Success or Snub? My Fair Lady (37th Academy Awards Review Pt. 2)
1964 may not have been the greatest year for movies but it is a strong contender for possibly being the most iconic year of the 60s in terms of movies. This is going to be a shorter rundown than normal but every movie noted is one of the most quintessential films of the decade.
By this point, the Hays Code was practically optional. It still existed and would provide rules for the studios but if they thought it was more profitable to not follow it, they wouldn’t. Furthermore, the new head of the office, Eric Johnston, was a classic Kennedy liberal and would make more and more exceptions and bending of the rules. The major studios did, on average, stick tenaciously to the Code although it was less because of pressure and more because of mounting costs and the near-bankruptcy of 20th Century Fox after Cleopatra (1963) (not to mention probably some lingering attitudes from the Blacklist era), which made studios more conservative and pursue a “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality. Unfortunately, their hold on pop culture would become incredibly broken, as demonstrated by England and France swallowing up the lion’s share of pop culture, and the previous year’s Oscars where almost every award-winning film was a British one.
Theater owners, with no such scruples or guidelines and no longer compelled to follow studios' censorship, could show whatever the Hell they wanted and audiences were willing to lap it up. Granted, usually “whatever” was somewhat limited by what would be considered tasteful and that could vary from community to community but green dollar bills will do a lot to assuage even the most conservative of theater owners.
Besides this void being filled by other countries, this also led to the rise and beginning of exploitation films, a genre that can be tricky to define as they range from crime thrillers to horror movies to action-adventure romps and everything in between. The best way to describe an exploitation film is a film that is the polar opposite of Hays Code-approved movies: as much gore as possible, as much nudity as possible, as much debauchery as possible, as much sex as possible and any taboo subject matters that can be encroached upon. The real groundbreaker in this regard was the Splatter Trilogy with Blood Feast
and Two Thousand Maniacs!
(and the following year’s Color Me Blood Red). These were the first movies wherein the director, Herschell Gordon Lewis, took no prisoners about making as gory as possible, showing a level of carnage unseen since the original All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). Of course, like most exploitation films, these are very low brow, dumb as Hell, contain horrendous acting and are probably the most historically important, genre-defining films to be borderline unwatchable. Of these three, Two Thousand Maniacs! is the best though mostly because it’s the only one that has some sort of commentary (being about the violent hatred of the South and how it has permeated throughout the generations).
A few years before this same time was the founding of American International Pictures, a low-budget studio run by Roger Corman who was a producer of these sorts of films that were slightly higher-brow than the Splatter Trilogy (at least by the standards of exploitation B-movies). Corman, if you've never heard of him, is one of the most important producers from 60s and 70s Hollywood as he was willing to hire anyone so long as they could make his lowbrow, low-budget films on budget and on time and would introduce them to other producer friends looking for hot new talent (Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard and James Cameron, among others, all started their careers directing for AIP). These movies had been made for a little while by this point, starting in the 50s with some low-budget, double-feature Westerns, and consistently churning out these films throughout the decade, sticking to their formula of A.R.K.O.F.F. for successful low-budget movies (standing for Action, Revolution, Killing, Oratory, Fantasy and Fornication). Notable of Corman's contribution was what he called the Poe Cycle, wherein he spent most of the decade adapting films of Edgar Allen Poe stories (beginning with The Fall of the House of Usher (1960) and with 1964’s rendition being the violent and dark The Masque of the Red Death
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The reason why I'm giving this little lesson is both to show that the roots for Hollywood New Wave actually began on what the producers snobbishly called "Poverty Row" studios but also because arguably the best of AIP’s films was The Last Man on Earth.
Based off of the novel I Am Legend (1954), this is often considered one of the best of these movies as Vincent Price plays a doctor trying to escape a plague of vampires that has completely dominated the Earth. Despite the laughable budget, Vincent Price’s manic, cynical performance and the dark twist ending (that both of the film’s remakes completely messed up) do hold the thing together and help keep The Last Man on Earth a highlight of the genre.
That’s how pop culture was being influenced by violence. But what about the sex? Well, look no further than Elvis Presley’s star vehicle Viva Las Vegas.
In this film, Elvis co-stars along Ann-Margret (who ironically had her breakout role as a fangirl of an Elvis parody in the previous year’s Bye Bye Birdie (1963)) as they… compete with a racecar driver in Las Vegas because they want to save a garage?… Honestly, the plot doesn’t matter. What does matter is that Elvis had already spent his career getting in hot water with parents of America for his pelvis-thrusting, sensual ways. Pair that with Ann-Margret’s tight pants that leave little to the imagination and her bedroom eyes leaving even less and this is one of the steamiest movies ever made up to that point. (I also personally think that this is Elvis’ best movie but entirely for reasons unrelated to Elvis and his inability to break out of being typecast as a barely likable, hunky moron (i.e. the Vegas cinematography, the dance numbers, Ann-Margret, the Ben-Hur (1959)-esque climax etc.).)
(Elvis’ other movies that year were Kissin’ Cousins
and Roustabout.
These also feature the King of Rock being a marble-mouthed hunk who hits on every woman he meets though they’re often regarded as some of his weaker films and also made far less money than Viva Las Vegas. In fact, Viva Las Vegas made more in the box office than these two movies combined. My guess why? Not as tightly-written and no Ann-Margret in tight pants.)
Or how about The Carpetbaggers?
This is another 2.5-hour-long melodrama, about a love triangle between a millionaire named Jonas Cord (George Peppard), a Western movie star that invests in his company named Nevada Smith (Alan Ladd) and a widow that both are in love with named Rina Marlowe (Carroll Baker). What stands out about The Carpetbaggers is how sexual the film is. Previous melodramas usually had characters talking about their families or just mentioning how much in love they are. In this movie, Cord and Marlowe make a lot of sexual innuendos and lewd comments and there’s even a scene of Rina Marlowe being naked (that has long since been edited out in the post-MPAA world, showing how the Sexual Revolution wasn’t long for this world). This crossed major boundaries as Cord doesn’t pursue his love interest because he’s mistaken in his love, he pursues her because he wants her body.
None of these movies are the types of film that would win Academy Awards, which was made up entirely of people in the major studios; in fact, critics and the Academy hated them specifically for their taboo nature. Still, it’s good to illustrate where pop culture was going, how much classical morals were being challenged and how much audiences were actually willing to watch these types of movies. By early 1965 (when this awards ceremony took place), many of the films that started the Hollywood New Wave were being shopped around these cheap studios, with all parties being fully aware of how un-Code friendly they were and being rewarded for this lewd decision-making. (That having been said, I do think that The Carpetbaggers is better than most other melodramas of the era, including most of the Academy Award nominee frontrunners, mainly because of its taboo nature, though movie of the year it is not.)
Other historically important quick-hitters to acknowledge are
- 7 Faces of Dr. Lao
which won an honorary Academy Award for Best Make-Up (long before this became an official category in 1981) due to the lead playing all the same characters at a magical circus. The movie itself is good and, yes, the make-up job is impressive though it falls into Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) syndrome where the uncomfortable and unnecessary racial stereotyping can make it difficult to watch today.
- Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear!
The first theatrically-released film to have ever been based on a TV show… technically speaking. The first film to be kinda based off a TV show was Dragnet (1954), which was based off of a TV show of the same name (1951-1959) but that was adapted/spun off from a radio program of the same name (1949-1957). Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear! is the first one based off of a show made specifically for television. What’s interesting is that most movies based on TV shows usually try to up the scale of the characters and animation to reward fans of the show and neither Dragnet nor Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear! do that. The movie itself just feels like a long episode of the TV show without much scale or splurge for being feature-length (even the animation doesn’t feel like it’s better than Hanna-Barbera’s standard mediocre TV fare).
- And Le Monde Sans Soleil (Eng.: The World Without Sun)
Jacques Cousteau’s follow-up to The Silent World (1956), showing us the absolute deepest depths of the ocean and a well-earned winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary. Coming off of The Silent World, The World Without Sun is a lot more clinical and has less dumb jokes and is more in line with what you think of in regards to a great nature documentary.
Moving onto our bigger hitters. By the end of 1964, Beatlemania was in full swing. After conquering the music industry and receiving their breakout on television, John, Paul, George and Ringo entered the cinematic medium with A Hard Day’s Night.
Sharing a title with the 1964 album of the same name, A Hard Day’s Night follows the Beatles as they go on tour around England and play a show. The style is hard to describe as it very deliberately blurs the line between a fictional film and a documentary. The movie is shot like a documentary, and is certainly meant to feel like one, but the situations they arrive in are deliberately staged. (So, in other words, the opening when they’re hopping on the train, even if that’s something they did on a regular basis, they would’ve had multiple takes until they got the shot right.)
While the film does feature some song numbers of the band, most of A Hard Day’s Night is just spent hanging out with the band as they shoot the breeze and make jokes. The dialogue feels (and probably was) heavily improvised and authentic and there really isn’t too much of a plot. The real draw of the film is the parasocial relationship that the camera provides to allow the audience to feel like they’re hanging out with the band before seeing a show. In this way, A Hard Day’s Night is a pioneer of a lot of those Behind the Music and band documentaries that were very popular on VH1 and MTV during the 80s and 90s. Considering how the Beatles pioneered pop music as we know it, it only makes sense that this influence would carry on through the years as well.
Going back to A Hard Day’s Night can be very difficult if you’re not the biggest fan of the Beatles as the movie is largely plotless. Still, it has some contributions to cinema in its own right, mainly in paving the way for these “meet the band” documentaries and helping to mainstream popularize the jumpy editing style that was pioneered by Breathless (1960). A Hard Day’s Night would prove to be so popular that many other rock-and-roll legends of the 60s would have similar cinéma vérité-esque films such as Bob Dylan (Dont Look Back (1967)) and the Rolling Stones (Gimme Shelter (1970)).
While Britain was the country that formed the crux of the British Invasion, vicariously trotting to other exotic locales was something that also defined the 60s. Going back to foreign cinema once again, out of France came one of the most acclaimed musicals to make a splash overseas, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (Eng.: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg).
The winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg revolves around a couple in the French town of Cherbourg: Guy (Nino Castelnuovo, singing voice dubbed by José Bartel) and Geneviéve (Catherine Deneuve, singing voice dubbed by Danielle Licari). The movie is a melodrama about their romance and the young love they share and how they vow to always love each other. Of course, that vow ends up being tested when Guy is drafted by the government to fight in the Algerian War, taking him away from his beloved for two years.
Calling The Umbrellas of Cherbourg a musical is a slight misnomer as it would be more accurate to call it an opera. The entire film is spoken in song from beginning to end and the actors’ performances are meant to be as overwrought as possible. While a more cynical audience member might roll their eyes at it, the sheer commitment to the bit does enhance the emotion in the film. What makes the movie great is how it rejects many romantic film clichés and shows a slice of life of real issues that can seriously test the foundations of a relationship. Yet, because love is the emotion that life revolves around, why not make a romantic drama seem so epic? The very bright and colorful palette and set design completes the tone, giving the whole movie a very fairy tale-like atmosphere that deliberately echoes the saturated colors of Hollywood musicals whilst showing more real-life relationship problems.
The two actors really seem like they think they’ll die from being away from each other for so long, giving one of the best portrayals of young love in cinematic history. Also, the film gets major points for not taking the easy way out either. The decisions that these two make are not the ones you would think from this set-up and they have to live with these consequences. Thus, there ends up being some interesting commentary on how the youth of France will be destined to become just like their parents and the audience can debate about whether it’s the state making them that way or just part of life when you get older.
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg had an interesting relationship with the Academy Awards. It was nominated for Best Foreign Film at the 37th Academy Awards but was then nominated the following year for Best Original Music Score, Best Adapted Music Score and Best Original Song. This is because The Umbrellas of Cherbourg made such a splash in America in its subtitled version that it would end up being re-released the following year with a dubbed version, making it span across 2 Academy Awards ceremonies. Also, the fact that the score was originally written for the French version and was dubbed and rescored for the American dub meant that it actually qualified for both Original and Adapted Score.
As if this isn’t enough bizarre legalese, the Best Original Song was for the movie’s leitmotif “I Will Wait For You.” This is one of the most famous romance songs of the 60s and it actually appears nowhere in the movie. The spirit is there, as is the melody (which was originally called “Je Ne Pourrai Jamais Vivre San Toi” which would more literally translate to “I Could Never Live Without You”), but the lyrics to the song proper are nowhere in the film. However, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg was popular enough that lyrics were given to it and were performed by singer Connie Francis on her album Movie Greats of the 60s (1966) and this is the song that was nominated for the Oscar for Best Song.
(The average pop culture junkie nowadays probably associates the song with the tragic ending to what is widely regarded as one of the best episodes of the animated sitcom, Futurama (1999-present), which itself was paying homage to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.)
For brevity’s sake, I’ll only be reviewing The Umbrellas of Cherbourg in this blog since that’s when it first made its big splash. It is one of the year’s best films and, as mentioned, nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, an award that it lost to Vittorio De Sica’s Ieri, Oggi, Domani (Eng.: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow).
This was an Italian film that details three different shorts from all around Italy as three different couples (all of whom are played by Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni) in Naples, Milan and Rome deal with different relationship issues. The movie is fun but a bit of a mess and seems to reject De Sica’s Neorealist roots for a movie that lampoons Italian society in a more silly manner. It’s not a bad movie but it’s very inconsistent and nowhere near as good as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
Two great Japanese films also came out in America that year: Seppuku (released in America as Harakiri),
a movie about a samurai (Tatsuya Nakadai) who deals with the psychological consequences of being forced to commit ritualistic suicide, and Suna no Onna (Eng.: Woman in the Dunes)
a movie about a man (Eiji Okada) who is thrown into a sand pit with a woman (Kyoko Kishida) and must aid her in the daily sisyphean task of cleaning the sand out of the pit. Both films present the most scathing indictments of Japanese culture yet, with Harakiri criticizing the bushido code that damn near got the whole country killed in WWII and Woman in the Dunes’ parable having many possible interpretations (mine is how hard it is for women to get ahead in society). Comparing these two films and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg to Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow makes it very easy to see the Best Foreign Film Oscar as a snub this year.
We would ask how this happened but, to tell you the truth, I’m reasonably certain that most of the Academy didn’t even watch any of these movies and basically just traded back and forth between Italy and France for the award each year. Probably that plus a combination of remembering De Sica’s name from the Bicycle Thieves (1948) days even though this movie is nowhere near his best and is very inferior to the other nominees (and Harakiri wasn’t even nominated due to the Academy’s dumb rules of only allowing one movie per foreign country).
(Also, as another aside, it’s a damn shame that foreign-language films are never acknowledged for the technical awards either since those are mainly voted on by their respective guilds. Both The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Woman in the Dunes could’ve warranted Best Cinematography awards as they’re some of the most beautiful-looking movies you’ll ever see in your life.)
But you didn’t just have to go indulge in foreign cinema in LA and NYC arthouse theaters if you wanted to vicariously experience traveling the world. American studios were happy to show foreign lands and stories in English for your convenience; particularly in one of the best films of the year, taking place on the other side of Europe, Zorba the Greek.
A moody and joyless British writer named Basil (Alan Bates) arrives on the tiny Greek island of Crete with a deed to a piece of land over a lignite mine. He recruits a local on the ship ride over named Zorba (Anthony Quinn) to help him navigate the local customs and culture so as to recruit people to help him build said mine. The rest of the movie is the pair’s misadventures on the island as they experience all the various aspects of Greek culture while slowly putting this Rube Goldberg machine together that would make Zeus himself proud.
Despite its iconically upbeat theme song and being produced in America, Zorba the Greek is a very distinctly Greek, and by extension Balkan, movie. This is a corner of the world that existed between the Roman and Turkish empires, meaning that they have been subjected to thousands of years worth of wars, genocides and poverty. People from this corner of the globe tend to be very hardy, conservative and nationalistic but are also known for their warm hospitality and enjoyment of the simple things in life.
Thus, Zorba the Greek is a very dark film as Zorba and Basil find that the island, and the people on it, still bear a lot of scars from the recent wars that ravaged southeastern Europe. While recruiting villagers for their mine, they encounter graphic murder and the brutal sexism that exists in this part of the world. Zorba himself also has a very shady past, and is strongly implied to have been a war criminal in a past life, and yet he is also such a cheery, upbeat, happy-go-lucky man that he lights up every room he’s in.
Anthony Quinn is the show-stealer of the film and his portrayal of Zorba is one of the all-time great movie performances. This is one of those roles where you almost can’t believe that it’s an actor; it really feels like they got some middle-aged Greek man to gab for 2.5 hours and just pointed a camera at him. It’s even more impressive when you learn that Quinn wasn’t even Greek.
Zorba the Greek is another movie that’s a little long in the tooth, though I think that’s also because none of the locals are given subtitles making it difficult to understand what is going on. I understand that the goal is to put yourself in Basil’s shoes but these scenes go on long enough that it feels like the language barrier goes from artistic to just annoying. While this is a problem, unlike many other movies of the 60s, there is a payoff that’s worth it. The last scene of Zorba the Greek is one of the most unforgettable endings in cinematic history and it’s one of those endings where if they removed anything beforehand, it wouldn’t have been as strong. So if you decide to watch this movie (and I recommend that you do) and you find yourself squirming a bit at times from boredom, just stick with it, the payoff is worth your time.
Another one of the greatest films ever made was Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
Often shortened to simply Dr. Strangelove, the movie is about US Army General Jack Ripper (Sterling Hayden) who has gone rogue and authorized a nuclear attack on Moscow. Due to a series of bureaucratic hurdles, it’s extremely difficult to call off the attack and so the Joint Chiefs of Staff are assembled in the Pentagon’s war room to figure out how to avert World War III and nuclear Armageddon. Making a movie about the possibility of nuclear Armageddon only a couple years after the Cuban Missile Crisis is crazy enough but did I mention yet that this movie is actually a dark comedy, not a thriller?
Dr. Strangelove is one of the greatest and most famous, not to mention most nihilistic, political satires, making a very caustic and hilarious deconstruction of the right-wing egos that populate the highest echelons of power. Most of the movie revolves around the generals and politicians arguing with each other like schoolchildren and concerned about their egos whilst deciding the literal fate of humanity. George C. Scott is especially great as one of the lead generals who is so proud that the military machine he has perfected will defeat the Russians before catching himself once he realizes that he’s helping cause the end of the world.
Dr. Strangelove is one of those movies that could have so easily gone awry and come off as clumsily insensitive but the fact that it manages to still be a pretty funny movie is a major accomplishment. What’s even more impressive is that the movie doesn’t really have a straight man per se (technically the President (Peter Sellers) comes close to being the straight man but he's also portrayed as being a feckless loser who gets lost in the minutiae of these petty arguments). It just shows all of these right-wing morons and trusts the audience to know just how Goddamned ridiculous they sound from the way they speak. Considering the runaway jingoism of the American military (especially under President Lyndon Johnson), it’s a very timely and important satire.
This is often considered the breakout film of Stanley Kubrick, one of the greatest directors who ever lived and he’s another famously amazing director who, despite his prolific output, never won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Looking at the timeliness of when it came out, Dr. Strangelove definitely seems like it has its thumb to the pulse of American society better at the time than My Fair Lady did. It’s not quite Kubrick’s best as the movie has some issues with the sound design (a lot of the movie is set in the gigantic war room and in long shots the actors’ voice echoes to give the room weight, which can make it very difficult to understand what they’re saying at times) but this is a nitpick that doesn’t come close to explaining why the movie didn’t win.
If nothing else, the movie was a severe snub for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Dr. Strangelove’s screenplay is one of the best in cinematic history. They do such a good job at explaining why Armageddon is imminent and why the answer isn’t just as easy as the President simply calling it off. The plot proceeds at a perfect pace and tells you everything you need to know about the situation while still leaving in a lot of subtext that the audience can interpret and debate its meaning. Both for the Cold War satire, commentary on masculinity and even the interpretations of the title character (Peter Sellers) whose presence has some cynical commentary on America’s destiny.
The winner for the Oscar for Adapted Screenplay was Becket
a medieval political thriller based on the relationship between King Henry II (Peter O’Toole) and his chancellor, Thomas Becket (Richard Burton), which was a major awards frontrunner that year, being nominated for 11 Oscars but only winning the one. It’s not a bad movie, being one of the better medieval melodramas of the time period, but there isn’t a whole lot to dive into with the plot as what you see is what you get. Not that that’s a bad thing but compared to Dr. Strangelove? This had to have been just a participation trophy for a producer and writer who were more well-known by the Hollywood establishment instead of actual quality because this 2.5-hour-long film is nowhere near as well-written as the comparatively well-paced, economical and deep as Dr. Strangelove.
Moving onto some true film icons. This year saw the debut of one of the most beloved film characters of the decade, Peter Sellers’ Inspector Jacques Clouseau in The Pink Panther
and its sequel A Shot in the Dark.
The Pink Panther film series revolves around the bumbling Inspector Clouseau who solves different crimes all around Europe. The first film in the series is a bit of an outlier as it’s more of an espionage thriller with farcical elements. It revolves around a gentleman thief named the Phantom (David Niven) who wines and dines socialites while planning to steal a diamond called the Pink Panther. Clouseau acts as the heel of the movie, being the police detective constantly hot on the Phantom’s heels whose attempts to be a competent detective are thwarted by his own klutzy antics. His character would be the real breakout performance of The Pink Panther, so much so that the rest of the franchise revolves around him, completely ignoring Niven’s character in the movies to come.
As a result, A Shot in the Dark could be more closely considered the first true Pink Panther film and is one of the most beloved comedies of the 1960s. In this one, Clouseau is tracking down a murderer called the Phantom Killer (no relation to Niven’s character in the first movie) who has been targeting a family of rich snobs named the Ballons. Unlike the first Pink Panther which tries to have it both ways by being a farce and also a crime thriller, A Shot in the Dark is a straight-up comedy. It’s very manic, puts Clouseau in bizarre situations that make him seem like a real moron and even the twist of who the killer ends up being is pretty hilarious. Most of the humor is surprisingly dark and steeped in the death and suffering of most of the bad people that Clouseau encounters.
What makes Peter Sellers great isn’t just his comedic timing but also that his character mixes in this sense of slapstick that is more reminiscent of the great silent comedic icons of years gone by. Half the films’ jokes just revolve around him trying to walk from one end of a room to another and then somehow finding a way to trip it up. But what makes it so good is just how deadpan Sellers plays it. In both movies, he always acts like he’s a real police inspector who’s trying to do his job which just makes it funnier when he ends up falling down and mucking things up. A Shot in the Dark has more scenes of him in overtly funny situations (i.e. being constantly tackled by his bodyguard (Burt Kwouk), accidentally ending up in a nudist colony etc.) but he never plays it like he’s winking to the camera.
Comparing the two, A Shot in the Dark is the better film. While I do enjoy the espionage atmosphere of the original Pink Panther, it’s not one of the great spy films of the 60s. A Shot in the Dark, on the other hand, has such a quick and manic pace that it can be hard to keep up with the jokes at times. Both these movies live and die by Sellers and he knows exactly how to hit the mark of being as funny as possible without ever winking to the camera, a major comedic accomplishment for the decade.
Moving onto another iconic film character, the two of the top 5 grossing movies of the year ended up being from the same franchise with the latter actually setting a Guinness World Record for the fastest-grossing movie at the time (having made its entire budget back in only 2 weeks): the James Bond films From Russia With Love
and Goldfinger.
Pioneering the idea of sequels being bigger and better than the original film, both of these films once more chronicle the adventures of MI6 secret agent, James Bond (Sean Connery), as he travels the world to thwart evildoers. Both of these films are often regarded by Bond fans as arguably the best films in the franchise and both encapsulate opposite directions of what the series could be.
From Russia With Love primarily takes place in Turkey and has a very complex plot that shows more of the type of missions that a real-life Cold War spy would undertake. In this film, Bond aids a Russian government clerk named Tatiana Romanova (Daniela Bianchi, voice dubbed by Barbara Jefford) in defecting to the West in exchange for her smuggling a device capable of decoding Russian transmissions with her. Unbeknownst to both of them, however, they’re being tracked the whole time by a terrorist organization named SPECTRE whose mysterious leader (Anthony Dawson, voice dubbed by Eric Pohlmann) dispatches three of his top agents; Colonel Rosa Klebb (Lotte Lenya), Morzeny (Walter Gotell) and Kronsteen (Vladek Sheybal); to find a way to murder and humiliate Bond as revenge for his thwarting of their fellow agent Dr. No in the first film. Goldfinger, by contrast, is a relatively simpler plot as it details Bond’s pursuit of a gold-smuggling businessman named Auric Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe, voice dubbed by Michael Collins) across Europe and the United States as he tries to uncover Goldfinger’s mysterious plan for world domination.
We already talked in the previous installment about how James Bond is one of the most iconic characters in cinematic history and these two films introduced most of the iconic tropes of the franchise that weren’t in the first film: The cold open that shows our hero on a completely unrelated mission to establish how badass he is, the superstrong henchman that the hero needs to beat before he can fight the main bad guy, the gadgets, the rapport with his regulars at MI6 (his strict and dour boss M (Bernard Lee), M’s flirtatious secretary Ms. Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell), the grumpy and eccentric gadgets master Q (Desmond Llewelyn)), the poison blade hidden in a shoe, the garrote hidden in a watch, the briefcase that explodes if you don’t open it a certain way, the shadowy mastermind with a white Persian cat, the woman whose skin is painted gold, the hero meeting the villain socially, the bowler hat that turns deadly when thrown, the car with the ejection seat, the bomb inside Ft. Knox etc. Best of all is one of the most famous scenes in movie history where Goldfinger threatens to slice Bond in half with a laser beam leading to probably the best exchange in a franchise full of clever one-liners and great comebacks:
No one will deny that these were two of the most influential and best films of the year and, needless to say, weren’t nominated by the Academy at all, which is one of our highlights of genre snobbery. What awards were they snubbed for you may ask? Well, for starters, there’s the Best Original Song category. Shirley Bassey’s thunderous rendition of “Goldfinger” is one of the most famous movie songs and greatest movie openings of all time. Granted, this was the year of the musicals so it’s understandable why it didn’t win but to not even be nominated? Matt Monro’s “From Russia With Love” is also excellent although it’s not in the film as that movie’s intro uses an instrumental version of the song instead (which is also a great opening credits sequence).
I’m also going to argue Gert Fröbe’s performance as Auric Goldfinger as a snub for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. While both Dr. No and Rosa Klebb were fun bad guys in their own right, Goldfinger is where the trope of “Bond villain” comes from: the very rich and very powerful man with an army of henchmen who has a plan to take over the world. What makes the performance so great though is that Fröbe plays him a lot more realistically than many other Bond bad guys, mainly focusing on his character’s monstrous yet fragile ego. Every time he thinks he has beaten Bond, he has a sly, snarky grin like he’s so proud of himself and every time that Bond beats him, he’s furious because he can’t stand the idea of losing.
These little mannerisms make many of the hallmarks of this character archetype feel more real with Goldfinger. He is the type of person who would kill associates he no longer has any use for, who would install a miniature diorama of his plan into his house so he can explain it, who would tell his enemies all about his plan because he wants them to know how smart he is. He has so much fun being so evil that it’s hard not to have fun right alongside him. Fröbe and Connery’s chemistry is some of the best of any hero-and-villain pair in cinematic history which only gets more impressive when you learn that Fröbe was a German actor who barely spoke a word of English when he signed onto the project.
You might think that asking for a character who played a villain in a more fun action movie might not be performance of the year material but the winner for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor that year was Peter Ustinov in Topkapi.
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Topkapi is also a great action-adventure/heist film in its own right, revolving around a group of thieves who try to steal a priceless treasure from a Turkish museum. The film was directed by Jules Dassin, the same man who made Rififi (1955), back in America after having been Blacklisted for most of the 50s, and Topkapi is often considered a spiritual sequel to Rififi. Both are stylized heist films whose highlight is the heist itself which ends up being a 20-minute-long sequence with no music or dialogue which makes the scene that much more intense (the heist also features them rappelling into the museum from above, a scene that would inspire a more famous version of the same set-up in Mission: Impossible (1996)).
Ustinov plays the whiny sidekick/comic relief of the group and it is a role he plays well but it’s also not the typical type of performance that would win an Oscar. This is a good thing but it begs the question why him? Ustinov is fun but there’s not a whole lot to the character so why wouldn’t they want to acknowledge another action-adventure film without a whole lot to say about the world? My guess is that this was just a “due” award. Ustinov was a respected actor who had yet to win the Oscar so they gave him a win, even if it was just in a role as comic relief. Fröbe’s performance is definitely just as good as his and should’ve been at least nominated (especially over Stanley Holloway in My Fair Lady who was also one of the nominees).
And while we’re on that, we mentioned this in the previous installment, but Sean Connery should have been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Leading Actor. The winner was Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, which is a great performance in its own right, and the other nominees were Anthony Quinn in Zorba the Greek (deserved - and honestly probably should have been the real winner), Peter Sellers as multiple roles in Dr. Strangelove (who is so chameleonic that it’s hard to recognize him in these parts even knowing he’s playing all of them) and Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton in Becket. These last two, while great actors, are the Oscar-baiting roles. While they’re good (I mean it’s Peter O’Toole for Christ’s sake), I don’t think they’re as difficult to pull off.
Considering how Sellers was nominated for another film, we can understand why they weren’t acknowledging his turn as Clouseau but Connery was still snubbed. Think about how tough of a role this is. Connery has to be suave, dangerous and cool while still seeming like a professional who’s good at his job. It’s even more impressive here since, in these movies, he’s in actual serious danger but always makes it seem like he has things under control, even when they start spiraling out of it. These sort of action and comedy roles would be acknowledged less and less by the Academy as time went on and will be something that we discuss more often in the late 20th Century. It’s arguably more irritating here, though, because one of the acting winners was for a “pulpy” role and yet they wouldn’t look to these other films to acknowledge their contribution to cinema as well. Maybe because the American Academy was upset that their films were being upstaged by British ones, they chose to ignore the British actors? Though that reasoning doesn't track considering who won the Best Actress award.
Speaking of which, this Academy Awards ceremony was notorious for one of the most heated battles in the tabloids in Academy history. My Fair Lady’s biggest competition that year, as well as the highest-grossing movie of the year and the winner of multiple other Academy Awards, was Mary Poppins.
The movie revolves around the Banks family: the workaholic father (David Tomlinson), the easily distracted mother (Glynis Johns) and their rambunctious children, Jane and Michael (Karen Dotrice and Matthew Garber who would play similar roles in The Gnome-Mobile (1967) where they were credited as “The Mary Poppins Kids” which is next-level typecasting). Unable to control their children, the parents put out an ad for a nanny and into their lives whisks the magical Mary Poppins (Julie Andrews) who, along with her happy-go-lucky sidekick Bert (Dick Van Dyke), takes the children on all sorts of adventures to both improve their behavior and fix their familial dynamic.
Along with James Bond and the Beatles, Mary Poppins is one of the most quintessential icons of the British Invasion, rounding out the gamut as a cultural icon for the whole family. Mary Poppins is also often considered The Walt Disney Company’s live-action opus and arguably the greatest film made by the studio during Walt’s lifetime (although Fantasia (1940) and Bambi (1942) definitely warrant consideration for that title as well). The movie was inspired by a book series written by P. L. Travers that Disney used to read to his daughters before bed every night and he vowed to them that he would one day make a movie based on the book. Travers (who notoriously loathed the film and refused to let the studio make any more films after the first one, a feat the studio only accomplished after Travers passed away) fought Disney on the project for so long that, by the time it came out, Disney’s daughters were well into adulthood. In other words, this movie is basically the product of 20 years of brewing imagination and studio notes courtesy of the same mind that was so obsessed with childhood whimsy that he once absent-mindedly built a model train through his wife’s rose garden so he could take his daughters on train rides.
There’s a lot of reasons why Mary Poppins succeeds at being such an excellent film. The musical numbers are phenomenal, showing some great dance moves but also showing live-action characters interacting with animated ones (this had been done before by Disney but never to this extent). The score and songs of this movie were written by the Sherman Brothers, often considered one of the best and most influential songwriting pairs in cinematic history.*** Most of the Disney Company’s jingles from the 60s-70s were written by them and remain beloved by those who grew up with the songs. You don’t need to look far to look for dissections on where they’re great though one thing I think is overlooked and impressive is how they manage to make some memorable lyrics despite many, if not most, of their songs containing straight-up gibberish and somehow convincing the singers to deliver that gibberish with a completely straight face. The Shermans won the Oscar for Best Original Song this year for the incredibly catchy main theme, “Chim Chim Cher-ee,” and deservedly so though every song in Mary Poppins is excellent. In fact, Mary Poppins has one of the most consistently great soundtracks of any classic musical, which is especially impressive when you remember that they were competing against some of the best and brightest of Broadway at the time.
The story is also excellent, taking a fairly clichéd story at the time and turning it on its head. While the set-up of the story is that Mary Poppins arrives to make the children behave, a synopsis that was a-dime-a-dozen in Shirley Temple's films, the real character arc centers on their relationship with their workaholic father, Mr. Banks. This trope of “the parent who is so focused on work that they don’t focus on their child” would become one of the most clichéd movie set-ups ever but it still feels very fresh in Mary Poppins, even going back to it after so many of its imitators. For one, the film doesn’t overtly tip its hand that that’s what the plot is going to be from the word go but instead organically leads us there. For another, Mr. Banks isn’t portrayed as a jerk or abusive, he’s just portrayed as being clueless. In fact, there’s actually a pretty nice scene where he brings his children to work and is genuinely excited to show them what he does whilst remaining obtuse about how much they don’t want to be there.
This brings us to the final component: the acting is great. The film balances a lot of different tones, alternating from bright and whimsical to heavy and philosophical. As a result, the cast has their work cut out for them in balancing these tones but none of them ever glitch. All of the side-characters (even the downright ridiculous ones) stop just short of winking to the camera and always seem to be treating these roles seriously (also David Tomlinson was another snub for Best Leading or Supporting Actor). The most notorious of these is Dick Van Dyke with his hilariously awful cockney accent that is rightfully made fun of as one of the worst accents in cinematic history. But it does sometimes seem like people choose to focus on that and ignore that he also puts in a great performance. The character is implied to be homeless and yet he’s just so happy to be alive and bouncing all over the place in complete and utter joy.
And at the center of it all is Julie Andrews as the mysterious nanny, Mary Poppins. This character is such a treasure, being the ideal parent/nanny that any child wishes they had growing up. She is happy to let the children have fun but she also has little patience for bad behavior and is always quick to correct it. There’s this otherworldly aspect of the character that’s also gotten down very well, like the sheer aura of Poppins’ love is something that is beyond this world. She’s there to teach the children lessons but also teach the adults some lessons too, often without them even knowing. She’s so regal and refined that, still to this day, I have trouble believing that Julie Andrews was only 28 years old when she made the film! She carries herself like someone well into middle-age.
Andrews would win the Academy Award for Best Leading Actress for this role, a deserved honor, though this also ties into one of the most cynical awards ceremonies in Hollywood history. As we mentioned briefly in the last blog, My Fair Lady was originally a Broadway play that premiered in the 1950s where the role of Eliza Doolittle was played by none other than Julie Andrews herself. When the movie was bought by Warner Bros., they chose to recast the part with Audrey Hepburn since she was a bankable star and Andrews had yet to even be in a theatrical film. Meanwhile, Disney, who chose to rely on his own instincts when it came to casting, headhunted Andrews to play Mary Poppins. When Andrews won a Golden Globe for her performance, she cheekily thanked Jack Warner for dropping her so she could win an award in another movie. The Hollywood press and Academy members took that ball and ran with it all the way home.
These Oscars were essentially a showdown between Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady, with Mary Poppins receiving 13 nominations and My Fair Lady 12. They would trade award wins back and forth the whole night, with the whole Academy splitting into pro-Hepburn and pro-Andrews camps. Since Hollywood loves its drama to spill out into real-life, it's clear that the tabloids and Academy members (many of whom were press columnists at the time) were trying to create another Bette Davis and Joan Crawford situation, even though both actresses never had an unkind thing to say about the other (and, in fact, were probably very uncomfortable with how sensationalized this “feud” became). As mentioned in the previous blog, the acting award members were upset with Hepburn for proverbially stealing Andrews’ role and deliberately snubbed her for the role, especially once it was revealed that Hepburn’s singing voice was dubbed. This is especially mean, since Hepburn had an excellent performance in My Fair Lady, one of the best of the year, and it’s not like she was the one who deliberately went out of her way to screw Andrews over. She got offered a part and accepted it and acted the Hell out of it; Hepburn probably wasn’t even aware of Andrews when she signed onto My Fair Lady. The two performances are comparable in quality and either one would’ve been a fine victor (though Andrews’ singing voice is indeed excellent, which is demonstrated in one of the film’s best jokes).
In terms of the victory for Best Picture, however, when reading the reviews and gossip trades of the time, it becomes clear that it was really a competition between My Fair Lady and Mary Poppins and the other 3 nominees (Dr. Strangelove, Becket and Zorba the Greek) were simply placeholders. So which one was better and deserved to be called the best musical of the year? Well, let’s compare the two.
My Fair Lady is a romantic-comedy plot about a man and a woman who bond over some bizarre paradigm and slowly fall in love. It’s well done but it wasn't anything too new at the time. What was new were how unique the two leads were and the clever usage of phonetics. It was directed and produced by a professional director and producer who had a workman’s attitude to the picture. Mary Poppins starts off as a coming-of-age screwball plot that slowly morphs into a more adult lesson about asking parents to examine their relationships with their children and not waste their best years chasing the almighty dollar. Knowing that Disney made the movie for his daughters, it’s hard not to see the character of Mr. Banks as some sort of authorial insert.
The main characters of both films are very interesting and likable so that doesn’t seem like a fruitful comparison to make: Rex Harrison, Audrey Hepburn, Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke are all excellent. That having been said, unlike Harrison and Hepburn, Andrews and Van Dyke not only sing their own voices but also dance. And they’re pretty damn good at it too.
Dick Van Dyke dancing with partners who don't even exist in his plane of reality. The man did it convincingly enough to win the movie the Oscar for Best Visual Effects.
On that note, the musical numbers in My Fair Lady mostly consist of Professor Higgins or Eliza Doolittle doing the singing-talking while monologuing with relatively static camera angles. The biggest musical numbers are Alfred Doolittle’s sign-off which mostly consists of him strutting around a bar with extras and the ball where Eliza shows off her progress. The musical numbers in Mary Poppins are an extravaganza of special effects with each musical number giving you something entirely different to watch. Some are classically animated, some are stop-motion animated and then some just have the actors dancing their asses off. The big “Step in Time” number at the end of the film has Bert and his fellow chimney sweeps conducting legwork and dancing stunts that are on par with the legendary dancing in West Side Story (1961).
The climax of both movies consist of the protagonist confronting harder truths about themselves to learn a lesson. In My Fair Lady’s case, it depicts Professor Higgins sitting at home as he slowly realizes how much he actually cares about and misses Eliza. It’s a good scene. But Mary Poppins’ climax features a very beautifully-shot sequence where Mr. Banks walks through the dark streets of London at night, completely alone with his thoughts. This is one of the most thoughtful and mature scenes to have ever come out of the Walt Disney Company and almost feels like a scene out of a New Wave film. The fact that this moment is this good really goes to show how perfectly Mary Poppins balances its different tones as this only comes about 5 minutes after the aforementioned “Step in Time” number.
Neither film is perfect as both have problems with filler content. In My Fair Lady, there’s entire subplots and ancillary characters that could’ve been completely removed from the movie without anything changing. Mary Poppins has a tighter story but it does sometimes drag during the song, dance and animation sequences (“Step in Time” alone is 8 minutes long). Both disturb the pacing of the movie, but in a movie that’s meant to be showcasing the effects work, spending more time dedicated to the dance and animation numbers could be argued as a better usage of it. Plus it does play into the story as it helps us experience how much fun the kids are having with Mary and Bert.
Comparing these two back-to-back like this, it does seem clear that Mary Poppins is the superior film. My Fair Lady is a classic, make no mistake, and it’s worth a watch but in terms of being a musical, Mary Poppins is in the same strata as West Side Story and Singin’ in the Rain (1952) as one of the greatest musicals ever made. I personally think even The Umbrellas of Cherbourg pushed the medium of the movie musical further forward than My Fair Lady. And if we were to get away from the musicals, Dr. Strangelove really got its thumb on the pulse of Cold War tensions at the time, From Russia With Love and Goldfinger also got their thumbs to it in a completely different way and Zorba the Greek and Basil’s bromance is one of the greatest in cinematic history.
Walter E. Disney did more for animation as an art form than any other filmmaker who ever lived and, whatever his flaws, he always came off more as an artist than a businessman. By the late 50s, he had largely bowed out of the day-to-day management of his studio and films, choosing to focus more on his theme park in Anaheim. By all accounts, however, he made an exception for Mary Poppins. The film was directed by Robert Stevenson, Disney’s go-to live-action director who had already directed several great films that were able to balance whimsy with darker themes (i.e. Old Yeller (1957), Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959) etc.), but the passion and project was Disney’s.
After his death in 1966, Disney films would be disparaged by the baby boomers during the Hollywood New Wave, and some have theorized that the fact that animation remains seen as a genre exclusively for kids could partially be laid at Disney’s feet for having monopolized the industry for so long. Especially within his own company where many animators were told to stick to what Walt wanted, never being able to try more mature animation concepts. With the exception of the last point, these are all unfair comparisons as there were animation competitors to the Walt Disney Company such as Hanna-Barbera and the Looney Tunes (the former of whom was even more child-focused than Disney), and he had tried his hand at more mature films with Fantasia and (arguably) Bambi but both of those underperformed. Regardless of the opinion in this, there’s the question of if there was some acknowledgment from the Hollywood elites, would animation have been respected sooner or led to more adult animation during the New Wave?
Probably not, just knowing the attitudes of those filmmakers and there might be more demographic reasons why animation in the 1970s failed to launch for adults and got so shoddy for children (think about it; animation is about 20 years younger than movies and 20 years after the Hollywood New Wave of the 1970s was a massive renaissance in animation in the 1990s). But the fact remains: Disney was one of the most consistently snubbed filmmakers in Academy history (a record that Peter O’Toole and Stanley Kubrick would inevitably join him in), winning numerous awards for his short films, but none of his animated features were ever permitted to participate in the Best Picture nominee process. In fact, Mary Poppins is the only movie he ever produced that was even nominated for Best Picture and the first Best Picture nominee to have considerable scenes of animation.
Now, in fairness, I don’t know if this was a deliberate or ignorant snub as most of the people who never considered Disney part of their crowd from the 30s and 40s were dead or dying by this point. The Academy never releases its official ballot count for any of their votes but, considering how heated the competition was between these two movies, it wouldn’t surprise me if it ever came out that this was one of the closest Academy Award wins in history, with My Fair Lady winning only by a handful of votes. Alternatively, the other option is that the Walt Disney Company never fully stacked the Academy's deck full of studio peons or leaned on its employees the way that the other studios did to fully ensure their victory. We can never know for certain as the awards are designed to lose the vote counts to the sands of time, but it certainly seems that these two reasons are the most likely ones for Mary Poppins' snub.
On the other hand, the fact that these awards were less about choosing the better musical and more about which actress’ honor was being defended and whether an original musical or a musical originally shown on Broadway was superior is pretty damn ridiculous. Just as a movie on its own, as well as its merits as a musical, Mary Poppins is the superior film.
Calling My Fair Lady the Best Picture of 1964 was a…
SNUB!
***It may interest you to know that the Sherman Brothers' jingle "It's A Small World (After All)" currently holds the world record for the most frequently-played song in history. This is one those records that sounds impressive until you think about it: the song has been playing continuously on loop at a ride in Disneyland (as well other theme parks that opened later) every single day since 1955.
Personal Favorite Movies of 1964:
- A Shot in the Dark (dir. Blake Edwards)
- Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (dir. Stanley Kubrick)
- From Russia With Love (dir. Terence Young)
- Goldfinger (dir. Guy Hamilton)
- Le Monde Sans Soleil (World Without Sun) (dir. Jacques-Yves Cousteau)
- Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) (dir. Jacques Demy)
- Mary Poppins (dir. Robert Stevenson)
- Seppuku (Harakiri) (dir. Masaki Kobayashi)
- Suna no Onna (Woman in the Dunes) (dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara)
- Topkapi (dir. Jules Dassin)
- Zorba the Greek (dir. Michael Cacoyannis)
Favorite Heroes:
- Basil (Alan Bates) (Zorba the Greek)
- Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) (My Fair Lady)
- Hanshiro Tsugumo (Tatsuya Nakadai) (Seppuku (Harakiri))
- Inspector Jacques Clouseau (Peter Sellers) (The Pink Panther, A Shot in the Dark)
- James Bond (Sean Connery) (From Russia With Love, Goldfinger)
- Mary Poppins (Julie Andrews) (Mary Poppins)
- President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers) (Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb)
- Shuhei Hirayama (Chishu Ryu) (Sanma no Aji (An Autumn Afternoon))
- Tatiana Romanova (Daniela Bianchi, voice dubbed by Barbara Jefford) (From Russia With Love)
- Zorba (Anthony Quinn) (Zorba the Greek)
Favorite Villains:
- Auric Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe, voice dubbed by Michael Collins) Goldfinger)
- Colonel Rosa Klebb (Lotte Lenya) (From Russia With Love)
- Donald Red Grant (Robert Shaw) (From Russia With Love)
- Dr. Robert Morgan (Vincent Price) (The Last Man on Earth)
- General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) (Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb)
- General Jack Ripper (Sterling Hayden) (Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb)
- King Henry II (Peter O'Toole) (Becket)
- Kronsteen (Vladek Sheybal) (From Russia With Love)
- Oddjob (Harold Sakata) (Goldfinger)
- The Phantom Killer (A Shot in the Dark)
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