TCM: Leading up to the Oscars

 

This past Saturday was an all day long love affair with TCM. (it often is).  They have been running many Oscar winning movies leading up to Oscar day.  Saturday was the day of the epics! sheesh............  we are talking looooong movies!  But ya know what?.. I had no problem watching them!  I never say a movie is "too long", never.  In the case of the two I watched the other day, well.. the full stories just would not be told if they hadn't made them so long.   So beautiful.   So dramatic.  Fabulous movies all of them!

Lawrence of Arabia  (3  hr 36 min) 1962 Oscar Winner

Amazon.com
There's no getting around a simple, basic truth: watching Lawrence of Arabia in any home-video format represents a compromise. There's no better way to appreciate this epic biographical adventure than to see it projected in 70 millimeter onto a huge theater screen. That caveat aside, David Lean's masterful "desert classic" is still enjoyable on the small screen, especially if viewed in widescreen format. (If your only option is to view a "pan & scan" version, it's best not to bother; this is a film for which the widescreen format is utterly mandatory.) Peter O'Toole gives a star-making performance as T.E. Lawrence, the eccentric British officer who united the desert tribes of Arabia against the Turks during World War I. Lean orchestrates sweeping battle sequences and breathtaking action, but the film is really about the adventures and trials that transform Lawrence into a legendary man of the desert. Lean traces this transformation on a vast canvas of awesome physicality; no other movie has captured the expanse of the desert with such scope and grandeur. Equally important is the psychology of Lawrence, who remains an enigma even as we grasp his identification with the desert. Perhaps the greatest triumph of this landmark film is that Lean has conveyed the romance, danger, and allure of the desert with such physical and emotional power. It's a film about a man who leads one life but is irresistibly drawn to another, where his greatness and mystery are allowed to flourish in equal measure.

   

A young Peter O'Toole, little known to the movie world but very much known as  a stage actor.. until this movie.  He certainly paid  his dues making this movie!

He got to play along with the ever so gorgeous Omar Sharif  .. heat be still !

I also watched  Cleopatra    (3 hr 12 min) 1963 Oscar winner

 

Amazon.com essential video
This 1963 extravaganza, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, is certainly an epic historical drama with all the elements: elaborate sets, intricate costuming, name actors, a factual basis, and an overlong script (just over four hours). But the acting is well performed and the backdrops are lush, making this a film worth seeing. Elizabeth Taylor is Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen who seduces Julius Caesar (Rex Harrison) in a political move to hold onto her empire. When Caesar is killed in the Roman Senate, Cleopatra looks to Marc Antony (Richard Burton) for his support, practically enslaving him with her wiles. Taylor is dramatic in her role, at times overly serious, but stunning nonetheless as the woman described as "well versed in the natural sciences and mathematics. She speaks seven languages proficiently. Were she not a woman one would consider her to be an intellectual." While the film does seem to drag at moments, it deserves the four Oscars it won for cinematography, art direction-set direction, costumes, and special effects. Don't confuse this Cleopatra with the 1934 version directed by Cecil B. DeMille and starring Claudette Colbert.

   

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton... I need not say another word!

 

Today the movies being shown are of a more normal length... and later they are showing one of my absolute favorites that I never miss if I can help it!...

...at 3:30 today my favorite John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara movie is on "A Quiet Man" (1952)

 

Directed by the best western director ever, John Ford.  I cannot watch this movie and not want to rush right off to see Ireland!  The scenery Ford captured has got to be some of the best ever in a movie.

Amazon.com essential video
Blarney and bliss, mixed in equal proportions. John Wayne plays an American boxer who returns to the Emerald Isle, his native land. What he finds there is a fiery prospective spouse (Maureen O'Hara) and a country greener than any Ireland seen before or since--it's no surprise The Quiet Man won an Oscar for cinematography. It also won an Oscar for John Ford's direction, his fourth such award. The film was a deeply personal project for Ford (whose birth name was Sean Aloysius O'Fearna), and he lavished all of his affection for the Irish landscape and Irish people on this film. He also stages perhaps the greatest donnybrook in the history of movies, an epic fistfight between Wayne and the truculent Victor McLaglen--that's Ford's brother, Francis, as the elderly man on his deathbed who miraculously revives when he hears word of the dustup. Barry Fitzgerald, the original Irish elf, gets the movie's biggest laugh when he walks into the newlyweds' bedroom the morning after their wedding, and spots a broken bed. The look on his face says everything. The Quiet Man isn't the real Ireland, but as a delicious never-never land of Ford's imagination, it will do very nicely.

   (doesn't she look angelic? LOL LOL.. sorry,  you have to see the movie to appreciate that face!)

One of the most famous scenes in the movie is when John Wayne drags Maureen O'Hara all the way home, with half of the town following and watching!

Oh forbid I should get away with just enjoying "free movies"...

..while looking for pics to show you I found out that Maureen O'Hara wrote her Autobiography!  (dang! another book on the wish list!! sigh..) It's called

'Tis Herself: an Autobiography

I won't even try to suggest a John Wayne book.. I looked in Amazon and there are more than 20 books about him, so you're on your own if you want one on him!

What a weekend of movies !  And the Oscars are just around the corner.