The 1950 Retro Hollmann Awards: Part Two

Yesterday, our first nine awards were given out, with Best Pic nominees Gun Crazy and The Rules of the Game each receiving two. But what will actually take the title of the Best Picture of 1950? Reacquaint yourself with the nominees and Top Ten, and then read on:

The 1950 Retro Hollmann Awards: Part One

Following are the first nine categories of the 1950 Retro Hollmann Awards - including Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay. Reacquaint yourself with the full slate of nominees, take a look at the Top Ten, place your bets - and then come right back here and proceed...

Coming in June: 1935!

The 1950 Retro Hollmann Awards begin tomorrow, but now's as good a time as any to discuss the plan for June....after the jump.

The Nominees for the 1950 Retro Hollmann Awards!

Welp, 72 films and one Top Ten later....my nominees for the 1950 Retro Hollmann Awards!

The Top Ten of 1950

Our Honorable Mentions: The Asphalt Jungle, Catskill Honeymoon, Champagne for Caesar, Last Holiday, Night and the City, Stage Fright, and Winchester '73.

The top ten, in alphabetical order:

1950: And That's Not All!

And now a few more movies from 1950:

1950: Killers, Cons, Convicts, and Crooks

Yesterday, we laughed. Today, we look over our shoulders. Noirs and adventures, oddities and horrors, here are some films from 1950 focusing on The Criminal Element.

1950: Laughs

A lot of life stuff done delayed my writeups, so! We'll get through the 25 remaining films in big chunks. Let's start with the comedies, in no particular order.

1950: Catskill Honeymoon (and other historical documents)

We're gonna hitchhike up to the Catskills

Get on the highway to 17

We're gonna hitchhike up to the mountains

Up to the finest resort we have seen!

A group of ladies against a painted backdrop mapping the way to Young's Gap Resort, a montage of holidayers enjoying the amenities such a vacation offers. You've seen Dirty Dancing, now experience for yourself the entertainment offerings of the Borscht Belt in Catskill Honeymoon. Less a film than a document (even the contemporaneous New York Times review notes this) of popular Yiddish acts, a niche within a niche. Musical performances range from a nice young man singing dire ballads to a female cantor smoothly transitioning between Hebrew prayers and Pagliacci; sketches touch on subjects from overpriced food to linguistic differences between Lithuanians and Galicians.

1950: Best Picture of the Year

The Academy Awards' Best Picture lineup for 1950 is full of classics, stories so undeniable that, indeed, they remade 'em again and again. 

All About Eve became the 1970 Broadway musical Applause, which not only nabbed some Tony Awards, but two Emmy nominations for the 1973 telefilm; offstage, it's been riffed on everywhere, from Anna to Showgirls. Born Yesterday was already a Broadway show, but 43 years after this film, a remake starring Melanie Griffith, Don Johnson, and John Goodman came to cinemas. Nowadays, this Father of the Bride is not as known as the 1991 remake with Steve Martin...and yet another remake is on its way with Andy Garcia. King Solomon's Mines was just the latest adaptation of the classic novel: there was one in 1937 with Paul Robeson, another one in 1985 with Richard Chamberlain, even a 2004 miniseries with Patrick Swayze...though before this, I mostly knew protagonist Allan Quatermain as Sean Connery's character in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Sunset Blvd. remains relatively untouched onscreen, despite Glenn Close attempting to get a film of her Broadway triumph off the ground - though if memory serves, the 2010 Keira Knightley vehicle London Boulevard (dig that title) is a modern riff on its themes. 

What makes these classics work so? Let's see...

1950: Actress

More so than the Best Picture race, the Best Actress race of 1950 has divided Oscar fans and cinephiles for over 70 years. Yes, of course, Bette Davis or Gloria Swanson should have won for their immortal performances in, respectively, All About Eve and Sunset Blvd., who had the audacity to win?

OH, iconic Judy Holliday for iconic Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday? Hm...well...who else was...OH, Eve Harrington herself and the lead of women-in-prison cult classic Caged. Ahem, well, uh, in that case...hm.

An embarrassment of riches, clearly, so much so that I wrote much more about these performances than I did their male counterparts. But there's just so much to chew on, such great choices made by each performer, in such rich roles, how could I resist? See for yourself:

1950: Actor

Today we look at 1950's nominees for Best Actor. Three of these nominees first played their parts on Broadway, including the eventual winner:

Let's talk about it!

1950: Supporting Actress

A bit of business first: somehow, I neglected to mention the non-Oscar awardage for films nominated for the Music Awards, the Writing Awards and Director. If you revisit those pages, you'll see such info.

Now, on to the business at hand: Best Supporting Actress. An exquisite lineup. For Celeste Holm, it was the last of a series of nominations; for Thelma Ritter, it was the first of many. Hope Emerson, Josephine Hull, and Nancy Olson were one-and-dones, but from that trio came the night's Oscar winner:

All five gave great performances in fine films. Emerson as the butch matron in an all-female prison, Holm as the playwright's wife and best friend to the grande dame of the stage, Hull as the worried wealthy widow whose brother's mental state is an embarrassment, Olson as the script reader who wants to be a screenwriter, Ritter as the former vaudevillian turned dresser/housekeeper/assistant who sees her position threatened by Anne Baxter! Nothin' but riches I tells ya! Let's discuss:

1950: Supporting Actor

And we're back, with the nominees for Best Supporting Actor. Presented by the previous tyear's Best Supporting Actress winner, All the King's Men's Mercedes McCambridge.

1950: Director

We close out the first week of 1950 with the nominees for Best Director:

1950: The Writing Awards

Until 1956, the writing awards were no simple delineation between Adapted Screenplay and Original Screenplay. This was a time when studios marked a difference between their screenwriters and their story department.  So: if someone came up with a story, its characters and plot and all that, but did not write the final screenplay, they were eligible for Best Motion Picture Story. If someone wrote a screenplay, with dialogue and action and INT./EXT. and all that, working off of either a play, a novel, a magazine article or a Motion Picture Story written by another, they were eligible for Best Screenplay. And if a screenwriter also wrote the original story they were working off of, they were eligible for Best Story & Screenplay.

Two-time Academy Award nominee Ruth Chatterton put it succinctly in her presentation of the Writing Awards at the 23rd Oscars:

1950: The Music Awards

We continue with our journey through the 23rd Academy Awards in order of their original presentation. That brings us to the Music Awards, presented by Gene Kelly:

1950: Some Nominees

As we tend to do, our coverage of the year that was begins with the Academy Awards. And we shall take the categories in their order of presentation at the 23rd ceremony, held March 29, 1951, at the Pantages Theatre. Today, we focus on the nominees that were up for the "craft" categories, but nowhere else: Special Effects, Costume Design, Art Direction, Sound Recording, Cinematography. We'll also look at the winner for Best Foreign Film, still an honorary award without a block of nominees at the time. 

Let us begin where the Oscars did:

1950: Introduction

This month we pay tribute to the films of 1950...