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 literary critic 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: