1959: The Year that I Heard His Voice and The Panties Fell From My Hand

It took me like 20 minutes to come up with that title. It'll seem less perverted/odd in the next paragraph. Or maybe more so. Like many years, this one was kind of halfsies. BUT the winner is the first/last of the 3 films ever to win 11 Academy Awards. It also happens to be one of my favorite movies of all time. So the other films might as well just go home. They should consider it an honor to be mentioned in the same blog entry. But it's not the worst batch of movies I've come across. Even the bad ones are simply lacking in delivery, not inherently flawed. That always makes a big difference, because then there is always room for nice little moments amidst things that don't work.

Thankfully we begin with a movie that does work the whole way through: Anatomy of a Murder. I can see why this caused a stir when it came out, as compared to other films of the time it's pretty explicit with its dialogue. It'd be a fairly tame episode of Law and Order today in terms of content. But here's a perfect example of something that may have been controversial at the time, but not because that's all it wanted to accomplish. It's actually a good story that is well-delivered and well-acted that just happens to deal with the subject of rape. I found the title to be quite clever in this way, because it refers not only to what makes up and constitutes a murder, but also to the anatomical aspect to the rape trial. Such as the bruises on her face, proof of intercourse, etc. Not to mention the torn panties that Jimmy Stewart produces in the courtroom, which is where that bit in my title came from. One thing this film does right, that I think Judgment at Nuremberg should have also done, is have scenes outside of the courtroom. We see Jimmy Stewart (in a thankfully toned down form for this role) approached to try the case, as well as various other preliminary scenes before we get to the courtroom. And once we get there we have scenes outside of it as well. Jimmy reverse-reminded me of Matt Murdock (AKA Daredevil) with his fridge full of fish that a poor client had used as payment. This immediately establishes the type of lawyer that he is, without someone giving a ten minute speech about the quality of his character. The thing that really made this movie work though wasn't just the character, it was the suspense of the storytelling. I really didn't care who committed the crime (I rarely do) but the courtroom theatrics and clever doublespeak/lawyerspeak made it more about how to win an argument than justice. And that's what a lot of trials are about in real life. Because when you've tried hundreds of murder trials, I'd imagine you stopped feeling the impact of the situation around trial number 20 or so. Just like how Dr. House cares more about solving mysteries than saving people. And in this movie we have Jimmy Stewart pitted against George C. Scott for some really top notch acting. Lee Remick is also well-cast as the victim. She's pretty and she knows it, and the harpy-esque nature with which she conducts herself immediately draws her quality of character into question. So you begin to wonder: is she making it up? And this is a question you have from the beginning, simply because of how she conducts herself. Therefore, when the characters themselves call it into question it's not this big "GASP!" moment. Those fall flat upon repeat viewings and change the tone of a picture. It instead feels like a natural development with realistically building suspense. The film does come in a little long but I think it's segmented well enough that the length is appropriate. They give you different settings and conflicts often enough to keep it fresh, even though the story revolves around a relatively simple trial. Finally, it features some awesome upbeat noir-ish (if there is such a thing) music by Duke Ellington with a pre-Bond Bond-ian opening titles. Pretty great stuff, definitely worth a nod by the Academy.

On the other hand, I had very mixed feelings about The Diary of Anne Frank. I quite possibly had more opinions about this than most other films I watch. Because I think the source material is inherently powerful, and I believe we read it in 7th grade but I obviously don't remember a lot of it, but the delivery is off somehow. It feels Hollywood-ized and if there's anything that shouldn't receive that treatment...it's probably the Holocaust. For instance, the role of 13-year-old Anne is played by 21-year-old model Millie Perkins. But only because 30-year-old sex symbol/most adorable person of all time Audrey Hepburn turned it down. Because she felt she was too old. Which she was! And so was Millie. There's a scene where her sister is trying to point out her attractive qualities, and she's obviously reaching. If this is something they got from the actual diary, it would suggest that Anne was fairly plain-looking. Which would account for a lot of her character traits. So they cast a 21-year-old model? It is my personal opinion that they were trying to sexualize Anne Frank, which is pretty messed up. Let's look at a few examples: in her first scene we see her removing her underwear. From beneath her dress and she has on like six pairs, but still. They could have established the point that the family smuggled in a lot of clothes however they wanted and they chose a fairly sexual way of doing so. Then there's the forced love story. Was there an actual boy with her from another family in the attic? Yep. I'd have to read the source material myself though to see how much she actually talks about him, and what evidence there is of an actual romance. Even if there is, they play it up a bit much. It's supposed to be about maintaining one's lifestyle even during hardship, and it became a bit of a melodrama where the romance was concerned. But enough of that, I also had an issue with some of the small touches. Things like people shouting at each other or slamming doors. If I was a Jew hiding in an attic from the Nazis, I would probably avoid slamming a door and shouting. At times they mention the things they did to hide, such as never speaking during business hours and never moving the curtain back from the window. So I'd say that in real life they didn't actually shout or slam. If the Diary says, "so-and-so and blah-blah had an argument" that doesn't inherently mean they shouted. They probably didn't. So it removes you from the situation and makes the Holocaust more of a backdrop a la Hogan's Heroes than something that truly drives the story. There are definitely things that the film does really well and aside from Perkins' annoying whine of a voice, the acting is good. Especially the man who played Anne's father, he was the soul of the film. But seriously, if a big part of a film is dependent on narration then I wouldn't make the narrator have the vocal tone of a greedy eight-year-old on Santa's lap. Are lots of 13-year-old girls annoying in vocal tone? Certainly. Lots of them also sound normal. On one final note, its aspect ratio is a full-on 2.35:1 (think the really wide widescreen of action movies) but since the film is intimate in nature I think it would've looked better with 1.85:1. And so did the director, which I read afterwards. See? I don't completely make up all of this stuff. Just most of it. But anyway, despite what I've said I think this is actually a pretty good movie. I was only bothered by its flaws more than usual because I think it's a very powerful story and deserves only the best treatment. When I was in 7th or 8th grade my school did a production of it, with an age-appropriate Anne I might add, and it was quite good as I remember. So the story can be done really well, I just think they missed the mark by a little bit.

But not as much as The Nun's Story missed the mark. Well, I think Catholicism missed the mark actually, and this movie is just emulating. Oh boy, here we go with one of these entries! This is what Audrey Hepburn worked on instead of Diary I believe, and she's as good as ever. But the movie itself left me kind of baffled as to its meaning. Is it ridiculing certain aspects of religion or is it just showing how one person dealt with the moral questions on a personal level? A bit of both I suppose. But A) the movie is too long at two-and-a-half hours (it takes too long to get to the main story and the viewer is left detached from either main plot setting) and B) they once again did some irrelevant sexualizing. I tell you, 1959 is the year it went downhill folks. You've got explicit rape dialogue, making Holocaust victims sexy, and now making nuns sexy. I read that the sexual tension between Audrey and Peter Finch who plays the doctor in Africa isn't present in the book and that they added it for the movie. See? Not making this stuff up. That aspect of the story dilutes her character change. Because by the end of the movie (shhhh...spoilers) she's not a nun anymore. Anyone who has a crisis of faith during WWII and especially when over in Africa seeing the plight of some of the native people is simply a sane person. But adding the love aspect (which doesn't play out thankfully but is still present) makes you wonder if she left the sisterhood in part because she wanted a little Dr. McSteamy on the side. Around 50 entries here folks, I'm now referencing shows I hate. Now, if the main point of the film was that she fell and love and left the sisterhood that would be okay. If the main point was that she had a crisis of conscience and left, that would be okay. But you can't do both. This is what happens when studios make movies instead of people. Aspects of the film are also unintentionally (or intentionally? Once again, I couldn't tell) funny. You've got the nuns wearing wedding rings because they're married to Jesus (absurd, also a real thing) and you've got them planking amongst the pews as they beg forgiveness for slamming a door (more absurd, also a real thing). I had to ask my dad, who was once an altar boy, about these things. So were they criticizing or just showing the lifestyle realistically? It's an important question, because what Audrey's character thinks of these things is tied in to what the audience thinks, and thus become important things to know when she decides to leave. So I would have had her character show some more doubt throughout to help sell it. Maybe they did and I didn't notice because I was too busy laughing at an almost-sinless woman apologizing for talking back in a mildly rude manner. It is entirely possible that this was the case.

But I'm pretty sure I caught all of the bad parts of Room at the Top. This was another one that I found on the internet because it's not on DVD. Which is a pretty big clue that no one cares about the movie. Which is a pretty big clue that no one should care about the movie. Before I get to the film itself, the love theme (or main theme perhaps) sounded a lot like Michael's Theme from The Godfather. Not saying Nino Rota ripped it off, these things just happen at times. After all, there are only so many notes and combinations therein. But it threw me off because I kept expecting something cool to happen and all I got was some lousy philandering. 1959 people, look on its works ye mighty and despair. There was a whole lot of womanizing and making out in bras for a 1959 picture. Although it was British I suppose. And when your Empire is falling apart, who has time to care about breasts in movies? The two short paragraphs of plot description on Wikipedia really do describe the whole film without missing anything important. Basically it's about a guy who's trying to sleep his way to the top of the business ladder and he ends up ruining lots of people's lives getting there. Much like....Darling? Am I referencing that again? Except this is the precursor male version. Because obviously at the end he doesn't really have any measure of happiness. But this only works as a tragedy if you care about the guy. He's a total douche though so whatever happens to him doesn't mean anything to you in the slightest. The film is actually well-structured and well-paced for what it is, even if it's done with people you don't care about. The actors are good and the music is good. So I would imagine that if the same group of people came together to make a different movie, it would've been really good. And maybe there were some overtones of current political goings-on in the British Empire which obviously went over my head. No idea. Don't care. So if you're interested in watching a guy be slimy and have women interested in him anyway, this is the film for you.

Which brings us to the very not-explicit winner for this year, the incredibly well-deserving Ben-Hur. It's funny that there were so many movies in this year with overt sexual overtones because this is an overtly religious movie. BUT it's not all "repent!" or "praise Jesus!" It's a historically religious film. Jesus is a character but they never have him speak and you never see his face. It's very effective (seriously, not being sarcastic). The main story though concerns Judah Ben-Hur and his quest for vengeance. The big bad guy in the movie, Messala, was his boyhood friend even though Judah is Jewish and Messala is a Roman. So right there you already have one of my favorite themes in movies: people coming from similar backgrounds choosing different paths in life. When Judah is wrongfully accused of attacking some Romans, he becomes a slave. What follows is a long path to vengeance that re-enforces to the audience that vengeance helps no one, without doing so in a cheesy way. Which means that the movies with similar themes back then had no excuse for being too obvious. There were a lot of religious movies back then and a lot of them dealt with Jesus directly. And seeing him as a human being is always interesting, but at the end of the day that's not really how anyone remembers him (obviously). By having Jesus remain mostly as a point of conversation and never seeing him full-on, he remains a mythic and superhuman figure. And by not overdoing the scenes that revolve around him, it makes what is there mean something. Instead we get a story about one man's inner turmoil, and how that relates to larger religious ideas and moral quandries. The fight between good and evil is internal, as seen through external conflict. And the effects hold up remarkably well to this day. Because a model of a ship looks as good today as it did back then. This is why LOTR is the only film series from the early 2000s that doesn't look dated today. Plus, one cannot mention the film without mentioning the incredible chariot race near the end. My mom pointed out that that's the type of scene that goes on too long. And I could see how people might feel that way, but I'd say that any scene can go on for a while if it deserves it. In this case, it's the big confrontation after almost 3 1/2 hours of buildup (the whole film is over 220 minutes but it earns this crazy length) and it's very suspenseful. If it was over in two minutes then that would've been anti-climactic. And just to be fair, let's take the scene at the end of The Sopranos fourth season entitled "White Caps" as another example. I'm not sure how long it goes on, but it's at least a good 15-20 minutes. And it's just a married couple having a spat amidst their forthcoming divorce. But it's so well-done that you don't notice the time going by. I've seen similar conversations in movies that go on for 3 minutes and seem too long. So it's all dependent on the buildup to that scene, and if you care how it turns out. Well, this is another film I could go on forever about so I'll just add that Charlton Heston won for his role, and so did the music by Miklos Rozsa and they were both well-deserved. It's a good movie to take an afternoon to watch, on a nice big screen for the crazy wide widescreen that it utilizes (I think it's 2.70:1 or something crazy, it's basically a sliver). I can't imagine anyone disliking this movie, but then again I can't imagine anyone liking Jersey Shore. The name of which I refuse to italicize.

Well I think I liked that year more than I realized. Nothing lives up to the winner but only one thing was glaringly bad. Speaking of glaringly bad, I just re-watched both Transformers movies and I'm about to see part 3 tonight so there'll probably be even more Bay-bashing than usual pretty soon. That's all I know of the upcoming year though, as I have seen exactly none of the five nominees. All I know is it'll involve douchey French plot descriptions, presumably metaphorical felines, and a buddy cop movie without cops.