Laurence Olivier

Best Picture vs. Best Director: Is Hamlet Better than The Treasure of the Sierra Madre? (1948)

Alex Russell

In 2014 I watched every single Best Picture Oscar winner in an attempt to find the absolute worst of them. I found it: Crash. Most movies that win Best Picture also win Best Director. In fact, from 1927 to 2014 only 24 movies won the Oscar for Best Director without also winning the Oscar for Best Picture. Did any of those 24 deserve both awards? This is Best Picture vs. Best Director, in which we examine the few films to not win both awards and try to determine why the honors were split those years. Today’s movies are Hamlet (Best Picture) and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Best Director), the winners from 1948. Which is the better film?

The Best Director film: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which everyone knows at least for the “stinking badges” line (which isn’t actually exactly that, but you probably know that, too). It’s so much more than a memorable line. One of the best films on either of these lists, Sierra Madre is a serious look at men who feel the world owes them more than what they’ve got. Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) teams up with two other men (Tim Holt and Walter Huston, the director’s father) to search for gold in the mountains of Mexico. They luck out after relatively few setbacks and are rewarded with small personal fortunes. It’s enough to split three ways, but that logic only holds up until it’s dark out and you’re alone with your thoughts. Do you really have to split it? Don’t you deserve it all? How well do you really know these other guys, anyway?

The Best Director director: John Huston, who was nominated for the award four more times. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was his only win. Like seemingly every other great director on the list, he was married a number of times (five) and has famous offspring (Anjelica Huston). His name may not be one you immediately know like some others on this list, but he fits right in with the other drinking, smoking madmen who made great art in the 40s and 50s.

The Best Picture film: Hamlet (read the Worst Best Picture entry here), which I ranked 81st on my list of every Best Picture winner. I was pretty brutal to Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet in my first viewing, largely because I disagreed with the choice to play up Hamlet’s sexual feelings towards his mother. It might benefit from a rewatch, but I can’t imagine sitting through three more hours of those two actors inches from each other’s faces.

The Best Picture director: Laurence Olivier, who directed only a handful of movies despite being one of the greatest actors of all time. I recently watched the insane The Boys from Brazil and he nearly saved even that disaster. He was marvelous in Hitchcock’s Best Picture winner Rebecca. He was an iconic Shakespearean actor, but he seemed to only want to direct a few works. I haven’t seen his Henry V or Richard III, so as a director I can only judge his Hamlet. I judge it harshly, but more for the directing choices than for his performance, which is exactly what you’d expect from an actor of his stature.

Did the right movie win Best Picture? No, though I’m harder on Hamlet than the average viewer. I don’t like the interpretation of the play and that distorts my ability to judge any other part of the film, but it’s a lesser piece of art than Huston’s adaptation. I haven’t read the original The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but I have to imagine it’s closer to the film than Hamlet. There are comparisons to be made beyond that, but the most important thing to comment on here is how impressive Bogart is. He’s one of the greats for a reason, and he plays Dobbs with such darkness right from the start that it fills the viewer with unease. His portrayal sells the message of the whole picture, and I think that, on top of so much else, deserves the nod.

Just for the hell of it, are either of them worse than Crash? Nope. Hamlet is harder to sit through and it’s certainly less interesting, but the “interest” when you’re talking about Crash is morbid curiosity. I still think about that scene in Crash where a guy almost kills a kid in the street in broad daylight and then no one does anything about it. I think about that scene a lot.

Best Picture vs. Best Director Archives: The Greatest Show on Earth vs. The Quiet Man (1952) | Wings vs. Seventh Heaven (1931-1932) | Hamlet vs. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) |

Alex Russell lives in Chicago and is set in his ways. Disagree with him about anything at readingatrecess@gmail.com or on Twitter at @alexbad.

Worst Best Picture: Is Hamlet Better or Worse Than Crash?

Alex Russell

In “Worst Best Picture” we search every single Best Picture Oscar winner of all time from 1927 to present to uncover the worst of them all. Conventional wisdom says that 2005’s winner Crash is the worst winner in history. We won’t stop until we’ve tested every last one. Read the the first, our review of Crash, here. Posts will be relatively spoiler free, but there may be some details revealed. Today’s installment is the 1948 winner Hamlet. Is it better than Crash?

It’s Hamlet. It’s Laurence Olivier, one of the greatest actors of all time, as Hamlet, one of the greatest characters of all time, in Hamlet, one of the greatest stories of all time. How is it such a weird mess?

First things first, if you don’t like Hamlet the play, I can’t help you. I read it for the first time in high school thanks to a teacher who loved it deeply, and I loved it immediately. I’ve read a fair amount of Shakespeare and while I’m not going to pretend to be some scholar of the classics, I do like what I’ve read. I think As You Like It is really funny. I think Othello is a brutal story. Shakespeare is good, there, I said it, I’ll state that rare opinion.

Hamlet is considered one of the great stories in English because it’s so adaptable. You can view any story through Hamlet if you try hard enough. There’s politics, there’s trickery, there’s love and sex, there’s family, there’s comedy, there’s drama, there’s everything you need. It’s complicated, but at the most basic level it’s the story of what we do when we have to do something, but can’t decide what that should be. It’s also a thousand other things, and what’s most important about it to you can’t be an incorrect reading. That’s why it endures.

Olivier’s Hamlet (he wrote, directed, and starred in it, so this is entirely on him) is about the indecision of Hamlet after his father’s death. His mother, Queen Gertrude, has married the late king’s brother and Hamlet is filled with a variety of emotions about what is clearly a series of disasters in his life. I’m not going to retell Hamlet here. If you haven’t read it, though, don’t see the movie first.

The problem most people have with this version is that it cuts out major parts of the story. The characters of Fortinbras, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern are removed entirely. Olivier defended his choice by saying that it wouldn’t be possible to make a watchable film with their relatively minor scenes intact, but I would argue that at just shy of three hours, he didn’t make one without them, so why bother cutting anything? What different would the extra hour really make?

Whether or not you think the removal of those three characters impacts the story, Olivier’s other change is more severe. He plays up the “love story” of Hamlet and his mother to a degree that’s, frankly, a little hard to watch. There is certainly precedent for this in the text; Hamlet is distraught and doesn’t really understand his relationship with any person in his life after his father’s death, least of all his mother. However, in the movie, it’s drastic. They share scenes that feel overwrought to the point of actual romance rather than the tension of a forbidden love-like feeling. Subtext, this ain’t. It’s direct, and that’s definitely not what The Bard meant. In the scene where he kills Polonius and has to confront Gertrude, he delivers every line into her mouth and they are inches away from kissing for 10 full minutes. It’s crazy.

I know you can’t “be wrong” about an interpretation, but I don’t agree with Olivier’s choice. I also don’t think we need a film version of Hamlet in the first place, but even if we do, we don’t need this one. Hamlet needs to be multifaceted as a story, and Olivier is only interested in one (to me) small piece of the original text, and his movie is not what I want to see when I think of Hamlet.

The Best Part: Hamlet is not the story of a man who wants to have sex with his mother and can’t decide if he should kill his stepfather, or at the very least it is not that in that order, but if it has to be that to Olivier he has certainly succeeded in making what he wanted to make. There’s a perverseness to their scenes that reminds me of the best parts of other strange movies with that theme (like the really, really weird The House of Yes with Parker Posey) and while I don’t like the script’s choice to include them, the scenes themselves are well acted.

The Worst Part: Most people will say it’s all the cuts, but I think it’s the pacing. Plainly stated, this movie is boring as hell. Almost nothing on the list is as boring as Hamlet, and I’m a person that loves the original story and isn’t bored by Shakespeare. It’s gross at times and overdone at others, but the connective bits between those two mistakes are all slow and plodding, so it’s hard to say which part is the worst.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? While it’s a crime to try to change the Mona Lisa, this is still Hamlet. The worst Hamlet is better than the best Crash, though Crash is easier for a modern audience to watch. I can’t recommend you spend three hours of your life watching this version of Hamlet, but it’s more boring than terrible, which I guess makes it better than Crash.

Alex Russell lives in Chicago and is set in his ways. Disagree with him about anything at readingatrecess@gmail.com or on Twitter at @alexbad.

Worst Best Picture: Is Rebecca Better or Worse Than Crash?

Alex Russell

Rebecca, Alfred Hitchcok’s sole win for Best Picture, is mostly about what you don’t see. The story starts with a young woman (Joan Fontaine, who is not Rebecca, but we’ll get to that) who falls in love with a rich aristocrat named Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier). Maxim has recently lost his wife Rebecca and is deeply intrigued by the naive woman. They’re an unlikely pair, and the whole thing feels just a bit odd. There is virtually no courtship and they decide to marry right away. If that troubles you, well, that’s probably for the best.

Upon returning to Maxim’s absurd estate of Manderley, it becomes clear that Maxim’s life is not quite ready for a new wife. The house staff still feels a kind of deep bond with Maxim’s late wife, and even the moments of kindness they show his new one are more awkward than they are anything else. It’s difficult to write about this because “Rebecca” is dead at the start and Joan Fontaine’s character is never named. She’s the most prominent character, but she’s never named in a nod to how much Rebecca, a dead woman, controls her new life. She can’t even be “Mrs. de Winter,” as she soon learns, because Rebecca is that, forever.

It would be enough if the movie were about the struggles to replace a ghost, but it wouldn’t be Hitchcock. The first act of Rebecca touches on that topic, though, and it’s fascinating to watch the young woman walk around an enormous mansion and try to figure out how to be someone she’s never met. She’s too young to be married, even for the time period, and she’s certainly too young in “ways of the world.” It’s heavily suggested that she doesn’t know what to do, in more ways than one, and Maxim clearly got remarried to try to fix his public image as much as he did to try to get over his first wife.

The film gets complicated as some truths about Rebecca start to come out, and I won’t spoil all that. You’ve either read the source material of Daphne du Maurier’s novel or you want to keep this one exciting for yourself, either way there’s no reason to reveal the surprise. It’s genuinely not what you’re expecting, though. For as certain as I was about what the central struggle of Rebecca would be… nope. That much is worth your time, alone.

The strangest thing about Rebecca might be that it’s Hitchcock’s only win. Four of his films were nominated for Best Picture and he was nominated for Best Director five times, but none of those nine instances earned him a win. Rebecca is the sole Academy Award to Hitchcock’s name, and at that time they still gave Best Picture Oscars to the producer. Realizations like that make the Best Picture list problematic as a great history of film, because it is possible to complete the list to date and see only one Hitchcock movie. No list is ever going to be perfect, but my nomination for best Hitchcock movie, Strangers on a Train, would have competed with the airy musical An American in Paris. What may be worse, An American in Paris also beat A Streetcar Named Desire that year, and that’s a travesty.

So maybe the current list of 86 Best Picture winners isn’t meant to be a complete history of film. That’s fine. You should still see most of them, and this is one of the better ones. It’s dramatic — almost scary, though it’s not a horror movie — and it’s shocking, even 70 years later. It was Hitchcock’s first American film, and though the Academy likely had no idea how important he would become to American film, they got one right when they crowned it “best.”

The Best Part: The supporting cast! George Sanders, who you will recognize from All About Eve, attempts to blackmail a major character. Even with limited screen time, Sanders is remarkable. He plays the “snotty, sneaky aristocrat” type better than anyone, to the degree that you could make a case that he’s a reincarnation of his All About Eve role. Don’t write than fanfic. Judith Anderson also deserves note for her role as Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper that will never accept a new Mrs. de Winter.

The Worst Part: It’s honestly difficult to find something for this spot, sometimes. For Rebecca the closest I can come is that some of the staff at Manderley are a little absurd. Other than the terrifying Mrs. Danvers, no one really matters. Not a huge complaint, but a missed chance for some better characters, perhaps.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? If for no other reason than one is a powerful entrance to American cinema for one of the greatest directors of all time and one is a movie where Ludacris talks about wanting coffee with spaghetti, I am going to have to tip this ever-so-slightly in favor of Rebecca.

Alex Russell lives in Chicago and is set in his ways. Disagree with him about anything at readingatrecess@gmail.com or on Twitter at @alexbad.

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Laurence Olivier

Best Picture vs. Best Director: Is Hamlet Better than The Treasure of the Sierra Madre? (1948)

Worst Best Picture: Is Hamlet Better or Worse Than Crash?

Worst Best Picture: Is Rebecca Better or Worse Than Crash?