It was great to see Kathryn Bigelow accepting an Oscar as the first female to win as Best Director, and it brought me a sigh of relief to see Jeff Bridges finally take home a prize that could have (and should have) been his many times over the last 35 years.  Though I was pulling for Meryl Streep and her elusive third Oscar, I thought Sandra Bullock’s speech was the evening’s highlight.  However, every year we hear about how different and how retooled the Oscar show is going to be.  Then we sit down and there it is, the same misjudged and overinflated marathon we watched the year before.  A decision had been made, quite disrespectfully to my way of thinking, to hand out honorary Oscars in November rather than on the main telecast, supposedly to save precious TV time.  So, why did we get a 15-minute tribute to John Hughes?  I admit I was the wrong age for Hughes’ films, which mean nothing to me, but did he really warrant the kind of treatment one expects when paying tribute to a Hitchcock or a Spielberg?  I would much rather have seen Lauren Bacall get her Oscar “live.”  And where was 1949 Best Actor nominee Richard Todd in the “memoriam” reel?  Are the 1980s now the height of Hollywood nostalgia?  

And we still got the requisite pointless montage (on horror films) and the laughable dance piece.  Whenever the telecast has tried to be a variety show, it has spelled disaster.  This has been the case every single time I’ve watched the Oscars (and I’ve seen 40 of them).  It was dumb when they used to “dance” the costume nominees, and it was dumb last night, watching wonderful dancers interpret THE HURT LOCKER.  Can you say “kitsch”? 

As a concept, I like having five stars come out to talk about the nominees, but it did bring the show to a screeching halt.  If the Best Actor and Actress presentations were separated by an hour or so, then it wouldn’t feel so numbing.  And did you notice how many presenters said “And the winner is…,” rather than the kinder-gentler “And the Oscar goes to…”?  Was this accidental?  I’m fine with the use of “winner,” which is more honest.  Are we supposed to pretend that nobody won or lost?  But the tackiest bit of the night was the orchestra launching into “I Am Woman” following Bigelow’s speech.  The Oscars have caught up to the 70s!

Meryl Streep has been nominated in the Best Actress category 13 times and won only once (SOPHIE’S CHOICE).  Katharine Hepburn was nominated 12 times and won four Oscars.  For all the praise and accolades heaped upon Streep, she is starting to look overlooked, even ignored (at least each year at Oscar time).  Yes, she also has three supporting nominations and one win in that category (KRAMER VS. KRAMER), but Streep hasn’t heard her name called out at the Oscars since 1983.    

I actually had a better time last night than in most years, simply because I agreed with more of the choices than I usually do.  The ten Best Picture nominees seemed to do what they were supposed to do, broadening Oscar’s reach for the TV audience.  And it surely was a blessing not to have full performances of the nominated songs.  After all, the song category is the one hanging on by a thread in terms of relevance, so why give it more time than any other?  Now if we can just get Meryl that third Oscar, all will be right in the world, at least in the skewed, magical, and addictive world in which Oscar rules.

On March 1st, Oscar-winning Englishman David Niven would have turned 100 years old.  (He died at 73 in 1983.)  Beloved for his charm, wit, and elegance, Niven had an impressively long movie career filled with lasting favorites:  WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1939), A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (1946), THE BISHOP’S WIFE (1947), AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS (1956), THE GUNS OF NAVARONE (1961), and THE PINK PANTHER (1964).  He received the Academy Award on his first (and only) nomination, winning Best Actor for SEPARATE TABLES (1958), in the role of a military major who had been arrested for lewd behavior as a movie-theatre masher, someone who can handle sexual matters only with strangers in the dark.  In a role that was a far cry from his usually light and sophisticated parts, Niven acquitted himself most admirably.  Based on Terence Rattigan’s stage play, the acclaimed SEPARATE TABLES hasn’t aged very well; it now looks like a wildly overrated snob hit.  A GRAND HOTEL-style ensemble piece, SEPARATE TABLES (also set in a hotel) feels obvious and worn, but Niven’s performance holds up extremely well, a poignant rendering of a man with a dark secret who masks his pain and terror behind a puffed-up pose and an arsenal of military mannerisms.  It is unlike any other Niven performance, and it retains a freshness mostly lacking elsewhere in the film.  His character’s friendship with a mousy Deborah Kerr (with whom Niven made five films) is central to the movie.  Though its cast includes Burt Lancaster, Rita Hayworth, and several other “names,” most of this stiff-upper-lip drama is thinly conceived and short on illumination, with only Niven handily surpassing the material, especially when his major has nothing left to hide.  

If I had to pick my favorite Niven film, I’d go with BACHELOR MOTHER (1939), one of the comic gems of the great screwball-comedy era.  Directed by Garson Kanin and starring Ginger Rogers (with whom Niven made three films), BACHELOR MOTHER is a modestly mounted romantic comedy yet a worthy member of Hollywood’s classic output of 1939.  Rogers is at the peak of her stardom, truly one of the Golden Age’s top comediennes, and Niven partnered her delightfully.  It appears to be a case of Niven getting a role only after Cary Grant had proved unavailable, but who cares?  Niven makes the most of his Grant-like chance and he is irresistibly winning and deftly amusing.  His debonair persona is the perfect counterpoint to Rogers’ working-girl appeal, creating a bond similar to the one she had developed with Fred Astaire.  Rogers works in the toy department of a store owned by Niven’s father (Charles Coburn, great as always).  When she comes to the aid of a doorstep foundling, everyone believes that the baby is hers, no matter how hard she tries to explain the truth, eventually leading to suspicions that Niven, the boss’ son, is the father.  The film is one of the more beguiling of dream-factory Cinderella comedies, made with an unforced charm and sustained cleverness, containing at least one major and quite hilarious comic sequence of the period, the nightclub scene in which the two stars successfully pass Rogers off as Niven’s non-English-speaking Swedish date.  This sparkling comedy was horridly remade for Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher in 1956 as BUNDLE OF JOY.  Imagine Eddie Fisher stepping in for David Niven!

The bad news is that BACHELOR MOTHER is not available on DVD, but the good news is that TCM is showing it on March 24th at 9:45P.M.  Alert your DVR!

Screen songbird Kathryn Grayson died last week at 88, further decreasing the number of stars who remain from the Golden Age of the MGM Musical.  Though she never became a main player in the studio’s celebrated Freed Unit (the maker of MGM’s greatest musicals), Grayson was one of the key stars of the less prestigious musicals the studio churned out, produced more often by Joe Pasternak than the classier Arthur Freed.  Grayson made three trips to the higher-tiered Freed Unit, making two guest appearances in ZIEGFELD FOLLIES and TILL THE CLOUDS ROLL BY, both released in 1946, and then in the hugely profitable SHOW BOAT (1951), the film for which Grayson is best remembered.  But for most of her stardom, a solid decade between 1943 and 1953, Grayson starred in what might be called high-culture kitsch, slight musicals that were given a bit of classical heft by having Grayson trill an operatic aria or two.  It never hurt that she had lovely raven-black hair, a girl-next-door prettiness, a teensy waist, and, oh yes, ample breasts.

Grayson made her screen debut in the typical fashion of many a young and attractive MGM hopeful:  she was showcased opposite Mickey Rooney in an Andy Hardy picture, just as Lana Turner had done before her and as Esther Williams was about to do.  Grayson graduated from ANDY HARDY’S PRIVATE SECRETARY (1941) to Abbott and Costello’s RIO RITA (1942) and then got the full MGM push in the Technicolor A-list musical THOUSANDS CHEER (1943), co-starring another relative newcomer, Gene Kelly, though the movie seems more intent on pushing Grayson than Kelly.  Unfortunately, her side of the plot puts her in Shirley Temple territory, trying to reunite her separated parents.  The only reason to recall THOUSANDS CHEER is Lena Horne’s sublime “Honeysuckle Rose,” which has nothing to do with the nonsense surrounding it.  But the director, George Sidney, and both of his stars were reteamed on a little something called ANCHORS AWEIGH (1945), which properly focuses more on Kelly than Grayson, and more on Kelly’s teamwork with Frank Sinatra than on his romance with Grayson (who is cast here as a film extra hoping for her big break in the movies).  Though Grayson perhaps has as much musical screen time as the fellas–who are irresistibly cast as sailors on leave–she can’t quite compete with Kelly’s innovative dance sequences or Sinatra’s aching ballads.  (But how many mortals could?)  Ridiculously long at 139 minutes, ANCHORS AWEIGH is trite and uneven yet sporadically magical and transporting.  And it solidified Grayson as a top leading lady of the MGM musical, as well as the successor to the studio’s recently retired (in 1942) soprano Jeanette MacDonald, whose superstardom Grayson never quite equaled, especially as the movie musical moved further away from operetta-type material.  If the 1940s kept Grayson busy on those two films with Kelly and three films with Sinatra, the other two being IT HAPPENED IN BROOKLYN (1947) and THE KISSING BANDIT (1948), then the second half of her stardom allied her with two other male co-stars, two men who suited her more comfortably than the staggeringly gifted Gene and Frank.

THAT MIDNIGHT KISS (1949) and THE TOAST OF NEW ORLEANS (1950) were the two musicals that introduced tenor Mario Lanza to the screen, giving Grayson a handsome leading man with whom she could share operatic duets.  But Grayson was clearly put in the secondary position, lending her back-seat support to MGM’s big push on Lanza’s behalf.  In THAT MIDNIGHT KISS, it’s Ethel Barrymore, as Grayson’s grandmother, who steals the show (without moving a muscle, or singing a note).  Though THE TOAST OF NEW ORLEANS introduced “Be My Love,” one of the songs most associated with Grayson, the film is one of her worst.  (How did poor David Niven end up in this, playing second fiddle to both stars?)  Though mired in excruciating happy-peasant comedy, the film did give the stars a shot at MADAME BUTTERFLY at the climax.  Talk about a bizarre mix of high and low culture, which I guess might have been interpreted at the time as “something for everyone!”

The two roles for which Grayson is most remembered are two of the parts she played in her three vehicles with baritone Howard Keel, the leading man who suited her best of all.  Their vocal renditions of “Make Believe” in SHOW BOAT and ”Wunderbar” in KISS ME KATE (1953) are probably the two high points of her career.  (ANCHORS AWEIGH director George Sidney also directed SHOW BOAT and KISS ME KATE, making him the man who made Grayson’s three most enduring musical pictures.)  Grayson was far better suited to the ingenue simplicity of her Magnolia in SHOW BOAT than she was to the more theatrically demanding and sophisticated requirements of playing stage star Lilli Vanessi in KISS ME KATE, but she nonetheless became the Magnolia and Lilli that most of us grew up with.  (In KATE, she is seen as both a blonde and a redhead but not as a brunette.)  The middle teaming of Grayson and Keel is the thoroughly lackluster LOVELY TO LOOK AT (1952). 

Grayson and Keel were briefly the 1950s answer to Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, just as Marge and Gower Champion were momentarily spoken of in the same breath as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.  Grayson’s voice and personality never quite had the warmth of her fellow MGM soprano Jane Powell, nor did she have MacDonald’s idol-of-millions level of popularity, but she made her contribution to the movie musical at a key moment in its history.  It was a wunderbar decade for Grayson, and will I ever hear “Make Believe” without thinking first of her?

February 27 marks what would have been the 100th birthday of screen actress Joan Bennett, who died at age 80 in 1990.  When she first caught attention, as a blonde and beautiful (but rather awkward) ingenue in major early talkies such as DISRAELI and BULLDOG DRUMMOND, both from 1929, she was best known as the daughter of stage star Richard Bennett and the younger sister of Constance Bennett (whose movie-star shadow she would be in for most of the 1930s).  Neither of the Bennett actresses were first-rate talents, but Joan managed to have a very long career, continuing well after most of the public had forgotten Constance or daddy.  Joan was good at reinventing herself, a necessary talent for anyone who wants to last decades in the movie industry. 

She was a lovely blonde leading lady of the 1930s, then the raven-haired beauty of four Fritz Lang melodramas of the 1940s, making her a key femme fatale of film noir, with THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW (1944), opposite Edward G. Robinson, the best of her films for Lang.  At 40, she moved into the 1950s as the epitome of the upper-middle-class American housewife in FATHER OF THE BRIDE (1950) and its 1951 sequel FATHER’S LITTLE DIVIDEND.  And in the 1960s, she thrived on the small screen in the one-of-a-kind horror soap DARK SHADOWS.

Bennett had first shown glimmers of talent in Raoul Walsh’s snappy, wisecracking comedy ME AND MY GAL (1932), opposite Spencer Tracy, her future FATHER OF THE BRIDE husband.  She showed a likably deadpan approach to comedy.  In LITTLE WOMEN (1933), a massive hit and an instant classic, she was Amy, and director George Cukor got some lovely and charming moments from her, though hers is the least accomplished performance among the “women.”  A breakthrough for Bennett came in PRIVATE WORLDS (1935), a rarely seen drama I was lucky enough to catch a few years ago at a screening at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.  The stars of the film are Claudette Colbert and Charles Boyer, and it has been called the first major Hollywood film set in a mental institution, a decade and a half before THE SNAKE PIT (1948).  Directed by the estimable Gregory La Cava, PRIVATE WORLDS is an admirable drama remarkably free of easy answers, and it’s further striking for its feminist streak, with Colbert as a great psychiatrist, the equal of her male colleagues.  (The film never resorts to putting her in her “place.”)  Boyer plays the new boss, and he has a low opinion of female doctors.  He eventually comes around.  The film is unfortunately loaded with soapy plot turns, including the arrival of Boyer’s murderous sister Helen Vinson, who begins an affair with doctor Joel McCrea, married to a fragile Bennett.

Colbert received an Oscar nomination, a year after winning the award for IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT.  With her characteristic ease, warmth, and intelligence, she is radiant.  Boyer fares less well in a sketchier role, but McCrea is as wonderfully natural as always, even though the script undermines him by turning him into a heel.  (Colbert and McCrea, cast as pals and peers here, would take their obvious rapport and turn it into pure gold when they starred in Preston Sturges’ comic wonder THE PALM BEACH STORY seven years later.)  The surprise here is Bennett, in one of her best performances, tender and sympathetic, showing new confidence in her acting ability and making a strong and touching impression.  She plays a woman who feels she is nothing without her husband, and she handles this aspect of the character with restraint and delicacy.     

La Cava uses overlapping dialogue and spontaneous-feeling injections of humor, just as he would so famously in his STAGE DOOR two years later.  The most memorable and startling sequence is Bennett’s breakdown while a storm rages outside.  The visual and aural elements put you inside her mind as she mentally disintegrates and falls down a staircase. 

Despite its flaws, PRIVATE WORLDS is ambitious and affecting and made with great care.  It may be uneven and abbreviated, but it’s a movie that keeps you rooting for it.  I hope there will be more opportunities for it to be seen.  Its invisibility is a crime, especially considering the major artists involved.  And it contains what is probably the best performance ever given by the blonde Joan Bennett, long before she became a dark temptress or raised Elizabeth Taylor or trafficked in vampires.

I have nothing good to say about the new SHERLOCK HOLMES, the box-office juggernaut.  Director Guy Ritchie shows a talent for loudness, and that’s all.  The movie is heavy on endless, tiring action scenes, and the overall impact is that of a period-piece James Bond rip-off.  The main plot feels like a warmed-over retread of THE DA VINCI CODE, while the more personal story is a reworking of THE FRONT PAGE, with Holmes trying to prevent Dr. Watson from getting married and subsequently dissolving their partnership.  Though I think the movie would have been improved if Jude Law had played Holmes instead of Watson, such a switch would not have changed things enough.

There was some talk, mostly before the picture was released, about the supposed homoerotic undercurrent between Robert Downey, Jr.’s Holmes and Law’s Watson, but I couldn’t detect anything of that nature in their relationship, and not just because each fellow has a female love interest.  There simply isn’t enough chemistry between the stars, on any level.  You can get much more of a gay subtext in the old Holmes pictures starring Basil Rathbone, with Nigel Bruce his comic-relief  Watson.  I recently caught up with five pictures in this series and found them, minor as they are, to be quite enjoyable.  It surely was a more innocent time at the movies (in the late 30s to the mid 40s) when Holmes and Watson could be so inseparable without raising an eyebrow, particularly since they are both unmarried and apparently not even dating women.  

THE SPIDER WOMAN (1944) begins with Rathbone and Bruce on vacation together, on a fishing trip in Scotland.  Are these guys ever apart?  They even vacation together?  The “gayest” film in the series has to be THE HOUSE OF FEAR (1945), not just because of the usual Holmes-Watson chumminess or the fact that they resemble an old married couple.  (Rathbone tells Bruce, “You snored like a pig!”)  The plot hinges on seven older-men bachelors all staying at a Scottish mansion overhanging a cliff.  They call themselves “The Good Comrades” (I guess “Boys in the Band” was taken).  They are the beneficiaries of each others’ insurance policies.  Aubrey Mather, as the owner of the mansion and also a member of the club, gives one of the nellier performances of the era.  In true TEN LITTLE INDIANS fashion, the fellows are picked off one by one, with Holmes and Watson moving in to solve the case.  Of course, the gay overtones are primarily accidental and unintentional (except in Mather’s case), what with everyone seeming so clueless on that score, not to mention sexless.  Rathbone calls Bruce “my dear friend and colleague,” but Holmes may have fainted if anyone had told him that maybe his and Watson’s devotion to each other meant that they were partners of a kind we now call life partners.