Oscar Horrors: "The Tell Tale Heart"

BOO! In this 17 episode miniseries, suggested by Robert Gannon, Team Film Experience will be exploring Oscar nominated or Oscar winning contributions from or related to the Horror Film genre. Happy Halloween Season! 

HERE LIES... The Tell Tale Heart. Its insistent beating was drowned to death by the cacophony of musical noise coming from the instruments of Walt Disney's Toot Whistle Plunk and Bloom which won the Best Animated Short Film Oscar for 1953.

What is more horrifying than a madman who thinks himself sane, like the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe's legendary horror story The Tell Tale Heart? I can actually name four.

1. That an Oscar nomination by no means makes your film easy to find for future generations. This is especially true of any nominations outside of Picture, and Acting. Have you ever tried to find all the nominated short films to watch from any given calender year? SHUDDER. (YouTube has reanimated some of their corpses but otherwise, they're tough to dig up!)

2. That animation is still synonomous with children's entertainment despite all the disparate moods the medium is capable of. This short proves that animation is just as suitable for the macabre as it is the goofy slapstick. Note how the animator's makes creepy visual associations between a harmless old man's blind eye and mundane objects... and that director Ted Parmalee and his animators know as much about shadows as good noir filmmakers.

3. That the great James Mason never won an Oscar. CHILLING!, right? Not even for The Verdict or A Star is Born! He can do more with a few line readings than some actors can do in whole films. 

See how calmy and precisely I can tell this story to you? Listen.

The eye was always closed. For seven days I waited -- You think me mad? What madman could wait so patiently, so long -- in the old house, with the Old Man, and the eye that... 

4. That this short was rated X (X!) by the British censors in 1953... ...and now you can see things 100,000 times as grotesque and violent every night on television without parental guidance and with 100,000 times less humanizing guilt. 

Had you ever seen this short before?
What do you make of the new fictional Edgar Allen Poe themed thriller "The Raven" starring John Cusack?

"A Star is Born"... or, will be *after* the Star's baby is born.

Beyoncé announced her pregnancy at MTV's VMAs last night. I switched channels after Gaga's drag king opening number so the news got to me secondhand.

There be film fallout. The fourth feature film version of A Star is Born (2013? 2014?) is now delayed for at least nine months as Beyoncé gestates and welcomes her first child into the world. The musical, meant to be Clint Eastwood's post J Edgar project, had hoped to go before the cameras early in 2012 and with the speed that Eastwood tends to work we would have probably seen it as a Christmas 2012 release.

But now that Beyoncé is pregnant (and considering also that Leonardo DiCaprio has turned down the male lead role), this won't be happening just yet. The Beyoncé/Jay-Z babe will be born first.

Oscar-obsessives should keep a close eye on this one -- the film, not the babe. While the project seems ridiculous on the surface for both "another one?" superfluity and Eastwood + Beyoncé odd-coupledom, A Star is Born is a durable cultural object. It's always a major morphing showcase for the gifts of its leading lady. The first three incarnations resulted in 17 Oscar nominations and 3 Oscars all told including bids for Best Actress for both Janet Gaynor (1937) and Judy Garland (1954) and a Best Original Song Oscar for Barbra Streisand's "Evergreen" (1976).

Will we see Beyoncé as a Best Actress nominee in 2013 or 2014... or will she have to "settle" for a Best Song Oscar?

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.

NYFF "My Week With Marilyn" as Centerfold. Er.... Centerpiece!

News continues to trickle in about this year's New York Film Festival, the 49th (September 30th through October 16th). So, yes, expect 2012's festival to pull out all the stops to honor its own 50th birthday. We always cover this festival since its the easiest for The Film Experience, being NYC based, but this year we're aiming to do thrice the amount of our usual coverage. Stay tuned.

Here's what we know so far.

Opening Night ~ Roman Polanski's CARNAGE
Centerpiece ~ Simon Curtis's  MY WEEK WITH MARILYN (World Premiere)
Closing Night & Lineup In General ~ TBA... though it's usually selections that previously debuted at Cannes or Toronto. THE SKIN I LIVE IN is frequently rumored.

The Burmese Harp (1956)Masterworks ~ This is the section where they show old films, rare prints and retrospectives.

This year they'll be screening a restored and aspect-ratio corrected print of William Wyler's much-Oscar'ed Epic BEN-HUR (1959) which is a MUST for big screen viewing. I've had the opportunity once and the chariot race has to be seen blown up for maximum effect. There will be a rare screening of Nicholas Ray's experimental WE CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN (1973) which he tinkered with until his death in 1979. And the bulk of this section is a Centennial celebration of Japan's chameleonic Nikkatsu Corporation. They're showing over 30 of their films including the Oscar Best Foreign Language Film nominees THE BURMESE HARP (1956). More on that sidebar event here.

Tickets go on sale on September 12th unless you're a Film Society member in which case you can purchase early. Among the older films, I'm definitely taking in The Burmese Harp which I've never seen.

Hallelujah! A Judy Garland Retrospective

The Lincoln Center and the Paley Center here in NYC have joined forces to celebrate the all-singing all-dancing legend that is Judy Garland! 

Shout 'Hallelujah', c'mon get happy!"

Once upon a time she was dubbed "The World's Greatest Entertainer." Few celebrities have ever earned their PR self-mythologizing titles the way Judy G did. There's just no beating her for musical pleasure and cathartic heartbreak. And as if her sensational singing and dancing weren't enough, she was a fine actress, too!

I missed the first week of the celebration being in Michigan but I'll see what I can catch for the remainder of the summer program which ends August 9th. If you're not in New York City, you can always follow along at home as best you can with an impromptu DVD festival.

 

Still to come in the festival are...

Young Judy:
Everybody Sing (1938), For Me and My Gal (1942), Presenting Lily Mars (1943).... and of course a handful with Mickey Rooney: Babes in Arms (1939), Andy Hardy Meets Debutante (1940), Strike Up the Band (1940), Babes on Broadway (1941), Life Begins For Andy Hardy (1941) and Girl Crazy (1943)

Peak Judy: 
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) *one of my personal all time favorite films*, The Clock (1945) which was her first non-musical dramatic role, The Harvey Girls (1946), Easter Parade (1948), In the Good Old Summertime (1949), Summer Stock (1950), and the legendary A Star is Born (1954) in which Judy gives one of the greatest performances of all time. It should have won her the Oscar with ease. 

Late Period Judy:
Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) *Judy's final Oscar nomination*, A Child is Waiting (1963) with Burt Lancaster, and the must-see (for its thinly veiled Judy autiobiopic'isms) I Could Go On Singing (1963). Meanwhile, over at The Paley Center there's a longer celebration of her television years which runs through August 18th [more info here].

Watch a Judy Garland film this week! Which would you choose?