Marie Dressler — Not Just Another Pretty Face

She had a face like a bulldog, with a lantern jaw, bulbous nose, and heavy bags under deep-set eyes. Her pear-shaped body sagged, her voice growled, and the characters she played often wore their clothes as if a field of potatoes crawled into a burlap sack and was too tired to climb out again.

But she was a gifted actress — Buster Keaton often called her "the greatest character comedienne I ever saw" — and for a brief time, from 1931 until her death in 1934, Marie Dressler was the most popular actress in America.

Dressler got her start as part of Mack Sennett's stable of comic actors that included Charlie Chaplin, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, Gloria Swanson and the Keystone Kops.

In 1914, she starred in history's first feature-length comedy, Tillie's Punctured Romance, which also starred Chaplin in one of his earliest roles.

By the end of World War I, though, Dressler had pretty much disappeared from the movies.

Reduced to working as a maid, Dressler later admitted she found the fall from stardom so devastating, she seriously considered suicide.

But back when she was still a star, Dressler had befriended a young, struggling writer from San Francisco named Frances Marion, and when their roles were reversed and Marion was the top writer in Hollywood and Dressler was out of pictures altogether, Marion remembered her old friend and began including parts for her in various comedies.

When Marion was adapting the Eugene O'Neill play Anna Christie as the vehicle for Greta Garbo's sound debut, she expanded the part of an over-the-hill hooker specifically with Dressler in mind.

It was a pivotal opportunity for Dressler and proved to be her comeback role.

In the film, Dressler steals every scene she shares with the more-celebrated Garbo. To be sure Dressler possessed a theatrical talent that straddled the divide between the silent and modern eras, but I distinguish in my mind between an actor who chews scenery (Garbo, still relying on exaggerated, silent film techniques) and a character who chews scenery (Dressler's self-described "wharf rat" who hides her pain beneath a swaggering pose of indifference).

Garbo eventually shed the exaggerated techniques that had served her well during the silent era and mastered the subtleties of the new sound medium. But not before Dressler had bested her in their one head-to-head outing.

Dressler starred in a dozen movies over the next three years, including Min and Bill (another Frances Marion screenplay) which won her an Oscar.

In Min and Bill, a comedy-drama also starring Wallace Beery and Marjorie Rambeau, Dressler plays a dockside innkeeper who is raising the daughter of a prostitute as her own. As the girl grows up, Min (Dressler) does everything she can to protect the girl, eventually sacrificing herself for the girl's happiness.

The final shot of a deeply-conflicted Min — I'll let you discover the movie's plot twists on your own time — is the best acting of Dressler's career.

The film was a huge hit, and at a time when Norma Shearer, Marlene Dietrich and Joan Crawford were plying their trade, Dressler became the biggest star in Hollywood.

Emma secured her a second Oscar nomination, and the classic dramedy Dinner at Eight gave Dressler her best-known role, that of an aging stage actress reduced to begging favors of her closest friends.

Even people who don't know Dressler's name remember her in that film's last scene with up-and-coming Jean Harlow.

"I was reading a book the other day," says Harlow as the unforgettable social-climbing vamp, Kitty Packard.

"Reading a book?" says Dressler after the greatest double take in movie history.

"Yes. It's all about civilization or something. A nutty kind of a book. Do you know that the guy says that machinery is going to take the place of every profession?"

Dressler looks Harlow up and down and then says, "Oh, my dear, that's something you need never worry about."

A year later, Dressler was dead of cancer. She was 66.

Cimarron (1931)

The 1931 western Cimarron is on a short list of Oscar's most obscure best picture winners, and in a year that included such award-eligible features as Charlie Chaplin's City Lights, breakout gangster dramas starring Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, and Bela Lugosi's horror classic Dracula, also one of its most undeserving.

But if you like your American history uncomplicated and your movies pleasantly forgettable, Cimarron is not half bad.

The story begins in 1889 with the Oklahoma Land Rush — where 50,000 people lined up at the border and raced to claim the two million acres the U.S. government had opened up for settlement, a perfectly insane way to parcel out land — and ends in 1930 with the descendants of these settlers marinating in oil wealth.

Cimarron stars Richard Dix as a hard-luck rancher turned newspaper publisher, and Irene Dunne as his long-suffering wife. Dix kills an outlaw and flees the territory, leaving his wife to run the paper, winning her fame and social status, and eventually a term in Congress.

Cimarron's audience would have been old enough to remember the events depicted — which were roughly as distant in time to them as Ronald Reagan is to us — and the movie was a critical hit even though it lost money at the box office.

Dunne was nominated for the first of five Oscars (she never won) and she carries the movie. Dix, on the other hand, was on the fast track to oblivion, drinking his way to B-picture has-been status within a couple of years.

Based on Edna Ferber's best-selling novel, Cimarron is more about the myth of the American West than the reality — plucky settlers make good against the odds, and the right people find a fortune in the ground.

That the oil originally belonged to the Osage Nation is largely glossed over except to suggest that the previous owners were grateful that civilized white men had relieved them of the burden of managing all that money.

If you've got six hours to kill, might I suggest watching Cimarron as a double feature with Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon? The story of corporate theft and murder in the Osage Nation after oil is discovered on their land, Flower Moon's locale and time line overlaps with Cimarron's and provides a radically different perspective on the same moment in history.

Sure, after watching the two, you'll suffer a serious case of mental whiplash — what psychologists call "cognitive dissonance" (which I've written about here) — but you're a smart crew, you can take it.

As hard as it is to believe — given that the intervening years would see the premieres of Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, Red River, Shane, The Searchers, Rio Bravo, The Magnificent Seven, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, The Wild Bunch and many, many more — Cimarron was the last western to win the Oscar for best picture until Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves sixty years later.

If you ever wonder what motivates otherwise seemingly sane people like me to start handing out alternate Oscars, there's a good part of your answer right there.

Animal Crackers (1930)

This review is adapted from my (in)famous eight-part, 12,000 word essay on the Marx Brothers which you can start reading here ... if you're so inclined.

After the Broadway success of The Cocoanuts, playwrights George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind set to work on a follow-up, aided by songwriters Harry Ruby and Bert Kalmar.

Concluding that the Marx Brothers played best as a collision of anarchy and high society, they set the play on Long Island at the estate of a stuffy socialite (Margaret Dumont). Groucho, as African explorer Jeffrey T. Spaulding, was the guest of honor, with Chico as Emanuel Ravelli and Harpo as The Professor providing the weekend's musical entertainment.

"I used to know a fellow who looked exactly like you by the name of Emanuel Ravelli. Are you his brother?"

"I am Emanuel Ravelli."

"You're Emanuel Ravelli?"

"I am Emanuel Ravelli."

"Well, no wonder you look like him. But I still insist there is a resemblance."

"Heh, heh, he thinks I look alike."

The play was a big hit and included some of Groucho's most famous monologues, including a description of his most recent safari ("One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know"), a letter to his lawyer, and a spoof of the Eugene O'Neill play Strange Interlude, with Groucho addressing the audience directly.

There were also subplots involving the socialite's daughter, a painter named John Parker and a wealthy art collector who in a previous life was Abie the fish peddler. Unlike the movie version, there is also a journalist character modeled on gossip columnist Walter Winchell, several songs and a final act revolving around a costume party.

The play opened on October 23, 1928, at the Forty-Fourth Street Theatre and played 171 performances. As with its predecessor, Animal Crackers acquired several gags along the way, including this speech which a despondent Groucho ad libbed the night his savings were wiped out by the stock market crash of October 1929:

"Living with your folks. Living with your folks. The beginning of the end. Drab dead yesterdays shutting out beautiful tomorrows. Hideous, stumbling footsteps creaking along the misty corridors of time. And in those corridors I see figures, strange figures, weird figures: Steel 186, Anaconda 74, American Can 138..."

Shooting of the film began at Paramount's Astoria Studios in Queens, New York, at the end of April, 1930.

Most of the cast of the Broadway show was retained for the film. One exception was the part of the socialite's daughter, here played by Lillian Roth. An alcoholic who would later be the subject of the film I'll Cry Tomorrow, Roth claimed in her autobiography that she was sent to work with the Marx Brothers as punishment for her bad behavior.

Roth said working with the Brothers was "one step removed from a circus." She wrote:

"First Zeppo, the youngest, sauntered into the studio, about 9:30. At 10 somebody remembered to telephone Chico and wake him. Harpo, meanwhile, popped in, saw that most of the cast was missing, and strolled off. Later they found him asleep in his dressing room. Chico arrived about this time. Groucho, who had been golfing, arrived somewhat later, his clubs slung over his shoulder. He came in with his knees-bent walk, pulled a cigar out of his mouth, and with a mad, sidewise glance, announced, 'Anybody for lunch?'"

In technical terms, Animal Crackers is far superior to The Cocoanuts — better sound, better sets, more movement — but where you rank it in the Marx Brothers' oeuvre depends in no small part on what it is you value in a Marx Brothers movie.

Animal Crackers is the most quotable of all their films, with every line, particularly those from Groucho's monologues, a winner.

And in terms of having worked out in advance what they were going to do, it's the most polished film they made before moving to MGM in 1935.

Personally, I rank it third behind Duck Soup and A Night At The Opera.

But if what you respond to is the sense that anything can happen, as it often did when the Brothers were ad libbing, subverting not only the society the Brothers moved in but the conventions of film itself, then you might find the anarchic quality of their subsequent Paramount era pictures more to your taste — perhaps one of those the Marx Brothers made next, Monkey Business and Horse Feathers.

Rank it where you will, though, the movie was a big hit, grossing over $3 million, fourth among those movies released in 1930.

Note: For the 1936 re-release of Animal Crackers, several double entendres were cut from the original 1930 release — including the line "I think I'll try and make her" from Groucho's song "Hooray for Captain Spaulding." For years the cut material was assumed to be lost but in 2016 an original print turned up at the British Film Institute and is now available as part of The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection Restored Edition.

Mae Clarke (Waterloo Bridge)

She's remembered now, if at all, as "what's her name, the good- looking blonde who got James Cagney's grapefruit in the kisser."

But for a couple of years in 1930 and 1931, Mae Clarke was on a real roll. In fact, no actress in 1931 appeared in more must-see movies than Mae Clarke.

In addition to her acquaintance with Cagney's breakfast in The Public Enemy, she also played (1) Molly Malloy, a hooker with a heart of gold who befriends a death row inmate in the comedy The Front Page (later re-made as His Girl Friday); (2) the mad scientist's much put-upon fiancee in Frankenstein; and in one of the few lead roles of her career, an American chorus girl-turned-prostitute in the first and best version of the tragic romance Waterloo Bridge.

In that last one, Clarke meets a naive soldier boy on the London bridge where she plies her trade. This being wartime, he falls in love quickly and asks her to marry him.

For a prostitute, she has enough integrity not to jump at the offer, but she likes the boy enough to go with him to his family's country estate. There, she confesses all to the boy's mother.

If you've ever read the novel Camille by Alexandre Dumas fils, you'll have a pretty good idea where this is going. Hollywood, for all its posturing, has always had some pretty reactionary ideas about love, marriage and the moneyed classes.

Directed by James Whale — mostly known now for the early Universal horror movies — Waterloo Bridge clocks in at a brisk 81 minutes and Clarke is compelling enough to sweep you along with what is, to be honest, a load of romantic hokum. But I like romantic hokum and I like Mae Clarke, so I can unreservedly recommend Waterloo Bridge.

An undercurrent of melancholy runs below the surface of Clarke's performance so that even her happiest moments foreshadow her doom.

Clarke later chalked up her onscreen soulfullness to offscreen self-doubt that at times threatened to consume her.

Based on a play by Pulitzer Prize winner Robert E. Sherwood, there is no villain in this piece other than cold, hard reality. It's the sort of movie that critics of the day dismissed as a "woman's picture" — and dismiss now as a "chick flick" — and if you're tempted to give this one a miss because it features tears and romance, well, you're a dope.

Like Katie-Bar-The-Door, Clarke was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Unlike Katie, she started her career as a dancer, signed a contract with Universal Studios.

After the triumph of 1931, though, Clarke was in an automobile accident that broke her jaw and scarred her face — and just that quickly, her time as a star was over.

She was in and out of a sanitarium over the next couple of years and Universal canceled her contract.

After that, Clarke was reduced to playing supporting roles in movies, often trading on her infamy with the grapefruit to get work. She eventually moved on to television, appearing on the likes of Dragnet and Perry Mason.

She worked steadily until her retirement in 1970.

Clarke died of cancer in 1992 at the age of eighty-one.

By the way, her ex-husband Lewis Brice (Fanny's brother) enjoyed the grapefruit scene so much, he would frequently buy a ticket for the Times Square theater where The Public Enemy played twenty-four hours a day, ducking in just long enough to see his ex-wife get smacked with a grapefruit.

Boy, you have to wonder what that marriage was like.

1929-30 Alternate Oscars

Six days after the April 3, 1930 Oscar ceremony in honor of the best movies of 1928-29 — a public-relations debacle where a five-member panel of Louis B. Mayer's hand-chosen lackeys handed all the statues to insiders and Mayer's own entry for best picture — the Academy junked the Central Board of Judges and for the first time set in place procedures to leave the task of selecting winners to the full membership of the Academy itself.

They didn't wait long to see the results of the new system, holding the next ceremony just seven months later, the only time in Oscar history awards were handed out twice in the same calendar year.

For a first exercise in democracy, the Academy did pretty well.

All Quiet On The Western Front — not just the best picture of the year, but one of the best pictures of any year — won both the top prize and an Oscar for its director, Lewis Milestone, the second Oscar of his career.

The Big House, a highly-regarded prison drama, nabbed a pair of awards, one for legendary screenwriter Frances Marion, the other for sound editor Douglas Shearer, the first of his fourteen career Oscars. And though I prefer Ronald Colman in his first talkie, George Arliss gave a solid performance in Disraeli, a role he had first crafted on Broadway.

The only controversy was generated by Norma Shearer's win for best actress in the movie The Divorcee.

"What do you expect," said Joan Crawford afterwards. "She sleeps with the boss," referring to Shearer's powerful husband, MGM producer Irving Thalberg.

Me, I like Norma. Well, pre-code Norma anyway. But more on that later ...

As I put together my own list of Katie Award winners, I realized that my only problem with All Quiet On The Western Front was that it was so good it obscured the fact that overall, 1929-30 was a very weak year for movies.

Silent films had all but disappeared from theaters, but unfortunately, the talkies that replaced them were saddled with a primitive technology that practically bolted the camera and the actors to the floor. Moreover, most directors clearly had no idea what to do with sound, treating it as a novelty rather than an opportunity, sticking in a song or two, or worse going overboard and cramming every nook and cranny with talk-talk-talk.

Things would get better ...

As always, click on the highlighted link to read more ...

1929-30
PICTURE (Drama)
winner: All Quiet On The Western Front (prod. Carl Laemmle, Jr.)
nominees: Anna Christie (prod. Clarence Brown); The Big House (prod. Irving Thalberg); Bulldog Drummond (prod. Samuel Goldwyn); City Girl (prod. William Fox); A Cottage On Dartmoor (prod. H. Bruce Woolfe)

PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: The Cocoanuts (prod. Monta Bella)
nominees: Applause (prod. Monta Bell); Hallelujah! (prod. King Vidor); The Love Parade (prod. Ernst Lubitsch); The Skeleton Dance (prod. Walt Disney)

PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: Pandora's Box (prod. Heinz Landsmann)
nominees: The Blood Of A Poet (prod. Le Vicomte de Noailles); The Blue Angel (prod. Erich Pommer); Diary Of A Lost Girl (prod. Georg Wilhelm Pabst); Earth (prod. VUFKU); Under the Roofs Of Paris (prod. Films Sonores Tobis)

ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Ronald Colman (Bulldog Drummond)
nominees: George Arliss (Disraeli); Lew Ayres (All Quiet On The Western Front); Charles Farrell (Lucky Star); Emil Jannings (The Blue Angel); Uno Henning (A Cottage On Dartmoor)

ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Maurice Chevalier (The Love Parade)
nominees: Douglas Fairbanks (The Taming of the Shrew); William Haines (Speedway, Navy Blues and The Girl Said No); The Marx Brothers (The Cocoanuts); Albert Préjean (Under The Roofs Of Paris)

ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Louise Brooks (Pandora's Box and Diary Of A Lost Girl)
nominees: Nora Baring (A Cottage On Dartmoor); Marlene Dietrich (The Blue Angel); Greta Garbo (Anna Christie); Norma Shearer (The Divorcee)

ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Jeanette MacDonald (The Love Parade)
nominees: Helen Morgan (Applause); Mary Pickford (The Taming of the Shrew)

DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: Lewis Milestone (All Quiet On The Western Front)
nominees: Anthony Asquith (A Cottage On Dartmoor); Aleksandr Dovzhenko (Earth); F.W. Murnau (City Girl); G.W. Pabst (Pandora's Box and Diary Of A Lost Girl); Josef von Sternberg (The Blue Angel)

DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: King Vidor (Hallelujah!)
nominees: René Clair (Under The Roofs Of Paris); Ernst Lubitsch (The Love Parade); Rouben Mamoulian (Applause)

SUPPORTING ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Louis Wolheim (All Quiet On The Western Front)
nominees: Claud Allister (Bulldog Drummond); Wallace Beery (The Big House); Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (Our Modern Maidens); Francis Lederer (Pandora's Box); Robert Montgomery (The Divorcee, The Big House and Our Blushing Brides)

SUPPORTING ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Lupino Lane (The Love Parade)
nominees: Gaston Madot (Under the Roofs of Paris)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Anita Page (Our Modern Maidens and Our Blushing Brides)
nominees: Marie Dressler (Anna Christie); Leila Hyams (The Big House); Beryl Mercer (All Quiet on the Western Front); Seena Owen (Queen Kelly); Lilyan Tashman (Bulldog Drummond)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Nina Mae McKinney (Hallelujah!)
nominees: Margaret Dumont (The Cocoanuts)

SCREENPLAY
winner: George Abbott, Maxwell Anderson and Del Andrews; from a novel by Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet On The Western Front)
nominees: Frances Marion; additional dialogue by Joseph Farnham and Martin Flavin (The Big House); Elliott Lester; adaptation and scenario by Marion Orth and Gerthold Viertel; titles by H.H. Caldwell and Katherine Hilliker (City Girl); Rudolf Leonhardt, from the novel by Margarete Böhme (Diary of a Lost Girl)

SPECIAL AWARDS
"Swanee Shuffle" (Hallelujah!) (Best Song); Arthur Edeson (All Quiet On The Western Front) (Cinematography); C. Roy Hunter and Lewis Milestone (All Quiet On The Western Front) (Special Achievement In The Use Of Sound)

The Marx Brothers in The Cocoanuts — The Best Comedy of 1929

This review is adapted from my (in)famous eight-part, 12,000 word essay on the Marx Brothers which you can start reading here ... if you're so inclined.

By the time they filmed their first movie, the Marx Brothers were a well-oiled comedy machine with 25 years on the vaudeville circuit and three smash Broadway hits to their credit.

The Cocoanuts was worth the wait. It was one of the biggest hits of the year and, more importantly, introduced Americas to a brand of humor they had never seen before.

The movie was based on the stage play of the same name, a musical comedy (nominally) written by George S. Kaufman.

With half a dozen hits in five years, Kaufman was one of the leading young playwrights working on Broadway and his quick wit turned out to be a perfect fit for Groucho, who years later referred to Kaufman as "his God." (Kaufman later went on to win two Pulitzer Prizes.)

Kaufman built the play around the then-ongoing real estate boom in Florida and those of you familiar with the movie know the basic plot — with the help of a couple of disreputable guests (Chico and Harpo), the owner of a ramshackle hotel (Groucho) attempts to con a wealthy society maven (Margaret Dumont) into buying a worthless real estate development.

As always, though, the plot of a Marx Brothers production is simply a framework for a lot of gags, and The Cocoanuts featured some of the best of the Brothers' career.

"Think of the opportunities here in Florida. Three years ago, I came to Florida without a nickel in my pocket. Now? I've got a nickel in my pocket!"

"That's all very well, Mr. Hammer, but we haven't been paid in two weeks and we want our wages!"

"Wages? Do you want to be wage slaves, answer me that."

"No."

"No, of course not! Well, what makes wage slaves? Wages!"

To Kaufman's consternation, the Brothers also tended to ad lib throughout the show ("I think I just heard one of the original lines," he quipped at one performance) and in fact the best-remembered bit in the entire show — the "why a duck?" sequence — evolved from just such an ad lib.

The Cocoanuts ran for 377 shows before heading out on the road, a stripped-down production Groucho called "inferior," by which he meant that the chorus girls were neither as pretty nor as willing as their Broadway counterparts.

The audiences weren't inferior, though. The road show version of The Cocoanuts was big business, and the Los Angeles opening was attended by the likes of Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and Greta Garbo.

United Artists had first approached the Brothers a year earlier about turning The Cocoanuts into a film (imagine the Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin working out of the same studio), but balked at the Brothers' asking price of $75,000 for the film rights.

Paramount's Adolph Zukor balked, too, but then found himself upping the offer to $100,000 during dinner with a particularly eloquent Chico.

In January 1929, with the Brothers still performing their follow-up hit Animal Crackers on Broadway every evening, filming of The Cocoanuts began at Paramount's Astoria Studio on Long Island, New York. Paramount's east coast studio had been used for years to film New York-based acts such as W.C. Fields, but it had yet to fully convert to sound (or even sound proofing) when principle photography began.

Most of the filming took place in the early morning before the noise of traffic made sound recording impossible.

As a finished product, The Cocoanuts suffered from all the problems associated with early sound pictures. Primative sound recording equipment required the camera — and thus the actors — to remain rooted in place, a particular problem for Groucho who had trouble finding his marks anyway.

In addition, early microphones picked up sound indiscriminately. To muffle the sound of crinkling paper, every telegram, letter or map you see was soaked in water before each take (there was no muffling the sound of the crew's laughter, however, which ruined many takes).

The initial cut of The Cocoanuts ran nearly two-and-a-half hours, quickly trimmed after a preview to 96 minutes, mostly by dropping musical numbers. The film premiered in New York on May 3, 1929. The Brothers, who were performing down the street in Animal Crackers missed the show, but their mother Minnie was in attendance.

New York's critics were, at best, mixed in their reviews — prompting the Brothers to offer to buy back the negative from Paramount so they could burn it — but in the rest of the country, The Cocoanuts was a sensation.

Only two years into the sound era, movie audiences had never before seen, or more to the point, heard anything like Groucho's nonstop wordplay, and the film wound up grossing $1.8 million on a budget of $500,000, enough to rank seventh on the year's list of top-grossing films.

So where does The Cocoanuts rank among Marx Brothers films?

In the context of the times, there was nothing like it. Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd had made better comedies during the silent era, but (naturally) nothing relying on lightning quick verbal wit.

On the other hand, the Marx Brothers themselves quickly surpassed The Cocoanuts with their next film, Animal Crackers (more about that later), and would continue to surpass themselves with the likes of Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, Duck Soup, A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races.

Not until the dud Room Service in 1938 did the Brothers fall short of their own lofty standards. After that, the Marx Brothers made a series of serviceable comedies (mostly to keep the spendthrift Chico out of hock).

Should you see The Cocoanuts? Absolutely! And then see Animal Crackers and keep seeing the Marx Brothers until there are no more then start over again.

And why a duck? Cause if you try to cross over on a chicken, you'll find out why a duck!

1928-29 Alternate Oscars

If the Academy was vaguely in the ballpark the first year it handed out Oscars, it completely blew it the next. This year the winners were chosen by a five-member panel — The Central Board of Judges — and while the previous year's smoke-filled room used the awards to settle scores and promote their own interests, at least they felt the need to pretend they were motivated by artistic concerns. This year the panel seemed interested only in handing out awards to the Academy's founders and the man who hand-picked them for the job, Louis B. Mayer.

It was not until the following year that the full membership of the Academy voted on the awards.

The Broadway Melody, an MGM production — that is to say, Louis B. Mayer's baby — is the weakest best picture winner ever, which is saying something.

Mary Pickford, a co-founder of the Academy, took home the best actress trophy for her first talkie, Coquette, and while audiences flocked to see "America's Sweetheart" talk for the first time, critics reviled her performance and only the first Oscar campaign in history secured the award.

Likewise, best director Frank Lloyd, who won for the dull and overly-long The Divine Lady, was one of the founding members of the Academy and his win raised eyebrows among the press.

As for the best actor winner, In Old Arizona's Warner Baxter, the less said, the better. I know some of my fellow bloggers like his performance as the Cisco Kid, but let's just say I don't think his hammy fake Mexican stands up next to the likes of Buster Keaton, Douglas Fairbanks or John Gilbert, all of whom were eligible for the big prize that year.

Hopefully, this round of Katie awards will improve on the Academy's choices. At least I don't owe Louis B. Mayer anything.

Finally, I'll note that two of the Academy's choices, best screenplay winner, Ernst Lubitsch's The Patriot, and The Bridge Of San Luis Rey, which earned MGM set designer Cedric Gibbons the first of eleven Oscars (he was nominated thirty-nine times), have both been lost. That is, unfortunately, an all too common story when it comes to the early history of motion pictures — Hollywood took no care when it came to preserving these early films and let thousands of movies deteriorate or vanish altogether.

As national tragedies go, it's not exactly the Vietnam War. But it is a definite shame, like allowing the Louvre to go up in smoke because you can't be bothered not to play with matches.

1928-29
PICTURE (Drama)
winner: The Wind (prod. Victor Sjöström)
nominees: Blackmail (prod. John Maxwell); The Docks Of New York (prod. J.G. Bachmann); The Iron Mask (prod. Douglas Fairbanks); The Wedding March (prod. Pat Powers and Erich von Stroheim)

PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Steamboat Willie (prod. Walt Disney)
nominees: The Broadway Melody (prod. Irving Thalberg, Harry Rapf and Lawrence Weingarten); The Cameraman (prod. Buster Keaton); Show People (prod. Marion Davies and King Vidor); Steamboat Bill, Jr. (prod. Joseph M. Schenck);

PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: The Passion Of Joan Of Arc (prod. Société générale des films)
nominees: Un Chien Andalou (prod. Luis Buñuel); The Fall Of The House Of Usher (prod. Jean Epstein); Man With The Movie Camera (prod. VUFKU)

ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Douglas Fairbanks (The Iron Mask)
nominees: George Bancroft (The Docks Of New York); Warner Baxter (In Old Arizona); John Gilbert (A Woman Of Affairs and Desert Nights); Erich von Stroheim (The Wedding March)

ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Buster Keaton (Steamboat Bill, Jr. and The Cameraman)
nominees: William Haines (Show People); Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy (Two Tars)

ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Maria Falconetti (The Passion Of Joan Of Arc)
nominees: Betty Amann (Asphalt); Louise Brooks (Beggars Of Life); Betty Compson (The Docks Of New York); Greta Garbo (The Mysterious Lady, A Woman Of Affairs and Wild Orchids); Lillian Gish (The Wind)

ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Marion Davies (Show People)
nominees: Bessie Love (The Broadway Melody)

DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: Carl Theodor Dreyer (The Passion Of Joan Of Arc)
nominees: Victor Sjöström (The Wind); Josef von Sternberg (The Docks Of New York); Dziga Vertov (Man With The Movie Camera); Erich von Stroheim (The Wedding March)

DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Luis Buñuel (Un Chien Andalou)
nominees: Ub Iwerks (Steamboat Willie); Edward Sedgwick (The Cameraman); King Vidor (Show People)

SUPPORTING ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Wallace Beery (Beggars Of Life)
nominees: Donald Calthrop (Blackmail); Lewis Stone (A Woman Of Affairs); Gustav von Seyffertitz (The Mysterious Lady and The Docks Of New York)

SUPPORTING ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Ernest Torrence (Steamboat Bill, Jr. and Desert Nights)
nominees:

SUPPORTING ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Anna May Wong (Piccadilly)
nominees: Olga Baclanova (The Docks Of New York); Marie Glory (L'Argent); Mary Nolan (West Of Zanzibar); Anita Page (Our Dancing Daughters); Zasu Pitts (The Wedding March)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Marceline Day (The Cameraman)
nominees:

SCREENPLAY
winner: Frances Marion; from a novel by Dorothy Scarborough (The Wind)
nominees: Jules Furthman; story by John Monk Saunders; titles by Julian Johnson (The Docks Of New York); Joseph Delteil and Carl Theodor Dreyer (The Passion Of Joan Of Arc)

SPECIAL AWARDS
Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks (the creation and marketing of Mickey Mouse); Douglas Shearer (The Broadway Melody) (Special Achievement In The Use Of Sound); "The Broadway Melody" (The Broadway Melody) (Best Song); Un Chien Andalou (prod. Luis Buñuel) (Best Short Subject); John Arnold (The Wind) (Cinematography)