Best Writing, 1942

Awards presented March 4, 1943

The nominees were ... 
(Original Motion Picture Story) 

• Irving Berlin, Holiday Inn   
• Robert Buckner, Yankee Doodle Dandy 
• Paul Gallico, The Pride of the Yankees 
• Sidney Harmon, The Talk of the Town 
• Emeric Pressburger, The Invaders 

(Original Screenplay) 

• W.R. Burnett, Frank Butler, Wake Island 
• Frank Butler, Don Hartman, Road to Morocco 
• Ring Lardner Jr., Michael Kanin, Woman of the Year 
• George Oppenheimer, The War Against Mrs. Hadley 
• Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing   

(Screenplay) 

• Rodney Ackland, Emeric Pressburger, The Invaders 
• Irwin Shaw, Sidney Buchman, The Talk of the Town 
• Jo Swerling, Herman J. Mankiewicz, The Pride of the Yankees 
• Claudine West, George Froeschel, Arthur Wimperis, Random Harvest 
• Arthur Wimperis, George Froeschel, James Hilton, Claudine West, Mrs. Miniver  

... when they should have been ... 

(Original Motion Picture Story) 

• Robert Buckner, Yankee Doodle Dandy 
• Sidney Harmon, The Talk of the Town 
• Melchior Lengyel, Ernst Lubitsch, To Be or Not to Be  
• Emeric Pressburger, The Invaders 
• Preston Sturges, The Palm Beach Story 

(Original Screenplay)

• Frank Butler, Don Hartman, Road to Morocco 
• Ring Lardner Jr., Michael Kanin, Woman of the Year 
• Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing   
• Preston Sturges, Sullivan's Travels 
• Peter Viertel, Joan Harrison, Dorothy Parker, Saboteur 

(Screenplay) 

• Rodney Ackland, Emeric Pressburger, The Invaders 
• Edwin Justus Mayer, To Be or Not to Be 
• Casey Robinson, Now, Voyager 
• Irwin Shaw, Sidney Buchman, The Talk of the Town 
• Orson Welles, The Magnificent Ambersons 

And the Oscar went to ... 

(Original Motion Picture Story) 

Emeric Pressburger, The Invaders. 

Now generally known by its original British title, 49th Parallel, The Invaders tells of the efforts of five Nazi survivors to make their way across Canada to the then-neutral United States. Directed by Michael Powell, the movie is an undisguised plea for the United States to join in the fight against the Germans -- it was released in the United Kingdom in the fall of 1941, before Pearl Harbor. Pressburger, born in Hungary, began his career as a screenwriter in Germany and Austria, and went to England in 1936. The Invaders is the beginning of his long collaboration with Powell, with whom he formed a production company known as the Archers. Through 1956 they co-wrote, -produced, and -directed a series of opulent and impressive films that included Black Narcissus, The Tales of Hoffman, and The Red Shoes.   

(Original Screenplay) 

Ring Lardner Jr., Michael Kanin, Woman of the Year. 

The first of the nine films that Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy made together, Woman of the Year is not one of the best, but it was hugely popular at the time. Today the sexist subtext is all too glaring: Because of her devotion to her career, Hepburn is not a "real" woman, as demonstrated in a notorious scene at the end in which she tries to make breakfast and makes a mess instead. Mostly the movie relies on the chemistry between the leads, which continued on and off screen for twenty-five years. Lardner, the son of a famous humorist, began his Hollywood career as a publicist for David O. Selznick, and turned screenwriter in 1937 with uncredited work on Selznick's A Star Is Born and Nothing Sacred. His refusal to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s led to his imprisonment for contempt of Congress and blacklisting in Hollywood. He continued to write under pseudonyms in the '50s, and returned to credited screenwriting in 1965 with The Cincinnati Kid and won a second Oscar for MASH. Michael Kanin was the brother of Garson Kanin, who would later write the best of the Tracy-Hepburn films, Adam's Rib and Pat and Mike. Michael often collaborated with his wife, Fay Kanin, with whom he received a nomination for Teacher's Pet. 

(Screenplay) 

Arthur Wimperis, George Froeschel, James Hilton, Claudine West, Mrs. Miniver.  

The screenplay, based on a novel by Jan Struther, was much rewritten as events changed, including the attack on Pearl Harbor that propelled the United States into the war. Hilton, the best-known of the screenwriters, had written two novels that had already been made into movies, Lost Horizon and Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and he had contributed dialogue to Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent. It's likely that Wimperis, Froeschel, and West, more experienced at screenwriting, did the largest share of the work on the screenplay, but the quartet had an interesting track record: They were also simultaneously nominated for the screenplay of Random Harvest, which was based on one of Hilton's novels. West had also been nominated for the screenplay of Hilton's Lost Horizon.   

... when it should have gone to ... 

(Original Motion Picture Story) 

Melchior Lengyel, Ernst Lubitsch, To Be or Not to Be. 

Melchior Lengyel

Ernst Lubitsch

Amid the news coming out of Europe, Lubitsch gives us a comedy with Jack Benny and Carole Lombard as the stars of a shabby little Polish theatrical company who become involved in a plot to assassinate a Nazi spy. Too soon? That might have been the problem with Lubitsch's great blend of farce and melodrama where the Academy was concerned, since it gave the film only one Oscar nomination: for Werner Heymann's score. (In fact, Heymann had been hired when Miklos Rozsa, the original composer, expressed discomfort with the film's premise. But when Lubitsch objected to the heavy-handedness of Heymann's scoring for some scenes, Rozsa agreed to compose part of the score after all.) Critics and audiences, too, were a little mixed in their reaction to the film, now regarded as one of Lubitsch's greatest. In addition to the problem of satirizing the Nazis in the middle of the war, when they were usually portrayed as monsters and not buffoons, the film was also released two months after Lombard's death in a plane crash. Lengyel, born in Hungary, had come to Hollywood as a screenwriter in 1937 and earned his first Oscar nomination for Ninotchka. As for Lubitsch, who collaborated with Lengyel on the story and Edwin Justus Mayer on the screenplay, as Andrew Sarris puts it, "it was sufficient to say that Hitler had bad manners, and no evil was then inconceivable."

Carole Lombard and Jack Benny in To Be or Not to Be

(Original Screenplay) 

Preston Sturges, Sullivan's Travels. 

Preston Sturges

It's possible that the Academy ignored Sturges's greatest film because like its protagonist, John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea), it wanted to honor high-minded message films, of which the year's best picture winner, Mrs. Miniver, was an example. Sullivan, known for such comedies as Ants in Your Plants of 1939, wants to make a message movie out of the novel O Brother, Where Art Thou? written by "Sinclair Beckstein," Sturges's satiric conflation of the names of serious-minded novelists Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, and John Steinbeck. So he sets out on a road trip and learns, however, that making people laugh is a great and worthy aim. Not everybody got Sturges's joke: The New Yorker called Sullivan's Travels "pretentious" and the Hollywood Reporter accused him of self-contradiction, of making a message movie after all.

Joel McCrea and Jimmy Conlin in Sullivan's Travels

(Screenplay) 

Orson Welles, The Magnificent Ambersons. 

Orson Welles directing The Magnificent Ambersons

Welles had previously adapted Booth Tarkington's novel for the radio, performing it with his Mercury Players. As the published screenplay shows, Welles actually improves on his source, adding psychological depth and making its commentary on the effect of the Industrial Revolution on American society more subtle. Unfortunately, the existing film isn't the one Welles wrote. After he completed filming, he was enlisted in a documentary project in Brazil, part of the wartime propaganda effort to keep Latin American countries on our side. While he was out of the country, the first cut, slightly over two hours long, was previewed. The audience reaction was devastatingly negative, and after a second preview, slightly more favorable but still not wholly positive, RKO head George Schaefer put editor Robert Wise in charge of cutting and reshooting scenes. Wise assembled the film into its current eighty-eight-minute length. Meanwhile, Schaefer was fired, and new studio management decided to give the film a limited, unpromoted release. For those to whom Welles is a hero, the treatment of Ambersons is a story about the abuse of genius by commercial-minded dolts. But others see it as an instance of Welles's own self-destructiveness and ambivalence: His acceptance of the documentary project before seeing his film through to a satisfactory completion suggests a kind of directorial ADD. The remainder of Welles's film career, more than forty years, was spent scrounging for money, acting in movies of wildly varying quality, doing TV commercials, and producing movies of fitful brilliance. As late as 1970 he was still talking about assembling the surviving members of the cast -- Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, Tim Holt, and Anne Baxter -- and filming a new ending for Ambersons instead of the unsatisfactory "happy ending" the studio tacked onto its revision. He never received another Oscar nomination, but was given an honorary award at the 1970 ceremonies, "for superlative artistry and versatility in the creation of motion pictures."