In Contention

Tag: Charles Laughton

  • LIFE WITHOUT OSCAR: 1947 and 1948

    Catch up with the idea behind this series here.

    1947 kept the preachy, socially conscious train rolling at the Oscars with “Gentleman’s Agreement” taking the top prize. Anything exposing anti-Semitism was going to be hard to beat in the post-World War II period and the fact that it was actually well-made didn’t hurt either. More impressive is the fact that the Original Screenplay category that year featured both Charlie Chaplin and Vittorio De Sica as nominees.

    1948 saw the Brits take over and “Hamlet” becoming the first non-Hollywood production to ever take Best Picture. It also saw the debut of the Best Costume Design category and the first of thirty-four nominations for Edith Head. The Academy was at last, thinking a bit more globally, but they still missed out on some great titles. Such as….

    1947 – “One Wonderful Sunday” (Akira Kurosawa)

    Three years before “Rashomon” would make him an international celebrity and Academy Award recipient, Kurosawa was honing his craft with small, contemporary stories that focused on post World-War II Japan and its inhabitants. This small gem is exactly what it says on the tin, a wonderful Sunday in the life of an engaged couple. The man has only 15 yen to his name and the woman only 20, but they conspire to make the best of their day in any way they can.

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  • Roger Ebert on list-making and The Spectator’s latest

    Roger EbertIt seems The Spectator has conducted a greatest films poll, available online here.  Roger Ebert used the opportunity to offer up some thoughts on list-making in general and one of his favorites (the only one in which he participates), the Sight & Sound poll in particular:

    All lists of the “greatest” movies are propaganda. They have no deeper significance. It is useless to debate them. Even more useless to quarrel with their ordering of titles: Why is this film #11 and that one only #31? The most interesting lists are those by one person: What are Scorsese’s favorites, or Herzog’s? The least interesting are those by large-scale voting, for example by IMDb or movie magazines. The most respected poll, the only one I participate in, is the vote taken every 10 years by Sight & Sound, the British film magazine, which asks a large number of filmmakers, writers, critics, scholars, archivists and film festival directors.

    That one at least has taken on a canonical aspect. The list evolves slowly. Keaton rises, Chaplin falls. It is eventually decided that “Vertigo” is Hitchcock’s finest film. Ozu cracks the top ten. Every ten years the net is thrown out again. The Sight & Sound list at least reflects widespread thinking in what could be called the film establishment, and reflects awareness of the full span of more than a century of cinema.

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