The Oscar Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		2.0

The Oscar Blu-ray Movie Review

Keep the Faith.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman February 4, 2020

Percy Faith was one of the great underappreciated musical geniuses of the 20th century. There, I've said it and I'm glad. I have long championed Faith's music, too often disparaged as being "only easy listening", when the craft and sophistication that Faith brought to both his arrangements and his orchestrations (two totally separate yet obviously linked talents) is in my personal estimation inarguable. I have a friend who's a recording engineer who was born probably in the early 1950s and he once told me that there was no other song that took him back faster to the "comfy and cozy" feeling of his childhood than Faith's monumental hit recording of "Theme from A Summer Place", the biggest selling single of 1960 and a Grammy winner for Faith. Faith had a knack with film themes, as evidenced not just by that huge smash but by another gigantic hit he scored a few years before "Theme from A Summer Place" topped the charts, namely his number one hit from 1953, Moulin Rouge. Some trivia fans may know that Faith also shared an Oscar nomination for adapting the song score for Love Me or Leave Me, a gig he reportedly secured due to the insistence of Doris Day, with whom Faith was already long associated due to his tenure as staff arranger at Columbia Records, where he shepherded all sorts of Top 40 artists to huge hits during the transition from the Big Band Era to the solo singer epoch. That said, Faith had a kind of curiously lackluster career as a film composer, with only Love Me or Leave Me, Tammy Tell Me True, I'd Rather Be Rich, The Love Goddesses, The Third Day and the current film under discussion to his name as a composer. Those who frequent IMDb may see a couple of other listings under his composer tab, but they're reedits of various episodes of The Virginian, for which Faith provided the memorable theme music (the link has a kind of annoying Universal masthead, with the actual music starting at circa 00:29).

The back cover of this release at least admits that The Oscar is a “camp classic”, while also arguing perhaps a bit less persuasively that it’s a “masculine version of All About Eve,” which at the very least is wishful thinking and probably at least as (intentionally or otherwise) funny as anything in the film. The Oscar takes place on the night of the big awards ceremony, where ruthless heel Frankie Fane (Stephen Boyd) is up for Best Actor. Frankie’s buddy Hymie Kelly (Tony Bennett in his only dramatic performance) starts to reminisce about his friend, and we then get the back story of what led to Frankie’s career and, ultimately, Oscar nomination.

It’s a pretty turgid tale, with Frankie kind of a low life from the get go who has an almost genetic propensity toward using people, including Hymie and the woman who eventually becomes Frankie’s wife, Kay (Elke Sommer). Frankie has already been seen with a somewhat less high class woman, a stripper named Laurel Scott (Jill St. John), but as with several other characters in this stuffed to its gills showbiz soap opera, she’s basically just fodder for Frankie’s self-absorbed cannon. Anyone who has understandably come to the conclusion that movie stars are narcissistic bastards (at least the male ones) will find an exemplar in Frankie Fane, who just marauds through people, getting whatever he can from them, and then moving on. His “targets” include a talent scout named Sophie Cantaro (Eleanor Parker, who would soon move on to another camptastic soap operatic movie industry project with the short lived television series Bracken’s World) and agent Kappy Kapstetter (Milton Berle).

One of the problems with The Oscar is that Frankie Fane is such a cad it’s hard to understand why anyone tolerated him at any point in the story. That makes it all the more incredible that so many A-listers agreed to appear in cameos here, including Bob Hope recreating his famously self-deprecating hosting remarks at the Oscar ceremony, Frank Sinatra as another Best Actor nominee, and a number of other notables like Hedda Hopper and Johnny Grant. The film does offer some earnest performances, with Parker especially good as a wronged older woman, and even Tony Bennett (who kind of infamously won a “Golden Turkey” for this performance) delivering some good moments in this humble writer’s opinion. Other supporting players include Broderick Crawford as a crooked cop (perhaps parodying his long running television role in Highway Patrol), Ernest Borgnine as a crooked private investigator (are you sensing a trend here?), and Edie Adams as the investigator's put upon wife. Walter Brennan is kind of hilarious as a prospective sponsor for a proposed television series starring Fane, and the film is more or less stolen by Jean Hale as an uppity starlet who (temporarily at least) gives Frankie a taste of his own attitudinal medicine.

The Oscar Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Oscar is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Kino Lorber's Studio Classics imprint with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.67:1. The back cover of this release touts a "brand new 4K restoration", and this certainly is the best I've ever seen the film look. There are excellent fine detail levels across the board with regard to things like the gorgeous Academy Award nominated costumes by Edith Head that many of the women wear. Grain also resolves very organically throughout the presentation. There are still some curious rough spots to be seen, including a big scene between Hymie and Laurel that is considerably less detailed and quite badly scratched (see screenshot 5 in full resolution and you'll most likely be able to make out some of the damage), and color temperature varies pretty widely here. A lot of the flesh tones skew either toward a kind of purplish territory at times, or toward brown tones at others. Those variances aside, densities and saturation are both very good throughout the presentation. My score is 4.25.

The Oscar Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Oscar features a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track which capably reproduces the film's often laughable dialogue, along with of course Percy Faith's memorable score. Faith evidently either by choice or command farmed out orchestrating chores to the venerable team of Jack Hayes and Leo Shuken, but they recreate the typically lush Faith string sound in several cues that feature "Maybe September", one of two songs written for the film (see below), as underscore. Some of their other choices may strike some as a little odd (why no sleazy sounding sax during Laurel's stripper scene?), but the music sounds full bodied throughout. Some of Hymie's narration sounds pretty boxy in passing.

A brief trivia item: there's a fantastic party scene where Frankie meets Kay for the first time, and there's a jazz combo obviously playing live (I've complained in previous reviews about supposed piano players "finger synching" less than successfully, and it's obvious to me the guy in this group is really playing the piano). I'd love to know who these guys are (Tommy Tedesco gets an IMDb listing as guitarist, but I'm especially curious who the piano player is; if any Los Angeles jazz fan knows, please private message me. I think it may be Pete Jolly, but I'm not certain).

The Oscar Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Audio Commentary by Patton Oswalt, Josh Olson and Erik Nelson comes with special thanks to sound recordist Austen Zajonc and Harlan Ellison's archivist, Jason Davis.


• Audio Commentary by Film Historians Howard S. Berger, Steve Mitchell and Nathaniel Thompson

Additionally, Trailers for other Kino Lorber Studio Classics releases are offered.

The Oscar Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Many years ago I was both thrilled and kind of intimidated to find out that multi-Oscar winning songwriter Ray Evans was in the audience of a theater piece I was conducting, and after having been introduced to him during intermission, I asked if I could introduce him to the audience, which he happily agreed to. After doing that introduction, I launched into "Maybe September" , one of two absolutely gorgeous songs Mr. Evans provided the lyric to for this film with his frequent collaborator Jay Livingston (the other one is "The Glass Mountain"), and I was more than pleased when Mr. Evans told me later that my piano playing would have passed muster with Percy Faith. The Oscar kind of humorously did get two Academy Award nominations (for Art Direction and Costume Design) despite the general perception of it being a pretty lame movie, but Faith's music wasn't recognized, sadly. "Maybe September" evidently made it to the "short list" of Best Song nominations that year, but not to the final cut of the five eventual nominees, and I have to say from this particular fan's perspective, it certainly was more deserving of a nomination than "The Ballad of 'Cat Ballou'" (ironically co-written by another Livingston, Jerry, who is not related to Jay that I know of). The movie itself may be a mess, but for those who kind of like "train wreck" viewing experiences like this, at least you'll have a nifty soundtrack to listen to. Technical merits are solid for those considering a purchase.