In Contention

Tag: Point Blank

  • LIFE WITHOUT OSCAR: 1967 and 1968

    Catch up with the idea behind this series here.

    The civil rights struggle raged through America in the late 60’s and the issue found its way to Oscar’s front door in 1967 with “In the Heat of the Night” triumphing over “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” Neither has the lasting impact of fellow nominees “The Graduate” or “Bonnie and Clyde” but we can’t expect the Academy to award progressive filmmaking over safe filmmaking with a progressive message.

    1968 was a strange year indeed, with two big musicals, two historical, costume dramas and one independent thriller. “Oliver!” came away with the Best Picture prize while “2001: A Space Odyssey” had to settle for one win in the Visual Effects category. So…. why do we care about the Oscars again?

    More exciting is the fact that 1968 saw an exact tie in the Best Actress race. How thrilling must that have been to the Oscarwatchers in that day? Assuming there were any. And Alfred Hitchcock picked up the Irving “whoops, sorry we didn’t award you an Oscar” G. Thalberg award and gave the best speech in Oscar history.

    So, what failed to impress Ernest Borgnine and company these years?

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  • PAGE TO SCREEN: “London Boulevard” by Ken Bruen

    When Oscar-winning screenwriter William Monahan (“The Departed”) brings Irish crime writer Ken Bruen’s 2001 novel “London Boulevard” to screen in his directorial debut, he won’t be adapting the text so much as returning it to its natural source.

    A short, sharp, deliciously black-hearted thriller that reads not unlike a readymade screenplay in its brisk, dialogue-dominated prose, Bruen’s novel makes its debt to Hollywood clear not only in its construction (brief, propulsive chapters of only a couple pages’ length resemble individual cinematic scenes) and its assorted winking namechecks of bygone films and stars, but in its very conception.

    The title – not a location (locals will know that there is no London Boulevard in the British capital) but a metaphor of sorts – is our first clue to what Bruen is up to: the novel is itself an adaptation, and Billy Wilder’s gothic Hollywood noir “Sunset Boulevard” is the source material.

    The novel’s allusions to the 1950 classic aren’t exactly subtle. Where Wilder’s film gave us Joseph C. Gillis, a destitute L.A. screenwriter who seeks shelter in the mansion of faded movie goddess Norma Desmond to escape the repo man, “London Boulevard” crosses the Channel, jumps a half-century forward, and replaces Gillis with Mitchell, a middle-aged ex-con who dodges the ghosts of his past (and his own compulsive criminal urges) by shacking up in the plush Holland Park pad of Lillian Palmer, a washed-up theater diva plotting her triumphant West End return.

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