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:

The Winner Changes All: Best Supporting Actor, 1944

Presenting the 17th Academy Awards' nominees for Best Supporting Actor:

Hume Cronyn, The Seventh Cross

Barry Fitzgerald, Going My Way

Claude Rains, Mr. Skeffington

Clifton Webb, Laura

Monty Woolley, Since You Went Away

Cronyn is a man in Nazi Germany who must choose between protecting himself and helping a friend, a political refugee. Fitzgerald is an old and old-fashioned priest with a crumbling parish. Rains is a successful Jewish businessman who marries a woman who loves his money more than him, but he's hopeful that'll change. Webb is a bitchy columnist whose protege's murder is investigated. Woolley is a stuffy retired colonel boarding with a middle-class family, nursing a strained relationship with his grandson.

This was always going to be Fitzgerald's Oscar:

The fact that he was nominated for the exact same performance in Best Actor tells you so. At the time, Academy bylaws permitted an actor to be considered for whatever category, and he happened to score enough votes to place in both categories. Afterward, rules were changed so that an actor could only be nominated in the category submitted by their studio, but that got confusing, too: a clerical error in 1963 led to the entire cast of Cleopatra being submitted as leads, while Peter Sellers' multiple roles in 1964's Dr. Strangelove led to four simultaneous campaigns: one in Lead for all three roles together, and three in Supporting for each role individually. So then the rules were changed again: you could vote for a role in whichever category, but the category they got the most votes in first would be their nomination: thus, Kate Winslet in The Reader went from being campaigned all 2008 as Best Supporting Actress, only to wind up in Best Lead Actress.

So that's how a Supporting Actor won the Oscar and changed the rules.

It's not, admittedly, the best lineup. My rankings, from fifth to first:

Crime and Christmas: 1944, Part Nine

Our last batch of reviews before we get into the Oscar categories themselves: