Success or Snub? Mrs. Miniver (15th Academy Awards Review Pt. 2)

 To see part 1, click here.

 
49th Parallel Suite~Vaughan Williams - 49th Parallel

World War II upended Hollywood in so many different and radical ways that you could honestly read whole books about the time period. Large chunks of the industry were nationalized by President Roosevelt and many major studios were hired to start producing propaganda films. Not that I would expect any major studio to have the guts or poor taste to try to make a movie coming out against the war effort but the point remains: Hollywood was changed in a big way in 1942 and you can easily tell just by looking at the turnaround of films coming out.

Most major films coming out were not-even-remotely-veiled propaganda films for the American war effort to drum up support for the troops. From actual propaganda films such as Frank Capra’s Why We Fight documentary series (1942-1945) to the fact that many film icons would now star in movies where they fight the Nazis, such as Tarzan (Tarzan Triumphs (1943)), Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942), Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1942), Sherlock Holmes in Washington (1943)), the Invisible Man (Invisible Agent (1942)), Donald Duck (Der Fuehrer’s Face (1943)) and even Humphrey Bogart’s film noir heroes (All Through the Night (1942)).

In addition, many of the big actors and directors of the time period were drafted to either fight in the war, make documentary films of soldiers fighting on the ground or to make trips to neighboring countries to endorse the Good Neighbor Policy. This inadvertently led to more mainstream recognition of what used to be called B-pictures as the actors and directors in these films were pretty much the only ones left. Which, in turn, led to the rise of more genre-type films coming into vogue. So while the 30s was the decade of the musical, the 40s is when we see the Westerns, the swashbucklers, the monster movies, the Tales from the East and the film noirs becoming more and more quintessential.

WWII also marks a watershed moment in the production of documentaries. Numerous directors were drafted to, if not fight in the war itself, make documentaries detailing soldiers’ lives on the front lines for viewers back home. From Frank Capra’s Why We Fight

to John Ford’s The Battle of Midway, 

wartime documentaries were churned out at a steady pace during World War II. Documentaries are one of the other sticking points when it comes to the Oscars as a documentary has never won, nor even been nominated, for the Oscar for Best Picture. While this is a critique launched at the Academy by numerous critics, I’m personally a bit more curious if the Academy wishes to draw a distinction between fiction and non-fiction films. I can understand wanting to mark a difference between the two and the Oscar for Best Documentary has been a thing as long as the Oscars have been around.

Though if they want to limit Best Picture to just fictional films, it probably should have that in the title. And documentaries can, and have, moved public opinion and been shot in artful enough manners to warrant discussion as potentially being best movies of the year. But, I digress, we’re spinning our wheels here. I’m really only mentioning this due to the explosion of documentary films during WWII since I do not think any of the ones released around this time were Best Picture-worthy. Also calling documentary films released before the counterculture movement of the 60s “non-fiction” is a definite misnomer. Documentaries back then were usually filled with half-truths at best and flat-out lies at worst.

In case you’re wondering why I’m not giving more in-depth reviews to some of these war movies right now, fictional or otherwise, it’s because most of them are honestly pretty terrible. Hot take of the day here: I genuinely believe that the 3-year stint from 1942-1944 is the single worst time period in the history of cinema. While there were still great films that came out (as we shall see), your average movie from this time period is a horrendously preachy film constantly lecturing you about why democracy is important, to degrees that can become annoying to watch (e.g. Captains of the Clouds (1942), Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942), the aforementioned Sherlock Holmes films).

Still, that’s not to say that all the movies released that year were either B-films or war pictures. There were definitely enough movies being released that we could have a serious conversation on whether or not Mrs. Miniver was the best of the year. Let’s get some quick-hitters of some classics out of the way, shall we?

Two significant films that were beloved back then, and I think still hold up today to some degree, were Reap the Wild Wind by Cecil B. DeMille

and Holiday Inn, starring Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby.

Reap the Wild Wind is another DeMille classic that features a love story set amongst some morally onerous sailors in colonial Key West. In particular, it’s noteworthy for being a major breakthrough in special effects work as the climax features an extended undersea sequence where the two main characters fight a giant squid. While nowadays it looks pretty silly, this had audiences stunned back in the day. As a result, the move won a well-earned Oscar for Best Special Effects.

Holiday Inn is another Astaire musical that pairs him with famous singer, Bing Crosby. We’ll talk about Crosby more in later reviews but this is the movie where “White Christmas” comes from, which would go on to win the Oscar for Best Song. Interestingly, it was a bit of a sleeper hit, as the producers were hoping that the song “Be Careful, It’s My Heart” was going to be their big hit.

With those out of the way, let’s move onto the bigger hitters of films that are actually highly regarded, both back then and now. Interestingly, none of them have anything to do with the war. First was Orson Welles’ much-awaited follow-up to Citizen Kane (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons.

The Magnificent Ambersons is set in an unnamed Midwestern city (implied to be Detroit) and centers around a family called the Ambersons, specifically their son, George Amberson Minafer (Tim Holt). The Ambersons are rich and spoiled and frequently interact with another family called the Morgans, whose father (Joseph Cotten) seems to be in love with George’s mother, Isabel (Dolores Costello). From here, the film analyzes the two family’s relationship over the course of many years which is set against the backdrop of the town slowly changing from the invention of the automobile.

The Magnificent Ambersons has one of the most infamous pieces of Hollywood lore attached to it. The original cut was supposedly over 2 hours long. Welles, who, as you may remember, demanded final cut over his films, had to leave the country to make a film in South America and left the last chunk of editing in the hands of his studio, RKO. They, in turn, took it upon themselves to trim over 40 minutes of footage from the movie to make it more commercial, leaving The Magnificent Ambersons at a much more modest 88 minutes. Welles, needless to say, wasn’t happy and this footage, allegedly destroyed, has been the lost Holy Grail of film archivists for years.

Armed with this knowledge, you can easily see the missing gaps in the story. While The Magnificent Ambersons is excellent, with George being a delightful jerk of a main character, it does feel like a step down from Citizen Kane. It starts off great and does an excellent job establishing the world but the final act where we see the town having been totally changed by the rise of the automobile feels like it doesn’t hit as hard as it should. Maybe someday we’ll get to see the fully complete version but, as is, it’s still highly regarded as one of Orson Welles’ great films. Just not perfect.

A film that tackles similar themes, and thankfully wasn’t hacked apart by the studio, was Kings Row.

Set in a fictional town of the same name, Kings Row revolves around the life journey of a promising young doctor named Parris Mitchell (Robert Cummings) and his best friend, Drake McHugh (Ronald Reagan - yes, that Ronald Reagan). Parris and Drake each fancy the respective daughters of the two town doctors, Dr. Tower (Claude Rains) and Dr. Gordon (Charles Coburn), and find that both fathers explicitly forbid said romances. From there, the film takes some twists and turns, including some very dark and surprising ones that are not at all what you’d expect from a movie with this set-up.

Kings Row can best be described as a very grim combination of The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and Gone With the Wind (1939) with a little dash of Citizen Kane thrown in for good measure. It details the same sort of character study of a generic American town but instead of being about the triumph of the American spirit, it’s more about the close-mindedness and petty power trips that local community figures like to partake in. It shows the quintessential American Gothic, the mean-spiritedness and small-mindedness of small-town American life. What makes it great, though, is that it’s not nearly that cynical. The film still ends on a triumphant note, though it does go to pretty dark places.

Needless to say, the Hays Office had a field day with this film. The original book supposedly is even more risqué than the film which is really saying a lot as the film features some pretty gruesome deeds committed by the film’s villains.

While Kings Row is excellent, I do understand why it didn’t get much love. Once again, America just entered World War II and is focused on trying to sell to the public about how amazing American democracy is. A movie about the absolute worst parts of small town American culture in this time period isn’t going to do too well. With that said, Kings Row is a very good film and Ronald Reagan’s performance as Drake McHugh was a severe snub for the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. It’s actually pretty surprising how good his performance is since in almost every other film he ever made (e.g. Code of the Secret Service (1939), Knute Rockne, All American (1940), Bedtime for Bonzo (1951)), he doesn’t have what you would exactly call great roles.

(Fun fact: Kings Row was actually the movie that was supposed to make Reagan a star and, by all accounts, did. The way the system worked is that basically after you made your bones in supporting roles, you would be given the opportunity to have a breakout performance to become a star. Kings Row was that for Reagan. The only problem is that shortly after the film completed production, he enlisted in the United States Air Force, putting his career on the backburner where it never recovered after the war ended.)

As long as we’re talking about great films from that year, I am obligated to mention the last of Walt Disney’s initial classics, Bambi.

I swear I don’t plan this and that I’m not going to bemoan the fact that a Disney film never won the Oscar each and every single year. It just so happens that Disney’s first line-up of 5 films are all incredibly revolutionary and, yes, I do think that after 90+ years of them doing this damn show, odds are that at least one animated film could have been called the movie of the year. Case in point: Bambi, the life story of the titular deer (Bobby Stewart as a baby, Donnie Dunagan as a child, Hardie Albright as an adolescent, John Sutherland as an adult) as he grows up to become the Prince of the Forest. The movie combined a lot of the artistry from Fantasia (1940) with some very realistic animation work in the animals.

While animals weren’t anything new in Disney films or cartoons, what was new was how realistically they moved and looked. These aren’t Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck or Figaro the cat or other anthropomorphized animals that moved kinda like humans. In Bambi, the deer move like deer, the rabbits move like rabbits, the birds move like birds. This was supposed to be the studio’s 2nd film after Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) but it ended up being 5th just because of how exact Walt Disney wanted to be with the realistic animation, with an insane attention to detail. (Unfun fact: they once gutted and dressed a deer in the studio so the animators could study the skeleton and muscle structure to better understand how a deer moves.)

Bambi is basically a feature-length Fantasia (1940) sketch, showing the life of this deer in a very minimalistic manner. This is a very emotional movie but most of it is gotten through the gorgeous animation and music; the dialogue is usually very simplistic, expository or good for a quick gag. Something as simple as Bambi’s first encounter with rain can lead to a wonderful number showing how all the different animals of the forest deal with trying to find shelter from the storm.

Bambi’s also an early pioneer in environmental filmmaking, a full 20 years before the big environmentalist movement of the 60s and 70s. The film is set entirely from the perspective of the animals and features a group of hunters as the villains, referred to only as Man. In a very clever piece of filmmaking, you never actually see Man; instead his presence is characterized by a low piece of music and loud gunshots. But his sheer presence is so terrifying because we see the animals are mortally scared of Man. Some of the sequences featuring Man are still very intense to watch and give a great feeling of dread.

Looking back with hindsight and the amount of influence it had, Bambi is the most likely contender for being the best movie of 1942. However, back when it first came out, Bambi had a less-than-stellar performance. It received lukewarm reviews as some criticized it for being too dark and it did poorly in the box office. Disney cartoons had largely fallen out of favor with the public due to the changing mental attitudes and culture with the rise of the war. Bambi’s moderate failure led to the studio putting a halt on animated features for almost a decade. (Hilariously, the movie also got lambasted by hunting organizations for portraying hunters as evil. Walt Disney tried to leverage this into revenue for Bambi by picking a fight with said groups to garner some publicity but it ended up not working.)

If there was any movie that was a severe snub and was highly regarded in its time, though, that would have to be Preston Sturges’ beloved satire, Sullivan’s Travels.

John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea) is an enormously rich and successful director of very popular comedies in Hollywood. However, he’s gotten fed up with making these shallow pictures and wants to make a serious drama, something that will make him a truly great and respected director. Upon realizing that he has a pretty cushy lifestyle, he then embarks on a solipsistic journey of attempted self-destruction to try to make himself suffer enough to warrant making a drama. In doing so, however, he slowly comes to learn the importance of comedy and that it’s every bit as important in life as drama.

This is an argument you’ve heard me make before and this movie is very smart in how it gets to the heart of what movies are all about: to entertain. Yes, we love great films that tell us about ourselves but equally important are the films that can distract us from our troubles for a couple hours. The finale where Sullivan realizes this is one of the most beautiful and spine-tingling scenes from the Golden Age of Cinema. Obvious spoilers if you click on the link but it’s a truly wonderful moment of filmmaking, showcasing the joy of laughter and how important it is to people who really don’t have much else.

While Sullivan’s Travels is an excellent movie, this is another classic masterpiece that I don’t think has aged with the greatest of graces. Let me put it this way: Sullivan’s actual travels are great but sometimes the movie falls into the trap of falling back on a lot of screwball clichés and cheap gags of the era. And I’m also really not a fan of the way that Sully finally gets back to his friends and loved ones as it seems like a cheap out coming off of the above scene.

Nevertheless, Sullivan’s Travels is still a masterpiece. While it also received some mixed reviews coming off of Preston Sturges’ prior films (The Great McGinty (1940), The Lady Eve (1941)), it was still often placed on every notable critics’ top ten films of the year. And, yes, I do think it is a far superior film to Mrs. Miniver by just about every stretch of the imagination. Similar to 42nd Street (1933) a decade ago, this is a movie I’m honestly stunned wasn’t a heavy frontrunner at the Academy Awards ceremony.

So, yes, all 4 of these movies are far, far superior to Mrs. Miniver. Despite this, I think we ought to be a bit more forgiving of this ceremony simply because the country was being gripped by war fever which is why they thought a more socially relevant film would’ve been a war film. What we ought not to be forgiving is that 3 of these 4 movies weren’t nominated for any of the big awards (Kings Row was nominated for Outstanding Production and Best Director) nor were they serious contenders. (The biggest contenders were apparently the biopics, The Pride of the Yankees and Yankee Doodle Dandy. Both are pretty terrible by today’s standards, even compared to other outdated biopics such as The Great Ziegfeld (1936) or Sergeant York (1941), but since neither won, we won’t be giving the full treatment here. They were also well-received back in their time but have aged like milk.)

In terms of war movies that came out in 1942, the only movie that’s on par with Mrs. Miniver in terms of being an actually serious film in favor of the war effort was 49th Parallel (called The Invaders in America; was technically released in 1941 in England but didn’t make its way to America until March 1942, qualifying it for this year's Oscars).

(I also personally love Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be, a dark comedy set in war-torn Poland. Though this was a film that was deemed offensive at the time and wasn’t highly regarded until much later.)

49th Parallel was another film meant to drum up support for the war, though the screenwriter, Emeric Pressburger, jokingly acknowledged that he was also trying to use the film to frighten Americans into supporting the war. The film is unique amongst propaganda films in that instead of revolving around the culture it’s meant to idolize, it instead revolves around a group of Nazi villains.

A U-boat has sunk off the coast of Canada in Hudson Bay and a crew of 6 Nazis, led by Lieutenant Hirth (Eric Portman), wash up on the shore. They begin to trek to America, still officially neutral, to try to hitch their way home. Along the way, they encounter a series of colorful characters who all seem to embody different parts of Canadian culture from the Hutterite farmers to the polite huntsmen. This turns 49th Parallel into a prototypical road trip movie and a very fun and clever one at that.

While most other films of the era just focus on one part of Western culture to make a stand against the tide of fascism, 49th Parallel’s decision to focus on the Nazi invaders is a stroke of brilliance. Instead of us seeing these annoyingly perfect American or British (or Canadian) people conquering evil Nazis, they present us the Nazis and give them character. Every single opportunity Hirth and his henchmen have to do the right thing, they constantly don’t do it. Yet every character they meet seems to want to give them the benefit of the doubt. It manages to be a much more subtle film rather than constantly lecture the audience about the greatness of the West (though it still does that).

In addition, it’s actually a fun adventure film, which is pretty impressive considering how we’re following a group of Nazis for most of the film. Most of the locales they visit are picturesque and they never spend too long in one location that it feels boring. It’s very well-paced and the dialogue is that fairly witty dialogue that Pressburger would eventually become known for. Plus the climax did have me genuinely wondering if Hirth was going to get away with all his crimes or if someone was actually going to be able to stop him, which is always a sign that it’s doing something right.

Comparing 49th Parallel to Mrs. Miniver, you can see that these two movies are definitely a leg above most of the other war pictures coming out and easily two of the best movies that year. Rather than just shoving your typical Hollywood story into the war, these were two movies that were tailor-made to try to celebrate cultures that were being seriously threatened by the Nazi menace. Furthermore, both movies make the ideal argument that the war will not be won by soldiers and bombs but by the everyday people who believe in their democracy and refuse to bend to the Nazis. This is especially impressive considering how radically different films they are.

Nowadays, 49th Parallel has aged a lot better. If you want a good time capsule of the jingoism that permeated Hollywood and British cinema during the war years, it’s probably the one that’d be most worth your time. However, we do try to judge whether these awards were the right choices back when they were made, not with the benefit of hindsight. And with that in mind, yes, I can see why Mrs. Miniver was well-regarded back in 1942. While it’s about as entertaining as watching paint dry, seeing a movie about the war coming home to suburbia must’ve been one Hell of a wake-up call for those living in suburbia and I can see how it inspired many to do whatever they could to help in the war effort. Plus, when it’s good, it’s pretty good.

I definitely do have some stronger opinions on the acting awards that were given out this go around as James Cagney won the Oscar for Yankee Doodle Dandy when he should’ve won it four years ago for Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) and it should’ve gone to Joel McCrea in Sullivan’s Travels or Tim Holt in The Magnificent Ambersons (neither of whom were even nominated) but I digress. It honestly could've gone either way it looks like so we can consider it a tie. And since a tie for a win still counts as a win, that means that giving the Oscar for Outstanding Motion Picture to Mrs. Miniver was a…

SUCCESS!

Personal Favorite Movies of 1942:

• 49th Parallel (The Invaders) (dir. Michael Powell)
• All Through the Night (dir. Vincent Sherman)
• Arabian Nights (dir. John Rawlins)
• Bambi (dir. David Hand)
• Cat People (dir. Jacques Tourneur)
• Kings Row (dir. Sam Wood)
• Reap the Wild Wind (dir. Cecil B. DeMille)
• Road to Morocco (dir. David Butler)
• The Black Swan (dir. Henry King)
• To Be or Not To Be (dir. Ernst Lubitsch)

Favorite Heroes:

• Jeffrey Peters and Orville Turkey Jackson (Bing Crosby and Bob Hope) (Road to Morocco)
• John Lloyd Sullivan (Joel McCrea) (Sullivan's Travels)
• Joseph Tura (Jack Benny) (To Be or Not To Be)
• Parris Mitchell (Robert Cummings) (Kings Row)
• Prince Bambi (Bobby Stewart as a baby, Donnie Dunagan as a child, Hardie Albright as an adolescent, John Sutherland as an adult) (Bambi)

Favorite Villains:

• Colonel Ehrhardt (Sig Ruman) (To Be or Not To Be)
• Dr. and Mrs. Gordon (Charles Coburn and Judith Anderson) (Kings Row)
• George Amberson Minafer (Tim Holt) (The Magnificent Ambersons)
• Lieutenant Hirth (Eric Portman) (49th Parallel (The Invaders))
• Man (Bambi)