Showing posts with label Leo McCarey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Leo McCarey. Show all posts

Best Writing, 1944

Awards presented March 15, 1945
The nominees were ...
(Original Motion Picture Story) 
(Original Screenplay)
(Screenplay) 
... when they should have been ... 
(Original Motion Picture Story) 

And the Oscar went to ... 
(Original Motion Picture Story)  
Leo McCarey, Going My Way. 

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. 

(Original Screenplay)  
Lamar Trotti, Wilson. 

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. 

(Screenplay) 
Frank Butler, Frank Cavett, Going My Way. 

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) 

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)

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.   


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Best Director, 1944

Awards presented March 15, 1945
The nominees were ...
... when they should have been ... 

McCarey became the first person to produce the best picture while also winning as director and writer. (Under the Academy rules at the time, the best picture Oscar went to Paramount, and not to McCarey, so he can't technically be said to have won three Oscars for Going My Way, as Billy Wilder did for The Apartment, Francis Ford Coppola for The Godfather, Part II, James L. Brooks for Terms of Endearment, Peter Jackson for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, and Joel and Ethan Coen for No Country for Old Men, the other producer-director-writer trifectas.) This was the beginning of McCarey's move into a more sentimental period than the 1930s, when he was a writer-director responsible for raucous comedies starring Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, and Mae West, as well as for such screwball romantic comedies as The Awful Truth and My Favorite Wife. His devout Catholicism is on display in Going My Way and its sequel, The Bells of St. Mary's, and his near-hysterical anticommunism resulted in the bizarre My Son John.   

... when it should have gone to ... 

Barbara Stanwyck and Billy Wilder 
This was Wilder's first nomination as a director, a role he had assumed in Hollywood only two years earlier, on The Major and the Minor, though he had directed a film in France in 1933. It also signaled a move into his characteristic mode as both writer and director: a deep but usually entertaining cynicism about people and their motives. The next fifteen years would be his period of greatest achievement, resulting in such classics as The Lost Weekend, Sunset Blvd., Ace in the Hole, Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment. He idolized Ernst Lubitsch, but never quite mastered the so-called "Lubitsch touch," perhaps because Lubitsch was ironic, not cynical. As a result there are often false steps in Wilder's films, such as the suicide attempt by Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina, a departure from character so glaring that it undermines the entire movie. The false steps became more frequent in his films of the 1960s and '70s, the post-censorship, post-studio era, when Wilder no longer had institutional curbs on his cynicism. But his best work sets an example that filmmakers still aspire to, as exemplified by writer-director Michel Hazanavicius's tribute to Wilder in his acceptance speech for The Artist: "I would like to thank the following three people: I would like to thank Billy Wilder, I would like to thank Billy Wilder, and I would like to thank Billy Wilder."    
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Best Writing, 1940

Awards presented February 27, 1941

 The Academy was still trying to clarify the distinctions between story and screenplay and between something written for the screen and something adapted from another source. So for a while it worked with a tripartite division of the writing awards, still separating story and screenplay, but also giving out two awards for screenplays, one original to the screen and the other adapted. 

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

Preston Sturges with his Oscar for The Great McGinty
In a typical Sturges twist, a crooked politician is undone by one mistake: He turns honest. Sturges had been writing for the movies for a decade before making his debut as a director with two films in 1940: this one and Christmas in July. Both of them are terrific, though not quite up to the level of the five brilliant movies that followed: The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, and Hail the Conquering Hero. Like Christmas in July, The Great McGinty suffers from less-than-stellar casting -- Dick Powell and Ellen Drew in the former, and Brian Donlevy and Muriel Angelus in the latter. But every Sturges movie is an ensemble affair, because he created wonderful parts for his favorite character actors, chief among them William Demarest, who made eight films under Sturges's direction. 
Brian Donlevy in The Great McGinty
(Original Story) 

Though the Oscar went to Glazer and Toldy for their story, their success probably came because they were riding on the backs of a screenplay written by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder -- another example of the problematic division of the writing awards into separate story and screenplay categories. Claudette Colbert plays a war reporter modeled on Martha Gellhorn, and Ray Milland is a pilot whom she helps escape from the Fascists at the end of the Spanish Civil War. There is a clumsy blend of romantic comedy and the tragedy resulting from the oncoming World War throughout. Glazer had previously won for 7th Heaven. Toldy was the pseudonym of János Székely, who became known as Hans Székely after he moved from to Germany after World War I. He became a screenwriter in Berlin, where he met Ernst Lubitsch, who brought him to the United States in 1934. During the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s he moved to East Germany, and worked for the state-owned film studio DEFA before his death in 1958.      

(Screenplay) 

Stewart was a natural choice to adapt playwright Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story to the screen. He had been classmates with Barry at Yale, and Barry wrote the part of Nick Potter in Holiday with him in mind. Stewart played the role on Broadway, and adapted the play for the 1938 screen version in which the role was played by Edward Everett Horton (who had also played it in the 1930 version). Stewart had been part of the Algonquin Round Table circle and had gained some success as a playwright and humorist before coming to Hollywood in 1930. He quickly became known for his witty, sophisticated dialogue, and contributed to the screenplays of such films as Dinner at Eight, The Prisoner of Zenda, and Love Affair. In the 1950s he was blacklisted because of his earlier affiliation with leftist organizations, and he chose exile in London.       

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

Samuel and Bella Spewack
Leo McCarey
Cary Grant's wife, Irene Dunne, has been declared legally dead, but she shows up just after he has married Gail Patrick. Turns out she spent seven years shipwrecked on a desert island with Randolph Scott. Nifty romantic farce, nicely directed by Garson Kanin, but the story isn't all that original: As the script makes plain, it's loosely based on Tennyson's poem "Enoch Arden" (Dunne's character is named Ellen Arden). Still, it's the best of all the versions of the story, which include some silent melodramas as well as the contemporaneous Too Many Husbands and its musical remake Three for the Show, as well as the official remake of My Favorite Wife, called Move Over, Darling, which had been begun as Something's Gotta Give, the film Marilyn Monroe had started shortly before her death. This is the sole nomination for the Spewacks, a husband-and-wife writing team who had a string of Broadway successes, culminating in their Tony Award-winning book for Kiss Me, Kate. McCarey, who had previously teamed Grant and Dunne in The Awful Truth, was also the producer of the film.
Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, Randolph Scott in My Favorite Wife
(Screenplay) 

Charles Lederer
Lederer grew up in Hollywood, where he was raised by his aunt, Marion Davies, the mistress of William Randolph Hearst. A precocious child, he entered the University of California at Berkeley at the age of thirteen, but dropped out to become a reporter for the Hearst newspapers. His friendship with screenwriter and former journalist Ben Hecht got him his first screenwriting job: providing additional dialogue for the 1931 film version of The Front Page, the source of His Girl Friday. He would go on to work with director Howard Hawks on I Was a Male War Bride, The Thing From Another World, Monkey Business, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. He was much in demand for acerbic dialogue, and wrote the screenplays for such films as the thriller Kiss of Death and the Rat Pack caper Ocean's Eleven. In 1940, Lederer married Orson Welles's ex-wife Virginia Nicholson, and after some initial (and understandable) friction became close to Welles. He had also been friends with fellow screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, who was collaborating with Welles on Citizen Kane. The connection between Lederer and the creators of Kane has given rise to the story, promulgated by Gore Vidal, that "Rosebud," the mysterious final word of Charles Foster Kane, was actually Hearst's nickname for Marion Davies's genitalia, and that Lederer had told this to Mankiewicz and Welles. (Though it does seem like an exceptionally intimate detail for an aunt to share with her nephew.)   
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Best Director, 1937

Awards presented March 10, 1938

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
McCarey almost deserved it. The Awful Truth has some side-splitting moments, but then it falls apart a little at the end, with some prolonged nonsense about adjoining bedrooms and figures in a cuckoo clock. But that's McCarey, who was the first to team Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, gave us the best of the Marx Brothers movies in Duck Soup, and made the comedy classic Ruggles of Red Gap. Later, however, he let his devout Roman Catholicism take over for the sugary sentimentality of Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's and his extreme anticommunism resulted in the incoherent My Son John; both make his last film, Satan Never Sleeps, nearly unwatchable.  

... when it should have gone to ... 
George Cukor, Greta Garbo, and Robert Taylor on the set of Camille 
If there is one film of Garbo's that gets singled out as her greatest, it's Camille. And let's give a lot of credit to Cukor for that. Not for nothing was he known as a "woman's director." He oversaw some of Katharine Hepburn's greatest performances, including her screen debut in A Bill of Divorcement, as well as prepared and coached Vivien Leigh after he was fired as director of Gone With the Wind, helped get Ingrid Bergman her first Oscar for Gaslight, made Judy Holliday a star (and an Oscar-winner) for Born Yesterday, and nursed Judy Garland through her last great screen performance in A Star Is Born. But it's worth noting that he also got Oscar-winning performances out of James Stewart, Ronald Colman, and Rex Harrison, and showed a sure hand at directing Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy, among others. Garbo should have won for Camille, and Cukor at the very least should have been nominated. He had to wait almost thirty years for his Oscar, for My Fair Lady, which made him, at sixty-five, the oldest person up to that time to win for directing. (The current record-holder is Clint Eastwood, who was seventy-four when he won for Million Dollar Baby.) 
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