1946: Anna Magnani in "Rome, Open City"

Each month before the Supporting Actress Smackdown, Nick Taylor suggests alternatives to the actual Oscar nomination ballot.

by Nick Taylor

I gather that folks will have different ideas about whether Anna Magnani’s work in Rome, Open City belongs in the leading or supporting category. Magnani holds down the first half of her film similar to the way Janet Leigh leads us into Psycho, appearing as an indomitable central player until a cruel exit halfway through her film. Unlike Leigh, Magnani isn’t the only character driving her film, sharing a comparable amount of narrative focus as Aldo Fabrizi’s priest and Marcello Pagliero’s Resistance fighter, to say nothing of the other characters threaded through the first half who only grow more important as the film continues. Still, her presence is so strong that, like Leigh, you can’t forget about her even after she’s gone. It’s a bit gratifying to learn this question has been hanging around the performance since the film was originally released. Magnani won the second ever National Board of Review award for Best Actress as well as the inaugural Nastros d’Argento Award for Best Supporting Actress back home in Italy. Rome, Open City’s lone Screenplay nomination is certainly significant enough to indicate that American artists noticed the film, as well as the fortuitous relationships Magnani, Rossellini, and Fellini would go on to have with Hollywood, but I’d be fascinated to find any writing about whether she was thought to have a chance at a nomination that year.

So yes, there will be readers who will justifiably argue she shouldn’t be considered as an alternative to the supporting actress lineup that will soon be discussed. I’d be happy to hear those arguments, and would be even happier to start from a place of recognizing her brilliance within this revolutionary film. Magnani’s Pina, the heavily pregnant fiancé of a high-ranking Resistance fighter in occupied Italy, is embodied with such fierce, unvarnished power that she remains the film’s most memorable face among its many tragic figures...

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The heartbreaking beauty of "Brief Encounter"

by Cláudio Alves

Ever since I listened to Robert Altman's commentary track on the Gosford Park DVD, I've bristled at the idea that someone needs to be a certain age to enjoy a film. In that bonus feature, Altman mentions that Gosford Park has nothing to offer to fourteen-year-old boys, and they shouldn't get to watch it. As a fourteen-year-old boy for whom Gosford Park was a favorite, I felt personally attacked. A bit more than a decade later, I've grown less annoyed at such blanket statements about age and movie appreciation. As it turns out, there are films that can gain something when the audience seeing them is more mature. You may be asking yourself, what does this have to do with Brief Encounter or our 1946 celebration? Apologies for my long-windedness.

I'm trying to introduce a personal realization I had. While I might have loved Brief Encounter when I was a teen, I knew not of its power. Now, I think it's one of the best and most devastating films ever made…

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Almost There: Myrna Loy in "The Best Years of Our Lives"

by Cláudio Alves

The 19th Academy Awards were, in some regard, a celebration of the war's end, a reckoning with its immediate consequences. We can see it in the embrace of European cinema, an industry rising from the ashes, with nods for films like the Italian Neorealist Rome, Open City, and the French poetry of Children of Paradise. American cinema, America itself, was also still reeling from its hard-won victory. The scars were fresh and bloody when William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives won the Best Picture Oscar. The production portrays the lives of three military men returning home after the war's end, traumatized and still recovering, adapting back to civilian life. It was the perfect champion for these postwar Oscars.

Nevertheless, not even the picture's awards success could spell away some of its performers' chronic bad luck when it came to movie awards. After decades as one of Hollywood's greatest stars, Myrna Loy still couldn't get herself an Oscar nomination…

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1946: Martha Vickers in "The Big Sleep"

Each month before the Smackdown event, suggested options for an alternate ballot in Best Supporting Actress... 

by Nick Taylor

How is it I've ended up watching three Bogie & Bacall collaborations in reverse chronological order while celebrating the Smackdown years? At least this means that their pairings have only grown more rewarding, rather than less. I’d probably rank To Have and Have Not ever so slightly above The Big Sleep, but boy is it a twisty, entertaining film, making real cinema out of Raymond Chandler’s novel without sanding away his cynical wit and venom (This write-up is based on the 1946 version of the film, rather than the substantially reorganized and shorter 1945 cut). The Big Sleep also boasts the only real instance in any of these films of a supporting performer truly overshadowing the star couple for sheer charisma and watchability. That actress is Martha Vickers, in the role of Lauren Bacall’s drug-addicted, nymphomaniac sister Carmen Sternwood. If it’s one thing for Moorehead to walk away with a barely-there film like Dark Passage, it’s an entirely different feat to watch Vickers’ intense, dangerous, but visibly curtailed supporting turn swipe the whole movie out from under Bogie and Bacall at very nearly the top of their game. 

Before getting into Vickers’ performance, it’s worth sharing a bit of Hollywood history that explains why Vickers is in less of the film than one might be expecting...

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The Postman Rings Four Times

by Brent Calderwood

The Lana Turner / John Garfield classic The Postman Always Rings Twice opened 75 years ago in US theaters. Based on James M. Cain’s bestselling 1934 novel about a wife who colludes with her lover in an attempt to pull off the perfect murder, Postman had to gloss over the grime to get past the censors, but it remains one of the best-loved film noirs of all time, and its huge box office success has been credited with cementing Turner’s status as a top-billed star. 

While The Film Experience isn't set to celebrate the movies of 1946 until June, Postman belongs to multiple years. Here's a rundown of the four most famous screen adaptations of Cain’s crime novel, listed more or less in order of their critical reputation today...

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