Showing posts with label William Wyler. Show all posts
Showing posts with label William Wyler. Show all posts

Best Director, 1946

Awards presented March 13, 1947
The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 

Samuel Goldwyn, Harold Russell, and William Wyler with their Oscars for The Best Years of Our Lives
My designated competitors -- Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, and Rossellini -- were all greater directors than Wyler, more given to expressing their individual vision and personality. But I have no reason not to give Wyler the award for what is perhaps his greatest film, the one film of his that does come from personal experience and the elaboration of a vision. As a wartime documentarian, Wyler had seen what war does to people, and The Best Years of Our Lives is eloquent in demonstrating what the aftermath of war can do to those who fought in it. It's worth comparing this film to the one for which Wyler won his previous Oscar, Mrs. Miniver, to see how experience clarified Wyler's vision, purged him of sentimentality. He had no direct experience of what the British were undergoing when he made Mrs. Miniver, and the result is candy-coated, a set of contrivances and clichés about stiff-upper-lip Brits. Best Years is by no means a perfect treatment of its subject -- it's a long way from the neorealism of Rossellini's Open City -- but it's a heartfelt one. Wyler would go on to win a third Oscar -- reverting to his role as studio craftsman for the rather shameless Ben-Hur -- and accumulate a record-setting twelve nominations for directing, plus two more as producer.   
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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 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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