Show Notes
We’re journeying back to the early 1990s this week to discuss the forgotten failure Billy Bathgate. Adapted from E.L. Doctorow’s Pulitzer finalist, the film cast Dustin Hoffman as real-life mobster Dutch Schultz opposite a Loren Dean as the fictionalized street kid who falls under his wing. With Bruce Willis in a supporting role at the peak of his fame and Oscar-winning director Robert Benton at the helm, the film ultimately bombed at the box office but earned Nicole Kidman her first Golden Globe nomination.
This episode, we talk about the much publicized clashing between Hoffman’s ego and his reunited director and we have a (gasp) triple Six Timers quiz for Hoffman, Dean, and Stanley Tucci. We also talk about the film’s mild approach to crime material, the 1991 Supporting Actress race, and Benton’s somewhat forgotten Oscar comeback Places in the Heart.
Topics also include Highlander 2: The Quickening, Hook‘s surprising Oscar nominations, and surprise Frances Conroy.
More from This Had Oscar Buzz
Post-Chicago, just about any movie musical was fodder for awards buzz, especially if they boasted a cast as stacked as Romance and Cigarettes. A jukebox musical from the mind of John Turturro, the film stars James Gandolfini as a New York construction worker whose life goes into tumult when he cheats on his wife (Susan Sarandon) with a younger redhead (Kate Winslet). Bizarrely profane and minimally plotted, the film thudded onto the festival scene in 2005 and didn’t see a theatrical release until Turturro self-distributed it in 2007.
In the years after his Oscar win for The Untouchables, Sean Connery remained a major movie star and box office draw. The latter proved untrue in 1990 when The Russia House fizzled at the holiday box office. Based on the John le Carré novel, the film follows Connery as a publisher pulled into espionage in Russia during perestroika, only to fall in love with an informant’s wife, played by Michelle Pfeiffer. One year after The Fabulous Baker Boys, Pfeiffer earned a Globe nomination for her performance, but Oscar honored neither of these headliners.
In 2018, we were rooting for the comeback of director Karyn Kusama, emerging with the promising crime thriller Destroyer. Centering on Nicole Kidman playing against type as a grizzled investigator haunted by a previous undercover case gone wrong, the film applies a serpentine structure to its breed of hard boiled LA noir to mixed results. After receiving a mixed reaction on the festival circuit but praise for Kidman’s performance, the film was one of several 2018 Annapurna Pictures films that struggled to gain momentum.
We have writer Emily St. James back with us this week, so naturally we’re breaking our own record for oldest film discussed on the show (after her episode on Moby Dick)! Based on the Broadway smash comedy, Arsenic and Old Lacewas Frank Capra’s intentional return to comedy after a string of serious movies. Starring Cary Grant as the critic nephew of two aging sisters, the farce unfolds as the aunts reveal they have been offing unmarried travelers and a brother who now looks like Boris Karloff returns to the family. Since the adaptation rights stipulated the film could not open until the Broadway run ended, the film sat on a shelf and was not released until Capra was overseas documenting the war.
We’re back home from our latest trip to the Toronto International Film Festival! And as always, we’re offering you a buffet of our reactions from a week’s worth of movies that will be coming soon to a theatre near you! We talk about the newest People’s Choice Award winner La Bola Negra, along with the International People’s Choice Award winner (and Best Actor contender for Andrew Scott) Elsinore. Topics also include Julianne Moore earning huge crowd reaction in The Debut, Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine underwhelming us both, our collective favorite of the fest Mike Leigh’s Tender Loving Care, the TIFF preroll ads, injuries, festival flops, and more!!