Showing posts with label Best Director. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Best Director. Show all posts

Best Director, 1948

Awards presented March 24, 1949

And the nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 

This was, remarkably, Huston's first nomination and only win as director, though he also won for his screenplay. He had previously been nominated for the screenplays of Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet, The Maltese Falcon, and Sergeant York, and would receive double nominations as writer-director for The Asphalt Jungle and The African Queen, a double nomination as director and producer of the 1952 Moulin Rouge, two more writing nominations for Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison and The Man Who Would Be King, a supporting actor nomination for The Cardinal, and a final directing nomination for Prizzi's Honor. He would direct fifteen performances that received acting nominations, and four that won, including his father and his daughter. (The other two are Claire Trevor in Key Largo and Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen.) Is there a more impressive film career? 

... when it should have gone to ... 
Joanne Dru and Hawks take a smoke break

Have I ranted enough about the Academy's neglect of Hawks? This seems to me the greatest of all Hollywood Westerns, with the finest performance John Wayne ever gave (with the possible exception of the one he gave in The Searchers). It has a fresh, vital, sexy performance from an actor who declined into neurosis, Montgomery Clift. And is there a greater dick-measuring scene in movies than the one in which Clift and John Ireland compare guns? It has Walter Brennan hamming it up, and a gallery of great Western supporting performers: Harry Carey Sr. and Jr., Noah Beery Jr., Hank Worden, Chief Yowlatchie, and even Richard Farnsworth in an uncredited role as one of Dunston's men. Joanne Dru is the Hawksian woman in the mix, and even if Pauline Kael has a point when she calls her "frantic" and says she "acts as if the Old West were Greenwich Village," she's still fun to watch. The cattle drive is exciting and Dimitri Tiomkin's score is stirring. What's not to like? 
John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in Red River 

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Best Director, 1947

Awards presented March 20, 1948

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
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


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Best Director, 1946

Awards presented March 13, 1947
The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 

Samuel Goldwyn, Harold Russell, and William Wyler with their Oscars for The Best Years of Our Lives
My designated competitors -- Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, and Rossellini -- were all greater directors than Wyler, more given to expressing their individual vision and personality. But I have no reason not to give Wyler the award for what is perhaps his greatest film, the one film of his that does come from personal experience and the elaboration of a vision. As a wartime documentarian, Wyler had seen what war does to people, and The Best Years of Our Lives is eloquent in demonstrating what the aftermath of war can do to those who fought in it. It's worth comparing this film to the one for which Wyler won his previous Oscar, Mrs. Miniver, to see how experience clarified Wyler's vision, purged him of sentimentality. He had no direct experience of what the British were undergoing when he made Mrs. Miniver, and the result is candy-coated, a set of contrivances and clichés about stiff-upper-lip Brits. Best Years is by no means a perfect treatment of its subject -- it's a long way from the neorealism of Rossellini's Open City -- but it's a heartfelt one. Wyler would go on to win a third Oscar -- reverting to his role as studio craftsman for the rather shameless Ben-Hur -- and accumulate a record-setting twelve nominations for directing, plus two more as producer.   
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Best Director, 1945

Awards presented March 7, 1946
The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 

Billy Wilder directing Ray Milland and Doris Dowling in The Lost Weekend
Wilder's first Oscar (or rather Oscars, for he won for the screenplay, too) marked the beginning of the writer-director's peak period, which lasted through The Apartment in 1960. a fifteen-year stretch of remarkable accomplishment. His eight nominations for directing are exceeded only by William Wyler, who racked up twelve. Because his writing partner, Charles Brackett, also produced The Lost Weekend, Wilder was able to exert more than usual control over the film. Its success at the Oscars and at the box office launched a series of adult problem dramas. Over the next four years, best picture Oscars went to films about the difficulties faced by returning servicemen (The Best Years of Our Lives), antisemitism (Gentlemen's Agreement), and political demagoguery (All the King's Men).  
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Best Director, 1944

Awards presented March 15, 1945
The nominees were ...
... when they should have been ... 

McCarey became the first person to produce the best picture while also winning as director and writer. (Under the Academy rules at the time, the best picture Oscar went to Paramount, and not to McCarey, so he can't technically be said to have won three Oscars for Going My Way, as Billy Wilder did for The Apartment, Francis Ford Coppola for The Godfather, Part II, James L. Brooks for Terms of Endearment, Peter Jackson for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, and Joel and Ethan Coen for No Country for Old Men, the other producer-director-writer trifectas.) This was the beginning of McCarey's move into a more sentimental period than the 1930s, when he was a writer-director responsible for raucous comedies starring Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, and Mae West, as well as for such screwball romantic comedies as The Awful Truth and My Favorite Wife. His devout Catholicism is on display in Going My Way and its sequel, The Bells of St. Mary's, and his near-hysterical anticommunism resulted in the bizarre My Son John.   

... when it should have gone to ... 

Barbara Stanwyck and Billy Wilder 
This was Wilder's first nomination as a director, a role he had assumed in Hollywood only two years earlier, on The Major and the Minor, though he had directed a film in France in 1933. It also signaled a move into his characteristic mode as both writer and director: a deep but usually entertaining cynicism about people and their motives. The next fifteen years would be his period of greatest achievement, resulting in such classics as The Lost Weekend, Sunset Blvd., Ace in the Hole, Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment. He idolized Ernst Lubitsch, but never quite mastered the so-called "Lubitsch touch," perhaps because Lubitsch was ironic, not cynical. As a result there are often false steps in Wilder's films, such as the suicide attempt by Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina, a departure from character so glaring that it undermines the entire movie. The false steps became more frequent in his films of the 1960s and '70s, the post-censorship, post-studio era, when Wilder no longer had institutional curbs on his cynicism. But his best work sets an example that filmmakers still aspire to, as exemplified by writer-director Michel Hazanavicius's tribute to Wilder in his acceptance speech for The Artist: "I would like to thank the following three people: I would like to thank Billy Wilder, I would like to thank Billy Wilder, and I would like to thank Billy Wilder."    
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Best Director, 1943

Awards presented March 2, 1944
The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
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. 
Curtiz behind the camera, with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman
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Best Director, 1942

Awards presented March 4, 1943

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 

Wyler, born in Germany, came to America in 1922 at the behest of Carl Laemmle, the head of Universal Pictures, who was a distant relative of Wyler's mother. (Laemmle, notorious for putting family members on the Universal payroll, was the subject of a couplet by Ogden Nash: "Uncle Carl Laemmle / Has a very large faemmle.") Wyler began directing in 1925, when he was only twenty-three, and turned out dozens of silent Westerns. In the 1930s he was signed to a contract by Samuel Goldwyn, who appreciated Wyler's perfectionism, and began to rack up a string of twelve nominations, making him the most-nominated director in Oscar history. Mrs. Miniver was the first of three wins. After it, he joined the army air force and made several wartime documentaries. 

... when it should have gone to ... 

Or it could have been for The Palm Beach Story. That Sturges could have turned out two equally great, yet distinctly different, comic films in a single year is somewhat mind-blowing. But perhaps Sturges deserved it more for this one because of his difficulties with Veronica Lake, new to stardom, who neglected to tell him that she was six months pregnant when filming started. She was also at odds with her co-star, Joel McCrea, and with members of the crew.
Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake in Sullivan's Travels

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Best Director, 1941

Awards presented February 26, 1942

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
John Ford, How Green Was My Valley. 

 With this award, Ford became the first director to win two consecutive Oscars, a feat equaled only by Joseph L. Mankiewicz for A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve, and only the second (the first was Frank Capra) to have won three directing awards. At this point, the war interrupted Ford's Hollywood career. He went to work, with the commission of lieutenant commander in the navy, producing documentaries in support of the war effort, two of which, The Battle of Midway and December 7th, won Oscars. After the war, his work was dismissed by contemporary critics as evidence of a decline in talent, but it's now seen by many critics and film historians as his finest period, including such great Westerns as My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, and The Searchers, all of which, it now seems shocking to observe, received no Oscar nominations.  

... when it should have gone to ... 
Orson Welles, Citizen Kane. 

 Of course. Welles was the first person to receive simultaneous nominations as producer, actor, director, and writer. (The only other one is Warren Beatty, who did it twice, for Heaven Can Wait and Reds.)  Dubbed "the boy wonder" by the publicity machine, Welles came to Hollywood after a critically successful theatrical career and a famous stint on radio that included the War of the Worlds broadcast on Halloween 1938 that had much of the nation believing that Martians had landed in New Jersey. Still in his mid-twenties, he was given carte blanche by RKO, a major if troubled studio. But although Citizen Kane is one of the acknowledged cinematic masterpieces, Welles's career turned out to be a case of too much too soon. His battle with William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate on whose life Kane is clearly based, is the stuff of legends, many of which were spun by Welles. He claimed that the negative of his film would have been burned if he had not carried a rosary to a meeting with the chief Hollywood censor, Joseph I. Breen. At a key moment, Welles said, he let the rosary fall from his pocket, giving Breen the impression that Welles was really a nice Catholic boy. It's not quite clear from the anecdote why Breen would have had the power to destroy the negative in any case, but Hearst's desire to see the film destroyed or banned was very real. And Welles's taking on the publisher was seen by many in Hollywood as proof of his arrogance and untrustworthiness. Though his subsequent career is illuminated by flashes of brilliance, nothing ever came together again for him as superbly as Kane did.    

Welles, in a wheelchair because of a broken ankle, directs Dorothy Comingore in the opera scene from Citizen Kane

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Best Director, 1940

Awards presented February 27, 1941

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 

While today's critics find Ford's Oscar-winning work on big studio projects like Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley less interesting than on the films, particularly the Westerns, on which he exercised more individual control, this one is interesting because of the way Ford's humanistic vision transforms Steinbeck's novel, in which the characters are symbolic vehicles for his ideas about social justice. Ford gives them greater depth, and while this may rob the film of its political edge, it also takes the story out of the context of the Great Depression and gives it universality.

... when it should have gone to ... 

Howard Hawks, Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell
 on the set of His Girl Friday 
So much has been written about the long neglect of Hawks that there's not much point going into it again here. There are those who think that His Girl Friday is his greatest film, but they are the kind of people who spend their time making lists when they should be watching movies. One reason may be that it became Hawks's most widely seen film because Columbia failed to renew its copyright in 1968, which put it in the public domain, available for multiple transfers to video once the VCR became commercially available. It was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1993. It is, for sure, the greatest version of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's Broadway hit The Front Page, which was first filmed in 1931, and was remade by Billy Wilder in 1974 with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. But the Hawks version, which turned Hildy Johnson into a woman, shows signs of transcending the original. It was adapted, though not very successfully, into Switching Channels in 1988, with Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner in the Grant and Russell roles, with changed names and the action moved to a television studio. Then in 2003 playwright John Guare adapted both The Front Page and His Girl Friday into a stage version, keeping elements of both (including the sex change). It premiered in London and has subsequently crossed the Atlantic for several American productions.  
Rosalind Russell and the gentlemen of the press in His Girl Friday



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Best Director, 1939

Awards presented February 29, 1940
The nominees were ... 

It almost had to go to Fleming, even though much of the movie was directed by George Cukor, Sam Wood, and a number of second-unit directors including William Cameron Menzies. And every foot of the movie was overseen minutely by David O. Selznick. Cukor began it, but for a variety of reasons, including the fact that both Selznick and Cukor realized that he was the wrong man for so huge a project, he was replaced by Fleming, who was a close friend of Clark Gable's. Fleming had begun his career as a cameraman and became a cinematographer under the pioneers Allan Dwan and D.W. Griffith. He turned director in the 1920s, working with Douglas Fairbanks, among others. His best-known pre-GWTW films were Red Dust, Captains Courageous, and Test Pilot, all of which suggested that he was better equipped to handle action sequences than the stage-trained Cukor. But the task proved burdensome for Fleming, too, especially the constant barrage of quibbles and changes from Selznick, and for about a month in mid-filming he was replaced by Wood. Although he also received credit as the director of the second most famous movie of 1939, The Wizard of Oz, that, too, had multiple directors, including Cukor again, as well as Mervyn LeRoy, Norman Taurog, and, for the Kansas sequences, King Vidor. Fleming's post-Oscar career was relatively undistinguished.   

... when it should have gone to ... 

Ernst Lubitsch
Greta Garbo requested Lubitsch, the master of sophisticated comedy, as director of Ninotchka, and she gave one of her greatest performances for him, sometimes clearly parodying her moody, masked image in serious roles. She was insecure about her ability to play comedy, especially the scene in which she becomes drunk on champagne, and insisted on having the set closed to non-essential personnel. Contemporaries recall that she was happy with the film, but years later she told others that Lubitsch was "a vulgar little man" and that she hadn't enjoyed working with him. He had been an actor in Germany before turning director, and also wrote screenplays, which he continued to do occasionally after he came to the United States in 1922.
Garbo laughs in Ninotchka


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Best Director, 1938

Awards presented February 23, 1939

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
This was the last of Capra's three Oscars. He would continue to make films until 1961, and live on for thirty years beyond that. But of his subsequent work, only Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It's a Wonderful Life would receive critical and popular acclaim, and the latter film was not considered a success until repeated showings on TV made it an annual Christmastime event. 

... when it should have gone to ... 
Jean Renoir
The movies' great humanist, and in the opinion of Orson Welles and Charles Chaplin the greatest film director of all. (Why am I surprised that Welles and Chaplin named someone other than themselves?) Grand Illusion and Rules of the Game jockey with each other for positions on the lists of the greatest films of all time. Certainly, no Hollywood filmmaker of the time had quite the mastery of tonal variety -- from comedy to tragedy and back again -- as Renoir. It was the first foreign-language film to be nominated for best picture, although it should be noted that it received no other nominations -- not for Renoir as director, for his screenplay with Charles Spaak, for Christian Matras's cinematography, or for the performances of Jean Gabin, Pierre Fresnay, Marcel Dalio and Erich von Stroheim. Its influence has been felt down the years, in such movies as Stalag 17 and The Great Escape, but it retains its freshness. It was almost lost during World War II, after being denounced by Goebbels, who had all French prints confiscated when the Germans invaded France in 1940. The negative was thought to have been destroyed in an air raid in 1942, but it was rediscovered in a French archive in the 1990s and a restored print was screened in 1999. 

Marcel Dalio, Jean Gabin, and Pierre Fresnay in Grand Illusion 
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Best Director, 1937

Awards presented March 10, 1938

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
McCarey almost deserved it. The Awful Truth has some side-splitting moments, but then it falls apart a little at the end, with some prolonged nonsense about adjoining bedrooms and figures in a cuckoo clock. But that's McCarey, who was the first to team Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, gave us the best of the Marx Brothers movies in Duck Soup, and made the comedy classic Ruggles of Red Gap. Later, however, he let his devout Roman Catholicism take over for the sugary sentimentality of Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's and his extreme anticommunism resulted in the incoherent My Son John; both make his last film, Satan Never Sleeps, nearly unwatchable.  

... when it should have gone to ... 
George Cukor, Greta Garbo, and Robert Taylor on the set of Camille 
If there is one film of Garbo's that gets singled out as her greatest, it's Camille. And let's give a lot of credit to Cukor for that. Not for nothing was he known as a "woman's director." He oversaw some of Katharine Hepburn's greatest performances, including her screen debut in A Bill of Divorcement, as well as prepared and coached Vivien Leigh after he was fired as director of Gone With the Wind, helped get Ingrid Bergman her first Oscar for Gaslight, made Judy Holliday a star (and an Oscar-winner) for Born Yesterday, and nursed Judy Garland through her last great screen performance in A Star Is Born. But it's worth noting that he also got Oscar-winning performances out of James Stewart, Ronald Colman, and Rex Harrison, and showed a sure hand at directing Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy, among others. Garbo should have won for Camille, and Cukor at the very least should have been nominated. He had to wait almost thirty years for his Oscar, for My Fair Lady, which made him, at sixty-five, the oldest person up to that time to win for directing. (The current record-holder is Clint Eastwood, who was seventy-four when he won for Million Dollar Baby.) 
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Best Director, 1936

Awards presented March 4, 1937

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
And the Oscar went to ... 
Like all Capra films, this blend of screwball comedy, social comment, whimsy, and pathos has adoring admirers. Others like me find that its message -- the little people are better than the fat cats and country folk superior to city slickers -- is presented so ham-handedly as to suggest its essential falseness. Give Capra credit for making Jean Arthur a star after more than a decade in the business, though. 

... when it should have gone to ... 
William Wyler
Wyler was one of the most-honored directors, winning three Oscars -- for Mrs. Miniver, The Best Years of Our Lives, and Ben-Hur -- out of a record-setting twelve nominations. But his reputation has taken a hit from the auteur critics who find his work lacking in point of view, tasteful rather than stylish, subservient rather than daring. Andrew Sarris managed to make the words "meticulous craftsmanship" damning when he relegated Wyler to the "Less Than Meets the Eye" category of his book The American Cinema. It's true that there is no characteristic that we can call "Wylerian" to be isolated from such disparate films as Dodsworth, Roman Holiday, Ben-Hur, and Funny Girl, whereas a Howard Hawks could make films as various in subject and genre as Scarface, Bringing Up Baby, Red River, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and leave us discussing the "Hawksian" elements in each. The point is strengthened by the fact that in the same year that Wyler made Dodsworth, he also took over a film that had been begun by Hawks, Come and Get It, and the seams left by stitching together the two directors are glaringly obvious. But "meticulous craftsmanship" should be honored, and it's one of the things that make a film like Dodsworth (and The Best Years of Our Lives, The Heiress, and Roman Holiday, to name what I think are the best of Wyler's oeuvre) still such a pleasure to watch.     
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