The nominees were ...
(Original Motion Picture Story)
- Edward Doherty, Jules Schermer, The Sullivans
- Leo McCarey, Going My Way
- Alfred Neumann, Joseph Than, None Shall Escape
- Chandler Sprague, David Boehm, A Guy Named Joe
- John Steinbeck, Lifeboat
(Original Screenplay)
- Jerome Cady, Wing and a Prayer
- Richard Connell, Gladys Lehman, Two Girls and a Sailor
- Preston Sturges, Hail the Conquering Hero
- Preston Sturges, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek
- Lamar Trotti, Wilson
- Irving Brecher, Fred F. Finklehoffe, Meet Me in St. Louis
- Frank Butler, Frank Cavett, Going My Way
- Jay Dratler, Samuel Hoffenstein, Betty Reinhardt, Laura
- John Van Druten, Walter Reisch, John L. Balderston, Gaslight
- Billy Wilder, Raymond Chandler, Double Indemnity
... when they should have been ...
(Original Motion Picture Story)
And the Oscar went to ...
Going My Way was a movie with a message: Everything can be solved with a smile and a prayer. And that was as good as gold with war-weary audiences. You don't have to be as cynical as I am to see that this was hardly one of the Academy's heavyweight selections, and it's partly the genial way with which McCarey approaches the material, and the casting of Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald, who carry it off lightly, that makes it tolerable today. But just tolerable.
Woodrow Wilson was, for some reason, one of Darryl F. Zanuck's heroes, so Zanuck was determined to make a high-class, high-toned biopic, even going so far as to film it in Technicolor, which was rarely used for serious dramas in the 1940s. The result was a colossal flop. It's not as bad as it sounds, but it ran for more than two and a half hours, which is a long time to sit through the story of even the most charismatic of figures, which Wilson wasn't. Trotti must have seemed like the logical choice to write the screenplay: He was a Southerner, as was Wilson, and he had been nominated before for his screenplay for another presidential biopic, Young Mr. Lincoln.
Butler was a Paramount contract writer who had been nominated before, for Wake Island, and more significantly, Road to Morocco, one of the Bing Crosby-Bob Hope "Road" pictures. He had also written the story and screenplay for Crosby's Waikiki Wedding, so his evident rapport with Crosby made him the right man for this job. Cavett, another Paramount contract writer, would be nominated for the story of Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman, and win a second Oscar for The Greatest Show on Earth.
... when it should have gone to ...
(Original Motion Picture Story)
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| Sturges, underneath the camera, directs a scene in Hail the Conquering Hero |
This delirious comedy is kept furiously brewing by writer-director Sturges and his company of sublime character actors, including Eddie Bracken, William Demarest, Franklin Pangborn, Elizabeth Patterson, and Chester Conklin. Even though it's a satire on small-town patriotism, which you might expect wartime audiences would object to, it was a hit. It was Sturges's last film for Paramount, however, and he left the studio before final editing, by Stuart Gilmore, was completed. The first preview was unsuccessful, so Sturges offered to return for rewrites and retakes. Producer Buddy DeSylva accepted, and Sturges was able to shape the film the way he wanted.
(Original Screenplay)
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| Sturges on the set of The Miracle of Morgan's Creek |
Released before Sturges's other hit of 1944, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek had actually been filmed almost two years earlier. It was held up by the studio, Paramount, because it had so many films in the pipeline, and it was nervous about the subject matter: a young woman who goes to a party with some servicemen about to ship out, bumps her head, and in her concussed, semiconscious state, marries one of them, then later discovers she's pregnant and can't remember the father's name. The Production Code enforcers were of course worried about the film, as was the War Department, which felt that the portrayal of the soldiers might be detrimental in wartime. Sturges managed, amazingly, to sidestep all of the obstacles, getting away even with the name of the heroine -- Trudy Kockenlocker -- and the title, which suggested a kind of divine intervention that the Code enforcers, particular chairman Joseph I. Breen, a devout Catholic, might find offensive. And the film was a huge hit, as well as being one of the three or four funniest movies ever made, a subversive masterpiece that finds nothing sacred, least of all Motherhood and Our Boys Overseas.
(Screenplay)
The story of Laura was originally a play by Vera Caspary, Ring Twice for Laura, which producer-director Otto Preminger had considered staging. But he and Caspary disagreed about his suggested changes, and Caspary reworked it into a novel, the adaptation rights for which were sold to 20th Century-Fox. Despite his previous disagreements with Caspary, Preminger wanted to develop it into a film, and went to work with Dratler, Hoffenstein, and Reinhardt on the screenplay, in the course of which they altered the character and pumped up Clifton Webb's role, Waldo Lydecker, much to Caspary's dismay. In the middle of all of this, Darryl F. Zanuck, who had been on leave from Fox to work on films for the war effort, returned and resumed his role as head of the studio. Preminger and Zanuck had clashed before, so Zanuck removed Preminger as director and hired Rouben Mamoulian instead. But Preminger remained producer of the film and was able to demonstrate to Zanuck that his conception of the film was superior to Mamoulian's, so he was reinstated. Out of such turmoil and conflict came a classic thriller, full of lovable nasties and memorable lines. It's worth noting that uncredited work on the screenplay was done by Ring Lardner Jr., who had won an Oscar for Woman of the Year. Of the three credited writers, only Hoffenstein had a screenwriting career of much note: He was also nominated for the 1931 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
