Moving

Lack of time means I can't blog here as often as I'd like. So any comments on movies I want to make will be on http://sonofmavis.blogspot.com from now on. I'll probably revise and transfer previous blogs in due course.

Postscript

The British media report the Oscar results purely in terms of how British nominees fared. Well done, Helen, nonetheless. Perhaps I'll make the effort to see the film now.

So who followed which rule?

• O'Toole was hoping that rule 3 would see him home, but Whittaker trumped him with rule 8, a role so loud that it appeared leading when in reality it was support. Incidentally, Walter Matthau did it the other way round with his Oscar for The Fortune Cookie.
• Mirren's win is a definite 10. Streep's use of 8, with a touch of 5, for once didn't work, because Helen was in a classy British film, about a real-life classy British drama, playing a real-life classy British queen. The Yanks love that are willing to overlook the fact that Helen's well-known to be a dame.
• Arkin played card 3 successfully (as did Scorsese in direction). All the more reason why O'Toole failed. Hollywood likes to balance things out.
• Jennifer Hudson appears to have benefited from 7. They had to give Dreamgirls something.

So, bad luck, Peter. 45 years of playing outsize characters, desperately seeking to out-Newton Robert, except for once in Goodbye Mr Chips when he had a go at an introvert role. Good try, but no cigar.

But the biggest injustice this year is that Leslie Philips wasn't even nominated.

How to win an Oscar

TV and radio are doing what they do before any ‘big’ event, whether it be England versus Ireland, the Budget or, as today, the Oscars. They predict what’s going to happen, spend hours broadcasting the show, and then spend the next day talking about it.

Of course, all they’ll talk about are the so-called major awards and then only if they’ve gone to British winners. Silly, twittering reporters in long frocks will be hanging about outside post-Oscar parties, hoping some vain, self-obsessed, insecure, silicone-implanted, face-lifted, botoxed, coked-up, arrogant star will deign to mouth a few clichés into the microphone.

Hitchcock was taken to task once for saying actors were cattle. Hitch denied it. ‘I merely said was that they should be treated like cattle.’ All this interest in their private lives, their fashions, and why they think their latest film is so important is like seeing inside an abattoir. It’s best avoided if you want to carry on enjoying sausages.

But that’s all by the way. I started this with the intention of listing ten rules for actors to follow if they want to win an Oscar. I’m sure someone’s done a thorough study of winners – and losers – over the last eighty years, but here are my superficial thoughts.

1. Play a loser

It’s always good to play a drunk, for example. Ray Milland did it in The Lost Weekend. Or a whore, like Jane Fonda in Klute. Clare Trevor did both in Key Largo. Frank Sinatra was nominated for playing a drug addict in The Man with the Golden Arm, but Nick Cage took the prize with Leaving Las Vegas. Let’s not forget the Duke in True Grit.

2. Play a ‘differently-abled’ person

Jon Voight won as a paraplegic in Coming Home and Daniel Day-Lewis wasn’t at his most healthy in My Left Foot, and Cliff Robertson was a right Charly. I don’t think Robert Newton was even nominated as Long John Silver – a travesty – but the Duke didn’t do badly with one eye.

It’s obviously better actually to be disabled, but I don’t think even the most dedicated of Method actors would go that far. But amputee Harold Russell won best supporting actor for the Best Years of Our Lives and deaf Marlee Matlin was best actress in Children of a Lesser God.

Peter Finch outdid them all. He was dead when he won for Network.

3. Be old

This works in two ways. You’re coming to the end of your career/life and Hollywood has neglected you in the past. It remembers with embarrassment how it overlooked the likes of Cary Grant, Kirk Douglas and Bob Mitchum. It was fortunate for the Duke that he had little competition in 1969, although Dustin Hoffman was following Rule 2 in Midnight Cowboy.

Like disability, old age can also help attract sentimental votes. And there’s the wonder not that’s done well, but that it’s done at all. Art Carney, for example, in Harry and Tonto. And George Burns in The Sunshine Boys.

4. Be young

Not as helpful as being old, but at least it means you’ve got time on your side. Jodie Foster missed out for Taxi Driver, but came back for The Accused, where she used variations of rules 1 and 2. Tatum O’Neal got a statuette for Paper Moon, but it wasn’t the beginning of a glittering career. Jack Wild was only nominated for Oliver, and look what happened to him. Best avoided.

It’s supposed to be an actor’s nightmare to work with children, but it didn’t too the Duke any harm in True Grit, nor Greg in To Kill Mockingbird, nor Jack Nicholson in As Good as it Gets. And that last film even had a dog as well. Nobody can upstage Jack. That reminds me –

5. Be popular with your peers

In other words be Jack Nicholson.

6. Be black (obsolete rule)

Once Sidney Poitier (Lilies of the Field) and Halle Berry (Monster’s Ball) had got their Oscars, not to mention Denzel (Glory), the pressure to award something to a person of colour was no longer an issue. After all, I think it’s fair to say that the Academy was merely making a point in 1963 with Poitier, when his performance bore no comparison to Richard Harris’ (in This Sporting Life) or Newman’s in Hud in the same year.

I wonder what the Duke made of it. Which oppressed group is next, I wonder. ‘Native Americans?’ Come to think of it, people with Indian blood have won. Ben Johnson in The Last Picture Show, James Garner in Murphy’s Romance, and Cher in Moonstruck.

7. Be in the right place at the right time

If you’re lucky you can get swept up in the enthusiasm for a film. Paltrow, for example, in Shakespeare in Love (what an aberration!). And there was Russell Crowe’s win in Gladiator, Donna Reed’s supporting award for From Here to Eternity. I’ve a feeling that’s why Hattie McDaniel won in 1939. GWTW was so popular that even a black woman could get an honour. Mind you, she was playing a Mammy (no threat there).

Handing a support actor award can be useful where a worthy film is otherwise unacknowledged. Lust for Life, perhaps, and Twelve o’clock High.

8. Do something showy

Chew the scenery, be larger than life, ham it up, play against type, show you can ACT.

Examples: Walter Huston, in Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs, Hoffman in Rain Man, Pacino in Scent of a Woman, the Duke in True Grit, Bogart in The African Queen, Lancaster in Elmer Gantry, Marvin in Cat Ballou, Charlize Theron in Monster, Kingsley in Gandhi, Tom Hanks in Philadelphia, Borgnine in Marty, Roberts in Erin Brockovich and Broderick Crawford in All the King’s Men.

Anthony Quinn should have tried it the other way round. He might have won even more.

10. Give Hollywood a touch of class.

Not too often, but once in a while, Hollywood likes to allow itself a little prestige. Be there at the time. The film might soon be forgotten or disparaged, but you’ll have your Oscar, like Olivier for Hamlet, F Murray Abraham for Amadeus, Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire, Max Schell in Judgement at Nuremburg, Schofield in A Man for All Seasons, etc . . .etc. Oh, recently there was that bloke who won for Capote.

11. Take a tip from George C Scott (who followed rule 8): Who needs an Oscar, anyway?

Noir?

I’ve set myself the task of writing a review of all ten films in the DVD set, The Ultimate Film Noir Collection.
Click here


For anyone contemplating buying it, it’s excellent value, despite some dodgy transfer quality at time and an absence of commentaries or extras. Also, if you’re like me you won’t have heard of half of the films in the collection, but that is probably the main attraction, because they so rarely turn up on TV.

The ten films are listed on the link, by the way.

Before I get down to the individual films, I want to ponder on this term ‘film noir’, which I don’t like. For a start, it is a merely a phrase invented by French critics retrospectively to label crime films that shared a cinematic style and a few common themes. Second, it is prodigally over-used, usually to give some critical class to cheap (though hardly cheerful) B-movies.

I’ve seen Orson Welles’ Macbeth described as ‘noirish’ and read message board discussions arguing the toss about whether Leave Her to Heaven is a noir film. And is there any review of Chinatown which doesn’t describe it as ‘modern noir’ or ‘hommage to noir’. All of which begs the question I posed above.

Now a critical label doesn’t appear out of nowhere. It has to be based on certain definable criteria which are genuinely shared by a number of films, intentionally or otherwise. I would say that there is a consensus that a ‘film noir’ should have these three elements:

Style: monochrome; shadows, bars of light through blinds; expressionistic camera angles; flashbacks; narration, etc.
Theme: Life’s a bitch, and then the hero dies. ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods – they kill us for their sport.’
Elements: the femme fatale; the hero’s fatal flaw; crime; violence; corruption; the contrast between the fruits of crime and the poverty of honesty, etc.

Off hand I can’t think of many films that fit even those rather loose criteria, but the following are usually cited as leading examples:

Out of the Past (aka Build My Gallows High), although it has a lot of light and outdoor locations.
Double Indemnity
High Sierra – no femme, but a chienne fatale.
Detour – archetypal, with the added advantage of being a real Poverty Row product.
The Killers (1946).
Scarlet Street
Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (only joking).

I would dispute that the following are ‘noir’:

The Maltese Falcon and all the Chandler/Marlowe films. They may have the style, but they don’t have the content.
White Heat – the lead is psychotic, not a tragic hero.
He Walked by Night – police procedural.

I suppose what I’m saying is that if you try and define ‘noir’ you end up with a definition so narrow that it excludes most films, or so wide that it becomes meaningless. I am certainly saying that such labels are unnecessary and a recipe for critical laziness.

And who cares? If a film is good, why does it matter how we label it? After all, I won’t accept Treasure of the Sierra Madre or North-West Passage as Westerns, but that doesn’t stop them being great films.

Best Director, Best Picture?

When the first Oscars were presented, for the year 1927/28, the Best Picture was announced as Wings, a war film directed by William Wellman.

In those days there were two best direction awards, one for comedy and one for drama. This year the former went to Lewis Milestone, for Two Arabian Knights; and the latter to Frank Borzage for Seventh Heaven. William Wellman was not nominated for either.

I may be mistaken, but I believe that only once more was the director of a ‘Best Picture’ not even nominated for his contribution. That was in 1931/32 when Grand Hotel won and Edmund Goulding was completely overlooked. However, on a significant number of occasions, directors of ‘Best Picture’ have been nominated without winning

John Ford, for example, was nominated nine times, and won the award an impressive four times, but only once for a best picture, and that was How Green was my Valley, of all things.

Earlier this month IMDb conducted a poll to discover a consensus on which film to receive a Best Director award in the last two decades had most deserved to have been elected Best Picture. The films concerned were:

1989 Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone) lost to Driving Miss Daisy
1998 Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg) lost to Shakespeare in Love
2000 Traffic (Steven Soderbergh) lost to Gladiator
2002 The Pianist (Ramon Polanski) lost to Chicago
2005 Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee) lost to Crash

Why does this happen? Does it matter?

The simple reason for the discrepancy is the nomination process. The director nominations are decided by members of the directors' guild, about 200 of them; whereas the best picture choices are produced by polling the whole Academy (5000?).

I suppose it only matters if you have an auteurist approach to movies. After all, if Great Expectations is better-written than Dracula, then it’s a better book, isn’t it? So, if The Pianist is better-directed, it must be a better film than Chicago, mustn’t it?

Not necessarily. For a start, analogies are not arguments. In any case, what does ‘better-written’ mean? Are we talking about style, judicious choice of vocabulary, characterisation, plotting, philosophical depth, innovatory technique?

But I don’t want to get into this old argument. Just one or two points.

A film, unlike a book, is always a collaborative effort, no matter how dominant the director or how much creative freedom he has gained. It seems that every movie these days has the director’s name above the title, but that is usually a mere vanity. Kubricks and Von Sternbergs are rare.

It’s true that the days of the old studio hack director are over, where a director was handed a script, a crew and a roster of stars and told he’d got six weeks in which to shoot enough footage for the editor to weld into a finished movie. That was the era when Sam Goldwyn would insist that Wuthering Heights was ‘his’ film, not William Wyler’s.

I may have started by asking why directors are not honoured when ‘their’ movie is named Best Picture, but it is just as valid reverse the question. Why, for example, did Victor Fleming get the award for Gone with the Wind, when he was only one of three directors who worked on it, and when the whole project was tightly controlled by David O Selznick, the producer.

Mankiewicz won for All about Eve, and I wonder why, when all he did was competently manage an expert cast performing an excellent script.

Wyler’s direction of Ben-Hur was clunky at best, but won for overseeing an impressive and successful epic. And for having the sense to hand over the chariot race to Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt.

In the sixties four musicals won best picture and their directors were handed the accolade, when all they did was supervisea series of good song and dance numbers, now doubt choreographed by someone else. These were Oliver – was this the same Carol Reed who made The Third Man. Come to think of it, did he direct The Third Man, or was it Orson Welles? George Cukor stood back and let Rex Harrison perform, Audrey Hepburn be beautiful and Lerner and Loewe’s music for My Fair Lady flow. Robert Wise won with The Sound of Music (there we are, then) and shared his Oscar with his choreographer on West Side Story.

Now here’s a thought. Why spend all this time trying to correlate Best Picture and Best Director, when we should be comparing Best Director with Best Acting Performances? That, after all, is the director’s first responsibility: ‘to direct the actors on the studio floor.’ That’s for another time, but it might be relevant in the award to Franklin Schaffner for Patton, where he coached George C Scott to a well-deserved Oscar.

Back to the original question. Here are a few possible reasons why a director might be overlooked when his film is singled out as the best.

The winning film was a big, successful entertainment, the director made no significant personal contribution. Mutiny on the Bounty, for example, in 1935. It was more of an all-round Hollywood production than The Informer, a personal, ‘arty’ film, for which Ford won Best Director in the same year.

Around the World in Eighty Days and The Greatest Show on Earth are similar cases.

In 1940 Ford won for The Grapes of Wrath but the Best Picture was Rebecca. Again a straightforward entertainment (if that description can ever be applied to Hitchcock) against a serious, rather leftish film, with ‘director’ written all over it. Or maybe, the Academy just couldn’t make up its mind between the two.

Oddly, it seems to have worked the other way round when Mankiewicz won for A Letter to Three Wives, and All the King’s Men was Best Picture.

In 1948, Hollywood congratulated itself on its artistic leanings by honouring Hamlet, but maintained a balance by naming John Huston Best Director.

Driving Miss Daisy and Chariots of Fire were small gems, efficient and cost-effective, but didn’t have the directorial flash that gained the honour for Oliver Stone and Warren Beatty in the same years. It seems to be the case that ‘good’ directing has to draw attention to itself.

The more recent mis-matches follow the same pattern. Gladiator and Shakespeare in Love and Chicago were good old-fashioned Hollywood product, always more likely to win out over the war films with which they were competing, whether realistic and patriotic (Saving Private Ryan) or cynical and bitter (Born on the Fourth of July) or harrowing (The Pianist).

And then there’s the politics, the envy and feuds, the feeling that it’s somebody’s turn. What’s the betting that Scorsese will finally win this year, while The Departed won’t? If Letters from Iwo Jima wins, it will of course counter what I said in my last paragraph.

Because there is no pattern, no sense to it at all. George C Scott was right – there’s no place for competition in the arts.

Update

I haven't posted for a while. It's not that I've nothing to say, more that I've got too much. I plan to write a review of all 'The Ultimate Film Noir Collection', which I've been watching since Christmas. This means watching them all twice. And writing reviews is not as easy as I thought, not if you're going to be fair to the film.

I've also been wasting a lot of time trying to get links to work. I want to do that highlighting of text, which hides a link, but I'm getting all this HTML stuff round my neck.

My new wide-screen TV is driving me mad. I never know when I've got the right ratio. It seems these old films have to be watched with a black band on each side, unless you want to cut off the top of people's heads or stretch them sideways. Then you feel you're missing out. Odd, because I always wanted black lines showing when I was watching wide-screen on the old TV.

I've almost finished the novel on which The Last King of Scotland was based. I'll have to write something on that. It will fit in with earlier stuff on adaptation (which I haven't forgotten).

I saw a good old B-movie yesterday - Terror in a Texas Town. Silly title for an excellent film. Something else on the list.

The Last King of Scotland (2006)

Directed by Kevin MacDonald
Starring Forest Whittaker (Idi Amin) and James McAvoy (as Nicholas Garrigan)

After watching this film I left the cinema with a sense of disappointment, and as I walked to the pub I wondered why.

It wasn't just because it was too long, although I thought that the opening scenes could have been telescoped and wondered what exactly was the point of Gillian Anderson’s role.

It wasn’t the final violence, disgusting as it was. In fact I thought it was long overdue, considering the subject matter.

The editing style was a bit flashy for my taste at times and I would like to have seen some of the minor roles fleshed out more. The British diplomat perhaps, the other Ugandan doctor certainly.

I realised my problem was with the lead characters.

Forest Whitaker has been praised and honoured for his performance, justly so, for he is magnificent. But it upsets the balance of the film, which is not ‘The Life of Idi Amin’, (along the lines of All the King’s Men) but ‘The early life of Dr Nicholas Garrigan’ (along the lines of Moby Dick).

And I simply didn’t care for or about Nicholas Garrigan. As written, the character is feckless, superficial, mouthy and naïve (read ‘stupid’) and there is nothing James McAvoy can do to make him sympathetic.

I found it difficult to believe that Nicholas would have informed on the Minister of Health, having watched the violent mood swings and incipient paranoia of Amin. He is a doctor after all, and apparently quite a good one. And his affair with the dictator’s wife beggar’s belief, unless I’ve grown too old to remember the power of youthful hormones.

Whatever his motives, his behaviour overall leads to the torture and death of at least three innocent, even good, people. And yet there is no sense of Nicholas’ story being a tragic one, merely that a silly boy is lucky to get away free from the consequences of his actions.

But the film is worth seeing for Forest Whitaker, amiable buffoon and paranoid monster, moving from charm to bonhomie to suspicion to rage and back again with bewildering and terrifying ease.

I think the producers made the wrong film.