The nominees were ...
- George Cukor, A Double Life
- Edward Dmytryk, Crossfire
- Elia Kazan, Gentleman's Agreement
- Henry Koster, The Bishop's Wife
- David Lean, Great Expectations
- Charles Chaplin, Monsieur Verdoux
- Vittorio De Sica, Shoeshine
- David Lean, Great Expectations
- Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, Black Narcissus
- Jacques Tourneur, Out of the Past
And the Oscar went to ...
Years later, Kazan would tell an interviewer that Gentleman's Agreement, for which he won the first of his two Oscars, "was, as far as it went, essentially a Cosmopolitan story ... a very familiar, easily digestible story with conventional figures going through it.... They're all dressed up, and they're all going through these well-read maneuvers of social behavior. Whenever I see it, it reminds me of the illustrations in ladies' magazines in those days. I mean, those people don't shit." It's directed, he said, "like a stage play." Which, given that Kazan was one of the great stage directors of his day, the man who directed the original productions of A Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman, seemed to be enough for the Academy. But stage directors rely more heavily on actors than film directors do -- they have other tools, such as camera angles and editing, at their disposal -- and Kazan hasn't yet mastered these. Forced to defer to the decisions of producer Darryl Zanuck and to rely on bland studio contract players like Gregory Peck and Dorothy McGuire, he seems dispirited. What life there is in Gentleman's Agreement comes from the actors with their own fire and vivacity -- John Garfield, Celeste Holm, Anne Revere.
... when it should have gone to ...
 |
| David Lean, left. Valerie Hobson and John Mills as Estella and Pip in Great Expectations |
There are, I think, only two really great films of Charles Dickens novels, and this is one of them. The other is George Cukor's David Copperfield, though some would add a third, also directed by Lean, his 1948 Oliver Twist. Lean had pulled himself up by the bootstraps in the movie business, having begun as a "tea boy" at Gaumont Studios in 1927. He worked his way up the ranks, becoming an assistant director and an editor. He edited the Shaw films, Pygmalion and Major Barbara, produced by Gabriel Pascal, and by 1942, when he moved into the co-director's chair on Noël Coward's In Which We Serve, he had become one of the British film industry's most sought-after editors. He received the first of his seven nominations as director for Brief Encounter. Although some would argue that Lean's greatest period -- the series of epics that began with The Bridge on the River Kwai -- was ahead of him, I hold that it was his work on these more modestly budgeted films of the 1940s that show Lean's true gifts as a storyteller and creator of memorable characters.
 |
| Martita Hunt as Miss Havisham and Tony Wager as young Pip in Great Expectations |
No comments:
Post a Comment