I’m almost ashamed to admit that this was my first time watching All About Eve, and I was fairly well blown away by it. It was nominated for a record 14 Academy Awards in 1950 and it won six of them, including both Best Director and Best Writing, Screenplay for Director/Writer Joseph L. Mankiewicz. This was a seminal film that seemed to be fairly self-aware that it was a great film and took itself just seriously enough without crossing over into being pretentious.

There are a lot of things that fit together to make this a great film (it’s ranked by AFI as the #16 film of all time). First and foremost is the writing. Everyone has heard Bette Davis’ iconic, “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.” However, there are many more examples of outstanding dialogue throughout the film. In many places, the dialogue is biting and dripping with subtext. Plus there are many memorable lines of dialogue that say exactly what needs to be said in as few words possible.

On the other hand, the opening monologue that is narrated by Addison DeWitt, played with silky sophistication by George Sanders, is a rich description of many of the characters that we’ll be watching over the next two plus hours that is like listening to poetry. Each word written and spoken with such care as to make the audience feel like something astounding is about to happen. For most people, they will not be let down. Indeed, here are some of my favorites:

Bill’s thirty-two. He looks thirty-two. He looked it five years ago, he’ll look it twenty years from now. I hate men.

Peace and quiet is for libraries!

I’ll admit I may have seen better days, but I’m still not to be had for the price of a cocktail like a salted peanut.

Zanuck, Zanuck, Zanuck. What are you two, lovers?

We all have abnormalities in common. We’re a breed apart from the rest of humanity, we theatre folk. We are the original displaced personalities.

Aside from the dialogue, All About Eve has a well-crafted story with an interesting dramatic structure. Even though this is a film, it’s a film about the theater and it’s told to us in a manner that is much more like watching a play than watching a film. That may speak to its self-importance since theater is largely considered to be a much more highbrow endeavor than film. That being said, I am generally a fan of the cinematic experience and generally prefer that films show more and tell less. All About Eve is the exception that proves the rule. It’s like a play on screen, and its structure is more similar to a theatrical production as well. The script isn’t necessarily written in three acts like most other mainstream works. This story seems to told more in a two act structure but without the intermission. It’s also very dialogue-heavy since we’re generally being told things, although there are some subtle cinematic moments where if we’re paying attention we see that we’re being shown things. An example is when DeWitt asks Eve if she first saw Margo perform in San Francisco at the Shubert Theater, and Eve says yes. The look on DeWitt’s face tells the audience that there is no Shubert Theater in San Francisco, and that will be confirmed later in the film.

Another great attribute to All About Eve is the development of the characters. Indeed, this film might have some of the finest character work of any film that I’ve seen. All of the principle character experience some sort of growth or transformation, with Eve and Margo experiencing the greatest changes. The changes and development that all of these characters go through help to make this such a satisfying film. They do that by making us feel strong emotions about the characters. Not only do we have strong feelings in relation to Eve and Margo, but we also have strong feelings regarding DeWitt, as well as Bill Simpson, Margo’s boyfriend and Karen & Lloyd Richards, Margo’s best friend and her husband, who happens to write the plays in which Margo stars. We like these people most of the time. We loathe them some of the time, but we always care about them, and that is job number one for any screenwriter or director. You’ve got to make us care about the characters one way or another. If we don’t care, then there is no drama. If there is no drama, then there is no story. One thing is for sure in All About Eve. We care about all of the characters in this film.

The storyline in All About Eve follows Eve Harrington as she tries to usurp the life of Margo Channing, the biggest star on the Broadway circuit. When we first meet Eve, she seems like a mousy little thing as she waits outside the theater in the rain. Karen has seen her, and offers to introduce her to Margo since the two of them are friends. Star struck, Eve refuses at first, afraid that she’ll be bothering her, but Karen insists. Upon meeting Eve, Margo is struck by her innocence and her naiveté. There is something about Eve’s purity that reminds Margo of something that she lost, or perhaps never even had. Margo is 40-years old now, and feels but won’t admit that her best days are behind her. In Eve she sees her rejuvenated self and she brings Eve into her inner circle to act as her personal assistant.

Karen, Lloyd and Bill are similarly cast under Eve’s spell. Only Birdie, Margo’s faithful assistant sees through what Eve is trying to do. DeWitt seems to think something is up as well, but that’s mainly because he’s paid to be cynical, and he’s good at it too. Even the audience should be cast under the spell because Mankiewicz did such a good job of developing Eve as a character. He made her change from seeming mousy waif to manipulative succubus happen as gradually as he possibly could. It takes time for us as the audience to realize that she’s playing all of them for fools as a means to get to her own ends. Perhaps by half way through the film we realize that not only does Eve want Margo’s career, but she also wants her whole life. She wants everything that Margo has to be hers and she wants it badly enough to ruin Margo as she does it. She wants it badly enough to blackmail Karen about a betrayal of Margo that Eve herself set Karen up to do. She wants it badly enough to make DeWitt, her one ally, come off as a charlatan to Margo, Lloyd, Karen and Bill.

This is where DeWitt’s character growth comes in. Among the characters in the film, DeWitt spend the majority of the film as the least popular. However, during the pivotal moment, it is he who calls Eve to task. It is DeWitt who sees through her and tells her that he’s nobody’s fool. He may not have totally noble intentions, but he is the one who tells Eve that she’s manipulated even herself into the delusion of thinking that she’s become more than she ever has been, and that she now belongs to him. He goes on to tell her that he knows everything about her and the proletarian background that she painted about herself was something less than the truth. He throws all of her lies right back into her face.

Then the most remarkable thing of all happens. To a degree, Eve gets what she wants. She attains Margo’s success, getting cast in the role that Lloyd had originally written for Margo, and replacing Margo as well as the biggest star in the theater. But that leads to Margo’s extraordinary growth as a character. Margo actually catches on fairly early that Eve is up to no good. Unfortunately for Margo, she’s allowed Eve to get too close and she can’t get rid of her. Everyone else around is still taken by her charms. Margo fights tooth and nail to keep Eve from taking her place in the hierarchy, but to no avail. Eve becomes her understudy and tries hard to seduce both Bill and Lloyd in a manner that will land her the lead role in Lloyd’s new play, Cora. Eve seems to drive a wedge so deeply at one point between Margo and Bill that it appears their relationship will be ruined. Instead the opposite happens. Margo achieves a level of peace with herself that she had not experienced before. This woman who was so concerned that her best years were behind her started living in the moment and finally accepted the marriage proposal that Bill was about to stop making. Just when it looked like Eve was going to make Karen have to compromise their friendship, Margo tells Lloyd that she doesn’t want the part in Cora. Instead, she is content to live life as Bill’s wife. She needs nothing more. That is Margo’s character arc. She goes from insecure socialite to stable wife. She’s done living in the fast lane and is happy to settle down. She has the peace that Eve will never attain.

All About Eve is a story about life and what kind of life you want to have. Thematically it’s about exploring what people will do to achieve their dreams, but it’s also about discovering that maybe your dreams weren’t what you thought they were. This is not only an entertaining film, but it is a deep film and a deeply complex film that you should put near the top of your list of films to see if you haven’t seen it already.

Did the Academy get it right?

As you’ve probably surmised by now, I believe they did. That being said, Sunset Boulevard is one of the greatest films of all time, and was nominated against it. Indeed, AFI ranks Sunset Boulevard as the #12 film of all time, four spots higher than All About Eve. I will also say that I think Sunset Boulevard is one of the best films I’ve ever seen and holds up very well. In its own right, it won three Oscars and was nominated for a total of 11 Academy Awards. It’s considered to be the seminal Film Noir and it tells a haunting story that is nearly as deep and as complex as All About Eve. To be honest, I’d have had to flip a coin if I had been voting for Best Motion Picture for 1950. As I pointed out in a previous entry, 1950 was a good example of how it isn’t always an apples to apples comparison. Both of these films are considered to be top 20 all time. Both films respectively accomplished what they set out to accomplish. Both films had extraordinary screenplays and direction. Both films were marvelously acted. One thing that both films did have in common was that both films had older actresses who were past their primes playing older actresses who were past their primes. Bette Davis played Margo in All About Eve and Gloria Swanson played the exquisite Norma Desmond. Overall I can’t argue with the fact that All About Eve got more votes. But I don’t blame you if you feel that Sunset Boulevard should have been the winner. This was a tough year. What are your thoughts?

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

That is the theme of All the King’s Men, the winner of Best Motion Picture in 1949. Based on the Pulitzer Prize winning book of the same title by Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men follows the rise to power of Willie Stark (thought to be inspired by Huey P. Long, the former governor of Louisiana) from uneducated hick to a man who runs a political machine that is as powerful as it is ruthless. There is no one that Stark will allow to stand in his way in order to hold on to his power and there is no one that he isn’t willing to hurt or even kill to do the same.

What makes this story so compelling is the character arc that Stark goes through and the general idea of a charismatic and seemingly compassionate politician becoming corrupted by the very forces that he was put in power to fight. Willie Stark was a man of humble beginnings who started his rise to power by pointing out the corruption and graft committed by politicians in his state. He taught himself law and used a populist message to rally the “hicks” of his state to his cause. Claiming rightly to be one of them, Stark nearly won an improbable election that he only found himself running in because the state power brokers wanted him to split the populist vote with another candidate. But even though he lost the election, Stark ominously tells the idealistic newspaper reporter Jack Burden (John Ireland) that he learned how to win.

What makes Stark so charismatic and so popular is his message. He promises the people that he’ll fight for them. He claims that he can keep that promise because he’s one of them, and he’s right. He wins the next election by alternately making these promises and showing the same ruthlessness and practicing the same cutthroat politics that were used against him before. Once he’s elected he does keep many of the promises that he made to the people, like building schools and hospitals and roads, and that keeps him popular. The problem for Stark is that he develops a lust for power that cannot be satiated. This lust for power leads him to do things that you would have never imagined him doing when we first met him at the beginning of the film. This lust for power also leads to the disillusionment of the people around him, those that were once his sycophants, and leads to a tragic conclusion.

I had never seen this film before and knew nothing about it until I started watching it. I also found out that it was remade in 2005 with Sean Penn, Jude Law and Anthony Hopkins, among many others. There are no household names in the original, although along with its win for Best Motion Picture, Broderick Crawford won Best Actor in a Leading Role for his portrayal of Willie Stark and Mercedes McCambridge won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Stark’s jaded secretary Sadie Burke. I was actually pleasantly surprised by the depth and breadth of the film.

The depth of the film comes from the fact that Stark is doing such great things and wants to do even more great things, that the people close to him who should be his moral compass, namely Jack and Sadie, are all too willing to look the other way. This is especially true of both of them when it comes to Stark’s philandering. Stark starts out the film as a proper family man who has a wife who cares for him and a son who thinks the world of him. He doesn’t partake of liquor at the start of the film because his wife doesn’t approve of it. However, by the time he reaches the Governor’s Mansion, he’s a heavy drinker and he has a hard time keeping his libido in check. One of the women that he starts carousing with is Anne Stanton, Jack’s sweetheart from his home town. Anne is taken under Stark’s spell just like everyone else, but his words and promises enamor her in a much more profound way and she has an affair with him. This affair starts to crack the foundation of trust that Jack and Sadie (who is also in love with Stark, and having an affair with him as well) have with him but it’s still not enough to break it.

The film is actually told from Jack’s point of view, and Jack starts off as a cynical newspaper man, but falls under the spell of Stark and idealistically joins his team as a “researcher”. In fact, the main purpose of Jack’s research is to dig up dirt on Stark’s political opponents and keep it in a little black book so that it can be accessed at just the right time. His arc actually takes him full circle and back to cynical again by the end of the picture as he sees what type of man Stark has become. Jack’s journey from idealist back towards cynic begins when Stark demands that he dig up dirt on Judge Monte Stanton, a man that Jack has known and admired since he was a child, and whom Stark selected as his own Attorney General, but is not falling in line with Stark’s corrupt practices.

As Stark’s power increases, so does his web of corruption.

The one thing that I took away from this film was its depth. This is a very deep film, and even though I haven’t read the book, my guess is that it was able to replicate its depth from the novel. There are multiple layers to this story that are woven seamlessly together throughout. Any time you have a story with this level of political and personal intrigue, you are going to be left with a rich plot and a deep story. In fact, I believe that Robert Rossen, who wrote the screenplay (he also directed and produced the film), did a marvelous job of adapting a novel that was already popular into a script that was cinematically structured as well as this. This was a dramatic script that took what could have been very dry material and made it compelling and interesting.

Another thing that strikes me about this film is its lack of popularity. It’s not that it’s disliked or frowned upon. It’s just not really remembered as a great film. It’s not on AFI’s list of Top 100 films of all time. Indeed, none of the Best Picture nominees of 1949 made that list. I spent 3 years in films school, and this film was never reference. In fact, I hadn’t really even heard of it before I started working on this project. Also, I had never even heard of the remake until I saw a trailer for it on the DVD of the original. Why is that? The novel was deemed to be one of the 100 greatest novels of the 20^th Century. It was exceedingly popular in its day, and so was the film? I must admit that I haven’t researched the reasons that this film has fallen back to the pack in terms of popularity. Political drama is a popular genre in Hollywood, and there are many, many examples of well-remembered films of this type. As a matter of fact, I probably answered my own question when I thought to myself when the film was over that I’d probably rather watch Mr. Smith Goes To Washington rather than All the King’s Men, even though the latter is a much grittier and probably more honest accounting of the rotten underbelly of American politics.

Did the Academy get it right?

I believe they did, but I must admit that I haven’t seen any of the other films that were nominated that year. I should say that two films that weren’t nominated that came out that year were Adam’s Rib and The Sands of Iwo Jima. Neither was in the top 10 at the box office that year either, but history has been much kinder to those films than to any of the nominees, including All the King’s Men. Getting back to the point, I can’t argue with All the King’s Men winning Best Picture. I found it to be engaging, entertaining and riveting. It had a well-crafted story that was well-constructed as a film and had terrific performances from all of the actors that were in it. Just because it doesn’t live on in film lore as one of the greatest films ever doesn’t mean it wasn’t the best film released that year. If it seems like I don’t have particularly strong feelings one way or the other, it’s because I don’t. Overall this was an average year at best, and the All the King’s Men was the best film of a mediocre bunch and it would have had a hard time winning in almost any other year.

Hamlet is a film that people who are not aficionados of Shakespeare could appreciate, although I can understand why people who are not would avoid seeing this film. I do enjoy Shakespeare, having taken two semesters of him in college, and Hamlet was always one of my favorites. In fact, if you’ve never seen it, or if you haven’t seen it in a long time, you’ll be amazed at how many lines of Hamlet have become a part of our everyday vernacular. Everyone knows, “To be or not to be”, but how about these:

“Frailty, thy name is woman.”

“This above all; to thine own self be true.”

“There are more things on Heaven or Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

“Conscious doth make cowards of us all.”

“The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king”

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

And perhaps my personal favorite of this play/film:

“When sorrows come, they come not in single spies, but in battalions.”

And the list goes on and on.

Shakespeare is a tricky subject for film, as I wrote about in a previous blog.

http://monumentscripts.com/2012/09/03/they-dont-write-em-like-that-anymore/

Filmmakers like Laurence Olivier, Kenneth Branagh, and even Mel Gibson, have tried over the years to bring Shakespeare to the big screen with varying degrees of success. There is something intimidating about Shakespeare, especially to modern audiences, that keeps people away. Whether it reminds people too much if being in school, or whether they have a hard time following the language (all of the doth’s and thy’s and thou’s), or whether it just seems to them to be too pretentious, the Shakespeare audience of today is more of a niche audience than a mainstream one.

That’s one of the things that makes evaluating Olivier’s Hamlet challenging is that he was releasing this to a more accepting audience in 1948 than Gibson did in 1990 or Branagh did in 1996. I think that it would be much more difficult for a full on adaptation of Shakespeare to find an audience today. Certainly, as I wrote earlier, there have been plenty of modern adaptations where a Shakespearean story is told in a modern way, but there have been plenty of recent straight Shakespeare adaptations that have not seen any success at the box office, let alone with the Academy.

I understand that Shakespeare in Love won Best Picture of 1999, and I will get to that in due time. But if someone were to release Hamlet in theaters today, it’s doubtful that people would go see it. Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet did reasonably well in 1996, but even though it stuck with the Bard’s dialogue, everything else in it was modernized. In reality, that film had more in common with an MTV video than with a production of Shakespeare.

But right now we should be discussing Olivier’s Hamlet, which by any measure, is an outstanding film. It is also an interesting film in the creative choices that Olivier made in terms of how it was shot and how the story was told. He made some choices that were clearly cinematic and other choices that were clearly theatrical. Let’s discuss these in turn.

There are very few close ups in Hamlet. Even when there is only one person on the screen, the shots are wide to give it a very theatrical look. There are scenes in this film where you might feel like you’re seeing it played out in front of you on stage rather than on a screen. Much of the composition was very theatrical as well. The camera angles felt like they were at various seats in the house of a theater. If you ever get a chance to see this version of Hamlet, you should see it on as large a screen as possible, as clearly Olivier was attempting to give this film as much of a theatrical look as possible, and to really get the most out of it you’ll have to see it as big as possible. With the lack of close ups, it’s a little more difficult to get into the minds of the characters since it’s difficult to see their facial expressions.

That’s not to say there are no close ups or no opportunities to see what the characters may be thinking. In fact, there are some extreme close ups spread throughout the film. But seeing it on a large screen will give you the closest possible sense to what it looks like Olivier was going for and will allow you to see the actors in a way that is similar to how they would have been seen in a theater.

However with all that said, there are still some very cinematic elements to the story as well. The opening sequence where Marcellus and Bernardo tell Horatio of the spirit they’ve seen is shot in a very cinematic way with camera tricks to show the spirit and coming in and out of focus to show the uncertainty of the men. There are other scenes throughout the film that use similar techniques when they’re called for. And indeed there are other cinematic elements as well.

When you see Hamlet on stage, or any other Shakespeare play for that matter, there are moments called asides where a character will speak directly to the audience to tell the audience what they’re thinking in their heads, but the other characters cannot hear this dialogue. It’s 100% inner dialogue for the characters. In Olivier’s Hamlet, these asides primarily come from the character of Hamlet and they’re handled with voice over as Olivier stays on the screen silent. His voice says what he’s thinking, but he doesn’t speak. There are single lines that he’ll speak out loud in order to give them emphasis, however the internal dialogue is handled in a way that would be very difficult to do on stage, but is easy and advantageous to do in cinema.

There is one other thing to discuss regarding this film and that is how it was adapted. Branagh’s version is the play in its entirety and it comes in at just over four hours. Both Olivier and Gibson releases abridged versions and Olivier’s comes in at just over two and a half hours. Naturally things need to be left out and changed around, but there was one thing in Olivier’s version that I had a hard time with. Thinking on it a little, it could have less to do with the adaptation and more to do with the chemistry between the actors, but I felt that the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia was insufficiently developed in this version. This is unfortunate because it’s the single most important relationship in the film. It’s also the most complex relationship in the story, and thus the most difficult to get right. Hamlet loves Ophelia and she loves him, although her father and brother don’t want her to have anything to do with him, thinking that he’s gone mad in the wake of his father’s death.

Ophelia, played by Jean Simmons, just didn’t seem to mesh all that well with Olivier. Some 12 years later, they would share the screen again in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, but I had a hard time buying Hamlet’s affection for Ophelia in this version. As mentioned, their relationship is a complex one, and classically every time Hamlet seems to open himself up to her, he slams the door in her face. In Olivier’s version, I saw very little of him opening up to her. Their scenes were filled with conflict but there was little affection. What this does is lessen the emotional impact when Ophelia dies. I think that the problem is that Ophelia was not developed enough as a character. We see her bidding adieu to Laertes when he leaves for France, and we see her with Polonius her father, but we don’t have the chance to emotionally engage with Ophelia in a meaningful way.

Overall, however, Hamlet is a terrific film. Its production value is terrific. It had amazing costume design and the set design was superb as well. As an actor, there was never anyone better than Laurence Olivier. This would be the second Best Picture winner with him in the leading role (Rebecca being the previous winner), and his brooding, yet explosive style was tailor made for him to play Hamlet. Even though he was 41 when he played this role, and Hamlet is a character who is still in his twenties, it almost seems that Olivier and Hamlet are kindred spirits. As a director, Olivier was less dynamic. There isn’t anything wrong with the direction in Hamlet, but at the same time, there’s nothing extraordinary about it either. It was Olivier’s acting that won the Oscar for Hamlet.

There is one more thing that I need to say regarding Shakespeare in general. If you are a writer, you need to read Shakespeare. I’m sure there are people out there who think that he’s over rated and there are people who will tell you that knowing Shakespeare is not worht the time it will take you. Those people couldn’t be more wrong. William Shakespeare was one of the greatest writers of all time and modern screenwriters could learn much from his writing, especially writing dialogue. Now, you’re not going to write dialogue in the same style, obviously. But Shakespeare was a master of subtext, which is a skill that any screenplay writer needs. Shakespeare’s stories were compelling, dramatic and emotional. He could write comedies as well as tragedies with equal skill, and he came up with lines of dialogue that are often quoted to this day. Since this is primarly a blog about screenwriting, I’m going to say it one more time. If you are a screenwriter, you must be familiar with Shakespeare.

Did the Academy get it right?

This is a tough one for me. The two signature nominees of 1948 show how difficult it can be to discern which is the Best Picture of the year because it’s rarely an apples to apples comparison. I am a fan of Shakespeare. I’ve read most of his plays, and I try to see his plays performed on stage whenever I get a chance. Hamlet is one of my favorite works of Shakespeare. To use a more modern vernacular, I would say that when Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, he was in the Zone. As mentioned above, and to use another modern term, Hamlet is in Laurence Olivier’s wheelhouse, and I greatly enjoyed this version. All of that said, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is an amazing film. It was nominated against Hamlet in 1948, and it is a film fan’s film. It comes in at number 30 on AFI’s list of the 100 greatest films of all time (Hamlet is not on the list), and it is one of the signature roles for Humphrey Bogart, one of the seminal actors of the twentieth century. But how can you compare Hamlet to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre? They couldn’t be more different. Could you see Humphrey Bogart playing Hamlet? Likewise, how do you think Laurence Olivier would have handled playing Fred Dobbs? Both films have heroes that are eventually and tragically done in by their own internal flaws, but the stories themselves are as far apart from each other as the earth to the moon. So how does one person, let alone the many people who were Academy members at the time, determine which of these films was better? Both films accomplished what they set out to accomplish. Both films are perfect in their own way. Both films are entertaining, moving and powerful. The acting in Hamlet is superior to the acting in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre but only from a technical standpoint and not in terms of what each film required. For what it was, the acting in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was perfect. Personally I probably would have voted for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre had I been a voter in 1948, but it would not have been an easy vote in the least to cast.

An idealistic journalist poses as a Jew in order to write a series for his magazine on anti-Semitism.

That’s the logline for Gentleman’s Agreement, 1947’s Best Picture winner. It stars Gregory Peck as Schuyler Green, the steely-eyed crusader like many others that he would become known for through films like this one and To Kill a Mockingbird and so many others throughout his career. John Garfield plays Dave Goldman, his Jewish friend, with whom he commiserates and relates with over the course of the story. Dorothy McGuire plays Kathy Lacy, the niece of his editor and the love interest who doesn’t realize until it’s almost too late that she tolerates prejudice without even knowing it.

For me this film was a mixed bag. The first major component to the film is the story, which was an important one to tell, but at the same time it was too preachy. There were too many soliloquies, not only by Gregory Peck, but by almost every character in the movie. Indeed, it seemed like every important character gave at least one speech that would have been a half a page to a page worth of dialogue. The actors in this film really need to be admired for the amount of dialogue that they had to memorize and convincingly deliver. The problem with all of that dialogue is that it actually slows down the story. I didn’t need this to be an action movie, but there certainly could have been more occasions to show us what was going on rather than tell us what was going on.

Here’s an example. The beginning of the film shows Schuyler and his son Tommy arriving to New York having just moved there from California. After Schuyler receives this assignment to write a story on anti-Semitism, he eventually figures out that the angle involves masquerading himself as a Jew so that he can understand what it’s like to feel prejudice laid against them. Since no one knows him in New York, it’s easy to get everyone to believe he’s Jewish. Only Kathy and her uncle know the truth that Schuyler is not Jewish. As the film progresses, Schuyler and Kathy become romantically involved and are engaged to be married. They decide to take their honeymoon at an exclusive resort in the country, but Dave tells them that the inn is exclusive. In order to see this for himself, Schuyler goes to the inn under the ruse that he’s going to check in, all the while making it obvious that he’s Jewish. Between his conversation with the check in clerk and his conversation with the manager there is a lot of dialogue but there is also a lot of subtext. We are seeing Schuyler get treated with prejudice until the bellhop unceremoniously takes his bag and removes it from the lobby, placing it just outside the threshold and Schuyler, humiliated, humbly walks past the gawking onlookers out of the hotel.

There are two other scenes where characters relate stories about prejudice they’ve experienced or heard. Tommy comes home one night shaken up because some neighborhood boys bullied him and called him a “dirty Jew.” He then proceeds to tell Schuyler about what happened, giving every detail through dialogue what happened to him. In yet another scene, after Schuyler and Kathy have split up, Kathy tells Dave about being at a party where a person told a Jewish joke and how offended she was by it. This scene is slightly more effective because Dave recognized that she was offended but then asked her what she did about it, and when she admitted that she did nothing and she finally realizes that these “gentleman’s agreements” only make people complicit with the bigots even though they may not be bigots themselves, is an important moment in the film. However it would have been more effective had we seen Kathy at the party and seen her reaction rather than having her tell us about it. It would have had us more engaged as an audience if we had seen Tommy get confronted by bullies who called him those vile things.

The first scene is emotionally engaging because we’re seeing it happen. We’re seeing Schuyler get agitated and we feel sorry for him when he has to walk, humiliated, out of the lobby. Even though there is a lot of dialogue in the scene, we are watching it play out in front of us as though we ourselves were there. In the other two scenes we’re given the knowledge second hand. We see that the characters are upset as they’re telling us what happened, but it doesn’t have close to the same emotional impact than had we watched it happen rather than having it told to us.

That’s my overall take on the story of Gentleman’s Agreement. I wish they had showed us more and told us less.

The second major component to Gentleman’s Agreement is the theme. Obviously this is a film about overcoming prejudice, but what makes it interesting is that is shows varying levels of prejudice. When you think about later films that use racism and prejudice as thematic elements, like In the Heat of the Night or To Kill a Mockingbird or even more recent examples like Django Unchained or 42 or 12 Years a Slave, the people who are prejudiced or racist are all in. There is no masking their racism and they clearly believe that Jews or African Americans or whomever they hold their prejudice against are inferior people at best or not even people at all at worst. In Gentleman’s Agreement there are levels to the prejudice. There are plenty of people who are not prejudices against Jews themselves, but they’ll tell Jewish jokes, or they won’t chastise others for doing the same. As mentioned above, they may be complicit in the prejudice of others for not calling it what it is.

Director Elia Kazan did a great job of showing that, while you might not consider yourself to be a bigot, and in fact you may not be a bigot at all, you still may be acting in ways that could be considered to be prejudicial by a certain group of people. You would never discriminate against a Jewish person in a tangible way, like not renting them a room or not giving them a job that they’re qualified for. However, you also might not be offended by a joke that would be offensive to a Jew or a black person or an Asian person. That still is bigotry, only not at the same level.

That, at least, is what this film is trying to say.

The third major component of this film is its tone. This is a very serious film and it takes itself very seriously. It’s dealing with serious subject matter and has a very definite point of view. That’s not to say that there are no moments of levity, because there certainly are and they bring a certain amount of balance to the overall story. John Minify, the magazine editor is played by Albert Dekker with an enthusiastic wit that is a perfect counterbalance to Schuyler’s brooding idealism. Elaine Wales is the fashion writer for the magazine and she’s a spunky and fun woman who was played by Celeste Holm. Her character is somewhat of a rival to Kathy and is a counter balance to her as well. Kathy spends most of the film as a reserved, anxious woman, always nervous that she’ll say something to upset Schuyler. In many ways she’s almost as serious as he is. But Elaine is a spunky, good-time girl, and I found myself rooting for Schuyler to end up with her at the end because I felt like she’d be a much better match for him because she’s the one character in the film that allows Schuyler to look at the world in a less serious way. In fact, her personality is strong enough to demand it.

Kazan took the three major components of this film and used them to craft a film that was serious and bordered on being a little too preachy. That is the unfortunate byproduct of too much telling and not enough showing. Indeed, this is one of the more forgettable Best Picture winners and it shouldn’t be. It should be regarded as an important film with an important message. Indeed, the thematic elements of this film are (unfortunately) timeless as racism and bigotry continue to plague our society even to this day. What this film does is it takes the motif of walking in another’s shoes to gain real empathy on how they live and what they go through. If Kazan had shown us more and told us less, this film could have been an all-timer.

Did the Academy get it right?

Despite my own reservations about this film, I’m inclined to believe that it was the correct choice for Best Motion Picture. A case could be made for Miracle on 34^th Street or for Great Expectations. The former, especially, has achieved classic status if for no other reason than it’s shown on television every year around the Holidays. No film released in 1947 made the AFI Top 100 list, which you can take to mean whatever you wish. I take that it wasn’t a particularly strong field when you compare it to other years of the era. What I will say is that contemporary audiences and critics, as well as Academy voters, realized that this was an important film that should be recognized. It was important both artistically and socially and the Academy must have recognized that not only did Gentleman’s Agreement deserve to win, but it was also proper that it should win since anti-Semitism was so rampant at the time and Gentleman’s Agreement was shining such a bright light on the issue. Combine the overall quality of the film making with the social importance of its message, and Gentleman’s Agreement was the most deserving film of 1947.

Three World War II veterans return to their small town after the war and struggle to reintegrate themselves back into society.

That would be the logline that I would use to describe The Best Years of Our Lives, which is another one that I hadn’t seen, yet pleasantly surprised me. I didn’t have terribly high hopes for it going in, because I generally feel like films that follow too many characters get to be convoluted and unfocussed. I was also nervous due to the running time of 172 minutes. This had all of the earmarks of a film that would be difficult for me to get through. I found the opposite to be true. In fact, if anything, the film started out slowly, but then became more and more engaging as it went on and the characters more deeply involved with their individual issues and with each other.

The film begins with Capt. Fred Derry, a former bombardier, boarding a cargo plane bound for his home town. He gets on the plane with Homer Parrish, a sailor who lost both of his arms below the elbow. Derry tries to help him, but Homer refuses any help, determined to take care of himself and he manages to get his duffle on the plane and even light his own cigarette. Already on the plane is Sgt. Al Stephenson, and the three of them, although with different back grounds and at different ages, form an instant bond as they make their way back to the hometown that they all share.

On the plane ride, they all talk about their hopes and their concerns. Homer is nervous that the girl he left behind will no longer love him after she sees he has no arms. Al is nervous that his children, who will now be grown up, will not remember him and that he won’t be able to relate to them or to his wife. Fred is worried about finding a job and taking care of his wife who he married just before he left after only knowing her for a couple of weeks.

One by one, they’re each dropped off by a taxi. The pass by a club owned by Homer’s uncle, and Homer tries to get the guys to have a drink with him in order to avoid going home, but the other guys tell him no. He’s dropped off with his parents, and his mother can barely contain her tears and the look of heartbreak is evident on his father’s face. Only his fiancé Wilma doesn’t seem to mind, but Homer is so ashamed of his predicament that he can’t let Wilma get close to him.

Fred is taken to his parents’ house and they tell him that his wife Hortense has moved out and taken an apartment down town. She works at a nightclub, but they don’t know which one. He decides to go out and look for her after a few more uncomfortable moments with his parents.

Al arrives home to his wife Milly, played by Myrna Loy, who was making her second appearance in a Best Picture winner (The Great Ziegfeld) and adult daughter Peggy, played by Teresa Wright, also making a second appearance in a Best Picture winner (Mrs. Miniver). His teenage son is there as well, and it’s immediately clear that he is now a fish out of water. The war has not only changed him internally, but the time away has transformed his children into people that he doesn’t recognize. Overcome by the discomfort, Al decides to take Milly and Peggy out for a drink. As luck would have it, they bump into Fred, and Fred and Al get so drunk together that they pass out and Fred has to spend the night at Al’s apartment and in Peggy’s bed. After waking up, more than a little hung over, Fred shares a nice conversation with Peggy and there is an instant attraction between the two of them.

Meanwhile, Al goes back to the bank that he worked at before the war, and he’s more out of place there than he is at home. Fred tries to find a decent job and build his relationship with Hortense, even though he continues to fall deeper in love with Peggy, but all he’s able to find is his old job at the drug store that pays a fraction of what he made in the army. Homer tries to adjust to life being disabled, even though he can do almost anything that a person with two good hands can do. However his shame at his disability drives him farther away from Wilma, even though she makes it clear that she’ll love him no matter what.

As the film moves its way through the plot, the relationships between the veterans become more complex. Seeing how unhappy he is in his marriage, and how poorly he’s treated by his wife, Peggy vows to break up Fred’s marriage. Al and Milly don’t take too kindly to this idea and Al confronts Fred about it. Fred admits to Al that he’s in love with Peggy, but Al makes him promise not to see her anymore because he’s married and it wouldn’t be right for Peggy to be in the middle of that. The scene where this all comes to a head is classic film making and should be studied by any aspiring screenwriter or director or cinematographer. In fact, the documentary The Story of Film dedicates a sequence to how well this scene was filmed.

Fred and Al meet at the bar of Homer’s uncle. They have a drink in one of the booths. Al asks Fred directly if he’s in love with Peggy and Fred answers him honestly. Fred finally agrees not to see her anymore and tells Al that he’ll call her right now. Al says that’s fine. It’s an intense conversation that reveals the complex nature of their relationship. Al tells Fred that he’s fond of him, but he doesn’t want Peggy to get into a mess. He doesn’t like the idea of Fred “sneaking around corners to see Peggy. Taking her love on a bootleg basis.” That’s a great line of dialogue right there. He goes on to tell Fred that he’s going to do everything he can to keep Peggy away from him until Fred agrees not to see her anymore and he puts it in the form of a guarantee. Fred goes to a phone booth on the opposite end of the bar to make the call. We then watch an over the shoulder shot from Al’s POV as Fred walks to the other side of the bar to a phone booth. It’s a deep focus shot so the entire room stays in focus. After Fred enters the phone booth Homer enters the bar. He sees Al and wants to show him a routine that he does with his uncle on the piano. Al walks over to the piano and watches Homer and his uncle play Chopsticks on the piano. Now the camera is set up so that Homer is in a close up and Al is behind him in a medium shot. Still on the other side of the room and in focus is Fred talking on the phone. Al has one eye on Fred the whole time, and Fred, who can’t be heard, can be seen talking on the phone and reacting sadly. He’s clearly doing what he agreed to do.

There are so many things going on in this scene it’s hard to keep track of them. First of all, we have a contradiction of mood within the scene. We’re watching as Fred has to break up with the one girl who makes him happy. His life is crumbling. At the same time, we’re watching as Homer and his uncle merrily play a happy tune on the piano and Homer makes strides to becoming more normal. His life is rising while Fred’s is simultaneously falling. That creates a wonderful dramatic irony within the scene. Also, we see Fred break up with Peggy, but we don’t hear him say it. It’s done completely visually, the way it should be in film. Plus, the film makers use deep focus to keep the entire room in focus as we watch so we can clearly see everything that is going on in the scene. This scene has it all. Great writing, great acting and excellent cinematography and directing come together to create a scene that is dramatic and moves the story forward.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time discussing the rest of the plot. This is a film that you should try and see if you haven’t already. It is long, but it’s worth getting through, as many of the thematic elements involved in it are certainly topical today. With as many soldiers as we have coming home from wars today, seeing this film is something that a contemporary audience should be able to relate to. There are a lot of ideas relating to gender roles as well. This is a deep story that is emotional and topical all at the same time.

There is one more point I’d like to make. Harold Russell, who played Homer became the only person to ever win two Oscars for playing the same role. He won for Best Supporting Actor, and the Academy also bestowed on him an Honorary Award “For bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans through his appearance in The Best Years of Our Lives”. Russell was an actual amputee who lost both of his arms in an accident while working with explosives while in the Army. His performance was an inspiration to many, and it’s just another example of how this film is so topical today.

Did the Academy get it right?

I am of the opinion that they did. It was nominated against It’s a Wonderful Life, which is not only one of my favorite films of all time, but has become one of the best known and most beloved films in popular culture of all time. However, it was underappreciated in its time and didn’t reach the popularity it has now until it was shown repeatedly on television during Christmas time. Henry V, The Razor’s Edge and The Yearling have all reached varying levels of classic-ness over the past 70 years, and any of them certainly would have been a worthy winner on Oscar night. However, I believe that The Best Years of Our Lives was the clear winner because it struck a chord. The war hadn’t been over for very long and this film touched on issues that were permeating all levels of society. There probably wasn’t a person alive in this country in 1946 who couldn’t relate to this film on some level. I’m sure that it struck an emotional chord that carried it to a big night on Oscar night. But even aside from that, this is a very good film. It has a dramatic story, it’s well crafted, well made and deserved to be named the best picture of the year.

I watched The Lost Weekend a couple of days ago, and I’m still not sure what to say about it, other than I can’t imagine how it won Best Picture. The whole time I was watching it, I felt like I was watching an early attempt at surrealism that was doubling as a public service announcement. I was following along with the story, but also looking at the cinematography and the production design to try and figure out what made this movie special enough to be named the best film of the year. I must admit that even after thinking about it for two full days, I’m at a loss.

The Lost Weekend is about a failed writer named Don Birnam (Ray Milland) who has sunk to the depths of alcoholism. He lives with his brother Wick in New York City and the two of them have planned a weekend to the country to see their family and get Don away from the temptations of the city. However even as they pack, Don is trying every way he can think of to sneak a sip of rye whiskey. Don’s girlfriend (or maybe ex-girlfriend) Helen St. James (Jane Wyman) shows up and Don comes up with a ruse to get the two of them to go to the movies together. He then steals the money that was set aside for the house keeper and makes his way to the local pub where he drinks and continues to drink to the point where he’s drunk and misses his train. He happily discovers that his brother is done enabling him and has gone away by himself.

That kicks off a lost weekend of drunkenness and self-discovery as Don hits rock bottom. We watch Don go through all of the stereotypical things that alcoholics do, like lie to the ones they love, or steal from strangers or take personal affects to local pawn shops in order to get enough money to buy more liquor. Through a series of flashbacks and a whole lot of dialogue, we see the origins of Don’s alcoholism. This coincided with him meeting Helen, and we also see how Wick became his enabler. As the story progresses we learn that there are two Dons. There’s the Don that was once a promising writer and a fun person to be around. Then there’s the Don who drinks. That’s the Don who tells the other Don that he’s nothing more than a failure and might as well stop trying to succeed. Alcohol has never said no and never let him down. It will always be there for him. That is until it isn’t and he has to desperately find ways to acquire it. At one point in his past, Don had a gun and was ready to kill himself but the other Don convinced him to have a drink beforehand and he got so drunk that he forgot to kill himself.

I’m sure that for its time this film was very edgy. It tackles some very serious subject matter that was very taboo in the forties. It could have been the type of film that created a very dramatic atmosphere and had an ending that should have been very successful. Unfortunately the story was told in a way that I’m not particularly a fan of, and it caused the entire storyline to be very disjointed and all of the characters to be unsympathetic.

Billy Wilder directed this film, and while I haven’t seen all of his films, I’ve seen quite a few of them. This is the first film of his that I’ve watched and not liked. Indeed, Billy Wilder has directed and/or written some of the greatest films in the history of American cinema, but he missed badly on this one. The premise is very good, and as I mentioned, rather avant garde for the time. The filmmaking style is particularly avant garde as well, which does fit in with the mental state of a person struggling with alcoholism. What that avant garde style of filmmaking also resulted in was a storyline that is staggered and non-linear. That in and of itself is not a bad thing. Plenty of amazing films have been told in non-linear ways, but they all had other things happening in the stories that allowed the audience to connect.

What a non-linear story needs are characters that the audience will care about and root for. Even if those characters are less than perfect, the audience needs to root for them. What we have in this story is an alcoholic and his enablers. The only character who finally stands up and says enough is enough, walks out on the movie and only returns in a flashback. But Helen is a complete enabler, even though she tries to stay away. The bartender, Nat, keeps telling him to stop drinking even as he pours him more drinks. The barfly Gloria seems completely enamored with him but we’re never given a good reason why this would be the case. The one character who doesn’t enable Don is ‘Bim’ Nolan, the nurse at the rehab center that Don ends up in after a fall. The problem with ‘Bim’ is that Frank Faylen (you know him as Ernie the taxi driver in It’s a Wonderful Life) played him with a kind of sinister insanity that takes away any rooting interest in him.

Even Don is completely unsympathetic right from the beginning. The first thing we see him do is lie to his brother and girlfriend and then betray both of their trust. What we end up with is a film where we watch a man we don’t care about self-destruct. At the very least we should care about Helen and root for Don to get himself together for her. The problem is that there’s no reason to root for that. Helen would be much better off without him, and Don even admits it. We never see a time through the flashbacks where Don did anything that would make Helen’s life better. Had we seen something like that, had we seen an example of how Helen needs a healthy Don in her life to make her happy, then we could root for Don to get the help he needs to get his alcoholism under control so that they can be happy together. However, we as an audience are never given any reason to care about that, and the film suffers because of it.

If this film sounds like an old-school version of Leaving Las Vegas, it is. The difference is that Leaving Las Vegas gave us characters that we cared about and elicitedgenuine emotional reactions from audiences who cared about what happened to Ben Sanderson and Sera. The Lost Weekend tried to, but became too much of a serialized PSA to allow us an emotional connection.

Did the Academy get it right?

You can probably guess by now that my answer is no, and you’d be correct. Two film in particular that were nominated against it were more deserving, and those films were Mildred Pierce and Spellbound. Sometimes in basketball you get what’s called a “make-up call”. That’s when a player comes down the court and is called for a foul that he didn’t commit. It was a bad call against him. Later in the game he may commit an obvious foul that doesn’t get called because the referees are making it up to him for the bad call against him earlier in the game. That’s a “make-up” call. Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity should have won Best Motion Picture the previous year but didn’t. I wonder if the Academy tried a “make-up” call by awarding him the Oscar this year for an inferior film, because that seems to me to be what happened. The problem is that in basketball a “make-up” call restored balance to the competition. At the Oscars, it’s just the wrong call.