Oscars: The Parade's Gone By...

The eighty something annual Oscar show is tonight: the movie industry, "Hollywood," handing out little gold bald headed men to the "best." What began as an annual banquet to promote the motion picture business after scandal rocked the burgeoning industry in the nineteen-twenties has become a joke only taken seriously by people making money from it: advertisers, networks, style gurus, Joan and Melissa Rivers. Winning an Oscar, "talent"(artist?) in front or behind the camera can get fifteen minutes of fame and possibly larger pay checks; momentarily the winners are thought of as experts in their fields, but, daresay, does anyone remember any of the winners from three or four years ago? Can you name who won Best Actor in 1996 off the top of your head?

Okay. Not be too dismissive I'll shine light on the early awards ceremonies: the 1920's until the early 1950's. The first decade or so of the Academy's awards were held in hotel ballrooms; black and white photographs detail elegant yet casual affairs with attendees seated at dinner tables adorned with small lamps, vases with flowers, cutlery, and fine china. I love the relaxed atmosphere these old photos convey. In 1942 the AMPAS started handing Oscars in theaters where the awards continue to be held  today. As the forms of media changed so too did the awards ceremonies. Beginning in the Fifties newsreel camera footage showed attendees and nominees arriving at the Pantages theater in L.A.; millions more tuned into the broadcasts on television begun in 1953. The Oscars became an annual event.

By the 90's, marketing, advertising, the fashion industry, People magazine and the 24 television news cycle had descended.

 With the plethora of awards shows today, the Oscars has lost its distinctness. Not since 1940 have winners been announced beforehand, yet because of all the critic citations and other member voted programs devoted to movies, there is no longer any suspense in what actor or movie is going to win. Therefore, tired, overworked Americans, circa 2014, mostly gay men and straight females, just tune in to look at the borrowed dresses and baubles; and, as in the last few years, strained attempts at humor to make the telecast seem interesting. The show has become pure kitsch. I bet half the audience quits watching after the red carpet event shows like on E! channel.

Furthermore, why should we take seriously awards handed out by an organization 94% white, mostly male and over 50? Doesn't AMPAS sound like the G.O.P?

BROKEN BLOSSOMS

By 1919 Lillian Gish and D.W. Griffith had been working together as director and muse for nearly a decade. Don't let the date turn you away from this movie: it is one of the most poetic, tenderest love stories ever put on film. A tragic romance. Gish plays an abused girl of the London ghetto taken in by a kindly, young "Yellow Man" played by Richard Barthelmess. Unfortunately his love and care is not enough to save her from her sadistic father played by Donald Crisp. Despite being ill with Spanish influenza right before rehearsals were underway for the movie's production, Lillian Gish gives one of her iconic performances as a frail, virginal waif who is almost too pure and good for this world. Gish was reticent about assaying the role but Griffith forbid her to say no; he was a powerful influence on Gish's professional life. In her later years, when speaking of Griffith, she always referred to him as "Mr.Griffith, the Father of film."

Broken Blossoms is the reason it's hard to label Griffith racist. The movie is an interracial love story, and the Chinese man is the only decent man in the movie.

STAGECOACH

John Ford's Stagecoach is the quintessential western and one of the best ever made in the genre. After years of apprenticeship in undistinguished westerns, John Wayne broke out with his performance in this movie. He never forgot John Ford gave him his major break and the pair worked together on a number of movies, mostly westerns, despite their political differences. 

From an original short story that was published in Colliers, Ben Hecht and Dudley Nichols wrote a screenplay for Ford who had bought the rights to "Stage to Lordsburg." It had been years since Ford had made a western, even though today his westerns are what he is best known for. Producing it wasn't easy because westerns were thought of as B or even C pictures made on poverty row - Monogram and Republic studios - and John Wayne wasn't an established actor at this point. So Ford set up financing with independent producer Walter Wanger. The picture was released through United Artists. Stagecoach was an immediate hit upon release with critics and audiences and revived western moviemaking in Hollywood.

Screenwriter Dudley Nichols wrote many classics during the Golden Era of Hollywood: The Informer, Bringing Up Baby, For Whom the Bell Tolls and several John Ford directed. He won an Academy Award for The Informer but refused the award because the Writer's Guild was on strike at the time; the first award recipient to turn the golden bald little Oscar down. Despite this, Nichols was nominated three more times by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 

Everyone one in the cast is perfect, especially Thomas Mitchell playing an alcoholic doctor named "Doc." The Academy thought so too and awarded him an Best Supporting Acting award. In the same year Stagecoach was released he played Scarlett O'Hara's pa in Gone With the Wind. Claire Trevor plays the good hearted whore, Dallas,with a certain tough weariness that I guess most whores have. Trevor received top billing.When Ford was in talks with David O. Selznick to produce Stagecoach Selznick wanted Marlene Dietrich for the part of Dallas.  

The Birth of a Nation (1915)

D.W. Griffith's landmark movie epic The Birth of a Nation  from 1915 legitimized the movie industry in the United States. Birth was one of the first what we now call "feature" length movies. It ran a little over three hours and was shown as a roadshow engagement instead of the penny arcades where many watched movies in those days. The movie was the first to be shown in the White House - occupied at that time by Woodrow Wilson. Griffith earned the title "Father of film" due to the success and technical achievements of the movie. But the subject matter is seen today as racist and many historians have ambivalent feelings about the movie's huge success. Yes, on one hand Griffith set the standard for innovative film-making in his day; however, one cannot forget the awful caricatures of the African-Americans in the film, played by whites with obvious black face and what we now know and have - or should - a deep shame about: thousands of lynchings against African-Americans for sport during the early 1900's. There is a lynching in the movie. To watch Birth is to admire Griffith laying the ground work in editing, story structure, camera movements, and lighting for future movie makers; conversely it is also a time capsule of an era when the portrayal of the Klu Klux Klan so captured the imagination of certain moviegoers that not long after the terrorist group, for that is what they were, was revitalized, not only in the south but the midwest as well. Birth was a powerful recruiting tool: it fed the imagination of a glorified past when after the civil war southerners had to fight back against the carpetbaggers and Yankees who let African-Americans run wild, i.e., basically let them be the equal of whites. The thought of being molested by a African-American man sends one white woman over the cliff literally in the movie. Of course sexual assault was more prevalent the other way around: white men attacking African-American women. So one has to watch Birth for the art and not the message.

This quote from James Agee: "The most beautiful single shot I have seen in any movie is the battle charge in 'The Birth of a Nation.' I have heard it praised for its realism, but it is also far beyond realism. It seems to me to be a realization of a collective dream of what the Civil War was like..."

Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film (1980)

Hollywood is eminent movie historian Kevin Brownlow's blockbuster miniseries about the American silent movie era. It is one the finest and most informative documentaries about silent Hollywood or any period in Hollywood in terms of the scope and history it covers. The documentary is a movie lover's dream and essential viewing. Over the course of four years in the mid-to-late 1970's Brownlow interviewed hundreds of silent movie stars, directors, producers, technicians, journalists and writers who were employed in Hollywood during the first fifteen to twenty years of the movie business  British produced, shamefully this documentary never received proper distribution in the U.S., but now can viewed on Youtube. Here is the link.

The genesis of Hollywood started with the publication of Brownlow's The Parade's Gone By.. in 1968. The book is considered a classic among movie buffs, and with Hollywood being the standard bearer of movie documentaries, Parade is the definitive book about silent era Hollywood. Thames television produced the series Hollywood and according to Brownlow spent about $1 million making it, big money back then especially for British television. Though reluctant at first to work in television, Brownlow was also a filmmaker, he decided to do it after being impressed by the company. In some instances Brownlow had to pay film stars like Gish and Swanson, and a few stars like Alice Terry were interviewed but didn't want to appear on camera after 50 odd years. Most, however, were open with Brownlow, sharing their memories of this early golden era in movies.

In an interview with UPI in 1980 when Hollywood aired Brownlow stated: "Hollywood is not a history of the silent screen era. It is a homage - but clear eyed and realistic - of the 15 dramatic years in the life of an industry whose films are the closest we will get to H.G. Wells' Time Machine."

The movie has 13 episodes:

PIONEERS
IN THE BEGINNING
SINGLE BEDS AND DOUBLE STANDARDS
HOLLYWOOD GOES TO WAR
HAZARD OF THE GAME
SWANSON AND VALENTINO
THE AUTOCRATS
COMEDY - A SERIOUS BUSINESS
OUT WEST
THE MAN WITH THE MEGAPHONE
TRICK OF THE LIGHT
STAR TREATMENT
END OF AN ERA

The Pink Panther Strikes Again [1976]

In 1976 this was the newest, though not the pinkest Pink Panther movie. The fourth movie in the Pink Panther series is mainly a showcase for Peter Sellers and Herbert Lom. They're both like a middle aged Laurel and Hardy without the physical dissimilarities. It's generally funny in parts: Sellers dressed up as Quasimodo then floating out a window while on the phone, going to a gay bar and being sung to and hit on by a drag queen, but the gags and slapstick get old and the movie lags after an hour and it becomes apparent the slapstick routines make up for the lack of any story; no point of the movie being made besides a repeated formula had made hit movies before. Omar Sharif makes a brief cameo as an assassin, he had the lead alongside director Blake Edwards's wife Julie Andrews in "The Tamarind Seed" [1974], and Lesley Anne-Down shows up as a Russian defector trying to seduce Clouseau, which is weird and icky because she looks like teenager.  Two years later Peter Sellers would play Clouseau for a fifth and final time in "Revenge of the Pink Panther" [1978] which is on my list of movies to watch mainly because Dyan Cannon is in it.

TVM: The Third Girl from the Left [1973]

DIRECTOR: Peter Medak
WRITER:     Dory Previn


In 1973 Kim Novak had been off the big screen for four years having retreated from Hollywood to her home on a hilltop in Carmel, Ca. with a menagerie of animals. Her last two movies, The Legend of Lylah Clare and The Great Bank Robbery, had been duds, and she was approaching an important milestone for many actresses: her fortieth birthday.

Unfortunately, without the distinction of The Third Girl from the Left being Novak and Tony Curtis's television movie debuts and the first and only movie written by legendary songwriter and performer Dory Previn, Third Girl would've vanished after it aired in 1973. It's hardly a memorable piece of work from either actors'careers, although Curtis is first-rate, or of the director Peter Medak.

Television is often a writer's medium and when the writing stinks it shows in the actor's performances because of the tight camerawork: mostly medium shots and close-ups. Dory Previn was a famed Oscar nominated songwriter but her narrative writing here misses the park. It's a promising premise: an over-the-hill showgirl begins a relationship with a younger man while everything else falls around her, including her relationship with Tony Curtis whom she's been trying to get to marry her for thirteen years.

 In an Earl Wilson column interview Dory Previn , a former chorus girl, stated she wrote Third Girl because she wanted to write about what happens to chorus girls as they grow older. "The girls never have names," she told Wilson, "The choreographer says, 'Third girl from the left, you're out of step.' Some try suicide." Given that Previn was a talented songwriter it's no surprise that the most memorable thing about the movie is her haunting song she wrote and sang: "Gloria."

Director Peter Medak was a director from England and had just helmed The Ruling Class [1972] with Peter O'Toole. Third Girl was Medak's American produced movie debut, an inauspicious one. The directing here seems routine - like I said television is mostly a writer's medium.  He would go on to work primarily in television except with some notable theatrical movies like Let Him Have It [1991] and Romeo is Bleeding [1993].

The cast includes Michael Brandon as Novak's lover, George Furth, Barbi Benton, Louis Guss, Michael Conrad, Larry Bishop, and Anne Ramsey.

Third Girl was produced by Hugh Hefner's Playboy Production company and aired on ABC as part of their Tuesday night "Movie-of-the-Week" series.