Oscar Film Journal: The Awful Truth (1937)

We're officially in the thick of Oscar season, so let's add another page to the Oscar Film Journal, here at Enuffa.com!

Still in the weeds of the 1930s (YouTube is a treasure trove of old public domain stuff), specifically the year 1937 and a screwball comedy by Duck Soup director Leo McCarey.  It's The Awful Truth, starring Irene Dunne and Cary Grant.  Based on a 1922 play, The Awful Truth is a simple story about a wealthy couple who have fallen out of love, and each is convinced the other is fooling around.  The husband, Jerry, returns home after a bender with the guys, having told his wife he'd be in Florida (He gets a fake tan to add to the subterfuge).  Meanwhile Lucy spent the night, apparently platonically, with her voice teacher Armand, triggering Jerry's jealousy.  The distrust has reached a breaking point and the couple decide to get a divorce.  Lucy goes to live with her aunt, whose neighbor Dan (Ralph Bellamy) is a rich, unmarried oil man.  Lucy and Dan begin dating and eventually get engaged.  Meanwhile Jerry has been granted visitation rights to his wife's dog Mr. Smith, giving him an avenue to cockblock Lucy and Dan's relationship.  Then later in the film Lucy gets some payback when Jerry starts dating a rich heiress, crashing her parents' dinner party in the guise of Jerry's sister.  Lots of comedic misunderstandings in this film, some of it reminiscent of the Marx Brothers.  The upshot of course is that Jerry and Lucy realize they still have feelings for each other, just as their divorce is being finalized.

Oscar Film Journal: Lady for a Day (1933)

Welcome to another page in the Oscar Film Journal, here at Enuffa.com!

Still in the 1930s weeds (Hey, there's a veritable treasure trove of public domain films on YouTube), and today it's an early Frank Capra talkie, Lady for a Day, starring Warren William and May Robson.  Based on a short story called Madame La Gimp, LFAD centers on a destitute fruit vendor named Apple Annie, who lives in a tiny apartment in Depression Era New York City.  Annie has a daughter Louise who's lived in a Spanish convent since she was a child (We're never told who the father was or why Louise was taken away), with whom she keeps written correspondence, under the pretense that she's a well-to-do dowager.  But one day Annie gets a letter saying Louise is engaged to the son of a wealthy Spanish count who insists on meeting his in-laws before he'll agree to the marriage, and that the three of them are en route to NYC by boat.  Terrified of being found out, Annie begs one of her customers, a gangster and gambler named Dave the Dude, to set her up with a room in the fancy hotel where he lives.  Dave initially refuses but Annie's fellow street peddlers convince him to help with the charade, and Dave himself doesn't want to lose Annie as a vendor because he thinks her apples bring him luck.  Thus Apple Annie becomes Mrs. E. Worthington Manville.  But things get a little complicated when reporters start asking questions, and Dave and his henchmen are forced to kidnap them for a little while.  The scheme must go off without a hitch despite everyone involved being a phony, and Dave and his goons must also evade the snooping police department...

Oscar Film Journal: Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)

And we're back with another entry in the Oscar Film Journal, here at Enuffa.com!  Time to head back to that grand decade known as the 1990s!

Today it's the British rom-com Four Weddings and a Funeral, directed by Mike Newell from a script by Richard Curtis, and starring Hugh Grant, Andie MacDowell, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Simon Callow.  Inspired by a period in his own life when Curtis went to literally dozens of weddings, this film is your garden-variety meet-cute story, told in an inventive manner, mostly through the titular events.  

Hugh Grant plays Charles, a handsome but socially awkward bachelor, whose group of unmarried friends and relatives routinely gets invited to various nuptial ceremonies en masse.  Charles and his roommate Scarlett are chronically late to these events, usually dashing in just before the bride makes her entrance.  We're introduced to numerous characters and get a sense of their various quirks and relationships to each other, but the exposition is kept mostly organic; we don't even learn what any of them does for work, as Curtis felt they wouldn't be having work-related conversations at these events.  

Oscar Film Journal: I'm Still Here (2024)

What's up, Enuffa.com fans?  Welcome back to the Oscar Film Journal!

Doin' a little catch-up from the 2024 slate of Best Pic nominees, today we're looking at I'm Still Here, directed by Walter Salles and starring Fernanda Torres in an Oscar-nominated turn.  This film is a political biopic about one of thousands of families affected by the abhorrent Brazilian military dictatorship that controlled the country from 1964 to 1985.  Dissenters were arrested, silenced, tortured, murdered and/or disappeared.  It's estimated that over 400 people were either killed or went missing, while over 20,000 were tortured, and it should be noted that the inciting coup for this regime in '64 had the full support of the United States government.  We sure do love spreading "freedom" across the globe, don't we?

Anyway, the film depicts the struggles of the Paiva family, led by former Brazilian Congressman Rubens and his wife Eunice.  Rubens has returned to civilian life as an engineer but still surreptitiously aids the resistance without his family's knowledge.  One day men with guns take him away for questioning, while others stay at the house to monitor the family.  Then they take Eunice and her daughter Eliana away as well, keeping Eunice imprisoned for twelve days before sending them both home again.  However Rubens is still missing, the government denies any wrongdoing (of course), and Eunice will have to spend literally decades trying to find out what happened to her husband.

Oscar Film Journal: Bad Girl (1931)

And now it's time for another Oscar Film Journal entry, here at Enuffa.com!

Back to the Depression era we go, with 1931's Bad Girl, an adaptation of the hit 1928 novel by Vina Delmar.  Directed by Frank Borzage and starring relative newcomers Sally Eilers and James Dunn, the film faced significant pushback from the infamous Hays Office for its subject matter.  The novel was a fairly explicit cautionary tale about premarital sex and accidental pregnancy (considered so lurid it was banned in Boston), and the uptight censors felt the story was unfilmable as-is.  But Fox Film Corporation came up with a treatment that cleaned up the story and made it more about an unlikely couple falling in love, getting married, getting unexpectedly pregnant, and worrying about money and each other's commitment level.  Still the studio hedged their bets and only granted a $100,000 budget (equivalent to a scant $2 million today), and cast two unknowns as the leads.  Amazingly the film was a critical and commercial smash hit, pulling in over $1 million and making stars of Eilers and Dunn, who'd be cast together in several subsequent projects.