Tom Jones (1963) - Worst Best Picture ever? — Page 3

I like Oliver! more than most but I have to say after a certain character dies the happy numbers feel not so jolly. I know people think Reed was asleep at the wheel to film but I think he is excellent in directing the scenes and the atmosphere. He really wants to get a since of space and place. Plus, I think the performances are strong. Ron Moody beating Cliff Robertson would have been fine by me since I also think Robertson over O'Toole is a major Oscar roberry. That year was strange. No 2001 being the major Best Picture omission but also Rosemary's Baby felt underserved in all of the major categories.

Captain Newman, M.D. is not really a great thing to watch after seeing John Huston's Let There Be Light. Captain M.D. hasn't aged well whereas the Huston doc is probably one of the most important non-fiction documentations of PTSD and Darin's performance, the accent, the body language, is just over the top. I know some people were moved by it but all I see is Acting. TCM noted in its write-up of that film that many people felt Darin should've been nominated for a similar role earlier in Pressure Point. Oscar strategy and politicking is a fun rabbit hole.

I did actually enjoy Cat Balou when I saw it but I still cannot believe he won for it and that he beat Richard Burton in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.

besty- I have to say, A Man for All Seasons is a strange one. Zinnemann was respected but a religious reformer biopic winning in the sixties just feels so very strange. Were Burton and Taylor still so toxic that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? couldn't win? Was Mike Nichols too much of an up and comer, too associated with Nichols and May (as if there something wrong with that), to be taken seriously by the Academy?

It truly did seem that way. Also that year you had Antonioni nominated for Directing in Blow-Up along with Claude Lelouch for A Man and A Woman that did incredibly well in the major nominations. All while box office films like The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming are facing off with them in major categories.

I have vague memories for A Man of All Seasons but plan to check it out again.

Just out of curiosity I wanted to know how the movie was received in general. TCM provides the following:

THE CRITICS' CORNER: TOM JONES
AWARDS & HONORS

Kicking off awards season, the National Board of Review named Tom Jones Best Picture and Tony Richardson Best Director.

Tom Jones placed sixth on the New York Times' ten best list for 1963.

The film captured New York Film Critics Awards for Best Picture, Director and Actor (Albert Finney).

Finney won the Best Actor Award at the Venice Film Festival, at which Tom Jones was nominated for the Golden Lion.

Tom Jones won Golden Globes for Best English-Language Foreign Film, Best Motion Picture-Musical/Comedy and Most Promising Newcomer (Finney). It also was nominated for Best Motion Picture Actor-Musical/Comedy (Finney), Best Director, Best Support Actor (Hugh Griffith) and Best Supporting Actress (Joan Greenwood).

The Writers Guild of Great Britain honored John Osborne for Best British Comedy Screenplay.

Tom Jones won the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) awards for Best Film, Best British Film and Best Screenplay. It also was nominated for Best British Actor (Finney and Griffith) and Best British Actress (Edith Evans).

The film captured Motion Picture Exhibitor magazine's Laurel Award for Top Comedy.

Tom Jones was nominated for an Eddie Award by the American Cinema Editors.

Pointing the way to his Oscar® victory, Tony Richardson won the Director's Guild Award.

Tom Jones received ten Oscar® nominations, including a record three for Best Supporting Actress (Diane Cilento, Edith Evans and Joyce Redman). It was also nominated for Best Actor (Albert Finney), Best Supporting Actor (Hugh Griffith) and Best Art Direction. It won for Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay and Score.

John Addison's soundtrack recording won the Grammy Award.

In 1970, Los Angeles Times columnist Joyce Haber polled readers and industry members to name the greatest cinematic achievements of the '60s. Readers named Tom Jones the tenth best film overall, voted Albert Finney's the third best leading male performance in a comedy, Hugh Griffith's the second best supporting male comedy performance, John Osborne's screenplay the third best adaptation and Tony Richardson the best producer of a comedy. Industry members voted Griffith's performance the best supporting comedy performance by a male.

The Critics' Corner: Tom Jones

"There is nothing in this film that could give any member of the audience one moment of enjoyment."
- London Times

"Prepare yourself for one of the wildest, bawdiest and funniest comedies that a refreshingly agile filmmaker has ever brought to the screen....in finding a means of cinema expression in which to convey most suitably to our age the deceptively fastidious rhetoric and ribald wit of the Fielding work, Mr. Richardson and his scenarist, John Osborne of "Angry Young Man" fame, have worked out a structure and a rhythm that constitute a major creative achievement in themselves."
- Bosley Crowther, New York Times

"It is as though the camera had become a method actor: there are times when you wish you could buy, as on certain juke boxes, five minutes of silence....Obviously a film which elicits such lyric ejaculations from the reviewers cannot be all good."
- John Simon, New York magazine

"The film is a way-out, walleyed, wonderful exercise in cinema. It is also a social satire written in blood with a broadaxe. It is bawdy as the British were bawdy when a wench had to wear five petticoats to barricade her virtue."
- Time magazine

"Tom Jones is a continually delightful, mercurially rhapsodic, and altogether breath-taking film. There is, in fact, no detail, however small, which does not merit unstinting admiration. Tom Jones, an absolute triumph, is the best comedy ever made."
- Newsweek

"Tony Richardson whizzes through the Henry Fielding novel, but he pauses long enough for a great lewd eating scene."
- Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies

"The picture is a mess, sometimes called a romp, and a tribute as much as anything to the sudden new appetite for things English...The young Albert Finney tried to hold it together, but, as he knew, Tom is a passive part. Everyone else has more fun.."
- David Thomson, Have You Seen...?

"A coarse and vibrant adaptation of Fielding's picaresque novel of the Eighteenth century, full of mischievous enthusiasm and robust caricature."
- Peter Cowie, Eighty Years of Cinema

"This full-blooded, joyful adaptation of Fielding's famous novel is full of fashionable cinematic tricks but its bawdy good humor brought it a justifiable commercial success."
- Georges Sadoul, Dictionary of Films

"A silent film-inspired, quick edit, slapstick prologue punctuated by explicative intertitles and a sprightly harpsichord accompaniment sets the irreverent, whimsical tone for Tony Richardson's freeverse adaptation of Henry Fielding's beloved eighteenth century novel, Tom Jones, transforming the beloved comedy of manners satire as a giddy fusion of burlesque and Keystone Kops epic adventure."
- Strictly Film School, http://filmref.com/

"...under Richardson's eye and Osborne's pen, the point gets almost missed. So intent are they kicking over the walls, that their Tom becomes little more than an adventurer like a Flashman or a Sharpe. Sure, there's a little social history and commentary loitering in the background, but such is the twinkle in Albert Finney's eye and the built-in impetus to wish for his escape from every predicament, that we lose sight of the satire."
- Iain Miller, The Independent on Sunday

"Richardson's England is full of 18th century atmospherics, but its big attraction was the bawdy licence it allowed '60s permissiveness. Osborne's courageous hatchet job on Fielding's 1,000 page classic novel and Finney's gutsy performance add up to produce an enjoyable piece of irreverent entertainment."
- Robert Murphy, TimeOut Film Guide

I will never understand the negative reaction to Reed's direction of Oliver. To me his work is masterful and the picture the most satisfying adaptation of a stage musical to screen (sharing the honor with Francesco Rosi's Carmen if we count opera).

I don't find A Man For All Seasons at all out of step with a 60s oscar win. More was not a religious reformer, he was quite the opposite. He was a religious conservative. it is Henry who rebelled against the church much to More's dismay; not the other way around. But Henry was a religious rebel for reasons none of which have to do with religion. And Henry during the time of his standoff with More had only one goal in religious transformation: to assert his own authority over the English Church which would by nearly every other measure remain identical with the Roman Church in England. Neither Henry nor More were Protestants.

But all of that is background. The movie is about a hero standing up to injustice... or at least for the values he feels committed to and his loyalty to the church and his own conscience... and standing up to the establishment - his king and the king's lackeys - at great personal cost to himself. Nothing could be more in tune with the zeitgeist of the mid 60s than that. What's more, the story made it easy for Hollywood to root for the anti-establishment (the establishment in question being the crown and not the church, and the geopolitical separateness of them which More held sacrosanct) protagonist, because what More stood for were traditional values and identity, whereas Henry stood for flouting them in an effort to stabilize the country, not repeat the horrors of the Lancastrian-Yorkist wars, provide an heir and change one wife for another.

Updated On: 3/10/14 at 12:58 PM

Love your observations, henrik! I'm glad we agree about Carol Reed, too.

And reading what you wrote about A Man For All Seasons, it suddenly occurred to me that there is one common denominator in the Best Pics of 1965-1967, as different as they might seem. "The Sound of Music," "A Man For All Seasons, and "In the Heat of the Night" all have central characters increasingly at odds with the people and events around them, yet they remain true to themselves in the face of adversity. This common idea could be understood and appreciated by liberals and conservatives, older generations and younger generations alike.

---

Updated On: 3/9/14 at 02:25 PM

A great point, wonkit.

The decade of the 1960s began 33 years after the Academy started giving awards, so it's a safe bet that a new generation of members were voting along with the older ones, some of whom were retired or had even passed away by that point.

---

Why are you lumping it with Vanity Fair? Just curious since that was considerably later...

Carelessness. I know VANITY FAIR was written a century later, but something about its plot and rhythms has always struck me as more 18th century than 19th--even though it postdates Austen and is concurrent with Eliot..

And I haven't read PAMELA.

I'm so glad you're brining up PULP FICTION, Mister Matt and wonkit!

I was thinking about that movie at one point while I was watching "Tom Jones." I kept thinking "Jones" must have been the "Pulp Fiction" of its day, made by edgy new filmmakers, almost thumbing their noses at a movie genre while at the same time celebrating it (to a degree). I resent filmmakers whose biggest statement is to show us they're smarter or cooler than others who have come before them. It turns me off in a huge way. (This is how I feel about most of the Coen brothers' movies.)

There is a mean-spiritedness and superiority that saps any intended humor right out of the work. And as a result, all I see are the endless flaws, because I'm not invested in the stories or characters. I usually hate both, so I sit there and pick everything else about them apart.

Personally, I liked Pulp Fiction, but it absolutely fits into the mold of Tom Jones.

---

Very true, henrik. I've always been aware of and fascinated by the various trends in genres, usually sparked by one big hit, then suddenly the floodgates open.

Like the disaster films that started in the late '60s with Airport and kept going through the '70s. Also the gangster/mob films of the '70s and '80s. The Jane Austen era of the '90s. The fantasy/fairytale movies (Lord of the Rings, Potter, Narnia, and a gazillion more).

Many others.

---

To continue the brief Oliver Cromwell threadjack, I've always been mystified by this (somewhat) famous quote of Cromwell's, which was part of a message to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland:

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.

What the hell does "the bowels of Christ" mean?

---

Different Cromwell, PJ.

Wait so do we mean this one:





Or this one?

---

The top one, PJ. And that painting hangs in the Frick, glaring across a mantelpiece for all eternity at a portrait of More.

Henrik, yes, and there's a TV adaptation in the works as well, starring Mark Rylance. And a third book on its way!.