Showing posts with label Charles Brackett. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Charles Brackett. Show all posts

Best Writing, 1945

Awards presented March 7, 1946
The nominees were ... 
(Original Motion Picture Story)
(Screenplay) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Original Motion Picture Story)

A docudrama in a film noir style, with an introduction by J. Edgar Hoover himself, this spy story is based on the FBI's uncovering of the Duquesne espionage ring in 1941. An American student (William Eythe) is recruited by the Nazis to spy for the Germans in the United States. But he contacts the FBI and becomes a double agent, uncovering the identities of members of a spy ring trying to steal atomic bomb secrets. An interesting period piece at best, given its glorification of the FBI -- actual agents appear in many of its scenes -- and its assurances that the bureau has protected all of the bomb's secrets from theft by spies. This was the only Oscar win and nomination for Booth, who began his Hollywood writing career when a story he wrote became the basis of the 1936 film The General Died at Dawn.
William Eythe and Lloyd Nolan in The House on 42nd Street 
(Original Screenplay)

With his screenplay about a young French girl, a wartime refugee in Switzerland, and her struggle to overcome her fears, Schweizer became the first person to win an Oscar for a foreign-language film. That distinction aside, Marie-Louise is also one of the most obscure films ever to win a competitive Oscar, long out of circulation but reportedly available on DVD through various online sources. But then, almost every film nominated in this category is obscure, with the possible exception of Dillinger, a low-budget film from "poverty row" studio Monogram, starring Lawrence Tierney as the gangster. In an interview with Patrick McGilligan, Philip Yordan, who was nominated for Dillinger, claimed that his screenplay was the actual Oscar winner, but that the major studios had agreed not to make any gangster movies during wartime. Louis B. Mayer, Yordan claimed, was so angry that Monogram had ignored that agreement that he wanted the film destroyed, and when it came in first in the Oscar balloting, Yordan said that Walter Wanger, "who was high up in the academy," told him, "We pulled a switch," awarding the Oscar to Marie-Louise instead. Whatever the truth, and Yordan was a great stretcher of it, this was the first of two wins for Schweizer, whose second Oscar came three years later for The Search.    

(Screenplay) 

Brackett graduated from Harvard Law and practiced for several years before giving it up to become a writer, reviewing theater for the New Yorker and selling stories to magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post, several of which were made into silent films. He came to Hollywood in 1932 to devote himself to screenwriting, and was signed by Paramount in 1935. Most of his early films are forgettable, stuff like Rose of the Rancho and Piccadilly Jim, but in 1938 he was assigned to work on an Ernst Lubitsch film, Bluebeard's Eighth Wife, alongside another contract writer, Billy Wilder. It was, as many have noted, a perfect match: Brackett's patrician background merging with Wilder's European cynicism.  The role of Lubitsch in managing this seemingly volatile mix should not be underestimated, because it resulted in one of the greatest films of the 1930s, Ninotchka. Together, Brackett and Wilder worked on thirteen films, their partnership ending with Sunset Blvd., for which he won a second Oscar. Although he won a third writing Oscar for the 1953 Titanic, Brackett turned his attentions to producing. He would have been credited with an Oscar win for producing The Lost Weekend, except that the Academy presented the award to the studio rather than to the person who actually produced the film. He did most of his work as a producer for 20th Century-Fox, and was nominated for producing The King and I. 

... when it should have gone to ... 
(Original Screenplay)

  
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger 
Now usually known as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, its original British title, the film was released in Great Britain in 1943, but not in the United States until 1945, in a cut version titled either The Adventures of Colonel Blimp or just Colonel Blimp. I'm using the title from the Academy's "Reminder List of Eligible Releases" for the Oscar year 1945. But whatever you call it, Powell and Pressburger's saga of the military career of Clive Wynne-Candy (Roger Livesey) from the Boer War through World War II, stands head and shoulders above any of the original screenplay nominees of 1945. It probably got neglected by the Academy because the film had been attacked in Britain as insufficiently patriotic: Candy's closest friend is a German (Anton Walbrook) whom he meets during the Boer War. It's also said that Winston Churchill disliked the film because he saw Candy as a veiled caricature of himself -- Churchill had served in the Boer War and World War I, too. Thus the delay in releasing the film in the United States. The truncated American version also dispensed with the flashback format that is key to the film's narrative structure. In addition to Livesey and Walbrook, the film also stars Deborah Kerr, who appears in all three wartime episodes in three different characters. The movie's neglect and abuse was rectified in 2011 by Martin Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker, Powell's widow, who crafted a beautifully restored version. Powell and Pressburger's Candy, incidentally, bears only a tangential relationship to cartoonist David Low's Colonel Blimp, a satire on British jingoism. 
Roger Livesey and Anton Walbrook in Colonel Blimp 


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Best Writing, 1939

Awards presented February 29, 1940


The nominees were ... 
(Original Story) 
(Screenplay) 
(Original Story) 
(Screenplay) 
(Original Story) 

Foster's story was originally called "The Gentleman From Montana," although in the film the state Mr. Smith represents is never named. Foster had begun his career writing gags for the silent comedies produced by Hal Roach. He also began directing in 1936, but was more successful as a screenwriter. He received a second nomination for the screenplay of The More the Merrier.

(Screenplay) 

Howard was killed in a tractor accident on his Massachusetts farm a few months before Gone With the Wind premiered. His first draft of a screenplay was four hundred pages long, enough for a six-and-a-half-hour film. So other hands were turned to it: Jo Swerling, Oliver Garrett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Lee Mahin, John Van Druten, and Ben Hecht (who allegedly made his contributions without ever reading Margaret Mitchell's novel). In his biography of David O. Selznick, David Thomson puts it this way: Howard "was only designated writer, the figure around whom other efforts congregated. His was the draft to be rewritten, the wall against every other ball could be thrown." But Howard got sole credit, in part as a gesture of respect to his memory, and his widow took home the Oscar. He had previously been nominated for his screenplay for Dodsworth, and had received a Pulitzer Prize for his play They Knew What They Wanted, which had been filmed twice, in 1928 and 1930, and would be remade in 1940, though it's best known as the play on which Frank Loesser's musical The Most Happy Fella was based. 

... when it should have gone to ... 
(Original Story) 
Lamar Trotti, Young Mr. Lincoln.
Lamar Trotti
People expect this kind of historical drama/biopic to be stiff and boring. It isn't, thanks not only to Henry Fonda's terrific performance in the title role and John Ford's direction, but also to Trotti's screenplay, which focuses on the backwoods lawyer's defense of two young men accused of murder. A former journalist, Trotti came to Hollywood in 1932 and went to work at 20th Century-Fox, where he spent most of his career. In 1939 alone, he wrote the screenplays for The Story of Alexander Graham Bell and Drums Along the Mohawk, as well as Young Mr. Lincoln, all of which reflect his deep interest in American history. He won an Oscar for Wilson, and was nominated again for There's No Business Like Show Business.
Henry Fonda in Young Mr. Lincoln 
 (Screenplay)
Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder

Walter Reisch
This was the first of seven writing nominations for Brackett and twelve writing nominations for Wilder, the latter a long-held record until Woody Allen surpassed him on the way to racking up his fifteen writing nominations. Reisch accrued four nominations, and shared an Oscar with Brackett for the 1953 Titanic. Brackett won two more Oscars in collaboration with Wilder on Sunset Blvd. and The Lost Weekend. And Wilder added another writing win in his post-Brackett collaboration with I.A.L. Diamond on The Apartment. (Wilder also picked up producing and directing Oscars, bringing his total to six, plus an Irving Thalberg award.) Starting in 1938, Brackett and Wilder collaborated on thirteen screenplays -- a remarkable pairing, considering that Brackett was from a patrician family that traced its roots in America back to the seventeenth century and Wilder had arrived in the United States in 1933, fleeing the Nazi threat to his native Austria. Their collaboration was sometimes strained, and it ended in 1950 after their success with Sunset Blvd.  Brackett then turned his attention primarily to producing, though he reunited with Reisch on several screenplays, including The Mating Season, The Model and the Marriage Broker, and Niagara. Reisch had met his fellow Austrian Jew, Wilder, in Germany, where they both worked for the leading film company, UFA (Universum Film AG). He left Germany for Austria, but the Anschluss forced him to move to London, where he worked for a while with Alexander Korda before being hired by MGM. Much admired for his ability to solve problems of plotting and characterization, he remained at MGM until 1948, then reunited with Brackett at 20th Century-Fox. In addition to his work with Brackett and Wilder, he was also nominated for the screenplays for Comrade X and Gaslight.

Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas in Ninotchka 

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