Jill St John and Elke Summer in The Oscar (1965 film)

Jill St John (first 14 images) and Elke Summer. (Non-nude)

All comments and images from Whitecaps:

The Oscar is regarded as one of those “so bad it’s good movies.” It’s melodramatic to well past the point of camp, a film about a person (Stephen Boyd as Frankie Fane) who lucks into a (briefly) successful acting career. The film is star-studded, including Milton Berle as Fane’s agent and Tony Bennett, named Hymie Kelly, as Fane’s lifelong friend. This was Tony Bennett’s first and last major screen role.

Every line of dialogue is so overwrought that at one point I thought Fane would yell to Tony Bennett, “Hymie I’m not going to tell you again…No more wire hangers! EVER!”

However, so much has been written about the camp nature of the film that I’d like to focus instead on what sort of message this film was trying to send.

The film was based on a novel of the same name with the screenplay co-written by Harlan Ellison. I didn’t notice when watching, but when I went back to cap it, the film is very episodic. The film is exactly 2 hours long and basically comprises eight fifteen-minute segments. The film could have even titled the segments.

The film is mostly told in flashback with Tony Bennett’s occasional narration about how Fane had made it to the top by getting a nomination for best actor (which he is expected to win), but has destroyed everybody he ever met to get there.

However, I don’t think this is really the case. Basically Fane is a hothead with a hair-trigger temper who can’t stand being personally slighted, and who occasionally gets revenge. Other than the getting revenge part and not having as much of a hair-trigger temper, Rocky Balboa was presented the exact same way (in the first Rocky especially) and was the hero.

To demonstrate how bad Fane is supposed to be, every few minutes a person tells him “you’re evil” or “you’re horrible.” This is especially the case with the Elke Summer character who tells him this when he talks back to a major female Hollywood producer. While I also appreciate the importance of people listening and respecting others with more experience or expertise than they, the message I got was “you little people need to learn to stay in your station and respect your superiors.”

And for most of the film, Fane gets his revenge by using those who used him, including the female Hollywood producer, for whom he was a gigolo.

Fane does turn darker at exactly the one-hour mark when he has become the biggest actor in Hollywood. In addition to Fane badly mistreating his wife, it turns the studio has messed up, as a studio flunky failed to get Fane to renew his contract before it expired. His agent, Milton Berle, explains this to him and Fane tells him he wants a new negotiation as he felt the studio head slighted him when he was first signed. Berle tells him “This isn’t how things in done, you’d better be careful.” Berle’s character is played as extremely ethical, but isn’t he just defending the one-sided studio system here?

But Berle is correct, as exactly 15 minutes later (actually 14 minutes but that’s nitpicking), when Berle – some years later – is hoping to renew that contract, the studio head tells him to forget it, that not only have Fane’s on-set antics cost a lot of money but that Fane is “box office poison.”

I won’t spoil the ending. However, this is directly preceded by Fane having one of the most over-the-top movie nightmares ever. I do think though, that despite what the movie thinks it has made clear about Fane, and as nasty as Fane has become, what he does at the end is completely out of character.

Scoop’s note:

One of the many odd things about this film is the fact that many Hollywood heavyweights and actual Oscar winners appeared in this film, several of them as themselves. Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Merle Oberon, Hedda Hopper and Edith Head¹ are among the members of Hollywood royalty that played fictional versions of themselves. In effect, that serves as a suggestion that the action that the critics called “unrealistic” and “over-the-top” may not have been as far from the mark as those critics believed. Perhaps the road to the top in Old Hollywood really did consist of everyone pushing everyone else off the cliff beside the shoulder, and maybe the industry heavyweights in the film recognized at least a blurry reflection of that in this corny script. Perhaps the actual race to the Oscars, with the promoting and posturing to get a nomination and the studios’ subsequent negative campaigns against the other nominees, is almost as dirty and cutthroat as portrayed here.

Footnote #1:

Edith Head designed the costumes for 433 films. Given that, I suppose her astounding total of 34 Oscar nominations was just a result of Iversonian mathematics.

(In basketball, Allen Iverson realized that if you take 28 shots per game, you’re going to score a shitload of points, no matter how poor your success rate.)