The dreamers and the schemers...the hustlers and the hopefuls...the free-loaders and the phonies...the fakers and the famous...all fighting for the highest possible award! — tag line for The Oscar
It is not yet known just what kind of Academy Awards ceremony we're going to have this year if the writers' strike continues to complicate Hollywood's efforts to switch on the glitz. It could be said that in its long, star-studded history, the Academy hasn't really done all that much for the art of the motion picture, but it did inspire one of the all-time classic surreal trash movies, that one in a gazillion that justifies the often-misused and overtolerant phrase, "so bad it's good." The Oscar may not deserve to actually be called "good" in any sense, but it is a classic, if it's possible to be a classic among shitbombs.
It's certainly been a classic source of embarrassment for a great many famous people, some of them talented. With at least one of them, "talented" is barely an adequate word: this film marks the movie debut — no one who has seen it ever calls it his "acting debut" — of Tony Bennett, the man Frank Sinatra called "the best singer in the business." Bennett is also a famously nice guy, which is why this movie does not come up in his interviews; it would have been like an interviewer saying to Sinatra, "So, sport, what's it feel like to have screwed things up with Ava Gardner?", except that, with Bennett, it would have been the star, rather than the interviewer, who wound up broken and weeping. Bennett doesn't play a man who lusts for the Oscar — that role falls to Stephen Boyd, an actor who was put on this Earth for the single purpose of making Kirk Douglas look subtle. Boyd plays Frankie Fane, a fast-rising hotshot actor who tears a swath of destruction through the people in his life as he charges to the top. No friend or agent commands his loyalty. No woman strikes him as undumpable — this is a guy who's looking for a chance to trade up when he's with Elke Sommer! Bennett plays the one friend who tries hardest to stick by him, a groveling shmuck named Hymie Kelly. Hymie's decent nature prevents him from doing the world a favor by running Frankie over with his car, but he does let loose with his true feelings in voice-over soliloquy.
The notorious opening of the movie finds him sitting in the audience at the Oscars presentation, waiting to hear Frankie's name called, and setting the audience up for the deluge of flashbacks that will bring the us up to speed, by gargling these lines: "You finally made it, Frankie! Oscar night! And here you sit, on top of a glass mountain called "success." You're one of the chosen five, and the whole town's holding its breath to see who won it. It's been quite a climb, hasn't it, Frankie? Down at the bottom, scuffling for dimes in those smokers, all the way to the top. Magic Hollywood! Ever think about it? I do, friend Frankie, I do..." This, it will turn out, represents the movie's style of dialogue at its mildest and most naturalistic. Bennett, who has spun such magic with the words provided to him by Cole Porter, Sammy Cahn, and E. Y. "Yip" Harburg, here had the chance to work with a real peach: Harlan Ellison. The movie's script is credited to Ellison, Russel Rouse (who directed it), and Clarence Greene (who produced), and Ellison's penchant for dialogue that's so florid it's borderline lurid — pulp poetry with a touch of hepcat — is much in evidence. (Hymie tells us that, "Like a junkie shooting pure quicksilver into his veins, Frankie got turned on by the wildest narcotic known to man: success! The parts got bigger and bigger, and Frankie got hungrier and hungrier." When Frankie is tired of being judged, he protests, "Will you stop beating on my ears! I've had it up to here with all this bring-down!")
The story the movie the tells and the movie itself actually have much the same punchline: Frankie, who's burned so many people that it's begun to hurt his career, gets the Oscar nomination, and its potential to provide him with a comeback, because he's been cast as "a man without morals," a role in which he can hardly help but be convincing, and the movie, which promises to rip the lid off Hollywood unreality, is itself a prime specimen of it. Beloved among a select set of aficionados of unintentional comedy, The Oscar is criminally unavailable on DVD, which might be a hint that, even after more than forty years, not everyone out there appreciates the joke. But somebody must hold the broadcast rights. If the WGA shuts down the Oscars telecast, whichever TV network is holding the bag ought to move heaven and earth to get ahold of The Oscar and show it instead. They'd be doing the Lord's work.