Our Man in Havana (Carol Reed, 1959)

Noël Coward and Alec Guinness in Our Man in Havana

Cast: Alec Guinness, Burl Ives, Maureen O'Hara, Ernie Kovacs, Noël Coward, Ralph Richardson, Jo Morrow. Screenplay: Graham Greene, based on his novel. Cinematography: Oswald Morris. Art direction: John Box. Film editing: Bert Bates. Music: Frank Deniz, Laurence Deniz.

Given its cast, its director, and its screenwriter, Our Man in Havana has always seemed to me that it should be a little bit better than it is. I think director Carol Reed may be mostly at fault: His best films, like Odd Man Out (1947), The Fallen Idol (1948), and The Third Man (1949), have just the right mixture of gravitas and wit. Here there's a little too much gravitas weighing down what could have a more pronounced satiric edge: a tale of bumbling British espionage. It's possible, too, that a little uncertainty of tone lingers over the movie because it was filmed on location in Cuba just after the fall of Batista -- Fidel Castro himself visited the shoot -- and the subsequent course of the revolution lends a queasiness to the subject matter. Nevertheless, we are in the hands of masters like Alec Guinness, Noël Coward, and Ralph Richardson here, so there's enough to enjoy. 

Cavalcade (Frank Lloyd, 1933)

There are lots of forgettable best picture Oscar winners: Who today watches The Great Ziegfeld (Robert Z. Leonard, 1936), The Life of Emile Zola (William Dieterle, 1937), or Gentleman's Agreement (Elia Kazan, 1947)? But Cavalcade may be the most forgettable (and forgotten) of them all. Based on a play by Noël Coward adapted by Reginald Berkeley and Sonya Levien, it's the saga of 33 years in the lives of a wealthy London couple, Robert (Clive Brook) and Jane Marryot (Diana Wynyard). Its portrait of their lives and the lives of their servants may have inspired the popular British TV series Upstairs Downstairs, and through it the even more popular Downton Abbey, both of which cover pretty much the same time period. In Cavalcade, as in the two TV series, the families suffer losses from the sinking of the Titanic and from World War I, and experience the social upheaval of a changing class system. But Cavalcade tries to cram it all into less than two hours, and tends to be more blatantly nostalgic about the passing scene. Unlike the creators of the later TV series, Coward and his adapters didn't have the benefit in 1933 of seeing what effect the events of the first third of the twentieth century would have on Britain and the world. It settles for a bit of prophecy in the form of a montage in which various talking heads rant about disarmament, communism, atheism, Christianity, and other ideologies, including a rather corny scene in a louche night club where same-sex couples seem to be on the verge of making out. (The film is pre-Code, so the strictures against depicting homosexuality haven't kicked in yet, though it's clear that the film -- despite Coward's own sexual orientation -- disapproves of it.) In addition to the best picture Oscar, Cavalcade also won a second Oscar for its director, Frank Lloyd, who had been the first director to be so honored, for The Divine Lady (1929). Wynyard also received a nomination for best actress, losing to a newcomer, Katharine Hepburn in Morning Glory (Lowell Sherman, 1933). Wynyard had a more successful career on stage than in movies. In Cavalcade she tries to register emotion by staring meditatively into the middle distance, which often looks like she has spotted something troubling on the wallpaper. The rest of the cast includes Herbert Mundin and Una O'Connor as the Marryots' servants, and Frank Lawton as Joe Marryot, the younger son, all three of whom would be reunited in a much better movie, David Copperfield (George Cukor, 1935). For the record, some of the films that Cavalcade beat for best picture include 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon), I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (Mervyn LeRoy), and Little Women (Cukor).