33rd Hall of Fame

I approached God's Little Acre a little warily after hearing mixed things about it - but I was pleased to have found it in a second-hand store's DVD rack for a buck, and seeing as I needed to see it counted that as providence. Was that providence, or was I being cursed? That's hard to say, for even though this film veers off the track here and there, I did notice aspects that I liked and thought it did really well for a steamy pulp drama from the 1950s. It's based on a controversial 1933 novel by Erskine Caldwell, which caused a scandal - it ended up being banned in Saint Paul, Minnesota and Boston, and I'd be disingenuous if I were to say "because sex is evil", because I think adultery was more the issue for zealots. Even so, hysteria over sex is extremely silly and unhealthy for poor people who grow up thinking it's dirty and wrong. Caldwell was tried in a New York court, and ended up winning his case before counter-suing for false arrest and malicious prosecution. The movie seems to have been promoted as a provocative, erotic Streetcar Named Desire-type drama with shirtless men and nightgown-clad women having secret trysts in the night. Of course, there's a rather peculiar side to the movie - but it delivers the heat, even if it's light on the action.

God's Little Acre starts in wacky fashion with an old guy in Georgia, Ty Ty Walden (Robert Ryan) digging deep holes all over his weather-beaten property, assisted by two of his sons - Buck (Jack Lord) and Shaw (Vic Morrow). He's been digging for years, looking for a supposed haul of gold that his grandfather hid somewhere (his search has gone on 15 years apparently - with the missing gold being secreted away a century ago.) Ty Ty is a happy-go-lucky kind of fellow. Buck though, is an angry young man who is furious with his wife for the passionate yearning she has for another man - her brother-in-law Will Thompson (Aldo Ray). In the meantime, prospective but bumbling sheriff Pluto (Buddy Hackett) visits the gang and informs Ty Ty that albinos have a sixth sense that can locate gold, leading to the elder Walden kidnapping young Dave Dawson (Michael Landon) and forcing the poor guy to run around his place with a divining rod - which he pretends works just to end the constant threats of harm to himself. That's before Darlin' Jill (Fay Spain) finds him and gets to work on him. That's the set-up, and the rest of the story also involves a closed cotton mill Will is desperate to see open again, Ty Ty's rich outcast of a son Jim (Lance Fuller) and the general sense that the women living here are being deprived of the sex they desperately want and need by guys who are generally acting like idiots.

Lets be frank here. Would the inclusion of a silly character played by Buddy Hackett have improved A Streetcar Named Desire or made it worse? Okay - I know I'm not being fair when I say that. God's Little Acre is going for something different, and lending this sweaty, lusty movie a comedic atmosphere can either improve it or make it worse depending on what you're hoping it might be. I didn't gel with the funny stuff, but found that Anthony Mann was much better at bringing the erotic, sensual power from his actors during the scenes that were more serious. That scene, with the sweaty shirtless Aldo Ray meeting up with a scantily clad Tina Louise had a genuine, blood-pumping sexual intensity to it. The scrapping and fighting in the movie also has that intensity to it, and when it's on it feels like I'm watching a completely different movie. Buddy Hackett, and albino-Michael Landon are well and truly cast aside during those moments. I also liked the way it depicted alcoholism as a life-destroying evil, while also eyeing up the pitfalls and dark side to capitalism. This film was doing a lot I really liked, but I found the side I was meant to find funny just crazy and silly intead of comedic.

"God's Little Acre" refers to the small plot of land that Ty Ty marks out, from which whatever comes forth will go to His work. It doesn't really reflect well on him that he keeps moving the goalposts by changing that Acre whenever he thinks he might have made a mistake by giving God the gold he's looking for - but it's very evident that this is his cheeky charm, ie - he's a rascal. He's happy though, even if he's misguided at the start of the film - more than you can say about every other character in the film, who is either sexually frustrated or having way too much sex. The heat in Georgia isn't helping either, with various characters in states of undress - sweaty in the sultry afternoons, getting worked up and hot-tempered. People under 18 years of age couldn't go see it when it came out - showing how remarkably times have changed. Screenwriter Ben Maddow's name was swapped with that of Philip Yordan, a controversial figure today because nobody really knows how many screenplays he actually wrote, or how many he claimed while acting as a front for McCarthy-era blacklisted writers in Hollywood.

All up, God's Little Acre was a pretty strange creation, but I can't say that I hated it. I think it was a faithful adaptation of a book that had a balance of sex and silliness in it, and I think maybe if the silly stuff had of been scrapped I might have been a huge exponent of the movie. I guess controversy is never a bad thing when it comes time to grab those headlines - but that said I'd never heard of God's Little Acre until now (not that I'm much of a guage for anything pre-1960s.) This is the very definition of a mixed bag - but I'm always interested in exploring the unusual and different, and this was definitely that. During the 1950s movie-makers had to be clever in how they alluded to sex and erotica - and sometimes I think getting creative in that area actually helped more than what we see in modern films, with a couple just grabbing each other and humping away before the audience. The urge is more erotic for an audience sometimes - and scenes where characters lust after each other but try to deny it, skirt the issue or flirt makes for friction that was undeniably present in a lot of older films, but missing today. I found watching God's Little Acre enlightening, sometimes frustrating but ultimately silly and sexy.

__________________

Phoenix, I enjoyed reading your review of God's Little Acre. As always you're informative with the background information and your personal reaction to the film.

It's funny that you should say, "I approached God's Little Acre a little warily after hearing mixed things about it - but I was pleased to have found it in a second-hand store's DVD rack for a buck, and seeing as I needed to see it counted that as providence. Was that providence, or was I being cursed?" Image that, I chose a cursed film!


You know I could agree, in part, with what you said here, " I didn't gel with the funny stuff, but found that Anthony Mann was much better at bringing the erotic, sensual power from his actors during the scenes that were more serious. That scene, with the sweaty shirtless Aldo Ray meeting up with a scantily clad Tina Louise had a genuine, blood-pumping sexual intensity to it. The scrapping and fighting in the movie also has that intensity to it, and when it's on it feels like I'm watching a completely different movie"...
To me it totally felt like two different movies with vastly different styles. I don't know if that was by design? Or just the way it turned out. But yeah the nighttime encounter between Aldo Ray and Tina Louise was about as steamy of sexuality as you could get in a movie at that time. That scene alone shows what director Anthony Mann could do. He's one of my favorite directors.

I do get that the comic parts don't work for many but I loved those wacky outlandish characters, which reminded me of a cross between Gilligan's Island and Fantasy Island. I think the beauty of the film is hidden from plain sight and that is the director misdirects us emotionally, priming us to see a screwball comedy but in the third act hits us over the head with some truly sad and depressing stuff as we watch Aldo Ray beat his head against the proverbial wall until he lays dead in a futile attempt to break free from the doldrums of a life that drove him to death...
Then the director takes the redemption of Ty Ty (Robert Ryan) who has swore off wasting his life looking for buried gold and promised to get back to work growing cotton, the very cotton that could keep the mill running...and has him find an old buried shovel and in the end he's going back to digging a hole. From comedy to utter tragedy as these people, like so many people, destroy they lives in vein attempts. I think the comedy is the wool that is pulled over our eyes by our own self disillusion of a dream...The ending of the film is a warning not to follow one's dream too far.

The fact that he found that movie for sale in person is probably the most amazing thing I've ever read on this forum.

There's nothing greater to contemplate than how the driving force behind all of mankind shifted through the end of the 19th Century, and led to a tumultuous, extraordinary power shift away from religion and towards an industrial-based 20th Century of which oil was a major currency. Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood stages this battle between religion and capitalism as a fight between two very different malignant personalities - Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) and Eli Sunday (Paul Dano). Plainview is a sociopath - as he confesses to the man who, at the time, claims to be his brother. The only time in the film he lets his guard down. Well representative of what he represents. Sunday is a con-man and a fraud, and his sermons spectacular shows that win him adherents from his audience. Yes, a very cynical way to be viewing religion - but There Will Be Blood is a very hard-edged, brutal look at humanity from a power-based perspective. I love it for it's clear and concise metaphorical artistry, and for the two incredible twin performances from it's leads.

The film starts at the very end of the 1800s, and introduces us to Plainview by illustrating to us his brute determination to climb up both literally and figuratively when he appears to break many bones in his body prospecting in New Mexico - dragging himself out of a pit, through the harsh landscape, and into an assay office to stake his claim. Eventually he finds oil, and adopts a son that belonged to a worker of his that dies in an accident - H.W., transforming his public image into that of a 'family man'. Daniel is approached by a young man by the name of Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), Eli's twin brother, who sells him information about an oil deposit in Little Boston - leading to Plainview and H.W.'s voyage there, and them buying up most of the properties. Turns out there's an ocean of oil there, and while turning it into a fortune Plainview goes head to head with Eli Sunday in a series of dramatic confrontations and power plays. In the meantime, H.W. is deafened in an accident, and sent away by Plainview, giving some quarters the power to shame him. He's also approached by a man claiming to be his brother - leading to his first murder. The film ends with two mighty confrontations - between Plainview and both H.W. and Eli Sunday.

"I am the third revelation!" Plainview thunders at a terrified, diminished Eli Sunday at the end of There Will Be Blood. The first revelation was God's commandments handed down to Moses, and the second revelation was the teachings of Jesus to man. The third is meant to be a person imbued with the power and teachings of God, through whom God speaks. It's a denunciation of everything Plainview has seen Eli do, and a pronouncement of how he has subsumed his standing as a whole. Mankind now worships a new God. Earlier in the film it was Eli who was claiming that he was the third revelation, pretending to heal illness and cast out disease through the power God was giving him - but in the end this turns out to be empty rhetoric, and Plainview exercises real, incontrovertible power that man is depending on. To gain this power, Plainview has been absolutely ruthless, determined, deadly - filled with hate, and ready to strike anyone that might threaten his quest. Even H.W., who he ultimately rejects.

So, when I watch There Will Be Blood it's always with this bigger picture in mind. The way the world changed during the time period the film is set in. As Daniel Plainview, Daniel Day Lewis is so frighteningly real - he disappears into his character so completely I never see the actor himself. In regards to that, I think it must be one of the greatest performances I've ever seen in a film. It's an aura the performer carries around, slightly under the surface as he wants to represent himself as an upstanding family man. "I hate most people," he says to his supposed brother, Henry (Kevin J. O'Connor) - "I look at people and I see nothing worth liking. I want to earn enough money I can get away from everyone." He sees the worst in people, and despises them. As Paul and Eli Sunday, Paul Dano is something else entirely. He's more boy-like, pale, ineffectual and sniveling. He's a great performer, but he doesn't have the focus, strength or intelligence of Plainview. Daniel Day Lewis won an Academy Award for his performance, and while I thought Dano should have got a nomination, there was no way he could have beat Javier Bardem in 2008.

Visually, Robert Elswit's Oscar-winning cinematography make the film as much fun to sit and appreciate as it is to contemplate and think about. Considering the sweeping, grand topic it concerns, it stands to reason that the visual representation should be just as imposing and impressive. As much as coincidence is granting me recently, Elswit and P.T. Anderson used the cinematography of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (a film I reviewed very recently) as a basis for how There Will Be Blood should look. Straightforward, simple, yet impressively grand. Marfa, Texas was the place used for filming, with the rest of the production wrapped up in Los Angeles - and you walk away from the film with a succinct memory of that harsh, unrelenting sun that Plainview crawls under during the film's famous, long dialogue-free opening. Tough land to live on - dry and rocky with only sparse vegetation - this epic battle marked by greed is taking place in a hot, pitiless and severe place. I love those wide, all-encompassing shots when it comes to the work these people are doing.

The film was nominated for various other Academy Awards - P.T. Anderson himself lost out when it came to Best Picture, Director and Screenwriting (adapted) - they were all won by the Coen Bros, with their masterpiece No Country For Old Men coming along at a time when both that and this film should have swept all before them. There can be only one. Art Direction went to Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street - fair enough. Film editing went to The Bourne Ultimatum (surprisingly not The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) as did Sound editing. I remember when both There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men both came out - they seemed somehow conjoined in some way. Even their titles seemed interchangeable - if not for their original sources, nobody would have questioned if the Coens' film had of been called There Will Be Blood and P.T. Anderson's No Country For Old Men. If asked for my personal preference, I go with There Will Be Blood, but I love the other as well. They both have their own distinctive driving force.

Of course, taken at face value There Will Be Blood still has a lot of narrative power. Plainview's rise to wealth through pure grit and determination - and through oil - is something to behold, in all it's dark, moody anti-glory. All the moments where he might have been redeemed all pass him by. He fails H.W., and he murders Henry. He enriches himself, but gains no friends - and he never has any kind of relationship, romantic or otherwise, with anyone (excluding business necessity.) He ends up an alcoholic, shooting up his own massive mansion and passing out in it's grand rooms. He ends up angry, unshaven and dirty - even though his quest for great power has been a success. His greatest joy is the vengeance he wreaks on his nemesis, Eli Sunday, after Sunday's own vengeance earlier on in the story. That's one of my favourite scenes of all time (in any movie) - the way Eli gets the upper hand when Plainview needs the use of the land that belongs to one in his congregation. Plainview agrees to be baptised, and Eli humiliates and degrades Plainview in a sermon - and forces him to admit that he abandoned H.W. Plainview whispers something to Eli at the end of that scene, and although we never hear what he says, the look on Eli's face says it all.

The last scene in the film is the crescendo. It is There Will Be Blood's exclamation point. It's a twin to the scene where Eli gets the upper hand over Plainview. It's a scene famous for it's "I drink your milkshake" memes, which must have been puzzling to those who haven't seen the film. Frankly, Eli isn't a very sympathetic character, so it's enjoyable to see him destroyed by Plainview - but at the same time this destruction is horrifying because of what it represents. The transition is complete, and the third revelation is the stupendously wealthy and powerful oilman. He's drained all of the power away from the old institutions, and now mankind is completely dependent on him. To have made mankind as a whole dependent on what you produce has to be the greatest feat of power-transferral that has ever occurred in history, and to this day these few have influenced world history, as the fruits of our labour has flowed to them. When There Will Be Blood was made, the Iraq War was still fresh in everyone's minds. Anyway, all of this is why I think it's a great, and very important, film. One of the greatest of all time, in fact.

Mona Lisa

some spoilers

Pretty simple flick, but looks great and is compelling story-wise. The acting was pretty great with some recognizable actors. Hoskins was great as an out-of-touch, somehow naive, short-tempered, low-level thug that you'd thump countless versions of in a 16-bit beat 'em up. I was a big fan of his fit when Simone got him threads but he still wore his floral button up under the jacket. If this movie came out today or was more well known there would be reddit posts about George actually being a bad person. The differences between Simone and George would make their romance improbable at best, so I found myself rooting for them not to get together at the end but for the film to do something more interesting while still being honest about how George would actually fall for Simone. It didn't play exactly how I predicted, but it was honest about George not getting that particular girl. It's rough to watch George embarrass himself when it fully clicks in him that he's fallen for Simone and there's no way he's getting that back from her. It didn't feel like George was being judged by the film or filmmaker though, which is a nice touch.

3 more weeks.

Extra credit if you all finish by Monday.

...when ice cubes melt and freeze over

Don't make me start handing out candy for posting reviews.

I won't be done by Monday but I got 1.5 left

Technically I'm done now. I'm just waiting on posting my last review.

I have two left. I think.
But I am cleaning my house (major under-taking), having relatives in form out-of-town and then going on vacation for a long weekend. so I will be finishing up two weeks from now. Sorry!

Are you going someplace on vacation really fun? Or just nice and relaxing. I could use a vacation myself

I think you're done, God's Little Acre is posted twice in your list on the first page. I was wondering how you had 10 films because two have been Dq'd.

I think she means that she hasn't watched and reviewed Mona Lisa yet.

I’m going “down the shore.” We got a condo on the beach with a swimming pool as well for the weekend.

I need to rewatch There Will Be Blood and Mona Lisa.

A Man For All Seasons is one of those films I knew nothing about until actually watching it upon a friend's recommendation. Going by it's title, I expected weddings, dances, celebration and fun, for to me calling someone a man for all seasons meant he was a joy to be around no matter the occasion - a more accurate title might have been My Head, But Not My Honor or Till My Death I Be True. I'd honestly gone through a period of my life thinking A Man For All Seasons might be a musical. Well, it immediately hooked me - there's such an immediacy to a cardinal sending a sealed summons to be hastily carried along the Thames, while strains of Georges Delerue's magnificent old-time, rousing and vibrant score gets a rare chance to shine. This is one of those films where the opening credits really put you in the mood for what's to come - and after seeing it the first time I soon watched it again, and again. Ted Moore's beautiful photography on the river also adds to the mystique.

So, what we eventually find wrapped in the 16th Century tapestry of this Fred Zinnemann film is a profile in courage - a man, Sir Thomas More (Paul Scofield), who steadfastly refuses to condone the way King Henry VIII (Robert Shaw) goes about trying to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and then will not brook Henry having himself declared "Supreme Head of the Church of England" - all in an effort to marry a woman who can provide him with a male heir. Even when it becomes clear that his refusal to acknowledge King Henry as Head of the Church will cost him his life, More continues, because to him it's a sacred matter that he could never square with himself. It's the kind of principled bravery that's admirable, even if to many of us the matter itself is ultimately meaningless. We need more people who stand by their beliefs, and not sell out over money or fear.

There's a treasure trove of fine performances and notable names in the film's roster - Paul Schofield himself won the Best Actor Academy Award for 1967 - carrying on where he left off by playing More in the stage version. Robert Shaw, as the effervescent, volatile Henry VIII, was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar - amazingly, it was the only time he was ever nominated. Orson Welles makes an early splash as Cardinal Wolsey, who holds the lofty post of Lord Chancellor when the film begins - it doesn't appear to me that Welles is completely sober, or else his performance has an extra layer to it. Leo McKern features as the Machiavellian Thomas Cromwell - someone he was born to play - and John Hurt makes an early screen appearance for him as the slimy, unfaithful Richard Rich. Susannah York plays More's daughter Margaret, Nigel Davenport the Duke of Norfolk and Vanessa Redgrave is Anne Boleyn. Wendy Hiller was also nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar - playing More's wife Alice. It's truly a stacked cast, and everyone is a joy to watch.

The costume design in this film won an Oscar - there's no surprise there. I can't attest to what the 1500s were really like, but A Man For All Seasons makes every effort to take us back to this Tudor period. Today, CGI would be used to create a film with a much grander visual scale to it - but that would be an utter disservice to A Man For All Seasons, because it's a film that relies on a certain intimacy to proceedings. Instead of the vast machinery of state, it's about a family man forced to make excruciating personal sacrifices for his own soul. It's a human story, and thus relatable to anyone who might drop in to watch it. We're all constantly faced with situations along the lines of : do I lie to keep the peace, or tell the truth despite the fact there will be bad consequences? How far are we willing to go? So while the various costumes are breathtaking the setting takes a cue from the play and keeps us confined to small spaces. Absolutely the right choice.

Visually, there's an interesting motif that keeps on springing up - a double-sided one that consists of various gargoyles contrasted with nature. The former are man-made constructs, lifeless and forever-frozen in mid-grimace representing the fallible works of man, and the latter alive, colourful and forever in an ecstatic dance representing the works of God. It's to the latter that Sir Thomas More turns to in A Man For All Seasons. Director of Photography Ted Moore also won an Oscar for Best Cinematography at a time when there were still two awards being handed out - for colour and black & white. His work is entrancing from the get-go and incorporates the Thames (here the River Beaulieu) into much of it's flow. Moore was behind the camera shooting many of the early James Bond films, right from Dr. No on through to The Man With the Golden Gun - this would be his only Oscar win.

Watching A Man For All Seasons again was emotional for me - the More family is one that's easy to become attached to, and the scenes where Thomas is confronted by his family during one last short visit are extremely sad, because family is timeless and it's easy to imagine what such a situation would be like. I can understand why he can't back down - how he'd be destroying his sense of self-worth if he were to concede finally and go against everything he was fighting for within himself and with the king's minions. It would have been easier to do so earlier - but the longer a person holds out, the more important the issue seems to become. The final scenes show More's skill when it comes to the law, and how worthless that will be - because the result has already been decided. In the end, when we find out what happened to all of the characters - the various executions etc. - we find a deep sense of irony when we learn that Richard Rich eventually became Chancellor of England and died an old man, in his bed. That's politics for you.

Well over 50 years after it's release, I still hear about this film gaining new fans which continue to keep it's shine brightly glowing so many years after it was made. As far as I know the only person in the cast who's still alive is Vanessa Redgrave. There are other versions out there - a 1988 Made-For-TV version starring Charlton Heston, John Gielgud and funnily enough Vanessa Redgrave again is out there. A 1964 Australian tele-play also exists. It's probably overdue another adaptation - especially considering the world we live in today - but I doubt it would have the power of the original, which would be hard to outdo. It's a fine work in all departments - technically well made, with Robert Bolt proving adept at adapting his own play for the big screen. Bolt won a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, and director Zinnemann would see his fine film win Best Picture, while also delivering him a Best Director Academy Award. All richly deserved. Words can hardly do this film justice.

Wolf Hall, featuring Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell and Damian Lewis as Henry VIII is really good. Funny thing is, seeing as this one has Cromwell as it's protagonist it's way more sympathetic to him than A Man For All Seasons was. Jonathan Pryce plays Cardinal Wolsey, and Claire Foy a scheming Anne Boleyn.

Ohh! That sounds good, thanks for mentioning it. I've looked for and hopefully I can find it to watch.