Oscar Profile: The Apartment (1960)

My favorite movie of all-time is on TCM today.

Part of Jill and Michael's 2012 TCM Summer Under the Stars Blogathon.

Directed by Billy Wilder
Produced by Billy Wilder
Written by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond
Starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, Jack Kruschen

Synopsis: C.C. Baxter (Lemmon) is an ordinary young bachelor, who is rising fast up the corporate ladder. What makes him special? Why does he ascend to the heights of more privileged older men in his workplace? Because he happens to be letting those very businessmen use his apartment for their extramarital indiscretions. Granted, Baxter has a heart, as he falls in love with Ms. Fran Kubelik (MacLaine), an elevator operator at his office. His world comes crashing down when he learns that his boss Mr. Jeff Sheldrake (MacMurray) was, and is, having an affair with her - in Baxter's apartment of all places. Fran has her own problems, and Baxter takes care of her when she tries to commit suicide after Sheldrake refuses to leave his wife. But will they work out their problems? Will Baxter put a stop to his boss' philandering? Will Fran tear herself away from the married man she hopelessly loves? In short, will the pair end up together? At times funny, at times devastating, and other times oh so tender, this is Billy Wilder's bittersweet masterpiece.

Today TCM is honoring Jack Lemmon. This wonderful film airs at 5:45 p.m.

Oscar Profile: 10 Nominations, 5 Wins

Best Picture: Billy Wilder (WON)

Other Nominees: The Alamo, Elmer Gantry, Sons and Lovers, The Sundowner

Verdict: Richly deserved, especially since Psycho was not nominated.

Best Director: Billy Wilder (WON)

Other Nominees: Jack Cardiff (Sons and Lovers), Jules Dassin (Never on Sunday), Alfred Hitchcock (Psycho), Fred Zinnemann (The Sundowners)
Verdict: Again, well-deserved. Hitchcock does some great things in Psycho, but Wilder's magnum opus is too finely crafted to be beaten.

Best Actor: Jack Lemmon

Other Nominees: Trevor Howard (Sons and Lovers), Burt Lancaster (Elmer Gantry), Laurence Olivier (The Entertainer), Spencer Tracy (Inherit the Wind)
Verdict: He already had an Oscar at this point, but it's a shame he had to lose this one. In arguably his best performance, he was passed over for Burt Lancaster's electrifying performance in Elmer Gantry.

Best Actress: Shirley MacLaine

Other Nominees: Greer Garson (Sunrise at Campobello), Deborah Kerr (The Sundowners), Melina Mercouri (Never on Sunday), Elizabeth Taylor (Butterfield 8)

Verdict: She lost to a controversial choice in Elizabeth Taylor, whose film Butterfield 8 was up for the Oscar when she was ill with a severe case of viral pneumonia. Quite sad really, for both actresses.

Best Supporting Actor: Jack Kruschen

Other Nominees: Peter Falk (Murder, Inc.), Sal Mineo (Exodus), Peter Ustinov (Spartacus), Chill Wills (The Alamo)
Verdict: Losing to Peter Ustinov's performance in Spartacus is not the issue, but his nomination seems to have bumped MacMurray out of a deserved nod.

Best Original Screenplay: Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond (WON)

Other Nominees: The Angry Silence, The Facts of Life, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Never on Sunday
Verdict: No dispute. It's a rich combination of comedy and drama with great characters and many memorable scenes. This was an easy choice.

Best Art Direction: Alexandre Taylor & Edward G. Boyle (B&W) (WON)

Other Nominees: The Facts of Life, Psycho, Sons and Lovers, Visit to a Small Planet
Verdict: The film features solid production design, but Psycho deserved this one.

Best Cinematography: Joseph LaShelle (B&W)

Other Nominees: The Facts of Life, Inherit the Wind, Psycho, Sons and Lovers
Verdict: Beautifully shot in the then dying-out black and white palate. Still, Psycho deserved this too (instead of Sons and Lovers).

Best Film Editing: Daniel Mandell (WON)

Other Nominees: The Alamo, Inherit the Wind, Pepe, Spartacus
Verdict: The film is just over two hours, and it avoids dragging its feet. Every scene is perfectly timed, with the heartwarming final scene arriving before you know it.

Best Sound: Gordon Sawyer

Other Nominees: The Alamo, Cimarron, Pepe, Sunrise at Campobello
Verdict: There wasn't much competition here, but The Alamo deserved its win over this particular work.

If you haven't seen this great film, check it out on TCM this evening.

TCM is Re-releasing "Singin' in the Rain"...

...on July 12th in select theaters for its 60th anniversary. More info here. List of theaters here.

If I Could Program TCM for a Day...

I'm totally stealing this idea from The Hollywood Revue, but it was a great idea. I tried to incorporate both foreign classics and Hollywood ones. Every film is, arguably, a popular film in its own right, but I just couldn't help including all of these great films. Though my picks might not be very original, they are some of my very favorites. One thing is for sure: I'd watch TCM all day.

My TCM schedule:

6:00 AM: Three Colors: Blue (1993)
7:50 AM: Black Orpheus (1959)
9:40 AM: The Apartment (1960)
12:00 PM: Persona (1966)
1:30 PM: The Maltese Falcon (1941)
3:30 PM: Notorious (1946)
5:20 PM: Metropolis (1927)
8:00 PM: Dial M for Murder (1954)
10:00 PM: The Philadelphia Story (1940)
12:15 AM: Gaslight (1944)
2:15 AM: The Awful Truth (1937)
4:00 AM: To Have and Have Not (1945)

I Saw "Casablanca" on the Big Screen...

...and it was amazing! Turner Classic Movies has re-released the film in theaters for one day only (today) in honor of its 70th anniversary. Not only is the restoration gorgeous, but the screening also features a brief documentary on the film, as well as an introduction by none other than Robert Osborne. I'm lucky I even got to see it, because I actually forgot all about it until I just happened to check the theater's showtimes. Anyway, the film is universally hailed as one of Hollywood's best offerings and should be seen in theaters if possible. Check it out if you can. You won't be disappointed. More details here.

Update: TCM is presenting the film again on April 26th at 7 p.m.

Black Moon

It’s always a treat to see a previously unscreened horror film from the 1930s-1950s.

TCM recently showed the rare “Black Moon” (1934), from Columbia Studios, a tale of voodoo and human sacrifice. The fact that it starred 1930s scream queen Fay Wray was another plus. I was really looking forward to this.

Sadly, “Black Moon” proved a disappointment in the horror movie sense, but I was still glad to have seen it. Like so many 1930s movies, it packs an amazing amount of incident in its short 68-minute running time. I may have been disappointed, but I wasn’t bored.

“Black Moon” starts out very promisingly. There’s a close-up of a woman looking unsettled as drums are heard steadily beating in the background. The camera pulls back and we see that the woman herself is beating on the drums, looking as if she’s in a trance while sitting in a very lavish apartment.

The woman turns out to be Juanita Perez (Dorothy Burgess) who grew up on an unnamed island in the Caribbean and is returning for a visit with her husband Stephen (Jack Holt) and young daughter Nancy (Cora Sue Collins). Stephen’s secretary Gail (Fay Wray) is in love with her boss and declines the opportunity to accompany the family on a working vacation, but agrees at Stephen’s urging.

Once on the island, the lure of voodoo overcomes Juanita and the nightly ceremonies cause her to revert to her days as a young woman on the island, where she was a voodoo priestess. She becomes so immersed in her voodoo lifestyle that in a trance she attempts to sacrifice her own daughter.

I really liked Holt’s interplay with his child. This is a very devoted, affectionate father, but not on a high saccharine level. The script shortchanges the Juanita character a bit. She’s a bit off throughout the whole movie, so when the voodoo overtakes her, it’s not too surprising. More contrast to her character would have been welcome.

The horror element is very slight. There’s no attempt to make the voodoo a supernatural entity, apart from some voodoo dolls on display. But there’s an undeniable mood to the story, courtesy cinematographer Joseph August. There’s real menace to the voodoo ceremonies on display here, with the writing bodies silhouetted against torches and fires. August provided the gorgeous black and white cinematography for “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (1941) and “Portrait of Jennie” (1948), which are two of the most striking-looking black and white features from Hollywood’s Golden Age.

Director Roy William Neill remains one of the great unsung stylists of the 1930s and 1940s. In addition to all but one of the Universal Sherlock Holmes movies starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, he also directed one of Boris Karloff’s best vehicles, “The Black Room” (1935), a fairy-tale horror film that looks much more expensive than it likely was. (Despite Frank Capra and the Oscar sweep for “It Happened One Night” (1934), Columbia was considered somewhat of a Poverty Row studio at the time).

But Fay Wray is lovelier than ever, which is always a plus. Like I said, while it’s never entirely satisfying, it was a real treat to see this one.

The wonderful folks at TCM have been showing quite a lot of these Columbia B’s of late and I’m having a blast watching them. Some of these haven’t been on TV for decades. I still have quite a few to watch on the piles of tapes to get through. There’s another Fay Wray starrer called “Ann Carver’s Profession” (1933), Thelma Todd in “Air Hostess” (1932), Ann Sothern and Neil Hamilton in “Blind Date” (1934) and a Budd Boetticher-directed mystery called “The Missing Corpse” (1944), which is supposed to be quite good. Long live TCM, the greatest television channel of all time.

Below the Sea

What movie was released in 1933 and featured Fay Wray threatened by a giant, monstrous creature? If you guessed “King Kong” you would be correct.

But if you guessed “Below the Sea” you would also be correct.

Produced by Columbia Pictures, “Below the Sea” is one of those long-forgotten gems that TCM has been showing of late, thanks to their acquisition of rights to air Columbia titles.

I had never heard of “Below the Sea” before, but thanks to TCM I got to see it. It was a lot of fun.

“Below the Sea” tells of an expedition to search for a sunken, gold-laden World War I German submarine seven years after the war. Ralph Bellamy, in rare leading man status, heads the expedition, quickly butting heads with the expedition’s financial backer, the delectable Ms. Wray. Of course, they take an instant dislike to each other, but we know that won’t last long.

The first eight minutes or so of the movie are very interesting, being set during World War I on the submarine. All the dialogue is in German and there are no sub-titles. That struck me as a pretty modern touch for a 1933 movie.

The submarine’s commander is also along for the expedition, to show them where the submarine sank, but you just know he’s up to no good.

The film’s climax is pretty darn exciting as Fay and a crewmember are trapped in a diving bell that is attacked by a giant octopus. Good special effects are on display here as one of the giant tentacles snaps the diving bell line, causing the diving bell to sink to the ocean floor. Not only that, but the diving bell’s oxygen supply is slowly running out. Bellamy puts on a diving suit to dive down and re-hook the bell line; hard to do when he’s also fighting the octopus with an acetylene torch. The big drawback to the scene is lack of music. Composer Max Steiner demonstrated in “King Kong” how effective music can be to make fight scenes more exciting, but no matter. It’s still a marvelous sequence, and I was pretty amazed to watch it unfold.

It left me to wonder how many other B movie gems are out there that haven’t been shown in decades. Thanks to TCM, we’re able to see some of these jewels.

“Below the Sea” won’t re-write the history of movies, but it’s a very pleasant way to spend 75 minutes.

Rating for “Below the Sea”: Two and a half stars.

Ding Dong Williams

No, I have not started reviewing porno movies. Rather, “Ding Dong Williams” (1946), a musical from RKO, is a real rarity – a movie about film composing, a subject near and dear to my heart. I had never heard of this movie and didn’t know anything about it, but happened to tape it off TCM last year (yeah, I’m a little behind) because it was sandwiched between two movies I wanted to tape, so when I set the timer I just let it run through.

Felix Bressart plays an older, European style film composer whose music is derided as old fashioned for a climatic scene for a movie he is scoring. His bosses tell him to score it with a modern sound or out he goes.

That night he and his secretary are at a nightclub when he hears the clarinet playing of bandleader Ding Dong Williams and feel his music is just what they need for the climax of the movie. They invite him and his band to come work for the studio. The fact that Ding Dong can’t read or write music causes all sorts of complications, but all is neatly resolved 61 minutes later.

There have been several films about movies that feature film music as a sideline, but I think this is the only movie based around the writing of a film score. I know that Randy Quaid played a film composer in a move called “Martians, Go Home” (never saw it) and Jack Black played a film composer in last year’s romantic comedy “The Holiday”, but these are few and far between.

The leads were played by people who never made it (Glenn Vernon and Marcy McGuire,) which may be why the movie has fallen into obscurity. Robert Clarke, later the Hideous Sun Demon, appears (uncredited) as a nightclub bandleader. There’s also a funny take-off on singing cowboys.

One sequence is an orchestral rehearsal that takes place on a soundstage. I checked the IMDB and my suspicions were confirmed: the conductor was none other than C. Bakaleinikoff, music director for the movie.

For those of us who love these odd little nooks and crannies of film history, movies like “Ding Dong Williams” should be treasured. Thank goodness for TCM, where little gems such as these pop up, and surprise even hardened movie buffs such as myself. There are still lots of movie treasures to be uncovered.

Welcome to my corner

Greetings everyone. My name is Kevin Deany and I will be using this little corner of the Internet to write about my passion - the movies. Here you will find thoughts, observations, reviews and critiques of movies current and old (mostly old). I will be posting about movies I've watched, movie news, DVD news and reviews, etc.

When not watching movies, I am an account manager at the Chicago-based Figel Public Relations. I look forward to blogging and hope to use this opportunity to indulge in this unique and fun 21st Century method of communication.

So here we go on this great adventure, with my first post.

So anyway, after coming home from the E.L. Doctorow appearance in Willowbrook (don't worry, there won't be name dropping here) I got home about 9:00. With just about an hour to kill before the 10:00 news, I popped in the VCR a little programmer I had taped off TCM awhile back, "Homicide Bureau" a 1939 Columbia B crime drama with Bruce Cabot and Rita Hayworth. A quick 58 minutes long. I don't think this title had been shown on television in 40 years, so as a Rita fan it was a real treat to see. Unfortunately, it wasn't very good. It was nice to see her, but those Columbia B pics just didn't have the zest and vitality of their contemporaries at, say, RKO or Fox. Just compare the detective series at Fox (Charlie Chan, Mr. Moto and Michael Shayne) and RKO (with The Saint and The Falcon) with Columbia (Crime Doctor, The Lone Wolf, Ellery Queen and Boston Blackie) and you'll know what I'm talking about. The Columbia's are pretty turgid and rough going, though I have a soft spot in my heart for the Boston Blackies thanks to Chester Morris. TCM recently signed a contract with Sony so a whole slew of Columbia's are being screened for the first time in decades, and while I'm grateful to be getting acquainted with them, there have not been, so far, any real gems uncovered. But I remain hopeful .