The One Inch Barrier: 'Nights of Cabiria' and 'The Seventh Seal'
Friday, March 4, 2022 at 10:00PM by Nathaniel R
While we're sad about the current state of Oscar we still have 93 other years of Oscar history to obsess over. So I'm happy to share that I was invited back for a final appearance on "The One-Inch Barrier". Juan Carlos Ojano's podcast has looked at every Oscar race for Best International Feature Film while moving backward in time. Well almost every. There's still a few episodes to go. For this episode Juan Carlos and I talked about the nominated films of 1957 including The Gates of Paris (France), the noir The Devil Strikes at Night (Germany), the musical melodrama Mother India (India), the WW II survival drama Nine Lives (Norway), and the winning film Federico Fellini's enchanting Nights of Cabiria (Italy).
Ingmar Bergman's influential early classic The Seventh Seal was also submitted for the Oscars that year but the Academy unwisely passed. I have words about that. Hope you enjoy...
Reader Comments (3)
I re-watched Nights of Cabiria more than a month ago on MUBI (great service BTW) as I was just enthralled by it as I don't think there is anyone like a Giulietta Massina as she is just an original in terms of her innocence, charisma, and anguish. This is best performance among the films she did with Fellini. If I were to rank them...
1. Nights of Cabiria
2. La Strada
3. Juliet of the Spirits
4. Ginger & Fred (underrated!)
5. The White Sheik
Giulietta Masina would have won in this new foreign-friendly era. Deservedly
Nights of Cabiria is one of the very greatest films ever made, not just Giulietta Masina's best. but Fellini's best film ever. So in a sense, whatever else got nominated is kind of irrelevant.Three of the other four films have their plus points. Mother India is easily a (distant) second best with a fantastic musical number where the dancers form a map of India and a phenomenal performance from a little kid, here called Master Sajid, who, a decade later became the teen idol Sajid Khan, and even got his own tv show in America! Gates of Paris may not be one of Rene Clair's best, but it features an astonishing scene where some kids reenact a crime while a man in a bar reads a newspaper account of it aloud. The Devil Comes at Night is quite entertaining and perfectly serviceable if not particularly memorable. Nine Lives is of no interest whatsoever, and how it got the nod over Seventh Seal is a real head-scratcher.