Celeste Holm (1917-2012)

The oldest living Best Supporting Actress winner has now, unfortunately, left us. And to think we were just talking about the divinely appealing Celeste Holm. Holm died earlier today at 95 years of age in her Manhattan home with her husband at her side. She'd recently been hospitalized for dehydration and suffered a heart attack.

Celeste celebrating her Oscar at an anniversary screening in '12 and on Oscar nite in '48

Today's she's best remembered for her work in All About Eve (1950) and Gentlemen's Agreement (1947) for which she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, but her successful career also included Broadway stardom (she was the original Ado Annie in Oklahoma!) and her own television series "Honestly Celeste". She will most definitely be missed. 

In the last completed episode of Best Pictures from the Outside In (a series y'all bring up with regularity), we talked about Gentlemen's Agreement in which I found Holm fully deserving of her Oscar, writing:

In all seriousness Celeste Holm is tremendously good in this movie as a sassy career gal with a big but slightly lonely social life. At first I was worried it was one of those cases where you latch on to and overvalue a charismatic performance because it saves you from its dull surroundings (too many examples to name) but by the movie's end I was convinced that I would have found her sensational even if she hadn't been surrounded by so much dead air; the portrait was so vivid I could project a whole sequel with her character as the star.

Mike remarked that he wanted to meet her to thank her for being the best thing in so many movies.

Celeste and her husband at her 90th birthday party in 2007Celeste had been recently troubled by bitter family divisions and legal complications involving her depleted fortune, her much younger husband (from her fifth marriage in 2004) and her two sons. Our condolescences go out to all of them -- we hope everyone resolved their differences towards the end and hangs on to the good memories.

Program yourself a mini-Celeste fest in her honor soon. There are wonderful and/or storied films to choose from: All About Eve, Come to the Stable, Gentleman's Agreement, High Society, The Tender Trap, and the television musical Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella among them.

Hit Me With Your Best Shot: "Possessed"

We return to Season Three of the collaborative series Hit Me With Your Best Shot with not one but two tales of love-madness. I hadn't meant to pair them but I was so late with Possessed and it was time to bring the series back with The Story of Adele H. So there they were, two brunette screen goddesses Joan Crawford and (today's birthday girl) Isabelle Adjani, double-teaming me with their crazy-making sob stories of unrequited love. We'll cover Adele H tomorrow (yes, I'm running behind) but tonight, the first of these two Best Actress Nominated pictures.

Possessed (1947)
This 1947 noir stars the inimitable Joan Crawford as Louise, a woman who we meet after the events of the picture have taken place, wandering around in a daze looking for a man named "David". She is soon in a mental hospital and her back story, the story, begins to emerge. David (the dependably caddish Van Heflin), as it turns out, is the love of her life who she met while both were under the employ of a rich businessman. Louise, a feminist's nightmare, tosses aside all her dignity to veritably beg David to love her back and when he won't, she marries the boss instead and spends the rest of the movie obsessing over David and prone to jealous rages over her step-daughter's budding romance with her former lover. Louise is one of Crawford's most famous Victim roles but the actress is sly enough to also understand that Louise is enough of a masochist to also qualify her as the Film's Villain. The movie's best passage takes on a dream-like quality which is appropriate since Louise is a walking nightmare. 

Crawford Goes Mental after the jump!

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The Morning After

We always need a bit of time to recuperate. We'll be wrapping this year's Oscars up tonight through Wednesday. But for now... chilling. It's the morning after.

We've all seen this stone cold classic photo of Faye Dunaway the morning after her Oscar win for Network but Framework was kind enough to share more photos (and other Oscar types) in a slideshow gallery  and I did a little more searching too.

More "Morning After" after you click including Best Scene Steal and 2 Greedy Gretchens.

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Oscar Horrors: King of the Zombies' Tribal Beats

In this series, Team Experience is looking at Oscar nominated or Oscar winning contributions from or related to the horror genre. In this episode, Robert Gannon -- who dreamt up this whole series for us! -- looks at a true oddity in Oscar history.

HERE LIES...The original score of King of the Zombies (1941). There are a few interesting things to note about the Oscar nomination for a brief horror film (67 minutes!) that has not aged well. The least of which is that, music aside, it's not a particularly great or memorable film.

The year is 1942. Music is still a respected category at the Academy Awards. In an odd twist, 20 films are nominated for Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic Picture. Only at the 1945 ceremony were more films nominated in the category. At this point in Oscar history, there was no limit on the number of nominees. The nominated films simply met a quality threshold. That meant films like Citizen Kane and How Green Was My Valley could compete right alongside B-pictures like King of the Zombies.

As far as I'm concerned, King of the Zombies is the best nominated original score from that year. The zombies in this politically incorrect horror film are voodoo zombies, converted from slaves on a remote island off the coast of South America. Strains of a secret ritual rise and fall out of the sound mix, confusing the American travelers who crashed on the island. Various drums pound out a syncopated rhythm while a chorus of unseen voices chant and sing out a uniform refrain in (presumably) a made up language. It's a haunting blend that offers some of the only scares in the entire film. For a modern equivalent of how the score is used, think of how ineffective The Village would be without James Newton Howard's tension-building score.

I spend a lot of time listening to and researching film scores for my music direction work. The score of King of the Zombies is one that I can pull up in my head instantly and start playing. It's precise, it's perfect for the film, and it's very memorable.

King of the Zombies' score by Edward J. Kay set the foundation for modern voodoo zombie films. If there are voodoo rituals involved, you will hear the same tribal-inspired rhythms and chant-like vocals with nothing else in the mix. It's amazing that a film this small and inconsequential so readily established a horror covention.

Other Oscar Horrors...
Rosemary's Baby - Best Supporting Actress
The Swarm - Best Costume Design
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane -Best Actress in a Leading Role
The Birds - Best Effects, Special Visual Effects
The Fly -Best Makeup
Death Becomes Her -Best Effects, Visual Effects
The Exorcist -Best Actress in a Supporting Role 
Rosemary's Baby - Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium
Beetlejuice - Best Makeup

Carrie - Best Actress in a Leading Role
Bram Stoker's Dracula - Best Costume Design
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Best Actor in a Leading Role
Poltergeist - Best Effects, Visual Effects
Hellboy II: The Golden Army -Achievement in Makeup
The Silence of the Lambs -Best Director
The Tell-Tale Heart -Best Short Subject, Cartoons

DVR Alert! Monty Clift Day on TCM

Clift's Big LiftIt's been too long since I preached the good news: Montgomery Clift made movies. That's it. Easy holy words to remember. Pass them on. Amen.

Saturday August 20th (tomorrow!) on TCM
6:00 am Raintree County (1957)
His troubled southern epic with bestie (and best co-star) La Liz. 
9:00 am Lonelyhearts (1958)
A minor curiousity for a number of reasons (Myrna Loy!) but mostly important for being Maureen Stapleton's debut. She was Oscar nominated as a lonely wife chasing some Monty tail on the side.

11:00 am The Big Lift (1950)
Love this one (pictured left). There's something so relaxed about him here not a quality one tends to associate with his work. 
1:00 pm Red River (1948)
Must- see entertaining Howard Hawks western with awesome gay coding and Monty at his all time prettiest. John Wayne don't like pretty! 
3:30 pm From Here to Eternity (1953)
1953's Best Picture. A star-powered soap opera in war film's clothing. The star wattage is so bright it's visible across the entire Pacific: Clift, Kerr, Lancaster, Sinatra, Reed. 

5:45 pm The Misfits (1961)
Appropriately elegaic given that it's the last film for both Clark Gable and (a fantastic) Marilyn Monroe. Monty is wonderfully broken, too.
8:00 pm A Place in the Sun (1951)
Stone cold classic. 
10:15 pm The Heiress (1949)
Olivia de Havilland ♥ Montgomery Clift. But what does Clift  ♥ ? 

Monty watching himself in The Heiress

12:15 am The Search (1948)
His Oscar-nominated debut performance. That doesn't happen often for male actors but he was an instant sensation at 27.
2:15 am I Confess (1953)
His only Hitchcock. He plays a priest because you know, that buttoned up guilty quality of Clift always added great friction to his übersexiness.
4:00 am The Defector (1966)
His last movie, released just months after his death, in which he plays a physicist mixed up with the shady plans of one Roddy McDowall.  

And if I just typed all that up about my all time favorite actor and none of you watch any of them, you deserve all the opening weekends of Conan versus Spy Kids that come your way*.

*That was uncalled for. I apologize. No one deserves that.