The 1944 Retro Hollmann Awards, Part One

With my Top Ten decided, it's time to put 1944 to bed. Here are my winners and nominees for the 1944 Retro Hollmann Awards:

(Figuring Out) My Top Ten of 1944

I have been going back and forth with this Top Ten for days. I miss deadlines constantly, but that's usually laziness; this one has been an actual struggle. How do I narrow my list of thirteen down to just ten - and what do I say about them?

Hitch Limits Himself: Best Director, 1944

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.

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:

Five Is Enough: Best Picture, 1944

The 1st Academy Awards had three nominees for Outstanding Production (plus another three for Artistic Quality of Production, though the Academy only acknowledges Outstanding Production as the first Best Picture nominees). The field expanded very shortly after: the 2nd-4th Academy Awards had five nominees; the 5th had eight; the 6th had ten; the 7th and 8th had twelve; and things seemed settled when the ten-wide Best Picture lineup lasted from the 9th Academy Awards through the 16th Academy Awards. 

Come 1944, a new shakeup: five nominees for Best Picture, no more and no less, a tradition that lasted over 60 years and ended with the ten-wide selection of the 82nd Academy Awards. This, even as the individual Music categories (Score, Musical Score, Song) were tallying anywhere between 11 and 21 nominees! For the inaugural year of this new standard, which for many of us is still the standard (damn the past 18 years!), these were the nominees:

Double Indemnity

Paramount Pictures

Gaslight

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Going My Way

Paramount Pictures

Since You Went Away

Selznick International

Wilson

20th Century-Fox

A noir about an insurance agent who is wrapped up in a murder plot with an undeniable dame. A thriller about a newlywed whose husband may be purposely driving her mad for his own purposes. A light comedy about a young priest and an old priest clashing. A wartime drama about the experiences of the wives and children back home. A biopic about the President of the United States who dreamed of a united world and was castigated for it.

We’ve discussed elements of each of these films, and so I’ve linked their tags so that you can see everything I had to say about them beforehand. And now, my rankings, from fifth to first:

Almost All Winners: Best Actress, 1944

Presenting the 17th Academy Awards' nominees for Best Actress:

Ingrid Bergman, Gaslight

Claudette Colbert, Since You Went Away

Bette Davis, Mr. Skeffington

Greer Garson, Mrs. Parkington

Barbara Stanwyck, Double Indemnity

The Oscar ceremony honoring the films of 1944 took place on March 15, 1945. By that time, Going My Way was enough of a hit that a sequel, The Bells of St. Mary's, was already filming, reteaming director-writer Leo McCarey and star Bing Crosby, and adding Ingrid Bergman as a nun. When the Best Actress category for this year was announced, both McCarey and Crosby had already won their Going My Way Oscars, so when Ingrid Bergman was named the winner for Gaslight, she quipped, "I'm afraid if I didn't have an Oscar, too, they wouldn't speak to me." She needn't have worried.

Some Old Hollywood fans bemoan the win, not because she wasn't good, but because (a) she wound up getting two more anyway, and (b) this was probably the strongest chance Double Indemnity's Barbara Stanwyck had at winning. The other three were all former winners, with both Davis and Garson perennial favorites during this period. And in retrospect, certainly, it makes sense: Stanwyck's portrayal of Phyllis Dietrichson entered the public consciousness in a way none of the other performances have, the grande dame of all femme fatales. She even has her own Wikipedia page, which no other character here, or even in Double Indemnity, can claim!

The one who won, the one who left a legacy, or one of the others - who would you choose? My rankings, from fifth to first:

The Long Game: 1944, Part Seven

The final three Best Picture nominees are briefly glanced herein, and one of them, tragically, lost every single one of its nominations. But when I tell you that, and then when I tell you the five nominees were Double Indemnity, Gaslight, Going My Way, Since You Went Away, and Wilson, I bet you won't correctly guess who the sole "loser" was...