Best Screenplay 1935

1927/28 through 1997
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What was the Best Screenplay from amongst the 1945 nominees?

Captain Blood (Casey Robinson) (write-in nomination - third place finalist)
3
25%
The Informer (Dudley Nichols)
5
42%
The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (Achmed Abdullah, John L. Balderston, Grover Jones, William Slaven McNutt, Waldmar Young)
0
No votes
Mutiny on the Bounty (Jules Furthman, Talbot Jennings, Carey Wilson)
4
33%
 
Total votes: 12

The Original BJ
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Re: Best Screenplay 1935

Post by The Original BJ »

So few nominees makes coming up with alternates pretty easy -- The 39 Steps, A Night at the Opera, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Ruggles of Red Gap are all worthy writer-centric movies from this year.

The Lives of a Bengal Lancer is the nominee I'd rule out immediately. It's actually the kind of action movie (like Hacksaw Ridge) that the writers typically ignore, but I guess it was popular enough at the time for its nomination haul to include this category too. I find it, like many Imperial adventure movies of the era, stolid and humorless.

I could have gone for either of the other two nominees. The Informer is a powerful movie, and its script finds a lot of compelling details in a fairly simple premise. I do think, at times, it's a bit heavy-handed -- the sense of doom that pervades the movie can feel a bit obvious -- but its attempt to achieve something so grandly tragic merits commendation.

Mutiny on the Bounty isn't really what I think of as my kind of movie...but perhaps that's what makes me appreciate it to the extent that I do. It's an adventure yarn, but one with a far more psychologically complex approach towards its characters than is typical of the genre. It moves along quite swiftly, and contains a lot of darkly funny lines of dialogue as well. Absent something I have more personal attachment to, I'll give credit to the screenplay here for making the film something more memorable than I'd expected.
Big Magilla
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Re: Best Screenplay 1935

Post by Big Magilla »

I voted for the winner, Dudley Nichols' screenplay for The Informer, although Mutiny on the Bounty and The Lives of a Bengal Lancer were decent runners-up. As for write-ins, I would have written in David Copperfield over Captain Blood.
Big Magilla
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Best Screenplay 1935

Post by Big Magilla »

The poll is open.
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