Success or Snub? Hamlet (21st Academy Awards Review Pt. 2)

  To see part 1, click here.

Louisiana Story Suite~Louisiana Story - Virgil Thomson

Starting this year, the Academy Awards ceremony was moved to a private theater that was owned by the Academy itself as opposed to previous years when they would be hosted at theaters owned by major studios. This was done because of “rumors” that studios were putting pressure on Academy members to fix the votes so the Academy wanted to make things more above-board. You and I both know that this probably accomplished jack and squat but, nevertheless, this sort of internal pressure would do a lot to explain why a British film finally won the Academy Award for Best Picture this year.

Anyway, this is another one of those years where the winner was such a clear runaway that it can be a little difficult ascertaining what was the biggest competitor and also what could have and/or should have won in the place of Hamlet. But we’re not letting it go down without a fight.

If you’ve been following this blog series for a while, you’ll know that we have certain figures in American film history whose names keep popping up. These are the figures whose films still remain in the pop cultural lexicon so many years later despite their tendency to rarely, if ever, have won the Academy Awards. Yet, by some weird coincidence, 1948 marks the year that they had somewhat lesser outputs.

Walt Disney, as mentioned previously, hit a bit of a slump period during the war as he struggled to recoup costs on his films. The result was a series of anthology films and experimenting with live-action movies. In this year, that resulted in Melody Time

and So Dear to My Heart.

Melody Time is probably the most consistently good of Disney’s anthology films (with the Johnny Appleseed skit being a particular highlight) but none of them come anywhere near as close to Fantasia (1940).

So Dear to My Heart, meanwhile, is Disney’s love letter to his own childhood growing up in rural Missouri. Considering how it’s a nostalgic kids’ film made by Walt Disney, the film is not as syrupy or vomit-inducing as you would think. Of course, we’re grading that factor on a bell curve and basing that statement compared to Shirley Temple films and Song of the South (1947) so it’s not saying all that much. The movie is fine for a kids’ film, however, and also marks the first appearance of Professor Owl, a character that appears in multiple other Disney properties (there’s your fun trivia fact for the day).

From Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, there was The Red Shoes.

Coming off of A Matter of Life and Death (1946), this is a bit of a straighter story as it details the struggles of a ballerina troupe, particularly young Vicky Page (Moira Shearer) who must choose between her love and her art. This is a trope that has been done before in films such as Maytime (1937) and The Jazz Singer (1928) but few have done it as elegantly as this film. While this is often lauded and beloved by cinephiles, it’s not as much of a think piece as Powell and Pressburger’s previous films.

From Alfred Hitchcock, there was Rope.

This is one of the most experimental big-budget films of the day and the kind of film that only Hitchcock could’ve gotten made. A pair of young socialites (John Dall and Farley Granger) have murdered their friend (Dick Hogan) and hide his body in their apartment while they invite guests over for a party. The experiment is that the whole film is done in one smooth, long, continuous take… or at least it was supposed to. Back then, film canisters on cameras could only hold up to 10 minutes worth of film footage before running out of reel so the cuts are “disguised” in the movie to try to give the illusion of it all being one long take. As a result, Rope sticks around in movie buff circles for pioneering this kind of long take and leads to some pretty eye roll-worthy videos and articles of “Can you spot the 10 hidden cuts in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope?” The answer being: yes, every time the camera very obviously zooms in on someone’s back and goes all black for a second. (With modern technology, the idea of making a whole film in one continuous take is now perfectly possible, the feat having been accomplished in Russkij Kovcheg (Eng. Russian Ark) (2002).)

While Rope is a noble experiment, it’s also ultimately a failed experiment as it’s known more for the style attempt than the story itself. The main problem with the movie is that the two murderers are clearly the villains so instead of it being suspenseful if the other guests will discover their crime, we’re kinda rooting for them to get found out. Still, the movie does have its moments, particularly in James Stewart’s performance as Rupert Cadell, the murderers’ teacher and idol. Stewart is always a delight and he saves the movie with his unique performance as a nihilist with a heart of gold. (This is the type of character that only Hitchcock could dream up.) You would think that such a unique character played so well should’ve warranted a nod for the Academy Award for Best Actor but apparently not.

And Orson Welles also made a Shakespeare adaptation in the form of Macbeth.

This is a frankly terrible film that really shows how good Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet is by comparison. So much so that after Macbeth came out and bombed with critics and audiences, the studio demanded that the (already laughably-budgeted and far-too-short) film be truncated even more until it became an incomprehensible mess. If you ever want to fully understand just how important Hamlet is for the history of Shakespeare film adaptations, Macbeth is worth a watch just to see the night-and-day difference.

On a more positive note, Welles also made that year The Lady from Shanghai.

Centering around a sailor named Michael O’Hara (Orson Welles) who gets roped up into a romance and murder plot with a socialite named Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth), this is a very excellent noir. What makes it stand out from all the other noirs of the year and others, however, is the finale which is one of the most famous movie scenes ever when O’Hara confronts Elsa and her nefarious father (Everett Sloane).

This is the kind of creative scene that could only come from the same awesome mind that made Citizen Kane (1941) and has been parodied and imitated countless times, so much so that most people probably don’t even know the name of the movie it came from. We’ve mentioned in previous blogs that a frequent award that’s been floated to add to the Academy Awards and never has been is the Oscar for Best Scene. Even if the movie surrounding it is only decent, something this awesome and creative and stylized is something that should be acknowledged.

In terms of genre films, there’s one more landmark comedy film that came out that year: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were the spiritual successors to Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers, becoming the biggest comedic stars of the 1940s and 50s. Being the most definitive example of the “short, fat, dumb guy with a tall, skinny, smart guy” schtick, they made a series of “for the troops” comedies (e.g. Buck Privates (1942), In the Navy (1942), Keep ‘Em Flying (1942) etc.) and rode that high to superstardom. Unlike the Marx Bros. and Charlie Chaplin, however, their films don’t really have a lot of satire or anything interesting to say; they’re usually just a series of stand-up routines that they recycled from their burlesque days that are loosely bridged together by a story (and I mean very loosely). As a result, I think they’ve aged the most poorly out of all the comedic stars from the classic age of cinema and they’re best experienced by Youtubing some of their highlights (such as their most famous bit "Who's On First?") instead of actually sitting through their films.

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein was their most famous (and funniest) film, pairing them with the big three monsters of the Golden Age of Horror, encountering Count Dracula (Bela Lugosi), the Wolf Man (Lon Chaney Jr.) and, yes, Frankenstein’s Monster (Glenn Strange). Despite being a pioneer of the horror-comedy genre, this is about where the horror genre lost steam and wouldn’t be refreshing for another decade. Film’s fun though and it feels so good to have Lugosi as Dracula again.

(The other major comedy film that year was Sitting Pretty,

the film that featured the debut of Mr. Belvedere (Clifton Webb), who was an iconic character at the time. Movie’s amusing and Mr. Belvedere is delightful but no comment otherwise.)

Now that we’ve got that cleared out of the way, as we’ve seen, the late 40s was a time when the Academy decided to give the Academy Award for Best Picture to films that were trying to say something about the world around them. Yet, interestingly, that wasn’t what won this year despite the fact that there were several allegorical movies that came out in 1948. For examples:

There was The Search

which is a movie about children trying to readjust to the world around them after the Holocaust. Despite that pitch, it’s surprisingly not nearly as dark as you would think and really could just be any “orphans trying to get along with their new guardian” movie. The only difference being the reason why they were orphaned.

There was The Snake Pit

which depicts a woman’s struggle with mental illness while residing in an insane asylum. This was shocking to audiences back in the day though, nowadays, it’s pretty tame. This type of story was also handled much better in Spellbound (1945) and The Lost Weekend (1945) as Olivia de Havilland’s performance isn’t nearly as bone-chilling as a movie today would make it.

On the comedic side, there was a pretty amusing satire in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream Home

a satire of the post-war building boom that America was undergoing, showing the Hellish waste that the titular Mr. Blandings (Cary Grant) goes through to get the house of his dreams. This is more of what a comedy should be though it’s not one of the greats of the era.

There was also a really fun crime drama in The Naked City

which was one of the first movies to show police officers as not just heroes but ordinary people and really showed how crime is solved in the biggest city in America. It acts as a nice time capsule of New York City circa 1948 and avoids the trap of being too schmaltzy or too dour.

There was also a “documentary” called Louisiana Story.

I put the word documentary in quotes as this was a movie commissioned by the Standard Oil Co. to celebrate how their rigs improve the livelihoods of the Louisiana swamps and how they get along with the Cajun natives. As hilariously outdated as this is, it’s actually a very excellent and overlooked piece of filmmaking that is almost like Bambi (1942) in its atmosphere. I honestly almost wish that this won the Oscar because analyzing how out-of-date the moral is with how good of a movie it is makes for a fascinating historical time capsule.

While these are all good movies, none are quite on the same level of prestige as Hamlet. This is one of those times where I think a little genre snobbery is allowed: this is the first serious film adaptation of one of the greatest works of Western literature. When you compare it to previous Shakespeare film adaptations, this is the first one to feel like it’s treating the story with real dignity it deserves.    

        I have to say, I’m honestly stunned. After spending 20 installments reading about the studio politics that usually infest Academy Award decisions, it’s a surprising breath of fresh air when they give the award to a movie not from America and gave it just for the simple fact of it being a good movie that enhanced the medium in the best way.

The only movie that came out in America that year that was in the same strata as Hamlet in terms of cultural importance was the Western masterpiece, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

The movie is set on the Mexican frontier as a pair of drifters, Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) and Bob Curtin (Tim Holt), join forces with a grizzled, old prospector named Howard (Walter Huston) to mine for gold in the mountains. Along the way, they encounter all sorts of dangers, such as the mountains, the natives, the local bandits and the dangerous allure of gold and how it can corrupt a man’s soul.

When lined up with all the other Westerns from the era, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre really sticks out from the rest. While it has the same gorgeous landscape shots and dangerous vistas that define the genre, the film also takes a heavy psychological approach. A big chunk of the movie takes place at night with the characters’ faces illuminated by the fire or the moonlight, casting heavy shadows that reflect the dark path that Dobbs is heading down. As a result, the movie has a lot more in common with the film noirs of the era than the Westerns. As a matter of fact, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was directed by John Huston, the same man who made The Maltese Falcon (1941), and he brings the same style that made that movie so great into this one. (And in case you’re wondering, yes, he and Walter Huston were related, John directing his own father’s performance. This must’ve made for an interesting dynamic on set to say the least.)

While The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is supposed to be about how greed and gold fever corrupts a man into doing horrible things, this parable does slightly fall apart since Dobbs seems to already have some pretty loose morals from the outset. My personal interpretation instead is that the film is instead more of a Citizen Kane-esque criticism of the American myth of the cowboy that most other Westerns seemed to celebrate: that being of the rugged frontiersman who tamed the West and found his fortune in the frontier. In this case, the character of Howard is much more carefree and respectful towards nature and the local Natives and Mexicans and doesn’t let anything bother him. Dobbs, on the other hand, is highly possessive, doesn’t care about nature, hates everyone he meets and is accordingly punished. The character of Bob Curtin is caught in the middle between these two extremes.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre did quite well at the Oscars as the Huston family actually won three awards that night for Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor for Walter Huston. However, Bogart was not nominated for the Oscar for Best Leading Actor in what is often considered one of the worst sleights in the Academy’s history. Granted, the winner was Laurence Olivier in Hamlet, which is a solid choice, but the fact that Bogart wasn’t even nominated? While his evil scenes are a little over-the-top today, the role was very against type for Bogart as coming off of The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca (1942) where he played cynics with a heart of gold, seeing Bogart play this flat-out scumbag is a really impressive turn for him.

A common problem I’m noticing with the Academy, both back then and now, is that the criticisms lobbied sometimes aren’t necessarily for the winners of the award but also for who they choose to narrow it down to for the 5-10 nominees (depending on the year). Especially in the acting awards, they seem really easy and willing to fall into the trap of just choosing whichever actor plays the overwrought Oscar-bait performance versus an actually memorable, difficult-to-play character.

Case in point: besides Olivier’s Hamlet, the other four nominees were Lew Ayres in Johnny Belinda (playing a doctor who falls in love with and cares for a deaf woman), Montgomery Clift in The Search (playing a soldier who cares for the children, movie mentioned above), Dan Dailey in When My Baby Smiles At Me (playing an actor who cares for his wife and art, are you noticing a pattern here?) and Clifton Webb as Mr. Belvedere in Sitting Pretty (who is a fun and memorable character which admittedly disproves my thesis somewhat but this is still only one out of four). Bogart’s performance as Dobbs takes everything the audience would’ve come to expect from Bogart’s typical roles and the cowboy myth and mires it in a mean-spirited display of greed, desperation and just general filth. While not as much of an acting landmark as Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, it’s still one of Bogart’s most famous and unforgettable roles and showed the amount of dynamic range he truly had as an actor.

The reason for this snub was difficult to find since, as far as I know, Bogart didn’t do anything to piss off any powerful mogul or something like that. The movie was clearly quite respected as evidenced by the number of awards it did win. My guess for this decision? It’s just the Academy buying into their own hype of bequeathing awards based on Oscar bait. Sure, Dobbs is a disturbed and mean character but did you see just how much Lew Ayres’ doctor cared for that poor deaf girl in Johnny Belinda?!

Also, as long as we’re harping on this point, I think The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was snubbed in the Best Supporting Actor nominations as well. Granted, the winner was Walter Huston which is a good choice but why wasn’t there a nod for Alfonso Bedoya’s performance as the bandit, Gold Hat? This is one of the most menacing villains from this era, playing a great cross between a cheerful, friendly guy with a murderous savagery burning beneath. Though is this character also considered an offensive stereotype now? Maybe? Well, regardless, he’s also responsible for the most famous line from the movie:

Granted, I know why he wasn’t nominated (it wasn’t just African-Americans that people didn’t like back then) but it still emphasizes my point.

On the actress side of the aisle, the Oscar for Best Leading Actress went to Jane Wyman playing a deaf woman in Johnny Belinda. This trope of “actor playing disabled person for pity” is one of the easiest paths to an Academy Award that actors can take and is responsible for more transparently Oscar-bait films than you can count. (Though, if we’re being totally fair, this movie was one of the first films to do this trope.) The Oscar for Best Supporting Actress went to Claire Trevor as a lounge singer in Key Largo. And while Key Largo is a good film noir with some nice atmosphere (also directed by John Huston), why was her role acknowledged but not any of the other characters in this movie or other film noirs? Well, which is the only role that allows the actor to monologue about lost love for the Academy’s attention? Watch these two roles then watch Rita Hayworth’s femme fatale in The Lady from Shanghai and Jean Simmons’ Ophelia in Hamlet, give it 5 days and see which roles you can remember more easily.

This is a rant that I probably should’ve saved for later when we have more and more films and performances that do stick around in popular culture but were ignored by the Academy in favor of more melodramatic films and roles which will make this easier to articulate. Then again, acting like the Academy Awards have only become ridiculous in later years and used to be prestigious back in the Golden Age of Hollywood is one of the myths that makes this blog series so much fun to do. Most of the problems with them today have always been there and studio politics have always played more of a role in their decisions than actual artistic merit.

Zooming out from the Academy as a whole back to the choice of Success or Snub for Best Picture, this is actually one of the better decisions overall. While Hamlet hasn’t aged with the greatest of grace, it’s still a milestone in British cinema, Shakespearean film adaptations and acting. Olivier’s performance in particular is considered one of the most essential roles of the 20th Century, being a definitive portrayal of the Stanislavsky School of Acting (Olivier’s practice of it would form a friendly rivalry with Lee Strasberg’s Method Acting which many of the American film legends of the 50s, 60s and 70s would be students).

Even the nominees for Best Picture was a pretty solid roundup this year, the other nominees being The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Red Shoes, The Snake Pit and Johnny Belinda (I personally would’ve swapped out Johnny Belinda for Louisiana Story or The Naked City but we’re nitpicking at this point). In terms of milestones, there really is no comparison. While The Treasure of Sierra Madre, and Bogart’s performance in it, is also great, Laurence Olivier’s take on one of the greatest stories ever written really walks away with this decision.

Calling Hamlet the Best Picture of 1948 was a…

SUCCESS!

Personal Favorite Movies of 1948:

• Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (dir. Charles Barton)
• Joan of Arc (dir. Victor Fleming)
• Louisiana Story (dir. Robert J. Flaherty)
• Sitting Pretty (dir. Walter Lang)
• Sorry, Wrong Number (dir. Anatole Litvak)
• The Big Clock (dir. John Farrow)
• The Lady from Shanghai (dir. Orson Welles)
• The Naked City (dir. Jules Dassin)
• The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (dir. John Huston)
• Unfaithfully Yours (dir. Preston Sturges)

Favorite Heroes:

• Chick Young and Wilbur Grey (Bud Abbott and Lou Costello) (Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein)
• George Stroud (Ray Milland) (The Big Clock)
• Howard (Walter Huston) (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre)
• Jim Blandings (Cary Grant) (Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House)
• Joe Emmett Sullivan (Dennis O'Keefe) (Raw Deal)
• Lieutenant Dan Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald) (The Naked City)
• Lynn Belvedere (Clifton Webb) (Sitting Pretty)
• Michael O'Hara (Orson Welles) (The Lady from Shanghai)
• Rupert Cadell (James Stewart) (Rope)
• Steve (Montgomery Clift) (The Search)

Favorite Villains:

• Bishop Pierre Cauchon of Beauvais (Walter L. Sullivan) (Joan of Arc)
• Captain Ferdinand Brückner (Arno Paulsen) (Die Mörder Sind Unter Uns (Murderers Among Us))
• Count Dracula (Bela Lugosi) (Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein)
• Earl Janoth (Charles Laughton) (The Big Clock)
• Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre)
• Gold Hat (Alfonso Bedoya) (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre)
• Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson) (Key Largo)
• Lord Hamlet (Laurence Olivier) (Hamlet)
• Prime Minister Richelieu (Vincent Price) (The Three Musketeers)
• The Bannisters (Rita Hayworth and Everett Sloane) (The Lady from Shanghai)