East Lynne (Frank Lloyd, 1931)

East Lynne is best remembered today as one of the few generally unavailable films to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. The UCLA Film & Television archive holds the only print known to exist. For decades, it circulated in a hideous bootleg with the last reel missing. But an intrepid lover of film captured that last reel during a MOMA screening (I think) and now a composite version exists on YouTube until the copyright police force it down. It's still rough looking. But that detracts not a bit from the primal melodramatics on display.

The 1861 sensation novel by Ellen Wood on which the film is based had long since become a melodrama ur-text by 1931. In fact, Lloyd's version was the eighth [sic!] produced not including parodies and poorly disguised copies. All of which was part of the mini industry Wood's best-seller created. Its numerous stage adaptations were so successful that the line "Next week, East Lynne!" signified a guaranteed seat filler after a flop. The great Tod Slaughter, famous for portraying the melodramatic archetype of mustache-twirling Pure Evil, produced many productions and noted, "No other play in its time has ever been more maligned, more burlesqued, more ridiculed, or consistently made more money."

The most captivating aspect of the film today is how precisely it hits so many of the beats of classic melodrama, namely, a woman entering a hostile household (usually, as a result of class clashes) and a mother who must abandon her child. In the former register, it recalls films like The Shining Hour (Frank Borzage, 1938) and Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940) and perhaps a bit of Laughter (Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast, 1930), especially when East Lynne borrows a scene in which a character dons a bearskin. In the latter register, one feels echoes of Stella Dallas (Henry King, 1925), Madame X (Lionel Barrymore, 1929), and Final Accord (Douglas Sirk, 1936). And let's throw in a dash of Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945) for seasoning. As always with narratives so deeply set into a culture's psyche, it helps to ask why we keep (kept?) telling ourselves these stories over and over again. A fantasy of class mobility on one end and the possibility of being a woman and not a mother on the other, for starters. 

Grade: A-minus

Thunder Birds (William A. Wellman, 1942)

Dopey WWII propaganda film in gorgeous (is there any other kind?) Technicolor memorable only for the hot guys and (maybe) how fervently it courts Chinese participation on the Allies side. The most telling IMDb review discusses just one moment when "Gene [Tierney] steps out of the shower with ringlets in her hair that were captured by the Technicolor light in such a way as to take my breath away and have never forgotten it. Her hair was usually shown dry and perfectly coiffed and this is the only movie of hers I know where those fantastic ringlets were shown." That's the only way a film like this could work - in extremely fleeting images. In short, a movie to screenshot (as I did below with Ms. Tierney's ringlets), not watch.

Grade: C 

 

                                  

Ranking Best Picture Oscar Winners

This was not a pleasurable exercise. The only thing worse than a bad movie is an okay one. The lies Argo tells (along with the expert thriller mechanics with which it does so) enraged me more than a dutiful Wikipedia article like Spotlight. But that rage has stuck with me over the last decade whereas I would've flunked a quiz on Spotlight a month after I saw it. And so it goes with the vast majority of Best Picture Oscar winners.

I didn't get a chance to rewatch all of these. But those I did changed in estimation only a peg or two. So I'll never know if Braveheart, Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind, etc. are sitting in their appropriate buckets. Somewhere south of a B-minus is charitable enough (waves hand). I also didn't get a chance to review all the rewatches. But I've provided links to those I did. I'll probably get the most questions about No Country for Old Men. I've long since dispatched it as "Halloween for adults" so will leave it at that here (waves hand once more). As for that one film I refuse to watch, I saw the first Lord of the Rings installment and found it pitilessly dull. Sorry - I cannot stand world building. And even fans acknowledge that the win was less for that particular installment than the series as a whole so why bother? In effect, I saw the first three hours of a ten-hour epic and I'm more than fine with that.

Finally, while I've been watching all the Best Picture noms since 2016 (an "unnerving" project, as my friend Noah told me this week), I will not be watching the others. Skippy (huh?) and Nicholas and Alexandra (zzz) and District 9 (that was nominated?!?), I look forward to forsaking you with some desperately needed Paul Sharits. 

A+

All About Eve

How Green Was My Valley 

A

Parasite  

Midnight Cowboy 

Rebecca

Sunrise (for the pedants)

Amadeus

A-minus

Unforgiven

Casablanca

The Hurt Locker

Moonlight 

Nomadland 

The Best Years of Our Lives

Lawrence of Arabia 

The Broadway Melody

The Last Emperor

West Side Story

All Quiet on the Western Front

B+  

Mutiny on the Bounty

Gigi

Chicago

Million Dollar Baby

Schindler’s List

It Happened One Night 

Cimarron 

You Can’t Take It with You

Gone with the Wind

Ordinary People

The Apartment

The Shape of Water

Titanic 

The Silence of the Lambs

The Lost Weekend

All the King’s Men

Wings

On the Waterfront

Annie Hall

The Life of Emile Zola

The Godfather  

Out of Africa 

In the Heat of the Night 

The Greatest Show on Earth

B

The Great Ziegfeld

My Fair Lady 

Oliver!

Everything Everywhere All at Once

12 Years a Slave 

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) 

Slumdog Millionaire

Terms of Endearment

The Departed

Rocky

A Man for All Seasons

Dances with Wolves 

Gentleman’s Agreement 

Hamlet 

Marty

An American in Paris 

From Here to Eternity 

The Godfather Part II 

American Beauty

Driving Miss Daisy 

The French Connection

B-minus

Green Book 

Platoon

The Sound of Music 

The English Patient

Gandhi

Rain Man 

Shakespeare in Love

C+

Grand Hotel

The Deer Hunter 

Kramer vs. Kramer  

Going My Way 

Cavalcade 

Spotlight

The Sting 

CODA    

C

The King’s Speech

No Country for Old Men 

Mrs. Miniver

The Artist

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Chariots of Fire

C-minus

Ben-Hur

Patton

Gladiator

A Beautiful Mind

Braveheart

D+

Forrest Gump

D

Tom Jones

F  

Crash

Argo 

Around the World in 80 Days

Refuse to watch:

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King 

                                                                                 

2022 Best Picture Oscar Nominations Ranked

The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg) - Astonishing. For the first time in his career, Spielberg traffics in an ambiguity that keeps this semi-autobiographical legacy film unpredictable. The scene in which the beach-blond jock confronts Spielberg stand-in Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) may be the director's best ever for the baffled and contradictory responses it's elicited. And just when you think the dénouement is going to lock into Horatio Algeresque step, Sammy walks up to his new Hollywood apartment not in triumph but in the midst of a full-blown panic attack. Not counting A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, the man's best film since Minority Report if not 1979's underrated 1941. A

Tár (Todd Field) - A film designed to be debated into perpetuity. Like a good poststructuralist, Field destabilizes the center of each scene (including the exquisite ending) and maintains an edifice of free play throughout. I haven't discussed a film so much in years, especially with people who aren't avid filmgoers. A

Elvis (Baz Luhrmann) - Reviewed here. A-minus

Women Talking (Sarah Polley) - A film designed to plunge Armond White types into apoplexy. I admired the severe visual palette and compressed intensity of this "act of female imagination." A-minus

Triangle of Sadness (Ruben Östlund) - Vertically, yet another facile skewering of the rich and heartless. Horizontally, it shifts gears so many times that it gives whiplash to the viewer and, one must assume, Östlund himself given how he finishes it all off with a hilariously perverse non-ending. A-minus

All Quiet on the Western Front (Edward Berger) - Not sure what to do with this remake of the 1930 Best Picture Oscar winner. It's effectively anti-war, sure. But why was it remade now? B+

Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniels, 2022) - They spent so much time on this multiverse concept that they forgot to tell a compelling, non-cookie-cutter story. Once the rules of the multiverse were laid out, you could see how the rest of the film was going to lock into its narrative beats with dreary predictability. B

The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh) - Reviewed here. B

Avatar: The Way of Water (James Cameron) - I rolled my eyes about two dozen times at this "three-hour land acknowledgment" (to borrow Tyler Austin Harper's words in Slate). But I have to begrudgingly concede that Cameron brings off his colossally dorky vision with brio and keeps all 192 of those minutes moving briskly. B

Top Gun: Maverick (Joseph Kosinski) - Marginally more digestible than the godawful original. But it's essentially a remake so yeah, no. My Xmas 2022 screening of it is mercifully fading from memory to make for contemplation of much more substantial films such as Myra Breckinridge, Reform School Girls, Massacre at Central High, The Ritz, The Cassandra Crossing, etc. (to choose some recently digested titles). D+

My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964)

Pros:

1. Those gorgeous, eternal songs and the fecund musical universe it engendered. Read Tim J. Anderson's two chapters about the myriad recordings of the numbers and how they trained America in a new form aesthetic discernment in his terrific Making Easy Listening: Material Culture and Postwar American Recording (University of Minnesota Press, 2006). For one such spirited-and-then-some version, check out Lypsinka's take on Marilyn Maye's take on "Get Me to the Church on Time" here.  

2. The sick, gay-ass costumes and art direction of Cecil Beaton. I want never to leave the "Ascot Gavotte."

Cons:

1. The godawful, received, arbitrary, compulsorily heterosexual ending which George Bernard Shaw would've hated.

2. The length. Gawd, post-1960 Hollywood cinema makes my ass itch!

3. The direction. Cukor pulls off some elegant swirls. And I appreciate the perversity of rendering this a de facto inscription of the Broadway show. But lawd, is the camera heavy in that tumescent, Oscar-pandering, post-1960s Hollywood way! Cut! Track! Show me one (1!) fourth wall!

4. Audrey Hepburn. To state the obvious, she acquits herself admirably but Julie Andrews would've smoked her. 

Grade: B