1957: Ruby Dee in "Edge of the City"

Before the next Smackdown, Nick Taylor will be visiting some "alternates" to the Supporting Actress Ballot.

There are two noteworthy bits of trivia about Edge of the City. First: This marks the third of five films where Ruby Dee plays Sidney Poitier's wife, as well as the first of these films to focus on her character and their marriage in any real detail. Second: Edge of the City is the directorial debut of Martin Ritt, whose most famous films include Hud (which netted him his only Best Director nomination), Sounder, and The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, all of which were highly regarded by critics and Academy members alike. Ritt was a skilled actor’s director, able to craft naturalistic, cinematic performances from his ensembles while paying equal attention to the vastly different tones, milieus, and sociopolitical landscapes of each film. How could I resist the siren call of the first feature from a director this versatile and engaging, and with a cast this endlessly watchable? 

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May Retrospective: “Mikey and Nicky” (1976)

by Cláudio Alves

All of Elaine May's films explore questions of masculinity, usually centering around toxic men whose perspectives may define the narrative but are also skewered by the canny mind in the director's chair. Brittle and pathetic, her broken men expose themselves and their venality through spectacles of emotional evisceration, often letting us see into the darker depths of their souls even when they act as if they're conquering heroes.

Consequently, there's often an aspect of cruelty to the humor of May's funny pictures, a comedy born out of disdain that's wielded like a scalpel by a master surgeon. Through our uncomfortable laughs, the director dissects her characters most mercilessly. Because of that, it seems obvious that Elaine May would have no trouble doing calcinating dramas with the same ease with which she did incise comedy. After all, in hercinematic universe, every comedy is also a tragedy.

Such is the case of her third feature, 1976's Mikey and Nicky…

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Rosemary's Baby Pt 2: This is Really Happening!

Rosemary's Baby print by Jonathan Burton. For sale here.50th Anniversary Three-Part Mini-Series
Occasionally we'll take a movie and baton pass it around the team and really dive in. 

Rosemary's Baby (1968) is 50 years old now but it feels both ancient and fresh. It's always alive when you watch it. Having seeped into the very DNA of both the movies and our nightmares, it deserves a deep dive. In Part One by Seán McGovern we watched as Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and Guy Woodhouse (John Cassavettes) moved into a strange new apartment building, saw a neighbor mysteriously die, and become socially entangled with an intrusive neighbor couple Minnie and Roman Castavet (Ruth Gordon and Sydney Blackmer), who are both eccentrically endearing and very possibly sinister. 44 minutes into the film we can scratch out "very possibly" and just make that sinister. Full stop. We return to Rosemary just as we realize she's been drugged by Minnie's chocolate mousse "mouse" and has begun to dream... - Editor

Part 2 by Jason Adams

44:21 It seems appropriate to jump right in in the middle of a dream about to turn nightmare, for what else is Rosemary's Baby but that?

44:21 So much of this sequence will come back to haunt us later when Rosemary makes her final horrific discovery...

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Beauty vs Beast: The Men In Rosemary's Life

Jason from MNPP here on another Monday afternoon with another round of our weekly "Beauty vs Beast" series - today happens to be the 49th anniversary of my favorite movie Rosemary's Baby. Roman Polanski's masterpiece (one of his several masterpieces) was dropped from beak of the devil's stork into the world on June 12th 1968, a wailing bundle of joy (with its father's eyes) that became the 8th biggest film of the year, scoring over 33 million at the box office (aka 230 million in 2017 dollars, putting it on par with what Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them made last year) and forever giving pregnant woman something shiny and new to worry themselves about. (All of them witches!)

This being my favorite film we've already devoted one of these columns to it - we faced off the womenfolk with Rosemary (Mia Farrow) taking on Minnie (Ruth Gordon) last fall. Gordon won, same as the Oscars. So this time around let's turn our attentions to their respective partners! There's no time like Right Now for "Sleazy White Men Who Think They Own Women's Reproductive Organs" after all, so I give you Guy Woodhouse (John Cassavetes), star of "Nobody Loves an Albatross" and a world-class creep, and Roman Castavet (Sidney Blackmer), door to door Satan salesman. Choose wisely, your womb will thank you...

PREVIOUSLY We took a quick trip to the Moors last weekend to put poor Jane Eyre through the wringer again but in the end Mia Wasikowska came out on top (and who wouldn't want to come out on top of Michael Fassbender) with 58% of your vote. Said Nick T:

"I'm so happy to cheer for Jane. It's a great performance (yay Mia!), and if Jane won't act as her own hype man then I'll happily do it tor her."

Judy by the Numbers: "Snowflakes"

What on odd year is 1963 in the history of Judy Garland. 1964 marks the last year of Judy Garland's film career, and the boom of Judy's television career. The first of Judy's final two movies reunited Judy Garland with producer Stanley Kramer and actor Burt Lancaster, with whom she'd worked only two years before in Judgment at Nuremburg. By the early 1960s, Kramer was establishing himself as the prestige producer of hard-hitting social issue cinema. A Child Is Waiting, about an institution for developmentally challenged children, was no different.

The Movie: A Child is Waiting (Universal, 1963)
The Songwriter: Marjorie D. Kurtz
The Players: Judy Garland, Burt Lancaster, Gena Rowlands, directed by John Cassavetes

The Story: While the majority of Judy Garland's career was dominated by Technicolor musical extravaganzas, the last few films of her career do signal an attempt at darker, "more serious" work. Surrounded by Method artists like Rowlands, Cassavetes, and (to some degree) Lancaster, Judy clearly embraced a more fluid, less "Studio" form of acting. Her improvisation with the students shows this transition. This scene, not a "musical number" in the conventional sense, sees Judy attempting to teach a song to her students through many tactics - banging on the piano, half-quiet mumbling, sing-shouting, etc - while playing a range of tensions in the scene, from timidity to irritation to joy when they start to get it right. It is a subtle musical performance.

Most of the drama in A Child Is Waiting happened behind the scenes between Kramer and Cassavetes, but ultimately no battles or cute children could save the film. It lost $2 million among mixed reviews, a frustrating end to an artistic leap on Judy's part.