Hit Me With Your Best Shot: "Possessed"

We return to Season Three of the collaborative series Hit Me With Your Best Shot with not one but two tales of love-madness. I hadn't meant to pair them but I was so late with Possessed and it was time to bring the series back with The Story of Adele H. So there they were, two brunette screen goddesses Joan Crawford and (today's birthday girl) Isabelle Adjani, double-teaming me with their crazy-making sob stories of unrequited love. We'll cover Adele H tomorrow (yes, I'm running behind) but tonight, the first of these two Best Actress Nominated pictures.

Possessed (1947)
This 1947 noir stars the inimitable Joan Crawford as Louise, a woman who we meet after the events of the picture have taken place, wandering around in a daze looking for a man named "David". She is soon in a mental hospital and her back story, the story, begins to emerge. David (the dependably caddish Van Heflin), as it turns out, is the love of her life who she met while both were under the employ of a rich businessman. Louise, a feminist's nightmare, tosses aside all her dignity to veritably beg David to love her back and when he won't, she marries the boss instead and spends the rest of the movie obsessing over David and prone to jealous rages over her step-daughter's budding romance with her former lover. Louise is one of Crawford's most famous Victim roles but the actress is sly enough to also understand that Louise is enough of a masochist to also qualify her as the Film's Villain. The movie's best passage takes on a dream-like quality which is appropriate since Louise is a walking nightmare. 

Crawford Goes Mental after the jump!

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The Morning After

We always need a bit of time to recuperate. We'll be wrapping this year's Oscars up tonight through Wednesday. But for now... chilling. It's the morning after.

We've all seen this stone cold classic photo of Faye Dunaway the morning after her Oscar win for Network but Framework was kind enough to share more photos (and other Oscar types) in a slideshow gallery  and I did a little more searching too.

More "Morning After" after you click including Best Scene Steal and 2 Greedy Gretchens.

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Oscar Horrors: King of the Zombies' Tribal Beats

In this series, Team Experience is looking at Oscar nominated or Oscar winning contributions from or related to the horror genre. In this episode, Robert Gannon -- who dreamt up this whole series for us! -- looks at a true oddity in Oscar history.

HERE LIES...The original score of King of the Zombies (1941). There are a few interesting things to note about the Oscar nomination for a brief horror film (67 minutes!) that has not aged well. The least of which is that, music aside, it's not a particularly great or memorable film.

The year is 1942. Music is still a respected category at the Academy Awards. In an odd twist, 20 films are nominated for Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic Picture. Only at the 1945 ceremony were more films nominated in the category. At this point in Oscar history, there was no limit on the number of nominees. The nominated films simply met a quality threshold. That meant films like Citizen Kane and How Green Was My Valley could compete right alongside B-pictures like King of the Zombies.

As far as I'm concerned, King of the Zombies is the best nominated original score from that year. The zombies in this politically incorrect horror film are voodoo zombies, converted from slaves on a remote island off the coast of South America. Strains of a secret ritual rise and fall out of the sound mix, confusing the American travelers who crashed on the island. Various drums pound out a syncopated rhythm while a chorus of unseen voices chant and sing out a uniform refrain in (presumably) a made up language. It's a haunting blend that offers some of the only scares in the entire film. For a modern equivalent of how the score is used, think of how ineffective The Village would be without James Newton Howard's tension-building score.

I spend a lot of time listening to and researching film scores for my music direction work. The score of King of the Zombies is one that I can pull up in my head instantly and start playing. It's precise, it's perfect for the film, and it's very memorable.

King of the Zombies' score by Edward J. Kay set the foundation for modern voodoo zombie films. If there are voodoo rituals involved, you will hear the same tribal-inspired rhythms and chant-like vocals with nothing else in the mix. It's amazing that a film this small and inconsequential so readily established a horror covention.

Other Oscar Horrors...
Rosemary's Baby - Best Supporting Actress
The Swarm - Best Costume Design
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane -Best Actress in a Leading Role
The Birds - Best Effects, Special Visual Effects
The Fly -Best Makeup
Death Becomes Her -Best Effects, Visual Effects
The Exorcist -Best Actress in a Supporting Role 
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
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

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.

Sally Field is First Lady Mary Todd "Lincoln"

Steven Spielberg's Lincoln (2013?) is one of those movies that I always forget about due to its long long gestation period. I swear I've been hearing about it as long as Jodie Foster's Flora Plum or Jodie Foster's Leni Reifenstahl or a few of Terrence Malick's movies before they surfaced. Will it ever get made? Probably. This is Spielberg we're talking about and he's familiar with the green light. The biopic is now one small step closer to filming. Deadline reports that Sally Field is in as our seventeenth* First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln.

Spielberg says that Sally Field was always his first choice. I don't believe or disbelieve this exactly but I find it amusing that virtually every casting announcement for any movie (not specifically this one) comes with "they were our first choice all along" which simply can't be true 90% of the time we hear it else there would be very few auditions or screen tests ever held and precious little for casting directors to do other than fill up the bit roles and very little for management and representation to do other than negotiate.

At first the news felt odd and easily snarkable like "Sally Field co-starring with Daniel Day-Lewis? She's moving up in the world!" but then I quickly remembered that people -- apparently even myself. For shame -- are always underestimating her talent, probably because she's a "cute" actress as it were, and has been for her entire career. But I've seen enough of her work to know I shouldn't underestimate her. She's already proven herself on stage (she was a-ma-zing in a difficult role in The Goat or Who is Sylvia?), small screen (Emmys) and big screen (Oscars). She's one of those talents that "transfers" as it were. Plus: Daniel Day-Lewis isn't the only one with two Oscars in this marriage.

If you read up on Mary Todd Lincoln you'll find she was a pretty interesting woman with a very dramatic life: Her own family was torn up by the Civil War as she came from a border state, she outlived nearly all of her children, she was plagued by headaches and erratic behavior which some historians believe indicates that she was a manic depressive or bipolar). You have to wonder why some First Ladies don't get their own biopics.

The most peculiar thing about the casting is probably their age difference. Sally Field is 11 years older than Daniel Day-Lewis and we don't often see casting flip the gender/age disparity equation; Mary was 10 years younger than Abraham.

Here is the trailer to  Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940) which netted Raymond Massey and Oscar nomination for Best Actor (Ruth Gordon was not nominated as Mary Todd). John Ford's Young Lincoln (1939) the year before was only Oscar nominated for the screenplay.

No movie about Lincoln has been an Oscar powerhouse but you never know with that cast and director.

But First...
Spielberg's Lincoln is long enough away that perhaps we should be talking about Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter (2012) instead. Itopens in 14 months and stars Meryl Streep's future son-in-law Benjamin Walker as Honest Abe. He's apparently cornered the market on blood splattered presidents. His breakthrough role was in the play "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson" on Broadway (for which he turned down a role in X-Men: First Class) and all I can say about him is you're in for such a treat when you see him on the big screen. Major charisma he has. Big stardom awaits.

Benjamin Walker heads the cast of "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson"

*Abraham Lincoln was the 16th US President but Mary Todd was actually the 17th First Lady since President #10 John Tyler remarried while in office after the death of his first wife.