1943 Alternate Oscars

Some years, the choices are easier than others ...

My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.

1943 Alternate Oscars

My choices are noted with a ★. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔.

Some previously-published thoughts about Dooley Wilson, Humphrey Bogart and the ending of Casablanca.

[SPOILERS DEAD AHEAD]
Every now and then I see a complaint—or maybe just a plaintive wail—about the ending of Casablanca, along the lines of "But what about Sam?"

On an emotional level, I get it. Sam has followed Rick to hell and back, from at least Paris and probably before, all the way to this dead end job playing piano in the desert, and Rick just drops him like an unwieldy subplot, running off with Louie instead. What the fork, man?

But logically, it makes complete sense. I think Rick figures the trip to the airport is strictly a one way ticket. After he gets Lazlo and Ilsa on the plane, he is, at best, going to wind up in a concentration camp; more than likely, the Gestapo will stand him up against a wall and shoot him. That's not the sort of end you ask a good friend to share.

"Where I'm going, you can't follow. What I've got to do, you can't be any part of." Indeed.

That Rick gets away is wholly unexpected. You can't blame the man for that.

I like to think he and Louie went back and got Sam. It's the romantic in me. And Carl and Sasha, too, and the croupier and the doorman. And Yvonne. She was pretty hot even if she was no Ingrid Bergman, but then Ingrid Bergman is on her way to America with another man, so what the hell.

And then, because it's also a great movie, Rick busts the cast of The Maltese Falcon out of jail—and now we've got Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and Mary Astor along for the ride, too. Actually, we can have Greenstreet there twice since he also played Ferrari in Casablanca, and Lord knows he was fat enough to play two characters.

You've got a pretty good size army together by now.

Actually, this is just about what happened in Passage to Marseille, where Bogart, Rains, Lorre and Greenstreet reunited to fight the Nazis. They even brought in Michael Curtiz to direct it.

Now if they'd only brought in Howard Koch and the Epstein brothers to write it ...

Alternate Oscars: Vote For The Best Picture Of 1943

The Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (1943)

The best film of 1943 was The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, a brilliant comedy of manners from England's Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger that gently and wittily took Britain's military leaders to task—pretty daring considering that Britain was at the time still locked in a death struggle with Nazi Germany. Winston Churchill responded by trying (unsuccessfully) to suppress the film and it was a big hit in its home country. When it arrived in America two years later, Hollywood showed the prime minister how it's done—straightening out the film's flashback chronology and so chopping it up as to render it an incomprehensible mess and a box office flop, promptly forgotten.

Fortunately, it has been restored to its full glory, and features Deborah Kerr in not one but three star-making roles.

Over here, Hollywood produced a trio of outstanding films—The Ox-Bow Incident, Wild Bill Wellman's tense story of a mob determined to mete out its own brand of justice; Shadow of a Doubt, Alfred Hitchcock's brilliant tale of a serial killer come home to visit his family; and I Walked With A Zombie, a voodoo-infused retelling of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre from the master of atmospheric horror, Val Lewton.

I tried on all three of them for the top prize in drama, finally opting for The Ox-Bow Incident. Not only is it a gripping story with terrific performances all around, it's also a prime example of America grappling (albeit indirectly) with the question of why we were fighting the war—merely to survive at any cost or to preserve our higher ideals as well? It's an uncompromising film from beginning to end, a real achievement with a war on and the Production Code in effect. It's also entertaining, a tribute to Wellman, actors Henry Fonda and Dana Andrews, and author-producer Lamar Trotti. A real must-see.

PICTURE (Drama)
winner: The Ox-Bow Incident (prod. Lamar Trotti)
nominees: I Walked With A Zombie (prod. Val Lewton); Sahara (prod. Harry Joe Brown); Shadow Of A Doubt (prod. Jack H. Skirball); So Proudly We Hail! (prod. Mark Sandrich); The Song of Bernadette (prod. William Perlberg)

PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp (prod. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger)
nominees: Cabin In The Sky (prod. Arthur Freed); Heaven Can Wait (prod. Ernst Lubitsch); The More The Merrier (George Stevens)

PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: Vredens dag (Day of Wrath) (prod. Carl Theodor Dreyer and Tage Nielsen)

ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Joseph Cotten (Shadow Of A Doubt)
nominees: Humphrey Bogart (Sahara); Henry Fonda (The Ox-Bow Incident); Paul Lukas (Watch on the Rhine); Mickey Rooney (The Human Comedy)

ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Joel McCrea (The More The Merrier)
nominees: Don Ameche (Heaven Can Wait); Eddie 'Rochester' Anderson (Cabin in the Sky); Roger Livesey (The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp)

ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Teresa Wright (Shadow Of A Doubt)
nominees: Anne Baxter (Five Graves To Cairo); Ingrid Bergman (For Whom The Bell Tolls); Jennifer Jones (The Song Of Bernadette); Ida Lupino (The Hard Way)

ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Deborah Kerr (The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp)
nominees: Jean Arthur (The More The Merrier); Gene Tierney (Heaven Can Wait); Ethel Waters (Cabin In The Sky)

DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: William A. Wellman (The Ox-Bow Incident)
nominees: Carl Theodor Dreyer (Vredens dag a.k.a. Day of Wrath); Alfred Hitchcock (Shadow Of A Doubt); Jacques Tourneur (I Walked With A Zombie)

DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp)
nominees: Ernst Lubitsch (Heaven Can Wait); Vincente Minnelli (Cabin in the Sky); George Stevens (The More The Merrier)

SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Charles Coburn (The More The Merrier)
nominees: Dana Andrews (The Ox-Bow Incident); Rex Ingram (Cabin in the Sky and Sahara); Erich von Stroheim (Five Graves to Cairo); Anton Walbrook (The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Lena Horne (Cabin In The Sky and Stormy Weather)
nominees: Jean Brooks (The Seventh Victim); Jane Darwell (The Ox-Bow Incident); Veronica Lake (So Proudly We Hail!); Katina Paxinou (For Whom The Bell Tolls)

SCREENPLAY
winner: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp)
nominees: Lamar Trotti, from the novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark (The Ox-Bow Incident); Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson and Alma Reville, from a story by Gordon McDonell (Shadow of a Doubt)

SPECIAL AWARDS
"Happiness is a Thing Called Joe" (Cabin in the Sky) music by Harold Arlen; lyrics by E.Y. Harburg (Song)