Best Picture Bracket, Round 1

Back in February 2018, Entertainment Weekly magazine published a bracket to help readers determine the "Greatest 'Best Picture' of all Time." They also ran a poll on their website, in which I couldn't participate because I hadn't seen enough of the movies. Since then, I've been on a quest to watch them all. I report here on the results of my first round.

Part 1: Old Hollywood
The top-left corner of the bracket featured 16 movies made between 1930-1960. With the help of our county library system, Bryan and I started here.

First Contestants: All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) vs. The Lost Weekend (1945)

All Quiet on the Western Front was the third movie, second talkie, and second war flick ever to win Best Picture. War is a theme that the Academy loves and has returned to frequently. All Quiet on the Western Front, however, is a war film that could not have been made in any subsequent decade, for two reasons:

1. It's about World War I.
2. It tells the story from the losing side.

Pre-Nazi takeover, the Germans were not yet a Hollywood stock villain. Consequently, Universal Studios could produce adaptations of German novels. American critics also gave a hearty welcome to this macabre flick, which is about a young man who loses everything - starting with his education and ending, after 4 long years, with his life - because his jingoistic college professor convinced his entire class to enlist in the German army. 

Unlike later entries in the "war film" genre, this movie features rather restrained battle scenes with very little gore. It focuses instead on the psychological toll that killing, and being killed, takes on the young men involved. They huddle in trenches for days of shelling, and lose their wits. They fight over awful food because rations have run out. The main character, Paul, bayonets a French soldier, watches him slowly bleed to death, cracks, and starts begging the corpse for forgiveness. Later, he goes home on leave and is completely disgusted by the civilians' naive support for continuing a war that he knows is hopeless. At the end, Paul glazes over during a firefight, and reaches out of the trench to grab a butterfly. He gets shot.

I wish I could say that these movies get more cheerful over time. They don't.

In a particularly depressing afterword, the Nazis hated this story so much that they beheaded the author's sister.

Meanwhile, The Lost Weekend is a film with a much smaller focus: four days in the life of a hopeless alcoholic, Don. Don can't seem to accept the kindness and help of his loving brother, his girlfriend Helen, his landlady, or even Nancy the local sex worker. After his brother cleans all the alcohol out of the house and leaves to visit their parents on Thursday afternoon, Don steals his cleaning woman's paycheck to get some more booze. Then, he works his way around Third Avenue in search of more drinks from Friday morning until Sunday afternoon. 

It is not a pretty journey. He snatches a woman's purse in one bar, tries to pawn his typewriter (but fails because it's Yom Kippur), and begs $10 off Nancy even though he previously stood her up for a date. In the midst of withdrawal symptoms, he falls down stairs (losing his typewriter in the process) and ends up in a locked-ward drunk tank, where he steals a doctor's coat to get home. Helen (who goes so far as to sleep on his front steps overnight, hoping she can help him) eventually insists on coming inside to watch over him, whereupon he steals her fur coat...and pawns it to get a gun so he can kill himself.

Like I said: These aren't cheerful.

There is a happy ending, of a sort: the now-coatless Helen refuses to leave Don alone long enough to shoot himself. The bartender brings back the typewriter. And so Don resolves to write up the story of his Lost Weekend, thereby breaking the writer's block that drove him to drinking in the first place. 

The audience can tell, however, that this is far from a settled issue. Flashbacks have already shown us the results of several previous "dry-outs." Don's brother has been financially supporting him for years, but is clearly losing patience. Almost every named character has asked Don why Helen doesn't just leave him, which she very well might. In short, this is a very realistic story about someone who is losing a battle with addiction. It's downright painful to watch if you've ever had to cope with an addict in real life.

Our Verdict

All Quiet on the Western Front wins, by a narrow margin. 

Both of these movies succeeded in making us empathize with the characters, and provoking emotional responses. In fact, back-to-back viewing almost killed us. Overall, however, All Quiet has an enduring message that means more to us today than the message from The Lost Weekend. In short, countries should not allow eternal wars to chew up their youth.

Or as Bryan says, "It has a message America ignores." Which makes the message all the more important, in my opinion, despite the fact that it's a real downer.

Up next: Gone with the Wind (1939) vs. Marty (1954)