'TOM JONES'......BEST PICTURE OF THE YEAR? OR JUST THE MOMENT?

Tom Jones (1963)  You could pull your hair out thinking about the number of undeserving movies that won the Academy Award for Best Picture Of The Year......

            Cecil B. DeMille's "Greatest Show On Earth"?   Really?

            "Crash"?  Huh?  It may take decades of investigation to figure this one out......

            "Gandhi" over "E.T."?   Will anyone on planet Earth ever sit down and watch "Gandhi" other than Middle School students forced to view it for homework assignments?

             "Shakespeare In Love" over "Saving Private Ryan"?    Well, we can only give a thankful prayer that Jabba The Weinstein has no more power to shove one of his fake Masterpiece Theater movies down everyone's throats......(which hopefully means no more awards for museum waxworks items like "The King's Speech" and "The Iron Lady"....)

              "Life Is Beautiful"?  "The Artist"?   We'd like to believe that the Motion Picture Academy and its voters would never again rush to hug a fuzzy-wuzzy, cute 'n cuddly foreign film like a rescue shelter puppy with a three legs.  We'd like to believe that........ 

               We could go and on about all the movies that lucked out enough to hit the zeitgeist of the moment......walking away with an award that bestowed immortality, even if the actual movie was out-of-date and out of everyone's memory within the year of its release......

              But guess what? 1963's "Tom Jones", upon our recent re-viewing, is most definitely not one of those justifiably forgettable movies.....

              55 years later, we found it as raucously charming as when it first took the cinema world by storm.....

              Of all the goofy, gimmicky stuff that director Tony Richardson threw into the movie (silent film spoofery, fourth-wall asides from the actors, etc, etc) only the Keystone Kops speeded up slapstick moment looks really awkward and ancient......(as it does in all the 60's movies infected with camera over-cranking..)

               We still love the rest of it........Susannah York's to-die-for beautiful Sophie Western,......Hugh Griffith, as roaring drunk in real life as he is in the movie.......John Addison's score, rich in multiple themes and as tongue-in-cheek as the movie itself.......the long, long roster of iconic British character actors in the supporting cast......and most importantly, the nimble young Albert Finney giving the title role the exact correct amounts of sex appeal and self-depreciation.....

               There's no real mystery as to how the film overtook the Academy Awards.......nobody had seen anything quite like it.......high art mixed with low comedy. But unlike some of the other films that seduced the Academy into short-lived puppy-love crushes, "Tom Jones" still lives on as a viable entertaining experience......

               All these years later, it's still a 4 star movie to us (****).......(and any random minute of it is 1000 times better than the entire combined running times of "The Greatest Show On Earth", "Life Is Beautiful", "Crash","Shakespeare In Love"......and oh yes......"Gandhi"....