The Screengrab : bette davis

Up The Academy: Screengrab Salutes The All-Time Best & Worst Best Picture Winners (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:00:00 GMT

THE BEST:

CASABLANCA (1943)

For all the iconic Hollywood films from The Wizard of Oz to Star Wars that DIDN’T win Best Picture, it’s nice to know that Casablanca, at least, was properly enshrined. Whether you measure by cultural cachet, quotable lines, dorm room posters or AFI ranking, Humphrey Bogart’s finest hour is a classic among classics...and not in that “eat your broccoli” grad student dissertation way, either. The pace is crisp, the intrigue is intriguing, the writing is sharp and funny and the romance (not to mention the bromance) is swoony, even for cynics who’d normally gag on a sentiment like, “We’ll always have Paris.” In fact, Roger Ebert claims in his commentary on a special edition DVD of the film that he’s never heard a bad review of Casablanca, which he says is “probably on more lists of the greatest films of all time than any other single title, including Citizen Kane,” a masterpiece which may be “greater,” but nowhere near as beloved. Normally, such unquestioned, universal adoration would trigger my contrarian side (I’m lookin’ at you, Hanks!) – but that friggin' “La Marseillaise” scene gets me every goddamn time. (Now if you’ll excuse me, I seem to have a little something in my eye...)

ALL ABOUT EVE (1950)

This inside-show-business comic melodrama isn't the greatest movie ever to be garlanded with Oscars. It probably isn't even as great as Sunset Boulevard, another inside-show-business movie that happened to be nominated for Best Picture the very same year. But it's the choicest possible example of a certain kind of entertainment that looks especially fetching come awards season, the glittering self-hating bitch-fest, with actors jumping at the chance to show what overgrown, treacherous babies actors -- other actors -- really are behind the scenes, and also with the writer-director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, preserving some of the pearls of wit that he'd been test-screening at all the best Hollywood dinner parties for the preceding couple of years. Mankiewicz was lucky to get to assign his dialogue to a couple of the greatest bitches ever to stalk a soundstage: Bette Davis, in her archetypal role as the actress and force of nature Margot Channing, and George Sanders, who picked up a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his purring critic, Addison DeWitt. The movie even opens with an awards ceremony, which Sanders can be heard snarking at in voiceover. With that opening, Mankiewicz was making it clear to the Academy that he was setting up a joke that only they could satisfyingly complete by giving his movie the prize, and the voters were happy to comply.

ON THE WATERFRONT (1954)

On its surface, this movie about labor racketeering on the New York docks could easily be mistaken for the kind of torn-from-the-headlines melodrama that Warner Bros. used to whip up into flavorful, punchy stories in the '30s and which by the 1950s was often served up in bloated and sanctimonious form. (Directed by Elia Kazan from an original script by Budd Schulberg, the movie is also widely taken as its creators' attempt to rationalize their friendly witness status before the House Un-American Activities Committee by showing the informer as a beleaguered hero.) But the actual New York locations, the strong work by such actors as Eva Marie Saint and Rod Steiger, and the best-observed moments in Schulberg's script transcend the movie's built-in limitations. And Brando himself embodies transcendence. Working quietly at first and slowly building to a full boil, he makes Terry Malloy into a real human being even as he's defining the image of the alienated '50s hero, a working-class outsider whose anger and confusion -- the instinctive, untutored emotions of a trapped animal -- make him seem more alive than the society he can't fit into, a society that no one guessed at the time was rotting from deep inside. In addition to marking the end of Brando's professional collaboration with Kazan, it also turned out to mark the end of Brando's first phase as a culture hero: his next movie, representing the start of a long stint in the wilderness, was Desirée, in which he played Napoleon. But it was enough to live on for awhile.

THE GODFATHER (1972) & THE GODFATHER, PART II (1974)

The early seventies were such a wild time for American movies that a bloody, historically sophisticated use of a criminal family as a metaphor for the capitalist system and the corruption of the American dream served as the era's answer to Gone with the Wind. Francis Ford Coppola's masterpiece, as intelligent and emotionally complicated as any epic ever to come out of Hollywood, would stand as a high point both in the history of film and the Academy's fluctuating record of shows of good sense all by itself. It's to the Academy's considerable credit that it did the right thing when it was presented with Part II, which was not the automatic commercial blockbuster that the first film had been. It must have been an especially sweet moment for Coppola, considering that the other Best Picture nominees included not only his own The Conversation but Chinatown, which was the first film independently produced by Robert Evans after Evans left Paramount Pictures, where he and Coppola had a difficult time working together on the first Godfather. Plus he beat The Towering Inferno!

THE DEPARTED (2006)

Yes, we can all agree that it's a sham of a mockery of a travesty that Martin Scorsese never won an Oscar until 2007, and it makes no sense at all that The Departed is the only movie he directed to ever win Best Picture. Let's get past that, can we? Consider the competition this spectacularly entertaining Boston crime epic faced in the category: Babel, Letters from Iwo Jima, Little Miss Sunshine and The Queen. Not really a group with a lot of staying power. If I came across any of them while channel surfing tonight, I doubt I'd pause, but The Departed sucks me in every time. William Monahan's underrated script is an endlessly quotable encyclopedia of pungent tough-guy banter. Alec Baldwin and Mark Wahlberg in particular make the most of it, and although Jack Nicholson doesn't make the most convincing Boston mob boss, even he has his inspired moments. Scorsese isn't reinventing the wheel here, he's just showing all his imitators who have been trying to recreate Goodfellas for the past two decades how to really put on a show. There's an exhilarating pace and crackling energy to his relentless storytelling here, no matter that we've seen the story before (in Infernal Affairs, the Japanese thriller upon which The Departed is based) and that it may not actually make a lick of sense. I may be an apologist for late-period Scorsese (I think I love Gangs of New York even more), but even if you're not a Departed fan, who could begrudge one of our greatest living filmmakers (and one of the world's most enthusiastic movie fans) his moment in the Oscar spotlight?

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Six & Seven

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent & Scott Von Doviak

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 25 Leading Ladies of All Time (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 21:30:00 GMT

10. ISABELLA ROSSELLINI (1952 - )

Rossellini made her movie debut in 1976, playing a nun in Vincente Minnelli's A Matter of Time, which starred her mother, Ingrid Bergman -- but that was basically just a family outing. Her movie career didn't really take root until after her mother's death, when she appeared in 1985's White Nights. The next year, equipped with a tacky wig, a tackier apartment, and a kitchen knife, she achieved neo-noir immortality as Dorothy Vallens in Blue Velvet. She and Lynch became a couple, acting together in Zelly and Me and collaborating on his Wild at Heart. Around the time that picture hit theaters, he reportedly broke up with her over the phone, inspiring millions of film geeks across the globe to murmur in unison, "Jesus Christ, maybe he is nuts!" More recently, she has formed a productive working partnership with Canadian auteur Guy Maddin, who directed her in his feature The Saddest Music in the World and also in the short film My Dad Is 100 Years Old, a tribute to her father, Roberto Rossellini, which she wrote. (She also seized the opportunity to cast herself as Alfred Hitchcock, David Selznick, and Charlie Chaplin.) More recently, she wrote, directed and starred in the "Green Porno" short film series.

9. CATHERINE DENEUVE (1943 - )

With her cool elegance and breathtaking beauty, it would have been all too easy for Catherine Deneuve to become yet another in a long line of Euro-babes who were emerging during the 1950s and 1960s. That she dated notorious starlet-“groomer” Roger Vadim for a time would seem to indicate this. Yet from the early stages of her career, it was clear that Deneuve was in it for the long haul. For most rising performers, starring in a film by a relative neophyte in which every line of dialogue was not merely sung but dubbed by a professional singer would have seemed risky. But Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg became a sensation largely on the basis of Deneuve’s charisma, and she quickly became an international star. But rather than simply playing girlish characters again and again in a series of Umbrellas clones, Deneuve began seeking out roles that tweaked this archetype, notably as the tightly wound virgin of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion and the bourgeois wife with the vivid fantasy life in Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour. In the decades that followed, Deneuve became an icon in France -- literally, having served as the face of the French national symbol “Marianne” during the 1980s. Hollywood came calling on several occasions throughout her career, and Deneuve answered, most memorably as the 200-year-old bisexual vampire in The Hunger. But more often, Deneuve has leveraged her stardom -- and her still-formidable beauty -- to work with directors of international renown. In addition to Demy, Polanski, and Buñuel, Deneuve’s roll-call of world-class collaborators has also included François Truffaut, Jean-Pierre Melville, Andre Téchiné, Robert Aldrich, Raul Ruiz, Agnès Varda, Manoel de Oliveira, Léos Carax, and Arnaud Desplechin. Heck, she even petitioned to play a punch-press operator in Dancer in the Dark just to work with Lars Von Trier. Perhaps most happily for her fans, François Ozon’s 8 Women finally allowed Deneuve to unveil the singing voice that Jacques Demy had dubbed over decades before- which, as it turned out, was just fine after all.

8. MARILYN MONROE (1926-1962)

There are a lot of bad things you can say about Marilyn Monroe. A depressive, self-pitying pillhead, she had the biggest career anyone could ever hope for, and she threw it away; she was too ambitious, she fell in love too easily (and always with the wrong men), she was talented enough to go just so far and no farther. She never realized her potential (or never had any real potential to begin with); she helped to introduce a poisonous dumb-blonde stereotype for actresses – and, for that matter, for women – that persists to this day; and, if you believe some people (including, reportedly, Richard Nixon), she’s one of the reasons John F. Kennedy died. That’s pretty bad stuff. So what can you say in her defense? How about this: she was the biggest movie star of all time, and she will be for the rest of time. She was one of the most beautiful women who ever lived, and if the platinum-tressed knockout look has gotten out of control since her heyday, she had the pleasure of inventing it. She took a limited acting range and worked it to razor-sharpness, and if she never stepped out of a very specific spectrum of characters, she played each and every one of them to the hilt, and what’s more, she seemed to have a great time doing it. She was so universally beloved that every man wanted her and every woman wanted to be her, and she was the most mourned figure in America until JFK bought a bullet a year later. She is – more than James Dean, more than Humphrey Bogart, maybe even more than the Hollywood sign – a visual symbol of the movie business. She’s an icon’s icon, rivaled in our entire culture by only Elvis Presley. That’s what you can say about Marilyn Monroe.

7. BETTE DAVIS (1908-1989)

If you can judge even a superstar by the company they keep, how are we to judge Bette Davis? It’s beyond question that she’s one of the biggest stars who ever lived, but what kind of star was she? The name she’s most often linked with, by both fate (their most productive periods coincided) and judgment (they ran neck and neck for Oscar nominations much of their careers), is Katharine Hepburn. But Hepburn always seemed to be in Hollywood, but never of it: you could easily get the idea she was just a well-meaning, patrician East Coast gal who happened to be really good at acting in movies. Davis, on the other hand, was a self-constructed creature of Hollywood who was nearly as influential off screen as she was on. A ruthless manager of her own career, she forced more than one studio into court when she felt she was being mishandled by the system, and so influential was she in backstage wrangling that she became known as “the fourth Warner Brother”. Of course, her other famous nickname was “Mother Goddamn”; her only rival in sheer ballsy spite, and the only person who could assess an enemy and go right for their jugular, was Joan Crawford. With their cut-throat business acumen, their penetrating eyes, their disastrous personal lives, and their ability to exploit a studio system built to exploit them, Crawford would be the real actress Davis most resembled if it weren’t for one thing: Davis was ten times the actress Crawford was. With her dramatic intensity, her cynical humor, and her ease in any kind of genre, Bette Davis wasn’t just a superstar, she was also a legitimately great actress – and that’s why she’s on this list.

6. MERYL STREEP (1949 - )

If there is one thing that can be considered a transcendental aspect of Meryl Streep’s career, it is that she proved that you don’t have to be inhumanly attractive to become an actress of superstar caliber. (Obligatorily, we will mention that it also says a lot about Hollywood that Ms. Streep – who, in fact, has always been a perfectly lovely-looking woman – is not considered particularly attractive by its standards.) Simultaneously, if there is one thing that can be considered an abject failure about Meryl Streep’s career, it is that it set no particular precedent; since her stunning early work in movies like Sophie’s Choice and Silkwood to her amazing latter-day roles in Adaptation and The Hours, she has been widely feted as the greatest actress alive, while elsewhere, starring roles keep on going to the sort of women who look like she doesn’t. Pity poor Streep: she’ll have to go to her grave content to be merely the most spellbinding actress of the last half-century, with nothing but an unprecedented 14 Oscar nominations to show for it. If it were anyone else getting that many nods for Academy gold, you’d have to suspect the fix was in – no one can be that good. But Meryl Streep is, astonishingly, that good. At times, in fact, she seems to be some sort of highly sophisticated android that has been programmed by omniscient aliens to be good at acting: every one of her fourteen nominations was well-earned, and you could make a solid argument she should have won at least half a dozen more than the two she owns. She has no particular schtick, tic, or gimmick; she’s seemingly not drawn to a particular type of role, nor does she seek out scripts that play to one strength or another. Instead, she acts the way Michael Jordan plays basketball: whatever is required of her in the moment, she finds some unexpected yet utterly effective way of doing it, and there is no way to stop her.

Click Here for Part One, Two, Three, Five, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce

When Good Directors Go Bad: Death Becomes Her (1992, Robert Zemeckis)

Paul Clark — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Robert Zemeckis has been one of Hollywood’s most bankable filmmakers for nearly three decades. A former protégé of Steven Spielberg, Zemeckis began his career making broad comedies before a move to big-budget fare demonstrated his flair for cutting-edge special effects. Yet in his best work, Zemeckis is able to seamlessly integrate the demands of ambitious effects with involving storylines that have surprising emotional pull. For example, in his 1985 film Back to the Future, Zemeckis took a science fiction comedy about a teenager traveling back in time to his parents’ high school years and turned it into the story of the boy trying to make things right with his family.

Following the runaway box office success of Back to the Future, Zemeckis rose to the ranks of Hollywood’s A-list directors, and with the release of his even more ambitious Who Framed Roger Rabbit, he became Hollywood’s go-to director for effects-heavy blockbusters infused with plenty of humor and heart. At this point in his career Zemeckis could more or less write his own ticket, so after expanding on the Back to the Future saga with two sequels, he decided to film a script written by Martin Donovan, an up-and-coming filmmaker who had recently released a cultish science fiction film entitled Apartment Zero. Donovan’s screenplay provided ample opportunities to indulge the darker side of his sense of humor, which had largely gone unused since 1980’s Used Cars, as well as giving him a chance to experiment with the body-morphing effects for the first time. The project was entitled Death Becomes Her.

Having read some of the Death Becomes Her screenplay, it’s easy for me to see how Zemeckis might have been attracted to it. Like Back to the Future, Roger Rabbit, and even Back to the Future Part III, Death Becomes Her combines two seemingly incompatible elements- in this case, a Grand Guignol-style story of two lifelong rivals and a darkly comic morality tale about the allure of youth and beauty. But while the screenplay had potential, much of that potential was lost on the way to the screen, and the finished product really doesn’t work very well. The movie’s not very funny and pretty shrill, but there are a number of other issues as well.

One big problem is the casting. In conceiving the ageless divas at the center of the story, Donovan no doubt took a cue from the legendary rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Unfortunately, actresses who can fill those shoes are few and far between, not just talent-wise, but also because their reputations as world-class pills preceded them. By contrast, Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn are merely actresses playing a role. Streep, quintessential actress that she is, comes closer to pulling it off, but whereas audiences never had a problem believing Davis or Crawford as divas (probably because they were), with Streep it merely feels like a performance. For her part, Hawn is never quite convincing as a worthy opponent for Streep- even in her more sinister moments, she comes off as too much of a lightweight. And Bruce Willis, as the ineffectual surgeon-turned-mortician who comes between then, is given next to nothing to do, and never fills in the blank spot where his character should be.

As for the Oscar-winning visual effects, they’re still pretty impressive, but they don’t have the same kind of magic as, say, the groundbreaking effects in Roger Rabbit. Whereas Zemeckis managed to use the effects of Roger Rabbit to create a convincing world which humans and cartoons convincingly inhabited together, he never successfully integrates his effects into the story here. The giveaway is the lack of camera movement in the big effects scenes. Usually, Zemeckis likes to keep his camera in motion, but whenever the special effects kick in, Death Becomes Her literally stops dead in its tracks. The result is a movie in which story takes a backseat to the demands of CGI, a trap that Zemeckis’ previous work managed to successfully avoid.

But in the end Death Becomes Her’s biggest problem may simply be its lack of nerve. Rather than embracing the twisted possibilities of its storyline, the movie wimps out in the final reel by becoming a morality tale about the necessity of living life to the fullest. I’m guessing some of this was the result of studio mandates (a PG-13 rating, the rewrites from Universal’s in-house scribe David Koepp) in order to preserve their no doubt sizable investment in the film. However, Zemeckis has always been more at home with Americana than in the realm of the macabre. It’s tantalizing to imagine what Terry Gilliam or a young Peter Jackson might have done with the material. But while Death Becomes Her holds some interest both as a wellspring of the body-morphing effects that are still used today and as an early incarnation of Meryl Streep’s recent metamorphosis from leading lady into character actress, on its own merits it just isn’t very good.

Ignominious Exits: The Top Ten Worst Final Films (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Last week, in honor of Heath Ledger’s last completed performance (as the Joker in The Dark Knight), we examined the final performances and films of actors and directors that served as fitting capstones to their careers. This week, in a Top Ten list suggested by YOU (in the general sense, and "Other Matt" specifically), we present ten ignominious exits: the cinematic equivalent of dying on the toilet, suffered by artists who really deserved better.

Charles Chaplin's A COUNTESS FROM HONG KONG (1967)

Chaplin's previous film, A King in New York, had been made ten years earlier and was the last film in which he starred; it was a stillborn disaster, and would have qualified as a notably sad ending to his career in its own right if he hadn't managed to follow it up with this thing. But Countess, which he also wrote and produced, as well as having written the music and contributed a cameo appearance, is especially embarrassing for its timeless, packed-in-mothballs quality. It was, after all, made the same year as Bonnie & Clyde and The Graduate, yet you wouldn't guess from watching it that anything had happened in either filmmaking or the world at large since about 1949. The film's leading man is Marlon Brando, and you couldn't guess from his work here that he'd ever known livelier days, either. Brando was used to directors who welcomed his attempts to fuse elements of his personality with his characters, but Chaplin was an old-fashioned sort who had no truck with that kind of Method foolishness; anything the actors tried to bring in interfered with the clickety-clack of the script that he'd been running inside his head for years. Some people regard some of Brando's later performances as being synonymous with the term "self-indulgent": he stands accused of having undercut his own movies and made his colleagues' lives difficult by abandoning coherence and logic and doing whatever he felt like doing in the name of letting his freak flag fly. But even in something like The Island of Dr. Moreau, he's at least inventive and amusing, stuck in a hopeless project but trying to entertain the audience while he entertains himself. Chaplin's movie gives you the chance to see what Brando looked like when he'd abandoned all hope: chained to a stupid script (and the character name "Ogden Mears"), he slogs through his blocking and reels off his dialogue syllable by syllable, plainly just wanting it all to be over. It's a sign of how thoroughly Chaplin had lost touch with his creative instincts that, once he'd broken the actor of his early attempts to bring some of his own collaborative instincts and energy to the role, he claimed to find Brando's work delightful. A Countess from Hong Kong went over like a fart at a funeral with critics and audiences, but damned if Petula Clark didn't have a number one hit with a reworked version of the movie's theme song. The Beatles, having displaced Charlie as England's most popular international import, must have had a rueful chuckle over that.

Stanley Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT (1999)

Stanley Kubrick spent more than the last two years of his life working on this, his only film after 1987's Full Metal Jacket. He didn't just work at his accustomed glacial pace; he shot the film once, then recast two important supporting roles with different actors (with Sydney Pollack and Marie Richardson stepping in for, respectively, Harvey Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh) and shot much of it again. One fringe benefit of the production was that it unexpectedly took its star, Tom Cruise, out of circulation for a couple of movie seasons. Kubrick died a few days after a screening of what may or may not have been his ideal final version of the film for Cruise, his co-star and then-wife Nicole Kidman, and Warner Brothers executives. By then, the media, for lack of other Cruise-related news in the two and a half years since his Oscar-nominated turn in Jerry Maguire, had been flogging the picture so hard that they had at least as much invested in its success as the studio. The news of Kubrick's death ratcheted up the odds considerably: the thought that he had died while putting the finishing touches on something that might be less than his masterpiece was generally considered too morbid a thought to bear. Eyes Wide Shut was released in the summer of 1999 amid a tsunami of hype, but since the movie itself was hard to stay awake through, the hype itself had a distinctive, abstract quality, given that it was easier to make the movie sound interesting if you sort of reviewed another, imaginary version of the actual picture. The most popular gambit was to devote great seas of ink to discussing whether the sex scenes between Tom and Nicole were the sexiest ever filmed or just the sexiest ever performed by an actual husband and wife; the topic was covered to such a degree that it inspired a backlash, which took the form not of people arguing that the sex scenes between Tom and Nicole weren't really all that sexy but instead, of people arguing that it actually made them uncomfortable to see two married actors going at it on screen, since for all the viewer knew, that might be what they really look like when they're going at it at home, thus raising all kinds of "T.M.I."-related issues. In order to understand just how desperate the hype merchants were to avoid discussing the actual movie, it helps to know that in all of Eyes Wide Shut's two hours and forty minutes, there is not a single sex scene between Tom and Nicole, unless you count a couple of minutes of pre-coital necking which takes place, appropriately enough given the personalities involved, while Tom and Nicole are staring at themselves in a mirror. Bolstered by this kind of Barnum-esque coverage, Eyes Wide Shut did respectable business until word of mouth overcame it and theater owners needed the space for extra screenings of The Blair Witch Project. The question of what Kubrick himself thought of his final film remains controversial, and when Full Metal Jacket star R. Lee Ermey dared to tell an interviewer that his old buddy Stan had told him shortly before his death that he had helmed "a piece of shit", many were quick to come down on the drill sergeant as if he had convened a meeting of all the children of the world to inform them that there is no Santa Claus.

Bette Davis in WICKED STEPMOTHER (1989)

No Hollywood star of the classic era worked harder than Bette Davis for good roles and sustained career longevity. In the 1930s, she breached her contract with Warner Bros. to take roles in English films and then unsuccessfully sued her studio, claiming that they were killing her career by forcing her to appear in "mediocre" films. When her career cooled as she entered middle age, she prankishly took out a classified newspaper ad reminding the industry of her availability. And as she grew elderly, she embraced a new movie image as a hag horror queen and became a not-infrequent guest star on series TV. Whether you admire this side of Davis as an undying devotion to the practice of her craft or see it as the egomania of a Madonna prototype whose life only seemed to be real so long as millions of people were paying attention to her -- and it was probably a little from column A and a little from column B -- it was almost fated to ultimately bite her in the ass, and the last big bite was Wicked Stepmother, a godforsaken "supernatural comedy" written and directed by Larry Cohen. Davis, who was 80 at the time of shooting, plays a witch who marries Lionel Stander and proceeds to turn his family topsy-turvy. Or at least that was the idea: Davis rankled the set after a week of shooting, putting out a statement saying that the script that she had agreed to perform was so bad it was unplayable and that Cohen was deliberately shooting her to look grotesque. For his part, Cohen announced to the press that his star had been too sick to work but was afraid that if her condition became common knowledge, no one would ever hire her again. A look at the movie provides solid evidence for both claims. Davis, frail and with her head topped by a gruesome-looking red wig, does look pretty bad, but even the healthy members of the cast seem on the verge of pitching over from the effects of having to deliver Cohen's dialogue. Whatever really happened, it's kind of amazing that the woman who once went toe-to-toe with Jack Warner might have thought that Larry Cohen would chivalrously watch her back after she'd walked out on him. (Instead of burning the precious footage he had of his famous star, Cohen rewrote the script to explain that Davis's character was now inhabiting the body of a cat and assigned her lines and business to a new character, her "daughter", played by Barbara Carrera.) Davis died a few months after Cohen's reupholstered version of the movie briefly surfaced, like pond scum, in theaters. The finished version includes a nasty in-joke involving Davis' old nemesis, Joan Crawford (whose own final film was the 1970 British scare picture Trog, in which Mommie Dearest co-starred with a dude in a frozen-faced monkey suit). That was pretty embarrassing, but given that Crawford had enough sense and self-restraint to retire after that and spend the last seven years of her life in virtual seclusion, we'd have to judge that Crawford wins that round on points.

Click here for Part Two and Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Grumpy Old Actresses: de Havilland-Fontaine Feud Enters Its Ninth Decade

Phil Nugent — Tue, 20 May 2008 14:30:00 GMT

A year ago, we ran a Screengrab Top Ten devoted to the greatest Hollywood feuds of all time. Somehow, we neglected to mention the long-running animosity between two real-life sisters--Olivia de Havilland and the younger sibling, Joan Fontaine, both Oscar winning actresses, both big stars in the 1940s, and both reputedly liable to laugh themselves to death if they ever got the chance to see the other step on a roller skate and ride it into an open manhole. Now Rupert Cornwell of the Independent rubs salt in the wound by informing us that both ladies, now 91 and 90 years old respectively, would still like nothing better than to ring each other's doorbell and run. According to Cornwell, the scab got flicked off recently when "the Academy of Motion Pictures which organises the Oscars held a bash honouring the late actress Bette Davis on the 100th anniversary of her birth. Naturally, Joan and Olivia, among the closest surviving contemporaries of Bette Davis were invited. According to insiders, Olivia – who lives in Paris – at first let it be known she could not manage so long a trip. Upon learning her sister would not be coming, Joan agreed to attend. Then Olivia decided after all she would be there in person to commemorate Davis, her friend with whom she had worked in films such as Hush Sweet Charlotte. So Joan in the end took a pass."

There are a couple of schools of thought on the subject of the sibling feud. Some believe that it has been going on for seventy years and has its roots in the women's competition for good roles and awards in an industry that has never made it easy for its actresses. Other believe that it's been going on for, oh, say ninety years, and has its roots in the sisters first getting a look at each other. Certainly whatever fires may have already been burning were fueled when Joan was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for Rebecca, in a role that her sister had sought for herself. One year later, Joan won the award for another Hitchcock film, Suspicion, and this time, her sister was one of her fellow nominees (for her work in Hold Back the Dawn--Olivia, now the last surviving major cast member of Gone with the Wind, seems to have had a thing for sappy, four-word titles). Remembering the golden moment when she beat her sister like a drum on Oscar night, Fontaine later wrote that "the hair-pulling, the savage wrestling matches, the time Olivia fractured my collar bone, all came rushing back in kaleidoscopic imagery. My paralysis was total ... I felt age four, being confronted by my older sister. Damn it! I had incurred her wrath again." (Cornwell notes that "In a historical context, it is even more remarkable. If Rebecca was indeed the match that lit the fuse of rivalry, the sisters have been at it since Hitler invaded France. But by Joan's account, the feud extends from the 1920s; in other words they were fighting with each other when Charles Lindbergh first flew the Atlantic.") The psychodrama of the de Havillands would continue to serve as a thread linking Oscar nights yet to come, most notably in 1946, when Joan, pressed into service as an Oscar presenter, wound up handing Olivia the Best Actress award she won that year (for To Each His Own) and looking very much as if she'd like to club her with it. Both ladies have been pretty much retired since some TV work about twenty years ago. But somebody should really move heaven and earth to get them together in a remake of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? before it's too late.

DVD Digest for April 8, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a cracked fantasy favorite finally gets the DVD it deserves, and DVD lovers can finally order their milkshakes to go.

For most moviegoers, the big news this week is the arrival of Paul Thomas Anderson's latest masterpiece There Will Be Blood in DVD. But while that's cause for celebration, be warned- as with Sweeney Todd last week, Paramount is releasing the film in two separate versions, a bare-bones single-disc release and a two-disc set featuring some deleted scenes and a number of featurettes about the making of, and history behind, the film. Normally, I'd be skeptical about the relatively slim pickings even on the two-disc set, but Anderson's recent DVD releases haven't contained too much in the way of commentaries and the like, so this was to be expected from him. Besides, it's not like you're NOT going to buy There Will Be Blood- it's awesome enough to stand on its own merits without all the snazzy bells and whistles.

But no less noteworthy is the release of a new version of Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Sony, also Blu-Ray). Munchausen, a notorious flop in its day, has since become something of a cult favorite, and it's good to see Sony finally giving it a good DVD treatment. Naturally, there's a Terry Gilliam commentary track, which should be reason enough to buy the DVD, considering that Gilliam's commentaries are never better than when he's talking about films that were mishandled by their distributors. The two-disc set also includes the three-part documentary "The Madness and Misadventures of Munchausen," as well as storyboard sequences that supposedly feature "all-new vocal performances by Terry Gilliam and Chris McKeown." Dare I hope Gilliam drew the storyboards in Pythonimation style?

In other classics coming to DVD news, Fox is continuing the celebration of Bette Davis with a six-disc Bette Davis Centenary Celebration Collection that includes a new two-disc version of All About Eve along with bare-bones discs of The Nanny, The Virgin Queen, Phone Call From a Stranger, and the gothic-horror classic Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte. Other than that, not much to write about in the classics department, unless of course the Blu-Ray release of Arnold Schwarzenegger in The 6th Day blows your hair back. In which case don't let me stop you.

More recent titles being released on DVD this week include John C. Reilly in the musical biopic spoof Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (Sony, also Blu-Ray), the family fantasy The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep (Sony, also Blu-Ray), Robert Redford's star-studded Iraq War dud Lions For Lambs (MGM), and the Leonardo DiCaprio-produced and -narrated tree-hugger documentary The 11th Hour (Warner).

Finally, David Huddleston's checking in again this week, this time to offer his condolences to Warner's HD-DVD release of I Am Legend. You know, Huddleston's condolences might make me feel bad for Will Smith's character in the film, except I'm guessing he'd be grateful for the company.

DVD Digest for April 1, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

In a slow week for new DVDs, there are no real world-beaters being released today. However, there are a number of solid picks for movie lovers of various stripes, and if nothing else there should be fewer flubs in this column than there were last week.

Easily the most interesting recent film to come out on DVD this week, Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Paramount) is being released by Paramount in both single- and double-disc editions. The big difference, as usual, is one of special features, as the extra disc includes a number of new featurettes, including spotlights on the history behind the Sweeney Todd legend and a doc on Stephen Sondheim's music. But the real keeper is the film itself, a legitimately dark creation, easily the most despairing Burton film to date. Burton's vision complements the already strong material so perfectly that it more than compensates for the not-quite-up-to-snuff singing by stars Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, who are pretty great otherwise. Sweeney Todd is the filet of this week's new films on DVD, although with such competition as Alvin and the Chipmunks (Fox, also Blu-Ray) and Resurrecting the Champ (Fox), that's pretty faint praise.

Also of note is Warner's The Bette Davis Collection Volume 3, the latest in their exhaustive assembling of box sets featuring the studio era's biggest stars. Normally the selection in these sets are pretty dire, comprised largely of films that weren't ready for a standalone release. However, this set looks unusually strong. Included in the set are the Davis fan favorite Deception, 1943's Watch on the Rhine (which won Davis' costar Paul Lukas a Best Actor Oscar), and In This Our Life, a pre-Hush, Hush... Sweet Charlotte collaboration between Davis and Olivia De Havilland. Other titles in the set are The Old Maid, All This, and Heaven Too, and The Great Lie. As usual, Warner has dug into their vaults and paired each film with their "Warner Night at the Movies" programs, including classic newsreels, cartoons, and trailers. Eventually the well will have to run dry on Davis films as it does with all stars, but this collection should be worth a look.

The only other intriguing DVD release this week- that is, unless you're clamoring for Martin: The Complete Fourth Season or Murder, She Wrote Season 8- is Koch Lorber's trio of new DVD editions of films by the Italian filmmakers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. Among the films is the American DVD debut of 1993's Fiorile and 1984's Kaos, plus a new edition of their 1982 classic Night of the Shooting Stars. Koch Lorber's DVD releases can be dicey, both in terms of variable picture quality and the lack of special features. However, for those who've been waiting for more of the Tavianis' films to get released on DVD, the wait is over.

Finally, our old pal David Huddleston has returned from his vacation just in time to voice his condolences to the following HD-DVD releases:

Appleseed Ex Machina (Warner)
August Rush (Warner)

Because nothing says "watch this on a bigass HDTV" than a box-office flop about a musical prodigy. Who's with me?

Home Video Rep Report: "Forbidden Hollywood Collection - Vol.2"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

As Paul Clark recently pointed out, this is the week that No Country for Old Men came out on DVD. Which is all well and good, but I just saw it a few months ago. So did you, probably, but when's the last time you saw Clark Gable, in a mondo-bondage chauffeur outfit, punch out Barbara Stanwyck for interfering with his plans to keep their employer drunk so he can starve her children to death, or Humphrey Bogart taking one look at wide-eyed Ann Dvorak and miming sniffing something powdery while flashing his dirtiest grin and snickering, "Uh-oh!" These charming relics of Hollywood's early wildcat period can be found in the new three-disc set Forbidden Hollywood Collection - Vol.2, assembled from the vaults of Turner Classic Movies. (Volume One, which came out last year, included the long-lost Stanwyck vehicle Angel Face and the giddily scandalous Jean Harlow movie Red Headed Woman.) The discs provide a handy sampler of what Hollywood comedies and melodramas got into in the Pre-Code days before censors roused the rabble and threw a corset around Mae West. For sheer entertainment value, the new set is worth picking up just for 1931's Night Nurse, the hard-headed, hard-boiled nifty starring Stanwyck, Gable, and the platinum wisecrack dispenser Joan Blondell, and the 1932 Three on a Match, in which Blondell is the smart good girl who gets the guy, Ann Dvorak is the good-time girl who doesn't appreciate the guy, and Bette Davis is the one who makes contemporary audiences go, "Jesus Christ, Ann Dvorak makes Bette Davis look like a whipped mouse!" Match makes the case that the cult icon Dvorak, best remembered now as Paul Muni's sister in the original Scarface, deserves to be remembered as the quivering embodiment of the Pre-Code spirit. In the inevitable TCM documentary that's included in the DVD set, she's likened to a sputtering live wire, and she seems to be having a more exciting time than anyone else onscreen whether she's resisting temptation (which was something she never did for long), giving in to temptation (diving in with both feet), or paying for her sins by diving out a window with instructions to the police written on her nightie with lipstick.

The set also includes two Norma Shearer pictures, The Divorcee, which won the boring old thing an Academy Award for Best Actress of 1930, and A Free Soul, which came out the next year and won a Best Actor Award for Lionel Barrymore, who played her father. As that data may suggest, these were A-pictures in their day, but they don't hold up as well as the B's do. But they do have some historical interest, in part because they reveal what people who thought they were looking for something wild and steamy but who couldn't deal with the sight of Ann Dvorak in full writhe were prepared to settle for. Coiffed and dressed to the nines, Shearer could pass for a pretty hot number, though she could never act for shit, and the whole point of her pictures was to let her get just enough of a whiff of liberated hedonism to get her to run back to hubby and daddy. Like Night Nurse, A Free Soul is notable for bottling the dirty essence of Pre-Code Clark Gable, who is once again cast as a magnetic crook who keeps a highborn gal, Shearer, in sexual thrall, to the point that her fiancee. Leslie Howard, is obliged to shoot the blighter. (After that, Barrymore, a lawyer, is obliged to defend Howard in court by telling the jury that none of this would have happened if he'd just had the foresight to lock his daughter in the bedroom until her hormones settled down.) Also included is Female (1932), which stars Ruth Chatterton as a rich car company owner whose casual affair with George Brent turns all serious and shit. It falls between the two stools set by Dvorak and Shearer; Chatterton gets to have some fun early on treating her employee pool as her own personal stud stable, but by the end she's imploring Brent not just to marry her but to take charge of her company so she'll be free to stay at home and turn out enough kids that they can start their own baseball team.

Forgotten Films: "All Night Long" (1981)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Gene Hackman turned seventy-eight this past week. Though he seems to have eased into semi-retirement — his last movie appearance was in 2004's Welcome to Mooseport with Ray Romano, a teaming that I assume was a thrill for at least one of them — for decades Hackman was as sturdily dependable as any hard-working character lead turned unlikely movie star in Hollywood history. His birthday provides as good an excuse as any to dig out one of his best performances, in one of his best, and least-appreciated movies, the 1981 comedy All Night Long. It's also a terrific movie to discover at the dawn of a still-new year, because it's about a man who seems to be used up and past the point the point of no return taking the reins and making a new world for himself, by learning in the nick of time to cast off what no longer works for him and doing, and going after, whatever the hell he wants.

Hackman plays George Dupler, whose twenty years of service to the corporate behemoth have driven him to the edge of a nervous breakdown. One day, his stress becomes notable enough that he's encouraged to express what's bothering him, and a chair goes flying through the shiny glass wall of his company's building. A dead man walking, George is shuttled off to serve out his days as night manager of an enormous twenty-four-hour Los Angeles drugstore. The screenwriter, W. D. Richter, apparently took his inspiration from a magazine article about nocturnal urban living as the last great frontier. George has to cross that frontier to build himself a new life; it starts with him adjusting his internal clock to his new working hours, expands to his taking up with the mistress of his teenage son (Dennis Quaid), and winds up with him moving into a loft and embarking on a career as an inventor. His first invention is a new kind of mirror. It doesn't reverse the image of what you're seeing: it gives the user the chance to see what others actually behold when they look at him, the poor sap.

All Night Long has its own eccentric humor and a cool, liberating tone, and it actually got several admiring notices when it was released early in 1981. Unfortunately, it got caught up in internal Hollywood politics and bad marketing decisions, all of them related to the actress who plays George's new squeeze: Barbra Streisand. The movie was directed by the Belgian Jean-Claude Tramont, who was married to the semi-legendary Hollywood agent Sue Mengers, who at the time had Streisand as a star client. The movie had headed into production with the actress Lisa Eichhorn set to play the female lead, but somebody must have thought that having Streisand on board would be good for something, with the result that she was nudged into the role, the film's budget ballooned accordingly, and the finished product was released with an ad campaign that seemed designed to call up memories of previous comic horrors such as For Pete's Sake and The Main Event. Tramont's career never recovered from the movie's high-profile commercial failure; he would direct only once more — As Summers Die, a 1986 TV film with Bette Davis, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Scott Glenn — before dying in 1996. The funny thing is that Streisand neither makes nor sinks the movie; her quirky-mouse performance is amusing — you can see her consciously trying not to come across as a diva — but she and Hackman have zero chemistry. Their romance just seems like a fling he uses to cushion his fall as he transitions into a new life; you can't imagine they'll be together for long after the final credits roll. But if All Night Long is compromised as a love story, as a tribute to a loser who didn't know how to lie down, it's richly satisfying. Tramont, Richter, and Hackman started out with the quirky tools of classic screwball comedy and applied them with so much heartfelt grace and imagination that they constructed a comedy worthy of Rilke's dictum, "You must change your life!"

That Gal!: Celeste Holm

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 20:30:00 GMT

This week's That Gal! accomplishes something that we get to do all too infrequently in this feature: profile a character actor from the Golden Age of Hollywood that we're lucky enough to still have with us. Celeste Holm was born in New Jersey at the height of the First World War, but didn't attain fame on the motion picture screen until after the Second: the daughter of a painter and a Norwegian insurance salesman (whose sharp Nordic features were reflected in his daughter's own face) worked on Broadway for over a decade, including a long and celebrated stint as the lead in the original run of Oklahoma!, before she was signed to an exclusive contract with 20th Century Fox in 1946.

She made an immediate impact in a number of supporting roles, establishing herself as one of the few women attractive enough to carry a lead performance but strong enough as an actress to inhabit challenging character parts. The majority of her dozens of films, however, were made in the 1950s, before Holm realized that the acting she loved first was the acting she loved best: despite a star-studded and highly decorated career on the silver screen, she far preferred stage acting, and returned to it almost exclusively in the 1960s and 1970s, occasionally doing television work to pay the bills before heading back to the footlights.&

The 1980s saw a mini-career renaissance for the tony, aristocratic actress, and age had diminished her acting chops not a whit: younger viewers got their first glimpse of her when she appeared in the wildly popular domestic comedy Three Men and a Baby in 1987. She hasn't made a movie in several years, but she's hardly stood idle; she's touring with a one-woman theatrical show, she's won a lawsuit against Pedro Almodovar for unauthorized use of her image, and, in grand Hollywood tradition, she's moved on to her fifth husband, an opera singer almost 50 years her junior. Now that's showbiz!

Where to see Celeste Holm at her best:

GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT (1947)

In only her third motion picture, Celeste Holm comes through with a career-making performance in this prestige Gregory Peck vehicle where a reporter goes undercover to expose hidden anti-Semitism. Message films such as this have lost a lot of their highbrow factor, but Holm's performance as the working-class woman with whom Peck has a brief affair before abandoning her for the charmless Dorothy McGuire still packs a wallop; viewers at the time agreed, rewarding her with an Oscar and a Golden Globe.

ALL ABOUT EVE (1950)

Holm's second Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress came when she played opposite of Bette Davis in this film about a woman's rise to the top of the Hollywood ladder, and terrifying fall back down. It also provided her with a classic anecdote: when she first met the elemental Davis on set, she greeted her with a police "Good morning", to which Davis responded with the last words she'd ever exchange with Holm: "Aw, shit! Manners!"

HIGH SOCIETY (1956)

A celebrated musical adaptation of the already successful play and film The Philadelphia Story, High Society had tons of great songs and a great singer to deliver them in the person of Bing Crosby. Playing C.K. Dexter-Haven's lady love and comic foil, Liz Imbrie, Celeste Holm delivers a terrific comedic and musical role, really showing off the talents she developed during a decade on Broadway -- and, not coincidentally, gets off some of the movie's cleverest and slickest lines.