Here’s a picture of Thomas with his stuff:

Thomas opening presents

I’ve got two videos posted – one of Thomas opening his stocking and one of him opening presents from his grandparents.  If you go HERE, you can see them.  Embedding doesn’t work as well.

here's what I managed to do with our little tree and long string of lights

Also, the plan is to try and do some more videos, especially if we manage to go sledding.  So keep checking the YouTube page and hopefully you’ll see more videos of Thomas.

UPDATE (12:40 PM):  We went sledding this morning after the presents and I am in the process of putting up the sledding videos on the YouTube page, so if they’re not there when you look, check back later.

the 1975-1980 Ballantine paperback editions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings

If your only experience with The Lord of the Rings is the three Peter Jackson films, you might have a lot of questions.  The films do a great job of streamlining the epic story, but there are, of course, still things that are left unanswered.

Well, I’m not going to help you.  The books are brilliant and you should go read them.

But, there are questions that even long-time readers of the books must have.  I know I certainly do, because they come up every time I read them and this time I decided to finally write them down.  There are probably answers to some of these buried either within the 12 volume History of Middle Earth or The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, but I’m not gonna try and slog through them right now.  Too much other stuff to read at the moment.

But, I do present you with questions that occur to me pretty much every year.  Feel free to respond if you have answers or guesses.

1.  Why on earth do the dwarves have instruments with them when they arrive at Bag End?  And what happens to them later?

John Howe's illustration for the first chapter of The Hobbit

Hell, Tolkien himself didn’t even have an answer for this question.  At the end of the typescript of “The Quest of Erebor” which appeared in print in Unfinished Tales there was a penciled note that read “Nothing is said to justify the musical instruments that the Dwarves brought to Bag End – nor to explain what became of them.”  (The Annotated Hobbit, p 377)  It does provide a nice moment in The Hobbit, so they can play and have their moment, but why would they have brought the instruments when they knew what kind of journey they were on?  And were they lost in the Misty Mountains when the Goblins stole the horses?

2.  Can Gandalf really not read the runes on Glamdring?

I, mean, he is Gandalf after all.  He’s been on Middle-Earth for close to 2000 years.  He seems to know every language spoken on Middle Earth.  And he can’t read the runes?

3.  How did Fatty Bolger get to Crickhollow?

“Fond as he was of Frodo, Fatty Bolger had no desire to leave the Shire, nor to see what lay outside it.  His family came from the Eastfarthing, from Budgeford in Bridgefields in fact, but he had never been over the Brandywine Bridge.”  (I, p 153 – all the page numbers I use are from the Ballatine 1975-1980 version shown above, but the pages are the same as most paperback editions of the books).

But he’s on the other side of the Brandywine Bridge!  I suppose he and Merry could have gone down and taken the furniture to Buckleberry Ferry when they left Hobbiton on p. 103, but is that likely?  I suppose it’s a term that’s meant to describe hobbits who don’t leave the Shire, as opposed to the Brandybucks, but still.  That sentence always struck me as quite odd.

4.  Does Frodo’s sword get destroyed twice?

“All blades perish that pierce that dreadful King,” Aragorn says on I, p 265, but then 21 pages later, Frodo’s sword breaks when he tries to resist the Witch King.

5.  What flies over the camp when they are in Hollin?

“Frodo looked up at the sky.  Suddenly he saw or felt a shadow pass over the high stars, as if for a moment they faded and then flashed out again.”  (I, p 374)

In the film, Peter Jackson decided to make the crebain from Dunland what was “moving fast and against the wind,” but in the book they flew past the night before.  Every time I read it, I think this is the first appearance of the winged Nazgûl, but in The Two Towers, Gandalf makes it clear that the Nazgul have not yet crossed the river.  So what the hell flew over the Fellowship?

6.  Who do Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli see on the edge of Fangorn?

He’s wearing a hat, like Gandalf and unlike Saruman.  He doesn’t attack them.  It seems like it’s a foreshadowing of Gandalf’s return, yet on page 130, Gandalf is quite explicit that it is not him that they saw.  Who was it?

7.  Are men more powerful than Maia?

Gandalf comes off the worse against the Witch King in the Extended Edition of Return of the King

It would certainly seem to be the case.  Sauron gives way to the men of Numenor when Al-Pharazon comes to Middle-Earth.  Gandalf, a Maia, is able to match a Balrog, yet is perhaps over-matched by the Witch King of Angmar, a wraith that used to be a man.  And Gandalf says of Denethor “He was too great to be subdued to the will of the Dark Power,” (III, p 161), yet Saruman, a Maia, is subdued.  There might be a better explanation of all of this, but I was surprised this time around while reading the books to find this thought crossing my mind.

8.  Is Celeborn the wisest?

The rest of the questions I dealt with in chronological order, but this one I saved to the end because it seems so ridiculous.  But Galadriel herself says “the Lord of the Galadrim is accounted the wisest of the Elves of Middle-Earth.” (I, p 462).  Aside from a personal dislike of the character (he is so much less interesting than Galadriel or Elrond), this doesn’t seem to hold water.  While Saruman leads the White Council, it was Gandalf that Galadriel thought should be the leader.  Celeborn is not a possessor of one of the Three Rings, which seems odd if he is the wisest.  And clearly Gil-Galad and Cirdan must not have thought so as neither chose to pass their ring down to Celeborn.  And in the Tale of Years, Cirdan is described as one who “saw further and deeper than any other in Middle-Earth.”  And Aragorn would also seem to lend doubt to the idea: “There are not many in Middle-Earth that I should say were safe, if they were left alone to talk with him, even now when he has suffered a defeat.  Gandalf, Elrond, and Galadriel, perhaps, now that his wickedness has been laid bare, but very few others.” (II, p 220)  I don’t see Celeborn on that list.  I can understand Galadriel being modest, but to proclaim Celeborn wisest over Elrond?  I just can’t see it.

My Top 10:

The Academy sometimes gets it right. Casablanca is easily the best film of 1943.

1. Casablanca
2. Shadow of a Doubt
3. In Which We Serve
4. For Whom the Bell Tolls
5. The Ox-Bow Incident
6. This Land is Mine
7. Five Graves to Cairo
8. Heaven Can Wait
9. Watch on the Rhine
10. The More the Merrier

Academy Awards:

• Best Picture:  Casablanca
• Best Director:  Casablanca
• Best Actor:  Paul Lukas  (Watch on the Rhine)
• Best Actress:  Jennifer Jones  (The Song of Bernadette)
• Best Supporting Actor:  Charles Coburn  (The More the Merrier)
• Best Supporting Actress:  Katina Paxinou  (For Whom the Bell Tolls)
• Best Screenplay:  Casablanca  (from the play Everybody Goes to Rick’s)
  
• Best Original Screenplay:  Princess O’Rourke
• Best Original Story:  The Human Comedy

Consensus Awards:

• Best Picture:  In Which We Serve
• Best Director:  George Stevens  (The More the Merrier)
• Best Actor:  Paul Lukas  (Watch on the Rhine)
• Best Actress:  Jennifer Jones  (Song of Bernadette)
• Best Supporting Actor:  Akim Tamiroff  (For Whom the Bell Tolls)
• Best Supporting Actress:  Katina Paxinou  (For Whom the Bell Tolls)

Top 5 Films  (Top 1000):

• Casablanca – #15
• Shadow of a Doubt – #330
• I Walked with a Zombie – #488
• Fires were Started – #590
• Heaven Can Wait – #944

Top 5 Awards Points:

1. The Song of Bernadette – 688
2. Watch on the Rhine – 416
3. Casablanca – 410
4. For Whom the Bell Tolls – 401
5. The More the Merrier – 360

AFI Top 100 Films:

• Casablanca – #2  (1998) /  #3  (2007)

Nighthawk Awards:

• 

  Nighthawk (and Oscar) winner Katina Paxinou and Nighthawk winner (and Oscar nominee) Ingrid Bergman in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943)

• Best Picture:  Casablanca
• Best Director:  Michael Curtiz  (Casablanca)
• Best Actor:  Humphrey Bogart  (Casablanca)
• Best Actress:  Ingrid Bergman  (For Whom the Bell Tolls)
• Best Supporting Actor:  Claude Rains  (Casablanca)
• Best Supporting Actress:  Katina Paxinou  (For Whom the Bell Tolls)
• Best Adapted Screenplay:  Casablanca (from the play Everybody Goes to Rick’s)
• Best Original Screenplay:  Shadow of a Doubt
• Best Foreign Film:  Sanshiro Sugata

Nighthawk Notables:

• Best Film to Watch Over and Over:  Casablanca
• Best Scene:  Singing of “La Marseillaise” in Casablanca
• Best Line  (comedic):  “My health.  I came to Casablanca for the waters.”  “But we are in the middle of the desert.”  “I was misinformed.”  (Casablanca – Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains)
• Best Line  (dramatic):  “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”  (Casablanca – Humphrey Bogart)
• Best Ending:  Casablanca

Ebert Great Films:

• Casablanca

What would 1943 be as a Year in Film if Casablanca had been released in L.A. in November of 1942 like it was in New York?  There is Hitchcock’s favorite of his films and Noel Coward co-directing with David Lean (Lean’s first directorial effort) In Which We Serve but neither did great at the Oscars (Serve gets a Best Picture nomination but only 1 other while Doubt gets nominated only for its story).  The more successful films at the Oscars (The Song of Bernadette, The More the Merrier, For Whom the Bell Tolls) have not been aged as well.  Fewer nominations go to solid films from exiled European directors Billy Wilder (Five Graves to Cairo), Fritz Lang (Hangman Also Die) and Jean Renoir (This Land is Mine).  There is no year where there is a more distinct drop after the top 5 than this one.  Casablanca is one of the greatest films ever made, then #2 through #5 are mid range **** films, but after that there is a precipitous drop, with my #6 film in the lower ***.5 range.

Film History: The Hollywood Foreign Correspondents Association (later known as the Hollywood Foreign Press) is founded and awards the first Golden Globes.  While Frank Capra is beginning the Why We Fight series and war films begin to dominate the box office, Howard Hughes fights his war to focus on the breasts of Jane Russell.  Two big directors of the thirties, Max Reinhardt and W.S. Van Dyke, both die.  Leslie Howard is killed in a plane crash while working for the British government.  Akira Kurosawa directs his first film, Sanshiro Sugata.  One of the great marriages in film history (both in length and in artistic collaboration) takes place on 30 October between Federico Fellini and Giuletta Masina.

Academy Awards: In the last year of 10 Best Picture nominees, The Ox-Bow Incident becomes the last film to get nominated for Best Picture and receive no other nominations.  Bette Davis is not nominated for Best Actress for the first time since 1937.  Ingrid Bergman, Greer Garson and Jennifer Jones are all nominated for the first of 3 consecutive years (though Jones’ nomination in 1944 will be for Supporting Actress).  Harold Arlen is nominated three times in the same category (Best Song) and loses all three.  For the second year in a row, Greer Garson is Oscar nominated for the title character of a film (Mrs. Miniver and Madame Curie) and Walter Pidgeon is nominated for playing her husband.  Casablanca becomes the last film until 1974 to win the Oscar without winning another major movie award (one of the main critics, the Golden Globe or the BAFTA).  The only film since to do this are The Godfather Part II and Braveheart.

• Worst Oscar:  Best Original Screenplay for Princess O’Rourke
• Worst Oscar Nomination:  Best Director for The Human Comedy
• Worst Oscar Omission:  Best Editing for In Which We Serve
• Worst Oscar-Nominated Film:  Thank Your Lucky Stars
• Worst Oscar Category:  Best Song
• Best Oscar Category:  Best Supporting Actress
• Oscar / Nighthawk Award Agreements:  Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Interior Decoration – Color

Awards: In Which We Serve, nominated for Best Picture, had won both the New York Film Critics and the National Board of Review the year before.  For 1943, the NYFC goes with Watch on the Rhine (which they also give Best Actor) and the NBR goes with The Ox-Bow Incident.  While Paul Lukas goes on to win the Oscar, Ida Lupino becomes the first actress since Greta Garbo in 1935 to win the NYFC and fail to get an Oscar nomination.  George Stevens comes from behind to win Best Director on the seventh ballot after trailing William Wellman (The Ox-Bow Incident) and Fritz Lang.

Golden Globes: This was the first year of the Golden Globes and the big winner was The Song of Bernadette (this, combined with its 12 Oscar nominations is why it finished first in points) which took Best Picture and Best Actress.  Paul Lukas made it a clean sweep of Best Actor to go with his Oscar and NYFC Award.  The two supporting awards went to Akim Tamiroff and Katina Paxinou as the rebels in For Whom the Bell Tolls.  All of the initial Golden Globe winners received Oscar nominations (or wins), something that would continue until 1950 when the lead acting roles were divided by genre.  If there were nominees, their names are lost to time as the HFPA shows no record of anyone other than the winners all the way up until 1948.

Donald Duck and Joe Carioca in Saludos Amigos (1943)

Under-appreciated Film of 1943:

Saludos Amigos

I’m very much the champion of the second hero.  I don’t have a particular interest in Superman, Bugs Bunny or Mickey Mouse.  But damn, am I ever a fan of Batman, Daffy Duck and Donald Duck.  There are few scenes in all of film history I enjoy as much as the piano duel between Daffy and Donald in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.  So it’s odd that it took me so long to finally get around to watching this as I was finishing up the list of official Disney Animated features back in 2006.

When people think of the Disney list, they think of the original bunch of brilliant animated films (Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, Bambi) and then jump ahead to the literary adaptations of the 50’s (Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, The Lady and the Tramp) and they always seem to forget that Disney did make animated feature films throughout the 40’s.  It just that they were a different kind of film, often a mish-mash of various stories thrown together, anthologies of short films put together as longer films for feature release that have been given short-shrift, not only by critics and film historians, but by Disney itself.

Just think about it.  How many of the following have you seen: Saludos Amigos, The Three Caballeros, Song of the South, Fun and Fancy Free and Melody Time?  Certainly Disney has tried to forget Song of the South, though it is no more politically incorrect than Gone with the Wind, but the others just seem to disappear with it.  But they are good films.  They’re not great and certainly none of them would belong among the peak films of the early era, the 50’s or the 1989-1994 rebirth, but they are very good, fun to watch and enjoyable.  They’re as good, if not better than a lot of other Disney “classics” like The Jungle Book, The Aristocats or The Fox and the Hound.

The key to Saludos Amigos, which might be the best of the bunch, is the presence of Donald Duck.  Yes, he is only part of the film and there is a good Goofy segment and the interesting segment with Pedro the plane, but Donald is the key.  The adventures that he has in South America with Joe Carioca are the impetus for the follow-up, The Three Caballeros (probably the weakest of the five) and when he doesn’t have to play second fiddle to Mickey we get to enjoy him for who he is, a very irritable but funny duck who is amazingly difficult to understand.

Is this not the most persuasive review?  Well, think about this.  As I write this, Monsters vs. Aliens and Ice Age 3 are the #6 and 7 biggest films of the year.  Do you really want to own those?  Is there much originality or even quality in them?  Even in this year of 5 Oscar nominees for Best Animated Film neither is likely to be nominated.  You could do much worse than to settle for an old, quirky Disney film with Donald as its star.

My Top 10:

Sullivan's Travels

1. Sullivan’s Travels
2. Bambi
3. Yankee Doodle Dandy
4. The Magnificent Ambersons
5. Kings Row
6. To Be or Not To Be
7. The Palm Beach Story
8. Pride of the Yankees
9. Now Voyager
10. Woman of the Year

Academy Awards:

• Best Picture:  Mrs. Miniver
• Best Director:  William Wyler  (Mrs. Miniver)
• Best Actor:  James Cagney  (Yankee Doodle Dandy)
• Best Actress:  Greer Garson  (Mrs. Miniver)
• Best Supporting Actor:  Van Heflin  (Johnny Eager)
• Best Supporting Actress:  Teresa Wright  (Mrs. Miniver)
• Best Screenplay:  Mrs. Miniver (from the novel by Jan Struther)
• Best Original Screenplay:  Woman of the Year
• Best Original Story:  The 49th Parallel

Consensus Awards:

• Best Picture:  Mrs. Miniver
• Best Director:  John Farrow  (Wake Island)
• Best Actor:  James Cagney  (Yankee Doodle Dandy)
• Best Actress:  Greer Garson  (Mrs. Miniver)
• Best Supporting Actress:  Agnes Moorehead  (The Magnificent Ambersons)

Top 5 Films  (Top 1000):

• The Magnificent Ambersons – #43
• To Be or Not To Be – #71
• The Palm Beach Story – #168
• Sullivan’s Travels – #171
• Cat People – #471

Top 5 Awards Points:

1. Mrs. Miniver – 610
2. Yankee Doodle Dandy – 420
3. Pride of the Yankees – 360
4. Wake Island – 255
5. Random Harvest – 245

AFI Top 100 Films:

• Yankee Doodle Dandy – #100  (1998) /  #98  (2007)
• Sullivan’s Travels – #61  (2007)

Nighthawk Awards:

• 

  Nighthawk nominee (and Oscar winner) Teresa Wright with Nighthawk and Oscar winner Greer Garson in Mrs Miniver, the Oscar winning Best Picture of 1942

• Best Picture:  Sullivan’s Travels
• Best Director:  Preston Sturges  (Sullivan’s Travels)
• Best Actor:  James Cagney  (Yankee Doodle Dandy)
• Best Actress:  Greer Garson  (Mrs. Miniver)
• Best Supporting Actor:  Walter Huston  (Yankee Doodle Dandy)
• Best Supporting Actress:  Agnes Moorehead  (The Magnificent Ambersons)
• Best Adapted Screenplay:  The Magnificent Ambersons (from the novel by Booth Tarkington)
• Best Original Screenplay:  Sullivan’s Travels

Nighthawk Notables:

• Best Film to Watch Over and Over:  Bambi
• Best Scene:  James Cagney tapping down the steps in Yankee Doodle Dandy
• Best Line:  “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”  (Bambi – Thumper repeating what his father always says)
• Best Ending:  Yankee Doodle Dandy (“What’s the matter old timer?  Don’t you remember this song?”)

Ebert Great Films:

• Yankee Doodle Dandy
• Cat People

The two big films got pushed to the 1943 Oscars, leaving the year wide open.  In Which We Serve wins both critics groups but the Academy changes its eligibility date from January 13 to December 31 and it isn’t able to get a booking in Los Angeles and qualify for the Oscars.  Casablanca is released in November, but doesn’t play Los Angeles until February and also becomes eligible for the Oscars the next year.  Mrs. Miniver then sneaks in and crushes everything else at the Oscars while the best film of the year, Sullivan’s Travels, will have to wait to be treasured.  In the meantime, RKO recuts The Magnificent Ambersons when Orson Welles is in Mexico, though even the 88 minute bastardized cut of what was a 131 minute film still shows Welles’ brilliance.

Film History: John Barrymore finally succeeds in drinking himself into the grave.  Carole Lombard dies in a plane crash while selling war bonds.  Late 20th Century film fans get blessed with the births of one of it biggest stars (Harrison Ford), its best directors (Martin Scorsese) and its greatest critics (Roger Ebert).  The U.S. government forms the Office of War Information, which will work with Hollywood to make wartime propaganda films.  Bob Hope takes a break from the Road films to take his first U.S.O tour.  Bette Davis co-founds the Hollywood Canteen, which will become a haven for servicemen in Los Angeles.  Gene Kelly makes his film debut.  The Nazi government completes the nationalization of the German film industry.  Val Lewton produces his first film, Cat People.  Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy pair together for the first time with Woman of the Year.

Academy Awards: William Wyler wins his first of 3 Oscars with his fourth nomination in a row, the only director in history to do so.  Mrs. Miniver becomes the first film nominated for all the non-technical awards (Picture, Director, Screenplay, all 4 acting awards), winning five of them (all but Actor and Supporting Actor).  Its 12 nominations will be the high for the decade (later tied by The Song of Bernadette and Johnny Belinda).  Teresa Wright becomes the second actress nominated for Actress and Supporting Actress in the same year, and like Fay Bainter before her, wins Best Supporting Actress.  Orson Welles scores a second Best Picture nomination but fails to earn a second Best Director, Actor or Screenplay nomination.  Sam Wood gets two Best Picture nominations (Kings Row and Pride of the Yankees) for the second time.  Emeric Pressburger scores nominations in all three writing categories, winning Best Original Story.  Pride of the Yankees gets 11 nominations without a Best Director nomination – a mark that will be tied by The Color Purple but has yet to be surpassed.

• Worst Oscar:  Best Cinematography – Color for The Black Swan
• Worst Oscar Nomination:  Best Editing for Mrs. Miniver
• Worst Oscar Omission:  Best Original Screenplay for Sullivan’s Travels
• Worst Oscar-Nominated Film:  The Black Swan
• Worst Oscar Category:  Best Interior Decoration – Black and White
• Best Oscar Category:  Best Supporting Actress
• Best Oscar Nomination:  Best Score of a Drama or Comedy – The Gold Rush – 17 years after its initial release, re-released with a score and sound and gets two Oscar nominations
• Oscar / Nighthawk Award Agreements:  Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Sound, Best Special Effects

Awards: The same film wins both the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics, but because the eligibility date was moved from January 13 to December 31, In Which We Serve is ineligible for the Oscars until 1943.  Agnes Moorehead wins Best Actress from the New York Film Critics, even though the Oscars end up nominating her for Best Supporting Actress.  John Farrow wins Best Director, but does manage an Oscar nomination.  James Cagney is the only one to repeat himself from the NYFC into the Oscar race, winning Best Actor from both.

Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake in Sullivan's Travels

Under-appreciated Film of 1942:

Sullivan’s Travels (dir.  Preston Sturges)

It does well on the top 1000 list, even though it finishes slightly below the much lighter Preston Sturges / Joel McCrea collaboration, The Palm Beach Story.  And while it leapt up the AFI list in 2007, it didn’t even make the top 100 the first time around.  Roger Ebert has yet to include it in his Great Films series (in fact, he hasn’t included any Preston Sturges film).  Then, of course, there are the Oscars.  And that was a big goose egg.

In fact, in between his Oscar for The Great McGinty and his double nominations for The Miracle of Morgan Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero in 1944, you might have expected his success in 1942 of the double whammy of Sullivan’s Travels and The Palm Beach Story would get something, but neither of them got so much as a single nomination.  And poor Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake both went through their entire careers without any awards attention at all.

So there is the question of how I first saw it.  It was long before I had a Great Directors list, long before I decided to watch all of the Criterion films and even before the IMDb was in existence, when you still had to go find film information out of books in the library, I had good teachers who cared about film.  And as we watched Hannah and her Sisters in film class and saw the great scene where Woody Allen watches the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup and learns there is some meaning to life, even if the meaning is laughter, I had a professor who knew to tell us where the inspiration for the scene came from.  Because before the Coen Brothers had ever decided to call their depression musical O Brother Where Art Thou, Allen had gotten earlier inspiration from Sullivan’s Travels.  That scene in Hannah, so perfect for a modern audience, is an homage to Sullivan’s Travels, where late in the film, with Joel McCrea trapped in a chain gang, after having decided that he didn’t want to make light, fluffy films anymore, that he wanted to make something dark and deep and meaningful, that he wanted to see man’s inhumanity to man and somehow capture it on film, only to find himself falsely imprisoned; he sits in the dark with his fellow convicts (much like what will happen in O Brother) and he watches Playful Pluto and sees the laughter erupting around him and is surprised to hear the laughter out of his own mouth, he realizes how important it is to make people laugh.

While the Academy does occasionally acknowledge a great Comedy (9 out of 81 Best Picture winners I list primarily as a Comedy), it more often than not ignores them.  Only 59 of the 468 Best Picture nominees are Comedies.  Dr. Strangelove, M*A*S*H and Hannah and her Sisters all lost.  Some Like It Hot, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (whose scene where Roger and Eddie sit in the balcony and watch Goofy probably wouldn’t exist without Sullivan) and Ed Wood all failed to get nominated.  City Lights, Modern Times, His Girl Friday, Sullivan’s Travels and Say Anything were completely shut out.  But there is so much to making people laugh.  I can’t imagine life without Monty Python and the Holy Grail or A Fish Called Wanda.  I can’t imagine how dreary it would be.

There is so much more to Sullivan’s Travels.  There are the great, off-setting performances of Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake, both so perfectly cast.  There is the script which manages to satirize so much about Hollywood, its artsiness and its recycling of the same material over and over.  There is the wonderful story and how it comes back around to itself in a way that you wouldn’t necessarily expect.  There is that ridiculous trailer that the studio uses to follow Sully on his travels.

Then there is the concept of how wonderful laughter is, how much we need it.  I’m fond of the line, “laugh so you don’t cry.”  No film teaches us that more than Sullivan’s Travels.  If only the Academy had gotten the joke.

Erik and I went in for Thomas’ parent-teacher conference on Wednesday. The good news is that Thomas basically has the kindergarten curriculum down already, so his teacher is going to focus more strongly on his social interactions. Starting on Tuesday, he’s going to start going into one of the mainstream classrooms for part of the day, and they are going to substantially increase the amount of the day he is in one of the other transitional kindergartens that has more kids in it. Thomas came with us since we didn’t have anyone to watch him if we both wanted to attend, and it was very interesting for his teacher to see him in a slightly altered setting. He was acting very much like he does at home, but apparently he is usually much quieter and controlled when he is at school.

We are considering discontinuing his Spanish lessons. They are afterschool on Thursdays and Thomas is just too tired out from the day to really participate. Plus the classes are in the gym, so he totally wants to run around. We’re going to try this week and make a determination from that.

Yesterday Thomas and I met up with my coworker Krista and she gave Thomas a swimming lesson at a local pool! He did well with the kicking, but needs to work on putting his mouth in the water and blowing bubbles. We should give him a straw and tell him it’s his milk — he’d have no problem with bubbles then!

My Top 10:

A perfect example of Gregg Toland's deep-focus cinematography in Citizen Kane, keeping both Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten in focus.

1. Citizen Kane
2. The Maltese Falcon
3. Fantasia
4. The Lady Eve
5. Suspicion
6. High Sierra
7. Ball of Fire
8. How Green Was My Valley
9. The Little Foxes
10. Pepe le Moko

Academy Awards:

• Best Picture:  How Green Was My Valley
• Best Director:  John Ford  (How Green Was My Valley)
• Best Actor:  Gary Cooper  (Sergeant York)
• Best Actress:  Joan Fontaine  (Suspicion)
• Best Supporting Actor:  Donald Walsh  (How Green Was My Valley)
• Best Supporting Actress:  Mary Astor  (The Great Lie)
• Best Screenplay:  Here Comes Mr. Jordan
• Best Original Screenplay:  Citizen Kane
• Best Original Story:  Here Comes Mr. Jordan

Consensus Awards:

• Best Picture:  Citizen Kane
• Best Director:  John Ford  (How Green Was My Valley)
• Best Actor:  Gary Cooper  (Sergeant York)
• Best Actress:  Joan Fontaine  (Suspicion)

Top 5 Films  (Top 1000)

• Citizen Kane – #1
• The Lady Eve – #114
• The Maltese Falcon – #161
• Fantasia – #279
• How Green Was My Valley – #355

Top 5 Awards Points

1. How Green Was My Valley – 570
2. Citizen Kane – 505
3. Sergeant York – 475
4. Here Comes Mr. Jordan – 345
5. The Little Foxes – 300

AFI Top 100 Films:

• Citizen Kane – #1  (both polls)
• The Maltese Falcon – #23  (1998) / #31  (2007)
• Fantasia – #58  (1998)

Nighthawk Awards:

Barbara Stanwyck showing her seductive allure to Henry Fonda in The Lady Eve (1941)

• Best Picture:  Citizen Kane
• Best Director:  Orson Welles  (Citizen Kane)
• Best Actor:  Orson Welles  (Citizen Kane)
• Best Actress:  Barbara Stanwyck  (The Lady Eve)
• Best Supporting Actor:  Sydney Greenstreet  (The Maltese Falcon)
• Best Supporting Actress:  Teresa Wright  (The Little Foxes)
• Best Adapted Screenplay:  The Maltese Falcon (from the novel by Dashiell Hammett)
• Best Original Screenplay:  Citizen Kane

Nighthawk Notables:

• Best Film to Watch Over and Over:  The Maltese Falcon
• Best Scene:  “The Dance of the Hours” in Fantasia – dancing hippos!!!
• Best Line:  “Men like my father cannot die.  They are with us still, as real in memory as they were in the flesh – loving and beloved forever.”  (How Green Was My Valley – Roddy McDowall)
• Best Ending:  Citizen Kane

Ebert Great Films:

• The Lady Eve
• Citizen Kane
• The Maltese Falcon

John Huston and Orson Welles both make their film debuts, perhaps the two best in film history.  Yet, somehow, in the end, it is John Ford, the older master who comes out on top at the Oscars, winning his first Best Picture and his third Best Director.  But Huston and Welles will continue to make their influence known as the dark shadows and fog of Falcon and the new innovations in filming from Kane influence the most enduring genre to emerge from the war: Film Noir.

Film History: In spite of the Hearst newspapers refusing to even mention the title of Citizen Kane it goes on to win Best Picture from both critics groups and get nominated for 9 Oscars.  Today it is widely regarded as the greatest and most influential film ever made.  Ava Gardner is spotted in a photograph and signed to a 7 year contract with MGM while Rita Hayworth gets her first starring role.  Frank Capra becomes the first major film industry figure to join the armed forces, signing up 5 days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  Greta Garbo retires from films.  George Raft turns down roles in both High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon, allowing Humphrey Bogart to catapult into stardom.  Edwin S. Porter, the silent film pioneer, dies.

Academy Awards: How Green Was My Valley wins Best Picture while having fewer nominations than Sergeant York, the first winner since 1934 to not lead the field in nominations.  John Ford wins Best Director, joining Frank Capra with 3 Oscars.  Orson Welles beats Charlie Chaplin’s mark from the year before by getting 4 nominations for the same film (Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Actor).  The Little Foxes sets a new record by going 0 for 9, a mark that will stand until 1977.  Best Documentary is added as a category.  Instead of Best Score and Best Original Score, the categories are changed to Best Scoring of a Dramatic Picture and Best Scoring of a Musical Picture.  Joan Fontaine wins Best Actress over her sister, Olivia de Havilland.  Citizen Kane and Sergeant York compete against each other directly in 9 categories with Kane winning once and York twice.  In five categories (Picture, Director, Editing, Dramatic Score, Interior Decoration – B&W), Citizen Kane, Sergeant York, How Green Was My Valley and Little Foxes all compete with each other.  Cary Grant finally gets Oscar nominated – for the sentimental melodrama Penny Serenade.  Walter Brennan is nominated but loses for the first time after three wins.  Fox President Darryl F. Zanuck opens How Green Was My Valley on the last day of Oscar eligibility to keep the film fresh in the voters minds, the first to do so.

• Worst Oscar:  Best Editing for Sergeant York
• Worst Oscar Nomination:  Best Editing for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
• Worst Oscar Omission:  Best Director for John Huston  (The Maltese Falcon)
• Worst Oscar-Nominated Film:  All American Co-Ed
• Worst Oscar Category:  Cinematography  (Color)
• Best Oscar Category:  Best Supporting Actress
• Oscar / Nighthawk Awards Agreement:  Best Original Screenplay

Awards: Gary Cooper becomes the first person to win Best Actor from the New York Film Critics and go on to win the Oscar.  Citizen Kane joins the growing list of films to win both the New York Film Critics and the National Board of Review and lose at the Oscars.  John Ford wins Best Director from the NYFC for the third consecutive year and fourth time overall.  Joan Fontaine joins Luise Rainer and Vivien Leigh as winners of both the NYFC and the Oscar.  Pepe le Moko wins Best Foreign Film from the NBR while the NYFC declines to name one, citing the scarcity of Foreign films due to the war.  Neither group will choose a Best Foreign Film again until 1946.

Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery in Hitchcock's Screwball Comedy classic: Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941)

Under-appreciated Film of 1941:

Mr. & Mrs. Smith (dir.  Alfred Hitchcock)

That this film is forgotten and that the atrocity with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie should have re-used the title is a travesty.

Of course, that this film is forgotten is not entirely the fault of modern audiences.  While dreck like All American Co-Ed, Blood and Sand, Son of Monte Cristo and Las Vegas Nights were receiving Oscar nominations (ensuring that completists like me would eventually track them down), this film gets not a single mention.  Nor did Hitchcock try to keep it around for posterity, given his view of the film:

That picture was done as a friendly gesture to Carole Lombard.  At the time, she was married to Clark Gable, and she asked whether I’d do a picture with her.  In a weak moment I accepted, and I more or less followed Norman Krasna’s screenplay.  Since I really didn’t understand the type of people who were portrayed in the film, all I did was to photograph the scenes as written.  (Hitchcock/Truffaut, p 139)

That’s it for the mention in the book, except later when Truffaut says that the comedies were an “out and out waste of time” and Hitchcock agrees.  Hitchcock spends more time in the book explaining Carole Lombard’s practical joke on the set about Hitchcock’s famous “actors are cattle” comment.  They don’t talk about the film at all.

And that’s a shame, because, coming on at the tail end of the great Screwball Comedies, this is a great example.  It highlights Carole Lombard’s phenomenal comedic gifts, one of her best performances (along with My Man Godfrey and To Be or Not to Be).  It is more tragic that it is forgotten as it was the last film Lombard lived to see as she died early in 1942 in a plane crash while on a war bond drive before To Be was released.

It also stars Robert Montgomery in one of his best roles.  Montgomery often gets forgotten when talking about stars of the forties in lieu of such wooden performers as Tyrone Power and Victor Mature, but it was Montgomery who had truly great range, with his killer in Night Must Fall, his reincarnated boxer in Here Comes Mr. Jordan and his detective in Ride the Pink Horse.  And the two of them have such wonderful chemistry as a couple who find out by accident that their marriage was never truly legal and how that pulls them apart and how they are eventually back together.  In some ways it is a remake of The Awful Truth with a few different twists thrown in and lacking the supporting performance of Ralph Bellamy.  But while Truth has been immortalized by the presence of Cary Grant and the Oscar for Best Director, no such praises come this way for Smith.

Take a couple of hours to watch it.  Especially the opening scenes, where we slowly learn that they have been fighting for two days and that they never leave the room when they are fighting; they stay together until they can work it out.  Watch how Montgomery tries to sneak a fast one past Lombard and watch their reactions with each other.  Don’t let yourself miss such a wonderful film.

My Top 10:

Henry Fonda as Tom Joad during his final speech in The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

1. The Grapes of Wrath
2. The Great Dictator
3. The Philadelphia Story
4. Rebecca
5. His Girl Friday
6. Pinocchio
7. The Great McGinty
8. The Shop Around the Corner
9. La Bete Humaine
10. Pride and Prejudice

Academy Awards:

• Best Picture:  Rebecca
• Best Director:  John Ford  (The Grapes of Wrath)
• Best Actor:  Jimmy Stewart  (The Philadelphia Story)
• Best Actress:  Ginger Rogers  (Kitty Foyle)
• Best Supporting Actor:  Walter Brennan  (The Westerner)
• Best Supporting Actress:  Jane Darwell  (The Grapes of Wrath)
• Best Screenplay:  The Philadelphia Story (from the play by Donald Ogden Stewart)
• Best Original Screenplay:  The Great McGinty
• Best Original Story:  Arise, My Love

Consensus Awards:

• Best Picture:  The Grapes of Wrath
• Best Director:  John Ford  (The Grapes of Wrath)
• Best Actor:  Charlie Chaplin  (The Great Dictator)
• Best Actress:  Katharine Hepburn  (The Philadelphia Story)
• Best Foreign Film:  The Baker’s Wife

Top 5  (Top 1000):

• His Girl Friday – #102
• The Grapes of Wrath – #127
• The Philadelphia Story – #142
• The Great Dictator – #234
• The Shop Around the Corner – #237

Top 5 Awards Points:

1. The Grapes of Wrath – 590
2. Rebecca – 425
3. The Philadelphia Story – 380
4. The Long Voyage Home – 275
5. The Great Dictator – 250

AFI Top 100 Films:

• The Grapes of Wrath – #21  (1998) / #23  (2007)
• The Philadelphia Story – #51  (1998) / #44  (2007)

Nighthawk Awards:

Oscar winner (and Nighthawk nominee) Jimmy Stewart and Nighthawk Winners Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story (1940)

• Best Picture:  The Grapes of Wrath
• Best Director:  John Ford  (The Grapes of Wrath)
• Best Actor:  Henry Fonda  (The Grapes of Wrath)
• Best Actress:  Katharine Hepburn  (The Philadelphia Story)
• Best Supporting Actor:  Cary Grant  (The Philadelphia Story)
• Best Supporting Actress:  Judith Anderson  (Rebecca)
• Best Adapted Screenplay:  The Grapes of Wrath (from the novel by John Steinbeck)
• Best Original Screenplay:  The Great Dictator

Nighthawk Notables:

• Best Film to Watch Over and Over:  His Girl Friday
• Best Scene:  Charlie Chaplin leaping into the chest in The Great Dictator
• Best Line (dramatic):  “Look up, Hannah! The soul of man has been given wings and at last he is beginning to fly. He is flying into the rainbow! Into the light of hope, into the future! The glorious future, that belongs to you, to me and to all of us. Look up, Hannah. Look up!”  (The Great Dictator – Charlie Chaplin)
• Best Line (comedic):  “No, no, never mind the Chinese earthquake for heaven’s sake…Look, I don’t care if there’s a million dead…No, no, junk the Polish Corridor…Take all those Miss America pictures off Page Six…Take Hitler and stick him on the funny page…No, no, leave the rooster story alone – that’s human interest.”  (His Girl Friday – Cary Grant)
• Best Ending:  The Great Dictator

Ebert Great Films:

• Pinocchio
• The Bank Dick
• The Grapes of Wrath
• The Great Dictator
• The Thief of Bagdad

While 1939 is constantly held up as the greatest year, 1940 may actually be a better year.  Certainly there are few years that can match its top 5 films or even its top 6.  It is the year in which Screwball Comedy hit its peak with the release of both His Girl Friday and The Philadelphia Story and Cary Grant still didn’t an Oscar nomination.  In spite of the great Comedies, the Oscars go for more sappy melodramas (All This and Heaven Too, Kitty Foyle, Our Town), while ignoring His Girl Friday, The Shop Around the Corner and The Great McGinty (Shop and Friday get shut out completely).

Film History: Alfred Hitchcock makes his first American film and wins Best Picture.  The five majors (Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros, MGM, RKO) agree to outlaw “blind-selling”, the process by which they force theaters to accept films they have not seen.  This leads to a reduction in B-movies from the major and and an increase from Columbia, Universal and Republic to fill the gap.  Road to Singapore opens, the first of the Bob Hope / Bing Crosby road films.  Jean Renoir, director of the two greatest French films ever made at this point (Grand Illusion, Rules of the Game) leaves France ahead of the Nazi arrival and arrives in the U.S. the next year where he will stay through the duration of the war.  Preston Sturges agrees to a fee over $1 for his script for The Great McGinty if he will be allowed to direct.  It is his directing debut and his script wins the Oscar.  Abbott and Costello make their first film together.  William Hanna and Joe Barbera debut a new cartoon team for MGM: Tom and Jerry.

Academy Awards: Jimmy Stewart wins Best Actor, an award that is often referred to today as a “makeup Oscar” for not winning for Mr. Smith the year before.  Rebecca wins Best Picture but Hitchcock fails to win Best Director.  As producer of Rebecca and Gone with the Wind, David O. Selznick becomes the first person to win back to back Best Picture Oscars.  The Letter sets a new record by going 0 for 7.  Walter Brennan becomes the first Actor to win 3 Oscars.  Bette Davis becomes the first Actress to be nominated 3 years in a row (in a streak that will extend to 5 years).  Greer Garson fails to get a nomination for the last time until 1946.  Ginger Rogers win Best Actress for her only nomination, the first to do so since Mary Pickford in 1929 and the last to do so until Judy Holliday in 1950.  No limits on the number of nominees in most of the technical categories (except Editing) results in 59 different films nominated for feature film awards.  The number will fluctuate between 57 and 65 until 1945 and then never go above 46 again.  John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and Sam Wood all end up with two Best Picture nominees.  Pinocchio and Thief of Bagdad become the first films to win multiple Oscars without a Best Picture nomination.  Bagdad’s 3 Oscars without a BP nomination will stand as a record until 1952.  Interior Decoration is split into Color and Black and White while Original Screenplay is added as a category.

• Worst Oscar:  Best Editing for Northwest Mounted Police
• Worst Oscar Nomination:  Best Picture for All This and Heaven Too
• Worst Oscar Omission:  Best Actress for Rosalind Russell  (His Girl Friday)
• Worst Oscar Nominated-Film:  One Million B.C.
• Worst Oscar Category:  Best Sound
• Best Oscar Category:  Best Original Score – a plethora of great choices among the 17 nominees
• Oscar / Nighthawk Agreement:  Best Director / Best Cinematography (Black and White) / Best Special Effects / Best Song

Awards: For only the second time, the New York Film Critics gave Best Picture and Best Director to the same film and like the first time (The Informer), it was for a John Ford film: The Grapes of Wrath.  And like several other years, the NBR also gives it Best Picture and then it loses at the Oscars.  Both groups also agree that The Baker’s Wife is the Best Foreign Film.  The NBR confuses things by having the Oscar winner for Best Picture from 1939 and another nominee (Of Mice and Men) in its Top 10 list along with six of the 1940 nominees.  The New York Critics again gives Best Actor to an Oscar nominee who would lose at the Oscars (Charlie Chaplin) and does the same for Best Actress (Katharine Hepburn).

Greer Garson as Lizzie Bennett and Laurence Olivier as Mr. Darcy in the first film version of Pride and Prejudice (1940)

Under-appreciated Film of 1940:

Pride and Prejudice (dir. Robert Z. Leonard)

During the years of World War II, Greer Garson was nominated for Best Actress six times.  The only year she failed to earn a nomination was in 1940.  While the Academy nominated Martha Wood for Our Town and gave the Oscar to Ginger Rogers for the weepy sentimentality of Kitty Foyle, Garson’s performance as Lizzie Bennett in the first film version of Pride and Prejudice was ignored.  It wasn’t the only thing that was ignored.

Pride and Prejudice won the Oscar for Best Interior Decoration (Black and White) in what turned out to be its only Oscar nomination.  Here we had a great cast: Edmund Gwenn and Mary Boland as the Bennetts, Greer Garson as thoughful, inspired Lizzie and of course, the brilliant casting of Laurence Olivier was Mr. Darcy.  During the last 15 years, while Colin Firth has become so solidly attached to the role of Mr. Darcy it seems that everyone has completely forgotten how perfect Laurence Olivier was for the role.  Is there any actor in film history who could more perfectly portray a stuffed shirt, a man who truly believes himself to be superior to those around him, only to see him suffer the sharp pangs of love for the one woman who also irritates him the most.  Not to mention that in a year when such stolid dramas as All This and Heaven Too and Our Town were nominated (not to mention the ridiculous melodrama of Kitty Foyle) they couldn’t have found a place for another great Comedy?  My top 10 includes 6 Comedies.  The Oscars included 2.

I detest the novel, of course, as can be seen here, find it as unreadable as all the rest of Ms. Austen’s novels, all equally devoid of any knowledge of the outside world.  But there is no question that at the heart of her story is a passionate, burning love that longed to be played out on screen.  There are many fine versions of the novel and there are ones that even far superior to this version (I will always prefer the 2005 film), but there is a lot to be said for this forgotten treasure.  Amazingly enough, in spite of the Austen explosion, until 1995 this was the only film version of any of her novels.

But this film only breeds a greater acknowledgement of what Laurence Olivier brought to film acting.  He had already brought Heathcliff vividly to life the year before and in 1940 he was in fact nominated for Best Actor for his perfect Max De Winter in Rebecca so he wasn’t snubbed.  But while he is mostly remembered today for the Shakespeare which he brought to life on-screen, there is no question that he had the physicality, the vitality, the romance, even the comedic skills that so few actors have ever been able to pit together in one package.

My Top 10:

The best film of the decade and maybe the century: The Wizard of Oz

1. The Wizard of Oz
2. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
3. Wuthering Heights
4. Stagecoach
5. The Lady Vanishes
6. Alexander Nevsky
7. Gone with the Wind
8. Of Mice and Men
9. Gunga Din
10. Port of Shadows

Academy Awards:

• Best Picture:  Gone with the Wind
• Best Director:  Victor Fleming  (Gone with the Wind)
• Best Actor:  Robert Donat  (Goodbye Mr. Chips)
• Best Actress:  Vivien Leigh  (Gone with the Wind)
• Best Supporting Actor:  Thomas Mitchell  (Stagecoach)
• Best Supporting Actress:  Hattie McDaniel  (Gone with the Wind)
• Best Screenplay:  Gone with the Wind (from the novel by Margaret Mitchell)
• Best Original Story:  Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Consensus Awards:

• Best Picture:  Wuthering Heights
• Best Director:  John Ford  (Stagecoach)
• Best Actor:  Jimmy Stewart  (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington)
• Best Actress:  Vivien Leigh  (Gone with the Wind)

Top 5 Films  (Top 1000):

• Gone with the Wind – #60
• The Wizard of Oz – #62
• Stagecoach – #83
• Alexander Nevsky – #217
• Only Angels Have Wings – #218

Top 5 Awards Points:

1. Gone with the Wind – 740
2. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington – 480
3. Wuthering Heights – 405
4. Stagecoach – 365
5. Goodbye Mr. Chips – 295

AFI Top 100 Films:

• Gone with the Wind – #4  (1998) / #6  (2007)
• The Wizard of Oz – #6  (1998) / #10  (2007)
• Mr. Smith Goes to Washington – #29  (1998) / #26  (2007)
• Stagecoach – #63  (1998)
• Wuthering Heights – #73  (1998)

Nighthawk Awards:

A very deserving Oscar and Nighthawk winner (Vivien Leigh), an Oscar nominee and Nighthawk winner (Olivia de Havilland) and a badly miscast Leslie Howard in Gone with the Wind

• Best Picture:  The Wizard of Oz
• Best Director:  Victor Fleming  (The Wizard of Oz)
• Best Actor:  Jimmy Stewart  (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington)
• Best Actress:  Vivien Leigh  (Gone with the Wind)
• Best Supporting Actor:  Claude Rains  (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington)
• Best Supporting Actress:  Olivia de Havilland  (Gone with the Wind)
• Best Adapted Screenplay:  The Wizard of Oz (from the novel by L. Frank Baum)
• Best Original Screenplay:  Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
• Best Foreign Film:  Rules of the Game

Nighthawk Notables:

• Best Film to Watch Over and Over:  The Wizard of Oz
• Best Scene:  the change from black and white to color in The Wizard of Oz
• Best Line:  “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”  (in spite of not being a Gone with the Wind fan it really is the best line of the year)
• Best Ending:  The Wizard of Oz

Ebert Great Films:

• The Wizard of Oz
• Gone with the Wind

It is NOT the best year in film history.  I have already dealt with that idea in a different post here.  But it is the year that is most talked about.  Of course we’re here in 2009, 70 years on, so it’s gotten quite a bit of press this year and will again in 5 years, much like it did back in 1989.  Even other people must be backing away from the idea somewhat as both Wuthering Heights and Stagecoach fell off the AFI list on the second go around.  But it the first year that really proved what Hollywood was capable of.  It is the first year where every Best Picture nominee gets at least *** from me.  Even the weakest nominee (Love Affair) isn’t an embarrassment.

Film History: Gone with the Wind changes the course of film records with new marks at the Oscars and the box office.  Its box office record would stand until 1966 but adjusted for inflation, it is still the highest grossing film in history.  Stagecoach is released, pushing Westerns back into the A picture and making a star out of John Wayne.  Ninotchka is released with the tag: “Garbo Laughs!”  Carl Vincent publishes The History of the Cinematic Art, one of the first books on the history of film.  Basil Rathbone appears as Sherlock Holmes for the first time.  The powers of the Silent Era are dimmed with the deaths of Douglas Fairbanks and Carl Laemmle.

Academy Awards: Gone with the Wind sets records for nominations, wins and points.  It will take until 1950 to be surpassed for nominations, 1953 for points and 1958 for wins and even today stands tied for 3rd in nominations, tied for 8th in wins and 2nd in points.  Had Costume Design existed as a category in 1939, it certainly would have been the first to 14 nominations and 9 wins.  While I disagree with its Oscar for Best Picture and find its Oscars for Screenplay and Editing to be absurd, the others are all worthy winners and I even completely agree with its win for Best Actress.  Mr. Smith Goes to Washington begins the trend of classic films with plenty of nominations but only 1 win – for its Story (other films to follow this trend are Citizen Kane, Chinatown, Dog Day Afternoon, The Crying Game, Pulp Fiction, Sense and Sensibility, Gosford Park, Lost in Translation and Sideways).  In a year with classic performances that are remembered decades later by Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart and Laurence Olivier, it is Robert Donat who somehow manages to win Best Actor.  Hattie McDaniel becomes the first African-American to win an Oscar.  The Academy adds the new category of Special Effects and divides Cinematography into separate categories for Black and White and Color.  According to Tom O’Neill, Gable finished third behind Donat and Stewart and Vivien Leigh almost lost to Bette Davis.

• Worst Oscar:  Best Screenplay for Gone with the Wind
• Worst Oscar Nomination:  Best Editing for The Rains Came
• Worst Oscar Omission:  Best Editing for The Wizard of Oz
• Worst Oscar-nominated Film:  Gulliver’s Travels
• Worst Oscar Category:  Best Editing
• Best Oscar Category:  Best Cinematography – two deserving winners and a host of deserving nominees

Awards: The awards groups weren’t much help in coming to a consensus.  The National Board of Review voted before Gone with the Wind was even released (later placing it in their top 10 for 1940) and gave Best Picture to Confessions of a Nazi Spy, a film hard to find today.  They went with Port of Shadows for Best Foreign Film, but did manage to include 5 of the Academy’s 10 nominees in their Top 10 list, though Thomas Mitchell was the only Oscar winner to make their Best Acting list.  At the New York Film Critics, they deadlocked on Wind and Mr. Smith for 13 ballots before compromising on Wuthering Heights.  The compromise was extended with a Best Actor for Jimmy Stewart and a Best Actress for Vivien Leigh while giving Best Director to John Ford and Best Foreign Film to Harvest.

The luminous Judy Garland in her greatest role: as Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz

#1 film of 1939:

The Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming among others)

I can’t write about an overlooked or under-appreciated film for 1939 because there aren’t any.  The year has just been over-analyzed to death, especially this year because of the 70th anniversary of all the films (it’ll happen again in 5 years).  But I can write about The Wizard of Oz for a variety of reasons.

First, the more I watch it, the more it grows on me, if such a thing is even possible.  And it’s not like I see it every several years.  I own it on DVD and I watch it with my son.  I watch it on my own.  I watch it when it comes on television.  I’ve even seen it several times in the theater.

Second, it heads the list of so many genres and seems to transcend them all.  I listed it as a Kids movie when I divided the genres and certainly it is far and away the best Kids movie ever made, animated or not.  Then, of course, it is a Musical, one with some of the greatest, most memorable songs ever put the music.  Is there anyone who doesn’t know “We’re Off to See the Wizard,” even if they’ve never seen it (is there anyone other than my friend Amanda who hasn’t seen it and she’s only missing out because her mother was afraid of the winged monkeys and never let her watch it as a kid).  It is also a Fantasy film, topping even any of the Lord of the Rings films.  It’s dramatic and comedic all at once, an amazing epic that moves across all the different kinds of film.

Third, it might just be the single greatest film ever made.  I still hold on to Sunset Blvd. at the top of the list, but there are a few films which could legitimately compete for the title (Grand Illusion, Children of Paradise, Rashomon, The Godfather, Chinatown).  But while there are satiric elements to Sunset, this is the only one of those that could even conceivably called a Comedy.  It retains a sense of joy that isn’t to be found in the other contenders.

Fourth, it contains one of those rare performances that make you fall in love.  And I don’t mean you find the actress gorgeous or some sort of physical desire.  I mean you fall in love, in much the same way you could fall in love with Natalie Portman in Beautiful Girls or Audrey Tatou in Amelie or Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca.  Judy Garland is so wonderfully luminous in the film, such a winning presence that Dorothy Gale becomes not just the little girl of the novel who manages to prefer the drabs grays of Kansas over the amazing color of Oz, but a beautiful young woman who more than anything just wants to find herself at home again.  Is there any question as leans back against the haystack and begins to sing about what she might find far away that “Over the Rainbow” is THE Oscar winning song of all-time?

There is no question that the book is considered a classic and has been re-interpreted in many ways over the years.  The original book is a great children’s book, but lacks the magic that the screen brings to the tale, the way it brings to life the Wicked Witch, the Yellow Brick Road and the Ruby Slippers (which were not Ruby in the book).  And while people can find their Oz fix in Wicked (the book or the musical), The Wiz or Tin Man, this is the true classic version.

It’s not just me as a champion of the film.  While BFI has covered over 70 different films in their BFI Film Classics Series, many of them by big name film writers, the only one written by a seriously brilliant writer is the one on The Wizard of Oz written by Salman Rushdie: “But Garland singing ‘Over the Rainbow’ did something extraordinary: in that moment she gave the film its heart, and the force of her rendition is strong and sweet and deep enough to carry us through all the tomfoolery that follows, even to bestow upon it a touching quality, a vulnerable charm, that is increased only by Bert Lahr’s equally extraordinary creation of the role of the Cowardly Lion.”

Rushdie also seems to sum up the film with his concluding paragraph:

“So Oz finally became home; the imagined world became the actual world, as it does for us all, because the truth is that once we have left our childhood places and started out to make up our lives, armed only with what we have and are, we understand that the real secret of the ruby slippers is not that ‘there’s no place like home’, but rather that there is no longer any such place as home: except, of course, for the home we make, or the homes that are made for us, in Oz: which is anywhere, and everywhere, except the place from where we began.”

The Wizard of Oz was nominated for 6 Academy Awards, winning 2.  It receives 21 Nighthawk nominations and wins 13.  The nominations is the highest of any of the over 6500 films I have seen and the wins are tied for second, only behind Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.  So what accounts for such a large difference between my estimation of the film and the Academy’s?  The first is that I use the entire scale of awards, not just what what existed at the time, so 3 of my awards are in categories that didn’t exist in 1939: Best Sound Editing, Best Costume Design and Best Makeup.  There are the three categories that it was nominated in and lost to Gone with the Wind, all of which it wins from me: Best Picture, Best Cinematography (Color from the Academy though I make no distinction) and Best Interior Decoration (now known as Art Direction).  Wind was a worthy winner of the last two, but I give the nod to Wizard.  To me, there is no question on Best Picture.  There are the two Oscars it actually won and richly deserved: Best Original Score and Best Song.  Then there is the category it lost (ridiculously) to The Rains Came: Best Special Effects.  That brings the total to 9 wins.  There are Best Editing and Best Sound, which it was unaccountably not nominated for.  There is Best Adapted Screenplay which it was passed over for a badly written script full of absurd cliches.  There is Best Director, which it was not technically eligible for because Victor Fleming was nominated for Wind and the rules didn’t allow for double nominations.  That covers the 13 wins.  What about the other 8 nominations?  Well, four of them are easy: 4 more of the songs.  All of the songs, so memorable, so wonderful, were eligible and I have no problem nominating “We’re Off to See the Wizard,” “If I Only Had a Brain,” “If I Only Had a Heart,” and “If Only Had the Nerve” over any other eligible songs.

That just leaves the least appreciated part of the film: the performances.  The technical aspects were well appreciated at the time (only Wind and The Rains came had more technical nominations) and the songs have been greatly treasured for decades.  But what about the performances.  While Thomas Mitchell might have won the Oscar and Claude Rains deserved it, there is no question that Ray Bolger as the sly and subtle Scarecrow and Frank Morgan as a plethora of roles, including the Wizard were deserving of Supporting Actor nominations.  And what would the film be without the performance of Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West.  I definitely rate her higher than Oscar winner Hattie McDaniel and there are days when I consider that she should actually win.

Which one again brings us back to Judy Garland.  Do we even need to think about the rest of her career, the sad sinking towards despair and destruction?  Does this have to be the high point of one of the biggest Hollywood stars?  Or can we just think about such an amazing presence on film, so believable as the girl who wants to escape and then just as believable as the one who just wants to go home?  Just keep your eye on her, because she takes the musical to its very heart and soul with her performance of “Over the Rainbow” and that’s before she emerges out of sepia into color and seals her presence as one of the most charming performances in screen history.

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) and scenes from his 16 novels

I had an interesting idea about a year ago.  I would finish reading Charles Dickens.  I had been reading Great Expectations for the first time since my Freshman year of high school and I figured that aside from stopping there, it might not be a bad idea to continue with the other Dickens novels.  All of them.  While over the years I had read several of his novels, I was still slightly less than halfway done and I was missing several of his “major” novels.  I decided the best way was to approach them chronologically, to get a sense of how he developed over the years, whether the “minor” novels that came early on really deserved such status.  After the first few novels, I had timed it out as such so that if I read one novel a month, I would be done by the end of the year, so since March, I have been going through one Dickens novel a month and yesterday, I finally finished with The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the final, 16th, unfinished novel that he was working on when he died in 1870.  So here are my thoughts on his novels after spending the last year reading through them all.  Some are magnificent, among the best novels ever written while others I would not recommend unless you’re planning to do what I have just done.  I read them through in chronological order, but I’m presenting them in a ranking order, based on my own personal preference.  If I ever get around to sorting out a list of the 100 Best Novels (regardless of when it was written or in what language), then I’ll probably include the top 2.  Maybe #3.  We’ll have to see how that eventually plays out.  But in the meantime, here’s a slight break from my usual film postings.

Dombey and Son (1848)

16.  Dombey and Son

Is Dickens a great author or has his popularity simply prevailed?  He certainly was astoundingly popular at his peak and ruled the book-stalls of the times in a way that Dan Brown can only dream of.  But how much of it is literature?  There is a lot of “minor” Dickens and there is a reason that a lot of it is minor.  His penchant for coincidence and sentimentality can mar even the best of his works.  But for a minor title like Dombey, there is no saving it.  Dombey is so unmemorable that even though I just read it in April, I can’t for the life of me remember anything about it.  All I remember is thinking at the time, well, this is the weakest thing Dickens ever wrote.

15.  Martin Chuzzlewit

Martin Chuzzlewit (1844)

This is Dickens’ American novel and the last of his picaresque works.  It follows in the tradition of Tom Jones, but it lacks any of the wit or style that Fielding brought to his rogue.  While Dickens may have thought this the best of all his novels, there is a reason that it is so rarely read today.  There are certainly people who champion it, who talk about the satire with which he depicts America, a satire that certainly bears some resonance today.  But I found the attempts at satire and wit to fall flat and was completely uninterested in Martin as a character.  As I write this, I want to move Martin to the last spot on the list, but I read this right before I read Dombey and I remember thinking at the time that Dombey was definitely the weakest, so I’ll follow along with my original instincts.  Certainly unless you’re a Dickens completist (or have OCD like me), I can’t really recommend either of these lowest two.

The Pickwick Papers (1837)

14.  The Pickwick Papers

Pickwick was the novel that began it all.  It first began to be serialized in 1836, following on the immense success of Sketches by Boz and was issued as a complete novel in 1837.  It took me three tries to finally complete back in January.  I’ve owned a copy for years (ever since college in fact) and it was one of the novels that first lead me to believe how little regard I have for Victorian Literature.  While more exposure in the years since to the Brontes and Thomas Hardy has lead me to a greater appreciation, this is still a novel that stumps me.  It is one of the few works of literature that I will admit that I just might not get.  True, it is hard for modern readers because of its random style (extremely episodic, both as a result of being a first novel and because of the style of publication), but there is so much talk of the humor of the book and certainly none of that ever settled in with me.  So, while widely regarded as a classic, let’s just settle it that it doesn’t find much favor with me and settles down towards the bottom of the Dickens list.

13.  The Mystery of Edwin Drood

The Mystery of Edwin Drood - unfinished when Dickens died in 1870, but published later that year

Would this have ranked higher if it had been completed?  I’m not entirely certain of that.  I just sense that somewhere beyond what was completed would have been a descent into coincidence and sentimentality that would have belied any of the darker mystery and the final fate of Edwin Drood.  For some reason lately this novel has managed to pick up some steam, with various modern writers taking their own stab at what might have happened later in the story.  By the time I finally got to Drood, the Dickens was starting to wear on me.  I had been through several of his very long major works that I found to be over-rated and I kept thinking this was in the same vein.  It took so long to finally get going that even though Dickens had finished half the planned chapters and only taken 250 pages, I couldn’t help but think that the remaining chapters would somehow have pushed the book closer to the 800 page mark once again.

Our Mutual Friend (1865)

12.  Our Mutual Friend

I have no objections to long novels.  I read Lord of the Rings every year and I wouldn’t take out a single word of The Brothers Karamazov or Ulysses.  But I find that many shorter novels end up being much stronger, not because they are shorter, but because they find ways to be more succinct.  I look at Our Mutual Friend or Bleak House and I understand what people talk about in terms of being one of the “major” novels and about the themes and the psychological explorations that Dickens undertakes long before the advent of Sigmund Freud, but then I look at the length and I try to slog through all the pages and I throw up my arms and go, “enough already.”  Look at the top two works on this list, also written during the major period, but much shorter novels.  That doesn’t make them better in and of themselves, but they also never drag, not for a single page, whereas Our Mutual Friend takes so long to get anywhere and so much longer to keep going that there is only so much I can do with a theme and psychological insight.

11.  Bleak House

Bleak House (1853)

Bleak House, to me, suffers from some of the same problems as Our Mutual Friend.  Yes, you can do a longer novel, such as David Copperfield or Nicholas Nickleby, provided you can keep the story interesting enough to justify the length.  But Dickens does not possess the psychological depth of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy or the modernist style of Joyce to maintain such a length without the story to provide it.  So Bleak House becomes another of his major novels that falls short for me.  Is it worth reading?  Yes, certainly everything from Our Mutual Friend up to the top of the list is worth reading in one manner or another.  Would I ever assign it to students?  No.  Would I ever read it again?  Highly unlikely.  I wanted to get through all of Dickens at least once, but I can’t imagine reading anything again that fell below the top 7.

The Old Curiosity Shop (1841)

10.  The Old Curiosity Shop

“Is Little Nell alive?” the crowds would yell at the ships as they came in to the docks in New York.  Published in installments during 1840 and 1841, this was the novel that truly cemented Dickens’ popularity.  People could not get enough of the story and the death scene had been dragged out and they were desperate to know what happened.  Of course, years later this would provoke Oscar Wilde’s famous statement: “One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without dissolving into tears…of laughter.”  There was certainly more baggage attached to this book than any of the other Dickens’ novels which I hadn’t read when I started this project (I don’t know what this might say about either Dickens or myself that all of the novels I had read before I began the project, and thus, was re-reading ended up higher than all the novels that I hadn’t read).  When I finally had made it through the novel to the famous death scene, I was surprised.  First, it didn’t seem to last nearly as long as I had heard.  Second, I felt neither the overwhelming loss that washed over many of the contemporary readers, nor the revulsion for the sentimentality of the scene that Wilde expressed.  In fact, given Dickens’ penchant for sentimentality, I was rather surprised that the scene was as understated as it was.

The fascinating thing about the novel was that I just wasn’t that interested in the fate of Nell or her grandfather.  In fact, by the time I got to Nell’s death scene I had lost quite a bit of interest in the novel as a whole.  Everything about the power of the novel hinges on the character of Daniel Quilp, the evil hunchbacked dwarf who might just be Dickens’ best villian (yes, even better than Madame DeFarge).  Every time he appears on the scene, he is so full of malice, but is clever about it, that his menace just overwhelms everything else.  It’s the classic problem from Romeo and Juliet, where Mercutio ends up as so much more an interesting character than Romeo that it undercuts the power of the romance.  Quilp is such a brilliant villain, that whenever he isn’t there the novel loses its power and when he dies (of course he dies – this is Dickens after all), there just isn’t enough left of the novel to hold interest.

9.  Barnaby Rudge

Barnaby Rudge (1841)

I was taken completely by surprise reading this.  Between the disappointing ending of Curiosity (everything post Quilp just dragged) and the trudging through the drudge of Chuzzlewit and Dombey, this was a welcome breath of fresh air.  Who would have thought that one of Dickens’ least regarded novels, one that almost never makes an appearance on film (the BBC seems to have tackled almost everything else), the “other historical novel” aside from Cities, would be so enjoyable?  This is one of those books like Great Expectations where the final revelation of the Dickensian coincidence would actually be welcomed instead of a point of ridicule.  It almost seems a predecessor to Cities, as it takes place during the Gordon Riots of 1780, not long before the main action in Cities.  And at its heart is Barnaby Rudge, who, unlike David Copperfield, does not force us to endure his life story.  Perhaps what makes this so effective is the third person narration, as we don’t have to listen to Barnaby try to tell us his story, instead we get a look at his history against the backdrop of English history.

Hard Times (1854)

8.  Hard Times

The shortest of the major novels, it is perhaps also the most contentious.  Written between Bleak House and Little Dorrit against the backdrop of financial problems, both the novel’s length and its subject seem to be a reflection of Dickens’ life in the mid 1850’s.  But I, like many critics, find that to be a strength.  Without the length of Our Mutual Friend bogging it down, it still manages to find the same kind of tone in its look at society.  It is one of the rarest to find in a filmed version, but it is available in a Norton Critical Edition, reflecting the amount of work that critics have pored into it over the years.

7.  Little Dorrit

Little Dorrit (1857)

One of the marks of many Dickens novels is the young child pressured by the world, forced to endure and somehow even come through.  There is no question that this is the story of Dickens life itself and it was never much of a secret, but as I am not a fan of biographical criticism, I try to steer away from that.  I look to see if a novel can stand on its own outside of whatever outside influence of the author’s life may have had in its story.  At times, Little Dorrit is dragged down by its length, trapped in Dickens’ determination to make us understand how oppressive the Victorian era was to those who did not have the financial means to achieve independence.  In some ways, this is a longer continuation of Hard Times, but with more of a story and a central character who returned to the kind of characters that Dickens had made popular in Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop and David Copperfield.  In 1988, it was filmed in a magnificent adapation with Alec Guinness which earned him his final Oscar nomination (quite deservedly).

David Copperfield (1850)

6.  David Copperfield

Is it heresy to maintain David Copperfield at such a low position among Dickens’ novels?  While Our Mutual Friend and Bleak House are considered major novels, there are many who consider this the epitome of Dickens work, the orphaned urchin who must make his way through society and learn to grow and thrive while pitted against one of the best remembered villains in all of literature: Uriah Heep.  Of course, there are characters aplenty in the novel, the most memorable being Micawber, who is remembered by many as much for the portrayal by W.C. Fields in the 1935 film version as he is from the novel itself.  There is no question that Dickens himself left a special place in his heart for this novel and for the character of David in particular, though this is as likely because of the autobiographical nature of the story as it is the writing.  After all, Dickens thought that Martin Chuzzelwit was the best of his novels.  And there are many great aspects of this novel.  So why rank it sixth?  It is David himself, whom I never particularly warm to as a narrator.  Unlike Pip, who Dickens does a better job with of not seeming so irritating, there is just something about the way that David tells the story that puts me off.  I am always reminded of Holden Caulfield explaining that his novel won’t have “all that David Copperfield kind of crap.”

5.  Oliver Twist

Oliver Twist (1839)

The most suited to film versions, partially because of its length, partially due to the darkness of the story itself, Oliver Twist has continued to endure.  There is the David Lean version with Alec Guinness brilliant Fagin, Robert Newton’s brutal Sykes and Kay Walsh’s tragic Nancy.  There is the silent version with a masterful Lon Chaney as Fagin.  There is the 1968 Best Picture winner, Oliver!, with great performances and songs that annoy.  There is the 2005 version with a tragic take by Ben Kingsley.  There is the truly awful 1933 version that is a reminder of how annoying Oliver himself can be.

But what about the novel itself?  Well, there are two problems with the novel.  The first is Oliver himself, who can be quite clearly annoying, which is not exactly what you want from your title character.  But Oliver seems to be less the hero than simply the focal point.  There is the other problem of the coincidence that marks Oliver’s familial history, probably the most absurd plot point that Dickens ever came up with.  But in the end, they don’t actually matter that much because there are the characters, and they are brilliant from the beginning and stay that way until the end.  There isn’t just Fagin, a nasty depiction of a Jewish stereotype, yet a fascinating character nonetheless.  There is the Beedle, there is the deadly Bill Sykes and his faithful dog.  There is the tragic Nancy, who finally makes a decision to justify her life only to have it cost her that very life.  And there is, of course, the Artful Dodger.  While Dickens’ books are full of colorful characters, ones whose legacy will last for centuries, Oliver Twist is interesting in that it is all the morally devious characters that are the most worth reading about.  Nobility holds no sway in this novel.

A Christmas Carol (1843)

4.  A Christmas Carol

How can a tale so short, so full of blatant sentimentality, with such a sappy character as Tiny Tim, with such a cheesy ending still stand the test of time?  Because there is no question but that it does stand the test of time.  It is probably the most read novel that Dickens ever wrote and every holiday season it takes its place on the radio and television and in bookstores and people devour it over and over again.  Is the moral redemption of Scrooge that bring people back?  Is it the nobility of the holiday season, a reach for something in which the holiday season prevails over those who would strive against it?  What is it about Scrooge that makes actors, especially fine British actors like Alistair Sim, Albert Finney, Michael Caine and Patrick Stewart keep coming to him?  Sure, you get to play the mean-hearted, despicable miser, but you will also have to play the happy-go-lucky Scrooge at the end.  Perhaps the secret is the same secret that lies in Citizen Kane, that something in your past, when you are innocent and carefree, is really what makes you who you are; that reaching back to find what you have lost can conquer what you have become and in the end that is what you hold on to.  Because it is a great book, with magnificent descriptions, a brilliant look at what makes a man into who he is and what can make him reach for redemption.  If you want a film version, the best is the 1951 version with Alistair Sim.

3.  Nicholas Nickleby

Nicholas Nickleby (1839)

Back in 2002 I saw the film version of this before I read the novel.  I was delightfully surprised at how enjoyable it was, how it seemed to have the comic vision that so many people talk about Pickwick having, how it had the kind of delightful villains that makes Oliver Twist so memorable, yet wasn’t loaded down with a central character that aggravates the nerves like Oliver or David Copperfield.  It is a complete novel, the best of Dickens’ longer novels, certainly the best of the early novels and the film version did it justice, with memorable supporting performances from Christopher Plummer, Jim Broadbent and Nathan Lane.  It is a reminder that the kind of character acting that is so amazing to watch in, it seems, every British actor, is perfectly suited for Dickens novels because the characters are so varied and enjoyable.  The only two Dickens novels that seem like they would really work with a Hollywood studio are A Christmas Carol and A Tale of Two Cities, because they are the only two in which everything seems to revolve around a strong, interesting central character.  For the rest, it is up to the Brits to show us what characters can really be like when fully brought to life.

A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

2.  A Tale of Two Cities

For a long time I not only ranked this as the best of the Dickens novels, but as one of the few 19th century novels not written in Russian that I really and truly loved (The Red and the Black and The Three Musketeers were my other two examples).  As I have re-read it again twice in the last couple of years, it has lost none of its power.  It is one of the few novels in history to have a truly amazing and memorable first and last line (Lolita, The Catcher in the Rye and The Princess Bride are the other three that really make that list), it has one of the great heroes in literature, the brilliant Sydney Carton, who almost qualifies as the first anti-hero as he drunkenly makes his way through the novel, only to come through in the end.  It has all the horrors of the French Revolution, but doesn’t lose sight of the human story at the center of the novel.  It’s amazing that only one great film version has been made (the 1935 version with Ronald Colman) because this is crying out to be filmed again and again.  It has everything a great film needs: a dark story, great supporting characters, a beautiful heroine, a tragic hero who sacrifices himself, blood, revolution, romance.

1.  Great Expectations

Great Expectations (1861)

This comes back again to Carol Mooney.  As I said, for a long time I held Tale as the best of Dickens’ work.  My estimation of the greatness of Tale hasn’t changed.  What has changed is my estimation of how great a novel Great Expectations is.  I first read it in 9th grade with Carol as my English teacher and for a long time, I was suffering.  The opening was nice and snappy, but then it got bogged down for a long time, until the final 100 pages, which I remember just zipping through.  But that was it.  I read it for class and then put it away.  For almost 20 years.

But then I came back to it.  In fact, it was reading again late last year just before watching the David Lean film again to finish off my Director Project after 5 years that inspired me to finally go back and read all of Dickens.  Because there is so much to this novel, and Lean’s film is the perfect guide to where to find it.  There is the brilliant opening of the book, out in the graveyard, made so darkly real in the film version.  But then there is Miss Havisham, made more alive by her appearances in the Thursday Next books, and brought to life so disturbingly dark in the film.  But then we move onto London.  We have Frances L. Sullivan, who would later be so perfect as the Beedle in Lean’s Oliver Twist, and he is so brilliant, so witty, so caustic, as Mr. Jaggers that he carries the film so perfectly here.  Yes, John Mills was too old to play Pip, but he feels right in spite of his age and the introduction of Alec Guinness into the world of film as Herbert Pocket can never be topped.  Then, of course, we move on through the darker part of the film and move towards the brutal conclusion.  We see how much Pip has turned away from those who love him, we see the violence, we get the brilliant underlying story of what truly makes him a man.  He never does fulfill those great expectations, but we him make steps to become a better person and that is where he grows.  Yes, there is sentimentality and of course there is the amazing Dickensian coincidence, but they work so well to further the story rather than just come in and rescue it.  This is the fully formed genesis of the perfect Victorian novel, with the young boy brought to become a man in the dangerous world of London.  I still hold A Tale of Two Cities up as a fantastic book.  But if you have to read only one Dickens novel, these days I will recommend Great Expectations.

My Top 10:

Grand Illusion - Renoir's brilliant masterpiece

1. Grand Illusion
2. The Adventures of Robin Hood
3. Bringing Up Baby
4. You Can’t Take It With You
5. Pygmalion
6. Angels with Dirty Faces
7. Merrily We Live
8. Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife
9. The Citadel
10. Of Human Hearts

Academy Awards:

• Best Picture:  You Can’t Take It With You
• Best Director:  Frank Capra  (You Can’t Take It With You)
• Best Actor:  Spencer Tracy  (Boys Town)
• Best Actress:  Bette Davis  (Jezebel)
• Best Supporting Actor:  Walter Brennan  (Kentucky)
• Best Supporting Actress:  Fay Bainter  (Jezebel)
• Best Screenplay:  Pygmalion (from the play by George Bernard Shaw)
• Best Original Story:  Boys Town

Consensus Awards:

• Best Picture:  The Citadel
• Best Director:  Frank Capra  (You Can’t Take It With You)
• Best Actor:  James Cagney  (Angels with Dirty Faces)
• Best Actress:  Margaret Sullavan  (Three Comrades)
• Best Foreign Film:  Grand Illusion

Top 5 Films  (Top 1000)

• Grand Illusion – #25
• Bringing Up Baby – #79
• Olympia – #443
• The Adventures of Robin Hood – #464
• Holiday – #609

Top 5 Awards Points:

1. The Citadel – 350
2. You Can’t Take It With You – 330
3. Boys Town – 285
4. Jezebel – 230
5. Pygmalion / Alexander’s Ragtime Band – 195

AFI Top 100 Films:

• Bringing Up Baby – #97  (1998) / #88  (2007)

Nighthawk Awards:

The two best lead performances of 1938: Wendy Hiller and Leslie Howard in Pygmalion

• Best Picture:  Grand Illusion
• Best Director:  Jean Renoir  (Grand Illusion)
• Best Actor:  Leslie Howard  (Pygmalion)
• Best Actress:  Wendy Hiller  (Pygmalion)
• Best Supporting Actor:  Erich von Stroheim  (Grand Illusion)
• Best Supporting Actress:  Billie Burke  (Merrily We Live)
• Best Adapted Screenplay:  Bringing Up Baby (from the story by Hagar Wilde)
• Best Original Screenplay:  Grand Illusion
• Best Foreign Film:  Alexander Nevsky

Nighthawk Notables:

• Best Film to Watch Over and Over:  Bringing Up Baby
• Best Scene:  the end of Bringing Up Baby
• Best Line:  “I just went gay all of a sudden.”  (Bringing Up Baby – Cary Grant)
• Best Ending:  Bringing Up Baby

Ebert Great Films:

• Grand Illusion
• The Adventures of Robin Hood

In the year where the first Foreign Film to be nominated for Best Picture stands as one of the finest films ever made, Frank Capra took home the Oscars again.  This was the last full year of film-making before the war, but it is also the last before what many consider the golden age of cinema.  While Capra won the Oscar (probably as much about his standing in the industry at the time as it was about the quality of the film – though it was the second best of the nominees), there is no question today that Grand Illusion is considered one of the finest films ever made.

Film History: Contemporary audiences differ in tastes from future critics as Bringing Up Baby is such a financial failure that Howard Hawks’ contract is bought out and Katharine Hepburn is labelled “box office poison.”  Hedda Hopper begins her reign of power by publishing her first gossip column.  The ten year struggle to break the studio system begins with the filing of United States v. Paramount Pictures Inc., et al.  Three Comrades, the only film with a screen credit to F. Scott Fitzgerald, is released.  Georges Melies dies at the age of 78.  Sergei Eisenstein finally finishes his first sound film, Alexander Nevsky.

Academy Awards: Frank Capra becomes the first three time Best Director winner.  Michael Curtiz, meanwhile, is a double loser, the last Director nominated twice in one year until 2000 (according to page 1015 of Inside Oscar, the Academy changed the rules in 1939 to prevent double nominations, but never mention it changing back, thus leading to some confusion for 2000).  The Academy drops two categories: Assistant Director and Dance Direction.  Fay Bainter becomes the first person to be nominated for Actress and Supporting Actress in the same year.  She wins for Supporting, beginning a trend that will hold until 1988.  You Can’t Take It With You wins Best Picture and Best Director and nothing else, the last to do so (the only other BP winner with only 2 wins since is The Greatest Show on Earth).  Grand Illusion becomes the first Foreign Film to be nominated for Best Picture, something that will not happen again until 1969.  Spencer Tracy becomes the first two time Best Actor winner and the last to win back to back until 1994.  Bette Davis and Walter Brennan both win their second acting Oscars.

• Worst Oscar:  Best Original Story for Boys Town
• Worst Oscar Nomination:  Best Director for Boys Town
• Worst Oscar Omission:  Best Original Screenplay for Grand Illusion
• Worst Oscar-nominated Film:  Under Western Stars
• Worst Oscar Category:  Best Supporting Actor – none of the nominees made my top 5
• Best Oscar Category:  Best Supporting Actress
• Best Oscar Nomination:  Best Picture for Grand Illusion – only Foreign language nomination until 1969

Awards: The Citadel becomes the third film in four years to win both the NBR and the NYFC and lose at the Oscars.  Amazingly enough, with 10 slots each for NBR and the Oscars, they only agreed on two: The Citadel and Jezebel (though the NBR did give Grand Illusion Best Foreign Film as did the NYFC).  The NBR still made a list of acting performances with no preferences and Spencer Tracy was the only one of the eventual Oscar winners included.  The NYFC went with eventual Oscar nominees James Cagney and Margaret Sullavan, though their Best Director went to Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes, which wouldn’t be Oscar eligible until the next year.

The great unknown screwball comedy: Merrily We Live

Over-looked film of 1938:

Merrily We Live (dir. Norman Z. McLeod)

I looked for this film for years to no avail before finally having it come on TCM one night early last year (it will be on again in February during 31 Days of Oscar).  It just seemed ridiculous that a film with 5 Oscar nominations (Supporting Actress, Cinematography, Art Direction, Sound, Song) should be so difficult to track down.  What made it even more aggravating was watching it and realizing that unlike most hard to find multiple nominees of the 30’s, it was actually worth it.  I also give it 5 nominations, but not for the technical aspects, which were good, but not great, but for Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress (2), Original Screenplay and Song. with Oscar nominee Billie Burke ending up with the Nighthawk Award.  In a Comedy / Drama split like the Golden Globes, it would also nominations from me for Picture, Actor and Actress (Comedy).  It’s one of the great screwball comedies and somehow only exists to be shown once every year or so on TCM.

What is it about screwball comedies that they don’t really get made anymore?  Does no one but George Clooney appreciate them and their place in film history (I mention Clooney because he starred in Intolerable Cruelty and directed and starred in Leatherheads — the two closest examples of modern times).  They had interesting leads, men and women who actually had brains and could spar with each other with wit and style.  They were so well paced, so fun, so interesting that they make me forget that they are almost always about the upper class.

Like all great examples of the screwball comedy, Merrily We Live has two solid lead performances, this time from Brian Aherne and Constance Bennett.  But like many other examples, it is the supporting players who really bring the film to life.  Would those people who only know Billie Burke as Glinda the Good Witch, would they be able to comprehend how fantastic she is as the flighty matron of the family?  Then there is Alan Mowbray, so perfectly droll as the butler who is forced to endure so much from this ridiculous family and his timing is always perfect.

But then there is Bonita Granville.  One of the things I miss most about those old comedies is the presence of the wise-cracking, know it all younger sister (Natalie Portman’s brilliant performance in Beautiful Girls is clearly descended from these characters).  The one most remembered is the younger sister in The Philadelphia Story, but the two best are Bonita Granville in Merrily We Live and Diana Lynn in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek.  Both are quick witted, help to move the plot along and perfectly cope with ridiculous parents and older sisters who clearly can’t make good decisions and must be watched over by the younger sibling.  If there is anything in film that needs to be revived it is this character, because damn are they great to watch.