What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1951

The Year: 1951

What the Nominees Were: An American in Paris, Decision Before Dawn, A Place in the Sun, Quo Vadis, A Streetcar Named Desire
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Over in England, Alexander Mackendrick delivered a devastating social satire called The Man in the White Suit

What Did Win: An American in Paris
How It’s Aged: It’s okay. Gene Kelly is a great dancer, and director Vincente Minelli shows an impressive visual skill, but the story is so slight as to be virtually invisible.  Everyone involved would make better movies.  

What Should’ve Won: A Place in the Sun
How Hard Was the Decision: Hard, because A Streetcar Named Desire is such a great movie, and would have been a very deserving winner, especially for the smoldering star turn from Marlon Brando. Ultimately, I chose this movie because Streetcar merely lives up to the greatness of its source material, where A Place in the Sun surpasses its source.

Director: George Stevens
Writers: Michael Wilson (right before he was blacklisted) and Harry Brown, based on the novel “An American Tragedy” by Theodore Dreiser
Stars: Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, Shelley Winters and Raymond Burr

The Story: A young man from the poor end of a wealthy family is belatedly given a chance to join the family business, but he impregnates an employee he has no intention of marrying, instead pursuing a beautiful debutant. Eventually, there’s nothing to do but to kill the pregnant one on a deserted lake, but before long, he is arrested and tried.

Any Nominations or Wins: It won Director, Screenplay, Cinematography, Black and White Costume Design, Editing, and Score. It lost Picture, Actor and Actress (Winters got a nomination but Taylor didn’t. Eventually they would each wind up with two.)
Why It Didn’t Win: Clearly, with all those Oscars, it almost did win. Everyone at the time thought it would be Sun or Streetcar, but then presenter Jesse Lasky gasped and said, “Oh my! The winner is An American in Paris!” Bosley Crowther of the New York Times said it was unbelievable that there were “so many people so insensitive to the excellencies of motion picture art that they would vote for a frivolous musical picture over a powerful and pregnant tragedy” (apparently referring to Sun, not Streetcar.) The Academy gets points for reaching out into other genres, and for finally rewarding another color movie, but I would say that this was not the right year for that.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. How do you cut an 800 page novel down to a two hour movie? Most obviously by cutting out the first half (involving the protagonist’s first, equally tragic attempt to make it in a different big city), but beyond that, by casting great actors who can summarize reams of text by putting it all on their faces. More about them:
2. This movie would seem to suffer from a frequent problem plaguing Hollywood movies: Our hero is supposed to be awkward around women, but they cast a strikingly handsome young actor to play him. But Clift makes it work by being so self-conscious, awkward, and flat-out neurotic. He convincingly portrays a young man very uncomfortable in his own skin, so much so that you’re left with the impression that it might not have been very fun to be Montgomery Clift, either.
   
3. Elizabeth Taylor has it easier because she gets to play what she really was: an ethereally beautiful young debutant. But she does what few actresses could have done in the part: have her character be just broken enough inside that she’s compulsively drawn to a totally twisted up male. (“Tell mama, tell mama all.”)
   
4. But as good as those two are, Shelly Winters steals the movie as the frumpy-but-just-pretty-enough-to-get-herself-in-trouble first girlfriend. Winters is plenty attractive in real life, but she deserved an Oscar for doing the opposite of Clift and Taylor, radiating anti-glamor from every pore. Every look on her face breaks your heart.
   
5. This movie was even harder to watch than All the King’s Men, given what’s happened to America. The real American tragedy here is the lack of access to safe and legal abortion (Winters begs a doctor for one, but he refuses), a tragedy that was alleviated, and then came crashing back down on us. Watching this movie today hits differently than it would have hit ten years ago.
   
6. To what degree is Clift’s George Eastman an evil man? It’s easy to sympathize with him even at his worst, partially because of his background: homeschooled (really unschooled) by sidewalk preachers, then finally forced by the government to go to school for just a few years before he had to drop out and go to work at 13, but never stops believing that he can have it all. Perhaps Dreiser was right: Perhaps there is something particularly American about this tragedy. (Charlie Chaplin called it “the greatest movie ever made about America”)

Ah, 1951: “It’s Digestible!” was the best tagline you could come up with for your food product?