Best Original Story 1946

1927/28 through 1997
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What was the Best Original Story of 1946?

The Dark Mirror (Vladimir Pozner)
3
30%
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (John Patrick)
0
No votes
The Stranger (Victor Trivas)
2
20%
To Each His Own (Charles Brackett)
3
30%
Vacation from Marriage (Clemence Dane)
2
20%
 
Total votes: 10

Mister Tee
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Re: Best Original Story 1946

Post by Mister Tee »

I have a more or less equal "that was fine, nothing outstanding" reaction to all five nominees, so it's rather arbitrary where my vote ends up.

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers is a typical b-grade Stanwyck melodrama, but it's amusing enough to kill two hours.

I don't find The Dark Mirror much different -- you give me a story about identical twins, I have trouble taking it seriously from the get-go. But, again, enjoyable.

The Stranger starts out excitingly, but -- like, for me, much of Welles' work -- peters out as it goes along. Welles always pooh-poohed this one, claiming he did it strictly to fulfill contract terms, but I don't find it notably inferior to other work of the era.

To finally leave the noir genre: To Each His Own, as I've no doubt said here many times, is soap opera through and through, but attains such a purity of its kind it's hard to resist. And the final line absolutely kills.

Vacation from Marriage seems the most honestly inventive of the group -- using the timely topic of wartime separation to deal with the serious issue of what happens to a marriage when the partners spend a good deal of time apart. It doesn't achieve Bergman heights on the topic, but it's a decently insightful piece, so I'll say the voters made the correct choice.
ksrymy
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Re: Best Original Story 1946

Post by ksrymy »

I know Welles is revered like no one else in the film community, but, man, "The Stranger" is really, really, really bad.

"Martha Ivers" is also overbloated and unexciting.

"To Each His Own" is touching, and I usually dig Charles Brackett's work. Even without Wilder, he proves his talent.

But I'm going for "The Dark Mirror" here which should be absolutely preposterous in theory. We're in the height of Hollywood's love affair with psychiatry at this point, and twins were all the rage ("A Stolen Life" was this year too, no?). It's basically a mish-mash of the two things people craved most at this point, but it works really well. It gets my vote.
"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 Original Story 1946

Post by Big Magilla »

This is a tough one because I like four of these five a lot.

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers is a convoluted and overheated story that I can easily pass on.

The Stranger is a suspenseful early hunt for the Nazi war criminal in hiding drama made all the more fascinating by the similarity of Orson Welles' character to the one he will soon play in The Third Man, but that's beside the point.

The Oscar winning Vacation from Marriage, more aptly titled Perfect Strangers in the U.K. - which would make it the third nominee with "strange" in the title - is a fascinating, heartfelt drama that was a deserving winner, but I like the two de Havilland films better. What better way to celebrate her 100th birthday than to reward one of the two films that heralded her comeback after winning her court case against Warner Bros.?

The Dark Mirror is a terrific story about a psychiatrist helping the police determine which twin sister is a murderess. It was a tour-de-force for de Havilland, but it might have been a lot less so with an inferior story. This one really works.

Ultimately, though, I have to go with To Each His Own, easily my favorite tearjerker of all time. That genre is much maligned, and usually rightly so, but here the tears are earned as a young girl loses her World War 1 lover, gives up her illegitimate baby, becomes a hardened if successful businesswoman of international renown and still melts like a naïve schoolgirl when her now grown clueless son fleetingly re-enters her life. Charles Brackett won three Oscars, two of them shared with Billy Wilder who supplied the cynicism to their collaborations, but here dealing with straight-forward unabashed sentimentality and no Wilder to put a cynical spin on it, he's still creating fascinating characters in vivid situations. I could watch the London blitz opening and the wartime nightclub ending in an endless loop.
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Best Original Story 1946

Post by Big Magilla »

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