Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actor 1948

The Contenders:

Laurence Olivier: Hamlet (winner)
Lew Ayres: Johnny Belinda
Montgomery Clift: The Search
Clifton Webb: Sitting Pretty
Dan Dailey: When My Baby Smiles at Me

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Director 1948

The Contenders:

Laurence Olivier: Hamlet
Jean Negulesco: Johnny Belinda
Fred Zinnemann: The Search
Anatole Litvak: The Snake Pit
John Huston: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (winner)

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Adapted Screenplay 1948

The Contenders:

A Foreign Affair
Johnny Belinda
The Search
The Snake Pit
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (winner)

Looking High and Low

Film: The Search
Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

I’ve never been shy about my general dislike of Montgomery Clift. I suppose that “dislike” is too strong a word. He’s just rarely done much for me; he’s one of those actors who tend to make me think that the person doing the casting should have looked a little harder. That’s a position I’m going to revise slightly with The Search, because I think this is the best thing I’ve seen Clift do, and there are a couple of his performances (Judgment at Nuremburg, The Heiress) that I like pretty well.

The Search is a heavier topic than I was expecting. The first part of the film is concerned with, more or less, a primer on the Holocaust. The film is squeamish enough or politically correct enough that it doesn’t go into much detail here. Instead, it focuses more on the low-hanging fruit of children who were affected. We are shown a happy Czech family only to discover that they were eventually captured by the Nazis, separated, and tossed into concentration camps. The father and daughter, we learn, were killed. The mother, Mrs. Malik (Jarmila Novotna), survives the war and is hopeful that her young son Karel (Ivan Jandl) may have survived. She dedicates herself to finding out the fate of her boy.