Saturday, April 3, 2010

The Nominees For Best Picture Of 1931-32

À Nous La Liberté (prod. Frank Clifford)

Frankenstein (prod. Carl Laemmle, Jr.)

Freaks (prod. Tod Browning)

Grand Hotel (prod. Irving Thalberg)

Monkey Business (prod. Herman J. Mankiewicz)

Scarface (prod. Howard Hughes)

Waterloo Bridge (prod. Carl Laemmle Jr.)

5 comments:

Erik Beck said...

Stunned that you went with Monkey Business instead of Horse Feathers. Other than that, assuming you didn't consider Vampyr, it's a great list.

My vote is for Scarface.

Mythical Monkey said...

I've been treating Horse Feathers as a 1932-33 picture -- imdb.com has it being released on August 10, 1932 and the 32-33 Oscars ran from August 1, 1932 to December 31, 1933. But all the release dates from those days are pretty murky. It could very well have been eligible for 1931-32 in which case I would have picked it over Monkey Business.

The Academy could have made things simpler if they'd either nominated Horse Feathers as they should have or if they'd abandoned their nutty split-year format earlier.

And funny you should mention Vampyr -- I've been working on my essay about the nominees for 1932-33 and have so far written this in my notes:

Finally, there's the problem of when to nominate Carl Theodor Dreyer's horror classic, Vampyr, which was filmed in 1930, first premiered in Berlin in May 1932, then after scathing reviews was substantially reworked and re-premiered in Paris in September 1932. I can't say for sure when it showed up in America (under the title Castle Of Doom) but my guess it that it was some time after that. I probably could have chosen just about any year to nominate it for a Katie Award, but I went for 1932-33 on the theory that the version Dreyer wanted the world to see was released during that time frame.

In any event, both Horse Feathers (and Duck Soup of course) and Vampyr make appearances in the next go around ...

Anonymous said...

so many good ones, its funny i was just reading about À Nous La Liberté the other day, definitely on my list for movies to see.

Erik Beck said...

When I re-watched the Best Picture nominees for 31-32 for my post (which goes up later tonight), I ended up deciding that Five Star Final was the best of them. Not that Grand Hotel went down at all, but Five Star Final went up that much.

Mythical Monkey said...

For those of you who haven't seen it, Edward G. Robinson is fantastic in Five Star Final and the story -- he's the editor of a tabloid newspaper that destroys a woman and her family just to boost circulation -- could have been written yesterday.