Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actress 1966

The Contenders:

Lynn Redgrave: Georgy Girl
Anouk Aimee: A Man and a Woman
Vanessa Redgrave: Morgan—A Suitable Case for Treatment
Ida Kaminska: The Shop on Main Street
Elizabeth Taylor: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (winner)

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Film: Obchod Na Korze (The Shop on Main Street)
Format: DVD from NetFlix on kick-ass portable DVD player

The last three reviews I’ve posted take place during World War II, and all three have a significant Jewish component. Naturally, today I decided to make it four in a row. I’ve heard great things about Obchod Na Korze (The Shop on Main Street), so it’s been on my radar for some time. I really knew nothing about it. As a matter of fact, I continued to foolishly mix it up with Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner until quite recently.

Yeah, they aren’t the same movie at all. This isn’t anything like a sweet little romance that was remade into an ad for AOL starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. It is instead a home front war drama, with the home front being in Czechoslovakia. Tono Brtko (Jozef Kroner) is a simple carpenter who doesn’t want to make a lot of trouble. He’s got enough of his own, mostly caused by his shrew of a wife, Evelyna (Hana Slivkova). What makes things worse for him is that his wife’s sister’s husband has made good.