In our last installment, we read one critic from the 1920s refer to silent films as the “uncertain art of the unspoken drama.” What made it so uncertain was its newness. People then had no way of knowing how the technology was going to play out. Were “flickers” a fad, or something more? Would they be superseded by some newer, better, impossible-to-predict technology, making them as irrelevant as the horse and buggy had become by 1919? Or was this “uncertain art of the unspoken drama” fated to last for centuries, with names like Griffith and Gish remembered and admired in the year 3919 the same way ancient names like Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides still carried weight in 1919?

As it happened, silent films vanished in the face of synchronous sound only a decade after Broken Blossoms appeared. Black-and-white photography lasted a few more decades, but that, too, eventually gave way to color. The art of film continued, but the art of silent film was dead and largely forgotten.

And yet here we are, ninety years later, using this newest of game-changing technologies — the Internet — to spend over a month talking about one of these old movies. If you’ve followed along, you’ve learned much about the people that made it, the thoughts that fueled their artistic decisions, the innovative techniques that brought it to life on screen, and the rapturous reaction of American audiences everywhere to its fell beauty, bewitching exoticism, and achingly tragic love story.

Real art endures.

Consider, then, the following analysis, pulled from one of the thousands of books of modern academic criticism published at our universities each year (for the morbidly curious, this one is titled Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction, and was written by Gina Marchetti, a professor specializing in Asian cinema). Broken Blossoms, this scholarly tome informs us, is “a tale of sexual perversity” delineating not D. W. Griffith’s poetic soul but his “own well-documented penchant for young girls as objects of erotic desire.” The movie is not — as contemporary audiences once judged it — a tender, heartbreaking story of innocent love in a brutal world, but one of “rape, incest, sadism, masochism, pedophilia, necrophilia, fetishism, voyeurism, and prostitution as well as miscegenation.”

In short, this aged little film (one that had audiences openly weeping in their seats, and critics rhapsodizing about “Such art, so real one can think only of the classics, and of the masterly paintings remembered through the ages; so exquisite, so fragile, so beautifully and fragrantly poetic. . .”) is judged to be pornography. “Bible-Belt pornography,” to be exact:

Given the very thinly disguised sexual deviations depicted in the film, approaching Broken Blossoms as a pornographic text seems appropriate. Like pornography, Broken Blossoms uses spectacle to arouse the sexual interest of the spectator, while narrative structure permits, controls, and legitimizes this arousal by symbolically punishing the principals (and through them the viewer who identifies with them) for their erotic excesses. However, spectacle wins out, and the evocation of an atmosphere, an image, a feeling that stimulates the erotic involvement of the male viewer takes precedence over the moral imperatives of the plot.

Stimulates the erotic involvement of the male viewer? Actually, the truth is the exact opposite: Broken Blossoms was what we call in modern parlance a “chick flick.” It was mothers and wives and daughters who stood in line to see it again and again, driving its box office grosses into the stratosphere. Editor Robert Parrish, the same man who helped John Ford edit The Battle of Midway during World War II, remembers being dragged to Broken Blossoms by his mother as a child. As he tells it in his memoir Growing Up In Hollywood:

As we crossed Broad Street and turned into Talbotton Road, I could see the lights flashing BROKEN B OSSOMS on the Royal. The L was not functioning, and for the first five years after that I thought we had seen Broken Bossoms that afternoon. . . .

We took our seats, and as the lights went down, a man and a pipe organ came up out of the floor in front of the screen. He was banging away at the keys and kicking his feet and I thought his name was Wurlitzer because that’s what it said on the organ. . . .

Mr. Wurlitzer’s music rose to a crescendo as the coming attractions ended and Broken Blossoms started. My mother’s eyes began to fill as soon as Lillian Gish’s name appeared. . . her watery eyes were glued to the screen. Nothing sad had happened yet, but she knew what was coming up and she wasn’t going to be caught unprepared. . . .

By now, the famous emotional scene in the closet was on and my mother was really enjoying herself. The tears were flowing freely. . . I looked around. Most of the other people were women. They were all crying.

Over-educated and hyper-politicized academics the world over would have us believe that the reactions of these long dead women were the result of cultural brainwashing, accomplished through relentless oppression levied via racism, sexism, and any other -ism, -phobia, or -philia that can be dreamt up. Thousands of nigh-unreadable books make such arguments every year. The pages are formatted into near gibberish according to the dictates of the pompous, pretentious, and monolithically leftist Modern Language Association. The contents are absurdly footnoted against myriad other academic treatises in an endless, incestuous merry-go-round. And the whole works is funded by heaping piles of your tax dollars, funneled like mobster-loot into the lavish coffers of once-great universities. Students pay tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of being assigned such books, and they are relentlessly pressured into accepting their batty premises.

Thus it happens that, when presented with two people on a movie screen expressing honest love, our children are soberly informed that it is really (to pull again from the above-mentioned volume) “implicit sexual abuse,” a “rape fantasy,” and an expression of “white, patriarchal power.” Note the rhetorical sleights of hand. The critic can’t reasonably damn Broken Blossoms for bonafide sexual abuse, because none exists in the film — so she falls back on implicit. The critic can’t cry rape, because no rape occurs anywhere in the film — so she tries to claim that somewhere in the story lurks a rape fantasy. And, of course, what book of modern academic criticism would be complete without suggesting that Battling Burrows, the villain of the film, isn’t just an abusive ogre who happens to be both white and a father, he’s abusive because he’s both white and a father.

Putting ivory-tower ravings aside for the moment, let us ask the $64,000 question: what message did D. W. Griffith intend for his film, if any? I looked long and hard for a clue to this riddle, and finally found the answer in an old 1919 file clipping from a long-forgotten magazine interview. Which magazine, alas, remains a mystery, but the article’s title is “Just Marionettes,” and the byline credits one Louise Williams, who describes attending the New York premiere of the film. “Incense floated out from the stage,” she writes, “while the notes of a balalaika orchestra threaded a plaintive melody back and forth through the fabric that was being woven in the mind of the audience. Far back in a corner of one of the upper boxes sat D. W. Griffith, hat drawn down over his eyes, chin sunk deep in his overcoat collar, watching unobtrusively to see how New York would take Broken Blossoms, the result of his latest straying from the beaten paths of picture making, and the first picture of his repertoire series.”

Afterwards she cornered Griffith, and goes on to relate the following:

“We didn’t have any idea that this picture would take hold in the way it has,” Griffith remarked with the most unassuming frankness as we stood, discussing the picture after the showing was over. “It was originally intended to be just a regular picture, so far as presentation was concerned. But something impelled me — the story, in the first place. I believed in it. Personally, I think that Thomas Burke is about the only writer doing anything original nowadays, and his “Chink and the Child,” from which we made the picture, has a big message, which ought to do much toward internationalizing human sympathy. Of course, we broke all the rules when we did this story: it has a yellow man for a hero, instead of a white one; it’s a tragedy throughout; there are no quick, snappy bits; the story moves very slowly. But I believe that it shows convincingly that we’re wrong when we labor under the delusion that Americans are superior to those they call “foreigners.” No nation can do that — just as no nation can afford to think that it represents all the beauty and heroism and ideals in the world.”

OK, let’s recap:

Filmmakers and viewers of 1919: human sympathy, tragedy, anti-prejudice, beauty, poetry, heroism, ideals.

Modern critics and academics: rape, incest, sadism, masochism, pedophilia, necrophilia, fetishism, voyeurism, prostitution, miscegenation, and “white, patriarchal power.”

The next time you hear someone write with a straight face that, say, the horsewhip wielded so horrifically by Battling Burrows in Broken Blossoms is a phallic symbol just because actor Donald Crisp holds it “at penis height,” or that when his abused daughter drops to the floor and desperately wipes the dust off his shoes it represents not abject fear but fellatio, keep in mind that these theories say far more about the critic than the work being criticized. If you’ve read enough in the field, you don’t have to be any kind of prude to conclude that academia is home to some real sick puppies. There’s nothing too crazy for them to say, nothing too perverted (not just in a sexual sense, but also in a logical, rational one) to slather on any beloved book, film, song, painting or poem you care to name. These people are nothing less than cultural terrorists who will happily blow your entire culture sky-high just to watch it burn if you let them.

Good criticism is earthy, carrying with it the grit of the soil of a culture, and thus the tang of truth. It doesn’t rely on jargon, it doesn’t try to achieve a sheen of authenticity with footnotes and MLA format, and it is easily understandable by anyone with a passing interest in the subject at hand. You know you’ve encountered good criticism when it leaves you feeling expanded and healthy, afire both with a respect for art and with a pride for your culture. Worthwhile essays deepen and broaden their subjects in one’s mind — in a very real sense, they make the original work better. Forever after, the thoughts of the essayist will be there in your head, reminding you of how that particular work of art succeeded in putting you in touch with some untrammeled height of emotion or depth of virtue.

In the original theater program for Broken Blossoms there is a quote from Confucius, one that hints that D. W. Griffith understood all this as well as anybody: “I care little who makes a nation’s laws if I have the making of its ballads.” Conservatives would be wise to heed those ancient words of wisdom. Culture matters, and if we let the other side pervert and mock the great art of the past with impunity, then we’re not worth a damn, and we’ll all get the debased, degraded culture we deserve. The tears wept by our great-grandmothers during this silent ballad still echo down to us, if we care to listen, with a music powerful enough to drown out the deranged howling of all the cultural terrorists combined.

This concludes our look at D. W. Griffith’s sumptuous, “unspoken” love story, Broken Blossoms. Come back next week for an all-new film from an all-new year, only at Big Hollywood.

Previous posts in the series “D. W. Griffith, Lillian Gish, and Broken Blossoms”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

There are plenty of ways to view Broken Blossoms — free on YouTube, streamed via Netflix’s on-demand service, or even projected on-screen during the occasional museum or revival-house retrospective. If it’s a DVD you want, visit the Silent Era website and read their detailed analysis of all the various versions floating around out there. They recommend the edition released by Kino International (a company that advertises itself as providing “The Best in World Cinema”).

Whenever you watch a silent movie, you’ll want to worry about two items: the music and the film speed. My opinion is that, for modern viewers, these films go down a lot better when played absolutely silent, with the accompanying music track muted. Almost all of the music on silent movie DVDs is of the crappy keyboard variety, with repetitive themes that fail to live up to the often splendorous visuals. When watched in silence, the long-buried original pace of the film becomes discernible. Before you know it, shot-lengths that used to feel strange and edits that used to feel jarring begin to flow and make sense.

As for speed, our modern eyes can forgive things moving in slow-motion far easier than when they are sped-up in Benny Hill fashion. I therefore recommend that you adjust the speed setting on your DVD player so that the film plays just a bit slower than normal. That will give all movements a far more realistic edge, and I think you’ll find that the images become much more dramatic as a result.

Broken Blossoms is only around ninety minutes long, so I do hope you give it a whirl. There are many joys to be had in silent film, and culturally literate conservatives need to familiarize themselves with the best of them.

For cinematographic “boy Friday” Karl Brown (1896–1990), this latest impossible request was all in a day’s work. Ever since begging his way into a job with Griffith as a camera assistant, he had often been sent on strange excursions to capture some particular shot haunting the director’s imagination. “One man who was the master designer, Griffith, drew all the plans,” Brown wrote as an old man in his book Adventures With D. W. Griffith. “The rest of us, from the highest to the lowest, gave whatever was in us to the realization of the master plan. I was the lowest, a beast of burden by day and a chore boy by night. The work was cruelly hard, the hours exhaustingly long.”

This latest task, Brown soon discovered, was for a new film called Broken Blossoms, a title “so sickly sweet that the working crew, a godless bunch by definition, never called it anything but Busted Posies.” The film was supposed to take place in the infamous Limehouse district in London, a poverty-wracked den of thieves, swindlers, brutes, hookers, and opium addicts bordering the Thames. Griffith had pulled strings to get young Mr. Brown called back to Hollywood (from a World War I stint in the Army) just so he could create and capture one master image of the Limehouse riverfront on celluloid.

Despite a reputation for action, spectacle and (in the case of one singularly notorious film) controversy, at heart and above all David Wark Griffith (1875–1948) was a poet. In later years, the people who worked with him on his best known movies — The Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), Broken Blossoms (1919), and Way Down East (1920) — all remembered how much he admired Edgar Allan Poe and a variety of other versifiers. With stories that inspired his poetic nature, it wasn’t enough to just shoot action — the images had to possess a certain aura and emotional resonance that hammered home the themes of his tales.

For Broken Blossoms, this meant doing more than walking down to the nearest culvert, getting a quick shot of the Los Angeles River, and calling it the Thames on film. He needed an idealized waterfront tableau, one full of shadows and fog and billowing clouds, a place full of secret thoughts and fantasies. A place where a pair of sad, lonely people — each bereft of happiness and starved for some hint of beauty in life — could find each other and fall in love like two fragile flickers of light amidst a sea of darkness. A place of poetry and dreams.

Actress Mary Pickford — who along with her husband Douglas Fairbanks and the comedian Charlie Chaplin were partners with Griffith in a new production company, United Artists — was the one who introduced the director to a bestselling volume of short stories, Limehouse Nights (1916), authored by a young Englishman named Thomas Burke.

The book, coming as it did in the years before literature grew stark and hardboiled in the hands of writers like Ernest Hemingway and Dashiell Hammett, was a soul-stirring reverie of romance, sordidness, and exoticism rivaling the appeal of modern novels such as Memoirs of a Geisha (1997). “Thomas Burke’s stories of Limehouse were enjoying a great vogue,” Karl Brown remembered many decades later. “I’d read all of them. So had everyone else. You might as well confess at once that you were utterly behind the times if you were not intimately acquainted with Burke’s stories of Limehouse. The whole English-reading world knew every dark and dangerous alley of Limehouse as well as they knew the way to the corner grocery.”

Griffith became particularly entranced with the first story in the volume, “The Chink and the Child” (a title as offensive then as today — Burke’s use of the pejorative here is cynical, designed to elicit sympathy from the reader and putting us firmly on his Chinese protagonist’s side). This story (and hence the bestselling book as a whole) sets the mood as follows:

IT is a tale of love and lovers that they tell in the low-lit Causeway that slinks from West India Dock Road to the dark waste of waters beyond. In Pennyfields, too, you may hear it; and I do not doubt that it is told in far-away Tai-Ping, in Singapore, in Tokio, in Shanghai, and those other gay-lamped haunts of wonder whither the wandering people of Limehouse go and whence they return so casually. It is a tale for tears, and should you hear it in the lilied tongue of the yellow men, it would awaken in you all your pity. In our bald speech it must, unhappily, lose its essential fragrance, that quality that will lift an affair of squalor into the loftier spheres of passion and imagination, beauty and sorrow. It will sound unconvincing, a little. . . you know. . . the kind of thing that is best forgotten. Perhaps. . . .

But listen.

These lilting, lyrical, rhythmic words, and the ones that followed, made a deep impression upon the famous director. “It was originally intended to be just a regular picture, so far as presentation was concerned,” he said in an interview soon after the film’s release. But what was supposed to be a straightforward programmer grew much more visually ambitious. “Something impelled me — the story, in the first place. I believed in it.” These were years in which Griffith felt a great responsibility to grow the medium of film beyond its Nickelodeon roots and into a more rarefied sphere. His last few films had been indifferently received, and he was determined to do justice to this popular, achingly soulful work of literature. With Broken Blossoms, he endeavored to craft a “photodrama” unlike any seen before.

Karl Brown eventually created the Limehouse riverfront shots by building them in miniature. A trough was filled with water to make the Thames, wooden storefronts covered one side of the foreground, fake ships lazily drifted through the frame, a large painted background gave the sky billowing night clouds, some smoke provided the requisite night fog, and flash powder sprinkled on the water created the effect of sparkling moonlight on gentle ripples. After the whole diorama was lit with strategically placed lights, the effect was convincing. Brown took his film to Griffith’s on-site developing department, where they lovingly developed and tinted the film multiple times until it was just the right shade and color to evoke a riverfront at night.

When Brown projected his finished shot for Griffith, the director watched with rapt attention, then asked to see the whole thing again, overwhelmed. “It’s a painting!” he gasped in awe. “A painting. . . that moves!”

With that, Karl Brown went back to his Army outfit, and Griffith went on to shoot his film in a matter of a few weeks. For the first time in his career, he stayed entirely in the studio on meticulously designed sets, where he had total control over light and mise-en-scène as he strove to get every shot to measure up to that first great painterly effect.

Brown was away in the Army during the shooting of Broken Blossoms, but he returned home in time for the movie’s grand Los Angeles premiere on September 16, 1919. The movie had already appeared in New York earlier that spring, receiving rave reviews, and he was curious to finally see with his own eyes what magic Griffith had conjured to earn them.

He arrived at Clune’s Auditorium, a massive silent theater seating thousands, to find that all of the movers and shakers in Hollywood had turned out for the spectacle (an architectural marvel and a Los Angeles landmark, Clune’s would later become the longtime home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic). The program booklet carried a cryptic legal note: “Copyrights and patents pending on all lightings and effects used in this production.” It also contained an alluring epigraph heralding the evening’s entertainment, from Poe: “The end of all art is to be beautiful — there is no moral in art.”

Everyone in the crowd was no doubt sharing the same thought: what on earth had Griffith come up with this time?

They soon found out. A Russian balalaika orchestra — of all things! — came through the door of the orchestra pit and took their places. Incense began floating up lazily from the stage in tenuous, fragrant strands. Then, Karl Brown writes,

The houselights dimmed, but not entirely so. Instead of darkness, the entire auditorium was suffused with a strange, unearthly blue that seemed to come from everywhere — from the chandelier, from spots ranged along the balconies, from the footlights. There was something eerily supernatural about it.

The balalaikas began to whimper a strange, haunting, shimmering melody. . . The big curtain whispered upward, revealing the screen, which was not all white but bathed in that strange, all-suffusing blue coming from spots arranged around the inside of the proscenium arch.

Then the picture came on in a slow fade that revealed the scene I had been released from the army to make — but with what a difference. I had seen it in a black-painted little projection room on a white screen with black edges and a silence broken only by the whirring of the projection machine.

This was a vision of gold swimming in a misty blue, a vision that seemed to reach on and on, far and away, as far as the mind could reach. The shimmering music echoed the shimmering of the water. The slow movement of the river was the endless motion of time itself. You could head a gasp from the audience at the impact of pure beauty.

My mother, seated next to me, reached over and gripped my arm strongly.

As the movie played out for that audience of jaded Hollywood veterans, they were as taken with its stunning visuals as the New York critics had been. All the reviews raved about its color and beauty. “The screen was always bathed with a curious, vibrant mauve,” marveled the New York Sun, “while the inner core of the picture itself shimmered with salmon pink.” The New York Times promised its readers that, “Many of the pictures surpass anything hitherto seen on the screen in beauty and dramatic force.” The Morning Telegraph went even further, gushing that “No word of ours can do justice to the photographic effects, which are like beautiful paintings, put on with an impressionistic touch. . . Such art, so real one can think only of the classics, and of the masterly paintings remembered through the ages; so exquisite, so fragile, so beautifully and fragrantly poetic is Broken Blossoms.”

Karl Brown, Lillian Gish, and the rest of Griffith’s crew finished watching the movie with thousands of Hollywood counterparts, and all realized they had just seen something far beyond anything they ever imagined could exist on celluloid. Brown tells us that

The picture closed as it had begun, with that blue vision of the mysterious river of time, forever flowing yet forever the same, with the shimmering of the balalaikas dying away to silence.

The reaction of that crowded house was the ultimate in applause — a stunned silence of the deeply moved. This lasted a moment, and then came a spontaneous roar of sound, people on their feet shattering the air, hands smiting hands, voices crying, “Bravo! Bravo!” and the walls loud with the echoed uproar.

This went on and on, until finally Griffith appeared, a small, frail figure all in black and seeming to be very tiny at the edge of that big proscenium. He said nothing. . . He let the waves sweep over him a moment and then he was gone; the houselights came on and the audience began to leave, full of overflowing talk about the miracle they had witnessed.

In London, critics gave Griffith’s depiction of the Limehouse district their highest accolades. “The reviews were all but unbelievably exultant,” Brown writes. “They could find no words of praise fine enough to compliment Griffith on his meticulously accurate reproduction of Limehouse down to its tiniest detail. This was something no American should be capable of doing, because one must live in such a place for a lifetime to capture its inner spirit and not merely its outward appearance. And yet he had done it.” Some even claimed to have hunted down the exact spot where Griffith must have filmed that lush and ghostly master shot of the riverfront. That it was a miniature invented by a twenty-two-year old kid in a Hollywood studio eluded them.

Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers, how Lillian Gish generated the performance of a lifetime for Broken Blossoms.

Previous posts in the series “D. W. Griffith, Lillian Gish, and Broken Blossoms”

Part 1

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Read Limehouse Nights and More Limehouse Nights by Thomas Burke. Both volumes of short stories are available online, and still well worth perusing.

Adventures With D. W. Griffith by Karl Brown. An intimate behind-the-scenes look at Griffith and his production company during their Hollywood years, when all of his greatest films were made, including Broken Blossoms. Written by Brown in old age, some fifty years after his time with the master director.

Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film. Brown is also featured in several episodes of Kevin Brownlow’s epic thirteen-episode documentary on the silent era. Every fan of cinema should see this series at least once in their life, but unfortunately the set is only available on VHS at the moment, and is ridiculously overpriced (I scored my set through alternate, shadowy channels worthy of Limehouse itself). You can currently find several episodes on YouTube. Narrated by James Mason.

Clune’s Auditorium. Some history and pictures of the storied silent film auditorium in Los Angeles where Broken Blossoms had its west-coast premiere. After 1920 it became the Philharmonic Auditorium, and also was used as a Baptist super-church until its demolition in 1985 (to make way for a promised new complex of ritzy modern buildings that never materialized — the area is now an empty lot).

The greatest element — that’s a bold claim, considering the hot competition among the movie’s other collaborators. But in hindsight, few would argue that the marvelous sets, vehicles, and spy gadgets of Goldfinger, masterminded by production designer Ken Adam, are any less iconic than Ian Fleming’s novel, Sean Connery’s performance, or John Barry’s musical score.

Production design is a largely unsung art. Both the script and the need for historical accuracy tend to serve as harsh governors on the dreams and fantasies of the people charged with designing a movie’s sets and props. But the Bond films, Adam says, “are done so loosely that the script isn’t the Bible that it is in most films. It changes all the time, and the whole process of writing is like some democratic debating society.”

When Dr. No went into production in 1961, Adam got a mere 14,000 pounds (out of the movie’s total budget of 350,000) with which to design all of the interior sets for this “tongue-in-cheek spectacular,” including the casino in the opening scene, Bond’s apartments, M’s office, and the sprawling, futuristic lair of the villainous doctor himself. He performed his task in England while the rest of the cast and crew were off filming exteriors in Jamaica, and when they returned they were stunned by what they saw:

Adam, originally a German who fled to England with his family before the War, called on his love of German Expressionism to invent outrageous sets that were, as he called them, “theatrical realism. . . exaggerated practicality. . . hyper-reality by design.” Larger-than-life, yes, but still of life, much like Fleming’s novels themselves. “Nobody could foresee the success of Dr. No,” Adams insists. “What happened was like magic, almost.”

Two years later Adam arrived on the set of his second Bond film, Goldfinger, with a budget many times that of his previous effort. His first task this time out was designing the new car Bond was to use. He settled on the Aston Martin DB5 because, “It was sort of the most prestigious British sports car at the time. We couldn’t have used a Ferrari or something like that, you know.”

An admitted “sports-car freak,” Adam went nuts pimping out Bond’s ride with its now-legendary array of special options, using the rationale that “all the gimmickry and gadgets were just what I would have wanted in my own car.” The entire crew was encouraged to submit their own ideas for upgrades, and by the time he was finished he had spent 25,000 pounds — almost double the total production design budget of Dr. No — on the Aston Martin alone. As it happened the vehicle was only on screen for thirteen minutes, but Adam’s conception of it was so wildly inventive and fun that it became the most famous car in movie history.

The sets for Goldfinger were no less well imagined. Everyone has their own fave: the gorgeous apartment where Bond wakes to find his lover covered in gold paint, the vast Bank of England dining hall — bad brandy, good cigars — where Bond gets the details of his mission, the cavernous laser room where our intrepid hero nearly becomes special agent castratum, the plush confines of the Lockheed jet where Bond meets Pussy Galore and outfoxes the clever peep-holes used by the lovely Mei-Lei.

Everything in the film drips with the opulence, style, and color for which the Bond series is known — all of it spawned from the mind of Ken Adam, and laid out in drawings inspired by his life experiences and unique visual sense. “No design is worth doing if you just reproduce reality,” he stresses. “I don’t believe you can get a sense of reality by copying. I think you can get that better by not copying. But you must always be honest. You mustn’t do things just to create chi-chi effects. You must have a reason.”

Take Auric Goldfinger’s breathtaking Kentucky country estate, with its stables and Playboy Mansion-like diversions. Adam remembers that

We called the set where he keeps the harnesses and tack the rumpus room. . . I knew this rumpus room had to convert into a gas chamber, so all the walls were designed to close. Even the big stainless steel fireplace came down so that no fresh air could get in. It was pretty horrifying, actually.

And at the same time the other moving objects, like the billiard table, had a practical purpose by turning round and becoming the briefing model of the raid on Fort Knox. The rotating bar was a little gratuitous, but once I’d started I thought, “I might as well!” So it turned from a rather harmless-looking, luxurious tack room into a combined War Room and gas chamber.

Check out the finished set in the following clip, and as each shot reveals new architectural glories and wonders, keep in mind that this isn’t some real-life room rented from a billionaire’s mansion, it’s a movie set, built from scratch and designed from the ground up by Ken Adam:

Theatergoers in 1964 were dazzled by these ingenious sets, and almost a half-century later they have yet to lose their ability to inspire awe.

This elaborate design came from a deeper place in Adam’s psyche than may at first be apparent. He lived most of his life in England, but he was born Klaus Hugo Adam in 1921 Berlin, emigrating to the UK only when the rise of Hitler threatened his family’s safety. During the war he became the only German-born pilot in the Royal Air Force, serving his adopted country with distinction against the country he was originally from. Twenty years later, during the making of Goldfinger, he still hadn’t got past the dichotomy of his upbringing. “Remember it was the 1960s,” says Adam:

The Second World War was still very much in everybody’s minds. . . I had to keep in mind that all the gangsters are going to be finally poisoned by gas, you see. . . .

When the Germans now write about me, it’s not that they say, “he was affected by the sadistic ideas of the period,” but I grew up with some of these things. So knowingly or not knowingly, I tried to show some of those impressions, my early impressions, in my designs. . . it’s mixing this kind of playful fantasy with the ultimate horror.

Given Adam’s background and influences, it’s not going too far to posit that Goldfinger’s luxurious abode, so wondrous and modern yet laced with a sinister aspect, beggars comparisons to places like The Berghof, Hitler’s “eagle’s nest” hideaway in the Bavarian Alps, where profoundly evil men enjoyed the very best wine, women and song as they poured over intricate maps, scale-models and globes while plotting the assembly-line domination and destruction of whole populations. And the fiendishly clever bit of mechanized death that lies at the heart of Goldfinger’s “rumpus room,” with every avenue of escape clipped off like the tickings of a well-designed watch, evokes painful memories of the meticulously engineered real-life abattoirs of the Holocaust.

“In hindsight,” Adam says, “I think Goldfinger was maybe the best example of a Bond film that I designed, where the settings accentuate the dramatic message of the film. I had a completely free hand.”

The Cold War was a constant presence in the work of Adam throughout the Sixties, not only in the Bond series but in films such as Dr. Strangelove (1964 — where he designed the memorable War Room for Stanley Kubrick, foregoing the chance to work on From Russia, With Love to take the job), as well as more realistic spy films like The Ipcress File (1965) and Funeral in Berlin (1966), both starring Michael Caine. But perhaps his single greatest Cold War set, the one that veers the furthest into cinematic outrageousness while remaining utterly convincing, was the interior of the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox as depicted at the end of Goldfinger.

“I’d seen the vault of the Bank of England,” says Adam, “and you know gold is so heavy, so it’s never stacked more than two foot or two-foot-six high. . . I’m sure the inside of Fort Knox is very dull, with low vaults and a few trolleys traveling around.” But of course, for a Bond movie dull simply won’t do. “The public wanted to see gold!” Adam thought, and so he gave it to them using all of the sumptuous splendor he could muster. “If you go to the biggest gold depository in the world you expect to see gold towering up to the heavens. . . I wanted to build a cathedral of gold, almost forty foot high — completely impractical.”

Adam was aided by the fact that, due to stringent security, virtually no one among the public knew what the interior of the Depository looked like. There were no pictures floating around, no descriptions of any kind:

Remember, the President of the United States wasn’t allowed inside. And I was really rather pleased about that. Because it gave me the opportunity to design it the way I thought it should be designed, with gold stacked up to forty feet in height. I also liked the concept of putting the gold behind bars, you know, spectators being on the other side. I liked playing around with that. . . a surreality, which in fact is accepted by the audience as reality.

The final result of his designs inspired veneration in audiences. Film scholar Christopher Frayling, a keen follower of Adam’s career, recalls his first viewing of Goldfinger back in 1964: “The audience erupted with applause — even at a matinée — when Oddjob got his comeuppance by being electrocuted. . . I’d never known a cinema audience to spontaneously applaud like that. But there was something about the way in which the sequence worked; it satisfied everybody.”

The towers of gold, the impregnable bars, the futuristic elevators, Oddjob’s deadly bowler hat, the bomb threatening to make the bullion holdings of the United States radioactive — all of these things were designed by Adam and the rest of Goldfinger’s art department out of whole cloth, following Adam’s crucial decision to go whole-hog and make the Bond series not a humdrum copy of reality but the stuff of which cinematic dreams are made of.

Adam likes telling an apocryphal story “from reliable sources” about how the newly inaugurated Ronald Reagan, upon entering the White House for the first time, demanded to see the War Room from Dr. Strangelove and was dejected when his handlers informed the “amiable dunce” that none in fact existed outside of the film. Liberals have perpetuated the story ad nauseam ever since (usually prefacing it by such well-worn phrasings as “it was said that. . . ,” “I’ve heard that. . . ,” “According to many sources. . . ”) because it fits neatly into their fantasy view of conservatives in general and Reagan in particular. But, although they won’t admit it, many of those same people were themselves taken in by the glittering interior of Fort Knox in Goldfinger. “Everyone is now convinced Fort Knox looks like that,” Adam says, “As a film designer you can create a reality which is more acceptable to the public than the actual thing. . . United Artists got so many letters saying, how were we allowed in when the president wasn’t allowed, and so on. So I consider that a successful design.”

The late critic David Sylvester went much further than that, calling Adam’s sets “probably the most amazing and enthralling pieces of fantastic architecture in the history of talking pictures.” Millions of viewers around the world — from Presidents on down to the poorest kid at the cheapest matinée — would agree.

Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we conclude our pleasure cruise of Goldfinger with a study of the best critical volume written about Bond, wherein a conservative writer defended 007 in the wake of a widespread academic and media backlash against the series.

Previous posts in the series “Ian Fleming, Sean Connery, and Goldfinger”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Three books about Ken Adam. Production design is rarely given full-book treatments, even as other aspects of filmmaking are immortalized in hundreds of volumes of criticism and analysis. The work of two-time Academy Award-winner Ken Adam, however, is featured in no less than three major retrospective editions: Moonraker, Strangelove, and Other Celluloid Dreams: The Visionary Art of Ken Adam by Ken Adam and David Sylvester, Ken Adam: The Art of Production Design by Christopher Frayling, and Ken Adam Designs the Movies: James Bond and Beyond by Adam and Frayling. All are meaty, colorful books filled with drawings and photos illustrating the intricate and inspired work that went into the design of such Bond films as Dr. No, Goldfinger, You Only Live Twice, Diamonds Are Forever, The Spy Who Loved Me, and Moonraker, not to mention Dr. Strangelove and the dozens of other movies he worked on throughout his career.

Ken Adam (production designer). This 150-page oral history transcript is housed at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library, and can be accessed and read by any interested scholar in the Los Angeles area. The interviews contained in the transcript were conducted in 2002 by Jennifer Peterson.

Article on Ken Adam in frieze magazine. Frieze bills itself as “the leading magazine of contemporary art and culture.” This piece by Dan Fox, published in Issue 51 for March-April 2000 and now reprinted on the web, is notable for its expert analysis of the artistry underlining Adam’s designs and drawings.

Christopher Frayling discussions with Ken Adam. These candid interviews took place in 2008. The sound on the videos could be a lot better, but if you persevere you will hear some interesting stories about Adam’s work on Dr. No, Dr. Strangelove, Goldfinger, and production design in general.

Ken Adam, designer — Cold War Modern. Here’s an Adam excerpt from a much longer documentary, with more interview material about his life and career.

In desperation, he temporarily moved in with his pal John Barry, the music composer for the Bond series. Barry was a regular patron of London’s tony clubs and discotheques, and so Caine fully expected to have some good times while staying over as a guest. What he got instead was being kept up night after night by a strange tune Barry was tinkering with: two blaring notes in the key of F major, followed by a trailing melody in D flat, repeated over and over like a villainous echo:

Decades later, music critic Terry Walstrom would marvel at how this famous introduction “arrests the attention and stuns the ear,” with the unorthodox key transition being akin to “opening a carton of fat-free milk and pouring out a glass of vodka. Entirely without precedent.”

Unknowingly just a few months away from his own stardom courtesy of 1964’s Zulu (another film scored by Barry), Michael Caine lay in the dark listening to the haunting melody of “Goldfinger,” little guessing that the song would one day be judged one of the finest of the last fifty years, with its young composer becoming the greatest British purveyor of movie music in the twentieth century.

John Barry Prendergast was the great-grandson of famous bare-knuckled boxing champ Jack Sullivan, but no hint of “the sweet science” filtered down through the family tree to him. Born in 1933, his father owned a chain of cinemas and his mother was a concert pianist. Barry took piano lessons from the age of nine (with one teacher whacking his fingers with a ruler whenever he missed a key), and fell in love with movies while working in the projection booths of his Dad’s theaters. Soon he had every intention of becoming a classically trained film composer.

Then, as Barry tells it, “When I was fifteen, I met totally different music. My brother was crazy about swing: Goodman, Ellington, Herman, the Dorseys, Harry James and the rest. I was horrified. Then, secretly fascinated. Then openly fascinated.” Against all common sense given his film aspirations, Barry found himself forgoing his piano studies to learn the trumpet, while devouring every jazz record he could find. “I was a big, big fan of Stan Kenton’s,” he says.

I wanted to listen to the early Kenton stuff — that brass sound was predominant, both the high brass (they said he had five trumpets, five trombones) and also the low brass sound, a rich, low sound. I think the genesis of the Bond sound was most certainly that Kentonesque, sharp attack; extreme ranges, top Cs and beyond, and on the low end you’d go right down to the low Fs and below, so you’d have a wall of sound. The typical thing, that Bond thing, is very much this brass sound.

Managing military bands during his compulsory national service convinced Barry that bandleader was the greatest job in the world. Problem was, the big swing bands were on their way out — too big, too expensive, too old-style. They were being replaced by rock ‘n’ roll groups featuring a smaller mix of brass, percussion, and newfangled instruments like electric guitars.

Barry took advantage of this changing of the guard by recruiting some ex-Army buddies and local musicians into a new group he called The John Barry Seven. Instead of Benny Goodman it was Bill Haley who inspired these kids. Decked out in matching light-grey suits and sporting practiced dance steps to go along with the music, they soon were a regular feature in British music halls and on TV.

In 1957, the respected UK pop-music newspaper Record Mirror said that the John Barry Seven were “mainly on a rock kick, but if you can stand that, then the act is excellent. They are faultlessly turned out, perform with slickness, precision and abandon. An act produced with professional thoroughness, an object lesson to the youngsters in the business.” Barry and his band toured with Paul Anka, jump-started the career of British teen idol Adam Faith, and played in the first Royal Variety Show in 1960. Perhaps the high point of that early period was Faith’s 1959 breakthrough hit, “What Do You Want?”

As the Fifties gave way to the swinging Sixties, Barry began scoring films as a side-gig. His first was 1960’s hilariously bad contribution to the teen-rebellion genre, Beat Girl. But even as he wrote music for a schlocky picture with lines like “My mother was a stripper. . . I wanna be a stripper too!”, he was still pining to graduate to his first love: serious composition for cinema. “You knew he had another agenda,” Adam Faith later remembered about his early collaborations with Barry. “He used pop music as a platform — a jumping off platform. Almost from the first day that I met him, John’s ambition went beyond making a few pop records.”

Barry began recording orchestral demos for his budding film-scoring career, and his arrangements became progressively grander in scale. One Friday in June 1962 he got a call from Noel Rogers, the head of music publishing at United Artists in London. There was a movie rushing into theaters, a picture based on the famous James Bond books, and the producers weren’t happy with the main theme. Would Barry consider reworking the existing melody into something hotter and hipper?

The composer knew vaguely of James Bond but had never read a single line of Ian Fleming’s prose, nor did the producers have time to let him screen a rough cut of the picture. It was a rush job: he was offered two-hundred pounds, given the basic melody as written by Dr. No composer Monty Norman, and ordered to turn in an updated arrangement of the main theme by the following Wednesday. Knowing only that the Bond series featured spies, gunplay and girls, Barry decided to use Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn” and Nelson Riddle’s “Untouchables” theme as primary models for his own effort. “It was very Dizzy Gillespie,” Barry said later in an interview. “The bridge of the James Bond theme — it’s totally be-bop. It was this crazy mixture of stuff. . . really a ragbag of ideas.”

Gathering together the current incarnation of his John Barry Seven, he padded them out with additional players until he had a streamlined, lean-and-mean “orchestra.” There were nine pieces of brass (five saxes, plus trumpets and trombones), a bit of percussion for rhythm, and no strings at all aside from the ones attached to the sinister, growling electric guitar of Vic Flick, a young impresario who had joined the Seven in 1959. It was Flick who suggested creating “a more ominous feel” by playing his bit an octave lower, starting on the sixth string rather than the fourth. “We tried it,” says Flick, “and it turned out to be very effective.” Have a listen and judge for yourself:

The film’s producers liked the theme so much that they added it not only to the main titles, but to a number of other scenes in Dr. No as well. When released as a single later that year, “The James Bond Theme” became a huge hit on the radio, cementing the character of James Bond in the popular culture. “The Bond Sound is made up of two different elements,” Barry says, “the pop guitar sound plus influences from people like Bill Russo and Stan Kenton. The pop side made it very accessible, and the jazz side gave it a size and feel that was different. Fred Astaire said, ‘Make it big, give it style, and give it class,’ and that’s the bible on which I worked.”

Right on the heels of Dr. No’s success came the first Bond sequel, From Russia, With Love. Previously limited to rearranging Dr. No’s title track, Barry was hired this time to score the entire film, with one crucial exception: the movie’s theme song, written by Lionel Bart and crooned by Matt Munro. For a second time, therefore, he found himself in the somewhat unenviable position of giving someone else’s preexisting melody his own jazzy, brassy “Bond Sound.”

But once again, the producers liked what he turned in so much that they made the decision to track one of Barry’s instrumentals over the opening credits, relegating the vocalized version of the theme to the end of the film:

Barry also used From Russia, With Love to introduce an all-new, multi-purpose Bond action theme called simply “007.” It proved popular with fans, and ultimately was used again and again throughout the series:

It wasn’t until Goldfinger in 1964 that Barry was entrusted with penning his first Bond theme song, complete with lyrics and a vocalist of his choosing, and he was determined to make the most of it. One of his favorite Sixties haunts, The Pickwick Club, was owned by the lyricist Leslie Bricusse. Barry asked him and fellow song-smith Anthony Newly to provide lyrics for the tune, but when they first heard it they were astounded by how unconventional it was. “What the hell do I do with it?” Newly asked.

“It’s ‘Mack the Knife,’” Barry replied. “A song about a villain.”

That was the key, and from there Bricusse and Newly were able to find words that lived up to the brazen, audacious, subtly creepy melody:

Goldfinger!
He’s the man.
The man with the Midas touch.
A spider’s touch. . . .
Such. . .
a cold finger.
Beckons you
to enter his web of sin.
But don’t. . .  go. . . in. . . .

Tony Newly, an accomplished singer in his own right, recorded a version of “Goldfinger” that ultimately went unused in the film, but which focuses the mind on the exquisite silkiness of the lyrics, freed as they are here from the wailing brass of the “James Bond sound”:

Once the music was on paper, and while Bricusse and Newly were still penning the words, Barry went on a hunt for a singer capable of doing justice to the sheer outlandishness of the piece. He settled on a beautiful, full-throated pop diva of mixed African/English heritage named Shirley Bassey, who heralded from Wales. As soon as she swung by the studio and listened to Barry’s haunting melodies, she was entranced. “Just hearing the opening bars convinced me that this was no ordinary song,” Bassey later gushed, “and I told him ‘I don’t care what the lyrics are like — I’ll do it!’”

Bassey’s incomparable voice was the final necessary ingredient in the potent “Goldfinger” musical brew. “She just whammed it out with so much conviction,” Barry later marveled. “[Her voice] was feminine but she had a metallic quality in her voice. An absolute metallic edge. So the whole thing worked. It wouldn’t had been what it was had Shirley not sang it.” At one concert with Barry in 1964, Bassey hit a high note so powerfully that, as she tells it, “my dress strap broke and out popped my left boob! I didn’t miss a beat as I kept my hand there and. . . finished the song still holding on.”

Small wonder she’s never been invited to sing at the Super Bowl. . . .

While the movie was growing into a cultural phenomenon, the soundtrack album for Goldfinger went on a rampage of its own, knocking The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night out of the top spot of the US charts, and ultimately hanging around on the list for seventy weeks. Two million copies were sold in just the first six months, and the title song became a #1 hit as far away as Japan. “The end result worked just perfectly,” says the composer with pride.

John Barry’s involvement with James Bond stretched over a quarter-century, until by 1987’s The Living Daylights he felt he had “exhausted all my ideas, rung all the changes possible. It was a formula that had run its course. The best had been done as far as I was concerned.” Goldfinger remains his favorite Bond score, a magic convergence of talent and execution that comes along maybe once or twice in a lifetime.

By no means is Barry only known for Bond. He has won five Academy Awards during his long career, bringing his stately, elegant, and lush compositions to bear on films as varied as Born Free (1967), The Lion in Winter (1969), Midnight Cowboy (1969), King Kong (1976), The Deep (1977), Bruce Lee’s Game of Death (1978), Disney’s The Black Hole (1979), Somewhere in Time (1980), Body Heat (1981), Out of Africa (1986), and his magnificent crowning achievement, Dances with Wolves (1991). But it’s the pulsing, soaring, jazz-and-brass Bond efforts for which he’ll be remembered best. And among that group of scores, Goldfinger reigns supreme.

Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers, a look at the amazing production design of Goldfinger, and the endlessly inventive man who dreamt up the larger-than-life look of Bond’s world.

Previous posts in the series “Ian Fleming, Sean Connery, and Goldfinger”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

The (near-)complete Goldfinger soundtrack. Like many albums from the period, the original 1964 Goldfinger contained only a small portion of the total music from the movie. Many other cues languished unreleased for decades, until they began appearing on other compilations during the CD era. In 2003 a digitally remastered edition finally combined all of this material onto a single disc. If you pick up a copy of Goldfinger, make sure it is the 2003 version.

John Barry: The Man With the Midas Touch by Geoff Leonard, Pete Walker, and Gareth Bramley. The definitive Barry resource, presented in a fine cloth-bound edition by a trio of fan/scholars. Over two-hundred photographs and a detailed filmography supplement the meaty and well-written biographical chapters. Skips over most details about the  composer’s personal life (at Barry’s request, apparently) but more than makes up for it with rare information about his career. A recommended addition to any decent library on cinema or music.

Vic Flick, Guitarman: From James Bond to the Beatles and Beyond by Vic Flick. The musician’s 2008 autobiography, featuring his stint with the John Barry Seven, his memorable guitar playing for “The James Bond Theme,” and his storied later career as a much sought-after session player.

Tony Newly with Shirley Bassey on TV in the UK. Watch both the lyricist and singer of “Goldfinger” — several years removed from their future collaboration with John Barry — as they tease an appreciative 1961 TV audience with a medley of their early hits.

John Barry conducts “Goldfinger” and “The James Bond Theme” in concert. This was filmed in 2001, almost forty years after Barry wrote the music, but the old man shows he still has the Midas Touch:

SUNDAY MORNING: Dog lovers everywhere united to make Fox’s Marley & Me the #1 Christmas weekend movie with an expected $51.18M in the Thursday-thru-Sunday period for a Per Theatre Average of $14,888. Pre-opening industry tracking pointed to a clear win for Bedtime Stories (Disney), but it was the lovable lab who finished on top.

As an aside, all of us who read John Grogan’s extraordinarily well-written novel should have seen this coming. The book is a joy, and anyone who has a dog, or has ever had a dog, could easily identify with the struggles and pleasures of having a 4-legged member of the family.

The success of Marley slightly mitigates a disastrous year for Fox. Its year started out well enough riding the huge success of 2007 release Alvin & the Chipmunks into January ($70M of Alvin’s gross landed in this calendar year). The January 18 release of chick-flick 27 Dresses scored for Katherine Heigl ($76.8M in the US), then Jumper was a good solid February hit, topping $80M, followed by the wildly successful Horton Hears a Who ($154.5M domestic). Little did Fox know that when the Ashton Kutcher-Cameron Diaz comedy What Happens in Vegas played solidly to the tune of $80.2M domestic starting in May, it would be its last legit hit until Christmas’ Marley & Me. This is a huge, redemptive win for Fox, and its sentimental tear-jerker of a dog movie could near $100M domestic by Sunday.

There were 11 consecutive under-performing titles during the Fox drought of 2008, including expensive failures like mega-bombs Meet Dave ($11.8M domestic) and The X-Files: I Want to Believe ($20.9M cume). There were also misses like The Rocker ($6.4M cume),  City of Ember ($7.8M cume) and recent disappointments like Baz Luhrmann’s Australia (about $45M in the bank as its run winds down) and the critically-reviled The Day the Earth Stood Still, which picked up another $10.29M during the Christmas-thru-Sunday frame for a domestic cume of only $63M.

Despite the success of Marley, Fox will be #6 among the so-called “Big 6” studios in market share for the year. The winning studio , Warner Bros, essentially locked up the crown in late summer as The Dark Knight piled up meteoric grosses. As I have written in the past, the WB gang seemed destined to break the all-time single year record for domestic ticket sales, and now I can report that they have officially surpassed Sony’s 2006 record of $1.71 billion.

With the respectable hold for Jim Carrey’s Yes Man ($22.38M over 4 days for a 10-day cume of $49.8M), the continued success of Four Christmases (adding $7.29M for a new cume of $111.67M) and the excellent expansion of Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino (with a $38K or so cume at 84 locations), I am projecting a total domestic box office take of $1.74 billion as of today.  That is a staggering number, and it wasn’t all due to the success of mega-hit The Dark Knight.

Warner Bros perfectly marketed and distributed Sex and the City after picking up the baton from New Line. They also maximized the gross for the previously 3D-geared Journey to the Center of the Earth, selling it as a solid traditional 2D experience and generating $100M. And, they turned a pedestrian holiday comedy, Four Christmases, into a $100M smash. Expect a jubilant press release from Warner Bros in the next few days.

There is great news for Paramount and David Fincher in this holiday season. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a big hit. Based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, this spiritual tale starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett had only 2,988 playdates, but the screen count may be as high as 3,500 with Paramount securing multiple screens at many key locations for the 2 hour 48 minute epic. The film coaxed a magical $39.1M or so r the 4-day Christmas weekend.

Benjamin Button will do very steady business through awards season, and the spectacularly-reviewed film will likely have $70M-$80M in the bank by the end of next weekend.  It will continue to hold well through awards season with major nominations at the Golden Globes and the SAG Awards. I strongly believe that this movie is headed for something in the $170M domestic range and reaching $200M is not out of the question.

Only 2 of the last 11 Best Picture winners have failed to break through the $100M barrier, including last year’s Coen Brothers thriller No Country For Old Men.

BEST PICTURE WINNERS
2008 – No Country For Old Men – $74.2M
2007 – The Departed – $132.3M
2006 – Crash – $54.5M
2005 – Million Dollar Baby – $100.5M
2004 – Lord of the Rings: Return of the King – $377M
2003 – Chicago – $170.6M
2002 – A Beautiful Mind – $170.7M
2001 – Gladiator – $187.7M
2000 – American Beauty – $130M
1999 – Shakespeare in Love – $100.3M
1998 – Titanic – $600.7M

Academy Awards voters, whether they admit it or not, love big blockbusters, and after last year’s terrible Oscar broadcast ratings, there will be a strong yet silent, push to recognize films that movie-goers all over the country have seen. Benjamin Button is now likely to fit the bill nicely. Wouldn’t an Oscar night showdown between The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and mega-hit The Dark Knight make for a spectacular Academy Awards storyline (although, there’s always a chance that Danny Boyle’s gutty, little indie Slumdog Millionaire could steal the big prize from the big budget studio blockbusters).

#3 Bedtime Stories, also starring Keri Russell, Guy Pearce and the irrepressible Russell Brand from Saving Sarah Marshall, has managed $38.6M in just 4 days. It’s a fine showing, although most experts (including yours truly) thought it would be the weekend’s big winner.. The opening for Sandler is slightly under expectations and slightly below par with his recent hits, although it’s hard to compare a Christmas 4-day opening with a traditional 3-day weekend start.

Technically, the 3-day weekend opening (Friday-thru-Sunday) for Bedtime Stories was $27.6M or so. Accepting that Christmas Day took a great deal of “steam” out of the picture, that number compares favorably to July’s You Don’t Mess With the Zohan ($38.53M opening – $100M cume) and 2007’s I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry ($34.23M opening – $120M cume). Given that Bedtime Stories skews much younger and has family appeal, it should demonstrate great “playability” could very well have $80M in the bank by the end of New Year’s weekend.

A strong 3-day weekend came on the heels of a monstrous Christmas Day as Marley & Me, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Bedtime Stories all out-grossed the previous Christmas Day opening champion Ali ($10.2M). In terms of all-time best performance on Christmas Day, opening or otherwise, the three 2008 holiday box office juggernauts finished as the #2, #6 and #10 of all time.

ALL-TIME TOP 10 CHRISTMAS DAY PERFORMANCES
1. Meet the Fockers – $19.5M
2. Marley & Me – $14.67M (estimate)
3. Lord of the Rings: Return of the King – $13.9M
4. National Treasure: Book of Secrets – $13.6M
5. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers – $12.3M
6. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – $12M (estimate)
7. Night at the Museum – $11.7M
8. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring – $11.5M
9. Cast Away – $10.9M
10. Bedtime Stories - $10.52M (estimate)

Tom Cruise’s Valkerie (MGM/UA) has out-performed industry expectations finishing 4th for both Christmas Day and the long weekend. The eye patch wearing Cruise seemed headed for another disaster with his Nazi epic, but it has finished the 4-day with just over $30M. You could have won some bar bets with studio execs if back in November you had wagered that this won would even crack $25M over the Christmas holiday. Holdover Yes Man (Warner Bros) rounds out the top 5 for the long holiday weekend.

The only other new wide opening is Frank Miller’s The Spirit (Lionsgate). No Sin City magic here as the movie has stumbled out of the gates with about $10.35M, and it is fading very quickly based on downright awful word-of-mouth.

Revolutionary Road (Dreamworks/Paramount) is officially a PTA monster. Opening on just 3 screens Friday, the Sam Mendes-directed drama grabbed over $22K per location on opening day, and it will finish the weekend with about a $64,133 PTA. Not only is that the best PTA of 2008 (topping Frost/Nixon’s number for December 5-7), it is the 29th-best 3-day PTA of all time.

It is very hard to say what the commercial prospects for this picture may be. It is brilliantly acted with perfectly modulated performances by Leo and Kate, a truly unique turn by New York stage actor Michael Shannon and certain-to-be-under-appreciated work from Oscar winner Kathy Bates. I would also like to single out Kathryn Hahn, who was brilliant in Broadway’s Tony-winning Boeing, Boeing. Something about neighbor Milly Campbell’s desperate “golly gee-ness” captures the era to perfection.

Bringing Richard Yates novel to the big screen was no small feat, and screenwriter Justin Haythe has winnowed the somewhat sprawling novel down to its most cinematic pieces. Haythe is a lock for a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination at the Oscars, and I would make Winslet the betting favorite for Best Actress for her work in Rev Road, but can the film break through in other categories?

DiCaprio has a strong shot at a Best Actor nod, battling with Richard Jenkins, Brad Pitt and Clint Eastwood for the final 2 spots (after Frank Langella, Sean Penn and Mickey Rourke). It’s uphill for Shannon in the Best Supporting Actor category with Heath Ledger, Robert Downey Jr. and Phillip Seymour Hoffman as locks. Slumdog Millionaire’s Dev Patel has picked up a great deal of momentum since his SAG Award nomination, he seems to have sewn up the 4th spot. That leaves one spot open for Josh Brolin from Milk, Ralph Fiennes for The Duchess, Eddie Marsan for Happy-Go-Lucky or, an extreme longshot, Tom Cruise for Tropic Thunder. At the moment, I am leaning toward Brolin who will also get credit for his work in W..

Gran Torino has expanded very well to 84 locations and quite a few multiple screen situations for a PTA of just over $38K. There is clearly some commercial viability here as this love it or hate it movie goes wider in January.The big question remains. Will Oscar voters nominate Eastwood for Best Actor for his snarling, racist Walt Kowalski performance? In my estimation, his performance is the weakest of the contenders, but viewed in the context of his career, it feels like a nice culmination of his acting work.

It is surprising how softly Frost/Nixon (Universal) is playing at 205 locations. It generated a $9,473 PTA, which is disappointing. This is a great film with a tour de force performance by Frank Langella as President Richard M. Nixon. It may be that the movie-going public isn’t interested in reliving the Watergate nightmare, especially when everyone has a general mistrust of government after the Bush years. Movies can be an escape from a tough economy, government corruption and political scandal. Thus, films like Slumdog Millionaire, Benjamin Button and Marley & Me are more attractive film destinations.

A lack of commercial success will not keep Langella out of the Best Actor category, but Ron Howard’s movie could be potentially handicapped in the Best Picture race if it doesn’t begin selling tickets at a better clip. Ben Button, Slumdog and The Dark Knight are all legitimate hits, appropriate to their scale. I am penciling in Milk (Focus) as a likely Best Picture nominee leaving one slot set aside for Frost/Nixon. Mega-hit Wall-E (Disney) could sneak in instead. Or, if The Wrestler (Fox Searchlight) expands better than Howard’s political biopic – Mickey Rourke’s comeback delivered almost $28K per location over the Christmas 4-day – maybe Darren Aronofsky will find his movie among the big 5. The same goes for the aforementioned Revolutionary Road. A Best Picture nod would be a game-changer for Dreamworks/Paramount, and the slow start for Frost/Nixon may have left the door open.

FINAL 4-DAY CHRISTMAS WEEKEND ESTIMATES
1. NEW – Marley & Me (Fox) – $51.67M, $14,849 PTA, $51.67M cume
2. NEW – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Paramount) – $39.1M, $13,086 PTA, $39.1M cume
3. NEW – Bedtime Stories (Disney) – $38.6M, $10,486PTA, $38.6M cume
4. NEW – Valkyrie (MGM/UA) – $30.4M, $11,214 PTA, $30.4M cume
5. Yes Man (Warner Bros) – $22.38M, $6,517 PTA, $49.8M cume
6. Seven Pounds (Sony) – $18.2M, $6,599 PTA, $38.86M cume
7. Tale of Despereaux (Universal) – $11.37M, $3,659 PTA, $28.07M cume
8. The Day the Earth Stood Still (Fox) – $10.59M, $4,409 PTA, $63.4M cume
9. NEW – The Spirit (Lionsgate) – $10.35M, $4,126 PTA, $10.35M cume
10. Four Christmases (Warner Bros) – $7.29M, $2,904 PTA, $111.67M cume
11. Doubt (Miramax) – $7.1M, $5,604 PTA, $8.78M cume
12. Slumdog Millionaire (Fox Searchlight) – $5.81M, $9,417 PTA, $19.41M cume
13. Twilight (Summit) – $5.5M, $2,975 PTA, $167.06M
*Gran Torino (Warner Bros) – $3.2M, $38,155 PTA, $4.28M cume
*Milk (Focus) – $2.32M, $7,481 PTA, $13.52M cume
*Frost/Nixon (Universal) – $1.94M, $9,473 PTA, $3.58M cume
*The Reader (Weinstein) – $847,000, $7,302 PTA, $1.23M cume
*The Wrestler (Fox Searchlight) – $515,000, $28,611 PTA, $893,000 cume
*NEW – Revolutionary Road (Dreamworks/Paramount) – $192,400, $64,133 PTA, $192.400 cume
*NEW – Last Chance Harvey (Overture) – $132,000, $22,000 PTA, $132,000 cume
*NEW – Waltz with Bashir (Sony Classics) – $55,144, $11,029 PTA, $55,144 cume

FINALY 4-DAY CHRISTMAS WEEKEND PTA ESTIMATES
1. NEW – Revolutionary Road (Dreamworks/Paramount) – 3 locations, $64,133 PTA
2. Gran Torino (Warner Bros) – 84 locations, $38,155 PTA
3. The Wrestler (Fox Searchlight) – 18 locations, $28,611 PTA
4. NEW – Last Chance Harvey (Overture) – 6 location, $22,000 PTA
5. NEW – Marley & Me (Fox) – 3,480 locations, $14,849 PTA
6. NEW – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Paramount) – 2,988 locations, $13,086 PTA
7. NEW – Valkyrie (MGM/UA) – 2,711 locations, 11,075 PTA
8. NEW – Waltz with Bashir (Sony Classics) – 6 locations, $11,029 PTA
9. NEW – Bedtime Stories (Disney) – 3,681 locations, $10,486 PTA
10. Frost/Nixon (Universal) – 205 locations, $9,473 PTA
11. Slumdog Millionaire (Fox Searchlight) – 614 locations, $9,471 PTA
12. Milk (Focus) – 311 locations, $7,481 PTA
13. The Reader (Weinstein) – 116 locations, $7,302 PTA
14. Seven Pounds (Sony) – 2,758 locations – $6,599 PTA
15. Yes Man (Warner Bros) – 3,434 locations, $6,517 PTA
16. Doubt (Miramax) – 1,267 locations, $5,450 PTA
17. The Day the Earth Stood Still (Fox) – 2,402 locations – $4,409 PTA
18. NEW – The Spirit (Lionsgate) – 2,509 locations – $4,126 PTA