God is good – he has sent me a big, strong man.

Over time, I’ve landed on the term “odyssey” as a shorthand for my journey through the Best Picture nominees, and especially going through the decades of the 50s and 60s, boy has that term been an apt one. The increasing scale of the productions and runtimes of the films in these decades, especially in the BP canon, has become particularly daunting; so it’s a very refreshing break when I come up to a film that’s a scant 90-or-so minutes long, feels as economical as its runtime suggests, and really doesn’t need to be anything more than what it is. Lilies of the Field is a very simple story, with a small cast of characters, that tells the story it means to and not much more than that, which is kinda part of the point of it to boot. It is indeed nice to spend some time with a film on a smaller scale such as this, but even so, it does beg the question of how & why this ended up in the category that I’m covering.

Sidney Poitier stars as Homer Smith, a traveling handyman who stops at a small homestead off the road to service his car. Living & working the land there are a group of five nuns who fled from East Germany, and who immediately see Homer’s arrival as the Lord answering their prayers for someone who can build them a chapel at the farm for them and the local immigrant community. While he’s nice enough to initially offer to fix their roof for them, Homer doesn’t want to be conscripted into a lot of time-consuming work that he isn’t getting paid for. It’s only after traveling into town with the sisters & meeting some of the community, including the local priest who currently holds mass out of the back of his truck as well as a construction supplier who hires Homer on a freelance basis after he sees the good work he does, and only after he begins to identify with the project as a self-fulfillment of his architect dreams & shepherding the project after some of the locals come by to pitch in, that he ends up bending to the sisters’ prayers and building them a chapel that he, and the community, can be proud of.

Honestly, that plot synopsis covers basically everything about the film itself, especially since the actual film is simple & concise by design and thus is yet another of the kind of films that make it hard to talk about at length in a review. It’s shot modestly but well, the production design is effective for the few interiors the film does have, and the small cast is good while doing their job of not standing out too much. What few members of the supporting cast do make an impact are probably Lilia Skala as the head nun Mother Maria and Stanley Adams as Juan, the proprietor of a local diner Homer eats at and who ends up as a sort of confidant for him (a brief shout-out, too, to director Ralph Nelson, who plays the minor role of Ashton, the contractor who hires Homer for construction work – he was simple & effective enough as an actor that I was surprised to find out afterward that he was also the director of the film). Really, though, all of this is to waffle around for things to say before I do finally get to Sidney Poitier, the film’s lead, and who became the first black actor to win an Oscar in a leading role for this; Poitier is definitely good, and the role allows him to be very freewheeling & cavalier with how he goes about it, which helps his efforts quite a bit, but it still didn’t feel like he’d done enough to really merit the win in my opinion – Spencer Tracy’s win for Boys Town was largely just him being warm and kind and, well, Spencer Tracy, and Poitier’s win here, while historic, feels too much like it falls into the same or similar traps.

It does get annoying having to try & fill out a full review for a film that can really just be called good and that be that, but that’s Lilies of the Field, to what definitely feels like an intentional degree. Again, though, for lack of anything else to say, I do have to bring up how out-of-left-field it kinda feels to see this among the slate of five for Best Picture; it’s an incredibly unassuming film, but that in itself doesn’t further impress enough to warrant a nod here like some other such films in the past. It’s certainly not a poor film, though, and I’d be hesitant to try & say that audiences would be unsatisfied at taking this journey, especially with how comparatively short the film is (though, with how spartan the film is overall, that might bore a lot more people in a potential audience than I’m probably accounting for). Aside from Poitier’s Oscar-winning turn, though, there’s really no reason to seek this out, but if you do, he’s certainly good & likable enough to make the hour and a half a pleasant enough way to spend the time.

Arbitrary Rating: 7/10

Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.

It goes without saying that there’s a level of prestige or cachet behind the epithet of “Best Picture winner”, and that serious dramas are more likely than others to have the weight behind them to successfully fill that prestige; after all, the cliche of “Oscar bait” didn’t exactly spring up out of nowhere unfoundedly. I’ve mentioned a few times how comedies rarely tend to have that weight to pull off a BP win, and looking over the near-100 years of Oscar to this point, comedies winning the big one are pretty few and far between. So, to sit down and watch Tom Jones, a period comedy by British New Wave director Tony Richardson, which not only won Best Picture but is such an out-and-out comedy that one almost can’t believe the Academy looked at it with the glowingly loving eyes that it did, it does make the phrase “genre whiplash” come to mind pretty readily in response. Sure, it’s a period piece, and the production value in making it one and filming it as so is sure to catch the Academy’s eye, but my god is this film so wacky and zany at its core that, had it been animated instead of filmed in live-action, it could’ve easily passed as a Looney Tunes production or Terry Gilliam-animated Monty Python skit with nary a thing about its content altered whatsoever.

Based on the novel by Henry Fielding, Tom Jones is the story of its title character, who is found in the bed of Squire Allworthy as a baby in his English estate circa the mid-1700s. Assuming the baby is the result of an illegitimate tryst between two of his servants, he has them banished and ends up raising the boy in his own household. Though Tom and Allworthy love each other as father & son despite no actual relation, Tom as an adult is much more of a playful, charismatic rascal than Allworthy would want for an heir, and though Tom and his neighbor, Squire Western’s daughter Sophie, are clearly in love despite Tom having no family and thus status to marry in 18th-century England (and also because Tom is more than a bit of a playboy due to his good looks), Allworthy and Western set Sophie up to marry Allworthy’s dour & orthodox nephew Blifil, and Tom is given a cash allowance and cut loose to make his own way in the world. Of course, Tom only really wants to be with Sophie, and the film is a cavalier romp through Tom’s life as he tries to find his way and not cross too many of the wrong people in his efforts to be enough of a man for the woman he loves to marry.

So, to indulge the wordsmiths in my audience who’ll know the context and use of the term right off, I’ve seen at least one Letterboxd review of Tom Jones that described the film as “picaresque as fuck”, and good golly on a high horse gleefully cavorting through the English countryside is that ever the perfect descriptor of this madcap, episodic character study, with especially extreme emphasis on that final word in particular. While the film could get by on being zany & irreverent to start and just leaving it there, the filmmakers also thumbed through the English dictionary and caught sight of the word “bawdy”, and I can only imagine the level of salivation happening as they threw as much of that into the mix as they possibly could as well. Not only does Tom like to run around, fuck around, and eat & drink whenever the opportunity arises, the actual filmmaking & camerawork of the film itself is clearly having a ball with doing the exact same. The opening of the film where an infant Tom is found in the bed is shot & structured like a silent film, complete with intertitles, and while the camera itself is whipping & zooming to catch spare bits of footage and action and cranking the speed of the footage up & down without a care, the editors are employing every wipe and fade and kitschy scene transition or cutting technique that’s possible to accent the wildness at play, and even adding in extra touches like the squeaky-reed score to emphasize the visual comedy a la the Benny Hill theme as well as occasional fourth-wall breaks by the characters themselves. All of it seems directly intended to demolish the old & standard way of making movies in as many ways as the filmmakers can think of and get away with, and the culture shock of seeing something like this in 1963 is, in my opinion, probably largely the reason to its success and why the Academy saw fit to award & nominate this film as much as they did. A lot of the noms don’t make as much sense now that the years have passed; Albert Finney is fine as the title character but frankly didn’t deserve a Best Actor nom here, and the film absolutely didn’t need three separate nominations for Supporting Actress – I could maybe possibly see Edith Evans sticking around in that category, and Hugh Griffith does a lot to sell his character to make his Supporting Actor nom sorta worthwhile, but that would be it in the acting categories.

Frankly, it’s how much the overall reception to this one has mellowed in the decades since that sticks out the most with this. While it was a critical & commercial success in 1963, it’s widely regarded now as one of the worst films to win Best Picture, and even director Tony Richardson in his memoirs regarded the film largely as a misfire. I can see how these arguments have become more widespread, just as I can see how they contrast to the film’s reception in the 60s; this was so different, so shockingly unorthodox of a film for 1963, that I can see how 1960s audiences & critics could find this so engaging, while also making the general appraisal of the film swinging downward as much as it did as time went on make perfect sense, after the novelty of the differences had worn off & become more standard as the 70s got underway. Even with my trying to watch these nominees as a product of their times, it was hard to really fall in love with Tom Jones, though I was also able to appreciate what it did & brought to filmmaking in its era, so my opinion of it kinda ended up balancing out in the middle. With regards to the film being a Best-Picture-winning comedy, while I probably wouldn’t agree with its win in any circumstance, it’s really whether or not the word bawdy and its various uses as a selling point or appeal lands squarely within your interests that’ll decide if this is your kinda thing or not; if it does, Tom Jones will be a delightful couple of hours, and if not, you’ll probably come out of it wondering how anyone could find something like this entertaining.

Arbitrary Rating: 7/10

C’mon you, let’s go… People are waiting.

At the risk of showing my hand a little too early, I wasn’t expecting to have to struggle through Elia Kazan’s America America as much as I did. I generally like Kazan’s films; they’re well-made & very detailed in the production, and usually carry a heavy moral or value that’s portrayed well through the context of the film’s narrative. Kazan is very much an issue or morals filmmaker, and considering his own history (up to and including his testimony in front of the HUAC) as well as his family history, it’s very easy to see why this became Kazan’s niche. His Greek family’s struggle & journey across the Atlantic to the golden shores is itself the subject of America America, and to say that Kazan gets to his most personal with this film is to be bald-faced obvious about it. With how personal the subject matter and story is to Kazan, and the lengths he went to to make the production and film itself the embodiment & depiction of that struggle, it does make it hard to try & talk objectively about the film’s faults or ways it comes up short; as much as the film clearly meant to Kazan and anyone whose family had to go through this struggle (or even went through it themselves), watching America America just as a film on its own merits, there’s a lot more here that feels like weaknesses or rough filmmaking than the strengths of it.

America America is a loose fictionalization of Kazan’s uncle’s actual struggle to escape the oppressed villages of Anatolia, once the ethnic homeland of Greeks and Armenians and now subjugated as part of modern-day Turkey circa the turn of the century, and make his way to America, the land of the free and the symbol of a new life. The fictional uncle, here known as Stavros, initially plans to scrape his way to America with his Armenian friend Vartan, but after a church massacre that leaves his friend dead, he is sent by his father to Constantinople with the family’s entire material wealth to aid his uncle’s carpet business and build enough wealth to bring the family over one by one into safety. Stavros, however, can only dream of America, and even after enduring a series of small and great misfortunes along the way to and after arriving at Constantinople, including his uncle setting him up in an arranged marriage to a rich competitor’s daughter, the idealistic Stavros can do not much better than keep his head down, grit his teeth, and wait for whatever opportunity he can seize upon to finally realize his dream and reach the land of the truly free.

That this is supposedly pretty biographical towards Kazan’s uncle should make it no surprise that Kazan spares absolutely no detail or expense in portraying this journey as authentically as he can, and this is really the main detail of America America that bears bringing up before any other. Kazan filmed largely in Turkey and Greece, with a cast of ethnic Greeks and virtual unknowns, including his lead actor Stathis Giallelis; most of the filming was on location and largely outdoors, with everything set & dressed to represent authentic Anatolia circa the late 1890s; Giallelis himself worked on his English for 18 months in order to play the character, and the Turkish authorities were displeased enough by how their country was portrayed in the film that they tried to confiscate the footage, which was only saved by the filmmakers switching the labels on the canisters. All of this comes across in the film, and the effort involved by the production team is really the star of the show in every moment. It’s the technicals, the practical technology used to film the footage & record the audio, that ends up a distracting mishmash; a very great deal of the dialogue is overdubbing, and not good overdubbing at that, a lot of the characterization was muddled & poorly-portrayed at best, and a lot of the choices in how things were filmed & edited together, especially in the first half of the film, did little to build a narrative or get the audiences invested in the story or characters. I was close to dismissing the film entirely as another of 1001Plus Steve’s misery parfaits, and that the film was almost three whole hours only seemed to exacerbate my struggle to finish it. Thankfully, the second half of the film improved on the aspects the first had been lacking: a more gradual & deliberate pace, generally better audio, and the focus of Stavros’ single-minded desire to go to America was more channeled & subtextual. The methods of Kazan’s storytelling were much more put to use here, and the narrative seemed finally to be actually building toward the conclusion Kazan wants to get to. He does get us there, and the story of Stavros and his family’s enduring struggle does come to a narrative conclusion; it’s just whether or not one wants to subject themselves to rather roughshod filmmaking & writing for a good half-to-two-thirds of a nearly three hour movie in order to get there.

I get that this was basically Kazan’s baby, one of his most personal & core family wounds laid bare on the screen, and that because of that, it makes us want to afford some leeway & grant Kazan more of a favorable response in our assessment of the film. I get that, and I want to as well, especially with how Kazan’s depiction of what emigrating to America meant to his uncle and his family and how that belief in the American dream was basically behind his entire life, including when he sat before Congress and named names; but, watching the film on its own, I just can’t get behind raising my rating of it any higher than what I’m giving it. There are good things about the film, make no doubt; the production design itself was excellent & won the film its only Oscar win, and Giallelis gives his absolute all in his performance even through the lousy overdubbing, but the positives of the film unfortunately don’t outweigh the negatives, and that’s entirely why I’m giving it the rating I am. This is an important film on immigration & what immigrants had to go through in years past (and, in many ways, a lot still do) to make it to America, and it’s just as important a film for Elia Kazan himself, but as a film by itself, it’s only barely worth getting through it, and at three hours, you’ve got a hell of a struggle ahead of you.

Arbitrary Rating: 6/10

Come, come, there’s a wondrous land… where I’ll build you a home in the meadow…

Honestly, I don’t feel as equipped as I probably should be to really critique a film like How the West Was Won, yet another mega-cast, multi-director, epic-scope genre production of the 1960s (boy, they’re everywhere this decade; It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World came out this same year, too, though I’ll miss that one as it missed out on a Best Picture nom). Why this is requires some setup & explanation: in the burgeoning widescreen boom of the 50s, one format that was introduced to try & really push the spectacle of the wider resolutions to their limit was called Cinerama, which involved shooting film on three cameras side-by-side all synched together, and then projecting the three resulting reels on a super-wide, curved screen to get one relatively-seamless epic panorama for the audience. Because the format was so novel, and so few artists & writers really knew what to do with it and how to use the format to narrative & compositional advantage, Cinerama films were largely documentaries & travelogues, with only two films made in the three-strip format that had actual narrative & storylines to them. How the West Was Won is one of those two, and watching it now in the modern era on a not-nearly-wide-enough regular ol’ flat screen, it feels like I’m not really getting the full experience of it; though, with the film itself being really unsure of how to use its ultra-wide resolution to tell its story, I don’t know how much more I’d really be getting, frankly.

How the West Was Won is a five-part generational story of exactly that; how the pioneers & settlers of the western territories of the early United States set out to make the territory their own, both for themselves as well as develop the land even further for the country & future generations. Nominally, the story is told through three generations of one family, known in the first segment as the Prescott family and then, after the eldest daughter marries, the Rawlings family thereafter. Each of the film’s five segments covers a topic & time period in the development of the west from its beginnings into the early modern era: river travel & trade, settling the plains, the incursion of the Civil War, the development & building of the railroads, and finally the rule of law winning out over the outlaws of the wild west, taming the country for good.

With five different sections telling a decades-spanning story, three different directors helming different segments, and a cast as extensive & cameo-filled as any since… well, since The Longest Day the year before, this is a whopper of a production with a lot to handle & try to piece together in the end. As much as the film looks & feels pretty uniform through the whole thing, it at least succeeds at that; it’s really the story it’s telling as well as how the Cinerama format constricts the directors in how they try & tell it that is questionably successful, if anything. Henry Hathaway, who directed three of the film’s five sections, notably cursed the Cinerama format for how unfit it was to telling a story outside of showing off panoramic vistas, and John Ford, who covered the Civil War segment, hated how much more set dressing they had to do to cover the extremely wide resolution; both these men’s complaints are apparent & indicative in watching the film, as the composition of virtually any & every shot is basically identical regardless of where the action or cast are in the frame or how much expansive landscape is needlessly in the background simply by virtue of the format making it impossible to not have it. With the three reels side-by-side, even with more modern-day restorations to make the seams indistinguishable and the format more readily viewable on a flat display, the whole film comes off almost like a Wes Anderson picture with how the composition is forced to be to cover the format, and some of the shots & scenes come off almost like a fish-eye lens with how much the image needs to be warped slightly to fit even a regular non-curved widescreen display. All this is to say that the format, ostensibly used to show off as much of the western frontier as a motion picture possibly could, ends up hampering the resultant film more than it really helps it, and I can fully understand how this is only one of two narrative pictures ever made in Cinerama. It’s a shame, too, since the story itself, in a more regular & thoroughly-understood format, would work just as well if not better; it’s nothing to get in a tizzy over, and it’s exactly what that plot synopsis up there (or even a shorter one) would imply you’re getting with a film like this, but it works for what it wants to be, and the cast at least are game enough to do their jobs regardless of the now-three cameras aimed at them instead of one.

This is just a weird, weird bird, all things considered. I want to like it more than I already kind of do, because when the film settles into the storytelling and lets the visual language of filmmaking do its thing, it’s exactly what you would want out of the title & the marketing pitch; it’s just hard to settle into that for much of the time because the Cinerama format itself is so distracting, and not always in the good way. That’s really the experience of How the West Was Won in a nutshell, and I’m only left with curiosity about how this would have been if it had opted for even a standard widescreen format instead. I can see how it ended up in the Best Picture field, too, with its surprising box office success along with how novel a success of a film it was, though I probably wouldn’t agree with that line of thinking. I guess it’s still nice, though, to experience something as truly novel & different as this in my ongoing movie-watching journey; I’m just not convinced this is as much of an unqualified success as the format itself wants to implicitly suggest that it is.

Arbitrary Rating: 7/10

For the Allies as well as the Germans, it will be…

I guess, in a way, all the war films in the Best Picture canon from the WWII years through the aftermath have all been leading up to this. It’s 1962, enough time has passed (indeed, the children of the Greatest Generation that fought in WWII have all now come of age themselves, so they’re certainly old enough for a film like this), so the moviegoing audiences of this decade are just about ready for an all-encompassing docu-drama about arguably the single most important day of the entire war: the landings at Normandy that marked the beginning of the Allies’ invasion of mainland Europe & their pushback against the Nazis’ takeover of the continent. Befitting its scope and stature of importance, production on The Longest Day was famously extensive; producer Darryl F. Zanuck pulled out all the stops in what would be the final crowning achievement in his career, hiring three different directors to cover the different-language segments of the film, a cast of so many notable names in so many different roles (ranging from significant players to cameo appearances) that it honestly boggles the mind, and a reported budget of $10 million, making it the most expensive black-and-white film ever made until Schindler’s List. Zanuck in the past has definitely gotten pretty zany with how much he puts into his productions, and the results of his efforts (both with the films and his attempts to secure recognition for them) have been pretty hit-and-miss, but thankfully, he hits his mark pretty damn well with this one; it may not be a sterling drama or an exemplary script that one tends to go to the movies for in a decade like this, but it’s exactly what the material requires and it fulfills that requirement the best that it possibly could.

The Longest Day is a docu-drama effort to recount the story of basically everything that took place on that famous day, from the angles of everybody involved: the Americans, the British, the French, and the Germans, all played by native actors in their original languages. It details the last bits of planning & decision-making that led up to the go-ahead the night before, how the Germans tried to prepare for the eventual invasion despite not knowing where it would actually be, all the different avenues that were simultaneously deployed on the morning of to help & hasten the Allies’ eventual efforts (including guerrilla tactics from French resistance fighters, and airborne paratroopers dropped in to secure important positions & bridges to keep the Germans from sabotaging the advance), and of course the largest amphibian invasion in recorded history itself on the five marked zones of the beaches at Normandy, and the hell the ground troops there went through to clear the beach & prepare to make their way inland to liberate France & close in on Hitler and the Third Reich.

If it hasn’t already been apparent, the expansive scope of the film and how it basically covers from a wide-angle lens all the details of June 6, 1944 from all the involved parties really needs to be emphasized; this is as broad and extensive a portrait of the day in question as a film like this could try & have the balls to pull off, and still have enough plotlines & narrative threads to hold the attention of moviegoers instead of just being a straight documentary. With how much material it covers, the film absolutely utilizes every second of its 3-hour runtime, and thankfully there’s plenty enough going on that audience members are unlikely to get bored at any point; in fact, the film is damn near rapid-fire with how quick it introduces plotlines and characters, including title cards to identify key players in the events to come that flip in & out one after another so relentlessly that I fairly soon gave up on following what character was what and stuck to identifying actors I knew and where people generally were in relation to the events they were taking part in. This, coupled with the different languages, helps a lot in compartmentalizing the plot and what’s all variously happening over the film, and if this wasn’t as smartly directed and the production shepherded with less of an all-encompassing lens than it was, this could’ve easily devolved into a smattering of war action with no real throughline for an audience to follow, so kudos to Zanuck and his writers & directors for pulling this off so neatly. The production itself also deserves more than a meager helping of brownie points; it’s frankly flabbergasting just how much is packed into this film from a logistical & filmmaking standpoint, and every involved department gets plenty of time to flex their craft & show off what they can do in a wide-ranging war epic like this one. A few of the tracking shots from the Normandy landings are absolute all-timers, along with one featuring the adjacent battle for Ouistreham that dips & flies over the entire city while coordinated battles & advancements are playing out, and it really throws into remarkable relief how much took place on that day as well as how fast everything had to move for the Allies to really get the drop on the Germans and not get stymied as soon as they landed in France. The cast is, to be frank, ludicrously extensive, and indeed is so much so that very few individual players if any stand out enough amongst the plot and the action to give noteworthy performances, though that’s pretty much what the material requires – John Wayne is typical John Wayne even under an Army helmet, and Henry Fonda appears and then disappears from the film after so short a time that you wonder why they even bothered to bring him in, but again, one shouldn’t be here for the cast: be here for the production, and in that, this is a solid winner.

There’s basically two questions I came out of this with: how it holds up in the Oscar category it managed to land in, and how well it works for the film it’s trying to be on its own. For the former, I can see arguments made as to how this isn’t too much of a story compared to what Hollywood likes to award in a category like this, and indeed if we somehow brought back the nomenclature of the earlier Oscars and called this category Outstanding Production, this nomination in particular seems a lot more fitting. That said, for the latter question, there’s no question that The Longest Day succeeds at what it’s aiming for; even with its budget, it still turned a profit for 20th Century Fox and even just pipped Lawrence of Arabia as the highest-grossing movie of the year, becoming the highest-grossing black-and-white film ever at the time. Is some of that fueled by wartime nostalgia & remembrance by the generation that fought in the war and their families that wanted to see what their loved ones went through? Undoubtedly, but I would say not entirely, and thankfully our fighting boys got a hell of a production & film by itself to represent them, so it didn’t need to be entirely. I’ve seen it said that The Longest Day marked the most indelible stamp on WWII films and the Normandy landings until Spielberg put out his version some 36 years later, and I can absolutely vouch for that assessment after seeing this one myself. It may not have a heartstring-tugging story or the dour anti-war message most people might look for in a film like this, but damn if there isn’t a better film from this era that just shows off everything the entire war effort had to go through to make a single day like this the one that counted, and sometimes that can be just as engrossing & entertaining as anything else.

Arbitrary Rating: 8/10

I know what he’s thinking… I could see it in his face. And I do not intend to let him forget it.

There are certain stories in the Golden Age of Hollywood that they loved to within an inch of its life, enough for every producer and/or writer in the business to want to put their hands all over their own version of the idea, regardless of if it’s a good idea to do so or not. Case in point: this 1962 remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, a production that saw commencement because MGM wanted to do color widescreen remakes of their more successful black-and-white films, and then after a point became an ongoing inevitability because so much money & effort had already been sunk into the production that there was just no way to concede & call it a failure. And so the production drudged on & onward, through at least two directors and more writers making a pass at drafts than even MGM could keep track of, while all of them and the producing staff at MGM having to do their best at corralling the arguably biggest barnacle attached to the whole boondoggle: Marlon Brando as the star. With Brando doing his usual bit of kneecapping the production whenever it doesn’t do everything his way, and the rest of the production being the hodgepodge of efforts it was forced to be, it’s frankly a pretty impressive thing that the resulting film ends up as watchable as it does. It’s definitely not great, the seams of the production are very visible throughout, and there’s really no real reason to bother with this one over other better versions, but that this wasn’t too awful a watch even at a shade over three hours is practically a miracle the more one reads up on the film.

If you’re unfamiliar with the story or haven’t seen the other versions Hollywood has done over the years (including the 1935 Best Picture winner), the Bounty is a ship in service to England circa the late 1700s that is sent on a voyage to Tahiti to acquire breadfruit for transplanting to Britain’s colony in Jamaica, under the captaincy of William Bligh. Bligh is a stern & brutally by-the-books captain, which in this era & service to country means there is no real means out at sea for anyone to speak up or question his authority regardless of what he orders or wants to do, including his officers up to and especially his second-in-command, Fletcher Christian. After wasting precious time attempting a foolhardy shorter route westward around Cape Horn, Bligh’s bullheaded efforts to succeed in his mission quickly start to break the morale & temperament of his men, and after several months stay in Tahiti living the island paradise life with the locals, the men are soon to reach their tipping point with Bligh upon departing for Jamaica; if only Mr. Christian would gather his humanity & position of authority to help the men do something about it, before Bligh’s single-mindedness & brutality threaten to kill every man under his command.

It’s worth noting that both this and the 1935 version take some liberties with what is an actual true historical event that happened, chiefly making William Bligh into an even more cruel antagonist of a captain in order to make the film more like, well, a film, which given the business of storytelling is fairly understandable. It’s basically everything else about the business of filmmaking and the choices this ends up forcing onto the creatives and the production team that is what ultimately sink the efforts of this Bounty, and though again it can and does all make sense when one looks at it logistically, it does also beg the question of why so many people allowed the production to run off the rails in the various ways that it did. But in fairness, all of this is behind-the-scenes drama; so, how’s the actual film itself? Honestly, for a three hour voyage, it could’ve been worse (though I should also point out, which I have in the past, that I have a proclivity toward seafaring adventure films, so this may have simply been more within my wheelhouse than other similarly convoluted production boondoggles). There’s thankfully enough plot throughout that the film moves along at a good clip & doesn’t waste time just to hit three hours, and the cinematography is exactly what you’d want it to be for a widescreen color version of Bounty. The acting from everyone is pretty standard, not too showy but exactly what the material requires, up to and including Trevor Howard as Bligh. Of course, we can’t ignore the biggest name on the marquee, and when he enters the film in that ridiculous outfit tossing out dialogue in that obnoxious accent, everyone is sure to know that Brando is doing his Brando thing once again; and, as per usual, though he somehow manages to just barely make it all work for what he’s doing definitely should not given him every excuse in the world to be allowed to do everything he is, and it’s this & how it affected the entire production that is ultimately at fault for how stitched together Bounty feels overall, despite still working as a solid piece of material.

It’s the dichotomy between the troubled production and the resultant film that is really at the heart of a viewing of this Mutiny on the Bounty, and it’s that that I’ve tried to emphasize as much as I can in this review; that the film, even while it does manage to work, also still betrays the seams that are visible throughout. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing, but it does keep something like this from being truly great, and on the back end, that the production ended up being so troubled & the producers couldn’t manage to find a point to pull the plug on it before the snowball started tumbling meant that there was no way the film could possibly have been a success. Indeed, the film was a box office flop even while being the fifth highest-grossing film of 1962, and the numbers added to Brando’s shenanigans during the production effectively killed his career for the next decade. It’s probably for the best that Brando was finally cut down to size, but it is still pretty remarkable how he manages to make a character like his Fletcher Christian work in spite of himself, and that this Mutiny on the Bounty does just barely manage to work despite all the production went through. It’s not an outstanding film or even the best version of its story, but it’s a pretty interesting capsule of its era of filmmaking on top of being a pretty absorbing seafaring picture, and that’s certainly more than nothing.

Arbitrary Rating: 7/10

You’ve a gift of the Blarney about ya, and no mistakin’ about that.

I gotta say, at this venture in my odyssey through Best Picture and entering the decade I’m entering, I wasn’t expecting to enjoy a musical as much as I enjoyed this one. I have a history, largely through high school, with musicals, as some who’ve been with me since my 1001 quest might recall, and as such my prospects upon starting up a movie musical I haven’t seen yet are largely two-fold: somewhat jaded or exhausted with the genre as a whole, as well as unsure of the viability of an unseen one, since I have seen most of the major works in the genre already (some multiple times). Even with whatever gaps there are in my viewing history, it’s that last part that seems to be the seed for whatever doubts arise when I come across a musical going through Best Picture – since I’ve seen most of the big ones, going through a sea of unseen musicals feels even more like battening down the hatches to weather the storm. With that, I started up The Music Man rather more carefree than is normal for me, just wanting to get through it well enough and to continue on afterwards. Imagine my surprise (and retrospective delight) that, not only was it a pretty easy watch even at two and a half hours, I actually had a pretty good time with it overall.

Robert Preston stars in probably the defining role of his career as Professor Harold Hill, a showman and band leader who arrives on the midday train into River City, Iowa in the early 1910s. Thing is, he’s only nominally a showman, he’s definitely not a professor, and his name may not even be Harold Hill; he’s a confidence man, emphasis on the “con”, and one of his notable ploys is selling a town on the idea of forming a marching band for the town’s young lads, getting them to pony up a fortune to pay for the instruments & uniforms, then skipping town once he has all the dough. Indeed, he ends up in River City after a bunch of other salesman on his train, disgruntled with Hill’s schemes affecting their genuine lines of business, inadvertently goad him into it as a challenge, and with the help of an old-time friend & fellow huckster in town local Marcellus Washburn, he aims to prove he can swindle any town he stops in, even a hard-nosed, tight-knit, Iowa-stubborn town like River City. Only thing is, the townspeople themselves are getting more out of Hill’s swindle than he himself thought he was giving them, and Hill is even getting more out of it himself than he thought after he falls for the town’s librarian, Marian Paroo, and when the town mayor along with one of Hill’s disgruntled train associates seek to uncover & reveal the truth about the unknown newcomer, Harold will have a much harder time making a decision when the check comes due and it’s time for him to skip town.

Now a musical’s a musical, sure, and even right at that you’re either already sold or you’re decidedly not; if it’s the latter, I’d be hard-pressed to find any musical to recommend that would change your mind, and if it’s the former, all you’d need is that plot synopsis and the prospect of Robert Preston in the lead role and you’ve got what you need to hit play on this one. Indeed, even from someone who’s largely had their fill of musicals over their life, The Music Man works really well as a product of the genre it’s in, and with director Morton DaCosta having also helmed the Broadway version, you know this film adaptation is gonna hit every note right where it needs to. The songs grab you & catch your interest right from the opening number, mostly with how little they cared about melody & aria singing over rhythm & syncopation; the opening song isn’t even sung at all, but rather pitter-pattered in spoken verse like a group of scat singers, and this reversed priority continues with the later songs that are sung & do have melody (with a few exceptions, mostly courtesy of the barbershop quartet shoehorned into the production that still manage to be likable despite how superfluous they are). It’s different enough to blow away preconceived notions of this being a musical and thus what it should be sounding like (at least compared to the musicals that Best Picture has had so far), and thankfully DaCosta takes similar swings with the production itself to make this truly a film adaptation and not just a filmed version of the stage play, which is more than other directors have bothered with in the past. The cast are also having a ball of a time in this one, from the supporting players all the way down to the ensemble, and though Shirley Jones has some decent singing and a lovely visage, there’s not a whole lot of character in Marian that she’s tasked with selling beyond that, and Shirley Jones can sing & look pretty with a basket on her head. But really, it’s the leading man that sells this picture and this musical more than anything, and to say that Robert Preston was born to play this role would be underselling it; his presence & sheer charisma as Harold Hill have seemingly no limit, and in fact it even threatens to undermine the moments in the film when fractures in Hill’s persona start to show. Jack Warner of Warner Brothers was apparently notorious for doing film versions of musicals with bigger stars recast in the leads, and virtually everyone he went to with the role of Harold Hill turned it down because nobody could do this role better than Preston, with Cary Grant going even further & saying he wouldn’t even bother to see the film if Preston wasn’t reprising his stage role. That’s how you know someone is born to play a role, and Preston absolutely vindicates the decision to make Jack Warner buckle & bring him over for the film version.

If I were to look at this from as objective an angle as I can, as a film and as a Best Picture nominee, there are some things here that don’t really work or don’t mesh together as well, and there’s the usual generous liberties given to a musical in terms of plot cohesion & suspension of disbelief. But, with musicals, if they end up being really good (or even just good enough in cases), one finds it a lot easier to overlook such things; it works better as a musical than it does as just a film, and the added enjoyment of the genre can grant a production a lot of leeway just from the entertainment factor. The Music Man is exactly such a movie musical; maybe not the best around, but absolutely good enough that a lot of the discerning critiques towards films or musicals don’t matter as much. It’s certainly one of the easiest two-and-a-half-hour musicals I hadn’t already sat through, and for where I’m at in the Best Picture timeline & chronology of movies, that’s saying a lot more than almost anything else I bothered to.

Arbitrary Rating: 8/10

I am going to tell them the truth… if the whole world conspires against it.

When I first got started on the Best Picture Odyssey, especially after making the big list I’d have to go through on that page up top & linking all the films I’d already reviewed, there were a few more than notable entries on that list that were not already highlighted in blue that I was looking forward to getting to, both ones I’d seen and ones I had yet to. Filling in the larger holes in my moviegoing history is a weird point of notability for me; must be my pride as a cinephile, even though I readily inform people of notable gaps in my history even as I also am looking forward to finally closing them and experiencing the films for myself. The air or mystique of the truly great or classic films is also a factor in this, I think, and it certainly was in my leading up to the nominees of 1961. At the very least for the genre or niche of courtroom dramas or historical films, most people versed in cinema would hold Judgment at Nuremberg as a titan, quite possibly a Mount Rushmore entry for the genre, and it wouldn’t be hard for me to imagine many who would hold it to such lofty standards even outside the genre it’s in. It was certainly one of the most noticeable of my gaps that jumped at me off the webpage whenever I saw it, and even after starting the film & watching for a while, I was wondering if, when, and how the film would measure up in my eyes. It did take a while for the bits and pieces of the film’s message to come across for me, but as the running time continued to pass and the questions the film was asking continued to elude any easy answers, by the time the end credits rolled, I could tell with rising certainty that this was indeed a film that had staying power; not because it successfully answers the questions it asks, but because it leaves the audience with a lot to think about in regards to those questions, especially whether or not we’re comfortable with what some of those answers might really be.

The famous (or infamous) Nuremberg Trials were a series of military tribunals held in the aftermath of WWII to prosecute Nazi war criminals for their crimes against humanity for all the world to see; the first was arguably the most famous and had the most notorious names that weren’t already dead or still in hiding, but it was then followed by a series of twelve such trials to further hand down sentences to others who were caught or who could otherwise be held accountable for Nazi atrocities. Judgment at Nuremberg the film is a fictionalized account of one of these known as the Judges Trial, so called because the men on the dock were all judges or prosecutors who either aided the Nazi regime with their sentencing, or who otherwise stood idle or with their hands in their pockets by tacit complicity with the inhumane programs & laws put forth by the Nazi government. In particular, the film follows Judge Dan Haywood, a respected jurist from Maine who is chosen to head the 3-person tribunal overseeing the Judges Trial, and how Haywood goes about gaining a clearer picture of both the events & arguments put forth in the trial by the prosecution & defense as well as the mindset of the German people both during & after the war, to ascertain for himself how men like the 4 defendants and the German people at large could’ve allowed all that happened to happen and who, if any individual persons at all, are really responsible for all that the Nazis subjected the world to.

There’s a lot of material that Judgment at Nuremberg covers, and a lot of material to potentially cover about it. Probably the biggest selling point to anyone who’s looking for a classic film to watch is the cast, and truly this is one of the most stacked casts of talented actors in the 1960s and beyond. Besides Spencer Tracy headlining as Judge Haywood, you’ve got Richard Widmark as the chief prosecutor, Maximilian Schell as head of the defense, Burt Lancaster as the principal defendant & focal point of Haywood’s inquisitive curiosity, Marlene Dietrich as a German widow who befriends Haywood & serves as the perspective point of the German people at large, William Shatner as Haywood’s legal assistant, and notable character cameos from the likes of Montgomery Clift and Judy Garland; a better and more talented cast for this kind of work would be nigh impossible to find, indeed. Everyone is excellent here, from Tracy providing the bedrock with his character you’d expect from Spencer Tracy, to Max Schell giving such a barnburner of a performance that he even won Best Actor over Tracy for this film, to Clift and Garland making the absolute most of their limited screentime (Clift in particular is shockingly good here, even for him, though anyone who reads up on his personal history will see this for the double-edged sword his life was at this time); nobody in this cast is letting the film down in any way whatsoever. The other main draw, I’d imagine, is the historical record as depicted by the narrative, and there’s plenty here as well to sate that particular appetite; some notable or choice moments for me were the footage Widmark’s character screens for the courtroom, footage actually taken by Allied soldiers as they liberated some of the concentration camps, and it’s as shocking and hard-to-watch as one would expect it to be, as well as an argument between the 4 defendants at a prison meal afterwards about how it couldn’t be possible for the crimes of the Holocaust to be so vast and numerous as the Allies claim, only for a nearby inmate & administrator of the camps to detail, straightforwardly & with banal practicality, exactly how it was possible to do with how the camps were managed – it was an enlightening moment that highlighted how simple it could be to enact such evil deeds just by working out the logistics & people keeping their head down to keep their nose on the grindstone.

What all the film’s generous assets, those I’ve touched on and some I didn’t get to detail, end up amounting to altogether is what I personally feel is the principle selling point of the film, or at least what should be after the eyes have already been lit up from the prospects of the cast and the interest in history, and that’s the underlying message the film’s coverage of the trial attempts to investigate and answer with anything close to objectivity. Both Schell & Dietrich’s characters in the film make extensive attempts to elaborate on how the German people as a whole were largely unaware of the horrors of the Holocaust, on how the totality of the Nazis’ hold on power meant that all they could do was keep their head down & hope to survive whatever happens, on how their love for their country was exploited & poisoned by Hitler and the Nazis to affect their atrocities, and how the only choices for most of the German people were to stand against it and be killed (or worse), or to choose to stay alive and be now held implicitly accountable by the rest of the world. Schell’s character takes this further, by making his defense of the 4 judges ultimately a point of order on the defense of the German people as a whole, and also how other countries and regimes (up to and especially including the US and the Soviets) have made many of the same such mistakes or lapses in good judgment they are now holding up to Germany as proof of their collective responsibility for the Nazis. It’s a compelling point, and it’s a lot to take in and try to wrestle with, especially with how the film ultimately concludes and the actions & dialogue given by Haywood and Lancaster’s character Ernst Janning, and it’s what Judgment at Nuremberg really wants to leave its audience with: if justice is truly to be blind, and objective in how it looks at actions & judges responsibility, then it must do so objectively, regardless of how this may make people feel or how fair or unfair it may seem to one country or another. If Germany as a whole is responsible, the film argues, then so is the rest of the world as well, and if we want to be eager in meting out justice for subjective reasons, then we cannot look away or try & dilute its effect or impact if justice is to be done objectively; otherwise, it is not true justice. It’s a hard lesson the film tries to depict, and I can only imagine how much harder a lesson it is for audiences of today’s era to swallow even compared to the comparatively-fresh-out-of-WWII audiences of the 1960s. It’s for this reason that I feel this film’s staying power has only grown since it was first released, and even with its runtime, it is why this is still the must-see courtroom drama its reputation has championed it as.

Arbitrary Rating: 9/10