Success or Snub? Going My Way (17th Academy Awards Review Pt. 2)

  To see part 1, click here.

Double Indemnity Suite~Miklós Rózsa - Double Indemnity

As the war furor seemed to be dying down and victory for the Allies became more and more assured, the list of war movies slowly morphed from pure propaganda films to actually making some genuinely excellent films, a few of which actually took risks. For example, there was None Shall Escape

which was the first film to actually tackle the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews. The movie is surprisingly dark for such an old film and the villain, Wilhelm Grimm (Alexander Knox), is one of the most effective and chilling bad guys of the war years. Long before this type of character would become commonplace in most WWII dramas, this is the first Nazi villain to really show the horrors of prejudice and fascism.

At the other end of the spectrum is Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller, Lifeboat.

This movie takes place after a ship was sunk by a German U-boat and a colorful cast of characters all board the nearest lifeboat to try to survive. One of them happens to be a Nazi named Kapitan Willi (Walter Slezak) and many of the film’s conflicts revolve around the characters debating what to do with him. The film received some controversy in its day as it was lambasted for showing the German in a somewhat positive light while the war was ongoing though this complaint was far overblown (Willi is still the film’s villain, he just has some redeeming qualities to make him a more interesting character).

This is now often seen as one of Hitchcock’s most underrated films and is an idea of filmmaking that shows how a simple story can be done well as the whole film is set in one location and relies just on the acting and script to create suspense.

And there was also Hail the Conquering Hero,

a screwball comedy that acts as an amusing satire on the hero worship that was gripping the country. The film revolves around Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith (Eddie Bracken), a young boy who is discharged from the Army due to a medical condition but decides to lie to his mom that he served in the Battle of Guadalcanal. When he returns home, he finds that the word has gotten around and the whole town considers him their local hero despite the fact that he only served a month in the Army.

Making a cautionary tale about the dangers of hero worship when every other movie and work of art in the era was lauding the patriotism of our troops is a risky move but it works out well. This is up there with Sullivan’s Travels (1942) as one of the best movies made by Preston Sturges and its screenplay (the film’s sole Oscar nomination) is still considered by many screenwriters in the biz as one of the best ever written.

All three of these films are easily superior to Going My Way but we’re just getting started here. A lot more of the B-movies of the era continued to gain steam with some excellent outputs such as the horror movies (e.g. Cry of the Werewolf, The Lodger) and the Tales from the East (e.g. Kismet, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves) but, above all, the film noir. 1944 seems to have been the Year of the Noir as some of the best and most important crime thrillers of that era came out during this year.

We’re going to do some quick-hitters here to help contextualize the craze before giving more detail to one of the greatest noirs (and movies) for the feature presentation. But to begin going down the list, there’s Bluebeard,

a movie set in Paris and revolving around a serial killing artist with all the creative imagery that it entails. While not a great movie, it’s part of this noir boom and provides a curious blend between the noir as well as some echoes of the monster movies.

There’s also Ministry of Fear,

a film noir directed by Fritz Lang (whose haunting shadows in M (1931) and Fury (1936) is arguably where the roots for the genre began) that’s set during Blitz-stricken London and uses much of the rubble and ruins to emphasize its shadows (which may have in turn influenced The Third Man (1949), another great movie we’ll talk about later). This is also one of the most clinical of the film noirs, giving a pretty straightforward story.

Another big one was Gaslight.

The movie that won Ingrid Bergman an (incredibly well-deserved) Oscar, Gaslight details the marriage between Paula (Ingrid Bergman) and her husband, Gregory (Charles Boyer). The two move into a house on Gregory’s insistence and Paula begins to suspect that he might be engaging in criminal activities. Every time she confronts him about this, though, Gregory manages to convince her that she is just imagining things.

Gaslight stands out in the annals of film noir in that not only is it a very good crime drama with great use of shadows but it also depicts a tragic portrayal of spousal abuse. You really buy the relationship between these two and they definitely sell the emotional abuse that Paula is suffering. The film would make such an impact with its portrayal of spousal abuse, that its title would enter the pop culture lexicon (this movie is where the phrase ‘gaslighting’ comes from).

One of the most well-regarded noirs of that year is Laura,

often considered one of the best murder-mysteries ever made. A buxom, young advertising executive named Laura (Gene Tierney) has been murdered and the cynical Lieutenant McPherson (Dana Andrews) is on the trail to find her killer, weaving a web of all the uncanny and sinister characters who inhabited Laura’s social circle.

While the style and smart dialogue is what makes Laura good, what makes this especially stand out in the noir genre is how well-written the mystery is. One of the problems with noir is that the genre does sometimes takes a bit of style over substance and the murder-mysteries can be almost incomprehensible in some films, even ones that are hailed as masterpieces (e.g. The Big Sleep (1946)). Laura, on the other hand, never glitches. It’s a very good mystery that’s very easy to follow with a good cast of suspects (though the killer is admittedly easy to guess for the modern viewer), a great midpoint twist and some smart commentary.

But the best noir of 1944 has got to be Double Indemnity.

This movie stands right next to The Maltese Falcon (1941) as one of the greatest and most definitive of all the noirs and was a frontrunner at this year’s Academy Awards, ultimately taking home nothing. Double Indemnity revolves around a pair of insurance salesmen/claims adjusters, Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) and Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson). While selling claims around Los Angeles, Neff meets the beautiful Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) who seduces him. It isn’t long before their affair reaches the point that Phyllis convinces Neff to help take out a double indemnity life insurance policy on her husband (Tom Powers) and then murder him. The rest of the movie is them covering up the crime while Keyes acts as the main investigator on the case.

This is a great set-up and pushed the envelope in two regards. For one, this is one of the first crime thrillers to feature an in-depth portrayal of how to commit a murder and actually shows the act being committed on-screen. For another, Double Indemnity pioneered the idea of the femme fatale in cinema: a villainess who is a seductive and mysterious woman who uses her sex as a weapon. While having a woman be a villain is not a new archetype, Phyllis Dietrichson is the first woman villain to use her feminine charms for evil.

This movie is well before the sexual revolution of the 60s and yet marks an interesting transition of acknowledgment of women being more sexy. Even though Phyllis is pretty conservatively dressed by today’s standards, the movie spends a lot of time showing her in scantily-clad clothes, see-through shirts and very short skirts. This is a major risk for Hays Code-era Hollywood and may have been one of the films that helped equate sexual fluidity with evil characters in Hollywood. The harsh shadows and dark lighting that so defined the noir only adds to this feeling of sexual steaminess, heightening the mood of Walter Neff, who weaves a trail of death and destruction in his quest to keep Phyllis safe, stay out of jail and keep his best friend from finding out his crimes. (Fun fact: this is also the first noir to have the Venetian blinds effect, wherein the shadows behind some window blinds (or another similar object) gives the illusion of the character being behind prison bars.)

Of course, by today’s standards, Double Indemnity is pretty tame but that doesn’t mean it’s aged poorly. On the contrary, this is one of the best-aged films of any of the old-school movies I’ve watched for this blog. It’s still an excellent, tightly-written and fantastically paced thriller with a number of great twists and turns as it hurdles to its finale. It was highly lauded in its day and one critic even noted it as being in the same level of The Maltese Falcon and Citizen Kane (1941).

This was clearly the other frontrunner of the Academy Awards that year and the fact that it lost to Going My Way is something that would make anyone raise an eyebrow. There’s a story attached to this but, before we get to that, we have two other major films to talk about that were equally snubbed. First is 1944’s second-highest-grossing movie of the year (after Going My Way) and one of the greatest musicals of all time, Meet Me in St. Louis.

Set over the course of about 6 months, though a big chunk takes place during Christmastime, Meet Me in St. Louis revolves around an all-American family named the Smiths in St. Louis, Missouri around the turn of the century. The movie is mostly a series of vignettes just detailing the lives of the family, primarily the second-oldest daughter, Esther (Judy Garland) and her butting heads with her father, Lonnie (Leon Ames) and doting on her baby sister, Tootie (Margaret O’Brien). The film is notable for its songs, particularly “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas,” which has now become one of the staples of the holiday season (though it was “The Trolley Song” that was nominated for the Oscar for Best Original Song which it (undeservedly) lost to "Swinging on a Star" from Going My Way).

While slice-of-life musicals were pretty standard by this point (much of Judy Garland’s career was based off of this), and were getting pretty stale coming off of The Wizard of Oz (1939), Meet Me in St. Louis works better in two regards. The film was one of the first movies directed by Vincente Minnelli, a director whose name would become synonymous with many of the great epic musicals of the 1950s (e.g. An American in Paris (1951), Gigi (1958)) as well as numerous other melodramas (e.g. The Bad and the Beautiful (1953), The Cobweb (1955)). He’s a bit of a spiritual successor to Ernst Lubitsch  in that while his movies seem to border on being sappy or overdone, he never quite forgets the human element that makes them easier to love. As a result, he sits just on the right side of over-the-top.

Meet Me in St. Louis is a perfect demonstration of both of these aspects of his style. This is one of the first musicals to be shot entirely in Technicolor and the color damn near pops off the screen. It’s beautiful to look at with a lot of warm colors that can be either enchanting or threatening, depending entirely on what mood the film is aiming for at that point in time. His musical numbers also have a great sense of kinetic energy, like the above Trolley Song, and are a delight to watch.

But the movie doesn’t forget the human element. Judy Garland was one Hell of an actress, despite her tragic personal life, and she really nails down the right amount of emotion needed for this role. You believe she loves her sister, she’s angry at her dad, she likes the boy next door. These are all roles that had been done in other movies but you genuinely believe her and want to see her happy.

If Going My Way was meant to be the winner based on its accomplishments as a musical, then it fails miserably compared to Meet Me in St. Louis. The song sequences in Meet Me in St. Louis blow the ones in Going My Way out of the water. This is more energetic, more emotional, more delightful, more exciting, more beautiful and an all-around more charming film by every stretch of the imagination.

To close off this trifecta on the Success or Snub rundown, the last movie we have to look at is Since You Went Away.

This is where this choice seems really bizarre to me as 1944 was the only one of the Academy Awards to take place during the war years where a war drama didn’t win the Oscar for Best Motion Picture (as they finally started calling it this year). Coming off of Mrs. Miniver (1942) and Casablanca (1942), you’d think that Since You Went Away would be the next logical choice in terms of celebrating American involvement in World War II. Since You Went Away is basically the American equivalent to Mrs. Miniver, in that it’s an epic detailing the lives of a normal, suburban family that tries to survive after their lives have been uprooted by the war.

More specifically, the movie is about Anne Hilton (Claudette Colbert) and her daughters, Jane (Jennifer Jones) and Bridget (Shirley Temple), who struggle to make ends meet after Anne’s husband, Tim (who the audience never sees), volunteers to serve in the war. Whereas most movies of the war era show espionage adventures or actual battles, Since You Went Away brings it back home to the everyday American who struggles to make sacrifices on the homefront. It’s a very clever choice that all the members of the family are women who are used to being pampered and not having to work hard but have now lost the family’s breadwinner. They’re often resentful of the war and wish that it never occurred at all so things could go back to normal. But, over the course of the movie, and their encounters with some very interesting soldiers, they ultimately learn how to do their part to help on the homefront.

Since You Went Away avoids a lot of the preachiness of the era by creating very three-dimensional and interesting characters. While it still has a couple lectures near the end, they feel much more earned because we’ve seen how hard it is for the Hiltons to accept their duty. Plus, it also has one of the most iconic romantic movie scenes when Jane sees off her sweetheart, Corporal Smollett (Robert Walker), and chases down the train to say goodbye. This moment has been imitated and parodied numerous times throughout the years (my personal favorite being the one from Airplane! (1980)) but it’s surprisingly still effective because of how good the chemistry between the two are.

The movie isn’t perfect as it definitely could’ve trimmed some time and Shirley Temple’s acting as the younger daughter still falls into a lot of her typical schmaltziness but, overall, Since You Went Away is one of the most effective and powerful dramas of the war years. Claudette Colbert is especially excellent as the mom. The portrayal of strong motherhood in the face of the home front is a very underrated feminist icon and you really believe just how much she loves her husband. This thread is what carries through the film and, by the end of the movie, you’re hoping to see Tim even though you still don’t know what he looks like.

So these are all three of the best movies to come out of the early 40s and they all lost to Going My Way? How on Earth did this happen? Well, there is a story attached to this one that is a good chance to illustrate why these awards are not nearly as prestigious as the Hollywood studio heads would like to pretend that they are.

Going into this ceremony, Double Indemnity was the very clear frontrunner. It was lauded by every critic of note and noted for its step forward with its grim subject matter. Even Alfred Hitchcock wrote a letter to the director, Billy Wilder, saying that “Since Double Indemnity, the two most important words in motion pictures are Billy and Wilder.” As you can imagine, Wilder was on cloud nine and expecting some big things to happen when he attended the awards ceremony on March 15th, 1945.

Unfortunately, his studio bosses had different ideas. One of the biggest problems with the Academy, if not the biggest, both back then and now, is that for all their celebrations of pushing the envelope in cinema, they’re much more conservative in their taste than they like to let on. The studio heads wanted Going My Way to win and, back then (and likely now), it was expected for studio employees to vote for whatever the studio bosses wanted to win. So, no, this board of Academy Award wins were not actually democratically voted on by card-carrying members of the business but instead just laid down by what a handful of producers wanted and their employees being expected to kowtow. So even if the average member of the Academy thought that Double Indemnity was the best film of that year, they would’ve voted for Going My Way because their bosses said so.

But then why did they want Going My Way specifically? Well, probably the same reason why it was a hit in the first place: it had Bing Crosby doing a serious movie for once and people liked seeing that so they figured to capture the zeitgeist and shower him with awards. Once you get past the celebrity of it, there’s really not much in Going My Way’s favor and it is a very clearly inferior film to all the ones I just listed. If they wanted to give out the Outstanding Picture award for pushing the envelope, then they should’ve given the award to Double Indemnity. If they wanted to give out the award for Going My Way’s accomplishments as a musical, then they should’ve given the award to Meet Me in St. Louis. If they wanted to give out the award for being a feel-good movie, then they should’ve given the award to Since You Went Away.

To make matters worse, this is the year that the Academy truncated the number of nominees for Best Picture from ten down to five, a decision that wouldn’t be reversed until 2009, over 60 years later. It’s surprisingly difficult to find an exact reason why this actually happened as most articles I talk online just say that it happened. My best educated guess is that it was a cost-saving measure since the war was going on and it added symmetry to all the other awards (which were almost always a top 5). (Bette Davis actually proposed ending the Awards altogether during the war and using the money they would’ve spent on them to buy war bonds instead. This suggestion almost got her thrown out of Hollywood.) After the war ended, it was probably just inertia and added prestige to be in a top 5 instead of top 10. This is a very stupid reason as well as flat-out unfair considering how much Hollywood lives and dies by these awards. Several of the movies we just listed probably would’ve been nominated to a top 5 but because of the limits, it just leads to even more snubs.

If these awards are meant to recognize filmmaking accomplishments, why limit it to just 5? Why not make it 10? And I’m not talking about just the Best Motion Picture either. Neither of the insurance salesmen in Double Indemnity were nominated for Best Actor (in fact, Edward G. Robinson never once won a single Academy Award) and would’ve warranted a nod if they expanded it. There’s going to be countless performances, movies and screenplays that we’ll see down the line that are almost certainly top 10-worthy and wouldn’t warrant an acknowledgment. 

I didn’t even get to mention some other great movies that came out this year such as Arsenic and Old Lace (Frank Capra’s turn at a dark comedy and one of Cary Grant’s great comedic performances) and Bathing Beauty (also a great funny movie that has the famous pool ballet that’s another one of the most famous and parodied movie scenes ever). The only thing that all these movies don’t have that Going My Way did was Bing Crosby. And if that’s enough to win the Academy Award over, then clearly Road to Morocco (1942) should’ve won over Mrs. Miniver.

Wilder did not handle his loss well and got to experience his heartbreak in real time as he watched Going My Way slowly win a sweep at the Oscars. Hilariously, he stuck his leg out into the aisle and tripped Leo McCarey as McCarey went up to grab the Best Director Award. Then, while waiting for his limousine to arrive, Wilder shouted loud enough for everyone to hear, “What the Hell does the Academy Award mean, for God’s sake?!”

What indeed, Billy, what indeed. Giving Going My Way the Oscar for Best Motion Picture of 1944 (as well as almost every other award that it won; the fact that this movie is one of the bigger Academy Award winners in cinematic history, earning more trophies than even Casablanca (1942), honestly pisses me off) was a…

SNUB!

Personal Favorite Movies of 1944:

• Arsenic and Old Lace (dir. Frank Capra)
• Bathing Beauty (dir. George Sidney)
• Double Indemnity (dir. Billy Wilder)
• Laura (dir. Otto Preminger)
• Hail the Conquering Hero (dir. Preston Sturges)
• Meet Me in St. Louis (dir. Vincente Minnelli)
• None Shall Escape (dir. Andre DeToth)
• Sherlock Holmes and the Scarlet Claw (dir. Roy William Neill)
• Since You Went Away (dir. John Cromwell)
• The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress (dir. Major William Wyler)

Favorite Heroes:

• Amy Reed (Ann Carter) (The Curse of the Cat People)
• Anne Hilton (Claudette Colbert) (Since You Went Away)
• Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) (Double Indemnity)
• Constance Parker (Tallulah Bankhead) (Lifeboat)
• Jane Hilton (Jennifer Jones) (Since You Went Away)
• Lieutenant Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) (Laura)
• Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant) (Arsenic and Old Lace)
• Stephen Neale (Ray Milland) (Ministry of Fear)
• Steven Elliott (Red Skelton) (Bathing Beauty)
• Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith (Eddie Bracken) (Hail the Conquering Hero)

Favorite Villains:

• Barbara Farren (Elizabeth Russell) (The Curse of the Cat People)
• Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer) (Gaslight)
• Heidt (Dan Duryea) (The Woman in the Window)
• Jonathan Brewster (Raymond Massey) (Arsenic and Old Lace)
• Mr. Brocklehurst (Douglas Dumbrille) (Jane Eyre)
• Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) (Double Indemnity)
• The Murderer (Laura)
• The Nazi Spy Leader (Carl Esmond) (Ministry of Fear)
• Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) (Double Indemnity)
• Wilhelm Grimm (Alexander Knox) (None Shall Escape)