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 a bit too 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: