The Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (1946)

If Jimmy Stewart had died in the war while flying bomber missions over Germany, I think we would have said some nice things about him, but I don't think it would have occurred to anyone to carve his face onto acting's Mount Rushmore. After the war, Stewart either had within him an undercurrent of rage and melancholy that he fought to control or during the war he perfectly observed rage and melancholy and could draw on that understanding like the truest method actor. Either way, after World War II, I think he was just about the finest actor around.

By nearly universal acclaim, mine included, Jimmy Stewart's performance in It's A Wonderful Life was his best. It was his (and Frank Capra's) first movie after a five year absence and he had serious doubts about his ability to revive his career. The scene where George Bailey is praying in Martini's bar and the tears begin to flow, Stewart said that was real. He started thinking about himself and the war and his fears about his career, and the tears just came.

There are two scenes in It's A Wonderful Life you should especially watch for, bits with no dialogue, just concentrating on Stewart's face. The first is when's he's leaving to go to college and the guy says "but they'll vote with Potter otherwise." The second is a bit later when his brother comes home on the train with Ruth Dakin (Ruth Dakin Bailey!). In both, you see realization, then despair, then the conscious rearranging of his face so that no one else will see—the whole set-up of the movie in a pair of five second bits. Damn fine acting, in my layman's opinion.

In other scenes, Stewart is able to hit notes of despair and self-pity and anger that are scary, and he's not afraid to take it out on his wife and children. For an actor who has a reputation as a nice guy, in many scenes in this movie and others in the post-war era, he's a completely unredeemed bastard.

Anyway, if you've never seen It's A Wonderful Life and you've convinced yourself in advance that it's pure treacle, trust me, you couldn't be more wrong.

PICTURE (Drama)
winner: It's A Wonderful Life (prod. Frank Capra)
nominees: The Best Years of Our Lives (prod. Samuel Goldwyn); The Big Sleep (prod. Howard Hawks); Gilda (prod. Virginia Van Upp); Great Expectations (prod. Ronald Neame); The Killers (prod. Mark Hellinger); A Matter Of Life And Death (prod. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger); My Darling Clementine (prod. Samuel J. Engel); Notorious (prod. Alfred Hitchcock); The Postman Always Rings Twice (prod. Carey Wilson)

PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Make Mine Music (prod. Walt Disney)
nominees: Cluny Brown (prod. Ernst Lubitch); The Harvey Girls (prod. Arthur Freed); A Night in Casablanca (prod. David L. Loew); Road To Utopia (prod. Paul Jones)

PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: La belle et la bête (Beauty And The Beast) (prod. André Paulvé)
nominees: Paisà (Paisan) (prod. Rod E. Geiger and Roberto Rossellini); Sciuscià (Shoeshine) (prod. Giuseppe Amato and Paolo William Tamburella)

ACTOR (Drama)
winner: James Stewart (It's A Wonderful Life)
nominees: Dana Andrews (The Best Years Of Our Lives); Humphrey Bogart (The Big Sleep); Henry Fonda (My Darling Clementine); John Garfield (The Postman Always Rings Twice); Cary Grant (Notorious); Fredric March (The Best Years Of Our Lives)

ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Bob Hope and Bing Crosby (Road To Utopia)
nominees: Ray Bolger (The Harvey Girls); Charles Boyer (Cluny Brown)

ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Rita Hayworth (Gilda)
nominees: Lauren Bacall (The Big Sleep); Ingrid Bergman (Notorious); Joan Crawford (Humoresque); Irene Dunne (Anna and the King of Siam); Deborah Kerr (I See A Dark Stranger); Donna Reed (It's A Wonderful Life); Lana Turner (The Postman Always Rings Twice)

ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Jennifer Jones (Cluny Brown)
nominees: Judy Garland (The Harvey Girls); Dorothy Lamour (Road To Utopia)

DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: Frank Capra (It's A Wonderful Life)
nominees: Vittorio de Sica (Sciuscià a.k.a. Shoeshine); John Ford (My Darling Clementine); Tay Garnett (The Postman Always Rings Twice); Howard Hawks (The Big Sleep); Alfred Hitchcock (Notorious); David Lean (Great Expectations); William Wyler (The Best Years Of Our Lives)

DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Jean Cocteau (La belle et la bête a.k.a. Beauty And The Beast)
nominees: Ernst Lubitsch (Cluny Brown)

SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Claude Rains (Notorious)
nominees: Lionel Barrymore (It's A Wonderful Life); Walter Brennan (My Darling Clementine); Oscar Levant (Humoresque); Thomas Mitchell (It's A Wonderful Life); Harold Russell (The Best Years Of Our Lives); Henry Travers (It's A Wonderful Life); Clifton Webb (The Razor's Edge)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Myrna Loy (The Best Years Of Our Lives)
nominees: Ethel Barrymore (The Spiral Staircase); Anne Baxter (The Razor's Edge); Ava Gardner (The Killers); Leopoldine Konstantin (Notorious); Jean Simmons (Great Expectations); Teresa Wright (The Best Years Of Our Lives)

SCREENPLAY
winner: Robert E. Sherwood, from the novella Glory For Me by MacKinlay Kantor based on a Time magazine article (The Best Years Of Our Lives)
nominees: William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman, from the novel by Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep); David Lean, Ronald Neame and Anthony Havelock-Allan (Great Expectations); Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett and Frank Capra, with additional scenes by Jo Swerling, from a short story by Philip Van Doren Stern (It's A Wonderful Life); Ben Hecht (Notorious)

SPECIAL AWARDS
Christian Berard, Lucien Carre and Rene Moulaert (La belle et la bête a.k.a. Beauty And The Beast) (Art Direction-Set Decoration)

Dadaism, Surrealism And The Anti-Narrative Experiment, Part Two: Additional Examples And What To Make Of All This

Un Chien Andalou was the best of the surrealist films but it wasn't the first—although what exactly was the first is hard to say. I mentioned that René Clare's Entr'acte with its runaway coffin came along in 1924 but some film historians argue that it's more Dada than surreal and who am I to disagree (especially since I wouldn't know how).

But one thing is certain. By 1928, the attempt to break away from the traditional narrative form as a way of conveying the human experience on film was in full swing.

Well, I say traditional.

The narrative structure of movies we today know and love was all of fourteen years old at this point, hardly established enough to qualify as a tradition. Let's say "trend" then, a trend toward making movies resemble the narrative structure of theater and literature. And not everyone was ready to concede that this particular trend made fullest use of film's potential to convey the human experience.

But anyway.

In addition to Entr'acte, a trio of highly-regarded films displaying surrealist influences beat Un Chien Andalou into the theaters.

La Coquille et le Clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman) premiered in Paris in February 1928, sixteen months before Buñuel's classic. Directed by Germaine Dulac, a leading radical feminist and one of the first women to direct movies in the French film industry, La Coquille et le Clergyman is the story (if there is a story) of a clergyman who becomes erotically obsessed with a general's mistress. Although this struggle is shown in symbolic terms—the priest's slowly fragmenting face, for example—and British censors banned La Coquille et le Clergyman on the basis that the "film is so obscure as to have no apparent meaning. If there is a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable," which no doubt thrilled Madame Dulac, there's nothing on screen that has the power of Buñuel's razor and its reputation has justly faded over the years.

A superior exercise was Jean Epstein's La Chute de la Maison Usher, an adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's The Fall Of The House Of Usher. Luis Buñuel worked as Epstein's assistant director and it shows. The movie combines the abstract, exaggerated sets common to German Expressionism with images of surrealism, particularly of a portrait central to the story that is at times a painting and at times a live woman, that are pure Buñuel.

Epstein did not set out to make a surrealist movie, but instead an adaptation of the novel that was faithful to the spirit of Poe, but the use of surrealism here keeps the audience off-balance in a way that heightens the sense of horror.

Maybe the best of the surrealist experiments that doesn't have Luis Buñuel's name on it is L'Étoile de Mer, one of six movies directed by Man Ray, better known for his photographs and paintings. There's no story, just a mood, a man and woman photographed through a pane of glass, juxtaposed with the poetry of Robert Desnos. The effect is as lyrical as Un Chien Andalou is brutal.

You might also take a look at Jean Cocteau's Le Sang d'un Poète (The Blood Of A Poet), a mock- doc- umentary or as Cocteau put it "a realistic documentary of unreal events." Surrealists at the time weren't sure Cocteau qualified as one of their own, and I'm not going to wade into the argument. I'll just say that Cocteau, who here included such sequences as a painted portrait that begins to speak, was clearly influenced by surrealism and probably couldn't have made his beautiful and bizarre version of Beauty and the Beast in 1946 without first making The Blood Of A Poet. For that reason alone, I thought it was worth tracking down and you might, too.

The Russian director Dziga Vertov wasn't a surrealist but his Man With The Movie Camera is definitely another example from early 1929 of a film trying to subvert traditional expectations of narrative. Urban Cinefile calls it three films in one, a documentary of Russian life, a documentary of the making of the documentary and a documentary of the audience watching the documentary. These images—of Russian factories, trolley cars, women in undergarments, etc.—are served up as a collage that is not so much an experiment in film making as an experiment in film editing.

I have read that Vertov intended this collage to be either a sly com- mentary on life in the Soviet Union, interesting and busy but a bit soulless, or an equally sly commentary on our insistence that even a random jumble of images must have meaning. The fact that he spent so much time in the editing room suggests Vertov meant something by it but if he did, the finished product resolutely keeps the secret safe from us. In the end any given image is well-made but overall most of Man With The Movie Camera is no more interesting than the random images you'd find in any tourist's camera.

Finally, while I'm writing about movies without a narrative that aren't necessarily surrealist, maybe I should mention People On Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag), directed by brothers Curt and Robert Siodmak with assists from Edgar G. Ulmer and Fred Zinnemann, and written by Billy Wilder. It's actually the opposite of surrealism, an exercise in early neo-realism—just following five young Berliners around on a lazy Sunday afternoon—but it is yet another attempt to tell a story without resorting to narrative.

In the case of all involved it was not an experiment they were much interested in repeating when their careers took off. Wilder, who wrote the script on pieces of scratch paper, dismissed it as not much more than a newsreel. "I would not see it. I don't know—I think it was just a freelance experiment of a picture. It never quite got into much depth."

That might be a pretty good epitaph for most of these movies.

In any event, the surrealist movement began to crack up within a few years, torpedoed by incessant bickering and internal strife as even its practitioners couldn't agree on what they meant as they endeavored to mean nothing. The founder of the surrealist movement, André Breton, bitterly denounced those who he felt had strayed from the party line, Buñuel and Epstein fell out during the filming of La Chute de la Maison Usher, and writer Antonin Arnaud was so incensed by how director Germaine Dulac had interpreted his screenplay La Coquille et le Clergyman, he called her a "cow" at the film's premiere.

Apparently there are a lot of very strict rules involved in doing anything you want.

In late 1928, Buster Keaton spoofed surrealism in his last great film, The Cameraman. In that one the experimental-looking collage was the result of a cameraman (Keaton) incorrectly loading film into the camera and a documentary on the Tong War in Chinatown was actually filmed by an organ grinder's monkey (don't ask). It's a very funny movie, certainly funnier than a razor blade slicing an eyeball.

As a means of artistic ex- pression, sur- realism was a smashing success and remains influential to this day, although perhaps not in the way its founders envisioned. You'll find examples of it in animation (e.g., Tex Avery cartoons, Yellow Submarine), music videos, advertizing. Personally, I think surrealism works best as comedy, Monty Python, for example, and although even the most surreal imagery in Monty Python isn't quite surrealism as its early practitioners understood it since a joke is a form of comprehensible narrative, you have to admit there is always something unexpected about, say, the Spanish Inquisition.

On the other hand, as a political movement, surrealism was a complete bust. While the actions of our world's leaders often seem surreal, it turns out that no matter what system of government you adopt, war and oppression still occur—which shouldn't come as a surprise since governments are made up of people and on a fundamental level, people never change.

So should you bother tracking down Un Chien Andalou or any of the other movies I've mentioned? Well, that depends.

I'm warning you up front, a little bit of this stuff goes a very long way. As with any new medium or technology, early users experimented for a while, eventually hit upon what worked, what didn't. The experiments were useful but definitely of more interest to a budding film student than to a middle-aged working man at the end of a hard week. Which is ironic because the surrealists hoped their films would lead the working man to reject the simplistic answers and bourgeois values that the surrealists felt had led to World War I and the excesses of the post-war bull market. Instead, they wound up preaching to a choir of fellow surrealists and after a while, not even them.

If you do choose to try some of these movies, my advice is "Don't think, you'll only hurt the ballclub." They were not meant to be understood literally, but emotionally, so don't try to figure them out; just watch them and react.