The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

USA, 92 minutes
Director: Robert Wise
Writers: Edmund H. North, Harry Bates
Photography: Leo Tover
Music: Bernard Herrmann
Editor: William Reynolds
Cast: Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, Hugh Marlowe, Sam Jaffe, Billy Gray, Frances Bavier, Lock Martin

In the old movie business parlance (pre-'60s), a B movie was a low-budget shorter feature, often in a genre style, intended for the back half of double features. The A movie was the main attraction. It was full of stars and class and intended to win awards or make big box office or both. I would have guessed that The Day the Earth Stood Still, a science fiction picture with a theremin soundtrack I have been watching all my life, was a B movie, but no. It had a budget. The special effects are restrained, even primitive, but they are effective. The director is Robert Wise, a student of Orson Welles, whose career spanned The Magnificent Ambersons and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, with The Day the Earth Stood Still, West Side Story, and The Sound of Music between. Patricia Neal, an intriguing versatile cross between a character player and a leading lady, had a career starting to bust out all over. And the score is by Bernard Herrmann, a rising A player, who was among the first to use the theremin for the movies, followed shortly by thousands of B movie science fiction for the rest of the decade. In fact, the spooky electronic instrument was almost exclusively associated with science fiction movies until Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys tore it away for their own purposes. Pere Ubu returned the favor decades later but that's all another subject for another day. With everything else, The Day the Earth Stood Still is basically patient zero for science fiction theremin movies.

Reportedly Wise was interested in this project because he was a believer in UFOs. Indeed, the picture rings with its message, an uplifting one even, a fervent belief in a kind of idealized United Nations vision and proto hippie yearning for peaceful coexistence. These are the things I like about the movie myself—with my appreciation for Star Trek, it's possible that I just like a good stirring liberal skit. But actually there's a good deal of art and old-fashioned craft to this movie. At the same time, it reminds me a little of a friend I spoke to once who was "against" UFOs. It wasn't that he didn't believe they existed, but rather that he didn't believe aliens from other planets deserved the degradation of associating with humanity.

The Sound of Music (1965)

USA, 174 minutes
Director: Robert Wise
Writers: George Hurdalek, Howard Lindsay, Russel Crouse, Ernest Lehman, Maria von Trapp
Photography: Ted D. McCord
Music: Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II, Irwin Kostal
Editor: William Reynolds
Cast: Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Richard Haydn, Eleanor Parker, Peggy Wood, Anna Lee, Marni Nixon, Angela Cartwright

At some point I realized that 1965 was going to be a critical juncture in this ongoing Movie of the Year project. It was the year I personally became aware of "going out to the movies" as an activity that meant something specific, and special, although parental accompaniment—or at least permission and transport—were still necessarily involved. I'm thus aware that my choice is something of a sentimental one, as seeing The Sound of Music was precisely a mandatory family activity, in the same year that I discovered top 40 radio and that the Beatles' Help! was released. I resented The Sound of Music then, rejected it as corny, and never looked back until a few years ago, when it somehow got in front of me again (also probably for sentimental reasons, with the death of my father looming). Programming note: It is also the last one I will be offering in the series for a little while, as I increasingly feel the need to research what's ahead for the early '60s, '50s, and back—March or April next year is my target for resuming, with 1964. From here on, all picks will come from retrospect, so I'm indulging one last opportunity for a movie I saw in its time, though my feelings about it are somewhat complicated.

Actually, in that later viewing, there was a particular moment that decisively turned me around on The Sound of Music, which for something like two hours I watched alternating between groaning and wincing and, surprisingly often, thinking, "Hey, this isn't so bad." When I realized the song "Something Good" was not only in the movie, but came from it, I fell in line. I had come to love the homely mystical approach of that song (both musical and lyrical) by way of a Caetano Veloso cover version of it in 2004. Coming at a swooning romantic high point of the picture, I was done. That was it. Even Julie Andrews capering about as dim bulb nun and mountain meadow maid (it has to bear some responsibility for The Flying Nun, yes?), with those magnificent snow-capped Alps peaks in the backdrop, convinced me now. I made my peace. The hills are alive, see.

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

USA, 88 minutes
Directors: Orson Welles, Fred Fleck, Robert Wise
Writers: Booth Tarkington, Orson Welles, Jack Moss, Joseph Cotten
Photography: Stanley Cortez, Jack MacKenzie, Orson Welles
Music: Bernard Herrmann, Roy Webb
Editors: Robert Wise, Jack Moss, Mark Robson
Cast: Joseph Cotten, Dolores Costello, Agnes Moorhead, Tim Holt, Anne Baxter, Ray Collins, Richard Bennett, Erskine Sanford, Donald Dillaway, Orson Welles

I found myself surprisingly put in mind of F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby the last time I looked at The Magnificent Ambersons. It's not just the similar title constructions—in the case of Ambersons the adjective appears mostly offered with at least irony, if not sarcasm, unlike the intermeshed and more complex layers of meaning intended for Gatsby. The Magnificent Ambersons is based on Booth Tarkington, of course, so as with not just Gatsby but also Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, and many others it also consorts in a certain ideal of the turn-of-the-20th-century Midwestern American idyll, rendered more caustically by H.L. Mencken as the "booboisie." I also thought the lovely overboiled language of Welles's voiceover narration occasionally strayed into Fitzgeraldian realms. And of course there's a number of incidental touch-points in their parallel stories of lifelong love for a woman cruelly denied.

But the paradox is that whereas The Great Gatsby may arguably be a very nearly perfect work of art, The Magnificent Ambersons is famously only the smoking hulk of whatever it might have been. It's known at least as much for being the movie "they took away" from Welles and wrecked as anything else. Here's what Wikipedia has on what happened and specifically what was lost. Look at the movie, read it, and weep. That's how things work around here apparently. RKO execs slashed away some 40 minutes of footage from Welles's early cut and reshot the ending. They monkeyed with everything—the story, the music, the photography. They say a copy of that early cut was shipped to Welles in Brazil, where he was already at work on his next project, but it has since never turned up. The cut footage moldered for a time in a vault but eventually was destroyed to make room for more important things to store there, perhaps Oscars®.