What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1954

The Year: 1954
What the Nominees Were: The Caine Mutiny, The Country Girl, On the Waterfront, Seven Brides For Seven Brothers, Three Coins in the Fountain
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Hitchcock turned out a masterpiece with Rear Window. George Cukor delivered the first of many remakes of A Star is Born, giving Judy Garland her best showcase. Disney’s great live action version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was worthy of consideration. Over in Italy, Fellini topped himself with La Strada.

What Did Win: On the Waterfront
How It’s Aged: On its own merits? It’s clearly a great film. As a historical artifact? It’s terrible. Its writer and director had shamefully named names in the witch hunts, and made this movie to defend their position. Once you know that, it poisons the whole thing, and you realize there are some places where characters act a little unnaturally in order to make the filmmakers’ larger political point. Still well worth watching for Brando’s stunning “coulda been a contenda” performance, but a movie with dubious motives.

What Should’ve Won: Rear Window

How Hard Was the Decision: A very hard choice. I was very tempted to go with A Star is Born, which is classic Oscar Bait that somehow failed to catch its prey. The “Born in a Trunk” musical number is Best-Picture worthy all by itself. But Rear Window, while less Oscar-y, is one of the all-time great films and it was impossible to pass it over.

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writer: John Michael Hayes, based on the short story “It Had to Be Murder” by Cornell Woolrich
Stars: James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Wendell Corey, Thelma Ritter and Raymond Burr

The Story: A daredevil photographer gets injured on the job and laid up in his apartment with a broken leg. He begins spying on his neighbors, ands comes to suspect one of them of murdering his wife. He eventually convinces his society girlfriend (who wishes he would marry her) to break into the man’s apartment, but that gets them both in danger.

Any Nominations or Wins: It was nominated for Director, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography and Sound, but won nothing.
Why It Didn’t Win: When Hitchcock first arrived in Hollywood, the Academy loved him, nominating his first three American films for Best Picture, giving the prize to Rebecca, and giving Suspicion Best Actress. But then they inexplicably soured on him, passing over masterpiece after masterpiece, never giving him a Directing award even as he reached new artistic peaks. They seemingly decided that he was “just” a suspense director after all, and it was quite unfair of him that he had initially convinced them otherwise.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Of course, the really unconvincing thing about this movie is that anyone would not want to marry Grace Kelly. Her comet burned across the face of Hollywood for less than ten years, but she sure turned out a lot of great films in that time. Her incredible poise and presence had a lot to do with that. She won Best Actress for another movie this year (The Country Girl), infamously beating Garland’s superior performance in A Star is Born, but it’s hard to begrudge Kelly any award they wanted to give her, just to have some testament to her brief but amazing career.
   
2. It’s one of my favorite movie trivia questions: What movie released in 1954 had the largest indoor set that had ever been built at the time? The answer is of course Rear Window and the fact that you wouldn’t have thought of it is a testament to the potent “movie magic” on display here. The massive set is totally convincing as an outdoor courtyard inside a Manhattan block, and we never think about the fact that they were shooting this movie from 9-5 on a Hollywood soundstage then going home to their families promptly in time for dinner.
   
3. More films noir were based on Woolrich’s writing than any other author, and one of the best assignments from my hapless screenwriting career was getting hired by his estate to adapt one of his short stories, but alas, like everything else I wrote, it never got made. Maybe the time for Woolrich has passed, but, for a time, he and Hollywood were perfectly in sync, scratching the itch of postwar paranoia.
4. This isn’t the only Hitchcock film about voyeurism I’ll be awarding, so I’ll talk more about that later, but I love one aspect I’ll point out here: The shape of windows on the facing building look like the view through a movie camera with the new wider film aspect ratio plus lines for the TV-safe aspect ratio.  One form of voyeurism you engage in with the public, and another kind you engage in in the privacy of your own home.  Hitchcock is exploring them both.    
   
5. How do you build suspense? Through skillful editing, right? But Hitchcock frequently proved he didn’t need editing, such as in the long static shot of Kelly breaking into the killer’s apartment. As viewers, we desperately long for cut aways that we don’t get, keeping our hearts in our throats.
   
   
   

Ah, 1954: Those baked beans are going to go flying everywhere as soon as you bite into that thing.