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.