Four A-minus Best Picture Oscar Winners!

Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992)

On first viewing, I deemed this a masterpiece. Now I find it a bit sloppy in its revision of the American film western. As Alfred Soto asks, "would Bill Munny really become the Terminator after all those years of dormancy, and why the hell isn’t Morgan Freeman’s race mentioned once yet he’s lynched just the same?" That Munny wastes every Evil at the eleventh hour jibes with neither the narrative nor the revision. And Freeman's Ned Logan raises the eternal question concerning representation of the disenfranchised - do filmmakers hone in on the disenfranchisement or do they ignore it altogether so as not to mess with a good formula (leaving other options to independent cinema?)? Still, it makes up in academic flair what it lacks in dramatic urgency. Like Shania Twain's Come On Over, Unforgiven seems tailor-made for critics and scholars and as a film professor obsessed with the western, I find it irresistible. 

The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946)

Not much to say about this one beyond something noncommittal like "I find much of it moving." I'm far more intrigued by the critical rings of fire through which it has jumped over the past 75 years. Jonathan Rosenbaum has a useful post on his site tracing the shifting responses, especially Dave Kehr's which went from dissing the film for "exuding a stifling piety at times" to calling it a masterwork. I want to think it a masterwork too. Will someone sit through all 172 minutes with me to help me get there? Sarah Kozloff's otherwise-fine BFI on it didn't help much. Maybe Alison Macor's new Making The Best Years of Our Lives: The Hollywood Classic That Inspired a Nation will. Until then, I'll retreat into history and posit that while 1939 may be Hollywood's greatest year, 1946 was the best year of Hollywood's life in terms of admissions, the apex before the Fall, before all the neos and posts (or the perception thereof since revisionism is never relegated to one post-WWII era). Wyler's film epitomizes that peak which no doubt has contributed to its chaotic critical reception. It stands in for that mythical everyone who went to the movies. For the entropy that followed (and if you want to simplify history further), check out two films that have meant much more to me: Daisy Kenyon (Otto Preminger, 1947) and It's Always Fair Weather (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1955). 

The Last Emperor (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1987)

Unlike so many of the bloated Best Picture winners of the era, The Last Emperor has an attractive perversity at the heart of its conception. The gargantuan scale, especially large masses of humanity effecting change, abrades against an ineffectual main character. Aisin-Gioro Puyi (played by John Lone as an adult) wants to put his mark on the world but he keeps getting tossed about by history. The resulting inertia diminishes the film's replay value. But it makes for a far more hypnotic watch than Chariots of Fire or Gandhi. And the poop sniffing scene, complete with judicious close-up, is for the ages.

Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)

The 1962ness of this thing bowls me over. In its loonier moments (when Lean pauses the narrative to take a look around the deserts, say), you can feel the late-1960s/early 1970s head film on the horizon. 2001, El Topo, The Shooting, even Head itself can all be detected in those endless vistas and that Dune-looking sun. And I admire how Lean reserved some of his 227-minute running time to observe the effects of violence on random characters as when an unknown passenger from a derailed train walks off dazed into the desert.

Unforgiven: A-minus

The Best Years of Our Lives: A-minus

The Last Emperor: A-minus

Lawrence of Arabia: A-minus

Doctor Zhivago (David Lean, 1965); Over the Top (Menahem Golan, 1987)

I assume I'm strawmanning here. But what Oscar contenders are supposed to have over art cinema and the avant-garde is expert storytelling. So where is that in the Zhivago? The train ride out of Moscow is indelible and it's difficult not to be impressed by the epic sway of the thing. But the central romance between Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif) and Lara Antipova (Julie Christie) is shoddily telegraphed. In fact, if your attention flagged during the scene where Yuri moons over Lara as she's ironing, you might miss that they ever were in love at all before the typically truncated second act. (If these limitations are present in Boris Pasternak's 1957 novel, which I'll likely never read, that's of no concern here; I'm writing about the film.) And with three-plus hours to play with, it's not as if Lean had no time to develop the romance a bit more. Like so many directors in this era of tumescent prestige pics, Lean doesn't know when to cut. Weighed down with Quality, his camera in an early scene lingers on young Yuri's face staring at a balalaika. We know it's Yuri's Rosebud. But Lean stays on the face for such a preposterous amount of time that I honestly thought I hit pause on the player. Dude, we get it. Cut! P. S. People telling me I should see it on the big screen to the rear.

Over the Top is a dumb Sylvester Stallone vehicle that shockingly lost money. Arm wrestling, trucks, and Rocky/Rambo seemed like such a surefire recipe in 1987. But until the screenplay gives up on the story after Stallone wins the climactic arm wrestling match (and, really, who cares about anything else at that point?), it tells a damn tight story. So tight, it's true, that you'll forget it in a week or so. But its bite-sized fun was a tonic after the longueurs of the Zhivago. Best line came not from the film but from the Mr. when I asked about the fairness of one of the wrestling moves: "Why are you asking me about penalty rules in late-1980s arm wrestling contests?!?"

Doctor Zhivago: B

Over the Top: B 

The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean, 1957)

There's a terrific film lurking somewhere in here. The climactic bridge destruction will file your fingernails down to nubs. But Lean cannot resist puffing everything up into An Oscar Film®. At 161 minutes, a good forty minutes could easily be shorn, especially all the scenes of William Holden in paradise. Also, even though Oscar films are supposed to be selling narrative dexterity, the storytelling is sloppy. It's naive, at best, to posit that the film must end with said bridge destruction. It leaves so many questions unanswered, namely, the fate of everyone involved, both prisoners and captors. Set a Don Siegel or a Raoul Walsh on it and this thing would snap. Then again, it would come across as a "mere" genre pic and get ignored by the Academy, as if An Oscar Film® weren't its own genre with limitations and patterns.

Grade (my affection is waning so I better get this in now): B+