Best Adapted Screenplay: the pre-Oscar years (1912-1926)

I grabbed this banner from altscreen.com. They deserve credit, because it’s awesome.

My Top 10 Adapted Screenplays:

1. Greed  (1925)
2. The Phantom of the Opera  (1925)
3. The Hunchback of Notre Dame  (1923)
4. Faust  (1926)
5. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse  (1921)
6. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde  (1920)
7. Ingeborg Holm  (1913)
8. Oliver Twist  (1922)
9. The Birth of a Nation  (1915)
10. The Avenging Conscience  (1914)

 

The Top 100 Novels: The Complete List

The Top 100 Novels.

Here it is.  My Top 100 Novels – the complete list.

The intro was here.  The second 100 can be found here.  Various statistics and trivia about the list can be found here.

Here is the list:

 

Top 100 Novels #35: Great Expectations

My Harper Perennial Classic copy of Great Expectations

Great Expectations

• Author:  Charles Dickens  (1812  -  1870)
• Rank:  #35
• Published:  1861
• Publisher:  Chapman & Hall
• Pages:  495
• First Line:  “My father’s family name being Pirrip and my christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip.”
• Last Line:  “I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw the shadow of no parting from her.”
• ML Edition:  Modern Library Classics (2001) – surprisingly, never in hardcover
• Film: many – most notably 1946 (**** – David Lean), 1998 (*** – Alfonso Cuarón)
• First Read:  Spring, 1989

 

For Love of Books: Bantam Classics

My Dickens and Dostoevsky Bantam Classics

The Bantam and Signet go side by side.  Bantam is the classics paperback side of Random House just like Signet covers that for Penguin.  They are owned by two of the largest publishers and they publish many of the same books.  They are possibly the two best ways to get large library of classics in paperback.  They look great, they hold up well and they are a great bargain.

Bantam hasn’t been doing this as long as Signet – Signet, after all, has been around for decades, and I am not doing a whole history of Bantam.  These classics are the ones that began to be published around about 1981.  There were earlier Bantam Classics, but they seem to have set aside a large group of ISBN’s beginning in 1981 and they began to make them more uniform.  For a long time, they were all one solid color along the side – the Dostoevksy’s in the picture are a good example of what I love about them.  They also standardized the font on the front and spine, so they all look good together on the shelf.

 

The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture – 1947

John Garfield getting upset that he wasn't nominated alongside Gregory Peck and Celeste Holm for Gentleman's Agreement (1947)

The 20th Academy Awards, for the film year 1947.  The nominations were announced on February 15, 1948 and the awards were held on March 20, 1948

Best Picture:  Gentleman’s Agreement

• Great Expectations
• Crossfire
• Miracle on 34th Street
• The Bishop’s Wife

Most Surprising Omission:  A Double Life

Best Eligible Film Not Nominated:  La belle et la bete

Best Eligible English Language Film Not Nominated:  A Matter of Life and Death

Rank (out of 82) Among Best Picture Years:  #34

 

For Love of Books: Harper Perennial Classics (updated)

Harper Perennial Classic set - those that I own

If you ask any serious book collector about a series of classics that are about the size of a mass market, but are hardcover, with dust jackets, they are going to think you are talking about the Modern Library.  And normally you would be right, and later in this series, I will do several posts about the Modern Library.  But today, I’m talking about a set of books that I grew up with, saw every day, but rarely ever encounter in the book world.  They just aren’t found that often.  They are the original Harper Perennial Classic Series, printed by Harper & Row and released in 1965.

Their relative scarcity as compared to the Modern Library is part of the reason they aren’t ever discussed.  The other is that there is pretty much no information about them.  While there are books and web sites dedicated entirely to the Modern Library, it’s very difficult to find out anything about this pretty nice set of books.  I’ve been able to find a little on the Net, but most of what I know is from growing up with them.

 

Top 100 Novels #83: A Tale of Two Cities

the original Modern Library version of A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities

• Author:  Charles Dickens  (1812 – 1870)
• Rank:  #83
• Published:  1859
• Publisher:  Chapman & Hall
• Pages:  356  (Bantam Classic)
• First Line:  “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
• Last Line:  ” ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done, it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.’ “
• ML Edition:  #189 – three covers (1939, 1953, 1958)
• Film:  1935 (dir. Frank Conway – **** – review here), 1958  (dir. Ralph Thomas  -  **)
• Read:  Summer, 1995

 

The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture – 1936

"I must have more steps" - the vision of Florenz Ziegfeld in The Great Ziegfeld (1936)

The 9th Academy Awards, for the year 1936.  The nominations were announced on February 7, 1937 and the awards were held on March 4, 1937.

Best Picture:  The Great Ziegfeld

• Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
• A Tale of Two Cities
• Dodsworth
• Libeled Lady
• The Story of Louis Pasteur
• Romeo and Juliet
• Three Smart Girls
• Anthony Adverse
• San Francisco

Most Surprising Omission:  My Man Godfrey

Best Eligible Film Not Nominated:  Modern Times

Rank (out of 82) Among Best Picture Years:  #74

 

The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture – 1935

Mutiny on the Bounty is the only film to earn 3 Best Actor nominations, but I couldn’t find a picture with all three, so here are Charles Laughton and Clark Gable. Franchot Tone was the other.

The 8th Academy Awards, for the film year of 1935.  The nominations were announced on February 7, 1936 and the awards were held on March 5, 1936.

Best Picture:  Mutiny on the Bounty

• The Informer
• Les Miserables
• Captain Blood
• Top Hat
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• The Lives of a Bengal Lancer
• David Copperfield
• Ruggles of Red Gap
• Alice Adams
• Naughty Marietta
• The Broadway Melody of 1936

Most Surprising Omission:  Anna Karenina

Best Film Not Nominated:  The Bride of Frankenstein

Rank (out of 82) Among Best Picture Years:  #67

 

A Year of Reading Dickens

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.