Review: Richard Burton in The Robe

In writing about its 2009 Blu-ray release, The New York Times' Dave Kehr referred to The Robe as Richard Burton's "first important American film." That's fundamentally true: for this is a picture that symbolizes a call-to-action from an industry at a paradigm shift - as the first production ever released in CinemaScope, the film was a reminder to the public that the limits of television were finite, that entertainment of epic enormity could only be made possible via Hollywood filmmaking. The top-grossing film of 1953, The Robe is important solely due to the business virtues it represents. As a film, it's stodgy and forgettable at best.

1953: 26th Academy Awards

And the Nominees Were... 

• MARLON BRANDO, Julius Caesar
• RICHARD BURTON, The Robe
• MONTGOMERY CLIFT, From Here to Eternity
• WILLIAM HOLDEN, Stalag 17
• BURT LANCASTER, From Here to Eternity
• LESLIE CARON, Lili 
• AVA GARDNER, Mogambo
• AUDREY HEPBURN, Roman Holiday
• DEBORAH KERR, From Here to Eternity
• MAGGIE MCNAMARA, The Moon is Blue

Best Actor has a biopic problem

For months, Bradley Cooper had been pegged as a frontrunner for the Best Actor prize for his performance in A Star is Born. And why not?

Any of us who closely follow film awards — particularly those related to acting — know that they aren’t won simply on the basis of merit. For better or for worse, the annual rat race for these little gold statuettes can be equated to a cocktail with various ingredients, which include:

1. The amount of active campaigning one does throughout what is essentially a six month circuit, 
2. Whether or not the film and/or performance is any good, and
3. One's personal narrative: an overarching, supplementary account that may compel voters to think, "this person deserves it" 

Nominations 2018: Postmortem

It's a celebration! As is typically the case with Nominations Day, we were treated to some surprises this morning - some films lost momentum, some performances were snubbed, and some wishful thinking proved to be exactly that. In any case, you can find a few top-level thoughts on my end after the jump. And feel free to chime in with your own thoughts!

Final Predictions: 2018

The day is nearly upon us! The nominations for the 91st Academy Awards will be announced bright and early tomorrow morning, and as per usual, I've thrown out my predictions for the top six categories after the jump.

Nomination day comes as the Academy tries to persevere through one of the more trying years in recent AMPAS history. In just six months, our boy Oscar has dealt with PR controversies ranging from the Best Popular Film debacle, the Kevin Hart hosting fiasco, in addition to SAG-AFTRA accusing the Academy of preventing actors from presenting on other award shows.

The road ahead almost certainly seems opportune for more criticism: will the ceremony's host-less format go swimmingly? Will this year's broadcast be the fifth consecutive year of declining ratings? Will they embrace Green Book and Bohemian Rhapsody, thereby opening themselves up to the fury of Film Twitter?

We'll find out soon enough. I for one am always thrilled about nomination day, often times more so than the actual ceremony itself, as it typically presents a handful of big surprises in the major categories. So let's see what awaits us, and, as always, I'll be whipping up a post-mortem tomorrow.

The Verdict: Best Actress 1952

The Verdict: Best Actor 1952

Shirley Booth, Come Back, Little Sheba

Won: Academy Award - Best Actress • New York Film Critics Circle - Best Actress
Golden Globe Award - Best Actress in a Drama • Cannes Film Festival - Best Actress

1952's slate of Best Actress contenders has gained a bad rap. I had read insinuations that the year is particularly poor on the actressing front, and yet, based on what I've seen so far, I'd conclude that it's largely an imperfect lineup with performances and films that hit a murky gray: be that Susan Hayward's questionably saintlike performance in a run-of-the-mill biopic, Joan Crawford's emoting in a sensationalized B-movie, Bette Davis' wild hysterics in a Sunset-Boulevard-on-bath-salts camp picture, or Julie Harris' pubescent hysterics in a stagey stage-to-film adaptation, this is not a field of contenders that strikes wide-range appeal to the modern masses. That being said, I don't think either are awful, though they do challenge you to conclude otherwise.

This also rings true for Shirley Booth, the victor of this pack: she and her performance in Come Back, Little Sheba are easily more forgotten and receive significantly less share of voice than the likes of fellow winners Judy Holliday, Vivien Leigh, Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly. This is in spite of the fact that Booth was a juggernaut during her respective year, picking up nearly every major Best Actress prize available (it should be noted that no other actor that decade, male or female, received prizes from Cannes, the National Board of Review, the New York Film Critics Circle, the Globes and the Academy for a sole performance).

Julie Harris, The Member of the Wedding

You're four minutes in to The Member of the Wedding before Brandon deWilde's John Henry proclaims aloud, "Frankie's crazy!" It's a flippant line, executed quickly and in a humorous, charming manner, and yet it also serves as a forewarning for what's to come for the next hour and a half: Frankie Addams, played by a fiercely dedicated Julie Harris, is batshit insane, and you the viewer are in for a helluva ride.

Joan Crawford, Sudden Fear

The other week, I had a dream in which I was terrorized by Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford. I remember little about the dream outside of the fact that Faye/Joan was incensed about something and screaming at me about it - her face terrifying, flush with fury.

It goes without saying that the symbolism of "angry Joan Crawford," made possible by Mommie Dearest, has ingratiated itself into, and endured as a component of, Crawford's legacy. Crawford's bitter rivalry with Bette Davis stands as another component of this legacy, recently publicized and manifested by Ryan Murphy's Feud: Bette & Joan. It's safe to say that these properties have helped immortalize Crawford to the collective wisdom as a dramatic public figure, her prowess as a skilled dramatic actress known more so to cinephiles and actressphiles such as myself (and perhaps you, dear reader).

I myself am guilty of forgetting about Crawford's talents as an actress, even though I really ought to know better by now. Sudden Fear, Crawford's last Academy Award-nominated performance, is a palpable reminder that there's much more to the actress beyond the feuds, the grandeur, the tempestuousness, the pettiness.

Bette Davis, The Star

The challenge in digesting a performance like Bette Davis' in The Star lies in the fact that it inherently conflicts with two dimensions of who I am as an individual. A moviegoer with a more modernist, art house-leaning eye might view Davis' performance as a relic of its time, one riddled with such grossly melodramatic narrative devices that it veers into farcical parody. A more lax moviegoer (dare I say, of the homosexual variety) might see Davis' performance as a fun, campy joyride - the film a befitting vehicle for an inherently dramatic diva to showcase all the qualities to which her fandom admires her for.

Susan Hayward, With a Song in My Heart

To watch With a Song in My Heart is to be fed a two-hour tale of an impossibly saintlike (and horribly basic, if you ask me) individual. This ought not come as a surprise to me or you by now, as biopics, especially those of the classical Hollywood variety, are often semi-fictionalized and scrubbed of its subjects' imperfections, revealing little to us about said subjects aside from the fact that they may have had to endure something traumatic once, and/or they may have been faced with a difficult decision they had to make. Jane Froman herself had a heavy hand in the production of With a Song in My Heart, perhaps an acting influence on the film's insignificant narrative weight.

Marlon Brando, Viva Zapata!

Won: Cannes Film Festival - Best Actor

It is only appropriate that the man often credited as being the trailblazing force behind bridging the gap between realism and film acting should also thrill us in his ability to bridge the gap between his own whiteness and other ethnicities. Viva Zapata! would not be the only film in the 1950s to which Marlon Brando attempted to play a character of an entirely different ethnicity from his own, and, based on what I've seen, Brando's Emiliano Zapata isn't nearly as jarring or disagreeable as his Sakini in The Teahouse of August Moon, released four years later. But Brando's interpretation of the Mexican revolutionary straddles the threshold of my own tolerance towards whitewashing - for at what point does it become a little too silly, thereby taking the viewer "out" of the picture?

Alec Guinness, The Lavender Hill Mob

I wasn't fond of The Lavender Hill Mob. In fact, it was a bit of a struggle for me to make my way through the film. I report this feeling queer about my overall sentiment, as though I've misunderstood something - for both the film and its lead performance from Alec Guinness seem to have favorable notices online. And yet, for whatever reason, neither registered for me.

Gary Cooper, High Noon

Won: Academy Award - Best Actor | Golden Globe (Drama) - Best Actor

Years ago, before Oscargasms came to fruition, I was haphazardly watching and reviewing various movies that piqued my interest. One of those films was Wings. For a picture that had very little surprises outside of Buddy Rogers' drunken hallucinogenic bubble episode, one moment that I can usually recall is that of Gary Cooper’s cameo at the half hour mark. We see Cooper waking up from a nap, hair perfectly coiffed, where in typical old-Hollywood fashion, he then smolders his way through his 2 or so minutes of screen time. Moments later, Cooper's character dies in a plane accident while practicing figure eights. While brief, he had about him a radiant energy in those moments that are effortless yet impactful. I ramble on about this because I find it ironic — and fitting — that my journey with Cooper should end at High Noon. For what Cooper delivers in the film is heavily silent, and there is a forcefulness in his presence I’d not felt since that very cameo in Wings.

Kirk Douglas, The Bad and the Beautiful

If there's one thing I've deduced from the few Kirk Douglas performances I've watched so far, it's that he's quite good at playing a dick. In quick succession, Douglas delivered a pompous boxer in Champion, a pompous reporter in Ace in the Hole, and a hard ass detective in Detective Story who's technically a good guy but kind of pompous in the sense that he's riddled with toxic masculinity. As they say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it - and thus we're here to witness Douglas' third rendering of an ambitious tool who backstabs his way to the top, this time in the form of a Hollywood producer.

José Ferrer, Moulin Rouge

Bravado was what made José Ferrer's performance in Cyrano de Bergerac so compelling to me, but not a lick of it is to be found in Moulin Rouge. However, the body disfigurement - and therefore, Oscar-baity "grotesqueness," if you will - is still there, this time child-sized legs on a grown man instead of an aggressively large nose.

Best Picture: The Greatest Show on Earth

Cheers to Five Years

It's been FIVE years since I started this blog. It's amazing that I've kept it running for as long as I have without giving up (though I know that in the last year or so it has seemed as though I've given up on it quite a bit)!

The truth is: work has been eating my life, not in a good way. It's to the point where I want to cherish every minute of my free time by doing absolutely nothing. I know this isn't good. And it has been tricky - being cognizant of the fact that there are passions you want to pursue, passions that are being put in the back burner because you can't quite reconcile the energy to simply do it and get it done.

But, another truth: I've not given up on this blog yet. I may be putting out a severely low volume of posts by the month, but the fact of the matter is, I'm still here, still typing away when I can, still watching movies but not writing as fast as I should (The Greatest Show on Earth and Moulin Rouge are next in the queue), still passionate about film, still daydreaming about watching A Woman Under the Influence some day but frustrated that I can't act on it at this exact moment in time because I'm abiding by a goal and promise I made for myself five years ago. I think about films - past, present, future - every day. Even if I don't write every day - the love I have for the medium endures.

So I hope that you bear with me as I continue to get my shit together. And I hope that you continue to check-in, to read, to comment, to share your thoughts. That's what keeps me going!

Ralph Richardson, The Sound Barrier

Won: New York Film Critics Circle - Best Actor | National Board of Review - Best Actor

Chuck Yeager may have been the first man to exceed the speed of sound in level flight, but if the Brits behind The Sound Barrier had their way, that'd have been an achievement accomplished by a British pilot who had in turn been egged on by an aircraft-obsessed oil magnate.