445. Eegah

445. (22 Oct) Eegah (1962, Arch Hall Sr.) 3

442. The Magic Sword

442. (19 Oct) The Magic Sword (1962, Bert I. Gordon) 17

434. Light in the Piazza

434. (16 Oct) Light in the Piazza (1962, Guy Green) 66



Light in the Piazza is in very strange, sometimes uncomfortable thematic territory. The initial discomfort in Yvette Mimieux and George Hamilton's romance eventually becomes easy to accept because they have such astonishing chemistry together. There are moments where they share the screen that are breathtakingly heartfelt.

Olivia de Havilland is also superb, particularly late in the film when she starts to assert herself as a strong, alluring older woman. She gives her character's moral dilemma real depth. Guy Green makes brilliant use of the Florentine scenery.

The Final Conclusion - Best Actress 1962

1962

So the much anticipated ranking is:

5. Lee Remick in Days of Wine and Roses

Although Lee Remick is overshadowed in many ways, she's just excellent as Kirsten, a pathetic woman, a real victim. Her story is very heartbreaking and you don't get any fun out of it but Remick's realism in this part is really impressive. A great performance that should be much more frequently talked about.

4. Geraldine Page in Sweet Bird of Youth

I would kill to see this performance on the stage but instead I have to make do with a great motion picture performance that's nothing short of excellent. Geraldine Page makes Alexandra a very fascinating character and she single-handedly makes the movie worthy of watching. This work is a real treat. Truly-truly memorable effort by a great actress.

3. Katharine Hepburn in Long Day's Journey Into Night

I must say that I was thouroughly impressed by the performance of Katharine Hepburn. Although there's something in me that prevented me from totally embrace it, I still find her truly amazing in her part. As Mary Tyrone, she's just chilling and really disturbing but she never overplays Mary's broken personality. Fantastic work.

2. Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

This is an iconic performance and rightfully so. It's both delicious and shocking, funny and disgusting. Bette's brilliance is at (another) peak here and she's really unforgettable. No matter what she does on the screen, it's going to be something that you'll never ever forget. She nails each and every nuance of Baby Jane and the result is a fantastic, dazzling and intense work by a brilliant actress.

1.Anne Bancroft in The Miracle Worker

I was totally amazed by Anne Bancroft's star-making turn as Annie Sullivan, the determined and tough teacher. Anne Bancroft created a multi-layered fascinating character that is a real joy to watch. Her beauty shines through the screen and it's effect is just astonishing. I was taken by this work and I can only praise her for this. It's kind of cheesy to say it's a miracle but for me, it is.

So I can proudly announce

the winner is...

Anne Bandroft

in

The Miracle Worker

That was a nailbiter.

Final thoughts: A really great year (the highest grades overall) but somehow I wasn't that blown away. All of these ladies were great but somehow I didn't enjoy this year as much as I expected to. Still, a wonderful year with great performances. The ranking was very difficult for me but I hopw to have made the right decision. I wasn't very sure but eventually, this seemed like the best alternative.

Omissions: Jeanne Moreau in Jules et Jim; Anna Magnani in Mamma Roma; Shelley Winters in Lolita

The ranking of the reviewed years:

1. 1969
2. 1944
3. 1974
4. 1961
5. 1989
6. 1962
7. 2001
8. 1959
9. 2006
10. 1978
11. 2010
12. 1996
13. 1964
14. 1939
15. 1977
16. 1992
17. 1997
18. 2009
19. 1980
20. 1941
21. 1972
22. 1963
23. 1966
24. 1973
25. 1983
26. 1986
27. 1937
28. 1990
29. 1954
30. 1958
31. 1948
32. 2002
33. 1957
34. 2003
35. 1940
36. 1998
37. 1975

About the next year: It's no secret that it will be 1943. :)

What do you think?

Geraldine Page in Sweet Bird of Youth

Geraldine Page received her third Oscar nomination for playing Alexandra Del Largo, a depressed, movie star in the movie Sweet Bird of Youth. Geraldine Page won the Golden Globe for this performance of hers so I suspect she received many votes from the members of the Academy, too. I think she was third behind Anne Bancroft and Bette Davis. The fact that she had lost the previous year for Summer and Smoke must have helped her a lot, too. Poor Geraldine, I think she was always either second or third or at least fourth and that's why she had to wait so much for the win.

Although Sweet Bird of Youth is not a masterpiece, it's quite a decent movie. It doesn't have the tension of Richard Brooks' earlier Tennessee Williams adaptation, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. One can easily observe that in Paul Newman's performance. His work here was just uninspired and bored (unlike in Cat... where the character's inner pain almost burned the screen) though never really bad. He just didn't stand out. Ed Begley's nomination and eventual Oscar win is a mystery unsolved. I guess... no I don't. He just won. Same goes for Shirley Knight's nomination.

The only reason why people still remember this movie is Geraldine Page's performance as Alexandra, the mentally unstable actress. If it wasn't for her, I wouldn't watch a movie like this twice. She's the only reason to watch this movie and it's so strong. Geraldine Page was born to play Tennessee Williams' heroines. Her neurotic persona and the unique, radiant presence of hers makes her the ideal choice for such roles. All of my greatest memories of Geraldine Page are in connection with her famous nervous ticks. When I think about Geraldine Page, I see the hysterical Eve in Interiors crying theatrically next to the window or the hopeful old lady from A Trip to Bountiful who's desperate to go home once. In short, I love this woman and I would be stupid not to love her most delicious performance as Alexandra.

Alexandra (as I said) a typical Tennesse Williams heroine: she's broken down, mentally unstable and yet she's hoping for a better future. She has a lover that she never takes really seriously. Somehow, things work out for her in the end. She's a diva in the best sense of the word. Despite all this (or because of this), I felt so sorry for her. Geraldine was not afraid of making Alexandra (or as she likes to be called "Princess") a miserable creature. Her breakdown at the cinema, the tragic falshbacks all add to the dramatic effects of this performance and Page uses the opportunities that she's given. From the first minute to the last, you just cannot take your eyes off her and she has a very magnetic presence.

However, something is working against Geraldine: her movie. In all fairness, she's not given enough time to shine and therefore she's less brilliant than she could have been. I mean, the story of Chance and the Finleys take away so much time from her and as a result, she never becomes the leading character that she deserves to be. This is not Geraldine's fault but it's a setback for her, unfortunately. If I'm really honest, I just don't see why she was needed in this movie. Just for the sake of a great female character? I really don't want to criticise Geraldine with this, I'm just angry about this thing.

Still, denying Geraldine's greatness here is totally useless as she stil owns her movie. She offers many unforgettable scenes. For example, her big exit where she frankly tells Chance what to do :D and when things work out for Alexandra. Geraldine plays masterfully with Alexandra's emotions and she leaves a really strong impression. You know, I'm a sucker for great theatrical acting. I imagine I would have orgasmed over Geraldine's last scene had I seen it on the stage. This way it's just a brilliant experience.

I would kill to see this performance on the stage but instead I have to make do with a great motion picture performance that's nothing short of excellent. Geraldine Page makes Alexandra a very fascinating character and she single-handedly makes the movie worthy of watching. This work is a real treat. Truly-truly memorable effort by a great actress.

What do you think?

I sleep to the ranking. Conclusions: tomorrow!

Anne Bancroft in The Miracle Worker

Anne Bancroft received her first Best Actress nomination and only Oscar for playing Anne Sullivan, the famous teacher of Helen Keller. It's strange that people thought that Bette Davis would win the Oscar for playing Baby Jane. I'm not comparing them, I just think that I would have expected Bancroft to win. First of all, her movie received multiple nominations in very important categories plus Anne Bancroft was a young and upcoming actress who's earned fame on Broadway. So I'm not that surprised by this win. It's pretty much like Marion Cotillard's win. It wasn't expected but with hindsight, it's an obvious choice.

The Miracle Worker is an astonishing, beautiful movie about Helen Keller. There are many versions of this story but I firmly believe that nothing can be better than this one. It's quite stunning that it was not nominated for Best Picture. However, all the nominations were deserved for this movie. Arthur Penn's direction is fantastic and had David Lean not been nominated, he would be my pick for the win. Patty Duke is also fantastic and now I feel that placing her in supporting wasn't that much of a category fraud.

It really wasn't because the main character of this movie is really Anne Sullivan (she's the miracle worker). I think no other actress than Anne Bancroft could have played this character so brilliantly. Anne Bancroft was a terrific, wonderful actress who's just fantastic in each and every role of hers. That voice, that presence is so astonishing and she's like a real magnet. You just have to look at her so that you don't miss any of her brilliant moments. Although her iconic role is Mrs. Robinson from The Graduate, this one is not any weaker. The characters and Anne's approach to them cannot be any more different.

Anne Sullivan is a very tough and dedicated teacher who's haunted by her horrifying past. There's a kind of mystery in her. Those sunglasses make her somehow distant and Anne played her as if she was an otherwordly person. Anne is not the kind, gentle person that you would expect in such a story. She is very tough and incredibly strict and yet she has a kind of strange connection to Helen.

Unlike Patty Duke's mostly technical performance (which is also brilliant), Anne mostly relies on the emotions and shows the demons of Annie so brilliantly. The scene where she's talking about her past with her brother and the awful things they went through is incredibly effective and chilling. She goes through so many emotions and it's just wonderful to see them change in Anne's performance. She shows all the contradictions of this character so wonderfully.

I also loved how Bancroft showed the vulnerability inside Annie's determination. I love those moments when we get to see Annie's fears and weaknesses. There are so many wonderful layers in this character and Anne Bancroft is able to reveal all of them. Although some may argue that it was easy for her to play Annie as she had previously played her on Broadway (winning a Tony for it), I think film is a totally different thing and it's incredibly difficult to adapt a stage performance to the screen. Anne is, however, never theatrical and she avoided all the possible traps and dangers of this role. There isn't a stagy feeling in it (which you can sometimes spot in Katharine Hepburn's performance as Mary Tyrone) and it all seemed so natural for me.

I was also impressed by how well she worked with Patty Duke. Their performances are totally different and yet they result in sheer perfection. It was just wonderful any time that they were together on the screen. Neither of them tried to overshadow the other one (the never did) and they really were very supportive of each other. I felt that there was a special connection between them very much like Annie's and Helen's. Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke gave us one of the best on-screen duos ever.

However, what amazed me the most was the clarity and beauty of this performance. Despite her flaws, Annie seemed like a real saint to me. This beauty drew and touched me so much that everything else failed to eist for me apart from Anne. It was just wonderful. After a while, her work becomes like a very clean creek which flows gently on a summer afternoon. There was something very relaxing about Anne and it was almost a spiritual experience for me. And that rarely happens in a film. My feelings about her are just indescribable. I guess not many people said this before but this is almost an angelic performance for me.

So after all, I was totally amazed by Anne Bancroft's star-making turn as Annie Sullivan, the determined and tough teacher. Anne Bancroft created a multi-layered fascinating character that is a real joy to watch. Her beauty shines through the screen and it's effect is just astonishing. I was taken by this work and I can only praise her for this. It's kind of cheesy to say it's a miracle but for me, it is.

What do you think?

Katharine Hepburn in Long Day's Journey Into Night

Katharine Hepburn received her ninth Best Actress nomination for playing Mary Tyrone, a depressed, unstable addict in the movie version of Eugene O'Neill's drama, Long Day's Journey Into Night. Although nowadays it's one of Katharine Hepburn's most famous performances (she herself considered this one her best) and it won Best Actress at Cannes, I don't think she had much of a chance of winning her second Oscar. I feel her performance combined with her fame and iconic image got her many votes but I think she only got ahead of Lee Remick (or not even her). It's a very tricky case with her.

Long Day's Journey Into Night is not a bad movie. Although it's overlong and even boring sometimes, the greatness of the real play shines through the material. It's an old-fashioned ensemble piece and there was Sidney Lumet as a director. The whole thing seems very stagy and I imagine it would have been fascinating on the stage. Ralph Richardson gives a great stage performance but he's too mannered for a film and he really overacts sometimes. Jason Robards and Dean Stockwell are great but nothing really amazing (maybe Robards).

Katharine Hepburn plays Mary, the mother of a dysfunctional, unhappy family. She's also mentally unstable and addicted to morphine. She's full of disturbing thoughts and shattered dreams and she's unbelievably depressed. I really cannot think of many other actress in this role besides Katharine Hepburn. Mary is an incredibly hard role to play and any misstep would have ruined it. An incredible talent isn't enough for her. This part needs an extremely confident performer who's no fears of going to places she's never been to before. I guess Katharine Hepburn was the best choice for that in Hollywood. Ironically, I'm not much of a fan of Katharine Hepburn. I mean I do admire her but I don't love her as much as others. Still, I find her stone-cold sober fascinating. This lady had a real personality (just read Jane Fonda's book, she's a fascinating character there) and she's so original.

Mary is a very unlikely Katharine Hepburn character. She's different from everything she had done and would do later. I've got used to watching her being manipulative or an unhappy spinster or a very self-confident, emancipated woman. However, Mary is something else. What I loved the most is that Kate made Mary a real ghost-like presence. As a result, she's always very frightening and disturbing to watch. There's a kind of repetitiveness in her performance that makes it very intense. I was mostly shocked by the way she portrayed Mary's denial of her son's sickness. There's a scene where he reveals where he reveals the truth and Mary slaps him on the face, screams and hugs him obsessedly. It's a very strong moment and it is really unforgettable.

Hepburn is the true standout in the cast of Long Day's Journey Into Night. She steals each and every moment from her co-stars without truly intending to. She feels like a great ensemble player but we know how much she contributed to the movie when she's not on the screen (for about an hour). Without her, the whole thing is quite slow and even boring but with her, the whole movie turns into something brilliant. That previously mentioned haunting presence is just brilliant. And she never overplays these aspects of Mary (there are scenes at the edge, though). In the end, she's very much like Ophelia from Hamlet, she becomes a shadow of her old self. It's very painful to see her suffer but it's also wonderful to see Hepburn act so great.

The movie ends with a great monologue of Mary which is excellently delivered by Katharine Hepburn. However, Sidney Lumet screwed the whole effect with close-ups. The effect would have been even stronger. That's not Hepburn's fault really, I just wanted to say. The way she speaks about the Virgin Mary and her old desire of becoming a nun is fantastic. There's something so brutal about it.

In the end, I must say that I was thouroughly impressed by the performance of Katharine Hepburn. Although there's something in me that prevented me from totally embrace it, I still find her truly amazing in her part. As Mary Tyrone, she's just chilling and really disturbing but she never overplays Mary's broken personality. Fantastic work.

What do you think?

Lee Remick in Days of Wine and Roses

Lee Remick received her only Oscar nomination for playing Kirsten, the alcoholic wife of another alcholic in Days of Wine and Roses. Poor Lee, she didn't have much of a chance of winning the Oscar. Honestly, there wasn't a prayer, was there? She might have received some votes and I'm sure many people loved her but in such a field with legends like Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis, it was impossible for Lee to win. So she's pretty much the "fifth" nominee but not a filler in the true sense of the word.

Days of Wine and Roses is a really tough movie to watch. It begins as something very ordinary but eventually it turns out to be an incredibly heartbreaking and brutally realistic story. It's almost unbelievable that it was made by Blake Edwards who's mostly known for his comedies like Victor/Victoria and The Pink Panther. That being said, it is a surprising piece of work. Another major draw is that it's just as brutal for the second time. However, there's one reason why this movie is that great: Jack Lemmon gives the performance of his lifetime. Boy, oh boy! He's just... Unbelievable. This was the movie that made him my favorite actor and there's a reason for that. He gets my Best Actor vote (over Peter O'Toole). I can't watch the scene without tears when he says "My name is Joe Clay and I'm an alcoholic."

Once again, poor Lee Remick. This whole thing is not fair for her. She has so many drawbacks and setbacks that are impossible to overcome. No wonder that her performance is rarely discussed. First of all, she was nominated along with motion picture legends like Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis plus two respected stage actresses. Second, she plays the minor co-lead alongside an actor who gives the performance of his lifetime. Third, she doesn't get that much screentime (though she gets the flashy, showy scenes needed by her). Can she overcome all these setbacks? Not really. Is she great? Yes.

Remick plays Kirsten, a woman who doesn't like alcohol in the beginning. However, she has a chocolate addiction. She is a potential alcholic and she quickly becomes one thanks to a brandy that tastes like chocolate and her boyfriend and later husband, Joe. Kirsten is (by all means) a victim. Horrible things happen to her and she cannot fight them. It's a really interesting parallel between the character and the performance. They both becomes victims of a man and major drawbacks. However, Lee, the actress, gets out of it succesfully unlike poor Kirsten.

You really see a development (?) in this performance. Although you cannot observe her changes as much as Jack Lemmon's character, you'll still pretty much see how much damage booze can cause in a life. It's always much more shocking to see a drunken woman since she loses all the tenderness inside her. We can see that here. First, Kirsten is a charming, beautiful and radiant girl and you are just not surprised that Joe fell in love with her. As the story goes on, she breaks down more and more and dives deeper and deeper into desperation. And I felt more and more sorry for her. I always love when actors don't make their characters miserable. However, here it was the very best choice made by Remick. Kirsten is nothing but a pathetic drunk, there isn't much else to say about her at one point. She's broken down, she loses everything she had.

Remick's chemistry (?) with Jack Lemmon is excellent and their scenes are really shocking and tell very much. Their fights seem so real and neither of them tries to outdo the other one. They really seem to be supportive of each other. Whenever they are drunk, they act like the same body and it was wonderful. Their last scene is just excellent. Remick delivers her monologue excellently and it was a really emotional and intense moment. Kirsten just cannot give up booze and this reality (as brutal as it is) just seems to be right for the movie. Her story doesn't go for a cheap happy ending and therefore it's just more realistic.

Although Lee Remick is overshadowed in many ways, she's just excellent as Kirsten, a pathetic woman, a real victim. Her story is very heartbreaking and you don't get any fun out of it but Remick's realism in this part is really impressive. A great performance that should be much more frequently talked about.

What do you think? (Sorry for my recent laziness with these posts but I had a lot to do)

Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Bette Davis received her last Oscar nomination for playing the iconic role of 'Baby' Jane Hudson, a forgotten child star in What Eve Happened to Baby Jane? There are some fun stories going on about this nomination of Bette Davis. Apparently, she wanted to win desperately and she was actually the front-runner so she had no false. When she lost eventually, she felt a cold hand on her shoulder and heard the sentence "Sorry. I have an Oscar to accept". That hand belonged to Bette Davis' arch enemy and her co-star Joan Crawford. I guess this is just a lovely anecdote but I don't rule out that this actually happened. Poor Bette, I guess she was a close second. The fact that she had a campy exploitation movie must have ruined her chances.

As I said, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is a very campy movie but it's sort of fun. It's a little bit too exaggerated version of Sunset Boulevard but it is a classic on its own right. It's full of suspense, great scenes, memorable lines and such. I think Victor Buono was quite good in his role and probably deserved his nomination. However, writing about these facts seems so unnecessary as this movie is really about Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. I bet it must have been (it still is) a real treat to watch these divas fighting. This was a big fight which was won by Bette but Joan could even make a defeat look like a win.

Sometimes I have a really hard time writing about Bette Davis. Sure, she's become one of my favorite actresses (thanks to these reviews) and I got to know much more of her legendary work and yet I don't have the words to describe her talent. No, she's not beautiful and glamorous like Joan Crawford but she had such real, enourmous acting abilities plus a real interesting personality. I don't know but these old-school superstars seem so much more interesting than our new celebrities (that's another reason why Liz Taylor's death was such a big loss). And we won't ever know their secret.

If I held a poll about what's Bette's greatest performance, I imagine it would be a very close one between Baby Jane and Margo Channing. Although I prefer Margo, I don't think I like Baby Jane much less. Both works are true testaments of Bette's huge talent and they are iconic from the first minute to the last. Each and every moment is so strong and memorable. I mean how can you forget Bette singing a stupid song as if she was 5 years old or the way she says "You didn't eat your dindin". Yes, this must seem crazy if you haven't seen the movie. However, if you watch it you'll see how sick and disturbing it really looks on the screen.

Baby Jane Hudson is nothing more than a mentally unstable drunk. And Bette shows this so brutally and depressingly. What always amazes me is that she's both a tragic and a comic character. I laughed out loud many times at her bitchiness (or I guess it goes way beyond Bette's regular bitchiness) and cruelty. However, there's such devastating reality. This performance is mostly criticised because Bette is overacting it. But I always thought? WASN'T THAT THE POINT? Baby Jane was a person of theatrical screams, laughter and basically a five-year-old trapped in a middle-aged body.

However, I felt a kind of sadistic joy when I saw her being mean to Joan's character, Blanche. That horrible laugh when she gets Blanche's reaction to her special gourmet dindin is just wonderful. It's no wonder that it became an iconic moment of film history. Once you see that, you just won't forget it, for sure. But she also nails the scenes where she has to imitate Joan's voice. She's so hysterical there. The "evil side of Jane is shown excellently by Bette and she really brings the suspense to the screen.

And yes, it was devastating to watch Baby Jane struggle and suffer. There's a heart-breaking scene where Jane is standing in front of the mirror and she realizes how old and ugly she's become. It was really painful. Just like her "performances" with Victor Buono's character. Because of these moments (and the ending) I always felt that in the end Jane turned out to be the victim instead of Blanche. I'm not saying why exactly but thos who have seen the movie know it very well. Jane is mentally ill and she's holding onto her childhood and her stardom that never really existed. Bette showed a heart-breaking portrayal of child stars and how horrible their life can become (and it happened way before such things were mentioned). Just look over the names of these child stars: Tatum O'Neal, Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor, Judy Garland. Their early stardom ended in addiction and/or way too early death. Bette fearlessly showed these things in a rather exaggerated but extremely shocking way.

This is an iconic performance and rightfully so. It's both delicious and shocking, funny and disgusting. Bette's brilliance is at (another) peak here and she's really unforgettable. No matter what she does on the screen, it's going to be something that you'll never ever forget. She nails each and every nuance of Baby Jane and the result is a fantastic, dazzling and intense work by a brilliant actress.

What do you think?

The Next Year

1962

So the nominees were:

• Anne Bancroft in The Miracle Worker
• Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
• Katharine Hepburn in Long Day's Journey Into Night
• Geraldine Page in Sweet Bird of Youth
• Lee Remick in Days of Wine and Roses

A legendary year that looks WOW! Which one of these brilliant actresses will get my vote?

What do you think? What's your ranking? What's your prediction for my ranking?

L'Eclisse (1962)

****
Country: Italy
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

The first time I watched Antonioni's L'Eclisse was years ago, and I remembered so little about it—two brief scenes and the amazing silent coda which lasts several minutes—that when I recently watched it again I was essentially seeing it for the first time. The greatest impression the film left with me was what a completely visual filmmaker Antonioni was. Paul Cézanne once said of Claude Monet, "He's nothing but an eye, but what an eye." I think this comment could equally be applied to Antonioni, for here incident is less important and has less impact than visual detail. Each shot in L'Eclisse is masterfully composed, at once abstract and fraught with significance. The choice of objects and people; their placement and movement in the frame; the geometry, perspective, and depth of the intricate yet crisply delineated compositions; the subtle tonal gradations of the black-and-white images; the purposeful transitions from one image to the next; the architecture of buildings, rooms, and streets—all visual aspects of each image in the movie are carefully and precisely planned by Antonioni.

In contrast to this complete control of the visual elements of the movie, the most important elements of conventional narrative—character and plot—seem startlingly casual. The main characters, Vittoria (Monica Vitti), a translator, and Piero (Alain Delon), a stock trader, are only sketchily defined. She is a detached observer of her own life living almost entirely in the sensations of the moment, while he is a shallow materialist driven by an ethos of competition and acquisition. The events of the movie seem almost self-propelled, unfolding in an episodic way that defies conventional narration in which one event leads to the next as the plot proceeds to its conclusion. Antonioni instead simply lays out a series of incidents whose impact is essentially cumulative.

The movie does have a clear beginning, as Vittoria breaks off her engagement and her relationship to Riccardo (Francisco Rabal) in a long, elaborately choreographed and edited sequence as self-contained and visually distinctive as the lengthy montage at the end. But from that point on events, although presented chronologically, seem to evolve spontaneously as the movie meanders from episode to episode. Events occur almost in isolation from one another, and the most memorable parts of the movie have little causal connection: The evening Vittoria spends with her girl friends, chatting, dressing up, and fooling around. The eerie episode when Piero's car, having been stolen by a drunk, is lifted from the river where it has crashed, with the drowned thief still in it. The frenzy of the stock exchange where Piero works, at one point interrupted by a minute's silence for a dead colleague before the trading bell rings and pandemonium instantly resumes. A quiet interlude in a small private airplane, where Vittoria seems to come unmoored from her ordinary existence and float free for a brief time, a sequence that more vividly than any other in the film gives a sense of the contrast between interior confinement, with four people crammed into a tiny airplane, and the openness of exterior space, with the plane floating through the sky and clouds.

Even the ending is wholly ambiguous. After their last tryst, Vittoria and Piero vow to meet again that evening and every day after that. Yet after they part, Piero replaces all the telephones he has taken off the hook for the duration of the tryst and resumes his normal commercial life, while Vittoria wanders down the staircase hesitatingly, her facial expressions hinting at indecision and conflict, actions that mirror those of the first sequence when she was working up the nerve to tell her fiancé she had decided to end their relationship. Yet there is method to this apparent narrative randomness: it corresponds exactly to what I take to be the point of the film, that in the modern world people's lives simply proceed from one stage to the next without clear meaning or purpose. Tellingly, Antonioni declines to do with his narrative what storytellers traditionally have always done—impose form where there is none inherent.

The one element of conventional narrative that Antonioni does not minimize is setting. In fact, he makes this the centerpiece and the unifying element of the movie. Always there is the emphasis on space—the lack or surfeit of it—and the contrast between overfilled interior spaces and empty exterior spaces—the vast, soulless ultra-modern postwar suburbs where Vittoria lives, places that are nearly silent except for the rustling of foliage, the spooky vibration of metal fence posts in the breeze, the clang of metal gates as they open and shut.

All this attention to visual detail is not just decorative, but profoundly thematic. The places where these people live and work, the landscapes through which they move tell us more about them than do their words and actions. The people in the foreground and what is happening to them are less important than the buildings, streets, objects, even other people in the background and on the periphery, for it is through location that Antonioni reveals his preoccupation with mood. The movie is ultimately more about the shifting moods of its characters than about their personalities, problems, or motivation. The people in the movie are almost vacuums. The places where they exist have greater substance and form than they themselves do, in a sense standing in for the vacancy of their inner lives.

Then there is that stunning final montage (Antonioni's version of Ozu's pillow shots?) when we revisit outdoor locations where scenes in the movie have taken place, but without any of the main characters present, ending as the streetlights come on and night falls. Containing no dialogue and with no obvious narrative connection to the rest of the film, this sequence is still perhaps the most meaningful in the entire movie. Antonioni seems to be saying that people and events are transient, that only places last. This is most strongly expressed in recurrent images of a barrel of water in which Vittoria earlier dropped a stick and which has now sprung a leak. As Antonioni repeatedly returns to the barrel we watch the water slowly emptying from it and flowing down the street and into the gutter. Life simply goes on, he seems to be saying, slowly flowing away, leaving behind only the empty vessel that once contained it. It is to Antonioni's credit that he has made a film about ennui that itself is never boring, a quality due largely to his astounding ability to use the camera to evoke mood and to transfer that mood almost subliminally to the viewer.

The strongest memory of a living person we take from the film is of Monica Vitti, whose Vittoria—in her aimless drift through life, unable to connect for long with anyone or anything—is the human focus of the movie. And the strongest human images that remain behind are the many lingering shots of her unreadable face, her expressions enigmatic yet hauntingly suggestive of a woman lost in a strange, bewildering, and apparently meaningless world.

1962: Hollywood's Second Greatest Year? Part 5

The Summing Up

In the previous installments of this series I've written on the five movies that for me are the unequivocal American masterpieces of 1962: Lawrence of Arabia, Long Day's Journey into Night, The Miracle Worker, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and Ride the High Country. In truth this is not all that large a number of great American movies for any single year. What really distinguishes the year 1962 in American pictures for me, though, is the addition to these five masterpieces of an unusually large number of films that fall just short of masterpiece status but are nonetheless excellent works.

Although many knowledgeable film lovers consider To Kill a Mockingbird a great movie, I would add it to this latter group. Mockingbird has many fine qualities, but I don't think it quite reaches the level of the five I have identified as the great American movies of the year. Its condemnation of racism is laudable and important, but in narrative terms I find that the emphasis on this theme essentially turns the movie into a courtroom drama that proceeds in lockstep to its inevitable conclusion. I prefer the greater emphasis of the novel on the less dramatic but more moving childhood memory aspects of the story.

I am also not a big fan of Gregory Peck, and for me his rather wooden acting style makes the nobility of Atticus Finch seem stiff and just a bit dull. (I realize that I am likely in the minority here.) I would have preferred a warmer actor like Henry Fonda or Joel McCrea or even William Holden as Atticus Finch. I do think, however, that while Mockingbird falls short of masterpiece status, it is still an excellent movie and am including it on the following list of other notable American movies of the year:

• Cape Fear
• Days of Wine and Roses
• Experiment in Terror
• Hatari!
• Lolita
• Lonely Are the Brave
• The Longest Day
• Lover Come Back (shown in Los Angeles in late December 1961, probably to qualify for the Oscars—it did receive a nomination for best original screenplay—but not in general release in the US until March 1962)
• The Manchurian Candidate (a good year for John Frankenheimer, who also directed All Fall Down and The Birdman of Alcatraz)
• The Music Man
  
• Sweet Bird of Youth
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
  

For the record, here are the five films nominated for the Oscar as best picture of 1962:

• Lawrence of Arabia (the winner)
• The Longest Day
• The Music Man
• Mutiny on the Bounty
• To Kill a Mockingbird
  

Several notable British and foreign language films were also first released in the US in 1962. Some of these presage the directions American films would take later in the decade—on the one hand, greater realism; on the other hand, a greater degree of auteur-inspired stylization.

• Through a Glass Darkly (Sweden)—Oscar winner as best foreign film of 1961
• Divorce, Italian Style (Italy)
• L'Eclisse (Italy)
• Shoot the Piano Player (France)
• Jules and Jim (France)
• Last Year at Marienbad (France)
• Sundays and Cybèle (France)—Oscar winner as best foreign film of 1962
• The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (UK)
• A Taste of Honey (UK)
• Whistle Down the Wind (UK)
• Billy Budd (a UK production but with a number of Americans in the cast and produced by Allied Artists)
  

Finally, a few observations about some of the memorable performances of the year. This was an especially fine year for acting—another reason 1962 was such a great year—and when Oscar time came, all the nominations for best actor and best actress were for once well deserved. But several other nomination-worthy performances didn't make the cut, especially in the best actor category: James Stewart and John Wayne, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; Joel McCrea, Ride the High Country; Kirk Douglas, Lonely Are the Brave (according to Michael Douglas, his father's favorite movie he ever made); James Mason, Lolita (he was the very personification of Humbert Humbert); Jason Robards and Ralph Richardson, Long Day's Journey Into Night; Robert Mitchum's menacing psycho in Cape Fear; Paul Newman, Sweet Bird of Youth; Robert Preston's exuberant Prof. Harold Hill in The Music Man; Tom Courtenay's sensitive performance as a juvenile delinquent in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.

As for actresses, even though I'm a huge fan of Bette Davis and consider her without question a superior actress to Joan Crawford, I feel Crawford—restricted to acting largely with her facial expressions and voice—gave an unusually thoughtful and controlled performance in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? that compared quite favorably to the Oscar-nominated Davis's flamboyant gargoyle. Nineteen-year-old Rita Tushingham, who shared the best actress award with Katharine Hepburn at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival, gave a striking debut performance in the British film A Taste of Honey. And what about Jeanne Moreau's unforgettable Catherine in Jules and Jim? After all, performances in foreign language films were just beginning to be recognized by the Academy: Sophia Loren had won the year before for her performance in the Italian film Two Women, and Marcello Mastroianni received a best actor nomination that very year for Divorce, Italian Style.

In the supporting categories, the following noteworthy performances were overlooked by Oscar: Lee Marvin, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (the definitive version of his early villains); Ross Martin's chilling psychopath in Experiment in Terror; Charles Bickford, so touching as he mourns the loss of his daughter to booze in Days of Wine and Roses; Edgar Buchanan, Ride the High Country; Brandon de Wilde, All Fall Down; Brock Peters, To Kill a Mockingbird; Walter Matthau as the genial sheriff in Lonely Are the Brave, a performance more subtle and sincere than his later hammy ones; Charles Laughton and Don Murray, Advise and Consent; Robert Ryan in Billy Budd; Eva Marie Saint, All Fall Down; Vera Miles, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; and Shelley Winters, hilariously vulgar in Lolita.

1962: Hollywood's Second Greatest Year? Part 4

An Elegy for the Western

The fifth American masterpiece of 1962 is another Western, Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country. Like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (which I wrote about in Part 3 of this series), this is a movie that emphasizes theme more strongly than the traditional Western, and that theme is strikingly revealed in its very first scenes. The movie opens with Steve Judd (Joel McCrea) ambling down what seems to be the typical street of a town in a typical Western movie. But Judd, gazing intently all around him, is clearly puzzled, for something is wrong here. The street is deserted; there is no traffic on it, no horses, wagons, or people. The sidewalks, though, are crowded with people expectantly watching the street, and the buildings are festooned with flags and bunting. It almost looks as though the whole town has turned out to welcome Judd.

Suddenly a uniformed policeman hurries up to Judd, shouting, "Get out of the way, old man. Can't you see you're in the way?" And a few moments later a camel bearing a cowboy comes thundering down the street, followed by several more cowboys on horses. The circus—or in this case, the Wild West show—is in town and Judd has just witnessed the end of a race between a camel rider from the show and a group of local cowboys. When Judd is then nearly run down by a primitive automobile, the point of the movie becomes clear: This is not a movie glorifying the Old West, but a lament for its passing; what for Judd is a way of life has become for everyone else a sideshow. Ride the High Country is not just another Western, but an elegy for a movie genre that has lost its relevance.

Judd, a retired U. S. Marshall, has come to town to do a job. He has been hired by the local bank to travel to Coarsegold, a mining camp in the Sierras and bring back $250,000 worth of gold bullion from the miners there. But he needs help to do that, and he finds it in an unexpected place. While visiting the Wild West show, he encounters an old friend, Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott), who is performing as a sort of imitation-Buffalo Bill Cody sharpshooter called the Oregon Kid. Westrum volunteers himself and his young friend and fellow performer (he was the camel rider) Heck Longtree (Ron Starr) to accompany Judd on his mission to the Gold Country.

When we next see Westrum, he looks completely different. Gone are the long hair and beard he wore in the show. Has he gotten a haircut and shaved? Or, which seems more likely, has he simply shed a long-haired wig and false beard along with the elaborate buckskin costume and stage make-up he was obviously wearing when we first saw him? Either way Westrum's whole Wild West persona was plainly just a disguise used while performing as part of a nostalgic Wild West fantasy. This pretense seems an appropriate touch, for it is quickly revealed that Westrum and Longtree plan to rob Judd on the way back and take the gold for themselves.

Within fifteen minutes of the first scene, the men are on their way. From that point on, the movie follows a classic structure dating back to Greek mythology: the two-part, mirror-image division into a journey in and a journey back, like Orpheus descending to hell and returning. When the men spend their first night in the barn of a ranch, they unexpectedly pick up a traveling companion, Elsa Knudsen (Mariette Hartley), the ranch owner's young daughter, who wants to escape her puritanical and overly protective father to join her fiancé, who lives near Coarsegold.

Arrival in Coarsegold reveals that nothing is what the travelers anticipated. It is clear that Elsa's fiancé and his brothers are a family of lascivious degenerates who plan to share Elsa and use her essentially as a sex slave. Coarsegold itself is a hellish place, a tent city run by the owner/madam of the local saloon/brothel, Kate, and her crony, the alcoholic Judge Tolliver (Edgar Buchanan, who is terrific). And the expected $250,000 in gold turns out to be only $11,000 worth.

The "marriage" ceremony the drunken judge performs for Elsa is a surreal farce, taking place in the scarlet-walled saloon/brothel with Kate as Elsa's "bridesmaid" and the prostitutes as her "flower girls." Judd, Westrum, and young Longtree (who has developed a crush on Elsa) cannot allow the sham marriage to be consummated. Judd coerces the judge into invalidating the marriage, and the three men and Elsa leave Coarsegold, pursued by the angry bridegroom and his brothers, and begin their return journey, passing the same landmarks they had encountered previously.

When Westrum and Longtree make their move to seize the gold, Judd overpowers them and now has to contend not only with the vengeful pursuers but with two prisoners as well. After one shootout with the pursuers, they manage to make it back to Elsa's ranch, only to find that the surviving pursuers have reached it first, killed Elsa's father, and are waiting to ambush them. Westrum uses his sharpshooting skills to help Judd overcome the remaining pursuers and redeems himself by promising the dying Judd, who has been wounded in the shootout, to complete their mission and deliver the gold to the bank.

Ride the High Country was hardly the first anti-romantic Western. The demythologizing of the Old West in movies began at least as early as 1948 with John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (although admittedly that film is set in Mexico). This reappraisal of the genre continued with the Anthony Mann-James Stewart Westerns and the Budd Boeticcher-Randolph Scott Westerns of the 1950s. These were tough, cynical movies whose main characters were no longer unambiguously heroic, but had paradoxical and sometimes outright undesirable qualities and motivations. Happy endings in which unequivocally good people defeated unequivocally evil people were no longer a given of the genre. Desirable outcomes, if they occurred at all, came at a high price and were balanced by sacrifice and loss. And sometimes, even when bad people were overcome, the victory was a hollow one that left an unpleasant aftertaste.

In John Ford's Westerns most people are decent and peaceful. Ford doesn't deny the existence of villains like Liberty Valance who seek to victimize these decent people, but the villains are the exception and are subject to control by the collective resistance of ordinary people and the heroic actions of extraordinary people like Tom Doniphon in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The Mann and Boetticher Westerns begin to blur the distinction between hero and villain, with each of these opposing forces sharing some traits of the other. The villains have their own warped code of honor while the heroes are ruthlessly dedicated to achieving their aims at any cost, and ordinary people are often unfortunately caught in the middle of this conflict.

In Ride the High Country Peckinpah takes the concept of the Old West as idealized myth and gives it his own slant. He darkens the Western genre even further than Mann and Boetticher by superimposing on the traditional formulas of the John Ford-style Western his own unrelentingly bleak view of humanity, in which people are almost without exception driven by their most ignoble qualities. His characters are motivated by greed, revenge, the desire to exploit others, or just plain self-interest rather than conscience, a sense of right and wrong, or a belief in justice, as Ford's characters are. He doesn't seem to be denying altogether that idealistic people and selfless actions existed in the Old West, but rather that they were the rare exception. In Ride the High Country there are precious few morally neutral people. Judd and the innocent Elsa are the only unalloyed forces of honor and truth in the entire movie. Everyone else is, if not openly corrupt, then false and covertly corrupt. And Peckinpah seems to be saying that the force of their corruption makes them juggernauts able to smash nearly everything in their path.

Peckinpah also seems to be suggesting that in addition to the baser human motivations, time and change are destructive forces as well, a theme he further explored in 1969's The Wild Bunch. Judd is a man out of time, a noble but quixotic figure whose adherence to a code of honor makes him an anachronism. In his Westerns Peckinpah's brand of cynicism is expressed in the belief that any potential for good in the Old West was swept aside by the passage of time before it was able to be fulfilled. This strikes me as the cynicism not of the born nihilist, but of the disillusioned idealist. Perhaps that explains the one bit of hope he allows in this dismal view of humanity: the rare instance when someone like Westrum is inspired by the example and self-sacrifice of someone like Judd to undergo a transformation for the better and, at least temporarily, master his most unethical instincts and impulses.

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Next week I'll be concluding my series on the year 1962 in American films.

1962: Hollywood's Second Greatest Year? Part 3

Fact vs. Legend in the Old West

In my two previous posts on the great American films of the year 1962, I discussed a historical epic, Lawrence of Arabia, and two brilliant adaptations of stage plays, Long Day's Journey into Night and The Miracle Worker. The fourth American masterpiece released in 1962 was a Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Directed by the undisputed master of the genre, John Ford, the movie was at the time dismissed by most critics as a throwback, a relic of an outdated genre. Since then the reevaluation of the films of Ford and his recognition as one of the major American auteurs have led to the reevaluation of this movie. It is now rightly regarded as his last great work, and of the same caliber as his greatest Westerns: Stagecoach (1939), My Darling Clementine (1946), and The Searchers (1956).

The film begins with the arrival by train in the small Western town of Shinbone of a distinguished U.S. Senator, Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart), and his wife, Hallie (Vera Miles), who have returned to Shinbone for the funeral of an old friend—and onetime rival of Stoddard for Hallie—Tom Doniphon (John Wayne). Stoddard is known as the man who first gained fame for killing the notorious gunman Liberty Valance in a gunfight in Shinbone, an event that launched his political career. When newspaper reporters pressure Stoddard into giving an interview, he agrees in order to set the record straight about his own history and his friendship with Doniphon. Most of the rest of the movie consists of a flashback that begins with Stoddard's arrival in the town decades earlier as a recent graduate of law school.

It is on the stagecoach ride into Shinbone that Stoddard has his first encounter with Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) when Valance and his cronies rob the stagecoach. Valance, a vicious sadist, not only robs the passengers but also humiliates Stoddard and vandalizes his most prized possession, his set of law books. With this irruption of violence and cruelty into the orderly world of Stoddard, the thematic concern of the movie is immediately established (and will be elaborated on in many variations for the duration of the film): the conflict between might, represented at this point by Valance, and right, represented by Stoddard, the enduring conflict between anarchy and the rule of law.

In the restaurant/saloon in Shinbone, Stoddard first meets his future wife, Hallie, who works in the kitchen, and Tom Doniphon, who comes there to visit her. When he hears of the encounter with Valance, Doniphon offers Stoddard a pistol and tells him, "Out here, a man settles his own problems." Stoddard refuses the gun. Amused by the naiveté of Stoddard and his idealistic belief in the power of the law, Doniphon nicknames him—half-affectionately, half-condescendingly—Pilgrim. Is he alluding to the self-righteous innocence of Christian Pilgrim in The Pilgrim's Progress, or perhaps to the Pilgrims of New England, who came to settle a new continent and encountered more difficulties than they had ever imagined?

Lee Marvin, James Stewart, and John Wayne

Embarking on a campaign to civilize and bring democracy to the Old West, Stoddard quickly gains many followers. He founds a free school in the town to teach literacy to both children and adults. He organizes a town meeting to discuss the territorial convention to petition Congress for statehood. He befriends the local newspaper editor, the alcoholic Dutton Peabody (Edmond O'Brien), and persuades him to write articles and editorials in support of statehood.

But Liberty Valance is hired by the big cattle ranchers, who feel threatened by the regulation that statehood would bring to their industry and by the Constitutional rights that the people of the territory would gain. The school is destroyed, the newspaper editor Peabody savagely beaten after he writes in support of statehood, and the town meeting disrupted. The cattle barons and their hired gun, Liberty Valance, have set themselves in opposition to the most hallowed institutions of democracy: the rights to universal education, free speech, a free press, and free elections.

This is all too much even for a pacifist like Stoddard, who declares, "When force threatens, talk's no good any more," arms himself, and goes looking for Valance. It is this decision that leads to the nighttime showdown between the two men in the streets of Shinbone. It seems certain that Stoddard, no match for a practiced gunman like Valance, will be killed, but he miraculously manages to shoot Valance dead. In the rowdy town meeting that follows, Stoddard, treated like a hero, is elected to be the town's representative at the territorial convention.

At the convention Stoddard, whose reputation as the man who shot Liberty Valance has preceded him, is nominated to present the convention's petition for statehood to Congress. However, appalled at being lionized for committing an act of violence, an act that in retrospect he feels went against his conscience, he declines the nomination and walks out of the convention. Outside, he finds himself face to face with Doniphon, who has followed him, and who drops a bombshell: It was he, hiding in the shadows, who actually shot Liberty Valance, and we are shown the true version of events in flashback from Doniphon's point of view, Rashomon-style. Stoddard is at first stunned and then, relieved at last of the guilt he felt over killing Valance and becoming a celebrity for committing an act that violated his personal ethics, he returns to the convention and accepts the nomination.

As the film returns to the present, Stoddard has finally told the truth to the newspapermen and acknowledged that it was actually Doniphon who was the hero. He is unprepared for their reaction. They refuse to print the story, preferring to preserve the false version of history that has become accepted as the truth. "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend," they tell Stoddard, a line that itself has become almost legendary.

The truth behind the legend

One of the reasons this movie was dismissed when it was released is that much of the black-and-white picture was shot in the studio and very little on location. Because of this it lacks the pictorial grandeur of Ford's other Westerns shot in the Monument Valley and Moab, Utah, an essential element of those movies and one of the things that give them their distinctive character. But to make up for its lack of spectacular scenery, Liberty Valance has a far greater emphasis on theme than any of Ford's other Westerns. In his last great movie, Ford chose to explore larger issues than the character-centered conflicts of his earlier Westerns, specifically the question of the proper role of force in a democratic society. One critic, Richard Brody, writing about The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in a recent issue of the New Yorker (Oct. 26, 2009), went so far as to call it "the greatest American political movie."

Doniphon's revelation at the territorial convention causes Stoddard to modify his position on the use of force. Stoddard learns that where force is concerned, things are not as simple as he thought. He learns that force is in itself neither right nor wrong, but that it is the application to which force is put that makes it right or wrong. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance Ford suggests that force is necessary to create and maintain order, that force and the rule of law must work together to defeat anarchy and deflect destructive violence. Without force, the rule of law is powerless, but the controlled use of force and the rule of law working together can create an environment in which democratic institutions are able to flourish and civic stability is assured.

And Ford the storyteller seems to argue that the element of meaning created by mythology is just as important in forging a sense of community and civic identity as the facts of history. No matter how an individual viewer reacts to Ford's views—if indeed this is Ford's view, for equating the ideas of Ford with the ideas expressed by the characters in his movies can be a risky thing for a viewer to do—he makes a reasonable case that at the least must be given serious consideration. And as Peter Bogdanovich, perhaps the greatest Ford scholar and interpreter, points out, in Liberty Valance Ford does expose the facts behind the mythology, and one could argue that the idea that the facts don't always correspond to the myth is actually another important theme of the film.

In casting John Wayne and James Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ford achieved a real coup. The familiar screen persona of each makes him the ideal embodiment of the attitude his character represents. As the embodiment of force, the ultra-masculine Wayne is the ideal Tom Doniphon, a realist, a stolid loner who lives outside society but uses his strength to protect its most cherished values. As Doniphon's opposite, the embodiment of the rule of law, Stewart (the man who played Destry, the sheriff who refused to carry a gun) is the perfect Ransom Stoddard, an idealist who longs to establish and become part of a community based on order and democratic values.

Each man represents one of the elements essential to the maintenance of a civilized community: the power of reason sustained by the power of physical strength. And perhaps most important, by the end of the movie each man comes to see the philosophy of the other as complementary to his own and to incorporate in his own philosophy.

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In the next installment of this series, I'll be examining the final American masterpiece of 1962.

1962: Hollywood's Second Greatest Year? Part 2

The Play's the Thing

Lawrence of Arabia, which I wrote about in the previous installment of this series, is based on an original screenplay by Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson, which in turn was based on the writings of T. E. Lawrence himself. But two of the other great American movies released in 1962 are film versions of stage plays. One of these is the Nobel Prize-winning playwright Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night (itself the winner of the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for drama), directed by Sidney Lumet. Lumet came to movies from television, where he had worked as a director for nearly ten years before directing his first film, 12 Angry Men (1957).

Running nearly three hours in its unedited version, Journey is possibly the best film version of a stage play I have ever seen. Anyone who has seen it will understand when I say that watching it is an emotionally devastating experience, an experience comparable to watching one of the most emotionally intense films of Ingmar Bergman. By the end of the movie the viewer knows thoroughly the Tyrone family and the deeply flawed relationships of each of its members to the others. And what a family: a tyrannical, obsessively miserly father, a morphine-addicted mother, an alienated, alcoholic older son, and a sensitive younger son dying from tuberculosis.

Credit for the film's powerful impact must go, of course, to O'Neill, but also to director Lumet, who prudently resists the temptation to "open out" the play, keeping it confined to the Tyrone house and to the four members of the family and their maid. In doing this he emphasizes the isolation of the family and their self-created entrapment in despair. In addition, the black-and-white cinematography of Boris Kaufman (Vigo's Zero de Conduite and L'Atalante, On the Waterfront) must be mentioned, with its masterful use of light and shadow within the house, and its capturing of the subtly shifting intensity of light as the day progresses into night, and daylight progresses to lamplight. But above all, credit must go to the ensemble cast—Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards, and Dean Stockwell. At the Cannes film festival Hepburn was voted Best Actress, and Richardson, Robards, and Stockwell all shared the Best Actor award.

If I had to single out one of these brilliant performances for special recognition, it would be Katharine Hepburn's Oscar-nominated turn as Mary Tyrone. I greatly admire Hepburn's comedy and light dramatic performances, but her straight dramatic performances sometimes strike me as emphasizing her weaknesses as an actress. Her Mary Tyrone, though, is in a class by itself and unlike anything she had done before or has done since. It has none of the overly earnest histrionics or the idiosyncrasies and tics that can diminish the force of her weightier dramatic performances.

Here she poignantly makes you feel all of the pain, disappointment, and years of frustrated expectations that have broken Mary Tyrone and driven her to become a morphine addict. Hepburn constantly makes you see that trapped inside the dope-addled woman is the hopeful, naive girl who married the dashing older actor. Pauline Kael wrote of her performance that "Hepburn's transitions here—the way she can look 18 or 80 at will—seem iridescent." A comparison of her interpretation of Mary Tyrone to that of the British actress Constance Cummings in Laurence Olivier's 1973 television version—where Mary Tyrone is unsympathetically portrayed as rather self-pitying, petulant, and neurotic—shows how profoundly affecting Hepburn, forlorn and vulnerable, really is in this movie. The cumulative effect of her performance on the viewer is not unlike the terror and pity experienced by the viewers of Greek tragedy. As Pauline Kael put it, "[T]he screen's most beautiful comedienne of the 30s and 40s becomes our greatest screen tragedienne."

The other great movie of 1962 adapted from a stage play is The Miracle Worker, adapted by William Gibson from his play about Helen Keller (Patty Duke) and her teacher and lifelong friend Annie Sullivan (Anne Bancroft). The director of The Miracle Worker, Arthur Penn, had like Sidney Lumet come from television, and this was only his second movie.

The Miracle Worker was rightly described in promotional material as "An Emotional Earthquake!" When the movie begins, the nearly blind Sullivan, a graduate of and teacher at the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, has been hired by Keller's wealthy, genteel Alabama family as governess to an essentially spoiled and untamed creature. Stricken at the age of nineteen months with an illness—possible scarlet fever or meningitis—that left her blind and deaf, Helen has been allowed to develop without any sort of training except for a rudimentary kind of sign language she has been able to acquire spontaneously.

In the early days Helen's reaction to her new governess and teacher alternates unpredictably between co-operation and hostility. Annie succeeds in making limited progress with her pupil only to experience sudden setbacks marked by violent tantrums and physical attacks by Helen. Her greatest success is in teaching Helen to spell with her fingers the names of objects. Yet Annie realizes that Helen is really only mimicking her without grasping the relationship between objects and words. "It's still a finger game to her—no meaning," she tells Helen's mother.

The uneasy relationship between Annie and Helen erupts into all-out conflict one day during the family meal, which as in most traditional Southern households of the time takes place at midday. Helen has never been taught to eat properly, instead roaming around the table while the rest of the family eat and picking bites of food off their plates. Finally Annie can stand this no longer and orders everyone else out of the dining room. What follows is a truly mesmerizing scene lasting nearly ten minutes and containing not a single word of dialogue.

Determined to teach Helen to eat at the table using a plate and spoon, Annie must physically subdue the intractable child. The scene is filled with a relentless physicality that almost borders on brutality on the part of Sullivan. This is in reality less a conflict than a war in which she must conquer her opponent if she is to have any chance of making progress in educating her. The scene occupies less than ten minutes of screen time, but in narrative time it goes on for several hours, until in fact it is time for the next meal of the day. By sheer persistence and force of will Annie does at last succeed at teaching the child to eat properly.

At a loss as to how to proceed with Helen's education beyond this point, Annie finally hits upon a plan to isolate the child from the family and live with her in a cottage on another part of the estate. "I don't think Helen's worst handicap is deafness and blindness," she tells her mother. "I think it's your love and pity." The family reluctantly agree to a two-week trial of the scheme. The two do grow closer as Helen gradually accepts the situation and learns to trust her teacher. But Annie is frustrated in her chief desire, to teach Helen the concept of language. "One word and I can put the world in your hand," she says to Helen in frustration one day.

The two weeks, however, come to an end without this happening, and the family refuse to extend the trial period. At dinner on the first night after their return, things are going badly. Helen is behaving willfully, defying Annie and testing her limits. After she throws a pitcher of water in Annie's face, Annie physically drags her from the dining room in front of the horrified family. Outside at the well Annie tries to force Helen to re-fill the water pitcher using the old-fashioned hand pump. In the unforgettable scene that follows, the breakthrough that Annie has been working for suddenly happens.

Helen's mother has already told Annie that at the age of six months Helen had actually vocalized the word for water, saying "wa-wa." As Helen holds her hand under the stream of water, Annie recognizes in Helen the dawning of awareness of the relationship between objects and words, the birth in Helen's consciousness of the concept of language. Helen, in truth an extraordinarily intelligent child, is somehow able to remember her first experience with language from babyhood and like an unimpaired infant learning her first word, finally vocalizes her first word, "wa-wa." The emotional impact of this scene on the viewer is almost overpowering.

The Miracle Worker has numerous cinematic virtues that make it far more than just a filmed version of a stage play. Repeated images of water throughout the film foreshadow the climactic scene. Penn's use of sound is brilliant. To form a transition between scenes, he frequently overlaps sound and image, beginning the sound from the next scene before the actual cut to it. At the end of the dining room scene, we hear a clock begin to chime; Penn then cuts to the family waiting outside, and the clock finishes chiming. His use of the hand-held camera and of grainy or slightly out-of-focus images superimposed on Annie's face, instead of the conventional flashback, to tell us details about Annie's sad history suggest that Penn had been carefully watching the early films of the French New Wave directors like Alain Resnais and François Truffaut.

But the movie really belongs to Bancroft and Duke. So fully do they inhabit their roles (both had played them in the Broadway production, also directed by Penn) that it is impossible to imagine anyone else playing Annie and Helen. Both were deservedly rewarded with Oscars, Bancroft for best actress and Duke for best supporting actress. Duke became the first child ever to win an Oscar in competition.

The award was a special triumph for Bancroft, who after years spent in Hollywood in the 1950s making cheesy movies like Gorilla at Large, had finally deserted Hollywood for the New York stage, where she won two Tony awards. After The Miracle Worker Bancroft became a bona fide movie star, turning in memorable performances in several other movies, including The Pumpkin Eater (1964), The Graduate (1967), in which she played the iconic Mrs. Robinson, Agnes of God (1985), and 84 Charing Cross Road (1987). In the process she received four more Oscar nominations. For me Bancroft was the pre-eminent American actress of the 1960's.