1. The Human Comedy (1943)
Back in the old days or at least in 1943, films would often show an idyllic world. A world inhabited by families like the one in Leave it to Beaver where people would live in towns like Ithaca and characters have names such as Homer and Ulysses. To be frank, I am a sucker for classical mythology and languages but the allusions and references stop there. This is no Finnegans Wake or Ulyssess, either. This film follows a boy played by Mickey Rooney. The reason why this is such a strange nomination is that everything and nothing happens in this film. This is Hollywood escapism at its zenith. The war is the backdrop, like an unwelcome stranger that the audience need not to be bothered with. Years later American Beauty would achieve what this film attempted to do with a structured story and a coherent plot. But a quote from the film will reveal quite a bit about this strange nomination since the title can perhaps be hipster ironic nowadays:
I am Matthew Macauley. I have been dead for two years. So much of me is still living that I know now the end is only the beginning. As I look down on my homeland of Ithaca, California, with its cactus, vineyards and orchards, I see that so much of me is still living there - in the places I've been, in the fields and streets and church and most of all in my home, where my hopes, my dreams, my ambitions still live in the daily life of my loved ones."
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