The Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (1966)

The Professionals is a well-made, fast-paced action-adventure western starring Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan and Woody Strode. Alternate Oscar guru Erik Beck, whose site News From The Boston Becks I refer to more often than a preacher refers to the Bible, calls it a comedy, and while I doubt it's ever otherwise been characterized as such, I can see his point. It's a sharp, witty caper flick with a team of amusing specialists engaged in a job that should get everybody killed by the end of the first reel but you damn well know won't—a sort of Ocean's Eleven, if you will, set in the Mexican desert.

It's a very good western, and maybe the best of a list of those that, despite its cast and three Oscar nominations, no one seems to have ever heard of. And it is better than any of the overt comedies you can name from 1966, perhaps the worst year for American comedies since Americans started making comedies.

But ultimately underneath all the rousing action is a melancholy meditation on the end of things (in this specific case, the Mexican Revolution) that, to me at least, makes The Professionals both a sublime western and something other than a comedy.

"La Revolución," Jack Palance says in a great speech toward the end of the film, "is like a great love affair. In the beginning, she is a goddess. A holy cause. But every love affair has a terrible enemy—time. We see her as she is. La Revolución is not a goddess but a whore. She was never pure, never saintly, never perfect. And we run away, find another lover, another cause. Quick, sordid affairs. Lust, but no love. Passion, but no compassion. Without love, without a cause, we are nothing! We stay because we believe. We leave because we are disillusioned. We come back because we are lost. We die because we are committed."

Anyway, for me The Professionals falls on the drama side of the rather useless drama-comedy divide. Which leaves me without a real choice for best picture (comedy/musical) for 1966.

I could have gone with Alfie, which features Michael Caine's absolutely superb performance as a swinging Cockney nitwit who never grasps the human cost of his free-love lifestyle, but overall Alfie, like a sandwich that's been in the refrigerator too long, hasn't aged well and leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

As for the other possibilities, Harper is a minor, though entertaining, Paul Newman take on Ross Macdonald's great Lew Archer detective series; and The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, Lord Love A Duck and A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum try too hard to be "wacky" and "zany," a problem shared by many of the comedies of that era.

In the end, I went for the last film standing, Cul-de-sac, Roman Polanski's twisted retelling of the basic Desperate Hours/Key Largo set-up: an inept crook (Lionel Stander) who's clearly seen too many gangster movies holds a disfunctional couple (Donald Pleasance, Françoise Dorléac) hostage during a home invasion while he waits for his own personal Godot to arrive and whisk him away to safety. Instead of murder and mayhem, though, we get cross-dressing, couples therapy and late-night confessionals, and even a bit of Godfrey-style butling courtesy of the gangster when unexpected guests arrive.

Cul-de-sac has more of a weird vibe than a screwball one, and it's not riotously funny to be sure, but it is sickly fascinating nonetheless.

Speaking of Polanski, I've mentioned him once before in a post I called "Cognitive Dissonance," the gist of which is that I think Polanski is (or was, anyway) a great filmmaker who is also a despicable human being. That he made great movies (particularly Chinatown) doesn't in any way excuse what he has done as a man, and I'd only ever shake hands with him in order to slap cuffs on his wrists in preparation for leading him off to the prison in California he will evidently never see.

At the same time, though, unless a movie is in and of itself despicable—Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will comes to mind—I won't condemn it just because I don't like the person who made it. Because lets face it, some of those people in Hollywood are absolute rats.

So judging Cul-de-sac on its own merits, rather than on Polanski's, I've reluctantly chosen it as the best English-language comedy of 1966.

Really, though, you should watch The Professionals instead.

PICTURE (Drama)
winner: Blow-Up (prod. Carlo Ponti)
nominees: A Man For All Seasons (prod. Fred Zinnemann); The Professionals (prod. Richard Brooks); Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (prod. Ernest Lehman)

PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Cul-de-sac (prod. Gene Gutowski, Michael Klinger and Tony Tenser)
nominees: Alfie (prod. Lewis Gilbert); Harper (prod. Jerry Gershwin and Elliott Kastner)

PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: Persona (prod. Ingmar Bergman)
nominees: Andrei Rublev (prod. Tamara Ogorodnikova); Au Hasard Balthazar (prod. Mag Bodard); La battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers) (prod. Antonio Musu and Yacef Saadi); Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) (prod. Alberto Grimaldi); Masculin-Feminin (prod. Anatole Dauman)

ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Richard Burton (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?)
nominees: Rock Hudson (Seconds); Steve McQueen (The Sand Pebbles); Paul Scofield (A Man For All Seasons)

ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Michael Caine (Alfie)
nominees: Alan Arkin (The Russian Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming); Paul Newman (Harper); Don Knotts (The Ghost and Mr. Chicken); Zero Mostel (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum); Donald Pleasence (Cul-de-sac); Lionel Stander (Cul-de-sac)

ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Elizabeth Taylor (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?)
nominees: Anouk Aimée (Un homme et une femme a.k.a. A Man and a Woman); Bibi Andersson (Persona); Liv Ullmann (Persona)

ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Lynn Redgrave (Georgy Girl)
nominees: Vanessa Redgrave (Morgan!); Tuesday Weld (Lord Love a Duck); Joanne Woodward (A Big Hand for the Little Lady)

DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: Michelangelo Antonioni (Blow-Up)
nominees: Ingmar Bergman (Persona); Robert Bresson (Au Hasard Balthazar); Richard Brooks (The Professionals); Jean-Luc Godard (Masculin-Feminin); Sergio Leone (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo a.k.a. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly); Mike Nichols (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?); Gillo Pontecorvo (La battaglia di Algeri a.k.a. The Battle of Algiers); Andrei Tarkovsky (Andrei Rublev)

DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Jirí Menzel (Ostre sledované vlaky a.k.a. Closely Watched Trains)
nominees: Lewis Gilbert (Alfie); Roman Polanski (Cul-de-sac)

SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Walter Matthau (The Fortune Cookie)
nominees: Jack Gilford (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way To the Forum); George Segal (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?); Josef Somr (Ostre sledované vlaky a.k.a. Closely Watched Trains); Eli Wallach (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo a.k.a. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Sandy Dennis (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?)
nominees: Wendy Hiller (A Man For All Seasons); Vivien Merchant (Alfie); Shelley Winters (Harper and Alfie)

SCREENPLAY
winner: Robert Bolt, from his play (A Man For All Seasons)
nominees: Richard Brooks, from the novel A Mule for the Marquesa by Frank O’Rourke (The Professionals); Ernest Lehman, from the play by Edward Albee (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?)

SPECIAL AWARDS
Ennio Morricone (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo a.k.a. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) (Score); Conrad Hall (The Professionals) (Cinematography); The Endless Summer (Documentary)

Cognitive Dissonance

And the current carries us farther yet from the essay for best director of 1930-31 ...

The ever reliable Wikipedia describes cognitive dissonance as that "uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously" and suggests that most people instinctively try to bring the two ideas into harmony by either changing their belief structure so the two ideas are no longer in conflict or rationalizing away one of the two ideas, again to reduce the conflict.

Yesterday's seemingly innocent picture of Errol Flynn inadvertently created a lot of cognitive dissonance when, between Douglas Fairbanks's dirty joking and my own curiosity, we discovered that Flynn's already shady past cast darker shadows than we here at the Monkey had imagined. Not just a "dashing ladies man who drank too much and tickled Basil Rathbone's ribs with the blade," as I put it on Thingy's blog, "Pondering Life," Flynn was a serial seducer of underage girls (tried in 1943 but acquitted on charges of raping two teenagers and engaged to marry a fifteen year old at the time of his death in 1959), as well as, at least on one documented occasion, an anti-Semitic blowhard.

One biographer has even charged he was a spy for Hitler's Germany (although others contend he was a leftist drinking buddy of Fidel Castro's and the British government a few years ago revealed that during the last days of World War II, Flynn was actually a spy for the British).

In any event, nasty business.

Which is a bit of a problem because I, for one, like Errol Flynn's movies, particularly The Adventures of Robin Hood. Am I required to like Errol Flynn as well or otherwise have to explain away his private behavior before I can admit to such? Or should I just stop watching his movies altogether?

The instinctive sense that I need to choose one of these options is cognitive dissonance.

There was an even bigger example of cognitive dissonance in the movie-fan blogosphere recently when Switzerland arrested Roman Polanski in advance of extraditing him to the United States to face sentencing following his 1978 guilty plea to unlawful sexual intercourse—a subject I hadn't planned to address in any fashion until my cryogenically-frozen head reaches 1974's Chinatown in this blog, sometime around the turn of the next century.

In my notes for the essay about the best director of 1974 (yes, I've made notes that far ahead— I've even written about Amy Adams's 2008 performance in Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day and Lord knows you'll be waiting forever before I get around to posting it), I have written: "Judgment of Polanski the man I leave to you, to God, to history, to Polanski's own withered conscience and to the appropriate legal authorities in any event. I certainly wouldn't want anything I've said about Polanski the artist to be construed as a defense of Polanski the man."

That's pretty much how I feel about Errol Flynn. And a lot of other people, too.

The farther I get into blogging about movies and their history, the clearer it becomes that the people who made great movies weren't necessarily great people, and certainly what you see on the screen doesn't reflect what you would have seen in their private lives. John Ford was an insufferable bastard, Henry Fonda was a terrible father, Woody Allen married his girlfriend's daughter. Dalton Trumbo was a Communist, Ward Bond hated Communists, Elia Kazan informed on his friends. Veronica Lake earned the nickname "the Bitch," Margaret Sullavan was a depressed alcoholic and Betty Hutton was as crazy as an outhouse rat. Clark Gable had bad breath and Joan Crawford's and Marilyn Monroe's legendary shortcomings I dare say you know about.

Renee Zellweger was reportedly so difficult on the set of Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason that afterwards her co-stars Hugh Grant and Colin Firth announced their (thankfully short-lived) retirements from the movies. Jane Greer, on the other hand, was as sweet as chess pie, as loyal as a faithful dog and as brave as your average Marine, but that doesn't mean she wasn't absolutely riveting as the murderous femme fatale Kathy Moffit in the noir classic, Out of the Past.

There are any number of ways you can handle unpleasant information about the people who make movies. My father refused to watch Jane Fonda because of her politics; my mother-in-law still won't watch John Wayne because of his. Which is a pity from the point of view of the movie fan because it means you miss out on Klute and The Searchers, two great movies with two great performances that, I'll tip my hand now, will win their respective stars Katie Awards.

You can also go the other way and excuse behavior of your heroes you would never forgive of your enemies. Thus you'll find plenty of petitions seeking to free Roman Polanski despite committing a crime you'd insist your neighbor be buried for. Our brains are hard-wired that way, or so scientists tell us, something to remember the next you (or I) want to beat someone senseless for taking a position we don't agree with, but there's not much future for the republic if we're forever choosing to behave like territorial pack animals.

In writing this blog, I have opted for a third way. I have in the past and will continue in the future to distill out the professional from the personal, the on-screen persona from the private one, and though I have written about both, and will continue to do so, I've been choosing awards and reviewing movies strictly based on the former. Some of the winners have been creeps and some have been saints, but all of them have done something on screen that I think is worth your time and attention.

It's either that or stop writing about movies altogether. But then anything you write is guaranteed to offend somebody. After all, I imagine there are still some people out there who insist the world is flat. You can't please everybody.

So when 1938 rolls around, I will go ahead and lavish praise on The Adventures of Robin Hood and its star, Errol Flynn, no matter what he may or may not have done when he wasn't wearing green tights and a feather in his cap.

You're okay with that, right?