Each month, I scour the Turner Classic Movies schedule for upcoming films that I can't miss. The highlights are posted here for your reading and viewing pleasure! (All listed times are Eastern Standard, check your local listings or TCM.com for actual air times in your area. Each day's schedule begins at 6:00 a.m.; if a film airs between midnight and 6 a.m. it is listed on the previous day's programming schedule.)
It is awards season in Hollywood, which means that it is also time for TCM's 31 Days of Oscar festival featuring Academy Award-nominated films from February 1 through March 2. This year, as a play on the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game, each film in the 31 Days schedule is linked to the next by a common actor; no actor is repeated and the last film is linked to the first. For my monthly movie picks, I've linked an actor from each classic film to a 2016 Oscar nominee. Each is linked in less than six degrees and no actor is repeated. As an added bit of fun, or difficulty, the last link must include the current nominee's co-star in the movie from which he or she was nominated. Make sense? Let's get to the picks...
2/5, 8 PM - The Love Parade (1929)
The Love Parade is a light, airy musical comedy directed by Ernst Lubitsch starring Maurice Chevalier as a raffish count who marries the queen of a small European country, played by Jeanette MacDonald, only to find that being the man behind the great lady isn't a role he's willing to play. The film has an interesting take on gender politics, but ends on an unfortunately conventional note. However, it's pretty fun along the way. The film is at its most crackling when Chevalier and MacDonald trade flirty dialogue and Lubitsch employs his talent for telling risqué jokes in a tasteful fashion.
The film received seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director for Lubitsch, and Best Actor for Chevalier. MacDonald is most associated with the string of wholesome operettas she starred in opposite Nelson Eddy. The Love Parade was MacDonald's first film and I was surprised to learn that it was Lubitsch who discovered her. As Queen Louise she shows off a talent for comedy and singing, as well as her legs. The rest of the cast includes colorful character actors like silent film comedian Lupino Lane, gravel-voiced Eugene Pallette, and plucky Lillian Roth (whose thick New York accent is a bit of an anachronism, but who cares?).
To connect The Love Parade to this year's Oscar nominees, we'll go from Chevalier to Leslie Caron (Gigi) to Juliette Binoche (Chocolat) to Steve Carell (Dan in Real Life) to Christian Bale in The Big Short. I've been a fan of Bale for a long time (hello, Newsies!) and I'd love to see him try a romantic role again after his latest streak of intense dramatic and action roles. Has it really been 21 years since he stole hearts as Laurie in Little Women? I know Bale has it in him to channel his inner Chevalier in a light romance again.
2/10, 3:45 AM - This Land is Mine (1943)
Charles Laughton stars as a timid school teacher living in a World War II occupied town and suspected of being a Nazi collaborator. Though we're told the setting is "somewhere in Europe," it is likely meant to be France, the home country of director Jean Renoir. Renoir, who had made the great anti-war film Grand Illusion in 1937, aimed to show American audiences what the day-to-day life of an occupied country was like for its citizens. In addition to Laughton, the cast includes the very capable Maureen O'Hara, George Sanders, and Walter Slezak.
The film won an Academy Award for Best Sound. It was the only competitive Academy Award ever received by a Renoir film, though the director did receive an honorary award in 1974.
I'm going to connect This Land is Mine to a 2016 Oscar nominated film which also looks at paranoia and suspicion during wartime, Bridge of Spies: from star Maureen O'Hara to John Candy (Only the Lonely) to Tom Hanks (Volunteers) to Best Supporting Actor nominee Mark Rylance. Rylance's understated and unexpectedly wry performance as a convicted Russian spy during the Cold War is one of my favorites of the year.
2/26, 3:30 PM - Day for Night (1973)
Francois Truffaut directed, co-wrote, and stars in Day for Night as a film director struggling to complete his movie on-location in the French Riviera. Frequent collaborator Jean-Pierre Leaud plays the lead actor in the film-within-a-film and the glamorous Jacqueline Bissett is the leading lady. It's a movie about making movies - a favorite topic for the Academy Awards - and the title refers to the technique of filming a scene set at night during the daytime with the help of a camera filter.
Day for Night received Oscar nominations for Truffaut in the categories of Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, as well as a Best Supporting Actress nomination for veteran Italian actress Valentina Cortese as an older actress who can't remember her lines. However, the only Academy Award it won was Best Foreign Language Film, as the entry for France, which isn't too shabby.
Day for Night is about creating an illusion, a fiction which we accept as reality; so, I'll connect it to current nominee which is also about constructing reality from illusion, but with a much more dramatic tone: Room. Jacqueline Bissett connects to Sean Connery (Murder on the Orient Express) to Kevin Costner (The Untouchables) to Joan Allen (The Upside of Anger) to the star of Room, Brie Larson. Larson's affecting performance as a young woman held captive in a single room, striving to create a loving and healthy reality for her son, has made her a front-runner for this year's Best Actress award.
2/27, 12 AM - Apollo 13 (1995)
Apollo 13 tells the true story of the 1970 mission to the moon in which three astronauts were left stranded en route after an explosion crippled their spacecraft. Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, and Kevin Bacon play the astronauts who, with the help of Mission Control in Houston, must draw upon all their training to devise solutions which will bring them home. Director Ron Howard has made many good films and I think this is one of his very best; surprisingly though, Howard was not even nominated by the Academy for Best Director (the award that year ultimately went to Mel Gibson for Braveheart). Howard would win an Oscar six years later for A Beautiful Mind, but I think Apollo 13 is a better film and a better testament to his skill. (And it isn't even my favorite film of 1995; that would be fellow Best Picture nominee Sense and Sensibility whose director, Ang Lee, was also not nominated...it was a strange year.)
The film received eight Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay, and Supporting Actor and Actress nominations for Ed Harris as the Mission Control flight director and Kathleen Quinlan as Marilyn, the wife of astronaut Jim Lovell (played by Tom Hanks). However, it won only two awards, for sound and editing.
I have a hard time thinking of any film about space exploration that doesn't involve some sort of accident which jeopardizes the entire mission. Maybe A Trip to the Moon from 1899? Of course, in that adventure from film's early days, the voyage was all a dream; but since mankind actually started taking trips to the moon, filmmakers have devised all manner of calamities to befall such missions - some based on fact, but mostly fiction. One such story is current Best Picture nominee The Martian. Like Apollo 13, the veteran director of The Martian, Ridley Scott, was not nominated by the Academy. I really liked The Martian and I'm disappointed that it isn't more of a front-runner this awards season; though star Matt Damon has a long-shot chance for Best Actor. For this last connection from Oscar nominees past to present, I have to start with Mr. Six Degrees himself, Kevin Bacon: from Bacon to John Lithgow (Footloose) to Jessica Chastain (Interstellar) to the titular "martian" Matt Damon.
The 2016 Oscars, honoring films from 2015, will be given out on February 28. I'll be watching to see if any of my favorite films win, hope you'll join me!
No comments:
Post a Comment