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Burt Lancaster (right) plots an escape with his prison cell mates in Brute Force (1947)

Things may be slow on the Oscar front at this time of year, but that does not mean that I stop watching movies. I attend press or theatrical screenings of highly buzzed about new releases (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Sex and the City, Iron Man, WALL-E, etc.); I check out soon-to-be-released DVDs (including 21 just last week); and, most enjoyably, I catch up on my classics, some of which I have seen years before and others of which I have been hoping to see for just as long. Over the past two months or so, I've checked off a number of these, and so I thought I'd recap some of them:

• Advise and Consent (1962), one of the great (but dated) political procedurals, adapted from Allen Drury's soap-operatic novel about the behind-the-scenes workings of the American government by the great director Otto Preminger and featuring outstanding performances by Franchot Tone as the dying President, Lew Ayres as his reluctant successor, and Walter Pidgeon, Don Murray, and especially Charles Laughton as United States Senators; frequent invocations of the film during the presidential primary season by MSNBC's Chris Matthews spurred me to finally check it out.
• Bright Victory (1951) comes from director Mark Robson, who is probably best known for helming the dark melodramas Champion (1949) and Peyton Place (1957). In-between those two films, he made two other films that are much lesser known but probably of greater significance: Home of the Brave (1949) and Bright Victory, both studies of race that were way ahead of their time. In this film, Arthur Kennedy stars as an all-American G.I. blinded by a sniper's bullet while fighting in North Africa during World War II. While recuperating at an Army medical facility, he befriends another soldier facing the same predicament, played by James Edwards. The two get along winningly until—in a scene that still packs a wallop—Kennedy makes a bigoted statement that leads him to learn that Edwards is, in fact, black. The metaphors are obvious and yet perfect: when you can't see, you can no longer judge a man based on the way he looks, and then you realize we are all the same. The film can get slightly preachy, at times, and the romantic subplot with beautiful Peggy Dow (Harvey) seems somewhat unnecessary, but the film overall is an important one. And, incidentally, Edwards is owed some of the credit for breaking down film's racial barriers that is usually afforded exclusively to Sidney Poitier; Edwards was playing leading roles year's before Poitier broke through in Blackboard Jungle (1955).
• The Parallax View (1974) is the archetypal 1970s political-thriller, but is really about obsession, a theme that producer-director Alan J. Pakula explored previously in Klute (1971) and subsequently in All the President's Men (1976). The film, which was clearly inspired by the JFK assassination and its subsequent investigations, centers around a shameless reporter (Warren Beatty, preening at the height of his sex appeal) as he pursues the facts behind a political assassination that he believes are being covered up. (The extended brainwashing sequence took guts!) More than anything else, what sets apart post-JFK films about obsession from those that came before them is the utter exasperation that colors their endings—the truth is rarely exposed and the little guy rarely emerges mentally and/or physically intact, having been crushed by the very people he previously thought were on his side. This post-JFK rule seems to apply not only to political films—Seven Days in May (1964), Dr. Strangelove (1964), Three Days of the Condor (1975)—but to all films about obsession, including most notably Antonioni's Blow Up (1966) and The Conversation (1974).
  
• David Copperfield (1935), the David O. Selznick prestige-project in which Charles Dickens' title character is played by young Freddie Bartholomew in his first featured role (he's a little too green and grating), surrounded by an all-star team including Lionel Barrymore, Elsa Lanchester, Jessie Ralph, Edna Mae Oliver, and standouts Basil Rathbone (effectively detestable as David's step-father) and W.C. Fields (effectively, and surprisingly, charming—opposite a child, no less!—as the infinitely-quotable man David wishes were his step-father, possessing an oddly American accent in the film); something, however, is missing from the film, and it is far from "Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Greatest Motion Picture," as advertised.
  
• my new Criterion Collection special edition of The Third Man (1949), which merits—and will receive—its own post shortly
  
• The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), a Cecil B. DeMille chronicle of a Barnum-like circus that is as far from meriting that title as possible thanks to a bloated runtime of 152 minutes, stiff performances (most of all by Charlton Heston, least of all by Betty Hutton), and no real point... the fact that it won Best Picture over High Noon (1952) and The Quiet Man (1952) is one of the greatest injustices of Oscar history.
• In Cold Blood (1967), the powerful big-screen adaptation of Truman Capote's groundbreaking non-fiction novel, in which a remorseful murderer is ironically portrayed by future unremorseful murderer Robert Blake in an equally good performance; the film's violence and language hammered some of the final nails in the coffin of movie censors
  
• Dressed to Kill (1980), an early example of director Brian Da Palma's obsession with flesh and blood (venereal horror), featuring a Psycho-like disposal of the female lead (Angie Dickinson, in a good performance) and resolution (with Michael Caine as you've never seen him before).
  
• Charly (1968), in which Cliff Robertson gives a career-defining, Oscar-winning performance as the eponymous mentally retarded character who cannot even outsmart a mouse (wonderful Algernon) until a medical procedure abruptly makes him even smarter than his devoted teacher, played by a somewhat stiff Claire Bloom, if only for a time—a clear inspiration for the similarly powerful Awakenings (1990).
  
• American History X (1998), featuring a haunting but great performance by Edward Norton as a neo-Nazi skinhead that earned him a Best Actor nomination (and, as an aside, a surprisingly touching supporting turn by Beverly D'Angelo... yes, the same Beverly D'Angelo who was married to Chevy Chase's Clark W. Griswold in all the National Lampoon's Vacation movies and Al Pacino is real-life).
• Brute Force (1947), the Jules Dassin-directed film noir in which Hume Cronyn, as a sadistic prison guard, almost—almost—steals the show from Burt Lancaster, as a prisoner with brains, a heart, and the gentlest eyes in the world.
• Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), a dark-comedy that is often ranked among the best British films of all-time, in which Dennis Price stars as a conniving social climber and Alec Guinness portrays eight of his different victims (long before Peter Sellers, Mike Myers, or Eddie Murphy did the same).

On the docket for the coming days:

• The Gunfighter (1950), a western that stars Gregory Peck, of all people; earned a rare Best Picture nomination for a film of that genre; and paved the way for other adult westerns like High Noon (1952).
• Refusenik (2008), an acclaimed documentary that chronicles the thirty-year international movement to free Jews in the Soviet Union and features interviews with key players like Natan Sharansky.
• Air Force (1943), released during the heart of World War II, follows the crew of an Air Force bomber as it is dispatched to the Philippines in the wake of Pearl Harbor; the focus on the interpersonal relations of the men on board (including John Garfield, Arthur Kennedy, and Gig Young) comes to illustrate the group-mentality that won the War, and also illustrates director Howard Hawks career-long obsessisions with aviation and professionals performing their duties.

Feel free to share your thoughts on any of these films in the "Comments" section below.