Best Screenplay 1945

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What were the best Original and Adapted Screenplays of 1945?

Dillinger (Philip Yordan)
3
13%
Marie-Louise (Richard Schweitzer)
2
9%
Music for Millions (Myles Connolly)
2
9%
Salty O'Rourke (Milton Holmes)
0
No votes
What Next, Corporal Hargrove? (Harry Kurnitz)
0
No votes
The Lost Weekend (Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder)
7
30%
Mildred Pierce (Ranald MacDougall)
4
17%
Pride of the Marines (Albert Maltz)
1
4%
The Story of G.I. Joe (Leopold Atlas, Guy Endone, Philip Stenson)
0
No votes
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Frank Davis, Tess Schlesinger)
4
17%
 
Total votes: 23

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gunnar
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Re: Best Screenplay 1945

Post by gunnar »

Mister Tee wrote:
gunnar wrote:I watched What's Next, Corporal Hargrove?, Marie-Louise, and Salty O'Rourke during the past 24 hours .
Any hints where to find Marie-Louise and Salty O'Rourke? They're the two that still elude me. (I caught up with Music for Millions after writing here four years ago. Also, caught up with the predecessor See Here, Private Hargrove, which, as I suspected, didn't make Corporal Hargrove any funnier.)
I sent you the info in a PM.
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Re: Best Screenplay 1945

Post by Mister Tee »

gunnar wrote:I watched What's Next, Corporal Hargrove?, Marie-Louise, and Salty O'Rourke during the past 24 hours .
Any hints where to find Marie-Louise and Salty O'Rourke? They're the two that still elude me. (I caught up with Music for Millions after writing here four years ago. Also, caught up with the predecessor See Here, Private Hargrove, which, as I suspected, didn't make Corporal Hargrove any funnier.)
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Re: Best Screenplay 1945

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I watched What's Next, Corporal Hargrove?, Marie-Louise, and Salty O'Rourke during the past 24 hours so I'm now up to speed on all of the nominees. To me, Marie-Louise is easily the best movie in the original category with the other nominees a step (or two) below. Corporal Hargrove wasn't as good as Private Hargrove (which was good, but not great) and I'm not sure why it got a nomination. The screenplay for Salty O'Rourke wasn't bad, Dillinger was okay, and Music for Millions was good. My vote goes to Marie-Louise.

In the adapted category, the two top choices for me are The Lost Weekend and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Each was very good to excellent, though in different ways. My vote goes to The Lost Weekend. Mildred Pierce and Pride of the Marines were both good with The Story of G.I. Joe coming in behind them for me.
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Re: Best Screenplay 1945

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Time to tackle the Adapted category. (I haven't seen one of the Original nominees in that tough-to-track-down slate.)

Pride of the Marines is a movie that sort of gets increasingly better as it goes along. I thought it started as a fairly grisly lightweight romance, became a mostly generic war movie, and then ended on a halfway compelling triumph over disability drama. However, at no point did I think the script was ever interesting enough to merit writing prizes, and given that several of the omitted Best Picture nominees had far more literate credentials (The Bells of St. Mary's, Spellbound), I have no idea how it even got this nomination.

G.I. Joe (or The Story of..., depending on which title you go with) features some solid writing in the correspondence sequences (presumably drawn pretty closely from the source material), as well as some insightful conversations between characters about the nature of war and their role in it. The film also builds to a pretty powerful final scene. The movie isn't in my wheelhouse enough to get my vote -- and I do think it has its generic WWII movie elements too -- but for once, I can understand how a war drama got its nomination in this category.

Hot take: I preferred the Haynes/Winslet version of Mildred Pierce (though it doesn't solve a problem apparently inherent to the source material, which is that the conclusion just dribbles away). This isn't to say that the Curtiz/Crawford version doesn't have its worthy elements, but I don't feel that the murder is all that well integrated into the narrative as a whole -- it FEELS like something inserted into a storyline that wasn't built for it. As a result, I find the movie sort of an awkward blend of female melodrama and noir, with high points one would typically associate with those genres (resonant tragedies, plenty of hard boiled dialogue), but an overall through-line that doesn't feel quite tonally grounded.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a pretty moving family drama, with a lot of honest insight about the relationship between parents and kids, the sad things one has to learn when growing up, and the struggles of everyday people trying to live within their means. The story's central conflict -- between a girl who idealizes her drunk (and often absent) father because he gives her affection and the mother who has to be tougher while knowing that her efforts to keep the family afloat will never be fully appreciated -- is quite sensitively rendered in a lot of small, thoughtful moments. I do think the script reveals some seams in its adaptation -- a number of times the movie really breezes by some major plot points, as if the writers were trying to cram in as much story from the novel as possible -- but it's a respectable and affecting piece of work.

But I go pretty easily for The Lost Weekend, a very efficient piece of writing which tells a compact story that pulses along with narrative momentum and features a decent amount of depth along the way. Of course, the film's treatment of the subject matter is no longer as startling as it must have seemed in 1945, but it's still a thoughtful and powerful portrait of addiction -- it doesn't feel to me like a dated piece of work, because the impact remains quite strong. The ending is an especially effective high-wire act -- you can read it as uplifting, because of how Milland averts tragedy, but everything that has proceeded it is gloomy enough to suggest that he's only safe this time, and the road to full recovery is still quite a long way off. I agree that the script is not in Wilder's top tier, but it's still a fairly substantial achievement, and merited this prize.
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Re: Best Screenplay 1945

Post by dws1982 »

Mister Tee wrote:Of the omittees, I might suggest They Were Expendable (yes, a John Ford film I really like)
Definitely top five Ford, in my opinion. Ford himself was more mixed on it...sometimes he would say he didn't like it at all, other times he would say he liked it.
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Re: Best Screenplay 1945

Post by Mister Tee »

OK, let's get through this quick.

1945 was, for me, the weakest year of the 40s; there are few films for which I have much enthusiasm. Of the omittees, I might suggest They Were Expendable (yes, a John Ford film I really like) or the more trivial Murder, My Sweet (a film I prefer to The Big Sleep). And, maybe, It's in the Bag, a Fred Allen movie VERY loosely based on the same novel as The Twelve Chairs -- it's slight, but it might have appealed to the same writers who nominated The Road to Utopia.

It's certainly a ton funnier than What Next, Corporal Hargrove?, an utterly standard service comedy. It was interesting to read BJ's comment about not caring for such films pre-MASH -- it made me realize that many of you have grown up in a world where the irreverence of MASH was taken for granted. The more benign service comedy was pretty much an American film staple from the beginning of the sound era (I believe the stage play What Price Glory? in the 20s was thought to have inaugurated the genre.); I probably saw dozens as a kid -- not to mention TV series like Sgt. Bilko or Hogan's Heroes -- before MASH came along to subvert the model. Hargrove is a completely innocuous example. (By the way, I've never seen the film's predecessor, See Here, Private Hargrove, but I don't think I'd have picked up any nuances from it that would enhance my appreciation of this sequel.)

Hargrove is one of only two entries I've seen among the originals. The other is Dillnger, a B-movie biography, most interesting to me for revealing that the cliche of the prison escape movie -- the bar of soap carved into a gun shape -- actually came from a true-life incident.

Since I'm missing all the rest, I'll not be voting -- something that fails to break my heart.

We noted that the 1946 best picture slate didn't much carry over to the screenwriters' lists, and here it happens again, with only two making the transfer. (And only the best picture winner managed a nod for both film and director -- I imagine there wasn't much suspense in that year's contest.)

Pride of the Marines is another nomination for a later blacklisted writer. I found it a pretty uninteresting film -- a war film followed by a triumph over handicap film. Even John Garfield couldn't do much for it.

I'm more impressed by Mildred Pierce having seen the apparently more-faithful-to-Cain Todd Haynes version. Both have intriguing enough material, but this version had the wit to know the story-line was crying out for a murder to center it. I don't take this film very seriously, but I enjoy it plenty, and there's lots of whip-smart dialogue along the way.

The heart-wrenching poor family saga is not a favorite genre of mine, but A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is one of the better examples. Perhaps it's mostly Kazan's clear-eyed approach that keeps it on an unsentimental track, but credit has to be given to the script.

The Story of G.I. Joe is of course drawn from the work of a celebrated war correspondent, and thus offers a writer's touch from its conception. There's some standard war-picture stuff, but also some quite lucid writing. It's one of the better nominees this year.

The Lost Weekend is obviously no longer a breakthrough movie, but -- no surprise, given its creators -- it's a sharp, urban take on what was still considered a subject fit for comedy at the time. There are a lot of inventive moments along the way -- the bottle in the coat at the cloakroom, the closed pawn shops on Yom Kippur, the DT's -- and a general wised-up tone that makes the film easy to watch even as its subject matter has faded. Not in Wilder's top tier, but a solid achievement for many, and my choice in this group.
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Re: Best Screenplay 1945

Post by Snick's Guy »

Thank you for all the effort you have put in to these polls - I have so enjoyed viewing the poll data as well as reading the various commentaries - as we move into the technical categories - how about something visual like cinematography or art direction? Original score could also be fun.
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Re: Best Screenplay 1945

Post by Big Magilla »

Mister Tee wrote:I'll try to get to this after the convention's passed, but I'm wondering if we might want to declare a brief hiatus. Whether from summer lethargy or difficulty tracing down obscure nominees, the last few threads have pretty much amounted to thee and me. Maybe slow down and let some people catch up?

Tangential issue: has anyone heard from our Italian friend of late? I'd have expected him to weigh in on a number of recent years, even if he hadn't seen all, and I miss having his opinions (possibly to wildly disagree with).
Fewer and fewer people are participating the farther back we go. It may have been a mistake to go in reverse. Interest has built in previous polls as we got closer to the here and now.

I will continue to post weekly as long as I can, but I have other things going on. I have two columns to write for Oscarguy.com per week, one on DVD releases, the other a profile of someone connected to the Oscars, as well as contributing to other articles. I am also the editor of my community newspaper which takes up a lot of my time. Now the Board of Trustees of the Home Owners Association wants me to build a website which will also mean a lot of time once they give me a starting date. I've already done the research I needed to do and have the website hosts sitting on their hands while the Board and the Property Manager get their act together. On top of that, I've got a new ophthalmologist to see next week, my regular doctor after that and quite likely an ear, nose and throat specialist to see as I've been having difficulty with my hearing that needs attention. I've already taken the hearing aid test and been told that I have significant hearing loss in both ears but don't need a hearing aid. Then I have my sister, brother-in-law and one of their sons coming from Texas at the end of the month. The nephew, who is attending Columbia Engineering School, stored his stuff here for the summer. Their visit conflicts with a great-niece's second birthday party near Buffalo on the day before Memorial Day so at least I have an excuse not to drive all the way up there.

My mother lived to 86, but she had a stroke at 66 and didn't move around a lot after that. My father lived to 91. He worked until he was 84, but then he got dementia and lived in the Twilight Zone for his last seven years. I intend to stay active physically and mentally as long as I can. No quiet retirement for me.

Are we up for another poll when this one finally chugs along to its last gasp? If so, what should we tackle next?
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Re: Best Screenplay 1945

Post by Precious Doll »

I voted for The Lost Weekend in adapted. Mildred Pearce is a close second.

I'm passing on original. I've seen all the nominees but none of them are remotely award worthy. Aside from Salty O'Rourke which I first saw a couple of years ago I must confess that I don't remember anything about the other 4 nominees.
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Re: Best Screenplay 1945

Post by The Original BJ »

For me, it's not so much the difficulty of finding obscure nominees -- though there are definitely some races where I couldn't vote -- as just needing some time to catch up on my queue. Between starting a new job that required me to sit through an extraordinary number of hours of television to prepare, summer vacation for a few weeks, and watching the convention this week, I've just simply fallen behind even on races where I would be able to comment. And with the Olympics coming up in a few weeks, it'll undoubtedly slow my progress as well.

Certainly I would never want the thread to stall because I wasn't caught up -- I sort of figured I'd just go at my own pace and catch up as I could -- but if other folks are feeling like they want some more time to get through movies, I'd second that as a good idea.
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Re: Best Screenplay 1945

Post by Mister Tee »

I'll try to get to this after the convention's passed, but I'm wondering if we might want to declare a brief hiatus. Whether from summer lethargy or difficulty tracing down obscure nominees, the last few threads have pretty much amounted to thee and me. Maybe slow down and let some people catch up?

Tangential issue: has anyone heard from our Italian friend of late? I'd have expected him to weigh in on a number of recent years, even if he hadn't seen all, and I miss having his opinions (possibly to wildly disagree with).

Oh, and four stars to anyone who's seen more than three of the nominees under Original. I've been at this 50 years, and two is all I can claim.
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Re: Best Screenplay 1945

Post by Big Magilla »

Original

I've never seen Marie-Louise but the story of a girl escaping the Nazis by train at least sounds like something a little different.

I don't know whether I ever saw Salty O'Rourke or not. I was thinking that it was a Wallace Beery movie like 20 Mule Team or something.

Music for Millions was an affecting Margaret O'Brien tearjerker but not really a great example of writing.

What Next, Corporal Hargrove was a sequel to See Here, Private Hargrove which suggests that the rules were a lot different then. Sequels are now by definition considered adaptations.

My vote, subject to change if I ever see Marie-Louise, goes to the low-budget Dillinger which was one of the better gangster films of the decade.

Adapted

Not a bad group, but there were so many others that could have been considered including Spellbound, The Keys of the Kingdom, Scarlet Street, The Southerner, The Bells of St. Mary's, Christmas in Connecticut, The Cheaters and even The Corn Is Green and The Valley of Decision.

Of the actual nominees, Pride of the Yankees was a good but standard bio. The Story of G.I. Joe was a well-made war film. Mildred Pierce was a decent adaptation, but Curtiz's stylish direction and the performances made it seem better than it actually was.

The Lost Weekend won the Oscar and is likely to win here, but I've voted for Brackett and Wilder enough. I'm giving my vote to the beautifully written A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
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Best Screenplay 1945

Post by Big Magilla »

The poll is open.
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