Oscars Retrospective: Around the World in 80 Days (29th Academy Awards Review Pt. 2)
To see part 1, click here.
Rock Around the Clock~Bill Haley & His CometsAround the World in 80 Days is another case of an Academy Award winner that is a decent, even good, movie but because it was declared the greatest movie of the year, it invites a degree of scrutiny that it cannot hold up under. This isn’t helped by the fact that there were a number of classics that came out in 1956. Let’s start talking about them, shall we?
Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare (and subsequent Lavender Scare) perished in one of the most famous political downfalls of all time when the Senator from Wisconsin was publicly humiliated on national television, censured by the Senate and then drank himself to death, all without catching a single Communist spy. This, coupled with the Supreme Court overturning some of the HUAC laws, the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott and increasing demographic changes, meant that American culture did start taking a more liberal bent in the late 50s going into the 60s. 1956 has three films that are worth addressing in this regard though I don’t think any of them are anything special.
Storm Center
was the first anti-McCarthy movie, as it is the tragic tale of a librarian (Bette Davis) whose life is ruined by her local town because she refuses to get rid of books holding Communist theories. It’s a good parable and a decent enough movie but it’s also about as subtle as a brick to the face and pushes the envelope so far in the opposite direction that it becomes eyeroll-worthy.
After Blackboard Jungle (1955) blew audiences away by having rock-and-roll on its soundtrack, Rock Around the Clock
broke ground by being the first musical to consist entirely of the Devil’s music. The film is a (very) fictionalized account of how rock-and-roll was discovered, being based around the musical stylings of Bill Haley and His Comets. The movie is fun, if forgettable, but also set the stage for later rock musicals such as Jailhouse Rock (1957) and Yellow Submarine (1968).
And, finally, the Academy Award for Best Original Story went to The Brave One
a movie about a young Mexican boy who raises a bull and tries to save it from being killed by bullfighters. It’s about as good as your typical “boy and pet” stories of this era (and by good, I mean terrible) though the climactic bullfight is very harrowing. What’s notable though, is that this Academy Award win was won by Richie Rich, a pseudonym given by Dalton Trumbo, one of the Blacklisted Hollywood Ten (“Mr. Rich” did not appear at the ceremony because he said that his wife was expecting so the Award was accepted on his behalf by a WGA exec). The fact that one of the Hollywood Ten won an Academy Award less than five years after the Blacklist was established is a fun little piece of irony and would let people in on the joke perform a nice little silent rebellion. Almost all of those blacklisted would be back in work by the end of the decade.
Moving on. Ingrid Bergman won the Academy Award for Best Leading Actress for her role as the titular lost princess in Anastasia.
This is one of the classic, great 50s love films as a Russian club owner named Sergei (Yul Brynner) meets a young woman named Anna (Bergman) who thinks that she’s the lost Russian princess, Anastasia Romanov, who allegedly escaped when her family was massacred during the Bolshevik Revolution. The film is then about him trying to piece together Anna’s lost past, figuring out if she is the lost Russian princess and, most importantly, introducing her to to the family’s sole survivor, Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna (Helen Hayes), who’s offering a bounty to anyone who can find her lost granddaughter.
The film was based on a then-famous news story when a real-life woman claimed to be Anastasia Romanov and gained press for it. The story was of course debunked and the woman exposed as a fraud (the real-life Anastasia Romanov was brutally murdered with the rest of her family, her body just wasn’t displayed in the pictures of the event and the story wasn’t revealed until after the Berlin Wall fell and Soviet info was declassified) but the film takes this fairy tale idea and makes a pretty good movie out of it. Anastasia is an overall good drama but where it really shines are the scenes where Anna meets her grandmother. Bergman and Hayes are amazing together and really get across the tragedy of what happened to the Romanov family. The whole movie is worth watching to see these two together.
(I’m probably obligated to mention the 1998 20th Century Fox (not Disney!) remake of the same name, which has most of the same story beats but changes it to an animated musical. Despite including a subplot of an evil wizard and song sequences, I actually think this is a rare case of the original and remake being of comparable quality to each other. Watch both and decide which is better for yourself!)
The Academy Award for Best Documentary (Feature) went to one of the greatest and most influential documentaries of all time, Le Monde du Silence which translates to The Silent World.
The film details life aboard the Calypso, a vessel chartered to study marine flora and fauna, captained by Jacques Cousteau, a man whose name would become synonymous with aquatic documentaries. This is debatably the first modern documentary as many previous documentaries such as Nanook of the North (1922) or the Why We Fight films (1941-1946) were basically propaganda films or just completely made-up. If it was about showing Americans foreign culture, usually the locals were directed to act like obnoxious stereotypes of said culture instead of providing a real look-see.
The Silent World eschews most of that… kinda. Granted, the sailors on board are clearly mugging it up a bit for the camera and the music and editing does sometime speed up the pace to make things seem more dramatic than they actually are, but the meat of The Silent World is just showing the beautiful underwater abyss and Cousteau sharing his love of it with us. Underwater cinematography was pioneered with the fictional films 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1953) and Creature from the Black Lagoon (1953) so it was only a matter of time before some brave documentarian started using that technology to inform. Splurging for Technicolor helps make these aquatic vistas a true wonder to behold. The Silent World was a revolutionary documentary for how it’s paced, how it's edited and how it shows this aquatic wilderness.
It also shows a fascinating time capsule of life aboard a scientific expedition before the environmentalist movement gained hold in the 1960s. Cousteau is often considered the father of the conservation movement, probably as a mea culpa for the over-the-top environmental damage he commits in The Silent World, which would be comical if it wasn’t for the fact that these things really happened. Highlights include him and his crew running over a baby whale with their boat, stabbing the sharks who try to eat said baby whale carcass and dynamiting a coral reef.
We discussed during the WWII years how documentaries are a great cinematic art form that are segregated from the regular Academy Awards and have never once even been nominated for Best Picture. If there was a time for this to happen, this should’ve been it. The Silent World is one of the most oft-remembered films of the 50s and inspires more curiosity about the world around us than Around the World in 80 Days certainly does. But maybe should the awards have a separate category for fictional films versus non-fictional films? But if that’s the case, maybe it should say so. The Silent World was the first (and, for a very long time, only) documentary film to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival so it clearly has cinematic chops that should be respected.
After years of numerous snubs from foreign cinema, the 29th Academy Awards featured the first instance of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the first winner of which was La Strada (Eng.: The Road).
The breakout film of Federico Fellini (the most famous Italian director of the 20th Century), La Strada took the world by storm when it first came out and was one of the first films of the impending European New Wave. (This movement is often called the French New Wave because it was based out of Paris and Parisian movie theaters and revolved around the (somewhat snooty) magazine, Cahiers du Cinéma, but I think calling it the European New Wave is a more accurate title. Mainly because just calling it French ignores many other, equally important filmmakers during the late 50s and 60s who were part of this movement such as Fellini, Ingmar Bergman and Luis Buñuel.) Similar to the Neorealist movement, the New Wave had films that were based more on personal, realistic stories instead of the flights of fancy that those silly Americans liked to indulge in. Unlike the Neorealist movement, which usually had a grittier aesthetic, New Wave films were much more stylized and tried to experiment with the actual medium of filmmaking. Also, while Neorealist movies were usually very classist in nature, New Wave films tended to ask more complex questions about society which don’t have easy answers (and are practically never answered in the movies themselves).
La Strada, and Fellini’s filmmaking in general, is a bit of an in-between as it has some gorgeous shots but it’s usually interspersed throughout in an otherwise grim environment. La Strada is about a strongman performer named Zampanó (Anthony Quinn) who purchases a shy woman named Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina) from her parents to act as his assistant. The movie then details their life on the road in kind of an odd couple relationship though, make no mistake, this is not a pleasant movie romance. Zampanó is a wicked brute of a man who likes to leave Gelsomina in a ditch while he goes to spend his money on hookers and wine but alternately beats her if she even thinks of leaving him. He’s probably one of the most flat-out unlikable protagonists in cinematic history and that’s what makes La Strada one of the great films. The last act really tries to make you feel pity for this dude and it’s a fun question of just how much you can sympathize with someone who has virtually no redeeming qualities.
The film was actually more controversial in Europe than it was in America as a brawl broke out at the Venice Film Festival when La Strada was announced as the winner which really goes to show how stupidly people take this stuff. Some people like to throw fists, others spend 5 years on the Internet watching a century’s worth of film history to castigate people who’ve been dead for 50 years.
Anyway, while La Strada did deserve its win, we’re still sticking in foreign cinema for a bit for two other major films, neither of which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Cinema or any Oscars. From France, there was Du Rififi Chez Les Hommes, released in America as just Rififi.
A heist film noir directed by Jules Dassin (an American noir director who fled to France after being blacklisted), Rififi is one of the high water marks of the heist genre and is often considered one of the greatest movies ever made. I personally disagree as I think that the climactic setpieces are very underwhelming and try way too hard to redeem its protagonists. What no one will disagree with, however, is that Rififi has one of the greatest movie scenes ever made.
The centerpiece of any heist movie is the heist itself and Rififi stands heads and shoulders above the genre with what is quite possibly the greatest heist in cinematic history. The sequence (where the burglars break into a jewelry store) is almost a full half-hour long and features no dialogue or music; only the hushed sound effects. The film does a great job at establishing that they have to rob the store and get out before the Sun comes up. As a result, you’re very aware of the ticking time clock and constantly on edge wondering if the burglars will be able to accomplish the heist in time. The heist is a phenomenal showcase of minimalist filmmaking as, despite having no dialogue or music (I really can’t emphasize this enough), it is downright hypnotizing to watch. (It’s so excellent that I think this is why the last act of Rififi is a little weak; there’s no topping this scene).
One of the great filmmaking debates is how much does one great scene elevate a movie? Obviously, a movie is the sum of its parts but sometimes you have a movie where it has one sequence that is just so much more electrifying than everything else around it. Making a movie is hard but a scene can really show the height of a filmmaker’s prowess: the ability to show how good you can structure a moment by telling a complete story, while moving a bigger story, in one single location. That’s why, for a long time, people have been clamoring for the Academy Award for Best Scene to become a thing. This should’ve been the year that this should’ve been established. Even back then, audiences and critics were floored by this heist scene and it was lauded on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean and considered a masterclass in filmmaking. Rififi didn’t even receive an honorary award for contributions to cinema. The amount of planning and creativity required to make this heist is something that should be acknowledged and it was not.
Even if they were Hellbent on ignoring Rififi because of Dassin’s Blacklist status, there are American examples of Best Scene that deserved an Academy Award. Another epic sequence of the year was in Alfred Hitchcock’s remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much.
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The film is solid, not one of Hitchcock’s best, but a pretty fun thriller. What really stands out about it is the climactic sequence where our main characters try to stop an assassination that will take place during the final crescendo of a concert. It’s an electrifying sequence that shows how much the Master of Suspense lived up to his moniker.
Moving onto another major snub, this one from Japan, Ikiru (Eng.: To Live)
is another one of the greatest movies ever made as it revolves around an elderly bureaucrat named Mr. Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) who discovers that he has terminal stomach cancer and is going to die in a year. Realizing that he has wasted his life in a meaningless job that he loathes, he embarks on a journey to give his life some meaning before he expires. Ikiru has some truly powerful ruminations about both the meaning of life and the meaninglessness of bureaucracy.
In the interest of saving space, I won’t give the full feature treatment to Ikiru but just conclude this section by acknowledging that La Strada, Rififi and Ikiru are all far, far superior films to Around the World in 80 Days and two of them went unjustly unacknowledged by the Academy. Apparently, if it doesn’t start some drama that some Los Angeleno parasites who crave drama and press can latch onto, it isn’t worth acknowledging. But, you know what, let’s play it their way, shall we?
1956 was the high water mark of the film epic trend. Movies kept getting longer and bigger and grander in scale to keep driving butts into the theaters. All five movies nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture were large-scale epics and there were a few more that weren’t nominated because, again, the Academy insisted on truncating the list of nominees from ten to five because they say that only five movies are good enough for them to take time out of their days to watch. But, yes, the epic was what was on the mind of the pop culture zeitgeist when this ceremony occurred. So, let’s look at some epic cinema and see which ones, if any, of them, are superior to Around the World in 80 Days. Or, let’s be more accurate and say that we’re going to analyze why all of them are better movies than Around the World in 80 Days.
First on on the nominee list was Friendly Persuasion
the shortest of the films here but also one of the most interesting. The movie revolves around a family of Quakers called the Birdwells who end up caught in the middle between their devotion to their faith (which dictates absolute pacifism) and being caught up in the impending American Civil War.
Friendly Persuasion is mostly a character study of the Quaker faith in mid-century frontier America and the war doesn’t come in until the last third but this works to the film’s advantage. By indulging us in the world of this family and seeing how happy their lifestyle makes them, it makes their final shootout with the Confederates much more harrowing. It’s very smart filmmaking as it’s suspenseful on multiple levels as you’re both afraid for the characters getting killed but you also don’t want to see them kill and sacrifice their morals. Despite the excitement of the war not appearing until very late in the film, you’re always aware of it approaching and know the decision that the characters are going to encounter sooner or later. It keeps you very invested all the way through and helps serve the film’s excellent parable.
Next on the nominee list was The King and I
which was based on the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical which was based on the previous (inferior) film Anna and the King of Siam (1946) which was based on the novel of the same name which was based on the memoirs of the real-life Anna Leonowens (played in this film by Deborah Kerr), a British governess who was given the opportunity to teach the many children and wives of Mongkut, the King of Siam (Yul Brynner). Given that we’re talking about five degrees of separation here, I’m not going to dwell on the historical accuracy of the film (or more likely the lack thereof) and just talk about it as is.
This film was beloved when it came out and is still often considered one of the essential musicals of the 1950s. The songs by Rodgers and Hammerstein are amazing, the production design is incredible but what people love about it are the two leads. It’s a great story that gives King Mongkut a surprisingly identifiable conflict as he’s caught between the traditionalism and barbarism of his past and the civilized future he wants to lead his people to. You’re never quite sure where on this spectrum of barbarism he’ll fall and the decision he makes at the end does always get me wondering if he’ll do the right thing.
That having been said, there are problems here that I’m more aware of after having watched this movie as an adult. For one thing, while Mongkut is an interesting character, Brynner is quite obviously not a Siamese man and I can easily see that voice he’s putting on offending an Asian person. Also, coming off of the glorious tap-dancing and epic sets of Singin’ in the Rain (1952), the musical numbers in The King and I are much more underwhelming than I remember. Don’t get me wrong, the songs are great, some of the best, but do you remember the actual scenes accompanying these songs? Most of them are just the characters standing and singing (or really monologuing) as the camera sits perfectly still.
For example, one of the best songs in the movie is A Puzzlement, a metaphysical piece where King Mongkut contemplates his growing older, the world making less sense to him and how he feels unsure of his place in it. Quite a lot you can do with that in terms of dance and visual stimuli and the film does none of them.
(Little-known fun fact: like Anastasia, The King and I was also remade as an animated film during the animation renaissance of the 1990s. Unlike the Anastasia remake, this one is much more wretched and is often considered the worst film to have been adapted from a Rodgers & Hammerstein product. Do yourself a favor and stick with the original here.)
Third on the nominees list and the winner of the Academy Award for Best Director, which indicates that this was probably the strongest competitor for the Best Picture award, was Giant.
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The best way to describe Giant is as the Texan and more politically correct equivalent to Gone With the Wind (1939), though not quite that good. A young woman named Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor) marries a Texan rancher named Bick Benedict (Rock Hudson) who owns a ranch that goes back several generations and is greatly looking forward to leaving the ranch in the exact same position for his children and his children’s children. He also embodies literally every stereotype about Texas you could possibly imagine and, like most Texans, has a very stubborn view of the world that won’t budge. This leads to a beautifully toxic marriage as the far more socially conscious Leslie constantly questions everything about Benedict’s point of view. Their world is further shaken up as Texas transitions from a rural ranching economy to an affluent manufacturing one with the rise of oil.
Giant is one of those movies that I find very aggravating to watch because it’s so close to being a masterpiece and so much about it is so good which just makes the very big flaws all the more annoying. The cinematography is incredible, the make-up job on all the characters showing the passing of years is pretty flawless and I find Bick Benedict a downright fascinating character. While he has some ugly opinions showcased in the film, what I find interesting is how they portray the difference between ignorant conservatism and actual racism and misogyny. To Benedict, women stay in the kitchen and the Tejanos don’t marry white kids because that’s just the way things have always been in his world. But when confronted and challenged on these viewpoints, he can’t seem to give any sort of logical reason why this is so. The fun of Benedict’s arc is seeing these values contrast with other values that are probably even more sacred to him over the course of his life.
While Giant is about celebrating Texas, it’s also surprisingly pretty critical towards Texan culture, particularly in the societal racism inflicted upon Tejanos, which was pretty progressive for the time. (Most films that featured civil rights issues during the Golden Age of Hollywood were usually banned in Southern states but Giant was an exception just because Texans love Texas so much that they wouldn’t dare let a movie about Texas not be screened in Texas. It ended up doing quite well in the Lone Star State.)
That’s what’s great about Giant. What sucks about Giant is that this is a movie that really loves to hear itself talk and seems to have no respect for the intelligence of its viewer. Every difficult decision that the Benedict family makes or societal upheaval they encounter is spelled out in painstaking detail, no matter how visually well it’s weaved. For example, the climax of the film is actually very cathartic to watch. It eschews the typical Hollywood finale for something that makes you think a bit more and requires the characters to make a more difficult decision than you might initially predict and ultimately ties together the entire moral in a very clever way. But don’t worry, if all that requires too much thinking for you, Bick and Leslie will spend another ten minutes analyzing the whole scene and explaining what it means. Considering how the movie is running over 3 hours by this point, it gets really obnoxious. This is one of those film epics where it did not need to be this long and feels like they were padding most of it so they could get the epic label. (It’s also one of those nominees that I actually wish did win even if it’s not the best movie of the year just because it would be much more fascinating to analyze than Around the World in 80 Days.)
Giant is one of those movies that I think deserves a remake as it could really be something special with some ironing out of the flaws. I don’t think it’s the best movie of the year nor the best directing job of the year (that second one should’ve gone to Jules Dassin for the aforementioned Rififi but they couldn’t deny the almighty Blacklist, now could they?) but it still has some great things worth mining and remains one of the top 3 movies that James Dean ever starred in.
Before moving onto the final nominee, which will act as our feature presentation, we need to look at a few nominots. One that isn’t a good movie but is worth acknowledging is Laurence Olivier’s Richard III
the last film of the 40s and 50s Shakespeare boom and a poor one to go out on. Richard III (1592) is already one of Shakespeare’s most complex and difficult-to-follow plays so trimming some fat to fit the running time just makes it even more labyrinthine. Still, the film has a legacy to it as Olivier’s performance as Richard III of Gloucester was lauded and, while it had middling receipts on its original release, its re-release in the 60s was a major hit. Nowadays, it’s considered Olivier’s weakest Shakespeare film, making this an interesting study on how a film’s legacy can valley and peak and valley again throughout the years.
Another film that I’ll be quick-hitting because of its quality (or lack thereof) is King Vidor’s War and Peace
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a frankly terrible film that might be the only one of these high-grossing film epics that’s actually worse than Around the World in 80 Days. Despite the action scenes being excellent, it feels like the poor man’s Gone With the Wind (1939) (which probably influenced all of these movies and is a good yardstick to grade them by) with a 58-year-old Henry Fonda being wildly miscast as its 20-something-year-old protagonist. The film seems to have a misguided assumption that in a movie about the Napoleonic Wars, the focus should be on some teenage melodrama in the one time period of the Russian court where everyone had American accents.
Rounding out these adaptations of major works was John Huston’s adaptation of Moby Dick,
a much better adaptation of an even more labyrinthine novel. This movie is usually a bit more highly rated than Richard III and War and Peace, mostly because Moby Dick lends itself well to being an exciting chase film, balancing a great work of literature with being commercially viable. Most of the sailors are adapted well but it’s Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab who steals the show. Some critics at the time felt that the actor was miscast but I personally disagree as Peck does get down the obsessive nature of the character quite well.
Where Moby Dick fails miserably though is the special effects. Huston wanted the film to look like an illustration of old whaling prints, which is a neat concept, but it results in green screen effects and color correction that makes the film look hilariously fake, even by the standards of the time period that it came out in. It’s a distracting mood whiplash at times when you see Ahab monologuing about his obsessive desire to harpoon this whale while it’s clear that he is standing nowhere near the ocean. Which does raise a fun question here though: Both Around the World in 80 Days and Moby Dick are big special effects films but while Moby Dick is a better story, Around the World in 80 Days actually looks more convincing. Which one makes for the better film in this case?
If we were to grade these epics based on what film had the longest legacy and staying power, then the clear answer would have to be Godzilla, King of the Monsters!
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One of the most iconic creatures to come out of the Land of the Rising Sun, Godzilla (called Gojira in Japan which is also the original title of the film) pioneered the kaiju genre ("kaiju" roughly translates to “strange beast”), which is a type of movie where giant monsters tear apart cities and beat the stuffing out of each other. Godzilla spawned a franchise where he would confront other monsters, a franchise that is still ongoing to this day. These creatures possessed all sorts of cool designs in their own rights and allowed filmmakers to come up with creative ways to cause major property damage. Rodan, Mothra, Ghidorah, Gamera and Gigan are just a few other names that would join Godzilla’s lexicon and are responsible for more cheesy, over-the-top movies than you could possibly count.
In light of all this silliness, it is easy to forget that the very first Godzilla movie was meant to be a legitimate horror movie. Instead of the bright sunny skies and silly characters of later films, the original Godzilla is shot mainly in the dark with uncomfortable close-ups of the death and destruction that he causes. In fact, that famously fake rubber suit looks less fake in this movie than its sequels because you almost never have a good enough look at the creature. Instead of being the protector of Earth, Godzilla is an allegory for the death and waste caused by the atomic bomb (which is fitting considering how Japan’s the only country to ever find itself on the wrong end of one). This is far and away the most iconic film on the rundown and would help introduce a whole generation of audiences to Japanese actors with inexplicably American accents whose dialogue is never appropriately synced with their lip movements.
Given that it’s a sci-fi foreign film, you would think that Godzilla, King of the Monsters! would be subject to genre snobbery, and in some ways it was, but there’s a bit of an asterisk that bears mentioning here. When the film was adapted to America, it was dubbed into English and re-edited to include several American actors, one of whom monologues almost the entirety of the film, painfully spelling out the moral of the film instead of simply showing it. Then again, this didn’t necessarily stop Giant from getting notable accolades so maybe we can still hold it against them for not acknowledging the film. Still, there are two editions of this classic and the one that the Academy would’ve been seeing at the time was significantly worse.
(I also must conduct a slight mea culpa here and admit that I’m actually not entirely sure just how much our arguments for foreign-language films not being nominated have held water throughout the early years of Hollywood. Nowadays if you watch these films, you’ll most likely be seeing the original version with subtitles but, back then, many studios importing films would’ve had them dubbed into English, and in a very poor manner at that. Most of these dubs are now lost which can make it hard to know whether audiences, and the Academy, would’ve been judging the original film subtitled or a chopped-up dubbed version with the IQ points dropped a few percentiles. To my knowledge, more pulpy films that would appeal to a wide audience like Godzilla and Seven Samurai (1955) would’ve been dubbed while higher-brow, arthouse stuff like Ikiru and La Strada would’ve been subtitled. Since we ascertain these criticisms by the films that would’ve been available to the Hollywood community at the time, we can lay off some of these foreign snub complaints for the near future.)
It’s time for our three-part feature presentation. If there was any science-fiction that was a victim of genre snobbery, that would’ve had to have been the crown jewel of the science-fiction craze, Forbidden Planet.
Forbidden Planet takes place in the far-off future as an expedition led by Dr. Edward Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) took place on the far-off planet, Altair IV. Earth has long since lost contact with Morbius and has sent a new expedition led by Commander John J. Adams (Leslie Nielsen - yes, that same Leslie Nielsen who used to be a dramatic actor in his youth) to investigate the planet and make contact with Dr. Morbius, despite his warnings to stay away. The film is largely about Adams’ crew investigating the planet, interacting with Morbius and learning the secrets about the hidden dangers on Altair IV that ruined Morbius’ first expedition.
Forbidden Planet has an almost Citizen Kane (1941)-esque level of impact as it pushed the boundaries of the science-fiction genre so headily that you could easily separate films that came out before Forbidden Planet from those that came out after. (In particular, Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek (1966-1969) clearly took a lot from this, which itself had such an influence that you can’t swing a cat at MIT without hitting a student whose passion for science sprung from that TV show.) It was the first film to take place entirely on another planet as it features humans going to another world instead of aliens coming to ours. It was the first film to feature spaceships capable of interstellar space travel. It was the first film of any kind, sci-fi or otherwise, to feature an entirely electronic score (though The Lost Weekend (1945) and its use of the theremin was probably more of a pioneer in this regard but it apparently had some other instruments mixed in), giving it a very unnerving atmosphere. And it was the first film to feature a robot character who has a personality with Robby the Robot (voiced by Marvin Miller) who is the best character in the movie.
While many science-fiction films of the 50s were low-grade monster movies that were obvious allegories for the dangers posed by atomic weaponry and mutually-assured destruction, Forbidden Planet stands out from the pack with some more interesting themes. I can’t really go into the excellence of the plot without giving the big mystery of the film away but let me assure you that it’ll make you put your thinking cap on. Forbidden Planet essentially acts as a whodunnit that works on multiple levels. It’s great fun learning about how all these things on this planet and in this future work and keeps the audience on its toes as it plays catch up on the film’s internal rules. The reveal of what the monster actually is is a real mindbender and lends itself to giving the film rewatch value so you can see all the little clues leading up to its first appearance.
Now, admittedly, the story in this film is more interesting than the characters, most of whom are pretty dull (aside from the aforementioned Robby the Robot), but the production design makes up for it. While you can tell it’s a little bit dated and not entirely real, it’s still groundbreaking. The charm of these sorts of sets is knowing that someone went through the effort to build, design and paint all these fun sci-fi gadgets. And it’s not one of those movies where it almost takes place in just one room so they could’ve made one set and been done with it. The movie takes you from the spaceship to the ruins of another spaceship to Dr. Morbius’ home to his lab to the different locales on the planet itself.
Forbidden Planet did earn a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Special Effects (rightfully so) though, because it’s science-fiction, it was never going to get anywhere close to the Best Picture nomination. This, to me, is one of the most egregious cases of genre snobbery we’ve seen yet in this series. There is an argument to be made linking the sci-fi craze with a sort of juvenilization of pop culture in the 50s but 1. acting like every “adult” film of the 30s and 40s was worthy but this wasn’t is a complete crock of bull and 2. this writes off the potential that the genre presents. Disregarding Forbidden Planet just because it shares a genre with crap like Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957) would be like disregarding The King and I just because it shares a genre with Show Boat (1936). Sounds really stupid when you put it like that, right? While, like I said, the characters aren’t the greatest, there’s a lot more subtlety and clever themes to Forbidden Planet than Around the World in 80 Days.
But at the very least Forbidden Planet did receive some sort of nomination which is more than I can say for The Searchers.
Widely considered the greatest classical Western ever made as well as John Ford and John Wayne’s respective masterpiece, The Searchers acts as both the perfect ideal and elegant deconstruction of the genre. The film revolves around a Confederate veteran named Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) who returns home after the war to reunite with his brother, Aaron (Walter Coy) and sister-in-law, Martha (Dorothy Jordan). The reunion is cut short, however, when a band of Comanches attack the homestead and kidnap Aaron and Martha’s daughters, Debbie (Natalie Wood) and Lucy (Pippa Scott). Ethan then leads a posse into the great American wilderness on a years-long quest to track down and rescue his nieces.
The history of the Wild West is one that has long been steeped in blood and suffering by the constant raids between American settlers and the Native Americans. To settlers living on the frontier, Native attacks were considered the stuff of nightmares and it could be worth your life to stray too far away from civilization. Thus, in movies that are celebrating the mythology of the American West, most of the villains would usually be Native raiders and these characters would have scarcely any more depth to them than the Frankenstein’s Monster. In a more enlightened era, we realize that things were less black-and-white and that these raids usually occurred because the Native tribes were being encroached upon, genocided, had different ideas of how treaties worked than those of European descent and those treaties were habitually dishonored.
There’s a lot of argument for how the portrayal of Native Americans in most of these Westerns is downright appalling to modern sensibilities to say the least, and John Ford is no exception to that rule. While there were some movies that would try to portray Native Americans in a more complex light or have token good guys (a great example of this would be the excellent Broken Arrow (1950)), you wouldn’t get films that would actually shine lights on these cultures until all the way in the 1990s.
This is important to understand because The Searchers seems like that typical classic Western about cowboys and Indians but there’s a lot more going on underneath the surface. Ethan Edwards’ language and actions concerning the Native Americans that he meets is so vile that it seems to contradict the movie's own plot structure. At first, you think the way he speaks is par for the course for a movie from this era but it gets so ugly to such a degree that even your average American in the 1950s couldn’t ignore how intensely hateful he is. One of the big developments in the plot (which makes the film even more interesting and will probably make you want to see this more so I’ll hope you forgive the mild spoiler) is that he comes to learn that his niece has spent so much time as a Comanche that she has embraced their culture. Edwards thus changes his quest to continue searching for his niece so he can kill her and put her out of her misery. The man is literally so obsessed with his hatred for these people that he’d rather kill a member of his own family than let her live as a Comanche.
Despite this, The Searchers still plays into the Western tropes of almost every Native that Edwards encounters being a whooping savage. You could make the argument that this might just be the world as seen through Edwards’ eyes but the more fascinating historiography is that it’s a film being made by a director who seems to be wanting to conduct a mea culpa for his treatment towards this culture but is unable to overcome his own prejudiced views and clichés. Even ignoring this aspect, The Searchers is still excellent in its tale of a complex, war-torn man being cursed to wander the Earth in his insatiable quest for violence and how that violence poisons his soul. It perfectly embodies the ruggedness of the West with the beautiful dead vistas reflecting the dying soul of its cynical main character and is easily both John Ford’s best film and John Wayne’s best performance (and take that from someone who usually doesn’t like either of these men’s movies). It does sometimes fall into Ford’s perennial trap of having annoying comic relief that seems out-of-place for such a dour setting but these comic relief characters seem easier to divorce from the action than in any of his other movies (all of these comic relief scenes exist at the homestead; everytime Edwards rides out into the frontier, the movie gets great again).
But how do you wash the down masterpiece of one film legend? With another. The final Best Picture nominee, and the most famous film epic of the 1950s, was Cecil B. DeMille’s masterpiece, The Ten Commandments.
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Prelude~Elmer Bernstein - The Ten Commandments
In a year full of big films, The Ten Commandments was probably the biggest of them all. DeMille was 74 when it came out and was suffering almost monthly heart attacks so it was kind of a given that this was going to be his very last film. It was a remake of a 1923 silent epic of the same name, which was DeMille’s first big film and the one closest to his heart. The story is an adaptation of the most famous story of the Old Testament. And it would go on to become the highest-grossing film of the year and would make so much money that it eclipsed Gone With the Wind’s record to become the highest-grossing film of all time. Gone With the Wind was then re-released less than 6 months later and swiftly retook its crown but, hey, acknowledgment where it's due. Adjusted for inflation at the time of this being written, The Ten Commandments also holds the title of being the eighth-highest grossing movie of all time.
The Ten Commandments is an adaptation of the Book of Exodus, telling the story of Moses, who was raised in the house of the Egyptian Pharaoh Seti I (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) as his presumptive heir. Over the years of growing up, Moses, who never met his birth parents, grows obsessed with getting in touch with his roots and eventually discovers that he is actually a Hebrew, a race of people who are enslaved by the Egyptians to build their pyramids. Over the course of his life, and with the aid of the Almighty Father (also voiced by Heston which is a clever choice), Moses eventually rebels against his family and leads his people to freedom.
DeMille is that extraordinarily rare case of a movie director where his last film is also his best one. Most directors will usually tap out at the masterpiece at some point partway through the career and then meander onwards to inevitable ignominy. (Granted, DeMille was always known for his stylistic leanings and having the substance being more theatrical than filmic but, hey, he worked for that style.) An entire lifetime of life in show business had all been building up to this film and it’s all there on the screen for you to see.
We’ll get into the look of the film in a moment but I want to discuss why this film is so strong and what makes it DeMille’s best film. And that comes down to it being a great story. We’ve discussed previously how the trap that DeMille often falls into is his love of theatrical dialogue that does not sound even remotely realistic. While this is a problem in crap like The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), it doesn’t affect The Ten Commandments all that much. This story is thousands of years old so the characters sounding more like Shakespeare makes the story feel more prestigious instead of cheesy. Many of the long monologues are still engaging to watch because of their Biblical tone.
The characters also do a lot to help elevate the film. Moses is such a captivating figure that he served as the basis for at least three different religions so any portrayal of him will have some big shoes to fill and Charlton Heston fills them quite comfortably. Heston’s portrayal of Moses comes off as a truly majestic and regal figure. This is a man who is destined for greatness and everyone in his life seems enamored with him. Thus, as he learns the truth of his heritage, he ends up being torn between these two worlds and makes his humiliations feel that much more powerful. You’re really rooting for this guy to achieve his destiny and become the great man that he was born to be, even if it’s on the other side.
Most of the rest of the cast are very excellent as well, bringing the prestige that the story requires. Yul Brynner as Rameses is a great bad guy; Martha Scott, John Carradine and Olive Deering play the part of Moses’ tortured biological family and Edward G. Robinson and Vincent Price play two minor but especially memorable villains. There are two performances that are worth homing in on here in particular though. First is Cedric Hardwicke as Seti who, despite being a brutal and unforgiving tyrant, comes off as a loving father who wants what is best for Moses. This both makes Rameses more unlikable by comparison and serves a grim reminder of how gentle rulers can still harbor oppressive regimes. Second is Anne Baxter as Nefretiri, a princess who is in love with Moses but pursues him primarily because of his destiny as the Pharaoh’s heir. This, in my opinion, is the heart of the movie as she and Moses clearly have a long and passionate history which makes Moses’ standing up to the Egyptian Royal Family that much more difficult of a decision for him. It would’ve been so easy to make this character the pure, unlikable harlot to contrast with Moses’ eventual wife, Sephora (Yvonne De Carlo), but Baxter brings a lot of depth to Nefretiri and was a snub for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Also, say what you want about DeMille, both as an artist and a political commentator, but the son of a bitch sure as Hell knew story structure. It’s been a common refrain in this blog that a lot of these film epics are way too needlessly long and seem to be aiming for a long running time because it fits with the “epic” label instead of just having a story that warrants a long length. The Ten Commandments does not fall into this trap. I’ve seen this movie 3 or 4 times in my life and each time I’m stunned by how quickly it moves. It does not feel like 3-and-a-half hours. It barely even feels like 2 hours. The pacing is perfect.
But let’s finally address what made audiences fall in love with it and that was the special effects. This is the movie that beat out Forbidden Planet for the Academy Award for Best Special Effects and, while I think Forbidden Planet’s effects have aged better, there’s no denying that The Ten Commandments was a marvel when it came out. Most of these other movies usually save up for one big sequence or one big sequence every hour. The Ten Commandments has over a dozen large-scale sequences from the Book of Exodus. You have the fiery hail, the river of blood, the earth swallowing the followers of the Golden Calf and Moses parting the Red Sea, among others.
In terms of watching the movie today, I still think it holds up because of how strong the story is though it does bear mentioning that it’s a very theatrical film (and I mean that in the Broadway sense, not in terms of watching it in an actual theater though you should still do that if given the chance). The digital matte effects can seem pretty cheesy to an audience raised on CGI but I think some of the other aspects of the film still come off as pretty majestic. The sets and costumes are amazing, of course, but, to me, the most impressive part is the actual exodus of the Hebrews. The amazement of this scene comes both from the strength of the story but also knowing how they did this scene. These aren’t miniatures or matte paintings; DeMille actually hired and coordinated over a thousand extras for this one sequence alone.
Amidst all of the dumb snubs in the history of the Academy, and we’ve encountered over a dozen by now, this stands out as one that isn't infuriating so much as straight-up puzzling. Nowadays, both The Ten Commandments and The Searchers are considered two of the greatest American movies of all time and the capstones to their respective directors’ careers. In fact, all of these movies, even the lesser ones, can easily be called better than Around the World in 80 Days. So what the Hell gives?
Well, let’s limit it just to the big three that we covered at the end since the Academy was clearly pretty keen on giving the award to an epic film. Forbidden Planet was basically dead out of the gate due to it being a sci-fi film despite this, again, being a pretty clear example of genre snobbery. The Searchers is interesting as it was actually, technically speaking, an independent film. John Ford was bankrolled by C.V. Whitney Pictures, a company owned by (big shock) C.V. Whitney, a horse-racing billionaire who wanted to finance some Western movies. So, even though The Searchers was distributed by Warner Bros., its status as an indie film meant that the Academy would ignore it in favor of films that were bankrolled by Hollywood itself. This is equally senseless, however, as the movie was still directed by a guy who was essentially Hollywood royalty and distributed by Hollywood but because it wasn’t actually produced by Hollywood, that makes it DQ’d.
The last one is the biggest shock of these choices as The Ten Commandments seems to hit all the checkmarks for what should’ve won the Academy Awards. It’s big, it made a ton of money, it’s made by a man who only won the Academy Award once before this, it’s a celebration of American Christianity, it should’ve gotten it all. This is a genuine mystery as I cannot find any reason; just about every historical essay I can find concerning Around the World in 80 Days identifies its legacy as “that movie that somehow beat The Ten Commandments and The Searchers to the Academy Award.”
(Equally shocking and notable is that neither John Wayne nor Charlton Heston were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Leading Actor. The winner was Yul Brynner in The King and I which, while whitewashed today, was a fair choice at the time. But to not even nominate Wayne or Heston is insane.)
My guess? The big current event of the year was the Suez Crisis wherein the British Empire was globally humiliated and forced to acknowledge that it was no longer the world’s preeminent superpower. This was a cultural downfall for England so maybe the upper-crust Anglophilic Academy put its thumb on the scale for a movie that was celebrating British culture as compared to the rest of the world? It’s a bit of a stretch but that’s the only explanation I can think of for calling it the most topical movie of the year. Either that or the votes for Best Picture were pretty divided between the top 5 choices and Around the World in 80 Days won by only a handful of votes (again, just a guess). But even the fact that Around the World in 80 Days was considered one of the top 5 movies of the year seems ridiculous. We just mentioned half a dozen other epic films that were all clearly better, not to mention some non-epic, yet still better, films such as Ikiru and The Silent World. I know we talk about genre snobbery and there’s nothing wrong with it being a fun adventure film but, even by those standards, this isn’t even all that good, let alone the best picture of the year.
Calling Around the World in 80 Days the best movie of 1956 was a…
SNUB!
Personal Favorite Movies of 1956:
- Anastasia (dir. Antaole Litvak)
- Forbidden Planet (dir. Fred M. Wilcox)
- Gojira (Godzilla, King of the Monsters!) (dir. Ishiro Honda and Terry O. Morse) (watch the original if you can though the Americanized version is solid despite my complaints)
- Ikiru (To Live) (dir. Akira Kurosawa)
- La Strada (The Road) (dir. Federico Fellini)
- Moby Dick (dir. John Huston)
- The Killing (dir. Stanley Kubrick)
- The Man Who Knew Too Much (dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
- The Searchers (dir. John Ford)
- The Ten Commandments (dir. Cecil B. DeMille)
Favorite Heroes:
- Alicia Hull (Bette Davis) (Storm Center)
- Anna Leonowens (Deborah Kerr) (The King and I)
- Bick Benedict (Rock Hudson) (Giant)
- Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) (The Searchers)
- Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina) (La Strada (The Road))
- Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanov (Ingrid Bergman) (Anastasia)
- Jess Birdwell (Gary Cooper) (Friendly Persuasion)
- Moses (Charlton Heston) (The Ten Commandments)
- Mr. Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) (Ikiru (To Live))
- Tony Le Stephanois (Jean Servais) (Du Rififi Chez Les Hommes (Rififi))
Favorite Villains:
- Captain Ahab (Gregory Peck) (Moby Dick)
- Dathan (Edward G. Robinson) (The Ten Commandments)
- Godzilla (Hazuo Nakajima) (Gojira (Godzilla, King of the Monsters!))
- Jett Rink (James Dean) (Giant)
- Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) (The Killing)
- Nefretiri (Anne Baxter) (The Ten Commandments)
- Rameses II (Yul Brynner) (The Ten Commandments)
- Sarge (Mickey Simpson) (Giant)
- The Invisible Beast (Forbidden Planet)
- Zampanó (Anthony Quinn) (La Strada (The Road))
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