Showing posts with label Emeric Pressburger. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Emeric Pressburger. 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, 1942

Awards presented March 4, 1943

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

Now generally known by its original British title, 49th Parallel, The Invaders tells of the efforts of five Nazi survivors to make their way across Canada to the then-neutral United States. Directed by Michael Powell, the movie is an undisguised plea for the United States to join in the fight against the Germans -- it was released in the United Kingdom in the fall of 1941, before Pearl Harbor. Pressburger, born in Hungary, began his career as a screenwriter in Germany and Austria, and went to England in 1936. The Invaders is the beginning of his long collaboration with Powell, with whom he formed a production company known as the Archers. Through 1956 they co-wrote, -produced, and -directed a series of opulent and impressive films that included Black Narcissus, The Tales of Hoffman, and The Red Shoes.   

(Original Screenplay) 

The first of the nine films that Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy made together, Woman of the Year is not one of the best, but it was hugely popular at the time. Today the sexist subtext is all too glaring: Because of her devotion to her career, Hepburn is not a "real" woman, as demonstrated in a notorious scene at the end in which she tries to make breakfast and makes a mess instead. Mostly the movie relies on the chemistry between the leads, which continued on and off screen for twenty-five years. Lardner, the son of a famous humorist, began his Hollywood career as a publicist for David O. Selznick, and turned screenwriter in 1937 with uncredited work on Selznick's A Star Is Born and Nothing Sacred. His refusal to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s led to his imprisonment for contempt of Congress and blacklisting in Hollywood. He continued to write under pseudonyms in the '50s, and returned to credited screenwriting in 1965 with The Cincinnati Kid and won a second Oscar for MASH. Michael Kanin was the brother of Garson Kanin, who would later write the best of the Tracy-Hepburn films, Adam's Rib and Pat and Mike. Michael often collaborated with his wife, Fay Kanin, with whom he received a nomination for Teacher's Pet. 

(Screenplay) 

The screenplay, based on a novel by Jan Struther, was much rewritten as events changed, including the attack on Pearl Harbor that propelled the United States into the war. Hilton, the best-known of the screenwriters, had written two novels that had already been made into movies, Lost Horizon and Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and he had contributed dialogue to Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent. It's likely that Wimperis, Froeschel, and West, more experienced at screenwriting, did the largest share of the work on the screenplay, but the quartet had an interesting track record: They were also simultaneously nominated for the screenplay of Random Harvest, which was based on one of Hilton's novels. West had also been nominated for the screenplay of Hilton's Lost Horizon.   

... when it should have gone to ... 
(Original Motion Picture Story) 

Melchior Lengyel
Ernst Lubitsch
Amid the news coming out of Europe, Lubitsch gives us a comedy with Jack Benny and Carole Lombard as the stars of a shabby little Polish theatrical company who become involved in a plot to assassinate a Nazi spy. Too soon? That might have been the problem with Lubitsch's great blend of farce and melodrama where the Academy was concerned, since it gave the film only one Oscar nomination: for Werner Heymann's score. (In fact, Heymann had been hired when Miklos Rozsa, the original composer, expressed discomfort with the film's premise. But when Lubitsch objected to the heavy-handedness of Heymann's scoring for some scenes, Rozsa agreed to compose part of the score after all.) Critics and audiences, too, were a little mixed in their reaction to the film, now regarded as one of Lubitsch's greatest. In addition to the problem of satirizing the Nazis in the middle of the war, when they were usually portrayed as monsters and not buffoons, the film was also released two months after Lombard's death in a plane crash. Lengyel, born in Hungary, had come to Hollywood as a screenwriter in 1937 and earned his first Oscar nomination for Ninotchka. As for Lubitsch, who collaborated with Lengyel on the story and Edwin Justus Mayer on the screenplay, as Andrew Sarris puts it, "it was sufficient to say that Hitler had bad manners, and no evil was then inconceivable."
Carole Lombard and Jack Benny in To Be or Not to Be
(Original Screenplay) 

Preston Sturges
It's possible that the Academy ignored Sturges's greatest film because like its protagonist, John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea), it wanted to honor high-minded message films, of which the year's best picture winner, Mrs. Miniver, was an example. Sullivan, known for such comedies as Ants in Your Plants of 1939, wants to make a message movie out of the novel O Brother, Where Art Thou? written by "Sinclair Beckstein," Sturges's satiric conflation of the names of serious-minded novelists Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, and John Steinbeck. So he sets out on a road trip and learns, however, that making people laugh is a great and worthy aim. Not everybody got Sturges's joke: The New Yorker called Sullivan's Travels "pretentious" and the Hollywood Reporter accused him of self-contradiction, of making a message movie after all.
Joel McCrea and Jimmy Conlin in Sullivan's Travels
(Screenplay) 

Orson Welles directing The Magnificent Ambersons
Welles had previously adapted Booth Tarkington's novel for the radio, performing it with his Mercury Players. As the published screenplay shows, Welles actually improves on his source, adding psychological depth and making its commentary on the effect of the Industrial Revolution on American society more subtle. Unfortunately, the existing film isn't the one Welles wrote. After he completed filming, he was enlisted in a documentary project in Brazil, part of the wartime propaganda effort to keep Latin American countries on our side. While he was out of the country, the first cut, slightly over two hours long, was previewed. The audience reaction was devastatingly negative, and after a second preview, slightly more favorable but still not wholly positive, RKO head George Schaefer put editor Robert Wise in charge of cutting and reshooting scenes. Wise assembled the film into its current eighty-eight-minute length. Meanwhile, Schaefer was fired, and new studio management decided to give the film a limited, unpromoted release. For those to whom Welles is a hero, the treatment of Ambersons is a story about the abuse of genius by commercial-minded dolts. But others see it as an instance of Welles's own self-destructiveness and ambivalence: His acceptance of the documentary project before seeing his film through to a satisfactory completion suggests a kind of directorial ADD. The remainder of Welles's film career, more than forty years, was spent scrounging for money, acting in movies of wildly varying quality, doing TV commercials, and producing movies of fitful brilliance. As late as 1970 he was still talking about assembling the surviving members of the cast -- Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, Tim Holt, and Anne Baxter -- and filming a new ending for Ambersons instead of the unsatisfactory "happy ending" the studio tacked onto its revision. He never received another Oscar nomination, but was given an honorary award at the 1970 ceremonies, "for superlative artistry and versatility in the creation of motion pictures."  
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