What Should Have Won, Part IV: The 1960s

I have put off talking about the 1960s in my appraisal of the Academy Award-winning films of the past, mainly for one reason: I can’t stand the films of the 1960s. While the decade was good for many things, American cinema during those years had a sort of elephantiasis about it – with the world changing so rapidly during those tumultuous years, the Academy just couldn’t keep up with the times. Maybe that’s why clunky musicals won Best Picture four out of the 10 years of the decade (more winners for musicals than in any other decade). Nevertheless, there were some bright spots in these years, as I will try to demonstrate:

Let’s keep our rules in mind. My choice has to have been nominated for at least one Oscar in at least one category. It does not have to have been nominated for Best Picture. Any category will do.

1960

What film won Best Picture: The Apartment
What film should have won: The Apartment

This is the only year in the decade where the Academy got it right. Some people might claim that Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was the film of the year (and they’d have a point), but I have to give the nod to Billy Wilder’s damn-near perfect romantic comedy. And correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this the last film in black and white to win Best Picture?

1961

What film won Best Picture: West Side Story
What film should have won: Splendor in the Grass

I know a lot of people love West Side Story, and while it’s a great show I’ve always felt that the movie left a lot to be desired. The clunky literalism of shooting it on the streets of New York with a group of actors who are way too old to be playing teenagers (and a leading lady who can’t sing) strikes me as being fundamentally wrongheaded. In fact, I've thought for a long time that the show is ripe for a remake -- with real Hispanics as the Sharks and shot in a stylistic way that resembled The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. For 1961 I would have given the Oscar to another Natalie Wood film from the same year – Elia Kazan’s great film Splendor in the Grass, from a script by William Inge. The fact that you’ve never heard of it doesn’t make it any less great, and it might be Natalie Wood’s best performance.

1962

What film won Best Picture: Lawrence of Arabia
What film should have won: Long Day’s Journey into Night/The Manchurian Candidate

I know I’m in a distinct minority here, but I can’t stand Lawrence of Arabia. Can't stand it. In fact, the last time it was revived theatrically, at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York, I walked out on it. Instead of David Lean’s bloated desert epic, I would call it a tie between two very different films: Sidney Lumet’s pitch-perfect adaptation of O’Neill’s autobiographical masterpiece Long Day’s Journey Into Night (with a masterful ensemble performance by a superb cast), and John Frankenheimer’s suspense classic The Manchurian Candidate.

1963

What film won Best Picture: Tom Jones
What film should have won: America, America

Tom Jones just doesn’t age well. I saw it recently on DVD and I started cringing from the minute they opened with a mock silent film. The helicopter shots didn’t help matters. My choice for this year would have been Elia Kazan’s last great film (and one of his least known), his paean to his adopted country, America, America. The minute it comes out on DVD you have to find a way to see it. It’s one of the most powerful films he ever made, and it was clearly a labor of love.

1964

What film won Best Picture: My Fair Lady
What film should have won: Dr. Strangelove

It would be interesting to see what My Fair Lady would have been like if Jack Warner had relented and given his original choice for director, Vincente Minnelli, a cut of the profits and let him direct the film. It made have ended up a great film musical instead of the stagebound bore it became under the usually capable hands of George Cukor. Instead, I would go with a certified masterpiece, one of the few from this decade: Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.

1965

What film won Best Picture: The Sound of Music
What film should have won: A Thousand Clowns

The Sound of Music was the film that finally supplanted Gone With The Wind as the biggest box office success of all time, but I’ve never been able to warm to it: I have no idea why. Granted, 1965 wasn’t the greatest of movie years, and had I been an Academy voter at the time I might have wished that, like the Pulitzers do sometimes with their Drama award, they had declined to name a winner that year, but I find A Thousand Clowns (with a great performance by Jason Robards and an adorable one from the luminous Barbara Harris) to be the only film made that year that I would most want to return to -- or that I have any desire to return to, for that matter. You couldn't make me watch The Sound of Music again with a gun at my head.

1966

What film won Best Picture: A Man for All Seasons
What film should have won: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Spare me from Important Pictures About Great Men (who are almost always white and who invariably speak with plummy British accents). I saw this film on a re-release in the 70s (on a double bill with Chaplin’s City Lights, if you can believe it), and was not amused. I’d give the Oscar to Mike Nichols for this scathing adaptation of Edward Albee’s play about marital hell, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, with amazing performances from Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (who should have gotten an Oscar for his performance).

1967

What film won Best Picture: In the Heat of the Night
What film should have won: The Graduate

It could have been worse, I suppose: they could have given the Oscar to Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner? But I would give it to Mike Nichols for the second year in a row for his masterpiece (and one of the few truly great films to come out of the 60s) The Graduate. And who cares if Dustin Hoffman is miscast? This is one of the very few studio films of the 60s that still holds up for me.

1968

What film won Best Picture: Oliver!
What film should have won: The Producers/Rosemary’s Baby

Another bloated musical wins the Oscar. Well, I would go the other way, and call it a tie between Mel Brooks’ The Producers and Roman Polanski’s suspense film based on Ira Levin’s novel, Rosemary’s Baby. Who wouldn’t rather see Zero Mostel screaming “Double! Double!” or Mia Farrow looking horrified at what’s been done to her child over Mark Lester croaking out “Where is love?” I mean really…

1969

What film won Best Picture: Midnight Cowboy
What film should have won: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

As the 60s were ending, the Academy started to get adventurous. They gave their last award for the 60s to John Schlesinger’s film about dreams and sleaze in Times Square, Midnight Cowboy. You’d think I’d agree, right? Well, you’d be wrong. I would have gone with George Roy Hill’s revisionist Western (from a script by William Goldman), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The film that teamed Paul Newman and Robert Redford for the first of only two screen appearances together.

That’s all for the 60s. I’ll try to get to the 70s (one of the great decades for American cinema) fairly soon.

Tom Moran

Some Random Notes

• We now know what killed Anna Nicole Smith. And you know what? I still don't give a shit.

• The pressure is mounting on Alberto Gonzales. He almost certainly lied in public (but not under oath) about the extent of his knowledge and participation of the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys, and while President Bush is supposedly standing behind the first Hispanic Attorney General, it seems like it's only a matter of time before Gonzales is forced to step down. And yet I'm wondering how much attention the American people are paying to this squalid mess. Where's the outrage? I suspect they think of it as no big deal -- as just politics as usual.

• Chuck Hagel thinks that impeaching George W. Bush might not be an unrealistic option. Hagel is quoted as saying that, "Any president who says, I don't care, or I will not respond to what the people of this country are saying about Iraq or anything else, or I don't care what the Congress does, I am going to proceed - if a president really believes that, then there are - what I was pointing out, there are ways to deal with that." Remember what I said in a previous post about Bush's fate in any impeachment proceeding being in the hands of the senators of his own party? Well, statements like Hagel's are not a good sign.

• Mike Binder, who directed the film "The Upside of Anger," has a new film out called "Reign Over Me," starring Don Cheadle and Adam Sandler. Sandler plays a man who "lost everything in 9/11." I have to admit I find the notion of using the deaths on 9/11 as a plot point in a Hollywood movie to be offensive, and yet I realize that in WWII-era Hollywood films such as "Wake Island" and "So Proudly We Hail," point points were made out of people who lost loved ones at the attack on Pearl Harbor. Am I just unduly squeamish about these things?

Tom Moran

Some Things Aren't Meant To Be

We all have our disappointments in life -- relationships that ended badly, or connections that weren't made -- but when you're a writer you tend to carry around with you all the projects that you once wanted to write but for one reason or another never jelled, or that were abandoned before completion.

I was reminded of one of these projects by a news story that has recently made it onto the Associated Press.

The AP is reporting that the body of Harry Houdini, the handcuff king, is being exhumed to find out whether or not he died, not from peritonitis derived from a punch in the stomach as was thought at the time, but from poison. It's alleged that Houdini's enemies in the spiritualist world, incensed by his debunking of mediums and charlatans who claimed to contact those in the great beyond, had him killed with arsenic.

This reminds me of a project I wanted to write more than 20 years ago. I was musing one day over the career of one of America's greatest filmmakers, and it occurred to me in my twentysomething wisdom that his biggest problem with the American film industry was that he'd never had a hit. One huge hit, I thought at the time, could give a jump start to a directing career that badly needed it.

And at the time (this was the mid-80s) the perfect actor was at just the right age to play the lead in this hypothetical film. You combine the director, the actor, the part and the subject matter and you had, I thought, the making of a great film.

The film was to be on the life of Houdini. The actor was to have been Robert DeNiro. And the director was to have been Orson Welles.

Just the idea of Orson Welles, whose interest in magic was well known and who had actually met Houdini as a child, directing a film about Houdini with DeNiro in the lead was so great an idea that I thought it might actually happen. I would have hoped to write it myself but even if I didn't, I would have been happy just to see the film get made.

But it wasn't meant to be. As I was about to attempt to contact Orson Welles and pitch the idea to him, he died at the age of 70. There was not point trying to pitch the idea with any other director. What would have been the point?

So hearing that Houdini's death might have been a murder mystery makes me even more -- what's the word? -- nostalgic for a film that never saw the light of day, or even existed except as an idea in my head. And now in yours.

Tom Moran

Bring It On!

It looks like the Senate of the United States is going to force a showdown with the White House over the current scandal involving Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

According to the New York Times, the Judiciary Committee has authorized the issuing of subpoenas to various white House officials, including Karl Rove, so that they will have to testify about why eight U.S. Attorneys were summarily fired using the flimsiest of excuses.

The White House has made a counteroffer, in which the officials would come up to the Hill and talk with the committee but in private, not under oath, and without any record of the discussion being kept.

Hmmmmmm... now why do you think that is?

Could it be that if they don't testify under oath they won't be subject ot perjury charges and prison time if they lie? “Well,” Rep. John Conyers said according to the Times piece, “we could meet at the local pub to have that kind of gathering.”

This reminds me of what the current chairwoman of the Senate Environmental Committee, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), told Republican Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) when he tried to cut off and restrict Al Gore's testimony in front of the committe by, in effect, acting as if he was still the chair of the committee:

“No, that isn’t the rule. You’re not making the rules. You used to when you did this. Elections have consequences. So I make the rules.”

The audience in the room burst into applause -- as well they should have. And it made a larger point besides just putting one pompous blowhard of a right-winger in his place. The fact is that there has been a major sea change in Washington, and some people on the right are a little slow to acknowledge it. The White House is still acting as if they can bully Congress into accepting any crumbs of cooperation they care to dish out. And that's not the case anymore.

The fact is that the Democrats in Congress are exercising their oversight prerogatives in order to find out why eight U.S. Attorneys were dismissed for what certainly seems to be partisan political reasons. The White House can bitch and moan about "show trials" all it wants, but no one with half a brain is accepting their subtle-as-a-rubber-crutch analogy between Congress and the Stalinist Soviet Union of the 1930s. After all, it's the Bush White House that's acting as if they're living in a totalitarian state with the executive as all-powerful and the legislative branch being nothing more than a Politburo-style rubber stamp for the executive.

That may have been true before January, when Bush had a Republican Congress that let him do whatever he wanted, but what's going on right now is exactly the kind of checks and balances laid out in the Constitution. It's democracy in action. And it's about time.

Tom Moran

Apologies to Kevin Smith

I don't make a lot of mistakes on this blog but when I do, I acknowledge them.

So I have to do a little groveling here. I'll make it brief.

Almost a year ago I wrote a blog item criticizing Kevin Smith, director of "Clerks" and "Chasing Amy," for going back to the well and directing "Clerks II" (no links -- we're not about links here). I thought it was a bit much to make a sequel to a indie film from over a decade ago.

Well, I finally caught up to "Clerks II" on DVD last week.

And it's fucking hilarious. One of the best comedies of recent years. A bit Rabelaisian (to put it mildly), and it's not to everyone's taste (especially if you're not into what they call in the film "interspecies erotica"), but I laughed my ass off.

Since Kevin Smith was raised Catholic, all I can say is...

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Tom Moran

Will He or Won't He? Check His Pants

Everyone seems to be reading the tea leaves in order to ascertain whether or not Al Gore will run for president in 2008.

Eleanor Clift in Newsweek (full disclosure: my former employer) reports that Gore is losing weight, and that this might be a sign that he's thinking of running:

A leading indicator of his intentions could be Gore's waistline. The theory is that slimming down will be a signal he intends to run. "He has lost a few pounds, and Hillary can read into that what she wants," says a longtime adviser who declined to be identified discussing his boss's figure. Gore has always been a voracious eater, and at 58, the pounds don't come off so easily. He is trying to be healthier, working out daily when he can.

So Gore losing (or trying to lose) weight means he's running? I'm not so sure. Elsewhere in the same Newsweek piece, Clift reports that Laurie David (wife of Larry David and an environmental activist) has openly advocated that Gore should run:

Laurie David, who helped bankroll Gore's film, and whose "personal fantasy" is that he run, says that when she presses him, he's always coy and says his cell phone is breaking up. "I believe him when he says he doesn't have any intention of running," David told NEWSWEEK. "But I also believe the door is not completely shut."

But how long can that door stay ajar? This is turning into the most ridiculously front-loaded race in the history of presidential primaries, and chances are that whoever wins Iowa and New Hampshire will be unbeatable. How long can Gore hold out if he wants to get into the race? Even now we're hearing stories of Hillary Clinton making phone calls to prospective supporters only to find out that Barack Obama had gotten there first. The people who would ordinarily support Gore are going to be snatched up by other candidates very soon.

Gore says he has not intention of running, and I respect that: the fact is that anyone who is willing to do what it takes to be president should probably be disqualified for the job anyway. But whoever moves into the White House in January of 2009 will have an awesome (in the true sense of the word) job on his or her hands -- dealing with an economy that may well be in shambles by then; trying to get legislation passed through a Congress that has a very thin Democratic majority -- and of course, trying to muck out the steaming abbatoir that is Iraq. It's not an enviable job. One can certainly understand why Gore might want the cup to pass from him.

But the country needs him. I honestly believe that -- as well as I believe that Gore is the best and most qualified person to run the country and clean up the mess that George W. Bush and his band of criminals have made.

Half the country, and quite possibly more than half, hates Hillary Clinton with a passion. And the left wing of the Democratic party isn't crazy about her either.

Barack Obama has had exactly two years experience in Congress (to give you some perspective, when JFK ran for president at a similar age he had 14 years experience in Congress).

Al Gore is the best candidate the Democrats can find.

But will they find him? Better yet, will he allow himself to be found?

Tom Moran

The Rout of the Right?

If you're any kind of progressive, you've gotta love it when Time magazine has a piece called "How the Right Went Wrong" with a doctored photo of Ronald Reagan shedding a tear over what has become of his party, or when TownHall.com has articles entitled "Is Conservatism Dying?" and "5 Things Republicans Can Learn From the Democrats."

But is this too good to be true? Granted, the Bush administration is in free-fall and looks to go down in history as one of the worst administrations ever, but does that necessarily mean that conservatism is in free-fall as well? Well, let's take a look.

The three most prominent contenders for the Republican nomination for president in 2008 are far from your garden variety right-wing conservatives. John McCain is deeply distrusted by the right, in spite of all the nauseating things he's done to appease them. Rudy Giuliani is admired for his admittedly sterling performance during 9/11 but do the people on the right who idolize him have any idea what his stands are on social issues? Do they know that he's pro-gun control, pro-choice and pro-gay rights? Or that he likes to wear women's clothing on occasion (one of them slapped on a recent cover of National Review)? Or that he's on his third wife -- and that his first wife was his cousin? And Mitt Romney, who is admittedly telegenic (and still on his first wife) has "changed his mind" on so many issues that you can almost write the "flip-flopper" ads for his opponents in the upcoming primaries.

So where are the true believers? Why haven't people like Mike Huckabee or Sam Brownback made any traction? Is it just name recognition? Will they move up in the field as the (no doubt endless) debates start happening? Or has the right-wing of the party simply written off this election cycle and decided to regroup and take their chances on 2012 or 2016, either with Jeb Bush or someone else?

I'm not sure I envy whoever wins the 2008 presidential election -- especially if they're a Democrat. Iraq is still going to be a disaster and it could arguably be worse than it is now -- and the incoming president will probably not have the option of walking away from a stalemate and calling it victory, the way Eisenhower did in Korea. And I'm starting to think that the American economy is poised to go right into the toilet, so they could easily have a major recession on their hands as they come into office. Not a pretty picture, is it?

But let's not get complaisant. The Democrats hold control of the Senate by exactly one vote, and the GOP still has the White House until January, 2009. This is still a 50/50 country and Democrats have a lot of work to do if they're going to convince Americans that they can clean up the mess that the right-wing Republicans have made of this country, among others.

Tom Moran

CelticProgressive Enters the Terrible Twos

Today marks the second anniversary of this blog. A lot has happened in those two years.

New Orleans was hit by a hurricane that left it underwater and showed to the world how pitifully inadequate the Bush adminsitration was. Iraq descended even further into chaos.

But on the bright side, Scooter Libby has been convicted, Donald Rumsfeld has resigned, Tom DeLay has left the House in disgrace, and the Democrats took control of Congress for the first time in a dozen years.

There has been good news. But there's a lot more to do.

We need to elect a Democrat to the White House in 2008. We need to get this country out of the morass it currently occupies in Iraq and begin repairing the damage that's been done to our life and our liberties since this criminal administration took over in 2001.

While the economy looks very shaky to me, I think that we can begin to feel a little optimistic. Bush is a lame duck, and it's obvious to everyone that his adminstration has been a pathetic failure. From their delusions of grandeur, when they thought they could remake the Middle East, they now realize that the best they can do by way of a strategy for the war is to try not to lose until after Hillary gets inaugurated -- then blame the mess on her.

But the end of the Bush years is in sight. And they can't end soon enough for me.

Tom Moran

Ann Coulter Strikes Again

Ann Coulter really should be in The Guinness Book of World Records -- or at least take a spot on David Letterman's "Stupid Human Tricks." She's the only person I know who can get her foot in her mouth and her finger down her throat at the same time.

What's her latest atrocity?

At the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday, Coulter made the following comment about Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards:

I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'faggot,' so I -- so kind of an impasse, can't really talk about Edwards.

The three major candidates on the Republican side -- John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney -- have all condemned Coulter's comments. Only Giuliani did so directly: the other two did so through spokespeople, apparently on the old Orson Welles theory, "Never handle shit -- even with gloves. The gloves just get shitty. The shit doesn't get glovey."

Now we know she was kidding -- that Ann is such a kidder -- but Coulter doesn't seem to realize that her fifteen minutes of fame are pretty much up. When the three major candidates of your own party all condemn you, I think it's time to pack it in.

Personally, I think people are being very unfair to Coulter. They should have a little compassion, and a little sympathy. After all, you know how high-strung these trannies can be.

Oooops. Did I just call Ann Coulter a tranny? I guess it's off to rehab for me...

Tom Moran

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.: 1917-2007

One of America's foremost historians, Arthur Schlesinger, died yesterday. He was 89 years old.

Among his 20 books are works on Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, and the quasi-official history of the Kennedy Administration, the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Days. He also chronicled the life of President Kennedy's brother in Robert Kennedy and His Times.

An unabashed liberal partisan, he worked in the Kennedy White House as special assistant to the President. In that position he wrote a memo warning the administration against the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba -- a memo that was ignored, with disastrous consequences. After the debacle, Kennedy was heard to say that, while Schlesinger was sure to write his own history of the Kennedy Adnministration, "he better not publish that memorandum while I’m still alive.”

Schlesinger's history of the Kennedy years won him a second Pulitzer (he won his first for The Age of Jackson), but was given the backhanded compliment by Gore Vidal of being compared to Disraeli's classic political novel, Coningsby. This may have been motivated by two things: a) Vidal was persona non grata from the Kennedy White House since 1961, and: b) Vidal was never awarded a Pulitzer.

Schlesinger was a praiseworthy historian both because he was adept at giving his readers the big picture of the times of his subjects (the first volume of his Age of Roosevelt, The Crisis of the Old Order, is arguably the book to read if you want to know just how desperate things were in America in the depths of the Depression) and because he completely eschewed the kind of academic jargon that came to dominate (if not pollute) not only historical books but academic books of all kinds. His books have the pellucidity of Grant's Personal Memoirs with the rigorous scholarship of Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He was one of America's greatest historians, and his passing is a great loss to the country he chronicled so well.

Tom Moran