Best Screenplay 1949

1927/28 through 1997
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What were the best original and adapted screenplays of 1949?

Battleground (Robert Pirosh)
0
No votes
Jolson Sings Again (Sidney Buchman)
0
No votes
Paisan (Alfred Hayes, Federico Fellini, Sergio Amidei, Marcello Pagliero, Roberto Rossellini)
7
25%
Passport to Pimlico (T.E.B. Clarke)
4
14%
The Quiet One (Helen Leavit, Janice Loeb, Sidney Meyers)
2
7%
All the King's Men (Robert Rossen)
2
7%
The Bicycle Thief (Cesare Zavattini)
8
29%
Champion (Carl Foreman)
0
No votes
The Fallen Idol (Graham Greene)
1
4%
A Letter to Three Wives (Joseph L. Mankiewicz)
4
14%
 
Total votes: 28

Heksagon
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Re: Best Screenplay 1949

Post by Heksagon »

I can only vote in the Original category, and I'm not hugely impressed by the line-up. Paisà is my favorite film here, and it gets my vote, even if I consider it to be far from the best that Italian Neo-Realism had to offer (remember, I don't really like episode type films either).

Battleground is a decent, if somewhat lightweight war-film. Severely lacking in originality and depth in characters, it won't get my endorsement for screenwriting.

I have seen Passport to Pimlico eight years ago but I remember virtually nothing of it. Evidently it didn't impress me too much. I have to admit, I've never been the biggest fan of Ealing films.

Jolson Sings Again is a fairly mediocre musical-biopic, and although the Don Quixote, vol. 2-type storyline where Jolson gets to see his life fictionalized is exceptional, it's far from being well enough executed to merit an Oscar nomination.

The Quiet One deserves credit for at least trying to be original and for trying to deal with social issues, but the end result is nowhere near good enough to merit a nomination either.
The Original BJ
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Re: Best Screenplay 1949

Post by The Original BJ »

The Adapted roster is indeed a pretty solid slate, in a good year, as evidenced by the plethora of alternates everyone has cited so far. (I'd definitely echo ksrymy's endorsement for Late Spring, though of course it didn't reach the US until years later.)

Champion isn't really any great shakes in the plot department -- we're getting into an era of film history where the movies that established the archetypes can now seem a bit simple -- but the writing from scene to scene is definitely solid, it feels honest throughout, and the ending provides real impact. Not exciting enough to choose, but a thoroughly respectable nominee.

A Letter to Three Wives is the kind of movie whose set-up alone feels like a relic when viewed with contemporary eyes -- if anyone had had a cell phone on that boat, there'd barely even be a story. Of course, this only exposes what was probably always an inherent issue with the material, which is that the stakes of the story just don't seem that high, and there isn't that much narrative drive. That said, there's still plenty of Mankiewciz wit in the dialogue, as well as thoughtful exploration about marriage and relationships. It isn't miscast as a screenplay winner.

All the King's Men is another movie that has dated a bit -- as an expose on political corruption, it's pretty clearly from the pre-Watergate era, and some elements come off pretty tame today. But others certainly don't -- in the era of Trump, Broderick Crawford's blustery rabble-rouser remains an exceedingly dynamic creation, as does McCambridge's tough as nails campaign manager. For these characters alone, and for those moments when the dialogue feels biting even today, the script still feels worthwhile over a half century later.

The Fallen Idol is a very strong thriller, with a narrative full of suspense, a great sense of the atmosphere of postwar Europe, and a real mordant sense of humor. I agree with what Mister Tee wrote, about how the film examines what it feels like to be a child in a world full of things beyond your grasp, as well as how being an adult doesn't suddenly mean the world makes perfect sense either. It's not quite as strong a work as The Third Man next year, but it's still one of the best filmic examples of the kind of moody, thrillers with a heart at which Graham Greene excelled.

But The Bicycle Thief is one of the greatest of all films, and though the Italian neorealists often receive the most attention for pioneering a certain kind of directorial style, this film's script is extremely strong on a narrative level. Its individual vignettes build upon one another to culminate in what feels like great tragedy, and the film showcases one of the most honest depictions of a father-son relationship in the cinema. By the end of the film you just feel an immense sense of despair, not only for the lives of the story's fictional protagonists, but for a world that wears people out with such suffering. A heartbreaking movie, and the obvious choice here.
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Re: Best Screenplay 1949

Post by Greg »

Mister Tee wrote:All the King’s Men has to have the strangest award-profile of almost any best picture winner – an adaptation of a Pulitzer-winning novel that failed to win for screenplay OR director. Other winners with that portfolio were musicals or epics, where the screenplay failure made sense.
By the time of that year's awards, writer-director Robert Rossen had been at least unofficially blacklisted.
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Re: Best Screenplay 1949

Post by Mister Tee »

For me, Intruder in the Dust is the clear omission under adaptation – I like it better than pretty much all the best picture contenders, and see it as easily the finest screen version of Faulkner. The Heiress is also a puzzling miss – it’s the tight script that makes it so popular to this day, and, even if you go by BJ’s “how different is it from the play?” criterion, it’s the same two Goetzes who extracted the highly dramatic play from James’ not-so-obviously-adaptable novel. I’d also advocate for Caught and Les Enfants Terribles – though the latter seems not to have been released stateside for several more years (had I known, I’d have noted it in the earlier thread).

The actual adapted field, though, is one of the strongest in this period. I re-watched Champion not all that long ago and was impressed with its biting script and consistently clear-eyed tone. I for one like it better than Body and Soul.

All the King’s Men has to have the strangest award-profile of almost any best picture winner – an adaptation of a Pulitzer-winning novel that failed to win for screenplay OR director. Other winners with that portfolio were musicals or epics, where the screenplay failure made sense. In any case…the film is probably not as strong as it appeared to me when I first saw it in my youth (at that time, I had it in vague company with From Here to Eternity and On the Waterfront); but it’s a strong melodrama that would even contend for my vote were the field not so distinguished overall.

A Letter to Three Wives has many of the qualities of the script for which Mankiewicz won the following year – a clever structuring device, witty dialogue for days. But what it doesn’t have is the heft of All About Eve – the sense it’s about something more than its own cleverness. It’s the kind of movie I could see winning on the original side, against leaner competition, but it’s an atypical choice in the usually more best-picture-centric adapted field.

The Fallen Idol is a lovely little film – a thriller that sees the gap between what a child perceives and what an adult is dealing with, and takes both equally seriously. Reed and Greene in collaboration did what Hitchcock did at his best: capture a sense of the powerlessness felt by an ordinary man as he’s consumed by forces bigger than him…and frame it all within a gripping suspense story. In most years, this film would get my vote.

But The Bicycle Thief – or Bicycle Thieves, which it’s hard for me to suddenly switch to calling it after a lifetime otherwise – is one of the high points of the neorealism movement: a seeming simply story that achieves enormous emotional depths. It’s surely one of the saddest movies ever made, but it doesn’t feel like it’s jerking tears: the camera just observes as this rain of bad luck falls all over our hero. A beatutiful piece of work, and my choice.

Jolson Sings Again is just an idiotic candidate here – not because the film is so minor (though it is), but because it so obviously leeches off the film from three years earlier. (Linklater’s two Before… nominations tell us the rules have totally reversed today.) The only interesting thing in the whole movie is the meta-moment when Larry Parks as Jolson meets Larry Parks as Larry Parks.

My god, everybody loved war pictures in this era. How many times did the writers alone nominate a WWII film between 1941 and, say, 1960? (I could count myself, but I’m lazy.) Battleground seems pretty close to a generic combat feature. I’m sure at the time it rang deeply for vets – the Battle of the Bulge having been a particularly grisly episode in the war – but time distances us from everything, and for contemporary audiences, the film might as well be dealing with the Peloponnesian War.

I’m surprised that, when Michael Moore won the WGA prize for Bowling for Columbine, nobody noted that The Quiet One had preceded it as a documentary with a writing nomination. (I never realized, till tracking the film down on You Tube, that it was a doc.) The film is a well-meaning piece of liberal advocacy – pushing for both racial tolerance AND mental health, a lefty daily double – and it feels a bit passe now…though the “reality” quotient makes it marginally more interesting as artifact than similarly-themed and contemporaneous fiction films.

I can certainly understand those voting for Paisan. Like many Rossellini movies of the era, it’s got an authentic feel, and is well-written/acted. But I’ve always had something of a problem with anthology films – they’re like a book of short stories, when I go into a film looking for the equivalent of a novel. The film isn’t quite cohesive enough to get my vote.

So, I’ll be an Ealing whore one last time. Passport to Pimlico isn’t as well-known as many of their 50s films – because it’s Guinness-less? – but I think it’s among the cleverest. I love that it not only starts with a wild premise – that this small piece of Britain is effectively a Burgundian possession – but that it keeps building on that premise, spinning ever crazier, escalating to insane heights as the characters become obsessed with the ridiculous notion of defending their Burgundian heritage. Many a perfectly good comedy would have stopped about three steps into this plot; that this film has the courage to keep climbing upward makes it, for me, the best piece of writing in the group.
ksrymy
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Re: Best Screenplay 1949

Post by ksrymy »

BEST SCREENPLAY
01. Late Spring (Kogo Noda & Yasujiro Ozu, based on the novel "Chichi to musume" by Kazuo Hirotsu)
02. The Small Back Room (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, based on the novel by Nigel Balchin)
03. Adam's Rib (Ruth Gordon & Garson Kanin)
04. Kind Hearts and Coronets (John Dighton, Robert Hamer, based on the novel by Roy Horniman)
05. Le Silence de la mer (Jean-Pierre Melville, based on the short story by Vercors)

But, as far as Oscar qualifications go, you'll be harder pressed to find better ones from the year than Paisan and Bicycle Thieves.
"Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known." - F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Re: Best Screenplay 1949

Post by Big Magilla »

Original

I have no idea whether the person voting for The Quiet One really thought the cinematography and editing deserved a screenplay Oscar or whether he or she was voting for it just to annoy me in light of my previous comments, but without an explanation I guess we'll never know. Even if their contributions did shape the narrative, it was Gary Merrill's voiceover (written by James Agee) and the occasional dialogue (also written by Agee) that informed the screenplay. At the very least Agee should have been co-nominated.

Oscar winner Sidney Buchman (Here Comes Mr. Jordan) was one of Hollywood's better screenwriters and his screenplay for the Jolson sequel was better than most show biz biopics of the era but there's nothing about it that cries out for an Oscar nod.

The remaining nominees are very strong.

Passport to Pimlico is one of the better Ealing comedies and deserved the nomination. For some unexplainable reason, Battleground has always been my favorite film about the ordinary foot solider of World War II and deserved the nomination. Ultimately, however, I picked the screenplay for Rossellini's brilliant Paisan which to my mind stands up just as well as the more celebrated Rome, Open City.

Adapted

There are no slugs here. All five were worthy nominees.

Champion, though much admired at the time, has since taken a backseat in critical appreciation to 1947's Body and Soul and that year's The Set-Up but I think it stands tall enough on its own.

All the King's Men was certainly an ambitious undertaking and writer Rossen's meticulous screenplay serves director Rossen well.

Graham Greene's expert screenplay for Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol presents a dream team of writing and directing that got even better with the following year's The Third Man.

A Letter to Three Wives had the year's best dialogue, especially in the scenes involving Linda Darnell, Paul Douglas, Connie Gilchrist and Thelma Ritter, but my vote goes to Cesare Zavvatini's screenplay for the year's finest film, De Sica's The Bicycle Thief which is now known in the U.S. under the title to which it has always been known in the rest of the world, Bicycle Thieves.
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Re: Best Screenplay 1949

Post by Big Magilla »

Yes, The Bicycle Thief was adapted from a novel.

The oddest nomination, as I alluded to the Original Story thread, is the nods that went to the documentary cinematographers and the editor of The Quiet One instead of James Agee who wrote the narration and dialogue that runs throughout the film.
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Re: Best Screenplay 1949

Post by Greg »

I had to check IMDB to make sure that The Bicycle Thief was adapted. It is kind of ironic that a neorealist film has an adapted script. Also, did anyone one else read the novel All The King's Men in high school like me?
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Best Screenplay 1949

Post by Big Magilla »

The poll is open.
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