Greatest Shows on Earth

Overture

It was All Quiet on the Western Front when I set about to accomplish my most recent goal. It Happened One Night in 2008 that I decided to watch every Academy Award Best Picture Winner. Just after the 2009 Awards ceremony, I accomplished my goal like Patton advancing through the Germans, which prompted this blog. It would be a Titanic and Rocky task to list every movie from the past eighty years in this writing, and I am afraid I would be Unforgiven for bogging things down with absurd attempts to work The Life of Emile Zola or Gigi into my writing. Instead, I will simply write some thoughts from my self-taught class on the evolution of film.

Act I
When I started my pursuit last year, I had already watched about half of the best picture winners. For the sake of economics, I avoided rental fees by watching the films as they cycled through cable television. This led to a non-sequential approach to my viewing, but it also kept things interesting when jumping from 1968’s Oliver! to 1928’s Sunrise. Taking this disordered approach prompted my first observation: that it is always best to view a film with the eyes of the year in which it was made.

Around the World in 80 Days provides a great example of the need to adjust your expectations. As one might expect, simply winning the Academy Award for Best Motion Picture does not assure timeless-classic status. If you sit down to watch the 1956 version of Jules Verne’s story, you are setting yourself up for three hours of grainy cinematography that will make you feel like you’ve been watching for a full 80 days. The film is littered with stereotypical representations of Spain, Japan, and America’s wild west. The jokes are tired and the cinematography is merely satisfactory. But if you watch the film with 1956 eyes and realize that few people had ever before seen the stirring shots of Spain, Japan, and Thailand, then it certainly makes the experience more tolerable. In some cases, it can move a film from just fine to extremely impressive.

Once coming to this realization, you won’t question whether or not Casablanca would look any better if shot in color. The Bridge on the River Kwai may look more impressive with high-def tropical shots, but you cannot ignore how impressive Burma appeared to viewers in 1957 when filming Alec Guinness’s British grit. And while the dogfight scenes in Wings still hold up eighty years later, viewers should work to appreciate that William Wellman successfully created action and suspense without sound or any of the modern CGI effects. Mutiny on the Bounty gave us a template for swashbuckling on the high seas, while All Quiet on the Western Front introduced viewers to the epic war film. Rebecca stirred people as an early psychological thriller despite having scenes so shadowy that you could barely distinguish the forest in the dark as the camera drew close to Manderley.

There is no doubt these films would be visual spectacles if recreated today, but there is only the smallest chance that the reproduction would capture the magic that made the original great. It may be easy to imagine Mutiny on the Bounty, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Rebecca updated with the cinematographic efforts of Pirates of the Caribbean, Saving Private Ryan, and the crisp black and white from Schindler’s List. But as the 1998 Psycho demonstrates, even mimicking the exact shots of an original masterpiece with the improved technology of modernity will not guarantee the tense nature of a great psychological thriller (and in that particular case, the updated version was neither psychological nor thrilling). With some films, it is hard to put on the lenses of a viewer from years past, but doing so will provide a much greater film to enjoy.

Act II
My second observation really struck me after the Academy announced the 2008 nominees (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Milk, The Reader, and Slumdog Millionaire). While each of these films certainly had value, they all seemed to lack the depth that one might expect from a best picture nominee. Even Fitzgerald’s 9,000 word short story seemed more thought-provoking than the three-hour adaptation of Benjamin Button. None of the films were particularly bad, but I think there is a good argument that The Wrestler and Gran Torino had more value than the actual nominees. The nominees, however, tended to have a much more positive tone than Wrestler and Torino. It seems historically, that when the country is facing war and economic hardship that movie-viewers, even movie critics, seek a more escapist experience at the theater.

In 1931 and 1932 when America settled into the Great Depression, the Academy picked Cimarron and Grand Hotel—two generally upbeat films. In the Academy Awards after the Pearl Harbor attack and the start of World War II, the Academy chose How Green Was My Valley over the grittier and still-appreciated Maltese Falcon and Citizen Kane. How Green is a perfectly fine film, but certainly not superior to Maltese Falcon or Citizen Kane. The capacity for the country’s societal mood to affect the outcome of the award likely explains why we have some Academy winners that seem bizarre after the passage of time. Not only is it important to view the film with the eyes of the era in which it was made, but it seems just as important to consider the country’s milieu when watching a significant film.

Anticlimax
My final thought is merely the application of the adage that there really can be too much of a good thing. Just because you enjoy filet mignon, does not necessarily mean you want a juicy steak every night of the week. After working through this list of films, I felt like I had been eating bacon-wrapped beef for days. I really love watching films, particularly if they leave me thinking after the credits have rolled, but by the time I was down to a handful of films to check off my list, I really just wanted to watch Anchorman, Airplane, or The Princess Bride, though even those seemed a bit taxing.

Finale
My run through the Academy Award winners did not leave me with any revolutionary conclusions, but the stories are “with me still, real in memory as they were in flesh, loving and beloved forever.”* “Thank heavens” the films made their mark because they present a historical record of the country in the way they tackle religion, politics, race, gender, sex, and drugs. So much of the world around us is “Madness. Madness” and when a good film tackles an issue head on, the stories help us form our opinions—both in support and opposition. So with my final thought, I recommend the best picture pursuit to any film aficionado; it could be the “beginning of a beautiful friendship.” “That’s all, ladies and gentlemen, that’s all. Come again to the greatest show on Earth. Bring the children. Bring the old folks. You can shake the sawdust off your feet but you can’t shake it out of your heart. Come again, folks. The greatest show on Earth. Come again.”

* How Green Was my Valley
Gigi
The Bridge on the River Kwai
Casablanca
The Greatest Show on Earth