A man needs a little madness… or else, he never dares cut the rope & be free.

There’s a certain category of “Oscar bait” films that pops up in Best Picture every now and then, and it’s almost never not mildly annoying whenever they do pop up: the films that are a showcase for its leading performance & are otherwise just barely good or passable outside of that. Normally, these are biopics, but even wholly fictional narratives have plenty of examples of this happening, and for 1964, it seems Best Picture just couldn’t be without Zorba the Greek and the titular performance by Anthony Quinn. Now, granted, Quinn is good in the role, and whether or not you agree that he deserved his nomination for Best Actor, it’s a little easier to see the argument the Academy was making for him there; but here, for Best Picture, I just can’t see what they were going for nominating this, besides Quinn and that the film was a bigger box office hit than most people expected of it.

A British writer named Basil travels to the Greek island of Crete to take ownership of an inherited mine on an undeveloped plot of land. On the way there, he meets Alexis Zorba, a local vagabond who is every bit the lived-in experience of Greek life, in contrast to the rather reserved & stiff British emigrant. After finding out Zorba has experience as a miner (among many other trades), Basil hires the man as his foreman, and the two set out to work up the land & make some money for themselves and the rather poor local village. Along the way, Zorba sees to it to show his uptight boss how to be less afraid of life and how to just start living it, both in relation to a local widow who catches Basil’s eye & her in turn, and a French hotel madam named Hortense who ends up taken with Zorba, as well as how their friendship & operation ends up affecting the lives of the villagers, in both benefit and tragedy.

I’m kinda waffling with that plot summary in terms of finding a narrative or throughline, and Zorba the Greek is a film that very much wants to feel like it has those things without any conception of how to go about actually having them. Various plotlines or incidental actions pop up here and there, and some are explored or develop into further events while others don’t seem to have much impact on the overall plot; the tone & direction of the film & its narrative is very sketchy & loose, and kinda jumps & skips around almost like it’s not certain of what it wants to be or how to be what it really wants. If the throughline of the film is just Zorba & Basil’s burgeoning friendship and their mine operation, that could be enough, but the film jumps between potential plot developments so carefreely that it seems to forget this throughline should be the driving force of things for much of the time, only going back to it when whatever plot tangent has run its course or welcome before the next scene change comes due. Perhaps some of this is writer/director Michael Cacoyannis’s adaptation of the source novel, and from what I’ve heard, the film does weave around quite a bit of the original material; either way, it makes the film feel more like an exercise in withstanding the running time than a satisfactory experience as a whole. The saving grace of the film, then, naturally ends up being the cast, and while Quinn fully inhabits his role and all the complexities of a man who’s live every facet of life that can affect a man, the supporting cast also do some pretty good work as well, particularly Lila Kedrova as Madame Hortense; Alan Bates, who plays Basil, is definitely more of a non-entity than the protagonist of a film ought to be, but part of that feels like a fault with centering the film on that character and the choices in writing & directing it rather than on Bates himself.

I was really on the fence with this about giving it a 6 or a 7, and basically all of that is on Quinn; the film as a whole feels like a 6, but Quinn is honestly better than the rest of it and I wanted to give him a bonus point or two just for that. But, if I’m being honest, that’s for him and not the film, and my typing out this review & elaborating on the faults of the writing & directing seems to have solidified my decision for me. Zorba the Greek isn’t a wholly bad film, but it doesn’t feel satisfying enough for the type of film it wants to be & is trying to be, and that plus its inability to stay consistent with its tone & narrative ends up nudging it just south of the midpoint in my assessment. Quinn is enjoyable, and I can kind of see how some may have wanted him in the Best Actor conversation, but the film as a whole got more noms in other categories than I think it really should’ve, and that includes Best Picture. It’s not bad, but it’s not particularly good, and the Oscars’ top category can & should do better than that regardless of whatever prominent name is headlining the marquee.

Arbitrary Rating: 6/10

Oh, Lord… how heavy thy honor is to bear.

I have to admit that my knowledge of world history & notable events in foreign countries is not as thorough as I would like it to be. Case in point: I had no idea who Thomas Becket was until I watched this film, despite his history & friends-turned-enemies relationship with King Henry II being described as notable cornerstone events in both British history and that of the Church of England. As such, it feels like the film Becket, starring Richard Burton as Becket and Peter O’Toole as Henry II, takes some liberty with the knowledge that its audience is fully aware of who these two people are and the importance of their relationship & events therein, and thus I couldn’t help but feel a bit of imposter syndrome starting the film as ignorant as I was of all that. I will say, though, that regardless of my foreknowledge of Becket and his symbolic importance, this film still grabbed my moviegoing attention pretty early on & held it through the entire runtime; that I was largely ignorant of Thomas Becket going into it indeed only seems to highlight how effective Becket the film ultimately is.

For the other philistines like myself who might need a bit of a primer, King Henry II was king of England in the mid-12th century and Thomas Becket was his personal friend and appointee to the position of Lord Chancellor, serving as Henry’s right-hand & advisor in his rule. The film adds a bit of historical inaccuracy to flare the drama a bit, making Becket a Saxon and thus looked down on by the largely-Norman ruling class; despite his friendship with Henry & enabling of Henry’s desires to cavort around and have fun, his appointment as Chancellor ups the classism factor of the film’s drama significantly, though Henry is still often stymied by resistance from the Archbishop of Canterbury to his taxation efforts. Things change when the archbishop dies, and Henry is struck by the brilliant idea of naming Becket the replacement; Becket, however, is much more a man of morals than Henry has thus far counted on, and begs Henry not to put him in a position to weigh his honor before God against the wishes of his king. Henry, the freewheeling adolescent-minded ruler that he is, does it anyway; and thus the stage is set for an inevitable confrontation between two friends unwillingly pitted on opposite sides of the chessboard, and such a game can only be done & over with when one king or the other is taken off the table.

In case that last bit of plot summary seems like mildly implied spoilers, it should be noted that Becket the film starts off with Peter O’Toole removing his shirt in preparation to be whipped in penance in front of Becket’s tomb, so the film being told in flashback should offer no surprises as to where the story is ultimately going. It’s thus how engaging & entertaining the journey of getting us there will be that matters, and I was surprised as heck at how engaged I was with Becket the whole way through. I’m not really sure what I was expecting going into it; maybe that it was a period piece and very nearly two-and-a-half hours (along with my ignorance of the subject matter) that had me on the backfoot, but it’s ultimately the talents of the two leads in keeping the vitality of the storytelling at the high level required to make this work as well as it ends up doing. Sure, the production itself is excellent, keeping its period focus right-on and not being ostentatious about it (the cinematography is the other half of that that sells the setting exactly how it should), and the writing & direction are similarly bang-on and not any more overboard or showy for the sake of it. But, really, this is all on the shoulders of Burton & O’Toole, and they are by and large the reason this not only works but is as entertaining as it is; O’Toole throws himself happily into the role of a hedonistic layabout, a king all too happy to let others manage the kingdom as he is upset whenever his royal whims aren’t made reality whenever he has them, and how good O’Toole is here in direct comparison to his iconic role of two years prior is a testament to the actor he is. The bigger surprise for me, though, was Burton; it’s always been a tough endeavor to put Burton in a film role that really makes use of his unique style & talents (and doesn’t fall into the trap of trying that too much & sinking his performance like a weight), but Thomas Becket is just such a role, and Burton makes of it exactly what only him being cast in this role could have. It’s definitely the best Richard Burton has been thus far in the Best Picture canon, and I look forward to seeing more like this from him.

This is honestly a weird sell, in terms of recommendation; there’s a lot here that feels like it shouldn’t be a selling point, and for some people might not be, but Burton & O’Toole are so good here that a lot of that apprehension is just wiped away by the end of it. They’re the reason to see this, and the reason to enjoy seeing this, but they are admittedly so much the main reason that it throws into murkiness the quality of the rest of the film outside of them. It does kinda feel like splitting hairs, but I wonder how this film would’ve been if two different actors has been cast in the lead roles; I don’t know if it would’ve been as well-regarded as a result, and my thinking along those lines make me wonder a bit about this film’s real feasibility in the Best Picture category. But, to again devil’s advocate against myself, I might be overthinking the film that either could’ve or couldn’t have been against the film that we have right here, and Becket is a film that works better than I think a lot of people will think it should going in. Whether that’s Best Picture worthy is either here nor there, but it’s a film that ends up worth the watch, at least.

Arbitrary Rating: 8/10

There is only one way… my way. Make me queen.

So, to piggyback off what I talked about in my previous review, the films of Best Picture through the 50s and 60s have definitely been an increasingly weighty ordeal, both in production and runtime; so, it’s only fitting that I deliberately saved the weightiest, most extravagant, most ungodly unwieldy runtime & production of them all for last this year. For anyone who’s a fan of stats or trivia and who doesn’t already know, 1963’s Cleopatra is the longest film ever nominated for Best Picture, at an official runtime of 4 hours and 3 minutes upon its original premiere in New York, and was such a gargantuan production & expenditure for 20th Century Fox (smashing the record for most expensive film ever made) that, despite ending up as the highest-grossing film of the year, was still a box office failure through its initial run. Its troubled & notorious production is already such the stuff of legend that there’s really no need for me to cover too much here; what really only mattered to me, though, was how Cleopatra holds up as an actual viewing experience. Even with my trepidation at the lengthy runtime, I was surprised as heck that the film itself is actually pretty watchable, and was well-paced enough (along with the intermission) to be one of the easier epic-length films for me to get through.

As befitting the most epic production that the Hollywood studio system ever undertook, Cleopatra is the wide-reaching story of the life of the Egyptian queen, namely her romantic entanglements with both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony and her ambitions of using both men to not only secure her throne, but to follow in Alexander the Great’s footsteps in expanding her domain across the known world. This she attempts first by utilizing the aid of Caesar to wrest the Egyptian throne from her brother Ptolemy, then successfully seducing the Roman leader and bearing him a son, to whom she wishes to bequeath the entire world as an empire. After Caesar’s own ambitions of being emperor lead to his assassination, Cleopatra is forced to settle for the desires of Mark Antony, who leads the Roman legions in Caesar’s wake while Rome itself falls to Caesar’s adopted heir Octavian instead of Cleopatra’s child; after years of stringing Antony along, however, the two finally manage to find common ground as lovers, and must find a way to ensure their dreams as both world leaders and lovers together are brought to pass after Antony’s marriage to Cleopatra brings the wrath of Octavian and Rome down on Egypt.

There’s a lot of story to cover in Cleopatra, though admittedly not a lot of overall narrative, and that feels almost by design with how Cleopatra the production was brought about and set sail. After several abortive attempts to start production and firing the film’s original director before bringing on Joseph L. Mankiewicz, it was only then that the film had anything resembling a shooting script to work off of; I elaborate this detail in particular to point out the clear priorities of producer Walter Wanger and 20th Century Fox with this film, both in how it was made and what comes across in the finished product. More than anything, what’s apparent through the whole viewing of Cleopatra is that this is a film that’s designed as a showcase; of the sets, of the costumes, of the production work, of the actors, the film is set up & moves forward to show off these things more than it does to tell a story or a narrative arc (that it ends up having these things as well is really secondary to the film’s main goal). In this endeavor, I can only say that Cecil B. DeMille, who directed the 1934 production of Cleopatra, would be more than pleased with this version; even with the inherent added value of being in color, no expense was spared with the elaborate and thorough production design in the foreground and background of virtually every minute of this film’s runtime, and the producers’ goal of making this film be a sumptuous feast for the eyes the likes of which color widescreen films have never before managed to attain has absolutely been successful. So, what about the rest; the people in the audience who are here for the storytelling medium that motion pictures are supposedly all about? Surprisingly, they’re not left too in the dust by this production, even with the film’s narrative focus being very obviously far in second-place (if that) behind the visual splendor; the script is deliberately focused on the characters at the heart of it, how the decisions and desires of Cleopatra, Caesar, Antony, and the shuffling cast of supporting players that dip in and out of their lives are what really drives the events of history depicted, and in this the film manages to succeed where the haphazard scriptwriting & production process might make one think the film couldn’t possibly. Sure, it’s not outstanding, and the storytelling could never successfully measure up to the visual feast on display, but Mankiewicz is a smart enough writer-director to not fall into the trap of trying to with the production he was hired onto; he gets the job done in the best way he could’ve, and that plus the visual extravagance is more than enough to get his audience through. And of course, the talents of Elizabeth Taylor, Rex Harrison, and Richard Burton as the main trio are exactly what you’d expect of them, and the supporting cast are also all very good, enough that they don’t feel like they’re playing second fiddle to the main stars, which is laudable.

Honestly, I was expecting this to not live up to expectations, in particular that the troubled production meant that the film couldn’t possibly do so, or justify the runtime. I doubt I could justify the exorbitant expense the production itself was, nearly bankrupting 20th Century Fox and doing a large amount to ending the studio system of Hollywood’s Golden Age in favor of the smaller-scale, director-driven productions of the burgeoning Hollywood New Wave; but, I found Cleopatra honestly too easy of a watch to dismiss off-hand or in the ways that the internet probably expects me to, and with the decent pacing of the film and the intermission card cutting the runtime neatly in half, I basically didn’t have any real problem with how long the film was, which was the biggest surprise to me personally. Could the film have been shorter? Probably, yes, though I’ve read accounts of people who’ve seen the various shorter cuts the studio tried to manage the film’s box office with after its premiere, and they almost universally regard them as chop jobs. If Cleopatra could have been shorter, it would’ve had to be at the start of production, with a different focus of how to make the film from the outset; but then, of course, the resultant film wouldn’t have been this Cleopatra, and for all the troubles this one went though & caused for everyone involved, this Cleopatra isn’t nearly as bad as I expected it to be. It could have been better, and less of a boondoggle, but for what it’s trying to be, it’s pretty good at being it.

Arbitrary Rating: 8/10

God is good – he has sent me a big, strong man.

Over time, I’ve landed on the term “odyssey” as a shorthand for my journey through the Best Picture nominees, and especially going through the decades of the 50s and 60s, boy has that term been an apt one. The increasing scale of the productions and runtimes of the films in these decades, especially in the BP canon, has become particularly daunting; so it’s a very refreshing break when I come up to a film that’s a scant 90-or-so minutes long, feels as economical as its runtime suggests, and really doesn’t need to be anything more than what it is. Lilies of the Field is a very simple story, with a small cast of characters, that tells the story it means to and not much more than that, which is kinda part of the point of it to boot. It is indeed nice to spend some time with a film on a smaller scale such as this, but even so, it does beg the question of how & why this ended up in the category that I’m covering.

Sidney Poitier stars as Homer Smith, a traveling handyman who stops at a small homestead off the road to service his car. Living & working the land there are a group of five nuns who fled from East Germany, and who immediately see Homer’s arrival as the Lord answering their prayers for someone who can build them a chapel at the farm for them and the local immigrant community. While he’s nice enough to initially offer to fix their roof for them, Homer doesn’t want to be conscripted into a lot of time-consuming work that he isn’t getting paid for. It’s only after traveling into town with the sisters & meeting some of the community, including the local priest who currently holds mass out of the back of his truck as well as a construction supplier who hires Homer on a freelance basis after he sees the good work he does, and only after he begins to identify with the project as a self-fulfillment of his architect dreams & shepherding the project after some of the locals come by to pitch in, that he ends up bending to the sisters’ prayers and building them a chapel that he, and the community, can be proud of.

Honestly, that plot synopsis covers basically everything about the film itself, especially since the actual film is simple & concise by design and thus is yet another of the kind of films that make it hard to talk about at length in a review. It’s shot modestly but well, the production design is effective for the few interiors the film does have, and the small cast is good while doing their job of not standing out too much. What few members of the supporting cast do make an impact are probably Lilia Skala as the head nun Mother Maria and Stanley Adams as Juan, the proprietor of a local diner Homer eats at and who ends up as a sort of confidant for him (a brief shout-out, too, to director Ralph Nelson, who plays the minor role of Ashton, the contractor who hires Homer for construction work – he was simple & effective enough as an actor that I was surprised to find out afterward that he was also the director of the film). Really, though, all of this is to waffle around for things to say before I do finally get to Sidney Poitier, the film’s lead, and who became the first black actor to win an Oscar in a leading role for this; Poitier is definitely good, and the role allows him to be very freewheeling & cavalier with how he goes about it, which helps his efforts quite a bit, but it still didn’t feel like he’d done enough to really merit the win in my opinion – Spencer Tracy’s win for Boys Town was largely just him being warm and kind and, well, Spencer Tracy, and Poitier’s win here, while historic, feels too much like it falls into the same or similar traps.

It does get annoying having to try & fill out a full review for a film that can really just be called good and that be that, but that’s Lilies of the Field, to what definitely feels like an intentional degree. Again, though, for lack of anything else to say, I do have to bring up how out-of-left-field it kinda feels to see this among the slate of five for Best Picture; it’s an incredibly unassuming film, but that in itself doesn’t further impress enough to warrant a nod here like some other such films in the past. It’s certainly not a poor film, though, and I’d be hesitant to try & say that audiences would be unsatisfied at taking this journey, especially with how comparatively short the film is (though, with how spartan the film is overall, that might bore a lot more people in a potential audience than I’m probably accounting for). Aside from Poitier’s Oscar-winning turn, though, there’s really no reason to seek this out, but if you do, he’s certainly good & likable enough to make the hour and a half a pleasant enough way to spend the time.

Arbitrary Rating: 7/10

Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.

It goes without saying that there’s a level of prestige or cachet behind the epithet of “Best Picture winner”, and that serious dramas are more likely than others to have the weight behind them to successfully fill that prestige; after all, the cliche of “Oscar bait” didn’t exactly spring up out of nowhere unfoundedly. I’ve mentioned a few times how comedies rarely tend to have that weight to pull off a BP win, and looking over the near-100 years of Oscar to this point, comedies winning the big one are pretty few and far between. So, to sit down and watch Tom Jones, a period comedy by British New Wave director Tony Richardson, which not only won Best Picture but is such an out-and-out comedy that one almost can’t believe the Academy looked at it with the glowingly loving eyes that it did, it does make the phrase “genre whiplash” come to mind pretty readily in response. Sure, it’s a period piece, and the production value in making it one and filming it as so is sure to catch the Academy’s eye, but my god is this film so wacky and zany at its core that, had it been animated instead of filmed in live-action, it could’ve easily passed as a Looney Tunes production or Terry Gilliam-animated Monty Python skit with nary a thing about its content altered whatsoever.

Based on the novel by Henry Fielding, Tom Jones is the story of its title character, who is found in the bed of Squire Allworthy as a baby in his English estate circa the mid-1700s. Assuming the baby is the result of an illegitimate tryst between two of his servants, he has them banished and ends up raising the boy in his own household. Though Tom and Allworthy love each other as father & son despite no actual relation, Tom as an adult is much more of a playful, charismatic rascal than Allworthy would want for an heir, and though Tom and his neighbor, Squire Western’s daughter Sophie, are clearly in love despite Tom having no family and thus status to marry in 18th-century England (and also because Tom is more than a bit of a playboy due to his good looks), Allworthy and Western set Sophie up to marry Allworthy’s dour & orthodox nephew Blifil, and Tom is given a cash allowance and cut loose to make his own way in the world. Of course, Tom only really wants to be with Sophie, and the film is a cavalier romp through Tom’s life as he tries to find his way and not cross too many of the wrong people in his efforts to be enough of a man for the woman he loves to marry.

So, to indulge the wordsmiths in my audience who’ll know the context and use of the term right off, I’ve seen at least one Letterboxd review of Tom Jones that described the film as “picaresque as fuck”, and good golly on a high horse gleefully cavorting through the English countryside is that ever the perfect descriptor of this madcap, episodic character study, with especially extreme emphasis on that final word in particular. While the film could get by on being zany & irreverent to start and just leaving it there, the filmmakers also thumbed through the English dictionary and caught sight of the word “bawdy”, and I can only imagine the level of salivation happening as they threw as much of that into the mix as they possibly could as well. Not only does Tom like to run around, fuck around, and eat & drink whenever the opportunity arises, the actual filmmaking & camerawork of the film itself is clearly having a ball with doing the exact same. The opening of the film where an infant Tom is found in the bed is shot & structured like a silent film, complete with intertitles, and while the camera itself is whipping & zooming to catch spare bits of footage and action and cranking the speed of the footage up & down without a care, the editors are employing every wipe and fade and kitschy scene transition or cutting technique that’s possible to accent the wildness at play, and even adding in extra touches like the squeaky-reed score to emphasize the visual comedy a la the Benny Hill theme as well as occasional fourth-wall breaks by the characters themselves. All of it seems directly intended to demolish the old & standard way of making movies in as many ways as the filmmakers can think of and get away with, and the culture shock of seeing something like this in 1963 is, in my opinion, probably largely the reason to its success and why the Academy saw fit to award & nominate this film as much as they did. A lot of the noms don’t make as much sense now that the years have passed; Albert Finney is fine as the title character but frankly didn’t deserve a Best Actor nom here, and the film absolutely didn’t need three separate nominations for Supporting Actress – I could maybe possibly see Edith Evans sticking around in that category, and Hugh Griffith does a lot to sell his character to make his Supporting Actor nom sorta worthwhile, but that would be it in the acting categories.

Frankly, it’s how much the overall reception to this one has mellowed in the decades since that sticks out the most with this. While it was a critical & commercial success in 1963, it’s widely regarded now as one of the worst films to win Best Picture, and even director Tony Richardson in his memoirs regarded the film largely as a misfire. I can see how these arguments have become more widespread, just as I can see how they contrast to the film’s reception in the 60s; this was so different, so shockingly unorthodox of a film for 1963, that I can see how 1960s audiences & critics could find this so engaging, while also making the general appraisal of the film swinging downward as much as it did as time went on make perfect sense, after the novelty of the differences had worn off & become more standard as the 70s got underway. Even with my trying to watch these nominees as a product of their times, it was hard to really fall in love with Tom Jones, though I was also able to appreciate what it did & brought to filmmaking in its era, so my opinion of it kinda ended up balancing out in the middle. With regards to the film being a Best-Picture-winning comedy, while I probably wouldn’t agree with its win in any circumstance, it’s really whether or not the word bawdy and its various uses as a selling point or appeal lands squarely within your interests that’ll decide if this is your kinda thing or not; if it does, Tom Jones will be a delightful couple of hours, and if not, you’ll probably come out of it wondering how anyone could find something like this entertaining.

Arbitrary Rating: 7/10

C’mon you, let’s go… People are waiting.

At the risk of showing my hand a little too early, I wasn’t expecting to have to struggle through Elia Kazan’s America America as much as I did. I generally like Kazan’s films; they’re well-made & very detailed in the production, and usually carry a heavy moral or value that’s portrayed well through the context of the film’s narrative. Kazan is very much an issue or morals filmmaker, and considering his own history (up to and including his testimony in front of the HUAC) as well as his family history, it’s very easy to see why this became Kazan’s niche. His Greek family’s struggle & journey across the Atlantic to the golden shores is itself the subject of America America, and to say that Kazan gets to his most personal with this film is to be bald-faced obvious about it. With how personal the subject matter and story is to Kazan, and the lengths he went to to make the production and film itself the embodiment & depiction of that struggle, it does make it hard to try & talk objectively about the film’s faults or ways it comes up short; as much as the film clearly meant to Kazan and anyone whose family had to go through this struggle (or even went through it themselves), watching America America just as a film on its own merits, there’s a lot more here that feels like weaknesses or rough filmmaking than the strengths of it.

America America is a loose fictionalization of Kazan’s uncle’s actual struggle to escape the oppressed villages of Anatolia, once the ethnic homeland of Greeks and Armenians and now subjugated as part of modern-day Turkey circa the turn of the century, and make his way to America, the land of the free and the symbol of a new life. The fictional uncle, here known as Stavros, initially plans to scrape his way to America with his Armenian friend Vartan, but after a church massacre that leaves his friend dead, he is sent by his father to Constantinople with the family’s entire material wealth to aid his uncle’s carpet business and build enough wealth to bring the family over one by one into safety. Stavros, however, can only dream of America, and even after enduring a series of small and great misfortunes along the way to and after arriving at Constantinople, including his uncle setting him up in an arranged marriage to a rich competitor’s daughter, the idealistic Stavros can do not much better than keep his head down, grit his teeth, and wait for whatever opportunity he can seize upon to finally realize his dream and reach the land of the truly free.

That this is supposedly pretty biographical towards Kazan’s uncle should make it no surprise that Kazan spares absolutely no detail or expense in portraying this journey as authentically as he can, and this is really the main detail of America America that bears bringing up before any other. Kazan filmed largely in Turkey and Greece, with a cast of ethnic Greeks and virtual unknowns, including his lead actor Stathis Giallelis; most of the filming was on location and largely outdoors, with everything set & dressed to represent authentic Anatolia circa the late 1890s; Giallelis himself worked on his English for 18 months in order to play the character, and the Turkish authorities were displeased enough by how their country was portrayed in the film that they tried to confiscate the footage, which was only saved by the filmmakers switching the labels on the canisters. All of this comes across in the film, and the effort involved by the production team is really the star of the show in every moment. It’s the technicals, the practical technology used to film the footage & record the audio, that ends up a distracting mishmash; a very great deal of the dialogue is overdubbing, and not good overdubbing at that, a lot of the characterization was muddled & poorly-portrayed at best, and a lot of the choices in how things were filmed & edited together, especially in the first half of the film, did little to build a narrative or get the audiences invested in the story or characters. I was close to dismissing the film entirely as another of 1001Plus Steve’s misery parfaits, and that the film was almost three whole hours only seemed to exacerbate my struggle to finish it. Thankfully, the second half of the film improved on the aspects the first had been lacking: a more gradual & deliberate pace, generally better audio, and the focus of Stavros’ single-minded desire to go to America was more channeled & subtextual. The methods of Kazan’s storytelling were much more put to use here, and the narrative seemed finally to be actually building toward the conclusion Kazan wants to get to. He does get us there, and the story of Stavros and his family’s enduring struggle does come to a narrative conclusion; it’s just whether or not one wants to subject themselves to rather roughshod filmmaking & writing for a good half-to-two-thirds of a nearly three hour movie in order to get there.

I get that this was basically Kazan’s baby, one of his most personal & core family wounds laid bare on the screen, and that because of that, it makes us want to afford some leeway & grant Kazan more of a favorable response in our assessment of the film. I get that, and I want to as well, especially with how Kazan’s depiction of what emigrating to America meant to his uncle and his family and how that belief in the American dream was basically behind his entire life, including when he sat before Congress and named names; but, watching the film on its own, I just can’t get behind raising my rating of it any higher than what I’m giving it. There are good things about the film, make no doubt; the production design itself was excellent & won the film its only Oscar win, and Giallelis gives his absolute all in his performance even through the lousy overdubbing, but the positives of the film unfortunately don’t outweigh the negatives, and that’s entirely why I’m giving it the rating I am. This is an important film on immigration & what immigrants had to go through in years past (and, in many ways, a lot still do) to make it to America, and it’s just as important a film for Elia Kazan himself, but as a film by itself, it’s only barely worth getting through it, and at three hours, you’ve got a hell of a struggle ahead of you.

Arbitrary Rating: 6/10

Come, come, there’s a wondrous land… where I’ll build you a home in the meadow…

Honestly, I don’t feel as equipped as I probably should be to really critique a film like How the West Was Won, yet another mega-cast, multi-director, epic-scope genre production of the 1960s (boy, they’re everywhere this decade; It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World came out this same year, too, though I’ll miss that one as it missed out on a Best Picture nom). Why this is requires some setup & explanation: in the burgeoning widescreen boom of the 50s, one format that was introduced to try & really push the spectacle of the wider resolutions to their limit was called Cinerama, which involved shooting film on three cameras side-by-side all synched together, and then projecting the three resulting reels on a super-wide, curved screen to get one relatively-seamless epic panorama for the audience. Because the format was so novel, and so few artists & writers really knew what to do with it and how to use the format to narrative & compositional advantage, Cinerama films were largely documentaries & travelogues, with only two films made in the three-strip format that had actual narrative & storylines to them. How the West Was Won is one of those two, and watching it now in the modern era on a not-nearly-wide-enough regular ol’ flat screen, it feels like I’m not really getting the full experience of it; though, with the film itself being really unsure of how to use its ultra-wide resolution to tell its story, I don’t know how much more I’d really be getting, frankly.

How the West Was Won is a five-part generational story of exactly that; how the pioneers & settlers of the western territories of the early United States set out to make the territory their own, both for themselves as well as develop the land even further for the country & future generations. Nominally, the story is told through three generations of one family, known in the first segment as the Prescott family and then, after the eldest daughter marries, the Rawlings family thereafter. Each of the film’s five segments covers a topic & time period in the development of the west from its beginnings into the early modern era: river travel & trade, settling the plains, the incursion of the Civil War, the development & building of the railroads, and finally the rule of law winning out over the outlaws of the wild west, taming the country for good.

With five different sections telling a decades-spanning story, three different directors helming different segments, and a cast as extensive & cameo-filled as any since… well, since The Longest Day the year before, this is a whopper of a production with a lot to handle & try to piece together in the end. As much as the film looks & feels pretty uniform through the whole thing, it at least succeeds at that; it’s really the story it’s telling as well as how the Cinerama format constricts the directors in how they try & tell it that is questionably successful, if anything. Henry Hathaway, who directed three of the film’s five sections, notably cursed the Cinerama format for how unfit it was to telling a story outside of showing off panoramic vistas, and John Ford, who covered the Civil War segment, hated how much more set dressing they had to do to cover the extremely wide resolution; both these men’s complaints are apparent & indicative in watching the film, as the composition of virtually any & every shot is basically identical regardless of where the action or cast are in the frame or how much expansive landscape is needlessly in the background simply by virtue of the format making it impossible to not have it. With the three reels side-by-side, even with more modern-day restorations to make the seams indistinguishable and the format more readily viewable on a flat display, the whole film comes off almost like a Wes Anderson picture with how the composition is forced to be to cover the format, and some of the shots & scenes come off almost like a fish-eye lens with how much the image needs to be warped slightly to fit even a regular non-curved widescreen display. All this is to say that the format, ostensibly used to show off as much of the western frontier as a motion picture possibly could, ends up hampering the resultant film more than it really helps it, and I can fully understand how this is only one of two narrative pictures ever made in Cinerama. It’s a shame, too, since the story itself, in a more regular & thoroughly-understood format, would work just as well if not better; it’s nothing to get in a tizzy over, and it’s exactly what that plot synopsis up there (or even a shorter one) would imply you’re getting with a film like this, but it works for what it wants to be, and the cast at least are game enough to do their jobs regardless of the now-three cameras aimed at them instead of one.

This is just a weird, weird bird, all things considered. I want to like it more than I already kind of do, because when the film settles into the storytelling and lets the visual language of filmmaking do its thing, it’s exactly what you would want out of the title & the marketing pitch; it’s just hard to settle into that for much of the time because the Cinerama format itself is so distracting, and not always in the good way. That’s really the experience of How the West Was Won in a nutshell, and I’m only left with curiosity about how this would have been if it had opted for even a standard widescreen format instead. I can see how it ended up in the Best Picture field, too, with its surprising box office success along with how novel a success of a film it was, though I probably wouldn’t agree with that line of thinking. I guess it’s still nice, though, to experience something as truly novel & different as this in my ongoing movie-watching journey; I’m just not convinced this is as much of an unqualified success as the format itself wants to implicitly suggest that it is.

Arbitrary Rating: 7/10