Win a 50th Anniversary Blu-Ray of "West Side Story"

I've been meaning to celebrate the 50th anniversary of West Side Story (1961) for two months now. I've shirked my duties as a fan.

When you're a fan, you're a fan all the way, from your first sing-along to your last dying day. ♫

But no more! In addition to December being the kick off for our year in review festivities let's celebrate the greatest musical ever written here and there with posts about the 1961 multiple Oscar winner. 

I have two copies of the 50th anniversary Blu-Ray to give away. To enter simply send me an e-mail [filmexperience(at)gmail(dot)com] with "WSS" in the subject line by Sunday night, December 4th with the following information.

1. Your full name and mailing address 
(this will be kept private unless you win in which case the studio gets your info to send you the prize!)

2. An anecdote about your personal relationship to this movie, be it a favorite song, first time you saw it, moment you love, favorite character, line from a song you have used in public or WHATEVER...  (This second part may not be kept private. I might quote you in a future post!)

Enter the contest TONIGHT!

tonight, tonight
the world is wild and bright
going mad
shooting sparks into space

Theadora Van Runkle (1929-2011)

Take off those berets and fedoras and pay your respects. The great costume designer Theadora Van Runkle, a three time Oscar nominee, passed away this past Friday of lung cancer at 83 years of age [src]. For those who don't immediately connect her name to her movies, know that her work was seismic. 

Her most famous creations were actually those done on her very first feature Bonnie & Clyde (1967). She was able to do the picture only after Warren Beatty and the costume designers guild president screamed at each other for half an hour (she was not a guild member then) according to Mark Harris's invaluable tome Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and The Birth of New Hollywood.  She had never done a film and at one tense point admitted to Warren Beatty that she had no idea what she was doing. 

After Beatty vetoed her first period-specific ideas, she came up with the now legendary out of time ensembles that nodded to both the 1930s (when the story takes place) and contemporary 60s French New Wave that the project had always hoped to emulate (Beatty had originally wanted François Truffaut himself to direct).

You see people who are great beauties and never get anywhere. This was style."
-Theadora Van Runkle on Dunaway as Bonnie. 

Van Runkle even claims that she was the one who brought the unknown Faye Dunaway to Beatty & director Arthur Penn's attention. "There's the girl you should cast!" though there are competing legends as to how Dunaway first came up in the long search for the girl.

Because of the tight budget, many of the costumes worn by other characters weren't actually Van Runkle's designs but costuming the titular pair was enough to win her a permanent place in movie history and her first Oscar nomination. She was later nominated for both The Godfather Part Two (1974) and Peggy Sue Got Married (1986).

Those Oscar nominated movies were hardly the only memorable gigs. Other showy movies included the infamously delirious transgendered farce Myra Breckenridge (1970), the ill-fated Mame (1974), the post-war romantic drama New York New York (1977) and the bawdy gaudy musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982).

I'll always have a special place in my heart for her work on Peggy Sue Got Married. I love that too-shiny / too-tight gown that Peggy Sue is proud she can still fit into at her 25th reunion. Like Bonnie, Peggy Sue is straddling two eras, this time literally; a lovely mirage of the past clinging to a totally contemporary soul.

Good night and thank you, Theadora.

Oscar Horrors: Nosy Neighbor Finale

Editor's Note: This is the final entry in our Oscar Horrors miniseries. We really hope you enjoyed all 17 entries -- full index at the bottom of this post. Should we do it again next year? (Yes, there are more nominations afforded to the creepy-crawly films. The Oscars have been around for 84 years after all...) -Nathaniel

HERE LIES... Ruth Gordon's Oscar-winning turn in Rosemary's Baby who drugged her competition and dragged them to hell in 1968.

Robert here, with a look back at one of Oscar's best Best Supporting Actress decisions. You probably already know that Ruth Gordon was a real Hollywood veteran when she won her Oscar for Rosemary's Baby, having been in the showbiz business ever since appearing as a picture baby in 1915 and taking a stage role as one of Peter Pan's lost boys. Even if you didn't know that, it's the sort of thing that seems right. Or you may have deduced it after seeing footage of Ruth winning her Oscar and declaring "I can't tell ya' how encouraging a thing like this is" followed by a big audience laugh. It's a good laugh line and a silly thing to say after over fifty years in the business. But the laugh was on the audience because Ruth was right. At the time of her win, Ruth's career was going fine. She'd already been a nominee for Inside Daisy Clover a few years earlier. So it would be wrong to say that the Oscar raised her career from the dead... but it sure created a monster.
 
In the first 53 years of Ruth Gordon's career, the pre-Oscar years, Miss Ruth assembled 13 screen credits to her name. Not an insane amount. Not the hundreds you probably assumed from such an enduring actress. But hey, showbusiness is showbusiness. You take what you can get to put food on the table. In the final 19 years of her career, the post-Oscar years, Madam Ruth showed up on screen 28 times. If you take out TV roles the number still almost doubles post-Oscar. so between the ages of 72 and her passing at 88, Ruth Gordon worked twice as much onscreen as in the first 70 years of her life. You'd think she'd made a deal with the devil.

How'd she do that? Well, Ruth Gordon knew what she was doing. Her performance in Rosemary's Baby is the most memorable in the film. But it's not written that way. Consider the descriptive names given to all the characters in the film: the plain but still very pretty Rosemary, the generically masculine Guy, the ancient and powerful Roman, and Ruth Gordon plays Minnie. She's a tiny little thing. Okay, she's got some sass, but she doesn't have any big emotional stand-out Oscar scenes, except of course that she makes every scene she's in stand out.
 
She's a villain. She's evil. Really evil. Frustratingly, annoyingly evil. She's your grandmother's pestering friend, but evil. And the Oscars don't like their supporting actresses to be that evil. Even when they're villainous, like Tilda Swinton or Mo'Nique, they're multi-layered evil. They have human moments. Oscar like's his supporting ladies complex but his supporting men sociopathic. Ruth's Minnie Castevet is dangerous and remorseless. She has more in common with the Hannibal Lecters, Anton Chigurhs and Jokers of the world then her fellow supporting actresses. Then she followed it all up with Harold & Maude. Chances are, if you don't know Ruth as Minnie, you know her as Maude. From the malevolent to the benevolent. It was the one-two punch of her career and it proved that she could do anything. And that, is truly scary.

OSCAR HORRORS
The Swarm - Best Costume Design
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane -Best Actress in a Leading Role
The Fly -Best Makeup
Death Becomes Her -Best Effects, Visual Effects
The Exorcist -Best Actress in a Supporting Role 
The Birds - Best Effects, Special Visual Effects

The Birds - Best Effects, Special Visual Effects
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
King of the Zombies - Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic Picture

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

Oscar Horrors: I've Written a Letter to Bette

HERE LIES... Bette Davis's Best Actress nomination for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, sent to an early grave by Anne Bancroft's more Oscar-friendly work in The Miracle Worker. 

Andreas from Pussy Goes Grrr here. In 1962, Bette Davis had a good three decades of acting ahead of her—what endurance!—but her disturbing, self-deprecating performance as Baby Jane Hudson sure feels like a go-for-broke swan song. It builds on all her tics and trademarks (bitchiness, powerful voice, melodramatic intensity) and exaggerates them almost beyond recognition. Following in the footsteps of Norma Desmond, Baby Jane's a quintessential star-as-monster. Try as you might, you just can't look away.

Granted, Joan Crawford does co-star as Baby Jane's paraplegic sister Blanche. But this is unmistakably Bette's show all the way: she dominates every second of screen time, whether by snarling and squawking with an alcohol-induced slur, or through a mere flutter of her eyelashes. She plays the role broader than broad with gargoyle makeup and coarse body language, often standing akimbo like a pissed-off teenager. But she leaves space for smaller gestures, like the sudden, wicked curling of her lips, that give us a vision of Baby Jane's sick, sad inner life.

Because she's not all monstrous. If only she was, she'd be so much easier to watch. Instead Bette plays her with a nagging core of pathos, of innocence lost. Occasionally her underlying tragedy (and implicit Electra complex) breach the surface, like when she sings her old vaudeville hit "I've Written a Letter to Daddy." It's the film's great can't-look-away set-piece, a pitiful song and dance rooted in Baby Jane's hideous regression to childhood, and Bette performs the hell out of it. No shame, no holding back, nothing but raw chutzpah.

Egged on by Victor Buono's ghoulish pianist, she hoarsely belts out the mawkish melody, and the resulting incongruity is a nauseating mix of horror and morbid comedy. It's a boozy, psychotic siren song that, to their credit, the Academy's members were unable to resist. It's an artifact of poisoned camp, a sour recapitulation of Bette's Hollywood career, and an indelible piece of horror history.

And if you want a real surprise, watch Baby Jane back to back with Bette's foray into Hammer horror, The Nanny. There, she's equally chilling, but all of Baby Jane's grand flourishes have been replaced with stoicism and restraint. It's black-and-white proof that Bette's performances didn't just have magnitude; they had range.

Previously on Oscar Horrors
The Fly, Death Becomes Her, The Exorcist, The Birds, Carrie and more....
Top 100 Most Memorable Best Actress "Characters" 

Distant Relatives: Lawrence of Arabia and The Lord of the Rings

Robert here w/ Distant Relatives, exploring the connections between one classic and one contemporary film.

Heroes, Real and Imagined

"The Lord of the Rings" was originally published in 1954, eight years before the release of the film Lawrence of Arabia. Technically it came first. Then again T.E. Lawrence rode through Arabia in 1916 besting J.R.R. Tolkien's adventure by 38 years. Really, if you wanted to continue down this path you'd have to go back invention of the epic hero tale itself. This is why these films make for a fascinating fit. They are, arguably, the greatest cinematic epic based in realty and the greatest cinematic epic based in fantasy. They have similarities as a direct reflection of their status as epic hero storytelling, and similarities so specific they transcend that label. Then there are the differences. You won't see me use the term "reluctant hero" here because Lawrence, though he may get there eventually, starts off expecting his adventures to be "fun." Frodo not so much. And it's safe to say without a spoiler warning, that you're aware that Lawrence didn't do anything in Arabia that saved the world, even on a small scale, yet that's just the mission that Frodo is tasked with. Lawrence's mission is a little more vague, creating chaos, trotting from one quickly conceived battle to another, eventually perhaps uniting the Arabs. Quite a ways from Frodo's to destroy the ring of power, save the world. But both are attempting to bring some sort of perceived restoration to a land and both are at the whim of a towering ancient history, of which they will soon become a part.
 
Both stories start off similarly enough with a singular character chosen for their je ne sais quoi and sent off to a far away place. Although that je ne sais quoi may be some combination of strength, resolve, and perhaps to their detriment, innocence. In other words, they both understand, or will understand that the trick to standing the fire is "Not minding that it hurts." Immediately there is danger, harsh foreign landscape and people, separated by clan or by race, defined by differences; the Bedouin, the Howeitat, the Dwarfs, the Elves forced to work together, united for the purpose of our hero. Following this is the hardship of travel, the escalation of war, battles by name (Aqaba, Helm's Deep, Damascus, Gondor), and an inhuman enemy, actual non-human Uruk-hai for Frodo, and for Lawrence, the Turks represented only briefly by the Bey of Daara who tortures, though not much more than we've seen of some of our heroes. Sometimes the pure evil of fantasy is less unsettling than the complexity of reality. Finally there is a resolution, an ending, or a semi-ending. But I'd argue that in both cases the resolution is only partially relevant.

Into the Darkness

We already know that Frodo will achieve much and Lawrence will achieve little. Their journeys foresee those ends quite quickly. What's more important is how those journeys will alter them, and not for the better. The term "epic hero tale" conjures up images of bravery and glory, but Frodo and Lawrence experience a whirlwind of darkness, fear, and corruption. Of course, the one ring is a symbol of power and with great power comes great corruptibility. Frodo falls deeper and deeper into darkness until he's won over by Gollum. Lawrence too lets his building grandeur fill his own head. But there's an even greater darkness at play. Early in the film, after Lawrence kills a man he laments, not that he may have to do it again, but that he enjoyed it. In so many ways, these men are the keepers of life and death. Victories slowly come filled less with jubilation and more with relief that the end is one step closer. Meanwhile the old men who run the world sit at tables and make declarations and have no idea just how little power they have, and how much belongs to one little person.

Epic hero tales that give us everyman protagonists, exotic locales, and thickening drama are a staple of storytelling. Here, even at opposite ends of the fantasy/reality spectrum we find two films that meet all the criteria for a quality epic. Did T.E. Lawrence's story make for a great film because it naturally met all the criteria of the genre? Because it seemed to be scripted? Is The Lord of the Rings such a beloved tale because despite the fantasy, the emotions, the personalities and the conflicts are so close to what we see in reality? These films cross over each other and back again and still are only bookends for cinema's rich collection of epics whether fantasy or reality.

Other Cinematic Relatives: Star Wars (1977-1983), Princess Mononoke (1997), Ben-Hur (1959), and The Harry Potter Series