Tom Jones

Uh, it wasn't long after you started that the film and television industry started to take an interest in you, and you began really in film as a villain.

You were in Tom Jones-

... which is a wonderful film with Oliver Reed in it.

I absolutely-

Um, but the other thing that me, that I was thinking of, I didn't really come to an answer.

Um, again, this is like kind of because of the podcast and the other movies we watch, I was trying to think like, how did this win best picture? Not because it was bad, but like, if you think about the last few movies we've watched, they've been either epics or musicals or the quirky Tom Jones.

Um, And so, yeah, I was trying to think, like, was it because this was English and some of the other movies we've seen, you know, like Lawrence of Arabia, Tom Jones, like have been English? Was it was it because it was just different enough, like Nan said, was intellectual and maybe the Academy voters, you know, want to do a short, you know, a little bit of a break.

Because, you know, there wasn't any it wasn't like there was like a star, you know, cast.

I mean, they're famous people, but not not necessarily ones that you would automatically say, oh, this deserves the Oscar.

All right.

We must visit the Tom Jones line.

Is The Shape of Water better or worse than Tom Jones?

I will say, if it is better or worse, I don't think it is significantly either of those things.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

I wanted more to him.

him.I think it might be worse than Tom Jones

And she was in a lot of films of the 50s, like The Admiral Crichton with Kenneth Moore, The Naked Edge.

She was in an Oscar winning film in the 60s called Tom Jones.

And famously, she was married to Sean Connery for a number of years in the 60s.

probably throughout his early Bond years.

It was an unlikely four-way match-up, too, for The Road.

The director of Singing in the Rain... and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, with the Academy Award-winning writer of John Schlesinger's Darling, and the brash, beefy star of Tom Jones, with the actress who epitomized Hollywood elegance and delicacy.

It's a product of its time, using fashion of its time, using the star power of its time, and honestly, blending a conversation of the... film methodology of its time it's using some very traditional elements but also mixing in french new wave inspiration from the early 60s culminating in a film that was coming out around the same time as the early new hollywood wave such as bonnie and clyde and the graduate two for the road fits very well amongst this category of films even if it might not be as polished or pristine as the others It feels of its time, and yet it also, through its inventive, modern, imaginative, creative space, feels a bit timeless at the same time.

It feels as though it structurally could be a movie made for our modern day.

Oh, yeah.

And it, it was, it was compared at the time to that food seduction scene in Tom Jones, the 1963 movie, where the, the man and the woman sort of, the way they eat food with each other, i- in front of each other is obviously, you know, incredibly suggestive, you know? So the way, um, so Faye Dunaway starts, like, stroking the chess piece and you think Steve McQueen-

Yes

... he- he's gonna flip that board in one minute's time.

O'Toole tests, and something happens in the test that nobody had quite anticipated, not because he's doing something actorly and technical and impressive, but because the desert and the costume and the camera seem to be conspiring with him rather than just recording him.

he looks like he belongs in the frame in some almost metaphysical way lean watches the test and understands immediately that he's found something rarer than a good actor he's found a face that the camera has already decided to be faithful to the film that gets made with o'toole is a film about a man who may be performing his own madness who is so far inside a role he's written for himself that he's lost the borders of the self beneath it that specific quality the quality of someone who might be genuinely unhinged in a way that's also genuinely magnetic is what o'toole brings it's also notably what o'toole was he was a combustible brilliant self-destructive personality who burned through everything money health relationships with the same gorgeous excess that lawrence brings to his desert campaign the film and the man were not separable finney is a different kind of actor entirely he is earthed When Finney plays someone in crisis, he plays it from the ground up, which is brilliant for Tom Jones and Saturday night and Sunday morning, but might have given you a Lawrence who is suffering rather than transcending.

A great performance, almost certainly, but O'Toole gives you a Lawrence who seems to believe, might actually believe, that he is not quite subject to the laws that govern other people.

And the film needs that.

Because he's not.

In the Tom Jones episode, I claimed that Peter O'Toole had won Best Actor before starring in How to Steal a Million, and that is just completely untrue, and I am so sorry for spreading such misinformation, but it comes from a place of...

Loving Peter O'Toole.

And that's valid.