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Ultimate Movie Rankings page (e.g. Hitchcock, Kazan)

posted 2 years ago by swanstep (2632)
3 replies | jump to latest

I recently watched Kazan's East of Eden (1955) (w. James Dean, Julie Harris, etc.) and was interested afterwards in understanding how big a hit it was at the time. The following subpage of ultimatemovierankings.com, i.e., on Kazan, had the answer:
https://www.ultimatemovierankings.com/elia-kazan-movies/

I'm not sure how seriously to take these figures but the main table on that page allows you to order it by Box-Office, by Box-Office ranking for the year, by Adjusted Box office, by number of Oscar Noms, and by a few other metrics too. East of Eden was, it turns out, Kazan's second biggest hit behind only Gentlemen's Agreement (1947), with an adjusted Box Office total of $251.6 million.

Looking at Hitch's sub-page:
https://www.ultimatemovierankings.com/alfred-hitchcock-movies/
we see that his six biggest US hits (Rear Window, Psycho, Notorious, Spellbound, NbNW, Rebecca) were all bigger than Kazan's biggest.

The site seems to be worth bookmarking and spending the odd hour or two with. [I'll update this post if I later develop any reasons to be strongly sceptical of its figures.]

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

we see that (Hitchcock's) six biggest US hits (Rear Window, Psycho, Notorious, Spellbound, NbNW, Rebecca) were all bigger than Kazan's biggest.

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An interesting site, swanstep, though I will confess some difficulty understanding some of the numbers. It looked like Rebecca was a higher grosser than a lot of Hitchcock movies -- adjusted for inflation?

I've always figured Psycho for Hitchcock's biggest hit -- and yet I think I keep seeing that Rear Window actually did better. Rear Window is the more "appropriate type" of studio hit: Technicolor(though not VistaVision), one major star(James Stewart) one new star aborning(Grace Kelly), one crackerjack support lady(Thelma Ritter) and some very good supporting men(Wendell Corey, Raymond Burr.) The plot was great and Hitchcock's cinematic talent here hit one of those peaks("My batteries were fully charged," said Hitchcock to Truffaut -- I will guess this is because it was his first film for Paramount and he wanted to prove himself to them.)

The climaxes of Rear Window and Psycho are certainly more small scale than the epic run across Mount Rushmore in NXNW -- and yet, NXNW seems to have grossed below both of them. That rather amazes me. Ernest Lehman hoped to write "the Hitchocck movie to end all Hitchcock movies" with North by Northwest. He kinda DID -- its almost an epic -- but Rear Window, Psycho...Notorious -- SPELLBOUND -- did better?)

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

On Elia Kazan versus Hitchcock:

I'd say that Kazan had more powerful "prestige bona fides" than Hitchcock, but I'm not surprised to see that his box office grosses were generally lower and Kazan -- like more than a few of his peers -- ended up struggling for work in the end. Some of his last works are just OK in my estimation --- The Arrangement, with Kirk Douglas and Faye Dunaway(and Richard Boone as Douglas' dad being astonishingly BORING in a movie; I'd have thought that was impossible.) The Last Tycoon is, to me, noteable solely for our only chance to see Jack Nicholson and Robert DeNiro share a few scenes in their young primes(NIcholson is FAR more charismatic) plus good work by Old Dogs Robert Mitchum as a studio chief and Tony Curtis as an aging movie star.

But that's near the end for Kazan -- those dangerous years per QT.

The great stuff is up front: Gentleman's Agreement, Streetcar, On the Waterfront, East of Eden...

A couple of Hitchcock/Kazan intersects;

In 1951, Warners released both A Streetcar Names Desire and Strangers on a Train. The Kazan film was the Oscar bait, with Marlon Brando making his name, bigtime. But Strangers on a Train was a big hit, too and I'll always find Robert Walker as a big Oscar snub at a time when I'll bet he wasn't considered at all. I like Strangers on a Train BETTER than I like the stagebound and censored Streetcar.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

In 1954, Hitchocck and Kazan released "peak" classics: Rear Window versus On the Waterfront. Rear Window didn't have a chance at the Oscars. No Best Picture nomination, only Hitchcock for Best Director. Myself(and others whom I have read) seem to find it "no contest" all these decades later: Rear Window was simply a more masterful, brilliant work. But AT THE TIME, I have read, a New York-based, Method-obsessed, "realistic" crowd of film people simply despised Rear Window and its "artificiality" versus the realism of On the Waterfront.

I think they are both fine films -- both favorites of mine -- though for 1954, I rank 'em this way:

Number One: Rear Window
Number Two: Them!(Seminal and brutal kid's SciFi about giant ants.)

Still, in On the Waterfront we have such things as a dummy being thrown off a roof as a murder victim and a kind of heavy-handed gangster movie in lieu of a study of labor relations. The musical score(by Leonard Bernstein!) is overdone. Yes...the taxicab scene IS great, and I really do like how at the end, Brando yells at Big Boss Man Lee J. Cobb(whadda ham) and tells him off for all his criminal activity, but only ends up beaten by goons for his trouble. (Well, he does MORE than that..he's a leader, a hero, but he still gets beat up...)

On the Waterfront: very good. Rear Window: Great.

Whether or not the Academy saw it that way in 1954, history has made the correction.

PS. For all the Method-based, autueristic support for Elia Kazan, his issues of informing during the HUAC hearings evidently slowly pulled projects away from him and led to that embarrassing decades later appearance at the Oscars in which some attendees refused to applaud. The Academy could have saved itself a lot of angst if it had given Hitchcock the 1954 Best Director Oscar!