Success or Snub? The Sound of Music (38th Academy Awards Review Pt. 2)
Doctor Zhivago Suite~Maurice Jarre - Doctor Zhivago
The 38th Academy Awards were the first Oscar ceremony to be broadcast in color and had Lynda Bird Johnson (the daughter of President Lyndon B. Johnson and First Lady Lady Bird Johnson and the sister of Luci Baines Johnson; the fact that everyone on his family tree also had the initials ‘LBJ’ should tell you a lot about the 36th President) in attendance. That is just about the only interesting thing about this terrible show.
As mentioned in the previous blog, while The Sound of Music largely cleaned up the awards, being nominated for 10 and winning 5, and became the highest-grossing movie ever made up to that point in time, many big-city critics and up-and-comers in Hollywood derided it in favor of smaller films. And there were quite a few smaller movies that came out, many of which won some of the other big awards, and were trying new things. Thus, it’s actually pretty easy to divide many of the movies coming out of Hollywood at this time into two pretty distinct categories: big-budget extravaganzas that were keeping to the formula of what they know worked and smaller, more artistic films that were trying new things. There was almost nothing in-between.
(The only major medium-budget films of note in 1965, both of which were 2 of the year’s top grossers and weirdly enough both have felines in the title, were What’s New Pussycat?,
As mentioned in the previous blog, while The Sound of Music largely cleaned up the awards, being nominated for 10 and winning 5, and became the highest-grossing movie ever made up to that point in time, many big-city critics and up-and-comers in Hollywood derided it in favor of smaller films. And there were quite a few smaller movies that came out, many of which won some of the other big awards, and were trying new things. Thus, it’s actually pretty easy to divide many of the movies coming out of Hollywood at this time into two pretty distinct categories: big-budget extravaganzas that were keeping to the formula of what they know worked and smaller, more artistic films that were trying new things. There was almost nothing in-between.
(The only major medium-budget films of note in 1965, both of which were 2 of the year’s top grossers and weirdly enough both have felines in the title, were What’s New Pussycat?,
a screwball that acted as Woody Allen’s breakout role and whose title song is far more famous than the not-very-well-aged-or-funny movie, and That Darn Cat!,
one of the Walt Disney Company’s best and most overlooked live-action films that balances its silly setup and characters with a surprisingly intense crime thriller plot.)
Let’s start with the lower-budget, more artistic films by going down the list of the acting awards. The winner for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress was Shelley Winters in A Patch of Blue.
Let’s start with the lower-budget, more artistic films by going down the list of the acting awards. The winner for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress was Shelley Winters in A Patch of Blue.
A Patch of Blue is another somewhat hackneyed set-up for a film that ends up being pretty solid because of its competent directing and acting. The film is about a blind white girl named Selina D’Arcey (Debi Strom as a child, Elizabeth Hartman as an adult) who falls in love with a black man named Gordon (Sidney Poitier) and their relationship together. The obvious connotations of how love is blind are a bit eyeroll-worthy but the two actors have believable chemistry and the film does give a pretty good portrayal of the difficulties of living with blindness. Winters plays the proverbial wicked stepmother of Selina and she does a very good job at being a pretty vile and racist parent.
Starting around this time, Sidney Poitier’s movies would be getting a bit of a backlash from African-American critics. While Poitier did break a major color barrier in films wherein he played an intelligent, self-assured and oftentimes angry man at his mistreatment by society, it eventually became pretty clear that he was always being typecast as this same role. In other words, Hollywood had yet to achieve true representation as the only characters that Poitier was allowed to play was “the black guy,” and the only actor in Hollywood who could play “the black guy” was Poitier. As a result, movies like A Patch of Blue and Lilies of the Field (1963) were disparaged, both back then and now, as pioneering the Magical Black Man trope which comes off as condescending and lacking actual progress.
In other words, while A Patch of Blue was trying, it definitely wasn’t movie of the year and its commentary is fairly surface-level. Although Winters could be argued as deserving her Oscar win as her character is the only thing that gives this movie an actual edge, which does make it better than Lilies of the Field at least.
Starting around this time, Sidney Poitier’s movies would be getting a bit of a backlash from African-American critics. While Poitier did break a major color barrier in films wherein he played an intelligent, self-assured and oftentimes angry man at his mistreatment by society, it eventually became pretty clear that he was always being typecast as this same role. In other words, Hollywood had yet to achieve true representation as the only characters that Poitier was allowed to play was “the black guy,” and the only actor in Hollywood who could play “the black guy” was Poitier. As a result, movies like A Patch of Blue and Lilies of the Field (1963) were disparaged, both back then and now, as pioneering the Magical Black Man trope which comes off as condescending and lacking actual progress.
In other words, while A Patch of Blue was trying, it definitely wasn’t movie of the year and its commentary is fairly surface-level. Although Winters could be argued as deserving her Oscar win as her character is the only thing that gives this movie an actual edge, which does make it better than Lilies of the Field at least.
The Oscar for Best Supporting Actor went to Martin Balsam in A Thousand Clowns.
A Thousand Clowns is closer to the type of movies that would encompass the Hollywood New Wave. The film revolves around a washed-up TV writer named Murray Burns (Jason Robards) who lives with his nephew, Nick (Barry Gordon), and is chronically and happily jobless. Just about every character in his life encourages him to get a job and he resists, seeing no reason to do so as he is happy to continue living in squalor, not contributing anything to society. Thus, the film is a character study of the no work attitude of the 60s youth, analyzing the balance between what is selling out versus what is actually contributing to the world around you. Martin Balsam plays one of the side-characters who gives an impassioned monologue on the value of work and how his contribution to society makes him a better person.
Of this dramatic half, A Thousand Clowns is one of the best though it is inconsistent and, unlike The Sound of Music, didn’t have a lot of cultural staying power. Despite this being most similar to a New Wave film (though it’s certainly a lot less dour than most of them), it came and went pretty quickly, even back then, and if it did win the Oscar, we would probably acknowledge it being topical for its time but definitely could’ve taken the idea further and been a bit more satirical with it. So the search continues.
The winner for the Academy Award for Best Leading Actress was Julie Christie in Darling.
Of this dramatic half, A Thousand Clowns is one of the best though it is inconsistent and, unlike The Sound of Music, didn’t have a lot of cultural staying power. Despite this being most similar to a New Wave film (though it’s certainly a lot less dour than most of them), it came and went pretty quickly, even back then, and if it did win the Oscar, we would probably acknowledge it being topical for its time but definitely could’ve taken the idea further and been a bit more satirical with it. So the search continues.
The winner for the Academy Award for Best Leading Actress was Julie Christie in Darling.
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Darling was advertised as the British/American equivalent to La Dolce Vita (1960), as it revolves around a rich model named Diana Scott (Christie) who is unhappily married to a man named Tony Bridges (T.B. Bowen) and starts looking for excitement. This is a prime example of our previously-mentioned trends of richsploitation (dramas about rich people that revolve around how miserable they are) and cinéma vérité (films with a very realistic style that try to capture life as is). It’s also the exact opposite of The Sound of Music in that it was very highly-praised at the time but has aged tremendously poorly. I personally can’t stand this Goddamned film. The only thing more annoying than spending 2 hours watching someone who has benefited from the rare genetic lottery of being both rich and beautiful just go about their boring life is to hear them complain about it the whole time. It also doesn’t help that, unlike the over-the-top gaudiness of La Dolce Vita, this film is very restrained and is about as entertaining as watching paint dry. (And, no, Julie Christie didn't deserve the Oscar for Best Leading Actress although she probably only got it because Julie Andrews won it the previous year.)
One of the most notoriously undeserved Oscar wins was when the Academy Award for Best Leading Actor went to Lee Marvin in Cat Ballou.
One of the most notoriously undeserved Oscar wins was when the Academy Award for Best Leading Actor went to Lee Marvin in Cat Ballou.
Cat Ballou is a Western comedy (that is not even remotely funny) about the titular woman (Jane Fonda) who becomes an outlaw. Lee Marvin plays a dual role as the villainous outlaw Tim Strawn and a crack gunfighter that Ballou hires to protect her named Kid Shelleen, who is only a good shot when he’s drunk. While he does both roles fine, neither are even remotely close to performance-of-the-year good as both roles had been done to death in movies by this point. Which isn’t bad if the the villain was especially menacing (he isn’t) or the drunken sidekick was especially amusing (he isn’t) but it seems more likely that Marvin won on basis of his being due for an award since he hadn’t won one yet, as a make-up for playing the same role but in a much better and more menacing manner in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and because actors love the trope of someone playing such two wildly different roles in the same film (though that somehow didn’t get Peter Sellers a victory for Dr. Strangelove (1964)).
The film that everyone thought would win Best Actor, and probably the most historically significant of these more small-scale films was The Pawnbroker.
The film that everyone thought would win Best Actor, and probably the most historically significant of these more small-scale films was The Pawnbroker.
The Pawnbroker is about a German immigrant named Sol Nazerman (Rod Steiger) who operates a pawn store in a slum in East Harlem and is generally introverted and often nasty to everyone around him. Over the course of the film, we learn that he is actually a Holocaust survivor who still flashes back to his horrific treatment in the concentration camps. The Pawnbroker is the first film to deal with the Holocaust from the point of view of a survivor and it does not pull many punches in showing the horrors that he endured. One notable and particularly horrible scene is when Nazerman meets a prostitute (Thelma Oliver) who flashes him her breasts which causes him to flash back to when his nude wife (Linda Geiser) was raped by Nazi officers.
This scene in particular got the movie into hot water with the censor board that still administered Hollywood films, now fully consolidated under the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) (which had existed back ever since Hollywood was founded and had liaisons with the Hays Office that administered the Production Code; these organizations were formally consolidated around this time and the reasons of the two offices and differences are very labyrinthine, political and not interesting enough to really be worth going into here), who summarily rejected it, calling it “unacceptably sex suggestive and lustful.” (Which… holy crap. The fact that they considered this scene titillating is almost as uncomfortable as the scene itself.) The producer of the film stared down the MPAA and arranged to have The Pawnbroker released anyway. In a transparently desperate attempt to reassert their authority and relevance, the MPAA backpedaled and authorized their approval for The Pawnbroker as a special and unique case that should not set a precedent.
This, of course, did exactly the opposite and told producers all they needed to know that eventually the MPAA/ratings board would one day kowtow if it was lucrative enough. And, honestly, rightfully so; the nudity on display does make The Pawnbroker a much more effective drama. The nudity is rightfully uncomfortable and shows the horrors that men and women like the Nazermans really did suffer through.
While The Pawnbroker is a very important movie, Rod Steiger is excellent in the role and it was one of the first, if not the first, films to show the grittier side of New York City, the movie is deeply flawed. The big problem is that a lot of the people who visit Nazerman’s pawn store are basically stereotypes and some of them seem to want to look up to Nazerman despite the fact that he openly hates their company. There’s no real interesting throughline to the modern-day half of the plot to keep it engaging besides just learning more about Nazerman’s backstory and, honestly, the film might’ve been stronger if it had been just about his experiences during the Holocaust and ditched the modern-day half of the story. Still, The Pawnbroker does deserve credit for pushing boundaries.
The two most artistic films that have aged the best are the psychological horror-thrillers, The Collector
This scene in particular got the movie into hot water with the censor board that still administered Hollywood films, now fully consolidated under the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) (which had existed back ever since Hollywood was founded and had liaisons with the Hays Office that administered the Production Code; these organizations were formally consolidated around this time and the reasons of the two offices and differences are very labyrinthine, political and not interesting enough to really be worth going into here), who summarily rejected it, calling it “unacceptably sex suggestive and lustful.” (Which… holy crap. The fact that they considered this scene titillating is almost as uncomfortable as the scene itself.) The producer of the film stared down the MPAA and arranged to have The Pawnbroker released anyway. In a transparently desperate attempt to reassert their authority and relevance, the MPAA backpedaled and authorized their approval for The Pawnbroker as a special and unique case that should not set a precedent.
This, of course, did exactly the opposite and told producers all they needed to know that eventually the MPAA/ratings board would one day kowtow if it was lucrative enough. And, honestly, rightfully so; the nudity on display does make The Pawnbroker a much more effective drama. The nudity is rightfully uncomfortable and shows the horrors that men and women like the Nazermans really did suffer through.
While The Pawnbroker is a very important movie, Rod Steiger is excellent in the role and it was one of the first, if not the first, films to show the grittier side of New York City, the movie is deeply flawed. The big problem is that a lot of the people who visit Nazerman’s pawn store are basically stereotypes and some of them seem to want to look up to Nazerman despite the fact that he openly hates their company. There’s no real interesting throughline to the modern-day half of the plot to keep it engaging besides just learning more about Nazerman’s backstory and, honestly, the film might’ve been stronger if it had been just about his experiences during the Holocaust and ditched the modern-day half of the story. Still, The Pawnbroker does deserve credit for pushing boundaries.
The two most artistic films that have aged the best are the psychological horror-thrillers, The Collector
and Repulsion.
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Both films analyze the obsessive male gaze on women from opposite sides of the gender aisle and in very radically different ways. The Collector is about a young man named Freddie (Terence Stamp) who stalks and eventually kidnaps an art student named Miranda Grey (Samantha Eggar). He squirrels her away into the basement of his house in Kent and blackmails her into being his muse and girlfriend. While the film is a pretty clear-cut hostage thriller, it allows for some classist and gender commentary as the poor, self-loathing Freddie projects a lot of his hang-ups with women onto his ward and there’s a fun dance of dialogue of her using his own desires and resentments against him before sometimes going a hair too far.
While The Collector is a good movie, Repulsion is an excellent movie. Carole Ledoux (Catherine Deneuve) is an attractive, young, psychologically fragile woman living in London as a manicurist who lives with her sister Helen (Yvonne Furneaux) who is having a tryst with another man named Michael (Ian Hendry). Carole is plainly uncomfortable with the male gaze, the male touch and, eventually, the very presence of men and slowly self-destructs as she cuts herself off from the outside world because she doesn’t want to deal with any men. The implications of why Carole behaves this way are entirely up to the viewer (though pretty obvious if you think about it); we’re never given her motivation, just a character study into her uncomfortable psychology.
Repulsion is a considerable groundbreaker in psychological filmmaking as the apartment grows increasingly distorted and arms start sprouting from the walls. While this isn’t the first psychological horror with an unreliable/clearly insane narrator, as this had been experimented with in The Haunting (1963) and some of the riskier Universal monster films, this is definitely the furthest the envelope had been pushed in this regard since the silent era. By the end of the movie, you’re not entirely sure what is and isn’t even in Carole’s head anymore.
Both films are very timely in their portrayal of how men can feel so possessive of women that they can become a danger and are still pretty disturbing watches years later. The Collector was directed by William Wyler, the same man who made Ben-Hur (1959) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and it’s a pretty impressive turn for the man who made such big epics. The movie received a few nominations from the Academy, though no wins.
Repulsion, which was the second film by an up-and-coming Roman Polanski on an independent budget with foreign actors, was roundly ignored. In terms of the sort of films that would fit into the New Wave and that were pointing to the way to the future of cinema, Repulsion is by far the best of this lineup. While it is on the slow side and for some can blur the line between boring and avant-garde, it was easily one of the year’s best and most revolutionary films. Whether or not it was the best or better than The Sound of Music is both debatable and an exercise in futility as both are radically different films. (Though if Repulsion did win the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1965, the implications for both the early start of the New Wave and generational clash in Hollywood would be insane to think about.) Regardless, it should have been nominated for Best Picture (at least over Darling which was one of the nominees) and also Best Leading Actress for Catherine Deneuve, Best Black-and-White Cinematography and Best Black-and-White Costume Design.
But I digress. Repulsion was the type of indie movie that Hollywood would ignore until it was completely taken over by the New Wave generation… who would then ignore future trends themselves as they came but that’s all a story for another day. So while critics may have derided The Sound of Music and demanded better, more artistic movies, very few of these artistic films were fully up to snuff. The rest were either still experimenting or just failed experiments outright. So, with that in mind, let’s change gears to the epic films and see if there was anything that was better than The Sound of Music.
Around this time is when the cracks started forming in the epic trend. For every Sound of Music, there were a few failures. One of the most interesting failures is Battle of the Bulge.
While The Collector is a good movie, Repulsion is an excellent movie. Carole Ledoux (Catherine Deneuve) is an attractive, young, psychologically fragile woman living in London as a manicurist who lives with her sister Helen (Yvonne Furneaux) who is having a tryst with another man named Michael (Ian Hendry). Carole is plainly uncomfortable with the male gaze, the male touch and, eventually, the very presence of men and slowly self-destructs as she cuts herself off from the outside world because she doesn’t want to deal with any men. The implications of why Carole behaves this way are entirely up to the viewer (though pretty obvious if you think about it); we’re never given her motivation, just a character study into her uncomfortable psychology.
Repulsion is a considerable groundbreaker in psychological filmmaking as the apartment grows increasingly distorted and arms start sprouting from the walls. While this isn’t the first psychological horror with an unreliable/clearly insane narrator, as this had been experimented with in The Haunting (1963) and some of the riskier Universal monster films, this is definitely the furthest the envelope had been pushed in this regard since the silent era. By the end of the movie, you’re not entirely sure what is and isn’t even in Carole’s head anymore.
Both films are very timely in their portrayal of how men can feel so possessive of women that they can become a danger and are still pretty disturbing watches years later. The Collector was directed by William Wyler, the same man who made Ben-Hur (1959) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and it’s a pretty impressive turn for the man who made such big epics. The movie received a few nominations from the Academy, though no wins.
Repulsion, which was the second film by an up-and-coming Roman Polanski on an independent budget with foreign actors, was roundly ignored. In terms of the sort of films that would fit into the New Wave and that were pointing to the way to the future of cinema, Repulsion is by far the best of this lineup. While it is on the slow side and for some can blur the line between boring and avant-garde, it was easily one of the year’s best and most revolutionary films. Whether or not it was the best or better than The Sound of Music is both debatable and an exercise in futility as both are radically different films. (Though if Repulsion did win the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1965, the implications for both the early start of the New Wave and generational clash in Hollywood would be insane to think about.) Regardless, it should have been nominated for Best Picture (at least over Darling which was one of the nominees) and also Best Leading Actress for Catherine Deneuve, Best Black-and-White Cinematography and Best Black-and-White Costume Design.
But I digress. Repulsion was the type of indie movie that Hollywood would ignore until it was completely taken over by the New Wave generation… who would then ignore future trends themselves as they came but that’s all a story for another day. So while critics may have derided The Sound of Music and demanded better, more artistic movies, very few of these artistic films were fully up to snuff. The rest were either still experimenting or just failed experiments outright. So, with that in mind, let’s change gears to the epic films and see if there was anything that was better than The Sound of Music.
Around this time is when the cracks started forming in the epic trend. For every Sound of Music, there were a few failures. One of the most interesting failures is Battle of the Bulge.
We’ve discussed how often historical accuracy is worth analyzing in a movie but this is the very rare case of a movie that was so historically inaccurate that audiences flat-out rejected it for that reason. The actual Battle of the Bulge was fought over the course of a month in a foggy forest with pitched shootouts by footsoldiers (the forest and fog being too thick for airplanes or tanks to properly reinforce them) and was ordered by Adolf Hitler himself in a last-ditch effort to break the Allied advance. The movie’s battle (which acts as the climax of the film after 90 minutes of build-up) features a shootout between two large tank battalions in a hilly plain and is orchestrated by an evil colonel (Robert Shaw) who wants to use the battle to make the war go on indefinitely (as if being a Nazi isn’t a good enough motivation to make him evil). The film got so much wrong that former U.S. President/Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower did a rare post-retirement press conference to lambaste the movie.
If you can get past all this, though, Battle of the Bulge is one of the most entertaining action movies of the 60s. It’s paced and built up well, Robert Shaw plays a really fun bad guy and, as mentioned, the finale features a bunch of tanks blowing each other up. It’s a great set piece that feels very cathartic to watch after all that build-up. It’s a little boggling that this movie exists under its title as the real-life Battle of the Bulge was already insane enough to make for a good movie (and is done justice in a great episode of the miniseries Band of Brothers (2001)) but, if you can get past all that, this is a fun way to spend a rainy afternoon.
Another movie that didn’t do well was The Flight of the Phoenix.
If you can get past all this, though, Battle of the Bulge is one of the most entertaining action movies of the 60s. It’s paced and built up well, Robert Shaw plays a really fun bad guy and, as mentioned, the finale features a bunch of tanks blowing each other up. It’s a great set piece that feels very cathartic to watch after all that build-up. It’s a little boggling that this movie exists under its title as the real-life Battle of the Bulge was already insane enough to make for a good movie (and is done justice in a great episode of the miniseries Band of Brothers (2001)) but, if you can get past all that, this is a fun way to spend a rainy afternoon.
Another movie that didn’t do well was The Flight of the Phoenix.
The Flight of the Phoenix revolves around a cargo plane that crash lands in the desert and the crew on board eventually come to the conclusion that their only option for survival is to patch the plane back together and try to fly back to civilization. This is certainly a great idea for a movie though it’s far more boring than it sounds. Hearing this pitch, you think most of The Flight of the Phoenix would be a fun how-to in MacGuyver-esque plane construction, debating which materials can hold which piece together, how to reconstruct an engine etc. Instead, most of the movie is just the characters debating what the best way to get out of the desert is and whether they should walk or fly the plane. Again. And again. And again.
It starts spinning its wheels very fast and you become very aware of the 2.5-hour running time before too long. Though at the very least the climactic plane lift-off is pretty cool though that comes with a sordid BTS story attached: the prop plane that looks like it could barely hold together fell apart in midair shortly after liftoff, killing the stunt pilot. Apparently gross negligence and reckless disregard for human life was one of those things that the Golden Age of Hollywood was still pulling off in its late years. Whether this story enhances or ruins the scene depends on who you ask.
The last hurrah of the Biblical/ancient Roman epics was The Greatest Story Ever Told,
It starts spinning its wheels very fast and you become very aware of the 2.5-hour running time before too long. Though at the very least the climactic plane lift-off is pretty cool though that comes with a sordid BTS story attached: the prop plane that looks like it could barely hold together fell apart in midair shortly after liftoff, killing the stunt pilot. Apparently gross negligence and reckless disregard for human life was one of those things that the Golden Age of Hollywood was still pulling off in its late years. Whether this story enhances or ruins the scene depends on who you ask.
The last hurrah of the Biblical/ancient Roman epics was The Greatest Story Ever Told,
a depiction about the life and times of Jesus Christ of Nazareth (Max von Sydow). Of all of these epics, this one is probably the best example of the gross excesses of late-stage Hollywood during this time, as the film was almost as much of a fiscal disaster as Cleopatra (1963). While they avoided the trap of shooting in multiple countries and almost killing its cast, it still failed to break even despite making over $15 million at the box office. The failure of this film with the following year’s The Bible: In The Beginning… (1966) basically killed off whatever was left of this genre for good.
In later years, The Greatest Story Ever Told has gotten some second wind in movie buff circles, acknowledging its great aspects. Von Sydow is very good at playing the Messiah, the production design and cinematography is majestic and of this unofficial trilogy of epic Biblical films in the early 60s (King of Kings (1962), this film and The Bible: In The Beginning…), this is the best of the bunch. While that’s all true, and The Greatest Story Ever Told isn’t a bad movie, it’s not an especially great one either, nor is it really worth your time to watch. If you want to watch a Biblical epic from this time period, you’re better off watching either The Ten Commandments (1956) or Ben-Hur.
Moving onto the big-budget, adventure films that actually did make money, we’re going to tier this up according to box office gross, as the top 5 high-grossers of the year were all pretty big movies that were rewarded accordingly. Numbers 5 and 4 were, respectively, The Great Race
In later years, The Greatest Story Ever Told has gotten some second wind in movie buff circles, acknowledging its great aspects. Von Sydow is very good at playing the Messiah, the production design and cinematography is majestic and of this unofficial trilogy of epic Biblical films in the early 60s (King of Kings (1962), this film and The Bible: In The Beginning…), this is the best of the bunch. While that’s all true, and The Greatest Story Ever Told isn’t a bad movie, it’s not an especially great one either, nor is it really worth your time to watch. If you want to watch a Biblical epic from this time period, you’re better off watching either The Ten Commandments (1956) or Ben-Hur.
Moving onto the big-budget, adventure films that actually did make money, we’re going to tier this up according to box office gross, as the top 5 high-grossers of the year were all pretty big movies that were rewarded accordingly. Numbers 5 and 4 were, respectively, The Great Race
and Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines - or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 Hours and 11 Minutes.
These are another pair of brother-and-sister films, as they were both high-octane, big-budget, star-studded comedy films that were clearly meant to cash in on the massive success of It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). Both movies take place around the turn of the 20th century and center on a race around the world with a bunch of silly, colorful characters: The Great Race via cars, Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines via planes. Both had incredibly large set pieces and running times that would be completely unheard of today and both were nominated for several technical Oscars (with The Great Race winning the Academy Award for Best Sound Effects). But which one is better?
While The Great Race begins with several different competitors, they’re all quickly weaned down to just the main three. You have our hero, the Great Leslie (Tony Curtis), a daredevil and celebrity who is so damned perfect that he earns the scorn and envy of the villainous Professor Fate (Jack Lemmon), who has made it his mission in life to show Leslie up. The third main competitor is the suffragette, Maggie DuBois (Natalie Wood), who enters the race to prove a point that women can be just as effective as men. Having a 2.5-hour comedy shouldered entirely by just 3 people is a tall order and this is the major problem with The Great Race.
Having a protagonist being ridiculously perfect is one of those things that can only be funny for so long as having no flaws and not being allowed to be the heel makes for a pretty boring main character to follow (to see this idea of a comically perfect ubermensch done well, watch A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966) which has a similar archetype playing the antagonist). Jack Lemmon as the Daffy Duck-esque villain seems to be the fan favorite but practically every line he says is shouted and I can very easily see him getting on some people’s nerves after a while. As a result, it seems like the lion’s share of the movie is on Natalie Wood's shoulders and even she starts off as a fun parody of the self-righteous feminist before eventually just becoming the girlfriend by the end of it.
By contrast, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines does keep all dozen competitors in the race throughout the film. The movie’s characters are admittedly not as unique though that’s because part of the fun is that all of them are comedic stereotypes of their respective countries. You have the rugged American cowboy (Stuart Whitman), the romantic Italian (Alberto Sordi), the pompous Frenchman (Jean-Pierre Cassel); by far the best is the high-strung, super-militaristic Prussian officer played by Gert Fröbe. Fröbe, fresh off of a star-making turn as the titular villain in Goldfinger (1964), was upset that people associated him with such a nasty, humorless villain and so wanted to make a career change into funnier roles. With that in mind, you can tell he is having so much fun making this character into such a self-important dunce.
The Great Race also has serious problems with pacing. The movie is a road trip film, a comedic spin on Around the World in 80 Days (1956), but there’s an egregiously long subplot where they get lost in some central European kingdom that has some political machinations going on to overthrow its king. It feels like they just wandered into a completely different movie and it grinds the race to a halt. While Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines is also a little long in the tooth it does keep the focus where it should: on the race. While the titular Great Race begins pretty early on, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines has a lot more build-up to the race itself, making the race feel a lot more majestic when it finally does begin.
You can obviously tell which one I think is worth your time if you choose to watch one of these films. Critics at the time agreed as The Great Race got more mixed reviews but has later grown into a cult classic, probably once enough time had elapsed that it became nostalgic for those who grew up with it. What I find interesting is contextualizing these films and the comedy genre as a whole in the burgeoning New Wave and counterculture. Once the New Wave finally took over Hollywood and the Academy, comedy would be relegated to sort of B-picture status, with comedies almost never being respected by critics or the Academy again. In addition, while comedies also aren’t usually considered the biggest example of New Wave films, they definitely also changed a lot in the late 60s and during the 70s.
Movies like The Great Race and Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, while their pace is quicker than the screwballs of yore, the humor is based on classic vaudeville and slapstick. The really anarchic, spit-in-your-face, witty comedies that would be pioneered by Mel Brooks, Monty Python, the Zucker Brothers and the Not-Ready-For-Primetime Players makes these movies downright quaint and tame by comparison. For example, the most famous scene in The Great Race is when the director set out to create what he called the greatest pie fight in history.
While The Great Race begins with several different competitors, they’re all quickly weaned down to just the main three. You have our hero, the Great Leslie (Tony Curtis), a daredevil and celebrity who is so damned perfect that he earns the scorn and envy of the villainous Professor Fate (Jack Lemmon), who has made it his mission in life to show Leslie up. The third main competitor is the suffragette, Maggie DuBois (Natalie Wood), who enters the race to prove a point that women can be just as effective as men. Having a 2.5-hour comedy shouldered entirely by just 3 people is a tall order and this is the major problem with The Great Race.
Having a protagonist being ridiculously perfect is one of those things that can only be funny for so long as having no flaws and not being allowed to be the heel makes for a pretty boring main character to follow (to see this idea of a comically perfect ubermensch done well, watch A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966) which has a similar archetype playing the antagonist). Jack Lemmon as the Daffy Duck-esque villain seems to be the fan favorite but practically every line he says is shouted and I can very easily see him getting on some people’s nerves after a while. As a result, it seems like the lion’s share of the movie is on Natalie Wood's shoulders and even she starts off as a fun parody of the self-righteous feminist before eventually just becoming the girlfriend by the end of it.
By contrast, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines does keep all dozen competitors in the race throughout the film. The movie’s characters are admittedly not as unique though that’s because part of the fun is that all of them are comedic stereotypes of their respective countries. You have the rugged American cowboy (Stuart Whitman), the romantic Italian (Alberto Sordi), the pompous Frenchman (Jean-Pierre Cassel); by far the best is the high-strung, super-militaristic Prussian officer played by Gert Fröbe. Fröbe, fresh off of a star-making turn as the titular villain in Goldfinger (1964), was upset that people associated him with such a nasty, humorless villain and so wanted to make a career change into funnier roles. With that in mind, you can tell he is having so much fun making this character into such a self-important dunce.
The Great Race also has serious problems with pacing. The movie is a road trip film, a comedic spin on Around the World in 80 Days (1956), but there’s an egregiously long subplot where they get lost in some central European kingdom that has some political machinations going on to overthrow its king. It feels like they just wandered into a completely different movie and it grinds the race to a halt. While Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines is also a little long in the tooth it does keep the focus where it should: on the race. While the titular Great Race begins pretty early on, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines has a lot more build-up to the race itself, making the race feel a lot more majestic when it finally does begin.
You can obviously tell which one I think is worth your time if you choose to watch one of these films. Critics at the time agreed as The Great Race got more mixed reviews but has later grown into a cult classic, probably once enough time had elapsed that it became nostalgic for those who grew up with it. What I find interesting is contextualizing these films and the comedy genre as a whole in the burgeoning New Wave and counterculture. Once the New Wave finally took over Hollywood and the Academy, comedy would be relegated to sort of B-picture status, with comedies almost never being respected by critics or the Academy again. In addition, while comedies also aren’t usually considered the biggest example of New Wave films, they definitely also changed a lot in the late 60s and during the 70s.
Movies like The Great Race and Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, while their pace is quicker than the screwballs of yore, the humor is based on classic vaudeville and slapstick. The really anarchic, spit-in-your-face, witty comedies that would be pioneered by Mel Brooks, Monty Python, the Zucker Brothers and the Not-Ready-For-Primetime Players makes these movies downright quaint and tame by comparison. For example, the most famous scene in The Great Race is when the director set out to create what he called the greatest pie fight in history.
While this is entertaining and fun to watch, the idea of getting pied in the face is one of those things that wasn’t quite as intrinsically funny as it used to be back during the height of vaudeville. Compare this to Mel Brooks’ infamous “Springtime for Hitler” song from The Producers (1968) only a few years later and you can see a night-and-day difference in how many boundaries the comedy in The Great Race was pushing (i.e. none at all). While I know that this isn’t the kind of movie The Great Race is trying to be, it’s interesting how The Sound of Music was criticized for not pushing boundaries enough but these two movies went unpunished. (Probably because The Sound of Music won the Oscar for Best Picture and these two didn't.)
As a result, these epic comedies are a kind of movie genre that really only existed at this particular point in time and probably will never exist again, at least not to the same level of tameness as these movies were at. Considering how edgy comedy has gotten over the past 50 years, the genre almost never rises above medium budget because that’s a risk that no sane producer would ever take. In fact, the only truly epic latter-day comedies I can think of off the top of my head, where part of the humor comes from how ridiculously big the scale gets, are Blues Brothers (1980) and Rat Race (2001) (which itself is a loose remake of It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World).
Getting back to the heart of the matter, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, while it could’ve stood to trim some time, I do think was the best of this epic comedy trend. While not a masterpiece, the really great thing about it is the aerial cinematography. The film is half-fun comedy and half-love letter to the majesty of being up in the air and golden age of aviation (with a humorous bookend where the movie ends with the casual banality of modern-day air travel). The aerial cinematography is incredible and really makes you feel like you’re up there with the pilots.
The third highest-grossing movie of the year was the James Bond adventure, Thunderball
As a result, these epic comedies are a kind of movie genre that really only existed at this particular point in time and probably will never exist again, at least not to the same level of tameness as these movies were at. Considering how edgy comedy has gotten over the past 50 years, the genre almost never rises above medium budget because that’s a risk that no sane producer would ever take. In fact, the only truly epic latter-day comedies I can think of off the top of my head, where part of the humor comes from how ridiculously big the scale gets, are Blues Brothers (1980) and Rat Race (2001) (which itself is a loose remake of It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World).
Getting back to the heart of the matter, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, while it could’ve stood to trim some time, I do think was the best of this epic comedy trend. While not a masterpiece, the really great thing about it is the aerial cinematography. The film is half-fun comedy and half-love letter to the majesty of being up in the air and golden age of aviation (with a humorous bookend where the movie ends with the casual banality of modern-day air travel). The aerial cinematography is incredible and really makes you feel like you’re up there with the pilots.
The third highest-grossing movie of the year was the James Bond adventure, Thunderball
or as fans of the franchise sometimes call it, “the underwater one.” As you can tell by this point, the 60s was the height of Bondmania, with each Connery film consistently being one of the highest-rated films of the year. In this one, a NATO bomber is sunk and the atomic bombs on board are stolen by the terrorist organization SPECTRE who threatens to nuke a random city if they are not paid a ransom within one week. So our favorite spy (Sean Connery) is dispatched to the Bahamas where he uncovers the mystery of the missing plane in the waters off the coast.
The producers of the Bond franchise, Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, were insistent on making each Bond film bigger and better than the last or, if they couldn’t do that, at the very least make each one different. In this case, this movie is famous for its long sequences of underwater cinematography as Bond explores underwater grottoes, escapes man-eating sharks and eventually shows down with an army of bad guys in what might be the very first underwater action scene in cinematic history (The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1955) doesn’t have action sequences). Due to the length of these underwater scenes, some fans do think the movie drags at times. I personally disagree but I can see the argument. Probably the bigger problem is that this movie does show its age a bit more than some of the other 60s Bond films, particularly the climax (spoiler warning for that link) which features Bond battling several thugs on an out-of-control boat with some admittedly terrible green screen and editing.
Even ignoring the underwater scenes and sometimes sloppy editing, this is another great espionage adventure with great set pieces throughout (particularly the parade chase about halfway through the movie). The acting is great with Connery still being a great spy and the film matching Goldfinger with another great pair of iconic villains (SPECTRE's eyepatch-toting No. 2, Emilio Largo (Adolfo Celi, voice dubbed by Robert Rietty) and his partner-in-crime, Fiona Volpe (Luciana Paluzzi) who is one of cinema’s greatest femme fatales). The pacing, sans those water scenes, is also pretty excellent as the film constantly reminds you of the ticking time clock as you get closer and closer to the bombs going off.
This movie’s also notable as being arguably the first true action movie, at least in the modern sense of the word. Swashbucklers and aviation movies have existed since the dawn of cinema and these spy movies had been ongoing since North by Northwest (1959) but all of those usually have just one or two big action scenes, even the previous Bond films. In Thunderball, I’d say about every 20 minutes someone ends up getting beaten up, chased down or shot. There’s a lot of variety in the types of action and it’s consistently spaced throughout, upgrading the Bond films from mystery thrillers to the hyper-action that the franchise, and most box office toppers of the future, are known for. Thunderball is a major pioneer and landmark in filmmaking in this regard.
Thunderball won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects but was snubbed across the board elsewhere. We’ve discussed genre snobbery before and we’ll discuss it again so I won’t go into it too deeply here. This will be an interesting discussion as cinema gets more pulpy the further along we go as we find out the hard way (especially in the 2010s and 20s) that just because a movie makes a ton of money doesn’t mean that it’s good. That is not the case here. The first 5 Bond films are consistently rated as some of the best action-adventure films of all time and they were clearly regarded as such in their heyday as well. If nothing else, it should have at least warranted nominations for Best Color Cinematography and Best Sound. If The Great Race was good enough to warrant those nominations, then so was Thunderball.
And now for our feature presentation. The second-highest-grossing movie of the year (and ninth-highest-grossing movie of all time once adjusted for inflation), as well as The Sound of Music’s greatest competition, was Doctor Zhivago.
The producers of the Bond franchise, Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, were insistent on making each Bond film bigger and better than the last or, if they couldn’t do that, at the very least make each one different. In this case, this movie is famous for its long sequences of underwater cinematography as Bond explores underwater grottoes, escapes man-eating sharks and eventually shows down with an army of bad guys in what might be the very first underwater action scene in cinematic history (The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1955) doesn’t have action sequences). Due to the length of these underwater scenes, some fans do think the movie drags at times. I personally disagree but I can see the argument. Probably the bigger problem is that this movie does show its age a bit more than some of the other 60s Bond films, particularly the climax (spoiler warning for that link) which features Bond battling several thugs on an out-of-control boat with some admittedly terrible green screen and editing.
Even ignoring the underwater scenes and sometimes sloppy editing, this is another great espionage adventure with great set pieces throughout (particularly the parade chase about halfway through the movie). The acting is great with Connery still being a great spy and the film matching Goldfinger with another great pair of iconic villains (SPECTRE's eyepatch-toting No. 2, Emilio Largo (Adolfo Celi, voice dubbed by Robert Rietty) and his partner-in-crime, Fiona Volpe (Luciana Paluzzi) who is one of cinema’s greatest femme fatales). The pacing, sans those water scenes, is also pretty excellent as the film constantly reminds you of the ticking time clock as you get closer and closer to the bombs going off.
This movie’s also notable as being arguably the first true action movie, at least in the modern sense of the word. Swashbucklers and aviation movies have existed since the dawn of cinema and these spy movies had been ongoing since North by Northwest (1959) but all of those usually have just one or two big action scenes, even the previous Bond films. In Thunderball, I’d say about every 20 minutes someone ends up getting beaten up, chased down or shot. There’s a lot of variety in the types of action and it’s consistently spaced throughout, upgrading the Bond films from mystery thrillers to the hyper-action that the franchise, and most box office toppers of the future, are known for. Thunderball is a major pioneer and landmark in filmmaking in this regard.
Thunderball won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects but was snubbed across the board elsewhere. We’ve discussed genre snobbery before and we’ll discuss it again so I won’t go into it too deeply here. This will be an interesting discussion as cinema gets more pulpy the further along we go as we find out the hard way (especially in the 2010s and 20s) that just because a movie makes a ton of money doesn’t mean that it’s good. That is not the case here. The first 5 Bond films are consistently rated as some of the best action-adventure films of all time and they were clearly regarded as such in their heyday as well. If nothing else, it should have at least warranted nominations for Best Color Cinematography and Best Sound. If The Great Race was good enough to warrant those nominations, then so was Thunderball.
And now for our feature presentation. The second-highest-grossing movie of the year (and ninth-highest-grossing movie of all time once adjusted for inflation), as well as The Sound of Music’s greatest competition, was Doctor Zhivago.
Along with The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962), this forms a nice little trilogy of David Lean’s larger-than-life epic films. This also makes for a pretty fascinating Academy Award competition as it pits the two archetypes of this epic genre against each other: would the Academy have preferred an epic musical or an epic historical drama? We can obviously see the answer but the question is were they right to do so? (Because there were no catty remarks between the lead actors/actresses, this actually wasn’t treated quite as intensely as, say, the previous year’s Mary Poppins (1964) vs. My Fair Lady even if, from a film critic’s POV, this makes for a more interesting competition. Que sera sera.)
Doctor Zhivago is a love triangle set against the backdrop of the Bolshevik Revolution and ensuing Russian Civil War. Yuri Andreyevich Zhivago (Tarek Sharif as a child, Omar Sharif as an adult) is a young orphan who moves to Moscow to become a physician. While there, he becomes engaged to his wards’ daughter, Tonya Gromeko (Geraldine Chaplin), but, through a series of events, eventually starts a close friendship with a politically-connected nurse named Lara Antipova (Julie Christie). The movie then follows these characters through the years as their lives, and all of Russian society, are upended by Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks.
Like Lean’s previous films, there’s a lot to sink your teeth into Doctor Zhivago and just how fantastic of a film it is. The big thing that I think Lean always got down very well is making you feel like you were in the environment that the movie takes place in. In The Bridge on the River Kwai, you see the steam rising off the jungle floor which allows you to feel how hot and sticky the characters must be. In Lawrence of Arabia, you constantly see the harsh sun beat down on the desert dunes to make it feel like you’re in that oven. Doctor Zhivago turns the thermostat in the complete opposite direction. A lot of the back half of the movie is set in the snowy drifts of Siberia. The characters are always bundled up and sloshing through the muddy snow and ice. At one point, an ice storm hits our characters that is so cold that it freezes the glass windows of a house solid. You see their breath crystallize and their teeth chatter. You see their faces turn red as the cold wind bites it. Doctor Zhivago is a very frigid film.
Yet Lean avoided the trap of many other epics by focusing so much on the environment and settings that he forgot to make interesting characters. Compared to Colonel Nicholson and T.E. Lawrence, Dr. Yuri Zhivago is less of a martial man. He’s much more of an everyman who ends up getting caught up in the revolution of the times, often against his will. When Lean was making the movie, he reached out to both Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif, the co-stars of Lawrence of Arabia, to offer to play Yuri but O’Toole ended up being busy with other projects and I think it’s for the best that it happened this way. While O’Toole would’ve been great in his own way, something about Sharif’s big brown eyes really gives the character this childlike innocence. He seems so warm and loving that it really hurts that much more when the film’s tragedies hit him. While O’Toole might have been friendly, I don’t think it would’ve hit as hard.
Doctor Zhivago is a love triangle set against the backdrop of the Bolshevik Revolution and ensuing Russian Civil War. Yuri Andreyevich Zhivago (Tarek Sharif as a child, Omar Sharif as an adult) is a young orphan who moves to Moscow to become a physician. While there, he becomes engaged to his wards’ daughter, Tonya Gromeko (Geraldine Chaplin), but, through a series of events, eventually starts a close friendship with a politically-connected nurse named Lara Antipova (Julie Christie). The movie then follows these characters through the years as their lives, and all of Russian society, are upended by Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks.
Like Lean’s previous films, there’s a lot to sink your teeth into Doctor Zhivago and just how fantastic of a film it is. The big thing that I think Lean always got down very well is making you feel like you were in the environment that the movie takes place in. In The Bridge on the River Kwai, you see the steam rising off the jungle floor which allows you to feel how hot and sticky the characters must be. In Lawrence of Arabia, you constantly see the harsh sun beat down on the desert dunes to make it feel like you’re in that oven. Doctor Zhivago turns the thermostat in the complete opposite direction. A lot of the back half of the movie is set in the snowy drifts of Siberia. The characters are always bundled up and sloshing through the muddy snow and ice. At one point, an ice storm hits our characters that is so cold that it freezes the glass windows of a house solid. You see their breath crystallize and their teeth chatter. You see their faces turn red as the cold wind bites it. Doctor Zhivago is a very frigid film.
Yet Lean avoided the trap of many other epics by focusing so much on the environment and settings that he forgot to make interesting characters. Compared to Colonel Nicholson and T.E. Lawrence, Dr. Yuri Zhivago is less of a martial man. He’s much more of an everyman who ends up getting caught up in the revolution of the times, often against his will. When Lean was making the movie, he reached out to both Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif, the co-stars of Lawrence of Arabia, to offer to play Yuri but O’Toole ended up being busy with other projects and I think it’s for the best that it happened this way. While O’Toole would’ve been great in his own way, something about Sharif’s big brown eyes really gives the character this childlike innocence. He seems so warm and loving that it really hurts that much more when the film’s tragedies hit him. While O’Toole might have been friendly, I don’t think it would’ve hit as hard.
In Soviet Russia, mustache freezes SNOW!
This then ties into the third great aspect of Doctor Zhivago, and the one that makes it stick out from the crowd in terms of these historical fiction epics, is that the movie doesn’t tie into any historical moments. I mean, yes, the movie takes place in Tsarist Moscow and Yuri and Lara do meet during the Eastern Front in World War I but most other films would involve historical figures. We never actually meet Lenin, the Romanovs or any of the people who would be involved in the formation of the first USSR. We see soldiers beating up people on the streets but we don’t see the actual storming of the Tsarist palace.
This helps the parable of Doctor Zhivago and make it feel far more humanlike. This is just a movie about a group of people whose lives are ruined by this dictatorship. Yuri Zhivago was not a super-nationalist or someone fiercely loyal to the Tsar. He’s just a sweet man who wants to grow up, be a good doctor, help people and raise a family. But because he had some opinions that ran afoul of the state, he ends up being subjected to a pogrom at the hands of the state.
During the counterculture revolution of the 60s (and, let’s face it, today as well), there was always a question in left-wing circles of just how bad the Soviet Union actually was. Was Communism really all that wrong? The only one telling us that it was that bad is the U.S. government and they’re clearly wrong about a lot of things. Admittedly, part of the reason why it be easier to dismiss the Soviet Union’s crimes at the time is because the full horrors of Joseph Stalin’s reign weren’t revealed to the world until after the Soviet Union fell in 1991 (and friendly reminder that this is the same Stalin who murdered more people than Hitler) but, even accounting for that, Doctor Zhivago tells a very human story of a man whose life is systematically ruined because he had the misfortune of being born in a time period where these things will happen.
Admittedly, this is also a bit of a problem with the film. Doctor Zhivago is a very movie-fied story. Some might argue that making it more realistic would’ve emphasized the point more but the counterargument would be that those movies are only seen by patrons of arthouse theaters whereas Doctor Zhivago would be (and evidently was) seen by more of the mass public. Another slightly bigger flaw is that the movie does admittedly glorify Tsarist Russia a bit too much. The film has a very Gone With the Wind (1939)-esque structure where the first half is a lot more benign than the second half after the Revolution. Some could say this glorifies that time period more than is fully warranted since the Tsar had his own problems as a ruler (you don’t encourage men like Lenin and Stalin to run your country if things are going well) but that’s just how the movie is set up.
There are other problems with the movie though that does make Doctor Zhivago pale in comparison to Lean’s previous works though. The real bummer of this film is that the pacing isn’t quite perfect. For example, there’s one sequence where (mild spoilers) Yuri leaves his family to get some supplies and, while on his way home, he is captured and forcibly conscripted by a regiment of the Red Army, the idea being that there is no greater loyalty than the state, family be damned. Yuri ends up being on the road with this regiment for 2 years before he manages to finally escape them and return home. The scene where he finally returns to his home after his wife must have thought he abandoned her is one of the film’s big tearjerkers.
The problem is that this whole sequence from when he leaves home to when he returns is about a total of 10 minutes. In other words, we aren’t shown that Yuri has been away from them for 2 years, he just says it’s been 2 years. Thus, this scene doesn’t feel like it hits as hard as it should have. This would be a nitpick but this feels like a major misfire coming from Lean; the same man who made a Hellish afternoon in Lawrence of Arabia take up a full half-hour of screentime to emphasize how brutal the desert is. He should have known better than this. This is the most egregious example but there are a lot of little moments that add up over the course of Doctor Zhivago that muddy the pace. While it’s not as boring as The Flight of the Phoenix, you are aware that you’ll have been sitting there for 3 hours by the end of Doctor Zhivago. The movie’s still a masterpiece, it’s just not as close-to-perfect as the director’s previous films.
Getting down the million-dollar question, there could be an argument for this being a snub choice just in terms of timing relevance. During a brief Cold War thaw and the height of American liberalism in 1965, this is a movie that does remind us of the evils of Soviet Communism and how it ruined innocent lives. The Sound of Music doesn’t really have much of a capturing the spirit of the times, besides maybe Maria’s frollicking in flowers and general love of music making her into a prototypical hippie. In terms of pushing filmmaking boundaries, neither The Sound of Music nor Doctor Zhivago really pioneered anything new. Repulsion arguably did though so it’s not being here is definitely a snub though it’s definitely a bit on the slow side and was an independent movie from Britain (in other words, Academy kryptonite).
But I digress. Critics be damned, The Sound of Music was, and still is, a masterpiece. If nothing else, it’s also by far the most famous and iconic movie of the year; the only other movie that can compare in its entrance to the great pop culture lexicon is Thunderball (with its addition to the Bond tropes of the eyepatch-wearing villain who alternates between feeding henchmen to sharks or killing them with exploding chairs). If you start singing any song from The Sound of Music with someone, odds are pretty good they’ll respond in kind. By contrast, nowadays Doctor Zhivago and Repulsion exist in the historical shadows of their respective directors’ other (better) films.
So this is actually the rare Academy Award ceremony where people at the time thought it was a snub choice but, over the years, it turned out to be a pretty deserved win. Comparing The Sound of Music back-to-back with all of these other films, almost none of the artistic films were disciplined or pulled off well enough to merit being called best of the year. And none of the other epics were lovable enough to match its charm. Ultimately, in terms of just accomplishing everything it set out to do, The Sound of Music is definitely, if not the best movie of the year, at the very least in the top 5. This is a pretty difficult film to pull off when you think about it and the matching of tones never glitches. The transition from a fun, family-friendly musical into an emotional romance into eventually a quiet, intense thriller is very seamlessly done. The sequence where the von Trapp family escapes from the Nazis is as intense as anything in Doctor Zhivago. The Sound of Music is also, if nothing else, more well-paced than Doctor Zhivago, or any of these other films, as it flies by in the blink of an eye.
Calling The Sound of Music the best film of 1965 was a…
SUCCESS!
Personal Favorite Movies of 1965:
- Battle of the Bulge (dir. Ken Annakin)
- Doctor Zhivago (dir. David Lean)
- Repulsion (dir. Roman Polanski)
- San Daikaiju Chikyu Saidai no Kessen (Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster) (dir. Ishiro Honda)
- That Darn Cat! (dir. Robert Stevenson)
- The Collector (dir. William Wyler)
- The Sound of Music (dir. Robert Wise)
- Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines - or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 Hours and 11 Minutes (dir. Ken Annakin)
- Thunderball (dir. Terence Young)
- Von Ryan's Express (dir. Mark Robson)
Favorite Heroes:
- Agent Zeke Kelso (Dean Jones) (That Darn Cat!)
- Captain von Trapp (Christopher Plummer, singing voice dubbed by Bill Lee) (The Sound of Music)
- Dr. Yuri Andreyevich Zhivago (Omar Sharif) (Doctor Zhivago)
- James Bond (Sean Connery) (Thunderball)
- Maggie DuBois (Natalie Wood) (The Great Race)
- Maria (Julie Andrews) (The Sound of Music)
- Murray Burns (Jason Robards) (A Thousand Clowns)
- Pattie Randall (Hayley Mills) (That Darn Cat!)
- Selina D'Arcey (Debi Storm as a child, Elizabeth Hartman as an adult) (A Patch of Blue)
- Tóno Brtko (Jozef Kroner) (Obchod na Korze (The Shop on Main Street))
Favorite Villains:
- Colonel Martin Hassler (Robert Shaw) (Battle of the Bulge)
- Dan (Neville Brand) (That Darn Cat!)
- Carole Ledoux (Catherine Deneuve) (Repulsion)
- Emilio Largo (Adolfo Celi, voice dubbed by Robert Rietty) (Thunderball)
- Ferdinand Griffon and Marianne Renoir (Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karine) (Pierrot le Fou (Pierrot the Fool))
- Fiona Volpe (Luciana Paluzzi) (Thunderball)
- Rolfe (Daniel Truhitte) (The Sound of Music)
- Rose-Ann D'Arcey (Shelley Winters) (A Patch of Blue)
- The Bolsheviks (Doctor Zhivago)
- The Landlord (Patrick Wymark) (Repulsion)
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