word he was saying for those whole endless minutes. Billy came back and handled the muttering, uncomfortable audience with "And it's appropriate, since he started his work in SILENTS!" The secret to a Good Oscar Host is to forget that it's ever being televised, period, full-stop: You're there at an awards banquet, so keep things moving, crack some inside niche jokes for the people in the seats, and be a prepared enough ad-libber for the fact that anything will happen. Like when Steve Martin reacted to Bjork's Best-Song dress with "I would have worn my dead-swan this evening, but it was So Last Year."

Yyyyyepppers. This thread has been drifting like an icy highway, but it's about CLASSICAL MUSIC in movies, like it say in the header. Y'know, the way you can't hear the Blue Danube without seeing spaceships, or wonder why helicopters in Vietnam were playing "Kill the Wabbit" over their loudspeakers: Just a heads up that Criterion, ahem, FINALLY has the Bergman "The Magic Flute" (1975) scheduled for Blu-ray on 3/12, for those who didn't buy the whole depressing boxset: https://www.criterion.com/films/613-the-magic-flute Another DVD I can finally get off my dustier shelves.

You can have a female investigator after a bachelor criminal, if it's Steve McQueen & Faye Dunaway in "The Thomas Crown Affair", but if he's married, are we expecting catfights between Agnes and Loretta? (And not real-life ones over Orson?) And director Danny DeVito was still too afraid to kill the dog. There were reportedly two studio cuts screened.

Perhaps a memoriam to Telly Savalas, Pat Morita and Dom DeLuise?: https://splinternews.com/a-look-back-at-historys-tackiest-oscars-opening-numbers-1793855080 Yes. THESE are what we had before Billy Crystal CGI'ed himself into the year's movies. Lord help me, I didn't even remember that Teri Garr one. 😮

#OscarsSo(RobLowe&Snow)White 😱

Hard to get past those three, but if I had to pick a more recent one, what about Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines from "Running Scared" (1984)? So, not like Danny DeVito from "Romancing the Stone" (1984), then? "Look, I can't talk now, Ira, she's with some guy...How should I know 'which guy', she likes guys--So do YOU! (hangs up phone)"

At least it got them over the stigma about saying they liked Black Panther. See, that wasn't so painful, was it? (In the old days, we would think nothing of nominating "Star Wars", "Field of Dreams" or "Towering Inferno", if we happened to like them. Whose danged awards ARE these anyway, and yes, we're looking at you, Golden Globes?) It also means we won't have as many mainstream arthouse-indie films pushed down the committee's throat, which is how all the messy trouble started to begin with. This is our first or second completely Weinstein-free Oscars, and commercial mainstream films are just beginning to awaken from their fourteen-year slumber. Oscar-watchers refer to it as "This year's Lego Movie": The rampantly viral idea that a movie was CRUELLY SNUBBED! if it didn't happen to make the cut on quality despite the devoted love of a niche-fanboy audience. One year, that was "Creed", which gave us #OscarsSoWhite, and the next year it was "Wonder Woman", which gave us "Overlooked women in Hollywood". Well, that at least is true: Ever since they switched to "Ranked voting" (ironically, to try and bring in more commercial films after Wall-E and Dark Knight became "the first Lego Movies"), literally the wrong Pictures have been winning: The new voting system asks for listed favorites, with more points given to the #1 pick, and less to the #2 pick, etc. And while there'll be a split vote over whether Black Panther or A Star is Born should be "the" #1 pick, there's usually a consensus that the impressive but artsy Roma should clearly be given its due as the Second-Best Film of the Year, for the #2 slot. As a result, guess which film gets twice as many votes as the first two. In the old five-nomination days, the main one-on-one battle was always between the Populist Commercial-Sweep Hit vs. the Impressive Downbeat Critical Darling, and you knew which one would send the others home--And those of us in our betting pools would chortle up our sleeves at naive friends and co-workers who would say "But 'The Killing Fields' was more emotionally powerful than 'Amadeus'!", or "The Academy hates fantasy! They're not going to turn down Clint Eastwood and Sean Penn, just to give it to an 'elf movie'!" Nowadays, though, they've screwed up the works and all bets are off...Now is your chance, T'challa, the Oscars need a HERO!

Nnnnnnnnnnnno. 😐 The all-star 1972 Michael Crawford/Fiona Fullerton version is everywhere fine PD kids-movies are exploited, in a hundred different colors and conditions, but the pristine BFI widescreen color-restored version did sneak out on a gray-market DVD. I'm not as big a fan of the original "Night of the Living Dead", the Carole Lombard "Nothing Sacred" or Jose Ferrer's "Cyrano"--and I physically can't stand "My Man Godfrey"--so it's hard to pick classic PD Favorites.

Having trouble with the sound, are we? The problem's on your end, and PLEASE get it looked into before we get more complaints about YouTube links. (Had that problem myself, one time, and turned out that the Flash extension on the computer was messed up, but that was a few good systems ago in the early 00's.)

Accdg. to IMDb, it was his least favorite of the ones he directed, and that could be one reason why. Also, that he originally wanted the psychological twist of a savvy female investigator, for Agnes Moorehead, but the studio may have thought the romantic element with Young may have been too confusing, and stuck to Robinson's more conventional Double-Indemnity typecasting instead. (And as Public-Domain Favorites go, I still prefer "Charade", "House on Haunted Hill", "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and the Abbott & Costello "Jack & the Beanstalk", m'self, but this one's pretty good.)

Try the more established (ie. non-concert) version instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2j8u8vNsA6A ("Lay off!" "Take THIS, Mary Queen of Scots! (thud!)")

The Stranger (1946) - Growing up when local TV stations actually used to show movies, I recognized this omnipresent title from its days as one of Orson Welles' many public-domain RKO Orphans, like "Touch of Evil" and "Mr. Arkadin", but I hadn't yet become a Citizen Kane fan back then, and had never gotten around to watching it. Now, thanks to Kino Lorber and Netflix cashing in on "Other Side of the Wind" this month, they've gone back and restored most of Public-Domain Welles, and I finally sat down to stream it. Orson's performance as a smooth, manipulative nasty Nazi fugitive (the one, we're told, who really came up with the idea for the camps, but just didn't want the credit) hiding out as a respected professor in an idyllically Andy-Griffith Connecticut college-town is perfect as usual--Welles is rarely bad in anything--and Edward G. Robinson repeats his "Double Indemnity" character as a too-clever-by half investigator, but for most of the movie, I kept wondering "what's the gimmick?" as to why Welles chose to direct it. Yes, he wanted the rich chance to play a smooth baddie, but without the post-war trappings, it's pretty much a good, standard, cracking 40's I-married-a-murderer thriller, only with then-recent controversies pasted on for shock value. In the late 40's and early 50's, it was still taboo in nice, safe, censored movies/TV to say that the Germans had been killing jay-ee-double-u-ess (most documentaries still referred to the victims as "non-Aryan citizens"), so, when Robinson's investigator shows our characters then-current newsreel film brought back from the camps, it obviously attracted Welles' bad-boy directorial urge to socially Shock the Teacher. Loretta Young plays our unaware heroine in jeopardy as Welles' new wife, and it's the last third of the movie that the tight thriller starts to unravel--After Robinson reveals the truth to her, Young hysterically refuses to believe it, and Welles manipulates her into protecting him from another alibi murder story, Robinson explains that the psychological pressure will be too much for her, and we should wait for her to crack. At that point, most of the major characters start cracking wildly ridiculously under pressure--The usually careful Welles at one point starts absent-mindedly doodling a swastika on a public phone pad, and then scribbles it out, while Young's "hysterical" performance makes you literally start to picture what Carol Burnett could have done with one of her TV old-movie parodies if she'd tried. This being a Welles film, the big climax has to take place in a big unusual thing setting (this time a clock tower, instead of a hall of mirrors), but Orson Welles could still be Orson Welles in his sleep, and there are enough of the usual trademark touches to rise this one above the standard B-thriller.

For example, the Undersea scenes from "Can You Imagine That?" were taken from an abandoned '64 Sherman Bros. number that eventually became "Beautiful Briny Sea" from Bedknobs & Broomsticks. As, too, was Angela Lansbury's cameo, but hey, Bedknobs, Poppins, same thing, six o' one. And as for the big Let's Go Fly a Balloon finale, would you believe Disney at one point originally considered that for Michael Jackson?...No, probably not.

Well, see, that's why it became one of the Aerobics National Anthems, when the disco 70's turned into the Jane Fonda 80's--If you're doing a half-hour set of touch-toes and sit-ups, you don't want to be thrown off by different tempos. (Btw, wasn't there a "Hooked On" arrangement of world national anthems, or am I just remembering a Benetton ad? The Italian anthem worked pretty well to that one beat.)

Well, BBC, but yes. (And, like most Drood adaptations, came up with their own solution, and a plausible enough one.) At least they didn't try to sell it as "Dracula" because it had Universal and Laemmle.

And, as "Xanadu" and "Electric Dreams" proved in the 80's, there are no bad movies with ELO music on the soundtrack. There was also that brief fad in the early 80's to sell familiar classical themes to the post-Disco/pre-Aerobics crowd: (...Hey, most of them were new to us, back then.)