A Century of Film: Columbia Pictures

A Century of Film

Columbia Pictures

The Studio

“Three men started it and they named it after themselves: C.B.C. Film Sales Company, for Jack Cohn, Joe Brandt and Jack’s younger brother, Harry Cohn.”  (Hail Columbia, Rochelle Larkin, p 11)  “The enterprise was growing in distinction, and hence it required a new name.  C.B.C. was now universally recognized in the trade by its sobriquet, Corned Beef and Cabbage.  A company could scarcely prosper under such a handicap.  On January 10, 1924, C.B.C. became Columbia Pictures.”  (King Cohn: The Life and Times of Harry Cohn, Bob Thomas, p 36)

“The movie business was divided into two unequal parts: The best film properties went to the major studios, the rest to the novices and dreamers on Poverty Row.  Harry Cohn was going to bridge that gap.”  (Larkin, p 12)  “Harry Cohn assumed the presidency of Columbia Pictures Corporation in 1932.  He retained his position as chief of production, becoming the only film company head to hold both positions.”  (Thomas, p 79)

In 1928, Columbia added what has now become famous as their logo, the torch lady.  Rather than quote some books for this one, I will point you here, where the person has already done an excellent job of summarizing the history of Columbia’s famous logo.  That site is also where I grabbed the logo above and there are several more versions through the years available in that fascinating piece.

“But what was Columbia’s specialty?  Three Stooges shorts?  Blonde movies?  Rita Hayworth musicals?  Or perhaps It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), All the King’s Men (1949), From Here to Eternity (1953)?”  (Columbia Pictures: Portrait of a Studio, Bernard F. Dick, ed., 1992)

Columbia was always known as a “major-minor” because it didn’t own its own chain of theaters.  Joe Brandt, president of the company, had decided against it, feeling it would eventually prove not to be an asset.  “Whether beneficent or not, Brandt’s decision was to establish the essential nature of Columbia as a movie company.  Columbia never enjoyed the cushion of guaranteed playing time.  It was required to gamble on quality films that would so engage the public that theaters would be forced to book Columbia movies.  And when the United States decreed separation of film making from theater owning in the 1940’s, Columbia escaped the paroxysms of those studios which could not function without the bulwark of their theater claims.”  (Thomas, p 42)

“Lacking a Clara Bow or a John Gilbert, Columbia relied on castoffs from the big studios: stars who had been let go because their box office appeal had seemingly been drained.  With the passé stars, Cohn combined newcomers, often borrowed at a bargain from major studios.”  (Thomas, p 45)  This is true; many of the stars of the studio’s biggest hits, people like Barbara Stanwyck, Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart weren’t actually under contract to Columbia.  Jean Arthur was the biggest actress for the studio in the late thirties (she was under contract from 1934 to 1944) but the biggest star at the studio was Frank Capra.  Capra rose at the studio, eventually getting his name above the title and earned the studio its first Oscars.  In the 1930’s, 14 Oscars were won by Columbia films and all but three of them were directed by Capra.  He left the studio after Lost Horizon in 1937 but came back after being talked into it by Cohn, though he left for good after Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.  The entire studio would win fewer in Oscars in the entire 1940’s than Capra’s films won in the 1930’s.

Thanks in a large part to Capra, “Columbia became the home of the sophisticated film, an eventuality that astounded the many people in Hollywood who considered Harry Cohn the compleat vulgarian.”  (Thomas, p 72)  But, “the 1940’s found Harry Cohn continuing his gamble on film subjects that other producers shunned, notably fantasy, musical biography and political realism.  It gave him pleasure to see his competitors rush to imitate his innovations, always with lesser success.”  (Thomas, p 167)

Then, after unsuccessfully trying to build up William Holden and only gradually making a minor star out of Glenn Ford, Cohn found what he was looking for: a star.  “The ascending stardom of Rita Hayworth provided a new and stimulating experience for Harry Cohn.  Never before had he been able to discover and develop – and then to profit from – a star of top rank.  Columbia had a sizable list of contract players, but they were serviceable actors and actresses who could be counted on to carry B pictures or to bolster the casts of the important product.  For stars, Cohn depended on loans from the big studios or multipicture deals with prominent free-lancers.  The latter were not entirely satisfactory, since they demanded huge salaries and were so independent in temperament that they resisted the dictation of Harry Cohn.  His faculty for alienation was such that Irene Dunne and Cary Grant, as well as Jean Arthur, refused to finish out their commitments for films with Columbia.”  (Thomas, p 217)

“Hollywood – where Elia Kazan once described Harry Cohn, Columbia’s founder, as ‘the biggest bug in the manure pile.’  Cohn boasted that he had a foolproof device for judging whether a picture was good or bad: ‘If my fanny squirms, it’s bad.  If my fanny doesn’t squirm, it’s good.  Just as simple as that.’  Writer Herman Mankiewicz’s response was, ‘Imagine – the whole world wired to Harry Cohn’s ass.'”  (Fast Fade: David Puttnam, Columbia Pictures and the Battle for Hollywood, Andrew Yule, p 207)  But Cohn knew success when he saw it and when he died in 1958, the studio started to founder a bit.  His death was a big deal: “Two thousand persons had come to Columbia that day, March 2, 1958.  It was the largest crowd ever to attend a funeral in Hollywood.  On his television program that week, Red Skelton made the comment that was to become legend: ‘Well, it only proves what they always say – give the public something they want to see, and they’ll come out for it.'”  (Thomas, p xvii-xviii)

“Columbia Pictures had lowly origins but it always managed to make pictures that transcended its humble beginnings.  The studio had been co-founded by Harry Cohn and his brother Jack in 1924. … Harry Cohn had been dubbed ‘His Crudeness’ by Frank Capra, whose films boosted Columbia’s status and earned it a slew of Academy Awards.  Cohn was paradoxivally both vulgar and discerning, and Columbia cranked out films from schlock to classics.  It never boasted a stable of glittering stars, although Rita Hayworth and glenn Ford made several pictures there. … In the fifties, Columbia had forged relationships with powerful independent producers such as Sam Spiegel, who was responsible for On the Waterfront (’54) and The Bridge on the River Kwai (’57) and Stanley Kramer, who made The Caine Mutiny (’54).  In the sixties, Otto Preminger, Sidney Lumet, Arthur Penn, Ted Kotcheff, Fred Zinnemann, Sydney Pollack, David Lean and William Wyler all made movies for Columbia.  By the end of the decade, when Peter Guber arrived, all of this was fading.  Despite the studio’s success in the late sixties, the venerable producers and directors were aging.”  (Hit and Run: How Jon Peters and Peter Gruber Took Sony for a Ride in Hollywood, Nancy Griffin and Kim Masters, p 67-68)

“From 1955 to 1964, [Mike Frankovich] was Columbia’s European production chief.  In 1964 he left London, where he had been based for nine years, and returned to Los Angeles as Columbia’s head of production … There is no doubt that Columbia’s succession of hits in the 1960s – Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Dr. Strangelove (1964), Cat Ballou (1965), The Professionals (1966), The Silencers (1966), and Casino Royale (which went sent Columbia’s stock soaring in 1967) – resulted, in great part from Frankovich’s ability to harmonize the talents of stars, directors and writers.  It is also not accidental that, during Frankovich’s tenure, Columbia films won thirty-five Oscars.”  (Dick, p 20-21)  But Frankovich was pushed out when Columbia was reorganized in 1968.  By the way, by my count, from 1955 to 1968, Columbia won 40 Oscars.

“In the early seventies, Columbia’s fortune had taken a turn for the worse.  After posting record profits of $21 million in 1968 on $243 million in revenues, the company lost $40 million in 1971.  Following a slight upturn in 1972, it lost $65 million again in 1973 and teetered on the verge of bankruptcy.”  (Griffin and Masters, p 72-73)  Those 1968 numbers include most of the gross of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (which opened in mid-December of 1967) as well as Funny Girl, two films that are both in the Top 200 all-time when adjusted for inflation.  There’s no big loser in 1971 but the studio released 37 films, its most after 1958 and The Last Picture Show was the only real hit.

“[Ray] Stark’s ties to Columbia had been close since the studio distributed Funny Girl, which opened in September 1968.  Columbia began losing money in 1971, and by 1973 the company’s very life was threatened by three expensive box office failures – 1776, Lost Horizon, and Young Winston.  Although Stark had produced none of these films, Columbia still owed him millions of dollars in deferred profits from Funny Girl and he feared that he might never get the money if the studio was forced into bankruptcy.” (Indecent Exposure: A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street, David McClintock, p 88)   As a result, Stark would help shepherd in the group that would eventually take charge of Columbia, including Herbert Allen and Alan Hirschfield: “Stark had finally toppled the dynasty that had held Columbia Pictures in its grip for fifty years and replaced it was a ruling family of his choosing.”  (Griffin and Masters, p 77)  And what those quotes don’t mention is that Stark also produced Columbia’s biggest hit of 1973, in fact their biggest hit between 1968 and 1975: The Way We Were.

McClintock, ironically, in a footnote really hits on one of the reasons why the studio was in the state it was when the Begelman scandal hit and tore the studio apart: “Generally, the Columbia board was not particularly distinguished, containing not a single independent lawyer, banker or other voice staunchly independent of the corporation’s vested interests as represented by Herbert Allen, Matty Rosenhaus, and the others who tended to be loyal to them.”  (McClintock, fn, p 126-127)

Then came the Begelman scandal.  I won’t dedicate much of my own writing to that because McClintock’s book is so good on the subject, so see the Books list at the bottom.

“By 1981, Columbia’s management was looking good again.  The company was a well-drilled unit under Herbert Allen, Fay Vincent and Frank Price.  Columbia Pictures had returned to financial health.  Hits like California Suite, The Cheap Detective, and Midnight Express in 1978, Kramer vs. Kramer and The China Syndrome in 1979, Stir Crazy and The Blue Lagoon in 1980, and Stripes and Absence of Malice in the current year, 1981, had kept revenues from the film division flowing nicely.  Many of the earlier titles were a legacy from the Hirschfield-Begelman era.  Columbia had purchased Ray Stark’s Rastar Company – with Stark still running it – for 300,000 Columbia shares, each valued at $32.50, for a total of $9,750,000.  The stage was set for the entry of the Coca-Cola Company.”  (Fast Fade: David Puttnam, Columbia Pictures and the Battle for Hollywood, Andrew Yule, p 181)

Yes, Coke bought Columbia and for some films on Wikipedia, it actually lists Coca-Cola Company as the studio.  But they were mostly hands off and the studio kept moving forward, at least until Coke decided to hands the reigns over to independent British producer David Puttnam.  “For the six months before David’s arrival at the studio, Columbia had been slipping badly in the box-office stakes.  The total for the period was still reasonable – $291 million; however, Karate Kid II accounted for $110 million of that, leaving the balance, $181 million, split between thirteen other features.”  (Yule, p 212)  Again, the books really cover this era – see below for more.

“The marriage of Columbia and TriStar was the end of David Puttnam.  His job was eliminated, and he was paid handsomely to go away.  Fay Vincent, the man who had hired him, was exiled to a vaguely defined position overseeing bottling properties – Coca-Cola’s equivalent of Siberia.  Victor Kaufman took the reins amid reports that Columbia stood to lose tens of millions on upcoming Puttnam movies that America wouldn’t want to see.”  (Griffin and Masters, p 211)  This kind of sums up the finale of the Andrew Yule book, though I highly recommend reading more about it in the Yule book.  Interesting to note that even though their book was published in 1996, Griffin and Masters don’t bother to mention, even in a footnote, that Fay Vincent bounced back from that “Siberia” posting by becoming the Assistant Commissioner of Major League Baseball and then, upon the death of Bart Giamatti, becoming the Commissioner himself for almost three years.  A big job and it’s surprising that it got no mention at all.

“Castle Rock was one of [Columbia]’s key relationships.  The company, founded in 1987, was run by five partners, the most famous of whom was Rob Reiner, director of This is Spinal Tap and Stand by Me.  Columbia Pictures (then owned by Coca-Cola) had been a major investor and owned 44 percent of Castle Rock.  Columbia distributed Castle Rock films in exchange for a percentage of the domestic box office.  Castle Rock paid for and controlled its own marketing.”  (Griffin and Masters, p 314).  At the time that Sony was buying the studio, this was key, especially for hit Reiner films like When Harry Met Sally and Misery (an appropriate film, since Castle Rock was named after Stephen King’s fictional town in Maine which is where Stand by Me takes place, even if it moved the town to Oregon).

In the last little bit before Sony took over the studio, Andrew Yule published another book that dealt a lot with Columbia: Losing the Light: Terry Gilliam & the Munchausen Saga.  There is a prophetic quote in the book at the end from “a veteran journalist”: “You have to understand about Columbia Pictures.  My impression is of a company in a holding pattern.  They haven’t started production on a single new movie in 1989.  They’re waiting for a takeover or for Ghostbusters II to open, whichever comes first.”  (Losing the Light: Terry Gilliam & the Munchausen Saga, Andrew Yule, p 225)  But then came the actual takeover and Gilliam, who it was claimed may never work again after Munchausen and certainly wouldn’t work for Columbia was making The Fisher King for TriStar, which was part of Columbia.  Gilliam himself said “My theory is that Victor Kaufman was just trying to tidy up Columbia’s books to increase the price of the Sony sale and the last thing he wanted to succeed was something Puttnam had initiated.” (Losing the Light, p 230)

For a good look at how Sony managed to take over the studio in a bit that really can’t be adequately compressed, read Chapter 17 of Hit and Run.  In early August [1991], Columbia Pictures Entertainment was rechristened: It was now called Sony Pictures Entertainment.  (The two film studios were still TriStar and Columbia).  The studio’s name change caused some grumbling in Hollywood about cultural heritage – especially when the big sign at the entrance to the lot was changed.”  (Griffin and Masters, p 305)

One point in all of this is that there is a good argument to be made that TriStar, which was the first studio I wrote about in a Century of Film post really could have been included in this piece.

Sony / Columbia (depending on what you look at – BoxOfficeMojo / IMDb / Wikipedia – it may say one, the other or both, but really Sony owns the company and Columbia is the studio) continued to move through the 90’s, producing some major hits.  But if Ray Stark had been the fulcrum of success for Columbia in the 70’s, in the 90’s, it was Castle Rock.  Between the release of Ghostbusters II and Men in Black, an eight year stretch, Columbia only had five films make $90 million dollars and four of them were Castle Rock films (A Few Good Men, City Slickers, In the Line of Fire, When Harry Met Sally).  It was responsible for two of the studio’s Best Picture nominations and its only two acting Oscars (Misery, City Slickers) during that stretch.

It would be two stars and two franchises who would rise up and help Columbia become a major force in the 2000’s (it would be the biggest studio at the box office in 2002, 2004 and 2006).  The two stars would be Will Smith and Adam Sandler.  Of the 46 films released by Columbia to make over $100 million between 1997 and 2011, almost a third of them would star one or the other (with one more starring Smith’s son).  The two franchises would be the reason Columbia would be #1 in those three years – the first two had Spider-Man films and the third would have a James Bond film, which Columbia would have the domestic distribution rights to starting with Casino Royale.  Smith would be the bigger star (of the top nine films in that stretch, the only non Spider-Man and non Smith film was The Da Vinci Code) but Sandler would be the more consistent star (nine films with over $100 million).

Notable Columbia Films

note:  These are Columbia notables.  Unless stated otherwise, assume it’s the first Columbia film to do whatever is listed, not the first ever.

• Discontented Husbands  –  first Columbia film  (1924)
• The Lone Wolf Returns  –  first series film  (1926)
• That Certain Thing  –  first Capra film for Columbia, first film with 1928-36 logo  (1928)
• Submarine – first film with sound  (1928)
• The Donovan Affair  –  first all-talkie film  (1929)
• Call of the West  –  first of over 300 B-Westerns  (1930)
• The Criminal Code  –  first to earn an Oscar nomination  (1931)
• Lady for a Day  –  first to earn an Oscar nomination for Best Picture  (1933)
• It Happened One Night  –  first Oscar winner for Best Picture  (1934)
• The King Steps Out  –  first use of 1936-76 logo  (1936)
• Meet Nero Wolfe  –  first Rita Hayworth film  (1936)
• Blondie  –  first of 28 Blondie films  (1938)
• Mr. Smith Goes to Washington  –  last Capra film for Columbia  (1939)
• My Son is Guilty  –  first Glenn Ford film  (1939)
• The Desperadoes  –  first Technicolor film – Columbia was late in the game on this  (1943)
• From Here to Eternity  –  most successful film at the Oscars  (1953)
• Pushover  –  first Kim Novak film  (1954)
• The Revenge of Frankenstein  –  first Hammer film released by Columbia  (1958)
• Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round  –  known only for being Harrison Ford’s film debut  (1966)
• Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner  –  first film to gross over $50 million  (1967)
• Funny Girl  –  first (ever) Rastar film  (1968)
• Murder by Death  –  first use of 1976-81 logo  (1976)
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind  –  first film to gross over $100 million  (1977)
• Nice Dreams  –  first use of 1981-93 logo  (1981)
• Tootsie  –  first film to gross over $150 million  (1982)
• Ghostbusters  –  first film to gross over $200 million; highest grossing Columbia film until 1997  (1984)
• Winter People  –  first Castle Rock film  (1989)
• Last Action Hero  –  first use of 1993-2006 logo  (1993)
• Sense and Sensibility  –  last Oscar nominee for Best Picture until 2010  (1995)
• Men in Black  –  first film to gross over $250 million  (1997)
• Sour Grapes  –  last Castle Rock film  (1998)
• Spider-Man  –  highest grossing Columbia film through 2011; first film to gross over $400 million  (2002)
• The Social Network  –  first Oscar nominee for Best Picture in 15 years  (2010)

 

Head of Columbia, Harry Cohn, with his best director, Frank Capra.

The Directors

Frank Capra

• Films:  20
• Years:  1928 – 1939
• Average Film:  72.2
• Best Film:  Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
• Worst Film:  Rain or Shine

The 20 films listed above for Capra don’t include several of his early films (pre 1933) which seem to be unavailable, all of which were also made for Columbia.  As mentioned above, Capra was extremely important to the studio.  He was the first director to ever earn an Oscar nomination, won Best Director three times in five years, helping Columbia’s reputation immensely and is responsible for almost every really good film that the studio made in the 1930’s.  As also mentioned above, of the 14 Oscars won by the studio’s film in the 1930’s, 11 of them were for Capra films and since three of them were for Capra, he by himself matched the rest of the studio.  His films also provided 39 of the studio’s 62 nominations during the decade.  Without him, it would take 13 years to match those 11 Oscars and it wouldn’t Best Director again until 1953.

Alexander Hall

• Films:  15
• Years:  1938  –  1947
• Average Film:  63.4
• Best Film:  Here Comes Mr. Jordan
• Worst Film:  Good Girls Go to Paris

For the most part, Hall was a fairly mediocre director.  I tried to see all of his films because he was once nominated for Best Director (for Here Comes Mr. Jordan, the only film of his to rank above ***) but there are some I still haven’t been able to get.  Of the 15 I have seen, only My Sister Eileen also manages to rise above a low ***.  Hall specialized in light Romantic Comedies (only two of his film do I not classify as Comedies).  Outside of Jordan, his whole oeuvre managed just one Oscar nomination (Best Actress for My Sister Eileen).

Charles Vidor

• Films:  8
• Years:  1941  –  1960
• Average Film:  65.6
• Best Film:  Gilda
• Worst Film:  The Loves of Carmen

Vidor was most known for working with Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford, directing Cover Girl, The Desperadoes, Gilda and The Loves of Carmen.  He was entrusted with a lot of Columbia’s first Technicolor films and his films are generally entertaining and worth watching at least once.

Edward Dmytryk

• Films:  10
• Years:  1941  –  1968
• Average Film:  61.0
• Best Film:  The Caine Mutiny
• Worst Film:  Anzio

The Caine Mutiny is miles above any of the other work that Dmytryk did for Columbia.  He made three mediocre films for Columbia in the early 40’s then was actually brought into the studio after he had already been blacklisted as one of the Hollywood 10, making seven more films for the studio from 1952 to 1968, though, outside of The Caine Mutiny, I really can’t recommend any of them.

David Lean

• Films:  3
• Years:  1957  –  1984
• Average Film:  98.3
• Best Film:  Lawrence of Arabia
• Worst Film:  A Passage to India

Lean only made three films for the studio, two for independent producer Sam Spiegel and then one much later.  But those films won 16 Oscars and earned 29 nominations, including two wins (and a nomination) for Lean himself and all are among the best Columbia films ever made and indeed in my Top 100 All-Time.

Rob Reiner

• Films:  7
• Years:  1986  –  1996
• Average Film:  71.7
• Best Film:  When Harry Met Sally…
• Worst Film:  North

I should note that Reiner’s average goes up to 82.8 if you don’t count North.  He made Stand by Me at the studio which gave birth to his Castle Rock Productions, which then was the home for all of Reiner’s films from 1989 to 1996, all of which, except for North, earned at least one Oscar nomination and included a Best Picture nominee (A Few Good Men) and a Best Actress winner (Misery).  Reiner’s decline took place mostly at other studios, after the Castle Rock distribution deal ended.

The Stars

Cary Grant

Grant only had a small contract with Columbia (with a simultaneous one with RKO) but it brought him one of his first major hits (The Awful Truth) as well as his first Oscar nomination (Penny Serenade).  In that time, he was also in one of Columbia’s most well-regarded hits (Only Angels Have Wings), one of Grant’s plumb roles (His Girl Friday) and another Best Picture nominee (The Talk of the Town).
Essential Viewing:  The Awful Truth, His Girl Friday, Penny Serenade

Jean Arthur

Arthur signed a five year contract in 1934.  During that time, she would be in a huge hit (Mr. Deeds Goes to Town), a Best Picture winner (You Can’t Take It With You) and the studio’s best film of the decade (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington), all directed by Frank Capra as well as the highly regarded Only Angels Have Wings.  She would sign another five year contract and in the next five years would be in such films as Too Many Husbands and The Talk of the Town and would earn her only Oscar nomination for The More the Merrier.  After this contract expired she retired from filmmaking, only making two more films in later years.
Essential Viewing:  The More the Merrier, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Rita Hayworth

Hayworth was the studio’s first genuine, bone-fide star.  She would be in several Columbia films in the late 30’s before hitting stardom with Angels Over Broadway in 1940.  She then made a couple of musicals with Fred Astaire before color discovered her with Cover Girl.  She would go back to black-and-white for Gilda which made her possibly the biggest pin-up in the world (and with good reason).  She was Columbia’s biggest star when she took a break in 1948 but she would come back and be a big star for them again in the 50’s.  I’ve seen at least 14 Columbia films starring Hayworth and there are some still that are hard to find.  Sadly, her best acting performances (Separate Tables, The Story on Page One) would not be for Columbia.
Essential Viewing:  Gilda, Cover Girl, Miss Sadie Thompson

Glenn Ford

Ford is perhaps most famous for his roles opposite Rita Hayworth (The Lady in Question, Gilda, The Loves of Carmen, Miss Sadie Thompson) but he was also a star outside of working with her, most notably in The Big Heat.
Essential Viewing:  The Big Heat, Gilda, The Desperadoes

Kim Novak

After Hayworth was gone (and even after she came back), Harry Cohn desperately wanted a pin-up to replace her.  He eventually settled on Novak who wasn’t as beautiful or as talented.  But she became a big star in the mid to late 50’s, even if her most notable film, Vertigo, was for Paramount.
Essential Viewing:  Picnic, Bell Book and Candle, 5 Against the House

Jack Nicholson

All of Nicholson’s early Oscar nominations were in Columbia films (Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Detail).  After the mid 70’s, he wouldn’t make a film at Columbia again for a long time.  In the early 90’s, he earned another Oscar nomination for A Few Good Men and also starred in Wolf and then he starred in three $100 million+ films for the company (As Good as It Gets, Something’s Gotta Give, Anger Management).
Essential Viewing:  A Few Good Men

Will Smith

Smith first worked with Columbia on Bad Boys but after Men in Black he became their biggest star ever.  From 2002 to 2008 he made five films at Columbia that made a combined $900 million.
Essential Viewing:  The Pursuit of Happyness, Men in Black, Hancock

Adam Sandler

Artistically, Sandler is the worst thing to ever happen to Columbia.  The vast majority of his films have been critically derided (with Punch-Drunk Love the notable exception), they have earned multiple Razzie nominations for Worst Picture and Jack and Jill is the biggest film ever at the Razzies.  But it’s easy to see why Sandler is important to Columbia and his Happy Madison Productions is headquartered on their lot.  His films have almost never lost money and the top 8 have earned collectively, well over $1 billion.  I don’t blame Columbia for making his films; I blame the audiences for paying for them.
Essential Viewing:  Punch-Drunk Love, Reign Over Me

Genres

It could just be a reflection of what I have seen, but it seems that Columbia really doesn’t go in for Genre films.  They really focused on Comedies (especially once Screwball Comedies came around), Dramas and, after Rita Hayworth came along, some Musicals.  Even through their whole history they’ve never really branched out as much as a lot of other studios have.  They did make a lot of B-Westerns (the book The Columbia Story lists 331 of them) but not a lot of Westerns outside of that.

What they did do was series films.  In The Columbia Story, the series films are separated from the regular feature films at the end of the books.  It includes 111 films in 7 different series (Blondie, Boston Blackie, Crime Doctor, Ellery Queen, Jungle Jim, Lone Wolf, Rusty).  These films really were the bulk of Columbia’s genre films during the years of the series films (starting in 1926, but the vast majority of them from 1938 to 1955).  From 1938 to 1955, Columbia released 945 feature films but only 603 primary features (non-series, non-B Western).

In more recent years, Columbia has really started to go in for sequels in attempts to kick-start some franchises (Spider-Man, Men in Black) and remakes.  From 2002 to 2011, Columbia remade all of the following films: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, The Fog, Fun with Dick and Jane, The Pink Panther, All the King’s Men, The Taking of Pelham 123, The Karate Kid and they have also made films out of the following which all used to be television shows: Spider-Man, I Spy, Charlie’s Angels, S.W.A.T., Bewitched, The Green Hornet, Smurfs.

The Top 100 Columbia Films

1. Lawrence of Arabia
2. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
3. The Bridge on the River Kwai
4. Seven Samurai
5. On the Waterfront
6. The Age of Innocence
7. A Passage to India
8. From Here to Eternity
9. The Shawshank Redemption
10. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
11. Sense and Sensibility
12. The Last Picture Show
13. Hamlet
14. The Social Network
15. Across the Universe
16. When Harry Met Sally…
17. The End of the Affair  (1999)
18. The Big Chill
19. Taxi Driver
20. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
21. A Man for All Seasons
22. His Girl Friday
23. Hope and Glory
24. Boyz N the Hood
25. Stand by Me
26. The Big Heat
27. Closer
28. Kramer vs. Kramer
29. Midnight Express
30. Adaptation
31. The Remains of the Day
32. Tootsie
33. Casino Royale  (2006)
34. It Happened One Night
35. In Cold Blood
36. Five Easy Pieces
37. A Few Good Men
38. Anatomy of a Murder
39. Tess
40. Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
41. Spider-Man 2
42. In the Line of Fire
43. The Last Emperor
44. The Awful Truth
45. To Die For
46. The Professionals
47. The More the Merrier
48. You Can’t Take It With You
49. Stranger than Fiction
50. The Ides of March
51. Ghostbusters
52. Shampoo
53. Black Hawk Down
54. Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
55. Picnic
56. Spider-Man
57. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
58. The Fifth Element
59. …And Justice for All
60. In a Lonely Place
61. The Collector
62. Moneyball
63. Our Man in Havana
64. All the King’s Men  (1949)
65. Roxanne
66. Hanussen
67. Groundhog Day
68. Absolute Power
69. Léon
70. Misery
71. The Guns of Navarone
72. Sundays and Cybele
73. Educating Rita
74. Still Crazy
75. King Rat
76. Here Comes Mr. Jordan
77. Little Women  (1994)
78. Arthur Christmas
79. Panic Room
80. Easy Rider
81. Death of a Salesman
82. The Big Easy
83. Big Fish
84. MacBeth  (1971)
85. The Front
86. The Caine Mutiny
87. Human Desire
88. The Pursuit of Happyness
89. A Raisin in the Sun
90. A River Runs Through It
91. Silverado
92. Fail Safe
93. Texasville
94. The Deadly Affair
95. The People vs. Larry Flynt
96. Awakenings
97. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
98. 3:10 to Yuma  (1957)
99. Twentieth Century
100. Absence of Malice

Notable Columbia Films Not in the Top 100

note:  Includes all films I have either already reviewed or have current plans to review in the future as well as all films I saw in the theater.

• Gandhi  (#101)
• Porgy and Bess  (#102)
• Quantum of Solace  (#103)
• Cash on Demand  (#106)
• Fat City  (#107)
• Men in Black  (#109)
• The Last Detail  (#110)
• Advise and Consent  (#111)
• The China Syndrome  (#112)
• Monster House  (#113)
• El Mariachi  (#114)
• A Soldier’s Story  (#115)
• Georgy Girl  (#116)
• The Last Hurrah  (#119)
• Zero Effect  (#120)
• Lady for a Day  (#121)
• Honeymoon in Vegas  (#122)
  ***
• Bram Stoker’s Dracula  (#123)
• Fly Away Home  (#124)
• La Bamba  (#125)
• The Lady from Shanghai  (#126)
• Bottle Rocket  (#127)
• The Buddy Holly Story  (#129)
• Punch-Drunk Love  (#130)
• The Go-Between  (#132)
• The Brothers Karamazov  (#137)
• To Sir With Love  (#139)
• Once Upon a Time in Mexico  (#142)
• Jason and the Argonauts  (#143)
• Gilda  (#144)
• Only Angels Have Wings  (#145)
• Cover Girl  (#146)
• Memoirs of a Geisha  (#148)
• California Suite  (#150)
• Oliver!  (#157)
• The L-Shaped Room  (#158)
• Andrei Rublev  (#159)
• The Way We Were  (#161)
• Images  (#164)
• The Member of the Wedding  (#165)
• Cactus Flower  (#167)
• You Were Never Lovelier  (#168)
• Claire’s Knee  (#170)
• Lost Horizon (1937)  (#174)
• The Criminal Code  (#181)
• 49th Parallel  (#184)
• The Dresser  (#188)
• I Never Sang for My Father  (#190)
• Theodora Goes Wild  (#191)
• The Prince of Tides  (#193)
• Othello (1995)  (#196)
• I’m All Right Jack  (#197)
• Hamlet (1969)  (#200)
• The Karate Kid (1984)  (#202)
• Hellboy  (#205)
• The Power of the Press  (#211)
• Pal Joey  (#212)
• A League of Their Own  (#214)
• All the King’s Men (2006)  (219)
• The Miracle Woman  (#220)
• The Talk of the Town  (#222)
• City Slickers  (#223)
• The Tall T  (#224)
• Two Rode Together  (#226)
• Too Many Husbands  (#228)
• The Pickup  (#229)
• Air Force One  (#230)
• Holiday  (#231)
• The American President  (#234)
• Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice  (#235)
• Crime and Punishment  (#238)
• Me and the Colonel  (#241)
• Angels Over Broadway  (#246)
• Together Again  (#247)
• Starman  (#256)
• Malice  (#259)
• The Taming of the Shrew  (#262)
• Bell, Book and Candle  (#263)
• Miss Sadie Thompson  (#268)
• You’ll Never Get Rich  (#271)
• The Desperadoes  (#278)
• Penny Serenade  (#283)
• The Da Vinci Code  (#285)
• The Happy Time  (#288)
• The Marrying Kind (1952)  (#290
• Platinum Blonde  (#296)
• Born Yesterday  (#300)
• Heavy Metal  (#303)
• The Solid Gold Cadillac  (#318)
• Golden Boy  (#320)
• Stripes  (#333)
• The Electric Horseman  (#339)
• Spider-Man 3  (#343)
• 84 Charing Cross Road  (#345)
• Gloria  (#370)
• The Wind in the Willows  (#372)
• Murder by Death  (#377)
• The End of the Affair (1955)  (#379)
• The 7th Voyage of Sinbad  (#386)
• The Revenge of Frankenstein  (#393)
• Les Miserables (1998)  (#394)
• A Song to Remember  (#399)
• The Bitter Tea of General Yen  (#411)
• Husbands  (#415)
• Funny Girl  (#417)
• Agnes of God  (#425)
• Butterflies are Free  (#442)
• Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner  (#464)
  **.5
• Suddenly, Last Summer  (#473)
• The Devil’s Own  (#475)
• Wolf  (#477)
• Postcards from the Edge  (#479)
• The Karate Kid Part II  (#481)
• The Tingler  (#489)
• Blondie  (#497)
• Julie and Julia  (#500)
• Radio Flyer  (#520)
• Jolson Sings Again  (#522)
• Saturday’s Hero  (#530
• The Loves of Carmen  (#535)
• City Hall  (#541)
• One Night of Love  (#553)
• Young Winston  (#566)
• Forget Paris  (#570)
• 1984  (#572)
• Ship of Fools  (#583)
• The Wild One  (#585)
• Flatliners  (#596)
• Body Double  (#612)
• Full of Life  (#617)
• The Cardinal  (#647)
• The Owl and the Pussycat  (#650)
• Superbad  (#663)
• The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009)  (#664)
  **
• Charlie’s Angels  (#670)
• Tommy  (#678)
• Can’t Hardly Wait  (#707)
• Obsession  (#712)
• America’s Sweethearts  (#737)
• 40 Carats  (#751)
• The Karate Kid Part III  (#756)
• Last Action Hero  (#758)
• Godspell  (#771)
• The Terror of Tiny Town  (#774)
• Nicholas and Alexandra  (#800)
  *.5
• Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle  (#821)
• The Road to Wellville  (#822)
  *
• First Knight  (#837)
  .5
• Needful Things  (#846)
• Ishtar  (#848)
• Lost Horizon (1973)  (#858)
• 13 Frightened Girls  (#867)
• North  (#868)

The Bottom 10 Columbia Films, #875-884
(worst being #10, which is #884 overall)

1. Mr. Deeds
2. White Chicks
3. Spring Break
4. Big Daddy
5. Jack and Jill
6. Sour Grapes
7. Leonard Part 6
8. 2012
9. Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star
10. Deuce Bigelow: European Gigolo

note:  The bottom three films are all zero stars.

Notes on Films

note:  These are just tidbits on some of the films.  The films are listed in alphabetical order.  Unless I have something specific to say, I don’t mention films that have full reviews elsewhere or films that I saw in the theater from 1989 to 2005 (they are all mentioned in those Nighthawk Awards).

• 3:10 to Yuma  –  A better film than I had remembered with a good villainous performance from Glenn Ford.
• Absence of Malice  –  A very good film that won’t get reviewed because it’s original.  Well worth seeing just for Newman’s performance.  Has one of my brother’s favorite film lines: “Boy, the last time there was a leak like this, Noah built hisself a boat.”
• Angels and Demons  –  My initial review of this upon seeing it was “So implausible that it makes The Da Vinci Code seems like established Catholic dogma.”
• Blondie on a Budget  –  None of the Blondie films are very good but if you see just one, see this one which has Rita Hayworth in it.
• Cash on Demand  –  I tried to see all the Hammer films released by Columbia (I’m close) and this was the best that I hadn’t seen before.  A tight little thriller with a strong performance from Peter Cushing.
• The Electric Horseman  –  Not worth mentioning except that it’s one of my mother’s favorite movies.
• A Few Good Men  –  Much higher on the list above than it would have been before but I have already re-watched it for the Best Adapted Screenplay project and it took a big jump up in my estimation this time.
• Fire Down Below  –  Should have been titled “Sorry, Jack Lemmon, but you’re no Robert Mitchum”
• Gilda  –  I want it to be a classic but even seeing it again didn’t raise it above high ***.  Definitely worth seeing though, just for Hayworth.
• The Green Hornet  –  Rich pothead douchebag becomes superhero because he’s bored.  Who thought this was a good idea?
• I Still Know What You Did Last Summer  –  Let’s make a movie starring Jennifer Love Hewitt and set it in the Bahamas and not put her in a bikini.  Who thought that was smart marketing?  Oh, and it totally stole its ideas from Scream 2.
• Ishtar  –  Just as bad as you think it’s going to be.
• Just Go With It  –  When you make me long for Goldie Hawn (this is a remake of Cactus Flower), you know you’ve done wrong.
• Just One of the Guys  –  The only thing I remember is that I think this was one of the first movies with a topless scene I ever saw.
• The Karate Kid (2010)  –  Totally pointless and unnecessary and Jayden Smith is too young.  But, there is one really good scene, which is when you realize what Jackie Chan does in the scene where he saves Smith from the bullies.
• The Man They Could Not Hang  –  Especially given that Columbia didn’t do much in the way of Horror, this one with Boris Karloff is well worth seeing.
• Mr. Deeds  –  If you thought the musical remake of Lost Horizon was the worst thing Columbia could do to a Frank Capra film you are in for a very unpleasant surprise.  What the hell is Oscar level talent like Winona Ryder, John Turturro and Steve Buscemi doing in this piece of shit?  This film seems like the filmmakers saw the episode of The Simpsons where Mel Gibson remakes Mr. Smith and thought that it was a brilliant idea.
• Murder by Death  –  Part of a wave of Mystery-Comedies in the mid to late 70’s.  I rewatched this a couple of years ago as a condition of being loaned some hard to find films from a regular commenter.  It’s funny in parts with its parody of other famous detectives (The Cheap Detective, two years later from Columbia would do the same) but doesn’t hold together well enough to be higher than a low ***.
• My Stepmother is an Alien  –  There was a girl named Sarah Borrey in my ninth grade class and I was desperately in love with her.  That same year this film, with a young actress named Alyson Hannigan who looked just like Sarah was released.  That’s all I remember and I spent years looking for her again before she finally became a household name almost a decade later with Buffy and American Pie.  Sarah transferred to a private high school after ninth grade and I never saw her again.
• Only Angels Have Wings  –  One of the Columbia films I re-watched for this post because it has such a high reputation.  I did bump it up a bit but it’s still at high *** and I’m not really certain why it’s ranked so high at TSPDT.
• The Other Boleyn Girl  –  Ironies abound.  Saw this in 2015, not long after Wolf Hall came out (in which some of the same events are told much better with Mark Rylance playing Cromwell instead of Thomas Boleyn) and right after Benedict Cumberbatch, who in this film, dies and his wife, played by Scarlett Johansson, ends up marrying Eddie Redmayne, lost the Best Actor Oscar race to, of course, Eddie Redmayne.  In spite of that cast, not worth seeing.
• Paul Blart: Mall Cop  –  In high school, a local mall had both Kindergarten Cop and Terminator 2 film scenes there.  This was filmed at my local mall in Massachusetts.  What a fall from my high school days.
• St. Elmo’s Fire  –  The Medium Sized Chill.  My best suggestion is to watch the video for the fantastic title song and skip the film.
• Still Crazy  –  A really good, fun movie with a fantastic soundtrack.  See it if you haven’t already.
• Stripes  –  One of the most ridiculous plots ever put on film but a fun film anyway with a pretty good score for a silly Comedy.
• The Terror of Tiny Town  –  Really has to be seen to be believed.
• Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story  –  Easily my favorite thing Judd Apatow has been involved with, namely because of Reilly’s goofy, endearing performance and a really good set of original songs.
• The War Lover  –  The film my parents saw on their first date which, for years, was described to me as “a film where Steve McQueen crashes into the White Cliffs of Dover at the end”.  Worth seeing namely for McQueen’s performance even if I just spoiled the end of it for you.
• Wholly Moses!  –  If you want a good example of why I can’t stand Dudley Moore, watch this terrible Biblical parody.
• Year of the Comet  –  My friend Tavis and I tried desperately to get this for years (I finally saw it years later) because William Goldman writes about in Which Lie Did I Tell, about how earnest he was about it and how no one cared.  Yeah, because it’s about a bottle of wine, Bill.  It’s not worth tracking down unless you’re obsessed with Penelope Ann Miller.
• Zookeeper  –  More crappy Kevin James filmed in Boston while we were there, this time at our zoo (Franklin Zoo).  A lot of CGI.  There is no spot in the zoo that gives you a view of the Boston skyline like this movie tries to show (more than once).

The 10 Most Under-Rated Columbia Films

These are all films that I rate at **** that have never appeared in TSPDT’s Top 1000 (now 2000) or their Top 250 21st Century Films (now 1000).  Also, I eliminated a few films that were nominated for Best Picture (The More the Merrier, Picnic, A Passage to India).  I present them in their rank order.

1. Hamlet
2. Across the Universe
3. The End of the Affair
4. In the Line of Fire
5. To Die For
6. The Professionals
7. Stranger Than Fiction
8. Ghostbusters
9. The Ides of March
10. Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion

The Best Columbia Films by Decade

• 1920’s:  no film above ***
• 1930’s:  Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
• 1940’s:  His Girl Friday
• 1950’s:  The Bridge on the River Kwai
• 1960’s:  Lawrence of Arabia
• 1970’s:  The Last Picture Show
• 1980’s:  A Passage to India
• 1990’s:  The Age of Innocence
• 2000’s:  Across the Universe
• 2010’s:  The Social Network

The Worst Columbia Films by Decade

• 1920’s:  no film below **.5
• 1930’s:  The Terror of Tiny Town
• 1940’s:  A Thousand and One Nights
• 1950’s:  Invasion U.S.A.
• 1960’s:  13 Frightened Girls
• 1970’s:  Lost Horizon
• 1980’s:  Leonard Part 6
• 1990’s:  Sour Grapes
• 2000’s:  Deuce Bigelow: European Gigolo
• 2010’s:  Bucky Larson: Born to be a Star

The Best Columbia Films by Genre

• Action:  Seven Samurai
• Adventure:  no film above ***
• Comedy:  Dr. Strangelove
• Crime:  Boyz N the Hood
• Drama:  Lawrence of Arabia
• Fantasy:  The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
• Horror:  Taxi Driver
• Kids:  Arthur Christmas
• Musical:  Across the Universe
• Mystery:  Anatomy of a Murder
• Sci-Fi:  Close Encounters of the Third Kind
• Suspense:  The Big Heat
• War:  The Bridge on the River Kwai
• Western:  The Professionals

The Worst Columbia Films by Genre

• Action:  2012
• Adventure:  Sheena
• Comedy:  Deuce Bigelow: European Gigolo
• Crime:  Buster and Billie
• Drama:  Invasion U.S.A.
• Fantasy:  Yor, the Hunter from the Future
• Horror:  Piranha II: The Spawning
• Kids:  The Smurfs
• Musical:  The Forbidden Dance
• Mystery:  Freedomland
• Sci-Fi:  Battle in Outer Space
• Suspense:  The Juror
• War:  The Patriot
• Western:  The Terror of Tiny Town

The Most Over-Rated Columbia Films

1. Superbad
   low **.5 for a film that’s really not that funny
2. Husbands
   low *** and not a classic like some would have you believe
3. Obsession
   I wish de Palma’s films were better but they’re not
4. Only Angels Have Wings
   quite a good film, actually, but not an all-time classic like its TSPDT rank would have you believe
5. The Lady from Shanghai
   again, a strong *** but not even the presence of Welles and Hayworth can make a solid film a great one

The Statistics

Total Films 1912-2011: 884  (4th)

Total Percentage of All Films 1912-2011:  6.59%

• 1912-1929:  5  (1.40%)  (13th – tie)
• 1930-1939:  63  (5.77%)  (7th)
• 1940-1949:  85  (7.57%)  (8th)
• 1950-1959:  122  (9.57%)  (3rd)
• 1960-1969:  132  (8.84%)  (2nd)
• 1970-1979:  125  (8.28%)  (2nd)
• 1980-1989:  108  (6.35%)  (3rd)
• 1990-1999:  121  (6.22%)  (3rd – tie)
• 2000-2009:  102  (4.16%)  (5th – tie)
• 2010-2011:  21  (4.43%)  (6th)

Percentage I’ve Seen of All Columbia Films 1924-2011:  35.84%  (41.79%)

note:  The second number in parenthesis for both the above line and the decade lines below refers to the percentage of major feature films by Columbia, thus not counting the various series films, the B Westerns or documentaries.  Except for documentaries (which are a very small percentage), those end by 1959 so I only include it for the first few decades.

Percentage I’ve Seen by Decade:

• 1924-1929:  4.84%  (4.96%)
• 1930-1939:  13.91%  (17.31%)
• 1940-1949:  15.36%  (21.04%)
• 1950-1959:  26.71%  (33.80%)
• 1960-1969:  49.62%
• 1970-1979:  62.50%
• 1980-1989:  70.59%
• 1990-1999:  73.46%
• 2000-2009:  65.58%
• 2010-2011:  83.33%

Biggest Years:

• 20:  1959
• 19:  1957
• 18:  1973
• 17:  1940
• 16:  1941, 1962

note:  Columbia has the most films of any studio in 1959, 1965, 1966, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975 and 1976.

Biggest Years by Percentage of All Films:

• 1959:  15.50%
• 1940:  14.29%
• 1941:  13.33%
• 1957:  12.84%
• 1954:  11.43%

Biggest Years by Percentage of Columbia Films I’ve Seen:

• 1983:  100%  (12 for 12)
• 1998:  92.86%  (13 for 14)
• 1994:  92.31%  (12 for 13)
• 1984, 1990:  85.71%  (12 for 14)

note:  The lowest year is any year before 1928.  I have seen none of the 69 films made before 1928.  1950 is the last year where I have seen less than 10%, 1953 is the most recent year I have seen less than 20%, 1968 is the only year since 1956 where I have seen less than 40% of the films.  1986 and 1988 are the only years since 1971 where I have seen less than half the films.  I have seen at least 60% of the films in all but six years since 1971.

Best Year:

• 1987, 1993:  4 films in the Top 20
• Columbia has never had more than 2 films in the Top 10 but has had two films 12 times, ranging from 1934 to 1995.  It had two Top 10 films and three Top 20 films each year from 1982 to 1984.

Eras:

• Top 10 most films every year except 1912-26 and 1927-28.

Columbia entered the Top 10 most films in 1932 and moved into 8th in 1934.  It passed Universal into 7th in 1938.  It caught RKO and moved into 6th in 1942 but moved back the next year and stayed in 7th until 1959.  It would stay in 6th until 1992 when it finally passed United Artists.  In 2008, it would catch MGM and move into 4th place among all studios.

The Top Films:

Columbia would be the last of the majors to win the Nighthawk, finally winning in 1953.  But by winning four in five years, it was the fourth studio to win four awards.  In 1962 it would become just the second to win five awards, after UA which did it the year before and two years later would be the first to win a sixth.  Because of the 31 year wait between awards it would only be the third studio to win seven awards and it still hasn’t won an eighth.

• Nighthawk Winner:  1953, 1954, 1956, 1957, 1962, 1964, 1995
• 4 Films in the Top 20:  1987, 1993
• Top 10 Films:  61
• First Year in the Top 10:  1934
• Latest Year in the Top 10:  2010
• Top 20 Films:  114
• Best Decade for Top 20 Films:  1980’s  (20)
• Worst Decade for Top 20 Films:  1920’s  (0)
• note:  Columbia had the most Top 20 films in the 90’s of any studio with 16.

Nighthawk Awards

• Number of Films That Have Earned Nominations:  163
• Number of Films That Have Won Nighthawks:  54
• Number of Films With Multiple Nominations:  97
• Number of Films With Multiple Wins:  24
• Best Picture Nominations:  36
• Total Number of Nominations:  576
• Total Number of Wins:  146
• Category With the Most Nominations:  Actor  (48)
• Director with Most Nighthawk Nominated Films:  Frank Capra  (7)
• Best Film with No Nighthawks:  The Shawshank Redemption
• Best Film with No Nighthawk Nominations:  Our Man in Havana
• Number of Films That Have Earned Drama Nominations:  85
• Number of Films That Have Earned Comedy Nominations:  70
• Number of Films That Have Won Drama Awards:  26
• Number of Films That Have Won Comedy Awards:  27
• Drama Picture Nominations:  28
• Comedy Picture Nominations:  26
• Total Number of Drama Nominations:  262
• Total Number of Comedy Nominations:  219
• Total Number of Drama Wins:  65
• Total Number of Comedy Wins:  65
• Category With the Most Nominations:  Actor  (43 – Drama  /  40 – Comedy)
• Best Drama Film With No Nominations:  Tess
• Best Comedy Film With No Nominations:  Still Crazy
• Most 2nd Place Finishes:  A Passage to India  (8)
• Most 6th Place Finishes:  The Remains of the Day  (4)
• Most Top 10 Finishes:  From Here to Eternity  (17)
• Most Top 20 Finishes:  From Here to Eternity  /  Lawrence of Arabia  (18)
• Films With at Least One Top 10 Finish:  243
• Best Film Without a Top 10 Finish:  Texasville
• Films With at Least One Top 20 Finish:  296
• Best Film Without a Top 20 Finish:  And Now for Something Completely Different

Most Nighthawk Nominations:

1. From Here to Eternity  –  15
2. The Bridge on the River Kwai  –  15
3. Lawrence of Arabia  –  14
4. On the Waterfront  –  13
5. Seven Samurai  –  13
6. A Passage to India  –  13
7. Taxi Driver  –  12
8. A Man for All Seasons  –  11
9. The Last Picture Show  –  11
10. Close Encounters of the Third Kind  /  The Age of Innocence  /  Sense and Sensibility  –  11

Most Nighthawks:

1. Seven Samurai  –  13
2. The Bridge on the River Kwai  –  13
3. Lawrence of Arabia  –  13
4. On the Waterfront  –  11
5. From Here to Eternity  –  10
6. Sense and Sensibility  –  9
7. Dr. Strangelove  –  5
8. Bram Stoker’s Dracula  –  4
9. six films  –  3

Most Nighthawk Points:

1. The Bridge on the River Kwai  –  780
2. From Here to Eternity  –  755
3. On the Waterfront  –  750
4. Lawrence of Arabia  –  740
5. Seven Samurai  –  690
6. Sense and Sensibility  –  625
7. A Passage to India  –  485
8. Dr. Strangelove  –  480
9. Taxi Driver  –  445
10. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington  –  425

Most Drama Nominations:

1. From Here to Eternity  –  9
2. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington  –  8
3. On the Waterfront  –  8
4. The Last Picture Show  –  8
5. A Passage to India  /  Sense and Sensibility  –  7

Most Comedy Nominations:

1. Shampoo  –  8
2. Tootsie  –  8
3. The Big Chill  –  8
4. The Awful Truth  –  7
5. When Harry Met Sally  –  7

Most Drama Wins:

1. From Here to Eternity  –  6
2. On the Waterfront  –  6
3. Lawrence of Arabia  –  5
4. A Passage to India  –  5
5. Sense and Sensibility  –  5

Most Comedy Wins:

1. The Awful Truth  –  6
2. The More the Merrier  –  5
3. Dr. Strangelove  –  5
4. Tootsie  –  5
5. The Big Chill  –  5

Most Drama Points:

1. From Here to Eternity  –  560
2. On the Waterfront  –  520
3. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington  –  490
4. A Passage to India  –  465
5. Sense and Sensibility  –  460
6. Lawrence of Arabia  –  430
7. The Bridge on the River Kwai  –  430
8. Five Easy Pieces  –  380
9. Seven Samurai  –  365
10. The Last Picture Show  –  345

Most Comedy Points:

1. The Awful Truth  –  500
2. Tootsie  –  490
3. The Big Chill  –  485
4. The More the Merrier  –  435
5. Dr. Strangelove  –  435
6. When Harry Met Sally  –  435
7. To Die For  –  370
8. Adaptation  –  365
9. Shampoo  –  355
10. Here Comes Mr. Jordan  –  335

All-Time Nighthawk Awards

note:  As always, films in red won the Oscar and films in blue were nominated.

• Best Picture

1. Lawrence of Arabia
2. Dr. Strangelove
3. The Bridge on the River Kwai
4. Seven Samurai
5. On the Waterfront

Analysis:  The full list above, of course, is the full list.
The first three films are all 99 films.  There are only 23 “99” films in film history and to have three of them is remarkable.  The only other studios with more than two are Paramount and Warner Bros which both have four.  All five of the films on the list win the Nighthawk as do From Here to Eternity and Sense and Sensibility while The Age of Innocence is one of the highest #2 films in film history.  Another 29 Columbia films earn Nighthawk nominations including three in the 15 year stretch where Columbia had no Oscar nominee for Best Picture (Hamlet, The End of the Affair, Across the Universe).  Aside from the six Dramas that win Picture, three more win the Drama award, all of them #2 in their year (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Five Easy Pieces, A Passage to India).  Aside from Dr. Strangelove, eight others win the Comedy award, with two of them (The More the Merrier, To Die For) doing it without even finishing in the Top 5 for the year overall (the other Comedy winners are The Awful Truth, The Professionals, Tootsie, The Big Chill, When Harry Met Sally, Across the Universe).  Overall, 57 films finish in the Top 10 and 99 finish in the Top 20 and earn at least ***.5.
Columbia has won Best Picture at the Oscars 12 times, including three times in five years from 1953 to 1957 and 7 times in 20 years from 1949 to 1968.  Before that, it had only won twice (It Happened One Night, You Can’t Take It With You) and since then has only won three times (Kramer vs. Kramer, Gandhi, The Last Emperor).  It earned its first nomination in 1933, never skipped more than one year until 1944, when there was a gap until 1949, then never skipped more than two years in a row until 1972-1975.  From 1976 to 1995, there were two consecutive year gaps (1985-1986, 1988-1989) but most years had a nominee.  But then, after 1995, it would not be until 2010 that another Columbia film would earn Best Picture.  Overall, there have been 51 nominees from Columbia, including the 1st and 4th most successful Oscar films, points-wise (From Here to Eternity, On the Waterfront).
Columbia has won Picture – Drama at the Globes 12 times, including five times from 1957 to 1966, though since 1979 it has only won twice (The Last Emperor, The Social Network).  It has also won Picture – Comedy three times (Oliver, Tootsie, Hope and Glory) as well as winning Picture – Musical twice in the stretch where Musical and Comedy were separate awards (Porgy and Bess, Song Without End).  In 1987, it became just the third studio to ever win both Drama and Comedy in the same year.  In addition, there have been 24 Drama nominees including two each in 1965, 1966 (three including the winner), 1967 and 1970 and it had three in the gap from 1995 to 2010 where it had no Oscar nominees (The People vs. Larry Flynt, The End of the Affair, Closer).  The studio has also had 37 more Comedy or Musical nominees including three in 1975 (Shampoo, Funny Lady, Tommy).  It has never gone more than 4 years between Comedy nominees.
The studio hasn’t been as successful at the BAFTAs.  It has won eight times (Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Strangelove, A Man for all Seasons, Gandhi, Educating Rita, The Last Emperor, Sense and Sensibility), the first four of which also won British Film.  It has earned an additional 29 nominations, though 11 of them were before 1968 when there were no limits on the number of nominees.  Since 1993, it only has three nominations (The End of the Affair, Big Fish, The Social Network).  It has earned six Best British Film nominations (in addition to the four wins) but Casino Royale is the only one since 1967.
Sense and Sensibility and The Social Network both won the BFCA while seven other films have earned nominations.  No Columbia film has won the PGA though 15 films have been nominated for it including 10 films in the award’s first 8 years and three films in 2011 (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Ides of March, Moneyball).
The Social Network is the only really big winner at the critics awards, sweeping all six while no other Columbia film has more than two.  That’s a little deceptive, though because Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, On the Waterfront and Bridge on the River Kwai all won both awards (NBR, NYFC) in an era where there were only two and A Man for All Seasons won those two in the first year of three awards so all of those were dominant winners.  In addition, five other films won two awards (Kramer vs. Kramer, Gandhi, A Passage to India, Hope and Glory, Sense and Sensibility).  Eight other Columbia films have won at least one critics award with It Happened One Night, True Glory (both NBR), All the King’s Men and From Here to Eternity (both NYFC) all doing it in an era where there were only two awards.  In 1971, Columbia had the NSFC winner (Claire’s Knee) and the NBR winner (Macbeth).

• Best Director

1. David Lean  (Lawrence of Arabia)
2. David Lean  (The Bridge on the River Kwai)
3. Akira Kurosawa  (Seven Samurai)
4. Elia Kazan  (On the Waterfront)
5. Martin Scorsese  (The Age of Innocence)

Analysis:  Scorsese doesn’t win the Nighthawk though the others do as do Zinnemann (From Here to Eternity), Kubrick (Dr. Strangelove) and Ang Lee (Sense and Sensibility).  Including Scorsese, there are 30 nominees who don’t win while there are 62 total Top 10 finishers.  Capra (Mr. Smith) and Lean (Passage) win Drama awards in addition to those above while Columbia has had 10 Comedy winners.
Columbia has an interesting and distinguished history at the Oscars in this category.  All of its wins have been in bunches with large gaps in between.  From 1934 to 1938, it won four Oscars, the only studio to ever win four in five years and the first to win three in a row (1936-38), something no other studio would do for four more decades and has only been done the two times.  But then it was followed by a 15 year gap before three in five years, a 5 year gap before winning three in seven years, an 11 year gap before winning three in nine years and then a gap that has run since 1987.  Columbia is the only studio to win back-to-back director Oscars without either film winning Best Picture (Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, The Awful Truth) and it’s even more incredible since both were Comedies.  In fact, Columbia’s first four Oscars in this category were all for Comedies and no other Comedy would win the award until 1952 and United Artists is the only other studio with more than one Director Oscar for Comedy (it has three).
Columbia has won 12 Globes but half of them were from 1949 to 1957 (including three in a row from 1953 to 1955: From Here to Eternity, On the Waterfront, Picnic) and only four have come since 1966 (Gandhi, Last Emperor, The People vs. Larry Flynt, Social Network).  In addition, it has earned 34 nominations including four in two years in 1992-93 (A Few Good Men, A River Runs Through It, Age of Innocence, Remains of the Day).
Columbia has only won three BAFTAs: Midnight Express, Gandhi and The Social Network.  In addition, it has earned 14 nominations.  At the BFCA, Ang Lee won and Tim Burton (Big Fish) earned a nomination.
Columbia has done well at the DGA which is much older than the PGA and coincides with Columbia’s strong era in the 1950’s and 1960’s.  It has won the award nine times, six of them from 1949 to 1966 and hasn’t won since 1987.  In addition, it has earned 35 nominations including eight in three years in the more extended nomination era of 1966-68.
David Fincher is the big critics winner, sweeping the awards in 2010.  Ang Lee won three awards in 1995.  David Lean won both awards in the era of two awards in 1957 and won the only award in 1962 (the NYFC had a strike going) and George Stevens won the award when there was only one award.  Aside from Lean, five other directors won two awards (including Lean in 1984) and 11 total directors won one award each, six of them before 1966 and two more when there were only three critics groups.  The most awards have been the NYFC (11) and the NBR (9).

• Best Adapted Screenplay:

1. Dr. Strangelove
2. The Bridge on the River Kwai
3. The Age of Innocence
4. The Shawshank Redemption
5. Adaptation

Analysis:  Nine films have won the Nighthawk, though only the top two listed here do (the other three are in very strong years).  The other winners are The Awful Truth, From Here to Eternity, Lawrence of Arabia, Midnight Express, Sense and Sensibility and The Social Network.  Another 28 films earn nominations and another 30 land in the Top 10.
Ten films win the Oscar including at least one film in every decade.  Another 41 earn Oscar nominations including 10 in the 60’s and three nominees in 1965 alone (Collector, Cat Ballou, Ship of Fools).  Six films win Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay (It Happened One Night, From Here to Eternity, The Bridge on the River Kwai, A Man for all Seasons, Kramer vs Kramer, Last Emperor).
Six films won the Globe that are also adapted (A Man for all Seasons, Midnight Express, Kramer vs Kramer, Last Emperor, Sense and Sensibility, Social Network).  Of those, only Man, Emperor and Social won the big three awards.  For the nomination numbers see the next category.
During the years before the category split at the BAFTAs six Columbia films that were adapted won Best Screenplay (Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Man for all Seasons, Go-Between, Last Picture Show, Last Detail).  Since the split (in 1983), The End of the Affair, Adaptation and Social Network have all won.  Before the split, six adapted films earned nominations and since the split 11 have earned nominations.
Four films have won the BFCA (Sense and Sensibility, Adaptation, Social Network, Moneyball) and one has been nominated (Big Fish).  All six of the Columbia WGA winners pre-split were adapted and seven more have won since the 1967 splits.  See below for more statistics.
Social Network won five critics awards (all but the NYFC) while Adaptation won four (not LAFC or NSFC).  Also, Sense and Sensibility and Moneyball each won three while four films won one award each, most importantly Anatomy of a Murder which did so when the NYFC was the only critics group that gave a Screenplay award.

• Best Original Screenplay:

1. When Harry Met Sally…
2. On the Waterfront
3. The Big Chill
4. Seven Samurai
5. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Analysis:  Six films win the Nighthawk including four above (not The Big Chill), Five Easy Pieces and Tootsie.  Seventeen more films earn nominations and 13 beyond that are in the Top 10.  Lately, Columbia has been far stronger with adapted scripts (there are only two Nighthawk nominees since 1993 – Stranger Than Fiction and Across the Universe).
Six films win the Oscar, one of which also won another writing award (Here Comes Mr. Jordan) and two of which were nominated (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 49th Parallel).  The other three winners are On the Waterfront, Gandhi and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner with the first two the only Columbia films to win Picture, Director and Original Screenplay.  Columbia hasn’t had an Oscar nominee in this category since 1993.
The only two original scripts to win the Golden Globe Screenplay award are Gandhi and The People vs Larry Flynt.  There have been a total of 24 Globe nominees for Screenplay (not including winner), most of them adapted but the Globe doesn’t distinguish.  Columbia did score five nominations in two years in 1983-84 (Dresser, Big Chill, Educating Rita, Soldier’s Story, Passage to India) but none of them won and they had the winner (Gandhi) and another nominee (Tootsie) in 1982.
The only pre-split winner at the BAFTAs that was original was I’m All Right Jack.  Since the split, Columbia has won two awards (When Harry Met Sally, Groundhog Day).  There were four original films nominated before the split and there have been five nominees since the split though none since 1993.
The only BFCA nominee is Stranger Than Fiction.
Six Columbia films have won the WGA, all six of them between 1967 and 1983.  In total, 66 films have earned nominations (not including the 19 winners) though Stranger Than Fiction is the only original nominee since 1995.
Tootsie is the big winner among original scripts at the critics awards, winning New York, LA and the NSFC.  Two films won two awards each (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Hope and Glory).  Shampoo and Stranger Than Fiction are the only original scripts to win one award.

• Best Actor:

1. Peter O’Toole  (Lawrence of Arabia)
2. Alec Guinness  (The Bridge on the River Kwai)
3. Marlon Brando  (On the Waterfront)
4. Robert De Niro  (Taxi Driver)
5. Anthony Hopkins  (The Remains of the Day)

Analysis:  Hopkins doesn’t win the Nighthawk though he does earn a perfect 9.  Actually, Columbia has six perfect 9’s because there is also Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.  Aside from those four above and Stewart, Peter Sellers (Dr. Strangelove), Jack Nicholson (Five Easy Pieces) and Michael Caine (Educating Rita) all win the Nighthawk.  Including Hopkins and the winners, there are 48 Nighthawk nominees including three in 1979 (Dustin Hoffman, Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino).  This is by far the most dominant category at the Nighthawk Globes with seven Comedy winners, 40 total Comedy nominees, 7 Drama winners and 43 total Drama nominees including three films nominated twice (From Here to Eternity, The Dresser, Shawshank Redemption).
Nine performances have won the Oscar and another 39 have earned Oscar nominations (including two from The Dresser).  But, until 1973 (when Jack Nicholson earned his second nomination), there had been 7 winners and 17 nominees and there only duplicate actor was Jimmy Stewart (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Anatomy of a Murder).  That would finally change starting in the 70’s with Nicholson (Five Easy Pieces, The Last Detail), Hoffman (Kramer vs Kramer, Tootsie) and De Niro (Taxi Driver, Awakenings) and even Will Smith (Ali, The Pursuit of Happyness).
Columbia has done decently in Drama at the Globes (10 wins, including back to back in 1982-83) and another 27 nominations.  In Comedy, while the nominations are spread out (30 over a space of almost 60 years with only one gap of more than five years), the winners are very much bunched: 1957 and 1958, then 1965 and 1968, then three straight from 1982 to 1984 with none since.  That also means Columbia won both Best Actor Globes in back-to-back years in 1982 and 1983, a rare distinction (it happened once before with United Artists).
Thirteen films have won the BAFTA while another 27 films have earned nominations while neither number includes the four films that earned two nominations (Seven Samurai, Prisoner, Dr. Strangelove, The Dresser) while the first number does include Lawrence of Arabia which did both.
With the BFCA coming around after the height of Columbia, only four performances have earned nominations (Ali, Pursuit of Happyness, Social Network, Moneyball).  The last three were all also SAG nominees as were The People vs Larry Flynt and Adaptation while Morgan Freeman won the SAG for Shawshank.
Five performances have won three critics awards: De Niro in Taxi Driver, Hoffman in Kramer, Kingsley in Gandhi, Eisenberg in Social Network and Pitt in Moneyball.  In addition, Awakenings won three awards, two for De Niro and one for Robin Williams.  Another eight films have won two awards with Guinness in Bridge on the River Kwai winning the only two in existence at the time and the two awards in 1965 being split for Ship of Fools (because Lee Marvin also won his for Cat Ballou).  Another 10 performances beyond that won one critics award each.

• Best Actress

1. Emma Thompson  (The Remains of the Day)
2. Emma Thompson  (Sense and Sensibility)
3. Julianne Moore  (The End of the Affair)
4. Rosalind Russell  (His Girl Friday)
5. Judy Davis  (A Passage to India)

Analysis:  Both Thompson performances and Davis win the Nighthawk.  Aside from Moore and Russell, there are 28 Nighthawk nominees.  Columbia does much better at the Nighthawk Globes in Comedy (10 winners, 20 nominees with two each in 1934, 1936 and 1938) than Drama (4 winners, 21 nominees).
The Oscars and I are not in alignment in this category as none of the five Oscar winners (It Happened One Night, Born Yesterday, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Funny Girl, Misery) are in my Top 5 though all but Russell earned nominations (along with 29 other performances including two from Suddenly Last Summer).  Irene Dunne is notable for being nominated in back-to-back years for Theodora Goes Wild and The Awful Truth.
Columbia has a strange history at the Globes.  It won in Comedy in 1950 (for Judy Holliday who was also Drama nominated) then Drama in 1959, 1963 and 1965.  Since then, Columbia has won 8 Comedy awards and only one Drama award (Misery) and twice earned two Comedy noms (Shampoo, Annie).  Altogether, there have been 32 Comedy noms (from 30 films) and 28 Drama noms (from 27 films).  Streisand is the big Columbia actress here with a Comedy win, two more Comedy noms and a Drama nom.
There have been 9 BAFTA winners, mostly for British actresses (Katharine Hepburn, Woodward and Fonda are the exceptions).  There have also been 25 other nominees.  At the BFCA, Nicole Kidman (To Die For) and Meryl Streep (Julie and Julia) won while Diane Keaton (Something’s Gotta Give) was nominated.  No Columbia actress has won SAG though five have earned noms (Sense and Sensibility, End of the Affair, Something’s Gotta Give, Memoirs of a Geisha, Julie and Julia).
A Passage to India won three awards (two for Peggy Ashcroft, one for Judy Davis) and Streep won two awards for Julie and Julia.  Aside from that, only eight other performances have even won a single critics award.

• Best Supporting Actor:

1. Toshiro Mifune  (Seven Samurai)
2. Omar Sharif  (Lawrence of Arabia)
3. Claude Rains  (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington)
4. Karl Malden  (On the Waterfront)
5. Sterling Hayden  (Dr. Strangelove)

Analysis:  All five of these win the Nighthawk as do Frank Sinatra (From Here to Eternity), Sessue Hayakawa (Bridge on the River Kwai), George C. Scott (Anatomy of a Murder), Gene Hackman (I Never Sang for My Father), Ben Johnson (Last Picture Show), Jack Warden (Shampoo), Chris Cooper (Adaptation) and Clive Owen (Closer).  It’s a strong category for Columbia.  Mr. Smith and Waterfront get two other nominations and Bridge and Picture Show get one more each.  In total there are 47 nominations from 41 films.  All the Drama winners are listed above but there are also an additional six performances that win the Comedy award as well.  Like I said, a strong category.
Only five actors have won the Oscar: Sinatra, Johnson, Cooper, Charles Coburn (The More the Merrier) and Jack Palance (City Slickers) but Waterfront had three nominees and Picture Show, Anatomy of a Murder and Mr. Smith had two each.  That gives the studio 48 nominations from 43 films.
Nine of the Columbia films have won the Globe and another 23 have earned nominations.  Only four performances have won the BAFTA (Edward Fox for The Go-Between, Johnson, John Hurt for Midnight Express, Owen) but there have been 26 total nominations, including two each for The Go-Between and Gandhi.  At the BFCA, Cooper won the award while three others have earned nominations.  But Columbia has been mostly ignored by SAG, earning just three nominations (Kenneth Branagh for Othello, Cooper, Jonah Hill for Moneyball).
Edward Norton won three critics awards in 1996 with The People vs. Larry Flynt being one of the films listed.  Two awards each went to Jack Nicholson (Easy Rider), Johnson, Nicholson again (A Few Good Men) and Cooper while seven performances have won one award each.

• Best Supporting Actress:

1. Meryl Streep  (Kramer vs. Kramer)
2. Eva Marie Saint  (On the Waterfront)
3. Meryl Streep  (Adaptation)
4. Natalie Portman  (Closer)
5. Peggy Ashcroft  (A Passage to India)

Analysis:  Portman doesn’t win the Nighthawk but the other four do as do 10 others.  This is a strong category for Columbia.  Aside from the 10 winners, there are 34 other nominees.  The Last Picture Show manages a winner and two other nominees while Kramer vs. Kramer and Tootsie have a winner and a nomination.
Of the 12 films to manage an Oscar winner and an Oscar nominee only Columbia has done it three times: The Last Picture Show, Kramer vs. Kramer, Tootsie.  Columbia has also managed nine other Oscar winners and 21 other nominees.
Columbia managed the winner and nominee trick at the Globes with Kramer and Only When I Laugh.  It also managed ten other winners, a film with two nominees (Last Picture Show) and nine other nominees.  It did the winner and nominee at the BAFTAs with Last Picture Show, Gandhi, Age of Innocence and Sense and Sensibility.  Aside from those four films, it has three BAFTA wins and nine nominees.  Angelina Jolie (Girl Interrupted) won the BFCA while three others have earned nominations.  Kate Winslet (Sensibility) and Jolie won SAG while Cloris Leachman (Spanglish) was nominated.
Streep won four awards for Kramer while three awards each went to Karen Black (Five Easy Pieces) and Jessica Lange (Tootsie) while The Last Picture Show split three awards (two for Ellen Burstyn, one for Cloris Leachman).  Peggy Ashcroft won two awards (and three as lead) as did Courtney Love for The People vs. Larry Flynt.  Eleven other performances won one award each.

• Best Ensemble

1. On the Waterfront
2. From Here to Eternity
3. The Last Picture Show
4. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
5. Lawrence of Arabia

Analysis:  This is based on the total points for acting for all members of the cast.  It’s impressive that Lawrence of Arabia can make the list without a single speaking role for a female.  Eternity and Picture Show make the list here without making the Top 5 in any individual acting categories because they were often in the Top 10, just not in the Top 5 and because they have large excellent casts.

• Best Editing:

1. The Bridge on the River Kwai
2. Lawrence of Arabia
3. The Social Network
4. On the Waterfront
5. Seven Samurai

Analysis:  Social Network doesn’t win the Nighthawk but the other four do as does From Here to Eternity.  Aside from Social Network, 31 other films also earn Nighthawk noms.
Columbia has done well at the Academy Awards, winning 11 Editing Oscars including three in a row in the 50’s (From Here to Eternity, On the Waterfront, Picnic) and back-to-back in 2010 and 2011 (Social Network, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo).  It has also earned 33 other nominations.  It has had three four year stretches with at least one nomination: five nominations in 1936-39, four from 1977-1980 and five again from 1982-85 but also had a 13 year drought between 1997 and 2010.
Columbia has only won twice at the BAFTAs (Midnight Express, Social Network) and has earned 12 nominations.  It won the BFCA with Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and earned a nomination for Social Network.  It has won the ACE four times (Gandhi, Last Emperor, Black Hawk Down, Social Network) and earned 17 other nominations, six of them since the group added a Comedy category.

• Best Cinematography:

1. Lawrence of Arabia
2. The Bridge on the River Kwai
3. A Passage to India
4. Seven Samurai
5. The Last Emperor

Analysis:  There is a sixth perfect score for Cinematography: Age of Innocence though it doesn’t win the Oscar because (like with many categories) of Schindler’s List.  It is one of 32 Nighthawk nominees in addition to the five winners.  There are also 29 more Top 10 and 47 more Top 20.
Twelve films have won the Oscar, half of them during the split category years and six since though only Memoirs of a Geisha has won since 1992.  In fact, nine of the wins were in just 30 years from 1953 to 1982.  There have also been 48 nominees, again split almost evenly (22 during the split years).  In the first few years after the split (1967), Columbia did well (9 nominations in six years) but not that well (no wins).
Three films have won the BAFTA (A Man for All Seasons, Tess, Memoirs of a Geisha) and 23 other films have been nominated, seven of them during the “British Cinematography” years.  Columbia has been blanked at the BFCA.  At the ASC there have been three wins (Shawshank, Patriot, Geisha) and nine other nominees.  Last Emperor won three critics awards, Tess won two and Hope and Glory and Dracula won one each.

• Best Original Score:

1. Lawrence of Arabia
2. The Bridge on the River Kwai
3. The Da Vinci Code
4. Silverado
5. Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Analysis:  The first three all win the Nighthawk as do From Here to Eternity, On the Waterfront, Seven Samurai, The Professionals, Taxi Driver, Sense and Sensibility and The Social Network.  Another 17 films earn nominations.
Columbia films have won 15 Oscars in Score though several of them were in the Musical Score category and one was in Adapted Score / Song Score (The Buddy Holly Story).  Since 1987, though, the only winner is Social Network.  Between all the Score categories, there have been 77 nominees and while it might not have won an Oscar in the 90’s, 10 Columbia films were nominated from 1991 to 1997.
Six films have won the Globe (Guns of Navarone, Midnight Express, Passage to India, Last Emperor, Memoirs of a Geisha, Social Network) and 16 others have been nominated, although, only two of those were from 1991 to 1997, showing some disagreement with the Oscars.
Only two films have won the BAFTA (Taxi Driver, Memoirs of a Geisha) while 13 others have earned nominations.  Geisha and Social Network both won the BFCA while three others have earned nominations.  Social Network also won two critics awards while Taxi Driver and Midnight Express each won one.

• Best Sound:

1. The Bridge on the River Kwai
2. Casino Royale
3. Lawrence of Arabia
4. Black Hawk Down
5. Seven Samurai

Analysis:  Six films win the Nighthawk, which doesn’t include Black Hawk Down but does include From Here to Eternity and On the Waterfront.  Another 25 films aside from that (including Black Hawk Down) earn nominations.
Six films win the Oscar, though only two since 1968 (The Last Emperor, Black Hawk Down) but a whopping 44 have earned nominations, including 24 since 1968 and four in 2010 and 2011 combined.  It’s worth mentioning that 13 of those nominations are from 1934 to 1945 when every studio was guaranteed a nomination.
Casino Royale is the only BAFTA winner though ten other films have earned nominations.  The Social Network is the only BFCA nominee.  No Columbia film has won the CAS though eleven films have earned nominations.

• Best Art Direction:

1. Bram Stoker’s Dracula
2. The Last Emperor
3. The Age of Innocence
4. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
5. Memoirs of a Geisha

Analysis:  There are 9 Columbia films that earn a perfect score in Art Direction.  The other four, in chronological order, are Lawrence of Arabia, A Passage to India, Hamlet and Marie Antoinette.  Those are among 13 Columbia films that win the Nighthawk and another 17 that earn nominations.
Eleven films have won the Oscar but only The Last Emperor and Memoirs of a Geisha since 1982.  In addition, 36 films have earned nominations.  Five films have won BAFTAs (Dr. Strangelove, A Man for All Seasons, The Hireling, Close Encounters, Baron Munchausen) and 23 other films have earned nominations.  There have been no BFCA nominees.  The ADG missed a lot of great Columbia work by starting late but Memoirs of a Geisha, Casino Royale and Girl with the Dragon Tattoo all won awards while 13 other films have earned nominations.

• Best Visual Effects

1. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
2. The Fifth Element
3. Spider-Man 2
4. Casino Royale
5. Jason and the Argonauts

Analysis:  Columbia isn’t a big VE driven studio.  Only 34 films even make the Top 20 at the Nighthawks.  Eight films do win the award, all but two of them before the 1977 boom (Dracula and Fifth Element are the exceptions) and there are 24 total nominees (including the winners).  Of the winners, four of them have visual effects from Ray Harryhausen and of the nominees, two are Spider-Man films two are Bond films and seven of them are Harryhausen films.
There are three Oscar winners (Guns of Navarone, Marooned, Spider-Man 2) and nine more Oscar nominees though, appallingly, none are Harryhausen films.  The Fifth Element wins the BAFTA and there are 12 more nominees, including six in seven years from 2002 to 2008.  2012 earned a BFCA nom.  Spider-Man 2, Casino Royale and Stuart Little 2 each won VES awards and Spider-Man 3 earned four noms while 21 total films have earned a combined 40 nominations.

• Best Sound Editing

1. Casino Royale
2. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
3. The Fifth Element
4. Seven Samurai
5. Black Hawk Down

Analysis:  There are five Nighthawk winners (From Here to Eternity, Seven Samurai, Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Casino Royale) and 22 more nominees.
There are two Oscar winners (Close Encounters, Dracula) and five more Oscar nominees.  45 different films have earned MPSE noms for a total of 55 nominations as well as 10 awards.

• Best Costume Design:

1. The Last Emperor
2. The Age of Innocence
3. Bram Stoker’s Dracula
4. Marie Antoinette
5. Memoirs of a Geisha

Analysis:  There are actually 10 Columbia films that earn a perfect 9 in Costume Design.  The other five, in chronological order, are Seven Samurai, Lawrence of Arabia, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Sense and Sensibility and Hamlet.  There are a total of 12 Nighthawk winners (Bridge on the River Kwai, A Man for All Seasons and Gandhi) but Munchausen doesn’t win.  Aside from Munchausen there are 12 other nominees.  Interestingly, Columbia has won six awards since 1989 but had no nominations that didn’t win.
Eleven films have won the Oscar including back-to-back winners in 1970 and 71 (Cromwell, Nicholas and Alexandra), 1992 and 93 (Dracula, Age of Innocence) and 2005 and 06 (Memoirs, Marie Antoinette).  There have been 26 other nominees including four in a row from 93-96 (the first two, Remains of the Day and Little Women, are #6 at the Nighthawks while the next two, Sense and Hamlet, are winners).  Eight films have won the BAFTA and there have been 19 nominees.  There have been no BFCA nominees.  Memoirs and Girl with the Dragon Tattoo both won CDG awards while seven others have earned nominations.

• Best Makeup

1. Bram Stoker’s Dracula
2. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
3. Memoirs of a Geisha
4. The Last Emperor
5. Hellboy

Analysis:  Because of weaker years, the Nighthawk winners, of which there are seven, aren’t the same as the list above (Seven Samurai, Lawrence of Arabia, Macbeth, Munchausen, Dracula, Fifth Element, Geisha).  There are 14 other Nighthawk nominees.
Dracula and Men in Black won the Oscar while five others have earned nominations.  Tootsie, Last Emperor and Munchausen won the BAFTA while nine others have earned nominations.  There have been no BFCA nominees.  The Patriot and both Charlie’s Angels films won MUASG awards while Ali, Spider-Man and Master of Disguise earned noms.

• Best Technical Aspects

1. Lawrence of Arabia
2. The Bridge on the River Kwai
3. Seven Samurai
4. Bram Stoker’s Dracula
5. The Fifth Element

Analysis:  Simply adding up all the points in the technical categories.  Great, great technical work from these five films.

• Best Original Song:

1. “Against All Odds”  (Against All Odds)
2. “The Flame Still Burns”  (Still Crazy)
3. “El Cancion del Mariachi”  (Desperado)
4. “Separate Lives”  (White Nights)
5. “It Might Be You”  (Tootsie)

Analysis:  Columbia has had several films in which the song is the only aspect that earns a Nighthawk nom.  Of the five films to win the Nighthawk (which includes Pennies from Heaven and Georgy Girl but not White Nights or Tootsie), only Georgy Girl earns another nomination.  Of the 16 other films to earn nominations, nine of them earn no other nominations and only From Here to Eternity and Tootsie earn Picture noms.
Columbia wasn’t a big Song nominee at the Academy.  33 Columbia films have earned 34 nominations but outside of the stretch where every studio earned a nomination (1938 to 1945, when it earned seven noms) and the early to mid 80’s where Columbia did well in the category (nine noms), it only earned 17 nominations spread out over 53 years.  It has won the award only five times (Born Free, Way We Were, You Light Up My Life, Thank God It’s Friday, White Nights) though it won back-to-back in 1977 and 1978.  All of those except Born Free also won the Globe while it has earned an additional 22 nominations.  However, while it hasn’t earned an Oscar nom since 1993, it has earned five Globe noms since then.  The short lived BAFTA category came during the early 80’s when Columbia was strong in this category and it earned nominations all three years (Annie, Tootsie, Ghostbusters) and won the award with the latter song.  There have been five BFCA noms but no winner (none of which, of course, earned Oscar noms).

• Best Animated Film:

1. Arthur Christmas
2. Monster House

Analysis:  Columbia isn’t a big Animated Film producer.  I have seen 17 films over the years that are animated and were released by Sony.  There have been two mild Japanese films (Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon, Jack and the Beanstalk), two Hanna/Barbera films (Hey There It’s Yogi Bear, The Man Called Flintstone) and several random films through the years (1001 Arabian Nights, Heavy Metal, American Pop, Care Bears Movie II, Manuelita, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, Eight Crazy Nights).  They released one Aardman film (Arthur Christmas) which earned Nighthawk, Globe, BAFTA, BFCA and Annie noms (and, of course, no Oscar nom).  Monster House was an Amblin film and it earned Nighthawk, Oscar, Globe, BFCA and Annie noms.  Then Sony began their own Sony Pictures Animation which, through 2011, has released Open Season, Surf’s Up, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and The Smurfs.  None of those films reach the ***.5 threshold for a Nighthawk nomination but they have, combined, earned one Oscar nom (Surf’s Up), one Globe nom (Cloudy), one BFCA nom (Cloudy) and three Annie noms (Open Season, Surf, Cloudy).

• Best Foreign Film:

1. Seven Samurai
2. Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
3. Hanussen
4. Sundays and Cybele
5. El Mariachi

Analysis:  Columbia isn’t a big Foreign Film distributor either.  I’ve seen just 37 films released in the States by Sony with Seven Samurai being far and away the best.  Only six films make my cutoff (El Bruto is the other one).  The first two win the Nighthawk, the next two both finish fourth, El Mariachi finishes 12th and El Bruto doesn’t make the Top 20.
Two films win the Oscar and three earn noms (Electra and Brothers Karamazov are the other two).  Because of weird Globe rules and British films being distributed by Columbia, six films have won the Globe (The Best of Enemies, Young Winston, Lies My Father Told Me, Tess, Gandhi, A Passage to India) while eleven more (eight of them British) earn noms.  There have been no BAFTA or BFCA noms.  Of the five films to win critics awards (all of them the NBR), one is British (The Prisoner) and two are Jacques Cousteau documentaries (Silent World, World Without Sun) with the last two being Sundays and Cybele and Claire’s Knee.

• Best Film (by my points system):

1. Lawrence of Arabia
2. The Bridge on the River Kwai
3. On the Waterfront
4. From Here to Eternity
5. Seven Samurai

Analysis:  The top four films here are among the top films of all-time, partially because of great technical work across the board and numerous great acting performances.  From Here to Eternity lands fourth here while not making the Top 5 in any of the individual categories.  It lands in the Top 10 in most categories but just can’t crack the Top 5 anywhere.

• Best Film  (weighted points system)

1. Lawrence of Arabia
2. The Bridge on the River Kwai
3. On the Waterfront
4. From Here to Eternity
5. The Age of Innocence

Analysis:  Age of Innocence passes Seven Samurai because of the acting which weighs more while A Passage to India finishes just three points short.

Best Films With No Top 5 Finishers:

• Hamlet
• Across the Universe
• A Man for All Seasons
• Stand by Me
• Hope and Glory
• Boyz N the Hood
• The Big Heat
• Midnight Express

Worst Film with a Top 5 Finish:

• Against All Odds

Nighthawk Notables

• Best Film to Watch Over and Over:  Dr. Strangelove
• Best Line  (comedic):  “You made a woman meow?’”  (Bruno Kirby in When Harry Met Sally…)
• Best Line  (dramatic):  “The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.”  (Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia)
• Best Opening:  Closer
• Best Ending:  The Bridge on the River Kwai
• Best Scene:  the approach of Sheriff Ali in Lawrence of Arabia
• Best Kiss:  Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity
• Best Death:  Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove
• Most Gut-Wrenching Scene:  Lawrence’s realization of who must die in Lawrence of Arabia
• Most Heart-Breaking Scene:  the end of Across the Universe
• Best Use of a Song (Dramatic):  “The Blower’s Daughter”  (Closer)
• Best Use of a Song (Comedic):  “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”  (The Big Chill)
• Best Original Song from a Bad Film:  “Better Days”  (Eat Pray Love)
• Best Soundtrack:  Across the Universe
• Best Non-Rock Soundtrack:  Lawrence of Arabia
• Watch the Film, SKIP the Book:  Sense and Sensibility
• Read the Book, SKIP the Film:  Lost Horizon  (1973)
• Funniest Film:  Dr. Strangelove
• Best Guilty Pleasure:  The Golden Voyage of Sinbad
• Most Over-Rated Film:  Superbad
• Worst Film by a Top 100 Director:  North  (Rob Reiner)
• Worst Film I Saw in the Theater:  Needful Things
• Worst Sequel:  Deuce Bigelow: European Gigolo
• Best Sequel:  Casino Royale
• Worst Remake:  Mr. Deeds
• Best Remake:  Hamlet (1996)
• Performance to Fall in Love With:  Evan Rachel Wood in Across the Universe
• Performance for the 14 Year Old in Me to Fall in Love With:  Alyson Hannigan in My Stepmother is an Alien
• Sexiest Performance:  Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday
• Highest Attractiveness / Acting Ability Ratio:  Rita Hayworth in Gilda
• Most Surprisingly Good Performance in an Otherwise Terrible Film:  Janet Suzman in Nicholas and Alexandra
• Coolest Performance:  Daniel Craig in Casino Royale
• Best Opening Credits Sequence:  Casino Royale
• Best End Credits Sequence:  Across the Universe
• Best Tagline:  “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies”  (The Social Network)
• Best Trailer:  Casino Royale
• Best Cameo:  Joe Cocker in Across the Universe
• Sexiest Cameo:  Gemma Arterton in Quantum of Solace
• Funniest Cameo:  Bruce Campbell in Spider-Man 2
• Best Animated Character Performance:  Ashley Jensen in Arthur Christmas

note:  Some of the categories that are usually here (e.g. Best Ensemble) that are covered by lists elsewhere in the post aren’t here.
note:  Soundtracks I Own from TriStar Films (chronological):  Lawrence of Arabia, The Big Chill, Stand by Me, La Bamba, Across the Universe

At the Theater:  By the end of 2011, I had probably seen over 1000 films in the theater at some point or another and had definitely been to the movies over 1000 times.  I had seen 52 Columbia films in the theater, starting with The Karate Kid Part II and including City Slickers (three times), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (twice), Spider-Man (three times), Spider-Man 2 (three times) and Across the Universe which moved me so much I wrote my first piece on this blog about it, over 10 years ago.

Awards

Academy Awards

• Number of Films That Have Earned Nominations:  237
• Number of Films That Have Won Oscars:  68
• Number of Films With Multiple Nominations:  142
• Number of Films With Multiple Wins:  31
• Best Picture Nominations:  51
• Total Number of Nominations:  732
• Total Number of Wins:  152
• Category With the Most Nominations:  Score  (77)
• Number of Films with Nominations I Haven’t Seen:  1
• Directors with Most Oscar Nominated Films:  Frank Capra  /  Rob Reiner  (6)
• Best Film with No Oscar Nominations:  His Girl Friday

Oscar Oddities:

• Columbia has the biggest Oscar points film ever and the #4 film but only one more in the Top 20.
• The Last Emperor has the most awards for a Columbia film but only the 10th most nominations.
• The only two Columbia films with more than 2 Oscars to win all of their nominations both won Picture: The Last Emperor (9 for 9) and It Happened One Night (5 for 5).
• The Remains of the Day is the biggest loser, going 0 for 8 while six films for 0 for 7.  Of those six films five were nominated for Picture (Pepe wasn’t) and none were nominated for Director.
• While 52.49% of all Oscar nominated films earn just one nomination, only 95 of the 237 Columbia films nominated have done so (40.08%).
• While Frank Capra and Rob Reiner have both directed six Oscar nominated films at Columbia, Capra’s films went 11 for 39 while Reiner’s went 1 for 10.  Mr. Smith Goes to Washington earned more nominations (11) than all of Reiner’s combined.
• The two biggest Oscar winning directors are David Lean (16 Oscars with three films) and Fred Zinnemann (14 with three films).

Most Oscar Nominations

1. From Here to Eternity  –  13
2. On the Waterfront  –  12
3. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington  –  11
4. Oliver!  –  11
5. Gandhi  –  11
6. A Passage to India  –  11
7. Lawrence of Arabia  –  10
8. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner  –  10
9. Tootsie  –  10
10. Close Encounters of the Third Kind  /  Kramer vs. Kramer  /  The Last Emperor  –  9

Most Oscar Wins:

1. The Last Emperor  –  9
2. From Here to Eternity  –  8
3. On the Waterfront  –  8
4. Gandhi  –  8
5. The Bridge on the River Kwai  –  7
6. Lawrence of Arabia  –  7
7. A Man for All Seasons  –  6
8. It Happened One Night  –  5
9. Oliver!  –  5
10. Kramer vs. Kramer  –  5

Most Oscar Points:

1. From Here to Eternity  –  675
2. On the Waterfront  –  655
3. Gandhi  –  565
4. The Last Emperor  –  530
5. Lawrence of Arabia  –  525
6. The Bridge on the River Kwai  –  520
7. Kramer vs. Kramer  –  510
8. Oliver!  –  490
9. A Man for All Seasons  –  480
10. It Happened One Night  –  410

Oscar Nominated Films:

• Columbia has three streaks of a decade or longer of having at least one nominated film: 1933-1946, 1948-1973 and 1975-1997.
• Since earning its first nomination in 1931, Columbia has never gone back-to-back years without at least one nominated film.
• The high number for nominated films in one year is 7 in 1984.
• Columbia lead in 1959 with 5 films, the first year since 1933 that no studio had at least 6 films.  It lead again in 1967, again with 5 films.  In 1969 and 1975 it would tie for the lead (again with 5).  It would tie in 1983 with 4 and lead all studios in both 1984 and 1985 with 7 and then 6.  Its most recent lead was in 1993, again with 5.
• Because of the late start (its first nominated film wasn’t until 1931 and its second in 1933) and because Frank Capra could only make so many films (he directed over a third of the Columbia films nominated in the 30’s), Columbia would rise briefly to a couple of ties for 7th in most overall nominated films but would mostly stay in 8th until finally passing Universal in 1966 and moving into 7th and finally catching RKO for 6th in 1970, over a decade after RKO went out of business.  Even though, MGM and UA basically don’t make movies anymore, Columbia is still a ways behind both of them and mired in 6th place.

By Decade:

• 1920’s:  0
• 1930’s:  17  (7th)
• 1940’s:  29  (8th)
• 1950’s:  31  (5th)
• 1960’s:  32  (6th)
• 1970’s:  37  (2nd)
• 1980’s:  37  (2nd – tie)
• 1990’s:  29  (6th – tie)
• 2000’s:  18  (7th)
• 2010’s:  6  (4th – tie)
• Total:  236  (6th)

Oscar Nominations:

• Columbia has lead in the total number of nominations 8 times, all between 1954 and 1987.  The years were 1954 (21), 1959 (17 – tie with MGM), 1968 (19), 1971 (17), 1975 (14), 1982 (24), 1984 (24) and 1987 (15).
• It rose briefly to 6th place overall in the late 30’s but only because of tracking Fox and 20th Century-Fox separately.  By 1941, 20th Century-Fox had passed it (even though it started four years later).  It would stay in 7th until finally passing RKO in 1962.  Columbia would finally catch United Artists and move into 5th place in 2006.

Years with Most Total Oscar Nominations:

• 1982, 1984:  24
• 1954:  21
• 1968:  19
• 1965, 1967:  18
• 1959, 1966, 1971:  17

By Decade:

• 1920’s:  0
• 1930’s:  62  (6th)
• 1940’s:  76  (8th)
• 1950’s:  102  (5th)
• 1960’s:  126  (3rd)
• 1970’s:  109  (4th)
• 1980’s:  114  (2nd)
• 1990’s:  81  (5th)
• 2000’s:  36  (12th)
• 2010’s:  24  (3rd)
• Total:  728  (5th)

Oscar Wins:

• The longest streak of years with at least one Oscar win is 1965 to 1973.
• Since winning its first Oscar in 1934, Columbia has never gone three consecutive years without at least one Oscar.
• Columbia lead all studios in Oscars 11 times, starting in 1934 when its then 7 Oscars tied the most for a studio in a year and most recently in 1987.  It lead in back-to-back years in 1953 and 1954.
• The most Oscars it has won in a year is 9 in 1987, all of which were won by The Last Emperor.  The Last Emperor won as many Oscars as Columbia would win in the following 13 years combined.
• Because it didn’t win an Oscar until the 7th Academy Awards, Columbia has never ranked highest than a tie for 4th in total Oscars by studio and was usually 6th overall behind all the majors.  By the time it passed RKO, it had been passed by United Artists and it wouldn’t pass UA until it had basically ceased making films in the early 90’s.  By 1995 it had actually caught Warner Bros with 139 total Oscars but since then Warners has won 28 Oscars while Columbia has won only 15.

By Decade:

• 1920’s:  0
• 1930’s:  15  (3rd)
• 1940’s:  8  (8th)
• 1950’s:  29  (4th)
• 1960’s:  31  (2nd)
• 1970’s:  23  (3rd)
• 1980’s:  26  (4th)
• 1990’s:  9  (9th)
• 2000’s:  8  (11th – tie)
• 2010’s:  4  (4th – tie)
• Total:  157  (5th)

Critics Awards

• Number of Films That Have Won Critics Awards:  72
• Number of Films With Multiple Awards:  36
• Best Picture Wins:  32
• Total Number of Awards:  212
• Category With the Most Awards:  Actor  (44)

Most Awards:

1. The Social Network  –  22
2. Kramer vs. Kramer  –  12
3. Tootsie  –  10
4. A Passage to India  –  10
5. Sense and Sensibility  –  9

Most Points:

1. The Social Network  –  1682
2. Kramer vs. Kramer  –  876
3. Tootsie  –  706
4. A Passage to India  –  701
5. Sense and Sensibility  –  701
6. A Man for All Seasons  –  596
7. Hope and Glory  –  558
8. The Bridge on the River Kwai  –  516
9. Adaptation  –  450
10. Moneyball  –  420

Highest Awards Percentage:

1. It Happened One Night  –  71.43%
2. The Bridge on the River Kwai  –  63.08%
3. A Man for All Seasons  –  49.30%
4. The Social Network  –  41.48%
5. Mr. Deeds Goes to Town  –  37.34%
6. On the Waterfront  –  32.02%
7. Kramer vs. Kramer  –  30.83%
8. From Here to Eternity  –  27.48%
9. Tootsie  –  25.56%
10. All the King’s Men  –  24.36%

Most Points by Critics Group:

• NYFC:  Places in the Heart  –  80
• LAFC:  Bugsy  –  270
• NSFC:  Devil in a Blue Dress  –  110
• BSFC:  Donnie Brasco  –  70
• CFC:  Bugsy / The Fisher King / Husbands and Wives / Jerry Maguire  –  60
• NBR:  As Good as It Gets  –  130

Golden Globes

• Number of Films That Have Earned Nominations:  173
• Number of Films That Have Won Globes:  62
• Number of Films With Multiple Nominations:  104
• Number of Films With Multiple Wins:  22
• Best Picture Nominations:  78 (36 Drama, 42 Comedy)
• Total Number of Nominations:  417
• Total Number of Wins:  103
• Category With the Most Nominations:  Picture  (78)
• Best Film with No Globe Nominations:  Dr. Strangelove

Globe Oddities:

• Four films won Picture and Director before there was a Screenplay award (All the King’s Men, On the Waterfront, Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia) but only three have won Picture, Director and Screenplay (A Man for All Seasons, Last Emperor, Social Network).  All but the first and last went on to win Picture and Director at the Oscars.
• Gandhi, which was ineligible for Picture, did win Foreign Film, Director and Screenplay.
• A whopping 17 Columbia films have won Best Actor; of those one one Best Actress (Educating Rita) and one other was nominated (Cat Ballou).  On the other hand, two Columbia films have won both supporting awards and they did it two years apart (Adaptation, Closer).
• From 1965 to 1968, Columbia had eleven Picture nominees, seven in Drama, four in Comedy.
• Columbia has never gone three straight years without a Picture nomination.

Most Globe Nominations:

1. Kramer vs. Kramer  –  7
2. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner  –  6
3. Midnight Express  –  6
4. Sense and Sensibility  –  6
5. Adaptation  –  6
6. The Social Network  –  6

Most Globes:

1. All the King’s Men  –  4
2. A Man for All Seasons  –  4
3. Midnight Express  –  4
4. Kramer vs. Kramer  –  4
5. Gandhi  –  4
6. The Last Emperor  –  4
7. The Social Network  –  4

Most Globe Points:

1. Kramer vs. Kramer  –  415
2. The Social Network  –  385
3. A Man for All Seasons  –  370
4. Midnight Express  –  370
5. The Last Emperor  –  355
6. All the King’s Men  –  345
7. Lawrence of Arabia  –  320
8. Tootsie  –  315
9. Sense and Sensibility  –  315
10. The Bridge on the River Kwai  /  The People vs. Larry Flynt  /  Adaptation  –  290

Guild Awards

• Number of Films That Have Earned Nominations:  163
• Number of Films That Have Won Guild Awards:  40
• Number of Films With Multiple Nominations:  75
• Number of Films With Multiple Wins:  14
• Best Picture Nominations:  17
• Total Number of Nominations:  347
• Total Number of Wins:  60
• Category With the Most Nominations:  Screenplay  (85)
• Best Film with No Guild Nominations:  Seven Samurai
• Best English Language Film with No Guild Nominations:  Across the Universe

Most Guild Nominations:

1. The Social Network  –  12
2. Memoirs of a Geisha  –  9
3. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo  –  9
4. Adaptation  –  8
5. Spider-Man 2  –  8
6. The Shawshank Redemption  –  7
7. Black Hawk Down  –  7
8. Moneyball  –  7
9. The Patriot  –  6
10. Spider-Man 3  –  6

Most Guild Wins:

1. Memoirs of a Geisha  –  4
2. All the King’s Men  –  3
3. The Patriot  –  3
4. Spider-Man 2  –  3
5. The Social Network  –  3
6. nine films  –  2

Most Guild Points:

1. The Social Network  –  450
2. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo  –  295
3. The Shawshank Redemption  –  280
4. Memoirs of a Geisha  –  275
5. Sense and Sensibility  –  270
6. Adaptation  –  270
7. All the King’s Men  –  250
8. Black Hawk Down  –  235
9. Spider-Man 2  –  220
10. Moneyball  –  220

Highest Guild Awards Percentage:

1. The Last Emperor  –  18.30%
2. Kramer vs. Kramer  –  16.83%
3. From Here to Eternity  –  16.50%
4. On the Waterfront  –  16.50%
5. All the King’s Men  –  15.72%
6. Tootsie  –  12.82%
7. Close Encounters of the Third Kind  –  12.40%
8. The China Syndrome  –  12.38%
9. Gandhi  –  11.97%
10. The Shawshank Redemption  –  11.07%

note:  There have been so many added guild awards that it’s useful to have this list for historical comparison.  Of note, All the King’s Men, the only film on both lists has a lower percentage than several films that come after it for the same reason it has more points – there were a lot more WGA nominees at that time than in later years and it won two separate awards.  The Last Emperor is tenth all-time in percentage.  The Social Network, on the other hand, isn’t even in the Top 35 in points.

The BAFTAs

• Number of Films That Have Earned Nominations:  124
• Number of Films That Have Won BAFTAs:  44
• Number of Films With Multiple Nominations:  75
• Number of Films With Multiple Wins:  21
• Most BAFTA Wins:  Terminator 2: Judgment Day  (2)
• Best Picture Nominations:  37
• Total Number of Nominations:  382
• Total Number of Wins:  86
• Category With the Most Nominations:  Actor  (44 films, 49 nominations)
• Best Film with No BAFTA Nominations:  The Shawshank Redemption

Most BAFTA Noms:

1. Gandhi  –  15
2. Hope and Glory  –  13
3. Sense and Sensibility  –  12
4. The Go-Between  –  11
5. The Last Emperor  –  11
6. The End of the Affair  –  10
7. Close Encounters of the Third Kind  –  9
8. Tootsie  –  9
9. A Passage to India  –  9
10. Casino Royale  –  9

Most BAFTA Wins:

1. A Man for All Seasons  –  7
2. The Bridge on the River Kwai  –  4
3. Lawrence of Arabia  –  4
4. Gandhi  –  4
5. 10 films  –  3

Most BAFTA Points:

1. Gandhi  –  590
2. A Man for All Seasons  –  470
3. Sense and Sensibility  –  470
4. The Go-Between  –  440
5. Hope and Glory  –  400
6. Lawrence of Arabia  –  385
7. The Last Emperor  –  360
8. The Bridge on the River Kwai  –  350
9. Dr. Strangelove  –  350
10. The End of the Affair  –  340

Broadcast Film Critics Awards
(Critic’s Choice Awards)

• Number of Films That Have Earned Nominations:  26
• Number of Films That Have Won BFCA Awards:  9
• Number of Films With Multiple Nominations:  10
• Number of Films With Multiple Wins:  3
• Most BFCA Noms:  The Social Network  (8)
• Most BFCA Wins:  The Social Network  (4)
• Best Picture Nominations:  9
• Total Number of Nominations:  49
• Total Number of Wins:  14
• Category With the Most Nominations:  Picture  (9)
• Best Film with No BFCA Nominations:  Across the Universe

BFCA Points:

1. The Social Network  –  430
2. Adaptation  –  220
3. Sense and Sensibility  –  180
4. Big Fish  –  170
5. Moneyball  –  165

All Awards

Most Nominations:

1. The Social Network  –  62
2. Sense and Sensibility  –  41
3. Gandhi  –  37
4. Tootsie  –  37
5. A Passage to India  –  37
6. Kramer vs. Kramer  –  36
7. The Last Emperor  –  33
8. Adaptation  –  33
9. A Man for All Seasons  –  29
10. Hope and Glory  /  Moneyball  –  29

Most Awards:

1. The Social Network  –  39
2. A Man for All Seasons  –  26
3. Kramer vs. Kramer  –  23
4. Gandhi  –  23
5. The Bridge on the River Kwai  –  22
6. The Last Emperor  –  22
7. Sense and Sensibility  –  19
8. On the Waterfront  –  18
9. Tootsie  –  17
10. Lawrence of Arabia  /  A Passage to India  –  16

Total Awards Points

1. The Social Network  –  3429
2. Kramer vs. Kramer  –  2101
3. Sense and Sensibility  –  2070
4. A Man for All Seasons  –  1923
5. Gandhi  –  1881
6. Tootsie  –  1748
7. The Bridge on the River Kwai  –  1699
8. A Passage to India  –  1661
9. The Last Emperor  –  1554
10. On the Waterfront  –  1476

Highest Awards Percentage:

1. It Happened One Night  –  22.35%
2. A Man for All Seasons  –  18.90%
3. Kramer vs. Kramer  –  18.49%
4. The Bridge on the River Kwai  –  18.37%
5. On the Waterfront  –  17.45%
6. From Here to Eternity  –  17.44%
7. Gandhi  –  16.31%
8. The Social Network  –  16.26%
9. Tootsie  –  15.16%
10. All the King’s Men  –  14.90%

Lists

Lists for studios are harder because I have to come up with them myself.  There are no books that rank the best films by studio and no way to sort through them on the IMDb or TSPDT.

The TSPDT Top 25 Columbia Films

1. Seven Samurai  (#10)
2. Taxi Driver  (#15)
3. Lawrence of Arabia  (#33)
4. Dr. Strangelove  (#48)
5. His Girl Friday  (#141)
6. On the Waterfront  (#150)
7. Close Encounters of the Third Kind  (#195)
8. Only Angels Have Wings  (#234)
9. In a Lonely Place  (#269)
10. Husbands  (#289)
11. The Last Picture Show  (#306)
12. It Happened One Night  (#329)
13. The Bridge on the River Kwai  (#379)
14. The Shawshank Redemption  (#387)
15. The Awful Truth  (#408)
16. Five Easy Pieces  (#424)
17. Punch-Drunk Love  (#442)
18. The Lady from Shanghai  (#449)
19. Tootsie  (#481)
20. The Big Heat  (#513)
21. The Age of Innocence  (#622)
22. Fat City  (#628)
23. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington  (#653)
24. Claire’s Knee  (#678)
25. When Harry Met Sally…  (#742)

note:  The numbers in parenthesis are the position on the most recent (2018) TSPDT list.  This list would have been different in any other year.  When Harry Met Sally only made the Top 1000 this year after eight years off the list.  Back when the list was reconfigured in 2013, Bridge on the River Kwai dropped over 100 spots while Husbands went up over 200 spots.  The Last Detail was in the Top 25 for a long time (sometimes quite high) but has dropped to #27 (The Last Emperor is above it).

The IMDb Top 10 Columbia Films

1. The Shawshank Redemption
2. Seven Samurai
3. Dr. Strangelove
4. Lawrence of Arabia
5. Taxi Driver
6. The Bridge on the River Kwai
7. On the Waterfront
8. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
9. It Happened One Night
10. Stand by Me

Top 10 U.S. Domestic Box Office  (1984-2011)

1. Spider-Man  –  $403.70 mil
2. Spider-Man 2  –  $373.58 mil
3. Spider-Man 3  –  $336.53 mil
4. Men in Black  –  $250.69 mil
5. Ghostbusters  –  $229.24 mil
6. Hancock  –  $227.94 mil
7. The Da Vinci Code  –  $217.53 mil
8. Men in Black II  –  $190.41 mil
9. Hitch  –  $179.49 mil
10. Tootsie  –  $177.20 mil

note:  I have seen every Columbia film in the Top 50 (and every Columbia film that has made over $80 million).

Top 10 U.S. Domestic Box Office (all-time, adjusted to October 2018)

1. Ghostbusters  –  $651.95 mil
2. Spider-Man  –  $636.48 mil
3. Spider-Man 2  –  $551.05 mil
4. Tootsie  –  $521.24 mil
5. Close Encounters of the Third Kind  –  $512.25 mil
6. Lawrence of Arabia  –  $507.31 mil
7. Men in Black  –  $500.28 mil
8. The Bridge on the River Kwai  –  $498.30 mil
9. Spider-Man 3  –  $448.05 mil
10. The Caine Mutiny  –  $406.59 mil

Books

Have there been more good books about film published about Columbia than any other studio?  I’m not even talking about books about Frank Capra (of which there are multiple good ones) or other people who spent time at the studio, but about what was actually going on at the studio itself.

King Cohn: The Life and Times of Harry Cohn, Bob Thomas, 1967

A fascinating book in terms of its subject and a wildly entertaining book that is full of anecdotes that made Harry Cohn seem larger than life.  A must read for anyone who is seriously interested in film history, it gives a very good, very detailed history of the studio from its founding through the death in 1958 of its head, Harry Cohn.  While I was reading it, there were numerous anecdotes that were so good that I simply had to read them aloud to Veronica and there are too many good ones to include here.  Long out of print but easy to find used online.

The Name Above the Title, Frank Capra, 1971

As the best director associated with the studio, the one who helped it to rise to an Oscar winning studio instead of just barely existing above the other Poverty Row studios, Capra is indelibly linked with Columbia.  That’s evidenced in the index where Harry Cohn takes up 11 lines of references, the same amount as taken up by Capra’s wife.  Cohn and Columbia don’t come in until page 79 but it dominates the action for 200 pages.  Capra’s book is helpful for getting the inside take on the making of the biggest Columbia films of the 1930’s.

The Films of Rita Hayworth: The Legend and Career of a Love Goddess, Gene Ringgold, 1974

The kind of guide to a star’s film that used to be so popular and has tailed off considerably in the last couple of decades, this is useful since the majority of Hayworth’s films were made for Columbia and she was the studio’s biggest star.  The introductory part, before the details of each film, talks much about her career at Columbia.  There are also a lot of stills and a detailed look at all of her films which included more than two dozen at Columbia, most notably Only Angels Have Wings, Angels Over Broadway, Cover Girl, Gilda and The Lady from Shanghai.

Hail Columbia, Rochelle Larkin, 1975

There are three things that limit this book.  First, it is over 40 years old now and thus way out of date.  Second, it has a variety of errors (it’s one thing to disagree with another source on a release date, quite another to just be way wrong, such as having correct months and days but wrong years).  Third, though it is styled in the manner of a coffee-table book, it is not of that size (it’s a little taller than an average hardcover book).  All of that said, this is actually a fantastic resource on Columbia Pictures and well worth looking at.  First, it provides an ample history of the studio.  Second, it groups things together and at the end of each chapter gives detailed information about a variety of important Columbia films that fit the chapter (example chapters: “The Capra Years”, “The Stars”, “The Oscars”).  Third, the reason it resemble a coffee-table book is that it is filled to the gills with stills (at one point eight pages in a row are full page stills of Rita Hayworth – although that brings up a different flaw in the book since they’re all in black-and-white).  It’s a nice companion book to The Columbia Story, listed below, because this does do those chapter groupings and allows you to think of the films as groups instead of just individual films across the years.  Long out-of-print but easy to find used, cheap.

Rita Hayworth: The Time, the Place and the Woman, John Kobal, 1978

Not the most authoritative biography, as it was published in 1978 but mostly ignores anything Hayworth did after leaving Columbia in 1979.  Useful for learning more about Columbia as is evidenced by the index.  The only person with more listings in the index than Harry Cohn (who first appears on page 15 and runs all the way until the end) is Hayworth herself.

Indecent Exposure: A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street, David McClintock, 1982

This a hard back to read and that is not a dis on McClintock, his writing style or his reporting.  The book is fascinating and well-researched and well-written.  The problem is that, even if you don’t know the back history of the story, halfway through the book you still to realize with a sinking stomach what is going to happen and it just make you nauseous.  This is the story that rocked Columbia in the late 70’s when the head of the studio, David Begelman, a former agent, was discovered through a string of circumstances (namely having to do with Cliff Robertson) to be embezzling tens of the thousands of dollars from the studio.  In the end, while Begelman was bounced, he was actually brought back and Alan Hirschfield, the president of the company ended up being ousted instead even though he was the only one who was actually acting properly.  You realize halfway through that the board is more interested in loyalty and perceptions than that the man who was overseeing the studio had committed embezzlement and fraud and had been lying to them from the start.  McClintock would eventually write a very good piece on Begelman after he killed himself in 1995 in the midst of more financial problems.  It’s interesting to note that as I write this, in August of 2018, nothing about the scandal, even though it bounced the head of the studio and the company is currently listed on the Wikipedia page for Columbia Pictures.  There are few books that give you such a good idea what a screwed up place Hollywood can be.

Fast Fade: David Puttnam, Columbia Pictures, and the Battle for Hollywood, Andrew Yule, 1988

A fascinating book, mostly about Puttnam and his rise in the movie industry but it also deals, of course, with his very tumultuous year running Columbia which didn’t work out well for him.  It spares nothing in its look at Puttnam but it also recognizes his strengths as well and I get the feeling that if Puttnam really was allowed to just deal with the movies as they came up and not have to deal with people like Ray Stark like he was promised he wouldn’t have to, then he could have survived and the studio could have thrived.  But he couldn’t and he didn’t.  A very good book that helps you understand exactly how loathsome Hollywood is.  There is a quote towards the end that, in retrospect, is hilarious: “Several films that David left in the can have interesting potential, perhaps none more than Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.  Will this teller of tall tales ride to the rescue of David’s beleaguered state?  Only time will tell.”  Oh, time told on that one.  The answer was no.

Out of Focus: Power, Pride, and Prejudice – David Puttnam in Hollywood, Charles Kipps, 1989

So why would we need another book about Puttnam and his time at Columbia so soon after the first one?  The easy answer is that this is the hit job.  Kipps never flat out says that this is a reaction book to Yule’s designed to show more of the other side of the story (even though Yule’s book was very good in its objectivity).  Kipps got full access to Ray Stark, who didn’t like being interviewed and this is the book that came out of that.  It became obvious to me on page 58 when Kipps denigrates Puttnam for always taking the credit for his films and not giving credits to directors like Hugh Hudson and Roland Joffe.  Well, since Puttnam produced the only films from either that ever received serious Oscar consideration (an Oscar win, two more nominations) and since Hudson sank kind of fast after Puttnam and Joffe sank even faster (his film work outside of Puttnam is an unmitigated disaster), to make that criticism is rather weak.  Then to read all the access he had to Stark, it was clear this was a book with an agenda.  I was also irritated by Kipps’ criticism of Puttnam on page 154: “To most studio heads, having an actor the status of Kevin Costner volunteering to do a film would be looked upon as manna from heaven.  But David didn’t see it that way.”  That scene takes place in the spring of 1987, before The Untouchables opened, when Costner had yet to be the lead in a film and was mostly unknown.  It’s Kipps trying to use later hindsight knowledge to try and criticize Puttnam and it’s clumsy and stupid.   What wasn’t clumsy and stupid because Kipps didn’t have hindsight is his criticism on Puttnam not giving the greenlight to Ray Stark’s production of Revenge.  That film opened in 1990, after the book was published, and was terrible and sank like a rock.  This out-of-print book can be found really cheap and it deserves it.

Losing the Light: Terry Gilliam & the Munchausen Saga, Andrew Yule, 1991

Yule’s follow-up book was a great inside look at the making of one particular film that was such a financial disaster.  Yule had great access to all of this involved in making the film and it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read about making a specific film with some especially interesting insights from Eric Idle (“Up until Munchausen, I’d always been very smart about Terry Gilliam films.  You don’t ever be in them.  Go and see them in the cinema by all means – but to be in them, fucking madness!!”).  Given the little bit about the film that had ended Yule’s previous book, this was a fantastic follow-up.  Deals less with Columbia (because they are mostly in the background saying, “No, we won’t give you more money.”) but still important and fascinating.

Columbia Pictures: Portrait of a Studio, Bernard F. Dick, ed., 1992

A fascinating book.  The first 60+ pages are a detailed history of the studio that could have formed the entire top part of this post.  After that, the book moves into an academic study (it was published by a university press) with 13 different essays, some of them on specific films produced by the studio but others about periods in the studio’s history (for instance, one is entirely on Capra, another on Rita Hayworth).  Finally, the book ends with a 55 page list of all the Columbia releases by year, which also mentions which ones weren’t produced but were rather just distributed by the studio, a really helpful list to compare to other lists online.

Hit and Run: How Jon Peters and Peter Gruber Took Sony for a Ride in Hollywood, Nancy Griffin and Kim Masters, 1996

A fascinating book about the years in which Peter Gruber (and, for a stretch, Jon Peters) ran Columbia, which also happened to overlap with the same period in which Sony purchased Columbia.  I distinctly remember Billy Crystal making comments at the Oscars about Sony buying Columbia.  Peters was a disaster but Gruber did some important work for the company and really helped it rise to the top.  It also discusses Mark Canton, the publicity desperate man who was responsible for Last Action Hero and who had some very successful films for the studio that didn’t get released until after he had been fired.  I think of this as kind of the third book in this trilogy, along with McClintock and Yule for the history of the real troubled times that rocked Columbia for some 20 years.

The Columbia Story, Clive Hirschhorn, 1999

The kind of great coffee-table book that us film buffs love.  Almost every studio has at least one of these and this is a good one.  It has a brief history of the studio, then goes through all of the films, year by year.  It even has sections in the back for various series (all of the information on series listed above came from this book), serials, British films and foreign films.  It isn’t great for figuring out the important films, for example, in 1938, just flipping through, you’d never realize that You Can’t Take it With You is a key film, only their second Best Picture winner (though there is an Oscar appendix).  It’s also a British book, so it’s aimed more towards British aspects (including film titles changes and a list of films Columbia made but didn’t distribute in Britain) which is a bit odd for a book about an American film studio.  But it’s definitely a great book for anyone who likes this kind of book and was an invaluable resource as I was going through the list of Columbia films and deciding which ones I still should try to see before completing this post.  Like so many on this list, sadly out-of-print, but available easily used.

Reviews

The Best Columbia Film I Haven’t Yet Reviewed

In the Line of Fire  (1993, dir. Wolfgang Petersen)

When I was growing up, my first thought of Clint Eastwood was the crusty guy who played Dirty Harry.  I didn’t even know he was a director.  Then I saw White Hunter Black Heart and then Unforgiven was released and I began to reassess my views on him (as a filmmaker).  Then came 1993 and following up his Oscar triumph was one of his best film performances followed a few months later by one of his best films as a director.  The latter, A Perfect World, I have written about before, partially because I feel it is so criminally under-rated.  But while that film was overlooked, this film wasn’t.  It was actually, not adjusting for inflation, the biggest he hit had ever been in and it would earn Original Screenplay, Supporting Actor and Editing nominations from both the Oscars and the BAFTAs.  It only earned a Screenplay nomination at the Nighthawks but in a very, very competitive year it also finished in 6th in Supporting Actor, Sound and Sound Editing and 7th in Director and Editing.  Not only that, but it has one of the most enjoyable performances from Clint Eastwood in his very long film career and is one of two films that make you think that Wolfgang Petersen should have had a much better career than he did (Das Boot is the other one).

Eastwood plays Frank Horrigan, a Secret Service agent who works on cases like forgery as he is clearly nearing retirement.  He used to work the presidential detail but he has never forgiven himself for not taking a bullet for JFK back in 1963 (a good use of both Eastwood’s age, who would have been 33, and of digital editing to place him in photos).  But, through chance, he stumbles across a plan to kill the president from a deranged maniac who turns out to be a former CIA assassin named Mitch Leary who is played by John Malkovich.  Malkovich had been a solid star for almost a decade at this point in films like The Killing Fields, Places in the Heart, Empire of the Sun and Dangerous Liaisons.  He could play dark and deceiving (Dangerous Liaisons) or gentle and dumb (Of Mice and Men).  But this film really moves him much closer to an edge that he would be more associated with in the years since.  I have long associated him with Tommy Lee Jones in that both of them can so easily straddle that fine line between a really brilliant performance and pure ham.  In later films like Con Air and Eragon he would err on the wrong side of the line but here, like with Jones, also this year in The Fugitive, he really pushes it brilliantly and comes up with a truly menacing performance.  He sinks into this role and chews it to shreds, always convinced he is the smartest person in the film (and he may not be wrong).

There is some action in this film, like the way we see what would happen if an assassination attempt happened aimed at the president and some chasing around, but this is really more of a thinking man’s thriller-mystery.  It’s a thriller because we’re on the edge of our seat but it’s a mystery because of where and how Leary is going to try and kill the president.  In the middle of all of this is Horrigan, who is trying to solve this case mostly on instinct (he often tells people about he can read people’s eyes) and what few clues he can pick up on (he brilliantly impounds a car because Leary placed his hand on it and they can get the prints).

This film really is firing on almost all of its cylinders.  It has Eastwood, not only in one of his most enjoyable roles, but also giving him a witty script to deal with:

Frank Horrigan: Oh, he’ll call again. He’s got, uh, “panache.”
Lilly Raines: Panache?
Frank Horrigan: Yeah, it means flamboyance.
Lilly Raines: Mm, I know what it means.
Frank Horrigan: Really? I had to look it up.

Petersen knows precisely when to throw in a bit of action to really get the audience on the edge of its seats and when to sit back and just let the detective work speak for itself.  We know a bit more than Frank does, of course, because the film has to give us more of Malkovich’s performance so we can see how deranged he is.  We even get some strong supporting work from the likes of John Mahoney and Fred Thompson.  Rene Russo provides a nice May-December romance for Eastwood that, while in spite of being obvious romantic fodder, does provide at least some nice moments on its inevitable move in that direction.

It’s not a perfect film, certainly.  There is a younger agent played by Dylan McDermott and not only can you telegraph that he is going to die, but you even have the annoying trope that he decides the night before that he’s going to resign because he can’t take the work.  But it more than makes up for that heading into the final act when we see how things play out, how Frank gets the brilliant line that leads to the climax (“Aim high”) and then even a final little coda with an unnerving voice from the grave on an answering machine and two people who decide to go find one of the single best spots in the entire country to go enjoy some ice cream.

The Worst Columbia Film I Haven’t Yet Reviewed

Bucky Larson: Born to be a Star  (2011, dir. Tom Brady)

I don’t know where to start with this review because I don’t really want to write about anything having to do with this film.

We could start with the director, I suppose.  His name is Tom Brady.  Not the great Tom Brady, the one who is on the five member short list for being the greatest quarterback of all-time (Unitas, Montana, Favre, Peyton, Brady).  The shitty director who has made three films that go beyond bad and right into appallingly bad (The Hot Chick, The Comebacks, Bucky Larson).  Taste is clearly a problem for both Bradys (Uggs?) but this one tries, I guess, to be funny, and fails spectacularly in every attempt.

Maybe I could start again with the star.  His name is Nick Swardson and he’s supposedly funny.  He hasn’t always been in bad films (he was the guy yelling “It’s Bowie!!!” in Almost Famous) but after Reno 911 he hooked up with Happy Madison Productions and it’s been hard to see any evidence of being funny.  He also turned out to be kind of an obnoxious dick when his response to the complete critical shredding of this film (at a 9 on Metacritic, it was the lowest scoring film of 2011, lower even than record Razzie winner Jack & Jill, also a Happy Madison Production released by Columbia) was that the critics just didn’t like the acting and directing and weren’t prepared to laugh.  It never seemed to occur to him that his film not only wasn’t funny but went beyond that to being completely offensive.

So let’s get to the plot of the film.  A dim-witted man still living at home (he does seem to be just dumb, not suffering from any specific disability) discovers his parents are porn stars from the 70’s and decides to move from Iowa to Hollywood to become a porn star and once there, does become one because his penis is so small that in films, it makes the female star realize she was happier with who she already had.  That’s the plot and the film doesn’t even do it well.

I am reminded of Roger Ebert’s maxim about people doing funny things aren’t funny but people trying to be serious and failing are funny.  The people who wrote this script thought “let’s write a story about an idiot with a small dick who somehow manages to become a porn star anyway” and thought that was funny.  Isn’t it funny how dumb he is?  Isn’t it funny how little endowed he is?

I’m not surprised that Adam Sandler had a hand in writing this.  I saw Anger Management as one of the numerous Columbia films I watched for this post and the premise of that film is that he’s not really that angry but gets send to anger management anyway.  Yet, there is a strong core of anger that runs through all of Sandler’s films and not just that, but a strong core of meanness.  Sandler clearly just isn’t nice or at least thinks that being unpleasant is a sure comedic way of going about things.  His films aren’t simply not funny but they are also mean and petty and small-minded and this is just about the worst of them, the rare kind of Comedy that earns zero stars from me.

Bonus Review

City Slickers  (1991, dir. Ron Underwood)

Some films you return to and you think, “what was I thinking, liking this film?”  But others hold up and stand the test of time.  Take City Slickers.  I saw City Slickers, or parts of it, four times in the theater in the summer of 1991.  The first time, I saw it, I think, with just John and Jay.  We laughed a lot and John found it so endearing that he named his car Norman (and he still uses the Billy Crystal, “Hellllooooooo” which I can hear in my head).  The second time, we brought Sean and he laughed so hard at the line “We’ll jump off that bridge when we come to it” that I actually had to take him out of the theater so he could regain his composure and go back in.  The third time, John and I popped in and watched it for a while before going to see Boyz N the Hood (John worked at the theater, so we could get in for free).  The fourth time, I had gone to see Dying Young and, in spite of Julia Roberts, it was so awful I left when I knew the next showing of City Slickers was about to begin.

It had been a long time since I had seen it.  I don’t think it had really been 27 years.  I’m sure I saw it in college at some point.  But I remembered basically everything in it (well, except that Billy’s son is played by a very young Jake Gyllenhaal, because of course, no one knew him in 1991, as it was his film debut after all).  There wasn’t a single moment that I had forgotten and the only really funny lines I had forgotten (when Crystal has the line about the Picasso, with the brilliant line “No, if she was a Picasso, she’d have three tits.”) weren’t because I had forgotten the lines or that they weren’t funny but that the whole point Crystal is making is about how when you’re married you might admire something else but you stick with what you have is one I have often made, but using the ordering food analogy that Garry Shandling made which made me forget the piece of art analogy that Crystal makes here.  What’s more, not only did I remember all of the lines, but in spite of remembering them, they still made me laugh.  Especially among those (which is referenced here in a great skit) is the great scene where one character tries to get another to understand how to program his VCR, something in all the years she had a VCR I was never able to get my mother to be able to do and there were times where others wanted to scream, just like the third character, “He doesn’t get it!  He’ll never get it!  It’s been four hours.  The cows can tape something by now!”

City Slickers, if you have never seen it, is a film about three guys at age 39 who are a bit lost in their lives.  One of them is so miserable in his marriage that he describes the best day of his life as his wedding day and feeling like a grownup and when asked what the worst day was says “Every day since is a tie.”  The second is trying to curb his straying ways and stick to the young, beautiful wife he has.  Those two are played with great comedic support by Daniel Stern and Bruno Kirby.  Stern, of course, had a voice that was calm and reassuring because he was the narrator on The Wonder Years and Kirby had already been great comedic support for Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally (“You made a woman meow?”).  Then there is Billy Crystal as a man who has lost his smile.  He’s 39 years old and he loves his wife and kids but he hates his job and needs to find something that will make him happy.

When I was a kid and I kept watching this, I watched it for Crystal’s lines, for brilliant lines that spoke truths like “Women need a reason to have sex.  Men just need a place.” or just funny lines like “Have you noticed the older you get, the younger your girlfriends get?  Soon you’ll be dating sperm.”  I watched the film because it made me laugh.  This time, watching it as I sit here trying to find a job, trying to find my own smile, a 43 year old man trying to figure out where I have been, thinking about the scene where Daniel Stern talks about how when he wasn’t getting along with his father, they could still talk about baseball, the film speaks to me in a way that the 16 year old me who kept going back to the movie theater never could have imagined.

City Slickers isn’t a great film and no matter how much it speaks to me, it never will be.  But it is a better film than I had ever realized, even while I was continually laughing.  It may have a lot of characters that aren’t very well drawn and it may rely on cliches and have some moments that seem too easily telegraphed and could have been written by any writer.  But it has a very real person, a wiseass who is trying to remember why likes to smile instead of just making smartass comments, it is genuinely funny and of course, it has a performance from Jack Palance, that, while I don’t think was the best of the year, certainly was one of the best and did win an Oscar for a solid, dependable actor who had been in the industry for almost half a century and had first been nominated almost 40 years before.

Post-2011

Genre:  Since 2011, the sequels and remakes haven’t stopped.  There have been been 7 films released in that time with the number “2” in the title (which don’t include the new Jumanji film or three of the Spider-Man films or third Men in Black film or the fourth coming soon) and remakes from previous films or television include 21 Jump Street, Total Recall, RoboCop, Annie, The Equalizer, Ghostbusters, The Magnificent Seven, Flatliners.

The Films:

note:  I am listing these in rank order.  The ranks are approximate.  These are not all the post-2011 films I have seen, but ones I have reviewed, think are notable or want to list.

• Zero Dark Thirty  –  #23
• American Hustle  –  #24
• Skyfall  –  #31
• Spider-Man: Homecoming  –  #65
• Passengers  –  #67  –  a really under-appreciated film.
• SPECTRE  –  #78
• Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle  –  #86  –  Dwayne Johnson is giving me serious reason to add him to this post.
• Captain Phillips  –  #88
• The Amazing Spider-Man  –  #102
• The Pirates! Band of Misfits  –  #112
• Ghostbusters (2016)  –  #135  –  I still think it should have been a sequel rather than a remake but pretty good for all of that.
• Goosebumps  –  #154  –  really fun Jack Black performance
• The Amazing Spider-Man 2  –  #156
• The Monuments Men  –  #158
• The Magnificent Seven (2016)  –  #407
• Aloha  –  #710  –  just to prove there are Cameron Crowe films I don’t like
• Sex Tape  –  #713  –  stop following me Jake Kasdan!  or follow me with Karen Gillan around!
• Hotel Transylvania  –  #765  –  this film and its two much worse sequels make the Ice Age films look new and inspired
• The Dark Tower  –  #817  –  I’m coming for you with a rubber hose, Akiva Goldsman!  I warned you!
• Inferno  –  #842  –  makes Angels and Demons look good
• Grown Ups 2  –  #880  –  lands in the bottom 10  –  in fact, the bottom 4 Columbia films since 2011 are all Comedies, three of them Sandler (That’s My Boy, Pixels, Grown Ups 2), the other James (Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2)

Statistics:  I have seen 54 of the 69 films since 2011 (78.26%), including all 8 films from 2013 and all 11 from 2017.

All-Time Awards:  “Skyfall” makes the Top 5 for Song; it also lands in the Top 5 for Sound Editing.

Nighthawk Awards:  Since 2011, six Columbia films have combined for 31 nominations but 28 of those are for American Hustle (11), Zero Dark Thirty (8) and Skyfall (9).  The last three go to The Pirates: Band of Misfits (Animated Film), Captain Phillips (Sound) and SPECTRE (Sound Editing).  The only wins are Actress for Zero Dark Thirty and Sound Editing for Skyfall.  In Drama, Zero Dark Thirty goes 1 for 5 (winning Actress), Skyfall goes 0 for 6 and Captain Phillips goes 0 for 2 while in Comedy, American Hustle goes 0 for 8 and The Pirates goes 0 for 1.

Nighthawk Notables:  Skyfall wins Best Sequel.  Chris Evans wins Funniest Cameo for Spider-Man: Homecoming.  The Dark Tower wins Read the Book, SKIP the Film.

At the Theater:  I have seen six Columbia films in the theater since 2011: Skyfall, Zero Dark Thirty, American Hustle, The Monuments Men, SPECTRE and Spider-Man: Homecoming.  What’s more surprising, since I often go to the movies by myself these days, I saw the last four of them with Veronica.

Academy Awards:  American Hustle earned 10 Oscar nominations, including the big seven but failed to win any.  Zero Dark Thirty and Skyfall both earned 5 noms and both won Sound Editing while Skyfall also won Song.  Captain Phillips earned 6 nominations including Picture.  Aside from those, The Pirates was nominated for Animated Film, SPECTRE won Song, Passengers was nominated for Score and Art Direction and Roman J Israel was nominated for Actor.  In 2013, Columbia would finally pass MGM and move into 4th place all-time.

Golden Globes:  Since 2011, 11 Columbia films have combined for 24 nominations and 6 wins.  American Hustle is the biggest film, earning 7 nominations and winning Picture – Comedy, Actress – Comedy and Supporting Actress.  Zero Dark Thirty earned 4 noms, including Picture and Director and won Actress – Drama.  The two Bond films both won Song.  The biggest categories have been Actor (one in Comedy, three in Drama), Actress (three in Comedy, one in Drama) and Song (four).  American Hustle was the first Picture – Comedy winner in 26 years.  Columbia hasn’t had a Picture nominee since 2013, the first time ever it has gone more than two straight years without a nominee.  That might end in 2018 with The Front Runner.

The BAFTAs:  Since 2011, only four Columbia films have earned BAFTA nominations but all of them were nominated for at least five awards and the only one not nominated for Best Film was Skyfall which won Best British Film.  The four films (the other three are Zero Dark Thirty, American Hustle and Captain Phillips) earned a combined 32 nominations and while there was no category where all four were nominated, three of them were nominated in Film, Supporting Actor, Director, Screenplay and Editing.  Skyfall also won Score, American Hustle won Original Screenplay, Supporting Actress and Makeup and Captain Phillips won Supporting Actor.

BFCA:  Again, the big four films earned a combined 24 nominations (while SPECTRE was nominated for Song).  ZDT, AH and CP were all nominated for Picture, Director and Screenplay.  ZDT won Actress and Editing, Skyfall won Song and AH won Makeup.

The Critics:  Zero Dark Thirty is second in wins (14), second in points (1002) and 10th in percentage (24.85%) while American Hustle wins four awards and Skyfall wins one.

Box Office:  The Spider-Man franchise now has the #2, 3, 4, 5 (Homecoming) and 7 (Amazing) spots on the list.  Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is the #1 film, by less than $1 million over the first Spider-Man but falls $2 million short of Caine Mutiny for making the Adjusted list.  Skyfall is #6 on the list.