Showing posts with label Frank Capra. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Frank Capra. Show all posts

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, 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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Best Director, 1934

Awards presented February 27, 1935
The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
Frank came up and got it
Capra with Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable
I have no problem with this choice. I love Hawks and Lubitsch more, of course, and Capra's sentimental populism goes crosswise with me. (Honestly, am I the only one who puts It's a Wonderful Life alongside Forrest Gump at the top of his list of Movies I Hope I Never Have to Watch Again?) To my mind, everything Capra did after It Happened One Night is a long slide downhill into intellectual, political, and moral chaos. But except for the busload of passengers singing "The Man on the Flying Trapeze," there is little in IHON that foreshadows Capra's degeneration into mush-headedness. I'd like to think that it's because he had wonderful actors like Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable to work with, but Gary Cooper, James Stewart, Barbara Stanwyck, and Jean Arthur are at least as good -- if not better. Some may think it's screenwriter Robert Riskin's fault, but screenwriter Philip Dunne put it more convincingly: "Frank provided the schmaltz and Bob provided the acid." And it was Capra who finally judged the proportion of schmaltz to acid. In later life, Capra was even reluctant to admit that Riskin had anything to do with the success of his films. Riskin was a good New Deal liberal, after all, and Capra headed off into the kind of libertarianism that cozies up with the right wing. Anyway, Riskin had nothing to do with the somewhat hysterical Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and the sticky fantasy of It's a Wonderful Life. Still, let's give Capra the nod for his one great film and its huge influence on the golden age of romantic comedy.    
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