I'm working on filling out the remainder of the Best Picture nominees I haven't seen, after reading all the posts in these threads for years. May as well share my progress here, and also write a little about the years I've completed so far. Going to try my best not to double up on the observations of DH and others but forgive me if I fail.
1930
All Quiet on the Western Front - What can you say? My favorite of all war films I've seen, and an extraordinarily lively and uncompromised example of a strong, sincere antiwar message surviving intact to the screen. The battle scenes are truly harrowing and intimate, and the quieter moments tend toward an unforced sense of heartbreak and futility that I don't even think
Grand Illusion totally matches, at least for me. We were shown this in a junior high school social studies class and our teacher positioned it as a warning, which I've thought of often ever since (this was four years before 9/11). Jon Voight's speech at the end of
Coming Home (which I'm otherwise lukewarm on) is the only thing I've seen that's come close to hitting me so hard.
The Big House - sometimes it's difficult to judge films that essentially created or defined entire subgenres, but this is great fun, and admirably gritty for MGM, and I appreciate that Frances Marion's screenplay doesn't demonize any of the prisoners, a handy demonstration (like
All Quiet) of what we potentially lost with the Hays Code. Films like this that are so economical in their storytelling, even if they're presented by competent workhorse studio directors like George Hill (who also made one of my favorite films from this year,
Min and Bill), are a big reason why I find myself drawn so much to the American films of the 1930s above everything else. My only wish here is that Robert Montgomery was given more to do; otherwise, Wallace Beery's character in particular is surprisingly robust and believable. And without showing the actual process or the cell, this has one of the most disturbing solitary-confinement sequences I've ever seen.
Disraeli - the sort of film that's built around a single performance, and it's now a bit hard to see why George Arliss' work as the Prime Minister was so celebrated. I find movies like this technically interesting because I enjoy seeing how early talkies play now, but that was honestly the only thing keeping me awake (and it's compromised in that regard anyway, as the uncut sound-on-disc version is lost). Points for some of the dialogue and for Arliss' hair, though.
The Divorcee - a strange one. I barely remember it now so I'm going to break the rules (probably) and reproduce what I wrote on Lboxd:
Like a lot of films from this era with proto-feminist implications, this cops out completely by the finale... and it's all the more annoying here because its method of doing so is to invoke a completely arbitrary plot point from early on (a traumatic car crash that results in a disfigurement and what the film offensively characterizes as a pity marriage) that was already tonally at odds with the rest of the film. Maybe if you shut this down two thirds in, when Norma Shearer's heroine is rightly peeved by her husband's hypocrisy and writes him out of her life, its treatment of her free spirit and passion would ring true. Instead it's absurdly moralistic and highly dependent on abhorrent double standards. A pity, because at its liveliest moments this is a kinetic treat -- like a film that wishes it could be a screwball Comedy of Remarriage but can't get there -- and Shearer is magical as always.
The Love Parade - I'm only just this year becoming a great fan of Lubitsch and have fallen head over heels for several of his films, namely
Trouble in Paradise,
Design for Living,
The Smiling Lieutenant and the less celebrated
Eternal Love. But this didn't ingratiate itself quite as well with me, maybe because so much of it hinges on Chevalier's mugging and a rather thin story and I just didn't find it as funny as the later comedies and musicals. That said, I was blown away at how technically slick it is -- easily unseating
Blackmail as the handsomest, most seamless 1920s talkie I've seen to date. And I truly adored the two numbers dominated by Lupito Lane and Lillian Roth and ended up wishing they were the center of attention throughout.
My vote:
All Quiet
***
1948
Hamlet - I love Shakespeare and I find it interesting to see how directors visualize the plays cinematically but this, while quite lovely to look at most of the time (I particularly love the closing shot), is less inspired in its technique than Olivier's
Henry V. Most of my other issues with it come down to textual differences, and I liked Olivier's performance as Hamlet, but it was kind of exactly what I expected on the whole.
Johnny Belinda - Everything about this suffering-narrative movie seems silly and wrongheaded, right down to the bizarre phony-violin rape scene, and I really don't care for Jane Wyman even when she's not trying to play a deaf-mute character, but for some reason I kind of got a kick out of the film. I don't think it was all because of Agnes Moorehead but she helped.
The Red Shoes - It's hard to remember sometimes that the Academy ever nominated classics this infallible. I've always felt it lost a lot of momentum after the magnificent ballet sequence, but that really doesn't matter, does it? I don't have to say it's one of the most beautiful films ever made because you know that.
the snake pit - Our identification with the great Olivia de Havilland as an asylum patient runs so deep, and her environment feels so distressingly real, that you can forgive a lot of this film's social-problem excesses; indeed, at its best this is very perceptive and quite disturbing.
Treasure of the Sierra Madre - I recently saw someone complain that this is narrative that relies far too much on convenient coincidences; maybe it says a lot about me that I never even noticed. I love practically everything about this, likely Huston's best film, from its nasty
Wages of Fear-predicting cynicism to Bogart's almost eerily convincing work as a total cad to the lump I always get in my throat when the dead man's letter is read aloud. Walter Huston, unrecognizable from
Dodsworth just a hair over a decade earlier, does an extraordinary job of rendering a cartoon of a character in three dimensions.
My vote:
Treasure of the Sierra Madre