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...