Oscars Retrospective: Tom Jones (36th Academy Awards Review)
I have to give the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences points on this one for originality. Tom Jones is probably the single most bizarre and against-type movie to have ever won the Academy Award for Best Picture. We’ve seen 35 of these movies made so far and usually they’ve been big romances, sweeping epics, experimentations with new sound systems, Westerns, war dramas, character studies of alcoholics, societal satires, blue-collar fairy tales, heartwarming comedies and Biblical epics. Reaching into the future, they would bestow their greatness upon more of the same as well as adding some Mafia dramas, white man’s burden/guilt, period pieces, biopics and fantasy films. A dry screwball comedy set in medieval Britain though? Yeah, that’s a unique one.
Tom Jones is based upon a comedic novel called The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling (1749) and is about the life and times of a British noble named, you guessed it, Tom Jones (Lynn Goldsworthy as a baby, Albert Finney as an adult). Jones is the womanizing adopted bastard son of a lord named Squire Allworthy (George Devine) and loves to get into trouble. Several other nobles hate him for being a bastard and acting like he’s on their level so they conspire to frame him for a crime and chase him off. The rest of the movie then revolves around Jones slowly making his way back up the chain of British society to… get his revenge, I guess? Or become a proper lord? It’s a bit hard to tell what his goal is after a certain point, which is both the film’s uniqueness and downfall.
Tom Jones is a fascinating film as it exists at a crossroads in British pop culture. The movie is a parody of the medieval period pieces of yore, such as Henry V (1944) and Hamlet (1948) with the plot having distant echoes of Wuthering Heights (1939). The set design is incredible as it really feels like you’ve traveled far back in time to medieval England. And yet, the story is very radically different from these sorts of period pieces. Most of those period pieces were about political intrigues or true love while Tom Jones seems to encompass much more of the free love and anti-authority attitudes that dominated America and England during the swinging 60s. Everything about it makes it abundantly clear to audiences at the time that this was not going to be their parents’ period piece.
Tom Jones is a movie that could only have been made during the 60s. What I find fascinating about the character is how his constant womanizing is not seen as a character flaw. If this movie was made now, or even just twenty years later, there would be a scene where Jones eventually realizes that his banging everything that moves is something that he should get a grip on. But instead the movie shows the antagonists are just as sex-crazed as he is and they’re the heels because they’re unable to admit to themselves that they have these urges too. Many of the jokes that side-characters engage in revolve around them having sex with each other when they think no one else is looking. (Obviously the sex in question is never shown but the movie makes no illusions about what is happening.)
I like to usually review movies by first looking at the good parts: the best part of the movie is the production design. Tom Jones does feel like up to par with these other period pieces in terms of making you feel like you’ve been transported back in time to medieval England. Yet the movie still has a cheapness to it if you know how to look. Almost all of the medievalism comes from the costumes and they’re not even that fancy compared to some of the costumes you see Laurence Olivier wearing. Tom Jones has very few scenes set in castles and more of them in rolling green fields and mud-encased farms. Thus, for what was presumably pennies on the dollar, director Tony Richardson was able to transport us back to medieval England.
Aside from that, the acting is pretty good. It is original. Some scenes are cool. And… uh… um…
Yeah, I’m grasping at straws here. Tom Jones is not a good movie and is one of the most forgettable films to win the Oscar for Best Picture. So much so that I had to rewatch this movie twice to try to jog my memory of what to write for this review and also to try to understand why it was so beloved at the time to win the Academy Award for Best Picture (in addition to Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Score) as well as being one of the year’s top 5 grossers. Very few things seem to ever bother our protagonist all that much so the movie being suspenseful is clearly not the goal. But this is the other thing: I don’t find the movie to be even remotely funny.
This movie, and many others at the time, is where there’s likely to be a serious culture clash between the movie viewer of the 60s and the movie viewer of today, even moreso than older films. The pitch of Tom Jones is basically asking what if you put a Beatle into a medieval period piece. And, like the Beatles, a lot of the charm and humor of the character comes from a young person giving such an attitude to his elders. This would’ve been downright scandalous back then, especially since most children in movies and television at the time were portrayed as being as obedient as possible. Now, to a generation who grew up in the shadow of Bart Simpson and Eric Cartman, this feels laughably tame. So tame, in fact, that you might not even realize at first that this was such a challenge. (This is why I had to watch the movie 3 times to fully get it.) So, sure, this gleeful rebellion of authority was new but that’s really the only thing Tom Jones has going for it.
Tom Jones is also very inconsistent in its pacing and tone. It’s hard to describe but every now and then the movie veers off into a stylized frenzy that feels like it’s being stylized for the sake of being stylized. For example, here’s an excerpt from a deer hunt that occurs partway through the film.
I can’t find the full scene on YouTube but the whole scene is shot like that excerpt and lasts for over five minutes. It’s cool and interesting to watch but it’s hard to articulate why it’s in the movie. We’re not learning anything new about the characters, it's definitely not funny and the scene doesn’t propel the story forward all that much (or at least not as much to warrant the length of time being devoted to it). Is it supposed to be satire? About how the cruelty of the animals shows the characters’ lack of care for those below them? I guess that could be an interpretation but the rest of Tom Jones doesn’t seem like the type of movie to be making that kind of grand commentary. There’s a lot of scenes throughout the movie that pop up like this and it gives this very inconsistent tone to the picture. It genuinely feels like the director just put it into the movie because it seemed cool but wouldn’t be able to explain why it was cool.
Tom Jones is one of the most difficult-to-review movies I have ever seen in my entire life. The style, pacing and tone is so utterly divorced from anything else I have seen before or since which makes it very excruciatingly difficult to articulate whether or not it’s a good movie. Back then, it did take the world a little bit by storm, grossing over $17,000,000 worldwide, winning multiple Oscars and being regaled by many critics at the time as one of the best movies of the year. Nowadays, though, it’s mostly forgotten because the style failed to influence other films and it hasn’t aged well.
A lot of these movies of the 1960s are profoundly difficult to review for this reason and is probably going to make for the next several Success or Snub calls excruciatingly difficult to write. A lot of movies that came out of the European New Wave and British Invasion showcased the medium being toyed with by filmmakers, experimenting with styles and story structure to create something completely new. Any movie that experimented in this way usually received rave reviews as being something that nobody had ever seen before. Sometimes, that’s awesome and the ball game is totally changed. Other times, however, there might be a good reason why some things were never tried before.
This is really getting into the weeds of philosophy of what actually makes a great movie. Obviously, we all applaud originality and doing things that have never been done before but just because a movie is doing experimental things doesn’t automatically mean the experiment was a success. This is an ethos that is challenging the general film scholar’s POV on 1960s filmmaking as I don’t think all of the movies that came out of this zeitgeist have aged well and may not have even been that great in the first place. Some experiments, like Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), still hold up and did new things in a way that’s still interesting. Other movies, however, tend to show why the rules exist the hard way (while the film was well-regarded, I personally think that Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960) is an excruciatingly dull movie whose directionlessness feels more pretentious than avant-garde).
But is that just our modern-day point of view? Especially now that we’re living in the aftermath of the 60s countercultural revolution, it might be easier to predict the movies would live on through the ages but, at the time, there was such a glut of culture and everyone was partaking in it that it must’ve been hard at the time to really predict how things were going to turn out.
Bringing it back to Tom Jones, this is a movie that falls into the category of being too experimental for its own good. Don’t just take my word for it; the director of the film, Tony Richardson, wasn’t happy with the final product. Richardson was a director from the British New Wave, having made Kitchen Sink classics like The Entertainer (1960) and A Taste of Honey (1961). He, more than anyone else, was shocked by Tom Jones’ mammoth success, writing in his autobiography that he felt that the film was botched and rushed in its execution. Allegedly, he claims that he was visibly cringing when he accepted the Academy Award as he couldn’t believe people loved this movie this much. It’s not hard to see his point-of-view either. Tom Jones has that feeling of being undisciplined and being directed in a manner where the director is kinda just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. Which, again, isn't the worst thing in the world but for the best movie of the year?
Armed with this knowledge, Tom Jones does have its moments and can be fun for a little while. But it is not a movie that goes on for just a little while. Tom Jones is over 2 hours long and, each time I’ve watched it, I start getting bored of it around the hour-and-15-minute mark. The big problem is that there really feels like there’s only one joke being made in the movie and they stretch it out for over 2 hours. Like, yes, we get it, people like having sex and the audience at the time were prudes. But maybe it’ll be even funnier if the movie tells you that again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again?
The character of Tom Jones clearly doesn’t really care much about anything in life, both at the beginning and ending, so there’s no real dramatic throughline to carry us through the movie either. As an experiment of turning a classic movie genre on its head, Tom Jones is an interesting historical artifact. As a full 3-act movie that keeps your attention for 2 hours though? It fails to impress.
But could its originality still allow it to be called the movie of the year?
In case you missed it:
1st Academy Awards (1927/28): Wings/Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans: Part 1, Part 2
2nd Academy Awards (1928/29): The Broadway Melody: Part 1, Part 2
3rd Academy Awards (1929/30): All Quiet on the Western Front: Part 1, Part 2
4th Academy Awards (1930/31): Cimarron: Part 1, Part 2
5th Academy Awards (1931/32): Grand Hotel: Part 1, Part 2
6th Academy Awards (1932/33): Cavalcade: Part 1, Part 2
7th Academy Awards (1934): It Happened One Night: Part 1, Part 2
8th Academy Awards (1935): Mutiny on the Bounty: Part 1, Part 2
9th Academy Awards (1936): The Great Ziegfeld: Part 1, Part 2
10th Academy Awards (1937): The Life of Emile Zola: Part 1, Part 2
11th Academy Awards (1938): You Can't Take It With You: Part 1, Part 2
12th Academy Awards (1939): Gone With the Wind: Part 1, Part 2
13th Academy Awards (1940): Rebecca: Part 1, Part 2
14th Academy Awards (1941): How Green Was My Valley: Part 1, Part 2
15th Academy Awards (1942): Mrs. Miniver: Part 1, Part 2
16th Academy Awards (1943): Casablanca: Part 1, Part 2
17th Academy Awards (1944): Going My Way: Part 1, Part 2
18th Academy Awards (1945): The Lost Weekend: Part 1, Part 2
19th Academy Awards (1946): The Best Years of Our Lives: Part 1, Part 2
20th Academy Awards (1947): Gentleman's Agreement: Part 1, Part 2
21st Academy Awards (1948): Hamlet: Part 1, Part 2
22nd Academy Awards (1949): All The King's Men: Part 1, Part 2
23rd Academy Awards (1950): All About Eve: Part 1, Part 2
24th Academy Awards (1951): An American in Paris: Part 1, Part 2
25th Academy Awards (1952): The Greatest Show on Earth: Part 1, Part 2
26th Academy Awards (1953): From Here to Eternity: Part 1, Part 2
27th Academy Awards (1954): On the Waterfront: Part 1, Part 2
28th Academy Awards (1955): Marty: Part 1, Part 2
29th Academy Awards (1956): Around the World in 80 Days: Part 1, Part 2
30th Academy Awards (1957): The Bridge on the River Kwai: Part 1, Part 2
31st Academy Awards (1958): Gigi: Part 1, Part 2
32nd Academy Awards (1959): Ben-Hur: Part 1, Part 2
33rd Academy Awards (1960): The Apartment: Part 1, Part 2
34th Academy Awards (1961): West Side Story: Part 1, Part 2
35th Academy Awards (1962): Lawrence of Arabia: Part 1, Part 2
.jpeg)
Comments
Post a Comment