What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1942

The Year: 1942

What the Nominees Were: 49th Parallel, King’s Row, The Magnificent Ambersons, Mrs. Miniver, The Pied Piper, The Pride of the Yankees, Random Harvest, The Talk of the Town, Wake Island, Yankee Doodle Dandee
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be Or Not to Be and Julien Duvivier’s anthology film Tales of Manhattan

What Did Win: Mrs. Miniver
How It’s Aged: It’s pretty treacly. There was a war on an this was unabashed propaganda for the stiff-upper-lip British housewives who were keeping calm and carrying on. But most of the movie is actually about an utterly uninteresting rose-growing contest? Not a movie anyone would watch today if it hadn’t won Best Picture.

What Should’ve Won: To Be Or Not to Be

How Hard Was the Decision: Very hard, maybe the hardest in this entire project. There were simply no universally acclaimed movies in 1942. Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons is probably the greatest movie of the year, but it’s so clearly cut down from a longer, better movie, against Welles’s wishes, that it almost seems wrong to honor it. I was inclined toward Tales of Manhattan, which I dearly love, but it runs into the problem of dated depictions of Black people. I don’t find the movie racist, but star Paul Robeson did condemn the movie, and I didn’t want to put myself in a place where I had to disagree with him! That left To Be or Not to Be, which I decided to rewatch and loved, though it’s not really meaty enough to be a Best Picture in most years. But in this year with no strong candidates, I decided to give it an unlikely win.

(To be clear, the best movie released in 1942 was Casablanca, which had its premiere in December, but it didn’t get a wide release until 1943, so it was nominated, and won, for that year. I was tempted to move it back to 1942 to avoid having to make this hard choice, but I decided to defer to the Academy and leave it in 1943.)

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Writer: Edwin Justus Mayer from a story by Melchior Lengyel
Stars: Carole Lombard, Jack Benny, Robert Stack

The Story: Jack Benny plays hammy Shakespearean actor Joseph Tura in pre-war Poland, with Carole Lombard as his loving-but-cheating wife. Robert Stack (17 years before “The Untouchables”) plays her dashing airman lover. When Hitler invades, they all three get caught up in a plot that eventually forces the married couple to go undercover as Nazis to save a bunch of airmen and get everybody out of the country safely.

Any Nominations or Wins: Just one nomination, for Best Score, which it lost

Why It Didn’t Win: With the world engulfed in war, Hollywood was understandably in full-on propaganda mode, and none other than Winston Churchill had declared, “Mrs. Miniver is propaganda worth a hundred battleships.” How could they not congratulate themselves for that? And they wouldn’t have been likely to give it to a somewhat breezy comedy that made light of the Nazi menace. Nevertheless, I’ve decided that, in my little world, they could have. (When Benny hosted the Oscars in 1944, he quipped, “It seems to me that to get a nomination a picture must have no laughs, and they tell me I’ve come pretty close to that a few times already.”)

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Benny was a dependably funny actor in the rare chances he got to be a leading man, but this movie exists as a showcase for the real star: Lombard. Beautiful, sophisticated and always very charming, even when she was shown cheating on perfectly good husbands, Lombard was the female Cary Grant. Tragically, she would die before this film was released, in a plane crash on the way home from a trip to sell War Bonds. Hollywood’s first and most unlikely life lost in the war effort.
   
2. At the beginning, the troupe is putting on “Hamlet” by night and rehearsing a play about Hitler during the day. This cleverly sets up why they have perfect Nazi uniforms ready to go when they have to begin their impersonations.
   
3. This semi-serious material stretches the limits of the famously light “Lubitsch Touch.” There’s a long period where Stack becomes the main character and there are no jokes. Benny completely disappears from 21:50 to 43:56 in the runtime! But it works wonderfully. This was a serious time, and things could only get so light. Once the plot gets in gear and the Nazi impersonations begin, the “Touch” reasserts itself and the film resumes its tightrope walk of making us laugh at the words “Heil Hitler.” (A phrase that is spoken at least 50 times in this movie!)
4. Benny, in disguise, can resist asking various Nazis if they have ever heard of the great actor Joseph Tura. He’s upset that none of the Nazis have heard of him, until he finally meets one who has seen him perform: “What he did to Shakespeare, we are doing now to Poland.” He wishes he hadn’t asked.
   
   
   

Ah, 1942: 

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1941

The Year: 1941

What the Nominees Were: Blossoms in the Dust, Citizen Kane, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Hold Back the Dawn, How Green Was My Valley, The Little Foxes, The Maltese Falcon, One Foot in Heaven, Sergeant York, Suspicion
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: There are good movies there but the bench was very deep in one of Hollywood’s best years. Other greats that weren’t considered: Capra’s Meet John Doe, Howard Hawks’ Ball of Fire, Hitchcock’s Suspicion and not one but two masterpieces from Preston Sturges: The Lady Eve and Sullivan’s Travels.

What Did Win: How Green Was My Valley
How It’s Aged: It’s old-fashioned. It’s pleasant to watch, but it’s sentimental and creaky. Not one of John Ford’s best movies, by any measure.

What Should’ve Won: Citizen Kane
How Hard Was the Decision: Not at all. Most strangers on the street will tell you that Citizen Kane should have beaten How Green Was My Valley for Best Picture. (Of course, if you know anything about me, you know how hard it was for me not to give it to Sullivan’s Travels)

Director: Orson Welles
Writers: Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles (But there’s a lot of contention about whether they actually deserve to share credit. David Fincher made a whole movie about the controversy called Mank, that I thought was bullshit. Even if everything in that movie was true, I still say that Welles deserves equal co-writing credit. Turning a sprawling 300 page drunken first-draft manuscript into a tightly focused 120 page brilliant screenplay is co-writing.)
Stars: Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton and Dorothy Comingore

The Story: A newsreel journalist tries to figure out why a famous man’s last word was “Rosebud.” In the stories he gathers, we see Charles Foster Kane inherit a goldmine from a roomer in his parents’ boarding house, get taken away off his sled to go live under the supervision of a bank, decide “it would be fun to run a newspaper,” become a huge success, run for governor but get caught with his mistress, marry her, try to turn her into a successful opera singer, build a huge estate, and die alone. At the end, they’re throwing his junk on the fire and we see that Rosebud was the name on the sled.

Any Nominations or Wins: It was nominated for Picture, Director, Actor, Original Screenplay, Interior Decoration, Cinematography, Editing, Score and Sound Recording, winning only for the screenplay.

Why It Didn’t Win: The character of Kane was very similar to real-life newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst with one big difference: Hearst was very much not dead. Indeed, Heart’s media empire launched a campaign against the film, led by Louella Parsons, one of the most powerful gossip columnists in Hollywood. Welles had practically been run out of town on a rail by the time the Oscars came around. Worse still: the movie lost money at the box office.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. The secret behind this movie’s greatness is that Welles had never written, directed or starred in a movie and had no idea what he was doing. The structure is so odd: First we get Kane’s whole life story in a newsreel, including all of the movie’s big reveals, then we dive deeper into Kane’s life, but we’re still jumping around like crazy (getting the review of the opera before we see it, etc) It’s almost Pulp-Fiction-esque in its disregard for linear narrative. What it resembles more than anything is a newspaper obit of Hearst, with a summary paragraph at the beginning and then a series of overlapping in-depth interviews.
   
   
   
2. In an episode of “The Secrets of Story Podcast” that never aired, my co-host James Kennedy claimed that spite is never a good story driver, and I couldn’t come up with a good counterexample. Later I came up with two: This and “The Bear.” In this, he makes a success of his newspaper just to spite those who said he couldn’t do it, and Carmy on “The Bear” becomes a world-class chef because he’s not allowed to cook at his family’s sandwich joint. I still say it’s a good driver.
3. Another aspect of never having made a movie: Welles naively asked why we never see the ceiling in movies, at which point the studio men patiently explained to him that movies down have ceilings because that’s where you hang the lights. Welles then (spitefully) declared that you would see the ceiling constantly in his film, because that would automatically create a bizarre sensation that we were watching real life and not a movie. This is similar to what J. J. Abrams would do later with lens flare (“We’ve only ever seen lens flare in real life film and video, but movies have studiously avoided it, so if I start using it, it will feel real.”) Both examples are tricks that only work for a few years, before audiences catch on, and the anti-artifice trick becomes just another artifice. 
4. In the newsreel we see, the left denounces Kane as a fascist and the right denounces him as a communist, and indeed his politics are hard to figure. He manufactures a war in Cuba, but also sponsors muckraking trustbusters. At the time, this wouldn’t have seemed strange, because this was all true of Hearst. Viewing the movie now, without that reference to fall back on, we have to come up with an explanation that can encompass Kane’s disparate traits. Ultimately, this man, rejected by his parents as a boy, desperately wants to be loved by as many people as possible, and that’s what war and the trustbusting have in common: they rouse great emotion.
5. The biggest mark against this movie was that it made it seem like Hearst’s real life mistress Marion Davies must have been a terrible actress, because her analog Susan Alexander Kane is such a terrible singer. In reality, Davies was quite a good actress, and her films were eventually rediscovered and appreciated.
6. Godfather cinematographer Gordon Willis earned the nickname “The Prince of Darkness” because of his willingness to let the screen go black occasionally, but Gregg Toland was the first to go there.  It’s amazing how much gorgeous blackness this movie is swimming in.
   
   
   

Ah, 1941:

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1940

The Year: 1940
What the Nominees Were: All This and Heaven Too, Foreign Correspondent, The Grapes of Wrath, The Great Dictator, Kitty Foyle, The Letter, The Long Voyage Home, Our Town, The Philadelphia Story, Rebecca
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Again, that’s a really great list. The Great McGinty was also a wonderful movie, and it won Original Screenplay, so it should have gotten a Picture nomination too.

What Should Have Won and Did Win: Rebecca
How Hard Was the Decision: One of the hardest decisions I had to make. The Philadelphia Story was by the same people as Holiday and it’s even better. If it had come out almost any other year, I would hand it the award. And I love The Grapes of Wrath and The Great Dictator. But Rebecca is better.

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writers: Screenplay by Robert E. Sherwood and Joan Harrison, Adaptation by Philip MacDonald and Michael Hogan, Based on the novel by Daphne du Maurier
Stars: Lawrence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, Judith Anderson and George Saunders 

The Story: An unnamed heroine, serving as travelling companion to a rich widow, enters into a whirlwind romance with suicidal zillionaire Maxim de Winter in Monte Carlo. They marry and she must take over running his Cornish estate, but she cannot escape the shadow of his “beloved” first wife, Rebecca. Eventually the truth comes out: He hated Rebecca and killed her. The mad servant who loved Rebecca and hates our heroine burns down the mansion but our couple escapes to live happily ever after.

Other Nominations and Wins: It won Picture and Black and White Cinematography, it lost Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actress for Anderson, Screenplay, Art Direction, Editing, Score and Special Effects.

Why It Won:

1. You may not notice on first watch that we never hear the heroine’s first name. You also might not notice that we never see Rebecca’s face, not even in flashbacks or photos or even portraits in the house. What’s the reason for these two odd choices, these two holes in the film? It turns the two women into doppelgangers of each other: The woman without a name and her other half, the woman without a face. That makes things much more disturbing and powerful. One of the most powerful moments is when the phone rings for Mrs. DeWinter, then Fontaine says “Mrs. DeWinter is dead” and hangs up, only to realize that call was probably for her, since she is, after all, the new Mrs. DeWinter (which is the closest she ever gets to a name.)
   
2. In the novel, Maxim confesses to his new wife that he killed Rebecca when she bragged of cuckolding him. Hollywood had a strict moral code at the time (enforced by Joseph Breen) that said you couldn’t make a movie about a killer who gets away with it. So, in the movie, he tells our heroine that he didn’t actually kill Rebecca: he was about to, but she tripped and died accidentally. That satisfied Breen, but we, thankfully have no reason to believe this very dubious story (which Maxim smartly tells no one except his besotted new wife). If he’s telling the truth, then this is a dumb, meaningless movie, but if he’s lying, then it’s gothic goodness. I, like every non-censor who saw the movie, enjoy it so much because I don’t believe Maxim for a second.
   
3. Hitchcock isn’t really remembered as an expressionist director, not in the same way that Fritz Lang and company were, but this movie expresses emotion through lighting in a way he didn’t usually do (shooting a whole scene through rain-streaked windows, for instance). It creates a painterly atmosphere not unlike Selznick’s previous picture Gone With the Wind, and helps explain why this was the only Hitchcock movie to win Best Picture.
   
4. Every time the heroine thinks she can escape Rebecca’s shadow, she finds another item with “R de W” embroidered on it. We realize that she will never be free to be mistress of the house until she has them all put in a bonfire and burned, but then she’d be that kind of second wife. She’s wonderfully trapped by embroidery.
5. (There was one place where Rebecca could be seen: On the poster. As a filmmaker, you can try to deny the audience something important, but Marketing won’t have that.)
   

Ah, 1940: Advice to Wives!

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1939

The Year: 1939

What the Nominees Were: Dark Victory, Gone With the Wind, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Love Affair, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Ninotchka, Of Mice and Men, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, Wuthering Heights
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: That’s a pretty good list. I also love Destry Rides Again and, if we stretch to foreign films, The Rules of the Game.

What Did Win: Gone with the Wind

How It’s Aged: Terribly. It’s flat-out pro-slavery and pro-Klan. It’s still a stirring epic, with an admirably complex love story, and the best thing about it is the expressionistic art direction, but it’s not as watchable as you remember it. The entire second half of the film is forgettable and aimless. Even if you’re willing to overlook the movie’s massive moral failings, you still may want to turn it off at intermission.

What Should’ve Won: The Wizard of Oz
How Hard Was the Decision: Fairly hard, because there were so many great movies this year, and it’s hard to imagine the Academy existing in any form and not giving the award to Gone with the Wind, but The Wizard of Oz was also nominated, and, in retrospect, clearly should have won. It’s aged the best of any movie from the 1930s. 

Director: Victor Fleming (and other uncredited directors) (Fleming was also the credited director on Gone with the Wind, though that was also a case where he took over a troubled production)
Writers: Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf, based on “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” by L. Frank Baum
Stars: Judy Garland, Frank Morgan, Ray Bolger

The Story: Young Dorothy Gale and her dog Toto are swept away by a tornado from their Kansas farm to the magical Land of Oz and embark on a quest with three new friends to see the Wizard, who can return her to her home and fulfill the others’ wishes.

Any Nominations or Wins: It was nominated for six. It lost for Picture, Art Direction, and Special Effects. It won Best Original Song for “Over the Rainbow”, Best Original Score and an Academy Juvenile Award for Garland.
Why It Didn’t Win: Nothing could have stood up to the Gone with the Wind juggernaut, and certainly not Wizard of Oz, a notorious bomb that had lost a million dollars for MGM. For this book, I have something they didn’t have: the benefit of hindsight.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. This is just such a perfect time capsule of the golden age of Hollywood. Every time I watch it, I have to keep reminding myself that the movie, most of which takes place outdoors (whether in Kansas or Oz) shot every frame indoors, with studio lighting and dioramas in the background. Every flower and ear of corn is papier mache. And yet, even when I remind myself, I keep getting sucked into the perfect illusion and I forget again. This is the ultimate product of the dream machine at its peak.
   
   
   
2. But that doesn’t explain why this movie has aged better than any other movie of the 1930s. At the time of this writing, it’s showing at the Sphere in Las Vegas, for $100 a ticket. Of course, one reason is that so much of the movie is in glorious technicolor. It took me a long time to realize that there were three great color movies of the 1930s (this, GWTW and Robin Hood), but very few great American color films of the 1940s. It would take Brits like Michael Powell to remind America of its own brilliant invention and reignite America’s love of color ten years later.
3. Edgar “Yip” Harburg was a Socialist songwriter who often wrote songs to tug the public consciousness like “Hey Brother, Can You Spare a Dime.” His songs in this movie are less political than that, but his social conscious still infuses them with a bit more power than they might otherwise have.
4. The problem is that you’ve probably watched this movie so many times that there’s nothing I can say to get you to check it out again. But there’s so much you’ve missed! The Scarecrow has a handgun when they leave Oz’s palace the first time! (Then it disappears. He lost in the Jitterbug number that was cut)
   
5. It is absolutely crazy how long this movie goes in Kansas: It doesn’t turn to color until 19 minutes in. The studio had a solution: Cut “Over the Rainbow”. But that would of course have been a huge mistake. In fact, the 19 black and white minutes is the secret of this movie’s success. Readers of the book are surprised to find that the idea that Kansas was grey and colorless is right there on the page. The more time Dorothy spends in her colorless, bleak world, the more we long for that explosion of color we know is coming, and the more we appreciate it. (The Sphere, by the way, abridges the movie and cuts most of the black and white out. You can’t expect to see a whole movie for just $100.)

Ah, 1939: 

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1938

“Matt,” you might say, “what the hell are you doing?? You can’t just pick up a series from May of 2012 as if you hadn’t missed a day! And aren’t you just repurposing a post you wrote for Underrated Movies, an even older series??” Yes, I can and yes it is. Well, folks, here it is, the 91-part series I promised: I’m finally going to finish “What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won”! And unlike “37 Days of Shakespeare,” I don’t want to spend several years doing it. I intend to do two a week every week and get this series done within a year. It occurs to me that I should finish this series and turn it into a book timed to the 100th anniversary of the awards, so here we go!

The Year: 1938

What the Nominees Were: The Adventures of Robin Hood, Alexander’s Ragtime Band, Boys Town, The Citadel, Four Daughters, Grand Illusion, Jezebel, Pygmalion, Test Pilot, You Can’t Take It With You

Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Bringing Up Baby and our winner

What Did Win: You Can’t Take It With You
How It’s Aged: It’s a perfectly delightful little movie, and a worthy winner, but, in retrospect, a minor Capra film and not the best movie that year.

What Should’ve Won: Holiday
How Hard Was the Decision: It was tempting to stick with the actual winner and Grand Illusion is a great film, which clearly could have won since it was nominated, despite being a foreign film. But Holiday is one of my favorite films, and ultimately it was an easy decision.

Director: George Cukor
Writers: David Ogden Stewart and Sidney Buchman, based on the play by Philip Barry
Stars: Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant and Doris Nolan

The Story: Free-thinking Johnny Case finds himself betrothed to a millionaire’s daughter. When her family, with the exception of black-sheep Linda and drunken Ned, want Johnny to settle down to big business, he rebels, wishing instead to spend the early years of his life on “holiday.” With the help of his friends Nick and Susan Potter, he makes up his mind as to which is the better course, and the better mate.

Any Nominations or Wins: It was just nominated for Best Art Direction.
Why It Didn’t Win: Katherine Hepburn was lucky to get the role because she was tarred as “Box Office Poison” at the time, and unfortunately this movie didn’t do great and didn’t break the streak, so the studio didn’t put any oomph behind it.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Nobody had more charm than Grant. He was so good at bowling audiences over with his talent that he was reluctant to let his persona slip and show more vulnerability, but this is one of his most raw and heartfelt performances. We get to see him waver between rich and poor, lover and clown, the witty sophisticate Cary Grant and the cockney acrobat Archie Leach. Like his character, Grant is negotiating onscreen the bargain between who he was and who he wants to be.
   
2. The central conflict of the movie—society pressures vs. bohemianism in a rich family—is not a big worry anymore. The stuffed shirts have been long since unstuffed themselves and nobody fashions themselves more “wild” and “independent” than the upper classes. These kids would all have piercings today and the parents wouldn’t mind a bit. But the underlying question still resonates: How do you get locked into a life you don’t want? That’s something you have to worry about even if you don’t drink champagne for breakfast.
3. And it’s fascinating to see the hints here of more serious trouble on the horizon. Grant is quickly made aware of the opportunities for stock manipulation that his new connections can provide. He's told that he could make a million in two years, or even quicker “if we had the right kind of government.” Grant’s bohemian friend asks suspiciously: “Like which country?”, but the question goes unanswered. Within a few years everyone would try to forget the appeal that Hitler had to American elites, but this movie was still willing to ring that bell in 1938.
4. I love that the gowns are by somebody simply named “Kalloch”, presumably after his plans to conquer America with a robot army were foiled.

How Available Is It?: When I last did this series 13 years ago, I would talk about whether the movie was available on disk, but these days we just watch everything on Amazon, so I’ll stop doing this.

Ah, 1938:

While You're Waiting, Check Out a Great Episode of Marvel Reread Club!

Steve and Matt Bird · 132 Marvel Reread Club April 1968 with Paris Cullins (part 1)

Hi folks! Still working on the new 91-part series but I wanted to get a few in the queue before I started posting them.

In the meantime, I don’t normally promote Marvel Reread Club on this blog, but this was a particularly good episode, featuring special guest Paris Cullins. Unfortunately, Paris had to record outside, which is distracting, but if you can ignore that, he tells great stories, including hilarious encounters with Stan Lee and Steve Ditko! Check it out!

A Bonus Episode of "A Good Story Well Told" on KPop Demon Hunters!

It's a new episode of "A Good Story Well Told", where Jonathan Auxier and I discuss KPop Demon Hunters and various things we've meant to discuss over the course of the show! Season 2 coming soon!

And here it is on Spotify:

37 Days of Shakespeare, Epilogue: The BBC Power Ranking Countdown

Already, kids, I spent years doing my Shakespeare series, and you thought it was done, but I wanted to do one final wrap-up today, where I rank the whole BBC series, in countdown format. My opinion of the plays themselves and these productions specifically are all mixed up with each other here. Unfortunately, the series is no longer easy to watch, as it has just disappeared off BritBox, so you’ll have to get the DVDs (perhaps from your local library) or acquire it in, ahem, other ways.  Click on the title to see my write-up of each production. 

• In 37th place, Titus Andronicus: Director Jane Howell, who will also be seen near the top of the list, cannot overcome the tastelessness of the material, and “spooky” cross-dissolves just feel tacky.
• 36th, Troilus and Cressida: Director Jonathan Miller stages the whole thing as a comedy but nothing is remotely funny, causing the play to feel like a tonal disaster. Broad gay stereotypes don’t help. And it’s just a weak play. It surely seems like Shakespeare didn’t finish it. It has no ending!
• 35th, King John: Not so much bad as completely forgettable. I may remember a scene outside a castle?  A few months after watching it, I would not be able to pass any pop quiz about this play.
• 34th, Henry VIII: Shameless Tudor propaganda that distorts history to a ridiculous extent, but a somewhat nice production shooting on actual outdoor locations.
• 33rd, Cymbeline: Plagued like so many of these plays by Elizabethan dress despite Roman times setting, this production failed the capture the nuttiness or martial thrills of Shakespeare’s play. That severed head was never going to look good in close-up.
• 32nd, The Taming of the Shrew: It’s fun to see John Cleese doing Shakespeare, but it just spotlights the essential problem of the text, which is that we no longer consider spousal mental abuse to be funny. Sarah Bedel as Katherine plays it rather serious, resulting in a major tonal mismatch.
• 31st, The Merchant of Venice: Shakespeare’s other super-offensive play gets a rather lively adaptation, with some genuine comedy thrown in there, but the inherent anti-Semitism of the material is only highlighted, not recontextualized in any way.
• 30th, All’s Well That Ends Well: Director Elijah Moshinsky’s only real mistake is to play the king scene as a sex scene, but he makes up for it with a very funny gibberish scene. The Helena - Bertrand reconciliation is unconvincing, of course, but it always is.
• 29th, Pericles, Prince of Tyre: Period-appropriate dress for once, and epic filmmaking on a shoestring video budget make for a rousing production of a weak play.
• 28th, Antony and Cleopatra: Director Jonathan Miller said in an interview that Cleopatra was just a “treacherous slut” and that attitude infects this production. More respect for her character would have gone a long way. Colin Blakely makes a fine Antony and the dress is once again blessedly period appropriate.
• 27th, Coriolanus: One of the weakest plays gets a glow-up from Moshinsky, with the most gorgeous lighting of the series. The homoerotic interpretation of the not-particularly-gay text is certainly …interesting.
• 26th, The Tempest: We’re getting into the better ones here. The cheapo special effects and homoerotic (there’s that word again) choreography on this one were both charming, and Michael Horden is excellent as Prospero.
• 25th, The Winter’s Tale: Jane Howell’s abstract stagework makes a weird play even weirder. It’s beautiful, but can’t smooth out the play’s wild tone shifts and egregious violation of the Aristotelean unities.
• 24th, Measure for Measure: Gravely serious performances from Kate Nelligan and Tim Pigott-Smith as the leads, alongside funny work from the other actors, somehow all comes together for a zesty final product.
• 23rd, Julius Caesar: Our first great text we’ve gotten to on this list receives a decent adaptation, with a good Brutus, Cassius and Anthony. Poor Cinna the Poet ends up being the only really sympathetic figure, but that doesn’t violate the text.
• 22nd, Macbeth: A great text, and well-acted, but tacky sets, lighting and camerawork undercut the performances. There are much better adaptations of this play.
• 21st, The Two Gentlemen of Verona: Ignore the Shaun Cassidy hair on the lead actor Tyler Butterworth, and this is a very engaging staging of an underrated play, mixing drama and comedy perfectly.
• 20th, The Merry Wives of Windsor: How wonderful to get to see Richard Griffiths as Falstaff, a part he was born to play, and Ben Kingsley is excellent as well as Frank Ford. Not Shakespeare’s best comedy, but the cast and director David Jones mine it for all its humor.
• 19th, Henry IV, Part 2: The first half of this play is quite forgettable, but it’s always good to just watch Falstaff be Falstaff. Anthony Quayle is great as the cowardly knight, and David Gwillim and Jon Finch are quite good as father and son Henrys.
• 18th, Love’s Labour’s Lost: Another underrated play gets a brilliant adaptation by Moshinsky, playing up the similarities to the works of Moliere by setting it late in the 17th century. Genuinely funny and sharply satiric of the enlightenment that was on its way.
• 17th, Much Ado About Nothing: One of Shakespeare’s best plays gets a lively adaptation with great sets. It can’t withstand comparison to Kenneth Brannagh’s version, but that’s an unfair standard. Robert Lindsay’s Benedick and Cherie Lunghi’s Beatrice do a good job keeping things effervescent until things darken, and they handle that nicely as well.
• 16th, Romeo and Juliet: The first episode got the series off to a rousing start, with lots of swordplay and swooning. Authentically casting 14-year-old Rebecca Saire as Juliet reminds us that this relationship isn’t a great idea, even before it ends so badly. And of course it’s great to see Alan Rickman as Tybalt, promising a lot more “no small parts” cameos to come.
• 15th, Henry V: Gwillim as Hal doesn’t have Quayle as Falstaff to support him this time, but he proves he can carry a production by himself as an inspiring-but-still-somewhat-callow king.
• 14th, Richard II: For the most part, the series failed to land the legendary Shakespearean actors I really wish we could have seen, but this and Hamlet, both starring Derek Jacobi, are exceptions, and they don’t disappoint. One of the big benefits of the series is to do the histories with consistent casting, so we get to meet Finch’s Henry IV here at the beginning of his journey and follow him to his death two plays later.
• 13th, Othello: What do we do with this play? Really, it should be ranked dead last for the egregious sin of doing the part in blackface, but once we roundly condemn that, there’s the uncomfortable fact that, other than that, this is an excellent adaptation, with Anthony Hopkins doing his typical great work in the lead and Bob Hoskins even better as a bitterly-laughing Iago.
• 12th, King Lear: One of the greatest plays, certainly, but I’m ranking these based on both quality of the play and quality of the production, which drags this down a bit. Director Jonathan Miller once again uses Elizabethan costume and the sets are tacky, but the performances are great.
• 11th, Henry IV, Part 1: One of the all-time great plays gets an excellent adaptation. Griffiths was so good as Falstaff in Merry Wives of Windsor, and it would have been fascinating to see if he could have carried off the, ahem, heftier version of the character in the History plays, but I can’t complain about Quayle, who plays the character with an emphasis on the sadder side of the comedy.
• 10th, Twelfth Night: One of the best plays is blessed by a sprightly performance by Felicity Kendal as Viola, including a very funny swordfight. Director John Gorrie’s production is almost too boisterous, but that’s not a bad problem to have.
• 9th, The Comedy of Errors: The brilliant decision to do it Patty Duke-style, with the same actors playing each set of twins, completely transforms the play, making it believable for once that everyone would get so confused. A very funny performance on a beautiful set. Roger Daltrey of The Who is shockingly good as both Dromios.
• 8th, Hamlet: Derek Jacobi is back and it’s great to get his melancholy Hamlet preserved on film (well, video anyway). And Patrick Stewart (with hair!) is fascinating as an even-keeled Claudius. It’s a long full-text version of this usually-cut-down play, and overstays its welcome a bit, but you can’t complain with a great cast and interesting minimalist staging from director Rodney Bennet.
• 7th, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The teenagers and the players are both very funny in this high-spirited performance (kept under two hours by overlapping the dialogue.) Puck, meanwhile, is an angry punk, which is a fascinating interpretation. It would have been great to set this one outside, but director Moshinsky does a fine job with the interior sets he has.
• 6th, As You Like It: The one production that matches what the original plan was for the series, before they gave up on shooting outside. A youthful Helen Mirren leads a cast cavorting on the grounds of Glamis Castle. With David “Darth Vader” Prowse as the wrestler! My one objection is that they make no attempt to make Mirren look like a boy when she’s in drag.
• Tied for 2nd place, Henry VI, Parts 1, 2 and 3, and Richard III: Ultimately, I just couldn’t break up this brilliant 14-hour quartet, all directed by Jane Howell, so all four are sharing the #2 spot. All done on one set, we start with a brightly colored child’s playroom and then follow the doomed country of England as it goes from playful contests of chivalry to unleashing hell on earth. The set is gradually degraded until it’s pitch black, and in the end we end up with Julia Foster as Queen Margaret cackling atop a mountain of corpses. If you had asked me to guess before I started what my top five would end up being, I wouldn’t have been able to do it in a thousand tries. I had never seen the Henry VI plays, which are almost never staged. Having them share this spot on the list only reinforces the impression you probably have that they are inseparable. Indeed, this series makes a strong case for the greatness of these plays together, but I was left with the impression that they should be staged more often and that they could be staged individually. If Part I was simply retitled “Shakespeare’s Joan of Arc”, surely it would get staged more.
• 1st place, Timon of Athens: This is generally considered one of Shakespeare’s worst plays, if not the very worst, but here it is sitting atop my list. Director Jonathan Miller makes a strong case for the play’s inherent greatness, but the quality of this production must be primarily credited to Jonathan Pryce’s bitterly rueful performance in the lead role. Miller’s daring decision to stage most of the second half as long unmoving takes creates a huge acting challenge but Pryce more than meets it. 

 Okay, folks, that’s it for Shakespeare posts! Hopefully the new 89-part follow-up series (I’m not even kidding) starts next week!

New Episode of "A Good Story Well Told" on Anne of Green Gables!

I got Jonathan to read a candidate for Great American Novel, so now Jonathan makes me read what might be the Great Canadian Novel, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. Will I embrace my neighbors to the north? 

 Check it out on Spotify here or Apple Podcasts here: