Success or Snub? Rebecca (13th Academy Awards Review Pt. 2)

 To see part 1, click here.

Toccata and Fugue in D Minor~Leopold Stokowski - Fantasia

As the 40s dawned, the 13th Academy Awards heralded some new changes of their own. The Award for Best Screenplay was now divided between the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay (winner was The Great McGinty, very meh) and the Oscar for Best Screenplay (winner was The Philadelphia Story, see below) which would eventually morph into the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. In light of a scandal the previous year where a reporter saw the results before they were read, the winners were now disguised in envelopes before they were read aloud. The fact that it took over a decade for envelopes to become a thing is hilarious to me.

While 1939 was considered the greatest year for American filmmaking, 1940 was no slouch either, as many classics and revolutionary pictures were released this year as well. A couple important mainstays appeared in the genre-type category. First was The Thief of Bagdad.

The Thief of Bagdad was a major breakthrough in special effects and the adventure film, being based on the classic Middle-Eastern folk tales of One Thousand and One Nights. This is the lesser-known stepbrother to The Wizard of Oz (1939) as the effects, while dated now, were major leaps forward with impressive set design, blue screen work and an incredible scale. It also loosely pioneered a little B-movie genre of the 40s with “Tales from the East” stories (e.g. Arabian Nights (1942), Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1944), Cobra Woman (1944)). The film swept a lot of the more technical awards at the Oscars but wasn’t nominated for any of the big ‘uns. In all fairness, though, while The Thief of Bagdad is fun (with Rex Ingram as the Djinn being a particular highlight), it ain’t no Wizard of Oz.

Another big deal was The Mark of Zorro, the film that helped launch Tyrone Power’s stardom who would become another big then-action hero in the wake of Errol Flynn. While there were other swashbucklers coming out that year and the surrounding ones (e.g. The Sea Hawk (1940), The Black Swan (1942)), The Mark of Zorro sticks out in one key regard. The final sword fight between Don Diego Vega a.k.a. Zorro (Tyrone Power) and the evil Capitaine Esteban Pasquale (Basil Rathbone) is often considered to be the greatest sword fight of the classic age of cinema, even outshining the climactic duel from The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).

Spoiler alert if you want to see this movie.

Another common complaint about the Academy is that there are numerous awards that people have been vying for years to become awards but the Academy still refuses to acknowledge. Two of these are the Oscar for Best Scene and Oscar for Best Stunt Work. In all fairness, I don’t know if these were being advocated for back then but this scene allows us to show an example of why they should exist. Even if The Mark of Zorro wasn’t necessarily movie of the year material (though it is a lot of fun), the sheer amount of choreography, hard work and ability to tell a whole story through this sort of spectacle back then is something that should be acknowledged, was not and still is not.

Though, in all fairness, if they did have those Oscars, they’d probably still find a way to screw them up somehow. With that in mind, let’s move onto the bigger hitters. Probably Rebecca’s biggest competition that year was the screwball, The Philadelphia Story.

Along with It Happened One Night (1934) and Bringing Up Baby (1937), this is another one of the most famous and genre-defining romantic-comedies of all time and helped cement the careers of all three of its stars. A ditzy socialite, Tracy Lord (Katherine Hepburn), is due to marry some rich snob named George Kittredge (John Howard) which is the talk of the town. So much so that the local gossip magazine sends in a trio of reporters to cover the story: Macaulay Connor (James Stewart), Liz Imbrie (Ruth Hussey) and Tracy’s ex-husband, C.B. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant).

The Philadelphia Story pioneered the other big cliche of the rom-com genre, that being the couple who’s divorced/broken up somehow getting back together through a series of unlikely situations. This is one of those stories that audiences like seeing and was often used in screwball comedies for most of the rest of the 1940s. Once again, this is the type of fairytale that is not indicative of a healthy romance but, since the Hays Code forbade showing extramarital affairs, hey, what could you do?

While The Philadelphia Story hasn’t aged quite as well as Capra’s screwballs, it’s still amusing, with the drunken party sequence in the middle of the film being a particular highlight. James Stewart would win the Academy Award for Best Actor, which gained some attention as being one of the first choices to get wide attention for being a snub. Stewart himself mused that he only won the award because he was snubbed for his role in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington the previous year and not due to his performance actually being the best of the year. (The Philadelphia Story also won the Academy Award for Best Screenplay and the writer, Donald Ogden Stewart, hilariously stated upon winning, “I have no one to thank but myself.”)

Instead, Stewart felt that the Oscar for Best Actor should have gone to Henry Fonda for his performance in The Grapes of Wrath which, incidentally, is our next film to talk about.

Based off of the John Steinbeck novel of the same name, The Grapes of Wrath is a think piece on the slow death of the American Dream during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl. It follows the Joad family, led by its son, Tom (Fonda’s character), who travel across the country from Oklahoma to California in search of work. They eventually land in migrant camps where the common people are oppressed by the cruel and sadistic guards.

Most Hollywood films of the 30s did their level best to try to ignore the Great Depression. Whether by design or profit, films were eager to peddle an all-American fantasy to audiences that tried to make them forget their troubles. If the Depression was mentioned at all, it was given a cursory glance or just used for set dressing (e.g. Stand Up and Cheer! (1934), My Man Godfrey (1936) etc.)

The Grapes of Wrath took all the harshness and cruelty of oppressive classism that permeated the Great Depression and threw it straight in the audience’s faces. It is cruel, it is mean, it is dark and it is what life was like for far too many Americans. It has a very dark cinematography that often shows barren landscapes and oppressive, shadowy buildings that just give this sense of hopelessness that permeates throughout the film. And, yes, Henry Fonda is very excellent as Tom Joad.

Despite this, I do feel that The Grapes of Wrath is a bit less than its promise. What do I mean by this? Well, if you’ve ever read the book, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), you’ll know that it has a very unpleasant ending, making the death of the American Dream complete. The film ends on a more positive note, encouraging audiences to take back control and band together. While this is a more hopeful ending, it does feel like the final payoff of the setup doesn’t really occur. While you might call it Hays Code nonsense, I don’t know; both Gone With the Wind and Of Mice and Men (the latter also based on a Steinbeck novel) still feel pretty dark for their time.

Then again, this is also probably just me nitpicking and the film wanting to be more inspirational for audiences who might be going through the same problems depicted and to encourage them to keep fighting. The Grapes of Wrath is often considered one of the greatest movies of all time and does a great job showing the plight of middle America during the Great Depression and the wanton abuse they suffer at the hands of the powerful. Incidentally, it also won the Oscar for Best Director, which seems to imply that this might have won had Selznick not campaigned so aggressively for Rebecca to win.

As long as we’re talking about socially relevant films that feature a performance that should’ve won the Award for Best Actor, we must also mention Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator.

With the silent era formally finished, The Great Dictator was Chaplin’s first sound film and his foray into the genre of screwballs. The film is based in the fictional central European country of Tomainia which is being ruled by the cruel dictator, Adenoid Hynkel (Charlie Chaplin) who has dreams of world domination and oppressing his country’s Jewish population. The other half of the film is centered in the Tomainian ghetto where the locals try to figure out ways to resist and overthrow Hynkel, putting most of their hopes in an unnamed barber (also Chaplin).

In case you couldn’t tell yet, The Great Dictator is a very strong and pointed satire of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, because if you can’t make fun of one of history’s greatest monsters, who can you make fun of? To put in perspective how important and socially relevant this was when it came out: Germany had invaded Poland, German Jewish populations were being rounded up into concentration camps, World War II was underway in Europe and Asia, Paris had fallen, the United States was still formally neutral and anti-Semitism was still tacitly approved in popular culture. Making a movie lampooning Hitler while your country is still formally neutral is something that took a lot of nerve and you can tell that Chaplin had an intense hatred for Nazism. His portrayal of Hynkel is a hilarious evolution in his acting style as the man is a whiny, pathetic idiot who makes decisions on poorly-thought-out whims and gets angry when other dictators make fun of him.

The Great Dictator manages to pull off a slapstick comedy set in a Nazi German ghetto without being offensive, which is a very impressive feat in hindsight (Chaplin later stated that if he had known the true horrors of the concentration camps at the time, he would not have made the film). And, once again, it manages the perfect balance of both comedy and heart that Chaplin pioneered so many years ago. The Great Dictator ends with one of cinema’s greatest speeches as the Jewish Barber gives an impassioned plea for democracy, the end of hatred and for those in power to view it as a responsibility instead of a privilege.

If there was ever a comedy that was snubbed for the Academy Award, this is it. This is also frequently considered one of the greatest films of all time, arguably the greatest satire of all time and Chaplin’s edgiest and greatest film. The fact that The Philadelphia Story was considered the comedic darling of the Academy over this film is pretty terrible but, before we start analyzing the Success or Snub title in depth, we have two more movies left, both made by the same filmmaker.

After Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs exploded on the scene back in 1937, Walt Disney Studios greatly expanded its base of production. After their film, Bambi, was hitting some development issues, they instead chose to fast-track his other feature on the docket: Pinocchio.

Based on Carlo Collodi’s 1883 novel, Pinocchio is a fairy tale of the titular wooden puppet (Dickie Jones) built by an eccentric toymaker named Geppetto (Christian Rub) who wishes upon a star that Pinoccho might someday be a real boy. His wish is heard by the mysterious Blue Fairy (Evelyn Venable) who brings Pinocchio to life and tells Pinocchio that if he proves himself, he will turn human. Accompanied by an anthropomorphic bug named Jiminy Cricket (Cliff Edwards), Pinocchio goes on a series of adventures, learning lessons and trying to prove himself to his father.

Like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio is one of the most beloved, cherished and iconic animated films of all time, with the character of Jiminy Cricket in particular being recycled for numerous other Disney properties. Unlike Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio is incredibly dark with some downright nightmarish imagery. All of the characters that Pinocchio meets in his journey are villainous ones, who often try to tempt him into doing wrong or threaten to cut him up into firewood.

Pinocchio has a very powerful moral about learning how to grow up and accept the evils of the world but still stay true to yourself and remain good. The strength here is helped by the fact that Pinocchio is a much more interesting character than Snow White or any of the dwarves. They actually make him act like, for lack of a better term, a real boy: throughout the film, he shirks his responsibilities, he smokes, he drinks, he frequently finds himself in bad situations. This doesn’t make him a bad kid, it makes him a kid and he’s able to learn his lesson and eventually help those he cares about. The fact that the film was willing to let all of the evil characters get away with their crimes and just let the audience accept that as part of the world makes Pinocchio stand out from most other films of the era.

In terms of technicals, this movie was a giant step forward in effects work for animation, with much more complex objects such as smoke, fire, water, rain etc. For example, in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the rain was clearly just lines drawn across the frame. In Pinocchio, the rain looks like actual rain. Just one of these would be enough for a movie but Disney and his animators really went above and beyond. The film’s climax takes place on the ocean with buffeting waves, smoke, sea foam, flying seagulls and Pinocchio and Geppetto trying to escape from the film’s final villain, Monstro the Whale (Thurl Ravenscroft), a creature so big that his whole body is never on-camera at once. The sheer amount of moving parts in this finale is insane.

All of this is just the bells and whistles; in terms of story, Pinocchio is still a masterpiece. The scenes are all classic, the characters are all memorable and the climax is intense enough to put in the same league as Hitchcock. And there is the song, “When You Wish Upon A Star,” which is one of Disney’s most famous and beloved songs, commonly being seen as the company’s leitmotif. The song would win the Oscar for Best Song, starting a trend of Disney movies usually winning these awards every year they get nominated.

Of course, that’s just the first film Disney made. His sweatshop-esque work ethic also produced another film that year, Fantasia.

Fantasia is probably the most popular and well-known avant-garde art piece of all time. It’d been a few years since Disney’s flagship character, Mickey Mouse, had had a successful cartoon so Disney and his animators created one that would be told entirely through the animation and music (i.e. no sound effects, dialogue etc.) Called The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, it featured Mickey stealing the magical hat of a sorcerer and getting into all sorts of mischief. As the costs of the short ballooned, it became abundantly clear that it would be impossible for a short film of its magnitude to recoup its budget. So Disney shrewdly decided to expand the idea to several other concepts and package them all together into a single film.

And thus Fantasia was born: a series of episodic shorts that are animated to the beat of some of the greatest classical music pieces of all time. The shorts of the film run the gamut from being abstract and creative to telling full stories just through the music to some combination in between. The idea is brilliant and the result is wonderful. Many events have an almost awe-inspiring scale to them and you can tell the animators were true masters of their craft, to an almost unreal degree. When I say that the film is animated to the music, I’m not just talking about thematically; the movement of the characters is actually animated to the beat and tempo of the music. This is difficult to pull off now, back then they did this working with cels and stencils.

Disney pulled out all the stops to make Fantasia something that audiences had never seen before. He and his distributors, RKO Pictures, commissioned special audio equipment in theaters to actually give the film the impression of being in a concert hall, pioneering the idea of surround sound, nowadays commonplace. To theaters that couldn’t accompany this, Fantasia was then pitched as a roadshow, traveling the country in multiple locations (it lasted over thirty-eight weeks in one location, outlasting the previous record held by Gone With the Wind (1939)). The film’s Rite of Spring sequence was also one of the first pop culture depictions of dinosaurs (along with One Million BC (1940)), bringing these creatures into the foray of the public imagination for the first time, particularly the terrifying T-Rex.

Along with Pinocchio, Fantasia also gets major kudos for pushing the envelope for what an animated film could get away with and still remains one of the most mature animated films to come out of the studio. The finale features an assault on Christian sensibilities as it depicts a Satanic celebration of evil where the dead rise from the grave, naked dancers turn into wild beasts and topless harpies drop the damned into pits of Hellfire. Between this and the scene where the T-Rex breaks the Stegosaurus’ neck, Fantasia is another one of those movies that I’m honestly surprised made it past the Hays Code.

Fantasia is a true work of art. Watching it is an almost otherworldly experience for both adults and children of all ages. And, of course, it and Pinocchio were nowhere close to being nominated for the Oscar for Outstanding Production. Fantasia was actually criticized by critics and Academy members at the time trying to meld what they consider “high art” (a.k.a. these classical pieces of music) with animation and film. This genuinely puzzles me as it is called the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Ideally, you would think that a film that incorporates high art to tell stories in new and interesting ways is a movie that should be considered the Outstanding Production of the year. This might be a culture clash on my part since this was a critique lobbied from elsewhere as well and I’m trying to get into the mindset of people born over 100 years ago but it’s still puzzling that this was not even acknowledged by the Academy.

You can probably see where this is going and I’m definitely going against the grain on this one. Rebecca is often widely respected as one of the best movies of that year and a key transition in Alfred Hitchcock’s career and I am not disputing this fact. Rebecca is indeed a very good movie, warts and all, but I’m still erring on the side of snub here. While it is a truly elegant thriller, compare it to the movies I just listed.

The Great Dictator was a searing indictment and cautionary tale of the war in Europe and the monsters who propagated it. The Grapes of Wrath was the first true tragic tale of Great Depression America and provided a sounding call for Americans to take responsibility for their country as they entered the new decade. Pinocchio showed the darkness of the world and how we must all overcome it; a pertinent moral given, again, the war that was becoming clearer and clearer on the horizon. And Fantasia was, and still is, one of the prime examples of how the visual medium can be a work of art.

Rebecca is an excellent movie and if you’re a fan of Hitchcock, you’ll definitely want to check it out. And out of all the other films that the Academy was considering (The Philadelphia Story, The Letter, Kitty Foyle), it’s definitely the best. But it also won primarily based off of studio politics and ultimately pales in comparison to the four I just listed. Calling Rebecca the best picture of 1940 was a…

SNUB!

Personal Favorite Movies of 1940:

• All This, and Heaven Too (dir. Anatole Litvak)
• Dance, Girl, Dance (dir. Dorothy Arzner)
• Fantasia (dir. Walt Disney's Nine Old Men)
• My Favorite Wife (dir. Garson Kanin)
• Pinocchio (dir. Ben Sharpsteen and Hamilton Luske)
• Rebecca (dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
• The Great Dictator (dir. Charlie Chaplin)
• The Mummy's Hand (dir. Christy Cabanne)
• The Mark of Zorro (dir. Rouben Mamoulian)
• The Philadelphia Story (dir. George Cukor)

Favorite Heroes:

• Don Diego Vega/Zorro (Tyrone Power) (The Mark of Zorro)
• Mickey Mouse (Fantasia)
• Pinocchio (Dickie Jones) (Pinocchio)
• The Jewish Barber (Charlie Chaplin) (The Great Dictator)
• Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) (The Grapes of Wrath)

Favorite Villains:

• Adenoid Hynkel (Charlie Chaplin) (The Great Dictator)
• Capitaine Esteban Pasquale (Basil Rathbone) (The Mark of Zorro)
• Chernabog (Fantasia)
• Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) (Rebecca)
• Rebecca de Winter (Rebecca)