What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1942

The Year: 1942

What the Nominees Were: 49th Parallel, King’s Row, The Magnificent Ambersons, Mrs. Miniver, The Pied Piper, The Pride of the Yankees, Random Harvest, The Talk of the Town, Wake Island, Yankee Doodle Dandee
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be Or Not to Be and Julien Duvivier’s anthology film Tales of Manhattan

What Did Win: Mrs. Miniver
How It’s Aged: It’s pretty treacly. There was a war on an this was unabashed propaganda for the stiff-upper-lip British housewives who were keeping calm and carrying on. But most of the movie is actually about an utterly uninteresting rose-growing contest? Not a movie anyone would watch today if it hadn’t won Best Picture.

What Should’ve Won: To Be Or Not to Be

How Hard Was the Decision: Very hard, maybe the hardest in this entire project. There were simply no universally acclaimed movies in 1942. Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons is probably the greatest movie of the year, but it’s so clearly cut down from a longer, better movie, against Welles’s wishes, that it almost seems wrong to honor it. I was inclined toward Tales of Manhattan, which I dearly love, but it runs into the problem of dated depictions of Black people. I don’t find the movie racist, but star Paul Robeson did condemn the movie, and I didn’t want to put myself in a place where I had to disagree with him! That left To Be or Not to Be, which I decided to rewatch and loved, though it’s not really meaty enough to be a Best Picture in most years. But in this year with no strong candidates, I decided to give it an unlikely win.

(To be clear, the best movie released in 1942 was Casablanca, which had its premiere in December, but it didn’t get a wide release until 1943, so it was nominated, and won, for that year. I was tempted to move it back to 1942 to avoid having to make this hard choice, but I decided to defer to the Academy and leave it in 1943.)

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Writer: Edwin Justus Mayer from a story by Melchior Lengyel
Stars: Carole Lombard, Jack Benny, Robert Stack

The Story: Jack Benny plays hammy Shakespearean actor Joseph Tura in pre-war Poland, with Carole Lombard as his loving-but-cheating wife. Robert Stack (17 years before “The Untouchables”) plays her dashing airman lover. When Hitler invades, they all three get caught up in a plot that eventually forces the married couple to go undercover as Nazis to save a bunch of airmen and get everybody out of the country safely.

Any Nominations or Wins: Just one nomination, for Best Score, which it lost

Why It Didn’t Win: With the world engulfed in war, Hollywood was understandably in full-on propaganda mode, and none other than Winston Churchill had declared, “Mrs. Miniver is propaganda worth a hundred battleships.” How could they not congratulate themselves for that? And they wouldn’t have been likely to give it to a somewhat breezy comedy that made light of the Nazi menace. Nevertheless, I’ve decided that, in my little world, they could have. (When Benny hosted the Oscars in 1944, he quipped, “It seems to me that to get a nomination a picture must have no laughs, and they tell me I’ve come pretty close to that a few times already.”)

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Benny was a dependably funny actor in the rare chances he got to be a leading man, but this movie exists as a showcase for the real star: Lombard. Beautiful, sophisticated and always very charming, even when she was shown cheating on perfectly good husbands, Lombard was the female Cary Grant. Tragically, she would die before this film was released, in a plane crash on the way home from a trip to sell War Bonds. Hollywood’s first and most unlikely life lost in the war effort.
   
2. At the beginning, the troupe is putting on “Hamlet” by night and rehearsing a play about Hitler during the day. This cleverly sets up why they have perfect Nazi uniforms ready to go when they have to begin their impersonations.
   
3. This semi-serious material stretches the limits of the famously light “Lubitsch Touch.” There’s a long period where Stack becomes the main character and there are no jokes. Benny completely disappears from 21:50 to 43:56 in the runtime! But it works wonderfully. This was a serious time, and things could only get so light. Once the plot gets in gear and the Nazi impersonations begin, the “Touch” reasserts itself and the film resumes its tightrope walk of making us laugh at the words “Heil Hitler.” (A phrase that is spoken at least 50 times in this movie!)
4. Benny, in disguise, can resist asking various Nazis if they have ever heard of the great actor Joseph Tura. He’s upset that none of the Nazis have heard of him, until he finally meets one who has seen him perform: “What he did to Shakespeare, we are doing now to Poland.” He wishes he hadn’t asked.
   
   
   

Ah, 1942: