I nominate Tony Bennett as “Hymie Kelly” in THE OSCAR, released in 1966 and directed by—or, more accurately, herded by—Russell Rouse. Come to think of it, the entire cast (Stephen Boyd, Milton Berle, Elke Sommer, Ernest Borgnine, Jill St. John, ad nauseum) is unlikely, as is the movie itself. Compared to THE OSCAR, VALLEY OF THE DOLLS is the height of cinema.
Well, it’s the early hours of October 3, so my list is short and contains just about all I’m capable of remembering. On Friday, Oct. 1, I was lucky enough to catch Elaine May’s brilliantly comic “A New Leaf” on a premium cable channel.
I’m thrilled to have just watched Joseph H. Lewis’s “Gun Crazy,” which TCM screened Saturday night. It’s been more than 30 years since I last saw it, and I’m about to purchase the DVD online so it won’t be another 30 years before I see it again.
Offhand, I can name four performances that are terrifying in their intensity:
1. The coolly beautiful but insanely jealous Gene Tierney in LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN (1945).
2. Ann Savage in DETOUR (1945), whose performance is so over-the-top deranged that it’s brilliant.
3. Robert Walker as the suave but sociopathic Bruno Anthony in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (1951).
4. James Mason in BIGGER THAN LIFE (1956) saying, with great wrath and menace, “God was wrong!”
I still have a soft spot in my heart for CINDERELLA. I saw it in a theater when I was six and made my mother sit through it twice. From an aesthetic and technical standpoint, however, I have to give props to PINOCCHIO. As for the second classical age of Disney, my favorite is BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, which was the first animated film my daughter (then almost two years old) saw in a theater.
LAURA (Otto Preminger)
MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS (Vincente Minnelli)
TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT (Howard Hawks)
MR. SKEFFINGTON (Vincent Sherman)
THE MIRACLE OF MORGAN’S CREEK (Preston Sturges)
IVAN THE TERRIBLE, PART I (Sergei Eisenstein)
JANE EYRE (Robert Stevenson)
HAIL THE CONQUERING HERO (Preston Sturges)
THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW (Fritz Lang)
There were two films that changed me forever—and both were by the same director.
When I was 12, I saw EAST OF EDEN for the first time. (We only had a black-and-white TV, so it was several years before I saw the film in widescreen color.) Apart from my falling in love with James Dean—who, I was shocked to learn from my mother, had been dead seven years!—I realized in watching this film that the actors weren’t just mouthing lines and randomly moving here and there: Someone, namely Elia Kazan, was guiding them.
Three years later, I finally saw—again on TV—ON THE WATERFRONT, which my parents had been telling me about for what seemed like forever. I was so electrified by the experience that I vowed to become a film reviewer. When I was a Cinema Studies grad student at NYU in the mid 1970s, the editor of a small film paper called “The Thousand Eyes” asked me to write about a film connected with an upcoming revival-house series. So it came to pass that ON THE WATERFRONT became the subject of my first film article, titled “The Agony of Kazan’s Informer.”
Technically, THE WIZARD OF OZ shifts from sepia to color and back to sepia. When I first saw it on TV in the 1950s, however, the Kansas sequences were black-and-white because my family had a black-and-white TV. It was some time before I fully appreciated the seismic shift of the Kansas-to-Oz transition.
I love in RAGING BULL that Jake La Motta’s life is rendered entirely in Weegee-like black-and-white except for a color segment representing home movies.
I’ve been begging the powers that be at Criterion to release a set of the four American films of Max Ophüls: THE EXILE, LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN, CAUGHT, and THE RECKLESS MOMENT. I’d like also to see releases of Bresson’s THE TRIAL OF JOAN OF ARC, Eustache’s THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE, and Rivette’s CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING. I’m not holding my breath for any of these, though.
For me, an unforgiveable element in a film I love otherwise is Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi in BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S.
What were Blake Edwards et al. thinking? Did anyone even think to ask Toshiro Mifune? (There wouldn’t have been that much English dialog to master, and the effect at least would have been more respectful.) As it happens, the Mr. Yunioshi character does not even appear in the Truman Capote novella as prominently or as often as he does in the film. So it is especially cringe-inducing to have to endure Rooney mugging in far too many scenes as a Japanese caricature straight out of American cartoons circa World War II. Even Buddy Ebsen’s brilliantly realized vignette as Doc Golightly cannot offset the captured-on-celluloid-forever embarrassment that is Mickey Rooney in BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S.
Thanks for reminding me about the dramatically and visually significant B/W to color to B/W shifts in BONJOUR TRISTESSE. As that is one of my favorite Preminger films, I can’t believe I forgot to list it myself.
There are three movie scenes or sequences, all under the direction of Elia Kazan, that bring mist to my eyes:
The point at which Johnny Nolan, a sentimental, well-meaning but alcoholic husband and father, sings “Annie Laurie” in A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN. The scene clarifies even further his bond with his daughter Francie as both of them emotionally exclude Katie, Johnny’s careworn wife and Francie’s mother.
The last moments of EAST OF EDEN, as Cal Trask sits by the bedside of his father Adam Trask, whose stroke seems to have reconciled son and father at last.
The beginning of the reunion sequence in SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS, when Deanie Loomis, now released from the sanitarium, asks her friends to take her to Bud Stamper, her former love. Her friends, at Deanie’s mother’s urging, say they don’t know his whereabouts (for fear of sending Deanie into another emotional tailspin). Unexpectedly, her father speaks up: “He’s staying out at his father’s old ranch.” Deanie goes to where her dad is sitting, gently lifts his chin, and kisses him on the forehead.
I don’t even know where to begin, so I’ll just throw out the first three that pop into my head: BARRY LYNDON, BLACK NARCISSUS, and WALL-E. I thought of the latter because the precision and clarity of detail in WALL-E’s home base stuns me every time.
“ I must say, for a charming, intelligent girl, you certainly surrounded yourself with a remarkable collection of dopes.”—Detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) to Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney) in LAURA.
60, MA in Film History/Criticism from the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University (1974–76); BS in Graphic Design (major) and Communication Arts (minor) from Cornell University (1968–72).
The next DVD I’ll receive from the good folks at Netflix is LURED, a 1947 Douglas Sirk film featuring Lucille Ball, George Sanders, and Boris Karloff. I just returned RAILROADED (1947), a PRC release elevated from its B-movie roots by Anthony Mann’s taut, atmospheric direction.
According to indieWIRE, the complete awards list is as follows. It’s as interesting for what is left out (Black Swan, 127 Hours, The Kids Are All Right, to name a few) as for what is included. Indeed, some of the Top Eleven choices are pretty surprising.
On another note, I think it’s great that NBR presents a William K. Everson Film History Award. In the mid-1970s, I was privileged to have taken Everson’s classes when I was a grad student in the Cinema Studies department at NYU, in addition to attending his public screenings at the New School for Social Research. Everson was the proverbial walking encyclopedia when it came to American and British narrative cinema, and I remain forever grateful for all that I learned from him.
Best Film: The Social Network
Best Director: David Fincher, The Social Network
Best Actor: Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network
Best Actress: Lesley Manville, Another Year
Best Supporting Actor: Christian Bale, The Fighter
Best Supporting Actress: Jacki Weaver, Animal Kingdom
Best Foreign Film: Of Gods and Men
Best Documentary: Waiting For “Superman”
Best Animated Feature: Toy Story 3
Best Ensemble Cast: The Town
Breakthrough Performance: Jennifer Lawrence, Winter’s Bone
Spotlight Award for Best Directorial Debut: Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, Restrepo
Best Original Screenplay: Chris Sparling, Buried
Best Adapted Screenplay: Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network
Special Filmmaking Achievement Award: Sofia Coppola, for for writing, directing, and producing Somewhere
William K. Everson Film History Award: Leonard Maltin
NBR Freedom of Expression: Fair Game, Conviction, Howl
Top Eleven Films (In alphabetical order):
Another Year
The Fighter
Hereafter
Inception
The King’s Speech
Shutter Island
The Social Network
The Town
Toy Story 3
True Grit
Winter’s Bone
PHIL OCHS: THERE BUT FOR FORTUNE, a documentary by Kenneth Bowser, opens Jan. 5, 2011, in New York City. Appropriately, it will be showing at the IFC Center, known as the Waverly Theater when Ochs was alive. Ochs used to see a lot of movies at the Waverly.
I’m trying for the first time to post a website link on MUBI. (The coding is a little different from the HTML coding I generally use.) So if the link is garbled, forgive me.
@Sarah Karina-Bogart: I thought you disliked Jonah Hex also—but it was another freebie, at least!
My list of losers—if I count just what I saw in theaters, as opposed to cable—would be Valentine’s Day and Salt. There may be others, but I’ve probably repressed them.
Most guest programmers show three or four films, depending on the length. My fantasy is to show four films that as of this writing are not available in the U.S. on DVD. My picks for Turner Classic Movies would be:
The Reckless Moment – Max Ophüls Lili – Charles Walters Mister Cory – Blake Edwards A New Leaf – Elaine May
I love all your lists because some of my own favorites are on many of them. And I agree: TCM needs to schedule a Ritz Brothers marathon.
One note: I didn’t mean to imply when I started this topic that a guest programmer should show only films that are unavailable in the U.S. on DVD. That was the theme I set for myself. (Some of my choices actually are available on DVD. I own a DVD of The Reckless Moment—but it’s a foreign import.) In this vein, though, I thought about substituting Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight for one of my choices, but I believe that film is tied up in so many rights problems that even mighty TCM couldn’t screen it.
I think about being a TCM guest programmer so much—not the height of reality, I know—that I have come up with different sets of films I would show. One set lists films I would enjoy talking about with Robert Osborne and sharing with the audience. There’s no unifying theme other than my love for these films:
Dodsworth – William Wyler Home from the Hill – Vincente Minnelli Splendor in the Grass – Elia Kazan Stavisky… – Alain Resnais
What is your favorite Alfred Hitchcock film? over 2 years ago
My favorite is Vertigo, followed by (in no particular order) Notorious, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, North by Northwest, and Psycho.
Go to Comment
Unlikely Casts over 2 years ago
I nominate Tony Bennett as “Hymie Kelly” in THE OSCAR, released in 1966 and directed by—or, more accurately, herded by—Russell Rouse. Come to think of it, the entire cast (Stephen Boyd, Milton Berle, Elke Sommer, Ernest Borgnine, Jill St. John, ad nauseum) is unlikely, as is the movie itself. Compared to THE OSCAR, VALLEY OF THE DOLLS is the height of cinema.
Go to Comment
What I Watched This Month over 2 years ago
Well, it’s the early hours of October 3, so my list is short and contains just about all I’m capable of remembering. On Friday, Oct. 1, I was lucky enough to catch Elaine May’s brilliantly comic “A New Leaf” on a premium cable channel.
I’m thrilled to have just watched Joseph H. Lewis’s “Gun Crazy,” which TCM screened Saturday night. It’s been more than 30 years since I last saw it, and I’m about to purchase the DVD online so it won’t be another 30 years before I see it again.
Go to Comment
Truly Terrifying Performances over 2 years ago
Offhand, I can name four performances that are terrifying in their intensity:
1. The coolly beautiful but insanely jealous Gene Tierney in LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN (1945).
2. Ann Savage in DETOUR (1945), whose performance is so over-the-top deranged that it’s brilliant.
3. Robert Walker as the suave but sociopathic Bruno Anthony in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (1951).
4. James Mason in BIGGER THAN LIFE (1956) saying, with great wrath and menace, “God was wrong!”
Go to Comment
you cringe when someone tells you they love this film... over 2 years ago
Well, my ex-husband loves RUDY. I believe that’s one of the reasons he’s my ex.
Go to Comment
Great Bad Movies over 2 years ago
Oh, my, where do I begin? VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, THE ROOM, THE SANDPIPER, and the apex of awfulness, THE OSCAR.
Go to Comment
Favourite Disney Film? over 2 years ago
I still have a soft spot in my heart for CINDERELLA. I saw it in a theater when I was six and made my mother sit through it twice. From an aesthetic and technical standpoint, however, I have to give props to PINOCCHIO. As for the second classical age of Disney, my favorite is BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, which was the first animated film my daughter (then almost two years old) saw in a theater.
Go to Comment
What is the first Foreign Language film you remember seeing? over 2 years ago
I was about eight when I saw Fellini’s LA STRADA, which left me about as depressed as an eight-year-old could be.
Go to Comment
1944 Poll over 2 years ago
1. DOUBLE INDEMNITY (Billy Wilder)
LAURA (Otto Preminger)
MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS (Vincente Minnelli)
TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT (Howard Hawks)
MR. SKEFFINGTON (Vincent Sherman)
THE MIRACLE OF MORGAN’S CREEK (Preston Sturges)
IVAN THE TERRIBLE, PART I (Sergei Eisenstein)
JANE EYRE (Robert Stevenson)
HAIL THE CONQUERING HERO (Preston Sturges)
THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW (Fritz Lang)
Go to Comment
what film changed you over 2 years ago
There were two films that changed me forever—and both were by the same director.
When I was 12, I saw EAST OF EDEN for the first time. (We only had a black-and-white TV, so it was several years before I saw the film in widescreen color.) Apart from my falling in love with James Dean—who, I was shocked to learn from my mother, had been dead seven years!—I realized in watching this film that the actors weren’t just mouthing lines and randomly moving here and there: Someone, namely Elia Kazan, was guiding them.
Three years later, I finally saw—again on TV—ON THE WATERFRONT, which my parents had been telling me about for what seemed like forever. I was so electrified by the experience that I vowed to become a film reviewer. When I was a Cinema Studies grad student at NYU in the mid 1970s, the editor of a small film paper called “The Thousand Eyes” asked me to write about a film connected with an upcoming revival-house series. So it came to pass that ON THE WATERFRONT became the subject of my first film article, titled “The Agony of Kazan’s Informer.”
Go to Comment
Films that move startlingly between black-and-white and color over 2 years ago
Technically, THE WIZARD OF OZ shifts from sepia to color and back to sepia. When I first saw it on TV in the 1950s, however, the Kansas sequences were black-and-white because my family had a black-and-white TV. It was some time before I fully appreciated the seismic shift of the Kansas-to-Oz transition.
I love in RAGING BULL that Jake La Motta’s life is rendered entirely in Weegee-like black-and-white except for a color segment representing home movies.
Go to Comment
Let's Go Ahead and make overly grand speculations about what releases criterion will anounce because surely it will be better than the last few months, right? over 2 years ago
I’ve been begging the powers that be at Criterion to release a set of the four American films of Max Ophüls: THE EXILE, LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN, CAUGHT, and THE RECKLESS MOMENT. I’d like also to see releases of Bresson’s THE TRIAL OF JOAN OF ARC, Eustache’s THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE, and Rivette’s CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING. I’m not holding my breath for any of these, though.
Go to Comment
WHAT ANNOYING OR HEINOUS ELEMENT IN A FAVORITE FILM ALMOST RUINS THE ENTIRE FILM FOR YOU? over 2 years ago
For me, an unforgiveable element in a film I love otherwise is Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi in BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S.
What were Blake Edwards et al. thinking? Did anyone even think to ask Toshiro Mifune? (There wouldn’t have been that much English dialog to master, and the effect at least would have been more respectful.) As it happens, the Mr. Yunioshi character does not even appear in the Truman Capote novella as prominently or as often as he does in the film. So it is especially cringe-inducing to have to endure Rooney mugging in far too many scenes as a Japanese caricature straight out of American cartoons circa World War II. Even Buddy Ebsen’s brilliantly realized vignette as Doc Golightly cannot offset the captured-on-celluloid-forever embarrassment that is Mickey Rooney in BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S.
Go to Comment
Films that move startlingly between black-and-white and color over 2 years ago
@ALLY THE MANIC LISTMAKER:
Thanks for reminding me about the dramatically and visually significant B/W to color to B/W shifts in BONJOUR TRISTESSE. As that is one of my favorite Preminger films, I can’t believe I forgot to list it myself.
Go to Comment
Films that move startlingly between black-and-white and color over 2 years ago
Here’s another one that came to me last night: Kenneth Branagh’s DEAD AGAIN.
Go to Comment
What film scenes really make you cry? over 2 years ago
There are three movie scenes or sequences, all under the direction of Elia Kazan, that bring mist to my eyes:
The point at which Johnny Nolan, a sentimental, well-meaning but alcoholic husband and father, sings “Annie Laurie” in A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN. The scene clarifies even further his bond with his daughter Francie as both of them emotionally exclude Katie, Johnny’s careworn wife and Francie’s mother.
The last moments of EAST OF EDEN, as Cal Trask sits by the bedside of his father Adam Trask, whose stroke seems to have reconciled son and father at last.
The beginning of the reunion sequence in SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS, when Deanie Loomis, now released from the sanitarium, asks her friends to take her to Bud Stamper, her former love. Her friends, at Deanie’s mother’s urging, say they don’t know his whereabouts (for fear of sending Deanie into another emotional tailspin). Unexpectedly, her father speaks up: “He’s staying out at his father’s old ranch.” Deanie goes to where her dad is sitting, gently lifts his chin, and kisses him on the forehead.
Go to Comment
If you had to pick ONE film as your favorite... over 2 years ago
For the past 30 years or so, mine has been SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS. I don’t anticipate it changing anytime soon.
Go to Comment
3 most visually pleasing films you've ever seen over 2 years ago
I don’t even know where to begin, so I’ll just throw out the first three that pop into my head: BARRY LYNDON, BLACK NARCISSUS, and WALL-E. I thought of the latter because the precision and clarity of detail in WALL-E’s home base stuns me every time.
Go to Comment
Film quotes you love over 2 years ago
“ I must say, for a charming, intelligent girl, you certainly surrounded yourself with a remarkable collection of dopes.”—Detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) to Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney) in LAURA.
Go to Comment
Age / Level of education? (An informal poll) over 2 years ago
60, MA in Film History/Criticism from the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University (1974–76); BS in Graphic Design (major) and Communication Arts (minor) from Cornell University (1968–72).
Go to Comment
One film you love and will love for the rest of your life? just one film, no cheating, treat it like a marriage! over 2 years ago
SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS
Go to Comment
Given the constraints listed below, what are your five favorite films? over 2 years ago
ALEXANDER NEVSKY – Sergei Eisenstein – Soviet Union
MOLIÈRE – Ariane Mnouchkine – France
ORDET – Carl Theodor Dreyer – Denmark
TOM JONES – Tony Richardson – United Kingdom
CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS (Documentary) – Andrew Jareki – United States
Go to Comment
What is in your Netflix "At Home" Queue right now (i.e., what the f are you renting)? over 2 years ago
The next DVD I’ll receive from the good folks at Netflix is LURED, a 1947 Douglas Sirk film featuring Lucille Ball, George Sanders, and Boris Karloff. I just returned RAILROADED (1947), a PRC release elevated from its B-movie roots by Anthony Mann’s taut, atmospheric direction.
Go to Comment
The Social Networked Named Best Film by the National Board of Review over 2 years ago
According to indieWIRE, the complete awards list is as follows. It’s as interesting for what is left out (Black Swan, 127 Hours, The Kids Are All Right, to name a few) as for what is included. Indeed, some of the Top Eleven choices are pretty surprising.
On another note, I think it’s great that NBR presents a William K. Everson Film History Award. In the mid-1970s, I was privileged to have taken Everson’s classes when I was a grad student in the Cinema Studies department at NYU, in addition to attending his public screenings at the New School for Social Research. Everson was the proverbial walking encyclopedia when it came to American and British narrative cinema, and I remain forever grateful for all that I learned from him.
Best Film: The Social Network
Best Director: David Fincher, The Social Network
Best Actor: Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network
Best Actress: Lesley Manville, Another Year
Best Supporting Actor: Christian Bale, The Fighter
Best Supporting Actress: Jacki Weaver, Animal Kingdom
Best Foreign Film: Of Gods and Men
Best Documentary: Waiting For “Superman”
Best Animated Feature: Toy Story 3
Best Ensemble Cast: The Town
Breakthrough Performance: Jennifer Lawrence, Winter’s Bone
Spotlight Award for Best Directorial Debut: Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, Restrepo
Best Original Screenplay: Chris Sparling, Buried
Best Adapted Screenplay: Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network
Special Filmmaking Achievement Award: Sofia Coppola, for for writing, directing, and producing Somewhere
William K. Everson Film History Award: Leonard Maltin
NBR Freedom of Expression: Fair Game, Conviction, Howl
Top Eleven Films (In alphabetical order):
Another Year
The Fighter
Hereafter
Inception
The King’s Speech
Shutter Island
The Social Network
The Town
Toy Story 3
True Grit
Winter’s Bone
Go to Comment
Phil Ochs over 2 years ago
PHIL OCHS: THERE BUT FOR FORTUNE, a documentary by Kenneth Bowser, opens Jan. 5, 2011, in New York City. Appropriately, it will be showing at the IFC Center, known as the Waverly Theater when Ochs was alive. Ochs used to see a lot of movies at the Waverly.
Go to Comment
Phil Ochs over 2 years ago
I’m trying for the first time to post a website link on MUBI. (The coding is a little different from the HTML coding I generally use.) So if the link is garbled, forgive me.
Playdates for Ochs Documentary
Go to Comment
Feel Free to Post Any Worst Films of the Year Lists Yours or Critics over 2 years ago
@Sarah Karina-Bogart: I thought you disliked Jonah Hex also—but it was another freebie, at least!
My list of losers—if I count just what I saw in theaters, as opposed to cable—would be Valentine’s Day and Salt. There may be others, but I’ve probably repressed them.
Go to Comment
Is there anyone in television that you consider an auteur? over 2 years ago
I think Matthew Weiner—the creator, executive producer, and frequent writer and director of Mad Men —defines what it means to be a television auteur.
Go to Comment
You're a Guest Programmer on TCM. What Will You Show? over 2 years ago
Most guest programmers show three or four films, depending on the length. My fantasy is to show four films that as of this writing are not available in the U.S. on DVD. My picks for Turner Classic Movies would be:
The Reckless Moment – Max Ophüls
Lili – Charles Walters
Mister Cory – Blake Edwards
A New Leaf – Elaine May
Go to Comment
You're a Guest Programmer on TCM. What Will You Show? over 2 years ago
I love all your lists because some of my own favorites are on many of them. And I agree: TCM needs to schedule a Ritz Brothers marathon.
One note: I didn’t mean to imply when I started this topic that a guest programmer should show only films that are unavailable in the U.S. on DVD. That was the theme I set for myself. (Some of my choices actually are available on DVD. I own a DVD of The Reckless Moment—but it’s a foreign import.) In this vein, though, I thought about substituting Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight for one of my choices, but I believe that film is tied up in so many rights problems that even mighty TCM couldn’t screen it.
I think about being a TCM guest programmer so much—not the height of reality, I know—that I have come up with different sets of films I would show. One set lists films I would enjoy talking about with Robert Osborne and sharing with the audience. There’s no unifying theme other than my love for these films:
Dodsworth – William Wyler
Home from the Hill – Vincente Minnelli
Splendor in the Grass – Elia Kazan
Stavisky… – Alain Resnais
Go to Comment