AFI Life Achievement Award: 50th Anniversary Special (American Film Institute, Turner Classic Movies, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (Saturday, December 30), I watch a couple of programs on Turner Classic Movies, a documentary salute to the American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Awards – called, naturally, AFI Life Achievement Award: 50th Anniversary Special (the awards themselves were created by the AFI’s governing board on February 23 or 26, 1973 – online sources differ – so 2023 was technically the 50th anniversary) – and a showing of the 1956 film The Searchers, directed by the first AFI LIfetime Achievement Award winner, John Ford. The AFI special was hosted by Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz (grandson of Citizen Kane co-author Herman Mankiewicz and grand-nephew of All About Eve writer-director Joe Mankiewicz, family connections that led me to joke that Ben is “a nodule off one of Hollywood’s most illustrious family trees”), and what was most fascinating about the show was how the awards ceremony telecast itself has evolved over the years. Early on the awards went mostly to directors – John Ford in 1973, Orson Welles in 1975, William Wyler in 1976, Alfred Hitchcock in 1979 (making what I believe was his last public appearance before his death in 1980) – plus a few legendary star names from the Golden Age: James Cagney in 1974, Bette Davis in 1977, Henry Fonda in 1978. In the 1970’s the awards show was a mostly serious tribute to film in general and the honorees in particular. Starting in the 1980’s they invited more comedians to do stand-up routines about the honorees as part of the show, and in the 2000’s they also began including major musical numbers vaguely related to the honoree and his or her career. One of the most stunning performances was Jennifer Hudson’s rendition of Sam Cooke’s last record, “A Change Is Gonna Come,” predictably from a show honoring an African-American (there’ve been three Black recipients: Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman).

Also there have been two parent-and-child pairs among the recipients – Henry Fonda in 1978 and his daughter Jane in 2014; Kirk Douglas in 1991 and his son Michael in 2009 – and one set of siblings: Warren Beatty in 2008 and Shirley MacLaine in 2012. It’s ironic that he got his award four years before she did (the family’s original name was “Beaty,” without the second “t”) even though she established herself as a star at least a decade before he did. Also the 2016 award went to film composer John Williams, the first recipient (and only one so far) who was neither an actor nor a director. The first AFI Lifetime Achievement Award show I ever actually watched when it initially aired was the 1975 “salute” (that was the word they used then) to Orson Welles, in which instead of showing clips from his completed and released films he ran a clip from his unfinished movie The Other Side of the Wind, which featured John Huston (AFI Lifetime Achievement Award winner in 1983) playing a legendary film director getting ready for a live appearance at a film festival, and pleaded with the assembled industry bigwigs for completion money to get the film finished and released. The Other Side of the Wind was actually produced by an Iranian company called Astrophore and got caught up in the maw of Middle East politics; when the Shah of Iran’s regime (to which Welles had a personal connection since he’d narrated a documentary lionizing the Shah filmed on the occasion of the 2,500th anniversary celebration of the Persian Empire) fell and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s “Islamic Republic” took over, the film got tied up in international legal complications and was still unfinished when Welles died in 1985 and Huston followed in 1987. The American Film Institute is one of the awards Billy Wilder (winner in 1986) called, with his usual mixture of cynicism and humor, the “Quick-Before-He-Croaks Awards,” but the tribute was welcome even though there was one comment during the awards ceremonies I quarreled with: during the 2015 ceremony honoring Steve Martin one of the hosts was shown asking the audience who was the greatest stand-up comedian of the 1970’s – and I yelled back at the TV, “George Carlin!” There were also a few more lacunae in the awardees: Woody Allen was shown in a brief film clip honoring Diane Keaton (who won in 2017) but he’s never won it himself; yes, I know he’s become a pariah among the #MeToo fascists, but he still deserves to be honored and definitely fits the “works that meet the test of time” criteria.