Read the full article on Firstpost, here: https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/with-the-end-of-cannes-2019-heres-looking-back-at-palme-dor-winners-over-the-years-6725551.html/
Now that Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite has won the Palme d’Or, let’s look back down the years and see if we can settle on the one Palme d’Or winner to beat all others. Let’s exclude the most recent winners like Shoplifters, The Square and I, Daniel Blake. They’re too new. It’s too soon to know how they will age. And aging is something inevitable in the movies, too. Take Delbert Mann’s Marty (1955), which won both the Academy Award for Best Picture and the Palme d’Or. Trivia note: The only other film to accomplish this double-win is Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend. Though when this film won, in 1946, the topmost award at Cannes was called Grand Prix du Festival International du Film. It’s only in 1955 that this name was changed to Palme d’Or, and Marty was the first winner. (The award went back to being called Grand Prix from 1964 to 1974, and thereon, it’s been the Palme d’Or.)
Marty is a simple love story about simple, ordinary folks: a butcher (Ernest Borgnine) and schoolteacher (Betsy Blair). Today, you’d call it an underdog romance. There’s a cultural context to it, sure. Look at the other romances that came out the same year. The Seven Year Itch had Tom Ewell and Marilyn Monroe. To Catch a Thief had Cary Grant and Grace Kelly and the French Riviera setting. Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, set in Hong Kong, had Jennifer Jones and William Holden. Summertime was set in Venice, and it had Rossano Brazzi and Katharine Hepburn and David Lean’s talent for spectacle. In the midst of all this, Marty stood out for being an unassuming tale about unassuming people. Cannes called it “a charming story”.
Continued at the link above.
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MANK
May 31, 2019
Stallone’s Rocky was inspired by Marty.
And Taxi driver did win the Palme D’or that year Rocky won the Oscar. I think the keenly competed year for Palme D’or was 1960, with L’avventura and Bergman’s The Virgin Spring with La Dolce Vita winning
1960 marked a tectonic shift in cinema as an art form, Apart from these great Films, there was also Godard’s Breathless, which I think was not part of the Cannes competition.
BTW ,Today Clint Eastwood turns 89
So I wrote a tribute to his great film Unforgiven that became a milestone in his career.
https://manksjoint.home.blog/2019/05/29/unforgiven-clint-eastwoods-revisionist-western-classic-that-demythologizes-the-west/
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chronophlogiston
June 1, 2019
Since you mentioned Wages of Fear, I have to say I am also a big fan of William Friedkin’s 1977 remake Sorceror. They really don’t make gritty ensemble pieces like that any more.
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Ramit
June 4, 2019
“But there’s also a healthy dose of fatalism.”
In a way, The Wages of War is a display of scientific temperament of street smart people. Despite the lack of formal education, some people can make seemingly impossible tasks possible just with sheer willingness and presence of mind. When the truck drivers have to counter the impact of the wind, they do so by increasing the speed! When they have to counter the smoothness of the surface, they create friction with tree branches. When they have to pour down the thick liquid into the boulder, they first make the pipe slippery in order to avoid sudden drop. And the way Mario pulls out the truck from the oil pool was sheer genius!
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Sai Ashwin
June 18, 2019
OMG BR, you had me there in the first half, I actually you were gonna low-key bash The Wages of Fear.
Whew, thank god. Its one of my favorite movies ever. I just love films that take genre and use it to explore aspects of the human condition.
Its so entertaining and enthralling!!! So many great things like how Jo changes from a boss to a coward and how it affects the relationship with Mario, the socio-political aspects (it was very controversial at the time, censored heavily in USA for obvious reasons), the homoerotic overtones between the 4 men. I especially love the scene where 3 of them partake to piss together and Jo is sad that he isn’t invited, the fantastic opening scene etc etc.
I could go and on and on about it but my incoherent ramblings wont do any good. Better to listen to Adrian Martin’s commentary track on the BFI Blu ray of the film.
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