What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1949

The Year: 1949

What the Nominees Were: All the King’s Men, Battleground, The Heiress, A Letter to Three Wives, Twelve O’Clock High
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: In America, The Set-Up and On the Town were very different movies, but both worthy of consideration. Over in England, Kind Hearts and Coronets is great. Further afield than that, in Japan, Akira Kurasawa had his first masterpiece with Stray Dog.

What Did Win: All the King’s Men
How It’s Aged: It’s an excellent film, and well worth watching given what’s going on in America at the time I’m writing this book (a scandal-proof populist demagogue calls for his supporters to storm the capitol, then wins another vote.) It was a worthy winner, but not as good as what should have won…

What Should’ve Won: The Third Man

How Hard Was the Decision: The Third Man is pretty widely recognized as the best movie of 1949, but I did rewatch All the King’s Men to help make the decision and was tempted to let it stand.

Director: Carol Reed
Writer: Graham Greene, adapting his own novella
Stars: Joseph Cotton, Alida Valli, Orson Welles and Trevor Howard

The Story: American pulp western writer Holly Martins arrives to visit his friend Harry Lime in postwar Vienna only to be told that Harry is dead. He then finds out that Harry was a notorious scammer, killing kids with fake penicillin. When he discovers Harry is still alive, he must decide whether to help the cops find him.

Any Nominations or Wins: It lost Director and Editing, but won for Robert Krasner’s bizarre canted cinematography.

Why It Didn’t Win: Despite having both stars of Citizen Kane, this feels more like a European than an American film.  (It was in fact a British-American co-production.)  This is a very cynical look at postwar Europe with a downbeat ending. Of course, All the King’s Men is also tremendously cynical and downbeat, so maybe that doesn’t account for it.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Vienna is divided into four zones, representing different ideas, but there’s also an above-below metaphor here. From atop the city’s famous ferris wheel, Harry has Holly look down at the people below: “Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?” but then, when cornered, Harry scurries down below those people to get away in the sewers (and we’ve already determined that the lower you go the more worthless you are.) Once he’s been shot, he tries to make it back up onto the street, but only his fingers make it out of the vent.
   
   
   
2. This movie is beautifully shot on location in the rubble of Vienna, still devastated from the war. They don’t have to tell us that Europe has been ruined (physically and spiritually), we can see it.
   
3. In both this and All the King’s Men, the good guy and the bad guy love the same woman, but she loves the bad guy more, devastating the hero. They’re both heartbreaking to watch, and showed that the world was still in a very dark place, four years after the war.
   
   
   
4. In Greene’s book (which is also well worth reading) the hero is named Rollo Martins. Did Greene change the name to Holly to indicate that the movie would inevitably have more of a Hollywood sensibility?  Greene divided his work sharply into two categories: literary works and “entertainments.” Like many authors who made such distinctions (Ed McBain, Cornell Woolrich) Greene was constantly confounded to see that both audiences and critics found more meaning in his “entertainments” than his “serious” works. Greene considered this an entertainment because it revolves around a police investigation, but according to my definition it should be considered literary: The hero loses by winning.
5. This is very dark material bizarrely scored throughout with sprightly zither music (The movie was promoted with the line “He’ll put you in a dither with his zither”) which gives everything a very European, cynical feeling. Many children are killed, and love is proven to be worthless, but isn’t it all a game, somehow? It makes the movie more pleasant to watch while somehow making it even darker.

Ah, 1949: