Judging Oscar: Best Picture 1953

-Year in Summary/What Did Win-

It seems that in the wake of a somewhat tumultuous reception to the previous year’s upsets and wealth-spreading, the Academy Awards for the films of 1953 went in a decidedly more favored direction for its second year on television. While there were plenty of films up for the major categories, and plenty of performers in the nomination fields, one title loomed head and shoulders above the rest, given its massive critical and commercial success (coming in second on the list of the year’s highest-grossing films). It was a given going into the ceremony that From Here to Eternity was the heavy favorite for almost every category it was up for (a whopping thirteen nominations, tying Gone with the Wind for the second-most ever); it was only a matter of who would get swept up along with the film to the podium. One lucky honoree was Frank Sinatra for Supporting Actor, who’d pulled every string and dealt in every backroom to get his role in the film; the leads of the film weren’t as lucky, however, with Audrey Hepburn graciously stealing the win for Best Actress and William Holden winning Best Actor to the surprise of many, including Holden himself (who felt one of the Eternity men should’ve won instead). Director Fred Zinnemann needn’t have worried any, if indeed he even did; his win for Best Director was assured, as was his film winning Best Picture among the eight total Oscars it won, also matching a record set by Gone with the Wind for the most ever.

-Ranking the Nominees-

-It should be absolutely zero surprise that The Robe is coming in last place for me; aside from a few tentative baby steps into the new field of color widescreen cinematography (and, admittedly, the film does look pretty good), The Robe has basically no selling points at all, and really only works if you’re already sold on the film’s religious position before you’ve even started it. Coming into this film expecting satisfaction in any facet of it other than personal religious validation will only leave you confused, disappointed, or irritated (you might get some humor out of it if you’re looking for corny, hackneyed performances, and then really mostly because of Jay Robinson as Caligula), and trying to think of how this managed a nomination in this category will only leave you doubly so. Don’t even bother; this just shouldn’t be here.

-I can see how the Academy felt enough appreciation for Julius Caesar to put it in this category, but I also disagree with it for sorta the same reasons. Being a Shakespeare film aside, this is an actors showcase first and foremost, and the main trio are by and large the best thing about the film and the reason to see it (though why Marlon Brando was seen as the choice for a Best Actor nom when he is absolutely a supporting role behind James Mason and John Gielgud is something one could argue about at great length). However, they are also the only reason to see it, and nothing else about the film warrants the effort to get through it; thus, why it got this nomination in particular is something that really leaves me scratching my head. Perhaps the Academy still wanted to show that it loves Shakespeare as much as the rest of the English-speaking world wanted everyone to; either way, it only shows the age of being beholden to such outdated thinking, with how poorly this nomination has held up in the years since.

-With how absolutely beloved this film was immediately upon its release, and for how many nominations and wins it racked up at the Oscars this year, I’m really only modestly satisfied with From Here to Eternity as a film, even with my rewatch for this segment. I said in my initial review, in the early years of this blog, that it was good but not anything really special to make it stand out from the pack, and now after watching it again, while I could be pushed into assessing the film as “very good” instead of only just, I would definitely dig in my heels if pressed to move any further; even at very good, there’s nothing in this that makes it stand out from a myriad of other “very good” pictures, in the Best Picture canon or outside it. I’d even say that the cast, while all very good, have all done better work elsewhere, and really that the film hit a particular moment for the Academy to be as widely honored as it was is probably more a matter of happenstance than genuine greatness. I’m not sure how many would agree with me, but it’s as far as I’m willing to go with it.

-Now, in terms of striking a chord, you’d be hard up to argue that Roman Holiday doesn’t do exactly that. This is the film that made Audrey Hepburn a star, and won her the Oscar for Best Actress, and rightly so on both accounts; her performance and the story told with her character is almost the perfect definition of “star-making”. But, for a Best Picture nomination, is the film as a whole up to the same level? I might say yes, if only barely so; the main hiccup, for me, is that the film is a 90 minute story told over a full two hours, and that the film takes its time so deliberately and meanders about so much is perhaps not as beneficial as the film may feel that it is, even with the ending it deservedly and fully earns. Trim some of the bloat down, and the film works just as good if not better, still keeps the ending it wants, and has a much better shot at this award for me. As it is, it comes across as just slightly enough of an effort to get through to make me hesitant about giving it Best Picture, though I’ll happily keep it among the field of nominees.

-Interestingly enough, the one or two reasons that kept me from giving this to Roman Holiday are, if I’m being honest, shared by Shane if I’m looking at the film overall. It’s also two hours long, and it also feels like it, taking its time and meandering with the plot in a not dissimilar way to William Wyler’s whimsical Italian romance. Here, however, the slowly-paced plot allows us time to simply bask in the frontier life that George Stevens took such great effort to capture, and it’s here that makes the key difference in how the somewhat languid pacing works to Shane’s benefit, instead of being narrative-focused and thus feeling like ten minutes of waiting to end up with five minutes of plot. In terms of its depiction of prairie living, and the simple & solid construction of its western story, Shane is as perfect a film as you’re likely to find, and it’s more a matter of personal tastes instead of any actual faults with the film that determines if it’s a worthwhile effort for one to see. It certainly makes its case among the milieu of westerns released up to then, and in my opinion, it’s the best choice among this field of nominees.

-What Should’ve Been Here-

1953 is a strange year for me; looking at what was released as well as what made the 1001 list, there’s not a lot that I really, really liked, or that sticks out enough as an obvious miss among the things I haven’t seen. A handful of other Oscar contenders, like Lili, Titanic, The Band Wagon, and especially Stalag 17 sure seem like they could’ve muscled into the category, especially against the lower end of the nominee table. It’s a surprise, with how Oscar has seen fit to nominate films like Trader Horn and King Solomon’s Mines, that Mogambo missed out on this category; perhaps the Academy didn’t take to it nearly as much as the public, nominating only a couple of the performances and nothing else. Walt Disney put out Peter Pan, which was an instant smash hit, but no way was the Academy at the point yet of nominating an animated picture (they were too busy giving Disney himself four other Oscars that evening, to this date the most any individual has won at a single ceremony). On the 1001 list, potential contenders The Bigamist and The Naked Spur missed the Academy’s eyesight, & Pickup on South Street would’ve been an unconventional choice. I’d imagine many would stump for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes mostly thanks to Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, but the movie around them only barely works, & even less so as a musical, so I certainly won’t. The foreign front has a bit more to offer, with good films in M. Hulot’s Holiday, Tales of Ugetsu, and The Earrings of Madame de, but that wouldn’t appeal to the Academy’s sensibilities about foreign pictures; there are two other more than worthy contenders, though, in Tokyo Story and The Wages of Fear, though I doubt either had a qualifying release in the States this year.

-What I Would’ve Picked-

This one’s a hard one, for two reasons: of the films from 1953 that I’ve seen, I wasn’t really solidly in love with any of them, save Shane and perhaps Roman Holiday, and also because I only watched or rewatched these five for this segment and not any others that might’ve stood a chance at reappraisal that may have bumped them up into contention for me. Aside from the nominees, I’m mostly going off memory, and it’s that nebulous remembrance coupled with whatever notes I’d written down in my blog posts that keeps Tokyo Story and The Wages of Fear from vying for the prize in my mind; both were films I liked and thought were well made, but I wasn’t sold on the label of “masterpiece” that so many others have placed on them, and it’ll be even harder to justify my picking one of them here as a result. Basically, then, my vote is going to Shane, and only because there’s nothing else that I’ve seen from this year that really does enough as a whole picture to potentially knock that film from its tentative position at the top. If I expand my knowledge of ’53 any further in the future, this could possibly change, but for right now, that’s where it’s ending up.

-How Did Oscar Do?-

I feel like 1953 is a better year than I’m generally able to regard it, and definitely better than what the Academy’s field of five here would have me believe. There’s some good films here, but definitely just as many outside the category, so how we ended up on this list of five is certainly a question mark, & one that I feel especially ill-equipped to answer in particular. Cinema in this era is still growing, still feeling out new technologies and storytelling genres like widescreen and epic films, and it still feels like the Academy doesn’t yet have a handle on what makes a truly all-time great picture, despite what they want to believe. I’m still holding out some hope, though, Oscar. There’s plenty of room in which to grow.

The Robe

Take nothing on faith. Bind yourself to no man.

I have to admit, I’m in more than a bit of a nervous spot right now. As I got going with the 1950s Best Picture slate, it was soon apparent the type & style of film that would be the prevalent one among the field of the decade’s nominees, especially the ones I hadn’t already seen. That I ended up enjoying Quo Vadis even to the mild extent that I had did not mean that I couldn’t also hear the warning bells tolling, that it would likely take a handful of years of films still figuring out this new, shiny style of entertainment before we finally get to the films that really make something of it, and I knew that expecting the Best Picture field to remain free of the dross of these cinematic experiments was not going to be an expectation that would be fulfilled, despite the inherent pedigree of Best Picture itself. It is thus that we come to The Robe, a film from 1953 that, while continuing down the path that Quo Vadis had charted on the map, also blazes a few additional steps of its own; as is readily apparent on the poster, The Robe is and was championed as the first motion picture in CinemaScope, which to save you a Google search was a new way of shooting and projecting a film in widescreen format, a format that had been experimented with on occasion up to the 1930s but had been mostly ignored since as a cost-cutting measure (hence why the Academy’s standard projection ratio of 1.375:1 was itself the standard for movie projection across the country). With The Robe, the concept of widescreen films would become a selling point for the first time, and would open the doors to widescreen cinema itself becoming a new standard in the years to follow. It’s thus as frustrating as it is that The Robe, despite being the first major widescreen film and a trailblazer for the format, is such a subpar film in every other aspect it tries to be.

If you’ve been annoyed at the Biblical-era epics thus far only being tangentially related to the story of Christ, well, here comes The Robe to finally give you the injection of divine love, evangelical, Son of God cinematic Christianity your veins have been juicing for. Marcellus Gallio is a Roman tribune who manages to run afoul of the Emperor-to-be, Caligula, both by outbidding him for a Greek servant named Demetrius, and for reuniting with his childhood love Diana, who has been pledged as Caligula’s future bride. Attempting to do away with his irritating foe, Caligula send Marcellus off on an official conscription to Jerusalem, where he winds up as the leader of the Roman regiment ordered to carry out the duties and sentences of governor Pontius Pilate, including Pilate’s reluctant condemnation to crucifixion of a man known as Christ. At the site itself, the indifferent Roman guards play a dice game to gamble, and Marcellus ends up winning the homespun robe Christ had worn carrying the cross up to Calvary, but upon putting it on to shield from the rain, begins recoiling in pain and is soon after afflicted with waking nightmares and bouts of madness. Convinced the robe is cursed, and having lost its possession to Demetrius who fled with it back in Judea, Marcellus thus heads back from Rome to the holy land to find the robe and destroy it, hoping to free himself from its influence as well as the influence of the man who wore it.

In case you weren’t able to infer enough from the ending of that plot synopsis, the journey Marcellus takes to free himself of the robe’s influence is very much more a journey for him to understand Christ and his influence, and ostensibly become a Christian himself, and if that feels a little too much like proselytizing for you, you’d do best to steer clear of The Robe, because that’s exactly what this is. Whatever tangential aside or degrees removed from the story of Christ that past Biblical epics had resolved themselves to out of safety or entertainment value is gone out the window with The Robe; this film is made for the masses, the Sunday kind, and it wants you to feel the unknowable faith and love of Jesus Christ as much as it wants to influence (read: deter) you in not trying too hard to actually understand it. Every turn of the narrative in this film is exactly the type of ethereal, unexplained compulsion that, to the initiated, rings of the ineffable truth of Christ and the Way, but to the heathens at large feels like the kind of head-in-the-sand, fingers-in-the-ears, “just don’t think about it” thinking that leads them so often to resign the word “faith” as a whole to willful ignorance. Early in the film, Demetrius catches a glimpse of Jesus as he first arrives in Jerusalem, making eye contact with him, and the film makes an elaborate and lengthy point of emphasizing Demetrius’ reaction in the shot, looking utterly spellbound and, when asked by someone why he’s reacting thus, is completely unable to put into words what he’s feeling, but in that one moment, he has already become a Christian. Similar such narratives of “divine inspiration” end up afflicting several other characters through the film, including Marcellus, and each carries that same faith-based air that tentatively toes the line between holy belief and magical brainwashing. It’s incredibly humorous that the film goes as far as to lampshade this comparison, with Roman doctors and soothsayers comparing the robe’s effects on Marcellus to curses and sorcery, and several characters in Cana trying to emphasize that the followers of Christ are not a cult, when that’s exactly what the depiction of Christ and his influence in the film comes across as. It might’ve been more forgivable if it was ancillary to the actual plot or merely served as the motive behind characters’ actions, but it is the actual driving force behind the narrative and the turns it takes, and unless you’re already in that particular fold, it only serves to be annoying and flimsily explained why the story and the characters do the things they do. The acting from the cast does this no favors, either, from Richard Burton performing his character as square and clenched as his jaw will allow him, to Jean Simmons’ portrayal of Diana amounting to the word “melodrama” and not a letter beyond, to the laughably rat-faced sneering of Jay Robinson’s Caligula, a character who hedonistically takes the concept of evil to its most theatrical no matter how ridiculous it thus appears.

Even with the film being basically the first major widescreen film, and with cinematographer Leon Shamroy actually making good use of the wider space to explore more with shot composition and framing, the nice cinematography is just not worth sitting through the actual content of the film at its core, and it’s an almost impossible sell to someone who isn’t already neck deep in the religious experience The Robe almost feels like it’s deliberately trying to convert you to; truly, the phrase “preaching to the choir” has never before been so apt to describe a motion picture. Frankly, I didn’t even care to bring up that this is actually based on a novel or that it spawned a sequel film dealing with Demetrius and his life after this film; the core of the storytelling in The Robe was so hollow, so affronted that I dared look at it with a critical eye, that it became irritating to think about, rather irrationally so. While widescreen as a format and as a standard would find its footing in the coming years, and even the genre of Biblical epics would eventually get to where they always wanted to be, The Robe is basically a stepping stone along those two particular journeys and nothing more, and it’s the most aggravating of all that the Academy felt obligated to ignore the numerous faults with this film and include it in the Best Picture field. Who knows; maybe it was divine inspiration… Either way, it’ll be nice when I can finally wash my hands of this kind of film and be done with it.

Arbitrary Rating: 5/10

Julius Caesar

Beware the Ides of March…

I initially knew 1953’s Julius Caesar only as one film in the string of four straight Best Actor nominations for Marlon Brando; what I didn’t know until I started looking into it today was that it is based on a Shakespeare play of the same name, and as long-time readers of this blog may recall, me and Billy Shakes have rarely seen eye to eye, so this film became somewhat more of a harder sell to me. Aside from the choices in cast, possibly the only other saving grace the film features is that it is directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who was given the job because, to quote producer John Houseman, he was one of the “best dialogue directors in the business”, so such a director helming an adaptation of the English language’s greatest ever writer should at least be something to be mildly enticed about, right? Well, I guess I should never count out the ability of William Shakespeare and those who adapt his works to let me down even on my most enthusiastic expectations (which this film hardly had that from me going in); even with the film only being a hair over two hours, it still took me two days to get through just because of how bored I was while watching it, and another day just to muster enough to say about it to put together a review.

For those not well versed on the Bard and his plays, Julius Caesar is actually the story of Caesar’s assassination, both the leadup to it and the civil war that erupts after between Caesar’s senatorial assassins, who killed the leader to prevent a potential autocracy, and the Second Triumvirate that rises in Caesar’s wake and seeks to avenge his death. While Caesar is the title character, the protagonists of the story are really Brutus, the reluctant participant in the deed and arguably the only one with truly noble intentions, and Cassius, the instigator of the plot and the one who brings Brutus onboard to help secure public opinion after Caesar’s death. These two characters are played in the film by James Mason and John Gielgud, respectively, and it is these two who carry the bulk of the film on their shoulders, and both make excellent work of the material and their characters alike. It is thus rather amusing now, in hindsight, to see Marlon Brando’s name trumpeted all over this film and its awards draw, as his performance as Mark Antony, while definitely powerful & a scene-stealer, only occupies a fraction of the screentime compared to Mason and Gielgud, and his scene-stealing ability is basically relegated to the single scene that focuses on him alone, the famous “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech he gives to the people of Rome while standing above Caesar’s freshly murdered body. Why he was put forth as the film’s main draw and as the contender for the Best Actor Oscar is a little befuddling; apparently, Mason too was concerned that Brando was drawing too much attention in his scenes while the film was shooting, and the tit for tat between them and Mankiewicz for screentime and audience sympathy makes for an amusing story while looking back now. Other than these three performances, though, I’m really left with nothing to say about this; the production was basic as a necessity, the dialogue was directly Shakespeare and nothing more, and even Greer Garson & Deborah Kerr are wasted in single-scene character roles to where you wonder why they needed such big names if they were just going to throw them away like this. It was nice, though, to once again see Miklos Rozsa’s name among the opening credits, though his score this time around isn’t as particularly memorable as his past few have been, but it suffices well enough.

It seems not even the legendary dialogue talents of Joe Mankiewicz can withstand the overwhelming pressure of adapting the once now and forever greatness of thy the Lord Great William Shakespeare the Eternal Bard and Savior of the Written English Word, henceforth and in perpetuity. Now, I’ll fully cop to the glibness of that sentence there, but the more Shakespeare films I’m forced to watch, the greater my resentment (especially being an American who went through English classes in middle & high school) at essentially being required to hold the man aloft on a pedestal for lack of a good modern reason to do so continues to grow & fester. I’m fully aware of the importance of the Shakester in codifying modern English prose and the extent of his influence on such in the decades & centuries after him, but in considering how well his stuff continues to work in the modern era, especially if it’s presented as straight and unembellished as productions like this Julius Caesar are, it really bends the mind to try and understand not why Shakes is as important as he was, but why he continues to be as revered as he is; a concept amusingly known as “bardolatry”, that I discovered doing some reading around after watching this film. Another review of this I found made a similar comment, to the tune of how Shakespeare’s written words are immortal, but that each presentation & interpretation of his work is very much a product of its time, and it’s film adaptations like this one that show that you can’t just do a straight rendition of Shakespeare and just inherently expect it to work; you gotta really play with the mold & put some effort in. Olivier showed how that can totally happen with his Henry V, and it’s thus more the letdown that it is when films like this come across more like Olivier’s Hamlet instead. I wasn’t expecting much from this, and aside from a couple choice scenes from a trio of more-than-capable actors, that’s basically all I got from it; I could continue questioning why it’s here in this Best Picture fold among other things, but I honestly feel that I’ve been mean enough to the film as it is. It possibly doesn’t deserve that, but it definitely didn’t do nearly enough to rise above my potentially doing so.

Arbitrary Rating: 6/10

Judging Oscar: Best Picture 1952

-Year in Summary/What Did Win-

For as much as the 25th Academy Awards were a milestone in itself, the ceremony – held on both coasts in Hollywood and New York City – had an even bigger milestone lined up in order to fund the thing: after a few studios refused to help foot the bill, NBC kicked in $100,000 as a sponsorship in return for broadcasting rights, and thus the Oscars for the films of 1952 was the first ceremony aired live on television. Jumping back and forth between the Pantages in Hollywood and NBC’s International Theater in New York, the awards were the first opportunity for movie fans to see their favorite stars live and unscripted in the comfort of their own home, and the broadcast became the most-watched single program in the five years of commercial television at that point. Evidently the voting body felt compelled to really spread the wealth around; Best Picture, Director, and the four acting awards all went to different films, including Shirley Booth in her film debut for Best Actress and John Ford as director of The Quiet Man, making him the only person to win Best Director four times. Gary Cooper’s Best Actor win for High Noon was viewed as a sign that the film’s expected shoo-in status for Best Picture was now a certainty, but not even the bicoastal live broadcast could mask the awkward and almost disgruntled response from the crowd when the big one was given to Cecil B. DeMille for The Greatest Show on Earth.

-Ranking the Nominees-

-Big-budget adventure films have always been the cream of Hollywood’s crop in terms of box office and entertainment spectacle, so why does Ivanhoe feel as unsatisfactory as it does? For a film in the same vein as The Adventures of Robin Hood, Ivanhoe is barely-passable entertainment at best, with only a couple of action scenes that get by more on the production value and some admittedly capable color cinematography than anything; everything else here is half-hearted at best and droll at worst, and despite its relative box office success, that this was nominated into this field in place of a few other potential pictures is honestly the most damning criticism of all.

-For a film that’s ranked second-last on RottenTomatoes’ list of every Best Picture winner ever, The Greatest Show on Earth could’ve honestly been a lot worse; of course, it also could’ve been a hell of a lot better. Cecil B. DeMille banks his picture on entertaining via the spectacle of the actual Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, which when the film sits back and just does that, it manages as entertainment well enough. It’s everything else, all the stuff DeMille adds and wraps the film around to make it a proper Hollywood film, that sinks it like a lead weight; the fictional narrative is the barest of pretexts in justifying the film at all, the writing and acting is melodramatic and overly-Hollywood, and DeMille seemingly can’t be arsed to put the work in fleshing anything out to make the film an ultimately satisfying one. Giving this Best Picture, and DeMille an Oscar, was just that: a gift, and all it unfortunately did was justify the vindicating hindsight of the myriad of Oscar look-back exposes written since then (including this one).

-It was the biggest struggle for me, in deciding this order and writing this post, of where to put Moulin Rouge in this ranking; even after I’d watched it, I was decidedly lukewarm about it, and didn’t really have very much to say or things to talk about when it came to assessing its value as a picture against its fellow nominees. I’m putting it here basically for lack of any real reason to move it any higher or any lower; it’s got a solid idea in mind in terms of the film’s look and palette, and it’s successful in realizing that, but the rest of the film is just a boilerplate biopic with a committed physical performance by Jose Ferrer, and that the film is so dismissable despite being a John Huston film is honestly what’s making me as indignant about it as I am.

-For as much as people seem to be touting the narrative, along with Greatest Show being undeserving, that this Oscar race is a two-man bout among the actual nominees, I’m just not sold on The Quiet Man having a real shot at this award. John Ford films tend to have excellent productions that use sets, locations, and cinematography to make the most of the setting of the picture, and truly this is no different; the lush, green landscapes of Ireland and the camera’s ability to capture and render them so lovingly are definitely the film’s biggest asset. While Ford’s pictures always look great, he more often than not can’t match the look of his films with the actual meat of the narrative, and that’s The Quiet Man eight ways to Sunday; with the choices in the script and the acting, it’s far too overly deliberate in everything it does to seem as real & lived-in as its setting wants you to think it is, and the strength of the cinematography alone shouldn’t have to carry the weight of the film’s weakness in narrative to make the film feel satisfying overall. That’s exactly what The Quiet Man does, and that shouldn’t be the best picture of the year to me.

-It’s the shortest of the five nominees in runtime, and had it won it would’ve been the shortest Best Picture winner ever, but High Noon has more in sheer worth and pure narrative than any of the other films in this roster, to where you almost wonder why films even need to be any longer. The economy of the runtime, framing the narrative as taking place in almost real-time, ends up as one of the film’s biggest strengths, and in rewatching it for this segment I ended up sitting through the whole thing just because the suspense of the narrative had been so successful in grabbing me. Hollywood was apparently pretty divided over this film, with its barely-concealed subtext relating to McCarthyism and the growing blacklist; even so, it was seen as the front-runner for Best Picture going into the ceremony, and among the five nominees, it definitely should’ve walked away with the award.

-What Should’ve Been Here-

It’s easy to look at the field of five nominees and think that it needs improvement; the problem is coming up with enough truly worthy films released in 1952 that stand a better chance than what’s there. A lot of the films nominated in other categories, like Viva Zapata, Hans Christian Andersen, and Come Back, Little Sheba weren’t received well enough overall for a real go at Best Picture; films that were, like Sudden Fear, With a Song in My Heart, and My Cousin Rachel might’ve been better choices. The 1001 list doesn’t have too many standouts, mostly genre films and a handful of foreign entries; Forbidden Games got a special nod for Foreign Language Film from the Academy, and Ikiru is another Kurosawa film the Academy ignored despite being better than most of the actual nominees (if not all). Notably missing is The Bad and the Beautiful, which was well-represented elsewhere in the ceremony; the film took home 5 Oscars, the most of the evening, and indeed the most ever won by a film not nominated for Best Picture. Also conspicuously missing is a certain movie musical that, despite two nominations elsewhere, missed out on the Best Picture field… somehow; perhaps the Academy was briefly tired of musicals after just giving Best Picture to one, but that’s no excuse (nor any other possible reason) for this Best Picture field to be without Singin’ in the Rain.

-What I Would’ve Picked-

While High Noon is definitely the choice among the nominees, and Ikiru would probably be the best foreign language selection… the Best Picture of 1952 is, was, always should’ve been, and always will be, Singin’ in the Rain. It is very possibly the best movie musical of all time, and that it not only didn’t win this year but didn’t even make the ballot is so beyond outrageous that it turns the corner from anger into downright bewilderment.

-How Did Oscar Do?-

With a rather piddling selection of five films, ignoring the best one to instead give Cecil B. DeMille a gimme, and completely forgetting how much they’re supposed to love musicals to where they snub the greatest one ever made, this ceremony’s effort is so subpar that (as I said in the last section) it actually evokes confusion more than ire…

What the hell was the Academy thinking?

Don’t let the flickering of those television sets distract you from what you should be about, Oscar. You’ve only got a bigger crowd now that’s paying even more attention to you. Get it together.

Moulin Rouge

No woman will ever love me. I have it on the best authority.

As much as I enjoy John Huston as a director, I had to admit that when I saw his name as the director of this film, it puzzled me; it was like I couldn’t reconcile in my head that the same John Huston that directed The Maltese Falcon and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre would direct a film centered on the Moulin Rouge and the burlesque, bohemian nightlife of Paris’ “Naughty 1890s”. Now having seen the film, & realizing it is much more a biopic of French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who so happened to center himself & base his art around the lifestyle the Moulin Rouge joyously celebrated back in its heyday, it’s a little more understandable; still weird, and the cognitive dissonance is still there, but at least a biopic makes more sense. This difference, however, in what Moulin Rouge the film (the 1952 one, at least) seems to be at first glance and looking at the marketing of it versus the Toulouse-Lautrec biopic it actually is, is probably the biggest foible when it comes to appreciating the film should one choose to watch it; you go into this film expecting something, and at first you seem to be getting it, but then it shifts focus and changes into something else, and you’re left wondering why you’re not getting more of what you thought you were going to when you started it.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec is a regular at the Moulin Rouge nightclub, a bawdy and vivacious party taking place every night on the outskirts of what respectable society would deem proper. The dismissed and the outcast that call the club home would seem the perfect crowd for Henri to fit into; born from an aristocratic marriage of first cousins, his genetic abnormality resulted in a stunted height when he broke both his legs in his youth and they refused to heal correctly, leaving Henri with no notion of fitting into aristocracy and even less of a notion of anyone being capable of loving such a crippled being as him. Of course, he is still a human being, and still has such emotions himself despite throwing himself into his art as extensively as he throws himself into his drinks every night; thus the film details Toulouse-Lautrec’s internal struggles when he does manage to fall in love with two women over the course of his short life, and how thoroughly his preconceptions about love end up destroying him, mentally and physically, much more than his genetic deficiency ever ended up holding him back.

I said in the opener that Moulin Rouge seems to be a certain sort of film going into it, and that it ends up being a very different film when one is done, and this really needs to be stressed for anyone who decides to give this one a go, especially when the film starts off at the Moulin Rouge itself, in full swing and with all the splendor and activity that one thinks will be the central focus of the film, given the title of it and the overall look and feel of the film and its promotional material. Truly, that the film is titled Moulin Rouge and that it is purported to be about the bohemian lifestyle that the cabaret itself was at the heart of is a gigantic red herring; this is merely a biopic of the artist who frequented the club and who did the most in immortalizing the lifestyle through his paintings and drawings, and from what I gathered after watching it, a rather fictionalized biopic at that. The trappings of the biopic genre, numerous and extensive, are all here in some form or another, and that the film focuses on them and its central figure and then goes about as if it’s very much something it’s not is the ultimate detriment of the picture. Where the film does succeed with its immortalization of Toulouse-Lautrec and his art is in how the film looks, both the cinematography and the production value itself. Huston had cinematographer Oswald Morris shoot the film with a color palette that matched Toulouse-Lautrec’s actual art, and then had the Technicolor printing deliberately desaturated so the film itself would look “as if Toulouse-Lautrec had directed it”; this combined gives the film its distinct look and feel, which along with the story of the painter’s life was the intent behind the picture more than anything else, made readily apparent in the three scenes in the film that do take place at the Moulin Rouge, and which make full use of the costumes, makeup, and set dressing of the cabaret to come off as a Toulouse-Lautrec painting come to life. It’s thus such a shame when the film shifts its focus and spends most of its running time in Henri’s Parisian apartment or following him on the streets when he goes about his regular life, and we care that much less when the energy of the film takes a nosedive squarely into biopic territory and leaves the Rouge behind, much like the artist himself is forced to during the film. The biopic elements might’ve come across a bit better if Jose Ferrer’s performance as Henri was more diverse and multifaceted than it is; Ferrer’s emotional expression as Toulouse-Lautrec ranges from taciturn a good 70% of the time, to lashing out in anger at the people around him all of the rest of the time, and doesn’t extend beyond these two emotions whatsoever, which makes it hard to care about the man or invest any of our attention in his well being. At the least, Ferrer shows how game he is to commit to Henri’s physical appearance, inventing a strapped device to hide his legs behind him while he walks on his knees for Henri’s wide shots, and I’ll definitely give him points for that.

It’s the aimlessness of the film, I think, that is ultimately its Achilles heel; Huston must’ve wanted to do a biopic of Toulouse-Lautrec, and had a solid idea in mind of the film looking like the artist’s paintings come to life, but when it came to actually telling the story of his life, he unfortunately couldn’t figure it out, and thus resulted to a by-the-numbers fictional biopic narrative that he was able to pick and place details into to make it seem like it was about the artist, covering that with the film’s look and feel & calling it a day. It’s really unfortunate that this is what Moulin Rouge feels like it amounts to, and it’s equally unfortunate that it is John Huston that is behind it. It also makes it doubly hard to try and recommend this even to those with an interest in Toulouse-Lautrec or the bohemian Paris nightlife; aside from looking like a painting come to life, the film won’t satisfy anyone who approaches it from any sort of direct angle, being a rudimentary and fictional biopic and nothing more. Fans of the artist at least have his work to go back to and enjoy; for anyone else, the sell of the picture is unfortunately not what they’re going to find out they have bought, and this ends up overshadowing just about any other opinion they might’ve ended up with.

Arbitrary Rating: 6/10

Ivanhoe

Justice belongs to all men, or it belongs to none.

For as long as Hollywood has sought to adapt great works of literature into motion pictures, there have been plenty of such adaptations that have, frankly, flat-out failed in doing justice to their source material. Whether it’s a producer whose eyes are bigger than his stomach, or a director who can’t see past their rose-tinted glasses, or a writer who only wants to capitalize on a known property, the annals of cinema are strewn with literary adaptations that can’t possibly hold a candle to the original texts, so much so that the notion of “the book being better than the movie” is an accepted standard of moviegoing (and the obverse, a film that is better than the book, is seen as a rarity and notable exception). I bring this up in particular as the bulk of my initial reaction after watching Ivanhoe, an adaptation of an 1800s historical novel by Sir Walter Scott, that I have not read and knew little about before this. Now, I’m not nearly as versed in classic literature as I am with cinema, so to do some looking after watching this film and finding out how important and influential Scott’s original novel was in English literature, it should really hammer in the point that even after my initial viewing of Ivanhoe, when I was largely ignorant of the film’s original source material, I could still tell that the film’s attempt at being a worthy literary adaptation had been more or less a failure.

Robert Taylor stars as the eponymous Wilfred of Ivanhoe, an English knight in service to King Richard the Lionheart during the Crusades. When Richard vanishes after the war, Ivanhoe goes searching for him, and manages to locate the monarch as a prisoner held by Leopold of Austria, who is demanding 150,000 marks of silver as a ransom. Thing is, most of England is convinced Richard is dead, largely thanks to the reigning Prince John, who knows of Richard’s predicament and is more than content to sit on the knowledge so he can continue to sit on the throne. Convincing enough of Richard’s loyal subjects that he is still alive to where they can gather the ransom will be hard enough; convincing the various combative branches of English people, such as Normans and Saxons (and even a contingent of Jews located in Sheffield), to band together as one country against the treacherous Prince John is another thing altogether. Thus, Ivanhoe cooks up a scheme to rally support against Prince John by taking on his knights in a jousting tournament to show that John’s fealty isn’t as strong and all-encompassing as many may think; and if that doesn’t do enough, perhaps taking on John’s crooked supporters more directly via a siege on their castle at Torquilstone, aided by the woodland efforts of one Robin of Locksley and his merry men, will drum up enough resistance for the people to demand the return of the rightful king of England.

Again, I knew very little about the source material for this film before watching it, but even still I probably should’ve been more wary of Ivanhoe than I was when I started it; my extended break aside, I should know better than to trust literary adaptations that make up the dross of the Best Picture nominees, and all I gathered about this one was that it was an adaptation and that it dealt with a character that was basically one degree to the side of the Robin Hood story, so there wasn’t much to build up in my eyes. Even still, that Ivanhoe comes across as tepid as it does is much more on director Richard Thorpe and star Robert Taylor, who along with this film’s producer would re-team on two more similar pictures to make up a quasi-trilogy of sorts. Not much hope for either of the other two films, though; while the color cinematography here was something to enjoy, and the score by Miklos Rozsa, another Quo Vadis handover, was similarly memorable, it’s in service to a film that doesn’t know how to really properly make something of its story, at least not nearly to the extent of the novel (from what I gathered afterward). Instead of a virtuous tale of chivalry told through the events of the narrative, Ivanhoe the film is mostly content to just put its adapted story to celluloid and be done with it, counting on such a half-hearted effort to be enough to get people into the seats regardless of if they walk away satisfied on the other end. Really, the adjective “half-hearted” sums up the creative efforts of the whole film quite neatly; even most of the cast, while trying, can’t seem to manage enough effort to sell the dialogue and their performances, though Thorpe and his cinematographer are smart enough to wring every ounce out of Elizabeth Taylor’s youthful beauty in stunning Technicolor (Joan Fontaine, the other main female role, can barely manage to seem interested in being in the film at all when she does appear). Even the action sequences, the only other possible draw for audiences, are really only held together by the production design and the use of the sets; the actual fight choreography and copious use of archers throughout collapses into a melodramatic heaving of sticks and rocks around, with the siege at Torquilstone managing engagement only from the sheer amount of things happening on the screen at once.

For a film with the runtime that it has, Ivanhoe was barely worth the effort to get through it, and the marketing of the film as the “biggest spectacle since Quo Vadis” turned out to be nothing but sheer marketing entirely; I think I’d honestly get more out of a second viewing of Quo Vadis than I did this first viewing of Ivanhoe, and this film is about half the length of the former. It’s one of those films that you can get through well enough, if only just well enough, and only after you’re done with it are you able to look back and realize how little you really got from it. I might be even more indignant toward Ivanhoe were I to try and contextualize its Best Picture nomination against a couple other films missing from the field, but I feel like I’ve been mean enough to the picture as it is, and probably more than it really deserves. Considering the apparent reputation of the original novel, that Ivanhoe the film ends up as just another also-ran in just about any way you’d want to approach it is honestly the most disappointing aspect of all. Even with the convenience of watching a 100-some-minute picture, you’re probably better off holding to the adage of films adapted from books and choosing to read the novel instead.

Arbitrary Rating: 6/10

The Greatest Show on Earth

You don’t need me; you’ve got what you love. You’ve got the circus.

For as much as people like to say that the Academy loves movies about movies, or about entertainment in general, the Academy also really loves honoring the people who they believe have “earned it”, either through their lasting impact on the industry or their formative influence on the same; countless times has the Academy been side-eyed for giving a competitive Oscar win for what basically amounts to a lifetime achievement award, often shirking the performance or creative work that really should’ve won that particular category in favor of making sure the greats are not without their golden garlands. Hell, if it weren’t such a common occurrence, posts like my Judging Oscar segments (among plenty of similar ones on other blogs & videos) wouldn’t be as prevalent or feel as vindicating as they often do. So for 1952, when the Academy had the opportunity to raise a pedestal for Cecil B. deMille, who’d gone far too overlooked in the short quarter-century the Academy had existed, they took what many assumed would be their last chance to do so; deMille was regarded even then as a legend of cinema & one of the founders of the Hollywood film industry, and was starting to get up there in years and physical health as well, and so they ended up giving Best Picture almost arbitrarily to his latest spectacle, The Greatest Show on Earth. Of course, history looking back on this decision has regarded it as one of the worst and most undeserving Best Picture winners ever; and, watching the film myself for the first time, I’m not inclined to argue against that position.

The Greatest Show on Earth, for those not in the know, is the tagline for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, an entertainment institution in America for well over a hundred years, and here, the actual circus is the backdrop and setting of the film, featuring many of the actual performers and acts themselves. While we see the ins and outs of the shows and performances, both underneath the big top and all that takes place behind the scenes to bring the tarp up and run this vast entertainment machine, the people at the heart of the show are the central focus of the plot; namely general manager Brad Braden, whose eye for the operation of the show is as thorough as his sight is narrowed by it, despite star trapeze artist Holly adoring him openly. In order to keep the show going and all of its attractions employed, Brad gambles on a full season run instead of a limited engagement, which will only be sustained by the show’s board as long as they’re making a profit; thus, to ensure large crowds are drawn in, Brad brings in The Great Sebastian, a trapeze artist as widely-known up in the air as he is as a womanizer on the ground, who quickly sets his sights on Holly as a fellow aerialist. Holly, however, is more than irked at being shunted out of center ring, and the two performers engage in a battle of daring one-upsmanship that, while thrilling the crowds, threatens to strain the ropes binding this family together to their breaking point.

There’s a lot of possibility with a broad synopsis like that, and it’s that simultaneous broad inklings of plot and scatter-shot attempt at being all-encompassing that ends up as the center of the film’s problems. I saw a review of this after I’d watched it that used a good analogy to describe the plot, and I’m going to lift it and use my own version of it here: this film basically has three different half-films making up the bulk of this film’s actual content, and instead of editing or revising to try and make it all coherent or more narratively satisfying, opts instead to just vacillate between all three at various points without regard to any of it forming into a wholly-realized picture. There’s a love triangle (actually a love pentagram, if including a couple other supporting characters) between the three lead players amid the background of a circus show, there’s a barely-holding-together subplot involving Jimmy Stewart’s clown character hiding out in the circus, and there’s what’s basically a documentary by Cecil B. deMille on the actual logistics and operations of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus and the shows themselves (narrated by deMille for good measure), and by god is deMille going to have all of his cakes and eat all of them too by having all three as the centerpieces of his film, regardless of his ability to congeal them together or even flesh out the plots into actual substantive narratives. To his credit, when the film basically sits back and acts as a recording of a circus performance, it’s easier to give that leeway as an audience and just enjoy the circus itself without worrying about the things that should be making a proper film of it; but, inevitably, we have to cut back to the fictional narrative, and it’s these portions that can’t even manage to stand up under the weight of that massive big top, made even heavier by the choices in writing and performing the material as hackneyed and old-fashioned as it is here. Everything, from the acting to the dialogue in the screenplay to the decision-making in the editing room, is done very pointedly and theatrically, emphatically emoting or enunciating words, playing to the balconies despite there being a lack of a need to. In Quo Vadis, this works because it fits the actual film that is being presented to us; here, there’s no reason for the performers and managers of a circus to be so melodramatic in their day-to-day actions, so deliberate and Hollywood in the delivery of their lines to where the editor knows exactly where to cut the beginning and ending of each shot without ever needing to look at the screenplay or shooting notes (and does exactly this and no better, to boot). Having Charlton Heston as the leading man makes this all the worse, with his acting here consisting of the term “ham-handed” and basically nothing else, and while his supporting players are game enough to try with the dialogue and the story (Betty Hutton and Cornel Wilde even learning the trapeze themselves for their close-up footage), not even the geniality of James Stewart’s persona, even under thick clown makeup, can save the film from all of its other problems.

The saddest thing about The Greatest Show on Earth, even with its concept and lack of thorough revision, is probably the possibility that it had, that still manages to show through even with the film’s weaknesses. There’s a good film to be had here, or at least one that’s successful at what it’s trying to do, but it seems like all the decisions that were made, either by deMille or the actors, were very much not the decisions that would’ve worked best or suited the material the most. There were more than a normal amount of times I caught myself watching the film almost in the background, having a different version of it playing in my head simultaneously that was more in line with what the material should be or how it could’ve been performed better, and I had to keep mentally checking myself in order to watch the film as it was and what it was giving me instead of a possibly better version that threatened to supplant my memories of the actual film itself. If I’m being honest, this isn’t really that bad, but given the reputation of deMille going into the film and the benefit of hindsight in the film’s winning Best Picture, what it is is disappointing; it should be better than it is, and that it’s not makes all the flaws that much more magnified. Given the Academy would have another shot with deMille a few years later in The Ten Commandments, their decision to gift him Best Picture with this is thus similarly more egregious, and serves to add a lot to the justification of all the side-eyes the Academy gets whenever it tries to be timeless or spread the love or honor a career over a performance or any of the other safe choices it makes over the nominees that should have won. The Academy may have wanted deMille’s film to be his Greatest Show, but it only ends up sufficing as merely a tolerable one, and no amount of golden gilding can stand up to the piercingly clear gaze of hindsight’s 20/20 vision. The Academy would do well to make more of an effort, even today, in remembering that.

Arbitrary Rating: 6/10

Judging Oscar: Best Picture 1951

-Year in Summary/What Did Win-

The 24th Academy Awards, going into the ceremony, seemed like much more of a toss-up than previous years, where there had essentially been an odds-on favorite or two in each category that would either win or be upset; for the films of 1951, there were several films, or performances in films, that could’ve reasonably taken any of the Oscars. Humphrey Bogart, fielding his second-ever nomination, mounted a modest campaign for himself as the sentimental choice for Best Actor; fellow nominee Marlon Brando, however, couldn’t have cared less, even with history regarding his breakthrough performance in A Streetcar Named Desire as one that changed the face of acting from that point forward. For Best Picture and Director, Elia Kazan’s Streetcar and George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun were duking it out head-to-head for both awards, as well as several of the black-and-white technical categories, while Gene Kelly’s personal investment into An American in Paris seemed destined to have to settle for the color awards, as well as an Honorary Oscar to him for his overall choreography work. Perhaps Bogie’s surprise win over Brando should’ve been more portentous than it seemed; while Streetcar would sweep the remaining acting categories, and George Stevens would secure himself the win for Best Director, the audible surprise was palpable when the envelope was opened and An American in Paris was announced, becoming the second color film, and only the third ever musical, to win Best Picture.

-Ranking the Nominees-

-Plenty of films this year received lots of Oscar love, and there were a slew of films that fielded multiple nominations, so it’s a bit of a surprise to look at the slate for Best Picture and see Decision Before Dawn there, as this film’s only other Oscar nom was for its editing. It’s a good picture, and the production value of the legitimate war-ravaged setting is very well-utilized (raising questions as to why it didn’t get additional nominations in the technicals), but it doesn’t quite have the overall impact that it should, or that it wants to have, and while it may have topped any other war film released this year to secure a Best Picture nomination, I’m not convinced it’s enough of a film to warrant said nom just for the sake of having a war film among them.

-I was prepared to dislike Quo Vadis before I’d started it, simply because it was three hours long and the type of Biblical epic that feels it needs to be that long without ever really justifying itself in being that long. I was surprised while watching it to find that I was actually having a good time doing so, and even putting aside the winning aspects of the color cinematography and ridiculously opulent production value, I found myself entertained and holding interest through the running time purely on the conviction of the film’s presentation style and the commitment of the cast in selling the film. That’s not to say the film is faultless, though, and the various minor issues with the story and the comparatively more major issues with some of the storytelling and dialogue keep this from being any higher in this ranking; still, though, I didn’t hate this as much as I and general popular opinion would’ve expected me to, and I’ll appreciate that more than anything.

-As much of a surprise as it was to the crowd at the Pantages that An American in Paris won this award, looking back at it through the eye of history and the output of Hollywood in the decades to follow, it’s really not that surprising. Vincente Minnelli’s showboat of a picture is a high-quality example of what made movie musicals of the era so beloved: gleefully colorful cinematography, a feel-good creampuff of a story, and the world-class song and dance talents of Gene Kelly, whose charm and joie de vivre in the expression of his talents easily wins you over where the selling points of musicals would otherwise fail. It’s that this is a creampuff, though, that makes it hard to stump for this to win Best Picture, and even harder to justify its actual win; feel-good films are fine and all, but Paris, despite its feel-goodiness, doesn’t ultimately amount to much (especially in regards to several supporting characters and subplots in the film), and this lack of fully fleshed-out narrative makes the film seem ultimately thrown together to build around and justify the ending ballet sequence, which is the real money-winner of the film and likely what tipped voters over the edge in giving it Best Picture more than anything. One outstanding sequence aside, this shouldn’t really be a Best Picture winner, and in my reckoning, it won’t be.

–A Place in the Sun, as befitting the source material’s original name, is a quintessential tragedy with an American setting, and that the film is held up as a truly American film was and is a big part of the picture’s marketing strategy. Comparatively to Paris, it’s got a little more substance to it than just generally relying on feel-good entertainment, but it is similar to it in ultimately amounting to rather little; the narrative really doesn’t make anything more of it beyond the actual tragedy at its core, and despite great performances from Elizabeth Taylor, Shelley Winters, and especially Montgomery Clift (whose style & manner is so noticeably different from everyone around him), and a solid directing hand from George Stevens, the timeless quality of the film built around the narrative just seems lacking here, & so I can’t say with certainty it’s the best picture of the year.

-Now here’s a film that almost goes without saying when one is talking about timelessness. A Streetcar Named Desire is based on a stage play (which was also directed by Elia Kazan), and one almost wouldn’t believe it watching the film with how amazingly cinematic it is; the cinematography and production makes great use of contrasting light and shadow and the detail of the grunginess of the DuBois apartment and its surroundings, and Kazan knows how to give the film the heft and weight it needs even with it being basically a character showcase – Woody Allen called the film a “perfect confluence of script, performance, and direction”, and he was absolutely correct. Of course, the stage play roots mean the film, even with its look, wouldn’t be anything without its ensemble, and Kazan’s decision to bring almost the whole Broadway cast over for the film version ended up completely justified; Vivien Leigh, the film’s one replacement cast member, redefines the legacy of her career as Blanche, and Marlon Brando’s performance redefined the very notion of film acting itself, cut from a wholly different cloth than the standard at the time (a quality he shared with Clift, whom Brando voted for for Best Actor this year). Brando being the only actor of the big four to miss out on an Oscar win here is unconscionable, and against the rest of the field of nominees (and the year as a whole), so too is the film missing out on Best Picture as well.

-What Should’ve Been Here-

The slate of nominees this year is pretty typical for Oscar in this era, though that doesn’t mean it couldn’t do with some improvement. Quo Vadis topped the box office this year by a considerable margin; fellow high-grossers like Show Boat, David and Bathsheba, and The Great Caruso could’ve potentially muscled into this category amid their other nominations. Streetcar had the stage adaptation slot locked down, which kept out this year’s version of Death of a Salesman. I’ve seen several mentions of surprise that The African Queen is not among this slate while also mentioning that they would not nominate it themselves, and I’ll join that particular fold. Other Oscar nominees that missed out include Detective Story, though William Wyler would get a Best Director nod; star Kirk Douglas missed out on a nom for that film as well as for Ace in the Hole, which probably should’ve been among the Best Picture field (though that’s more 20/20 hindsight, as the film flopped upon initial release). Rashomon was merely given a special award for Foreign Language film, even with it being better than a majority of actual nominees. Other 1001 list films like Pandora and the Flying Dutchman and The Day the Earth Stood Still were nowhere near the Academy’s wheelhouse, sadly; Strangers on a Train certainly should’ve been, given Hitchcock, and it should’ve been in the field for sure.

-What I Would’ve Picked-

I could be tempted to shake up the overall field by adding Strangers on a Train or perhaps Ace in the Hole, and Rashomon would’ve been an inspired choice even with the language barrier, but even with those additions, I’d still end up on Streetcar. It might be a hair’s width between that and Rashomon for my overall objective choice, but I’ll edge toward the American film for now in these still-kinda-early Oscar years.

-How Did Oscar Do?-

It seems Oscar opted for a rather standard slate overall to reflect a somewhat tepid year of films (though there are certainly enough winners if one goes about finding them), & even chose probably the safest choice among them to award the big one to boot. The 1950s would be the early heights of the growing genres of epic films and movie musicals, especially now that color is more and more the standard for those genres, so while this field doesn’t wow completely, it’s definitely indicative of the decade to follow. Now we’ll just have to see if it’s a hurdle that Oscar can manage to overcome.

Quo Vadis

I pray that one day he shall feel the joy of Your love. I pray with all my heart.

There is a concept inherent in watching a film, and really in being an audience to any work of fiction or narrative in general, that I feel has gotten increasingly lost or muddled in the last few decades or so. Suspension of disbelief to some, verisimilitude in fiction to others, the thought is essentially the same: that willingness to believe in the reality of the film itself, fictional though it be, to believe in the very believability of the film’s world along with the characters that act in it and the narrative that takes place. It’s a notion that’s become so second-nature over the century-plus of moviegoing that it’s taken for granted, and with the increasing need of movies to thrill, excite, surprise, & get a strong reaction out of its audience to where they have to go one step further than what they were able to before to do so, which the audience then comes to expect or anticipate, so then filmmakers go another step further, or try and come up with bigger twists or heavier hammer-drops… It’s a vicious cycle that’s resulted in moviegoing populations today being so jaded that they’ll mock or dismiss as “cringe” what, twenty or thirty years before, would’ve delighted or moved them, or at least been enough to sell them on what the film itself was doing or being. It’s why I’ve mentioned often on this site that I try and view a film in the mindset of someone watching it from the time it came out in, and I go in particular depth talking about it here to explain my response to watching Quo Vadis, a Roman/Biblical-era epic that would set the cloth that later films like The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur would cut to perfection: almost nothing about this film works when looked at from a modern angle, but still, when I got myself to fall into the presentation of the world the film was selling, I found myself nevertheless having enjoyed it.

Marcus Vinicius is a Roman commander who’s spent years away with his troops fighting victorious battles in Britain and France, and is eager to return to the city and partake in its pleasures. Rome, however, isn’t quite the same city as when he left it; the Emperor Nero, a pompous man-child and self-stylized artist, has grown increasingly bored and agitated with the commonfolk and the overall sycophantic advisors encircling him, and seeks to be more daring and ostentatious in his artistic endeavors to win the praise of the people, and while the Emperor is still publicly seen as a divine figurehead, there have been growing crowds of converts to a new collective that follow the teachings of a man known as Christ, a crowd that includes the young adopted daughter of a retired Roman general by the name of Lygia, who catches Marcus’ eye upon their meeting. Marcus, however, has caught the eye of Nero’s sultry wife Poppaea, equally agitated as the Emperor but for different reasons, and the impending collision of these clashing forces both within and surrounding Rome threatens to set a match to the future of the city, the Empire, and the prospects of Marcus & Lygia ending up together as well.

It would be easy to sum up Quo Vadis as a film to a modern audience in terms of selling points, and indeed I basically did in the opener when I said that it set the standard for Biblical-era epic films that would follow, such as The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur (many of the crew members on Quo Vadis would go on to also work on Ben-Hur as well). Now, epic films like this have been around the block in Hollywood before; even Ben-Hur was actually a remake of a similarly-titled silent film from 1925, but Quo Vadis marked a jump for the genre in terms of both production and box office. MGM put $7 million into shooting the film, making it the most expensive film ever made at that point, and their efforts would bring them their highest-grossing film at the box office since Gone With the Wind. It also marked the genre’s shift into color film, and all of this combined makes Quo Vadis a feast for the eyes and ears on a level several steps above what the genre had seen before. The production value in the film, from the sets to the costuming & make-up to the sheer number of extras throughout, is almost excessive, but it works for the setting the film is in, and also does a lot to hold attention where the film would otherwise falter. Even with the runtime being almost three hours, I was surprised at how well-handled it was and how I never got bored watching it, even with certain scenes being noticeably long, and I again attribute this to my brain’s willingness to go along with the film’s presentation style and the setting it was lavishly basking in. Part of this willingness extended to the dialogue, which may come across as hokey and bombastic to modern ears, but for me merely felt theatrical for the sake of setting, and it aided the presentation of the film. The cast also helped in this regard, particularly Peter Ustinov as Nero, who gleefully masticates the scenery of his character while savoring every bit he’s chewing on; Robert Taylor felt somewhat not enough of a presence to really anchor the film as Marcus Vinicius, but this had the unexpected benefit of making the film feel much more of an ensemble effort than one that had to rely on him as the male lead, and it highlighted the supporting players that much better as a result (though Deborah Kerr as Lygia unfortunately can’t escape being just recognizable enough to feel rather out-of-place as a more-known name).

While well-regarded when it came out, it seems time has not been kind to Quo Vadis; the film’s reputation and overall entertainment value among audiences has dropped quite a bit in the decades since, and what was once awe-inspiring and theatrical has become maudlin and passé as tastes have changed and audiences have gotten more used to films that followed this one. It’s understandable, to be certain; the storytelling in Quo Vadis is very much not tightly-knit together, the romance angles are very forced and lack subtlety, and the excessive production value, full of splendor to viewers at one point, can look needlessly so to a sizeable percentage of moviegoers today. I’m occasionally guilty myself of not regarding a film’s value and service as entertainment both within and outside of the time it’s from; I am, after all, a corporeal being that exists in one particular time within one particular culture, and to pretend as if that has no effect on me in things like this is to be basically lying to myself. But to take that thought to its extreme, to be closed-minded and outright dismissive of practically everything that doesn’t fall squarely within my purview or manage to outsmart me as a viewer with enough wow moments; to be rendered unable to enjoy or appreciate films like Quo Vadis for, at the very least, what they are trying to be, is probably more cringeworthy than any subjective projection of ego would have the people around me believe. I’m not saying moviegoers in general should force themselves to like films like Quo Vadis or think they’re good; I found numerous faults with the film even though I generally enjoyed it overall, and that’s largely why I’m giving it the rating I am. But, instead of opting to fit in with crowds or posture on social media by being totally jaded to films such as this, maybe they should at least try, to be more open and try responding to the style of pitch the film is selling. Who knows; maybe, like I did with this, you might find yourself having a better time than you pre-emptively thought you would’ve.

Arbitrary Rating: 7/10

Decision Before Dawn

Let the names of men like this remain unknown…

So, in returning to the Best Picture odyssey, I’ve chosen to start back into it with a war film. Aren’t I the intelligent one? It does fit a bit with the times, seeing as the Academy is at this point just getting into the era of being able to look back at the war effort with pride and a sense of honor, and though the era of perpetual war nominees for Best Picture might be over now that there’s not an actual war happening (the conflict in Korea had started by this time, but that was technically and logistically a UN endeavor to aid the South), to say that Best Picture is over and done with war films entirely is of course patently incorrect. Now, though, I’d imagine that Oscar will be more discerning with the war pictures it does decide to put up for the big one, with there being less overall as well as fewer slots to potentially fill with them; thus, the question with Decision Before Dawn becomes (as the only war film among the 5 nominees of 1951), is it the best film of all the war films released in 1951, however many there may be? While Decision does do a fairly good job covering the topic it covers, and it uses its production value to great effect (especially in the film’s second half), I’m not certain that it’s really the best of the bunch – unless the level of quality in the rest of the field is a lot lower than I’d assume it would be.

Nearing the end of the war in late 1944, Germany struggles to hold onto whatever positions it can against the Allied offensive as it marches toward the Rhine. In an effort to aid their gains, the Allies have begun making use of some of their German POWs who have volunteered as essentially double agents, being dropped behind the current war fronts into German territory to gather intel and report back to their camps, to assist the clearly imminently-victorious Allies in smoothing over the final stages of fighting. When one particular camp receives word that a German general is willing to negotiate the surrender of his entire corps, the camp sends in two teams: an American radio operator and recent transfer, Rennick, is to accompany a German POW codenamed Tiger to the general’s position to negotiate the surrender and radio back confirmation, while another POW codenamed Happy is dropped in several miles away to locate a large contingent of German tanks that would assuredly get in the way of a potential surrender by the corps, and relay intel on their location and strength back to the Allies. Of course, this is easier said than done, especially just by using German POWs for this sort of thing, risking a potential double-cross in the form of known trickster Tiger and the sentiment of being back among his own people that threatens Happy’s trustworthiness; regardless of either, though, the job must be done to help bring the war to the inevitable end that’s coming.

There’s a few things that Decision Before Dawn does with its production that are potentially notable; for one, it was filmed on location in Germany, in many of the still-ruined towns and cities that were then still under military occupation as a result of the war, and even used a lot of the local citizens to help the filming efforts, which must’ve been more than a bit of whiplash for them given the film comes barely five years after the end of the war. Secondly, as per the topic it covers, the main characters (aside from Rennick) are all German, and even with them being voluntarily used as spies to aid the American war effort, it’s still something that a film so close to the actual war saw fit to use German soldiers as main characters, and thus as people for the audience to sympathize with and perhaps even care for by the end. Extending a sense of humanity to the German people at large, and not just viewing them through the lens of the Nazi officials and the actions they inflict, is essentially the point of the film (and for the character of Rennick, whose narration & experiences bookend the film), and is an honorable intention for both the filmmakers and audiences of the early 1950s. Much of this is successful thanks to Oskar Werner, who plays Happy, and who the film shifts focus entirely to once the trio have parachuted into Germany; Werner’s amiable demeanor and kind eyes do a lot to present Happy as just an overall decent kid who got wrapped up with the war effort, and his experiences and tribulations with the citizens and soldiers of the still-at-war Germany do a good job painting a picture of the country and its citizens as a whole; again, outside the viewpoint of just the crowds that openly and enthusiastically throw up the Nazi salute. Additional kudos go to the cinematography, which has a lot to handle with the accurate production value of the bombed-out cities and the various military assets at use throughout the film, while also using a lot of variety with light and shadow, and it’s to the film’s credit that everything looks not just discernable, but very well done; also to the editing, which cuts all the material together pretty decently (though the film does have some pacing issues that make it hard to justify its length), and which earned the film’s only other nomination at the Oscars.

This is a film that is hard to recommend, and for once it’s not because it’s a bad production; on the contrary, the filmmaking efforts themselves are all very well handled, but the actual story itself just doesn’t quite seem worth it in the end, even despite the effort put into the film. The notion of looking at the German citizens with a humane eye and as partial victims of the war themselves is a good one, and shining a light on the efforts of these codenamed German espionage volunteers is ostensibly the aim of the film as put forth by the narration, but it almost seems like conclusions that are inherent of themselves, rather than the efforts of the film managing to convince us of something we couldn’t otherwise realize on our own. It could very likely be easier for me to do so watching the film over half a century after the end of the war, and such conclusions may not have been as inherent to audiences of 1951 than I so easily assume they are, but it was hard for me to sit through two hours of this film only to end up at the end basically where I’d already been when I started, and it’s this that, even with the good production value, makes it hard for me to try and push the rating of this one any higher than I’m giving it, and I really can’t bring myself to. I’m still not totally sure if this is really the best war film of the year, and the one to beat any of the others to getting a Best Picture slot, but it was well done in just about every department, so I’ll take that as a win and remind myself that, even just among war films, it could’ve been a heck of a lot worse.

Arbitrary Rating: 7/10