Unofficial Academy Awards Discussion Board

I could have sworn I found the Italian dubbed version of Bread Love & Dreams as well as the Korean mini-series with the same title. There are several pages of it under the original Italian title of Pane, amore e fantasia in Italian without subtitles,

Obviously one has to regularly check YouTube for availability. I'd gone through the entire list of screenplay nominees I hadn't seen about two months ago, and Night People was nowhere to be found, but it's been posted in the interim. It's, as I suspected, a painless watch, but nothing outstanding. As Pauline Kael noted in a review, it's basically a Nazi thriller re-costumed with Russians to reflect the change in geopolitics a decade after the war. It's certainly a briskly-paced film (the way I watched it perhaps more brisk than normal -- it seemed to be playing at a slightly faster than usual rate, so when people climbed stairs it looked like they were half-flying), and, if you ignore the Broderick Crawford parts -- the buffoonish-industrialist-needs-to-learn-his-place scenes -- it's an engaging enough film. Definitely better than There's No Business Like Show Business.

Bread, Love and Dreams, however, is not available. There is something with that title all over YouTube, but it's a Korean TV series, not the Italian movie that apparently starts deSica & Gina Lollobrigida.

Like The Sheep Has Five Legs the following year, Bread, Love and Dreams is a film I know nothing of, but remember being intrigued by the title as one of the first films I recall seeing advertised as a child. It's available at Amazon and on YouTube, though.

I have a soft spot for There's No Business Like Show Business because of the score and the way it's belted out by Merman, Dan Daily, Donald O'Connor and Marilyn Monroe, but there's no way the story, which is derivative of Daily's 1947 Betty Grable film, Mother Wore Tights, deserves a nomination.

The winner, Broken Lance, as Tee points out, is basically a reworking of House of Strangers for which Yordan wrote the screenplay from Jerome Weidman's novel so how it was even eligible is a bit of a head-scratcher.

I would replace these two with Genevieve and The Bigamist, both of which were eligible this year.

Night People was released on DVD by Fox three years ago (10/17/2012). It's available at Amazon and other sellers and on YouTube. It's got a strong cold war based story set in Berlin that compares favorably to Spielberg's Bridge of Spies with newsman Gregory Peck instead of Tom Hanks working on freeing the GI captured by the Soviets.

The class choice here, though, is the brilliant Forbidden Games, but it's based on a 1947 French novel by Boyer who is one of two writers credited with the film's dialogue and screenplay, so I don't get its eligibility. Nevertheless it gets my vote.

Another one I can make quick work of, because I'm missing not just one but two. Bread, Love and Dreams was one of those Netflix had listed as Extremely Long Wait, then abruptly shifted to unavailable. Night People I can't track down anywhere (though it looks painless).

There's No Business Like Show Business is a soap opera with songs, notable for being one of the few movies to really give Ethel Merman a chance to shine. And Marilyn Monroe too -- but it still adds up to nothing.

Broken Lance is a respectable enough Western -- though, to play the Magilla role here, I have to question its position in this category, as most of what I read about it refers to it as a blatant reworking of 1949's House of Strangers.

Anyway, the clear class of what I've seen is Forbidden Games -- one of my wife's all-time favorites, a touching but not sentimental portrait of what becomes of bereft children in a war environment. One of the films, along with deSica's several, that defined "foreign films" for movie-goers of the 50s prior to the New Wave, and a pretty wonderful effort. Consider me having given it a ghost vote.

What were the best motion picture stories of 1954?