OK, here we go. Months in the making, 75 films and 27 nominees later - my winners for the 1948 Retro Hollmann Awards.
Friday, July 28, 2023
Wednesday, July 26, 2023
And Next Week...
Taking a break from 1948 to talk about what's next. Starting August 1, we look back at the films of 1984! I screened 76 films for this project, including these 32 Academy Award nominees:
It all begins Tuesday, August 1st, right here at The Silver Screening Room.
Tuesday, July 25, 2023
The 1948 Retro Hollmann Awards - Nominees!
You've seen my Top Ten (I hope); now, the 27 films nominated in 18 categories for...the 1948 Retro Hollmann Awards! After the jump...
Monday, July 24, 2023
Top Ten of 1948
Yesterday, I stated that I found the Best Picture nominees of 1948 to be...lacking overall. On Friday, a friend of mine messaged to tell me he found my Best Actress rankings of 1948 to be lacking overall, so truly, there's no accounting for taste. As you're about to find out!
I started with 75 films:
It took a lot to narrow it all down to these. With apologies to the almost-made-its - Call Northside 777, Fanny, A Foreign Affair, Panic, Raw Deal, Red River, and The Red Shoes - I present my Top Ten of 1948, in alphabetical order:
Sunday, July 23, 2023
1948: Best Picture
Finally, Best Picture of 1948. Honestly, not one of the strongest lineups. There are two clear-cut masterpieces, alongside three films whose craftsmanship is undeniably good, but as movies...just overall not my thing, I guess. There are lots of films from this year I'd rank above...but we'll get there, never you mind about that now.
The nominees:
Friday, July 21, 2023
1948: Best Actress
One of my friends told me this was the category he was most interested to see my take on. Let's hope he is not disappointed:
Thursday, July 20, 2023
1948: Best Score
The nominees for Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture consist of four Best Picture nominees and Joan of Arc. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre did not make it here, though its composer, Max Steiner, was nominated for Johnny Belinda. And only one composer was showing up for the first time - and wound up winning! The nominees:
Wednesday, July 19, 2023
1948: Best Supporting Actor
The moment The Treasure of the Sierra Madre opened back in January 1948, critics had been talking up Walter Huston's performance as a shoo-in for the Oscars. For the usual Awards Season reasons, of course: veteran actor, frequently nominated but never won, deglam...oh, and his acting's great, too! All true, but there's one more thing: who could resist the narrative of Legacy? Not only was Huston giving the performance of his life, he was doing so in a film written and directed by his own son, John. Upon winning the Oscar (oh, yes, you saw that coming if you didn't already know), Huston said, "I said to him, 'Son, if you ever become a writer, try to write a good part for your old man some time.' Well, by cracky, that's what he did!"
They were the first parent-child pair to win Academy Awards in the same ceremony, a feat later repeated by Francis Ford Coppola (Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay) and his father Carmine Coppola (Original Score) for 1974's The Godfather: Part II.
But, while Huston's win may have been a cakewalk, he was up against what I consider one of this category's strongest lineups. If you please:
Tuesday, July 18, 2023
1948: Best Screenplay
The closest equivalent to Adapted Screenplay at the 1948 Academy Awards is just plain Screenplay, differentiating itself from Original Story by honoring the writers of the script itself - the dialogue, the stage directions, the INT./EXT., all that. For some reason (and we mentioned this before) the people who wrote both the story and the screenplay did not get their own category his year, so the writers of The Search found themselves winning one category and being nominated in the other. Here it is, alongside another original (albeit with three screenwriters working off a fourth person's story) and three direct adaptations. But you can see that for yourself:
Monday, July 17, 2023
1948: Original Song
In 1956, The Red Balloon made history as the first short film to win an Academy Award in a category other than the short film categories. A little less than a decade before that, however, "Wet Blanket Policy" became the first short to be nominated outside the shorts.
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The Woody Woodpecker cartoon runs a little over six minutes and was not even among the five up for Best Short Subject - Cartoon, a category won by MGM's "The Little Orphan," starring Tom and Jerry. Instead, it found itself up for Original Song, thanks to the new composition of a title tune, "The Woody Woodpecker Song." The song was a hit and is credited with really getting out the word on the bird, with fan clubs springing up and cinemas screening matinee blocks of Woody Woodpecker cartoons.
He still didn't win the Oscar, of course. Here's the competition:
Sunday, July 16, 2023
1948: Best Director
Got to this a couple days late, but here we go: Best Director, 1948.
Actually, before we get to the nominees - did you know this was also the first year that the Directors Guild of America gave out competitive awards? What was going on that everyone suddenly wanted their own trophies?
There were only four nominees that first year, only half of whom were also nominated at the 21st Academy Awards: Anatole Litvak for The Snake Pit and Fred Zinnemann for The Search. The other two were Howard Hawks for Red River and Joseph L. Mankiewicz for A Letter to Three Wives...a 1949 film. Mankiewicz would repeat his win at the 22nd Academy Awards, while the winner of the 1948 Oscar wasn't even nominated at the DGA Awards. Go figure!
Here are Oscar's nominees:
Thursday, July 13, 2023
1948: Best Actor
The question that haunts this category for this particular year: where's Humphrey Bogart's nomination for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre?
From the Los Angeles Times: "There is nought but credit to give to the actor for his very fine performance. He has a terrific dramatic summit to reach in the later scenes, and does this with notable effectiveness." From the New York Times: "His performance in this film is perhaps the best and most substantial that he has done." From Variety: "Bogart...comes through with a performance as memorable as his first major film role in The Petrified Forest was in 1935. ...In a remarkably controlled portrait, he progresses to the edge of madness without losing sight of the subtle shadings needed to establish persuasiveness."
To many, this is the performance Bogart should have won for (possibly clearing the way for a Brando win in 1951). Perhaps the reason for Bogart's absence is the about-face. Every review notes that his fans may be disappointed to find that instead of another "indestructible private eye" or flawed good guy, he plays a real asshole. Allegedly, he himself told a critic weeks prior to the film's opening, "I play the worst shit you ever saw." It's a great performance but a challenging part, one that perhaps fans weren't ready to see and co-workers weren't ready to award.
Here's who got nominated instead:
Wednesday, July 12, 2023
1948: Best Musical Score
How does one rate a score? True, this entire exercise is one of subjectivity (I'm sure there are Agnes Moorehead fans tsk-tsking), but how does one sit down, watch any of the five films listed today, and argue, "Well, clearly what Victor Young does with The Emperor Waltz is of a far superior quality, due respect, to what Alfred Newman is tasked to accomplish with When My Baby Smiles at Me?"
It'd be one thing if we were ranking the songs (that, I suspect, is why this category eventually became Best Song Score and went to the songwriters rather than music adaptors, but we'll save that for next month); we could very easily discuss the merits or otherwise of these particular Irving Berlin or Cole Porter scores. But this is more...complicated. This isn't about the songs but about the underscoring between songs, the dance breaks within those songs, and the opening credits made from the songs. It's not just about whether or not you like Berlin, but about whether what Green & Edens do with Berlin is effective enough to keep you entertained when you aren't hearing the lyrics.
To that end, here we go - the nominees for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture...
Tuesday, July 11, 2023
1948: Supporting Actress
Look at this lineup of character actresses: Oscar nominees today, Emmy winners tomorrow. Oh yes, each one of these ladies went on to TV gold. Academy Award winner Claire Trevor won an Emmy for her performance on the anthology show Producers' Showcase; Jean Simmons, for the mini-series The Thorn Birds. Ellen Corby won three just for The Waltons, while her I Remember Mama co-star Barbara Bel Geddes won one for playing Miss Ellie on Dallas. And while Agnes Moorehead went 0-for-4 with Oscar, with Emmy, she went...1-for-7 - her one Emmy wasn't for her six-time nominated Endora on Bewitched, either, but for her guest appearance on The Wild Wild West. Oh, well.
Five actresses with Emmy Awards. But what about Oscar? Let's discuss...
Monday, July 10, 2023
1948: Motion Picture Story
Last week, we discussed the films of 1948 in general - well, 75 of them, at least. For the next two weeks, we look at what the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences deemed, specifically, the best of the best. Starting today with Best Original Motion Picture Story.
In 1948, there is no Best Original Screenplay category or even a Best Story & Screenplay category. There is merely Original Story - made up of, yes, original storylines - and Screenplay - made up of screenplays based either on pre-existing work or aforementioned Original Stories. This is slightly unusual because although this delineation between writing a story (or treatment, outlining the events and arc of the plot) and writing a screenplay (the script itself with dialogue and all that) existed for some time, a category for writers who wrote both Story and Screenplay existed both before and after 1948. I'd love to know why, this one year was the exception.
Anyway, here's who they nominated:
Friday, July 7, 2023
1948: The Season
Today marks the last day of the mini-reactions (I don't know if they're in-depth enough to count as reviews or critiques). This bunch takes us from October 1st straight through Christmas Day, what today would pass as Awards Season. Not so different then, frankly: of the 16 titles we bring up today, nine would go on to Oscar nominations with six winning at least one, accounting for 50% of the night's overall winners! It's true, for everything there is a season...
Thursday, July 6, 2023
1948: Between Summer and Fall...
We now go into the end of Summer and beginning of Autumn - a lineup that includes a Best Picture nominee! Actually, there are a lot of nominees here: of these 13 films, only three of them weren't recognized by either the Academy or the WGA. One is a Poverty Row Charlie Chan film, one os a documentary, and the other is...Rope! Read on...
Wednesday, July 5, 2023
1948: Summer Songs
Summer is upon us, and what do you suppose the folks in 1948 were watching? By the looks of this lineup: musicals. Not just because four of the films below are musicals, but because two of them ended up among the highest-grossing films of the year - though, naturally, the two I prefer are neither of them. Sprinkled among those songs of the summer: Charlie Chan (not a season goes by without him!), a lot of noirs, and the greatest crossover any Cinematic Universe ever thought to put out...
Tuesday, July 4, 2023
1948: Spring
Happy Fourth! I cannot promise any fireworks with the following set of films, but I do guarantee entertainment...well, from most of them, anyway.
Monday, July 3, 2023
1948: An Auspicious Start
Of the hundreds of films that qualified for the 21st Academy Awards, I watched 75. Over the next few days - indeed, starting yesterday - I'm going to talk about those films and my reactions to them, thirteen a day, in order of release - excepting, of course, the five nominees for Best Picture, which I'll get into when I discuss that category on July 20th.
I will mention, though, an interesting fact. Much has been made of Everything Everywhere All At Once sustaining its buzz from its debut at South By Southwest on March 11, 2022, through its theatrical release 14 days later, all the way to being named Best Picture on March 12, 2023, a year and a day later. It is impressive, if only because the Academy tends to be biased in favor of later releases. The year 1948 was no exception - three of the five Best Picture nominees, including the winner, came out in the last quarter. Still, it's impressive that one of those other two nominees came out right at the beginning of the year.
Treasure of the Sierra Madre had its Los Angeles premiere January 14th, 1948, before receiving general release ten days later. In the Los Angeles Times review dated January 15th, Edwin Schallert called it "curiously powerful" and predicted that Walter Huston's performance as an old prospector "would be on the next nominations list, were it not for the fact that [the film] belongs to 1948 rather than 1947." Schallert was right, though: not only did Huston père receive one of the film's four Oscar nominations, he also accounts for one of its three wins. And this was a year when the Awards were held in late March (in fact, a year and two months to the day following its general release)! Director-screenwriter John Huston also found himself up for two WGA Awards: Best Western (a win!) and Best Drama (a loss, to The Snake Pit).
That's how the film year of 1948 started. Here's what came after:
Sunday, July 2, 2023
1948: Shakespeare, Writers, and the Year Before
This month we focus on the films of 1948.
Why the films of 1948? If you've been reading for a while, you may recall that last year, I wanted to watch all the Best Picture nominees adapted from William Shakespeare. 1948 is an exceptional year in that regard - not only was a Shakespeare film nominated, but it was also the winner.
Further research and current events convinced me this was a good time to bring back 1948: this was the inaugural year of the Writers Guild Awards. Nowadays, it's a fairly standard Oscar precursor, awarding Best Original Screenplay, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Documentary Screenplay. In its first year, however, the WGA Awards sought to honor every major genre and its unique position as an American Union with five categories: Drama, Comedy, Western, Musical, and the Robert Meltzer Award for Screenplay Dealing Most Ably With Problems of the American Scene. Television honors would be added later.
The Meltzer Award, by the way, is named for a screenwriter who died fighting the Nazis in 1944 only to be posthumously censured by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951. In between, the WGA established an award in his honor, as a hat-tip to those writers whose work addresses what's happening in America now. When he was named by HUAC, the award was suspended.
So, there we are: Shakespeare and Writers Guild Awards. Let's hop right to it, shall we?
The journey begins before 1948. Back then, as now, a film qualified for the Oscars when it played Los Angeles for a week. I've tried to go by LA release dates where available, but sometimes all I can find is a general US release date. The following five films had their releases before 1948, but did not play Los Angeles until the next year (or, in one case, two years later). Still, they qualify for our purposes, and so here they are.
Girl of the Canal (aka Painted Boats)
release date: January 12, 1946
(recommended by Juan Carlos Ojano)
See, here's a perfect example: Released in the UK in 1945, it received its "general" release in the United States on October 6, 1947; more than a year previously, however, it made its debut Stateside in January 1946...on New York television. TV was still new-ish, so there weren't yet rules in place regarding a strictly theatrical exhibition in order to qualify for the Academy Awards.
At just 48 minutes, it is a coming-of-age romance; a family drama; a documentary about a disappearing way of life. We've two families of canal workers - one with a motor, one being pulled by a horse on the shore - I question the efficiency of the latter but, then, so much of this film is about chipping away at the old ways of doing things in favor of modernity...and literacy. There's an intelligent son in the former, an intelligent daughter in the latter, they're attracted to each other, they've hopes and dreams, one kind of hankers for a life beyond, the other can't imagine a better way of life. It's just an interesting flick to watch unfold, especially since one gets to learn so much about a bygone way of life. Why canals? How did this become a way of life? Watch the film and find out for yourself!
Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome
release date: September 26, 1947
The final of four Dick Tracy films first hit US cinemas in 1947. I love this series of films: while they don't consistently maintain the wink at German Expressionism in their sets and costumes, they sustain a straight-faced camp in their dialogue and storylines. Dick's almost a non-entity, but they know that. The draw is Boris Karloff as a villain using special nerve gas to rob banks, a villain so terrifying, even the cops are comparing him to...Boris Karloff. The man never phoned a performance in, and here he demonstrates a gift for deadpan comedy that makes one wonder what he could have done with the Abrahams/Zucker/Zucker contingent. A good time.
Panic
release date: November 26, 1947
(recommended by Juan Carlos Ojano)
Adapted from a story by Georges Simenon, the creator of Inspector Maigret. In the aftermath of a woman's murder, suspicion falls on a loner who is largely disliked socially but, otherwise, has nothing against him. No matter, the fact that people don't like him is enough to hang him in the court of public opinion. The film follows that tightening noose, even as the doomed man himself discovers the identity of the true killer, which he hides for the sake of the woman he loves. An allegory for the collaboration of French citizens during the Vichy period, it's a damning portrayal of mob mentality. Brilliant flick.
The Chinese Ring
release date: December 6, 1947
Our first Charlie Chan of the year! At this point, the barely-passable Sidney Toler had died, the reigns going to the not-even-trying Roland Winters, in his first of six appearances as the great detective. Here, a beautiful Chinese princess comes to Chan for help but, before he can even meet her, she is assassinated while waiting for him in his own study. The titular ring refers to the one she wears on her hand, announcing her status. The solution seems divined out of thin air. Ends with a horrifying misogynist joke that feels very out of character for Charlie Chan. Apparently a word-for-word remake of the Boris Karloff flick Mr. Wong in Chinatown. DIRE.
Beauty and the Beast
release date: December 23, 1947
(recommended by Juan Carlos Ojano and Joe Leydon)
You know the old story of the beauty who frees her father from an enchanted palace by taking his place; this version includes Belle's jealous siblings. Clever production design, jaw-dropping makeup effects, ingenious casting/role-doubling, sparkling cinematography: this is a masterpiece, magic to behold.
Tomorrow, the first 13 films released in 1948 - plus a look at the first Best Picture nominee of the year.
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