Alternate Best Actress Of 1936

Other possibilities included Ruth Chatterton (Dodsworth), Bette Davis (The Petrified Forest), Myrna Loy (After The Thin Man and Libeled Lady), Ginger Rogers (Swing Time) and Sylvia Sidney (Fury and Sabotage).


You can find and vote in previous polls by clicking here.

Alternate Best Actress Of 1934: Reader Voted

I started putting these polls together a while back, got busy, forgot. Think I'll revive them in the run up to the Favorite Classic Movie Actress Tournament which begins in March. A shake down cruise, if you will.

The nominees are mine rather than the Academy's. The winner is up to you. Voting never closes. I think it's possible to share the poll on your own blog or Facebook page, but I'm not sure — just how tech savvy do you expect a Monkey to be?



You can find and vote in previous polls by clicking here.

March Madness Starts Tomorrow!

Yep, Monty's 2014 Favorite Classic Movie Actress Tournament starts tomorrow, 7 a.m. sharp. Set your alarm.

In the meantime, here's another question to gnaw on: of the three previous tourney winners, who's your favorite?

What A Character Blogathon, Part Three: Silent Supporting Players Who Were Better In The Sound Era

Eugene Pallette—best known for his froggy bass voice, this veteran of such films as My Man Godfrey and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington made his first movie in 1913 and had an important role in D.W. Griffith's classic Intolerance.

Adolphe Menjou—debuting in 1914, he was already great in such silent films as A Woman of Paris and The Marriage Circle, but sound added another layer of smarm and good humor. See, e.g., Morocco, The Front Page, A Farewell to Arms, Stage Door, Paths of Glory, etc.

Wallace Beery—a ham in any age, he played supporting roles in the The Last of the Mohicans (1920), the Douglas Fairbanks version of Robin Hood (1922), Buster Keaton's Three Ages (1923), and The Lost World (1925), but he won an Oscar in the sound era.

Mary Astor—made her film debut in 1920, but did her best work in Dodsworth and The Maltese Falcon, and won an Oscar for The Great Lie in 1941.

Lionel Barrymore—debuted in 1908 and was excellent in the Gloria Swanson version of Sadie Thompson but is best known for such sound work as It's A Wonderful Life, Key Largo, Grand Hotel and his Oscar-winning role in A Free Soul.

Marie Dressler—she starred across from Chaplin in the first feature-length comedy, Tillie's Punctured Romance in 1914, became a supporting player, then virtually disappeared before becoming Hollywood's top leading lady (no, seriously!) in the sound era, winning an Oscar for Min and Bill and providing the best double take in film history opposite Jean Harlow in Dinner at Eight.

Carole Lombard—debuting in 1921, she made multiple brief appearances as eye candy until Howard Hawks had the good sense to cast this irreverent, salty-tongued goddess in a comedy, 1934's Twentieth Century. After that, we got such classics as My Man Godfrey, Nothing Sacred and To Be or Not to Be before her untimely death in 1942.

Myrna Loy—played dozens of largely-forgotten vamps and exotics between 1925 and 1934 until cast opposite William Powell in the classic comedy whodunit, The Thin Man. After that, she was one of the biggest stars of Hollywood's Golden Age, a leading lady to the likes of Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Fredric March and, of course, Powell with whom she made fourteen films.

William Powell—Roger Ebert once wrote that Powell was to dialogue what Fred Astaire was to dance, and with the coming of the sound era, his career blossomed. But you can see him in thirty-five silent films, mostly as the stock heavy (including a brilliant turn as a Russian revolutionary in Josef von Sternberg's The Last Command.)

The Great Silent Recasting Blogathon, November 1-4, 2013

I've missed a lot of blogathons recently, for which I humbly apologize, but here's one I simply can't miss.

Carole & Co., the great site devoted to all things Carole Lombard, is hosting The Great Silent Recasting Blogathon on November 1st through the 4th. The rules are simple enough (in fact, they are a variation on the Great Recasting Blogathon from last summer):

[S]elect a film from 1965 onward ... then re-imagine it with silent-era actors and a director, as well as a studio and year of release. ... If an actor or actress appeared in a silent, even in bit parts, he or she is eligible as long as the fictional fllm is made at a time when he or she was actually working.

Count me in! In fact, in honor of Carole & Co., here's one starring Carole Lombard (who did indeed get her start during the silent era), Buster Keaton's never-happened follow-up to The General. It's a part she was born to play, I think.

As always, click on the picture to see full-sized.

The Final Four Is Set

The final four is set in the 2013 Favorite Classic Movie Actress Tournament—three favorites and a longshot, any one of whom would make a worthy winner.

The matches:

Carole Lombard

versus

Doris Day

with the winner to compete against the winner of

Bette Davis

versus

Diana Rigg

Voting starts tomorrow is now underway and runs through Tuesday at All Good Things.

2013 Favorite Classic Movie Actress Tourney—Carole Lombard Banner

Book Review: The Entertainer By Margaret Talbot (Highly Recommended)

I have to admit, when the galley proof of The Entertainer: Movies, Magic and My Father's Twentieth Century by Margaret Talbot arrived in the mail, I had my doubts. Hollywood memoirs are an uneven lot at best, often badly-written tales told by professional raconteurs, blabbermouths, axe-grinders, apologists, sex fiends and fantasists, only rarely amounting to more than 200 pages of time-marking windbaggery designed to collect an advance check and nothing more.

And the memoirs of the children of Hollywood stars are usually worse—distilling into either bitter hatchet jobs or worshipful love notes.

Bleh.

But I couldn't have been more wrong about this one. I was hooked on The Entertainer before I finished the preface and now rank it as one of the best Hollywood memoirs I've ever read.

The Entertainer—the story of Golden Age Hollywood actor Lyle Talbot—reminded me of two truths: first, that you don't have to be famous to be interesting (and vice versa), and second, that acting, like baseball, "may be a religion full of magic, cosmic truth, and the fundamental ontological riddles of our time, but it's also a job." (Bull Durham, in case you don't remember the quote.) Also that the story of Hollywood's evolution from a small company town to the largest purveyor of entertainment in the world—when told as well as it is here—is a fascinating one.

Okay, that's three things.

Lyle Talbot got his first lesson in acting early. Raised by his maternal grandmother in a small Nebraska town shortly after the turn of the century, Talbot routinely got a beating if he didn't shed enough tears over a lock of his dead mother's hair—the mother who had died shortly after Lyle's birth. Bewildered by this remembrance of a woman he'd never known, Talbot soon learned to conjure up the appropriate response even if he didn't quite know why he needed to. But he learned his lesson well, figuring out how to please people and enjoying the positive attention he got when he did.

At fifteen, Talbot left home to live with his father—his grandmother had forbidden a relationship with the man who had knocked-up her teenage daughter and carted her off to Pittsburgh for a quickie marriage—a pivotal moment in the boy's life. His father and his new stepmother were small-time performers, and Talbot joined a world of traveling carnivals, working first as a magician's assistant, then as a "plant" for a hypnotist, pretending to be hypnotized and doing crazy things to warm up the audience.

The two funniest anecdotes in the book make it clear it's a miracle Talbot made the transition to acting at all. Hired on as a bit actor in a traveling theater troupe, Talbot mistimed a staged punch in the very first scene of his very first performance and cold-cocked the star, leading to an early curtain. Only the intervention of the troupe manager's wife—she was sweet on the handsome boy—saved his job.

Years later, in 1932, Warner Brothers invited Talbot to Hollywood for a screen test. By now Talbot was an accomplished stage performer, but he was still wet behind the ears when it came to the internal workings of studio politics. For his screen test, he selected a fast-talking scene from a play he'd done many times, Louder Please, a comedy about a lecherous movie producer. He knew the part cold and had always gotten laughs when he played it on stage, but what he didn't realize was that Louder Please had been written by a disgruntled ex-Warners employee, Norman Krasna, about the studio's boss, Darryl F. Zanuck, a fact everybody in Hollywood but Talbot knew.

Fortunately, Zanuck was in a forgiving mood when he watched the tests the next day—or maybe it's that he had maverick director "Wild Bill" Wellman in tow—and Talbot got a contract.

Being one himself, Wellman loved troublemakers and despite the fact that Talbot was in fact a pretty straight arrow, immediately cast him in three of his movies, Love is a Racket with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., The Purchase Price with Barbara Stanwyck, and College Coach with Dick Powell and Pat O'Brien.

Like most second tier players in those days, Talbot worked like a dog, making eleven movies in 1932, ten in 1933 and ten more in 1934.

The best of his films was probably Three on a Match, starring Bette Davis, Joan Blondell and Ann Dvorak. One of the fastest and most cynical films of the pre-Code era, Three on a Match packs episodes of drug addiction, adultery, prostitution, blackmail, kidnapping, child neglect, suicide and Bette Davis in her undies into 63 breakneck minutes. Talbot's role as a weak-willed hoodlum who lures a rich housewife into a life of sex, champagne and cocaine was a memorable one.

"I can tell you're a real woman," he tells Dvorak at one point, "not one of those stuffed brassieres you see on Park Avenue."

What woman wouldn't swoon!

He also had good parts in 20,000 Years in Sing Sing opposite Spencer Tracy, Ladies They Talk About (Stanwyck again), and Mary Stevens, M.D. with Kay Francis at the height of her career.

Yet despite a big build-up and favorable notices, Talbot never achieved the stardom the studio had mapped out for him.

For one thing, he was involved for a while with Sam Warner's widow, Lina Basquette, whom the surviving Warner brothers had branded a "bad mother" and used the press and a pile of money to extort custody of her daughter from her. Despite pressure from his bosses, Talbot refused to break off the liaison, gallantly rising to her defense. For all the good it did. In the end, it was Basquette herself who ended the affair, taking up with another man right there in Talbot's living room while Talbot slept one off in the next room. (What can I say, Basquette liked men and wound up marrying nine of them, although not all at the same time.)

And then he developed a fondness for alcohol—Hollywood was a small town with lots of distractions, and the actors liked to blow off steam in places like the Brown Derby and the Cocoanut Grove. A teetotaler by upbringing, Talbot discovered he enjoyed the buoyant feeling he got from a drink, and with what was likely a genetic predisposition to alcoholism, he started lapping it up and found he couldn't stop. His drinking never prevented him from working, but the tabloid tales of drunken buffoonery didn't help his standing with a studio already worried about the trajectory of his career.

Nor did Talbot endear himself to his paymasters by co-founding the Screen Actors Guild, the first effective union of movie actors. The studios in those days worked their actors like plow horses, starting at 6 a.m., working until 8 p.m.—midnight on Saturdays!—six day a week. Theoretically, the actors got six weeks of vacation annually, but the studios often loaned them out during these stretches, and with no leverage to speak of, the actors had to take it and like it. Talbot was no political firebrand—he was close to apolitical—but like eighteen of the other twenty original founders, he came from a stage background which did have a strong union, and he instinctively rallied to the support of his fellow actors whom he thought of as his family.

But what ultimately derailed Talbot's path to stardom was his lack of that indefinable "it"—the charisma that makes your eyes go to a performer no matter what else was happening on the screen. Talbot was good-looking, but not as startlingly handsome as Robert Taylor; he was a ladies man, but wasn't as charmingly roguish as Clark Gable; he was hard-working but not as manically animated as James Cagney. He was a competent actor (occasionally better than that) and whatever role you asked him to play, he'd learn his lines and do a good job, but he had no edge, no mystery, no intriguing contradictions, and when you get right down to it, there was always somebody at hand who could play it better—thus, he was good enough to land good parts in a handful of good movies, but never great enough to land the great part in a great movie.

He wound up as one of the legion of "oh, yeah, that guy" character actors who filled out cast lists in nearly two hundred movies, and later nearly three hundred episodes of series television.

Warner Brothers dropped Talbot in 1936, and after that the parts he played were more and more forgettable—his best known movies on the downhill slide are probably the ones he made for the notorious Ed Wood, Plan 9 From Outer Space and Glen or Glenda. He had an unexpected Broadway hit during the war in the bedroom farce Separate Rooms, joined the Air Force where he organized entertainment for the troops, made serials (he was film's first Lex Luthor) and then settled into television. He was part of the cast of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, appearing in 72 episodes, and played guest spots on everything from Bonanza to Leave it to Beaver.

In fact, Talbot acted steadily until his retirement in 1987, when he appeared in an episode of Newhart and the movie Amazon Women of the Moon. He died in 1996 at the age of 94. He won no awards, received no nominations, and as far as I know, doesn't even have a star on the sidewalk in the town he called home for decades.

So what makes this biography of a relatively-unknown journeyman so fascinating?

Well, for one thing, Margaret Talbot is a terrific writer—working for the last decade as a staffer at The New Yorker, and before that for The New York Times Magazine and as an editor at The New Republic. She has an easy style that can serve up a memorable line seemingly without effort, such as with this description of pre-Code actress Glenda Farrell: "When she talked fast, as she almost always did, it was like the strident clackety-clack of a typewriter; you half expected her to ring at the end of a sentence."

But more than that, Talbot is only half telling the story of her father. What she's really doing is telling the story of entertainment in America during the 20th century. Her father acted in practically every medium there was—stage, radio, movies, television—and witnessed (and participated in) the development of the concept of "mass media." In telling her father's story, she evokes the Hollywood of the 1930s, New York of the early '40s, television in the '50s and '60s, and perhaps most interesting, the life of the actor living out of a trunk, playing tiny towns all over the American midwest nearly a hundred years ago, a way of life that came to end, ironically, when talkies came in.

She also writes of Lyle as a prime example of what she argues was the transformation of American values from the 19th century's focus on "character" (how one might be perceived in the "eyes of God") to the 20th century's fascination with "personality" (how we sell an image of ourselves to others).

All in all, a terrific story. Highly recommended.

The Entertainer is published by Riverhead Books and hits stores today. To promote the book's publication, the American Film Institute will be showing ten of Lyle Talbot's pre-Code movies at the AFI-Silver in Silver Spring, Maryland, from December 1 thru the 19th. Check listings.

TCM's Classic Movie Trivia #3

In lieu of actual content.

How many times was Carole Lombard married?
A. 1
B. 2
C. 3
D. 4

And no, they don't count "in your dreams," thus, no "E. 30 million."

Carole And Ginger State Their Cases

We're about half way through the voting in the fifth round—in the contest to represent the 1930s in the Final Four of Monty's Favorite Classic Movie Actress Tourney, Ginger Rogers leads Carole Lombard, 89-65.

We're turning the Monkey over to each actress to make her case for your vote, and what better way to do that than with an example of the work itself:

Carole Lombard (To Be Or Not To Be)


Ginger Rogers (Top Hat)


Remember: you've got until 10 p.m. Sunday night to cast your vote!

Looking Ahead: Monty's March Madness Favorite Actress Tournament #5

A look ahead at the Monty's March Madness Favorite Actress Tournament, part of which we'll be hosting here at the Monkey.

Voting begins March 5.

Carole Lombard
Birth Name: Jane Alice Peters
Tourney Bracket and Seeding: "Funny Ladies" #1
Birth Date: October 6, 1908
Birthplace: Fort Wayne, Indiana
Height: 5' 2"
Film Debut: A Perfect Crime (1921)
Academy Awards: 1 nomination, 0 wins
Katie Awards: Best Actress (Comedy/Musical) (1942) (To Be Or Not To Be)
Three More To See: Twentieth Century, My Man Godfrey, Nothing Sacred

versus

Gail Patrick
Birth Name: Margaret LaVelle Fitzpatrick
Tourney Bracket and Seeding: "Funny Ladies" #8
Birth Date: June 20, 1911
Birthplace: Birmingham, Alabama
Height: 5' 7"
Film Debut: If I Had a Million (1932)
Academy Awards: none
Katie Awards: Best Supporting Actress (1936) (My Man Godfrey)
Three More To See: Stage Door, My Favorite Wife, Love Crazy

The winner of this match-up will face the winner of:

Jean Arthur
Birth Name: Gladys Georgianna Greene
Tourney Bracket and Seeding: "Funny Ladies" #4
Birth Date: October 17, 1900
Birthplace: Plattsburgh, New York
Height: 5' 3"
Film Debut: Cameo Kirby (1923)
Academy Awards: 1 nomination, 0 wins
Katie Awards: Best Actress (Comedy/Musical) (1937) (Easy Living)
Three More To See: Mr. Deeds Goes To Town, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, The More the Merrier

versus

Margaret Sullavan
Birth Name: Margaret Brooke Sullavan Hancock
Tourney Bracket and Seeding: "Funny Ladies" #5
Birth Date: May 16, 1909
Birthplace: Norfolk, Virginia
Height: 5' 2½"
Film Debut: Only Yesterday (1933)
Academy Awards: 1 nomination, 0 wins
Katie Awards: Best Actress (Drama) (1938) (Three Comrades)
Three More To See: Little Man, What Now?, The Good Fairy, The Shop Around the Corner

Another Carole Lombard Banner

I don't know if you guys are having any fun, but I obviously am ...

The Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (1942)

By 1942, war had been raging in Europe for more than two years, and in Asia for more than ten, but you'd never know it from the movies of the era. As far as Hollywood was concerned, the war started when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and not one minute before. Not that Hollywood's myopia was anything unique—their indifference was very much in step with the rest of America's.

Once they discovered the war, though, they discovered it with a vengeance.

Hollywood's war fell into three overlapping phases—the rally-the-troops phase as the country's leaders coaxed Americans from their deeply-ingrained isolationism; the middle phase when films began to examine exactly what we were fighting for; and the final phase, when Hollywood was already anticipating the shape of the post-war world.

Casablanca, the classic romance starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, was very much part of the first phase, which is why I have included it here, rather than in 1943 where I usually think of it belonging (it did, after all, win the Oscar for best picture that year). But in fact, Casablanca actually premiered in November 1942, and more to the point it is the story of one man's journey from personal isolationism to fully-committed patriotism—the essence of a first phase film. As such, it belongs with such titles as Mrs. Miniver, To Be Or Not To Be and Yankee Doodle Dandy.

Still, seeing it here makes my head spin a bit.

For those of you playing along at home, Casablanca would have swept the same Katie awards whether I had placed it in 1942 or 1943. But in case you're wondering, if I had put it in 1943, the winners in 1942 would have been Cat People (picture/drama), Alan Ladd (actor/drama), Greer Garson (actress/drama), Orson Welles (director/drama), Van Heflin (supporting actor) and To Be Or Not To Be (screenplay).

The other awards would, of course, have stayed the same.

PICTURE (Drama)
winner: Casablanca (prod. Hal B. Wallis)
nominees: Cat People (prod. Val Lewton); In Which We Serve (prod. Noel Coward); The Magnificent Ambersons (prod. Orson Welles); Now, Voyager (prod. Hal B. Wallis); Random Harvest (prod. Sidney Franklin)

PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: To Be Or Not To Be (prod. Ernst Lubitsch)
nominees: Bambi (prod. Walt Disney); The Palm Beach Story (prod. Buddy G. DeSylva and Paul Jones); Woman of the Year (prod. Joseph L. Mankiewicz); Yankee Doodle Dandy (prod. Hal B. Wallis and Jack B. Warner)

PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: Chichi ariki (There Was a Father) (prod. Shôchiku Film)
nominees: Aniki Bóbó (prod. António Lopes Ribeiro); L’Assassin Habite… au 21 (The Murderer Lives at Number 21) (prod. Alfred Greven)

ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Humphrey Bogart (Casablanca)
nominees: Ronald Colman (Random Harvest); Gary Cooper (The Pride Of The Yankees); Joseph Cotten (The Magnificent Ambersons); Alan Ladd (This Gun For Hire and The Glass Key)

ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: James Cagney (Yankee Doodle Dandy)
nominees: Jack Benny (To Be Or Not To Be); Joel McCrea (The Palm Beach Story); Spencer Tracy (Woman Of The Year); Monty Woolley (The Man Who Came To Dinner)

ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Ingrid Bergman (Casablanca)
nominees: Bette Davis (Now, Voyager); Greer Garson (Mrs. Miniver and Random Harvest); Simone Simon (Cat People)


ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Carole Lombard (To Be Or Not To Be)
nominees: Jean Arthur (The Talk of the Town); Claudette Colbert (The Palm Beach Story); Katharine Hepburn (Woman Of The Year); Veronica Lake (I Married A Witch); Ginger Rogers (The Major And The Minor)

DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: Michael Curtiz (Casablanca)
nominees: Mervyn LeRoy (Random Harvest); Irving Rapper (Now, Voyager); Jacques Tourneur (Cat People); Orson Welles (The Magnificent Ambersons); William Wyler (Mrs. Miniver)

DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Ernst Lubitsch (To Be Or Not To Be)
nominees: Michael Curtiz (Yankee Doodle Dandy); George Stevens (Woman of the Year and The Talk of the Town); Preston Sturges (The Palm Beach Story); Billy Wilder (The Major and the Minor)

SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Claude Rains (Casablanca)
nominees: Van Heflin (Johnny Eager); Walter Huston (Yankee Doodle Dandy); Ronald Reagan (Kings Row); Sig Ruman (To Be Or Not To Be); S.Z. Sakall (Casablanca); Henry Travers (Mrs. Miniver); Dooley Wilson (Casablanca); Conrad Veidt (Casablanca)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Agnes Moorehead (The Magnificent Ambersons)
nominees: Mary Astor (The Palm Beach Story); Gladys Cooper (Now, Voyager); Susan Peters (Random Harvest); Mary Wickes (The Man Who Came To Dinner)

SCREENPLAY
winner: Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch, from the play "Everybody Comes To Rick's" by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison (Casablanca)
nominees: Noel Coward (In Which We Serve); Orson Welles, from the novel by Booth Tarkington (The Magnificent Ambersons); Edwin Justus Mayer, story by Melchior Lengyel (To Be Or Not To Be)

SPECIAL AWARDS
Nicholas Musuraca (Cat People) (Cinematography); Albert S. D'Agostino; Al Fields and Darrell Silvera (The Magnificent Ambersons) (Art Direction-Set Decoration)