THE OSCAR: Blu-ray (Embassy/Paramount, 1966) Kino Lorber

More ‘movie of the week’ than a movie event, director, Russell Rouse’s The Oscar (1966) was – I think – supposed to be yet another scathing tale about Hollywood fouling its own nest, a la the bitter and biting ilk of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) – that iconic and cruelly satirical classic, as darkly purposed and razor-backed in its fitful indictment on Hollywood’s aversion to its own castoff stars that sent MGM raja, L.B. Mayer scurrying from the theater to confront Wilder with “How could you do that?” With all due respect - and apologies – to the late Mr. Wilder, The Oscar is nothing like Sunset Boulevard – even if that famed stretch of pavement makes a cameo appearance in this, Rouse’s embarrassingly second-rate and shamelessly purple-patch pastiche of putrid and pugnacious pigs and prostitutes. Based on Richard Sales’ infinitely more readable exposé of the Jacqueline Suzanne fiber and fortitude, the roster of A-list (even B-grade) stars and celeb’s on tap for The Oscar – the movie – is outclassed by its audaciously awful screenplay from Harlan Ellison, Clarence Greene and Rouse. The picture’s monumental pan and implosion at the box office damn-near finished off Greene and Rouse’s respective careers. It also put a period to singer, Tony Bennett’s aspirations to turn one vocation into two; The Oscar, in tandem, marking both Bennett’s debut and swan song in the film industry. The Oscar hails from Hollywood’s own sadomasochistic endeavor to humiliate itself to the world at large.

Think of Hollywood as a community of bright young things and established gents in their Armani three-piece suits, endeavoring to make the greatest entertainment in the world? Think again! According to The Oscar, Hollywood is part cesspool/part booby-trap, where only the morally bankrupt and socially diseased prey upon the malaise of the emotionally desperate and insecure. At least, that is what The Oscar would have us believe. And, it stands to reason how some could easily get the idea that The Oscar is endeavoring to lay bare its own storied verisimilitude; what with such headliners as Stephen Boyd, Milton Berle, Elke Sommer, Ernest Borgnine, Jill St. John, Eleanor Parker, Joseph Cotten, Edie Adams, Peter Lawford, Broderick Crawford, Ed Begley, and, Walter Brennan doing their level best to fictionalize the truth, and, with no less real-life Hollywood alumni than Bob Hope, Hedda Hopper, Merle Oberon, Frank and Nancy Sinatra, and, Edith Head ‘playing themselves’. While there has been enough ‘real life’ drama within Hollywood’s gated community from its inception to 1966, undoubtedly to stockpile a scathing tell-all with zero embellishments, The Oscar seems less interested in revealing genuine human foibles, and, more fascinated with making some up, fantasizing a Tinsel Town and its industry’s insiders as the most evil-encroached enclave since Sodom and Gomorrah.  If only to judge Hollywood by The Oscar, clearly, this town needs no enemies from without as long as it has such judgmentally harsh friends, roiling from within.

The tag of this pantomime into the perverse - Hollywoodized grotesque - is one tough chestnut to crack. Frankie Fane (played with such telescopic repugnance by Stephen Boyd) is an outwardly beautiful, but bloodless and cruel one-time leading man, determined to revitalize his sagging film career. An Oscar would do it…or so, The Oscar would have us believe. This, of course, flies in the face of Oscar history, which, more oft than not, has illustrated that the bequest of a coveted ‘Best Actor/Actress’ golden bald guy is the beginning of the end to a lot of A-list movie legends. But in this pseudo-reincarnation of life as cheap and tawdry ‘art house’, with no aspersions cast on art itself, and, as only some of us know it, The Oscar is the kick-starter to a bright and shiny new age for any actor whose ambitions are blinded by greed and whose lifestyle is currently sunk into the doldrums of being bored with money. So, Frankie wants an Oscar – badly. Aside: it would have been prudent of the makers of The Oscar to astutely contextualize its importance within the grand scheme of celebrity culture. Not everyone wishes for fame. Some of us prefer anonymity to the comparatively shallow longing of the thronging masses. Drawing this parallel might have lent more sympathy to Frankie Fane’s frail pursuit as it could then be empathized with as mismanaged and mangled to the nth degree of ego run amok. But I digress.

The Oscar opens with Bob Hope as the MC in full Path colored regalia, going through the motions of another annual telecast, ably assisted by Merle Oberon announcing ‘…and the winner is’ in those golden years when Hollywood, not yet bitten by the bug of political correctness and could still regarded its nominees as falling into one of two categories: ‘winners’ or ‘losers’. Too bad for Fain, it’s another Frankie who leaps onto the stage to accept the award – Sinatra, in a truly mechanical piece of ‘acting’ that belies what a truly superb super-star and man for all seasons Sinatra was in his prime. From this idiotically clichéd point of embarkation, The Oscar has nowhere to go but down. The picture made naughtily second-rate by its confluence of bad acting meets crummy writing, and, phonier than thou in its sentiment as all the air kisses blown from these blood-thirsty…uh… ‘well-wishers’, The Oscar unravels into the sort of emotionally disingenuous, expressionless and totally counterfeit claptrap that we pretty much knew it would become, but desperately prayed against. The excrement, however glossily smeared over by Arthur Lonergan and Hal Pereira’s production design, given to that old-time glam-bam in Joseph Ruttenberg’s cinematography, takes a fairly liberal dump on Hollywood, the people, the industry, and, the award, all the while inferring its quasi-reality as the real deal behind all the glitter. So, we get smut in lieu of sex, and riches turned to rags as Boyd’s egocentric and unethical wannabe bashes into, rails against, then thoroughly muddies what little integrity is to be unearthed inside the offices of pseudo-studio big brass wielding unfettered power. We slink like penitent whoremongers from these contract-signing corporate leviathans into the slippery backroom badinage of Beverly Hills at its worst - ‘beautiful people’ doing very nasty things to each other.

Even in 1966, most fans were quite aware of filmdom’s peccadilloes and machinations: Hollywood has-beens never to be nominated for Academy Awards. Only in The Oscar, the opposite is true if one is willing to sell everything from the belt down to the highest bidder. Stephen Boyd, who acts the part of the bromide as though the pole has been inserted too liberally into his tuckus, has an upward slog here, lamenting with crocodile tears his inability to preserve relationships, when, in reality, he is reveling in the behind-the-scenes, ball-bashing human bing-bang that gets him where he wants to go. Remember, this is a guy who guts the romantic interests of his acting coach, Sophie Cantaro (Eleanor Parker) and marries the up-and-coming mannequin du jour, costume designer, Kay Bergdahl (Elke Sommer) as though he were indiscriminately trying to decide between the silk or the satin underwear. Wisely, the head of the studio, Kenneth Regan (Joseph Cotten) deduces what sort Frankie is and does not want any part of him – the big ‘meat’ without presence or even a soul to recommend him. Only Frankie’s agent, Kappy Kapstetter (Milton Berle) and his long-time companion, Hymie Kelly (Tony Bennett) remain circumspect about showbiz and Frankie’s place in it – each, in their own way, to feel the sting of Frankie’s unscrupulousness by the end. Only Hymie gets penultimate satisfaction here, turning to Frankie with soulless, penetrating eyes, muttering, “Lie down with pigs and you get up smelling like garbage.”

Indeed, Bennett’s brutish summation caps off a picture’s-worth of stale reminiscences about Frankie’s fumbled rise to the top, begun as a spieler for stripper girlfriend, Laurel Scott (Jill St. John). Moving to Manhattan, Frankie ditches Laurel for Kay to procure a ‘chance meeting’ with talent scout, Sophie Cantaro. She, in turn, arranges for him to be signed by Kappy – a mover and shaker, under whose tutelage things begin to happen. His own worst enemy, Frankie abuses those who can help him get to the top, believing that his backstabbing will pay off even more handsomely. To this end, he impulsively persuades Kay into a Mexican marriage in Tijuana, thereafter, cruelly mistreating her. Drunk on delusions of fame, Frankie spends profligately on expensive homes and cars. Making rather a bad enemy of Regan – the hand that feeds him – Frankie’s celebrity goes into a tailspin. He is branded ‘box office poison’ yet receives an Oscar nomination anyway for his role as a ‘man without morals’, eerily to mirror his own life. Determined to destroy the competition, leaving himself as the only viable contender for the statuette, Frankie hires a crooked P.I., Barney Yale (Ernest Borgnine) whose job it is to dig up any and all dirt on the competition, thus influencing Academy voters, while causing the other nominees to drop out of the race. Even when the scandal hit too close to home, Frankie encourages Yale to demolish the reputations of Hymie and Laurel. Begrudgingly, Hymie tells all – how he married Laurel who died from a botched abortion to rid herself of the child fathered by Frankie. Hoping to blackmail Frankie, Yale gets his comeuppances after Frankie turns to the P.I.’s ex-wife, Trina (Edie Adams) for a little bribery to keep everything hush-hush. We regress to the Academy Awards and presenter, Merle Oberon (playing herself) announcing Sinatra as the winner. Disillusioned, our Frankie is left to wring his hands while the other goats in triumph and all those whom Fane has wronged share now in the epic pleasure derived from his humiliating loss. So, it really is lonely at the top – or rather, on your way from the top to the bottom!

The Oscar is unintentionally hammy to a fault. Instead of wringing irony and pathos from its tale, we are left with a sort of grotesque dissatisfaction, unfulfilled even by watching Frankie Fane get his just desserts. Technically, a drama, The Oscar can instead be considered a disastrously bad attempt at black comedy or even broad burlesque. Affording this narrative drivel an all-star cast and budget to suggest it as a super-production only adds to the shamelessness in the exercise – Hollywood, eager to exorcise its demons with another broad-brushed reflection of atypical film folk, out to ruin each other as well as their own chances at immortality. Taking a few of the undeniable ‘bad apples’ that have populated Hollywood lore over the last hundred years and presenting them as ‘the standard bearers’ of an entire industry completely belies the fact that most alumni of the picture-making biz are dedicated, hard-working craftsman/women, rare to indulge in this sort of cheap and ruthless blood-letting The Oscar puts forth as merely par for the course of doing business in Tinsel Town – the tinsel, tainted and down around the knees of every boozing and balling starlet, eager to get in her kicks and pics in the papers.  

Of course, some of this might have clicked, even as grand guignol, if Stephen Boyd’s performance did not so closely resemble a frozen fixture plucked from the proscenium of Madame Tussaud’s wax museum.  I really do not understand it.  Boyd was an enigmatic star with a fiery disposition that could be stirred to excite an audience with just a casual flash of his penetrating eyes. In some ways, The Oscar marks an end to ‘that’ Stephen Boyd – the one who wowed us in movies like Island in the Sun (1957), The Best of Everything and Ben-Hur (both in 1959). Even when the movie itself was less than satisfactory, as in, say, Billy Rose’s Jumbo (1962), Boyd could be counted upon to emerge as a very fine actor. Herein, he is just awful, offering us none of the inner recklessness from which we might derive even a modicum of empathy for this misguidedly determined misanthrope. That Hollywood in general, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in particular allowed for their trademarks to be so utterly, maliciously maligned in this fashion, laden over with layers of self-pontificating philosophical contemplation that go nowhere – fast – is an even greater mystery.  Did the town honestly think a picture like The Oscar would win them any browning points with those still naïve enough to believe in Hollywood as a place where dreams really do come true?

Ah well, there is better news for ‘fans’ of The Oscar on Blu-ray. Kino Lorber’s newly minted 4K remastered hi-def offering reveals some gorgeous colors and very robust depth to the image. Intermittent and very brief amounts of white speckling do not detract from the impressive fine detail, excellent contrast, and superb textures revealed throughout.  Either the original elements used did not see a lot of playtime in the interim or they have been preserved with the utmost care afforded very few movies of its vintage. Even the Pathe color does not appear to have faded one iota since the movie’s theatrical debut. By any barometer one chooses to ascribe it, the mastering efforts here are commendable, even if the movie falls dramatically short of that moniker. The DTS 2.0 audio accurately reproduces the vintage audio, with crisp dialogue and no age-related hiss or pop. Kino offers up two audio commentaries – the first, featuring Patton Oswalt, Josh Olson and Erik Nelson – each, connected to screenwriter, Harlan Ellison.  The other involves Howard S. Berger, Steve Mitchell and Nathaniel Thompson. Of the two, the latter address by Berger and associates is the more compelling; the interaction, richer, and the connections made to the movie itself, infinitely a better way to spend your time – if, indeed, you wish to watch this movie in its entirety more than once. Kino has also loaded us with trailers for this and other product they sincerely hope you will want to buy from them. Bottom line: The Oscar is a glossy, misspent ho-hum of a movie, front-loaded and top-heavy with real stars given precious little to do. The Blu-ray is surprisingly solid. However, a good-looking bad picture is just that! Pass and be very glad that you did!

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

1

VIDEO/AUDIO

4.5

EXTRAS

2