8:30 a.m: First curve ball of the day: my preferred butcher doesn’t have pork neck bones for the gravy. Suggests spare ribs instead. What the hell.
8:45—9:15 a.m.: Get list of all Best Picture winners, paste into Word document, open other word document, re-figure-out how to work with two document windows simultaneously, rank Best Picture Winners according to both personal preference and secret rule book issued to Old School (as in “non-Vulgar”) Auteurists, as if I even know the difference any more. Who can tell the dancer from the dance, yo.
9:18 a.m.: Go out for more supplies. Tally up my total of Oscar Best Picture Winners. Second curve ball of the day: I realize I have 89 Best Picture whereas that Buzzfeed piece everyone’s so agitated about only ranked 85. Da fuh? Did I repeat some? I guess we’ll find out as the day progresses.
10:00 a.m.: Put my Rolling Stones albums in the disc changer—for some reason, early-middle Stones, starting with or around the UK Aftermath, is my default gravy-making music—and start slicing up the garlic in, yes, the Goodfellas razor blade style. I really AM in the tank for Scorsese.
10:10 a.m.: Another curveball: As a grateful recovering alcoholic, I forgot to get wine for the gravy. And the corner licka store isn’t open. So I have to schlep over to Scotto’s. While I’m there I might as well get a big-ass Tupperware thingie, as today I’m going to do what I’ve never actually done in all my years of making gravy: I’m gonna strain it before I put it in the fridge. An experiment. Good thing I have nothing to do all day, except make gravy, and rank all the Best Picture Oscar winners.
12 noon: Okay. The onion and garlic are in, the wine is in, the spare ribs are in, I went out and bought a spoon holder, there’s nothing to do but stand, sit, simmer and stir for three hours. Let’s get this Oscar assessment party started.
89: Argo
That’s right, Argo. My list, I can do whatever I want with it. Eat it, 2012!
But seriously: obviously it is ridiculous to assert that this is the WORST Best Picture winner ever. It is, however, entirely arguable that it is the least deserving. Start with the smarmy Hollywood self-congratulation, add the give-with-one-hand/take-away-with-the-other politics, fold in the Jack Kirby snub…”And that’s just for starters,” as Telly Savalas used to say.
88: Cimarron
“Cimarron’s not that bad,” my friend Ed Hulse (Portly And Distinguished Film Historian, we used to call him at Video Review) likes to say. Ed REALLY likes Westerns. Anyway, I did due diligence and watched this for a Premiere magazine “Worst Oscar Winners” piece and to tell you the truth I don’t remember a thing about it.
87: The Broadway Melody
In the high eighties the distinctions aren’t all that cost effective, so now that I think about it, this early talkie musical snoozer might be WORSE than Cimarron! Sorry Cimarron.
86: Cavalcade
Now this one’s DEFINITELY worse than Cimarron. Whereas I don’t remember much of Cimarron, I definitely remember starting to lose the will to live about twenty minutes into watching this, again doing the due diligence thing. Not recommended. (God, I sure am inputting “Cimarron” a lot.)
85: Around the World In Eighty Days
Okay, now we’re out of the ‘30s and into the ‘50s. This white elephant, a particular bete noir of Sarris’ if I recall correctly, is the sort of thing that made people think the Eisenhower administration was dumb. S.J. Perelman admirers feel as bummed out to be reminded of this as Joan Didion fans are to be reminded of Up Close And Personal. Makes It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World look like Love And Death.
84: The Greatest Show On Earth
This ill-advised foray into circus life for Cecil B. DeMille has a lot of attractive-seeming elements—great train crash scene, a really weird Jimmy Stewart performance—that one is apt to approach it from a “how bad can it be?” attitude. It’s bad.
83: The Great Ziegfeld
I love William Powell more than the next guy but Jesus H. [lapses into coma]
82: Crash
Man, we watched this the other night and it HAS NOT AGED WELL. And the shot with the Iranian guy with the gun and the American flag subtly secreted in the background oh lord. My wife and I blame it for ruining our weekend. And we dare you to…no, we don’t dare you, that’s hostile, we implore you, for your own safety, keep away from this mess. All that goodwill Paul Haggis built up with me in that Scientology book, shot.
12:20 p.m.: The gravy’s lookin’ pretty good. Sounding good, too—nice steady simmer.
Last couple of years I used a slow cooker to make gravy and while it turned out fine this year, in prepping a Sunday lasagna dinner, I felt that using the slow cooker would mean I wasn’t working hard enough. So I thought I’d go the whole watched-pot hog, do the San Marzano tomatoes. I’ve got to say that there’s something viscerally/spiritually satisfying about closely watching over the whole process.
81: You Can’t Take It With You
Cast and director and source material and all that notwithstanding, this one’s kind of a frantic mess, huh?
80: The Artist
Cloying, winsome, kinda dumb, technically slack. Other than that, fine.
79: The King’s Speech
When I initially reviewed this, I actually wrote that Hooper’s wide-angle excesses helped keep the movie interesting. I can really be a cockeyed optimist some times.
78: Slumdog Millionaire
Hmm. I’m not sure I’ve actually seen this.
77: Chicago
Rob Marshall is a very talented choreographer.
76: The Greatest Show On Earth
Ah! See! I did repeat one. See #84.
75: The Life of Emile Zola
The apogee of the “distinguished” studio biopic back in the day, this day being 1937. I liked Paul Muni better in I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang. Everybody else does too.
74: Mutiny on the Bounty
Legendary Laughton performance aside (Gable’s good too but bear with me) this thing’s got Thalberg Prestige written all over it, a particularly bad thing with this kinda story line if you ask me.
73: Chariots of Fire
A remarkably decrepit “distinguished” film, all attempts to contemporize the subgenre notwithstanding.
72: Gandhi
The movie that introduced the world to Ben Kingsley while also showcasing maybe about one-tenth of his range. Watchable.
71: A Man For All Seasons
This movie also infuriated Andrew Sarris: Oh wait, now that I’ve gone and gotten out my copy of The American Cinema (leaving the kitchen for a minute) it’s worse than I thought: “It is the payoff films—High Noon, From Here To Eternity, The Nun’s Story and A Man For All Seasons—that most vividly reveal the superficiality of Zinnemann’s personal commitment. At its best, his direction is inoffensive; at its worst it is downright dull.” That’s Fred Zinnemann, by the way. Andrew’s just warming up: “his true vocation remains the making of antimovies for antimoviegoers.” Whoa. Anyway there’s some people who’ll react to a dis of this movie by insisting that Paul Scofield gives the greatest performance ever given by anyone ever, and he is pretty good. What are you gonna do. The script is pretty highly regarded by some, too.
Man, this gravy is reducing a lot faster than I thought it would. I better go out and get some more tomato puree.
1:00 p.m.: Moving along nicely. The smell of the pork flavor is starting to emerge. Soon the wine will have cooked off and I’ll be able to taste it.
70: Out of Africa
Very pretty, weirdly dramatically moribund. And this seemed to be almost universally acknowledged at the time it got its Oscar. Awards sure are strange.
69: American Beauty
Speaking of movies I fulsomely and egregiously overrated on their initial release, this. I’m still fond of it on some levels but its honors bespeak of the fact that it’s exactly the sort of thing an academy would deem “edgy.”
68: Dances With Wolves
No, don’t slink away. Not EVERYBODY was embarrassed by this movie, it made a shit-ton of money. The screenwriter gets a point or two in my book for the shout-out to Exene Cervenka in his acceptance speech.
67: Oliver!
Carol Reed: What Happened?
66: All The King’s Men
Who’d have known that the only useful thing about the utterly misbegotten Steve Zaillian remake or re-adaptation of the novel or whatever you want to call it would be making this blustery mostly-mess look so much better?
65: Rain Man
“Interesting” story, good star power, moves right along, but a little opportunistic, no?
64: Forrest Gump
Hating on this movie has gotten so common, so conventional-wisdom, that I’m ALMOST ready for unreconstructed Robert Zemeckis lover Dave Kehr’s R.Z.-as-Voltaire read of the movie. It will go down easier, I bet, if I don’t watch the movie again first.
63: The English Patient
I’ve recently concluded that The Good German is a much, much better refutation of Casablanca than this movie. So there.
62: A Beautiful Mind
Russell Crowe is really good in this. In every other respect, though, this might be the most “Huh?” Best Picture Winner of all.
61: Braveheart
Really great battle scenes—it’s pretty clear Mel studied Kurosawa for real before laying this out. Little heavy on the gay-bashing and masochism though. Was there a Scottish lobby working the voters or something?
60: Gladiator
I was entertained.
59: Shakespeare In Love
The moving story of a pedigreed starlet willing to do nudity and her fateful affair with a Prince look alike in Elizabethan dress. Hence, a film for the ages.
58: Driving Miss Daisy
The good liberal movie good liberals love to hate. On the other hand, the legit theater isn’t exactly brimming with opportunities for senior-age white women and middle-aged African American males, so go right ahead and picket the next live production you find. As for the movie, it really IS well-performed, and Bruce Beresford’s an extremely able director who does not falter here.
57: My Fair Lady
Great songs, appealing performers (unless you know a lot about Rex Harrison’s personal life and have taken it to heart), absolutely leaden direction.
56: Amadeus
I watched this a few years ago with the “Milos Forman: What Happened” idea in mind, and was surprised and relieved to discover, lack of surreal touches and New Wave fragmentation aside, it wasn’t at all an “out of character” film for him. It’s just not in the top echelon of his work, I guess. But if you look at it without quailing at its length or thematic emphasis on Stupid Classical Music, it’s good stuff.
55: Terms of Endearment
Come on. James L. Brooks, Larry McMurtry, all of that. If American cinema had a domestic De Sica (albeit one without the wartime sensibility), Brooks was it for this picture.
54: Ordinary People
Like everyone else I’m terribly upset that it beat Raging Bull, whose immortality this loss did not affect a whit, and also yeah middlebrow bourgeois psychotherapeutic clichés but there are some career-high performances here, so let’s just take a deep breath. Wanna rap about it?
53: The Sound of Music
I played Captain Von Trapp in Seltzer School’s 1972 production of this musical, and Max Detweiler in Jefferson Township High School’s 1977 production of same. I love this movie. If you have a Sound of Music problem I feel bad for you, son. I’ve got 80-something Oscar problems but The Sound of Music ain’t one.
52: Hamlet
Good speeches, looks pretty spooky. Hinges on an absolute misinterpretation—“could not make up his mind” my foot—but it gives good Shakespeare for the most part.
51: Silence of the Lambs
Long after there are no more Oscars any more, this will be cited as the only motion picture featuring a Fall song on its soundtrack to ever win the Big One.
50: In The Heat of the Night
Pioneered the “look at all these people sweating” genre that A Time To Kill so adroitly picked up on.
49: Wings
A silent picture, as you may have heard. Production value, a good tough directorial signature courtesy of William Wellman, great action scenes. Don’t let anybody tell you different.
48 Mrs. Miniver
Its utility value has, yes, been decreased by the fact that World War II isn’t going on anymore, but give yourself over to this picture and it will have its way with you.
47: Going My Way
Robin Wood would tell you The Bells of St. Mary’s, the sequel, is the better film, and he’s not wrong, but in my book a Leo McCarey/Bing Crosby collaboration has nothing to not recommend it.
46: The Lost Weekend
Kate Aurthur, who wrote the Buzzfeed piece that indirectly inspired this one, is taking a lot of heat for it in the comments and in the Twittersphere and elsewhere, and as someone who reveres or just likes a lot of the movies that come in for her disdain in the piece, I understand the pain of the howlers. But Ms. Aurthur and I have some mutual friends, and I’m assured that she’s a good egg, and I believe those assurances, even as I recognize, whenever I happen to read her writing, that we don’t have a whole lot in common in terms of taste and sensibility. And as a grateful recovering alcoholic, I do wince as the “you will laugh watching it” assurance in her entry on this film—it seems a little presumptuous. I haven’t had much patience to the “alienating to contemporary sensibilities” condemnation critics so readily tar movies with, for one thing. Still. This is a Buzzfeed article we’re talking about here. We are not, for better or worse, Buzzfeed people here, so why get so bothered. Also: Nick Tosches hates this movie, too, partially because he’s very much higher on Charles Jackson’s book, and then because he thinks the movie’s an egregious piece of Hollywood hackwork. So go tell HIM he’s full of shit. And finally, the bat really IS bad. That said, I’m pretty fond of the picture.
45: Gentleman’s Agreement
Sure it’s dated, but thanks to Kazan’s commitment—and Peck’s—it’s got more sting than you’d expect.
44: Marty
The Academy’s perfunctory bow to the “small film.”
43: Tom Jones
The Academy’s perfunctory bow to the New Wave film. That’s just how much the actual New Wave confused the Academy.
42: West Side Story
There’s a lot wrong with this movie. For instance, Natalie Wood playing a Puerto Rican girl. But—she’s Natalie Wood! All of your other complaints have pretty much the same kind of answer. Live with it.
41: Gigi
MINNELLI POWER MISE EN SCÈNE POWER CHEVALIER POWER FUCK THE HATERS
40: Midnight Cowboy
Still quite the actors’ showcase. In other respects almost as dated as that Zola movie.
39: The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
The Academy’s perfunctory bow to the AICN/Badass Digest film.
38: West Side Story
Aha! ANOTHER redundancy. What an idiot I am.
37: Patton
The Academy’s not-at-all perfunctory bow to the “Remember When We Knew What The Hell We Were Doing Militarily” film.
36: The Sting
A last gasp of love for studio cinemacraft, amiable diversion division.
35: Hamlet
All right, enough of this nonsense, I’m starting to look bad. (“Starting?”) See #52.
34: Rocky
Marty, with boxing.
33: Platoon
ESPN’s answer to Apocalypse Now.
32: Million Dollar Baby
As implicitly promised, here’s where my shameless auteurist bias really waves its freak flag.
31: The Last Emperor
Poetic, tragic, ravishingly beautiful. A little self-infatuated. Not really that long.
30: Ben Hur
Cheesy and self-important, yes, but also a remarkably assured and technically breathtaking mega-production.
29: From Here To Eternity
What matters here is less direction or even story than a cast that’s almost literally a collection of icons, each signifying a different mode of anxiety (Lancaster, Kerr, Clift, Sinatra, Borgnine, Reed). A magnificent cinematic encapsulation of sorts.
28: One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
The not-even-incidental sexism in this ode to anarchy rankles like crazy—it did then, too. But Forman’s choreography of the boy’s club is just undeniable.
OK. Gravy is pretty much ready. Now for the strain and to check out the yield. Fingers crossed.
3:00 p.m.: Well as you can see the strain yielded a pretty smooth and colorful result and I’ve got to say it’s pretty tasty too. Largely out of frame is a tomato-splatter mess I've got to mop up ASAP.
As some of you might have inferred, I’m making lasagna again. For Sunday dinner. And no, it isn’t an Oscar party. My Lovely Wife and I wanted to have a few friends for dinner, and we gave them some optional dates and the consensus was this Sunday. These friends aren’t Oscar people, so it’s likely Claire and I will be tuning in late, if at all. Last year we didn’t see the ceremony because we were vacationing in Iceland. My thing is, if you really aren’t overly concerned about Oscar ceremonies, telling the world this over and over seems a counterintuitive action. Anyhow. I haven’t eaten all day, except for nibbles at the pork ribs I used to flavor the sauce, so let’s get the top 27 over and done with, okay?
27: The Departed
Oh the incredible irony that a movie its director, one of our greatest living filmmakers, had so relatively little personal investment in, would gain him these industry honors.
26: The Deer Hunter
I may be overrating this, I know. I just can’t ever shake the majesty of its first hour.
25: Kramer Vs. Kramer
I read how this movie is now unacceptable because sexism and I’m not going there, not here. My high esteem for it comes from its being the one Best Picture winner that most resembles a Truffaut film, stylistically.
24: Titanic
Love it or hate it, it’s Cinema, as I learned watching it in a theater with a 90-year-old woman who didn’t speak a word of English, and no smart remarks about my dating proclivities.
23: [Redacted]
The last title that I accidentally reproduced when making this list. Don’t make me beg you, people, how many times can I say I’m sorry for my sloppy work?
22: The Hurt Locker
Pretty tense.
21: Schindler’s List
While I agree with Kubrick’s caveat, I can’t see how American culture could have handled this subject better.
20: Unforgiven
I cannot tell a lie: Like Crash, it features of a shot in which a character is framed within portentous distance of a hanging American flag. Unlike Crash, it is a very good movie.
19: Gone With The Wind
Also Because Cinema, and the art White America has earned, and the unusual result of that intersection.
18: An American In Paris
Complaining about the characterizations in this is about as useful as complaining about the characterizations in The Gang’s All Here. Or Un Chien Andalou even.
17: Grand Hotel
Watched this on the new Blu-ray and was pleasantly surprised at how sprightly it remains. Will always be a sentimental favorite because it’s the only movie I ever saw screened at Paris’ Cinema MacMahon. Suck it!
16: Casablanca
Because Curt Bois plays the pickpocket.
15: The Bridge on the River Kwai
Because without it, no The Geisha Boy.
14: All Quiet on the Western Front
Because it’s not that stodgy.
13: Rebecca
Because Hitchcock.
12: It Happened One Night
Because Claudette Colbert.
11: The Apartment
Yeah, I’m getting pretty tired of the “because” device too.
10: Annie Hall
Not just a great romantic comedy but still a pretty damn sturdy metamovie.
9: No Country For Old Men
Not just a great thriller but still a pretty damn sturdy metamovie. Oh crap, you see what’s starting to happen.
8: Lawrence of Arabia
7: The French Connection
6: All About Eve
5: How Green Was My Valley
4: The Best Years of Our Lives
Eat it, Raymond Chandler!
3: The Godfather
2: On The Waterfront
1: The Godfather, Part II
You have been reading “Ranking Best Picture Winners While Making Gravy.” Thanks and have a great weekend.
Great dish - in both senses of the word!
Let me add my 5 Cents worth of comments and try to ever-so-gently rankle "the auteurist" Glenn a little bit in the process.
71: "A Man for all Seasons" - Of course it's dull, it's based on a play by Robert Bolt, so what did you expect?
67: "Oliver! Carol Reed: What Happened?" - Nothing happened. Reed just lavished the same talent and craftsmanship on material that auteurists (and most Americans) don't care about. This is not the place, but I will always insist that "Oliver!" is a much better (stage) musical than "The Sound of Music".
61: "Braveheart" - I would argue that one can actually draw a line of inspiration for this movie's battle scenes beyond Kurosawa to Eisenstein's "Alexander Nevskji". How wonderful that a right-wing nut should be inspired by one of the staunchest communists in cinema history!
By the way: is there anyone (apart from Quentin Tarantino) who in the last 25 years has done more work that obviously defines him as an "auteur" than Mel Gibson? In all of his films one can clearly detect the same skills and thematic pre-occupations. So: is there a special place in auteur heaaven for misogynistic, homophobic Christian extremists?
29: "From Here to Eternity" - it's always fun to see an auteurist twist himself into knots in order to defend a movie that he shouldn't like because it's not directed by an accepted master. So in this case, suddenly "direction or even story" don't matter...
See, nobody can convince me that "Million Dollar Baby" is a great movie, simply because it was directed by Clint Eastwood, or that "An American in Paris" is better than "Gigi" because it is a prime example of the unique auteurist qualities of Vincente Minnelli (it has Oscar Levant and Georges Guétary, for heaven's sake...)
I always thought that Andrew Sarris must have been punished enough for his apoplectic, dogmatic dismissal of great directors like William Wyler, Fred Zinnemannn and Billy Wilder by spending endless hours dissecting "gems" such as "Topaz" or (later in his life) "The Eiger Sanction" or "Heartbreak Ridge" in order to prove his point that the worst of an auteurist's output is still far more interesting than anything by a lesser mortal, while the rest of the world enjoyed watching "Jezebel", "Wuthering Heights", "The Little Foxes", "The Heiress", "Roman Holiday" or "The Search", "The Member of the Wedding", "The Nun's Story", "The Sundowners", or "Double Indemnity", "Sunset Boulevard" and "Some Like It Hot"...
Thanks for the list, Glenn - keep it cooking!
Posted by: Olaf | March 02, 2014 at 03:58 AM
The hard-core auteurists' insistence that (say) 'Land of the Pharaohs' must be superior to 'Treasure of the Sierra Madre' is like the planetary epicycles of Ptolemaic cosmology: it's a very clever and detailed theory, but it's still wrong.
Posted by: Oliver_C | March 02, 2014 at 06:02 AM
You know, I actually like Forrest Gump. Quite a bit. I'm not interested in defending it on an intellectual or even really an aesthetic level - a narrative level, I suppose. Its sentimentality doesn't bother me much, I find it quite funny at times (it has a drier sense of humor than people remember), and hell I'm just a sucker for anything that employs the "wandering narrative" storytelling style in which the character can be somewhere completely different (literally as well as figuratively) and unexpected in a matter of like 15 minutes. I also like films that traverse periods of time, observing the changes even at the expense of a tighter, more cogent focus. For that reason I'm also more forgiving of, yes, Cimarron than most (though Platform it isn't, it's still got that thing going for it).
Basically I could trade places with your sensibilities on Sound of Music - that's a film that (without loathing or anything) I just don't get the appeal of, especially given its popularity. It seems much smaller in scope and less multidimensional than other audience favorites like, say, Gone With the Wind, Wizard of Oz, E.T., Star Wars, etc. Go figure.
Hope the sauce was good.
P.S. fwiw, this is my only Oscar-related activity of the day; moving on...
Posted by: Joel Bocko | March 02, 2014 at 08:01 PM
23: The most emotionally satisfying of the late-career awards to the Film School/Brat-sum-Easy Riders Raging Bulls generation, De Palma's brutal, self-referential, formally experimental film was also the most unconventional film ever honored by the Acad-- oh, shit. Slipped into an alternate universe there fro a sec.
Posted by: Chris Labarthe | March 03, 2014 at 03:27 PM
My ten (alpha order)
12 Years a Slave
All About Eve
The Apartment
How Green Was My Valley
The Godfather Part II
It Happened One Night
Million Dollar Baby
My Fair Lady -- leaden direction? George Cukor was aesthetically incapable of ever being leaden. His work soars.
Unforgiven
The Sting (a most brilliant queering of 1930's movie texts)
Also:
Why should Kate Aurthur get flack? She placed ALL ABOUT EVE at number one -- its rightful position. What more can be expected?
As for LAND OF THE PHARAOHS -- it is better than THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE, and one does not have to be hardcore anything to reach such a conclusion. The film is Hawks most despairing and conflicted meditation on male/female relations. After making it (and then going on the longest break in his career), he returns with his late films which are noticeably more positive/less anxious about women.
Posted by: Brian Dauth | March 06, 2014 at 01:14 PM
Who needs Sarris around to defend 'Topaz' when we've still got Brian, bless 'im?
Posted by: Oliver_C | March 06, 2014 at 02:21 PM
Thank you Oliver. And I do defend TOPAZ -- I think the final five Hitchcocks are among his best films -- he remakes VERTIGO with MARNIE and then using natural light in TORN CURTAIN goes places in terms of aesthetics that he had never explored before. In the process he does abandon Romantic Modernism (thank goodness), and as a result these late works have not gotten the credit that they are due. Instead, they are seen as a falling off rather than the inspired re-imaginings they are. Hitchcock was doing in cinema what queers and postmodernists were doing in philosophy and other art media.
Posted by: Brian Dauth | March 07, 2014 at 11:11 AM
The final five Hitchcocks are _not_ his best films, and the more committed an auteurist is, the more apparent are the holes in the arguments.
Posted by: Jeff McMahon | March 07, 2014 at 03:01 PM
Jeff: I must disagree. These late films are great works of queer deconstruction. Do they operate like VERTIGO and other earlier films as High Modernist works of art? No. So if a viewer approaches them from a Modernist/non-queer perspective, they will experience the films as failures (in much the same fashion that supporters of traditional marriage are distressed by and cannot abide same-sex marriage since it varies from -- and in their minds corrupts -- their understanding of what marriage should be).
It is the job of an auteurist to follow the artist where she goes, and if she shifts and the viewer fails to do so, then the fault is with the viewer and not the art. Auteurism is robust enough to operate in modernist/postmodern/queer realms, but those who adopt it as an approach must be careful that their calibration of it is so narrow as to render it useless.
Posted by: Brian Dauth | March 07, 2014 at 03:49 PM
I suppose the self-sealing tomb-trap climax of 'Land of the Pharaohs' is, at least, memorable. Now 'Red Line 7000' on the other hand...
Posted by: Oliver_C | March 10, 2014 at 07:04 PM
Mr. Dauth, you are a tiresome, blinkered apologist.
That said, I adore Marnie.
Posted by: Jeff McMahon | March 11, 2014 at 05:40 PM
"if a viewer approaches them from a Modernist/non-queer perspective, they will experience the films as failures (in much the same fashion that supporters of traditional marriage are distressed by and cannot abide same-sex marriage since it varies from -- and in their minds corrupts -- their understanding of what marriage should be)."
Or a brilliant, skilled parodist.
Posted by: That Fuzzy Bastard | March 11, 2014 at 06:16 PM
I won't pretend to know what Brian's talking about, but TOPAZ is a great film, as Richard Jameson eloquently explains here.* To see it properly you have to see the theatrical version (which you can find on the Internet or watch at home if you have a multiregion DVD player that can play the German disc), not the uncut version on American DVDs that contains twenty extra minutes of dreadful business between Frederick Stafford and Dany Robin and the Truffaut actors who play Stafford's daughter and son-in-law. After the film went over badly at screenings, Hitchcock boldly cut virtually all of Stafford's family scenes, but Universal for some reason has insisted on "restoring" them to us and changing the meaning of the film.
* http://parallax-view.org/2009/07/30/hitchcock's-topaz-revisited/
Posted by: Asher Steinberg | March 11, 2014 at 10:31 PM
Jeff: why does approaching film from a queer perspective make me a "tired, blinkered apologist"? What I am apologizing for? For seeing success where others experience failure? I will admit that being queer opened up critical avenues for me that might be closed to non-queer viewers since a significant portion of my life experience was devoted to finding success in what society stigmatized as deviant, dirty and disreputable.
But just as the fact of my queerness inflects my aesthetic, so another cinephile's non-queerness does the same for her aesthetic. In my view, TOPAZ behaves much differently than many previous Hitchcock films. The film does not offer up a central performance for the audience to identify with (in this way TOPAZ seems an extension of the second half of TORN CURTAIN where Michael and Sarah's agency is gradually reduced to the point where they are replaced visually by two costume baskets – the actor is her clothing).
Some viewers will find the removal of identification figures in these two films to be a signature failure of these movies. But this failure is true only if one first posits the aesthetic axiom that all successful narrative works of art have characters at their center with whom an audience can identify. I find these late films to be vigorously re-thinking this proposition. Again, coming from a queer perspective I am comfortable with films which choose not to offer identification figures since a) the majority of the time such characters are conceived of in heterosexualist terms which I can experience as problematic; b) going against the grain of convention has insured survival for me, so when I see such behavior in a work of art I am cheered. In a similar fashion, viewers who prefer identification figures may find TOPAZ to be unfocused and disorganized since the film is not built around the spine of an identification figure – it is a diffuse film and this diffusion can be experienced by such viewers as failure. I do not agree with that verdict, but I can understand how someone can plausibly arrive at such a conclusion. In the same way, some people do not believe atonal music to have any merit while other listeners do.
Asher: I hope the above helps clarify what I am talking about. I often find that while viewers will acknowledge that spectatorship is a subjective practice, they are much less eager to embrace the conclusions that flow logically from this position – in fact, after acknowledging subjectivity, they then endorse the Romantic fiction that a work of art is a universal confection binding an audience together in a spell of transcendent truth and/or beauty. This spell obviates the differences between spectators (so much for subjectivity), uniting them in a blob of undifferentiated humanity. But what if we are as Ferlinghetti describes us: a melting pot in which nothing ever melts? What if the metaphor of a mosaic rather than a melting pot is more apt, and that as spectators what unites us is the practice of an appreciative critical engagement of the work of art and not a consensus/unified judgment of its worth?
The aesthetic tools a viewer brings to a film are her blinkers – to use Jeff’s term. All viewers have them – in fact, some spectators have several pairs. But no one is without them. The goal in my opinion is to understand deeply the contours of one’s own particular blinkers while simultaneously gaining at least a rudimentary knowledge of those of other viewers. As I said above, I can understand how a viewer with a particular set of aesthetic tools/blinkers could find TOPAZ a disagreeable failure. But differently equipped viewers can with equal conviction find it a success. The outcome depends on a) how a spectator defines aesthetic success and b) what her parameters of aesthetic pleasure are. Hence my comparison to the current debate over the nature of marriage: some people say marriage must be understood in only one fashion – the uniting of one man with one woman in a procreative bond focused on the raising of a family. On this question, their blinkers are quite narrow. Other people’s blinkers are wider and allow for a plurality of views about what should and should not be considered a marriage.
So is TOPAZ a great film? Yes, when engaged from some (but not all) perspectives.
Posted by: Brian Dauth | March 12, 2014 at 03:39 PM