Success or Snub? The Best Years of Our Lives (19th Academy Awards Review Pt. 2)

 To see part 1, click here.

The Battle of Agincourt~Henry V - Sir William Walton

I’m probably going to start sounding like a broken record at times during this blog so please forgive me if I keep harping on this point. In our last blog, we discussed how The Best Years of Our Lives was a big deal at the time but has ultimately aged fairly poorly. Now, we’re going to look at some of the other biggest movies of 1946, many of which were also big deals back then and have aged tremendously well.

Noirs continued in heavy spades, with several classics coming out in 1946 such as The Postman Always Rings Twice

Gilda

The Big Sleep

The Blue Dahlia

The Killers

The Spiral Staircase

and The Stranger.

All are stylized, cool and have a minimum level of quality that makes them worth watching but we’ve got bigger fish to fry today.

A truly great film that’s somewhat noir-adjacent that we must mention in more detail is Alfred Hitchcock’s espionage romance/thriller Notorious.

Similar to Shadow of a Doubt (1942), this movie presents an evolution in Hitchcock’s style in that this is the first film of his to seriously tackle relationship drama and jealousy that is so omnipresent in many of his later masterpieces. While he has had romance in his films before, they were mostly there as window-dressing or crowd-pleasers (in the sense that audiences back then, and now, just like to see the two protagonists get with each other at the end). In Notorious, the sexual tension is so intrinsic to the story, that if you took out the romance, the film wouldn’t be the same.

The film revolves around a spy named Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) and her handler/contact T.R. Devlin (Cary Grant). Alicia is assigned to track down and steal a hidden code from an escaped Nazi, Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains), by seducing him. To make this more complicated, Devlin and Alicia have fallen in love with each other, which adds some jealousy to when he has to watch her seduce Sebastian. These layers between the three main characters is already a good setup. Now add to it the suspenseful, nerve-wracking scenarios that Hitchcock was a master at dreaming up, and you have a very good film.

Moving onto the other classic genre of the era with another classic film director, John Ford released what is widely considered one of the greatest Westerns of the 1940s, My Darling Clementine.

Based off of Wyatt Earp’s (Henry Fonda) infamous gunfight in Tombstone, Arizona (which I think is the single event that has had more Westerns based off of it than any other event in the 19th Century), the film set the standard for Western films of the 40s and 50s. Similar to how Stagecoach wrote most of the clichés of the genre, with its gorgeous panoramic views of the desert, My Darling Clementine ups the ante by introducing the art of Technicolor into this world, truly bringing the Western to life.

The film also redefines and establishes many Western tropes that had already been experimented with. You have the colorful characters that encompass the posse, the love interest who seems to have lost her soul and the nasty, scenery-chewing villain who enjoys killing a little too much. My Darling Clementine is very well-paced with one of the better cast of characters of this type of genre, though my personal nitpick is that I think it does spend a little too much time on the romance instead of focusing on Earp cleaning up the town. Of course, this same aspect is part of what makes it so celebrated so I’m splitting hairs here.

Both Notorious and My Darling Clementine are excellent and would be worthy competitors to The Best Years of Our Lives. Unfortunately, neither were nominated for the Oscar for Best Motion Picture, even if I’d venture to say that they’re better and more well-regarded movies today than the actual winner. The biggest competitors that year were The Razor’s Edge

(a movie that tackles similar themes to The Best Years of Our Lives but much more slow-paced and boring) and actually a foreign film: Laurice Olivier’s Henry V.

This was released in England in 1944, made largely as a propaganda film to drum up support for the British invasion of Normandy. It was also originally called The Chronicle History of Henry the Fifth with His Battell Fought at Agincourt in France though on re-releases, and its release in America, it was truncated to Henry V. Based on the William Shakespeare play of the same name, it primarily depicts King Henry V’s (Laurence Olivier) battle to invade Agincourt, France and conquer it for the English Plantagenet dynasty. It’s rare that you see a Shakespeare play that doubles as a propaganda movie, especially considering how both the movie and real-life revolved around invasions of France, but this proud Britishness seems to simmer off of every frame of the film.

This movie is significant as a milestone for a couple reasons. For starters, it’s the movie that put Laurence Olivier on the map, who is often considered one of the greatest and most illustrious English actors of the 20th Century. For second, this was the first Shakespeare adaptation that was an actual smash hit. This, in turn, would lead to a slew of Shakespearean adaptations that would come along in the late 40s and early 50s, many of which we’ll be looking at in due time. And, finally, Henry V also stands out as a spectacle, showing large medieval battle scenes. These types of epic scales were scaled back (pun intended) during the war years so seeing this type of spectacle on the big screen again must’ve been a treat for American audiences. The movie was a big enough deal that it won an Academy Honorary Award which, as we’ve come to learn, is basically the Academy’s way of honoring films that they think is equal to or better than the actual winner in terms of influence but don’t actually award it because of studio politics.

That having been said, this is definitely not one of the best Shakespeare adaptations and I think falls into the category we mentioned previously of obnoxious propaganda films that we’ve talked about in prior installments. The movie cuts out some of Henry V’s nastier actions from the play and I’d venture to say about 50% of the dialogue in the film is constantly talking about how awesome King Henry V and England is.

Though while we’re over here across the pond, this does allow us to transition into going back to one of my favorite punching bags of the Academy, specifically in how frequently they snub foreign films and refuse to take them into consideration. The history of European cinema in the wake of WWII is one of the most illustrious and complex tales of cinematic history and ultimately gave birth to several movements that in turn influenced American cinema in its own way. From the year 1946 up through the 60s, European cinema in particular really began revolutionizing in a big way. This is a lot more complex than I’m going to get into but it’s going to be a drumbeat that we’re going to frequently return to in the blogs to come.

With that preface in mind, three of the greatest movies to ever come out of their respective countries saw their Stateside release in 1946: the British romance Brief Encounter, the French epic Les Enfants du Paradis (Eng.: Children of Paradise) and the Italian war drama, Roma, Cittá Aperta (Eng.: Rome, Open City).

Brief Encounter Suite~Brief Encounter - Sergei Rachmaninoff

Taking them one at a time, Brief Encounter is a very gripping film despite its very simplistic story. The film depicts Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson), a British middle-class woman with a husband and children, who briefly encounters the equally married British middle-class man, Dr. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard). The two hit it off and the film depicts their friendship that slowly blossoms into a romance over the course of several weeks. Eventually, the two start contemplating infidelity and taking the next step.

What makes this movie great is that it avoids many of the clichés that one would expect from a movie of this set-up and that would be done in a more modern, more cynical film. Laura is not unhappily married. Her husband (Cyril Raymond) is sweet, loving and supportive. She is not hurting for money, she’s comfortable. And Alec Harvey is not a villainous character either. This is just the story of two people falling in love and struggling to reconcile their emotions with their morals. They miss that spark of being desired by a total stranger, of the feeling of young love and want to experience it again. This is a very identifiable conflict and I’m sure is one that more people have experienced than they would care to admit.

Brief Encounter is often celebrated as one of the greatest British films ever and provides a much more subdued and artistic look and celebration of British culture and morals than Henry V. It was actually given some Oscar nods with Best Director, Best Leading Actress and Best Original Screenplay; the movie itself however wasn’t nominated for Best Picture. Almost seems like truncating the number of nominees from 10 to 5 was a stupid idea but I digress.

Children of Paradise was advertised in America as the French answer to Gone With the Wind (1939) which is a fairly appropriate way of looking at it. Set in the French theater of the 1830s, Children of Paradise takes place in a theater neighborhood colloquially known as the Boulevard of Crime (not because it was a dangerous area but because there were so many crime melodramas occurring on-stage every night). The film centers around a courtesan named Garance (Arletty) who is pursued by four different men: the mime Baptiste Deburau (Jean-Louis Barrault), who falls in love after seeing her on stage and is the de facto hero of the piece; the foppish actor Frédérick Lemaitre (Pierre Brasseur), who dreams of actually acting in a good play; the poet/thief Pierre-Francois Lacenaire (Marcel Harrand), whose hyper-masculine attitude seems to make him the Rhett Butler here (although Lacenaire is a much more villainous character) and the aristocrat Édouard de Montray (Louis Salou), who thinks that his money can buy everything which leaves him surprised at Garance’s independence.

Children of Paradise was released in Paris in 1945 before making it Stateside a year later. And, in case you’re wondering, yes, this movie was shot while the Nazis still occupied France. This actually lends a few interesting pieces of historiography to Children of Paradise as a result. The Nazi film industry was pretty stingy about releasing films longer than 90 minutes (let alone 3 hours) so the director, Marcel Carné, simply split the film into two movies and would show them right after the other (as well as charging twice the price of admission in the process). Its set also served as an undercover day job for many members of the French Resistance who worked as extras alongside actual Nazis who were supervising.

With five main characters and a true feast for the eyes, Children of Paradise serves as a celebration both of France but also of the craft of theater, clearly directed by a man who loved both. While it does drag at times (oh Lord, does it drag), it serves as a nice celebration of French culture in a time when France was just regaining its bearings. It also handles this celebration of its culture in a much more artistic and dignified way than 90% of British and American films during the war years. It’s now often regarded as one of the greatest movies ever made and a landmark in French cinema. There’s an old urban legend that says that, even now, Children of Paradise is screened somewhere in Paris every single day.

Of these three, though, Rome, Open City would be my choice for the snub of a foreign film that should’ve won the award. Partly because I think it’s a bit more economical in its time, partly also because the behind-the-scenes production of this story is downright insane. If you thought it was weird that Children of Paradise was made while France was occupied; Rome, Open City one-ups that by being a film denouncing German Nazis and Italian Fascists while Rome was an actual war zone. (If you want to split hairs and get technical here, the filming began after Mussolini’s Fascist government had officially fled Rome but I’ll counter with a couple caveats. One, the film’s pre-production must’ve been occurring during the occupation. Two, even if the army officially fled, there would still have fascist-sympathetic citizens and armed skirmishes breaking out.)

The story is a searing indictment of Italian Fascism and the German war machine that helped perpetuate it. A pair of resistance fighters, Giorgio (Marcello Pagliero) and Francesco (Francesco Grandjacquet), are on the run from the Nazis and hide out in the home of Francesco’s fiancée, Pina (Anna Magnani). As they shelter in Pina’s apartment, they convince a local priest named Don Pietro (Aldo Fabrizi) to help them transfer messages to fellow resistance fighters. Don Pietro serves as the Rick Blaine of this story, acting as an allegory of the Catholic Church during World War II as he starts off hesitant to join the Resistance but slowly joins and defends the rebels as he realizes it’s the truly Christian thing to do. (For context, the Church was formally neutral during WWII but numerous members of the clergy secretly undermined the Holocaust whenever possible and the Pope slowly but steadily became more outspoken against the Axis Powers as the war went on.)

While the film is a celebration of Italian resistance against Fascist rule, it also serves as an important pioneer in neorealism. Neorealism refers to a film movement that came to define Italian cinema in the post-war years (and eventually spread to the rest of Europe) and basically refers to a filmmaking style where the movies would depict more slice-of-life type stories, usually steeped in the poor and working class. The films would often cast non-professional actors to make the acting feel more realistic and the shooting style would be very clinical and not have much in the way of fancy cinematography. While Rome, Open City does stand out from many other neorealist films in that it does have a three-act structure and professional actors playing the protagonists, there are a lot of scenes clearly populated by everyday Italians and the movie takes its loving time in its pace that feels very out-of-place compared to most modern films.

The debate between the realistic style that rose in postwar Europe and the more stylized style that remained Hollywood’s bread and butter was one of the great filmmaking debates of the middle of the 20th Century. Neorealism would eventually be incorporated into and eclipsed by the French New Wave which in turn influenced the New Hollywood generation of the late 60s going into the 70s. This blog isn’t really about the difference between the two styles and which is better as there have been entire books written about it and I do have my own personal reservations with the style. But to get to the point, this was a whole new type of movie being made and it did make a pretty big splash in America at the time and brought international attention to Italian cinema. This should have been nominated at the Oscars and yet the only award it was nominated for was the Oscar for Best Screenplay.

This is normally where we would start comparing this in-depth on the choices but we still have one more movie to get through. And it’s actually an American movie. We’re going to take a look at one of the most beloved movies of all time directed by one of the most beloved directors of all time, Frank Capra’s magnum opus, It’s A Wonderful Life.

It's A Wonderful Life Suite~It's A Wonderful Life - Dimitri Tiomkin

Similar to The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Walt Disney’s initial lineup, It’s A Wonderful Life is a cherished part of Americana and is one of the few films from the Golden Age of Hollywood that the average person is most likely to have seen. Or, if they haven’t seen it, they’ll be familiar with the set-up at least. The head of a small town savings & loans company, George Bailey (Bobby Anderson as a child, James Stewart as an adult), has had one run of bad luck too many and, after one particularly lousy Christmas Eve, he decides to commit suicide. He is stopped at the last second, however, by his guardian angel, Clarence Oddbody (Henry Travers), who tells George just what a wonderful life he has by showing a world in which he was never born.

This is one of the most famous movie set-ups of all time but what’s really surprising to first-time viewers are two aspects: how well-paced it is and how depressing it is. It’s well past the halfway mark when Clarence shows up as most of the movie is showing George’s life. And, despite the title, his life can very easily be seen as unhappy. George grew up dreaming of traveling the world but spends most of his life systematically sacrificing his hopes and dreams in order to save his community and loved ones. If you haven’t seen this movie since you were a kid, I highly recommend you give it a rewatch as it does get better the older you get. You can’t fully appreciate George’s conflict until you’ve been screwed over by life like this. And James Stewart is chillingly good at the role. He is such a warm, generous person but you can always feel that seething, burning resentment beneath everything he says and does that builds and builds as the film goes on.

Most of the rest of the cast is equally excellent. Henry Travers is great as this ditz of an angel that means well, George’s relationship with his girlfriend and eventual wife Mary (Jean Gale as a child, Donna Reed as an adult) is one of the great movie romances, you come to feel like you know most of the people who live in Bedford Falls, but by far the most interesting character is George’s nemesis and rival businessman, Mr. Henry F. Potter (Lionel Barrymore). It really is amazing how for a movie that seems to believe in the goodness of mankind, made by a director who frequently preached the same belief, this probably has Capra’s most flat-out evil villain. While It’s A Wonderful Life is not as inherently political as Capra’s last couple of films, there’s still a pretty clear commentary on George’s method of business helping out his community versus Potter’s more parasitic greed that seeks to ruin the local community for a quick buck. What makes it even better is how against type it was for Lionel Barrymore. This was an actor known for playing kindly and grandfatherly roles so giving him a role this nasty and evil must’ve been a real shock for audiences back then and makes some of his downright repulsive lines (for example) have that much more impact.

Everything about this movie is either perfect or close to it. The cinematography and lighting is astounding, perfectly changing to the mood of the film at any given point in time (compare the Gaussian Girl effect during George and Mary’s love scenes to the dark and apocalyptic lighting during the Potterville sequences). The writing hits just the right note of schmaltzy while acknowledging the darker parts of humanity and the human psyche. And it all climaxes in one of the greatest movie scenes ever once George realizes what a wonderful life he has (obvious spoiler warning). After watching him just get beaten up by life again and again, it’s really hard not to smile at this finale no matter how hard you try.

Looking back at this choice so many years later, it seems almost like no contest. It’s A Wonderful Life is not only a better movie than The Best Years of Our Lives but also a darker, more powerful and more well-paced one. It’s pretty easy to compare these two movies and see it as a snub but this is the point when I must re-stress that if we’re going to criticize the history of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, we should be fair and criticize them for their thinking at the time. And once again, the key words are “at the time.” And this is where the history of these two movies gets really interesting.

If you know anything about the story behind It’s A Wonderful Life, you know that it wasn’t that big of a deal when it came out. Contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t a failure with critics as many believe. In fact, many critics considered it probably the only (American) film that came out that year that was in the same league as The Best Years of Our Lives. Capra privately fumed that the studio insisted that the film be released in the last week of 1946 to qualify it for the Oscar. His thinking was the movie was no contest for The Best Years of Our Lives and would’ve stood a stronger chance in 1947. While that may or may not be true, and It’s A Wonderful Life was nominated for all the big awards, it was completely ignored in favor of The Best Years of Our Lives.

On the audience side of things, while the film didn’t bomb, it still failed to recoup its budget and had a mediocre return at the box office. Audiences in 1946 seemed to like either much more cynical and dark movies that talked about serious problems or just completely pop entertainment. It’s A Wonderful Life falls into neither category. If you look at the top 10 grossing movies of the year (The Best Years of Our Lives, Duel in the Sun, The Jolson Story etc.), you can see that they all fall into one of these two categories. And while George Bailey does go to a pretty dark place, his whole life is still permeated by the feel-good Capra-ness that defines all of his films.

In addition, the movie also shows George interacting with numerous aspects of the then-past 30 years of American history, most of which were horrible to live through and audiences would probably prefer to forget. We see how George reacts to the Spanish Flu, the Great Depression and, eventually, World War II. In the last case, it’s a major plot point that George is the only man in his town who doesn’t get the opportunity to serve his country due to a hearing disability while his younger brother (Georgie Nokes as a child, Todd Karns as an adult) earns the Congressional Medal of Honor. It’s a powerful moment and you can see how it adds to his resentment, but it’s also easy to see how actual veterans in the audience and Academy members who want to acknowledge their service would’ve preferred watching a movie detailing the plights of people who had actually served in the war.

Honestly, I think It’s A Wonderful Life just missed the boat by a couple years. As the 40s went on and grew into the 50s, and the postwar boom seemed more and more apparent, you can see the pop culture of cinema get more and more upbeat again. It never quite returns to the schmaltziness and glisten of the 30s but it’s also not quite as dour as the 40s. (This is, of course, just a general rule of thumb; there are obviously dark films that came out in the 50s and cheerful movies that came out in the 40s but it’s just a good way to gauge pop culture at the time.) If It’s A Wonderful Life had come out only 3-5 years later, it might’ve made more of a splash than it did.

But in 1946, audiences weren’t really in the mood to buy it. It’s a Wonderful Life was largely forgotten about until its copyright expired in the 70s due to a clerical error. Since the film then fell into the public domain, television stations happily utilized the now-free film to fill up time blocks, usually screening it during Christmastime. Audiences that were now a generation removed appreciated the film much more and it has become a beloved classic and is now considered one of the greatest movies of all time and a staple of the holiday season. It’s fascinating to see how the public’s fickleness can change as the years go on and it’ll be interesting to see what box office failures of today become the great movies of tomorrow.

Getting back to the task at hand, you can see why the Academy would’ve chosen The Best Years of Our Lives over It’s A Wonderful Life at the time. It might seem like a strange decision now but that’s the way the die rolls. The bigger question here is comparing it to the three foreign films I’ve mentioned. Rome, Open City is an especially phenomenal movie that probably proved the biggest splash in a new filmmaking style since Citizen Kane (1941) (although admittedly not that big).

We’ve discussed before how it has taken far too long for the Academy to start giving foreign cinema the acknowledgment it deserves and it should not have taken until 2019 for a non-English-speaking film to win the Oscar for Best Picture. That having been said, this is a choice where I think we can understand why they made it. In the year immediately following the worst war in human history, it’s understandable that the American Academy would be more acknowledging a film about American veterans over Italian freedom-fighters or French culture. And, as mentioned in the previous blog, The Best Years of Our Lives was considered a big deal when it came out and considered one of the best movies ever made at the time. It just hasn’t aged with the grace that would make you want to go back to it. But in 1946, we can understand it.

Calling The Best Years of Our Lives the Best Motion Picture of 1946 was a…

SUCCESS!

Personal Favorite Movies of 1946:

• Brief Encounter (dir. David Lean)
• It's A Wonderful Life (dir. Frank Capra)
• Make Mine Music (dir. Jack Kenney, Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton Luske, Joshua Meador and Robert Cormack)
• My Darling Clementine (dir. John Ford)
• Notorious (dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
• Road to Utopia (dir. Hal Walker)
• Roma Cittá Aperta (Rome, Open City) (dir. Roberto Rossellini)
• The Killers (dir. Robert Siodmak)
• The Postman Always Rings Twice (dir. Tay Garnett)
• The Stranger (dir. Orson Welles)

Favorite Heroes:

• Anna Owens (Irene Dunne) (Anna and the King of Siam)
• Captain Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) (The Best Years of Our Lives)
• Don Pietro Pellegrini (Aldo Fabrizi) (Roma, Cittá Aperta (Rome, Open City))
• Duke Johnson and Chester Hoonton (Bing Crosby and Bob Hope) (Road to Utopia)
• George Bailey (Bobby Anderson as a child, James Stewart as an adult) (It's A Wonderful Life)
• Johnny Fedora (Make Mine Music)
• Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) (Brief Encounter)
• Mary Rankin (Loretta Young) (The Stranger)
• Mr. Wilson (Edward G. Robinson) (The Stranger)
• Petty Officer Homer Parrish (Harold Russell) (The Best Years of Our Lives)

Favorite Villains:

• Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains) (Notorious)
• Frank Chambers and Cora Smith (John Garfield and Lana Turner) (The Postman Always Rings Twice)
• Isabel Bradley (Gene Tierney) (The Razor's Edge)
• Major Bergmann (Henry Feist) (Roma, Cittá Aperta (Rome, Open City))
• Marie Derry (Virginia Mayo) (The Best Years of Our Lives)
• Mr. Henry F. Potter (Lionel Barrymore) (It's A Wonderful Life)
• Newman Clanton (Walter Brennan) (My Darling Clementine)
• Pierre-Francois Lacenaire (Marcel Herrand) (Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise))
• Professor Charles Rankin (Orson Welles) (The Stranger)
• The Creeper (Rondo Hatton) (House of Horrors)