To win an Oscar is a great honor in the art of film making. Each year the best directors, writers, actors, and films are awarded this honor of an Oscar. Many factors are taken into consideration when one is awarding an Oscar to an artist. One way might be in a screenplay and the way it depicts human relationships.
The relationships are depicted by the actors from the script. Three movies in the past that show the characters effectively are William Wyler’s 1949 The Heiress, based on Henry James’s 1880 Washington Square and Joseph Losey’s and Patrick Garland’s 1973 cinematic versions of Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 A Doll’s House. These movies show how people might act put in the conditions these characters were placed in.
In The Heiress, the character Catherine (Olivia de Havilland) struggles with being accepted by her father (Ralph Richardson) and her newfound love, Morris (Montgomery Clift). Catherine, being raised by her father, who had treated her with emotional abandonment, is naïve to the way the world in Washington Square really works. Catherine lives to please her father, however, cannot live up to his high standards put in place by Catherine’s dead mother.
Her father’s standards are so high that even he does not believe that Catherine’s choice with a husband would be good enough for him. This is the point that Catherine meets Morris, a dashing young man, who sweeps her off her feet. Morris, however, is a man looking for a woman to support him. Catherine fits the profile. Catherine struggles to please her father, while loving Morris, the man whom her father despises. This story shows the audience a sad relationship between a father and a daughter and man who is desperate not to really work in his life. These turbulent relationships between Catherine and her father and Catherine and Morris only cause to make Catherine stronger. In the end the men in her life lose what one gem they could have had. At the end, with her father having died unloved and Morris pounding in vain on the front door, she walks up her stairs, a proud, strong woman
Another character that shows the audience a woman is not a doll would be Nora from A Doll’s House. Nora (Jane Fonda/Claire Bloom) lives the life of a lady who has a family but who is treated like a child by her husband, Torvald (David Warner/Anthony Hopkins). This story focuses on the way the woman can be more than just a child bearer. The woman can be self-sufficient and obtain her own way in life. Nora discovers then when she has to take care of the bills because her husband is near death by borrowing money and forging her dead father’s signature. She eventually makes an enemy of Krogstad (Edward Fox/Denholm Eliot), the man to whom she owes the money, since he is the man her husband, the future manager of the bank, has just fired. The man threatens to tell her husband. This scares Nora because she knows her husband, would not like her having managed the finances at all.
However, Nora decides to let him find out on his own; and, when he does, she has a revelation. She realizes how he sees her as a person who could not manage without him. Nora knows that she can handle her life without him. So she decides to leave Torvald. This story focuses on the relationship between a husband a wife and the need for respect on both sides.
The lack of respect and love in Catherine’s and Nora’s lives causes them to make decisions in their lives that help make them strong women. These three movies should win Oscar for depicting human relationships. The relationship between the characters causes each woman to grow and become who they really are.
