Review-O-Sphere

  To see part 1, click here . Nightmare Alley Suite~Nightmare Alley - Cyril J. Mockridge Despite this being the 20th installment of the Academy Awards, there wasn’t much pomp, circumstance or drama (sad as it is to say). Probably the only really notable thing, since it’ll allow us to segue into our first film, is that James Baskett won the Honorary Award for his portrayal as Uncle Remus in Song of the South , making him the first African-American man to win an Academy Award. Walt Disney fell off during the war years as he spent most of it trying to keep his company afloat and primarily invested in making anthology films (basically lower-budget versions of Fantasia (1940)). Song of the South was one of his first serious forays back into the features. And if you’ve never heard of this movie, then I seriously envy that rock that you’ve been living under. Song of the South is set on a plantation in (what I presume is since the film never clearly establishes a year) the post-Ci...

  Main Titles~Gentleman's Agreement - Edward B. Powell The Lost Weekend (1945), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and Gentleman’s Agreement form a nice little trilogy of Oscar winners that seemed to be seriously challenging social mores and analyzing social issues that post-war Americans would have been going through. In an ideal world, this is something that I should be able to say about the Oscar winner every year but I digress. And similar to the other two films, Gentleman’s Agreement seems to occupy a much more realistic setting, trying to showcase a situation that feels like it could actually happen. Based on a best-selling novel that actually came out that same year (damn, Hollywood worked fast back then), Gentleman’s Agreement details the story of Philip Schuyler Greene (Gregory Peck), a magazine writer who is hired by his boss, Mr. Minify (Albert Dekker), to write an article on anti-Semitism. Greene struggles to come up with a unique angle on how to best address t...