Success or Snub? Gigi (31st Academy Awards Review Pt. 2)

  To see part 1, click here.

Vertigo Suite~Bernard Herrmann - Vertigo

The discussion for how good of a movie Gigi is opens up an interesting philosophical discussion of how much the Academy Awards actually matter and how much stock we can put into certain records. Each award is meant to grade something different but if you add them together and a movie earns several awards so it can officially say “winner of [insert number here] Academy Awards,” it can make it sound better than it actually is, leaving the casual viewer disappointed by how overhyped it was. In this case, Gigi broke a record where it won every movie it was nominated for, taking home 9 Academy Awards, beating out a record previously held by Gone With the Wind (1939) (that From Here to Eternity (1953) and On the Waterfront (1954) matched). Seems like a lot and probably makes it seem better than it actually is. But which awards did it win?

• Academy Award for Best Color Cinematography (fair enough)

• Academy Award for Best Film Editing (fair enough)

• Academy Award for Best Costume Design (fair enough)

• Academy Award for Best Art Design (deserved)

• Academy Award for Best Song for the song Gigi (fair enough)

• Academy Award for Best Scoring of a Motion Picture (deserved)

• Academy Award for Best Screenplay Adapted on Material from Another Medium (probably didn’t deserve)

• Academy Award for Best Director (we will discuss it in due time)

• Academy Award for Best Film (we will discuss it in due time)

So, yes, saying that this is the first film to ever win 9 Academy Awards makes it sound like a masterpiece that it is not. But when you run down the list, a couple of those seem fairly hard to argue. So how should those be graded then? Probably not anything we can begrudge so much as we can the Hollywood culture that orbits around these awards that overhypes these things to be more prestigious than they are. While Gigi was a splash when it came out, I think the overriding reason for its clean sweep at the Academy Awards might be because of how “due” Vincente Minnelli was for an Oscar by this point considering his previous losses for Meet Me in St. Louis (1942) and A Star Is Born (1954). But I digress.

A curious piece of happenstance occurred when David Niven held the dubious (and probably accidental) honor of being the first host to win an Academy Award as he won the Best Leading Actor Oscar for Separate Tables.

A truly awful piece of Oscar bait that Niven did not deserve to win compared to some other movies on this list.

A notorious piece of history is the Academy Award winner for Best Documentary, White Wilderness,

which, in case you’ve never heard of it, was the film that captured the migratory habits of lemmings wherein a herd of lemmings jumped off a cliff into the Arctic Ocean in their attempts to cross the body of water, committing mass suicide. Years later, it would be discovered that the filmmakers thought that watching lemmings do normal lemming stuff didn’t make for good cinema so they jostled the herd on some turntables beforehand and corralled them towards the cliff. In other words, no, lemmings will not actually commit suicide and this film didn’t just lie but also engaged in active animal cruelty by killing dozens, if not hundreds, of lemmings for our amusement.

Another quick-hitter of film history is the horror classic, The Blob.

Considered the last major horror icon of early Hollywood as well as the crown jewel of space-age drive-in teen movies, with its teenage protagonists fighting their parents who just don’t understand them and the catchy title theme that makes your town being consumed by the Blob sound like a rocking good time. The Blob is very stupid (but still fun) with piss-poor acting though the Blob was a cool movie monster and it would become one of the most iconic pictures of the late 50s, with the town the movie was shot in (Phoenixville, Pennsylvania) hosting an annual Blobfest for the past half-century. In terms of studying horror icons, the Blob is significant as it was the last of the classic movie monsters, a family that began with Dracula (1931) (or arguably The Phantom of the Opera (1925) or Nosferatu (1922)) and concluded here. The horror icon wouldn’t see new definitive icons until the birth of the slasher genre with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Halloween (1978) over 15 years later.

A much better horror film was Hammer Studios’ interpretation of Dracula, released as Horror of Dracula in America.

This is, in my opinion, the best film of the Hammer horror wave. While Christopher Lee is admittedly underwhelming as Count Dracula, Peter Cushing is the best Abraham van Hellsing ever put to film, redefining the character to the vampire hunter archetype that we know and love. This is as good of a Gothic horror as Gigi is a musical, if not better, though because of its genre, it was roundly ignored. Truly excellent film.

One of the bigger figures of this particular night was Burl Ives who was actually nominated for two different acting awards and was considered a frontrunner in both (in case that name sounds familiar, he’s the singer who voiced the songs in those 60s Rankin/Bass Christmas specials). He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in The Big Country

and is often considered a snub for his role in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

The Big Country is one of the more underrated Westerns of the 50s. A homesteader named Chris McKay (Gregory Peck) moves out West and ends up caught in a Hatfield and McCoy-esque generational feud between two families called the Terrells, led by its machismo patriarch Major Henry (Charles Bickford), and the Hannassys, led by its equally machismo patriarch Rufus (Burl Ives). The movie is a clever deconstruction of American masculinity as both the Major and Rufus are shown as pigheaded idiots who seem completely ignorant of how people are getting hurt because of their dumb pride. It’s a fun deconstruction of a lot of Western tropes and engaging throughout and also manages to ride the nice balance of showing its main character as being the bigger man without making him a wuss.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is the more famous of these two films and, despite being a different genre, does have similar themes. The movie revolves around a Southern family called the Pollitts as Brick Pollitt (Paul Newman) is suffering from severe depression and is lashing out at the rest of his family during a family reunion. The patriarch of the household, Big Daddy Pollitt (Burl Ives), takes it upon himself to talk some sense into his son and analyze why he is being so destructive. The movie does fall into the trap of feeling more like a play than a movie but the performances are all excellent and is another fun mirror to the hypocrisies of Southern American culture courtesy of Tennessee Williams.

While I personally think The Big Country has aged better, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is the more famous of these two movies and Big Daddy is definitely the more layered and complex character that Ives played that year. Comparing the two, you might think it a tad ridiculous that he lost the best Leading Actor award for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to Separate Tables though it does bear mentioning that Ives’ performance in The Big Country is also excellent. The Academy usually has a one role per actor per category rule, which seems fair as it would be easy for some Hollywood actors to monopolize the choices in any year given half a chance, though every now and then you run into a situation like this one where it can be hard to ascertain which role they should have been nominated for.

It’s interesting too because when the Academy Awards were founded, the Best Actor and Actress categories were given to someone for the cumulation of all the roles they did in a single year. The first winner for Best Actor, Emil Jannings, won for The Last Command (1928) and The Way of All Flesh (1927). Should they have stuck with it and just given it for cumulative? Maybe so. There are definitely times when actors have given more than one great performance in a year and it can be pointlessly debatable as to which one they should get an award for. Though the trade-off there is that there are times when actors star in great movies and terrible movies in the same year which would make for some pretty hilarious memes if this were to happen (there is a year when Adam Sandler starred in both Punch-Drunk Love (2002) and Eight Crazy Nights (2002)).

Moving onto our bigger hitters. Despite the successful lobbying for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Picture to become a thing to pay tribute to foreign cinema, that didn’t make that award immune to snub choices. The winner was Mon Oncle (Eng. My Uncle).

A sequel to Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (Eng.: Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday) (1953), Mon Oncle and its predecessor are tributes paid to the great slapstick comedies of the 1920s as the pipe-smoking, long-legged Monsieur Hulot (Jacques Tati) goes about his normal life while engaging in all sorts of slapstick gags. While the first film is mostly just a straight comedy, the sequel adds a bit of a satirical edge as Hulot is paired with his adoring nephew, Gérard (Alain Bécourt), whose hyper-materialist parents, the Arpels (Jean-Pierre Zola and Adrienne Servantie) grow increasingly frustrated with him.

Mon Oncle was highly lauded at the time and still remains a semi-classic in French cinema though there are some cracks in its record. Mon Oncle was largely derided by the up-and-coming French filmmakers for its genericism and inability to push new boundaries of filmmaking. This is a bit of a harsh metric to judge a movie by but it was a criticism constantly given by critics in Cahiérs du Cinema such as François Truffaut. While Hollywood may have been seen as “the man,” and that’s generally the tact we take in this blog series, that doesn’t mean that other countries didn’t also have their version of the man. Mon Oncle may be a satire of contemporary French culture but it is a very safe and surface-level one and doesn’t go as scathing as it could have. That, of course, is not the movie that Mon Oncle is trying to be but when one is keeping in mind that this is considered the best foreign film of the year, it certainly seems a bit overrated (especially given how needlessly long it is). The same critique could be launched of the other four nominees for Best Foreign Language Film, all of which are forgotten (Helden (Arms of the Man) from West Germany,

I Soliti Ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street) from Italy,

Cesta Duga Godina Danu (The Road A Year Long) from Yugoslavia

and La Vengenza (Vengeance) from Spain

).

By contrast, the most famous and ground-breaking foreign language movie of the year, which wasn’t nominated, was from Sweden: Det Sjunde Inseglet (Eng. The Seventh Seal),

which is widely considered the greatest film in Swedish history, as well as the greatest and breakout film of mid-century luminary Ingmar Bergman (not to be confused with Ingrid Bergman). The movie is set in medieval times during the Black Plague as a knight, Antonius Block (Max von Sydow), encounters Death (Bengt Ekerot), who has come to reap his immortal soul. Not yet ready to die, Block challenges Death to a game of chess, using his life and soul as the price for victory. And so the two play chess, with breaks included so Death can continue to go about his business and Block takes advantage of these breaks to continue his journey home, encountering all sorts of interesting characters along the way.

The Seventh Seal is a very dark and philosophical movie about faith and the silence of God. The portrait painted of medieval Europe in the movie is a very bleak one as there are ruminations of how a God who loves his children so much would let so much suffering be inflicted upon the world. Every character that Block meets in his journey is either already doomed or struggling to figure out how to find joy in a land quite literally stalked by Death. Times like this bring out some of the worst in people, as numerous characters hurt others as penance for their faith to try to become closer to God. It’s a very powerful allegory and is a distinctly Christian film, with many shots being recreations of medieval Christian iconography.

These “crisis of faith” films were Ingmar Bergman’s bread and butter but The Seventh Seal stands out as his most engaging and entertaining film by a pretty wide margin and I think a lot of that has to do with the more fantastical elements of the story. The image of the knight playing chess with Death on a beach is one of the most iconic moments in cinematic history and inspires the imagination. Isn’t that just such a cool set-up for a movie? Anyone can make a movie about someone coming to grips with death and their loss of faith but externalizing that antagonist into a physical character makes that crisis much more palpable and menacing. And speaking of which, while this is the movie that made Max von Sydow famous, the standout performance is Bengt Ekerot as Death. This image of the Grim Reaper is a bit unique in movies in that he doesn’t seem skeletal or undead, instead he’s dressed more like a monk, but Ekerot plays him with a smarmy cheekiness. He takes a downright mischievous delight in his job and looks so happy that he’s getting to kill even more people in a Black Plague-stricken Europe. Death is one of those great movie villains who manages to be both menacing and funny, often at the same time.

The Seventh Seal would go on to win the Palme d’Or and defined religious cinema for a generation. It’s not a lecture either and is pretty watchable for the lay viewer. It’s one of those movies that is both timeless but also timely as it reflected the crisis of faith that Bergman himself felt as being part of the first European generation to grow up in the shadow of World War II.

Not only was this the best foreign movie of the year, it’s arguably the best movie of the year period and might also be the most iconic movie of 1958 (or 1957 when it was released in Sweden), which is very impressive for a foreign film. Needless to say, this is a much more powerful and boundary-breaking film than Gigi, let alone Mon Oncle, and should’ve deserved the Academy Award for Best Motion Picture. But, again, the Academy likes to segregate foreign language cinema from American cinema so we need to return to the States for effective snubs. And there’s three worth noting there as well.

One of the best British films of the decade was A Night to Remember

which is often considered the second-best movie about the RMS Titanic disaster (the first obviously being Titanic (1997)). Anyone familiar with the James Cameron film will find that it takes most of its plot points from this one, particularly the commentary on class warfare and how the poor on board were left to die in steerage as the rich escaped. It’s a pretty groundbreaking movie in this regard, both for its musings on class as well as being one of the first major disaster movies, breathing new life into the genre over 20 years after In Old Chicago (1937).

What’s most impressive about A Night to Remember is that the latter Titanic film hasn’t made it fully obsolete. It’s still a very well-paced thriller with impressive effects for its day and a likable main character. It was highly lauded on both sides of the Atlantic and cleaned up the Golden Globes (the Academy’s sister institution that is somehow equally corrupt and sanctimonious and even less prestigious) but was ignored by the Academy.

The edgiest frontrunner at the Oscars was The Defiant Ones

a movie about a pair of convicts named Noah Cullen (Sidney Poitier), a black man, and Joker Jackson (Tony Curtis), a white man, who escape from prison while shackled together. The two then navigate the Southern United States, being forced to work together to survive. Being that they’re two criminals who don’t have much respect for societal norms, both characters are pretty racist and loathe that they need to rely on each other to survive. But, over time, they learn to accept each other’s company, break down their guards and eventually spark a friendship.

The Defiant Ones might be the earliest precursor of the typical buddy cop genre that became pretty prominent in the 70s and 80s. These films usually based their conflict on the two buddies being as diametrically opposed as possible with them being two different races being a particularly stark difference (the most iconic examples being the Lethal Weapon movies (1987-1998) and the Dirty Harry films (1971-1988) with the title character’s revolving door of partners). The Defiant Ones is definitely more of a straight parable than these latter films as the overcoming of the racial barrier is the entire conflict of the film.

The Defiant Ones still holds up many years later and I think a lot of that has to be the fact that it’s about a pair of prisoners. Joker Jackson, as mentioned, is a mean bastard who’s particularly inclined to be racist but the one type of person in America who was spat on even more than minorities in this era are convicts. Jackson is forced to endure the same kind of treatment that Cullen does every day. It’s a great character arc and the movie avoids becoming too cheesy about it, mostly because of how unrelentingly harsh the whole ordeal is.

The Defiant Ones was a significant frontrunner at the Academy Awards, being nominated for multiple awards and winning the Oscar for Best Black-and-White Cinematography and Best Story and Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen. If the Academy was still interested in giving out Oscar winners based on socially progressive movies, this would’ve easily won. But before we can analyze whether or not that is deserved or not, we need to first analyze another one of the greatest movies ever made that was completely ignored across the board, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) is a San Franciscan private investigator who suffers from vertigo which constantly affects his work. An old friend, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), hears that he’s struggling and decides to take pity on him and hires Scottie to tail his wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak), to find out the cause of her increasingly bizarre behavior. From that point unfolds a sordid tale of murder, mayhem and lechery as Scottie develops a crush on Madeleine. And before reading any further I’d highly recommend actually leaving this blog to go watch this movie. I’m not going to spoil anything but Vertigo is one of those movies where the less you know going in, the better it’ll be.

Vertigo stands out from the pack a bit by Hitchcock’s standards as he plays with his tried-and-true formula a bit. While there is still a murder-mystery and a young nubile blonde, the movie doesn’t really keep the focus on the murder or the romance. Both are in there but they take a backseat to the psychological profile of our tormented protagonist. Scottie Ferguson is by far Hitchcock’s most complex and 3-dimensional protagonist as he exists in the shadow of his haunted past and feels desperate to fill a hole in himself. The film exists as a commentary on the obsessive male gaze and how it is projected onto women. Scottie’s feelings for Madeleine slowly morph from being a job to a romance to an unhealthy obsession. One of the most chilling scenes is in the back half of the film, Scottie starts dating another woman and forces her to change her hairstyle and clothing to resemble Madeleine’s.

James Stewart is perfect as Scottie Ferguson. Stewart is most famous for his all-American “aw shucks” characters such as It’s A Wonderful Life (1946) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), so much so that it is easy to forget that he had some incredible range for an actor. Vertigo marks one of the very few times that he plays a more villainous character and very few other actors at the time could’ve pulled it off. Stewart brings both a vulnerability and intensity to Scottie Ferguson. You’re constantly torn between feeling sympathetic for his natural sweetness but also put off by his somewhat skeevy behavior.

Even by Hitchcock’s standards, the plot to this film is completely wild and he plays with a lot of storytelling conventions. For example, the twist of the film is actually given away to the audience about halfway through the movie. We find out what exactly is going on with Madeleine well before Scottie does. But instead of ruining the movie, all it does is raise the stakes. One of Hitchcock’s best lessons on how suspense works is that giving the audience information that the characters don’t have only makes us more invested. By tipping off the audience as to the truth of Madeleine, we’re now so much more invested to find out Scottie’s reaction.

The movie also pioneered a new film technique with what is now colloquially known as the Vertigo Effect. Every time that Scottie is suffering from an episode of vertigo, the camera will zoom while being pulled back, giving a very bizarre and distorted frame. That is now a common tool of the trade, being used to give a disorienting feeling (probably the most famous example, besides this movie, is in Jaws (1975)). The sets are all iconic and the film incorporates a lot of spirals into the visual design, reflecting the spiraling dizziness of Scottie’s vertigo which, in turn, reflects his own spiraling obsession.

Vertigo still shows a pretty interesting commentary on gender roles that still holds up so many years later. Back in the late 50s, women were still considered to be subservient to men and expected to reciprocate any feelings given them. Considering Hitchcock’s own famous hang-ups with women, particularly some of his leading actresses, this movie comes off as probably the most personal film of his. It kinda reminds me of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) where it’s the work of a man who seems very aware of his character flaws and is using his art to dissect them but is ultimately unable to grow past them.

Vertigo is nowadays often considered Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece and has been called one of the best movies ever, some critics even considering it the best American movie period. While I wouldn’t go that far (the movie's notoriously flawed ending I think precludes it from either of those titles), the fact that it’s even in the conversation for some people should be telling you something. Though it might interest you to know that at the time that it had more mixed reviews as critics were split on Vertigo. Many didn’t like that the twist was given halfway through the movie and thought that it spent way too much time showing the main character giving Madeleine the bedroom eyes instead of having more chases that these thrillers are known for.

Now, to be clear, this wasn’t necessarily a case of a film that wasn’t regarded as a masterpiece until later, it just wasn’t universally regarded as a masterpiece until later. Vertigo offers a fun litmus test of where each major Western country was in regards to how primed they were for accepting the New Wave and new film concepts. French critics adored Vertigo, British critics hated it and American critics were all over the map on it.

We have discussed previously in this blog that Alfred Hitchcock is often considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest, directors of the first half of the 20th Century and only won the Academy Award once in his whole career (and for a film that probably didn’t even deserve it). While he was always considered the Master of Suspense, his latter-day reputation as one of the greats wasn’t really universalized until the 1960s when many critics as Cahiérs du Cinema studied his films more in-depth. Not to say that he wasn’t respected by American audiences, he was definitely a celebrity, but he wasn’t considered to be such a high-caliber director that you automatically associate his name with greatness the way he is today.

So, armed with this knowledge, can we extend the Academy a little bit more leeway in the fact that they never gave him the Academy Award? I’m still going to err on the side of no. Sure, his films weren’t considered cinephiliac essentials until the 60s but cinephilia itself didn’t really exist until the 60s either. Movies before this weren’t really the locus point that all of society revolved around like they would become but the Academy Awards still viewed them as  the locus point that Hollywood revolved around. And, of course, this being Hollywood, they’re going to choose the most Hollywood movies that can be thought of.

Even if the general feeling towards Vertigo of the time being “some people love it, some people hate it,” would preclude it from winning the Academy Award for Best Picture, you can’t deny that it at least deserved a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Director. Hitchcock literally invented a brand-new camera style for this movie. How is that not warranted at least a nomination?

While nowadays Vertigo is often considered the best movie of 1958 and Gigi is considered a relatively average Best Picture winner (not one of the best but not one of the worst either), both films' receptions when they came out seemed to reflect this decision. In that regard, I think we can let it slide. But I’m still considering this a snub just because of the existence of The Defiant Ones, A Night to Remember, The Seventh Seal and even The Big Country and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. All five of those movies had very powerful ruminations on the world around them that would challenge the viewer while Gigi is just a fun romance. 

While we might be dabbling in a bit of our own genre snobbery in this regard for just deriding it for being a fun romantic musical, I don’t think it pushes the genre enough, revolutionizes enough or is enough of a visual epic to quite overcome this. I mean just talk about the films back to back: Vertigo is about a toxic romance, The Defiant Ones is about racism, A Night to Remember is about classism, The Seventh Seal is about religion, The Big Country is about masculinity, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is about generational trauma, Gigi is about a cute romance.

Calling Gigi the best film of 1958 was a…

SNUB!

Personal Favorite Movies of 1958:

• A Night to Remember (dir. Roy Ward Baker)
• Det Sjunde Inseglet (The Seventh Seal) (dir. Ingmar Bergman)
• Dracula (Horror of Dracula) (dir. Terence Fisher)
• I Married A Monster From Outer Space (dir. Gene Fowler Jr.)
• I Want To Live! (dir. Robert Wise)
• Gigi (dir. Vincente Minnelli)
• The Big Country (dir. William Wyler)
• The Defiant Ones (dir. Stanley Kramer)
• tom thumb (dir. George Pal)
• Vertigo (dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

Favorite Heroes:

• Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) (Det Sjunde Inseglet (The Seventh Seal))
• Barbara Graham (Susan Hayward) (I Want To Live!)
• Big Daddy Pollitt (Burl Ives) (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof)
• Dr. Abraham van Hellsing (Peter Cushing) (Dracula (Horror of Dracula))
• Gaston Lachaille (Louis Jourdan) (Gigi)
• James McKay (Gregory Peck) (The Big Country)
• Jof (Det Sjunde Inseglet (The Seventh Seal))
• Noah Cullen and Joker Jackson (Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis) (The Defiant Ones)
• Second Officer Charles Lightoller (Kenneth More) (A Night to Remember)
• The Old Man (Spencer Tracy) (The Old Man and the Sea)

Favorite Villains:

• Bill (Tom Tryon) (I Married A Monster From Outer Space)
• Billy's Mother (Cara Williams) (The Defiant Ones)
• Captain Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles) (Touch of Evil)
• Death (Bengt Ekerot) (Det Sjunde Inseglet (The Seventh Seal))
• Ivan and Antony (Terry-Thomas and Peter Sellers) (tom thumb)
• Mack (Claude Akins) (The Defiant Ones)
• Major Henry Terrill (Charles Bickford) (The Big Country)
• Rufus Hannassy (Burl Ives) (The Big Country)
• Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) (Vertigo)
• The Blob (The Blob)