OVP: Janie (1944)

Film: Janie (1944)
Stars: Joyce Reynolds, Robert Hutton, Edward Arnold, Ann Harding, Alan Hale, Richard Erdman, Hattie McDaniel
Director: Michael Curtiz
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Editing)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Oscar-nominated films come in many shapes and sizes, admittedly, but most of them you can pick out.  Your biopics, your issue dramas, your epics, your giant musicals-these are the films that constitute what is known in awards parlance as an "Oscar movie."  What you don't expect to see on the list of films that are nominated for an Oscar is a film about a teenybopper, essentially getting into trouble as she decides between her high school boyfriend and the handsome soldier come to town.  Janie is bizarre in the annals of Oscar viewing principally because today it would be more likely to be seen on ABC Family than at the Kodak, a fluffy-light comedy with largely unknown stars that somehow got nominated for Best Editing.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film itself is just a trifle of a movie.  It stars Joyce Reynolds as Janie, a girl in her late teens that everyone seems to adore principally because she's fun and gay and pretty.  She's the sort of character that you saw in shows like Gidget and wondered who had that idea for a human being, at least a compelling one, and yet it works.  She's constantly drawn between her high school boyfriend Scooter (Erdman, and for those who want to have a truly wonderful laugh, see this movie as this is Leonard from Community when he was nineteen) and her mother's friend's son Dick (Hutton, and with all due respect to Leonard, the choice is pretty obvious here), frequently getting into the sort of hair-brained schemes that we would expect on television now rather than in a movie.  She throws parties with way too many guests, accidentally ends up on the cover of Life magazine-those sorts of things.

The movie gains a lot from Reynolds lead performance.  I will be quite frank and admit that I didn't really know anything about Reynolds, a minor contract player for Warner Brothers who got her biggest role in this film.  She's extremely fun, and it's pretty easy to see why everyone keeps falling over themselves to be with her.  It's not a great example of classic acting, but it does show that twinkle that, were she around today, we would have attributed to a Zac Efron or Emma Stone and may have explored more with her career.  Sadly for Reynolds, either Hollywood didn't really know how to handle a teen star quite yet (she was a decade early for that sort of thing) or her taste for movies soured, as she quickly faded from the main stage and retired from the cinema (though she is still alive today, for you trivia hounds).  The rest of the cast, including Oscar-winner Hattie McDaniel are left to play sort of cardboard cutouts of characters (though I will admit it's thrilling to see McDaniel in a role outside of Gone with the Wind, as I don't believe I ever have before, and I've seen Gone with the Wind dozens of times).

The film received one Oscar nomination, for Editing, which is as I mentioned above is pretty inexplicable.  This isn't a poorly edited film, by any means but considering the content you half-expect something really insane in terms of the editing, which just isn't apparent.  There's some cool continuity shots within Janie's house, which is large and allows for multiple different scenes in different rooms without cutting, which is indeed clever (and adds to the film's humor) even if it's rather standard compared to what we do today (though that was perhaps more rare in 1944), so I give it credit for that.  Outside of that, though, there's nothing that the editing seems to add to the film to warrant this nomination.  This may be one of the hindrances of the OVP (I can't go back to 1944 and parcel through why this particular nomination happened, particularly in a category where only five nominees were allowed and not something like Score where you'd get into the high teens in terms of nominees).  But it's still a fun factoid if you want to justify predicting Mean Girls or Easy A in a major category-it's technically happened before.

What are your thoughts on Janie if you have seen it, and if not, what do you think about a teen film scoring a nomination it wouldn't dream to have a chance at today?  What do you think of the careers of Joyce Reynolds and Hattie McDaniel?  Share your thoughts in the comments!