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:

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1947

The Year: 1947

What the Nominees Were: The Bishop’s Wife, Crossfire, Gentlemen’s Agreement, Great Expectations, Miracle on 34th Street
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Those are five very good movies, so let’s just add my choice for what should’ve won. (Though there were a lot of great noirs in addition to Crossfire in 1947)

What Did Win: Gentlemen’s Agreement
How It’s Aged: Okay. It’s a very earnest “social conscious” movie about confronting antisemitism at many different levels, and a worthy movie to recognize in some way, but hardly the greatest movie that year.

What Should’ve Won: Black Narcissus
How Hard Was the Decision: Pretty hard, because there were no ideal choices for this year, so this was one of the years I just had to go with my favorite and imagine a world in which it could have won. Just go with me on this one.

Directors: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
Writers: Powell and Pressburger, based on the novel by Rumer Godden
Stars: Deborah Kerr, Sabu, David Farrar, Flora Robson, Esmond Knight, Jean Simmons

The Story: An order of nuns takes over a former brothel on a remote mountaintop in the Himalayas and tries to civilize the natives. Instead, they are slowly driven mad by the “fresh air.”

Any Nominations or Wins: It deservedly won the only two Oscars it was nominated for, for Color Cinematography and Color Art Direction

Why It Didn’t Win: The Academy’s view of Catholicism was embodied by Going My Way, not this dark vision of nuns going crazy on mountaintops! They had to admit how good the Cinematography and Art Direction were, but Picture would have been a stretch. Nevertheless, the next year, an almost-as-dark movie by the same filmmakers (The Red Shoes) was nominated for Picture, so I’m giving the Academy the right to get a little freakier a little quicker.

 
Why It Should Have Won:

1. Most film buffs in my generation discovered this movie through the great documentary Visions of Light, which singled it out for having some of the best cinematography of all time, and indeed Jack Cardiff’s lush, otherworldly color pallatte and unnerving compositions make this a singularly intense experience, unlike anything else ever shot before or since, but it’s not just the look-- the total film is a masterpiece, including the script, direction and performances.
2. The story could not be more shockingly irreverent: a bunch of racist nuns are destroyed by an erotic madness! (In a big budget movie from 1948??) But it also drives one thing home: If you’re writing an irreverent movie, then you’re writing a movie about reverence. Powell doesn’t approve of these women’s choice, but he performs an extraordinary feat of sympathy anyway. If you want to criticize someone’s world then you must learn to recreate their world, and to recreate their world you must understand them. What the movie “means” is defined by how it ends, but getting there requires that the writers must first totally sympathize with any world they want to criticize.
3. What was it about Deborah Kerr? She looked and dressed like a very proper lady, but directors saw in her quivering eyes a deep longing for wildness. This was her ultimate showcase. Though her habit never budges, she packs even more fire into her eyes than all the heat she generated making out with Burt Lancaster in those crashing waves in From Here to Eternity.
4. The film is both wildly ahead of its time and a product of it. The colonialism of the venture is unreservedly condemned, but the native Indians are still seen as primitive (for which they are both praised and criticized). Still, they have strong individual personalities and separate interior lives, which is a lot more than can be said of most “third world”-set movies of the time, even those that purported to be anti-imperialist.

Ah, 1947: Feels like a 2025 ad bragging about protein...

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1946

The Year: 1946

What the Nominees Were: The Best Years of Our Lives, Henry V, It’s a Wonderful Life, The Razor’s Edge, The Yearling
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Hitchcock’s brilliant spy thriller Notorious and Rita Hayworth’s star turn in Gilda.

What Did Win: The Best Years of Our Lives
How It’s Aged: Beautifully. This is one of the all-time great movies, and deserves so much credit for daringly confronting the big problems facing new veterans coming home from the war, not always getting the warm reception we associate with the “greatest generation.”

What Should’ve Won: It’s a Wonderful Life

How Hard Was the Decision: It was very hard to take away the Oscar from The Best Years of Our Lives, but ultimately it couldn’t compete. I religiously rewatch It’s a Wonderful Life every year, and appreciate it more and more each time, whereas I was content to watch Best Years just once.

Director: Frank Capra
Writers: Screenplay by Capra, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. Additional scenes by Jo Swerling. Based on a story by Philip Van Doren Stern
Stars: Jimmy Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore, Thomas Mitchell and Henry Travers

The Story: Small town building-and-loan manager George Bailey is considering suicide, (not realizing that town miser Mr. Potter has stolen his bank deposit) so some blinking stars in heaven review his life story, then send oddball angel Clarence down to help. Clarence decides to show George what life would have been like if he’d never been born, which convinces him that he’s actually had a wonderful life.

Any Nominations or Wins: Its only win was for “Technical Achievement.” It lost Picture, Director, Actor, Editing, and Sound.

Why It Didn’t Win: Capra was the king of the Oscars before he went off to war, but now he had come home to a chillier environment.  His old-fashioned style was considered out-of-touch with modern postwar times.  Perhaps this movie is simultaneously too dark (concerned with suicide) and too light (a literal deus ex machina) to win big awards, especially when put up against a very worthy winner like Best Years. Famously, this movie lost money when it came out and didn’t become a legendary classic until it fell into the public domain and TV stations could run it for free during Christmastime.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. This is, fundamentally, one of the weirdest movies ever made. George’s non-magical life story is long enough and compelling enough to fill a movie, and the whole Clarence storyline doesn’t even start until an hour and forty minutes in, suddenly taking things in a supernatural direction. Capra’s critics always called his movies “Capra-corn”, and surely nothing is cornier than angelic intervention, but it’s a brilliant move. The angel storyline only works because the movie was already a moving and satisfying story without it.
2. Every year, when we rewatched this movie growing up, the question was, should we then rewatch the Saturday Night Live skit where Uncle Billy remembers that Potter has the money and they all go beat the crap out of him? The problem is that, once you’ve seen the skit, it’s hard not to want to see that every year, but of course, the fact that the villain gets away with his villainy is one thing that makes this movie so great. Evil does not triumph, but it doesn’t suffer any consequences either, and our knowledge of that is part of why the end is so tear-jerking.
   
   
   
3. One of the first things we hear in that movie is that Clarence the angel has "the I.Q. of a rabbit." But can we now admit that he's actually a genius? Jumping in the river is genius. Showing George what would happen if he was never born is also genius. A brilliant outside-the-box solution and it was maybe the only thing that would have worked.
   
   
   
4. Why do millions of Americans rewatch this old black and white movie every year? Because its concerns about income equality and housing insecurity are evergreen. As an internet meme always points out at Christmas time, it’s still hard for a working man to save $5000, even eighty years later.
5. The case can be made that Stewart gives the greatest film performance ever. My favorite moment: When he’s sharing the phone with Mary and says “And I don’t want to get married, ever! To anyone!” Cut to: He’s happily getting married to her. We don’t need to see everything that happens in the meantime because Stewart had it all in his voice while protesting that he didn’t want it.
   
   
   

Ah, 1946: 

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1945

The Year: 1945

What the Nominees Were: Anchors Aweigh, The Bells of Saint Mary’s, The Lost Weekend, Mildred Pierce, Spellbound
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street. If the Academy had cast its eye abroad the French movie Children of Paradise would surely have been a tempting pick.

What Did Win: The Lost Weekend
How It’s Aged: Billy Wilder’s story of a brutal bender is a great film and well worth watching, but it’s just a bit too melodramatic for my tastes. The heavy score (including lots of theremin!) makes things rather heavy-handed, and the somewhat happy ending feels unearned. It would have been a lot more daring if they hadn’t cut out the real reason why he was drinking from the novel: he was repressing his homosexuality.

 
What Should’ve Won: Scarlet Street
How Hard Was the Decision: I had to rewatch The Lost Weekend to make sure of my decision. It was hard to take away Wilder’s Oscar, but of course I gave him one last year, so that lets Fritz Lang sneak in this year. Those were the only two movies I seriously considered, though Mildred Pierce is great.

Director: Fritz Lang
Writer: Dudley Nichols, based on the novel “La Chienne” by Georges De La Fouchardiere and Andre Mouezy-Eon
Stars: Edgar G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Dan Duryea

The Story: Robinson is a meek little bank clerk, unhappily married, who wants to be a painter, but he’s always had a problem with perspective. He falls under the spell of a femme fatale who falsely assumes that his odd little paintings are worth big money. Afraid to disillusion her, he has to support her with embezzled money. Things get complicated when her no-good boyfriend discovers that the paintings are worthless, and tries to get rid of them, but then the work belatedly gets discovered by the art world. In both situations, it is Robinson’s lack of perspective that ironically makes him a valuable commodity, for a short while, but it all comes crashing down. 

Any Nominations or Wins: None whatsoever
Why It Didn’t Win: The Academy was willing to nominate Double Indemnity the previous year, but this is a much grimier noir. The always-volatile Fritz Lang, meanwhile, was never a popular man, and received little acclaim when he moved from Germany to America for the (brilliant) middle period of his career. This is certainly a stretch to say this could have won. But The Lost Weekend is also a very dark film, so I just imagined that, in my alternate reality, the Academy got even darker.

Why It’s Great:

1. I’m just going to say, this may now be my favorite Fritz Lang movie. Better than Metropolis. Better than M. Better than The Big Heat. I’ll go even further: it may be my favorite film noir! I’ve always loved it but the restored version finally reveals how perfect it really is: The script is ingenious. The performances are heartbreaking. The directing is passionate. This movie interlocks plot and theme and symbolism and character with a microscopic level of clockwork precision.
2. Joan Bennett is certainly my all-time favorite femme fatale. In many ways, she’s the most pitiless and cruel lover to ever be depicted on the screen. (He begs to paint her portrait, but she forces him to get on his knees and paint her toenails instead, sneering “they’ll be masterpieces.”) But Bennett’s astounding performance grants her a deep pool of vulnerability and, against all odds, sympathy. Her love for her secret sleazebag boyfriend Duryea is so naïve, so overpowering, that the worse she treats Robinson, the more you pity her.
   
3. Lang was known for his imperiousness on set and many today dismiss his body of work as overly cruel, but that’s not true at all. Yes, he loved to subject his characters to the worst machinations of fate, but only to show that any degree of suffering or cruelty can be humanized and understood. They say that Bertrand Russell loved mankind but hated actual people. Lang was the opposite: He hated mankind but he could sympathize with every individual person.
   
4. Fictional movies about artists always have one huge problem: the art we see onscreen never matches the lofty things we hear people say about it. This time around, Lang, who collected many great painters before they were discovered, actually commissioned beautiful, richly modernistic work from a friend named John Decker. For once it’s nice to see a movie about a fictional artist in which people onscreen praise his work and you can actually agree.
   

Ah, 1945: I’ll just show a nice-looking ad for once...

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1944

The Year: 1944

What the Nominees Were: (The number of nominees went back down to five and would stay there for another 66 years before finally expanding again in 2010.) Double Indemnity, Gaslight, Going My Way, Since You Went Away, Wilson
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Laura, another proto-noir, was easily one of the best of the year

What Did Win: Going My Way
How It’s Aged: It’s way too corny. I’ve always found Bing Crosby to be a bland leading man and this movie is no exception. Barry Fitzgerald is a great character actor, but he’s too broad for a big role like this one.

What Should’ve Won: Double Indemnity
How Hard Was the Decision: Not hard, especially when I saw that Double Indemnity was one of the five nominees, proving that it wouldn’t have been that shocking for it to win (though I know that, in reality, it probably didn’t get that close, for reasons listed below)

Director: Billy Wilder
Writers: Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler, based on the novel by James M. Cain
Stars: Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck and Edward G. Robinson

The Story: Shady insurance salesman Walter Neff gets seduced into killing a customer’s husband, but then they get greedy and decide to collect double by using the titular clause. Neff’s friend at the insurance agency gets suspicious and investigates. The conspirators fall out and end up dead.

Any Nominations or Wins: It was nominated for Picture, Director, Actress, Screenplay, Cinematography Scoring and Sound, but won nothing.

Why It Didn’t Win: Film Noir was just being born in 1944 and the Academy was letting everyone know right away that they wanted none of it. The movie was too good not to nominate in all those categories, but it’s not surprising that it was totally shut out. When Leo McCarey was named Best Director for Going My Way, a bitter Wilder tripped him on his way to accept the award.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. When I first heard that French novelist Albert Camus (“The Stranger”) ranked Cain as one of his biggest influences, I wondered if he was pulling our leg, like later French directors insisting Jerry Lewis was America’s greatest director. But when I finally read Cain’s existentially bleak prose, I could see that he was indeed a direct ancestor of Camus’s style.
2. But we have two great noir novelists here, because Raymond Chandler co-writes the adaptation with Wilder. He does a great job adding more sparkle to Cain’s plain dialogue, but Wilder was so stunned by the horrors of Chandler’s alcoholism that he vowed to make a picture about that next. More on that next year…
3. Fred MacMurray had a good long career playing morally upright men (such as in “My Three Sons”) …with just two exceptions, both Billy Wilder movies, one near the beginning and one near the end of MacMurray’s career. Well, I’m going to pick both those movies, so you’re going to get a very skewed view of the man’s public image. He could not be more cynical here as an utterly amoral insurance man.
   
4. As the 40s began, top screenwriters Wilder, John Huston and Preston Sturges basically showed up arm-in-arm and demanded the right to direct their own scripts. The studio moguls weren’t at all sure that was a good idea, but the results were hard to argue with. Wilder’s first two movies are great, but it was with this film that he made it clear that the writer-director was here to stay …and so the true auteur was born.
5. Stanwyck is not really a naturally stunning woman, but nobody could act sexier, and she was on a tear with The Lady Eve, Ball of Fire, and this role. That anklet turned out to be the most incendiary wardrobe item from the peak Hollywood era.
   

Ah, 1944: Don’t be seduced by her facial soap! 

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1943

The Year: 1943

What the Nominees Were: Casablanca, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Heaven Can Wait, The Human Comedy, In Which We Serve, Madame Curie, The More the Merrier, The Ox-Bow Incident, The Song of Bernadette, Watch on the Rhine
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: One of Hitchcock’s great masterpieces, Shadow of a Doubt

What Should’ve Won and Did Win: Casablanca
How Hard Was the Decision: Surprisingly hard, because I really love Shadow of a Doubt, but c’mon, you can’t dethrone Casablanca. I seriously considered moving Casablanca back to 1942 (when it was actually released) to free this spot up for Hitchcock, but I decided that would be too counterfactual.

Director: Michael Curtiz
Writers: Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch, based on the play “Everybody Comes to Rick’s” by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison
Stars: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre

The Story: Cynical American Rick Blaine runs a nightclub in Nazi-occupied Morocco but comes into possession of some letters of transit that could get him back home. Just then, who should show up but his old lover Ilsa, now married to a resistance leader. Rick rediscovers his patriotism and reluctantly sends the lovers off together.

Any Nominations or Wins: It won Picture, Director and Screenplay, and lost for Actor, Supporting Actor for Rains, Cinematography, Editing and Scoring.

Why It Won:

1. The thing you always have to remind yourself of when watching movies made during the war is that they had no idea who was going to win the war. By the time the movie was released, then the ominous questions, “Can you imagine us in London?” and “How about New York?” might not be so speculative. The tremendous courage that it takes to make a movie like this cannot be overstated.
   
2. You might have noticed that, despite having this legendary movie on their resume, those are not legendary screenwriters, and indeed this movie was written by the seat of its pants, constantly being rewritten on set, buried in notes from producer Hal Wallis. So how on earth did it turn out so perfect? For once, the studio notes were spot-on, and the malleable screenwriters were right to take them. A strange alchemy resulted, the likes of which would rarely be seen again.
3. This movie is a great example of the power of reversible behavior to craft a great character. Before we ever meet Rick, we hear two times that he never drinks with his customers under any circumstances. When we meet him, we see him refuse again. Then Ilsa comes in and he instantly breaks his rule, shocking everyone. This sets us up for the bigger reversal: He has twice stated “I stick my neck out for no one” but in the end he ends up saying, “It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”
   
   
   
4. It’s also a great example of writing a strong personality: Bogart’s default argument tactic is just to blandly lie. Just one example: Captain Renault asks, “What in heaven's name brought you to Casablanca?” Rick responds, “My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.” “The waters? What waters? We're in the desert.” “I was misinformed.” It’s a slap in the face to be lied to so blatantly, but Renault is simply amused.
5. (I should point out that Citizen Kane spoiled me, and now I watch every other movie and ask “Where are the ceilings??”)

Ah, 1943: