Author: Alan Kuhl Graham

One Best Picture After Another #9: The Great Ziegfeld (1936)

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Welcome to One Best Picture After Another – where I attempt to watch all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture, starting at the very beginning. And attempt to answer two simple questions – is the film still actually any good? And why did it win?

6/10

When I first looked through the complete list of films that I’d be watching for this exercise, one of the titles that stood out was The Great Ziegfeld. There was one reason for this – William Powell. He plays the lead in this film and I’m a huge fan of his. Yet despite being someone who long ago fell for the man’s charms, I’d never watched this particular film. Mainly because, unlike the likes of My Man Godfrey, How To Marry A Millionaire and especially The Thin Man, it’s not a film of his that gets remembered and rescreened alongside those classics. Even among dedicated Powell-istas (Powell-ites? Powell-ians?) its reputation is that of a bit of a dud.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #297: The Rise And Fall Of Jonathan Creek

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Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

There’s something fun about discovering a show via word of mouth. When friends who know you well start asking if you’ve seen the latest thing on television because, in their opinion, it’s “very you”. And then the subsequent joy when you finally get round to watching it and discover that it is indeed “very me”.

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One Best Picture After Another #8: Mutiny On The Bounty (1935)

Alan Kuhl Graham1 Comment

Welcome to One Best Picture After Another – where I attempt to watch all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture, starting at the very beginning. And attempt to answer two simple questions – is the film still actually any good? And why did it win?

6/10

A year after It Happened One Night won the Oscar and Clark Gable is already back in the next winning film with Mutiny On The Bounty. Another triumph that reflected his popularity with audiences and critics in the mid-1930s. Or, to put it more bluntly, he was a Star.

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One Best Picture After Another #7: It Happened One Night (1934)

Alan Kuhl Graham1 Comment

Welcome to One Best Picture After Another – where I attempt to watch all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture, starting at the very beginning. And attempt to answer two simple questions – is the film still actually any good? And why did it win?

10/10

It Happened One Night is an Academy Award winning film that still has a high profile for a production made in the Thirties. It’s one of those movies that can be safely recommended to those who are interested in early classic cinema, and its the first film so far from all the Oscar winners that I was already a massive fan of.

But revisiting a few old friends is going to be part of this journey, and so it was joyous to dig out my own copy of this and put it in for the umpteenth time. And, unsurprisingly, it’s still brilliant. Rewatching it is also a reminder of why it’s hard to find anything new to say that hasn’t been said dozens of times before in the 92 years since it was a hit. This isn’t a complicated film: what it does is really quite simple. But it just does it so, so well.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #293: High Society And Other Technicolor Remakes

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Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

Last week, Julie wrote about two attempts to tell the same story on the big screen – a reminder that, ever since the beginning of cinema, people have gone back to what has gone before to have another stab at it. And as long as there have been remakes, there have been critics giving them a bad reputation. All my life I’ve had to read movie think pieces that declare that cinema is doomed by the lack of new ideas, as exemplified by the latest high-profile remake.

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One Best Picture After Another #6: Cavalcade (1933)

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Welcome to One Best Picture After Another – where I attempt to watch all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture, starting at the very beginning. And attempt to answer two simple questions – is the film still actually any good? And why did it win?

3/10

Cavalcade has a lot in common with previous winner Cimmaron. Just like that film, the story here stretches over decades, focusing on a few characters as they change and develop over time. It also references major events over that period, as we watch them impact on the ordinary lives we are following. Both films belong on the list of Oscar winners that have truly been forgotten by the passage of time.

It also shares the quality that it is utterly mystifying to me how such an incredibly awful film won the Best Picture Award.

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One Best Picture After Another #5: Grand Hotel (1932)

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Welcome to One Best Picture After Another – where I attempt to watch all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture, starting at the very beginning. And attempt to answer two simple questions – is the film still actually any good? And why did it win?

7/10

In 1930 a play called Grand Hotel opened on Broadway and was an instant success. Such a triumph led to a film adaptation, packed full of some of the biggest stars of the day, that struck box office gold, critical acclaim and eventually won the Academy Award. None of this was an accident: all of it was masterminded by MGM’s super producer Irving Thalberg.

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One Best Picture After Another #4: Cimarron (1931)

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Welcome to One Best Picture After Another – where I attempt to watch all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture, starting at the very beginning. And attempt to answer two simple questions – is the film still actually any good? And why did it win?

3/10

The past is a foreign country, they make films differently there. Both critically acclaimed and a box office hit back in 1931, Cimarron‘s appeal seems genuinely mystifying to me today. A Western saga set in Oklahoma that manages to be both clunky, messy and boring, despite having gun fights, family drama and a court case about sex work.

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One Best Picture After Another #3: All Quiet On The Western Front (1930)

Alan Kuhl Graham1 Comment

Welcome to One Best Picture After Another – where I attempt to watch all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture, starting at the very beginning. And attempt to answer two simple questions – is the film still actually any good? And why did it win?

10/10

When I was watching All Quiet On The Western Front, I couldn’t shake off the incredible fact that this was made in 1930. It feels so ahead of its time, a brilliant piece of work that casts a shadow on so many films made, not just that year, but for years to come. Mentally I’ve become so accustomed to accepting a certain level of production values when it comes to films made in the first decade of sound, that the fact this film comes along and blows all of that out the water is striking.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #285: Right Casting, Wrong Time

Alan Kuhl GrahamLeave a comment

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

Matt’s column last week about favourite actors reminded me of a curious, if rare, phenomenon. Where a great actor gets cast in a role they are clearly incredibly well suited for. And yet, somewhere in the back of my mind, I can’t help but feel that they would have been absolutely perfect for the role if they had been cast earlier in their career.

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