Goodbye, Eleanor Parker

Anne Marie here with some sad news. Hollywood beauty Eleanor Parker passed away early this week at age 91. Though Parker is best known for her iconic turn as the Countess in The Sound Of Music, she actually had a long and diverse career that included war films, B movies, swashbucklers, film noir, and three Best Actress nominations.

Eleanor Parker started as a bit player at Warner Brothers in the 1940s. At first, she bumped around in B movies and film noir, such as Between Two Worlds. But from the start she was willing to take risks. In 1946, she starred in a remake of the infamous Bette Davis vehicle Of Human Bondage opposite Paul Henreid. Both the film and her performance continue to garner mixed reviews, but no one could accuse her of taking the easy road.

The 1950s saw Eleanor Parker's star rise rapidly. In 1952, she starred in the large Technicolor swashbuckler Scaramouche opposite Stewart Granger (my personal favorite). Her three Oscar nominations were from this period: first Caged in 1951, then Detective Story in 1952, and finally Interrupted Melody in 1956. In addition to these, she also played Frank Sinatra's crippled wife in The Man With The Golden Arm. From the 1960s onward, Parker took more supporting roles in films such as The Sound Of Music and An American Dream. She retired in 1991.

Of all of Eleanor Parker's diverse performances, the stand out is Caged. Now a cult classic, Caged tells the story of a young lady (Parker) whose experiences in a woman's prison quickly turn her from naive innocent to cynical con. It could easily be lumped in with other Prison Women movies, but the fact is that for its time Caged was a shocking movie. Topics usually considered verboten by the Hays Code censorship--pregnancy, women's crime, homosexuality, and corrupt law enforcement--are all taboos attacked by this film. At the center of this whirlwind stands Eleanor Parker, giving one hell of a heartbreaking performance.

Parker in Caged

Eleanor Parker was an under-appreciated talent. However, in those films she where she left her mark she remains unforgettable. After all, how would Maria react without the Countess's sad and sly revelation? Where would Scaramouche get the will to fight without his fiery redhead? Finally, what actress could have raised a prison noir from genre pulp to Oscar-worthy film? Eleanor Parker was more than a pretty face, she was a pretty great actress. She will be missed.

SAG Nominations Are In!

Good morning Oscar watchers. This morning brings one of the biggest precursors of the season: the Screen Actor's Guild. These days the eventual Oscar cross-over is usually somewhere between "very hot" (19/20 for 2009) to "very warm" (17/20 in 2011 and 2010) so you can guarantee a large number of the below nominees will show up on Oscar ballots in January.

What are we thinking will cross over? What will fall out? Will tomorrow's Golden Globe nominations (!!!) erase whatever momentum that some of today's nominees have amassed (we're looking at you August: Osage County and Lee Daniels' The Butler)?

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Team FYC: "Blue Jasmine" for Costume Design

In the FYC series, we're spotlighting our favorite fringe contenders. Here's abstew on Blue Jasmine's threads.

When it comes to the Oscar for Best Costume Design, the Academy's aesthetic seems rather limited. They go one of two ways: Period Piece or Fantasy. Having a tendency to confuse 'Best' with 'Most' the eventual winner is often whichever is that year's most elaborate or over-the-top design (Alice in Wonderland, really?!). Contemporary set films with well-thought-out clothes that define the character tend to get overlooked in the Season End Gold Rush. Breakfast at Tiffany's, Pretty Woman, and Clueless are all victims of this crime against fashion. So, hopefully when the nominations are announced on January 16th, Cate Blanchett's inevitable Best Actress nomination for Blue Jasmine will be joined by a nomination for Suzy Benzinger's meticulously designed costumes for the Woody Allen film.

As a Park Avenue socialite, Jasmine French's life is defined by labels. Not just the one's society has placed on her - wife, mother, sister - but, more importantly, the one's that matter most to her, Designer labels - Chanel, Fendi, Louis Vuitton (Blanchett's pronunciation of the French fashion house is perfect in its pretension). In the first shot we see of her, sitting in First Class in her Chanel jacket, crisp white shirt, and strands of pearls, we immediately know who this woman is before she's even said a word. The Upper East side theater I saw the film in (next to Bloomingdale's, of course) was populated with woman all wearing a variation of the uniform. So, it makes sense that when Jasmine's world unravels after the downfall of her corrupt husband, the labels are all she has to cling to. Upon meeting her sister Ginger's boyfriend Chili and his friend, she clutches that highest of all status symbols, the Hermès Birkin bag, as if her life depends on it. Without it she'd be just as low-class as they are.

And yet, as the film progresses, you begin to see something a woman in her position would never be caught doing in public - repeating outfits. There's that Chanel jacket again paired with a different shirt.  Jasmine's fall from grace has forced her to be thrifty, mixing and matching clothes like a regular person. And she's soon confronted with something she thought she'd never have to wear in her life: hospital scrubs at a dentist office. (Her sister Ginger's job as a grocery store checkout girl, requires her to wear a similarly hideous smock.) The juxtaposition of how different the two are is clearly illustrated by the women's clothes. Ginger, all short denim skirts and platform espadrilles, is everything Jasmine has spent her whole life avoiding. Benzinger expresses so much about these character's through what they're wearing. The costumes are more than just clothes, but an essential element of the storytelling.

some previous FYCs... Mud | Stories We Tell | In a World... | Short Term 12 | The Great Gatsby |  Nebraska | Lawrence Anyways | World War Z | The World's End | The Conjuring | Aint Them Bodies Saints 

Potent Quotables - Margo Channing in All About Eve

Anne Marie here, looking forward to the end of the holidays when we can all toast the new year with a martini in hand. Many iconic movie lines seem to have come from characters who were three sheets to the wind, so I'd like to celebrate a few of them. I'll start with one of my favorite divas: Margo Channing, Star of Screen and Scotch. Her poison of the night is martinis very dry; buckets of them in fact. During her party - after "fasten your seat belts" but before the bumpiest part of the night - Margo corners Max to deliver this gem:

 

Bill's thirty-two. He looks thirty-two. He looked it five years ago, he'll look it twenty years from now. I hate men."

Though swimming in her self-pity at the bottom of a martini glass, Margot Channing is still a star.

Stars - even drunk ones - get the best lines, and the true insight and witty delivery speak to both Bette Davis's fantastic acting and Mankiewicz's devilish dialogue.

What's your favorite tipsy movie quote?
Slur it out in the comments, won't you?

Online Film Critics Society announces its nominations.

It's Tim, to discuss with you the Online Film Critics Society nominations. A day late, admittedly, but these sorts of lapses will happen in this rampant crush of critics group awards.. Anyway, as one of the Team Experience members who happens to be in the OFCS myself, it falls naturally to me to make a big darn deal about this particular announcement.

And in all immodesty, it's one of the more interesting sets of titles that has shown up this year. We were just complaining about groups like the AFI using their awards as nothing but Oscar predictions, were we not? There's certainly not much of that going on here, at least not at the nomination stage - in fairness, I fully expect that the winners will be part of the great Gravity and 12 Years a Slave love-in (and Her, if the group at large ever receives screener DVDs) - with some titles that have received absolutely no attention elsewhere and likely won't again. And that's what year-end awards and lists are about, to my mind: not commemorating the same three movies and two performances as everybody else, but passing around names of things that you really should have seen, it's so great.

This year also finds the OFCS made the jump from a traditional five nominees to a new-fashioned ten. We all undoubtedly have opinions on such matters; some of us, unfortunately, are prevented for reasons of professional ethics from communicating those opinions in public.

The nomination leaders include 12 Years a Slave with 8, and Her and Inside Llewyn Davis at six each (surprisingly, The Wind Rises, with 5, ends up ahead of Gravity's 4).

Nomination leader "12 Years a Slave"

The full list is below the jump.

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