THE WORST:
GONE WITH THE WIND (1939)
In 1939 dollars, Gone With The Wind is still the highest-grossing picture of all time, and it's certainly epic and iconic, what with the burning of Atlanta and Vivien Leigh’s mother of all Oscar clip lines, “As God as my witness, I’ll never be hungry again!” (not to mention Clark Gable’s Rhett Butler not giving a damn and Butterfly McQueen’s Prissy not knowin’ nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ babies). But lawzy me, what a stupid movie. For one thing, Scarlett O’Hara is easily one of the most annoying characters in cinema history – hardly the sort of person you’d want to spend 222 minutes with (or 238 minutes with overture, entr’act and exit music...thanks, Wikipedia)! Gable’s a hoot, of course...but there are plenty of other, better Gable movies that don’t require the audience to giggle at date rape and cheer the Confederacy. Even setting aside the fact that, as a Yankee (and a heterosexual male), I may not exactly be the film’s target audience, there’s still the issue of the production’s relentless over-the-top Cheez Whiz melodrama. Sure, acting styles have changed over the years, but Of Mice & Men, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington and Stagecoach were all nominated the same year, so it’s not as if Leigh’s proto-drag queen scenery chewing only looks goofy from a modern perspective: I’m pretty sure the movie was stupid in 1939, too.
THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH (1952)
Widely cited as the worst movie ever to win an Academy Award for Best Picture, the circus-corn epic The Greatest Show On Earth may have benefited from the political tenor of the times. Its main competition was High Noon, a vastly superior film that nonetheless made AMPAS voters nervous because of its barely disguised anti-McCarthyite message and blacklisted screenwriter. Whatever the reason for its win, there’s no denying that The Greatest Show On Earth is a big load of elephant shit. Even if Cecil B. DeMille hadn’t made it a good 25 years past his own personal expiration date as a filmmaker, it was leagues out of his comfort zone: used to coaching actors in sweeping Biblical and historical epics, he didn’t take to the tawdry, small love triangle under the big top, and no wonder. The dialogue is pure hokum, and the performances range from overblown (Cornel Wilde as an acrobat) to comatose (Charlton Heston as the circus manager). The central romance has as much heat as a paper safely match, and every subplot – and there’s plenty of them in its bloated two and a half hours – is as predictable as it is uninteresting. Even the presence of Jimmy Stewart does nothing to salvage the movie, since his role, as a clown with a dark secret, is telegraphed from the first frame. There’s lots of phony reaction shots of local yokels gasping at the wondrous sights and sounds of the circus, but it’s often unclear what they’re watching; it sure ain’t this movie.
THE SOUND OF MUSIC (1965)
The fact that this musical trip to the deep freeze that is Julie Andrews' soul was the biggest box-office sensation of the mid-1960s and held onto the title of Number One Hit of All Time for seven years until it was dislodged by, of all things, The Godfather, just goes to prove that you never know. Critics like to imagine that movies tell us something about the times in which they were made, but when you consider what was going on in the world between 1965 and 1972, all you can surmise from this movie's success is that people must have been desperate to escape reality as thoroughly as they could without barricading themselves inside an isolation tank. If you look at the reviews it received at the time, you see that even polite mainstream critics saw it as a potential menace that would lay waste to the culture like some species of plague, but looking at it with forty years of hindsight, the funniest thing about the movie is that it seems to have come and gone without leaving any progeny. It did inspired the studios to plow millions upon millions of dollars into "family musicals" (Thoroughly Modern Millie, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Doctor Dolittle, Paint Your Wagon, etc.), all of which are now best remembered for providing an education in just how little return it is possible to get on a major investment. Subsequent attempts to squeeze another nickel out of Andrews' screen image proved largely unsuccessful. (The 1968 musical Star! -- her reunion with The Sound of Music director Robert Wise -- was one of the great financial disasters of the era.) The closest the movie has come to being positively re-evaluated came in the 1990s, when it attracted a cult that attended screenings in fancy dress and talked back to the screen, Rocky Horror-style. For the first time ever, Christopher Plummer's Dracula-like performance as Baron Von Trapp actually made sense.
ORDINARY PEOPLE (1980)
Had anyone else been behind the cameras for Ordinary People, it would have come and gone with no great comment -- and perhaps even a modest amount of praise, for the quiet family drama isn’t terrible by any stretch -- but certainly without much hoopla, and definitely without a Best Picture nomination, let alone a win. But because Robert Redford was its director, and Hollywood has always been dismayingly overimpressed with actors who don’t completely embarrass themselves in the director’s chair, it ended up being praised far beyond its virtues. It’s hard to pick out any element about it that’s rotten; the performances are generally adept, the story is competent enough, and the direction is inoffensive. It’s a lot like a small literary novel that comes and goes without much comment. But just as there’s nothing much to damn it with, there’s also nothing much to recommend it. The Best Picture victory of the movie a lot of wise-asses immediately dubbed Ordinary Movie wouldn’t be such a sore thumb if it wasn’t for the competition it bested; not only did it triumph over Coal Miner’s Daughter, which covered much of the same ground only better, but it also beat out The Elephant Man and, shockingly, Raging Bull, both of which, unlike Redford’s directorial debut, went on to be numbered with the greatest films of the decade. Once it became clear what kind of filmmaker Redford really was, the Academy stopped embarrassing themselves by nominating him for big awards; if only they’d figured it out sooner.
FORREST GUMP (1994)
Of all the problems with our culture, what is the single most destructive and indefensible? Gosh, there's so many to choose from, but I'm gonna have to go with the enduringly popular notion that mental retardation and moral goodness are closely linked, to such a degree that one may not be fully possible without the other. Even in politics, the candidate who does the worst job of concealing the breadth of his intelligence is likely to be tagged as a know-it-all elitist and silver-tongued devil, and the one least ashamed of coming across as a dumbass is touted as being a tribune of the people who has the moral certitude that comes from being too dumb to know internal conflict. Forrest Gump isn't a movie about a hero who makes the right choices but the story of someone who does the right thing because he's such a dope that he doesn't know he has any other options. (Forrest's smarter friends, his lifelong love Jenny and his commanding officer in Vietnam, go down self-destructive paths that Forrest is too good to even know are there.) I think that a movie like this must have a special sick appeal in Hollywood, which is full of cynical, morally compromised people who find such nonsense comforting because it can be taken as a reassuring message to slimeballs everywhere: only the stupid can be truly good, so if you're not as good as you might like, it's not your fault: you just had the mixed fortune of being smart. The director, Robert Zemeckis, knows a lot about cynicism and moral compromise; he used to satirize it in movies like his great 1980 comedy Used Cars, and he found out that satire doesn't pay the bills. But even he may have been surprised to discover just how profitable sentimentalizing stupidity can be. Compared to this thing, Pulp Fiction, which it beat out for Best Picture, is as innocent as a newly born kitten on Christmas morning.
Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Five, Six & Seven
Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent
