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DVD Tom Jones
Winner of four Academy Awards including best picture, director, screenplay, and music, this 1963 adaptation of Henry Fielding's classic novel is a rousing, bawdy comedy about a young man's ribald adventures in 18th-century England. Albert Finney is splendidly hilarious in the title role of a charming womanizer who was discovered as an abandoned infant in the bed of Squire Allworthy, a wealthy landowner who named the child Tom Jones and raised him as his own. As a young man, Tom yearns for the comely daughter (Susannah York) of a neighboring squire, but his amorous adventures (including an extended food orgy that becomes the film's funniest scene) lead him to London and to a duel with a jealous husband. He's sentenced to hang, but fate intervenes. A hit around the world, the film was expertly written by noted playwright John Osborne, and Richardson uses a variety of old-style movie techniques to heighten the lusty, good-natured fun. Don't miss this one! --Jeff Shannon
I picked up this DVD because it won the Best Picture Oscar in 1963. I found it to be trite, boring, and terribly stuck in the 60's. It's hard to imagine how this film won the Best Picture Award over much better films like The Birds, Dr. No, Mad Mad Mad Mad World, Cleopatra, etc.
Tom Jones was so bad that I quit watching it half way through. I couldn't see wasting another hour on of my life.
Disjointed and episodic but, it comes together
I had to watch this movie carefully. At times it seems disjointed as the adventures of the illegitimate adopted son of a Squire Allworthy, a country squire in 18th century England, goes from one episode to another. There certainly is a plot but because of the rapid movement from one adventure to another, this plot can be difficult to follow without paying full attention to the film. Additionally, we are quickly introduced to a lot of characters so, it is difficult, at times to keep track of who's who and what their roles are, in Tom's adventures. However, if you pay attention, or, alteranatively, if you scroll back in your DVD to review scenes that were unclear, the movie does, indeed, come togther.
Tom, played by Albert Finney, is great as a womanizer who who falls in love with Sophie (played by Susannah York), the daughter of a drunken, neighboring squire. Thinking that Tom is the illegitimate adopted son with no blood ties to his adopted father, he heartily disapproves of Tom as a potential son in law. Rather, he prefers that Sophie marry the priggish, snotty nephew of Squire Allworthy because, after all, the nephew would be the heir to his fortune. Despite his love for Sophie, almost without trying, Tom seems to find himself in bed with various women in his bawdy adventures. These ribald adventures are as much a part of the movie as the plot is.
The cinematography is great. The sets, both of the country manors and mid 18th century London, are spectacular. The satire while cutting, is basically good natured as proper, pompous British gentry are skewered. This is a clever comedy which takes a little work, by the viewer to appreciate. Although it won the Oscar for best picture in 1963, because the disointed episodic nature of the movie makes it a little hard to follow, I give it four stars rather than five. The year 1963 was also the year that Sidney Poitier won the Oscar for best actor in Lilies of the Field. Having seen both of these movies, I would rate Lilies of the Field more deservng of best picture. But then again, perhaps I just didn't do the mental work necessary to fully appreciate Tom Jones.
A New Sense of Modernism
This is an adaptation of a large book, a Henry Fielding novel. In the early 1700's the growing middle class in Europe, especially in the British Empire, became literate. As an entertainment to get through the long hours of new leisure, novels flew from the printing presses. Tom Jones was a hit from the first. It was a bawdy tale with amusing detail. It is lucky that an experienced playwright like John Osborne was assigned the screenplay and double lucky that a fine director, Tony Richardson brought the tale to life.
Indeed, Richardson is a poet with the lush English countryside. Since much of the film depicts Tom Jones' amorous adventures in the grass with Molly Seagram, the peasant wench, on a skiff with the Squire's daughter, Sophie, in the tavern with his mother, er, not his mother, Mrs.Wilkens, and in the suites of a countess, the bawdy adventures spin by as food shoots from the mouths of lovers. There are also duels, a misunderstanding about the linage of the Jones baby, and an unwanted suitor for the lovely Sophie, Susan York.
I saw this film as a teen in 1963 and it telegraphed a new sense of modernism and sexual freedom without pretence that is ironic since Fielding's story was hundreds of years old on the eve of the Beatles and the swinging London of the 60's.
Robert Bolt's successful play was not considered a hot commercial property by Columbia Pictures--a period piece about a moral issue without a star, without even a love story. Perhaps that's why Columbia left director Fred Zinnemann alone to make A Man for All Seasons, as long as he stuck to a relatively small budget. The results took everyone by surprise, as the talky morality play became a box-office hit and collected the top Oscars for 1966. At the play's heart is the standoff between King Henry VIII (Robert Shaw, in young lion form) and Sir Thomas More (Paul Scofield, in an Oscar-winning performance). Henry wants More's official approval of divorce, but More's strict ethical and religious code will not let him waffle. More's rectitude is a source of exasperation to Cardinal... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Fred Zinnemann DVD Release Date: Released the 26 January 1999 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Originally broadcast as a 50-minute drama on Philco Television Playhouse in 1953, Marty ensured Paddy Chayefsky's status as one of the greatest writers of television's golden age. When Chayefsky, director Delbert Mann, and actor Ernest Borgnine reunited for this 90-minute film version, the play had been polished with extra scenes, further perfecting Chayefsky's timeless study of loneliness and heartbreak. And the film, in which Borgnine excels as the single, 35-year-old "fat and ugly" butcher Marty Pilletti, received well-deserved Oscars® for Best Picture, Director, Actor, and Screenplay. Although Chayefsky's central theme is the pain of being unwanted (as felt by Marty himself as well as his elderly Aunt Catherine, who's become a burden to her married daughter), the... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Ernest Borgnine - Betsy Blair Director(s): Delbert Mann DVD Release Date: Released the 19 June 2001 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Both riveting murder mystery and classic fish-out-of-water yarn, Norman Jewison's Oscar-winning In the Heat of the Night represents Hollywood at its wiliest, cloaking exposé in the most entertaining trappings. Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger prove the decade's most formidable antagonists. Poitier plays Virgil Tibbs, an arrogant homicide detective waylaid in Sparta, Mississippi; Steiger, in his bravura Oscar-winning turn, is Bill Gillespie, the town's hardheaded, bigoted sheriff who first arrests Tibbs for murder and then begs for his expertise. As the clues and suspects mount, Gillespie and his deputies develop begrudging respect for the black officer. The first-rate supporting cast includes Lee Grant as the victim's angry widow, Warren Oates as a voyeuristic deputy, William... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Sidney Poitier - Rod Steiger - Warren Oates - Lee Grant Director(s): Norman Jewison DVD Release Date: Released the 09 January 2001 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Romance at its most anti-romantic--that is the Billy Wilder stamp of genius, and this Best Picture Academy Award winner from 1960 is no exception. Set in a decidedly unsavory world of corporate climbing and philandering, the great filmmaker's trenchant, witty satire-melodrama takes the office politics of a corporation and plays them out in the apartment of lonely clerk C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon). By lending out his digs to the higher-ups for nightly extramarital flings with their secretaries, Baxter has managed to ascend the business ladder faster than even he imagined. The story turns even uglier, though, when Baxter's crush on the building's melancholy elevator operator (Shirley MacLaine) runs up against her long-standing affair with the big boss (a superbly smarmy Fred MacMurray). The... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Jack Lemmon - Shirley MacLaine - Fred MacMurray Director(s): Billy Wilder DVD Release Date: Released the 19 June 2001 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Winner of seven Academy Awards, including best picture, director, actor, and screenplay, William Wyler's brilliant drama about domestic life after World War II remains one of the all-time classics of American cinema. Inspired by a pictorial article about returning soldiers in Life magazine, the story focuses on three war veterans (Fredric March, Dana Andrews, and Harold Russell in unforgettable roles) and their rocky readjustment to civilian life in their Midwestern town of Boone City. Capturing the contradictory moods of America in the mid to late 1940s, this three-hour drama spans a complex range of honest emotions, from joyous celebration and happy reunion to deep-rooted ambivalence and reassessment of personal priorities. A movie milestone when released in 1946, The Best... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Fredric March - Dana Andrews Director(s): William Wyler DVD Release Date: Released the 05 July 2000 Usually ships in 24 hours
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