Award Season

It's Academy Award Season.  One of the fun things about this time of year is watching old movies of winners and losers.  My favorite so far is the 1968 classic, The Subject Was Roses.

It has the stilted feel of a play-made-into-a-movie, but is a powerful film in many ways.  Three years after a massive stroke left Patricia Neal in a coma for 21 days, Neal appeared as the mother in the movie.  You can see the pain of her life on her face and she has a very slight limp that adds to her sad beauty.

Based on a Pulitzer Price-winning play, The Subject Was Roses, also stars a very young Martin Sheen who won a Tony Award for his role as Timmy on Broadway.  Jack Albertson plays the dad and won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor as well as winning a Tony for his work on Broadway, were he starred along with Sheen.

The story centers on World War II veteran Timmy Cleary's return home after three years in the army.  He's changed, but his parent haven't.  Old disappointments and years of hurt surface between them with Timmy in the middle, only this time, Timmy sees himself and his parents through mature eyes.  The dynamic in the family has shifted as the sensitive young man and his long-suffering parents grapple with their lives and the changes in relationships that must come. Beautifully written and exquisitely acted, The Subject Was Roses is stunning in it's old fashioned storytelling power.

Sanctioned Movies

Every night for the last nine years and counting, my partner and I fall asleep with a tape or DVD of a movie playing on the television. It's not my favorite way to drift off. In fact, "Drop me; pluck me like a goddamn whatever-it-is...creeping vine, and throw me over your shoulder like an old shoe" isn't the last thing I want to hear before drifting into slumber land. But it is the brilliant Elizabeth Taylor as Martha in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" That's why it's a sanctioned movie. A sanctioned movie is one that's allowed to lull us to sleep.

There are rules. It's not all anarchy at bedtime. One of the rules is that some movies are only played during their season. There are summer movies and winter movies.

Summer Sanctioned Movies:

Body Heat, 1981, William Hurt watches a waitress pull on her uniform in a stuffy hotel room as a natural gas fire burns in the red sky outside.

The very cacophonous Father Goose (1964) that I loved as a child but wakes me every time with crashes, mega phones and a screeching whistle of a theme song.

Wrestling Ernest Hemingway (1993)
Fried Green Tomatoes (1991)

Winter Sanctioned Movies:

Gosford Park (2001)
Moonstruck (1987)
One True Thing (1998)
Howard's End (1992)

Then there are the dreaded Christmas movies: Jim Carrey in The Grinch, Chevy Chase in Christmas Vacation, Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone, and the obnoxious Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol.

I try to subtly encourage my favorites, The Jane Austen quartet.

Persuasion, Emma, Sense & Sensibility and Pride & Prejudice (any version including the 6 hour BBC or the luminous Keira Knightley but miscast Simon Woods (I wig wouldn't have been overdone)).

There's a Saturday Night movie, The Odd Couple, a film for all seasons.

The Woody Allen's and the Doris Day's all have their say.

But, along with the Jane Austen's, my favorite are the quiet films. Alfred Hitchcock qualifies. Vertigo has little dialogue and long passages of moody music. Rear Window is the same. Set up. Story. Suspense. A beautiful, simple construction.

Strangely enough, my other favorites are kids movies. Having loved being read to as a little girl, I can listen to any Harry Pottery or Lord of the Rings movie and pass right out.

The truth is, that my partner is a writer and, with the exception of Mildred Pierce and the mystifying Frank Sinatra picture Hole in the Head, the dialogue of our dreams is wonderful.

Two for the Road (1967)



Best Friends (1982)
All About Eve (1950)
The Goodbye Girl (1977)
Sunset Boulevard (1950)
Sideways (2004)
Brideshead Revisited (1981)

Looking at the list, I'm struck by how each film is perfect. The directing, acting, and writing. They are perfect gems and I'm lucky to take them to bed.