Movie – Oklahoma! (1955)

Okay, all together now: “Ooooooooooooooooh-klahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plain!”  There, now that that’s out of our systems let’s talk about this film.

Oklahoma! is among the biggest and most popular of musicals.  When it opened on Broadway in 1943 it ended up setting what was then a record with more than 2,200 performances.  Both the Broadway cast album and this film’s soundtrack album were immensely popular, spending years on the Best Seller charts.  There are a number of songs that even today many people will recognize.  But this isn’t your standard nice, innocent, happy musical.  If you stop to actually listen to the lyrics you find that they go to some dark places.  And some of the more suggestive lyrics from the stage musical had to be censored to make it past the Production Code requirements for films.

Movie – Human Desire (1954)

In 1953 Fritz Lang directed Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame in the noir film The Big Heat.  The very next year the three joined forces again for Human Desire.  And just like with The Big Heat, for some reason Grahame was not the first choice for the female lead.  Lang wanted Rita Hayworth, but couldn’t get her. 

The film is officially based on the 1890 Emile Zola novel La Bete Humaine, but beyond the big plot points it’s not a very faithful adaptation.  Jean Renoir’s 1938 movie La Bete Humaine starring Jean Gabin and Simone Simon stuck more closely to the way the characters were originally presented, including making the train itself almost a character in the film. 

Movie – The Big Heat (1953)

In my parent post for this set of Gloria Grahame movies I mentioned that she had been twice nominated for Oscars, winning once, but that I felt she should have been nominated two other times.  One of those I discussed in my review of In a Lonely Place.  The Big Heat is the other.  I was surprised when I found out she wasn’t the first choice to play the part she did.  The producers wanted Marilyn Monroe, but she would have cost too much, so they “settled” for Grahame.  I can’t imagine Monroe in Grahame’s role in this film, especially with the grit that is needed for it.  The Big Heat is not a nice film.  The bad guys are really bad, and even the good guy, driven by revenge, does things that are not much better.  The title of the film is very fitting.

Movie – The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)

It didn’t take me much time into watching The Bad and the Beautiful to figure out why this film got greenlit.  It’s a tale of a once successful movie producer who was a towering presence both in the industry and in the lives of the four people who open this film.  Hollywood loves stories about itself and they’ve been making them ever since there was a Hollywood.  And I’m sure contemporary audiences had fun trying to figure out which real Hollywood figures were being fictionalized in the movie.  This film holds the record for winning the most Oscars – five – without being nominated for Best Picture.  Among those is Gloria Grahame’s win for Best Supporting Actress.

Movie – The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)

If you ask people to list the ten least deserving Best Picture winners chances are pretty good that The Greatest Show on Earth will be among them.  Sometimes a film suffers in comparison to another nominee from the same year (i.e. Ordinary People vs. Raging Bull in 1981), or sometimes the film just isn’t Best Picture caliber (i.e. A Beautiful Mind in 2002).  In the case of The Greatest Show on Earth, both of these apply.  Two of the other films nominated that year were High Noon (1952) and The Quiet Man (1952).  Not even receiving a Best Picture nomination was Singin’ in the Rain (1952).  And the overall tone of The Greatest Show on Earth doesn’t scream “Best Picture!”  The mistake that some people make, though, is equating “shouldn’t have won” with “bad movie.”  In the other examples I gave both Ordinary People and A Beautiful Mind are films worth seeing; they just weren’t “Best Pictures”.  The Greatest Show on Earth is the same.  It’s “big with a capital B” entertainment from the undisputed king of big entertainment in the early days of Hollywood: Cecil B. DeMille.

Movie – In a Lonely Place (1950)

Of all the films on the 1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list In a Lonely Place was one of the most pleasant surprises.  Even though it starred Humphrey Bogart during his biggest days of fame I literally had never even heard of it before.  I sat down to watch the film knowing nothing about it and not expecting much, and when it was through I felt that this was the second best performance of Bogart’s career. (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre being the best.)  It also cemented in my mind the leading lady status of Gloria Grahame, who co-stars with Bogie.  Each of them reaches beyond their expected screen personas – he usually played the gruff but good man and she usually played the sexy temptress.  And in an era of filmmaking where only one of two endings was possible for a movie like this I was very pleasantly surprised to see this film take a third path.

Movie – Crossfire (1947)

Crossfire was a nominee for Best Picture in 1948 and had four other nominations, including Director, Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actor and Actress.  Nowadays, though, if it gets remembered at all it is for being “that other anti-Semitism movie”.  You see, Gentlemen’s Agreement (1947) won the Best Picture that year and its central premise was WASP Gregory Peck pretending to be Jewish and finding out the subtle and not so subtle ways that people held that Jewishness against him.  Crossfire doesn’t focus on the character receiving the abuse; it actually uses that character as the driving force for a whodunit because it opens with him having been murdered.  This film is worth seeking out, though, because of some good performances in it.

Movie – It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

The story of how It’s a Wonderful Life went from box office failure to Christmas classic is well known.  When I was younger, though, I didn’t know why it seemed to show up almost every day on one TV station or another during the month of December.  It wasn’t until years later that I learned about things like the public domain and film rights.  Since the studio had not renewed the rights on this film anyone with a TV transmitter could show it as often as they liked and not have to pay anything.  It was this constant presence in front of a large number of people that finally made it popular.  I actually never saw it until I was an adult, despite how prevalent it was.  When I did I was amused by the fact that it’s not really a Christmas movie at all; it’s just that the climax happens on Christmas Eve.  It was still a heartwarming film from the king of heartwarming films – Frank Capra.

Gloria Grahame Movies

“It wasn’t the way I looked at a man; it was the thought behind it.” – Gloria Grahame

If you do not watch many older films your first reaction is probably “Who’s Gloria Grahame?”  Well, she was sort of the Angelina Jolie of her day – the Angelina Jolie before she became a U.N. Goodwill Ambassador and started a mini-U.N. of her own.  For about ten years Jolie had this sexy, bad girl, don’t know what she’s going to do next, tongues always wagging about her, image.  That was Gloria Grahame from the mid 1940s to the mid 1950s.

Like Jolie, Grahame was known for her sex appeal onscreen, especially the way that she looked at men (hence the quote above.)  Despite some people wanting to disregard her because of her sexiness she got more challenging roles, culminating in a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for The Bad and the Beautiful (1952).  Jolie had a very similar arc, winning her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Girl, Interrupted (1999).

And after Jolie, in her joy at winning the Oscar, kissed her brother quickly on the lips and then in her acceptance speech said she loved her brother, the gossip mill started with all kinds of stories about “incestuous love affairs.”  Jolie was able to put those behind her. Unfortunately, Grahame was not able to put her scandal behind her.

Her second marriage was to director Nicholas Ray – a man 12 years older than her.  That ended in divorce, then after a third marriage also ended in divorce, Grahame married Anthony Ray – Nicholas Ray’s son and her former stepson.  He was 14 years younger than her.  This started rumors that her marriage to Nicholas Ray had ended because he had caught her in bed with his then 14 year old son Anthony.  Grahame also had children with each of these husbands.  Those must have been some fun family reunions.

(In case you’re wondering, Grahame’s son with Nicholas Ray would have been both a half-brother to Grahame’s two sons with Anthony Ray, and simultaneously an uncle to them, too.  That son by Nicholas Ray would also have been both a half-brother to Anthony Ray and simultaneously his stepson.  Got all that?)

Despite any rumors about her offscreen life, her career onscreen had an impressive ten year arc, from a brief, but memorable, appearance in 1946’s It’s a Wonderful Life that got her noticed, through the big budget 1955 musical Oklahoma.  Her personal awards included an Oscar nomination for Crossfire (1947) and her win for The Bad and the Beautiful.  In my opinion she probably deserved nominations for her work in both In a Lonely Place (1950) and The Big Heat (1953).

Finally, I did a very popular post on celebrity look-alikes back in 2011.  It’s had more than four times the number of hits of any other post I have done.  If you’ve never seen it, you can find it here.  Anyway, while I was watching the 2006 film The Fall there were times that I would have sworn that actress Justine Waddell was a clone of Gloria Grahame.  Here are pictures of the two of them.

Gloria Grahame

Justine Waddell in The Fall

As I review the films I will come back and add the links for them here.

It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
Crossfire (1947)
In a Lonely Place (1950)
The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)
The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)
The Big Heat (1953)
Human Desire (1954)
Oklahoma! (1955)

On to the reviews…