The nominees were ...
- Clarence Brown, The Human Comedy
- Michael Curtiz, Casablanca
- Henry King, The Song of Bernadette
- Ernst Lubitsch, Heaven Can Wait
- George Stevens, The More the Merrier
... when they should have been ...
- Noël Coward, David Lean, In Which We Serve
- Michael Curtiz, Casablanca
- Alfred Hitchcock, Shadow of a Doubt
- Ernst Lubitsch, Heaven Can Wait
- George Stevens, The More the Merrier
And the Oscar went to ...
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| Michael Curtiz accepts the Oscar for Casablanca |
Curtiz is one of those directors, like William Wyler, who give the auteur theorists fits: They made any number of brilliantly entertaining films without showing any distinct directorial fingerprints. In Curtiz's case we have Captain Blood, The Charge of the Light Brigade, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Angels With Dirty Faces, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Mildred Pierce, and of course the one for which he received his only Oscar. He directed more than one hundred films for Warner Bros. in the quarter century he spent with the studio, which hired him in 1925. Born in Budapest, he had begun his career as an actor, then a producer and director in Hungary and Austria when they were a single country. He was directing in Germany when he was approached by Jack Warner, who was planning a film, Noah's Ark, and had seen Curtiz's work on a film about Sodom and Gomorrah. It's possible that a lot of credit for Curtiz's output belongs to his producers, especially Hal Wallis, for after Wallis left Warners in 1944, Curtiz's films declined in quality. He was famous for his short temper, especially with actors and crew who couldn't understand his thick Hungarian accent, which gave rise to many anecdotes, including his order to "bring on the empty horses," meaning riderless ones, during the filming of The Charge of the Light Brigade. David Niven, one of the stars of the film, used the command as the title of one volume of his memoirs.
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| Curtiz behind the camera, with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman |
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