The 10 Best
Frank Capra – “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington” (1939)
The second director to win two Best Picture Oscars (Frank Lloyd, of “Cavalcade” and “Mutiny On The Bounty,” was the first, though Capra was also a producer on his films, unlike Lloyd), Frank Capra could have been forgiven for believing his career had peaked when “You Can’t Take It With You” won Best Picture and Best Director, just four years after “It Happened One Night” did the same. But Capra was far from done, and just a year later returned with one of his very finest achievements (in our mind, the finest), “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington.” A decidedly Capra-esque fable with a tougher edge than some of what came before, the film sees Jimmy Stewart as Jefferson Smith, the head of a Boy Ranger troop who’s picked by political plotters to replaced a deceased Senator, in the expectation that he’ll be easy to manipulate. Smith is taken under the wing of corrupt Senator Joseph Paine (the phenomenal Claude Rains), but soon finds both his new friend and the machinery that put him in power plotting to destroy him. A fiercely political film even among the aw-shucks quality that Capra and Stewart bring, it’s both a crowd-pleaser and, in a precursor to “It’s A Wonderful Life,” which the director and star would reunite for after the war, a desperately sad film that pushes its hero right to the edge. Quite rightly, it won Capra further Picture and Director nominations.
Vincente Minnelli – “The Bad & The Beautiful” (1952)
After his slight, but intermittently glorious musical “An American In Paris” won the Oscar, it was a bold move for Vincente Minnelli to bite the hand that fed with him with his Hollywood melodrama “The Bad & The Beautiful.” But the film’s as much a celebration of amoral behavior in the biz as it is a condemnation of it, and the film was immediately and rightly enshrined as a classic (and won five of the six Oscars it was up for, though it failed to be nominated for Best Director or Picture). Using a “Citizen Kane”-aping, deceptively ingenious flashback structure, it tells the story of the wrongs that second-generation mogul Jonathan Shields (a delicious Kirk Douglas) has done to director Barry Sullivan, screenwriter Dick Powell and star Lana Turner over the course of their careers, as he tries to sell them on a new project. Noirish and wryly funny in the same breath, and as beautiful to look at as anything Minnelli made, it’s a great portrait of the Faustian bargain people make in chasing stardom. Shields might be a devil who went to any lengths to get movies made, and while he might have ruined their personal lives, his targets owe their careers and greatest successes to him. No wonder Hollywood didn’t take it too personally, with Minnelli’s “Gigi” winning Best Picture a few years later too.
Elia Kazan – “East Of Eden” (1955)
“Pinky,” the follow-up to Elia Kazan’s first Best Picture winner, isn’t really one for the ages, but that’s perhaps fitting, because the one that actually won the Oscar, “Gentleman’s Agreement,” is a lesser Kazan picture. The second time he took the top prize, with the intensely personal “On The Waterfront,” Kazan had something far superior to come after, his adaptation of John Steinbeck’s “East Of Eden.” James Dean’s first starring role (and the only one released during his lifetime), it’s a family drama set in California in the first two decades of the 20th century, with Dean’s Cal and Richard Davalos caught in an Cain and Abel-like struggle. It’s a rich and novelistic attempt to wrangle the novel into cinematic shape, with an exposed-nerve intensity, and a lyricism fitting of the writer’s prose. The whole cast is excellent — Davalos, who didn’t get the career he deserved (though he was on the cover of The Smiths’ “Strangeways, Here We Come” at least), Julie Harris as the woman who comes between the brothers, Raymond Massey as their father. But it’s Dean’s film, a performance of Brando-like toughness and sensitivity, his need for approval so desperately sad, and it won him his first Oscar nomination. Sadly, he’d already died by then.
John Schlesinger – “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (1971)
Long before his boundary-breaking U.S. debut “Midnight Cowboy,” which became the first X-rated film to win Best Picture in the early days of 1970, John Schlesinger had established himself as one of the brightest lights of the British New Wave thanks to films including “Billy Liar” and “Darling.” So it was perhaps fitting that after his success across the pond, Schlesinger returned home for “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” which was almost as well-received, and tackled similarly sexually innovative waters as his previous picture. Written by Penelope Gilliatt (who’d gone on to be the New Yorker’s film critic, alternating with Pauline Kael), the film’s essentially a love triangle, with artist Bob (Murray Head) dating both divorcée Alex (Glenda Jackson) and Jewish doctor Daniel (Peter Finch). Looking at, for the time, sexually unconventional lives in a rather more middle-class way than ‘Cowboy’ had, and with a very British kind of repression of emotion involved — neither Jackson or Finch explicitly talk about their unhappiness at sharing a love — it’s nevertheless a finely honed a drama. Schlesinger doesn’t glamorize the London location, the people or the acts, and his three performers all do exemplary work, building utterly real people with every move. It’s as unsensationalized and moving as the best of Schlesinger’s work, and though it might have risked seeming minor to some, played well with the Academy, with the director, Gilliatt, Finch and Jackson all winning nominations. Also keep your eyes peeled for a brief appearance of a 14-year-old Daniel Day-Lewis.
William Friedkin – “The Exorcist” (1973)
These days, we know what to expect from a blockbuster. A portal in the sky, exploding airships, a Chinese star awkwardly inserted for one heavily-pandering scene. We don’t really expect extreme profanity, blasphemic masturbation, rich themes of religious and parenthood, and a total lack of spectacle. And yet, when adjusted for inflation, William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist” made nearly a billion dollars in the U.S. alone, making it one of the most financially successful follows-up to a Best Picture winner (though both Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments,” which followed “The Greatest Show On Earth,” and David Lean’s “Doctor Zhivago,” which followed “Lawrence Of Arabia,” just outgross it), as well as one of the best. Coming hot on the heels of Friedkin’s mainstream breakthrough with “The French Connection,” he took on William Peter Blatty’s novel and turned it into something strange, terrifying and iconic, a horror movie concerned with the soul more than the body. Nearly 45 years on, it remains capable of reducing you to a gibbering wreck, but it also moves, thanks to the performances of Ellen Burstyn, Max Von Sydow and Linda Blair, even if Friedkin went to some dubious ends to get them out of his cast. Unusually for the genre, it paid off with the Academy too, with ten nominations, though was beaten to most by the more benign “The Sting.”