What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1953

The Year: 1953
What the Nominees Were: From Here to Eternity, Julius Caesar, The Robe, Roman Holiday, Shane
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: America was still producing great noirs like The Big Heat and Pick-Up on South Street, but the Academy wasn’t noticing. Overseas, Fredrico Fellini turned out his first masterpiece with I Vitteloni, but it’s not the sort of movie that would have caught Hollywood’s fancy.

What Did Win: From Here to Eternity
How It’s Aged: Montgomery Clift is good as always, and Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr making out in crashing waves is a lot of fun, but ultimately this is a little too soapy for my taste. I rewatched it just to be sure and wasn’t very impressed. The overwrought deaths just got an eye-roll from me.

What Should’ve Won: Roman Holiday
How Hard Was the Decision: I’m always somewhat reluctant to take it away from a serious movie in favor of a more frivolous picture, but this is a shockingly good piece of fluff, so it wasn’t that hard.

Director: William Wyler
Writers: Dalton Trumbo and John Dighton. Story by Dalton Trumbo. Originally, credit onscreen was given to Ian McLellan Hunter who was acting as a “front” for the blacklisted Trumbo. McLellan’s Oscar was finally handed over to Trumbo’s widow in 1993.
Stars: Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn and Eddie Albert

The Story: A princess visiting Rome decides to run away and explore the city, not realizing that she’s been given a sleeping draught by her doctor. Passing out, she is taken in by a reporter, who soon realizes who she is and takes her around the city for adventures with his photographer pal, planning to sell the story for a fortune. When she realizes she must return home, he decides to kill the story and return the photos.

Any Nominations or Wins: It lost Picture, Director, Supporting Actor, Screenplay, Art Direction, Cinematography and Editing. It won Actress, Story, and Costume Design for Edith Head’s gorgeous gowns.
Why It Didn’t Win: This is my third pick in a row with a newly-blacklisted screenwriter! I guess I just like commies. Yet again, that hurt this movie’s chances, but it was more likely that this was a light romance, which the academy has never approved of very much.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. The studio, of course, wanted to shoot it all on the backlot (“What, that was good enough for Casablanca, so why is it not good enough for you??” they probably asked), but Wyler fought to shoot in Rome, which accounts for a huge amount of the movie’s appeal. It’s hard to tell what’s more charming, Hepburn or the city itself.
   
2. Peck’s agent insisted on his client being the only one billed above the title, as you would expect any agent to do, but Peck told him to lay off. When asked why, Peck responded “Because she’s going to win Best Actress for her first movie.” He was right and it is to his enormous credit that he realized it ahead of time, and let Hepburn be the star she was destined to be. What makes her performance so great is her mixture of lovely vulnerability with just enough willpower to get herself into trouble (and out of it).
3. The best scene in the movie is when Peck encourages Hepburn to stick her hand in the Mouth of Truth, and it’s all down to Hepburn’s performance. When you’re living a lie, you become irrational in fear of exposure, and Peck is having a fun time teasing her about that. When Peck reveals his hand hasn’t been bit off, Hepburn and the audience both explode with delight.
   
4. Over the course of this project, I’ll be taking away all three of Wyler’s Best Picture wins (Mrs. Miniver, The Best Years of Our Lives, and Ben-Hur), but I’m more than happy to give him this one to make up for it. This film is not as capital-I important as those three, but his famous perfectionism was just as valuable in service of this airier fare. He proves to be equally adept at a light touch as he was with a heavy hand.
5. Every single book published in the “romance” genre ends with the couple happily united, but almost every movie we think of when we hear the words “romance movie” ends with the lovers separated, permanently or not (Casablanca, Love Story, Titanic). Why did the screen decide it was more romantic to separate lovers but the print genre exclusively decree that lovers must end up together? (The fact that the lovers do not end up together in this one, I would say, puts it more in the “romance” than “romantic comedy” genre, where the lovers do end up together.)
   
   
   

Ah, 1953: What Could Go Wrong?

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1952

Our third yellow-red-and-black poster in a row!  I don’t find this color combo attractive!

The Year: 1952

What the Nominees Were: The Greatest Show on Earth, High Noon, Ivanhoe, Moulin Rouge, The Quiet Man
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: The Bad and the Beautiful feels like Oscar-bait at its best, so I’m very surprised it wasn’t nominated.

What Did Win: The Greatest Show on Earth
How It’s Aged: Cecil B. DeMille’s love letter to the circus is generally considered one of the all-time worst Best Pictures, but I have a stubborn affection for it. Trading in the Old Testament for the big top, DeMille brings the same epic spectacle, but he balances it out with an affecting subplot featuring Jimmy Stewart as a fugitive turned clown.

What Should’ve Won: High Noon
How Hard Was the Decision: Not hard. High Noon is the only universally acclaimed American release of 1952. The only competition I considered was The Bad and the Beautiful, which would have been a worthy winner, but can’t live up to this.

Director: Fred Zinnemann
Writer: Carl Foreman, based on the short story “The Tin Star” by John W. Cunningham
Stars: Gary Cooper, Thomas Mitchell, Lloyd Bridges, Katy Jurado, Grace Kelly

The Story: Old West town marshall Will Kane retires to marry a Quaker, but then finds out that a killer he arrested has gotten pardoned and is arriving on the noon train. His new wife says she’ll leave him if he stays and fights, but he defies her. He tries to recruit help, but everybody in town refuses, so he faces the bad guys single-handedly …or so he thinks.

Any Nominations or Wins: It lost Picture, Director and Screenplay, but won Actor, Editing, Scoring and Song
Why It Didn’t Win: A lot of people in Hollywood hated this movie, and Foreman was in trouble for his Communist Party connections around the same time it was released. John Wayne refused the part because of the political connotations, then got Foreman blacklisted for good measure, saying he would “never regret having helped run Foreman out of the country.” It’s amazing that such a hated film got so many nominations, but it’s not surprising that a film from pro-blacklist Cecil B. DeMille beat it.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Everyone understood that this movie was about how Foreman felt as the McCarthyite wolves circled him and friends wouldn’t back him up, which is why some people hated it and some people loved it. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times said “It bears a close relationship to things that are happening in the world today, where people are being terrorized by bullies and surrendering their freedoms out of senselessness and fear.” Great movies always speak to real life national pain, and this one exemplifies that.
2. Zinneman was too glossy for the French auteurist critics, but his films had plenty of personality and grit. I’ll be taking away the Oscar Zinneman actually won, but I’m happy to make up for it by recognizing his achievement here.
3. Grace Kelly is impressive in her debut as a leading lady, but her best decision is to let Katy Jurado steal their scenes together, as the Mexican-American shopkeeper who was romantically linked to Kane, Miller, and Kane’s no-good deputy. It is her speech that inspires Kelly’s dramatic final act.
   
4. Lee Van Cleef also makes his memorable-but-wordless film debut, as one of Miller’s confederates. Rumor has it that Zinneman offered him the larger deputy role on the condition that he get a nose job to look less menacing. Van Cleef wisely said no, and committed himself to a lifetime of villainy (including some title-character roles, as we’ll see many years from now.)
   
5. The movie takes place (in real time) on a Sunday morning, when half the town is in church and the other half is already drinking at the bar, but both layers of society turn out to be equally cowardly, in Foreman and Zinneman’s estimation. Ironically, only the Quaker picks up a gun. (My favorite little scene is when Cooper is confronting the churchmen and women and they decide to send the children away, then we cut to the children hooping and hollering in joy as they get to run outside, oblivious to the seriousness of the situation.)
   
6. Just as It’s a Wonderful Life always makes me want to see the Saturday Night Live skit it inspired, this movie always makes me want to rewatch the SNL “Josh Acid” skit, but it has unfortunately been completely scrubbed from the internet. Maybe because it starred Mel Gibson?

Ah, 1952: See Scenic Korea!

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1951

The Year: 1951

What the Nominees Were: An American in Paris, Decision Before Dawn, A Place in the Sun, Quo Vadis, A Streetcar Named Desire
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Over in England, Alexander Mackendrick delivered a devastating social satire called The Man in the White Suit

What Did Win: An American in Paris
How It’s Aged: It’s okay. Gene Kelly is a great dancer, and director Vincente Minelli shows an impressive visual skill, but the story is so slight as to be virtually invisible.  Everyone involved would make better movies.  

What Should’ve Won: A Place in the Sun
How Hard Was the Decision: Hard, because A Streetcar Named Desire is such a great movie, and would have been a very deserving winner, especially for the smoldering star turn from Marlon Brando. Ultimately, I chose this movie because Streetcar merely lives up to the greatness of its source material, where A Place in the Sun surpasses its source.

Director: George Stevens
Writers: Michael Wilson (right before he was blacklisted) and Harry Brown, based on the novel “An American Tragedy” by Theodore Dreiser
Stars: Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, Shelley Winters and Raymond Burr

The Story: A young man from the poor end of a wealthy family is belatedly given a chance to join the family business, but he impregnates an employee he has no intention of marrying, instead pursuing a beautiful debutant. Eventually, there’s nothing to do but to kill the pregnant one on a deserted lake, but before long, he is arrested and tried.

Any Nominations or Wins: It won Director, Screenplay, Cinematography, Black and White Costume Design, Editing, and Score. It lost Picture, Actor and Actress (Winters got a nomination but Taylor didn’t. Eventually they would each wind up with two.)
Why It Didn’t Win: Clearly, with all those Oscars, it almost did win. Everyone at the time thought it would be Sun or Streetcar, but then presenter Jesse Lasky gasped and said, “Oh my! The winner is An American in Paris!” Bosley Crowther of the New York Times said it was unbelievable that there were “so many people so insensitive to the excellencies of motion picture art that they would vote for a frivolous musical picture over a powerful and pregnant tragedy” (apparently referring to Sun, not Streetcar.) The Academy gets points for reaching out into other genres, and for finally rewarding another color movie, but I would say that this was not the right year for that.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. How do you cut an 800 page novel down to a two hour movie? Most obviously by cutting out the first half (involving the protagonist’s first, equally tragic attempt to make it in a different big city), but beyond that, by casting great actors who can summarize reams of text by putting it all on their faces. More about them:
2. This movie would seem to suffer from a frequent problem plaguing Hollywood movies: Our hero is supposed to be awkward around women, but they cast a strikingly handsome young actor to play him. But Clift makes it work by being so self-conscious, awkward, and flat-out neurotic. He convincingly portrays a young man very uncomfortable in his own skin, so much so that you’re left with the impression that it might not have been very fun to be Montgomery Clift, either.
   
3. Elizabeth Taylor has it easier because she gets to play what she really was: an ethereally beautiful young debutant. But she does what few actresses could have done in the part: have her character be just broken enough inside that she’s compulsively drawn to a totally twisted up male. (“Tell mama, tell mama all.”)
   
4. But as good as those two are, Shelly Winters steals the movie as the frumpy-but-just-pretty-enough-to-get-herself-in-trouble first girlfriend. Winters is plenty attractive in real life, but she deserved an Oscar for doing the opposite of Clift and Taylor, radiating anti-glamor from every pore. Every look on her face breaks your heart.
   
5. This movie was even harder to watch than All the King’s Men, given what’s happened to America. The real American tragedy here is the lack of access to safe and legal abortion (Winters begs a doctor for one, but he refuses), a tragedy that was alleviated, and then came crashing back down on us. Watching this movie today hits differently than it would have hit ten years ago.
   
6. To what degree is Clift’s George Eastman an evil man? It’s easy to sympathize with him even at his worst, partially because of his background: homeschooled (really unschooled) by sidewalk preachers, then finally forced by the government to go to school for just a few years before he had to drop out and go to work at 13, but never stops believing that he can have it all. Perhaps Dreiser was right: Perhaps there is something particularly American about this tragedy. (Charlie Chaplin called it “the greatest movie ever made about America”)

Ah, 1951: “It’s Digestible!” was the best tagline you could come up with for your food product?

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1950

The Year: 1950

What the Nominees Were: All About Eve, Born Yesterday, Father of the Bride, King Solomon’s Mines, Sunset Boulevard
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Huston’s noir The Asphalt Jungle is brilliant, and Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place is even better. American director Jules Dassin, exiled to Britain by the blacklist, turned out a great movie called Night and the City. Max Ophuls returned to France to make La Ronde.

What Did Win: All About Eve
How It’s Aged: Spectacularly. Just as witty as it was when Joseph Mankiewicz (Herman’s brother) wrote it and directed it, this is the ultimate exposé of backstage culture at its most venomous. But…

What Should’ve Won: Sunset Boulevard 

How Hard Was the Decision: A nearly impossible choice between All About Eve, Sunset Boulevard and In a Lonely Place. I seriously considered declaring a three-way tie. But, ultimately, I needed to make a choice (I decided to allow myself only one tie, which will come many years later.) As great as the other two movies are, Sunset Boulevard is the most iconic of the three. We quote it more often and the images are burned more indelibly onto our brains.

Director: Billy Wilder
Writers: Wilder, Charles Brackett and D. M. Marshman Jr. (Wilder and Brackett’s bridge partner who suggested they give a faded screen star a young lover, so they shared credit, and an Oscar, with him)
Stars: William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim and Nancy Olson

The Story: Washed-up screenwriter Joe Gillis, on the run from repo men, hides out at the crumbling mansion of ex-silent-screen-star Norma Desmond, helping her write a terrible screenplay about Salome. He discovers that her butler Max von Mayerling is actually her ex-husband. She pitches Salome to Cecil B. DeMille, but he turns her down. Norma falls in love with Joe, but he sneaks out to work on a new screenplay with young studio reader Betty Schaefer. Norma finally shoots Joe dead. DeMille has to come coax Norma into turning herself in by saying “We’re ready for your close-up.”

Any Nominations or Wins: 11 nominations! It lost Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Cinematography and Editing. It won “Story and Screenplay”, black and white Art Direction, and Score.
Why It Didn’t Win: Both this and the winner made the acting community look pretty bad, but All About Eve was about Broadway, whereas this hit a little closer to home for the Academy. Louis B. Mayer said to Billy Wilder, “You should be tarred and feathered and run out of Hollywood,” and Mayer still had a lot of swing at the academy (but would be fired from MGM shortly after the awards, ending an era.)

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Gloria Swanson was not their first choice, but other fading silent stars, like Mary Pickford, weren’t willing to be portrayed like this. Swanson relished the part of a long-past-faded silent queen turned into a deluded nightmare. She burns up the screen and steals the movie. And of course bringing her in allowed for the delicious prospect of using footage of her movie Queen Kelly, directed by the man playing her butler (and, as it turns out, former director) in the movie.
   
2. The cameos of Hollywood greats playing themselves are legendary (Buster Keaton, Gale Sondergaard, Warner Baxter), but none are more fascinating than Cecil B. DeMille. DeMille and Wilder were on opposite sides of the biggest feud at the time, whether ex-communists should be purged from the Director’s Guild (DeMille was leading the purge and Wilder opposed it) but DeMille still gamely played along with Wilder, personifying the studio system as a genial but ultimately heartless institution, that wrings all the value they can out of stars like Desmond and ditches them once the wrinkles appear.
   
3. Like James Cameron would be later, Billy Wilder was a great scene-writer but an even better scene deleter. The alternate beginning, where Joe’s corpse sits up in the morgue and narrates this tale to the other corpses, would have been terrible.
4. Most great stories begin with a public humiliation, and there’s no better way to do that than to have someone overhear something they weren’t supposed to hear (which requires less melodrama than having someone intentionally humiliate them.) When Joe hears Betty’s negative coverage of his script, then belatedly introduces himself, they’re both equally mortified. But Joe has gotten something valuable: He’s the first screenwriter to ever get completely honest feedback from a studio.
   
   
   
5. They say you should always write what you know. In this case, Wilder took that to an extreme. Not only had he been a Hollywood screenwriter, he had also been a gigolo in 1930s Vienna!
6. Is there any better example of an ironic fulfillment of a hero’s desire? Joe says that what he always wanted out of his Hollywood career was a pool. He gets it…
   

Ah, 1950: Madison Avenue understood what women wanted…

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1949

The Year: 1949

What the Nominees Were: All the King’s Men, Battleground, The Heiress, A Letter to Three Wives, Twelve O’Clock High
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: In America, The Set-Up and On the Town were very different movies, but both worthy of consideration. Over in England, Kind Hearts and Coronets is great. Further afield than that, in Japan, Akira Kurasawa had his first masterpiece with Stray Dog.

What Did Win: All the King’s Men
How It’s Aged: It’s an excellent film, and well worth watching given what’s going on in America at the time I’m writing this book (a scandal-proof populist demagogue calls for his supporters to storm the capitol, then wins another vote.) It was a worthy winner, but not as good as what should have won…

What Should’ve Won: The Third Man

How Hard Was the Decision: The Third Man is pretty widely recognized as the best movie of 1949, but I did rewatch All the King’s Men to help make the decision and was tempted to let it stand.

Director: Carol Reed
Writer: Graham Greene, adapting his own novella
Stars: Joseph Cotton, Alida Valli, Orson Welles and Trevor Howard

The Story: American pulp western writer Holly Martins arrives to visit his friend Harry Lime in postwar Vienna only to be told that Harry is dead. He then finds out that Harry was a notorious scammer, killing kids with fake penicillin. When he discovers Harry is still alive, he must decide whether to help the cops find him.

Any Nominations or Wins: It lost Director and Editing, but won for Robert Krasner’s bizarre canted cinematography.

Why It Didn’t Win: Despite having both stars of Citizen Kane, this feels more like a European than an American film.  (It was in fact a British-American co-production.)  This is a very cynical look at postwar Europe with a downbeat ending. Of course, All the King’s Men is also tremendously cynical and downbeat, so maybe that doesn’t account for it.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Vienna is divided into four zones, representing different ideas, but there’s also an above-below metaphor here. From atop the city’s famous ferris wheel, Harry has Holly look down at the people below: “Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?” but then, when cornered, Harry scurries down below those people to get away in the sewers (and we’ve already determined that the lower you go the more worthless you are.) Once he’s been shot, he tries to make it back up onto the street, but only his fingers make it out of the vent.
   
   
   
2. This movie is beautifully shot on location in the rubble of Vienna, still devastated from the war. They don’t have to tell us that Europe has been ruined (physically and spiritually), we can see it.
   
3. In both this and All the King’s Men, the good guy and the bad guy love the same woman, but she loves the bad guy more, devastating the hero. They’re both heartbreaking to watch, and showed that the world was still in a very dark place, four years after the war.
   
   
   
4. In Greene’s book (which is also well worth reading) the hero is named Rollo Martins. Did Greene change the name to Holly to indicate that the movie would inevitably have more of a Hollywood sensibility?  Greene divided his work sharply into two categories: literary works and “entertainments.” Like many authors who made such distinctions (Ed McBain, Cornell Woolrich) Greene was constantly confounded to see that both audiences and critics found more meaning in his “entertainments” than his “serious” works. Greene considered this an entertainment because it revolves around a police investigation, but according to my definition it should be considered literary: The hero loses by winning.
5. This is very dark material bizarrely scored throughout with sprightly zither music (The movie was promoted with the line “He’ll put you in a dither with his zither”) which gives everything a very European, cynical feeling. Many children are killed, and love is proven to be worthless, but isn’t it all a game, somehow? It makes the movie more pleasant to watch while somehow making it even darker.

Ah, 1949: 

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1948

The Year: 1948

What the Nominees Were: Hamlet, Johnny Belinda, The Red Shoes, The Snake Pit, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Hitchcock’s Rope is a genuinely deep movie that rises above its gimmick. Recent import Max Ophuls’s showed that he had mastered American film with Letter from an Unknown Woman. Preston Sturges produced his last masterpiece with Unfaithfully Yours. John Ford turned out one of his best westerns with Fort Apache.

What Did Win: Hamlet
How It’s Aged: It’s grown pretty creaky with age. Star Lawrence Olivier, who had played the role on stage so many times, is a little broad for film (and he’s too old now). The biggest problem is that Olivier makes the daring decision to play up the Freudian interpretation, by adding sexual implication to the scenes with Hamlet’s mother, but that would have been much more daring if he had actually cast a woman old enough to be his mother, but instead he cast a mother that was 8 years younger than himself! So much for daring!

 

What Should’ve Won: Fort Apache
How Hard Was the Decision: Very hard! I rewatched The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Red Shoes to help me make my decision, and they’re both great films, in very different ways. Sierra Madre features a riveting performance by Bogart, and it’s great to actually get an epic shot outdoors, but the movie’s attitude towards the people of Mexico has certainly not aged well. The Red Shoes is just as beautiful and hypnotic as the previous movie by Powell, Black Narcissus, and it came close to winning, but ultimately the movie’s odd pacing hurt its chances in my eyes. That left Rope and Fort Apache. Rope’s central stunt is fantastic (It’s all one shot), but also limiting. I had skipped over Ford’s work in previous years, so I decided it was time he won one. 

Director: John Ford
Writer: Frank S. Nugent, suggested by the story “Massacre” by James Warner Bellah
Stars: John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Shirley Temple, Pedro Arendariz, John Agar, Ward Bond, Victor McLaglen

The Story: A strict martinet, with his daughter in tow, takes over a remote Arizona army base where there’s much camaraderie but lax discipline. He refuses to listen to his more experienced men, who are attempting to maintain an uneasy truce with the Apache, and instead he uses their peacemaking efforts to lure the tribe into a trap, with disastrous consequences for all.

Any Nominations or Wins: None whatsoever! 

Why It Didn’t Win: As with Capra, this was a case where Ford had been an Academy darling (beating Citizen Kane!), then done his duty serving his country making documentaries in World War II, returned with even more clarity and vision …only to find that tastes had changed. But it’s still insane that this film received no nominations. One can only suspect that its anti-jingoistic bent may have hurt it. 

Why It Should Have Won:

1. The great Arnold Weinstein has a theory about how his fellow American literary critics tend to only apply the term “serious literature” to works in which family and community are destroyed or abandoned, but dismiss any work where such things are strengthened as un-serious fluff. I think that this helps explains why some Ford movies are not as valued as others. Ironically, Ford loved to use his rough Western settings to discuss his favorite topics: community-building and, yes, the value of domestication.
   
2. But beyond that, I suspect that this movie is a victim, ironically, or being so far ahead of its time in its racial politics. Modern critics love to make excuses for movies like The Searchers, and their brutal depiction of the Indians, by finding nuance in them and explaining them away as products of their time, but that narrative falls apart when you see a movie like this, which gives a far more modern portrayal of the relentless victimization of the Apache, who kept trying to keep up their side of an endless parade of faithless deals. It’s embarrassing to see a movie this honest, even today. It can’t imagine how much courage it took to make it back then.
3. I love role-reversal movies, where two actors oddly play against type. Here we have Fonda as the swaggering macho-man vs. Wayne as the gentle peacemaker, and they give two of their best performances. Fonda usually played roles that matched his political views: progressive and kind. But here he plays a role that, alas, matched the unpleasant personality he seems to have displayed at home: an uncomfortable, unreasonable autocrat. He does beautiful work and breaks your heart.
   
4. The more morally complex Ford’s westerns were, the more likely he was to shoot them in a studio, which leaves viewers in the position of choosing between verisimilitude and thoughtfulness, but this is one of the few that gives us both. The performances are aided immeasurably by being able to actually interact with all that beautiful Monument Valley scenery.
   
5. This movie is often paired with two subsequent Wayne-Ford movies, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande as the “cavalry trilogy”, (only the latter was an actual sequel) but it’s far richer than the other two, right up there with Ford’s greatest masterpieces

Ah, 1948: