1943 Oscar Watch

Oh, Oscar.  Even when you get it right, you get it so so wrong.

You can see my GABBY winners and nominees HERE

Best Picture

10. Madame Curie is a dull and boring biopic of Madame Curie and her husband Pierre who discovered Radium.  Greer Garson plays Madame Curie and Walter Pidgeon plays Pierre.  Mrs. Miniver was such a huge hit that they decided to get the two leads together again.  I was enjoying this movie for a while but it was completely in irony.  It hammers you over the head with every biopic trope and it also punches you in the face with every romantic movie trope.  I was giggling a lot but it's because I found this movie so terrible and it was one of those situations where I could either laugh or cry and I chose the former.

9. Watch On The Rhine is a very dull film.  About a quarter of it is about a guy fighting Nazis and the rest is a bunch of old ladies gossiping.  This is a hard movie to judge fairly as it is best remembered as the movie that won Best Actor over Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca.  While you're watching the movie you're basically just asking, "why?" over and over.  I've seen it a few times now and each time I lose a little more interest in it.  I find interest in the fact that Bette Davis is front and center on the poster and top billed as this is not her film at all.  She's a secondary character but her name assuredly sold more tickets than Paul Lukas.  So, if you're interested, the plot is about Paul Lukas, a German who is fighting Nazis overseas, he goes with his family to visit his mother-in-law in America.  There's a guest staying at the house who is spying for the Nazis who tries to blackmail him.  Lukas kills the spy and goes back to Germany to fight more Nazis.  The movie ends with the family wondering if he'll be okay.  It all adds up to a big plate of nothing much.

8. The Song of Bernadette is a very long (2½ hours) and not very well paced religious film about a young girl who starts to see visions of the Virgin Mary.  Jennifer Jones plays Bernadette, she's not good in her school and the nuns don't like her.  One day when she's out playing she sees a vision of Mary and becomes the talk of the town.  Some see her as a saint and some see her as a heretic.  The church begins an investigation and the town goes into a stir.  Eventually they believe her and she becomes a saint after she dies.  It's not a bad film but it is needlessly long.  If your movie is going to be over 2 hours, it should really be worth my time.  This story could have been told in 90 minutes.  One other thing I didn't like about the film is that her visions are always presented as real.  This wouldn't be a problem except that a large chunk of the film is about people doubting her.  It would have been more interesting if we, as the audience, could doubt her as well.

7. For Whom The Bell Tolls is a movie I have been hesitant about seeing for many years.  I just assumed that I would dislike it at worst or find it dull at best.  I was pleasantly surprised that it landed somewhere in the middle.  I didn't really like it, it was needlessly long but it had some good parts and the Technicolor popped off the screen.  I think that's what impressed me the most.  The story is nothing great and the performances are just okay but the cinematography is wonderful.  Gary Cooper stars as an American in the Spanish Civil War.  He is sent to blow up a bridge and he falls in love with Ingrid Bergman.  That's pretty much the film, I'm glad I finally saw it so I can fairly judge it but it's not something I would ever see again.

6. In Which We Serve is a Noel Coward film, starring Noel Coward, written by Noel Coward, directed by Noel Coward and produced by Noel Coward.  The poster has his name above the title and I think that is why I never had any interest in this film.  I'm not super familiar with Coward but I just assumed that the film would be pretentious.  I was pleasantly surprised.  Coward isn't the greatest actor but he was smart enough to surround his film with capable people.  He got David Lean to edit and co-direct the film and Ronald Neame to shoot it.  He also cast good actors in all the other parts, which makes Coward's performance really stick out.  The film is about a British ship.  We start with it being built, then it gets hit in battle and we get flashbacks of the men who survived the attack.  It's a pretty good film and really engaging for what is essentially a straight up propaganda film.

5. The Human Comedy is about World War II on the home front.  Mickey Rooney stars as a high school kid, his father is dead and his older brother has gone off to war.  He gets a job as a telegram boy and has to start telling people that their loved ones have died.  The movie is a bit episodic but it's really well done.  Rooney gives his best performance, when he has to read a telegram to a woman who can't read English that informs her that her husband was killed in the war I think is when Academy voters started marking their ballots.

4. Heaven Can Wait is an incredibly colorful comedy directed by Ernst Lubitsch.  I really love these Technicolor films of the 40s, they're more colorful than color.  They look both real and fake at the same time, if that makes sense.  This movie starts with an old Don Ameche, he is dead and sitting in the office of the devil.  He thinks he deserves to be in hell but the devil needs proof so Don tells him his life story.  It's a very pleasant film with good, fun performances from the cast including Ameche, Gene Tierney, Charles Coburn and Laird Cregar as "His Excellency".

3. The More The Merrier is a straight up romantic comedy that got 6 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and won 1.  What sets this apart from other films in the same genre of the time period?  Mostly, it's the cast.  Jean Arthur is one of the most lovely women to ever grace the screen.  Joel McCrea is just a charming average guy that is instantly relatable and Charles Coburn is the comically befuddled old eccentric who is the icing on the cake.  This film is about a housing shortage in Washington D.C..  Coburn is a retired billionaire who shows up for a meeting two days early and can't get a hotel, so he rents a room from Arthur.  For no real reason, except that he's an eccentric billionaire, he rents half of his room to McCrea.  Then he tries to facilitate a romantic relationship between the two.  It's a simple but wonderful little film that had me smiling the entire way through.

2. The Ox-Bow Incident is maybe the best western ever made.  I think I said that about The Searchers at one point but this is the one.  One of my big criticisms of a lot of Oscar films is length.  Many of these films are needlessly long.  This movie is 75 minutes and not a second of it is wasted.  Henry Fonda and Harry Morgan wander into a town.  Word gets out that a man has been murdered so a posse is formed to find the killers.  When they find three men in the desert with what appears to be stolen cattle they immediately want to lynch them without a fair trial.  Fonda believes the men are innocent so it's kind of like 12 Angry Men in the old west.  It's a brilliant depiction of mob mentality and, at a brisk 75 minutes, it flows better than most any other film.

1. Casablanca is one of the best movies ever made.  It placed 2nd on the AFI's top 100 movies list and 3rd on their 10th anniversary list.  Behind only Citizen Kane and The Godfather.  Why?  I've seen the film several times and each time I walk away thinking that it is a very good film but not realizing why this particular movie places so high on the list.  What sets it apart from every other 1940s romantic thriller?  Because there's a lot of them.  This time I watched it to try and specifically answer that question and the answer is simple, it's everything.  The characters, the performances, the story, the script, the direction, the cinematography, the score, everything about this movie is at the highest level of perfection.  Every scene has purpose.  If you've never seen the film, first of all, you should, but the plot is simple.  A guy has transit papers that can ensure sage passage to the person who carries them.  His ex-lover needs them but she also needs them for her husband, who is actively leading the fight against the Nazis.  So, does he give her the papers and lose her forever or does he keep them to screw them both over?  It's hard to explain why it's so good, I'm sure film scholars have wrote papers on it but for me it's just a feeling.  As you're watching it you can just sense all elements coming together to make a perfect film.

This is a case where Casablanca is #1, everything else ties for not being Casablanca.  Even if The Ox-Bow Incident won, and it would be my vote in almost any other year, it still would beat Casablanca and it would look like an upset.  I really like this Best Picture lineup.  You have an obvious winner, there is some filler (Madame Curie and Watch On The Rhine) but everything else deserves a nomination.  Nothing is as good as Casablanca though so there is a clear line between winner and nominees.  Honestly, it's very surprising that Casablanca won.  There was no sweep in progress (it only won Picture, Director and Screenplay), it won no acting honors and it came out the year before.  It premiered in 1942 but wasn't released wide until January of this year.  The Academy usually doesn't have that strong a memory.

Oscar Winner: Casablanca

My Vote: Casablanca

GABBY Winner: Casablanca

Best Actor

5. Walter Pidgeon plays famous physicist Pierre Curie in Madame Curie.  I found this movie dull and found his performance even more so.

4. Gary Cooper is an actor that I find to be just dull.  He can be used well, in westerns where he just has to ride a horse or in films like Mr. Deeds Goes To Town and The Pride Of The Yankees where he's playing an "aw shucks" country bumpkin in the big city.  When he has to act though he's just downright boring.  In For Whom The Bell Tolls he plays a teacher who partners with some anti-fascist guerrillas to blow up a bridge.  He romances Ingrid Bergman and is supposed to be the dashing action adventure hero but he's just kind of bland.  There's a reason Harrison Ford was so good as Indiana Jones and there's a reason not everyone can do it.

3. Paul Lukas is gonna go down in history not as a decent actor who won an Oscar for Watch On The Rhine but as the guy who won an Oscar over Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca.  It's only partly deserved.  It's deserved because he should not have won this category but he is the best thing about this dull film.  Lukas plays a German born man who started pushing back when the Nazis started coming to power.  He is now in America with his family still fighting the fight against fascism.  He's stoic and speaks with authority and when the movie focuses on him it has something going for it.  Unfortunately, the movie doesn't always stay with him and loses all steam.  He's also not better than Bogart, no matter how good he is.

2. Mickey Rooney is an actor who has a tendency to go big and over the top but in The Human Comedy he drops all of those bad habits and turns in his most natural and honest performance.  In comedic roles he has an energy that fills the screen and in dramatic roles he sometimes doesn't reign that energy in.  Take Boys Town for example where he's crying over little Pee-Wee.  It's effective but it's just a tad too much.  Now watch him in this film where he has to tell a woman that her husband has died in battle, he's perfect.

1. Humphrey Bogart plays Rick Blaine, owner of a casino in Casablanca.  He's a neutral American during the beginning of World War II, making money from the rest of the lot stuck awaiting passage to another country.  Casablanca is not a great place to live but Rick is gonna make some cash while he's there.  What's great about Bogart here is that he's playing a jaded man who keeps his emotions hidden but then in the flashbacks he's a completely different person.  We get to see why he is the way he is and that's not a side of Bogart we see to often.  We very rarely saw him in a romantic lens, but he's perfect at playing both sides of the character.  This is not only the iconic Bogart role but it's just an iconic performance by itself.  I can't imagine anyone else playing this role better than him.

This is another category where Humphrey Bogart is #1 and everything else is tied for not being Casablanca.  Bogart is really the only choice that makes sense but the Academy gave the win to Paul Lukas.  In a way, it makes sense, America just got into World War II and the choice was between a guy fighting Nazis and a guy hiding out from them.  They went with the Nazi fighter.  It wasn't just the Oscars though, Lukas won the Golden Globe and the New York Film Critics award as well.  Bogart got his eventually but he won over Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, see how one bad decision can cause a ripple effect?

Oscar Winner: Paul Lukas

My Vote: Humphrey Bogart

GABBY Winner: Humphrey Bogart

Best Actress

5. Greer Garson won an Oscar last year for Mrs. Miniver which is good because I don't need to pretend to come up with another reason not to vote for her for Madame Curie.

4. Joan Fontaine stars in a romantic melodrama with Charles Boyer in The Constant Nymph.  I was having trouble tracking this film down for the longest time and then when it came time to write this post I go through what's coming on TCM and there it was.  Damn, now I have no excuse to not watch it.  It's not good.  Fontaine plays a young girl with a heart condition who loves Boyer from afar.  He marries her cousin, which upsets her but they eventually both confess their love for each other.  Then of course, heart condition, you knew it was gonna happen.  Fontaine is so not convincing in this role.  She's supposed to be 14 years old but she's so clearly a grown woman.  It's like they thought they could fool us just by putting her hair in pigtails.

3. Jennifer Jones won the Oscar for her breakout role as Bernadette Soubirous, the young girl who sees visions of the Virgin Mary, in The Song Of Bernadette.  It's the definition of a "star making" role.  She auditioned for producer David O. Selznick, who signed her to a 7 year contract, she lands this role, wins an Oscar and eventually marries Selznick who gives her role after role in films that get her more and more Oscar nominations.  I'm not trying to hint that the system can be rigged but it is well documented that Selznick had a lot of pull with the Academy.  Jones is perfectly fine in the role but this is basically her film debut so there's no rush for me to vote for her.  Also, the film paints Bernadette as nothing but pure.  This is no fault of Jennifer's but it doesn't make for the most interesting character, someone who is completely innocent and untarnished. 

2. Ingrid Bergman plays Ilsa Lund in Casa...wait, what?  She got nominated for For Whom The Bell Tolls?  Okay.  Doesn't make a whole lot of sense but I'll play along.  Now, this could be a case of me not paying close enough attention but, was she supposed to be Spanish?  They mention that she was taken but...from Sweden?  Like, did Spanish fascists kidnap here from the Swedish alps?  All that aside, she’s perfectly fine in the role, she’s beautiful and in her first color film her natural radiance seems like it’s in 3D but this ain’t no Casablanca.

1. Jean Arthur lights up the screen in The More The Merrier.  She plays a woman who rents half of her apartment to an older man who in turn rents out half of his half to a handsome stranger.  There's not much to her performance other than to just be an absolute delight.  She's funny, frail, strong and beautiful and while she was falling in love with Joel McCrea, I was falling in love with her.

So Fontaine and Garson are out, having won recently and not really deserving a win for these performance in the first place.  If Bergman had been nominated for Casablanca she would win this category easily but they nominated her for the wrong film.  No big loss there as she went on to win 3 during her career.  So my vote is between Jones and Arthur and Jones is in her first film so that makes the decision easy.  Also, Jean Arthur deserved to win an Oscar in her career.  She's so good in so many films, You Can't Take It With You, Mr. Deeds Goes To Town, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, The Devil And Miss Jones, Shane.  She was one of my favorites.  The More The Merrier is not really an "Oscar" film but I couldn't care less, she's absolutely radiant in this film.

Oscar Winner: Jennifer Jones

My Vote: Jean Arthur

GABBY Winner: Ingrid Bergman for Casablanca

Best Supporting Actor

5. Charles Bickford plays a doubtful priest in The Song Of Bernadette who initially does not believe that a young girl is seeing visions but then turns around and becomes her strongest ally.  A win for Bickford here would only make sense if the film swept, which thankfully it didn't.  He just doesn't have much of a part.  He's skeptical, then admits he was wrong, that's all he does.  Vincent Price and Lee J. Cobb have much more interesting characters in the film and if the Academy needed to honor someone from the film it should have been one of them.

4. Akim Tamiroff plays Pablo, a Spanish revolutionary who leads a gang that helps Gary Cooper blow up a bridge in For Whom The Bell Tolls.  His character is a bit of a coward and he would rather hide in the mountains than fight or blow up a bridge.  It takes his wife to slap some courage into him.  I felt that his performance had two levels, way over the top and muted.  It seemed like he was constantly searching for a happy medium between both sides of his character.

3. J. Carrol Naish plays Italian prisoner Giuseppe in Sahara, a Humphrey Bogart World War II action adventure film.  Much like with Akim Tamiroff this year, I think the Academy really liked accents around this time.  If you gave a big and broad performance in a foreign accent, it was a surefire way of getting a nomination.  Sahara has a big cast of characters and the movie does a good job of giving each one enough time to develop.  Giuseppe has a good moment at the end when they leave him in the desert and then decide to turn around and then he has a good moment near the end where he is killed.  It's quite obvious when you watch the film why they singled him out but it's a bit odd that they picked this movie to honor, it doesn't feel like an Oscar movie.

2. Charles Coburn is an absolute hoot as retired billionaire Benjamin Dingle in The More The Merrier.  He's an old eccentric who is found of his catchphrase "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.", which is all the funnier seeing as how he just discovers the saying at the beginning of the film.  He's like an overgrown child in that way.  He sees something that interests him and repeats it over and over.  Much like how he just sees Joel McCrea on the streets and offers him a place to live, even though he has no legal right to.  It's a very funny role played by a very funny character actor.

1. Claude Rains plays Captain Louis Renault in Casablanca, a knowingly corrupt official.  I get so much pleasure watching Rains in this film.  He is having so much fun playing a character who knows he is a complete pile of shit and couldn't seem to care less.  He boasts about taking bribes and skirting the law, which is exactly why Rick knows he can trust him when he has to.  Rains is an absolute delight in this film and this is one of his best performances in a career that included numerous terrific roles, and no Oscars.

I used to look at the category as the one that Claude Rains lost, now I look at it as the one Charles Coburn won.  Rains is so iconic in Casablanca that it's hard to believe that he didn't win an Oscar but Coburn is damn good too in his film.  If anyone was going to beat Claude, it needed to be him.  The other 3 nominees would be terrible choices.  I also use to think of this victory as a sham because I was unfamiliar with Coburn's work for the longest time.  It wasn't until I really started seeking out these films that I grew to truly respect him.  Not just in his Oscar nominated roles in The Green Years and The Devil And Miss Jones but films like Kings Row, The Lady Eve, Monkey Business,The Paradine Case and, from this year, Heaven Can Wait.  I'm still voting for Claude Rains but Coburn holds up.

Oscar Winner: Charles Coburn

My Vote: Claude Rains

GABBY Winner: Claude Rains

Best Supporting Actress

5. Lucille Watson plays Bette Davis's mother in Watch On The Rhine.  I really think that playing a mother in the 1940s just automatically got you an Oscar nomination.  Watching this film, I can't point to a single part of her performance that I think warranted a nomination but the history of this category is just full of old ladies playing the mother of the lead character.

4. Anne Revere, speaking of mothers, plays Bernadette's mother in The Song Of Bernadette much like she played Elizabeth Taylor's mother in National Velvet and Gregory Peck's mother in Gentleman's Agreement, all 3 performances earned Oscar nominations, one resulting in a win.  She was very good at this type of role and is very natural.  She seems like a real mother, she loves her children, will do anything for them and will fight for them when they are in trouble.

3. Gladys Cooper plays an angry, jealous nun in The Song Of Bernadette.  I actually enjoyed her performance but she's not really in the film all that much.  She basically has one big scene where she resents Bernadette for being chosen by God when she has sacrificed her whole life.  It's one of those roles where she's introduced early in the film and you're thinking, why did they nominate her? and then she has her big scene later and you go, oh, I understand.  Still, can't vote for her, she's not in the movie that much and there are better performances in this category.

2. Katina Paxinou strikes such an interesting presence in For Whom The Bell Tolls, her first motion picture.  She is a tall woman with a distinctive face.  She calls herself ugly but she's not, yet she's not beautiful, she's striking.  It's precisely the kind of role and performance that wins an Oscar.  She's a Gypsy woman who is married to Akim Tamiroff's character.  At first she is presented as the only woman in the group who does the cooking and the cleaning but is then shown to be the most powerful.  She gets the gang to fight when her husband wants to hide and is quite easily the most interesting character in the film.  Her performance is very big and broad and just on the cusp of being over the top, but it's also very fun.

1. Paulette Goddard plays one of the nurses in So Proudly We Hail!, a film I really enjoyed and feel should have gotten more Oscar love.  Claudette Colbert and Veronica Lake should have been nominated and the film could have been in the Best Picture category over some of the lesser fare like Madame Curie.  The film is about a group of nurses in World War II, which is a side of the war we didn't see a lot of in film.  Colbert's husband is a soldier and she's never sure if he's alive or not, Lake is a woman whose husband was killed and she wants revenge and Goddard is the sexy, flirty nurse who always has the attention of the men.  All of the women are good in this film but if you're gonna pick one, I think you have to go with Lake who is truly fantastic in this film.  Since she's not here though this is my only chance to vote for this film and for Goddard herself.  She was an actress with an incredibly expressive face, having cut her teeth in the films of Charlie Chaplin that comes as no surprise.  I love her, I love her in this film, the only asterisk that comes with this vote is that I loved another performance in this film better.

So, Watson is out and the two Song Of Bernadette nominees cancel each other out.  That leaves Paxinou and Goddard.  I totally get why Paxinou won.  She's got the better role for starters, her movie got nominated for Best Picture and Goddard gets slightly overshadowed in her film.  If Veronica Lake was nominated I'd be voting for her instead.  I also totally admit that I'm not voting for Goddard's performance, I'm voting for her and I'm voting for her career, and I'm fine with that.  I always say that you can vote for the performance or the performer and sometimes I vote for the performer.

Oscar Winner: Katina Paxinou

My Vote: Paulette Goddard

GABBY Winner: Veronica Lake for So Proudly We Hail!

Best Director
Michael Curtiz rightfully wins for Casablanca.  The nominees were interesting this year.  You would think Sam Wood would be here for For Whom The Bell Tolls or Herman Schumlin for Watch On The Rhine.  Instead they went with Ernst Lubitsch and George Stevens for the comedies Heaven Can Wait and The More The Merrier, Clarence Brown for The Human Comedy and Henry King for The Song Of Bernadette.  William Wellman deserved to be here for The Ox-Bow Incident but the directors guild did a pretty good job this year.

Best Original Screenplay/Screenplay/Original Motion Picture Story
The Olivia de Havilland comedy Princess O'Rourke wins Original Screenplay over In Which We Serve and So Proudly We Hail!.  Casablanca rightfully wins Best Screenplay.  I'm not sure what separates Best Original Motion Picture Story from the other two writing awards but The Human Comedy wins over The More The Merrier and Shadow Of A Doubt.

Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture/Scoring of a Musical Picture
Between these 2 categories there are 26 nominees.  It's kind of hard to pick a favorite.  The Song Of Bernadette wins Dramatic or Comedy Score, which is just.  The music in the film is really good.  Fellow nominees Casablanca and For Whom The Bell Tolls are worthy too.  This Is The Army wins Musical Score over a bunch of other jukebox musicals of the time.

Best Original Song
'You'll Never Know' from Hello, Frisco, Hello wins, which was apparently a big hit at the time.  'That Old Black Magic' was also nominated as was 'Happiness Is A Thing Called Joe' from Cabin In The Sky.  I would have voted for that.  This was one of the first movies with an all black cast and because of that it was banned in a lot of places (hint, it was the south).

Best Sound Recording
None of the nominees really stick out as winners, probably Sahara would be the best.  This Land Is Mine wins which disproves my theory that musicals always win this category as This Is The Army was nominated.  Maybe the voters got confused and voted for the wrong movie starting with "this".  Wait, that means my theory still has merit.

Best Art Direction (Black and White)/Art Direction (Color)
The Song Of Bernadette wins the black and white category and Phantom Of The Opera wins the color category.  Both are good decisions.

Best Cinematography (Black and White)/Cinematography (Color)
The Song Of Bernadette and Phantom Of The Opera win these categories too.  I would have picked Casablanca and For Whom The Bell Tolls.

Best Film Editing
War movies have a good track record in this category and Air Force wins over Casablanca, Five Graves To Cairo, For Whom The Bell Tolls and The Song Of Bernadette.  Other than Bernadette, I think Air Force was the weakest of the nominees.

Best Special Effects
Not sure what constitutes a special effect as the nominees are Air Force, Bombardier, The North Star, So Proudly We Hail!, Stand By For Action and Crash Dive wins.

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1952