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Saturday Evening Movie Thread 09/16/2023 [TheJamesMadison]

The Second Quarter Century of Best Picture Winners

A few months ago I wrote about the first quarter century (roughly) of Best Picture winners at the Oscars. Well, in the ensuing months, as I've discovered the works of William Wyler and Peter Weir, I've also kept on with my viewing of Best Picture winners to the point where I can now talk about the next quarter century (roughly) of Best Picture winners at the Oscars.

And this is the period where I really think the Academy found some kind of sweet spot between awarding films with critical acclaim and awarding films that made a lot of money at the box office. That was how the Academy started, but the late 40s and early 50s saw a certain disconnect where the films winning Best Picture weren't the kings of the box office anymore. They weren't nothing films with limited runs only appreciated by insiders who only saw the films through screeners sent to them. Even Midnight Cowboy was the number three movie of the year at the box office it was released. Was it a conscious effort to stay relevant, or was it simply how movies were released at the time? Rarely going for the big opening weekend and needing, instead, extended runs with lots of popular support to get any kind of cultural clout?

I dunno.

Anyway, this period, specifically from 1951 to 1974, was a very good period in the Academy's efforts at rewarding itself with baubles.

Changing Times

The period in question was quite a wild one for American film. The early fifties was about the time that the studio system began to collapse. It was a slow process that affected some studios sooner than others with MGM lasting longer than most because it had been so successful for so long that it could largely ignore the after effects of tax changes that affected star pay (changing them from weekly pay to lump sums with points on grosses) while also retaining artisan talent for longer, but even MGM eventually fell, selling its library to television by the late 50s to make some quick money, and you can see that in this list of films over the years from the Academy.

You can see that just by comparing the first in this series, An American in Paris, to one of the last, Midnight Cowboy (I could also do this with the Godfather films, but Midnight Cowboy provides a starker contrast).

An American in Paris was an MGM production under musical producer Arthur Freed, directed by Vincente Minnelli and Gene Kelly (mostly Kelly, it seems, since Minnelli was divorcing Judy Garland at the time). It used large studio sets, was so patently unreal with theatrical spectacle, including its final twenty-minute ballet set to George Gershwin's music, and was generally unrealistic entertainment of that old MGM style. Midnight Cowboy, by contrast, was filmed on real locations in the dirty parts of New York City during the late 1960s, about two generally awful people, one of whom slowly dies over the course of the film from general unhealthiness, and is kind of unpleasant to look at. It was made with independent money, well outside of the studio system, and distributed by the long-established independent distributor United Artists.
And, keep in mind, Midnight Cowboy was the #3 movie at the box office in 1969.

American movie going was changing over the decades, and the Academy was reflecting that.

Fits and Starts


Do you know what won Best Picture in 1968, just one year before Midnight Cowboy? It was Oliver!, Carol Reed's extravagant adaptation of the stage musical based on the Charles Dickens' novel Oliver Twist, as much full of musical numbers, singing and dancing, as An American in Paris. It was the number five movie at the box office in 1968. Number 1 was Funny Girl, the William Wyler film about Fanny Bruce, a Ziegfeld girl, that introduced the movie going world to Barbara Streisand in the lead role (the film was also nominated that year). Do you know what came the next year? Patton, the classically built biopic about the American general during WWII. The script could have been made in the late 40s, to be honest.

What's my point here? My point is that the Academy wasn't heading straight into the furthest reaches of the changing cinema after the fall of the Hays Code that had dictated the strictures of moral behavior as presented in film. It almost seemed to be at war with itself as it went, wanting to award films that reflected the Hollywood that it had once been while, alternatively, awarding films that it saw as its future. I think that really manifested itself first with Tom Jones, the 1963 winner, an independent British film that introduced the world to Albert Finney in the title role.

Tom Jones stands in such stark contrast to the films that had been awarded just before it, especially the previous three, The Apartment, West Side Story, and Lawrence of Arabia made by, respectively, Billy Wilder, Robert Wise, and David Lean. All three that preceded Tony Richardson's film were precisely constructed from a cinematic point of view, representing, at a bare minimum from a technical craft point of view, the highest reaches of what serious money in an American production could do. And then Tom Jones is this shoe-string budget thing that was so obviously botched during production that entire sequences were created from B-roll and voiceover in the editing bay that it becomes obvious that many of the joys of the film are accidental.

These films together in a series show Hollywood trying to grapple with itself. Caught between past and future, between the last vestiges of the Studio System and its best talent against the new American and British cinema that had more minor financial backing, used few constructed sets, if any, and eschewed many of the formal rules that had come to define the popular cinematic product from the late 20s to the mid-60s.

Where Hollywood Could End Up Going


The Godfather is the marriage of old school esthetics and techniques with the more open embrace of sex and violence that marked the post-Hays world, and it's where Hollywood could keeping heading, with a continued effort to appeal to adult audiences. What could end up changing things would financial gurus getting their hands on the studios and trying to play everything safe again, latching onto movie stars, genre, and the beginning of serious franchising by the 80s. Gosh, I sure hope that doesn't happen. The Godfather, though, the biggest money-making film of 1972, was all about the craft that Francis Ford Coppola brought to an adaptation of a trashy Mafia novel by Mario Puzo.

That Coppola came out of the Roger Corman machine still tickles me because Corman was all about cheap productions, pre-sold rights, and pushing product as fast as possible. He was essentially out there to make content in the 60s, but he gave his talent free reign to do what they wanted. The most famous example I can think of is Joe Dante telling Corman that he wanted to make his feature film debut, Piranha, a horror comedy instead of just a horror film, and Corman agreed as long as he kept it under budget. I haven't yet dug into Coppola's early body of work, but I can easily imagine this intelligent UCLA film school graduate using the freedom that a producer like Corman offered him to stretch himself as an artist, not in arrogant avant garde ways but in refinement of his craft ways, and that's ultimately what he did in the smaller films that preceded The Godfather. He didn't want to direct the project, the studio insisting on an Italian director in order to give it the "proper" ethnic feel, and he eventually took it on, putting everything he could into it, and crafting one of the most beautifully classical films of the 70s that still feels like it's part of the 70s.

But then you have to compare it to William Friedkin's The French Connection, the film that won the year previously. Filmed on the grimy streets of New York City with a lot of cinema verite in its veins to create this gritty sense of a dirty reality, the film demonstrates Friedkin's documentary background just as fully as The Godfather demonstrates Coppola's formal mastery.

What I Would Have Voted For


I did this last time, and I'm gonna do it again. I'll explain a bit more since I got some pushback that I should have predicted for whenever you say that "this movie" should have won over "that movie," one inevitably gets the response that one is stupid because one doesn't love "that movie", even though I never expressed an opinion on "that movie".

So, what I mean is that out of the five nominees each year, I would have voted for the movie in parentheses. That's it. It's not me saying that, if there's a disagreement between my own little, unimportant taste and the Academy's choice from 50 years ago, that I hate the choice the Academy made. In more than one instance, I genuinely love the film I wouldn't vote for, I just love the other film a bit more. Same goes if I agree with the Academy and some other very worthy film wouldn't have gotten my vote. And then there are a couple of years where I think the Academy was smoking some bad stuff.

I should also note that I did my best to watch as many of the nominees I'd never seen before to make this list as robust as possible. In more than one instance, my mad dash to watch as much as I could did lead me to actually changing my mind about what I would have voted for. I also limited myself to what was nominated.

1951 - An American in Paris (An American in Paris)
1952 - The Greatest Show on Earth (The Quiet Man)
1953 - From Here to Eternity (Roman Holiday)
1954 - On the Waterfront (On the Waterfront)
1955 - Marty (Mister Roberts)
1956 - Around the World in 80 Days (Giant, one of the weakest years for nominations, especially considering that this is the year The Searchers was released)
1957 - The Bridge on the River Kwai (The Bridge on the River Kwai)
1958 - Gigi (The Defiant Ones)
1959 - Ben-Hur (Ben-Hur)
1960 - The Apartment (The Apartment)
1961 - West Side Story (Judgment at Nuremberg)
1962 - Lawrence of Arabia (Lawrence of Arabia)
1963 - Tom Jones (America America)
1964 - My Fair Lady (Dr. Strangelove)
1965 - The Sound of Music (The Sound of Music)
1966 - A Man for All Seasons (A Man for All Seasons)
1967 - In the Heat of the Night (The Graduate)
1968 - Oliver! (The Lion in Winter)
1969 - Midnight Cowboy (Z)
1970 - Patton (Patton)
1971 - The French Connection (A Clockwork Orange)
1972 - The Godfather (The Godfather, though I'd be really tempted to be the contrarian and vote for Cabaret, which I also think is really great)
1973 - The Sting (The Exorcist)
1974 - The Godfather Part II (Chinatown)

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

A Haunting in Venice

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

The Red Badge of Courage (Rating 3/4) Full Review "I'm glad to see the shadow of a potential masterpiece here. It's solidly good, demonstrating some of Huston's greatest technical strengths, but it always does feel like there's a masterpiece hidden just around the corner." [Youtube]

The African Queen (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "Still, it's really fun as it is. My complaints are minor." [Personal Collection]

Moby Dick (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "So, my problems with the film are Peck and that some of the special effects aren't great. The rest? Gold." [Personal Collection]

Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (Rating 3/4) Full Review "It's a story of war, about connection in war, and its impermanence. That it doesn't quite connect as well as Ford's film is probably because Huston just kind of gave up when he realized he couldn't push it as far as he wanted with the Hays Office in power." [Library]

The Barbarian and the Geisha (Rating 2/4) Full Review "Is it good? No, not at all. Is it a disaster? Not really. It's just this over-romanticized look at the life of a real man that goes so far over the edge that it doesn't feel real anymore." [Library]

The Roots of Heaven (Rating 1/4) Full Review Well, this is a complete and total mess." [Library]

The Misfits (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "Was John Huston really no better than the scripts he was working from?" [Criterion Channel]

The List of Adrian Messenger (Rating 2/4) Full Review "So, meh. Huston has made worse, but this is, at best, middling fare that was rightly forgotten by the cinematic world. Huston really feels like he's just coasting along from one job to the next, just finding the weirdest little reasons to pick up projects without trying to make them the best that they can be." [Library]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.

My next post will be on 9/16, and it will talk about the directing career of John Huston.