Re: Best Screenplay 1935
Posted: Sun Mar 05, 2017 2:52 am
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.
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.