1963: Tom Jones

The original Tom Jones poster. Not everybody loves it (or him), despite claims to the contrary.

“It is widely held that too much wine will dull a man’s desire. Indeed it will… in a dull man.” – Narrator explaining the hero’s actions, Tom Jones

Tom Jones is probably one of the most forgotten of Oscar movies, and for fairly good reason. Although clearly a ground breaking film in some regards (at least in terms of Oscar winners), it is also very badly dated in 2015 and also falls under the most dreaded of Best Picture stigmas: stuffy period piece. A tale of rural heredity woes and 18^th century parody doesn’t seem like a particularly enticing film for good reason – it is not. Still, the times in 1963, they were a-changin’ and in many ways Tom Jones is a reflection of those changes, even while rooted firmly in another era.

The modern Tom Jones poster, whose variations grace most DVD covers. A lipstick kiss! What a scoundrel!

Tom Jones begins with a strange, silent-movie style prologue, where the fantastically wealthy farmer Squire Allworthy (George Devine) finds a newborn baby in his bead. Ferreting out that the baby is the bastard child of two of his servants, Allworthy sends the parents away and opts to raise the baby, christened Tom, as his own. Twenty years later, Tom (Albert Finney) is a bored philandering youth who takes little seriously. Despite his many amorous conquests, Tom truly loves his neighbor, Sophie Western (Susannah York). Sophie’s father and Tom’s adopted cousin conspire to have him removed from Allworthy’s good graces for various reasons (Sophie’s father doesn’t want his daughter involved with a poor man, the cousin is looking out for his inheritance) and Tom is sent packing, penniless, to London. On the road, he encounters a set of wacky characters and adventures until learning Sophie has run away to escaped a planned marriage to a horrible bore. Tom conspires to win her back.

Tom Jones (Albert Finney) and his one true love, Sophie Wilson (Susannah York)

Tom Jones is without a doubt the most risqué best picture up to this point in time. Where a lot of Best Pictures like All About Eve or From Here to Eternity hinted at sex or perhaps had couples rolling around in bathing suits, Tom Jones shows lovers under covers. It is also the first (and only?) Best Picture winner to have both an incest joke and a joke about snorting opium. But it is also incredibly boring. After the strange silent opening, the movie “properly” starts with a very long fox hunt scene. Although technically very good (and realistically gory), the scene goes on and on. A lot of jokes, like Sophie’s father’s drunkenness and Tom’s unstoppable libido, are beaten into the ground. Also, Tom is supposed to be a rakish but charming youth, but many of his actions, particularly his endless skirt chasing, make him really unlikable. He comes off very poorly in today’s world. The best scene is one where Tom and one his many amours, starving after a long journey, eat a ton of food, while trying to romance each other.

Tom at the dinner romance scene. The actors ate so much during filming that they were sick for days.

The movie makes a lot of strange choice that I assume were very popular in the day but just feel weird now. There are a lot of self-referential bits and characters making a remark and literally winking at the camera/audience. One, where Tom throws his hat on the camera as he walks by to help hide the nakedness of a companion, is pretty clever, but the rest are just distracting and annoying. It is also weird to see Albert Finney, known mostly for playing the aging curmudgeon in movies like Annie or Big Fish, as a young and jolly chap.

I don’t think many people remember Tom Jones and for good reason – it is a very forgettable Oscar winner. To me, the most interesting thing about it is to examine the shifting cultural standards the film clearly represents. However, Oscar must not have been too happy with this win, since the next batch of winners is among the most conservative and family friendly.

Trivia: “What’s New Pussycat?” singer Tom Jones took his name from this movie; This movie had three best supporting actress nominees (Diane Cilento, Edith Evans and Joyce Redman) but all lost to Margaret Rutherford in The VIPs.

Other Oscars: Best Director (Tony Richardson); Best Adapted Screenplay; Best Music Score

Box Office: $37.6 Million (4^th for year)

Other Notable Films of 1963: Cleopatra$*; How the West Was Won*; It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World; The Sword in the Stone; The Birds; From Russia With Love; Bye Bye Birdie; The Great Escape; 8 ½; Lilies of the Field*; America, America*

$Top Box Office Draw – $57.7 Million

*  Best Picture Nominee

1962: Lawrence of Arabia

This poster for Lawrence of Arabia really tells you all you need to know: Handsome man in white, lots of desert.

The best of them won’t come for money; they’ll come for me. – T.E. Lawrence (Peter O’Toole), Lawrence of Arabia

Lawrence of Arabia is one of those movies where at first I wasn’t sure what I thought about it, bordering on maybe not even liking, but the more I thought about it, the more it really grew on me. It has a little something for everyone in retrospect. A very strange movie that feels like it set the course for the modern action epic, it also features clear influences from the French New Wave style of filmmaking and a nearly impenetrable lead character, whose motives are purposefully murky, often to a frustrating degree.

Peter O’Toole as TE Lawrence and Omar Sharif as Sharif Ali, who becomes the moral center of the movie and my favorite character

Like other classics Citizen Kane or La Bamba, Lawrence of Arabia starts with its lead character’s death, in this case an unintentionally funny motorcycle accident (more on this in a bit). At Lawrence’s funeral, a reporter tries to get quotes from famous people about the man, only to get several murky responses (I actually had to rewatch the funeral scene after the movie to piece together who was at the funeral and how their recollections differed from the “reality” of the movie). We then flash back to Lawrence’s early days as a misfit officer during World War I, stationed in the outcast African theater of the war. Lawrence is assigned to inspect the efforts of Arabian Prince Faisal (the decided non-Arabian Alec Guinness, last seen in Bridge on the River Kwai and of course much later seen as Obi Wan Kenobi). The British are hesitant to provide significant aid to the Arabians against their common foe (and Arabian colonizer) the Turkish Empire because the British don’t want an independent Arabian kingdom. The Arabians themselves are hampered by infighting amongst their own tribes, symbolized in the form of Sharif Ali (Omar Sharif), who kills Lawrence’s initial desert guide, because the rival tribesman drank from Ali’s well.

Lawrence and Sharif debate the decision to take Aqaba by crossing an impenetrable desert – and look pretty in doing so

Lawrence devises a crazy scheme to help the Arabs overtake the Turkish stronghold of Aqaba by approaching the town from an uncrossable hellish desert. Lawrence wins the respect of the Arabic army when he completes the torturous desert march, including rescuing a man believed lost in the desert. Lawrence leads the army in overtaking the town but becomes troubled by the violence of war, along with losing one of his two teenage charges to quicksand (!) as he returns to Cairo to tell his superiors about his victory. Lawrence engages in a guerrilla warfare campaign against the Turks and develops fame and notoriety when an American reporter writes about him to try and stir US interest in entering the war. Lawrence becomes increasingly unhinged between wild flights of violence, his ever-growing ego and a sincere desire to lead the Arabs to an independent state.

The future Obi Wan Kenobi, Alec Guinness, plays an Arabic prince, despite being British. Ah, Hollywood.

Even though Lean seems to be making a case against the manly hero of war trope, there are some really cool parts of this movie that seem exactly like they belong in manly men-of-war type films. The quote that starts this essay, when Lawrence, going bonkers from his ego and the terrors of war, leads to an awesome moment where Lawrence’s army cheers his arrival like a crowd pushing a boxer forward into a title fight. Of course, it turns out the men Lawrence thought would come for him actually did come for the money, but he seems to take little notice, until the mercenaries take part in a huge bloody slaughter.

The movie’s attitude towards violence is strange and reflects Lawrence’s own conflicted stance. Certain up-close scenes of violence are avoided almost to the point of comedy. When Ali shoots Lawrence’s initial guide, we see Ali shoot and then the guide’s gun fly towards Lawrence’s at an impossible angle (especially considering the guide looked to have been a good twenty feet away from Lawrence when he was shot). But as the movie progresses, Lawrence, Lean or the viewer (?) become more comfortable with blood until Lawrence stands covered in blood along with his mercenary army following a slaughter of a Turkish brigade.

Unlike most historical pieces we’ve encountered, Lawrence of Arabia offers practically zero background on Lawrence, the Arab revolution or even the larger picture of World War I. The viewer is just thrust into Lawrence’s life at the time of World War I and we’re off to gain our own footing.

Lawrence of Arabia was directed by David Lean, who also won an Oscar for the exotic war picture Bridge on the River Kwai. Lawrence is less openly satirical then Kwai but still carries undercurrents of anti-War sentiment as it examines the effects of Lawrence’s violent actions on himself and those intimately acquainted with him (they all grow to loathe him and Lawrence arguably loathes himself) and those who see him only from a distance (and see him as a hero). Much like Kwai, Lean fills Lawrence of Arabia with beautiful shots to capture the torturous landscape, until you practically feel the blistering heat coming off the screen (if you want to see camels running, then this is the movie for you by God).

Lawrence of Arabia continues the trend of inching toward modern action epics, first noticed in Best Pictures Ben-Hur and Bridge on the River Kwai. But it’s moral ambiguity towards its characters, including its hero, make it almost an art-house deconstruction of such action films and heroes. A challenging movie (and not just because of its three hour run time), its well worth seeing.

Trivia: Lawrence of Arabia does not contain a single line of dialogue spoken by a woman.

Other Oscars: Best Director (David Lean); Best Art Direction; Best Cinematography; Best Score; Best Editing; Best Sound;

Other Notable Films of 1962: The Longest Day*; The Music Man*; The Miracle Worker*; Mutiny on the Bounty*; To Kill a Mockingbird; Gypsy; The Manchurian Candidate; Dr. No (first James Bond movie)+; Lolita; Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?; Days of Wine and Roses; The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; State Fair;

*Best Picture Nominee

+Not released in U.S. until 1963

Box Office: $44.8 Million (#1 for the year)

1961: West Side Story

The fire escape imagery has become iconic and forever linked with West Side Story

I’ve just kissed a girl named Maria,
And suddenly I’ve found
How wonderful a sound
Can be!
Maria! – Tony, West Side Story

West Side Story, 1961’s Best Picture, is a much-loved, but fairly ridiculous movie. I mean that in a nice way because I really did enjoy watching this movie and hummed several of the songs for days afterwards, but, alas, this is a movie that has not aged very well. The fully bonefied love-child of the Hollywood Musical and the Socially Conscious picture (thus making it the very perfect Best Picture winner of its time), West Side Story, a modernized retelling of Romeo and Juliette blended with troubled youth hysteria and Broadway glitz, seems like it might have been shocking by the standards of 1961. But today, watching tough guys pirouette through the streets in menacing fashion all feels rather silly.

Tony (Richard Beymer) and Maria (Natalie Wood), the modern day Romeo and Juliet, sing “Tonight” on the aforementioned fire escape

In a hardscrabble patch of contemporary New York City, the Jets, a teen gang of nogoodniks run the streets but are facing encroachment from a Puerto Rican gang, the Sharks. Tony (Richard Beymer) is a Jets founder who has left the gang for the upward mobile career path of candy store clerk, but is implored by current leader Riff (Russ Tamblyn) to help set the terms for a “rumble” to establish supremacy between the Jets and Sharks. At the local youth center dance (a neutral ground the gangs use for the negotiations), Tony immediately falls in love with Maria (Natalie Wood), the sister of Sharks’ leader Bernardo (George Chakiris). Awkward. Overcome with love, Maria makes Tony promise to stop the rumble all together, but when Tony tries, a simple fist fight turns into a knife fight and both Riff and Bernardo are killed (Bernardo by Tony, in fact. Doubly Awkward.). Tony and Maria decide to run away together but are separated first. When Tony believes Maria has been killed, he walks through the streets demanding the Sharks kill him. He finally finds Maria alive but is shot as he runs to her and dies. Maria chides both sides for their endless cycle of violence and both gangs carry off Tony’s body.

A lot of fun has been poked at West Side Story over the years. Anytime gangs snap their fingers in menacing form or have impressively choreographed tough guy walks (even Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” video pays homage to the knife fight), those parodies are springing from West Side Story. The fight scenes are some of the most ridiculous, choreographed nonsense ever put on celluloid. But there are also a lot of affecting parts to West Side Story. The central love story between Tony and Maria in particular is moving, and their all-encompassing young love captures the same manic enrapture of Shakespeare’s inspirational lovers.

Bernardo and the Sharks in one of their “tough guy” choreographed dance routines.

The movie’s songs are pretty stupendous and several – “I Feel Pretty”, “Maria”, “In America” – have become standards and the movie provides appropriate dance numbers to match. Natalie Wood is a very good actress most of the time, but her Puerto Rican accent borders on embarrassing in parts. Neither Wood nor Beymer sang their own songs in this movie, and even though it was standard Hollywood practice at the time (and will show up again in a future Best Picture) it still feels like something of a cheat.

The movie’s central theme is muddled between a plea for racial tolerance and a plea to “fix” troubled youth and often both are explained with dialogue that’s a little too on-the-nose. In one groaner of an exchange a shopkeeper asks the Jets: “When do you kids stop? You make this world lousy!” to which a Jet replies “We didn’t make (the world), Doc.” In fact, the Jets have a whole song about how the buck for their problems keeps getting passed around. Later, when Maria is verbally berating both Jets and Sharks she screams “All of you! You all killed him! And my brother, and Riff. Not with bullets, or guns, with hate,” which certainly doesn’t lack or subtlety.

I don’t mean to tear West Side Story down because I really did like it for the most part, but there is a very square quality to this movie. It’s essentially the guy who thinks he’s the coolest in the room but everything has moved on and now he just seems over-the-hill. See it for the romance and the songs, but be warned you’re also getting some unintentional comedy.

Other Oscar Wins: Best Supporting Actor (George Chakiris)*; Best Supporting Actress (Rita Moreno); Art Direction*; Cinematography; Costume Design; Director (Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins); Editing; Original Score; Sound

Other Notable Movies of 1961: Fanny*; The Guns of Navarone*; The Hustler*; Judgment at Nuremburg*; The Parent Trap; The Absent Minded Professor; El Cid; La Dolce Vita; 101 Dalmatians; Splendor in the Grass; Breakfast at Tiffany’s; The Misfits

*Best Picture Nominee

Box Office: $43 Million (#1 for the year)