An Affair to Remember: 1991, Part Seven

Christmas Day audiences had a full menu in 1991: the Wim Wenders epic, the latest Lawrence Kasdan navel-gazer, a French film adaptation of a French literary classic, and the adaptation of a best-selling novel about a married man who falls in love with his sister's married therapist. Decisions, decisions! Audiences chose Hook; the Academy chose The Prince of Tides.

Based upon the 1986 best-selling novel of the same name by Pat Conroy,  The Prince of Tides was the second directorial effort for Barbra Streisand, who cast herself and Nick Nolte as the leads. The film wound up in the Top 20 highest-grossing films of 1991 and received seven Academy Award nominations - but not for Best Director, the only Best Picture nominee not to get a nomination in that category. As Billy Crystal sang, "Did this film direct myself?" Streisand would only direct one more film, 1996's The Mirror Has Two Faces.

Here are six of the films Vhristmas audiences could enjoy:

A Holiday for Murder: 1991, Part Six

It’s been a longtime tradition that studios save their Oscar hopefuls for the end of the year - closer to voting, fresh in the memory. It's no surprise, then, that three of the five Best Picture nominees were all released in December, two of them in the timeline we present today: December before Christmas. One of those is Bugsy:

Bugsy is a biopic of Benjamin Siegel (Warren Beatty), a Jewish gangster whose titular nickname was then-contemporaneous slang for crazy, due to his tendency to violently fly off the handle. Siegel invented Las Vegas as we know it today; the film gets into the risks he took, the tension between East Coast mobster Meyer Lansky (Ben Kingsley) and West Coast mobster Mickey Cohen (Harvey Keitel), his romance with Virginia Hill (Annette Bening), whose legs inspired the name of the casino-hotel The Flamingo, and more. It was not a total success at the box office, but director Barry Levinson blamed that on the fact that their distributor was more focused on the release of Hook, which came out just nine days before. Well, Bugsy got a Best Picture nomination and two Oscars; Hook was the #6 Box Office Hit of 1991 and won zero of its five Oscar nominations and had the larger cultural impact (my generation certainly seemed to hail it as a masterpiece), so who really won here?

The other nominee is JFK. 

Oliver Stone had already made a name for himself as the button-pushing, Oscar-winning filmmaker behind Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, as well as the screenplay for Midnight Express - this three-hour-and-change epic focuses on one New Orleans-based lawyer fixating on the much-discussed conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy and the subsequent cover-up. Not your typical holiday blockbuster fare, but it made over $200M worldwide, won two Oscars, and permeated the culture (even Seinfeld has an episode referencing a “magic loogie”).

It makes you feel for the no-doubt hopefuls that played at the same time. Such as:

True As It Can Be: 1991, Part Five

Since the Academy Awards began, only three animated films have won Best Picture. Two of them, Toy Story 3 and Up, are seen by many as beneficiaries of the Academy's 2009 expansion of the nominees to ten. The first animated Best Picture nominee didn't need an expanded ballot, it had the juice to take one of only five slots reserved for the very best in cinema, as decided by the people who make it. That was Beauty and the Beast:

After two decades of output that offered more curiosities than classics, the studio returned to making musical adaptations of fairy tales, as it had in the early days with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella. The Little Mermaid was a hit in 1989, and now came Beauty and the Beast, the "tale as old as time" about a beautiful young woman who, to save her father, offers herself as a prisoner to the owner of an enchanted castle: a prince cursed to live as a beast. Released the Friday before Thanksgiving, it proved to be no turkey. The songs, the canny casting (Angela Lansbury! Jerry Orbach!), the animation, the writing, all of it struck a chord with audiences and critics. It wrapped up the year as #3 at the box office and won two of its six Academy Award nominations. The success inspired a live-action Disney Channel pre-school series, a Broadway musical, a straight-to-video spinoff (with Tim Curry and Bernadette Peters!), and, eventually, a not-as-good live-action remake.

We'll get more into it when we discuss the Best Picture nominees. Meanwhile, that entire Autumn is full of instant classics and off-the-beaten-track masterpieces:

A Drag: 1991, Part Four

Summer slips into Autumn at the 1991 multiplexes, with a legendary documentary, a hit for Terry Gilliam, and a backloaded September:

Blockbuster Summer: 1991, Part Three

Summertime is the season for blockbusters, has been since 1975. The biggest hit of 1991 came out Fourth of July weekend, a movie that didn't just spend four weeks at #1, but wound up the #1 movie of the year, the first of three times director James Cameron could claim the top spot of the year. Obviously, I'm talking about Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

After the success of 1984's The Terminator, a sequel may have seemed inevitable, but it was a process getting started. James Cameron didn't want to do one, and besides, he had had a falling-out with the production company that held half the rights (Cameron's ex Gale Ann Hurd held the other half). Arnold Schwarzenegger did want a sequel, and he convinced Carolco Pictures, which had produced Total Recall, to purchase the rights and move forward - they even set a release date for Memorial Day weekend, before a storyline was even set. So, Cameron came back, and soon, it was the typical stories for a James Cameron film: behind schedule, over-budget, with reports that it cost too much to ever see profit. They were finishing post-production all the way up until the star-studded premiere on July 1; two days later, it hit screens.

A juggernaut. Not only did it take the top spot at the box office for the weekend, it broke the record for Fourth of July weekend releases. And everyone saw it, men, women, and children. It held onto the top spot for the entirety of July, sticking around long enough to end the year as 1991's highest grossing film. Right below it? Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, which had come out three weeks before...and which we'll also discuss below, alongside eleven others:

Guns Blazin': 1991, Part Two

The Silence of the Lambs continued its dominance for five weeks until Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze debuted. Eventually, the #1 spot was taken by City Slickers, which ended the year as the #5 hit of 1991, and which we get into below. But one movie that never topped the box office still became not just an Oscar winner, not just one of the year's top earners, but a cultural moment, debated by critics, audiences, and scholars: Thelma & Louise.

The brainchild of writer Callie Khouri, Thelma & Louise was born of her frustration with women's parts in cinema, and was originally set to be an indie film with Khouri directing. When the script got into Ridley Scott's hands, however, things changed: he came on as producer, and, after several others passed, eventually took on the directing reins, enticing actresses like Jodie Foster, Meryl Streep, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Goldie Hawn before the final duo of Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon were cast. And when it finally did come out, oh my goodness, what a furor. Was it feminist? Was it anti-male? Khouri and critic Janet Maslin said people who were offended were mis-aligning their sympathies (a nice way of saying, "a hit dog will holler"). It's a conversation that's still being had as subsequent generations discover the film; that, and what happens after the fade to white in the final frame, a sequence parodied over and over again in films (Wayne's World 2), television (Family Guy), commercials, and beyond. It's also the movie that changed the fortunes of the ab-solutely hunky drifter Louise takes up with, one Brad Pitt. And, did you know, just 19 days ago, a musical version of the film premiered in London, written by Callie Khouri with original songs by Neko Case? The legacy continues...

And it all happened here, in 1991, just one among these twelve releases:

The Early Bird: 1991, Part One

We start 1991 not in January, but in February. Partly because it just happened to work out that way. And partly because 1991's movie year - full of legends, beauty and the Beast and Thelma & Louise and JFK and Paris is Burning and Soapdish - can be said to center around the February box office smash that became a home video sensation, with enough heat to win Best Picture a year and a month after its initial release. Yes, yes: The Silence of the Lambs.

The film has an interesting pedigree for a blockbuster and Oscar winner. Based on a pulp paperback thriller, The Silence of the Lambs follows FBI trainee Clarice Starling as she hunts down a serial killer who skins his female victims; in her mission, she consults with the imprisoned murderer-psychiatrist-cannibal-genius Hannibal Lecter, who plays his own mind games with her. The director is Jonathan Demme, who by this time had become more known for his critically-acclaimed comedies like Melvin and Howard and Married to the Mob, though he initially broke through with exploitation pictures for Roger Corman, such as Caged Heat and Crazy Mama. The stars are Jodie Foster, a former child star who, with her Oscar-winning turn in 1988's The Accused, graduated into Serious Adult Actor, and Anthony Hopkins, a Welsh actor more known to the US for serious prestige work like The Lion in Winter or 87 Charing Cross Road. Together with writer Ted Tally, they made what could have been a lurid thriller and turned it into a hit with critics and audiences - and an enduring cinema classic.

Oh, yes, classic. We don't like to think of anything made after the 1960s as a classic, but it's been 35 years, I think we can say it, and The Silence of the Lambs more than qualifies, if just for how ubiquitous the film's iconography has become. Yes, the book series by Thomas Harris was already popular, and Michael Mann adapted Red Dragon into Manhunter in 1986, but it's the success of The Silence of the Lambs that gives us a four-film franchise, two television series (Hannibal and the short-lived Clarice), a musical parody (Silence! The Musical), decades of references (Zootopia 2 just last year paid homage), and even an "unconventional biography" (Brian Raftery's Hannibal Lecter: A Life, published just this February). Even during the film's first month of release, you could feel it: Foster and Hopkins presented the writing awards at the Academy Awards for 1990, just one month after The Silence of the Lambs came our, and were introduced with great fanfare and greeted by loud applause. When the VHS came out in October, it became the most rented video in the country. When the Academy Awards for 1991 were held the next year, the film became the third (and, so far, final) to win The Big Five: Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Screenplay (adapted, in this case). That's a lot of momentum to carry for a year, but it had the goods.

And to think, in some places it played alongside these films: