Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Adapted Screenplay 1989

The Contenders:

Born on the Fourth of July
Driving Miss Daisy (winner)
Enemies, a Love Story
Field of Dreams
My Left Foot

Convert to Mormonism, Maybe?

Films: Enemies, a Love Story
Format: DVD from Hanover Township Library through interlibrary loan on rockin’ flatscreen.

One of the problems of doing a series of movies from a large list is that some of those movies are difficult to find. NetFlix is missing a ton of the movies that I need to watch, which means I have to go to other sources. I need to continually remind myself to request those movies from the library when I can—there’s a good 100+ movies I can’t get through the easiest channels. Enemies, a Love Story is one of those movies, and this seems to be a pretty rare one in general—not a lot of reviews on Letterboxd, for instance. That often makes me feel like I’m shouting into an empty room when I review a film like this one.

Enemies, a Love Story is kind of a romance, kind of a drama, and a little bit of a comedy, which means, of course, that it’s none of these things. Herman Broder (Ron Silver) is a Holocaust survivor, who lived through the war by hiding in a hayloft where he was cared for by Yadwiga (Malgorzata Zajaczkowska under the name of Margaret Sophie Stein), his Polish peasant servant. After the war, he and Yadwiga emigrated to the United States and got married, because Herman’s wife had been killed and dumped into a mass grave.