Success or Snub? The Lost Weekend (18th Academy Awards Review Pt. 2)

  To see part 1, click here.

Main Titles~Miklós Rósza - Mildred Pierce

On September 2nd, 1945, World War II officially ended when Japan surrendered to the United States. What followed was the most epic party in human history as everyone in the world had what can best be described as a week-long drunken rager. After the dust settled, though, things seemed a lot more unsure for the average American and the country was collectively nervous, thinking, “Now what?” While now we know that the time period immediately following the war was probably the most impressive level of economic growth in American history, they didn’t know that at the time. The war got America out of the Great Depression; now that the war was over, would they go back to the Depression?

In addition, the war ended when the atomic bomb(s) was detonated on Japan for the whole world to see. World War II was already the deadliest conflict in human history; now humanity had weapons that could actually end civilization as we know it. And another world war seemed to be right around the corner as America and the USSR were already starting to come to blows over what to do with a wartorn Europe. And to make it all worse, President Franklin Roosevelt, who led the country through the Great Depression and the World War and most Americans felt they personally knew as a friend from his radio fireside chats, had passed away in April of 1945, leaving the country in the hands of the untested Harry Truman.

This was the mood of the country when the Academy met on March 7th, 1946. While the Academy had decided to return to its past of being as ostentatious as possible (they cut back on some of the glamor for the war years), this mood of uncertainty can be seen in most of the frontrunners of the Academy Awards that year. Kinda. I mean, you still had your whimsical films on the docket but the majority of films up for grabs definitely seemed a bit darker or more psychologically intense than normal.

But, before we get to those, we should acknowledge some of the more historical markers, most of which fall into the aforementioned category. For example, this was the first year that a sequel was a frontrunner. The Bells of St. Mary’s (the sequel to Going My Way (1944))

was nominated for Best Picture as well as several other awards. You already know by now how I feel about Going My Way and this is basically the same movie although now you have a nun played by Ingrid Bergman for Crosby to play off of. I’ll give credit that it’s a bit more focused than Going My Way but I still wouldn’t call it a good movie and am pretty sure it only did well for the Crosbyness of it.

Two other landmarks in terms of technology also exist in the films The Three Caballeros

and Anchors Aweigh.

These were the two first films to feature animated characters interacting with live-action actors (though, for the sake of a record, The Three Caballeros came out first). The Three Caballeros features Donald Duck (Clarence Nash) and his compatriots doing Bahia dances with Brazilian dancers while Anchors Aweigh features a very long sequence of Gene Kelly dancing with Jerry the Mouse (Sara Berner; the fact that Jerry talks in this movie bothers me way more than it should). This is a very impressive technology breakthrough and pioneered the same general idea of technology that we use today for having actors interact with CGI characters.

Even ignoring these scenes, both movies are a ton of fun and I believe that this was Gene Kelly’s major breakout performance as an actor and started his career of doing incredible dance sequences. Neither film is quite movie of the year level though.

Switching gears to the darker films, this year continued the big film noir craze of the 40s. Going down the list, there was Dillinger (based off the life of the gangster of the same name)

Dick Tracy (a more family-friendly film noir; what it lacks in grittiness, it makes up for in the stylized lighting and fun crime story)

Hangover Square (a film with a truly bizarre plot that surprisingly works)

Scarlet Street (another one of Fritz Lang’s great films and one of the first movies to have a villain get away with their crimes... kinda)

and Detour (one of the most highly-regarded film noirs in spite of its shoddy production design and laughable budget).

While these are all pretty good films (with Scarlet Street especially being one of my favorite films of this era), the noir frontrunner at the Oscars that year was Mildred Pierce.

The film revolves around Mildred Pierce Beragon (Joan Crawford) whose second husband, Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott), has been murdered by her first husband, Bert Pierce (Bruce Bennett). When the police approach Mildred for questioning, she tells them her life story (as most characters in old-school melodramas are wont to do), detailing her contentious relationships with her two husbands as well as her daughters, Veda (Ann Blyth) and Kay (Jo Ann Marlowe).

Mildred Pierce has both a lot going for it and a lot going against it. The style is quintessential noir, with all the heavy shadows that it entails. The plot is also pretty good with the final twist of the mastermind behind the crimes being a very nice surprise. On the other hand, this film is also way, way too long for its own good and I’m not a big fan of Joan Crawford’s performance. While she does well at selling the tragedy of the character, the problem is that it feels like the character is almost entirely a tragedy and comes off as kinda one note. There’s not a whole lot of tenacity or iron to her character that I feel like you would get from a Vivien Leigh or Bette Davis (I’m sure Joan Crawford would love hearing that comparison). Compare her to Ann Blyth’s performance as Veda, who has the much more difficult performance to pull off and does so flawlessly.

I bring this up because this is one of the few times where I find one of the Best Acting wins egregious enough to want to devote some page time to it. Joan Crawford won the Oscar for Best Leading Actress for her role in this movie. This film was a favor to Crawford to give her a more serious role after spending the first 15-20 years of her career doing more "easy" roles and allow her to transition to becoming a serious actress. Crawford being Crawford, she lied that she was sick at home with pneumonia, forcing the Academy to bring the award to her house in-person. This award seems like it was made more to reinstate her as Hollywood royalty instead of actual quality reasons (especially since she had been fired from MGM two years before this due to contract disputes and she was complaining about that fact to anyone that would listen).

While Mildred Pierce is a good movie, it is not the best noir of this line-up and Crawford was not performance of the year. Particularly compared to the other frontrunner, Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven.

Leave Her to Heaven Suite~Leave Her to Heaven - Alfred Newman

Leave Her to Heaven is an awesomely twisted movie that blends the genres of romance, psychological thriller and, to a lesser extent, film noir all into one. The film details the whirlwind romance between author Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde) and socialite Ellen Berent (Gene Tierney), which slowly devolves into a fairly abusive relationship as Ellen wants to become more and more controlling of Richard’s attention. While the film starts off fairly slow, it’s one of those movies that gets better the further it goes on, to the point that the climax is downright Hitchcockian with how suspenseful it is.

Tierney’s performance as Ellen is masterful as she portrays the full gamut of emotions from possessive to charming to downright manipulative and sadistic. Yet she still possesses this strange vulnerability as you can tell that Ellen just wants to be loved and adored. A basic human need that we all want but perverted to a disturbing degree. Some of the deeds that Ellen commits in order to keep Richard under her thumb are also genuinely shocking to watch, even to this day. This is up there with The Lost Weekend in terms of challenging social mores on taboo topics. While I’m not saying this should’ve won Best Picture, I’m saying it should’ve been a frontrunner and Tierney’s performance is one for the ages and a severe snub for Best Actress. It’s also one of those movies where the less you know going in, the better it’ll be so forgive me if this description here is a bit brisk.

Another film genre that received a big boost that year was the coming-of-age genre as two all-time classics hit the theater in the forms of National Velvet

and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

National Velvet is the more fun of the two as it revolves around Velvet Brown (Elizabeth Taylor), a horse-obsessed girl living in rural England and her adventures training and taking care of a horse alongside her best friend/quasi-love interest, Mi Taylor (Mickey Rooney), while under the watchful eyes of her strict but loving parents, Herbert (Donald Crisp) and Araminty (Anne Revere). While it’s a more fun film, it still has a great narrative of a young girl confronting the sexist world of horse jockeying and strikes a great balance of being fun without being overly schmaltzy (which is a major accomplishment for this era).

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn tells a more philosophical story as it centers around the lower-middle-class family called the Nolans living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, particularly on its oldest daughter, Francie (Peggy Ann Garner). The film mostly details their day-to-day lives in struggling with poverty and making ends meet as seen through the eyes of a child that’s slowly coming to grips with this fact. The film also touches on a very obvious allegory in the form of the titular tree that the family is growing in its backyard and how it keeps growing back even after getting trimmed again and again.

While A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was more well-regarded at the time, National Velvet has aged better. Both Elizabeth Taylor and Peggy Ann Garner give really impressive performances, especially given this time where most child actors and actresses still subscribed to the Shirley Temple school of acting in being as schmaltzy as possible. Both of these performances are far superior to Joan Crawford’s in Mildred Pierce and should have at the very least been nominated for the Oscar for Best Actress.

Once again, however, this series is meant to criticize Oscar winners, particularly for Best Picture, not necessarily films that were just frontrunners at the Academy Awards. So while Mildred Pierce didn’t deserve the accolades (in terms of just noir that year, I’d argue Scarlet Street, Detour and Leave Her to Heaven as being all superior films), we’re missing the forest for the trees here. While National Velvet, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Leave Her to Heaven are all excellent movies, The Lost Weekend still pushed the envelope more.

If we’re going to compare this award based on movies that did their best to pioneer new film styles, then probably the best comparison to The Lost Weekend would be Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound.

Main Theme~Spellbound - Miklós Rósza

Dr. Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman) is a psychoanalyst working at Green Manors Mental Hospital in Vermont. Her world is upended when she meets her new colleague, Dr. Anthony Edwardes (Gregory Peck) and becomes smitten with him. As they pursue a relationship, however, she slowly discovers that he is actually fairly mentally ill, has trouble remembering his past and, most interestingly, may not even be who he says he is. Dr. Petersen then tries to pull out all the stops to both treat him as a patient as well as discover the solution to this mystery.

While I’m sure that the psychoanalysis depicted in this film is not even remotely accurate by today’s standards, the fact that a movie in 1945 was willing to tackle a subject as complex and intense as mental health is very interesting. It’s got a good mystery and great acting but what really stands out are the therapy scenes. The highlight of the film is a trippy sequence wherein Dr. Petersen helps Dr. Edwardes talk through one of his dreams and the imagery, designed by Salvador Dalí, is just straight-up awesome. It’s also one of the most famous lost scenes as it was originally designed to be 20 minutes long but was eventually trimmed down to just over 2 minutes. The remaining 18 minutes were left on the cutting room floor and are now presumed lost. Granted, while 20 minutes seems like it would destroy the pacing of the film, it’s still a shame we probably will never see the full thing, even if just as a deleted scene.

This kind of boundary-pushing is what made Hitchcock so great and makes for a truly excellent movie. Even ignoring this singular scene, however, Spellbound is an excellent thriller. I’ve also heard how it pioneers the “strong female” archetype in that Ingrid Bergman’s character is the only woman in the mental hospital who constantly pushes against all the superior men in her life but they don’t beat you over the head with it.

If we’re going to compare The Lost Weekend to any other film genre that was culturally relevant, then we must return to the last year of contemporary WWII pictures (and I do emphasize the word contemporary because I think more films have been made about WWII than every other war in history combined). Two in particular are worth homing in on here.

First is The Story of G.I. Joe,

based on the journals written by real-life war correspondent, Ernie Pyle, and the stories he told about American soldiers on the ground in Italy. These newspaper columns that he wrote back from the front helped greatly humanize the war for the Americans back home and probably helped influence the majority of the movies we’ve seen here. Pyle would tragically be killed in action during the Battle of Okinawa and this film was released as a tribute to his writings, two months to the day after his death.

The Story of G.I. Joe uses Pyle (Burgess Meredith) as a framing device to follow the fictional C Company during their campaign through Tunisia and Italy, with prominent focus on the leader, Lieutenant Bill Walker (Robert Mitchum). This is the film that would turn Mitchum into a star, who would go on to be most often associated with many anti-heroic and villainous roles in film noirs and horror films through the 50s (e.g. Out of the Past (1947), The Night of the Hunter (1955), Cape Fear (1962)). While Mitchum’s main acting style for these latter roles were defined by being sleazy and laidback, that attitude translates here into making him seem very world-weary and tired. This is a man who’s been in the war way too long and is clearly sick of the death that constantly surrounds him. But he’s still a soldier and will keep fighting to keep his men alive to the end.

Unlike most other contemporary war films, which come off as very celebratory and cheering of American involvement, The Story of G.I. Joe was one of the first WWII films to really show the living Hell that fighting through the war was actually like. These men are dirty, covered in parasites and surrounded by death and destruction every day of their lives. The acting is pretty dialed back for the most part, just presenting the world as it is for this company. It largely aims at being the American equivalent to All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).

Unfortunately, that comparison does illustrate the thing that holds The Story of G.I. Joe back from being a true masterpiece. This is another film that seems to have been ruined from the Hays Code as I think this movie needs a much higher gore level and more horrifying cases of death and destruction than it has to work as an effective portrayal of the war. If you compare it to All Quiet on the Western Front or (a much later example but still good to show what I mean) Saving Private Ryan (1998), you can see that the soul-crushing grimness seems to be missing from this film. Though I guess the movie might not have been in a rush to really make it that horrific since this movie would’ve been shown to audiences while the war was still going on so maybe it’s for the best in the long run.

The best and most boundary-pushing war film of the year, though, as well as the biggest snub, would’ve been Pride of the Marines.

Loosely based on the real-life story of Private Al Schmid (John Garfield), this a very grim and powerful portrayal of a marine coming home to American life after the war. Specifically, Private Schmid is blinded by a grenade during the Battle of Guadalcanal and the loss of his sight depresses him beyond all hope. Having lost his independence and being forced to depend on others to help him navigate the world around him, he starts lashing out and wants everyone in his life to leave him so he can waste away.

This movie is on par with The Lost Weekend in showing a grim portrayal of a man being totally consumed by his demons and unable to accept the outstretched hands of his family and loved ones. Garfield is excellent as Private Schmid, showing both the heroism of a Marine during the opening battle scene and then becoming ruthlessly depressed at the loss of one of his senses. It adds to the power of the character as you can tell that he feels that he should be rewarded for his heroism or his duty to his country but is instead left blind. His increasing lashing out at his family feels very real and if you’ve ever gone through a particularly bad bout of depression, or know someone who has, these conversations can feel very familiar and timeless.

Now comparing it to The Lost Weekend, in total fairness, there’s not really any new filmmaking techniques that Pride of the Marines really pioneered. However as far as war dramas go, this is one of the best of the war years and could’ve easily hit home for a moviegoing crowd coming home from World War II, especially those who were injured or disabled. I honestly have no idea why this wasn’t nominated for the Academy Award, though, looking at how most of the frontrunners weren’t war-related, I think the Academy was eager to put the war behind them. Kind of a weird mindset for a crowd that just won the biggest, most generation-defining war in human history but I digress.

We could delve into this further but I’m getting away from the point here. What I find fascinating about 1945 in cinema is how many of these films come off as very psychological and seem to be tackling themes of mental health. The Lost Weekend, Spellbound and Pride of the Marines are all films that really seemed like they would speak to WWII veterans dealing with trauma or substance abuse, acknowledging the dangers of male pride and showing how it’s okay to seek the support and love of others, particular their wives and girlfriends (in all three films, the main character is eventually rescued from his demons by the female lead). Leave Her to Heaven seems to tackle the same themes as well, just from a gender-swapped and more sinister point of view.

These are all excellent movies. While I think the Academy was expecting to give the award to a more optimistic picture, and may have given the award just to assuage Billy Wilder’s ego after the previous year, the fact of the matter is that The Lost Weekend is a genuinely phenomenal movie and you could make the argument for it being the best movie of 1945. In fact, you could make that argument for most of the movies mentioned here. I think it gets down to the point that making a single award choice between several movies that are all great is kind of foolish at this point but that is a discussion for another day.

Calling The Lost Weekend the best motion picture of 1945 was a…

SUCCESS!

Personal Favorite Movies of 1945:

• Captain Kidd (dir. Rowland V. Lee)
• Dick Tracy (dir. William A. Berke)
• Leave Her to Heaven (dir. John M. Stahl)
• National Velvet (dir. Clarence Brown)
• Pride of the Marines (dir. Delmer Daves)
• Scarlet Street (dir. Fritz Lang)
• Spellbound (dir. Aflred Hitchcock)
• State Fair (dir. Walter Lang)
• The Lost Weekend (dir. Billy Wilder)
• The Three Caballeros (dir. Norman Ferguson)

Favorite Heroes:

• Dr. Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman) (Spellbound)
• Gunner's Mate Joe Brady (Gene Kelly) (Anchors Aweigh)
• Helen St. James (Jane Byman) (The Lost Weekend)
• Ruth Hartley (Eleanor Parker) (Pride of the Marines)
• Velvet Brown (Elizabeth Taylor) (National Velvet)

Favorite Villains

• Captain William Kidd (Charles Laughton) (Captain Kidd)
• Chris Cross (Edward G. Robinson) (Scarlet Street)
• Ellen (Gene Tierney) (Leave Her to Heaven)
• Johnny Prince (Dan Duryea) (Scarlet Street)
• Russell Quinton (Vincent Price) (Leave Her to Heaven)