The Oscar Project #41: Oliver! (1968)

by Chris Marshall:

Maybe I was just tired of all the musicals I’d seen, or maybe I just wasn’t in the right mood to watch it at the time, but Oliver! didn’t do anything for me. I can’t pinpoint exactly what it was I didn’t like, but I felt like I was suffering my way through it. Luckily that’s been rare so far, but it happens.

Perhaps it has something to do with my apathy toward Charles Dickens. I thought Great Expectations was wonderful, but that’s about the extent of my love for his work. Everything seems so bleak and hopeless, even when it’s not supposed to. I admit that this problem exists almost completely in my head, but there you have it.

But on the bright side, I could cross something else off my list. As with Hamlet, I had somehow gone my entire life without hearing/seeing/reading Oliver Twist, and while this film isn’t completely faithful to the original work, at least now I have the basic idea. Sure, I knew about Fagin, and the Artful Dodger, and “Please sir, may I have some more?” but that was it. I mean, I even thought he spent most of his time in the orphanage, but hey, he got out about five minutes into the movie!

The Oscar Project #38: The Sound of Music (1965)

by Chris Marshall:

As was the case with West Side Story, I watched The Sound of Music several years ago in a high school music class, so I didn’t exactly relish the idea of watching it again. It’s a good movie, but I don’t love it to the degree that many others do. Fortunately, I found that it was still enjoyable upon a second viewing.

It’s hard to imagine a movie star more likeable than Julie Andrews. At the time this movie was released, she was in the middle of a spectacular run. She won Best Actress for being Mary Poppins, won a Golden Globe for The Sound of Music, and was nominated for another Golden Globe for Thoroughly Modern Millie. Add the box office receipts for these films to her critical acclaim, and you have a pretty successful four year period.

If you’re the type of person to read The Oscar Project, you almost certainly know the plot already. Andrews, a nun, becomes governess for the Von Trapp family (she specializes in child rearing, apparently), falls in love with the man of the house, and then helps the family escape the Nazis. Oh, and everybody still knows all the musical numbers today, 47 years later.

The Oscar Project #37: My Fair Lady (1964)

by Chris Marshall:

I don’t know whether or not I agree with Roger Ebert’s assessment that My Fair Lady is one of the greatest of all musicals, but I will admit that it has a certain charm to it, a great deal of which is attributable to its lead actors. Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison may seem like an odd couple on the surface, but as it turns out, they have a great deal of chemistry.

Hepburn, as Eliza Doolittle, sells flowers on the streets and is from the lowest of the lower classes. Henry Higgins, or ‘Ennery ‘Iggins as Eliza calls him, is a linguist/phonologist/speech pathologist who believes that, in six months’ time, he can train anybody to speak “properly.” Higgins bets a fellow linguist, Pickering, that he will be successful.

Contrary to popular belief, though, or at least contrary to my belief, the speech lessons are not originally Higgins’s idea. Instead, Eliza seeks him out for lessons, believing that she will never be able to work in a flower shop unless she changes the way she speaks. She even offers to pay, although she can only afford to pay one shilling per lesson. Here is where the bet comes into play. Because Higgins won’t do it for such a low price, Pickering offers to pay for the lessons up front, on the condition that Higgins can “change” her in six months.

The Oscar Project #34: West Side Story (1961)

by Chris Marshall:

For all the mean things I’ve said about musicals in the last few posts, I really don’t hate them. There are just plenty of other things I’d rather be watching, especially in cases, as with West Side Story and The Sound of Music, where I’ve seen the movies before. I feel like I’m not really adding anything to my life by sitting through them again.

But I’m no cheater, and the rules of this project state that I have to watch every movie, even if I’ve seen it before. Early on, that didn’t matter much, because Casablanca was the only movie I had seen before 1950. As we get closer to the modern era, though, I’ve seen more of the winners, and it can feel a little tedious re-watching things.

This is doubly true when dealing with films that are almost three hours long. I appreciate West Side Story, but I don’t love it, certainly not in the same way that I do The Godfather, which I’m looking forward to seeing again. Perhaps I was a little too resentful of its existence when I watched it this time around, but I’m trying to be fair nevertheless.

The Oscar Project #31: Gigi (1958)

by Chris Marshall:

Believe it or not, Gigi is a pretty good movie. When I see a period piece musical set in France, the last thing I expect is to like it, but here we are. 

Leslie Caron, who we last saw in An American in Paris, plays the title role so well that I completely forgot about how much I didn’t like her character in that film. It had nothing to do with her, but nothing happened to make me care. In Gigi, though, she’s charming, devious, mischievous, a sort of primordial Juno, if Juno were less abrasive.

Indeed, it is the performances as a whole, rather than the musical numbers themselves, that make this movie so effective. Alongside Caron, Louis Jordan is also tremendous as Gaston, the upper-class socialite/playboy who ultimately falls for Gigi. And Maurice Chevalier as the quasi-narrator Honoré is extremely enjoyable as well .

The Oscar Project #24: An American in Paris (1951)

by Chris Marshall:

Seven years ago (in Oscar Project time), I made the comment that Going My Way was a kinda sorta musical in that Bing Crosby sang a couple of songs, but it still didn’t feel like what I think of as a musical; I said similar things about The Broadway Melody and The Great Ziegfeld as well. Well, 1951’s An American in Paris fits all the criteria of a “real musical.” In fact, there was almost nothing but songs and dance numbers.

When I think about dancers in the movies, Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire are always the first names I think of. Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain is usually considered the greatest example of this genre, but An American in Paris was the one that won the big prize. From what I understand, it was quite revolutionary; people had really never seen anything like it before.

But did I like it? I’d be hard pressed to say that I did. I appreciated the dancing (and some of the singing), but most of the time it was difficult to figure out what the dance numbers had to do with anything. Then again, I suppose the plot in these movies will always be of secondary importance; Marshall McLuhan famously said “the medium is the message,” but here the music is the message. People don’t watch this kind of movie for the story.

The Oscar Project #2: The Broadway Melody (1928)

Talking! What a novelty!

by Chris Marshall:

Movies have come a long way in the past 84 years, but at least some things have stayed the same. If you look at the list of Best Picture winners, you’ll see that almost all of them fall into some combination of three categories: War Film, Rich People Problems, or Historical Epic.[1] Wings took care of the first, so it’s only fitting that the second winner, The Broadway Melody, would take care of the second. In this case the rich people are two sisters with the completely normal names Hank and Queenie. Their “problems,” such as they are, are that they’ve just moved to New York to try and star on Broadway, and god forbid, they aren’t given top billing in their first show. Oh, and somebody mispronounces their last name.

Granted, the real conflict in the story centers around the love lives of the protagonists. The problem was that the film tried to set up Hank as the heroine (in the loosest sense of the word), but she came across as shrewish and intensely unlikeable. Hank and Eddie, a performer in the show, were “together,” I guess, I don’t know, we’re just supposed to accept it, and meanwhile, a wealthy socialite named Jock (or Jacques, depending on the scene) began courting Queenie. Both Hank and Eddie are opposed to this blossoming relationship, for reasons that are clear in Eddie’s case and utterly baffling in Hank’s. It turns out that Eddie is secretly in love with Queenie, while Hank just badgers her and tells her not to see him, ad nauseum, without ever explaining why. And they sang songs every now and then.