Awards presented March 2, 1944
The nominees were ...
(Original Motion Picture Story)
(Original Screenplay)
(Screenplay)
- Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, Howard Koch, Casablanca
- Dashiell Hammett, Watch on the Rhine
- Nunnally Johnson, Holy Matrimony
- Robert Russell, Frank Ross, Richard Flournoy, Lewis R. Foster, The More the Merrier
- George Seaton, The Song of Bernadette
... when they should have been ...
(Screenplay)
- Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, Five Graves to Cairo
- Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, Howard Koch, Casablanca
- Samson Raphaelson, Heaven Can Wait
- Robert Russell, Frank Ross, Richard Flournoy, Lewis R. Foster, The More the Merrier
- Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, Alma Reville, Shadow of a Doubt
And the Oscar went to ...
(Original Motion Picture Story)
In Pal Joey (the stage version, not the censor-crippled movie), a stripper sings about what goes through her mind as she's taking off her clothes on stage:
Zip! Walter Lippmann wasn't brilliant today.
Zip! Will Saroyan ever write a great play?
The answer, sadly, was no. Although he won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1939 play The Time of Your Life, as well as an Oscar for this story, Saroyan is mostly forgotten today. The consensus seems to be that he was too careless, too prolific, too optimistic, too sentimental ... in other words, too much. The story of The Human Comedy, about a telegraph delivery boy in a small California town, was written by Saroyan along with a screenplay, which he sold to MGM. But the treatment was much too long for a feature film of the time, and Saroyan was fired and the rewrite handled by Howard Estabrook. Saroyan then turned the story into a novel, which is often erroneously cited as the source of the film because it was published before the film was released. The film was one of Louis B. Mayer's favorites because of its celebration of Mayer's (and Saroyan's) sentimentalized version of "family values." In 1992, a little over a decade after his death, Saroyan's Oscar turned up in a San Francisco pawnshop.
(Original Screenplay)
Olivia de Havilland plays a princess, exiled in the United States by the war, who falls in love with an airline pilot and after some impediments arise, marries him thanks to some intervention by no less than FDR and his dog Fala. Krasna also made his debut as a director with the film. It was his only Oscar win after three prior nominations. The film is remarkable only because it was the straw that finally broke the back of the studio contract system, under which a studio could claim that a person signed to, say, a seven-year contract must put in seven years of actual work time -- in other words, time off between and even during filming (such as weekends and holidays) could not be counted as fulfilling the contract. De Havilland claimed to be exhausted from work, and initially refused to do the film. When she was forced to do it, she sued Warner Bros., with the backing of the Screen Actors Guild, and won. The court's ruling that a seven-year contract referred to seven calendar years is still known as "the de Havilland law."
(Screenplay)
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| Julius and Philip Epstein |
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| Howard Koch |
Because of Casablanca's enduring success, authorship of the screenplay has been contested over the years. Julius and his twin brother Philip Epstein produced the first workable screenplay from the unproduced play Everybody Comes to Rick's, by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison. Warner Bros. had bought the rights to the play for the then-generous sum of $20,000. Epstein later told writer Harlan Lebo, "There wasn't a world of truth in the picture. There were no Germans in Casablanca, certainly not in uniform, no letters of transit, there was nothing. And it was slapped together. For example, I don't know what would have happened if my brother and I hadn't come up with 'round up the usual suspects' for the ending. And it wasn't the result of a lot of thought, either; it was just one of those flashes." When the Epsteins, contract writers at Warners, moved on to other assignments, the script was passed around among other writers, including Wally Kline, Aeneas MacKenzie, and Lenore Coffee. Casey Robinson, who had worked closely with producer Hal B. Wallis over the years, was brought on to do major work, particularly on the love scenes, and the whole thing was handed over to Koch for a rewrite. In the end, the Writers Guild gave the screen credits to the Epsteins and Koch, excluding Robinson for reasons that have never been entirely clear. Robinson claimed at one point that he asked to have his name withdrawn because he didn't want to share screen credit with anyone. One persistent rumor about the script is that it was begun without knowing the outcome of the story, although the play ends as the film does: with Rick enabling Ilsa (called Lois in the play) to leave with Laszlo. Ingrid Bergman, who admitted that she wasn't aware that the film was based on a play, wrote in her memoirs that she was concerned about not knowing whether she would wind up with Humphrey Bogart or Paul Henreid and was told to "play it in-between," because the writers hadn't decided yet. But there is no evidence that the ending was ever in doubt, other than the role played in it by Louis (Claude Rains) and the fate of Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt). The Epstein brothers continued to work together until Philip's death in 1954. Julius had been nominated before for his work on Four Daughters with Lenore Coffee, and would receive two more nominations, for Pete 'n' Tillie and Reuben, Reuben. Koch had been nominated for his work on Sergeant York. He had begun his career as a playwright, but after two Broadway flops he began writing for radio, including the infamous "War of the Worlds" script for Orson Welles in 1937. He was hired as a Warner Bros. contract writer in 1939. Among his assignments was the 1943 film Mission to Moscow, a wartime propaganda drama that shone a favorable light on Stalin and the Soviet Union, which the United States was eager to keep as allies. Koch said that he was pressured into doing the film by studio head Jack Warner, but in 1947 Warner was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and, as a "friendly witness," was asked to testify about Mission to Moscow and other "leftist" films. In his testimony, Warner named Koch as a communist sympathizer. Blacklisted, Koch spent his later screenwriting career in England. He is sometimes confused with producers Howard W. Koch Sr. and Jr., to whom he was not related.
... when it should have gone to ...
(Original Motion Picture Story)
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| Jean Arthur, Joel McCrea, and Charles Coburn in The More the Merrier |
This delicious romantic comedy isn't seen as often as it should be, probably because its situation, a wartime shortage of housing in Washington, D.C., dates it. It was remade in 1966 as Walk, Don't Run, about the shortage of housing in Tokyo during the Olympics, but that version is memorable only because it was Cary Grant's last film. The three principals, Jean Arthur, Joel McCrea, and Charles Coburn, perform at their peak of charm, but while Arthur received her only nomination and Coburn won, McCrea was once again overlooked by the Academy, even though few leading men of his day performed both comic and action roles with his finesse. Russell was a talented playwright whose other claim to fame was the book for the 1965 musical Flora the Red Menace, on which he collaborated with George Abbott. While the show was not a success, closing after eighty-seven performances, it was a debut vehicle for Liza Minnelli, who won a Tony for her performance. And it was the first Broadway show to feature the songwriting team of John Kander and Fred Ebb. Ross had been an actor, and met Arthur when he had a small role in the 1929 film The Saturday Night Kid. They married three years later, by which time he had become a production assistant at Hal Roach Studios. He was the producer of two of her features, The Devil and Miss Jones and A Lady Takes a Chance. He shared in a 1945 honorary award presented to the producers, director, writers, and cast of the short film The House I Live In, which was designed to promote racial tolerance. He also received an Oscar nomination as producer of best picture nominee The Robe.
(Original Screenplay)
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| Coward in In Which We Serve |
One of the most versatile figures of the twentieth century, Coward was actor, composer, playwright, novelist, songwriter, producer, and director. He had made his first screen appearance while still in his teens in a bit part in D.W. Griffith's 1918 film Hearts of the World, and wrote his first screenplay, The Queen Was in the Parlor, in 1927. Many of his plays were adapted for the screen, including Cavalcade, the best picture winner for 1932-33. He not only wrote, but produced, directed (with David Lean), acted in, and composed the music score for In Which We Serve which tells about the lives of the crew of a torpedoed British destroyer. The result is a super patriotic opus, pulling out every stop in its paean to England (and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland), home, and duty. Coward based the story on the experiences of Lord Mountbatten, whose ship was sunk early in the war. The huge case includes Richard Attenborough and Celia Johnson in their film debuts, as well as John Mills, Bernard Miles, and Michael Wilding. It also features nine-year-old Daniel Massey, who would receive an Oscar nomination for Star!, in which he plays Noël Coward. Despite Coward's tour de force, the Oscar went to Norman Krasna's Princess O'Rourke, perhaps because Coward had been honored by the Academy for the film with an honorary award a year earlier. At that time it hadn't met the qualifications for release in the United States that would allow it to be nominated in the competitive categories.
If the test of a cinematographer's skill is the production of images that linger in the memory, then Edeson's work on this film certainly passes the test. Of course, there are other reasons why we remember Casablanca as fondly as we do, but this site is devoted to honoring what has lasted, and not what caught the Academy's fancy at a given time. Edeson was nominated three times and never won. In fact, he wasn't even producer Hal Wallis's first choice to shoot the film; James Wong Howe was. But as the saying goes, You must remember this:
If the test of a cinematographer's skill is the production of images that linger in the memory, then Edeson's work on this film certainly passes the test. Of course, there are other reasons why we remember Casablanca as fondly as we do, but this site is devoted to honoring what has lasted, and not what caught the Academy's fancy at a given time. Edeson was nominated three times and never won. In fact, he wasn't even producer Hal Wallis's first choice to shoot the film; James Wong Howe was. But as the saying goes, You must remember this: 
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