TCM ran this short, directed by Chuck Workman, between movies through the mid-90s, and I sat through the whole thing every time I came across it. Eventually, I managed to capture it on VHS and watched it over and over again. It’s the history of movies in less than ten minutes. And thanks to the magic of the internet, here it is:

I need to think of a name for these awards. . . .

Best Picture:

The End: Ugetsu
Oscar: From Here To Eternity

Best Director:

The End: Kenji Mizoguchi, Ugetsu
Oscar: Fred Zinneman, From Here To Eternity

Actor:

The End: Jacques Tati, M. Hulot’s Holiday
Oscar: William Holden, Stalag 17

Actress:

The End: Danielle Darrieux, Madame de . . .
Oscar: Audrey Hepburn, Roman Holiday

Supporting Actor:

The End: Jack Palance, Shane
Oscar: Frank Sinatra, From Here To Eternity

Supporting Actress:

The End: Thelma Ritter, Pickup On South Street
Oscar: Donna Reed, From Here To Eternity

Original Screenplay:

The End: Kogo Noda and Yasujiro Ozu, Tokyo Story
Oscar: Charles Brackett et al, Titanic and Dalton Trumbo, Roman Holiday

Adapted Screenplay:

The End: Matsutaro Kawaguchi and Yoshikata Yoda, Ugetsu
Oscar: Daniel Taradash, From Here To Eternity

Black And White Cinematography:

The End: Kazuo Miyagawa, Ugetsu
Oscar: Burnett Guffey, From Here To Eternity

Color Cinematography:

The End: Robert Surtees and Freddie Young, Mogambo
Oscar: Loyal Griggs, Shane

Editing:

The End: Borys Lewin, Madame de . . .
Oscar: William Lyon, From Here To Eternity

Art Direction:

The End: M. Hulot’s Holiday
Oscar: Julius Caesar and The Robe

Costume Design:

The End: Ugetsu
Oscar: Roman Holiday and The Robe

Sound:

The End: M. Hulot’s Holiday
Oscar: From Here To Eternity

Original Score:

The End: Kojun Saito, Tokyo Story
Oscar: Bronislau Kaper, Lili

Non-Oscar Awards:

Foreign Film:

Ugetsu

Soundtrack:

The Band Wagon

Breakthrough Performance:

Audrey Hepburn, Roman Holiday

Villain:

Lee Marvin, The Big Heat

Onto the final third of the countdown. This was a very fine year for movies, with quite a few excellent films noirs and war movies, and a strong international showing (four of my top five are non-American, or three if you’re the AFI). As always, methodologies, disclaimers, and updates can be found at The Big List on the sidebar.

19. Take Me Out To The Ballgame
18. Knock On Any Door
17. The Adventures Of Ichabod And Mr. Toad
16. The Big Steal
15. On The Town
14. I Shot Jesse James

13. White Heat – James Cagney’s Unforgiven: a middle-aged return to the genre that made him a star, dark and self-conscious. But it’s more of an exercise in nostalgia than Eastwood’s film, and not nearly as genre-defining/killing.

12. Sands Of Iwo Jima – The first of two prototypical WW2 movies on this list. John Wayne trains the requisite disparate group of young men into an effective fighting force, with some great action scenes and use of stock footage along the way. There’s also some nice homoeroticism as two fit blonde midwesterners spend much of the film “wrestling” with each other.

11. The Fountainhead – I can’t take Ayn Rand seriously, and I can’t believe director King Vidor did either, as this movie is absolutely hilarious. This is what I wrote a year and a half ago:

Gary Cooper stars in King Vidor’s adaptation of Ayn Rand’s screenplay of her novel about an unyielding architect who blows up a building when a bunch of jerks change his design without his permission. Cooper’s elmlike acting style is perfectly suited to the passionate rigidity of the architect. Patricia Neal plays the woman who loves him, though she’s married to newspaper magnate Raymond Massey. It’s hard to tell how much of the film’s humor is intentional, from the hilarity of Neal first spotting Cooper as he wields a giant drill boring holes in a rock, the the over the top seriousness with which Cooper recites Objectivist dogma’s doctrine of pure selfishness. Neal brings a real intensity to her S & M relationship with Cooper, and Massey’s as good as ever playing a man who wishes he had ideals. A weird movie, either terribly offensive or a lot of fun, depending on how you look at it.

Cooper’s acting has grown on me recently, I don’t think I’ll be comparing him to a tree anymore, but he certainly does capture the architect’s absurdly unyielding self-importance.

10. Battleground – The other archetypal WW2 movie, this one directed by William Wellman. During the Battle Of The Bulge, the 101st Airborne is trapped and besieged in the town of Bastogne. Not much in a way of big action sequences, the film instead focuses on the psychology of a whole squad of soldiers, the collective hero being one of the primary elements of the World War II genre, and one that tends to get replaced by the star/hero in later war films (Saving Private Ryan, Platoon, The Deer Hunter, etc).

9. Adam’s Rib – As much as I love Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn individually, I can’t say I’m a big fan of the films they made together. This is supposedly the best of them, and there are a few things I like about it (Judy Holliday, Jean Hagen, the wonderful long take of Hepburn interviewing Holliday), the movie tends to treat its battle of the sexes theme more like a cartoon than an actual issue. Maybe my memory is faulty, but isn’t this film all about putting the uppity Hepburn in her place, just like in Woman Of the Year and Pat And Mike and even The Philadelphia Story?

8. Kind Hearts And Coronets – Quite silly dark comedy with Dennis Price playing a wanna-be aristocrat who kills off all the relatives ahead of him in line for his dukedom. Alec Guinness, of course, plays all eight of the family members. The whole thing is delightful, and probably my favorite of the series of comedies Guinness made at Ealing Studios in the late 40s/early 50s.

7. She Wore A Yellow Ribbon – The second film in John Ford’s loosely grouped Cavalry Trilogy, and the only one in color. And what a glorious Technicolor it is. John Wayne plays the retiring Captain of a remote outpost. The film is quintessential Ford: warmly nostalgic, visually beautiful, with lots of fine comic supporting performances (Ford regulars Victor McLaglen, Ben Johnson, George O’Brien, and Harry Carey Jr), and more enlightened politically than its reputation. There’s even a scene of the main character talking to a grave, a Ford trope that is never less than moving.

6. Gun Crazy – Joseph H. Lewis’s twisted film noir about a young gun nut mixed up with a women who gets even more turned on by violence than he does. The two take off on a sex and bank robbery spree in the classic Bonnie & Clyde style. Peggy Cummins is great as one of noir’s most fatale femmes and John Dall (from Hitchock’s Rope) is great as the clueless man. A beautiful film, with a haunting finale in a fog-filled swamp, that is nonetheless a lot of fun as well.

5. Jour de fête – I wrote this not quite a year ago:

Jacques Tati’s first feature as a director, about a French village on the day the fair comes to town. Tati plays the bicycle-riding mailman who sees a short film about, he is told, the American post office (it’s actually a series of remarkable motorcycle stunts). Tati tries to match the American speed and efficiency and hilarity ensues. Tati’s style is already in place, at least visually (fairly long takes chronicling the slow buildups op the sight gags) and in terms of dialogue (there isn’t much), but the film doesn’t play with sound as much as his later Hulot films do (especially Playtime).

4. The Set-Up – This I wrote a little over two years ago:

I haven’t seen a lot of Robert Wise movies (see the comments on The Sound Of Music in the 1965 list for a list of some of his highlights), but this is easily my favorite. It’s the opposite of The Sound Of Music. Where that was bloated, colorful, sunny and epic this is dark, taught, and efficient. An essential film noir, it tells the real-time story of an overthehill boxer whose wife can’t watch him fight anymore and whose managers have brokered a deal with a gangster for him to throw the fight but haven’t bothered to tell him. Robert Ryan excels as the fighter with an unshakable belief that if he wins just one more fight he’ll finally be on his way to greatness. But it’s the mise en scène that’s the real star here. The film essentially takes place on one corner, where a cheap hotel, the boxing arena, an arcade and a bar lie. The sense of seediness, the dark underbelly of urban life that noir so effectively evokes has never been better exemplified than Wise does here, despite the apparent B-level of the production (it’s only about 70 minutes long and looks about as expensive as a Twilight Zone episode). The fight scenes are impressive, shot, like the rest of the film, in real time, and I never noticed them looking fake. Certainly as good as any boxing scenes until Scorsese’s Raging Bull (#3, 1980), for which this film was a major influence. I’d recommend it for fans of film noir and fans of sports movies, which must cover two-thirds of the world at least.

Here’s how I’d rank the Robert Wise Films I’ve Seen:

1. The Set-Up
2. Executive Suite
3. The Day The Earth Stood Still
4. West Side Story
5. Born To Kill
6. Star Trek: The Motion Picture
7. The Sound Of Music

I’ve started but not finished Until They Sail, and I have The Body Snatcher, Run Silent, Run Deep and Curse Of The Cat People on DVD, but haven’t watched them yet.

3. Stray Dog – Akira Kuroswa’s first great film noir, if you want to call it that. I guess it’s more of a police procedural, but that’s splitting hairs. Toshiro Mifune plays a young cop who loses his gun to a pickpocket. The gun then gets used in a series of crimes as Mifune searches for the guy who stole it. Takashi Shimura plays Mifune’s wiser, older partner. The film is an early version of the good/evil identity theme that Kurosawa explored more obliquely (and more effectively) in High And Low (and that John Woo has used as the major philosophical rationale (excuse?) for his ultra-violent action films for the past 20 years) in that Mifune and the criminal are of similar age and background, but one was able to become a cop, the other became a thief and killer. It’s an effective exploration of the effects the War and Occupation must have had on the surviving Japanese men, something that I haven’t seen a lot of in Japanese film: at this time Mizoguchi was making films about women and/or period films, and Ozu’s domestic melodramas rarely referenced the war in any direct way. But maybe (probably) I’ve just been watching the wrong films.

2. Late Spring – My favorite of Yasujiro Ozu’s films, Chishu Ryu plays a single father who wants his daughter (Setsuko Hara) to get married already (she 27 years old!) while she’d rather take care of him. So Ryu comes up with a scheme to trick his daughter into matrimony. That’s about it for the plot. The film is quintessential Ozu: the floor-level tatami shots, the funky editing patterns, the beautiful “pillow” shots that bridge scenes, the light and bouncy score, the overwhelming mood of joyous melancholy, everything you expect in an Ozu film is here. The camera even moves(!) however briefly and imperceptibly (it tracks to keep the actors immobile). I think it’s been awhile since I’ve ranked some Ozu, though I keep complaining about how hard it is, I might as well. Here’s where I’m at right now, with Early Summer on the way from netflix, Chichi Ariki saved on the tivo and An Autumn Afternoon preordered (Criterion’s releasing it in September):

1. Late Spring
2. Tokyo Story
3. Tokyo Twilight
4. A Story Of Floating Weeds
5. Floating Weeds
6. Tokyo Chorus
7. I Was Born But . . .
8. Early Spring
9. Equinox Flower
10. Passing Fancy
11. Late Autumn
12. The End Of Summer
13. Good Morning

Though if you ask me again tomorrow, I’ll tell you something different.

1. The Third Man – Just because Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles star in it, doesn’t make this Carol Reed film of a Graham Greene screenplay an American film. Despite what the AFI tells you, this is a British movie, and one of that country’s best ever. Cotton plays a pulp western writer who travels to post-war Vienna in search of his friend (Harry Lime), who he promptly learns is dead. Not believing it, Cotton investigates the death and the mysterious account of a third man who witnessed it. Along the way he meets Harry’s girlfriend (Alida Valli), lectures on literature, learns about just how evil Harry was from Trevor Howard, gets lectured on history and clocks by Welles, and hears a lifetime’s worth of zither music. It’s a flamboyantly perfect film, in the manner of Casablanca or Citizen Kane or All About Eve, and deservedly one of the most enduringly popular films of the period. There are so many wonderful sequences: Welles’s shocking entrance, the ferris wheel speech, the chase through the sewers, but my favorite is that final long shot with Valli walking down the road past a waiting Joseph Cotton, the best movie ending ever.

Some fine films have gone Unseen from this year. I’ve got the upcoming Criterion version of the Powell & Pressburger film preordered already.

The Small Back Room
12 O’clock High
All The King’s Men
The Heiress
I Was A Male War Bride
A Letter To Three Wives
Mighty Joe Young
Criss Cross
The Barkleys Of Broadway
The Stratton Story
The Fighting Kentuckian
Pinky
Border Incident
I Married A Communist
The Window
Thieves’ Highway
Samson And Delilah
The Reckless Moment
Intruder In The Dust
The Quiet Duel
Le Silence de la Mer
Blood Of The Beasts
House Of Strangers

And now for the awards:

Best Picture:

The End: The Third Man
Oscar: All The King’s Men

Director:

The End: Carol Reed, The Third Man
Oscar: Joseph L. Mankiewicz, A Letter To Three Wives

Actor:

The End: Alec Guiness, Kind Hearts And Coronets
Oscar: Broderick Crawford, All The King’s Men

Actress:

The End: Setsuko Hara, Late Spring
Oscar: Olivia de Havilland, The Heiress

Supporting Actor:

The End: Orson Welles, The Third Man
Oscar: Dean Jagger, Twelve O’Clock High

Supporting Actress:

The End: Judy Holliday, Adam’s Rib
Oscar: Mercedes McCambridge, All The King’s Men

Original Screenplay:

The End: Graham Greene, The Third Man
Oscar: Robert Pirosh, Battleground

Adapted Screenplay:

The End: Dalton Trumbo and MacKinlay Kantor, Gun Crazy
Oscar: Joseph L. Mankiewicz, A Letter To Three Wives

Black And White Cinematography:

The End: Robert Krasker, The Third Man
Oscar: Paul Vogel, Battleground

Color Cinematography:

The End: Winton C. Hoch, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon
Oscar: Winton C. Hoch, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon

Editing:

The End: Oswald Hafenrichter, The Third Man
Oscar: Harry W. Gerstad, Champion

Art Direction:

The End: The Third Man
Oscar: The Heiress and Little Women

Costume Design:

The End: She Wore A Yellow Ribbon
Oscar: The Heiress and The Adventures Of Don Juan

Sound:

The End: The Third Man
Oscar: Twelve O’Clock High

Original Score:

The End: Anton Karas, The Third Man
Oscar: Aaron Copland, The Heiress

Non-Oscar Awards:

Foreign Language Film:

Late Spring

Soundtrack:

The Third Man

Breakthrough Performance:

Jacques Tati, Jour de fête

Villain:

Orson Welles, The Third Man

Entertainment Weekly has published an entire issue full of Top 100 of the last 25 years lists. They’re all pretty terrible (the music one might even be worse than the movie list I linked to). There doesn’t appear to be any information on how the lists were compiled, or what criteria were used to create them. Unlike the AFI’s lists, they don’t limit themselves to American films (or British films they want to pass off as American), as they’ve included a whopping six films that aren’t English language (Wings Of Desire, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Lives Of Others, All About My Mother, T tu mamá también, and In The Mood For Love). The emphasis appears to be on mainstream films that made a lot of money, the closest thing to a description of methodology I’ve found was quoted from the magazine by someone somewhere on the internet: “What makes a classic?…Over the last 25 years, artists have created a body of work that deserves recognition as classic…We include memorable works that have endured public consciousness despite shrugs from academics — and the Academy. Our selections run the gamut from justly praised critical darlings…to benchmark genre fare.” So, these are apparently the 100 films they managed to remember from the last 25 years.

Well, here at The End Of Cinema we have a higher opinion of lists than the folks at EW appear to. If the essential function of lists like these is educational and argumentative, if they are to stimulate a love of cinema, then shouldn’t they necessarily include movies that are great despite not reaching the level of public consciousness of, say, Titanic? A list like EW’s flatters the audience, anyone can look at it and see that they’ve seen 90% of it already and pat themselves on the back for how familiar they are with “classic” cinema. Instead of inspiring them to seek out films they haven’t heard of an might like, EW tells them that everything that makes a lot of money is a great film.

This is not what the lists here are all about. Lists have been essential to my own cinephilia, whether the Sight & Sound Top Tens I used to memorize from the back of one of Roger Ebert’s books when I was on breaks at the video store I worked at in my early twenties, the lists of Oscar winners I plowed through in my teens or Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Top 1000 Films list from his great book Essential Cinema, I’ve discovered more about cinema from following lists than I ever did studying film in college. To the extent that I have an audience, I hope my lists, personal and idiosyncratic and gap-ridden as they are can function as motivators and idea-generators and queue-builders for my readers. I don’t want to congratulate people, and I certainly don’t want to sell magazines.

So, as a rough corrective to the EW list, here is an alternate Top 100 Of The Last 25 Years. It’s not exact, I just took the top 4 films from each year 1983-2007 and put them in chronological order. So while it isn’t exactly my Top 100, it’s pretty close. And it’s a hell of a lot better than the other one.

Sans soleil
The Right Stuff
Zelig
Trading Places
Stranger Than Paradise
Amadeus
Ghostbusters
This Is Spinal Tap
Ran
The Purple Rose Of Cairo
Out Of Africa
Police Story
The Mission
Hannah And Her Sisters
Platoon
Aliens
The Princess Bride
Broadcast News
Empire Of The Sun
Full Metal Jacket
Dangerous Liaisons
Bull Durham
The Last Temptation Of Christ
Die Hard
Do The Right Thing
Henry V
Crimes And Misdemeanors
Glory
Miller’s Crossing
Goodfellas
Dreams
Metropolitan
LA Story
Slacker
The Double Life Of Veronique
Barton Fink
Unforgiven
Last Of The Mohicans
Hard-Boiled
Reservoir Dogs
Three Colors: Blue
Dazed And Confused
True Romance
Searching For Bobby Fischer
Chungking Express
Pulp Fiction
Satantango
Three Colors: Red
Dead Man
Seven
Heat
Kicking And Screaming
Trainspotting
The English Patient
Big Night
Bottle Rocket
Boogie Nights
Happy Together
Taste Of Cherry
Lost Highway
The Big Lebowski
Rushmore
The Thin Red Line
The Flowers Of Shanghai
Eyes Wide Shut
Magnolia
The Wind Will Carry Us
The Matrix
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
In The Mood For Love
The Heart Of The World
Yi yi
Millennium Mambo
The Fellowship Of The Ring
AI: Artificial Intelligence
The Royal Tenenbaums
Punch-Drunk Love
Hero
The Two Towers
Blissfully Yours
Kill Bill Vol. 1
Last Life In The Universe
Goodbye, Dragon Inn
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter. . . And Spring
House Of Flying Daggers
2046
Tropical Malady
The World
The New World
Three Times
Munich
A History Of Violence
The Wind That Shakes The Barley
Still Life
Miami Vice
The Departed
I’m Not There
Flight Of The Red Balloon
No Country For Old Men
There Will Be Blood

Moving right along, since I haven’t really got anything better to do this afternoon.

Best Picture:

The End: Singin’ In The Rain
Oscar: The Greatest Show On Earth

Director:

The End: Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, Singin’ In The Rain
Oscar: John Ford, The Quiet Man

Actor:

The End: Takashi Shimura, Ikiru
Oscar: Gary Cooper, High Noon

Actress:

The End: Ingrid Bergman, Europa ’51
Oscar: Shirley Booth, Come Back, Little Sheba

Supporting Actor:

The End: Donald O’Connor, Singin’ In The Rain
Oscar: Anthony Quinn, Viva Zapata!

Supporting Actress:

The End: Jean Hagen, Singin’ In The Rain
Oscar: Gloria Grahame, The Bad And The Beautiful

Original Screenplay:

The End: Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Singin’ In The Rain
Oscar: T. E. B. Clarke, The Lavender Hill Mob

Adapted Screenplay:

The End: Nicholas Ray and A. I. Bezzerides, On Dangerous Ground
Oscar: Charles Schnee, The Bad And The Beautiful

Black And White Cinematography:

The End: John L. Russell, Park Row
Oscar: Robert Surtees, The Bad And The Beautiful

Color Cinematography:

The End: Winton C. Hoch, The Quiet Man
Oscar: Winton C. Hoch, The Quiet Man

Editing:

The End: Adrienne Fazan, Singin’ In The Rain
Oscar: Elmo Williams and Harry Gerstad, High Noon

Art Direction:

The End: Park Row
Oscar: Moulin Rouge; The Bad And The Beautiful

Costume Design:

The End: Singin’ In The Rain
Oscar: Moulin Rouge; The Bad And The Beautiful

Sound:

The End: Singin’ In The Rain
Oscar: The Sound Barrier

Original Score:

The End: Charles Chaplin, Limelight
Oscar: Dimitri Tiomkin, High Noon

Non-Oscar Awards:

Foreign Language Film:

Ikiru

Soundtrack:

Singin’ In The Rain

Breakthrough Performance:

Debbie Reynolds, Singin’ In The Rain

Villain:

Jean Hagen, Singin’ In The Rain

How it works: I assign various Oscar-type awards to the movies I’ve seen from each year. I’m not going to include all the Oscar categories, but I’ll get a lot of them, depending on the year. Only films I’ve seen will be eligible for any awards, but I’ll include the Academy’s choices as well, for comparison’s sake, though often the categories and film eligibility are different for their awards than mine.

Best Picture:

The End: The River
Oscar: An American In Paris

Best Director:

The End: Samuel Fuller, The Steel Helmet
Oscar: George Stevens, A Place In The Sun

Actor:

The End: Gene Evans, The Steel Helmet
Oscar: Humphrey Bogart, The African Queen

Actress:

The End: Anita Björk, Miss Julie
Oscar: Vivian Leigh, A Streetcar Named Desire

Supporting Actor:

The End: Robert Walker, Strangers On A Train
Oscar: Karl Malden, A Streetcar Named Desire

Supporting Actress:

The End: Thelma Ritter, The Mating Season
Oscar: Kim Hunter, A Streetcar Named Desire

Original Screenplay:

The End: Samuel Fuller, The Steel Helmet
Oscar: Alan Jay Lerner, An American In Paris

Adapted Screenplay:

The End: Jean Renoir and Rumer Godden, The River
Oscar: Michael Wilson and Harry Brown, A Place In The Sun

Black And White Cinematography:

The End: Léonce-Henri Burel, Diary Of A Country Priest
Oscar: William Mellor, A Place In The Sun

Color Cinematography:

The End: Claude Renoir, The River
Oscar: Alfred Gilks and John Alton, An American In Paris

Art Direction:

The End: The Tales Of Hoffman
Oscar: An American In Paris; A Streetcar Named Desire

Costume Design:

The End: The Tales Of Hoffman
Oscar: An American In Paris and A Place In The Sun

Sound:

The End: The Day The Earth Stood Still
Oscar: The Great Caruso

Editing:

The End: Adrienne Fazan, An American In Paris
Oscar: William Hornbeck, A Place In The Sun

Visual Effects:

The End: The Thing From Another World
Oscar: When Worlds Collide

Original Score:

The End: M. A. Partha Sarathy, The River
Oscar: Franz Waxman, A Place In The Sun

Non-Oscar Awards:

Foreign Language Film:

Diary Of A Country Priest

Soundtrack:

An American In Paris

Breakthrough Performance:

Gene Evans, The Steel Helmet

Villain:

Robert Walker, Strangers On A Train

Starting another new feature here at The End, wherein I assign various Oscar-type awards to the movies I’ve seen from each year. I’m not going to include all the Oscar categories, but I’ll get a lot of them, depending on the year. We’ll start with 1950 and go forward in time from there, and from now on, when I post a new Movie Of The Year write up, I’ll include those awards as well. Only films I’ve seen will be eligible for any awards, but I’ll include the Academy’s choices as well, for comparison’s sake, though often the categories and film eligibility are different for their awards than mine.

Best Picture:

The End; Rashomon
Oscar: All About Eve

Director:

The End: Akira Kurosawa, Rashomon
Oscar: Joseph L. Mankiewicz, All About Eve

Actor:

The End: Humphrey Bogart, In A Lonely Place
Oscar: José Ferrer, Cyrano de Bergerac

Actress:

The End: Bette Davis, All About Eve
Oscar: Judy Holliday, Born Yesterday

Supporting Actor:

The End: George Sanders, All About Eve
Oscar: George Sanders, All About Eve

Supporting Actress:

The End: Marilyn Monroe, The Asphalt Jungle & All About Eve
Oscar: Josephine Hull, Harvey

Original Screenplay:

The End: Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett and D. M. Marshman, Sunset Blvd.
Oscar: Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett and D. M. Marshman, Sunset Blvd.

Adapted Screenplay:

The End: Joseph L. Mankiewicz, All About Eve
Oscar: Joseph L. Mankiewicz, All About Eve

Cinematography:

The End: Kazuo Miyagawa, Rashomon
Oscar: Robert Krasker, The Third Man; Robert Surtees, King Solomon’s Mines

Art Direction:

The End: Rashomon
Oscar: Samson And Delilah; Sunset Blvd.

Costume Design:

The End: All About Eve
Oscar: Samson And Delilah; All About Eve

Sound:

The End: All About Eve
Oscar: All About Eve

Editing:

The End: Akira Kurosawa, Rashomon
Oscar: Ralph Winters and Conrad Nervig, King Solomon’s Mines

Original Score:

The End: Franz Waxman, Sunset Blvd.
Oscar: Franz Waxman, Sunset Blvd.

Non-Oscar Awards:

Foreign Language Film:

Rashomon

Breakthrough Performance:

Male: Toshiro Mifune, Rashomon
Female: Marilyn Monroe, All About Eve, The Asphalt Jungle

Villain:

Anne Baxter and George Sanders, All About Eve

Line:

“In this world, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant. Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.” – Harvey

As I start this, Boston’s up two games to one in the NBA Finals. Basketball’s been a lot of fun this year, I’m glad I decided to start watching it again, even if the Sonics are probably going to disappear.

Come Drink With Me – King Hu’s kung fu epic redefined the genre in a myriad of ways, not the least of which was in the casting of a woman (Cheng Pei-pei, from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, #1, 2000) in the lead role. Not as expansive or mystical as Hu’s great A Touch Of Zen (#2, 1969), the first half is nonetheless some of the most inspired atmospheric filmmaking in the genre’s history. Things get a bit silly in the second half, and the focus shifts too much away from Cheng (both reportedly the result of interference which led to Hu leaving haw Brothers after this, his only film for them), but the action scenes are always great. The #8 film of 1966.

Heroes Of The East – More on the entertainment-only side of the wuxia world is this Lau Kar-leung film reuniting him with his 36th Chamber Of Shaolin (#2, 1978) star Gordon Liu. Liu marries a Japanese girl, and after the two repeatedly quarrel over who’s martial arts are superior (Japan or China), she runs away and a gang of Japanese experts turn up to show him what’s what. He takes them all on, Shaolin style. Lots of fun with some great fight scenes, the movie isn’t really about anything more than that. The original US title was Shaolin Vs. Ninja, which captures the whole enterprise better, I think. The #9 film of 1979.

Jezebel – Bette Davis’s brilliant performance and William Wyler’s fine direction save what is otherwise a ridiculous film from the realm of only-enjoyable-as-camp. Davis plays an independent-minded Southern Belle who wears a scandalous red dress to a ball despite the protestations of society, her family, and her boyfriend (Henry Fonda). The ball scene has a real masochistic thrill to it as Fonda forces Davis to dance before the outraged crowd after she realizes just how much she’s humiliated herself. After that, the last two-thirds of the movie become a rather tedious account of how Fonda rejects her and she redeems herself by catching yellow fever, or something. It’s all very silly, but that one scene sizzles. The #16 film of 1938.

I Was Born But . . . – Generally regarded as the first great Yasujiro Ozu movie, though I think that distinction should belong to Tokyo Chorus (#4, 1931), it’s also the film he reworked late in his career as Good Morning (#10, 1959). Both films follow a group of suburban children as they become disenchanted with the grownups in their lives and eventually go on a hunger strike. But really, they’re quite different in tone. The latter film is much more comic (Ozu being one of the few Great Auteurs who managed to build a film around fart jokes) and the source of the kid’s disillusionment is both more material (they want to watch a wrestling match on TV) and more abstract (they point out the shallow emptiness of the politeness adults use to mediate their social interactions (the omnipresent “Ohayo” of the title)). In I Was Born But . . . the kids are new in town, and must deal with integrating themselves with the local gang of bullies, eventually becoming the leaders of the gang. Their crisis with with their parents (really their father, the mother is almost absent from the film, whereas she more prominent in the later film) is more concrete: at a gathering with their dad’s co-workers, they see him clowning around on film and realize that the man they had seen as a hero is viewed as a clown by his friends. I Was Born But . . . is therefore more poignant and tragic, while Good Morning is more general and less dramatic. Both films are profound in Ozu’s unique way of transforming specific realities into grand statements about the human condition. The #2 film of 1932.

Passing Fancy – The third, and unfortunately final, film in Criterion’s Silent Ozu Eclipse boxset is apparently one of David Bordwell’s favorite movies, though since I haven’t gotten around to reading his Ozu book (available as a free PDF on his website) I’m not sure why. As I’ve said, with Ozu it’s exceedingly difficult to make distinctions of quality between his works, but as far as I can tell, this was my least favorite of the films. It’s still a great film, of course, following a poor man and his son who eke out life in a tenement. The dad’s got a crush on a much younger woman, the boy isn’t a fan and the two get into a very dramatic fight. These two main characters are terrific, and the film is even closer to Ozu’s mature style than the two before it, but something about it didn’t click with me in the way the other two did. But the ending is wonderful, as joyous as anything I’ve seen in his films. The #6 film of 1933.

Romeo And Juliet – George Cukor’s version of the Shakespeare play, with an absurdly old cast playing the teenaged star-crossed lovers. Trevor Howard plays Romeo, Norma Shearer Juliet, and despite the best efforts of these fine actors, and Cukor’s usual deft camera style, it never, ever works. The #15 film of 1936.

Yang Kwei-fei – Kenji Mizoguchi’s adaptation of the classic Chinese (and Japanese) legend of the Imperial Concubine (Michiko Kyo) who almost lost an empire thanks to who greedy and corrupt family, but instead sacrifices herself for the Emperor (Masayuki Mori) she loves. Mizoguchi gives this, his first color film, a kind of fairy tale staginess, reminiscent of both John Ford’s 7 Women (#4, 1966) and Seijun Suzuki’s Princess Raccoon (#9, 2005) that only intensifies the romanticism. The great critic Tony Rayns, in his talk on the film on the Masters Of Cinema DVD seems to hate it, as do, apparently, a lot of other critics, which makes me wonder if I totally wrong, or a sap, or if these guys simply don’t have souls. The #11 film of 1955.

Cheyenne Autumn – John Ford’s farewell to Monument Valley, which gets a little silly as it’s the chronicle of the march the Cheyenne made from their reservation in Oklahoma to their homeland in Montana, all without leaving Arizona. Richard Widmark gives another fine performance as the cavalry officer trailing the nation on the march, and James Stewart is great in a comical interlude as Wyatt Earp. That interlude is one of the wonderful things about the film, so tonally different from the rest of the movie that it caused some degree of critical outrage at the time. Also wonderful is the way the film never really comes to a traditional climax, with possibly the most dramatic part of its conclusion filmed totally in longshot. Unfortunate, though, is that Edward G. Robinson was brought in to replace an ailing Spencer Tracy at the last minute. Not because Robinson’s bad, but because it necessitated filming the conclusion of the Cheyenne’s quest against a comically bad rear-projection, made all the more jarring by the typical beauty of Ford’s location shooing. The #13 film of 1964.

20 Million Miles To Earth – Cheesy B monster movie with great special effects and nothing else to recommend it. An American spaceship crash lands off the coast of Sicily after traveling to Venus. Child unwittingly rescues monster egg from the ship. It grows rapidly and destroys much of Rome. There’s a fantastic fight scene between the monster and an elephant. The #24 film of 1957.

The Mask Of Fu Manchu – Camp classic totally racist adventure film. Boris Karloff is great as the evil titular genius, Myrna Loy is a revelation as his perverse daughter (not as awesome as Gene Tierney in Josef von Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture(#8, 1941), but a lot of fun nonetheless), but those two seem to be the only ones who know they’re in a terrible movie. Everyone else is really bad. But there’s a convenient laser, which is nice. The #17 film of 1932.

Chikamatsu monogatari – Kenji Mizoguchi’s Tale Of The Crucified Lovers is, like a lot of Mioguchi, terribly depressing. A printer is accused, falsely, of having an affair with his boss’s wife. Since the punishment for adultery is crucifixion, the two run off into the mountains, where they fall in love, with tragic, and predictable, consequences. Mizoguchi’s concern seems to be much more with the society that condones such draconian punishments than with the characters themselves, whose motivations lack any kind of sense for most of the film. This prevents the film, for me, from reaching the transcendent heights of his greatest work. The #12 film of 1954.

Royal Tramp – Totally insane kung fu comedy starring Stephen Chow, from the year in which the top five grossing movies in Hong Kong all starred Stephen Chow. He plays the clownish brother of a brothel owner who gets himself inducted into a secret society and becomes involved in a dizzying array of palace intrigue. A seemingly endless series of puns, double entendres, manic violence and double crossings make the film near-total chaos, but somehow, in the end, everything resolves itself neatly and makes perfect sense. I think. The #28 film of 1992.

The Color Of Pomegranates – Director Sergei Parajanov’s mind-boggling anti-narrative account of the life of medieval Armenian poet Sayat Nova is the most difficult film I’ve had to rank in awhile. How can one possibly compare a film with no dialogue, no camera movement and no plot where only half the images make any kind of logical sense to the other films that make up the best of 1968 list (The Lion In Winter, Once Upon A Time In The West, Night Of The Living Dead, etc)? The closest film in style I’ve seen from that year is 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film I’ve seen countless times over the past 20 years. But after one viewing of a very subpar Kino DVD of Parajanov’s film, how can I possibly do it justice. It might be one of the greatest films ever made, it might be an incoherent art exercise, I really don’t know. What I do know is that I liked it and I’ll see it again, hopefully in a format that does it justice. For now, I’ll conservatively call it the #7 film of 1968.

The Incredible Hulk – I like Ang Lee’s version a lot, and everything that is great about that film (the visual style, the acting, the devotion to the psychological reality of the comic book characters) is either totally lacking or merely mediocre in this sequel. But there’s more Hulk smash!, which should make the philistines happy. It’s not comically bad like the worst of the Marvel adaptations, but it isn’t the least bit memorable either.

Wings – The film that arguably beat out Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans for the first Best Picture Oscar is a fine WWI movie from director William Wellman. The plot is more or less the same as Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor (two guys, in love with the same girl, go off to fly planes in war), but even more so than in Bay’s film, the film is hurt by the sheer idiocy of the main character, who prefers the totally bland girl from the city to the totally hot girl next door (Clara Bow). The ground-breaking aerial photography is truly excellent, and a very young Gary Cooper is more cool than ever in a very small role. There’s a none-too-subtle homosexual subtext to the film, the becomes quite obvious by the end of the movie, which is weird, but interesting. The #3 film of 1927.

Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic – She’s funny. It’s a standard concert film, for the most part, though there are attempts to liven it up with some of the same actors that later costarred on her TV show, and those scenes are funny too, for the most part. The songs, however, are subpar. The #26 film of 2005.

The Happening – The latest victim of critical groupthink, though apparently M. Night Shymalan’s more deserving of it than Wong Kar-wai was. It’s only the second of his films I’ve seen, and it’s not terrible. Very much a 50s B sci-fi film, right down to the stiff acting and overly earnest attitude, and I dug that. I admire the lack of post-modern winkiness and Shyamalan’s longer take style and Zooey Deschanel’s performance has some nice moments, notably two close-ups that bookend the film. It reminded me of Dn Siegel’s Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (#10, 1956), or what the remake of The Birds will be like, you know, the one where the director is going to fix the “flaw” in Hitchcock’s version, which was that he never explains what the birds’ motivation for attacking people is.

Becoming John Ford – The documentary about Ford that accompanies the mammoth (and wonderful) Ford At Fox boxset. It’s got a lot of good content, though focusing mostly on Ford’s relation with Darryl Zanuck and pretty much ignoring any film that doesn’t come in the box. Still, there’s some interesting stuff, despite the artiness of the direction (which you can be sure Ford would have despised). Peter Bogdanovich’s Ford documentary is a lot better, but I’ve yet to see one that fully explores his whole career, which may not be possible. The #31 film of 2007.

The File On Thelma Jordan – Decent film noir with Barbara Stanwyck is terrific as usual as the titular Thelma who may or may not have killed her aunt. Fortunately for her, she’s having an affair with the Asst. District Attorney (Wendell Corey, a capable sap). Robert Siodmak directed, but the film doesn’t have nearly the visual panache of his great The Killers (#7, 1946), with its iconic opening sequence. The #15 film of 1950.

The Courtship Of Eddie’s Father – Light domestic melodrama with Glenn Ford as a widower searching for a new wife that’ll make his son (Ron Howard) happy. Too sweet at times, despite the great Vincente Minnelli directing it feels too much like the sitcom it would ultimately become. Come to think of it, it bears more than a slight resemblance to Ozu’s Passing Fancy. That Ozu was able to make a better film out of it says a lot about him as a director, I think. The #15 film of 1963.

(And as I finish, the Celtics and Lakers are about to tipoff Game 6, which shows either just how slowly I can write or how absurdly long the NBA’s managed to stretch its playoffs.)