Re: Best Screenplay 1939
Posted: Sat Nov 26, 2016 4:20 pm
Okay: hopefully this is the last time you'll all have to hear me gripe about how boring I find 1939.
Overseas, they were making Rules of the Game and Le Jour Se Leve -- two lasting masterpieces. Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes was eligible here. And Only Angels Have Wings and Midnight could have been nominated. All of which makes me even more irked that Hollywood's 1939 nominees are kept under such special preserving glass.
The best to be said about Goodbye, Mr. Chips is it keeps it brief enough, unlike the monstrously bloated 1969 musical version. It's just a sentimental little "shy man who finds love and then fulfillment inspiring more students than he could have imagined". Supposedly Alexander Woollcott -- the curmudgeonly inspiration for The Man Who Came to Dinner -- touted the book relentlessly, showing that cynicism and deep sentimentality can be two sides of the same coin. I don't find anything special about this.
I've never read Gone with the Wind; I'm sure I never shall. How this soap opera became the great beloved novel and movie of America in the early sound era is simply beyond me. The first half -- the lead-in to war and the war itself -- is engaging enough, but the Reconstruction sections ramble on and on (and of course wildly sentimentalize the old South) to no purpose. The only constant that works is Leigh's Scarlett -- a daringly self-centered character, especially for a female in pre-feminist times. But that's not nearly enough to support the film's unconscionable length. When Titanic opened in 1997, Janet Maslin of the Times called it the Gone with the Wind of its time, and I don't disagree, but for negative reasons: to me, both are hugely produced efforts surrounding thin love stories that a mass audience and far too many critics thought passed for art.
Wuthering Heights is simpler, more delicately done, and a far more successful adaptation -- though adaptation may not be precisely the word, since the film truncates Bronte's novel by quite a bit (as I discovered in high school, when I thought I'd speed-read through the book on a weekend, having already seen the film). Cathy is a considerably less interesting character than Scarlett, but Heathcliff is far more complex than Rhett Butler, and Olivier's smoldering performance raises the engagement level of the love story to great (forgive me) heights. I'm not voting for the film, but it has my respect, which is more than I can say for most of the year's achievements.
I'm down to the two films I choose between in Original Story, but here I go the opposite way: though I think Mr. Smith is overall a more powerful piece of work, as a pure example of screenwriting (dialogue highlighted), Ninotchka is such a delight it gets my vote in this group.
Overseas, they were making Rules of the Game and Le Jour Se Leve -- two lasting masterpieces. Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes was eligible here. And Only Angels Have Wings and Midnight could have been nominated. All of which makes me even more irked that Hollywood's 1939 nominees are kept under such special preserving glass.
The best to be said about Goodbye, Mr. Chips is it keeps it brief enough, unlike the monstrously bloated 1969 musical version. It's just a sentimental little "shy man who finds love and then fulfillment inspiring more students than he could have imagined". Supposedly Alexander Woollcott -- the curmudgeonly inspiration for The Man Who Came to Dinner -- touted the book relentlessly, showing that cynicism and deep sentimentality can be two sides of the same coin. I don't find anything special about this.
I've never read Gone with the Wind; I'm sure I never shall. How this soap opera became the great beloved novel and movie of America in the early sound era is simply beyond me. The first half -- the lead-in to war and the war itself -- is engaging enough, but the Reconstruction sections ramble on and on (and of course wildly sentimentalize the old South) to no purpose. The only constant that works is Leigh's Scarlett -- a daringly self-centered character, especially for a female in pre-feminist times. But that's not nearly enough to support the film's unconscionable length. When Titanic opened in 1997, Janet Maslin of the Times called it the Gone with the Wind of its time, and I don't disagree, but for negative reasons: to me, both are hugely produced efforts surrounding thin love stories that a mass audience and far too many critics thought passed for art.
Wuthering Heights is simpler, more delicately done, and a far more successful adaptation -- though adaptation may not be precisely the word, since the film truncates Bronte's novel by quite a bit (as I discovered in high school, when I thought I'd speed-read through the book on a weekend, having already seen the film). Cathy is a considerably less interesting character than Scarlett, but Heathcliff is far more complex than Rhett Butler, and Olivier's smoldering performance raises the engagement level of the love story to great (forgive me) heights. I'm not voting for the film, but it has my respect, which is more than I can say for most of the year's achievements.
I'm down to the two films I choose between in Original Story, but here I go the opposite way: though I think Mr. Smith is overall a more powerful piece of work, as a pure example of screenwriting (dialogue highlighted), Ninotchka is such a delight it gets my vote in this group.