The Oscars get worse and worse every year.

First, people complain they’re too long (and they used to be, but at least they were entertaining and interesting people and films were nominated), then the ratings are too low (probably because they’re too long), etc.  This year, to try and combat the ratings slump, AMPAS decided to nominate 10 films for Best Picture, something which hasn’t happened since the 1940s.  That’s great, except has anyone noticed that  as of late there haven’t BEEN very many good movies released?  So we have 10 nominees, but still, those “other” movies like District 9, and whatever else was nominated, are never going to win, so why even bother?  And of course they completely passed up one of, if not the best, movies I saw in 2009: Jane Campion’s Bright Star.  Still, it wasn’t the nominees that made this year’s Oscars so snooze-worthy and lame, it was the complete sense of AWK-WAAAARDness that permeated throughout the entire show.

To start off with, why was Neil Patrick Harris doing a dance number at the beginning?  He said we may be wondering why he was there.  Well, yes, Barney, I was wondering that, and it was never explained.  It was just a cheesy Busby Berkeley music routine that I think set the tone for the entire night.

Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin did well with the jokes and provided some much needed comic relief, but while they were poking fun at the nominees we discovered two things: they put poor Gabourey Sidibe in a side seat that was somewhat removed from everyone else, in the aisle, and I felt really bad for her.  Just because she’s a big girl doesn’t mean they have to make it so obvious, poor thing.  The other thing I became aware of was how douchey George Clooney was being.  Dear George, you’re hot and everything, but smile once in a while, ok?  You’re not above anyone else there (and you didn’t win anyway, so try having more fun next time).  Why so serious?

Then they had people like Jennifer Lopez, Cameron Diaz, Miley Cyrus, and the kids from Twilight presenting.  What even?  I thought the Oscars were supposed to be about honoring the best, most talented contributions to cinema, not about crappy movies that happen to break the bank at the box office, or people who complain about how the Academy did them a great injustice by not nominating their movie El Cantante even though no one has ever heard of it and Jennifer Lopez isn’t very talented.  You were good in Selina, J.Lo., but that’s about it.  And Miley Cyrus?  I don’t even know.   Maybe they were doing this to try and get more teens to watch?  I’m confused.

Oh, the MOST awkward part was when that guy won for short subject documentary and he was giving this nice speech, and all of the sudden this lady came out of nowhere and totally pulled a Kanye West on him and started talking about God knows what.  Then she pointed out that the subject of the documentary was, in fact, in the audience, so the camera flashed to a girl in a wheelchair, probably to save that poor guy on stage from looking so embarrassed.  But jeez, was I embarrassed for him.

Next up on the awkward assembly line was the interprative dance portion.  Remember back in the day when they used to be really classy and have the orchestra or maybe a world renowned violinist like Itzahk Perlman play sections of the nominated scores while actual clips from the films were shown?  Now we just have people doing the robot to the UP score and The Lion King is stepping in for Avatar.  Whatever was happening on the tv, I just wanted it to end.  Thank god it eventually did, but then it just went in to this new thing they’re doing with 5 random actors getting up on stage to gush over the people who are nominated in the lead categories.  No one remembers that one movie you did together that one time.  Where were the clips?

Yes, that’s what was sorely missing: relevant montages.  Or just montages in general.  I usually watch the Oscars for the montages because I like seeing clips from amazing films compiled together so that I an pretend to remember what it was like when great movies were in abundance and brilliant acting ruled Hollywood.  Apparently the person who has done the montages in the past died, so instead of replacing him with someone of equal editing talent, we were stuck with some amateur montages that looked like something I would have done in production class in college.  TCM has 5 up on you when it comes to montages, AMPAS.  Why was there a random horror montage?  And why did it include a clip from Twilight?  Also, what’s up, In Memoriam montage?  Why were you showing pictures of Jennifer Jones in the Jean Simmons portion, and why did you include Michael Jackson and not Farrah Fawcet?  Also, why was there no old movie montage?  Those are always the best and always, always welcome.

Here's a random photo of Larry and Vivien to spice this post up. Classy winners, right there.

Things that were actually good about this year’s show: Katherine Bigelow beating James Cameron for…everything.  I haven’t seen either Avatar or The Hurt Locker, but I feel like I gave James Cameron enough of my money back in 1998, and I think this is why Avatar didn’t win anything substantial, J.C. already swept the place with Titanic.  I’m surprised JC didn’t bludgeon Bigelow when she won Best Director.  How awkward that they were sitting right behind one another.

This is from tumblr

I’ll admit I didn’t want Sandra Bullock to win Best Actress because I’ve never liked any of her films, but her speech was the most entertaining of the bunch, and she looked the best out of all the ladies there.  Way to go, Sandy.

Jeff Bridges sounds like a nice guy, although I really wanted Colin Firth to win for A Single Man.  And hey!  Tom Ford is AMAZING looking.  He really should have given Sarah Jessica Parker some tips about hair and not spending a week on the tanning bed, yikes.  You could tell who the real fashionista was in that presentation.

HUZZAH for UP!

All in all, this year’s Oscars were boring times 80.  I was so glad I had a room full of funny people to say entertaining things, because the company was infinitely better than the show itself.  Thanks, boys (and Cathy)!

Here’s hoping that next year there will be more good films and a better show.  Eh, who am I kidding?

This is the 100th post here at the vivandlarry.com blog! I feel like that’s a lot, although in reality it’s probably not since this blog has been online in one location or another for about 3 years. I’ve got other posts lined up but on this late-winter Friday, I thought it would be nice to take a trip down memory lane and revisit part of 2009’s Viv and Larry London Adventure Extravaganza! Mostly because I miss it and sometimes I get nostalgic.

A little over one year ago, I caught a train from Marylebone station in London en route to a tiny little hamlet in the English countryside called Haddenham and Thame Parkway. The station had a little cafe (Brief Encounter, anyone?) and one road leading out from the rather flooded parking lot. I was on a mission to find Notley Abbey, the Olivier’s famed estate near Oxford, and had an invitation from the current owners themselves. The previous day, I had met up with my friend Kasia who was traveling from Poland at the Starbucks near Marylebone and, having visited Notley before, she drew me a little map on a piece of paper.

Of course I ended up going the wrong direction! I would. I walked for about an hour over frozen grass and mud, with no sign of Notley, just fields and emptiness with the occasional house in between; nothing as majestic as what I’d seen in photos. Finally I saw a guy sitting on a tractor eating lunch, so I stopped to ask the way. He said Notley was on the other side of this giant field across the street, and that I could either walk across the field or take the long way around and walk on the road. After making it about 20 feet into the field, I realized it wasn’t frozen at all, and my boots got covered in cold mud, so I turned around and continued on the road. About 2 miles later, sweating and hot, I finally came to Laurence Olivier’s famous lime walk drive.

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Last week, I asked people on the Oliviers Facebook Fan Page as well as on tumblr if they had any questions they’d always wanted to know about Vivien Leigh and/or Laurence Olivier. After seeing my friend Almie do a fab video post on her blog, I decided to give it a try here, in effort to make the website more personal…? Or something. Straight off the bat I’d like to apologize for sounding like Audrina from The Hills–I do live in CA, in my defense. Also, sorry for the bad lighting, it makes me look like my make-up doesn’t match my skin tone. Just saying! This is making me self conscious. Anyway, let’s get to it!

Hello!

Well, I hope you enjoyed that. Hopefully I’ll get better at this with time!

EDIT:  I’m sorry, in talking about books about Viv and Larry, I completely forgot that there are actually three.  The other two that I neglected to mention are Darlings of the Gods by Gary O’Connor, and Love Scene by Jesse Lasky Jr.  They both read like fan fiction, but they’re pretty interesting, even if they don’t cite real sources.

Over the past year or so I’ve really fallen in love with the films of writer/producer/director team Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.  Their production company, “The Archers,” often worked in conjunction with J. Arthur Rank to release some of the best British films of all time.  You may recognize some of these titles: Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, A Matter of Life and Death, Peeping Tom, I Know Where I’m Going, The Thief of Baghdad, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, etc.  In 1941 they did a propaganda film called 49th Parallel which starred Leslie Howard, Laurence Olivier, Eric Portman, Glynis Johns, and Powell and Pressburger recurring actor Anton Wolbrook.  The film centered around a German U-boat that strands its occupants in Canada during WWII.  The German soldiers seek refuge in a seried of small hide-outs in attempt to cross the border to the still-neutral United States.  Larry played a French-Canadian fur trapper named Johnny (complete with accent!).

The movie was filmed at London’s Denham Studios in 1941 and was edited by soon-to-be-famous director David Lean.  Though Powell and Pressburger made eight films in support of the British war effort, 49th Parallel was one of only two of these films to get financial backing from the British government (the Ministry of Information Film Division was run by Kenneth Clark, father of Colin Clark).  The film’s success would transform Michael Powell’s career, and British cinema on the whole.  Historian Bruce Edder explains in his Criterion essay:

Director/producer Michael Powell and screenwriter Emeric Pressburger made a movie that defied the limits of filmmaking in wartime. In the midst of crippling travel restrictions, they crisscrossed the Atlantic and the length and breadth of Canada, covering more than 50,000 miles making their film. In the face of a British film industry that was close to collapse, they forged ahead with a topical thriller of two hours’ length, with a cast drawn from all over the world. They assembled from all of this a film filled with such beauty, vision, and vibrancy, that it was taken to heart by American audiences in a way that no British film before it—including Hitchcock’s celebrated thrillers—ever had been.

The quality of Powell and Pressburger’s achievement also inspired J. Arthur Rank, head of Britain’s General Film Distributors and its parent company, the Rank Organization, to expand production. While other British studios were cutting back on operations, Rank used 49th Parallel and its success in America (where, by Powell’s estimate, it netted an unheard of $5 million in box-office receipts) as the basis for establishing independent production companies headed by Powell and Pressburger (The Archers), David Lean (Cineguild), and Filippo Del Giudice and Laurence Olivier (Two Cities) resulting in such celebrated films as Stairway to Heaven, Henry V, In Which We Serve, Odd Man Out, Oliver Twist, Black Narcissus, and The Red Shoes.

Michael Powell (L) and Emeric Pressburger

I really like this movie and I’m glad it’s gotten the Criterion treatment, along with several other Powell and Pressburger films. If you get a chance to see this, I’d also highly recommend watching the features on the bonus disk.  They include a short film Powell did with Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson about life in the Fleet Air Arm from 1943, and a fabulous documentary called A Very British Affair which is all about the careers of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.  This documentary established Michael Powell as one of my favorite people.  The guy was hilarious!

I actually made this post so that I could share the following photos.  Larry Olivier made this film in between stints helping Vivien Leigh serve drinks to soldiers at canteens and making rousing speeches.  Vivien often visited on the set, and according to at least one Hollywood magazine, Larry would look to her for encouragement with his lines.

keep calm and put the kettle on

Going through the dalies

My favorite Powell and Pressburger film of them all is A Matter of Life and Death (Satirway to Heaven) from 1946 starring David Niven, Roger Livesey, Marius Goring, and Kim Hunter.  Watch it, it’s amazing!

From February 18-21, The American Cinematheque put on an Elia Kazan retrospective at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood.  This past Saturday, I met up with my friend Mark and his friends Will and Jay for dinner at the French Quarter restaurant in the French Market in West Hollywood.  We talked of films and politics, book projects and my upcoming trip to London for school.  Afterword, three of us went over the Hollywood for a double bill of Kazan’s Baby Doll and A Streetcar Named Desire, both starring Karl Malden, and both based on Tennessee Williams plays.

Baby Doll was a film I’d only seen bits of pieces of on TCM.  It was quite a racy little number.  In between films, there was a Q&A session with Carroll baker, the lead actress in Baby Doll, which was really interesting.  Then, it turned out Oscar-winning actress Patricia Neal (Hud) was in the audience!  A lot of people crowded her to get her autograph.  Millie Perkins, star of the 1959 film The Diary of Anne Frank was also there.  I love when remaining old celebrities come out of the woodwork for these kinds of events.  Only in Hollywood!

My main reason for attending the screening was to see A Streetcar Named Desire on the big screen for the first time.  It has been one of my favorite films since I discovered Vivien Leigh ages and ages ago.  This is such a powerful movie and Vivien is a tour-de-force as Blanche.  Much like her first turn as a southern belle in Gone with the Wind 11 years prior, Vivien’s Blanche absolutely steals the show.  It seems to be the general consensus among a lot of people that Marlon Brando is the one to watch in this film, but not so.  Seeing it in the theatre, when one is forced to pay attention, it is easy to see that the heart and soul of the story is Blanche, and the heart and soul of the film is Vivien.  She and Brando have great onscreen chemistry, but it is Vivien’s wounded butterfly that demands the most attention and sympathy.

Vivien first played Blanche on the London stage in 1949, where she was directed by Laurence Olivier.  At the same time, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden, and Jessica Tandy were being directed by Elia Kazan on Broadway.  When Vivien was offered the role in the film due to her commercial appeal, she is reported to have had initial difficulty integrating herself with a cast of Method actors, and she and Kazan often disagreed on how they thought Blanche should be portrayed.  Some regard Streetcar as the best thing to happen to Vivien’s career, while others (mainly those close to her) regarded it as the biggest mistake due to her own mental problems, which were beginning to get out of control around the time Streetcar was filmed.  Whatever the case, it is without a doubt one of the best screen performances of Vivien’s career, and one of the best screen performances in film history (*author’s opinion).

What I’ve always loved about Streetcar is that this is a film that relies solely on the strength of the actors’ performances, our attention is always on the characters.  I guess this is why three of the four leads won Oscars, there was little to no room for not being up to perfection in this film.

Streetcar is a sad film that is pretty tough to watch sometimes (not because it’s boring, but because it’s harrowing seeing a person descending into madness).  Kazan gets laurels for making it a great artistic achievement, and the cats gets cheers for being AMAZING.  If you love films, or Vivien Leigh, or anyone and you have yet to see this movie, please do.  It ranks among the best.

This review was terrible.  Apologies!

Rating: 5 stars

The 82nd Academy Awards are fast approaching.  Soon the day will be upon us when a movie about blue alien people will be named Best Picture and Sandra Bullock and “Oscar winner” will be said in the same sentence.  All the while, quality films like Jane Campion’s  beautiful Bright Star have been completely ignored in favor of box office returns.  I’m off track already.  What was this post going to be about?  Oh, yes!  This is actually a tribute to my favorite Oscar-winning couple.

Did you know that Vivien Leigh and Laurence are one of only TWO couples in the history of motion pictures who both won an Academy Award while married to one another?  This is a true story (the other couple is Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward).  Between them, they had 5 Oscars.  Now, unless your name is Meryl Streep, good luck living up to that amount of awesome.

Vivien Leigh won her first of two Academy Awards in 1940 for her portrayal of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind.  The ceremony was held in the famous Coconut Grove in the Ambassador Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles.  The Ambassador was recently demolished to make way for a much-needed inner-city school, but if you drive by the site where it once stood on Wilshire Blvd, you can still see part of the front entrance amidst a bleak landscape of bulldozed dirt.

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All of the posts this week are my contributions to the For the Love of Film: the Film Preservation Blogathon that is being put on by the Self-Styled Siren and Ferdy on Films in effort to raise money for the National Film Preservation Foundation.  As film lovers, we should all be aware of how delicate film is and how much of it has been lost due to improper preservation.  Luckily for all of us, there are individuals who have made careers out of restoring and archiving movies so that we are able to enjoy them, and so will future generations.  To donate to the National Film Preservation Foundation, please click HERE.

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The first time I was properly introduced to the work of the man I often claim as my favorite film director was through a screening of the 1957 film Nights of Cabiria in a film history class in college.  I was immediately struck by Giulietta Masina who plays the main character, Cabiria (in real life she was Felini’s wife and they made a stellar team).  The film tells the story of a prostitute looking for love in all the wrong places; she is mistreated and abused by men she falls in love with, but she still keeps her chin up.  Director Federico Fellini modeled Cabiria after Charlie Chaplin’s famous derelict, and the film itself was inspired by Chaplin’s City Lights.  It is easy to see the comparisons.  Like Chaplin, Masina was expert at emoting with her face.  Like Chaplin’s endearing Tramp, we don’t want anything bad to happen to Cabiria because she is such a kind soul trapped by circumstance, a shining light of kindness in a cruel world.  It is heartbreaking to see Cabiria being treated so horribly by men in this film, and yet her positive attitude during times of trouble (read: the entire film) is very inspiring.

In a wonderfully insightful essay about the film, Fellini wrote:

“The subject of loneliness and the observation of the isolated person has always interested me. Even as a child, I couldn’t help but notice those who didn’t fit in for one reason or another—myself included. In life, and for my films, I have always been interested in the out-of-step. Curiously, it’s usually those who are either too smart or those who are too stupid who are left out. The difference is, the smart ones often isolate themselves, while the less intelligent ones are usually isolated by the others. In Nights of Cabiria, I explore the pride of one of those who has been excluded.”

Nights of Cabiria is a perfect example of Italian Neo-Realism, a movement that sprang up after WWII and showed the darker side of life after Fascism and the plight of many impoverished Italians.  Though other films of the time period showed bereavement in a more literal sense (Vittorio DeSica’s Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D, Rosselini’s Rome Open City, Fellini’s La Strada also starring Masina), Cabiria is perhaps more tragic in that we know our heroine is somehow doomed, and yet she keeps fighting, keeps smiling, keeps dancing (“Mamboooo!”), and keeps living, despite the weight of the world being on her small shoulders.  There is a beautiful scene when Cabiria is in a theatre in Rome and is called upon stage to be hypnotized.  She stands in a spotlight with her eyes closed and a small smile on her face, shrouded in her own fantasies.  It is a wonderful example of showing her isolation through images.

My favorite part of the film has got to be the ending, in fact, it’s my favorite ending of any film that I’ve ever seen.  It’s inconclusive, and we’re not really offered much closure, but Fellini’s trick of bringing Cabiria out of her diegetic world and into the world of the spectator is brilliant and through this we are offered a mixed feeling of hope (especially with the amazing music by Nino Rota in the final scene) and dread.  I think posting a clip of the end of the film here is okay.  Though it makes more sense in the context of the entire movie, it’s a beautiful scene in itself and speaks volumes of Fellini and Masina’s brilliance.  Observe:

“Cabiria is a victim, and any of us can be a victim at one time or another. Cabiria is, however, more of a victim personality than most. Yet even so, there is also the survivor in her. This film doesn’t have a resolution in the sense that there is a final scene in which the story reaches a conclusion so definitive that you no longer have to worry about Cabiria. I myself have worried about her fate ever since.”

Me too, Mr. Fellini.  Me too.

All of the posts this week are my contributions to the For the Love of Film: the Film Preservation Blogathon that is being put on by the Self-Styled Siren and Ferdy on Films in effort to raise money for the National Film Preservation Foundation.  As film lovers, we should all be aware of how delicate film is and how much of it has been lost due to improper preservation.  Luckily for all of us, there are individuals who have made careers out of restoring and archiving movies so that we are able to enjoy them, and so will future generations.  To donate to the National Film Preservation Foundation, please click HERE.

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I always joke that if I could marry a movie, I’d marry David Lean’s 1945 quintessential British classic Brief Encounter.  Of course, that’s silly, but I say it because in my mind Brief Encounter is about as close to perfection as a film can get.  My friend Amanda recommended it a couple years ago and I’ve been hooked ever since.

Based on the 1936 play Still Life by Noel Coward, Brief Encounter is the story of an ordinary man and an ordinary woman who happily go about their ordinary lives (he is a doctor, she a housewife) until a chance meeting in the cafe at Milford Junction rail station shatters their senses of normalcy and sets in motion a forbidden love affair.  What sets Brief Encounter apart from other films with similar story lines (and there are many) is that it’s a perfect marriage of acting, directing, and screenwriting.  It also offers great commentary on the rigid morals of the British middle class shortly after WWII.  The lovers are deeply enamoured with one another, and their mid-day trips to the cinema, stolen kisses in railway tunnels, and a trip to the countryside, offer an exciting relief from the monotony of their private lives at home.  They are unable to consummate their love, however, out of a deeply rooted sense of guilt.  Alec and Laura, the latter especially, must make do with fantasies.  We see her on the train to Ketchworth dreaming about a perfect world with Alec: on a cruise, in Paris at the opera, and other romantic interludes.  We know as much as Laura does that her relationship with Alec must stay in the world of the fantastic.

"Alec and me"

Some of the best dialogue in the film comes out of Laura’s sense of guilt.  One of my favorite passages in any film is this one:

“This can’t last. This misery can’t last. I must remember that and try to control myself. Nothing lasts really. Neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long. There’ll come a time in the future when I shan’t mind about this anymore, when I can look back and say quite peacefully and cheerfully how silly I was. No, no, I don’t want that time to come ever. I want to remember every minute, always, always to the end of my days.”

To me, this is great writing.  Richard Dyer, film historian and professor at King’s College in London, did a book about Brief Encounter for the BFI in which he suggests that the two lovers’ moral struggle and oppression may have been linked to Noel Coward’s personal experience as a (closeted) gay man living in a time when homosexuality was illegal and forbidden.  From what Ive read and seen, I’m not sure how closeted Noel Coward actually was; he seemed quite open and it was much easier for gay men to be free about their sexuality when engaged in the theatre.  Either way, the screenwriting in Brief Encounter is the best.  It’s sharp, intelligent, and never falls into a pot of sap like so many romantic films today tend to do (I’m looking at you, Nicholas Sparks movies).

Alec: "Forgive me." Laura: "For what?" Alec: "For loving you. For making you so miserable."

Of course, Brief Encounter would not be the British equivalent of Casablanca (as some people refer to it) without Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard.  What I love about these two actors is that they weren’t at all glamorous, they were ordinary looking like you and me, and I think this made the story all the more believable.  Celia Johnson gives an especially powerful performance.  She had the most expressive and soulful eyes.  When Laura is at home with her husband and she is having an inner dialogue, wanting to tell him about her new doctor friend Alec, she says, “But, oh, Fred, I’ve been so foolish. I’ve fallen in love. I’m an ordinary woman. I didn’t think such violent things could happen to ordinary people.”   Can you imagine any other “conventionally beautiful” British star at the time uttering these lines in this film?  I don’t think I’d believe it if I saw it.  I’ve always thought of Ingrid Bergman as an unconventional beauty.  She was very natural, and I see Celia Johnson in the same way.

Brief Encounter is really the film that gave me an appreciation for David Lean.  I vastly prefer his earlier films to his later epics, and would take Blithe Spirit or Great Expectations of Doctor Zhivago any day.  Please don’t stone me for saying so.

If you have yet to see Brief Encounter, please do yourself a favor and remedy that situation.  You’re looking at a film that landed second on the BFI’s list of greatest British movies ever made, but it’s definitely first in my heart.  It is essential 1940s England.  And train station romances are simply the best.

Oh, shame on me I forgot to mention, the soundtrack is Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto #2.  This really is a movie after my own heart.

All of the posts this week are my contributions to the For the Love of Film: the Film Preservation Blogathon that is being put on by the Self-Styled Siren and Ferdy on Films in effort to raise money for the National Film Preservation Foundation.  As film lovers, we should all be aware of how delicate film is and how much of it has been lost due to improper preservation.  Luckily for all of us, there are individuals who have made careers out of restoring and archiving movies so that we are able to enjoy them, and so will future generations.  To donate to the National Film Preservation Foundation, please click HERE.

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Terrence Malick’s 1978 film Days of Heaven is a visual masterpiece. In fact, I’ll go as far as to say it’s one of the most visually stunning films I’ve ever seen. The story is quite simple on the surface: a young couple on the run in 1916, along with the boy’s younger sister, hitch a ride on a train to the Texas panhandle and work as seasonal harvesters on a young man’s farm. A love triangle forms between the boy Bill, girl Abbey, and the farmer (played by Sam Shepard) that ultimately leads to tragedy. All of the performances in this film are top notch (even Richard Gere, who usually isn’t one of my favorites), but I think Linda Manz totally steals the show. The story is, after all, told in a through her naive eyes, which gives the film a sort of fractured feeling. Manz has such a beautiful, haunted quality on screen.

Linda Manz

The photography is really central in Days of Heaven. Malick and cinematographer Nestor Almendros (who won an Oscar for his camera work) wanted to pay homage to silent cinema and have images take precedence in the story. They also wanted to use as much natural lighting as possible to make it look more authentic. Alberta, Canada was chosen as the location for filming because of its breathtaking scenery (as seen in other films such as Legends of the Fall), and Malick and Almendros paid special attention to the use of color, which, in Criterion’s restored version is absolutely breathtaking. Everything in this film feels authentic to its period setting, including the farmer’s mansion, which evokes scenes from George Stevens’ Giant, and was built with full interior and exteriors by art director Jack Fisk. The opening credits even use authentic period photography, including famous photos by Lewis Hine. And let’s not forget Ennio Morricone’s haunting score, one of the most beautiful of any film. Malick’s vision was to be “a drop of water on a pond, that moment of perfection.”

To put it plainly, Days of Heaven is a work of art. From the sweeping shots of thunder clouds and vivid sunsets, to a plague of locusts, to an isolated mansion in the snow, every image in this film is like a painting. I think Malick certainly achieved a moment of perfection with Days of Heaven, or about as close as one can get to perfection on film. It is a period piece, an avant garde film, an epic. It is simply mesmerizing in so many ways.

In the Criterion essay about the film, historian Adrian Martin describes his thoughts after seeing Days of Heaven in the theatre:

I vividly remember the experience of sitting in a large, state-of-the-art theater in 1978, encountering this work, which seemed like the shotgun marriage of a Hollywood epic (in 70 mm!) with an avant-garde poem. Wordless (but never soundless) scenes flared up and were snatched away before the mind could fully grasp their plot import; what we could see did not always seem matched to what we could hear. Yes, there was another “couple on the run”—Richard Gere and Brooke Adams as the lovers Bill and Abby, he fleeing a murder he inadvertently committed working in a Chicago steel mill, she pretending to be his sister during the wheat harvest season in the Texas panhandle near the turn of the twentieth century—but this time, the filmmaker’s gaze upon them was not simply distant or ironic but positively cosmic. And there was so much more going on around these two characters, beyond even the dramatic triangle they formed with the melancholic figure of the dying farmer (Sam Shepard)—now the landscape truly moved from background to foreground, and the work that went on in it, the changes that the seasons wreaked upon it, the daily miracles of shifting natural light or the punctual catastrophes of fire or locust plague that took place . . . all this mattered as much, if not more, than the strictly human element of the film.

Above all, the radical strangeness and newness of Days of Heaven was signaled to its first viewers by its most fragmented, inconclusive, “decentered” feature: the voice-over narration of young Linda Manz as Linda, Bill’s actual sister, who is along for the ride, often disengaged from the main action but always hovering somewhere near. It might have seemed, at first twang, like a reprise of Spacek’s “naive” viewpoint from Badlands, but Manz’s thought-track goes far beyond a literary conceit. It flits in and out of the tale unpredictably, sometimes knowing nothing and at other times everything, veering from banalities about the weather to profundities about human existence. Sometimes even her sentences go unfinished, hang in midair. In this voice we hear language itself in the process of struggling toward sense, meaning, insight—just as, elsewhere, we see the diverse elements of nature swirling together to perpetually make and unmake what we think of as a landscape, and human figures finding and losing themselves, over and over, as they desperately try to cement their individual identities or “characters.”

In 2007 it was chosen to be preserved by the National Film Registry and Library of Congress for its achievement in being “culturally, historically, and aesthetically important.” Presently, Criterion is preparing to release it on Blu-ray, and I think if any film deserves such a treatment, it’s this one. This is a film I would have loved the opportunity to see on the big screen.

I can’t recommend this film enough.  If you haven’t seen it, do yourself the favor of adding it to your netflix queue.   I’m also sorry if this write-up is incoherent, like a lot of film critics, I have a hard time describing Days of Heaven because it’s that amazing.

All of the posts this week are my contributions to the For the Love of Film: the Film Preservation Blogathon that is being put on by the Self-Styled Siren and Ferdy on Films in effort to raise money for the National Film Preservation Foundation.  As film lovers, we should all be aware of how delicate film is and how much of it has been lost due to improper preservation.  Luckily for all of us, there are individuals who have made careers out of restoring and archiving movies so that we are able to enjoy them, and so will future generations.  To donate to the National Film Preservation Foundation, please click HERE.

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Continuing with the Criterion love, today’s film recommendation is very fitting with the theme of www.vivandlarry.com.  That Hamilton Woman, Alexander Korda’s propaganda piece involving the real-life adulterous affair of Lord Horatio Nelson and Emma Hamilton, was released in the United States in 1941.  It was as much a propaganda picture as an exploitation of Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier’s immense popularity and appeal at the time.  Watching it for the first time with the commentary track by British historian Ian Christie, I learned quite a bit about the production of the film as well as the fascinating story of the real Nelson and Lady Hamilton.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill supported the film and even sent cables to Korda in Hollywood with suggestions for its title.  The main goal of That Hamilton Woman was to make a strong attempt at convincing then neutral America to take up arms with England in the fight against Germany.  Christie noted that Hungarian-born Korda was the best person to make such a patriotic British film because he was one of the only people who wanted to revolutionize the British film industry at the time.  Korda wanted his production company, the famed London Films, to focus on topics that were essentially British, filming adaptations of British authors and looking at British history–something  British producers hadn’t really done up until this point.

Because the crux of the story is the adulterous affair between Nelson and Emma Hamilton, and because it was filmed in Hollywood, Korda had Joseph Breen and the Production Code to contend with.  Vivien Leigh’s Emma is a perfect example of how a sinful woman is made to pay the consequences for her lifestyle choices under Breen’s code.  This was executed brilliantly by the film’s cinematographer, Rudolph Maté, who played heavily with lighting and the use of shadows to convey mood.  There is a great scene toward the end of the film where after dinner in London with the Hamiltons and Nelsons, Lady Nelson (Gladys Cooper) and Emma are talking with one another and we see Lady Nelson bathed in light in the background while Emma, in the foreground, is a silhouette in shadows.  We know Emma is the home-wrecker despite being the film’s heroine.  The idea that being a bad girl will lead to disastrous consequences is apparent from the very beginning of the film when we see Emma as she was after Horatio’s death, poor and old, stealing wine from a shop in France and being violently arrested and thrown in prison (which really happened).  Another facet of the Nelson/Hamilton love story that was tactfully worked around by Korda was the fact that Emma Hamilton had Horatio Nelson’s love child.  In the film we know Emma is pregnant when she faints after Nelson’s speech at the House of Lords, but the child is never shown (although according to production stills from the film, at least one scene with Emma and her daughter Horatia was in fact filmed but left out of the final version).

It’s a wonder that this film was able to achieve such a sense of cinematic style, because it was filmed in only six weeks and on a limited budget.  The famed art director Vincent Korda (Alex’s brother), can be thanked for making diamonds out of coal.  To save money, Alex Korda wanted to have the bulk of the film shot in one interior set.  Vincent magnificently designed Sir William Hamilton’s estate in Naples, complete with Mount Vesuvius smoking in the background to give audiences a sense that this was Italy and not a Hollywood back lot (although as Christie explains, Vesuvius couldn’t actually be seen from any such villa in Naples). Vincent Korda also designed the naval battle scenes, which are quite impressive considering this film was made in 1941. Another person who added to the glamor of the film was costume designer Rene Hubert who utilized many paintings of the real Nelson and Emma Hamilton in creating his costumes.  Apparently the real Nelson and Emma Hamilton were big fans of making statements with their fashion, and loved dressing up, so this works wonderfully for Leigh and Olivier’s characters in the film.

In 1940/41, Vivien Leigh’s star had eclipsed Olivier’s on screen, due to her popularity after Gone with the Wind.  She and Larry had just been married a couple weeks before the start of filming, and after having lost a fortune in their failed production of Romeo and Juliet on stage, accepted the offer to do That Hamilton Woman in large part because it would provide them enough money to go back home to London for the duration of the war.  Vivien is clearly the star of the film and is much more natural and luminous on screen than her husband.  However, their portrayals give wonderful contrast to one another, and the audience really gets a sense of the fact that despite this torrid love affair, Nelson’s first loyalty is to the British crown, and he is most concerned about saving Europe from the tyrannical Napoleon.

Emma Hamilton by George Romney and Vivien Leigh by Bob Coburn

It has been said that That Hamilton Woman was Winston Churchill’s favorite film and that he showed it to everyone, including FDR.  It is unclear how much patriotic sentiment his film raised in American audiences upon its release, but my guess is that its greatest appeal was the fact that it starred Hollywood’s dream couple.  At any rate, just a month after the film’s theatrical release, the Japanese bombed Pearl harbor and America was thrown into the war.

The London Films library has since been sold to Granada Media, which is where Criterion picked up this film for their collection.  I was so glad when I heard Criterion was going to be releasing this movie because my old Sam Goldwyn VHS was not very good quality, and I don’t even own a VCR anymore.  The restoration is decent.  Although we can still see light scratches in the film, it doesn’t in any way detract from its watchability, and it is suggested that this was part of the original print that was retained when the film was transferred to digital.  I have read that there wasn’t much that could be done with Miklós Rózsa’s beautiful score because it was on monotrack.

That Hamilton Woman is a beautiful film on the whole and it is by far the best of the three films that Vivien and Larry did together.  If you are interested in Alexander Korda films or the Oliviers in general, I’d highly recommend this film.

Available for purchase on Criterion: yes

Available for streaming on Netflix: no