The nominees were ...
(Original Motion Picture Story)
(Original Screenplay)
(Screenplay)
... when they should have been ...
(Original Motion Picture Story)
(Original Screenplay)
(Screenplay)
- Samuel G. Engel, Winston Miller, My Darling Clementine
- William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, Jules Furthman, The Big Sleep
- David Lean, Anthony Havelock-Allan, Ronald Neame, Brief Encounter
- Robert E. Sherwood, The Best Years of Our Lives
- Anthony Veiller, The Killers
And the Oscar went to ...
(Original Motion Picture Story)
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| Clemence Dane |
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| Glynis Johns and Deborah Kerr in Vacation From Marriage |
(Original Screenplay)
Muriel Box, Sydney Box, The Seventh Veil.
Concert pianist Ann Todd has a breakdown and psychiatrist Herbert Lom traces the origins of her mental problems to her relationship with her Svengali-like cousin and guardian, James Mason. Critics and audiences took this melodrama a good deal more seriously when dramas based on psychoanalysis, such as the previous year's Spellbound, were in vogue. Directed by Compton Bennett, the movie was hailed as a sign of the resurgence of the British film industry, though it's now overshadowed by other films of the year from Britain, such as Henry V and Brief Encounter. The Boxes were important figures in this renaissance of British film. She began as a "script girl," and started writing screenplays in 1935, the year that she married Sydney, a journalist. They collaborated on plays and short films, and when he became head of Gainsborough Pictures, a division of the Rank Organisation, after the war, she headed the writers' department. In 1951 Sydney created London Independent Producers, which gave her an opportunity to direct as well as write. After their divorce in 1969, she left filmmaking and started a publishing house, Femina, which was an outlet for her feminism, born of resentment at the sexism she encountered as one of the few British women directors.
Concert pianist Ann Todd has a breakdown and psychiatrist Herbert Lom traces the origins of her mental problems to her relationship with her Svengali-like cousin and guardian, James Mason. Critics and audiences took this melodrama a good deal more seriously when dramas based on psychoanalysis, such as the previous year's Spellbound, were in vogue. Directed by Compton Bennett, the movie was hailed as a sign of the resurgence of the British film industry, though it's now overshadowed by other films of the year from Britain, such as Henry V and Brief Encounter. The Boxes were important figures in this renaissance of British film. She began as a "script girl," and started writing screenplays in 1935, the year that she married Sydney, a journalist. They collaborated on plays and short films, and when he became head of Gainsborough Pictures, a division of the Rank Organisation, after the war, she headed the writers' department. In 1951 Sydney created London Independent Producers, which gave her an opportunity to direct as well as write. After their divorce in 1969, she left filmmaking and started a publishing house, Femina, which was an outlet for her feminism, born of resentment at the sexism she encountered as one of the few British women directors.
(Screenplay)
Robert E. Sherwood, The Best Years of Our Lives.
A Time magazine article about returning servicemen served as the seed for The Best Years of Our Lives: Producer Sam Goldwyn's wife, Frances, read it and suggested that it was a good subject for a film. Goldwyn commissioned novelist MacKinlay Kantor to turn it into a screenplay, but instead Kantor produced a novel -- in blank verse -- called Glory for Me, and was miffed when Goldwyn not only handed it over to Robert E. Sherwood to turn it into something filmable but also changed the title. Sherwood had worked as a screenwriter off and on since 1926, and had been nominated for the screenplay of Rebecca, but he was best-known as the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Idiot's Delight, Abe Lincoln in Illinois, and There Shall Be No Night. He later won a fourth Pulitzer for his book Roosevelt and Hopkins, a memoir of his stint as speechwriter for Franklin D. Roosevelt.
A Time magazine article about returning servicemen served as the seed for The Best Years of Our Lives: Producer Sam Goldwyn's wife, Frances, read it and suggested that it was a good subject for a film. Goldwyn commissioned novelist MacKinlay Kantor to turn it into a screenplay, but instead Kantor produced a novel -- in blank verse -- called Glory for Me, and was miffed when Goldwyn not only handed it over to Robert E. Sherwood to turn it into something filmable but also changed the title. Sherwood had worked as a screenwriter off and on since 1926, and had been nominated for the screenplay of Rebecca, but he was best-known as the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Idiot's Delight, Abe Lincoln in Illinois, and There Shall Be No Night. He later won a fourth Pulitzer for his book Roosevelt and Hopkins, a memoir of his stint as speechwriter for Franklin D. Roosevelt.
... when it should have gone to ...
(Original Screenplay)
Ben Hecht, Notorious.
Director Alfred Hitchcock originally conceived of Notorious as the story of a female con artist who is persuaded to use her skills in service of the government. Producer David O. Selznick owned the rights to a story, "The Song of the Dragon," written by John Taintor Foote and published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1921. In it, an actress is recruited to seduce the leader of a spy ring during World War I. Hitchcock updated the story to World War II, and produced an outline that he then worked with Ben Hecht on turning into a screenplay. Hecht had worked with Hitchcock on Foreign Correspondent, Lifeboat, and Spellbound, and together they came up with the plot's famous MacGuffin: the uranium that the spies are hiding in the wine cellar, even consulting with Caltech physicist Robert Millikan to confirm that uranium could be used to make a bomb and could be smuggled in a wine bottle. (Hitchcock, who had heard rumors about the Manhattan Project, claimed that he was trailed by the FBI after his visit to Millikan.) Selznick was unhappy with the screenplay, however, and hired Clifford Odets to revise it, but as his involvement with his main project, Duel in the Sun, took up more of his time, Selznick withdrew from the production, selling it to RKO. Hitchcock then became the film's producer, and apparently used none of Odets's changes. Notorious gave Hecht the last of his six nominations.
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| Ben Hecht |
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| Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains) visits his wine cellar in Notorious |
(Screenplay)
William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, Jules Furthman, The Big Sleep.
Anyone collecting evidence that the Academy had a thing against Howard Hawks will want to use The Big Sleep as evidence: It received no nominations in any category, even though this version of Raymond Chandler's novel is a much better film than The Blue Dahlia, for which Chandler himself received a nomination. Of course, that could be because The Blue Dahlia stars Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, between whom no sparks fly, whereas The Big Sleep features Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall at the height of their pre-marital affair. But I like to think that it's because the film was written by one of America's greatest novelists and two of its greatest screenwriters. (Or perhaps three, if it's true that Casablanca screenwriter Julius Epstein wrote the great scene in which Bogart and Bacall trade double entendres about horse racing.) The truth seems to be that Warner Bros. had no real confidence in The Big Sleep: It was filmed almost two years earlier, and its only screenings after its completion in January 1945 were for military personnel overseas. With the war drawing to a close, Warners decided to release all of its films that dealt with the war, and after Bacall's film Confidential Agent was a flop, her agent persuaded the studio to hold The Big Sleep from release and add some new material to show her off better. When it was finally released in August 1946, Bosley Crowther, the influential but often obtuse New York Times critic, panned it -- perhaps another reason for the Academy's neglect. It's a masterpiece, of course, and while I'd like to say that Faulkner is one of the major reasons for that, the truth is that Brackett and Furthman were the gifted screenwriters whereas Faulkner thought of his Hollywood work as just a way to pay the bills. Brackett was a science-fiction writer whose first novel, No Good From a Corpse, was a detective story very much influenced by Chandler. It caught Hawks's attention, and he hired her to work on the screenplay. Soon after The Big Sleep was released, she married and moved to Ohio, where she devoted herself to sci-fi, but in 1959 Hawks persuaded her to return to screenwriting, and she worked on his films Rio Bravo, Hatari!, Man's Favorite Sport?, El Dorado, and Rio Lobo. Robert Altman hired her to script his Raymond Chandler adaptation, The Long Goodbye, but her most famous screenplay returned her to her sci-fi roots: She wrote the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back, which Lawrence Kasdan completed after her death in 1978. Furthman, Faulkner, and Hawks had previously collaborated on To Have and Have Not, the first Bogart-Bacall film. Over a career stretching from 1915 to 1959, Furthman received only one Oscar nomination, for the 1935 Mutiny on the Bounty.
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| William Faulkner and Howard Hawks |
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| Leigh Brackett and Hawks |
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| Jules Furthman |
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