The nominees were ...
(Original Screenplay)
- Citizen Kane, Herman J. Mankiewicz, Orson Welles
- The Devil and Miss Jones, Norman Krasna
- Sergeant York, Abem Finkel, Harry Chandlee, Howard Koch, John Huston
- Tall, Dark and Handsome, Karl Tunberg, Darrell Ware
- Tom, Dick and Harry, Paul Jarrico
- Ball of Fire, Billy Wilder, Thomas Monroe
- Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Harry Segall
- The Lady Eve, Monckton Hoffe
- Meet John Doe, Richard Connell, Robert Presnell
- Night Train, Gordon Wellesley
- Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Sidney Buchman, Seton I. Miller
- Hold Back the Dawn, Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder
- How Green Was My Valley, Philip Dunne
- The Little Foxes, Lillian Hellman
- The Maltese Falcon, John Huston
... when they should have been ...
(Original Screenplay)
(Original Story)
(Screenplay)
And the Oscar went to ...
(Original Screenplay)
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| Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz |
In 1971 Pauline Kael generated controversy with her New Yorker essay "Raising Kane," which was later reprinted in The Citizen Kane Book. In it, she attempted to extend greater credit for the film's artistic success to Mankiewicz, claiming that the screenplay is largely his. To some extent, Kael's argument is a riposte to the so-called auteur critics, whose chief American spokesman was Andrew Sarris, who see the director as the chief "author" of a film, and to whom Welles is one of the great heroes. Director Peter Bogdanovich led the charge against Kael, and one of the bases of the anti-Kael position was the observation that nothing else in Mankiewicz's career as a screenwriter is as good as Kane. Mankiewicz, the older brother (by eleven years) of writer-director Joseph Mankiewicz, was a former journalist who came to Hollywood in 1926, and proceeded to persuade other journalists, chief among them Ben Hecht, to move there too. In a telegram, Mankiewicz famously told Hecht, "Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots." Welles himself credited Mankiewicz with an "enormous" contribution to the screenplay, including the "Rosebud" device that sets the narrative in motion. Welles said that they argued, however, over the name of the central character, Mankiewicz fearing that "Kane" would be seen as a clumsy biblical allusion. John Houseman, Welles's former Mercury Theater associate, was one of those who gave Mankiewicz chief, if not sole, credit for the screenplay, but Houseman and Welles had a great falling-out, and Welles bore a grudge against Houseman until his dying day. The controversy will never be resolved, though the prevailing evidence now seems to favor Welles over Mankiewicz, but in the end it's of interest only to partisans and ideologues.
(Original Story)
The confusion over story and screenplay credits continued this year, with Here Comes Mr. Jordan winning in both categories. Segall, who had been a contract writer for MGM and and RKO, created the story of Here Comes Mr. Jordan first as a play called Heaven Can Wait, which is the title Warren Beatty used when he remade Here Comes Mr. Jordan in 1978. (To add to the confusion, there is an unrelated 1943 Ernst Lubitsch film also called Heaven Can Wait.) Except for the 1952 film Monkey Business, with Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, and Marilyn Monroe, Segall's other screenwriting efforts are forgettable.
(Screenplay)
Buchman and Miller's version of Segall's story is brisker but more sentimental than the 1978 version written by Warren Beatty and Elaine May, who kept the names of the characters but changed the central one, Joe Pendleton, from a boxer to a quarterback. In this version, Pendleton, played by Robert Montgomery, dies in a plane crash and is whisked off to heaven by a busybody angel (played by Edward Everett Horton) who then discovers that he harvested Pendleton's soul prematurely: He was supposed to survive the crash. Mr. Jordan (Claude Rains) is the angel in charge of sorting things out, which involves returning Pendleton to Earth, but in the body of another man, a millionaire. Buchman was one of the star writers at Columbia, having been nominated previously for the screenplay of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. In 1942 he became vice-president of production at Columbia, second only to Harry Cohn, but in 1951 he was summoned to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He admitted that he had belonged to the Communist Party, but refused to name names of other party members, was found guilty of contempt of Congress and blacklisted. He moved to southern France, where in 1960 20th Century Fox put him in charge of the European division of the studio. Miller, who had been a screenwriter since 1927 and had previously been nominated for his work on The Criminal Code, signed a long-term contract with Warner Bros. in 1934, and is otherwise best known for his work on the screenplay of The Adventures of Robin Hood.
... when it should have gone to ...
(Original Story)
Nightclub entertainer Sugarpuss O'Shea (Barbara Stanwyck) hides out from the mob with a houseful of mostly elderly bachelor professors at work on an encyclopedia. The youngest of the lot, linguistics professor Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper) wants to use her command of the vernacular as a source for his entry on slang, but of course falls in love with her and winds up saving her from her gangster boyfriend, played by Dana Andrews. The idea of Cooper as a professor strikes some as ludicrous, but he handles the role with great charm. Howard Hawks directed, and if it doesn't seem as lively as some of his other films, it's probably because he was under the obsessive eye of producer Sam Goldwyn. Wilder, who was under contract to Paramount, was hired for the film in a trade deal: Goldwyn got Wilder in exchange for allowing Cooper, one of Goldwyn's contract players, to appear in Paramount's For Whom the Bell Tolls. Wilder had written the story much earlier, while he was still in Germany, and called on Monroe to help him Americanize it. They sold it to MGM, but eventually it fell into Goldwyn's hands. Wilder and Charles Brackett reworked the story into a screenplay, playing on the likeness of the seven elderly professors to Walt Disney's seven dwarfs.
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| Henry Travers, Oscar Homolka, Gary Cooper, Leonid Kinskey, Tully Marshall, S.Z. Sakall, Richard Haydn, and Aubrey Mather are awakened by Barbara Stanwyck in Ball of Fire. |
(Screenplay)
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| Humphrey Bogart and John Huston |
It comes as a shock today to realize that not only did The Maltese Falcon receive only three nominations (picture, supporting actor, and screenplay) but that it won none of them. Huston started writing in the early 1930s, selling stories to H.L. Mencken's American Mercury and Esquire, among other publications, and when his father, Walter, decided to try acting in movies with the advent of talking pictures, John followed him to Hollywood. Although he worked on a number of scripts, he grew disillusioned with screenwriting and took off for the bohemian life in Europe. After a series of escapades, including one in which the car he was driving killed a pedestrian, he decided to settle down and returned to Hollywood in 1937, determined to become a director as well as a writer. His work earned him a contract with Warner Bros. and an Oscar nomination for Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet. Eager to keep Huston under contract as a writer, Warners agreed to let him direct a property they already owned: Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon had been filmed twice before, under the same title in 1931 with Ricardo Cortez and Bebe Daniels, and as Satan Met a Lady in 1936 with Warren William and Bette Davis. But it took Huston's screenplay and direction to bring out its wonderfully strange essence. It also helped that Huston cast all the right people, Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, and Elisha Cook Jr. among them.
