The TCM presents series showed The Ten Commandments today. I don't usually get a chance to go to these...even when the movie interests me, being a full-time graduate student takes up too much of my time. (I think the last one I saw was Jaws, which was before the grad school thing started.) Since I'm on Spring Break from my teaching job, I decided to go spend my afternoon with The Ten Commandments. (My grad school isn't on Spring Break this week, so I still had several papers due this week.) I've seen it several times of course; I was one of those kids who always looked forward to watching it every Easter. As an adult I still have a great deal of affection for it, even though I can recognize the inherent silliness. It was fun to see it in a theater. In a 240-seat theater, it was probably close to half full, which is pretty good for a weekday afternoon.
Seeing it on a big screen, just like lots of old movies I've seen, I recognized positive qualities that I'd never noticed before; flaws seemed more apparent as well. Especially the length--this is one long movie, and it felt it today. If you watch it at home on DVD, you don't have to watch it at once. You can take breaks, stand up, walk around the room. In a theater, you're stuck there, and with dozens of other people in the there, you can't even get up and walk around. The silliness seems, well, more silly....in the credit column, DeMille's attention to detail is far beyond almost anything you see in modern epics. There is certainly some virtue in the way DeMille uses actual sets and actual crowds, rather than digitally created ones, and even if the visual effects seem kitschy today (the matte lines are really noticeable blown up on a 60-foot screen), they're still mighty impressive for a 60 year-old movie. And honestly, unlike a lot of epics, despite--or maybe because in some cases--some of the campy dialogue, a lot of the characters really register here. Not just the biggest characters, but lots of smaller ones as well. It was a fun movie. Not a great movie, not a movie that I can take remotely as seriously as DeMille obviously did, but I'm glad I got to see those images and hear that music (which I always liked) in a theater.
Best Picture and Director 1956
Re: Best Picture and Director 1956
My Picture nominees:
* A Man Escaped
Bigger Than Life
Flowing
Merry-Go-Round
Tea and Sympathy
My Director nominees:
Robert Aldrich … Attack!
* Robert Bresson … A Man Escaped
Mikio Naruse … Flowing
Nicholas Ray … Bigger Than Life
J. Lee Thompson … Yield to the Night
* A Man Escaped
Bigger Than Life
Flowing
Merry-Go-Round
Tea and Sympathy
My Director nominees:
Robert Aldrich … Attack!
* Robert Bresson … A Man Escaped
Mikio Naruse … Flowing
Nicholas Ray … Bigger Than Life
J. Lee Thompson … Yield to the Night
Re: Best Picture and Director 1956
Voted for Giant and Stevens.
My picks for 1956:
Best Picture
1. The Searchers
2. All That Heaven Allows
3. Giant
4. Bhowani Junction
5. The King and I
The 6th Spot: Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Best Director
1. John Ford, The Searchers
2. George Stevens, Giant
3. Douglas Sirk, All that Heaven Allows
4. Don Siegel, Invasion of the Body Snatchers
5. KIng Vidor, War and Peace
The 6th Spot: Walter Lang, The King and I
My picks for 1956:
Best Picture
1. The Searchers
2. All That Heaven Allows
3. Giant
4. Bhowani Junction
5. The King and I
The 6th Spot: Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Best Director
1. John Ford, The Searchers
2. George Stevens, Giant
3. Douglas Sirk, All that Heaven Allows
4. Don Siegel, Invasion of the Body Snatchers
5. KIng Vidor, War and Peace
The 6th Spot: Walter Lang, The King and I
Re: Best Picture and Director 1956
He directed the "Over the Rainbow" sequence (as well as the other Kansas scenes) in The Wizard of Oz. That alone qualifies him as a major sound filmmaker, nevermind War and Peace, Man Without a Star, Duel in the Sun, etc.The Original BJ wrote:When I voted for King Vidor in the first year's race, I wrote that he showed tremendous gift as a silent filmmaker...that never really resurfaced once he made the transition to sound.
I do think he was easily the best silent-era filmmaker. I'd give some other sound-era filmmakers the edge but that's not because I see a huge decline in Vidor's abilities. I just think that sound opened up possibilities that other filmmakers were better able to take advantage of. Vidor's films were so resolutely visual that most of his sound-era films--including War and Peace--could easily function as silents. Other filmmakers became completely transformed with sound. Ford would be a prime example. Visually, he was second to none, but most of his silents just feel so stodgy compared to the rest of his filmography.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1956
Look out! Look out! White elephants on parade, here they come, hippety hoppety! They're here! And there! White elephants everywhere!
One of the least impressive lineups ever. (Also, I believe the first lineup entirely in color, for what that's worth.) Of the also-rans, The Searchers, The Seven Samurai, and La Strada (and their directors) are the most impressive. But there were a whole slew of films more memorable than a lot of the bloated spectacles voters nominated: both gripping Hitchcocks (The Man Who Knew Too Much and The Wrong Man), Written on the Wind (I pitched All That Heaven last year, but if it was eligible here, then that even more so), The Ladykillers, the small but jolting Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and I'd even give a shout out to The Court Jester, not a major work but one which I find absolutely laugh-out-loud funny.
It's almost hard to pinpoint exactly which Best Picture nominee is the worst, but since you have to start somewhere, I'll begin by eliminating The Ten Commandments. It's just so silly, full of laughable dialogue ("Oh Moses, Moses, you stubborn, splendid, adorable fool!"), sets and costumes that border on camp, and a plot that just goes on forever. I guess the parting of the Red Seas sequence does play, and has helped the movie become a TV Easter perennial. But, boy, it's a long four hours.
As bad as Around the World in 80 Days is -- and I think it's definitely in the bottom five winners for me -- you can't entirely blame the Academy for the choice. It won the New York Film Critics Award, which means it was obviously far more critically respected then than its poor reputation now would suggest. (Or maybe all the awards groups were just off their rocker this year.) I agree that it's handsomely mounted, but the plot is just endless, full of episodes that aren't that fun, ceaseless montages, and a collection of cameos that come across as mostly goofy in-jokes rather than anything that contribute memorably to a narrative. I guess Michael Anderson handles the big production elements well enough, but his movie is another one I barely made it through in one sitting.
Perhaps even further proof that awards bodies were drinking some crazy Kool-Aid this year: Friendly Persuasion won the Palme d'Or, and I'm not even sure what to say about that. I find the movie almost laughably stiff, with actors practically struggling to say all those "thees" and "thous" with a straight face. Over the years, William Wyler helmed many solid movies, several of them even great ones, but this represents his worst nomination in my opinion. The tone across the board is all wrong, with the early scenes, full of attempts at cornpone jokiness, lacking any real humor, and the later scenes, in which the story becomes engulfed by war, really silly as the melodrama strains to ratchet up the intensity. And, in keeping with the theme this year, it's just so damn long.
At least last year, as they often do, the director's branch offered some cooler prospects. But this year, they just went with another bloated white elephant. When I voted for King Vidor in the first year's race, I wrote that he showed tremendous gift as a silent filmmaker...that never really resurfaced once he made the transition to sound. And I'm afraid I don't share dws's view, that this film is a cut above the other epics of this era. I think a number of the actors are miscast, and the script feels both truncated and -- you guessed it! -- really long. I will concur that it looks more visually graceful than, say, anything Cecil B. DeMille ever came up with, but I just find the film so ploddingly paced, despite its efforts to cram so much of the novel into the script, that it feels more like eat-your-vegetables cinema than anything I could get excited about.
Ultimately, my choice comes down to the same two movies Magilla chose -- The King and I and Giant -- neither of which are great, but both of which have their merits.
The King and I is probably the least flawed of the two. I'm a big fan of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical, and think so many of those songs ("Getting to Know You," "Shall We Dance?" "Hello, Young Lovers" and most of all "Something Wonderful") are beautifully written, musically and lyrically. The two leads are memorable, with Brynner's headstrong King a perfect match for Deborah Kerr's gentle but firm schoolteacher. Along the way, the narrative provides a lot of laughs, as these two members of very different cultures face off, and really emotionally lands its poignant ending. (Brynner's "I believe this to be YOUR fault" and Kerr's "I hope so, I do hope so" in that final scene just slays me.) And the sets and costumes are gorgeous, not just expensive-looking, but truly visually sumptuous. But there is a problem: Walter Lang's direction isn't what you'd call imaginative at all. I think he deserves some credit for the fact that the musical isn't just an on-screen clunker -- compare this movie to the film version of Carousel that same year, which just sits there -- but nor is it even as cinematic as any of the musicals that would win Best Picture over the next decade.
Giant, on the other hand, probably has more obvious problems. Like its fellow nominees, it's definitely got some bloat to it. The racial themes in the film's second half become fairly heavy-handed. And it's got some of the worst old age makeup in the history of ever. But...I think the movie has its strengths as well, starting with the Edna Ferber dynasty saga at its foundation, which provides an appealingly sweeping story and the moving themes about time passing and customs changing that fill a lot of the author's work. And I was particularly surprised to see that the movie wasn't just an endorsement of the everything is bigger and better in Texas ethos that one might assume would color a story of ranchers and oil mavens from this time -- there's a more skeptical attitude toward Bick Benedict and the world he inhabits that gives the movie some complexity, even as its narrative balloons. And visually, this might be as impressive a work as George Stevens ever mounted, with detailed compositions set against gorgeous landscapes and lived-in interiors (that cinematography omission is baffling), all underscored by the film's rousing theme music. In its best scenes, I think Giant soars higher than the other Best Picture nominees, so despite its flaws, it gets my vote, and I'll pick Stevens in tandem as Best Director.
One of the least impressive lineups ever. (Also, I believe the first lineup entirely in color, for what that's worth.) Of the also-rans, The Searchers, The Seven Samurai, and La Strada (and their directors) are the most impressive. But there were a whole slew of films more memorable than a lot of the bloated spectacles voters nominated: both gripping Hitchcocks (The Man Who Knew Too Much and The Wrong Man), Written on the Wind (I pitched All That Heaven last year, but if it was eligible here, then that even more so), The Ladykillers, the small but jolting Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and I'd even give a shout out to The Court Jester, not a major work but one which I find absolutely laugh-out-loud funny.
It's almost hard to pinpoint exactly which Best Picture nominee is the worst, but since you have to start somewhere, I'll begin by eliminating The Ten Commandments. It's just so silly, full of laughable dialogue ("Oh Moses, Moses, you stubborn, splendid, adorable fool!"), sets and costumes that border on camp, and a plot that just goes on forever. I guess the parting of the Red Seas sequence does play, and has helped the movie become a TV Easter perennial. But, boy, it's a long four hours.
As bad as Around the World in 80 Days is -- and I think it's definitely in the bottom five winners for me -- you can't entirely blame the Academy for the choice. It won the New York Film Critics Award, which means it was obviously far more critically respected then than its poor reputation now would suggest. (Or maybe all the awards groups were just off their rocker this year.) I agree that it's handsomely mounted, but the plot is just endless, full of episodes that aren't that fun, ceaseless montages, and a collection of cameos that come across as mostly goofy in-jokes rather than anything that contribute memorably to a narrative. I guess Michael Anderson handles the big production elements well enough, but his movie is another one I barely made it through in one sitting.
Perhaps even further proof that awards bodies were drinking some crazy Kool-Aid this year: Friendly Persuasion won the Palme d'Or, and I'm not even sure what to say about that. I find the movie almost laughably stiff, with actors practically struggling to say all those "thees" and "thous" with a straight face. Over the years, William Wyler helmed many solid movies, several of them even great ones, but this represents his worst nomination in my opinion. The tone across the board is all wrong, with the early scenes, full of attempts at cornpone jokiness, lacking any real humor, and the later scenes, in which the story becomes engulfed by war, really silly as the melodrama strains to ratchet up the intensity. And, in keeping with the theme this year, it's just so damn long.
At least last year, as they often do, the director's branch offered some cooler prospects. But this year, they just went with another bloated white elephant. When I voted for King Vidor in the first year's race, I wrote that he showed tremendous gift as a silent filmmaker...that never really resurfaced once he made the transition to sound. And I'm afraid I don't share dws's view, that this film is a cut above the other epics of this era. I think a number of the actors are miscast, and the script feels both truncated and -- you guessed it! -- really long. I will concur that it looks more visually graceful than, say, anything Cecil B. DeMille ever came up with, but I just find the film so ploddingly paced, despite its efforts to cram so much of the novel into the script, that it feels more like eat-your-vegetables cinema than anything I could get excited about.
Ultimately, my choice comes down to the same two movies Magilla chose -- The King and I and Giant -- neither of which are great, but both of which have their merits.
The King and I is probably the least flawed of the two. I'm a big fan of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical, and think so many of those songs ("Getting to Know You," "Shall We Dance?" "Hello, Young Lovers" and most of all "Something Wonderful") are beautifully written, musically and lyrically. The two leads are memorable, with Brynner's headstrong King a perfect match for Deborah Kerr's gentle but firm schoolteacher. Along the way, the narrative provides a lot of laughs, as these two members of very different cultures face off, and really emotionally lands its poignant ending. (Brynner's "I believe this to be YOUR fault" and Kerr's "I hope so, I do hope so" in that final scene just slays me.) And the sets and costumes are gorgeous, not just expensive-looking, but truly visually sumptuous. But there is a problem: Walter Lang's direction isn't what you'd call imaginative at all. I think he deserves some credit for the fact that the musical isn't just an on-screen clunker -- compare this movie to the film version of Carousel that same year, which just sits there -- but nor is it even as cinematic as any of the musicals that would win Best Picture over the next decade.
Giant, on the other hand, probably has more obvious problems. Like its fellow nominees, it's definitely got some bloat to it. The racial themes in the film's second half become fairly heavy-handed. And it's got some of the worst old age makeup in the history of ever. But...I think the movie has its strengths as well, starting with the Edna Ferber dynasty saga at its foundation, which provides an appealingly sweeping story and the moving themes about time passing and customs changing that fill a lot of the author's work. And I was particularly surprised to see that the movie wasn't just an endorsement of the everything is bigger and better in Texas ethos that one might assume would color a story of ranchers and oil mavens from this time -- there's a more skeptical attitude toward Bick Benedict and the world he inhabits that gives the movie some complexity, even as its narrative balloons. And visually, this might be as impressive a work as George Stevens ever mounted, with detailed compositions set against gorgeous landscapes and lived-in interiors (that cinematography omission is baffling), all underscored by the film's rousing theme music. In its best scenes, I think Giant soars higher than the other Best Picture nominees, so despite its flaws, it gets my vote, and I'll pick Stevens in tandem as Best Director.
Last edited by The Original BJ on Thu Jan 24, 2013 9:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Re: Best Picture and Director 1956
What I meant in not big is something not obviously made for the big screen and not the TV screen, or at least for the types of TV screens they had in the 1950s.Big Magilla wrote:Maybe not today, but it was "big" in 1956. Jessamyn West, author of the best-selling novel, was the second cousin oft sitting Vice President Richard Nixon. Gary Cooper's character was based on their great-grandfather.
Re: Best Picture and Director 1956
Another terrible 50's lineup. In Best Picture I go for The Ten Commandments. It's silly and goofy, but it's more memorable than anything else in the lineup. Maybe a half-hearted vote, but it's one movie I've watched for most of my life, and I still have a good bit of affection for it. None of the others (except possibly for Friendly Persuasion) even merit a second look.
Best Director is a very easy choice--King Vidor, King Vidor, King Vidor. War and Peace is such an underrated film--a beautiful marriage of Tolstoy's themes with Vidor's own American Protestant sensibility. (Actually the two dovetail quite nicely.) It's one of the more unconventional of all of the 50's and 60's epics--there are no heroes or villains (Vidor's films rarely had them), or even easily identifiable protagonists. Yeah, you could say that Henry Fonda (among others) is miscast, but I don't that takes away from the visual majesty of Vidor's work here--he really knows how to place actors and objects within a frame to create an amazing effect. His compositions and camera work aren't what you would call complicated, but I think Tag Gallgher was right to call him the most painterly of all filmmakers. This one is really overdue for reassessment.
Best Director is a very easy choice--King Vidor, King Vidor, King Vidor. War and Peace is such an underrated film--a beautiful marriage of Tolstoy's themes with Vidor's own American Protestant sensibility. (Actually the two dovetail quite nicely.) It's one of the more unconventional of all of the 50's and 60's epics--there are no heroes or villains (Vidor's films rarely had them), or even easily identifiable protagonists. Yeah, you could say that Henry Fonda (among others) is miscast, but I don't that takes away from the visual majesty of Vidor's work here--he really knows how to place actors and objects within a frame to create an amazing effect. His compositions and camera work aren't what you would call complicated, but I think Tag Gallgher was right to call him the most painterly of all filmmakers. This one is really overdue for reassessment.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1956
Maybe not today, but it was "big" in 1956. Jessamyn West, author of the best-selling novel, was the second cousin oft sitting Vice President Richard Nixon. Gary Cooper's character was based on their great-grandfather.
Re: Best Picture and Director 1956
I really do not think of Friendly Persuasion as a "big" film.
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Best Picture and Director 1956
"Big" was the operative word for 1956. "Big" as in big films in big theatres on big screens that couldn't be duplicated by a TV set in the living room.
All five nominees fit the description as did War and Peace represented by King Vidor in direction in place of Cecil B. DeMille whose The Ten Commandments was competing against Around the World in 80 Days; Friendly Persuasion; Giant and The King and I, all of whose directors made the cut.
John Ford's late career masterpiece, The Searchers qualifies as "big" but although it received respectable reviews at the time, it was largely seen as a standard western, something people could stay home and watch on TV. The two nominated westerns had the advantage of being about something a little different - Friendly Persuasion was about Quakers and Giant was about oil rich modern Texans. Two other films that have come to be regarded higher than the Best Picture slate are Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers which has been officially remade twice since and stolen from or as they like to say, paid homage to, in numerous other films. Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows has come to be regarded as much more than the women's weepie it was regarded as at the time.
The Ten Commandments is something of a kitsch masterpiece and a TV perennial, but it didn't appear on many critics' lists at the time. Around the World in 80 Days did. The film, which comes off as a three hour snoozer to today's audiences was the event film of the decade. It was presented in a new widescreen process producer Mike Todd named after himself called Todd-A-O. It was shown in large cities in legitimate theatres - the Winter Garden in New York. It was a popular outing for NYC schools that rivaled the popularity of visits to the U.N. Todd coined the term "cameo" for the now-you-see=them-know-you-don't-appearances of a large cast of major actors, most of whom mean nothing to today's audiences. It was one of those years in which the hype was going to win and it did.
In the absence of The Searchers; Invasion of the Body Snatchers; All That Heaven Allows and the under-rated Tea and Sympathy, I am torn between The King and I and Giant so I think I'll split the difference and vote for The King and I for Best Picture and George Stevens for Best Director.
All five nominees fit the description as did War and Peace represented by King Vidor in direction in place of Cecil B. DeMille whose The Ten Commandments was competing against Around the World in 80 Days; Friendly Persuasion; Giant and The King and I, all of whose directors made the cut.
John Ford's late career masterpiece, The Searchers qualifies as "big" but although it received respectable reviews at the time, it was largely seen as a standard western, something people could stay home and watch on TV. The two nominated westerns had the advantage of being about something a little different - Friendly Persuasion was about Quakers and Giant was about oil rich modern Texans. Two other films that have come to be regarded higher than the Best Picture slate are Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers which has been officially remade twice since and stolen from or as they like to say, paid homage to, in numerous other films. Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows has come to be regarded as much more than the women's weepie it was regarded as at the time.
The Ten Commandments is something of a kitsch masterpiece and a TV perennial, but it didn't appear on many critics' lists at the time. Around the World in 80 Days did. The film, which comes off as a three hour snoozer to today's audiences was the event film of the decade. It was presented in a new widescreen process producer Mike Todd named after himself called Todd-A-O. It was shown in large cities in legitimate theatres - the Winter Garden in New York. It was a popular outing for NYC schools that rivaled the popularity of visits to the U.N. Todd coined the term "cameo" for the now-you-see=them-know-you-don't-appearances of a large cast of major actors, most of whom mean nothing to today's audiences. It was one of those years in which the hype was going to win and it did.
In the absence of The Searchers; Invasion of the Body Snatchers; All That Heaven Allows and the under-rated Tea and Sympathy, I am torn between The King and I and Giant so I think I'll split the difference and vote for The King and I for Best Picture and George Stevens for Best Director.