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Fausterlitz

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    What Do They Have in Common?

    in Games and Trivia

    Posted

    31 minutes ago, Peebs said:

    Garbo and Russia? 

    Love (1927) she plays Anna Karenina, based on Tolstoy's novel

    The Mysterious Lady (1928) plays Tania Fedorova

    Grand Hotel (1932) plays Grusinskaya

    Anna Karenina (1935) 

    Ninotchka (1939) 

    Yep, that's it!  Not the most brilliant puzzle on my part, but it was all I could come up with at the moment. 

    Nice work as always, Peebs + tag, you're it.  🙂

    ClassiCategories

    in Games and Trivia

    Posted

    Stage Door (1937) -- Eve Arden wears cat as fashion statement

    The Third Man (1949) -- a kitten gives Harry Lime away

    Alice in Wonderland (1951) -- Cheshire Cat

    The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) -- hero is attacked by "giant" cat

    The Fly (1958) -- cat goes through transporter, never to be seen (only heard) again

    Walk on the Wild Side (1962) -- iconic black cat in opening and closing credits (Saul Bass)

    From Russia With Love (1963) -- cat as obligatory villain accessory (--> Austin Powers)

    The Godfather (1972) -- Marlon Brando uses cat to illustrate Don Corleone's preternaturally relaxed position of authority

    Shrek 2 (2004) -- Puss in Boots

    Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

     

     

     

    • Like 3

    STANWYCK OR DAVIS? BOTH? NEITHER?

    in General Discussions

    Posted

    Both, please! They are such different performers, and they give rather distinct kinds of pleasure. Stanwyck is both more consistent and more "naturalistic," I suppose: always believable and engaging, never overplaying or underplaying anything--she always seems to find exactly the tone the material requires.  (Although this may also help explain why she was comparatively underrated until more recently, and never won an Oscar.) She made The Lady Eve, Meet John Doe, and Ball of Fire all in the same year--the first of which is one of my favorite performances in any film comedy.

    Bette Davis obviously had a more "theatrical" approach, and thus was well-suited to playing characters who were themselves self-dramatizing (Of Human Bondage, Jezebel, The Little Foxes, All About Eve), but as you point out she could also convincingly play more restrained roles without any hint of dullness (e.g. in The Catered Affair). At her best, she has such a galvanizing energy, such a thorough understanding of her character's motivations, and such an alert intelligence, that she is mesmerizing to watch.

    I suppose if you forced me to "choose," I might acknowledge that Stanwyck's reliability also meant there were fewer enormous highs and lows throughout her career: she rarely exhibited quite the same level of daring, the same sort of extreme commitment to unsympathetic roles (and in lesser films, the sheer will to transcend the limitations of the material itself) that yielded some of Davis's more brilliant achievements. But this is a somewhat unfair comparison to make, since Davis was rather unique in that regard, at least among American film actresses of that era.  And all actors have certain limitations--comedy was definitely not Davis's strong suit, for example.

    • Like 4

    Best Actor versus Best Actress-- who's the best?

    in General Discussions

    Posted

    Well, the current rules are that all actors + actresses may vote in any and all acting categories.  Not sure whether that has always been the case.  The nominating process, at least, was much less democratic in the early years, and there were many fewer voters involved.  The first year, for example,

    "Each Academy member would cast one nominating vote in his branch. Period. Then a Board of Judges from each branch would count the votes and determine the nominations, turning them over to a Central Board of Judges. This Central Board was comprised of one representative from each branch and these five people would pick the Academy Award winners." [from Inside Oscar by Mason Wiley and Damien Bona]

    I believe the term "actors branch" was always meant to include both actors and actresses, so the phrase "one nominating vote in his branch. Period." in the above quote is unfortunately somewhat ambiguous.

    • Like 2

    Best Actor versus Best Actress-- who's the best?

    in General Discussions

    Posted

    42 minutes ago, TopBilled said:

    What would be interesting I think, is if we could find out how many votes or what percentage of the votes a winner received.

    I'd like to know if someone ever won by just one vote.

    I wrote an answer on quora.com last year that relates both to this question, and to the 1931/32 year you just mentioned:

    "The individual voting used to be publicly announced, but this was changed in 1935 when Price Waterhouse took over the accounting process.

    Interestingly, the first and only time there was a tie in the Best Actor category (1931–32), the two winners didn’t actually receive the same number of votes. Fredric March (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) and Wallace Beery (The Champ) were both declared winners, even though March had actually received one more vote than Beery. This is because the rules at the time stipulated that anyone who came within three votes of winning would also receive the same award.

    The only time there was a tie in the Best Actress category (1968), both actresses received exactly 3,030 votes: Katharine Hepburn (The Lion in Winter) and Barbra Streisand (Funny Girl). (Presumably the actual numbers were released in this case partly in order to verify the integrity of the process, but also because doing so didn’t materially “give anything away.”) Of course, by then the “three votes fewer is close enough” rule had long since been changed, so a genuine tie had become even more difficult to achieve.

    It’s safe to assume that actors nearly always vote for themselves when they are nominated. Which means that if either March or Beery had somehow failed to do so, they would still both have won an Oscar. But if either Hepburn or Streisand had failed to do so, one of them would not."

    So far I haven't been able to find any public record of the pre-1935 vote totals, but it must exist online somewhere. 

    • Like 3

    Best Actor versus Best Actress-- who's the best?

    in General Discussions

    Posted

    Well, this is certainly an intriguing thought experiment.

    For one thing, if the Academy had allowed a total of ten slots for "Best Acting" independent of gender, one assumes the male/female breakdown would have tended to fluctuate a good deal from one year to the next. In fact, from 1937 to 1944, The National Board of Review used to honor the best acting of the year in precisely this way, making no distinctions between genders, or even between nominally "leading" and "supporting" roles (although they did so without any set minimum or maximum number of actors to be so honored), and the resulting gender balance was quite unpredictable, although often to the disadvantage of actresses. (In 1938, for example, they honored 18 actors but only 4 actresses.)

    For me, the easiest choices are in 1952, 1956, and 1966, because in each case one of the actors involved had already won a Tony Award for playing the same role for many years onstage: Shirley Booth, Yul Brynner, and Paul Scofield.  I'm probably in the minority on this point, but I view that as a sort of "double-dipping" that puts fellow film nominees (who don't have the same luxury of extensive immersion in, preparation of, and performance of a role) at an unfair disadvantage.  So however excellent each of those performances undoubtedly is, I would tend to vote for their competitor simply from a fairness point of view. (I also think Elizabeth Taylor was never better than in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?)

    I would also vote for Sophia Loren in 1961 simply because I find that performance stunningly authentic. This is definitely nothing against Maximilian Schell, whose performance is also superb (he had also played the role previously in the original Playhouse 90 production).

    I'm agnostic on the first three pairs of films, partly because I haven't seen a few of them recently (and have never seen Watch on the Rhine). I will say, however, that I have subsequently seen more convincing Hamlets than Olivier's (and aside from Montgomery Clift in The Search, he was competing against a fairly weak field of actors that year, e.g., Dan Dailey  in When My Baby Smiles at Me, and Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was not even nominated); and I would have given best actress to Irene Dunne in I Remember Mama.

     

    • Like 1
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