TCM Schedule for Friday, February 13 -- 31 Days of Oscar -- Jewish History in the Early 20th Century

[Staph]

Our overall subject area for today is Religion. This morning we cover Religion in America, including religion during the Civil War, Catholics in the Southwest, and evangelism during the Depression. In the afternoon, we will study Death and the Afterlife, with conversations with those beyond the grave by Cosmo Topper, Mr. Jordan, and some guy named Joe. In prime time, we'll look at Jewish History in the Early 20th Century, in czarist Russia and two views of Holocaust survivors in New York City and in Israel. Enjoy!


6:00am -- Of Human Hearts (1938)
A rebellious son neglects his parents after enlisting in the Civil War.
Cast: Walter Huston, James Stewart, Gene Reynolds, Beulah Bondi
Dir: Clarence Brown
BW-104 mins, TV-PG

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role -- Beulah Bondi

The title was chosen in a nationwide contest MGM held on its radio program. The winner, high school student Ray Harris, not only won $5,000 but also was a special guest at the world premiere of the movie in his hometown of Greenville, South Carolina.


8:00am -- Lilies of the Field (1963)
An itinerant handyman in the Southwest gets a new outlook on life when he helps a group of German nuns build a chapel.
Cast: Sidney Poitier, Lilia Skala, Lisa Mann, Isa Crino
Dir: Ralph Nelson
BW-94 mins, TV-PG

Won an Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role -- Sidney Poitier

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actress in a Supporting Role -- Lilia Skala, Best Cinematography, Black-and-White -- Ernest Haller, Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium -- James Poe, and Best Picture

Shot on location in 14 days. Since the story's action was tied to the chapel's construction, crew had to work through the night to keep up with it "progress" in the film. The actual building was real and could have stood for decades, but because it was built on rented property, it had to be demolished immediately after the filming was completed.


10:00am -- Elmer Gantry (1960)
A young drifter finds success as a traveling preacher until his past catches up with him.
Cast: Burt Lancaster, Jean Simmons, Arthur Kennedy, Dean Jagger
Dir: Richard Brooks
C-147 mins, TV-PG

Won Oscars for Best Actor in a Leading Role -- Burt Lancaster, Best Actress in a Supporting Role -- Shirley Jones, and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium -- Richard Brooks

Nominated for Oscars for Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture -- André Previn, and Best Picture

Pat Hingle landed the title role, but before filming began, he became caught in a stalled elevator in his apartment building. He lost his balance while trying to crawl out and fell 54 feet down the shaft. He sustained massive injuries, including a fractured skull, wrist, hip and leg, and several broken ribs. He also lost his little finger on his left hand. Hingle spent much of the next year relearning how to walk and was forced to give up the part in order to recover from his horrific injuries.


12:30pm -- Topper (1937)
A fun-loving couple returns from the dead to help a henpecked husband.
Cast: Constance Bennett, Cary Grant, Roland Young, Billie Burke
Dir: Norman Z. McLeod
BW-97 mins, TV-G

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actor in a Supporting Role -- Roland Young, and Best Sound, Recording -- Elmer Raguse (Hal Roach SSD)

Producer Hal Roach wanted W.C. Fields and Jean Harlow to costar as George and Marian Kerby, but neither was available at the time.


2:15pm -- Topper Takes a Trip (1939)
A glamorous ghost helps a henpecked husband save his wife from gold-digging friends.
Cast: Constance Bennett, Roland Young, Billie Burke, Alan Mowbray
Dir: Norman Z. McLeod
BW-80 mins, TV-G

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Effects, Special Effects -- Roy Seawright (photographic)

Second of three Topper films -- unfortunately, this does not include Cary Grant as George Kerby.


4:00pm -- Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941)
A prizefighter who died before his time is reincarnated as a tycoon with a murderous wife.
Cast: Robert Montgomery, Evelyn Keyes, Claude Rains, Rita Johnson
Dir: Alexander Hall
BW-94 mins, TV-G

Won Oscars for Best Writing, Original Story -- Harry Segall, and Best Writing, Screenplay -- Sidney Buchman and Seton I. Miller

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actor in a Leading Role -- Robert Montgomery, Best Actor in a Supporting Role -- James Gleason, Best Cinematography, Black-and-White -- Joseph Walker, Best Director -- Alexander Hall, and Best Picture

James Gleason was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in the role of Max Corkle. This is the first time in Academy Awards history for a person to be nominated for a supporting Oscar for a role for which a different person would later also be nominated for a supporting Oscar: Jack Warden was nominated for Best Supporting Actor as Max Corkle in Heaven Can Wait (1978).


5:45pm -- A Guy Named Joe (1943)
A downed World War II pilot becomes the guardian angel for his successor in love and war.
Cast: Spencer Tracy, Irene Dunne, Van Johnson, Ward Bond
Dir: Victor Fleming
BW-120 mins, TV-G

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Writing, Original Story -- David Boehm and Chandler Sprague

There was no way to composite Spencer Tracy's image into the scenes where Van Johnson is flying, so he actually had to be standing behind Johnson and, later, Irene Dunne for the filming of these scenes. The same approach was used for The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947) (techniques for superimposing one image onto another were not invented until much later).


What's On Tonight: 31 DAYS OF OSCAR: JEWISH HISTORY IN THE EARLY 20TH CENT.


8:00pm -- Fiddler on the Roof (1971)
In Russia before the revolution, a Jewish milkman tries to marry off his daughters who have plans of their own.
Cast: Topol, Norma Crane, Leonard Frey, Molly Picon
Dir: Norman Jewison
C-181 mins, TV-G

Won Oscars for Best Cinematography -- Oswald Morris, Best Music, Scoring Adaptation and Original Song Score -- John Williams, and Best Sound -- Gordon K. McCallum and David Hildyard

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actor in a Leading Role -- Topol, Best Actor in a Supporting Role -- Leonard Frey, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration -- Robert F. Boyle. Michael Stringer and Peter Lamont, Best Director -- Norman Jewison, and Best Picture

To get the look he wanted for the film, director Norman Jewison told Director of Photography Oswald Morris, who was famous for shooting color films in unusual styles, to shoot the film in an earthy tone. Morris saw a woman wearing brown nylon hosiery, thought "That's the tone we want," asked the woman for the stockings on the spot, and shot the entire film with a stocking over the lens. The weave can be detected in some scenes. Morris also shot the musical number "Tevye's Dream" in sepia rather than in full color. He had previously filmed Moulin Rouge (1952) with a color style made to resemble Toulouse-Lautrec's paintings and Moby Dick (1956) in a color style made to resemble 19th century engravings of life at sea.


11:15pm -- Sophie's Choice (1982)
A concentration camp survivor resettles in New York City but can't escape her past.
Cast: Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Peter MacNicol, Rita Karin
Dir: Alan J. Pakula
C-151 mins, TV-MA

Won an Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role -- Meryl Streep

Nominated for Oscars for Best Cinematography -- Néstor Almendros, Best Costume Design -- Albert Wolsky, Best Music, Original Score -- Marvin Hamlisch, and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium -- Alan J. Pakula

Meryl Streep did the final 'choice' scene in one take and refused to do it again saying that, as a mother, she found it too painful and emotionally draining. Years later, Meryl Streep appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s show and the choice scene was shown. Meryl seemed very uncomfortable while the clip was playing and she revealed that she had in fact never watched the scene back until that very moment.


2:00am -- Exodus (1960)
A young Israeli activist fights to set up a homeland for his people.
Cast: Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint, Ralph Richardson, Peter Lawford
Dir: Otto Preminger
C-208 mins, TV-PG

Won an Oscar for Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture -- Ernest Gold

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actor in a Supporting Role -- Sal Mineo, and Best Cinematography, Color -- Sam Leavitt

At the film's premiere, as the movie neared its third hour with the end not yet in sight, comedian Mort Sahl stood up from his seat in the packed theater and shouted, "Otto, let my people go!" The incident quickly became a popular piece of Hollywood lore.

[Staph]

1. Sophie's Choice (1982)

Alan J. Pakula's Sophie's Choice (1982), from William Styron's novel about the after-effects of Holocaust evil, gives us film's most memorable incarnation of survivor's guilt. If Meryl Streep had inscribed no performance other than this film's tortured Polish woman who can't forgive herself for continuing to live while witnessing so much wrenching death, it would have insured her place in film history. Sophie is forced to make many choices - not between life and death, but between death and even worse death. History, despite its overwhelming presence, isn't what gives Sophie's Choice its power. It's Streep's tragic heroine tearing at our hearts, as she lives and relives the agony she never can shake for long. She throws herself into desperate, fleeting breakouts into sex and drink, revolving around her American Jewish lover, Nathan (Kevin Kline), equally damaged in different ways.

Life, intoxicating as it can get during these brief, heady interludes, is never a match for death. Sophie's tragedy is that she can't see how heroic she has been, and is. She thinks of herself as a failure. Streep's pale-skinned, delicate features become a geography of human torment. Her immersion in the character of Sophie includes an immersion in the Polish language - not just impersonation, but internalization. She has spoken of connecting with her own inner gutteral sounds. So it's not just a matter of getting the sound right - although her flawed, heavily accented English is pitch-perfect. It's also a matter of pulling from her gut a primal depth of sound that contributes to Sophie's innate earthiness, liveliness, integrity, never long able to escape being engulfed by an undertow of sadness.

She's not just an ambulatory accent; she's a personification of soul-sickness, weariness, too much experience of the wrong kind, from the day her stomach convulses when she learns that the respected law professor father in Cracow, who she adored and whose love she craved, whose speeches she dutifully typed, was a rabid anti-Semite who helped devise the Final Solution. Being sympathetic to the Resistance but stopping short of getting actively involved doesn't keep her from being rounded up with her two small children and stuffed into an Auschwitz-bound boxcar, a Polish Catholic as doomed as the Jews she accompanies. Streep is all the more affecting for having chosen to let us see the control Sophie exercises - most of the time.

Much of what she says is with her eyes, sometimes candid, sometimes breaking the gaze of her friend and confessor, Peter MacNicol's young observer figure and Styron surrogate, Stingo. He literally gives the film much of its voice, as narrator and innocent novice who comes to Brooklyn from Virginia in 1947 to become a novelist, touchingly following in the footsteps of Thomas Wolfe and, inevitably in his literary style, Faulkner. Structurally, he's necessary. He's the one who hears Sophie's secrets, hitherto hidden parts of her past she can't divulge to Nathan - including one final soul-destroying one. Not that Styron - or Pakula - gives the Southern writer the best of anything. Of the character's romantic ardor and talent with language there is no doubt. But he's a bit of a pipsqueak, a blank slate, unformed, with the personality of sushi.

Pakula, of Polish-Jewish lineage, has said that if his father hadn't come to America, his family might well have perished at Auschwitz. Certainly, there is conviction in his film's measured progression of moods. Its problematic flashbacks from the novel never break the momentum - although a lot of the tension in them comes from the frozen alertness and fear in Streep's eyes as Sophie, hating herself more and more each time she falls back on survival reflexes. Pakula and his cinematographer, Nestor Almendros, take a chance by contrasting the desaturated Agfacolor-like concentration camp sequences with Sophie's recollection of them in closeup, face framed by spun-gold hair, lips painted scarlet, visage bathed in icy blue light that reinforces her self-image as walking corpse, a vision of dead loveliness. It's an esthetic gamble that wins. We understand viscerally why the young writer becomes drawn to her and longs to supplant Nathan as her lover.

Today, you'd call Sophie and Nathan co-dependent enablers for their shared sado-masochism. They're love and death in the same package. Since Sophie and Nathan have befriended the writer named Stingo, and drag him from his solitude in their restored Victorian Brooklyn rooming house to party and join their spirited capers, the element of betrayal is present in spades, too. After Sophie drinks with Stingo when Nathan isn't around, Nathan accuses Stingo of moving in on "his girl" and accuses Sophie of letting him. Nathan's paranoia on this score isn't altogether unfounded. Still, the brilliant, impulsive and, on rare occasions, tender Nathan's roller-coaster ups and downs suggest that not all is well with him either as he seesaws between manic elation and murderous depression. Nathan's extremes leave Kline without the equivalent of Streep's detailing - her brilliant, seemingly improvisatory way of sometimes letting the faintest curl of an extended finger, or a vocal hesitation, or a distracted tugging at a loose strand of her golden hair do the talking. She's cool, but avoids mannerism. With Nathan, you quickly just wait for the next outsized gesture. Pakula, ever sensitive to mood, charges the emotional air with tense expectation. It gets the film past some slack pacing.

Kline's is a performance insufficiently appreciated for its choices and even subtlety, partly because Nathan's paranoid schizophrenic mood swings make us uncomfortable, squirmy. MacNicol's Stingo does, too, because whatever else he is - sensitive, good, chivalric - he's also something of a drip. It was Streep who recommended Kline to Pakula even before she was cast as Sophie. Cloaked in inevitability as her Oscar®-winning performance is, it's illuminating to recall that Streep was far from a shoo-in for the role. Styron went on record as favoring Ursula Andress as Sophie. Pakula's first choice was Liv Ullmann for her ability to project the foreignness that would add to her appeal in the eyes of an impressionable, romantic Southerner. Ullmann went on to other projects when Pakula took two years to fashion the screenplay. Polish actress Magda Vasaryova, Barbra Streisand, Marthe Keller and Streep (like Pakula, a Yale Drama School grad) threw their hats in the ring. Finally, Streep prevailed, a Slavic Blanche DuBois, gallantly but vainly trying to outrun her conviction that she owes the universe a death - hers.

Producers: Keith Barish, Alan J. Pakula
Director: Alan J. Pakula
Screenplay: Alan J. Pakula; William Styron (novel)
Cinematography: Nestor Almendros
Art Direction: John J. Moore
Music: Marvin Hamlisch
Film Editing: Evan Lottman
Cast: Meryl Streep (Sophie Zawistowski), Kevin Kline (Nathan Landau), Peter MacNicol (Stingo), Rita Karin (Yetta), Stephen D. Newman (Larry Landau), Greta Turken (Leslie Lapidus), Josh Mostel (Morris Fink), Marcell Rosenblatt (Astrid Weinstein), Moishe Rosenfeld (Moishe Rosenblum), Robin Bartlett (Lillian Grossman), Eugene Lipinski (Polish professor), John Rothman (librarian).

C-151m. Letterboxed.

by Jay Carr

Sources:
IMDb
International Directory of Actors/Directors
Meryl Streep: Reluctant Superstar, by Diana Maychick, St. Martin's, 1984
Alan J. Pakula: His Life and His Films, by Jared Brown, Back Stage, 2005
Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, by Annette Insdorf, Random House, 1983
Conversations with William Styron (Canadian radio interview by Stephen Lewis), edited by James W. West III, University of Mississippi Press, 1985