Showing posts with label Preston Sturges. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Preston Sturges. Show all posts

Best Writing, 1948

Awards presented March 24, 1949

 Ending the confusion of having two categories for screenplays, "Original Screenplay" and "Screenplay," must have seemed simple: Just reduce them to one, and retain the "Motion Picture Story" category. But it didn't satisfy the writers, who lost one of their opportunities for an Oscar. And it didn't really clarify matters for the voters, who were forced to decide whether a film succeeded because of its story or its screenplay, especially when, as in the case of The Search this year, it was nominated in both categories. So the fiddling with the writing categories would continue.

And the nominees were ... 
(Motion Picture Story) 
(Screenplay) 
... when they should have been ... 
(Motion Picture Story) 
(Screenplay) 
(Motion Picture Story) 

The Search is a well-made movie directed by Fred Zinnemann and filmed in the ruins of Nuremberg and other Bavarian cities. Montgomery Clift plays an Army private, stationed in postwar Germany, who helps a boy (Ivan Jandl) reunite with his mother (the great operatic soprano Jarmila Novotna in a non-singing role). Clift was nominated for an Oscar in this, his second film. (Red River, which was his first, was actually released after The Search.) He is said to have been unhappy with the original screenplay for The Search and to have rewritten much of it collaboration with Paul Jarrico, Betty Smith, and Peter Viertel, but the Academy stuck with the credited writers.  This was the second Oscar for Schweizer, whose first was for the "Original Screenplay" of the little-seen Marie-Louise. In fact, the obscurity of Marie-Louise, a winner chosen from nominees only slightly less obscure, may have been one reason why the Academy decided to stop dividing the screenplay category in two: better to have one screenplay winner for a picture that people had actually seen. Most of Schweizer's work was done in his native Switzerland. David Wechsler was a Swiss screenwriter who collaborated with Schweizer on several films, including The Last Chance and Heidi and Peter. He is sometimes confused with the contemporary assistant director David "Wex" Wechsler, and Wikipedia erroneously links his name on the entry for The Search with the American psychologist of the same name. 

(Screenplay) 

B. Traven? Ret Marut? Otto Feige?
An arrest photo of Marut taken
in London in 1923.  
Huston's screenplay is based on a novel by the mysterious writer known as B. Traven, whom Huston tried to meet before he began filming in Mexico. Instead, a man called Hal Croves showed up and showed Huston a document that was alleged to be a power of attorney, giving Croves the authority to make any decisions regarding the film. Crew members jumped to the conclusion that Croves was B. Traven himself, but Huston remained dubious. The encounter only added to the enigma of B. Traven, who seems have been a German actor named Ret Marut, which may itself have been a pseudonym for a man named Otto Feige. Or he might have been an American engineer called Berick Traven Torsvan. And let's not get into the theories that he was actually Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared in Mexico in 1913, or even Jack London, who faked his death in 1916 and moved to Mexico, where he continued writing. In any case, Huston's screenplay stands proudly on its own as one of those movies that are probably better than the books on which they're based. It was Huston who gave us: "Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges."
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre: Gold Hat refuses a request to show badges
... when it should have gone to ... 
(Motion Picture Story) 

Rex Harrison in Unfaithfully Yours
Preston Sturges
A celebrated symphony conductor (Rex Harrison), believing his wife (Linda Darnell) to be unfaithful, fantasizes about how he should handle the matter while conducting a concert. To the accompaniment of Rossini's Semiramide overture, he imagines murdering her; to the prelude to Wagner's Tannhäuser, he imagines an act of noble forgiveness; and to Tchaikovsky's Francesca da Rimini tone poem he envisions a game of Russian roulette with the man (Kurt Krueger) he thinks has cuckolded him. But when he decides to go through with the murder plot he botches it in a scene of hilarious slapstick. This classic black comedy was conceived by Sturges as early as 1932, but he was unable to sell it to a studio. After his successes as a writer-director in the earlier 1940s, he decided to produce it himself. But it was a huge flop: Audiences were no more ready for Sturges's version of black comedy than they were for Charles Chaplin's attempt a year earlier with Monsieur Verdoux. Sturges, who was recovering from the failure of The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, had one more Hollywood flop, Betty Grable's The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend, and decided to move to France, where he made his last film, The French, They Are a Funny Race, in 1955. Today, however, Unfaithfully Yours is considered one of Sturges's best movies, and the necessity of having the Sturges touch as director as well as writer is amply demonstrated by the inferior 1984 remake with Dudley Moore. 




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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 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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Best Director, 1942

Awards presented March 4, 1943

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 

Wyler, born in Germany, came to America in 1922 at the behest of Carl Laemmle, the head of Universal Pictures, who was a distant relative of Wyler's mother. (Laemmle, notorious for putting family members on the Universal payroll, was the subject of a couplet by Ogden Nash: "Uncle Carl Laemmle / Has a very large faemmle.") Wyler began directing in 1925, when he was only twenty-three, and turned out dozens of silent Westerns. In the 1930s he was signed to a contract by Samuel Goldwyn, who appreciated Wyler's perfectionism, and began to rack up a string of twelve nominations, making him the most-nominated director in Oscar history. Mrs. Miniver was the first of three wins. After it, he joined the army air force and made several wartime documentaries. 

... when it should have gone to ... 

Or it could have been for The Palm Beach Story. That Sturges could have turned out two equally great, yet distinctly different, comic films in a single year is somewhat mind-blowing. But perhaps Sturges deserved it more for this one because of his difficulties with Veronica Lake, new to stardom, who neglected to tell him that she was six months pregnant when filming started. She was also at odds with her co-star, Joel McCrea, and with members of the crew.
Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake in Sullivan's Travels

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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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