The Oscars and World War I
Saturday, February 8, 2020 at 7:52AM
Cláudio Alves in 1917, Goodbye Mr Chips, Lawrence of Arabia, Oscars (19), Sergeant York, War Horse, Wings

by Cláudio Alves

Tomorrow we might witness Oscar history being made with the crowning of the very first non-English Best Picture winner. Of course, it is just as likely that we'll see history repeating itself. If Parasite falters and 1917 claims the top prize, that's another muscular war film joining the ranks of the Best Picture pantheon. More specifically, a World War I epic of great technical ingenuity and daring, a project not too unlike the original Best Picture winner, Wings. From 1927 to 2019, movies with similar historical settings have found great success with the Academy, though World War I stories were more regularly found on the big screen when that conflict was still an actual memory for the living. 

For the Oscars' first decade, many war pictures won plaudits. For a time Hollywood let go of the heroic romantics of Wings and adopted a more melancholy view of recent History, with antiwar sentiment as well as complicated class studies that saw a broken society through the prism of war. All that would change with the arrival of World War II. The newer global nightmare readily took the place of the old war in the Academy's eyes, first as propaganda and then as more ponderous retrospective. To this day, people still joke that a sure way to win an Oscar is to do a World War II drama.

But back to the first World War. Here are the 12 Best Picture nominees that have told stories from that global conflict...

 


WINGS (1927)

This technical spectacle is a great picture to compare to 1917, both in terms of its similarly stellar technique and contrasting approaches to human drama.

 

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT (1930)

A gut-wrenching nightmare that hasn't lost any of its power in the last 90 years. This classic is often found at the top of lists ranking the Best World War I movies ever made.

 

A FAREWELL TO ARMS (1932)

If Helen Hayes had to win a Best Actress Oscar, it might as well have been for this lush wartime romance instead of the fallen woman moralities of The Sin of Madelon Claudet.

 

CAVALCADE (1933)

 This belabored epic has the unfortunate fame of being one of the worst and most boring Best Picture winners of all-time. 

 

GRAND ILLUSION (1938)

Jean Renoir's first undisputed masterpiece is a breathtaking look at class divides, dying ways of life and social hierarchies in a war-torn Europe. Jean Gabin, Pierre Fresnay and the inimitable Erich von Stroheim were never better.

 


GOODBYE, MR. CHIPS (1939)

Robert Donat won the Oscar against stiff competition from Clark Gable (Gone With the Wind) and Jimmy Stewart (Mr Smith Goes to Washington). The English actor's work in this decade-spanning epic is endearing and transformative, especially in the latter passages of the movie when grief and the weight of war take over.

 

SERGEANT YORK (1941)

A movie more interesting because of its Historical context than any discernible qualities of its own. This may be a story of World War I, but the morals of the thing position it as a piece of American propaganda for the eve of World War II.

 

WILSON (1944)

A mostly-forgotten Oscar champion which details the life of Woodrow Wilson with all the pomp and circumstance Twentieth Century Fox could scrounge up.

 


LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962)

A portrait of war and madness, a man and the landscape which consumes and defines him. Peter O'Toole is mesmerizing in this most spectacular of the 1960s historical epics. 

 


NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA (1971)

A bloodless retelling of Tsar Nicholas II's troubled life and disastrous reign, following him and his wife through the advent of World War I, the Russian Revolution and their family's tragic demise. It's lavish but dull.

 

WAR HORSE (2011) 

A movie so old-fashioned it seems like an experiment in bringing back the aesthetics and feel of late 1930s Technicolor epics. Despite its many nominations, this Steven Spielberg movie left the Oscars empty-handed.

 

1917 (2019)

Finally, we have one of this year's Best Picture frontrunners, a movie that has been a touch polarizing despite (or even because of) its formal wondrousness. A dry epic, full of blood and guts, explosions and the pristine cinematography of Roger Deakins.

 

Do you believe 1917 will follow Wings, All Quiet on the Western Front, Cavalcade and Lawrence of Arabia into the pantheon of the Academy's Best Pictures?

Article originally appeared on The Film Experience (http://thefilmexperience.net/).
See website for complete article licensing information.