Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Original Screenplay 1946

The Contenders:

The Blue Dahlia
Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis)
Notorious
Road to Utopia
The Seventh Veil (winner)

Svengali

Film: The Seventh Veil
Format: Internet video on laptop.

Sometimes I play coy in my first paragraph or two when it comes to the film I’m reviewing. I might suggest that I really liked the film when I didn’t, or hint my opinion one way or the other. I’m not going to do that for The Seventh Veil because this is a film that doesn’t deserve that kind of respect from me or from anyone else for that matter. I’m also going to spoil the hell out of this movie, so if you’re game to track this down and spend 90 minutes watching it, you’ve been warned. I am going to lay all its secrets bare and there’s nothing you can do to stop me, save from not reading further.

Why am I being this cruel to a 70-year-old film? Because The Seventh Veil is a perfect storm of terrible elements. It contains in roughly equal parts misogyny, physical and emotional abuse, Stockholm syndrome, incest, an actress in her 30s playing a 14-year-old, and egregious psychobabble. Evidently this passed for quality screenwriting in the mid-1940s, but today it does nothing but frustrate me. How in the hell did this pile of abusiveness and bad psychiatry win Best Original Screenplay?