Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Original Screenplay 1959

The Contenders:

The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cent Coups)
North by Northwest
Operation Petticoat
Pillow Talk (winner)
Wild Strawberries (Smultronstallet)

In the Navy

Film: Operation Petticoat
Format: DVD from Plano Community Library District through interlibrary loan on laptop.

War comedies are a strange breed of film. War, by nature, is deadly serious, and yet something so terribly serious does lend itself to a particular type of comedy. Black humor is the obvious guess, but a film like Operation Petticoat opts instead for something much closer to screwball. It’s also worth saying that 1959 was a good year for both Cary Grant and Tony Curtis. Both are top billed in this, and both had even more successfully financial films in the same year; Grant had North by Northwest and Curtis did Some Like it Hot.

Rear Admiral Matt Sherman (Cary Grant) boards the submarine Sea Tiger a couple of hours before the sub is to be decommissioned. Inside, he discovers the captain’s log. Since he was the first captain of the sub, it’s his own log, and the entire film is spent in flashback as Sherman goes through the log of the Sea Tiger’s particular adventures during World War II in the Pacific.