Drama Films

Today I’m looking at the genre of what I term “Drama Films” and listed below are some of the drama films I have. Some of these I’ve already dealt with under the “Classic Films”, “Westerns” & “War Films” so I won’t go into any detail on those, however some of the 4* “Drama Films” I have not dealt with I will look at in a bit more detail.

All the films listed below are Halliwell 4* and have drama listed as one of their categories.

The Battleship Potemkin (See Classic Film Blog)
The Bridge on the River Kwai (See Classic Film Blog)
Brighton Rock (See Classic Film Blog)
Cabaret
Casablanca (See Classic Film Blog)
Cinema Paradiso (See Classic Film Blog)
Citizen Kane (2 Disc Set)
Don't Look Now
Gone with the Wind (See Classic Film Blog)
Great Expectations
High Noon (See Western Film Blog)
If
It’s a Wonderful Life
Kes (See Classic Film Blog)
The Lady Vanishes (Hitchcock)
Lawrence of Arabia (See Classic Film Blog)
The Man in the White Suit
A Matter of Life & Death (See War Film Blog)
Midnight Cowboy
Pygmalion
The Red Shoes
Schindler’s List (See War Film Blog)
Saturday Night & Sunday Morning
The Seven Samurai
The Thirty Nine Steps (Hitchcock)
Vertigo
West Side Story (See Classic Film Blog)


So let’s take a more detailed look at


Cabaret is a 1972 American musical film directed by Bob Fosse and starring Liza Minnelli, Michael York and Joel Grey. The film is set in Berlin during the Weimar Republic in 1931, under the ominous presence of the growing Nazi Party.
The film is loosely based on the 1966 Broadway musical Cabaret by Kander and Ebb, which was adapted from The Berlin Stories of Christopher Isherwood and the play I Am a Camera. Only a few numbers from the stage score were used; Kander and Ebb wrote new ones to replace those that were discarded. In the traditional manner of musical theater, characters in the stage version of Cabaret sing to express emotion and advance the plot, but in the film version, musical numbers are confined to the stage of the cabaret and to a beer garden. Only two of the film's major characters sing any songs.


Cabaret was nominated for 10 Academy Awards in 1973, and nearly performed a clean sweep, winning 8, including Best Director (Bob Fosse), Best Actress (Liza Minnelli), Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Joel Grey), and winning for Cinematography, Editing, Music, Art Direction (Rolf Zehetbauer, Hans Jürgen Kiebach, Herbert Strabel) and Sound (losing Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay to The Godfather).



It won 7 BAFTA awards, including Best Film, Best Direction and Best Actress, and the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture (Musical or Comedy). Cabaret was produced by ABC Pictures and first distributed in the US by Allied Artists. Warner Bros. is the current US distributor.


In 1995, Cabaret was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".


In 2006, Cabaret ranked #5 on the American Film Institute's list of best musicals; the song "Cabaret" was ranked #18 on their 100 Years...100 Songs list in 2004.


In 2007, this film ranked #63 on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 Greatest American Movies.


Cabaret was shot mainly in low light and has a Expressionist feel in the musical sequences.

Citizen Kane is a 1941 American drama film, and the first feature film directed by Orson Welles. It was nominated for Academy Awards in nine categories, but won only for Best Original Screenplay by Herman Mankiewicz and Welles. It was released by RKO Pictures.
The story is a roman à clef which criticizes the life and legacy of William Randolph Hearst, an American newspaper magnate, and Welles' own life.[1] Upon its release, Hearst prohibited mention of the film in any of his newspapers.



The film traces the life and career of Charles Foster Kane, a man whose career in the publishing world is born of idealistic social service, but gradually evolves into a ruthless pursuit of power. Narrated principally through flashbacks, the story is revealed through the research of a newspaper reporter seeking to solve the mystery of the newspaper magnate's dying word: "Rosebud."


Citizen Kane is often cited as being one of the most innovative works in the history of film. The American Film Institute placed it at number one in its list of the 100 greatest U.S. movies of all time in 1997 and again in the revised list of 2007.



In a recent poll of film critics and directors conducted by the British Film Institute, Citizen Kane was ranked the number one best film of all time by both groups.


Academy Awards - 1941
Win
Best Original Screenplay - Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles
Nominations
Best Director - Orson Welles
Best Actor - Orson Welles
Best Film Editing - Robert Wise
Best Picture
Best Art Direction - Perry Ferguson, A. Roland Fields, Van Nest Polglase, Darrell Silvera
Best Cinematography (black and white) - Gregg Toland
Best Sound Mixing - John Aalberg
Best Music Score - Bernard Herrmann


Boos were heard almost every time Citizen Kane was referred to during the Oscars ceremony that year. Most of Hollywood did not want the film to see the light of day considering the threats that William Randolph Hearst had made if it did.


In December 2007, Welles' Oscar for best original screenplay came up for auction at Sotheby's in New York, but failed to reach its estimate of $800,000 to $1.2 million. The Oscar which was believed to have been lost by Welles was rediscovered in 1994 and is owned by the Dax Foundation, a Los Angeles based charity. At the same sale Welles' personal copy of the last revised draft of Citizen Kane before the shooting script did sell for $97,000.
Others


The National Board of Review gave 1941 "Best Acting" awards to Orson Welles and George Coulouris, and the film itself "Best Picture." That same year, the New York Times named it one of the Ten Best Films of the year, and the New York Film Critics Circle Award for "Best Picture" also went to Citizen Kane.








It's a Wonderful Life(1946 ) is an American film produced and directed by Frank Capra and loosely based on the short story "The Greatest Gift" written by Philip Van Doren Stern.


The film takes place in the fictional town of Bedford Falls shortly after World War II and stars James Stewart as George Bailey, a man whose imminent suicide on Christmas Eve gains the attention of his guardian angel, Clarence Odbody (Henry Travers) who is sent to help him in his hour of need. Much of the film is told through flashbacks spanning George's entire life and narrated by Franklin and Joseph, unseen Angels who are preparing Clarence for his mission to save George. Through these flashbacks we see all the people whose lives have been touched by George and the difference he has made to the community in which he lives.


The film is regarded as a classic and is a staple of Christmas television around the world, although, due to its high production costs and stiff competition at the box office, financially, it was considered a "flop." The film's break-even point was actually $6.3 million, approximately twice the production cost, a figure it never came close to achieving in its initial release.



An appraisal in 2006 reported: "Although it was not the complete box-office failure that today everyone believes … it was a major disappointment and confirmed, at least to the studios, that Capra was no longer capable of turning out the populist features that made his films the must-see, money-making events they once were."


It's a Wonderful Life was nominated for five Oscars without winning any, but the film has since been recognized by the American Film Institute as one of the 100 best American films ever made, and placed number one on their list of the most inspirational American films of all time.
Awards and honors
Prior to the Los Angeles release of It's a Wonderful Life, Liberty Films mounted an extensive promotional campaign which included a daily advertisement highlighting one of the film's players, along with comments from reviewers. Jimmy Starr wrote, "If I were an Oscar, I'd elope with It's a Wonderful Life lock, stock and barrel on the night of the Academy Awards". The New York Daily Times also wrote an editorial in which it declared the film and James Stewart's performance, to be worthy of Academy Award consideration.


It's a Wonderful Life received five Academy Award nominations:
Best Actor for James Stewart
Best Editing for William Hornbeck
Best Director for Frank Capra
Best Sound Recording for John Aalberg
Best Picture for Frank Capra


Capra won the "Best Motion Picture Director" award from the Golden Globes, and a "CEC Award" from the Cinema Writers Circle in Spain, for Mejor Película Extranjera (Best Foreign Film).

Jimmy Hawkins won a "Former Child Star Lifetime Achievement Award" from the Young Artist Awards in 1994; the award recognized his role as Tommy Bailey as igniting his career which lasted until the mid-1960s.


American Film Institute recognition
1998 AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies #11
2002 AFI's 100 Years... 100 Passions #8
2003 AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains:
George Bailey, hero #9
Henry F. Potter, villain #6
2006 AFI's 100 Years... 100 Cheers #1
2007 AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) - #20
2008 AFI's 10 Top 10 #3 in the genre of Fantasy





The Red Shoes (1948) is a British feature film about ballet, written, directed and produced by the team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, known collectively as The Archers.



Based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale about a pair of enchanted crimson ballet slippers, "The Red Shoes,"it tells the story of a young ballerina who joins an established ballet company and becomes the lead dancer in a new ballet called The Red Shoes, based on the story by Hans Christian Andersen about a woman who cannot stop dancing.



The film stars Moira Shearer, Anton Walbrook and Marius Goring and features Robert Helpmann, Léonide Massine and Ludmilla Tchérina, renowned dancers from the ballet world, as well as Esmond Knight and Albert Basserman. It has original music by Brian Easdale and cinematography by Jack Cardiff, and is well regarded for its creative use of Technicolor.
Although based ostensibly on the Anderson story, it was also said to have been inspired by the real-life meeting of Sergei Diaghilev with the British ballerina Diana Gould. Diaghilev asked her to join his company, but he died before she could do so. Diana Gould later became the second wife of Yehudi Menuhin.


Filmmakers such as Brian DePalma and Martin Scorsese have named it one of their all time favorite films.

And now for a lesser known film, probably because of its Japanese origins.

Seven Samurai is a 1954 Japanese film co-written, edited and directed by Akira Kurosawa. The film takes place in Warring States Period Japan (around 1587/1588). It follows the story of a village of farmers that hire seven masterless samurai (ronin) to combat bandits who will return after the harvest to steal their crops.



Seven Samurai is frequently described as one of the greatest and most influential films ever made, and is one of a select few Japanese films to become widely known in the West for an extended period of time.


It is the subject of both popular and critical acclaim; it was voted onto Sight & Sound's list of the ten greatest films of all time in 1982 and 1992, and remains on the director's top ten films in the 2002 poll.


The single largest undertaking by a Japanese filmmaker at the time, Seven Samurai was a technical and creative watershed that became Japan's highest-grossing movie and set a new standard for the industry.



Its influence can be most strongly felt in the western The Magnificent Seven (1960), a film specifically adapted from Seven Samurai. Director John Sturges took Seven Samurai and adapted it to the Old West, with the Samurai replaced by gunslingers. Many of The Magnificent Seven's scenes mirror those of Seven Samurai and the final line of dialogue is nearly identical: "The old man was right. Only the farmers won. We lost. We always lose." The film spawned several sequels and there was also a short-lived 1998 television series.










The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935 – Hitchcock Version) is an adventure novel by the British author (and future Governor General of Canada) John Buchan, first published in 1915 by William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh. It is the first of five novels featuring Richard Hannay, an all-action hero with a stiff upper lip and a miraculous habit of getting himself out of sticky situations.


The novel formed the basis for a number of film adaptations, notably: Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 version; a 1959 colour remake; a 1978 version which, though more faithful to the novel in its early stages, ends with a sequence set at the clocktower of the Palace of Westminster which bears no relation to the denouement of the novel; and a 2008 version for British television.