Success or Snub? Tom Jones (36th Academy Awards Review Pt. 2)

To see part 1, click here.

The Great Escape Suite~The Great Escape - Elmer Bernstein

        On November 22nd, 1963, Americans everywhere shared in a legendary bout of generational trauma when the inspirational, charismatic and Hollywood-handsome President John F. Kennedy was shot to death in Dallas, Texas, leaving the country in the hands of Lyndon B. Johnson. Johnson, while initially very popular (mainly because of his shameless use of Kennedy’s ghost for political purposes), would turn out to be much meaner, sleazier and seemed like more of the old guard that didn’t have the best interest of the youth in mind (and, in fact, may have even had something to do with Kennedy’s death himself). Civil rights activists especially recoiled since a Southerner was in the White House at a time when the civil rights movement was coming to a head. Faced with skepticism and grief at the loss of the most beloved President since Franklin Roosevelt, the young baby boomer generation and status-and-image-obsessed pop culture junkies would have to look elsewhere from the US government to find their new voice of the generation.

        It didn’t take them long to find it. In mid-December 1963, a disc jockey at Capitol Records received a request from a girl who sent in a copy of a song from her friend in England, entitled “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” The request was so popular that the band in question was invited onto The Ed Sullivan Show (1948-1971), the most popular variety show of the time, on February 9th, 1964. And in that brief half-hour, the band known as the Beatles changed pop culture forever in a way that was completely unlike anything done before by Elvis, Bing Crosby or anyone else. They were funny, they teased and made fun of old Ed Sullivan and their music preached love and acceptance to everyone. Inspired by their rebellious attitude, the coming-of-age youth rebelled against their parents and a new era was born, one where the old ways would be shaken off to usher in a new era of peace and love.

        This is the legend of pop culture and Beatlemania that formed in the youth-backed counterculture that would define the remainder of the 60s going into the 70s. Of course, most of this story is filled with half-truths or flat-out lies that were told by those involved in this movement to make it sound more magical and movie-like than it actually was. Lyndon Johnson would turn out to be a far more effective legislator than Kennedy and did more for civil rights than any other President in US history (and his authoritative biographer made a very exhaustive case on why Johnson almost certainly had nothing to do with Kennedy’s death). The Beatles weren’t accidentally discovered by a DJ taking a random song request; their manager did that as a PR stunt so the band could get into the lucrative American market. And the reason why the baby boomer crowd ended up having such a large counterculture was because they were a. orders of magnitudes the largest population in history up to that point and b. the first generation to live in a pop culture-dominated world that made them want to have their own grand journey and meaning. Furthermore, this was the first time there was a truly national and international pop culture. Countercultures always existed in post-Renaissance societies but they usually tended to be pretty localized. By the end of the 60s, there wouldn’t be anyone in the Western world who hadn’t heard of a hippie.

 

Pictured: the 60s.

        Regardless of what was real and what merely felt real, the fact of the matter is that the roaring success of the Beatles ushered in what is known as the British Invasion. America’s role as the top dog in Western pop culture was usurped by England for 4-6 electric years. Pop music was transformed from crooning jazz and oldies to hip and cool rock-and-roll, men grew their hair out, women’s skirts got shorter, free love became all the rage, young girls would start riots just to get a glimpse at their favorite band and Liverpool went from a blue-collar city dumping pollution into the Irish Sea to a blue-collar city dumping pollution into the Irish Sea with some iconic music.
        Hollywood was no stranger to the British Invasion either. Technically, you could argue the British Invasion hit movies before music since Lawrence of Arabia premiered in 1962 and the movies we’ll be discussing in this blog all premiered Stateside in 1963. Still, the humongous zeitgeist revolving around the British young and the rise of the first pop cultural phenomenon that belonged exclusively to the baby boomers (the oldest of which would now be full-fledged adults) would do a lot to explain Tom Jones’ massive success and Oscar win, especially since the Oscar ceremony was only 2 months after the Beatles’ breakout. While you might be inclined to think Academy types would look down their noses at the Beatles, I think this underestimates some willingness to enjoy new trends and wishing to remain relevant with the baby boomer audience. This is before the counterculture between old and young would really become militarized; it’s easy to see some older folks wanting to enjoy the stuff that their children and grandchildren were yapping about. So, hey, here’s a movie about a rebellious British teenager making fun of stuff they’ve come to expect so let’s shower it with some Oscars. Bearing this in mind, Tom Jones was definitely culturally relevant when it won the Academy Award. But does that mean it was actually the Best Picture?
        Probably not but this year didn’t have anything that was so overwhelmingly amazing that it can make ascertaining a snub a little difficult, especially keeping in the mindset of the era. With all that said , let’s start by talking about one of the Academy’s strangest pieces of trivia which revolves around the winner of the Academy Award for Best Live-Action Short Film: An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.

        It’s an excellent short, and well worth your time to track it down and watch, but it gained notability as the first Academy Award winner to have made its American debut on television, specifically as an episode of The Twilight Zone (1959-1964). You would think that this would make it ineligible for the Oscar, falling under the purview of the Emmys instead, but this is only part of the story. An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge was originally shot in France, won Best Short at the Cannes Film Festival and was then submitted to the Academy for their consideration. Simultaneously, The Twilight Zone was running out of budget for their fifth (and final) season and they had a hole in their schedule. Someone did the math and realized that licensing this short film would be cheaper than producing an entire new episode and so they did just that and recorded some lines from the show’s host to bookend it. So, in other words, this is the only time in history that an episode of a TV show won an Oscar even though it didn’t win it as an episode of TV. Weird, huh?
        With that out of the way, let’s start comparing Tom Jones to its American competition for feature films by going through the major touchstones in each genre, beginning with a dive back into the musical. Coming off of the previous 2 years where large-scale musicals were major contenders/winners at the Oscars, this year’s highest-grossing musical was the comparatively smaller-scale and ignored Bye Bye Birdie.

        And in fairness, you can see why. Despite its fun set-up and energized performances from actors giving it their all, the movie ends up being a pretty generic screwball and probably the best case-in-point of a musical where the movie comes alive during the musical numbers (including the famous opening that any fan of Mad Men (2007-2015) is familiar with) but gets really boring during the dialogue scenes.
        The other major musical was The Sword in the Stone.

        Basically Disney’s take on the King Arthur myth, this is another movie in the Tom Jones vein where it is a unique and experimental story though I don’t think it works. The Sword in the Stone feels less like a grand Arthurian adventure and more like going to school to learn lessons about leadership. It’s a very listless film and I honestly couldn’t tell you what the point was by the time it was over. Still, it, like all Disney movies, has its moments, and this movie marks the first appearance of Disney’s collaboration with the Sherman Brothers (a songwriting duo who we’ll discuss more in-depth with next year’s installment).
        A major landmark in documentary filmmaking occurred with the movies Point of Order

 

and Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment.

        One of the major breakthroughs to come out of the French New Wave was a style called cinéma vérité. Roughly translating to “truth cinema,” and pioneered by the film Chronique d’un Été (Eng.: Chronicle of a Summer) (1961, released in America in 1966 which is why we won’t be reviewing it here), it basically heralded the modern documentary. Encapsulating the Neorealist belief that truth is more interesting than fiction, cinéma vérité would observe real-life people doing real-life things with no voiceover; just showing things as they are. These deliberately blurred the line between reality and movies and would be a very common medium to see slices of everyday life like going to school (e.g. High School (1968)), discussions about church (e.g. A Time for Burning (1966)) and just witnessing the greatest building on Earth to invite discussions about New York City (e.g. Empire (1966)).
        America’s introduction to this genre was through the lens of its always-rambunctious political scene with Point of Order, which stitches together the Congressional hearings where Senator Joseph McCarthy suffered his downfall into one fluid narrative, and Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment, which details (the still-alive at the time of release) President Kennedy’s showdown with Alabaman Governor George Wallace over the federal desegregation of the University of Alabama. I’ll be very honest and say that, of all the experiments in filmmaking that came out in the 60s, cinéma vérité has aged tremendously poorly. Contrary to what a lot of these filmmakers believed, just seeing people go through ordinary life is actually not all that interesting to others. The style can also come off as very pretentious and documentaries would ultimately trend to being more stylized as time would go on though the fact that cinéma vérité movies weren’t exaggerated lies like earlier documentaries is worth noting.
        Point of Order and Crisis have aged better than most of these movies, though, mainly because they’re detailing genuinely interesting times in American history instead of some random person’s life, and they both still hold up. Point of Order is cathartic to watch as McCarthy’s smug bearings at these hearings were what caused his downfall 10 years before this and you get to vicariously relive the visceral disgust most Americans had seeing him back in 1955. Watching Army lawyer Joseph Welch shut him down at the end of the movie feels very satisfying after having spent 90 minutes of listening to him pepper innocent people with false accusations. Similarly, Crisis also still holds up as you can see why the Kennedy brothers were so lionized and were such astute politicians. (Although if you really want to get pedantic, Crisis probably wouldn’t be considered pure cinéma vérité since there is a narrator in the movie to fill in some of the gaps of the story for us.)
        These filmmaking experiments by beatniks are the type of thing the Academy wouldn’t take the initiative to look at and said beatniks wouldn’t submit to the Academy so an obvious impasse exists. Though I still think their breakthrough in just showing things as they are should’ve warranted winning the Academy Award for Best Documentary if the Academy was more proactive in studying independent film movements (as an academy of motion picture sciences should be doing). Instead the winner was Robert Frost: A Lover’s Quarrel with the World

which is also a solid documentary but seems like it won because the titular poet had recently passed away that same year. Point of Order and Crisis are more groundbreaking, engaging and informative.
        Since Tom Jones was made as a parody of the old-school British period piece, perhaps it seems only appropriate to compare the American equivalent: the epics. Let’s start with a movie that was nominated for multiple Academy Awards despite being one of the most notorious movie disasters of all time: Cleopatra.

        A loose remake of the 1934 Cecil B. DeMille film of the same name, Cleopatra revolves around the titular Egyptian Queen (Elizabeth Taylor) and her relationships with Julius Caesar (Rex Harrison) and his protégé, Mark Antony (Richard Burton). Cleopatra is often remembered as one of the biggest production disasters in Hollywood history as everything that could have possibly gone wrong went wrong. Principal photography began without a finished script, they changed shooting countries multiple times causing the taxes on the film to become insanely labyrinthine and one of those locations was in a harbor that still had active mines from World War II (somehow nobody died). Cleopatra wasted so much damn money that it would go on to become the highest-grossing movie of 1963 and it still lost money at the box office. Elizabeth Taylor’s extramarital affair with Richard Burton being the talk of the tabloids, making many critics eager to castigate the film, was just the cherry on top (ironically, this probably made younger audiences more likely to see it).
        Considering its notorious reputation, Cleopatra surprisingly isn’t bad although it’s not especially good either. The scale is impressive, the actors all do fine jobs and the film is never stupid. But it’s also very inconsistent, certain scenes are better than others and it’s not interesting enough to be worth 4 hours of your time. The movie was nominated and won several Academy Awards, almost all of them in the technical awards, which is fair, although I think its strong showing was less because of quality and more because of the film’s producers desperately trying to get some awards to increase the gross. Cleopatra was also nominated for Best Picture and, yeah, it definitely isn't “top 5 movies of the year” good.
        Another epic that gained a lot of notice that year, this one’s more generally positive, was How The West Was Won.

        How The West Was Won is more like a mini-series than a movie, showcasing 5 different stories as different members of a family over the generations settle the American West (the film begins with the Erie Canal in the 1830s and ends in Arizona in the 1880s). This is often considered one of the greatest of these old-school Hollywood epics and rightfully so. While it’s definitely more of the fairy tale of American frontierism than a docudrama, the film does a great job at balancing these stories and feeling like you’ve seen an epic that stretches across the generations. The movie is also refreshingly more progressive than other Westerns of the era as one of the stories revolves around someone trying to save Native Americans from being ripped off and subjugated by greedy railroad developers.
        The scale of this movie is so big that it was literally couldn't fit on normal movie screens. How The West Was Won toured as a roadshow in Cinerama wherein the movie would be projected onto a screen the size of three-screens (basically IMAX before IMAX existed). As a result, watching it today is a slightly strange experience as you can still see the folds on the prints where the screen would’ve switched over. It’s still great though and one of the absolute best of these old-school epics.
        The other big, pro-American epic that year was actually set on the opposite side of the world: America, America.

        America, America revolves around a Greek refugee named Stavros (Stathis Giallelis) who tries to find a way from his home country of Turkey to America, the land of opportunity. Similar to how How the West Was Won is about the story of the American conquering of the frontier, this movie is about the immigrant dream of brighter shores in the US, though America, America is a lot more dismal than the former. The film sheds a lot of light on the oppression that the Greeks and Armenians suffered at the hands of the Turks and gives a surprisingly nice slice of Turkish and Greek culture, heralding a new generation of filmmaking that would stop (overly) stereotyping foreign lands depicted in cinema.
        In another year, How The West Was Won or America, America would be the favorite for the Academy Award. Both encapsulate the American hope of the Kennedy years and seem to be the type of big epics that would normally win. Both were nominated for Best Picture and had campaigns for the award. Comparing these two movies (as well as Cleopatra) to Tom Jones, this choice seems like a massive upset to what we normally expect from the Academy crowd. Maybe the choice was divided, allowing Tom Jones to sneak through? Or maybe they were becoming aware of the younger generation and wanted to elevate a movie analyzing this clash between generations? In that case then, there was another epic that tackled this same subject in a far more elegant and mature manner: Il Gattopardo (Eng.: The Leopard).

        The Leopard was an Italian-and-French co-production that’s often regarded as one of the greatest movies ever made. The film revolves around the aging Italian Prince, Don Fabrizio Corbera (Burt Lancaster), who is caught up in the changing times of the Italian Unification. The film is a thinkpiece as this wealthy heir to medieval nobility contemplates his way of life slowly dying away to make way for the new generation that will grow up in the new country. The last hour of the film, showing a glamorous ball where the Prince wanders from room to room reflecting on his life and the end of his culture for the next generation, is one of the greatest sequences in cinematic history.
        The Leopard won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and was widely lauded in Europe though it received a more lukewarm reception in the United States. Sadly, this was a film that was butchered in the dub when it was released in the USA and American audiences would not become familiar with the original, subtitled film until over a decade later. In the interest of fairness, we can understand why the Academy wouldn’t have acknowledged The Leopard’s greatness upon release since the version they would've been seeing probably wasn't all that great.
        Another foreign Italian epic, that was released subtitled and intact, was 8½.

        Along with La Dolce Vita (1961), this is often regarded as one of Federico Fellini’s masterpieces, as well as one of the best movies about moviemaking. The film is about a director (Marcello Mastroianni) who is dealing with writer’s block as he tries to develop a film that would encapsulate his personal problems and feelings. In a meta sense, this makes 8½ feels like it must have been Fellini’s most personal film as 8½ has a lot of rich themes of the struggles to be emotionally vulnerable as a director and putting pieces of yourself out there for the whole world to see and experience as entertainment.
        Like La Dolce Vita, 8½ was highly praised upon its release, winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and being nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director, one of the few foreign films to be so honored. I’m also going out on a limb here and say that it was snubbed for the Best Picture, even as a nominee, since it’s easily a much better film than Cleopatra and Tom Jones.
       Admittedly, if 8½ or The Leopard won Best Picture, which would have been a massive deal in acknowledging foreign cinema in Hollywood, we’d probably still critique them here as both films drag like crazy in the middle and only retain masterpiece status because both end on a high note. Then again, that’s also a problem with all of the other epics listed here (How The West Was Won excluded) and it’s not like Tom Jones is a paragon of perfect pacing in moviemaking. Once again, foreign language cinema may be represented by the Academy, but they won’t dare let it win the biggest award.
        (While we’re in the realm of foreign cinema, the French New Wave was once again snubbed as two of the last classics of the movement to be released in America, Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket

and Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie: Film en Douze Tableaux (Eng.: My Life to Live)

weren’t nominated or acknowledged.)
        Despite how prestigious these movies are, arguably the most influential epic of that year was actually a comedy: It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

        The movie is a colossal ensemble piece as a group of colorful characters discover the existence of $350,000 buried somewhere in Santa Rosita State Park. Armed with this knowledge, they all race each other across the American Southwest to be the first to the treasure, meeting more colorful characters along the way, many of whom end up in the race as well. It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World acts as a sort-of callback to the Grand Hotel (1933) movies of the 30s where the attraction is less about these characters and more the fact that they’re all played by famous comedians at the time that audiences would’ve recognized. Everyone is playing the same type they’ve been portraying for years but seeing them all work off of each other was the fun and the cast was a real who’s who of famous comedic actors at the time: Milton Berle, Mickey Rooney, Sid Caesar, Ethel Merman, Buddy Hackett, Phil Silvers, Terry-Thomas, Edie Adams, Rochester Anderson, Jonathan Winters, Edward Everett Horton, Jim Backus, Buster Keaton, the Three Stooges, Don Knotts, Andy Devine, Peter Falk and that still isn’t everybody. While some of those names might be unfamiliar to modern audiences, it would’ve been a fun treat for pop culture junkies in 1963.
        It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World represents the next and arguably final evolution of screwball comedy before modern (i.e. deliberately inappropriate and/or offensive) comedy began in the Hollywood New Wave. Most of the humor comes from quips, one-liners and silly situations instead of the characters doing anything that horrible. As a result, this is the type of humor you either think ages well or you don’t. I’m personally not a fan but, still, the sheer passion and energy on display here is admirable. It’s even more impressive when you learn that the director, Stanley Kramer, had never made a comedy before and was known for more dramatic pictures (i.e. The Defiant Ones (1956), Inherit the Wind (1960), Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) etc). The sheer scale dedicated to such a silly concept is really the type of thing that won’t happen again anytime in the near-future and influenced comedies for most of the rest of the decade.
        The final major epic of the year was The Great Escape.

        A film about American POWs who try to escape from a German concentration camp, The Great Escape is a surprisingly slow burn compared to some of the other action spy movies of this era. It’s still awesome though, acting as a nice breakout role for Steve McQueen and an epic (but tragically short) climactic motorcycle chase. As Hollywood slowly fell apart over the course of the next few years and poured more and more money into these colossal epics to try to stay afloat, It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and The Great Escape (along with The Guns of Navarone (1961)), generated a trend of epic comedies and WWII action pictures which would add some nice diversity for those who got sick of 3-hour American dramas and Biblical thrillers. Granted, it’d be better if there were some that were more economical with their time but, regardless, both of these movies were highly influential.
        The other great American comedy of the year, although it’s not an epic, was The Nutty Professor.

        Often considered Jerry Lewis’ best movie, the film is a spoof of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), as it revolves around a professor (Lewis) with a kind heart but low self-esteem who takes a potion that transforms him into a narcissistic but effortlessly smooth swinger (also Lewis). Along with Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights (1931), this is the comedy that pioneered the trend in most modern comedies of giving the protagonist an ultimately good heart that makes us want to see him win. Even by those standards, though, The Nutty Professor goes further than most as its climax, instead of being an over-the-top gag, is surprisingly uncomfortable and makes the character confront some hard truths about himself. Plus, Lewis’ famously annoying voice (that makes most people either love or hate the rest of his movies, even back then) actually works to his advantage here as you can see why his character has trouble with women with a voice like that.
        In comparing these two comedic pictures to Tom Jones, The Nutty Professor is easily the best of the bunch, being the most consistently funny and having the strongest narrative arc. Tom Jones definitely experimented more but you could say that about It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World as well: spending this much money on this big of a scale for a farce was unprecedented at the time. It might be a more kitschy thing but it does work better overall. Tom Jones may have pushed boundaries more with its comedy, which we do applaud, but in terms of actually being funny and working as a film, these other two blow it out of the water.
        But at the very least, comedy did get some respect from the Academy back in the day, which is more than we can say for the other genre most often ignored for the institution’s long history: horror. Two major landmarks in the genre came out in 1963, and both were ignored: The Birds and The Haunting.

        The Birds was arguably Alfred Hitchcock’s last masterpiece, being a love story between socialite Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren who was horribly abused and sexually harassed by Hitchcock on the set of this film and Marnie (1964)) and lawyer Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) that is interrupted when the local avian wildlife decides to start attacking humans. The gear change from a romance into a horror film is masterfully done as the film very slowly but deliberately shows the birds getting weirder and weirder while leading up to their inevitable attack.
        When comparing The Birds to the Universal and Hammer monster movies of yore, you can really see just how much this pushed the genre further forward than any other movie since, well, probably Psycho (1960) but the point still remains. One underrated aspect is that the movie never does explain why the birds in the movie have all decided to go completely berserk. We hear some gossip on the news, some hints in the background if you want to look but, ultimately, things are just changing and the characters don’t know why. In earlier movies, even if the characters meeting the monster didn’t know where it came from, the audience was usually clued in in some way. In The Birds, we’re just as clueless as the protagonists on why the birds are attacking people which makes them that much more frightening: the monster that you don’t know is in many ways much scarier than the one you do.
        Hitchcock shows his mastery over suspense in the last act where, without giving away the sequence too much, it’s completely unlike anything he’d done before. Many of his movies ended in action sequences or suspenseful confrontations or shocking reveals. The climax of The Birds technically falls into the second category but in a way that’s far different than the ending of, say, Rear Window (1954). The constant cawing of the birds as our heroes very gingerly try to walk around them is still a scary sequence to watch, even if the effects on the birds themselves are pretty outdated. It's a very eerie scene and, if nothing else, made the film a severe snub for the Oscar for Best Sound Effects (which was given to the cartoonish usage in It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World) and/or Best Sound (won by How the West Was Won).

        The Haunting is set in a haunted house called Hill House where numerous owners and tenants have died over the years. A college researcher, Dr. John Markway (Richard Johnson), wishes to study paranormal activity and recruits the current owner of the house, Luke Sannerson (Russ Tamblyn), and two female test subjects, the cynical Theodora (Claire Bloom) and psychologically fragile Eleanor (Julie Harris), to spend several nights in the house and study their reactions. At first glance, The Haunting doesn’t seem to have all that much different from the haunted house genre that was pioneered by The Old Dark House (1933): where several strangers spend a night in a house and it’s never quite clear if the house is actually haunted or if there are more mundane explanations. The Haunting takes it a few steps further as it does clearly have some mind-bending setpieces so the question instead is how much is being caused by ghosts and how much are hallucinations coming from the head of our mentally unwell protagonist.
        Eleanor Lance is a very fascinating and unnerving character whose mental state clearly lends it well to being haunted. The more we find out about her, the more disturbing she becomes. This is what elevates the movie: both her performance and the complex character dynamics she shares with the other characters. They all act like adults while Eleanor has the emotional maturity of a teenager who crushes on the men and sees Theodora as competition for their affection. Similarly all three of the other actors are great as well. Dr. Markway comes off as very mature and intelligent, Luke seems like a playboy who slowly gets the fun drained out of him by the house and there’s a lot you can read into with the film’s implications of Theodora’s (bi)sexuality. (This is a great touch of acting direction as during the scary scenes, it’s usually just the two women together and it’s fun seeing Eleanor’s paranoia get fueled by her implied homophobia.)
        The Haunting was directed by Robert Wise, the man who made West Side Story (1961), and this is a very impressive genre turn for him. You can tell that he took a lot of influence from Psycho as the look of Hill House is probably the coolest-looking haunted house up to that point in time. The cinematography gets very creative and emphasizes the mind-bending nature of The Haunting as it speeds up to its tragic finale.
        At the time that it came out, The Haunting was considered the scariest movie ever made, with some theaters offering $100 prizes for anyone who could watch the entire movie at a midnight screening without walking out or fainting. Despite publicity stunts like this, however, The Haunting only did okay at the box office (the fact that movie theater owners were giving away $100 refunds at a time when tickets cost only a dollar may have had something to do with this). Comparing The Haunting to the cheesiness and fantastical creatures of the Universal and Hammer movies, The Haunting definitely feels like it hits a lot closer to actually trying to scare its audience. Nowadays, it’s tame, but it’s still a great watch to see the roots of a lot of the genre and it still works as a character study and psychological horror.
        Even accounting for taste, it really is difficult to see why neither of these movies were nominated for any Oscars other than the fact that they’re horror movies. The Birds should’ve gotten Hitchcock an Oscar for Best Director, even if just as a due award since he’d been snubbed numerous times by now. And even if you don’t like The Haunting, it’d be hard not to argue it deserving of at least nominations for the Oscars for Best Black-and-White Cinematography, Best Black-and-White Production Design and Best Leading Actress. Reading some of the critical and Academy member reviews at the time is hilarious as you can see them trying to wrestle with themselves about thinking it’s a good movie while also trying to sneer down their nose at The Haunting just because it’s a horror film. My favorite is Bosley Crowther of The New York Times acknowledging it as the best haunted house movie ever made but still saying that “there really is no point to it.”
        Big words, considering how the big award winner that year was Tom Jones, a movie that damn near revels in its lack of a point. (And, also, yes, The Haunting does have a point and it emphasizes said point so much that you would have to be very deliberately obtuse to miss it.) These are two of the best horror movies ever made and did more for their genre than Tom Jones did for comedies.
        This is normally when we’d about wrap things up but, honestly, this is one of those decisions that pisses me off enough that I want to keep going. The acting awards also deserve serious critiquing for this Academy Award ceremony, not just Best Picture. The Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress went to Margaret Rutherford in The V.I.P.s.

        The V.I.P.s is another comedy-drama ensemble piece as a bunch of characters are stuck at the V.I.P. Lounge in London’s Heathrow Airport where they undergo relationship problems. The movie’s ok though Rutherford’s victory boggles the mind. She plays the Duchess of Brighton, who is the film’s binge-drinking, crass piece of comic relief. This is not an especially difficult or notable performance to pull off and, in my opinion, one of the most undeserved Oscar wins ever.
        The Academy seemed really in love with British comedies that year as three of the five nominees for Best Supporting Actress were all side-characters from Tom Jones, all of whom's comedic performances revolve around blushing at the camera shortly before getting laid. If they wanted to acknowledge women being funny in comedies, where’s Stella Stevens as the love interest in The Nutty Professor? Or if they wanted to acknowledge darkly comedic chops from foreign actresses, where’s Anouk Aimée as the wife in 8½? Or, if they want to acknowledge actually excellent performances (which is what they say they do), where’s Claire Bloom’s layered performance in The Haunting?
        Another poor choice was the Academy Award for Best Leading Actor, which went to Sidney Poitier in Lilies of the Field.

        Lilies of the Field is similar to Tom Jones in that it’s not a good movie but it was pretty culturally relevant for its time, albeit for completely different reasons. Lilies of the Field revolves around a convent of nuns who meet a black man named Homer Smith (Sidney Poitier) and recruit him into improving their parish. This is a very hackneyed film as there is no real conflict and it mostly exists as sentimental schmaltz as the two groups of people help each other out, showing how we can all come together regardless of who we are through the love of God and giving back to the community. Lilies of the Field is like the religious equivalent of watching an episode of TeleTubbies (1997-2001) or a Lassie or Shirley Temple movie: its sickeningly saccharine nature inspires more revulsion than racial harmony.
        This is a difficult movie to review as, given this is still the 60s, you could see how it might be considered a step forward though I think it’s one of those things that seems to come off as more ignorant with time. It’s one of the earliest, if not the earliest, progenitors of the Magical Black Man trope (the trope actually has a different name in academic circles though I will not be using it here): where our white protagonists are suffering a problem and only achieve enlightenment with the help of their token black friend. Compared to earlier Hollywood movies where black characters were usually racist stereotypes, this is progress, but nowadays, it just shows the ignorance of the creators of the film as the character is so angelic, any character flaws or culture are completely fetishized. This is one of those tropes that refused to die in Hollywood and is responsible for more “progressive” (read: manipulative and devoid of real or healthy commentary) films that have been frontrunners in the Academy Awards than you can count, usually rolled in with the White Savior trope for good measure.
        Just to show how much actors’ careers live and die by these awards, Poitier would largely be typecast into these roles for the rest of his career, teaming up with a white protagonist in a different setting each time. Despite this, most of his later films would have more depth and ask more probing questions about the racial difference (e.g. A Touch of Blue (1964), In the Heat of the Night (1967), Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (1967) etc.) and yet he would never win another Oscar. Poitier, to his credit, is trying his hardest here, and he does his best to make Lilies of the Field quasi-watchable with his performance, but even the greatest actor on Earth couldn't save such a hackneyed role.
        Almost all of the other nominations for the role were in Oscar-baiting movies (i.e. Albert Finney in Tom Jones, Richard Harris in This Sporting Life, Rex Harrison in Cleopatra) so maybe he was better than them at least. But one role that wasn’t nominated is one of the most iconic movie characters to come out of the 60s: Sean Connery as James Bond in Dr. No.

        The James Bond movies are a long-running series of action-adventure films where a British spy for MI6 is sent on missions around the world to stop megalomaniacal villains from world domination. (Technically, Dr. No was released in England in 1962 but we go by American release dates for this blog, where it made its appearance on May 29th, 1963.) In this film specifically, Bond is sent to Jamaica after another MI6 agent named Commander Strangways (Timothy Moxon, voice dubbed by Robert Rietty) is murdered under mysterious circumstances. Compared to later Bond films where the plots can get to be over-the-top and have larger-than-life action sequences, Dr. No is surprisingly dry. It plays out more like a film noir or police investigation film, with a lot of scenes of Bond talking to other gentlemen in suits and ties. There’s still some action and a constant sense of danger that keeps things interesting but whereas later Bond films are about whether or not Bond can stop the villain, here, he never really seems like he struggles to find his way out of danger and most of the action scenes last 60 seconds or less.
        Besides the Beatles, there is nobody who embodied the British Invasion better than Sean Connery’s James Bond. He was handsome, sexy, dangerous, suave, funny, flirtatious and a total badass. He’s the man that every man wanted to be and every woman wanted to be with. Every mannerism he had was instantly iconic from his love for shaken (not stirred) martinis***; his tendency to introduce himself by his last name before his first name followed by his last name again and his wisecracking one-liners after killing someone (a trope that every action movie hero takes from but Connery was the only one who made it seem perfectly in-character). What makes the character fun, and made Connery’s portrayal the yardstick that all future portrayals of the character are graded against, is how he encompasses two radically different characters into one. He’s both a gentleman and a thug, a guy who could fit right at home at a high-class poker table and then go out back and beat someone to a pulp.
        Now, the question you might be asking after that is just how quickly James Bond became an icon and the answer is almost immediately. The producers of the film once recounted the story of the opening premiere of Dr. No where the audience applauded as soon as Bond showed up on-screen. And if you watch his introductory scene, it’s not hard to see why. This has to be one of the greatest intros to any movie character ever; from the second he appears, you instantly know that this is the coolest guy on the planet.
        I realize calling the Best Leading Actor award a snub here could ruffle some feathers as this is the first time in history that a black man won a competitive Academy Award (an honorary award was given to James Baskett for Song of the South (1946)). However, I think it’s also clear that it was awarded for political reasons, not merit, but the politics were noble ones during a time period when this nobility was greatly needed. And even if Lilies of the Field comes off as ignorant and schmaltzy today, you can see that it was trying to impart a good moral in a time period where it was needed. Though, at that point, the question then becomes why didn’t Lilies of the Field win the Best Picture award, especially since it was the only major fictional film of 1963 to analyze race relations. We’d probably still heavily criticize Lilies of the Field if it won but at least it would make some sense and would be a nice gesture to add Hollywood’s credence to the civil rights movement.
        Just looking at the performances on their own, though, Connery created a great character that very few others would be able to pull off while Poitier’s Homer Smith seems like something that almost any other halfway competent actor would be able to pull off. Connery’s Bond has an easy control over every situation he finds himself in. You believe every word he says, from his flirting to his steely menace to his critiquing vodka martinis. Considering the rumor-mongering and intensive searches that occur every time a new actor is needed for the role, it's clear that this is not an easy role that any actor can portray. He should have warranted a nomination at least.
        At least the Oscars for Best Leading Actress and Best Supporting Actor make sense. The awards respectively went to Patricia Neal and Melvyn Douglas for their performances in our last movie to talk about, Hud.

        Hud revolves around a ranching family called the Bannons: patriarch Homer (Melvyn Douglas) and his son, Hud (Paul Newman), and grandson, Lonnie (Brandon deWilde). The family enjoys an uneasy existence as Hud and Homer constantly butt heads over their lack of money despite having spent their whole life slaving away on the ranch. Things take a turn for the worst, however, when an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease starts working its way through Homer’s cattle, decimating the herd. Will Homer and Hud be able to put aside their differences and work together to save the ranch? As a matter of fact, no, they won’t.
        Hud is a dark revisionist Western in the same vein as The Ox-Bow Incident (1942) and High Noon (1952) though this one is even darker than those in some ways. Hud takes what was a pretty standard set-up in Westerns and turns it on its head. The crotchety old homesteader teaming up with a youngster to save the family farm and his son learning the value of loyalty and hard work is a pretty standard part of Americana and the frontier mythology. But Hud never does learn the value of loyalty and hard work. He’s arrogant and constantly resentful that his family is not more successful and ends up selling out his morals because he’s sick of this lifestyle. It ends up being a pretty sad tale as the father slowly comes to realize just how badly he failed his son.
        Patricia Neal plays Alma, the Bannons’ housekeeper and the object of Hud’s affections. Again, this trope of the coming-of-age youngster falling in love with the girl-next-door is something that audiences at the time would have seen before. Here, instead, it’s played in a very unsettling manner. Alma clearly does not reciprocate Hud’s feelings and gets increasingly uncomfortable by his pursuit of her, showing how the typical Hollywoodized method of pursuing women is actually very unhealthy. It’s an uncomfortably gross pursuit and the fact that famous heartthrob Paul Newman manages to make his character seem like such a creep is pretty impressive.
        Hud can be a bit slow at times but it’s still a great revisionist Western that provides a superb allegory for the opposite side of the generational cultural clash. Most other movies at the time were about the youth rebelling being shown as a good thing but Hud, instead, shows that not all rebellions are warranted. Over the course of the 60s and 70s, it would become an increasing part of the discourse of how youth was losing their morals by rebelling against everything their parents hold dear, including things that probably shouldn't have been rebelled against. (Marching for civil rights and experimenting with gender roles was one thing, harassing Vietnam veterans and bombing government buildings was quite another.) Hud was a nice cautionary reflective mirror of showing audiences, both older and younger, to not forget the sacrifices their parents gave them and not reject all of the morals they imparted or else you can turn into as much of a bastard as Hud Bannon. 
        Bringing it back to the million-dollar question of whether or not Tom Jones deserved to win the Oscar for Best Picture, I think you know the answer though the real question at this point is why did it win the Oscar and, by those same parameters, what should have won instead? Tom Jones is not all that good of a comedy though, if I’m being honest, I don’t really think It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is the best movie of the year either (The Nutty Professor could be because of its climax though). If Tom Jones was about the generational culture clash, then Hud analyzes it far more darkly and in a more serious manner though, again, if it won, I think we would still have reservations as it is a tad slow and has been forgotten. If Tom Jones won simply for political reasons (though what politics those would be are beyond me), then the winner should’ve been Lilies of the Field though Lilies of the Field isn’t a good movie either.
        I think it ultimately came down due to a combination of three factors: just trying to capture the youth zeitgeist of the era, the fact that the movie did try some new things and that, ultimately, this is the type of movie that Academy members (read: old white people in country clubs) like to watch to think they’re hip. As much as movies like The Leopard, 8½ and Vivre Sa Vie are respected by serious cinephiles, Academy members will only go as foreign as going over to England. Maybe it might also be as a make-up to England for ignoring the Kitchen Sink/English New Wave before this? But that seems unlikely since they ignored most of the French New Wave and Italian Neorealist Wave so what made the English New Wave so special?
        I feel a little bad being this scathing because Tom Jones isn’t nearly as clichéd as many other Best Picture winners I’ve lambasted before. It is original and experiments new film techniques which should be respected. But the simple logic of trying new things isn’t quite enough, hasn’t been in the past for the Academy and wouldn’t be in the future. Also, if just having a British spin on a genre with more sex and violence is enough, then why didn’t Dr. No win or become nominated?
        Before Bond, there wasn’t an investigation/spy movie with this much violence and sex and it changed the genre more or less immediately. In fact, the violence and sex are so essential to the movie, that the two most iconic scenes are 1. the opening credits that has the famous gunbarrel where Bond shoots an offscreen assailant and his blood pours down the screen and 2. the love interest’s entrance that turned Ursula Andress into one of the most famous sex symbols of the decade. But because one’s a period piece and the other’s a crime thriller, even if the period piece is nonsensical and forgotten and the crime thriller is deadly serious and still well-regarded, the genre hierarchy must always be respected.
        But I digress, if Tom Jones won the award for doing stuff that no one had ever done before, then the winner should either have been How The West Was Won, The Birds or The Haunting. In fact, I’d probably hazard a guess that had Beatlemania began only a few months after it did (i.e. after this Oscars ceremony took place), the winner mostly likely would’ve been How The West Was Won. But it wasn’t so calling Tom Jones the best movie of 1963 was a…


SNUB!

***For the record, shaking a martini makes it taste terrible. It’s a very weird favorite drink for someone who’s supposed to be a hobbyist sommelier.


Personal Favorite Movies of 1963:

• 8½ (dir. Federico Fellini)
• America, America (dir. Elia Kazan)
• Crisis: Behind A Presidential Commitment (dir. Robert Drew)
• Dr. No (dir. Terence Young)
• How The West Was Won (dir. Henry Hathaway, John Ford and George Marshall) 
• Hud (dir. Martin Ritt)
• Point of Order (dir. Emile de Antonio)
• The Birds (dir. Alfred Hitchcock) 
• The Haunting (dir. Robert Wise) 
• The Nutty Professor (dir. Jerry Lewis) 

Favorite Heroes:

• Dr. John Markway (Richard Johnson) (The Haunting)
• James Bond (Sean Connery) (Dr. No)
• Joseph Welch (Point of Order)
• Lord Mark Antony (Richard Burton) (Cleopatra) 
• Melanie Daniels and Mitch Brenner (Tippi Hedren and Rod Taylor) (The Birds) 
• Merlin (Karl Swenson) (The Sword in the Stone) 
• Otto Meyer (Phil Silvers) (It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World)
• Prince Don Fabrizio Corbera (Burt Lancaster) (Il Gattopardo (The Leopard))
• Professor Julius Kelp (Jerry Lewis) (The Nutty Professor) 
• Stavros Topouzoglou (Stathis Giallelis) (America, America) 

Favorite Villains:

• Augustus Gaius Julius Caesar Octavian (Roddy McDowall) (Cleopatra)
• Buddy Love (Jerry Lewis) (The Nutty Professor)
• Dr. No (Joseph Wiseman) (Dr. No)
• Eleanor Lance (Julie Harris) (The Haunting)
• Hill House (The Haunting)
• Hud Bannon (Paul Newman) (Hud)
• Mike King (Richard Widmark) (How The West Was Won)
• Senator Joseph McCarthy (Point of Order)
• The Birds (The Birds)
• The Wolf (Jimmy MacDonald) (The Sword in the Stone)