Author: Alan Kuhl Graham

Six Damn Fine Degrees #304: Erm… Misremembered Movies

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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!

Back in the mid-’90s I was living in a shared house, and one evening we decided to rent the Tony Scott movie True Romance. We enjoyed its mix of action, violence and Tarantino dialogue – all of which seemed to match the popular zeitgeist of the time. Then we got to the ending, when one of my housemates suddenly got incredibly animated.

“That’s NOT how it ends!”

We turned, slightly perplexed. I mean, we had just watched the thing. We had all seen the same ending, with the two leads driving into the sunset.

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One Best Picture After Another #12: Gone With The Wind (1939)

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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?

8/10

It speaks volumes about the vast cultural impact of Gone With The Wind that, when I was a kid, it still enjoyed some status as a reference point. We recognised the line “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”, even if we didn’t really know where it came from. This was over forty years after its release and yet it still had a popular legacy.

Despite all this, I did not actually see the film for quite a long time. Even when I got older and got into watching classic films, I never quite felt the pull to make me want to get the VHS, or later the DVD, of this film. It took until the 21st century, and a screening at London’s prestigious British Film Institute cinema for me to finally resolve to see it.

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One Best Picture After Another #11: You Can’t Take It With You (1938)

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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

There’s a term that’s sometimes used to refer to the works of Frank Capra that I dislike. It’s “Capra Corn”. It feels too much like a sneer at the director who genuinely tried to make popular cinema, and embraced storytelling that would be emotionally engaging to the widest possible audience. I always want to push back against it, to celebrate an innovative director and his earnest attempts to make intelligent, heart-warming cinema.

But, bloody hell, he sometimes makes that difficult.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #301: The Nightmare Fuel of “Sapphire And Steel”

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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!

I can vividly recall a number of recurring dreams I had as a child that terrified me. One involved a burning photo, with the person in the image seemingly aware they were on fire. Another involved discovering that people, when hugged, would crumble into nothing. But worst of all would be to be unsettled by a man with his back to me. Only for him to turn around and reveal that he did not have a face.

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One Best Picture After Another #10: The Life Of Emile Zola (1937)

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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

A surprising number of Best Picture winning films can be described as “Truly Forgotten”. For all their success at the time, they have left no cultural trace. They don’t get shown again in retro cinemas, nor do they get fancy extras-laden 4K Criterion releases.

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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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