The 1990 Retro Hollmann Awards: Part Three

OK, so we've got my Top Ten, part one of the awards, and part two of the awards. Now, the grand finale: part three of the 1990 Retro Hollmann Awards!

The 1990 Retro Hollmann Awards: Part One

This is the first of three posts this week, each dedicated to the 1990 Retro Hollmann Awards. No, I did not make a separate nominations announcement, all will be revealed as we go category by category. Get familiar with my Top Ten of this year, come back, and enjoy.

The first six categories:

Top Ten of 1990

Here's to the Honorable Mentions: Alice, Cinema Paradiso, King of New York, Miller's Crossing, Mr. & Mrs. Bridge, Postcards from the Edge, Reversal of Fortune, and to my #11, Mermaids. They almost made it to this Top Ten and, in the years to come, some may wind up becoming more dear to me than the films below. As of today, though, after 75 films and much consideration, these are my Top Ten Films of 1990 - in alphabetical order:

Oscars 1990: Best Supporting Actor

1990's Best Supporting Actor race is full of surprises. The first is Al Pacino's nomination for the comic strip adaptation Dick Tracy, where he goes big as gangster Big Boy Caprice. Pacino being nominated wasn't the surprise - the Golden Globes so honored him earlier - it was the fact that he got in for Dick Tracy and not in Best Actor for The Godfather: Part III that shocked.

The bigger surprise was the winner. Before there were 105 "precursors," common wisdom still held that the New York Film Critics held a lot of sway with Academy voters; this year's winner was Bruce Davison in Longtime Companion. He also won the Golden Glove and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Male. The only thing he didn't win was the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award, though he was named runner-up to Joe Pesci in GoodFellas (Pesci was reportedly runner-up to Davison's NYFCC win). If you wanted to win your Oscar pool, you were predicting Davison.

And you would have lost:

Well, here's how I'd rank 'em:

1990: A Qualified Success

When is a hit not a hit? This is a question that has long dogged the legacy of Dick Tracy, a film that had the biggest opening weekend in Disney history, made about $103 million in the US alone, ended the year as the #9 film of 1990, and tied with The Godfather Part III as the second most-nominated film at the 63rd Academy Awards - yet still awaits a sequel. Now, you and I know a studio, especially Disney, will greenlight three sequels and a spin-off TV show if they make a penny's profit. So what happened with Dick Tracy?

Money, honey. Director-producer-star Warren Beatty was infamous for budget overruns and this was no different, as he went about $20 million or so over budget. Additionally, Disney, inspired by the marketing blitz for 1989's Batman, spent millions on toys, tie-ins, and other products, like Dick Tracy watches, Dick Tracy clocks, Dick Tracy coloring books, and so on: they sold, but not as much as Disney had hoped (though, as a child, I inherited my older cousins' Dick Tracy and Mumbles action figures, which I later gifted to my younger cousins; where are they now, I wonder?). Variety reported the total cost of making and marketing the film was about $101 million...and it is said that a movie has to make twice its budget to earn a profit. It's since gained a kind of cult status, thanks to its style and its run on television (can you believe they used to allow Madonna's nipples during the day on network TV just because they were behind negligee in a PG-rated Disney flick??). 

Was it any good though? I'll get to that somewhere down below, amidst the other Spring 1990 releases.

1990: An Introduction

This month we focus on 1990. Y'all decided this: I put it to a vote, and The People demanded a review of years in which Kevin Costner directed a movie. 1990 is the first such year, with Dances with Wolves.

Among the 30 films nominated in the traditional competitive categories, one finds at least one NC-17 film, 10 indies, five directed by actors, and one "legacy sequel." The 30 nominees:

But, it's not just about Oscar nominees. I watched 75 films for this, and we're gonna talk about all of them. Here they are:

Akira Kurosawa's Dreams

Alice

Avalon

Awakenings

Back to the Future: Part III

Backtrack (aka Catchfire)

Blue Steel

The Bonfire of the Vanities

The Church

Cinema Paradiso

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover

Cry-Baby

Cyrano de Bergerac

Dances with Wolves

Darkman

Days of Thunder

Dick Tracy

Edward Scissorhands

The Exorcist III

The Field

Flatliners

Frankenstein Unbound

Ghost

The Godfather: Part III

GoodFellas

Green Card

The Grifters

The Guardian

Hamlet

Havana

Henry & June

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

Home Alone

House Party

The Hunt for Red October

I Love You to Death

Kindergarten Cop

King of New York

The Long Walk Home

Longtime Companion

Men at Work

Mermaids

Metropolitan

Miller's Crossing

Misery

Mr. and Mrs. Bridge

Mo' Better Blues

Monsieur Hire

My Blue Heaven

Narrow Margin

Night of the Living Dead

Nightbreed

Postcards from the Edge

Predator 2

Pretty Woman

Q&A

Reversal of Fortune

Robocop 2

Rocky V

The Russia House

Santa Sangre

The Sheltering Sky

State of Grace

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Texasville

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!

To Sleep with Anger

Total Recall

Tremors

The Two Jakes

Vincent & Theo

White Hunter, Black Heart

Wild at Heart

The Witches

Young Guns II

So, where to start? Tomorrow, I'll focus on a trend that continues to this day: the legacy sequel.

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1948: Shakespeare, Writers, and the Year Before

This month we focus on the films of 1948. 

Why the films of 1948? If you've been reading for a while, you may recall that last year, I wanted to watch all the Best Picture nominees adapted from William Shakespeare. 1948 is an exceptional year in that regard - not only was a Shakespeare film nominated, but it was also the winner.

Further research and current events convinced me this was a good time to bring back 1948: this was the inaugural year of the Writers Guild Awards. Nowadays, it's a fairly standard Oscar precursor, awarding Best Original Screenplay, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Documentary Screenplay. In its first year, however, the WGA Awards sought to honor every major genre and its unique position as an American Union with five categories: Drama, Comedy, Western, Musical, and the Robert Meltzer Award for Screenplay Dealing Most Ably With Problems of the American Scene. Television honors would be added later.

The Meltzer Award, by the way, is named for a screenwriter who died fighting the Nazis in 1944 only to be posthumously censured by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951. In between, the WGA established an award in his honor, as a hat-tip to those writers whose work addresses what's happening in America now. When he was named by HUAC, the award was suspended.

So, there we are: Shakespeare and Writers Guild Awards. Let's hop right to it, shall we?

The journey begins before 1948. Back then, as now, a film qualified for the Oscars when it played Los Angeles for a week. I've tried to go by LA release dates where available, but sometimes all I can find is a general US release date. The following five films had their releases before 1948, but did not play Los Angeles until the next year (or, in one case, two years later). Still, they qualify for our purposes, and so here they are.

Girl of the Canal (aka Painted Boats)

release date: January 12, 1946

(recommended by Juan Carlos Ojano)

See, here's a perfect example: Released in the UK in 1945, it received its "general" release in the United States on October 6, 1947; more than a year previously, however, it made its debut Stateside in January 1946...on New York television. TV was still new-ish, so there weren't yet rules in place regarding a strictly theatrical exhibition in order to qualify for the Academy Awards. 

At just 48 minutes, it is a coming-of-age romance; a family drama; a documentary about a disappearing way of life. We've two families of canal workers - one with a motor, one being pulled by a horse on the shore - I question the efficiency of the latter but, then, so much of this film is about chipping away at the old ways of doing things in favor of modernity...and literacy. There's an intelligent son in the former, an intelligent daughter in the latter, they're attracted to each other, they've hopes and dreams, one kind of hankers for a life beyond, the other can't imagine a better way of life. It's just an interesting flick to watch unfold, especially since one gets to learn so much about a bygone way of life. Why canals? How did this become a way of life? Watch the film and find out for yourself!

Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome

release date: September 26, 1947

The final of four Dick Tracy films first hit US cinemas in 1947. I love this series of films: while they don't consistently maintain the wink at German Expressionism in their sets and costumes, they sustain a straight-faced camp in their dialogue and storylines. Dick's almost a non-entity, but they know that. The draw is Boris Karloff as a villain using special nerve gas to rob banks, a villain so terrifying, even the cops are comparing him to...Boris Karloff. The man never phoned a performance in, and here he demonstrates a gift for deadpan comedy that makes one wonder what he could have done with the Abrahams/Zucker/Zucker contingent. A good time.

Panic

release date: November 26, 1947

(recommended by Juan Carlos Ojano)

Adapted from a story by Georges Simenon, the creator of Inspector Maigret. In the aftermath of a woman's murder, suspicion falls on a loner who is largely disliked socially but, otherwise, has nothing against him. No matter, the fact that people don't like him is enough to hang him in the court of public opinion. The film follows that tightening noose, even as the doomed man himself discovers the identity of the true killer, which he hides for the sake of the woman he loves. An allegory for the collaboration of French citizens during the Vichy period, it's a damning portrayal of mob mentality. Brilliant flick.

The Chinese Ring

release date: December 6, 1947

Our first Charlie Chan of the year! At this point, the barely-passable Sidney Toler had died, the reigns going to the not-even-trying Roland Winters, in his first of six appearances as the great detective. Here, a beautiful Chinese princess comes to Chan for help but, before he can even meet her, she is assassinated while waiting for him in his own study. The titular ring refers to the one she wears on her hand, announcing her status. The solution seems divined out of thin air. Ends with a horrifying misogynist joke that feels very out of character for Charlie Chan. Apparently a word-for-word remake of the Boris Karloff flick Mr. Wong in Chinatown. DIRE.

Beauty and the Beast

release date: December 23, 1947

(recommended by Juan Carlos Ojano and Joe Leydon)

You know the old story of the beauty who frees her father from an enchanted palace by taking his place; this version includes Belle's jealous siblings. Clever production design, jaw-dropping makeup effects, ingenious casting/role-doubling, sparkling cinematography: this is a masterpiece, magic to behold.

Tomorrow, the first 13 films released in 1948 - plus a look at the first Best Picture nominee of the year.

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1946: The Early Worms

The year is 1946, and things are getting interesting. Around the world, of course, the war that's kept all continents occupied since 1939 has finally ended. More wars will come in its wake, some direct responses to those "peace" treaties. In the movie world, long-delayed flicks are finally seeing the light of day, whether they be imports like the British drama Henry V or just long-held studio fare like the Barbara Stanwyck vehicle My Reputation - both filmed in 1944.

I watched 67 films from 1946, including the 36 Academy Award nominees. Traditionally, I've done an overview of those films and their respective categories over two weeks, then presented the rest of the films screened. This time around, I'll do something I haven't done in a while: this first week, I'm reviewing all the films - all but the five Best Picture nominees - in order of release, before deep-diving into their individual, nominated elements. Because, hell, just like any other year, these films' releases weren't separated by Oscar Time and Everything Else - winners came out alongside footnotes. We wanna see the full context, don't we?

Of course, because nationwide releases weren't quite a thing back then, that means some of the films of 1946 had their first US releases before 1946. How so? Well, remember, to get an Oscar nomination, you have to play a week in Los Angeles. You don't have to be released in Los Angeles first, though, and so New York, Chicago, Baltimore, they debuted many a film well before 1946. I'm beginning 1946 with nine such films, films with no known LA release date that I could find, but with initial US releases in 1945.

Beginning with....