Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actor 1967

The Contenders:
Warren Beatty: Bonnie and Clyde
Paul Newman: Cool Hand Luke
Dustin Hoffman: The Graduate
Spencer Tracy: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
Rod Steiger: In the Heat of the Night (winner)

The Magnificent Yankee

Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

Oh boy. February on TCM is great because every film they show has some connection to the Oscars and many of them are ones that I have trouble locating. With the case of The Magnificent Yankee, there may well be a reason that I have trouble finding someone willing to carry a copy. I won’t say that this is a bad movie, but I will say to my last breath that it’s dull as dishwater.

The Magnificent Yankee is the story of Oliver Wendell Holmes, and more specifically, it’s the story of Holmes when he was a Supreme Court justice. Holmes (Louis Calhern, who created this role on stage) arrives in Washington as a new justice with his wife, Fanny (Ann Harding). He is sworn in, and he makes an arrangement with Harvard to take on a single promising student every year to work as his clerk. Since the Holmeses are without children, this parade of young men becomes, more or less, their children. Holmes certainly takes a father’s pride in the men who operate as his yearly secretaries.

Travels with My Aunt

Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

Who knew that there’s evidently a very small genre of films involving young men being whirlwinded around by eccentric old women? I’d have thought that Auntie Mame and perhaps Harold and Maude would have been the limit, but that’s before I knew anything about Travels with My Aunt. There’s a great deal of similarity between this film and those others in that we have a wildly eccentric older woman educating a younger, much more staid man. Travels with My Aunt throws in a lot more felonies to keep things interesting. From my perspective, it helps greatly that this is based on the work of Graham Greene as well, since he’s long been a favorite of mine.

We start at the funeral of the mother of Henry Pulling (Alec McCowan), a staid banker who cares for his flowers more than he cares for anything else in the world. At the funeral, he encounters his Aunt Augusta (Maggie Smith), whom he had thought dead. She is, however, very much alive and tells the suddenly shocked Henry that his mother was not, in fact, his mother. Augusta takes Henry home with her where he is introduced to her current lover, a fortune teller from Sierra Leone she calls Wordsworth (Lou Gossett, Jr.). Henry escapes when he can only to discover after a visit from the police that Wordsworth has stowed marijuana in his mother’s urn.

The Mission

Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

Every now and again, someone gets it into his head that the world needs another religious epic, and for most of the Western world, this means something to inspire the Christian faithful. Thus we have The Mission from 1986, a film that additionally features the not inconsiderable talents of Jeremy Irons, Liam Neeson, and Robert De Niro. Make no mistake—while this isn’t a “greatest story ever told” sort of epic, this is a film about faith and its place in the human story. It depicts the church as something of an evil but faith as a virtue.

The film opens with a look at the world of the South America of the time. Spanish missionaries work to convert the native people of the Amazon. One such missionary attempts to convert the Guarani people who live high up in the forest above the waterfalls and is martyred for his trouble. His martyrdom comes in one of the opening shots; he is tied to a cross and tossed into the river to go over the falls. The Jesuits try again with Father Gabriel (Jeremy Irons), who manages to entrance the Guarani with his oboe. Father Gabriel and his associate Father Fielding (Liam Neeson) build a mission in this high place.

The Turning Point

Format: Internet video on laptop.

I might be surprising a number of people with this review. Musicals generally aren’t my thing, but The Turning Point isn’t a musical, but a dance film, and specifically a ballet film. I’m certain I’ve mentioned my tenuous ballet connection here before; it’s the one section of the Arts that I actually know something of thanks to my daughters. And while The Turning Point is a ballet movie, it’s also a drama. In fact, it’s kind of unfair to call it a ballet movie. It is one in the same way that Field of Dreams is a baseball movie. This is a film about relationships and people seen through the lens of a ballet company. It’s impossible to divorce the story from the dance, but this is in no manner a film about dancing.

I admit that I was mildly worried at the outset because of the presence of Shirley MacLaine, who tends to come off in many of her roles as completely neurotic. It’s unfair of me to prejudge in this way, but also virtually impossible for me not to. I’ve seen too many neurotic Shirley MacLaine performances to go into a film like this with my eyes closed. And, it’s about dancers, and she plays a former dancer/current dance teacher, and I can tell you from personal experience that dancers in general and ballet dancers in specific have their own patented brand of neurosis.

The Barretts of Wimpole Street

Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

I have a B.A. in literature (I promise this is relevant), so I’ve studied more than my share of the classics. When it comes to poetry, I’m not sure that Robert Browning would land anywhere near my list of favorites. So much of his work is so obtuse; it almost always left (and still leaves) me confused. I much preferred his wife’s work. Elizabeth Barrett’s work was simple without being simplistic. It’s understandable and powerful because it is so understandable. So it came as something of a happy moment for me when, on their first meeting in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Robert Browning (Fredric March) laments that almost everyone who reads his poetry finds it impenetrable. Damn right.

The Barretts of Wimpole Street is a sort of biopic but is more of a drama than anything else. Much of the film seems based at least vaguely on reality, although the darker moments that come near the end may not have been. I have no way to tell without doing more than the cursory research I’ve done. It’s an interesting extrapolation from what I could find about Elizabeth Barrett and her life before meeting Browning and their subsequent marriage.

Decision before Dawn

Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

I think I’ve mentioned before that when I was a kid, war films were my favorite genre of film. I watched other films, but war films were what I loved the best. Decision before Dawn is one that I missed until recently. This is another film where I enjoyed it while I was watching, but when it comes to the end and it’s time to write about it, I don’t know what to say.

On the surface, this is a pretty standard World War II picture pitting the Allied forces against the remnants of Germany toward the end of the fighting in Europe. Allied troops marching across the continent are still encountering resistance, of course, and are naturally doing everything they can to capture enemy troops and end the war as quickly as possible. One of those things they are doing is recruiting captured German soldiers to operate as spies behind enemy lines. It’s obvious that Germany will lose at this point, so ending the war as quickly as possible has become a priority.