FILM REVIEWS
Body and Soul (1947) B+
UA (Enterprise Productions)
Oscar Nominations: 3
Screenplay (Original): Abraham Polanski
Actor: John Garfield
Film Editing: Francis Lyon and Robert Parrish
Oscar Awards: 1
Film Editing
Oscar Context
Kazan's "Gentleman's Agreement," based on Laura Z. Hobson's novel and adapted to the screen by Moss Hart, dealt with anti-Semitism. At Oscar time, the drama was nominated for 8 Oscars, winning 3. "Gentleman's Agreement" was praised by most critics, one of whom one found it to be "more savagely arresting and properly resolved as a picture than it was as a book," and describing its script as "electric with honest reportage."
The film's major competitor for the Academy Awards of 1947 was Edward Dmytryk's "Crossfire," which lost in each of its five nominated categories. "Crossfire"'s nominated screenplay, by John Paxton, was based on Richard Brooks's novel The Brick Foxhole, though in a typically Hollywood manner it changed the book's homosexual hero into a Jew. The other two Best Picture nominees represented lighter fare: "The Bishop's Wife," with 6 nominations, and "Miracle on 34th Street," with 4 nods.
John Garfield lost the Best Actor Oscar, at his second and last nomination, to Academy's sentimental favorite, Ronald Colman, who won for George Cukor's "A Double Life."
Shockingly, the winner of the Original Screenplay Oscar was the least deserved nominee, Sidney Sheldon for the Cary Grant-Shirley Temple star vehicle, “The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer.”
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