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!