Summer 1944 gave us our second Best Picture, as well as one of my favorites of this year...
Since You Went Away
release: June
wins: Best Score (Max Steiner)
nominations: Best Picture, Best Actress (Claudette Colbert), Best Supporting Actor (Monty Woolley), Best Supporting Actress (Jennifer Jones), Best Cinematography - Black-and-White, Best Art Direction-Interior Decoration - Black-and-White (Mark-Lee Kirk / Victor A. Gangelin), Best Film Editing (Hal C. Kern / James E. Newcom), Best Special Effects (Jack Cosgrove / Arthur Johns)
dir: John Cromwell
pr: David O. Selznick
scr: David O. Selznick, adaptation by Margaret Buell Wilder, from the novel by Margaret Buell Wilder
cin: Stanley Cortez / Lee Garmes
David O. Selznick’s epic of the war as experienced by the families left behind - well, one family in particular, with Claudette Colbert as Mom, Jennifer Jones and Shirley Temple as her daughters, Hattie McDaniel as their cook-housekeeper, Monty Woolley as a boarder they must take in to make ends meet, Robert Walker as his estranged grandson who romances Jones, and Joseph Cotten as an old family friend.
According to the American Film Institute, Selznick, wanting to "do his part" in the war effort, had been looking to make a movie about the home front since 1943. A coincidence that this desire began soon after MGM's Mrs. Miniver, a British-set film on similar themes, became not only the highest-grossing film of 1942 but also the winner of six Academy Awards, including Best Picture? Unlikely. Once the rights to the epistolary Since You Went Away: Letters to a Soldier from His Wife were obtained from author Margaret Buell Wilder, Selznick himself worked on the screenplay, making the intimate story into the kind of "important" epic he preferred...and you got to admit, he does that very well! As usual with one of his productions, his heavy involvement included the hiring and firing of multiple directors (only John Cromwell is credited, though apparently he took ill early on and Selznick completed it himself) and multiple cinematographers (only Stanley Cortez and Lee Garmes are credited), and even after release, Selznick tinkered with the runtime. The available version runs just under three hours, including Overture and Intermission, but the premiere was, I have read, a little over three hours.
Well, the work paid off. Nine Oscar nominations, including a win for Max Steiner's score, plus the third highest-grossing film of the year, one of only two Best Picture nominees in the Top Ten. We'll get more into it next week.
Two Girls and a Sailor
release: June
nominations: Best Original Screenplay
dir: Richard Thorpe
pr: Joe Pasternak
scr: Richard Connell and Gladys Lehman
cin: Robert Surtees
Vaudevillian sisters vie for the affections of the same man while operating their own srvice canteen. Jimmy Durante is their uncle figure, and even if he is always Jimmy Durante, he's a welcome sight. The romantic plot is an excuse to string together a number of fine musical performances, typical of the era.
Address Unknown
release: June 1
nominations: Best Score (Morris Stoloff / Ernst Toch), Best Art Direction-Interior Decoration - Black-and-White (Lionel Banks / Walter Holscher / Joseph Kish)
dir: William Cameron Menzies
pr: William Cameron Menzies / Sam Wood
scr: Herbert Dalmas, from the novel by by Kressmann Taylor
cin: Rudolph Maté
I think of this alongside None Shall Escape, as it is similarly fixated on the Germans who embraced Nazism. This one is even more tragic: Paul Lukas plays a German gallery owner with a Jewish business partner who, after years in the United States, returns to the Fatherland just as it is being swept up in what he views as a new national pride. His new friends prove influential in his own rise in status, wealth, and power, so he ignores all the troubling rhetoric...until he begins to adopt it. More so than None Shall Escape, where the poison seemed to be in the veins from the beginning, Address Unknown is a haunting, timeless depiction of a good man losing his soul more out of convenience than actual dogmatic belief, but God, the result's the same, so what does that matter? Lukas' big scene at the end is sweaty, desperate, painful to watch.
The Invisible Man's Revenge
release: June 9
dir/pr: Ford Beebe
scr: Bertram Millhauser, adaptation by Jane MacDonald, suggested by The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells
cin: Milton R. Krasner
So you've got a guy out for revenge against former business partners he believed left him to die while on safari, he returns to their estate to claim what's his, meets a mad scientist who uses him as a guinea pig for an invisibility formula, and now....well, you see. No connection to any of the characters from the previous installments, and nowhere near as fun with the effects as, say, The Invisible Woman. The franchise is getting creaky.
Home in Indiana
release: June 15
nominations: Best Cinematography - Color
dir: Henry Hathaway
pr: André Daven
scr: Winston Miller, from "The Phanom Filly" by George Agnew Chamberlain
cin: Edward Cronjager
Gentle coming-of-age story about a rebellious young man who finds peace among the horses. Jeanne Crain makes her debut as the girl who helps nurture his peace and his new passion - she loves to race - with Walter Brennan and Charlotte Greenwood as the uncle and aunt who offer stability. It's a nice movie, pleasant to watch, and I swear you can feel the dust and smell the equine sweat coming off the screen.
Days of Glory
release: June 16
nominations: Best Special Effects (Vernon L. Walker / James G. Stewart / Roy Granville)
dir: Jacques Tourneur
pr: Casey Robinson
scr: Casey Robinson, original story by Melchior Lengyel
cin: Tony Gaudio
One of a number of films from the period made to promote support for the newest member of the Allied efforts, the Soviet Union. Naturally, that inclination came back to haunt everyone right after the war. At least we got this stirring film of Soviet guerrilla fighters fighting back against a Nazi invasion of their homeland, all subterfuge and coded messages and brutal attacks, and "comrade" repeated without irony or fear, but a sincere expression of shared national identity, a declaration that these are the people and a nation that you will fight and die for. Gregory Peck makes his feature film debut here, and he is beautiful. Hell of an ending.
The White Cliffs of Dover
release: June 19
nominations: Best Cinematography - Black-and-White
dir: Clarence Brown
pr: Clarence Brown / Sidney Franklin
scr: Claudine West & Jan Lustig and George Froeschel, additional poetry by Robert Nathan, from the verse novel The White Cliffs by Alice Duer Miller
cin: George J. Folsey
Irene Dunne is an American woman who marries British gentry just as WWI breaks out; she reflects on these years while in the present day - WWII, of course - she awaits 300 wounded while serving as a nurse. Like Since You Went Away, a look at the effects of war on the families left behind: honeymoons cut short, children left orphaned, mothers mourning sons taken too soon, the promise of "'til death do we part" immediately taken up by madmen. Yes, yes, an allegory, too, for the Special Relationship shared between the USA and the UK, and it suggests that it was the wars that eroded differences of class and nationality - must it take ripping ourselves apart ot bring us back together? Anyway, this is what I got just from watching the incandescent Ms. Dunne navigate the many roles thrust suddenly upon her, with moving support from Gladys Cooper.
Song of the Open Road
release: June 21
nominations: Best Musical Score (Charles Previn), Best Original Song ("Too Much in Love")
dir: S. Sylvan Simon
pr: Charles R. Rogers
scr: Albert Mannheimer, from a story by Irving Phillips and Edward Verdier
cin: John W. Boyle
Jane Powell, in her film debut, plays Jane Powell, film child star, who runs away from her Hollywood career to join the U.S. Crop Corps, the real-life initiative that had youths around the country picking up the work left behind by farmers turned soldiers. Powell's a delight as Jane, who has no idea how the world works but tries to fit in among the rest of the kids, even as she mucks it up time and again, passionate but incompetent. She wins you over, enough so to almost distract from the fact that this is one big federal works promotion. W.C. Fields appears.
Christmas Holiday
release: June 30
nominations: Best Score (Hans J. Salter)
dir: Robert Siodmak
pr: Felix Jackson
scr: Herman J. Mankiewicz, from the novel by W. Somerset Maugham
cin: Elwood "Woody" Bredell
A soldier on leave finds himself unable to make his connection, and he spends Christmas Eve with beautiful, sad Deanna Durbin, who takes him to Midnight Mass and tells him of her troubles, including marriage to a mentally unstable Gene Kelly and his enabling mother Gale Sondergaard. Gladys George is a madame, we love her. It's a quiet character study that asks a lot of musical comedy star Durbin, as a young woman who commits is determined to follow a feeling through to its end, good or bad. That is to say: when she meets Kelly and falls in love, she's determined to be the protagonist of a rom-com; when it all goes to hell, she's determined to play the fallen woman - she's playing Parts, and I don't know that she fully becomes Herself until that final, breathtaking shot at the end. That's all purposeful, of course, a great way to transition Durbin to more serious roles, and it's cleverly written, movingly directed, and sharply played by Durbin, who proves more than up to the challenge. This was one of my favorite discoveries of the last year.
Sensations of 1945
release: June 30
nominations: Best Musical Score (Mahlon Merrick)
dir: Andrew L. Stone
pr: Felix Jackson / Andrew L. Stone
scr: Dorothy Bennett and Andrew L. Stone, story by Frederick J. Jackson
cin: J. Peverell Marley / John J. Mescall
Mostly a revue, the story linking the performances being the tensions between a press agent who's so-so at his job and a dancer with great publicity instincts. OK.
Tomorrow, a Eugene O'Neill classic.
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