Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actor 1949

The Contenders:

Broderick Crawford: All the King's Men (winner)
Kirk Douglas: Champion
Richard Todd: The Hasty Heart
John Wayne: Sands of Iwo Jima
Gregory Peck: Twelve O’Clock High

Island Hopping

Film: Sands of Iwo Jima
Format: Movies! Channel on rockin’ flatscreen.

There’s something unique about American war movies made in the years during and just after World War II. It’s not terribly surprising that the films of this era are patriotic to put it mildly. In truth, a lot of them are pretty jingoistic, and Sands of Iwo Jima leans this way. We are at least spared the indignity of watching hordes of non-Americans pretend that they want to be Americans, though, since we’re dealing strictly with the battlefield here, and strictly with the island hopping campaign in the Pacific.

A new group of marines is assigned to Sergeant John M. Stryker (John Wayne), a notorious hardass. Stryker spends the first portion of the film running his troops through a massive amount of training and beating them down heavily. All of the men object to this naturally, but two are particularly vocal in their objections. The first of these is Pfc Peter Conway (John Agar) who is in the unfortunate position of being the son of one of Stryker’s former commanders. Worse for Conway is that Stryker was a huge admirer of Conway’s late father, and in fact named his own son after the man. Conway wants to be nothing like his father and enlisted more out of a sense of tradition than anything else, knowing that this attitude will make him a constant disappointment to Stryker.