Deal Me In 

Our theme this week
Card games at the movies

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   The Cincinnati Kid (1965)
Tuesday         —   Rounders (1998)
Wednesday    —   The Sting (1973)

Born Yesterday (1950)

Two sexes can play that game.  The game of cards in Born Yesterday is gin.  The lesson is:  don’t underestimate the dumb blonde.

Her name is Billie Dawn (Judy Holliday), and she’s not nearly as dumb as you think.  She accompanies her crude and crooked tycoon boss Harry Brock (Broderick Crawford) while he’s in Washington to peddle influence (we have made progress:  these days it takes a more refined class to buy off politicians).  Meanwhile, Brock hires a tutor (William Holden) to give Billie an “education.”  What she learns, among other things, is to think for herself.

The performances carry the picture, and Holliday, in reprising the role she played on stage, steals the show.  What’s more:  she stole the Academy Award for Best Actress, competing in a year against two of the most sensational performances in the history of movies.  Gloria Swanson (Sunset Boulevard) and Bette Davis (All About Eve) never did finer work, but went home empty-handed on Oscar night.  Schneider!

The Gin Game (scene continues for first minute)

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Oscar Déjà Vu

Our theme this week (theme introduction)
Film titles with two Oscar nominations for Best Picture

Featured this week
Monday         —   Moulin Rouge (1952, 2001)
Tuesday         —   Cleopatra (1934, 1963)
Wednesday    —   Heaven Can Wait (1943, 1978)

Romeo and Juliet (1936, 1968)

Romeo and Juliet (1936)
Director:  George Cukor
Writer:  Talbot Jennings; based on the play by William Shakespeare
Cast:  Norma Shearer (Juliet), Leslie Howard (Romeo), John Barrymore (Mercutio), Basil Rathbone (Tybalt), Edna May Oliver (The Nurse)
Oscar Summary:  4 nominations, including Picture, Actress (Shearer), Supporting Actor (Rathbone); no wins

Romeo and Juliet (1968)
Director:  Franco Zeffirelli
Writers:  Franco Brusati, Masolino D’Amico, Franco Zeffirelli; based on the play by William Shakespeare
Cast:  Leonard Whiting (Romeo), Olivia Hussey (Juliet), John McEnery (Mercutio), Milo O’Shea (Friar Lawrence), Michael York (Tybalt)
Oscar Summary:  4 nominations, including Picture, Director; 2 wins (Cinematography, Costume Design)

For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

The Juliet of this tale is Norma Shearer, one of Hollywood’s biggest stars going back to the silent era.  Her husband, for nearly a decade, was the legendary producer Irving Thalberg.  Thalberg made Romeo and Juliet for MGM, spending double the original budget, and further straining his already-deteriorated friendship with studio boss Louis B. Mayer.  Thalberg had earned his nickname the Boy Wonder for his uncanny talent for making box office hits, but this was not one of them.  His film about the pair of star-cross’d lovers went on to lose a million dollars, and Hollywood shied away from Shakespeare for several years afterward.  Shearer did earn an Oscar nomination, as did the picture, but the film was an especially sad landmark in her life.  On the day the film had its premiere in Los Angeles, Thalberg died of pneumonia, at the age of 37.

Shearer was 33 when she made the film.  Her co-star, Leslie Howard, was 42.  That’s probably not the casting that Shakespeare had in mind.  In the play, Juliet is 13.  Romeo’s age is never stated, but he’s young (“Upon whose tender chin, as yet, no manlike beard there grew”).  Even by Hollywood standards, the Shearer-Howard leads were a stretch.

Franco Zeffirelli cast two young actors whose combined age was about that of Shearer’s alone.  Olivia Hussey was 15, Leonard Whiting 17 (give or take a year, depending on the source).  Romeo and Juliet is the pinnacle of Zeffirelli’s film career.  He got his start during the late ’40s as an assistant to Luchino Visconti on La Terra Trema, and his career has been one classy production after another—some of it Shakespeare (The Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet), much of it opera (La Traviata, Otello), and a notable TV miniseries (Jesus of Nazareth, with Hussey as Mary).  His 1968 film won raves at the time and is one of the most highly regarded and popular screen adaptations of Shakespeare.  Much of the credit goes to the young actors, who seem just right for their parts, natural fits for those lovers of Verona of long ago.  The focus in the Zeffirelli film is the passion between Romeo and Juliet (not necessarily the case with other adaptations; see Baz Luhrmann).  It’s a beautiful film to look at and listen to—one for the ages.

Beyond the final credits
She isn’t as well-remembered as some others from her time, but Norma Shearer was a huge star.  Soon after she came to Hollywood, she co-starred with Lon Chaney in the first Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production, He Who Gets Slapped (1924).  By 1925 she was making $1,000 a week, and a lot more soon after that.  She made the transition to talkies with The Trial of Mary Dugan (1929), and won an Oscar for The Divorcee (one of her six nominations).  Her other notable films include A Free Soul (1931), The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), Marie Antoinette (1938), Idiot’s Delight (1939), and The Women (1939).  She was the inspiration for one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short stories, “Crazy Sunday.”  For his final, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald based the character of movie mogul Monroe Stahr on Shearer’s husband, Irving Thalberg.  Shearer retired from movies when she remarried in 1942.

“The only way to find the best actor would be to let everybody play Hamlet and let the best man win.”
—Humphrey Bogart (1951)

“If there’s one thing that actors know, other than that there weren’t any WMDs, it’s that there is no such thing as best in acting.”
—Sean Penn (2004)

“What does the Academy Award mean?  I don’t think it means much of anything.”
—Sally Field (1980)

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