Looking back over the years at films that have been nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award, there's always at least one each year that leaves someone today scratching their heads and wondering what anybody saw in it a the time to nominate it for Best Picture. "A Thousand Clowns" is that movie for 1965. Whenever that happens, I always chalk it up to hitting a cultural nerve that has since passed and that people living now don't totally get unless they were also living then. If nothing else, this movie feels like it has more to say about living in 1965 than its co-nominees "The Sound of Music," "Doctor Zhivago," or "Ship of Fools," all films that feel like they could have been made in a previous decade.
Jason Robards recreates his stage performance as a loafer caring for an abandoned nephew. Child services eventually comes calling in the guise of the adorable Barbara Harris and scene-stealing William Daniels, and when Harris and Robards falls for each other, he has to decide just how much he wants to resist Harris's efforts to domesticate him and turn him into a respectable member of society. The movie ends with somewhat of a compromise: Robards realizes he doesn't have to become an entirely different person just because he takes a steady job, and it's sometimes worth becoming a bit more conventional if it allows you to keep some of the things you love.
I like that message now, but I have a feeling I would have thought it came across as stodgy and dull at the time, with the youth counter culture growing in influence. In any case, it doesn't make for an especially gripping movie, and I wonder if the whole thing might have played better on stage.
Martin Balsam received his only Oscar nomination and win for playing Robards's brother, and whose performance mostly comes down to a single monologue in which he extolls the virtues of being ordinary.
"A Thousand Clowns" was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay (Herb Gardner adapted his own play), and Best Adapted Score, which consists of jarring renditions of marching band staples.
Grade: B-
Jason Robards recreates his stage performance as a loafer caring for an abandoned nephew. Child services eventually comes calling in the guise of the adorable Barbara Harris and scene-stealing William Daniels, and when Harris and Robards falls for each other, he has to decide just how much he wants to resist Harris's efforts to domesticate him and turn him into a respectable member of society. The movie ends with somewhat of a compromise: Robards realizes he doesn't have to become an entirely different person just because he takes a steady job, and it's sometimes worth becoming a bit more conventional if it allows you to keep some of the things you love.
I like that message now, but I have a feeling I would have thought it came across as stodgy and dull at the time, with the youth counter culture growing in influence. In any case, it doesn't make for an especially gripping movie, and I wonder if the whole thing might have played better on stage.
Martin Balsam received his only Oscar nomination and win for playing Robards's brother, and whose performance mostly comes down to a single monologue in which he extolls the virtues of being ordinary.
"A Thousand Clowns" was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay (Herb Gardner adapted his own play), and Best Adapted Score, which consists of jarring renditions of marching band staples.
Grade: B-