Category Archives: The Also Ran’s Project

Directed by Lewis Milestone

Screenplay by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, adaptation by Bartlett Cormack, additional dialog by Charles Lederer

Starring Pat O’Brien, Adolph Menjou

At the first Academy Awards[1] Lewis Milestone won Best Director for Two Arabian Knights, while Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans won Best Picture.  Unfortunately, both accomplishments are rendered somewhat to the dustbin of history with the Academy retroactively deciding Wings was Best Picture of the first Oscars, while Frank Borzage was Best Director  for 7^th Heaven.

How can that be? you ask.  Continue reading →

Directed by William Wellman

Written by William Wellman, Robert Carson, Dorothy Parker, and Alan Campbell

Starring Janet Gaynor, Frederic March, Adolph Menjou, Lionel Stander and Andy Devine

Esther (Janet Gaynor), dreams of making it in Hollywood, but when she arrives in California she finds success a little hard to come by.  Pluck and desire are not enough – you need luck and coincidence, too.  Fortunately, she meets movie star Norman Maine (Frederic March), who gives her career a massive assist.  In pretty short order she’s a star and married to Norman, who agrees to give up booze for her.  Things turn, though, when Esther’s fame – by now she’s renamed Vicki Lester – eclipses Norman, something his fragile ego cannot take.  He turns to booze again and quickly hits bottom.  When he realizes Vicki is willing to throw her entire career away just to do what it takes to sober him up, he swims out into the ocean and drowns.

Continue reading →

Directed by W.S. Van Dyke

Screenplay by Anita Loos, Story by Robert Hopkins

Starring Clark Gable, Jeannette MacDonald and Spencer Tracy

One of the beautiful things about his Project is getting to learn things about movies I never knew.  You know, like the trends and hidden meanings behind the Oscars themselves.  And honestly, looking at the losers has been far richer in discovery than looking at the winners.  After all, if we didn’t look at the losers we’d never know just what kind of a force William Holden was in the 1950s, what with having been in something like 5 or 6 Best Picture nominees.  Some actors will go their whole career without even being considered for a role in a Best Picture nominee, and here was William Holden scoring that many in one decade. Continue reading →

Directed by Geoerge Seaton

Written by George Seaton, adapted from the play by Clifford Odets

Starring Bing Crosby, William Holden and Grace Kelly

Loyal readers will know I already have a 1954 Also-Ran in this series, Three Coins In The Fountain.  But unlike the usual instance where I doubled up in a given year by accident – The Love Parade and The Big House in 1931/32 is just one such year – this time I did it on purpose.  Why?  Because William Holden has been a pretty big part of this project,[1] having had his films Our Town, Born Yesterday, and Picnic already included.  Under those circumstances it seemed a shame to leave one out.  So, in a nod towards completeness we turn our attention to The Country Girl. Continue reading →

Written and Directed by Marleen Gorris

Starring Willeke van Ammelrooy, Els Dottermans and Jan Decleir

The Netherlands, immediately post-WWII.  The widow Antonia (Willeke van Ammelrooy) returns with her daughter, Danielle (Els Dottermans), to her hometown to see about her dying mother, who in fact dies within minutes of Antonia’s arrival.  Afterwards, with her mother’s house now empty, Antonia moves in, then never leaves.  Over the following years Antonia puts down roots in the town, collecting a variety of hard-luck-cases into her orbit, who she protects as if they were her children, and also catches the eye of a widower, Farmer Bas (Jan Decleir).  After some time, she and the Farmer Bas take up together.  Amidst this she helps Danielle in her quest to have her own child, then helps raise that child, and even helps to raise her great-granddaughter as well.  Along the way the extended family endures the various ups and downs of life in the mid-to-late 20^th century and, in the end, Antonia dies happy, surrounded by family.

Continue reading →

Directed by Stephen Daldry

Written by Lee Hall

Starring Jamie Bell, Julie Walters, Gary Lewis, Jamie Draven, Jean Heywood, and Stuart Wells

In 1984 a miner’s strike was mounted England in an order to shut down the British coal industry as a whole and prevent the closure of unprofitable mines.[1]  Against this backdrop Billy Elliot (Jamie Bell), the son and brother of striking coal miners, rejects the boxing his father (Gary Lewis) wants him to learn, and instead takes an interest in ballet.  Much to the family’s chagrin, Billy excels at it and eventually lands an audition at the Royal Ballet School in London.  No shock, but Billy’s father and brother come to rally around the boy’s ballet interest and, in the end, Billy is accepted into the school. Continue reading →

Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Written by Ingmar Bergman

Starring Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson

While her husband is away on business, and her daughter is away at summer camp, a depressive psychiatrist (Liv Ullmann) takes a job as temporary director for psychiatry at some hospital.  Through her work there she another man (Erland Josephson) and while they don’t have a physical affair, they are emotionally intimate.  In the end, because of past trauma in her life, and her depression, she has a mental breakdown.

Is This For Me?

I’m not exactly ignorant of Ingmar Bergman’s work, but I’m no connoisseur either.  At best, I’ve had my moments and quite like several of his films: The Seventh Seal, The Virgin Spring and Wild Strawberries in particular.  I also have modest affection for The Magician, which is not transcendent, but was at least fine.  Visually striking, with Max Von Sydow giving an interesting performance.  But, on the whole the film was only fine.

That all said, taking his oeuvre as a collected thing, I don’t think I get Bergman, or his enduring appeal.  The problem, for me, is every time I’ve sampled his later films – those being the one’s in color – they’ve almost instantly turned me off.  They heighten emotions, yet suppress the visuals, making them jarring.  Some leave me cold, others leave me scolded.

Most leave me punished.[1]

The problem is many of Bergman’s later films do not seem the sort of movie to be enjoyed.  Appreciated on an intellectual level?  Yes.  Enjoyed?  No.

Face to Face is one of those punishing films. It’s visually uninteresting and overwrought.  Worse, it makes completely baffling choices with the main character that served no real purpose other than to try and drive me off.

The most obvious place the movie goes wrong is the rape of the main character in the later half of the first hour.  First, the rape is out of nowhere, similar to Marian Crane’s early death in Psycho, which makes it shocking for being unexpected.[2]  Then, this rape, and the character’s response to it, is tossed off.  It’s not reported, it’s not really brooded over, it’s not really addressed.  And there’s no good reason for any of those.  Or, really, any reason.  The most we get out of it is an admission to her would-be-lover (Erland Josephson) that she was not all that unhappy being raped.  After all, she says, it’s been a while since she last had sex.

And then, just like that, she lets it go.

What this means to us is the rape only existed for making the main character disappointed by it, and nothing else.  It did not catalyze her in any way, or spur her into some agency towards mental health.[3]  Rather, it happens and that’s it.  Which means it was a rape for the sake of having a rape.  Which is frankly offensive.

That all said, while the rape is offensive, Bergman is provocative with the way he addresses the “Do as I say, not as I do” mindset of many people, and the sort of toxicity of that way of thinking.  See, in this movie the main character is a psychiatrist who also suffers her own depression and psychosis.  But despite believing in the value of psychiatric treatment for others, she refuses to get it for herself.  Rather, she lives in denial of her own mental health and deludes herself into thinking she can ‘cure’ herself simply by willing her issues away.  As if denial and willpower are ever enough to overcome psychosis.  Of course, if she got treatment in the usual way then there would probably not be the massive breakdown that splits this movie neatly in half, and therefore, this would be a completely different film altogether.  So…there is that.

Two Halves of One Whole

Face to Face can be divided fairly neatly between the pre- and post-breakdown sections, with the film being completely different sorts of animals on either side of the break.  Pre-breakdown the film is about a clearly depressed woman trying to get through her day and outrun her psychosis, and basically failing it.

Post-breakdown the movie turns into a proto-All That Jazz,[4] complete with a lengthy series of fantasy sequences focused on the possibility of the main character’s death, much as All That Jazz would later do.  Here are some parallels between the movies:

• The neat bifurcation of the film between pre- and post-breakdown.
• Ignorance of health/denial of health to the detriment of the denier. In All That Jazz the denial was of the main character’s physical health, whereas in Face to Face it is the main character’s mental health.
• Both confront the character’s mortality with a surreal fantasy sequence. In All That Jazz, the main character confronts his death in some sort of musical/variety show setting, then dies.  Here?  She is tormented by strange visions of death, but ultimately lives. The main difference between the two films?  While All that Jazz dresses its sequence up in showbiz glamour and style, Face to Face cranks up the emotions and the dramatics from Ullmann, to the point of being unbearable.  If the film was attempting to make me uncomfortable, it worked.

And therein is where Face to Face squanders itself.  While Face to Face and All That Jazz feel incredibly similar, All That Jazz has style and drive, compared to Face to Face being flat and tepid, visually uninteresting, and squanders a good performance by Ullmann.[5]

In the end, where Bob Fosse directs the hell out of All That Jazz and gets the most out of it, Bergman stands in the way of his film’s success and it’s the worse for it.

Fun Fact

Dino De Laurentiis produced Face to Face.  If you came up age in the 1980’s you probably associate him with having produced a ton of schlocky movies like Death Wish, Mandingo, Amityville II and 3-D.  In a way, he was the proto-Cannon Films.

But little do most 1980s kids know that De Laurentiis actually had a long history of producing solid, arthouse films.  Amongst the directors he produced films for were Fellini, Roberto Rossellini, De Sica, Martin Ritt, John Huston, Visconti, Sidney Lumet, Milos Foreman, David Cronenberg, and David Lynch.  In fact, De Laurentiis won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1958 with La Strada, and was given the Irving Thalberg Award – the lifetime achievement award for producers – by the Academy in 2001.

So, he had an arthouse vibe.  But he also produced crap.  I suppose that’s what happens when you wind up with producing credits on 175 films.  Sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re bad, and you won’t know which until you actually make the film.

A Note on Versions

Though there are a couple different versions of this film floating around, from as short as 114 minutes, to the original Swedish TV broadcast at 177 minutes, I reviewed the 135 minute release from Olive Films.

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Please Read/Buy…

See the rest of the Also Rans Project here.

Also, don’t be afraid to have a look at the thing that inspired this, The Best Picture Project.  Or, you could buy the revised, updated version of that project in book form:  E-Book or Paperback.

To be a pal and buy my books, jum.p over here and here and have a look.  I promise, buying always makes you feel good.

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[1] To be fair, punishment is relative.  After all, he never made Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible.

[2] Although, rape doesn’t have to be sudden and unexpected to be shocking.  It’s shocking enough on it’s own terms.  Being sudden only increases the shock.

[3] Aside from all this, it’s deeply troubling as an audience member to view a rape as something that needs to inspire a person to revenge, or some other action.  Why does a woman have to be violated in order to take ownership of herself?  Why is there an expectation that rape in a movie has to be a plot device?

[4] All That Jazz, directed by Bob Fosse (1979)

[5] To be fair, while I intellectually see Ullmann’s performance as good, it’s also so off-the-rails at times you can’t not be mesmerized by it.  But in terms of this movie, which feels tepid, Ullmann’s unhinged performance seems like it’s coming in a from a distant land.

Directed by Irving Cummings and Raoul Walsh

Written by Tom Barry, based on “The Caballero’s Way” by O. Henry

Starring Warner Baxter, Edmund Lowe, and Dorothy Burgess

Old films are strange and foreign things to modern viewers.  Probably as strange and foreign to us as silent films were to move-goers after the advent of talking pictures.  Neither operates in the expected, so can be completely jarring.  Some of it has to do with advancements in sound, but just as jarring as the differences in the rhythms of the drama, or comedy; the use of the medium to tell a story; and the way the actors act out that story.

Yet, for all the differences in film across the years, they mostly have one thing entirely in common – they are designed to be efficient machines separating moviegoers from their cash.  To that end, each strives for a contemporary-to-their-time version of spectacle and, using the tools of their time, achieve it.  It’s just that what counts as spectacle, and what it looks like, has changed over time.

In the silent era the spectacle was over-broad performances and hand colored films.  The early talkies shoved in singing and dancing, even when it wasn’t really appropriate to the film, simply because they could.  Today it’s explosions and robot crap and 10-tons of CGI.

All that brings me to this: in film, nothing is ever old, and nothing is every new, as if time truly is a flat circle.

What’s It About?

The Cisco Kid (Baxter) is a suave, well-dressed bandit, making a living robbing stage coaches.  Of course, he’s not some ordinary crook, but is careful not to steal from the passengers – only the payroll boxes on the stage.  So by stealing only company money, he’s something of a romantic figure.

Well, at least he’s romantic to the hoi polloi.  To the company, he’s a thief and so eventually Sergeant Dunn (Lowe) is sent out to stop the thievery.  Only, Dunn is basically useless at the gig and instead spends his time falling in love Tonia Maria (Dorothy Burgess), who turns out to be Cisco’s sweetheart.  When she reciprocates and tries to help Dunn catch the Kid, she seals her own fate.

In the end, the Cisco Kid gets away.

This Shit Was Big Time[1]

The 1928/1929 Oscars were the second year for the awards and there were seven categories in all, down from the twelve awarded the first year.  Those categories were:

• Outstanding Picture[2]
• Best Director
• Best Actor
• Best Actress
• Best Art Direction
• Best Cinematography
• Best Writing

Two films led the nominations that year with five each:[3] The Patriot and In Old Arizona.  Though both films would lose in the Outstanding Picture race to a musical, The Broadway Melody, neither went away empty-handed.   Warner Baxter won Best Actor for In Old Arizona, while The Patriot won Best Writing.  Still, that they each led the nominations surely speaks to the broader appeal of both films and should have marked them as the favorite amongst the Academy voters as a whole.  In later years, this would be the assumption.  But in 1929…

Well, in 1929 the Academy membership as a whole didn’t vote on the winners at all – or didn’t seem to.  Rather, the awards were voted on by the small group of five or so folks who made up the Academy Central Board of Judges.  This meant it was easy to spread the love around to the various studios, and meant powerful men and women in Hollywood could guarantee nominations for a film, or an award for somebody or other, even if they were clearly undeserving.  This is how Mary Pickford won Best Actress 1928/1929.  This is why no film took more than one award each.

Oh, then there is this: the 1928/1929 Oscars were the first, and only, time there were no nominations.  There were only winners.  The only reason we have nominations now is due to research the Academy did into the matter, which later resulted in nominees being named retroactively.

The ultimate point of all this: the five nominations for In Old Arizona don’t really mean shit.

What About Me?

Director Irving Cummings was nominated for Best Director for In Old Arizona.  Sure, his direction was not great in an objective way, but it was a different time and they valued different things then.  That happens.  And that’s probably why not only did Cummings not get close to the Oscars again as a director, but is basically forgotten today.

What’s interesting about the Cummings nomination is he alone was nominated for Best Director for In Old Arizona, despite not being the sole director.  Rather, he is one of the two screen-credited directors on the film: Raoul Walsh was the other.  In this instance there were two directors because Cummings replaced Walsh after Walsh had an accident that took his eye and left him unable to finish the film.  Still, that doesn’t seem like it should be enough to rob a man of his nomination.  And yet, despite Walsh being first-named in the credits of the film – inverting the alphabetizing of the names – he was shut out of the nomination.

To be fair, though, if you read the last section of this piece you understand that not even Cummings was nominated at the time and it was the Academy who later decided he alone was nominated.  So, in truth, neither man were nominated, which is probably as it should have been.

Is It Any Good?

Really?  No.  Despite having five Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture, In Old Arizona is not good.

Tonally, it’s uneven.  On the one hand it wants to be a classic western.  On the other, it wants to be a romance.  On yet another it wants to be a Robin Hood story.  On top of this, it wants to be a musical.  And by trying to be everything it becomes nothing.   So, while this is a ‘western’, it’s barely one.  So much of the action takes place indoors that it’s more like a traditional studio film that they tacked on some outdoor work just to make it all look bigger.  And while it’s a romance, it’s more creepy than romantic.  And while it tries to be a musical, it fails hardest as a musical.

My suspicion is the film includes the number of songs it does is because sound films just became a thing and they wanted to take advantage of it.  Which is why the use of the music feels completely tacked-on.  And is why when the main character rides off the screen at one point, the camera swivels around to focus on some random mariachi singers, who add nothing at all but unneeded ambience.  And is why when the stagecoach arrives in town after being robbed, we are treated to an almost-full-length rendition of “Daisy, Daisy” before we get back to the plot.  In the end, the music does not help, only exists as a speedbump along the way.

But let’s be honest, tone of the film is the least of it’s problems.  The acting is fairly awful, with Lowe’s smugness the worst offender.  The visuals are static and uninteresting.  And while it’s reputed to be the first talkie western, and the first sound film to be filmed outdoors, it does nothing to deserve those milestones.  In the end it’s all slack and boring and, honestly, if you were to cut all the random musical interludes and the other times when the camera just sort of sat there staring at nothing, this film would be half and hour shorter and would still have all the same characters, story beats, and plot points.  In other words, you wouldn’t miss a thing.

In This Way, The Film Is Ick

The Cisco Kid is played by Warner Baxter.  Which means a Portuguese immigrant from Mexico is played by a white man.  Or, to boil it down: it’s a white man painted up with makeup to play a man of some color, complete with the ‘Mee-stir’ sort of accent.  And the love interest of the film, the Mexican Tonia Maria, was played by Dorothy Burgess.  Which was another white woman painted up to portray a Mexican.

White people wearing makeup to portray other races?  A common thing in early film.  Or, the early to mid-period of films.[4]  And which was a thing that was totally cool back then.  But while In Old Arizona is not outright racist about its portrayal of these character, the low-key racism makes the whole film specious.  So, if you’re planning on seeing this, you were warned.

In This Way, It’s Not Ick

Okay, while history and the changing of the times makes the portrayal of other races by white people specious In Old Arizona, it’s actually pretty progressive in how it treats its female lead.  In later years, when the Hollywood Code became a thing, and all sorts of rules came into place for how to deal with various types of characters, the movies would be much harder on a character like Tonia Maria, labeling her a slut, or a prostitute, and would probably kill her for that.[5]  She would have to be punished for sure.  But here, nobody cares at all that she likes to get around and, indeed, when she dies at the end, it’s tragic.  So, I guess it’s a ‘one step forward, one step back’ kind of thing.

 

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Please Read/Buy…

See the rest of the Also Rans Project here.

Also, don’t be afraid to have a look at the thing that inspired this, The Best Picture Project.  Or, you could buy the revised, updated version of that project in book form:  E-Book or Paperback.

To be a pal and buy my books, jum.p over here and here and have a look.  I promise, buying always makes you feel good.

_______________

 

[1] Much off this info was pulled from The Hollywood Reporter: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/race/oscars-academys-longstanding-relationship-accountants-question-981547

[2] That’s what they called Best Picture then.

[3] Five each being two more than the next most nominated films.

[4] Fun fact, Mr. White Guy, Rock Hudson, played a Native-American in Winchester ’73 (1950).

[5] It also would mean The Cisco Kid has to be punished for his thievery and treachery and would never get away with it.

Directed by Costa-Gavras

Written by Costa-Gavras and Donald Stewart, based upon the book of the same name by Thomas Hauser

Starring Sissy Spacek, Jack Lemmon, and John Shea

In the early 1970 Chile elected socialist Salvador Allende as president.  When economic problems followed his policies of nationalization and collectivizing industries, the military ousted Allende in a coup, supported by the CIA.  In the midst of the coup Allende was killed.  Though the official line was suicide, many suspected murder.  Even today, after Allende’s autopsy was released and confirms suicide, many still have doubts. Continue reading →

Directed by Stephen Frears

Screenplay by Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope, from the book “The Lost Child of Philomena Lee,” by Martin Sixsmith

Starring Judi Dench and Steve Coogan

In 1950s Ireland, a young unmarried Catholic girl, Philomena, finds herself pregnant and abandoned to a convent, where the nun’s basically force her to give her son up for adoption.  But not only does she never see him again, she is given no information on his whereabouts are anything of the sort.

He may as well be dead.

Out of a sense of shame and guilt, Philomena (played as an old woman by Dench) hides the truth about the boy from her later husband and family for fifty years, before she eventually confesses the secret to her daughter.  The daughter manages to hook her up with a journalist, Martin Sixsmith (Coogan), who agrees to help track down the son Philomena never knew. Continue reading →