I saw Kate's list the other day [link], and I just needed to copy the idea. If anyone else hasn't done this top 20 tag, go ahead and do it now! You may use the header I made if you want to.
There is a problem with me vs. these kind of tags though, and that is that I suck at making lists. I just can't rank favorite actors and point out the best. So what I did was that I first narrowed my favorites down to pre-1960's. Then I just went with those I feel are in the top 20 at the moment, and skipped a lot of my obvious favorites like:
Etc etc... I hope they will forgive me, and that I will be able to sleep tonight. Here is my current top 20 favorite actors, in alphabetical order (I'm a chicken, I know):
In celebration of the 100th post on Amanda Cooper's classic film blog A Noodle in a Haystack, she has put a lot of effort into creating a classic film survey - and of course I'm eager to participate in it. So, ladies and gentlemen (I guess that includes most of you): here are my answers!
1. What is your all-time favorite Clark Gable movie?
When it comes to "favorites" in cinema discussions, I am that kind of a boring person that simply won't answer - I just can't. I can have a favorite at the time, but the next week I might be in a different mood and have another one. In short, favorites are never a consistent thing when it comes to me. Therefore I will answer this question with two favorite Clark Gable films, one bad-guy-role and one good-guy. A favorite Clark Gable bad guy film is Night Nurse (1931). Only Gable could pull off a line like "I'm Nick... the chauffeur" and make it sound threatening. As for the good guy film, I will pick the first Gable film I ever saw: Mogambo (1953).
2. Do you like Joan Crawford best as a comedienne or a drama-queen?
I never cared too much for Crawford at all, though I admit that she is a really good actress. I like her best in Grand Hotel (1932), but I have no idea if her performance there fits in in any of the categories comedienne or drama-queen. She is delightfully toned down, and her character is both cynical and slightly amused. I'd pick Flaemmchen any day.
3. In your opinion, should Ginger Rogers have made more musicals post-Fred Astaire?
I don't really have an opinion, but what she did she did good - and I can't say I ever wished for her to do more. Her post-Astaire dramatic roles are superb, so why go on more with musicals?
4. I promise not to cause you bodily (or any other serious) harm if you don't agree with me on this one. So please be honest: do you like Elizabeth Taylor? Hm?
Haha. Well, I'm quite indifferent. She's amazing in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), but she doesn't always make that great of an impression in her movies. I like to watch her, even though I wouldn't see a film especially for her being in it. But I wouldn't change her as Maggie the Cat for any other actress in the world.
5. Who is your favorite offscreen Hollywood couple?
Jesus Christ, what a difficult question. It seems like most off-screen Hollywood couples get a divorce after a year or so, which make it hard to get used to them as a couple. In that case I will choose Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. They were married for 50 years until he died, and they look so genuine together. That's a couple I admire!
6. How about onscreen Hollywood couple?
Such hard questions to answer! Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart (damn, weren't they my favorite off-screen couple too...?)- the obvious sexual tension between them in To Have and Have Not (1944) is fascinating - I could watch that "You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve?" scene over and over again for eternity.
7. Favorite Jean Arthur movie?
After having seen A Foreign Affair (1948) for the first time recently, I think I will choose Jean Arthur as the congresswoman Phoebe Frost as my favorite character of hers, and also my favorite movie of hers. I was fascinated by how close to reality the film was, and deeply regret that I hadn't seen it before.
8. What was the first Gregory Peck movie you saw?
I believe it was either The Guns of Navarone (1961) or Cape Fear (1962) - I didn't instantly like him though. I thought he was so over-the-top American, but now I have gotten used to him and like him a lot. He's handsome too!
9. What film made you fall in love with Alfred Hitchcock? (And for those of you that say, "I don't like Hitchcock" -- what is wrong with you?!)
I don't think I have ever met a person who has seen a Hitchcock movie and not liking him! No, it would be something disturbingly wrong with them if they didn't like him, or just trying to be original by hating something others love. Okay, I'll answer the question now! I fell in love the first time I saw a Hitchcock film, when my classic film devotion was newly born. I believe it was The Birds (1963) I saw first, or if it even was Psycho (1960). Or was it Vertigo (1958)? Anyway - I fell in love immediately.
10. What is your favorite book-to-movie adaption?
That one I can answer without a problem - Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (publ. 1955) into Kubrick's Lolita (1962). It's extremely faithful to the book (which is one of the greatest books I've ever read), and it has managed to capture the feeling too, something that must be very difficult to manage. But of course, now that I think of it... There are more favorites. I recently read Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (publ. 1947), of which William Wyler's Wuthering Heights (1939) is a fantastic film adaption. He obviously decided to only include the first generation of the characters (the first half of the book), but in a film that is really wise choice. And Laurence Olivier raised the bar for Heathcliff characterizations to an unreachable height for everyone who ever tried to give a worthy performance of the character afterwards.
11. Do you prefer Shirley Temple as a little girl or as a teenager?
Ehrrmm... I haven't seen any Shirley Temple film! *trying desperately to avoid the rotten fruit thrown at me* But I have seen clips on YouTube, and from that I feel that Shirley Temple was best as a little girl. I can't believe that anyone anywhere in the world felt the need for her to grow up.
12. Favorite character actor?
Basil Rathbone! That is anyway the first name that pops into my head (naturally), but as to not complicate the answer I won't think about it further.
13. Favorite Barbara Stanwyck role?
Gaah! All these "favorite" questions! I can't do it! Okay, Baby Face (1933).
14. Who is your favorite of Cary Grant's leading ladies?
Katharine Hepburn, for sentimental reasons. The Philadelphia Story (1940) was one of the absolute first classic movies I ever watched. And re-watched. And re-watched again...
15. Bette Davis or Joan Crawford?
Bette Davis without a doubt. I never found Crawford interesting, while Bette Davis must be one of the most interesting persons in Hollywood history.
16. What actors and/or actresses do you think are underrated?
Laird Cregar is one who is probably not as underrated as he is forgotten. His acting is always close to magical. As for actresses my first thought is Gail Patrick. She always played "the other woman", while I have no problem thinking about her as a leading actress. Or was she one? I haven't seen too many of her films, but those I've seen always left me wishing for more scenes with her.
17. What actors and/or actresses do you think are overrated?
That was an interesting question! As much as I love Marlon Brando, I must say that he (and other method actors like Montgomery Clift) often are overrated. They are skilled, of course - but I think nowadays those are the actors that non-classic-film-devotees know the names of. And there are so many more great actors (and better) that are left out. As for actresses I'm tempted to say Joan Crawford. But perhaps I just don't like her because she neglected to wax her eyebrows in latter years.
18. Do you watch movies made pre-1980 exclusively, or do you spice up your viewing-fare with newer films?
I watch classics from every decade. Obvious classics, modern classics and will-probably-become-classics. It would be snobbish and foolish to pretend that good movies aren't made any more (even though you often have to turn your back to Hollywood to find them).
19. Is there an actor/actress who you have seen in a film and immediately loved? If so, who?
Haha, even though I just said that he was overrated - Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). God, how I drooled. And re-watched it. Drooled. Re-watched. And when that didn't satisfy me, I dragged my female friends down into the ditch of sin with me. I remember it as if it was yesterday: Three 16 year old girls having a house for themselves, watching A Streetcar Named Desire, drooling, swooning and eating popcorn. When I bought the film on DVD I gave away my VHS copy to one of them. She now has it as a decoration in her book shelf, to her boyfriend's frustration.
Another example is my favorite Swedsih drooling object Jarl Kulle. When I saw him as Count Malcolm in Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) the reaction was the same. That little trimmed moustache, that white shirt and that monocle, duelling for a lady's honor. Yikes. When I later saw another Ingmar Bergman comedy, The Devil's Eye (1960), I was lucky to find out that Bergman has cast Jarl Kulle as Don Juan - what a perfect choice!
20. Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire?
Fred Astaire. Even though Gene Kelly is talanted and funny, his perfectionism is felt right through the screen. Astaire isn't as good looking, but his charms and ease make him much more attractive and more comfortable to watch than Kelly.
21. Favorite Ginger Rogers drama?
I guess one can call Stage Door (1937) a drama, even though it's incredibly funny too. Anyway, she is adorable in it.
22. If you wrote a screenplay, who would be in your dream cast and what roles would they play? (Mixing actors and actresses from different generations is allowed: any person from any point in their career.)
I would like to see a film noir with Humphrey Bogart and Carole Lombard. I'd like to see her as a mysterious and dangerous temptress, smoking with a cigarette holder. She's accused for murdering her rich husband, and Bogart is the cynical detective that has to put aside his feelings of attraction towards Lombard in order to find out the truth about the case. Director: Billy Wilder. Or what do you think?
26. And now, the last question. What is your favorite movie from each of these genres: I'll answer this question from my present point of view, and what I would feel like watching today.
I've seen a lot of respectable bloggers making their own "film festivals" (see the adorable Matthew Coniam's viciously tempting Frank Tuttle Film Festival), and decided to make a contribution of my own.
After recently having watched My Sister My Love (original title: Syskonbädd 1782, 1966), from which I haven't yet quite recovered, I decided that the subject for my own film festival would be the Swedish director, Ingmar Bergman's protegee, the innovative Vilgot Sjöman. Haven't heard of him yet? No? Have you heard of "the Swedish sin"? Okay, but you do think about Swedish women as blonde and elusive? Okay, the initial indication of that comes from Arne Mattsson's One Summer of Happiness (original title: Hon dansade en sommar, 1951), where astonished audiences over the world saw Ulla Jacobsson's naked breasts - but I think offended Swedish women have a lot to blame on the fellow I now will introduce to you. (Just a small note: I am not to find among the offended women.)
Hang on, I think you'd like to put his name in bittersweet memory.
Vilgot Sjöman was born on December 2, 1924, in a working class family living in Stockholm, Sweden. At the age of 15 Vilgot worked as a clerk for a cereal company, but things would start to look brighter when he got his degree at Stockholm's University when he was 21. He started working in a prison, where he began writing plays, none of which was ever adopted on the theatre stage.
Three years later, 1948, he wrote a novel based on one of his plays called The Teacher (original title: Lektorn), which described a tense father-son relationship. A film based on the novel was released in 1952, called Defiance (original title: Trots) by Gustaf Molander.
This was the first, fresh breeze of what was yet to be created by Vilgot Sjöman - a series of provocative films dealing with relations, social standards and society problems, always stretching the boundaries of cencorship.
In 1956 Vilgot Sjöman had made his way to the United Stated and taken up a scholarship to study film at the UCLA. He worked as an apprentice for George Seaton during the filming of The Proud and Profane (1956), starring Deborah Kerr and William Holden, and soon felt ready to return to Sweden and turn the film industry and the cencorship upside down.
His debut as a film director was with a film called The Swedish Mistress (original title: Älskarinnan, 1962), sometimes just called The Mistress. The film shows a young woman torn between two men, one older and one younger, and had a cast that included regular Ingmar Bergman actors like Bibi Andersson (Persona, 1966) and Max von Sydow (The Seventh Seal, 1957).
The same year he assisted Ingmar Bergman in the filming of Winter Light (original title: Nattvardsgästerna, 1962). During that time he made a documentary called Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie (original title: Ingmar Bergman gör en film, 1963), following Bergman through the making of Winter Light. An extract from the documentary, with English subtitles, is included below.
But it was with Vilgot's second film, 491 (1964), that the cencor scissors (say that ten times in a row!) started to bother our dear director. The film was based on a novel by Lars Görling, and dealt with juvenile delinquency and homosexuality, a hot but avoided topic in Sweden at the time.
About the title: in The Holy Bible you can read about St. Peter, asking Jesus about how many times he should forgive his brother. Seven? Jesus answers that he should not forgive him seven times, but seventy times seven. 70 x 7 = 490.
The tagline of the film explains it further:
It is written that 490 times you can sin and be forgiven. This motion picture is about the 491st.
The film is made to look like a documentary that follows six tough boys being subject for a social experiment - one of observation. The boys are allowed to go wherever they want, do whatever they want, as long as they reside in the home that was appointed to them by the authorities. The absence of boundaries soon drives the boys to a life consisting of the pure thrill of brutality, petty crimes and anarchy. One scene that disturbed the audience, and quickly was cut, was a girl that, off-screen, was raped by a dog. Another cut out scene involved a homosexual rape.
The film remains unreleased in Sweden.
Stills from 491.
His next film was called The Dress (original title: Klänningen, 1964), and covered a disturbed mother-daughter relationship. The film, though featuring respected actors (among them the Ingmar Bergman favourite Gunnar Björnstrand, the squire Jöns in The Seventh Seal) it was totally rejected by the critics.
The next film by Vilgot Sjöman is the one I mentioned in the beginning of this post - My Sister My Love (also called Bed Siblings), and it is, to say the least, a remarkable film. To take it from the beginning:
The film is based upon a tragedy written somewhere between the years 1629-1633 by playwright John Ford, named 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. (Says quite a lot, huh?) Its subject of incest made the play one of the most controversial ones in the English litterature. The play was excluded from a 1831 collection of Ford's litterature, and the title has been changed many times to more acceptable versions like Giovanni and Annabella, 'Tis Pity or The Brother and Sister. The critics have been hard on the play well into the 20th century for not condemning the immoral characters enough. In 1961 Luchino Visconti directed a French adoption of the play at the Théâtre de Paris with Romy Schneider and Alain Delon.
And now to the Sjöman version. Apart from changing the names and the locations to Swedish respective ones, and redusing the moral dilemmas of the leading roles, Vilgot Sjöman has adapted the play to the screen without doing it any harm. The leading characters are played by Bibi Andersson as Charlotte and Per Oscarsson as Jacob.
As the original Swedish title indicates, the plot takes place in Sweden i the year 1782. At the beginning of the film, the young nobleman Jacob has just returned from France to his cherished sister, Charlotte. A sweet reunion scene is followed by Charlotte's announcement that she is getting married to baron Carl Ulrik Alsmeden (played by my #1 male icon Jarl Kulle). Jacob's reaction is not the one you'd expect - he gets so frustrated that he actually kills a chicken with his bare hands. In a successful attempt of making his sister jealous, he shows interest for a young Audrey Hepburn copy of a girl, Ebba (Tina Hedström). One thing leads to another, and a stolen kiss in the dark between the siblings is the sparkle that starts a fire that never could be put out. As the immoral Count Schwartz we once again see the irreplacable Gunnar Björnstrand.
The film is a masterpiece - but you can't walk away from that deep inside disturbing feeling (as intended). I wish someone had filmed my facial expressions when the film was over. I still need to recover.
You can see the last scene of the film here. (Not for touchy people!) It's not texted, but there's hardly any dialogue neither. Translation here: [Jarl Kulle, the man] "Get the doctor. Get the doctor!" [old woman] "It's a healthy baby. It's a totally healthy baby."
Stills from My Sister My Love.
The film that brought Vilgot Sjöman international fame (or at least a heck of a lot of attention) was released the next year. Does the title I Am Curious (Yellow) (Jag är nyfiken - gul, 1967) ring a bell? If not, then you have missed out on something.
This film is about a girl of twenty called Lena (played by Lena Nyman). She is a sociology student who is curious of everything that has to do with life. She wants to experience everything and collects information about it, storing it in an enormous archive. She deals with relationships, sex, political activism, meditation and interviews people about the social classes in Sweden. The film is made as a pseudo documentary, allowing us in humorous side plots to see the actors' and the director's reaction to the story and each other.
Lena: Do we have a class system in Sweden?
The interviewed: It depends on the people. Undress them, and they're all the same; dress them, and you have a class system.
Quote from I Am Curious (Yellow)
Posters and stills from I Am Curious (Yellow) and (Blue).
The film raised an international outcry for its nudity and realistic intercourse scenes. The film was shortened with eleven minutes by British cencors. In the United States copies of the film were seized by U. S. Customs in January, 1968 for being obscene, and the film itself was banned as pornography in most parts of the United States. Even though the US Supreme Court overturned the anti-obscenity ban on First Amendment grounds, the film was still only screened on two venues in the country (one in New York City and one in New Jersey) in March, 1968.
However, the film's notoriety guaranteed its success, and for the next 23 years it was the most successful foreign film in the US.
We have a lot to thank Vilgot Sjöman for when it comes to the more and more obvious boycott of the horrible Hay's Code that restricted the film making from 1934 to this date. I Am Curious (Yellow), and its sequel I Am Curious (Blue) (Jag är nyfiken - blå, 1968), inspired to John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972). (The colours in the titles are of course references to the Swedish flag.)
You can see an extract from I Am Curious (Blue)here. No nudity, though.
"One of the most important pictures I have ever seen in my life."
Author Norman Mailer on I Am Curious (Yellow)
Vilgot Sjöman would later return to similar themes in his later work, but the ice had already been broken and people weren't as upset anymore. Worth mentioning, though:
1971 - Till Sex Do Us Part (original title: Troll), about a young couple who believe that they will die if they have pre-marital sex.
1974 - A Handful of Love (original title: En handfull kärlek), for which he received the Swedish motion picture award Guldbaggen (translated as "The golden beetle", I guess...).
1995 - Alfred (or Alfred Nobel), Vilgot Sjöman's last film about the inventor, industrialist and founder of the Nobel Prizes, Alfred Nobel.
In 2003 he received the Ingmar Bergman Award for his contribution to Swedish cinema. Three years later, in 2006, Vilgot died of cerebral haemorrhage, having made an unforseen mark in both national and international film history.
Vilgot Sjöman: You get a love scene with Lena. A love scene with consequences.
Börje: What kind of consequences?
Vilgot Sjöman: I don't know. I'll think of something.
Quote from I Am Curious (Blue)
Harry Schein, Gunnar Björnstrand, Liv Ullman and Vilgot Sjöman.
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