Movies Til Dawn

As we near this year's Academy Awards (this Sunday I think?) I will continue posting weird, uncomfortable and sometimes just shameful moments in Oscar history. (If you've missed this series, s scroll down and look at the last seven or eight entires. A great way to avoid work for half an hour or so). Here's todays: In 1977 Vanessa Redgrave funded and narrated a documentary film, 'The Palestinian' about the situation of Palestinians and the activities of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. In the film 'Julia' (also made in 1977) she starred in the title role as a woman murdered by the Nazi German regime in the years prior to World War Two for her anti-Fascist activism. When Redgrave was nominated for an Oscar in 1978 for her role in 'Julia', members of the Jewish Defense League, led by Rabbi Meir Kahane,  burned effigies of Redgrave and picketed the ceremony to protest against her involvement in 'The Palestinian.' Redgrave won the Osc...

In 1999, the Motion Picture Academy voted to give director/writer/novelist/ratfink Elia Kazan an honorary Oscar for his lifetime's work. Hell hath no fury like righteous Hollywood prigs, however, and mayhem ensued. Kazan's testimony for the HUAC in the early 1950s (in which he named names of his former Communist Party 'cellmates') was still fresh in the minds of much of the older Hollywood crowd (most notably screenwriter Abraham Polonsky) and protests began immediately, with many asking the Academy to rescind the honor. They didn't. Accompanied onstage by Robert De Niro and Martin Scorcese, the ninety-year old Kazan endured a combination of a standing ovation and overt snubs by members who refused to stand or even applaud. Most righteous among them are Ed Harris and Nick Nolte, neither of whom worked with him or were old enough at the time of the HUAC hearings to know what the fuss was about and both of whom would most likely not have become actors if not for B...

Meet Robert Opel, the most famous man ever on the Oscars telecast whose name you don't know. Opel was the streaker who ran naked ('streaked') behind emcee David Niven at the 1974 Oscars. Streaking was a fad at that time and the producer of the Oscars, Jack Haley Jr., clearly had this in mind when he arranged this little stunt. What makes me so sure it's a stunt? Well, look at how well timed his ignominious moment is and how excellent Niven's retort is. Nobody, not even a clever Englishman with a little moustache, could have ad-libbed that 'shortcomings' line. (I'll leave the entire quote out, thus forcing you to watch the two-minute clip). And how did Opel get backstage in the first place? And what did he do with his clothes? And why is Liz Taylor wearing that hideous yellow dress? Ah, don't try to fool me, Oscar. You'll get nowhere--but quick! Opel was a photographer and something of a renegade--c lick here for the obligatory Wikipedia bio- ...

"If there was a winner it was the people who voted for me." So said Glenda Jackson recently by way of explaining why she was a no-show for her two Oscar wins, for 'A Touch Of Class' and 'Women In Love'. It's an interesting comment. At first it might be mistaken for the customary 'I couldn't have done it without youse' show-biz bromide. But in fact what she seems to be saying is that good sense prevailed and the Academy voters were tasteful and correct in their assessment of her performance being 'better' than Marsha Masons or Barbara Streisand or the other nominees for Best Actress at the 1974 Oscars. No matter. She still blew off the ceremony. Good for her.  If you scroll down you'll see that I've been posting  Oscar blow-offs and this one's pretty good. The general air in the audience when it becomes known that Ms. Jackson is AWOL is an uneasy one at best; Streisand stares off away from camera (already divining defeat?...

George C. Scott won the 1969 Best Actor Oscar for portraying General George S. Patton in the still wildly entertaining and watchable (largely because of his performance) 'Patton.' But did this mean anything special to George C.? Apparently not. He was always hypercritical of awards, feeling that they did a disservice to actors by pitting them against each other. Good for him! I'm in total agreement and, having had the dubious distinction of having lost an Oscar for my first film, have always felt that the final five nominations (or ten, or whatever they do now) should be the award--you're in a group of elite achievers that a body of professionals have voted to honor. Enough already with picking the 'best' one. As a voting member of the Academy I can assure you that the final selection process is a dubious one at best. Unlike Brando (see yesterdays post), George C. didn't send anyone up on stage to make an announcement about why he was refusing the Oscar....

What does it say about me that, even though I function as a modern-day show-biz professional (what a dismal combination of words), I'd rather watch the Oscars from 1951 then the event that I assume will be airing sometime in the next few weeks. (I haven't watched a live Oscar telecast in years). Yesterday I posted the strange best director win of Joe Mankiewicz in 1951 for 'All About Eve.' I call it strange since he gave no speech, nor did it seem as if he were expected to. The speech is what the Oscars has become all about, hasn't it? What the hell? But things were different for actors, apparently. Even actors who didn't win an award themselves were gifted with the opportunity of delivering a speech. Above watch as Broderick Crawford presents Judy Holliday, who isn't there, with the Best Actress Oscar for 'Born Yesterday'. The award is accepted on her behalf by Ethel Barrymore, who promptly goes into a well rehearsed little speech, possibly usin...

As mentioned in yesterday's post, Joseph L. Mankiewicz was a premiere member of the 'writer-directors club', proving to the studio heads (and perhaps the critics as well) that writers could actually function outside of their cubicles (or out from under their table at Chasen's) and make excellent directors. But despite that surge in prestige, apparently writer-directors weren't allowed to speak at the Oscar ceremony. Dig the above one minute and thirty second clip of Mankiewicz winning the best director Oscar for 'All About Eve'. It begins with Fred Astaire--the MC of the event I imagine--introducing Leo McCarey, the director who will present the best director award. The orchestra brings McCarey onto the stage with a few bars of 'Swinging On A Star', the hit from McCarey's own best director Oscar-winning film 'Going My Way'. (Nice touch, don't you think?) McCarey, in a gently jocular way, announces the nominees: George Cukor for ...

All writer-directors owe a tremendous debt to four visionary filmmakers: Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, John Huston and Joseph L. Mankiewicz. They were the men that successfully challenged the tired-even-at-the-time notion that writers were too passive (i.e. drunk and depressed) to direct, and directors were too impatient (i.e. crappy and brutish) to actually write. Happy Birthday, JLM. Above is a very nice, rather longish documentary on writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz titled (what else?) "All About Mankiewicz". Having read (many times as a youth) Kenneth L. Geist's very good, somewhat bitchy bio of Mankiewicz, I should have watched the doc with a tad less interest than I did--I've heard most of the stories and the best lines. But the real reason I watched this with such avidity is to see the director's house, which at the time this was filmed was in Bedford, New York. It's a very goyishe set-up--there are horses, lawns, trees, red bricks, colonial fu...

Let's close the week's journey from Paris nightclubs to Tango madness with, of all things, a look at the dancing career of Hollywood tough-guy-but-really-mushmouth-with-a-good heart-and-he-might have-once-been-a-gangster-but-who-can-trust-a-movie-like-the 'George Raft Story'...George Raft. Although born in Hell's Kitchen and a childhood friend of gangsters like Owney Madden, Raft--after stints as a boxer and pro-ballplayer--somehow drifted into dancing as a profession. Hard to picture now, but the 'hoofer' of the 1920s was a tough guy whose prowess with the feet was all the rage with the dames. (Am I making an politically incorrect assumption that all dancers were later a bunch of nances who scored sleeping pills for Judy Garland, danced at the Trocadero under the direction of famous swish Billy Daniels and wound up, if lucky, in Jack Cole's good graces and on George Cukor's Sunday afternoon invitation list? Nah...) Raft was indeed a superb danc...

Frank Veloz and Yolanda Casazza were a married dance team that, beginning in the 1920s and continuing through the 1940s, are generally considered to have been the masters and greatest innovators of that ever-exotic dance the 'Tango'. Above are two clips that will show you why. The first, from the 1935 movie 'Under The Pampas Moon', is called the 'Cobra Tango' and apparently depicts a fight between a snake and a tiger. (I did not intuit this from viewing it; I learned it from a very helpful Wikipedia page that you should click here to read ). The act is most sensual and unexpectedly (and somewhat frighteningly) acrobatic. I was gasping several times as Frank clearly was ready to drop Yolanda on her head and somehow, at the last second, managed not too. There are many elements incorporated in their version of the Tango that are simply not seen elsewhere--the aformentioned acrobatics for one, but also sudden detours into tap-dancing as well. The second clip i...

Having hit a wall in my pursuit of information on the mysterious 1929 Parisian nightclub footage posted over the past two days (scroll down to see, Jean-Luc), I've turned to--who else?--Louise Brooks to pick up the slack where others have...er, slacked off. Brooks apparently was a frequenter of Gilley's Royal Box Nightclub in her Europa Pabstian phase, which led me to the above clip of Brooks dancing the tango in 1930 in another Parisian nightclub. This one isn't real, though. It's a scene from her first talkie, 'Prix De Beaute' (aka 'Beauty Prize' in America, aka 'Miss Europe' in the UK). There's not quite enough of Brooks in the clip but the general Parisian-Tango-Early Talkie of it all is more than enough to satisfy my sudden thirst for the era, the location, the lostness of it all...   Subscribe in a reader

Yesterday I posted some fascinating raw footage of Zelli's Royal Box Nightclub in Paris, shot in 1929 (scroll down to see it, Francois). I wondered at its utility--was it stock for a movie? Documentary footage for a newsreel?--and now have the answer. Sort of. Not really. Watch the above reel--its a little over two minutes long and utilizes the raw footage as a set-up for a dramatic (sort of) scene that follows. In other words, somebody cut it together like a real movie with a real soundtrack and added a clearly staged scene in which a man and a woman each make phone calls on table top phones. There's even a title card--the movie is called 'A Night In Paris'. (Apparently Zelli's bar really did have telephones on the tables so this pushes my theory--posited yesterday--that this might be some sort of advert film for his club). What do they say on the phones? I don't know--I don't speaka da French. Why does this little staged drama follow the dancing scen...

Here's quite a find. It's raw footage--documentary, not staged--of an evening in a famous Montmartre nightclub of the 1920's called 'Zelli's Royal Box Nightclub'. I'm not certain what its purpose was--perhaps stock footage for a movie, a travelogue or newsreel?--but it's a haunting bit of voyeuristic film. The audio is clearly the original, recorded live, and the people dancing are honestly confused by the presence of the camera and sound gear--they look directly into the lens constantly, smiling with curiosity and ill-concealed bafflement. There are five seperate camera angles that capture about six minutes of now long-dead Parisians having a hell of a time of it in April, 1929. Zelli's nightclub was the brainchild of a most peculiar and enterprising man named Joe Zelli. Born in Rome, he came to New York City as a child and opened his first bar at age 15--this would have been around 1907/08. World War 1 seems to have taken him back to Europe an...

To close out the week that began because of my viewing of 'Star' last weekend, above I've posted a nice little ten minute 'featurette' on the making of the movie. I believe it was made for TV airing prior to the films release and, since there was as yet no such thing as DVD extras, it was a rare behind-the scenes look for people who wondered how movies were made. There are nice shots of Robert Wise directing, Michael Kidd choreographing and Julie Andrews rehearsing. Frankly, while watching it, I found myself rather liking all the material more than I did last Sunday. Maybe we'll start the whole process over again by watching the damn thing one more time this weekend...   Subscribe in a reader