The 17th Academy Awards' nominees for Best Director are:
Alfred Hitchcock, Lifeboat
Henry King, Wilson
Leo McCarey, Going My Way
Otto Preminger, Laura
Billy Wilder, Double Indemnity
Hitchcock is the reason we're here. This month, next month, and the month after that, I'm focusing on 1944, 1945, and 1960, years where he was nominated for Best Director (we've already covered 1940 and 1954).
Having read Patrick McGilligan's Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light - and perused, without finishing, Leonard J. Leff's Hitchcock and Selznick - earlier this year, I...won't say I'm expert on Hitchcock, but I have some context. Context I hope to share, accurately, with you, dear reader. Both tell of how Hitchcock was the wünderkind of British cinema, having worked his way up from title writer and art director to film director, even learning the ropes from the visionaries of German Expressionism. But by the 1930s, those German visionaries had been run out by the Nazis, while British cinema was famously very limited regarding resources. It was difficult for a man of Hitchcock's vision to get the films he wanted to make, made in the way he wanted to make them, and already by the mid-1930s, he was looking to Hollywood. He secured the services of Myron Selznick as his agent and, would you believe, the best offer came via Myron's brother David O. Selznick and his independent Selznick International - amazing!
Hitchcock came to the United States with a New York Film Critics Circle Award (for The Lady Vanishes) and 26 films already under his belt. He was no novice. Yet, apparently, there was little joy in the making of his first American film, the very British Rebecca, since David O. had a very heavy hand in production, and Hitchcock was used to doing his own thing. Fortunately, it was possible to be loaned out to other studios - thus 20th Century-Fox and the making of Lifeboat.
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| Hitchcock makes a cheeky cameo |
This was Hitch's half-realization of his dream project, which was to explore the tensions and joys among sex and race and class in a single space (the full realization would have been a film about twelve hours in one of those famous London parks, either Kensington or Covent, I forget). The desire was retooled a few times throughout his career, but he was able to scratch that itch within a timely wartime milieu with Lifeboat, an original concept that saw a glamorous journalist, a tycoon, several shipmates, a mother, a nurse, and a Nazi, all thrown together for 97 minutes. Execs, and some critics, balked at what they saw as noble treatment of the Nazi (as always, a critique says more about the viewer than about the filmmaker), and the film was dropped at the end of January 1944 to disastrous box office. Nevertheless, it managed three Academy Award nominations, a spot in the National Board of Review's Top Ten Films of 1944, and the NYFCC Award for Best Actress for Tallulah Bankhead in her first real screen performance since 1932.
Were those accolades all due to Hitchcock? Did he deserve this nomination? I've ranked the nominated directors from fifth to first:
5. Henry King for Wilson
second and final nomination
I hate Going My Way more, but you can't say McCarey isn't skilled. King's work here is skilled, too, but feels more like a journeyman than a man with passion behind the camera. The nomination is for the content, not for the execution. If it were a black-and-white film instead of Technicolor - a choice made by the producer - King would not be here.
4. Leo McCarey for Going My Way
second of two directing wins, second of three directing nominations; Golden Globe winner for Best Director, NYFCC Awards winner for Best Director
Your Oscar winner, folks. The man knows how to stage an intimate musical number, he's great with mise-en-scene and cutting to manipulate the emotions effectively, to say he's bad at what he does would be to be dishonest. You don't have the kind of career he's had if you're competent. But sometimes it's a matter of taste, and my tongue - after a fair number of films, I'd say - says to spit him out. All the mise-en-scene in the world can't save your dull-ass movie, Leo!
3. Otto Preminger for Laura
first of three nominations
Few people have such a sense of tone as Preminger, his movies tend to a tightrope-walk of darkly comic and very stressful. He has a lot of fun with the cast and crime of Laura. I'm in suspense, I'm identifying with despicable people, and I'm having a great goddam time. What else do you need? He drives it, he delivers.
2. Alfred Hitchcock for Lifeboat
second of five nominations
The inclination he had towards this kind of single-set mosaic shows: it's visually exciting without compromising the conceit of the single lifeboat, the ensemble is engaging, with each getting a chance to shine, and enough of them together in one frame to complicaste plot and character both directly and indirectly. He gives them all business to do, knows just when to just watch as a whole versus when to focus on a single character in closeup. Sure, the story calls for such things, but other choices, like foregoing a score in favor of just the wind and the waves, are unique to Hithcock, daring, I might say, and help build the claustrophobia.
1. Billy Wilder for Double Indemnity
Hitchcock’s is the gutsiest work in this lineup; Wilder’s is the most consistent. There's never a lull in Double Indemnity, you can't imagine cutting a single moment, so much thought has gone into every line, every lighting choice, every movement by the actors. Not saying he was a tyrant, merely that he understood what the film needed and ran the set and guided the performances accordingly, and what we have is a highly quotable, hilarious, erotic, tense thriller that reminds you of too many people you've met. It is simply superb.
Tomorrow, I drop the Oscars and get personal with my own Top Ten of 1944.
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