And the Academy award goes to….
In France unlike the UK cinema criticism is a serious business. The whole new wave movement which generated Jean Luc Godard, Francos Truffaut and Alain Resnais to name but three emanated from the film review magazine Les Cahiers du Cinema. Here celebrity interviewers like Jonathan Ross have their own film shows.
A honourable exception to this is Paul Gambaccini’s And The Academy Award Goes To on Radio 4 last Saturday morning at 10-30.
Yesterday he featured All about Eve the Bette Davis classic on stardom. In 30 minutes Paul Gambaccini gave a deep insight into the film.
How Claudette Colbert would have been cast but for an injured back, how Bette Davis fell in love and married her leading man Bill Simpson in the film, arguably the best acting performance of Marilyn Monroe.
The film was nominated for 14 awards but won 6 including best film, George Sanders as the cynical critic Addison de Witt and the scriptwriter and director Joseph Mankiewicz whose elder brother Joseph wrote the screenplay of Citizen Kane. The film became beloved if not adopted by gays notwithstanding the 2 obvious homosexuals Eve and de Witt were negative and the film embraces the durability of heterosexual love.
There was stiff competition from Sunset Boulevard and cinema historian David Thompson evaluated both. I believe The Third Man which received no nominations better than either. Graham Greene wrote the script and there were brilliant performances from Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton.
Paul Gambaccini was shamefully prosecuted under Operation Yewtree on flimsy evidence where the CPS admitted the chances of a successful prosecution were no more than 3%. The Director of Public Prosecutons was Keir Starmer tipped now as a future Labour leader. Gambaccini was obliged to sell his comic collection for £200,000 to raise money for the costs to defend himself and received no support from the Labour Party nor Stonewall on whose platforms he spoke. It’s wonderfully redemptive that Gambaccini, an authorative and fluent broadcaster, is back on the airwaves and his programme always scheduled around the time of the Oscars is too.
