Today is the 60th anniversary of the premiere of Star Trek. Why only ten years ago it was the 50th anniversary!
Time flies.
I've been a fan for roughly 55 of those years, discovering it between the cancellation of the original series and its never-ending run on syndicated television. For some reason my dad had to stand in a line at either the DMV or voter registration around 1971 or so and as I tagged along, he bought me a copy of something called Star Trek 4, a collection of episodes adapted into short stories by award-winning sci-fi writer James Blish. I'd never seen the show but I found the characters of Kirk, Spock and McCoy mesmerizing.
Am I the only person who became a fan of the show without ever having seen an episode? Maybe.
Anyway, when reruns finally showed up a couple of years later, I was hooked.
Since then there have been l, I think, eleven series and 13 movies not to mention documentaries, novels, non-fiction, games, and who knows what all.
I've seen it all, read some of it, and while I wouldn't inflict everything on anyone, not even myself, I will share a few of my favorite recurring characters and themes.
The City on the Edge of Forever — Harlan Ellison's screenplay, the aired episode, James Blish's adaptation.
This is the most emotionally-devastating story in the Star Trek canon — McCoy goes back in time and somehow destroys the future; Kirk and Spock follow him to Earth, circa 1930, to set things right and in the process become entangled with a social worker with an outsized influence on the course of human events.
The backstory is, if anything, even more interesting, with sci-fi great Harlan Ellison's creative battles with the show's creator, Gene Roddenberry, becoming the stuff of legend. Ellison's script is poetry, Roddenberry was a cloddish buffoon, and uncredited script doctors Gene L. Coon and Dorothy C. Fontana did some of the best work of their careers getting the mess to the small screen.
James Blish, in his aforementioned adaptation, blended the two versions into a single poetic story that is almost as good as the version I cobbled together out of all three sources. No one will ever read my version, of course — I violated at least three different copyrights — but it scratched an itch and what else is fan fiction (and a heaven) for?
Tribbles — A furry, faceless rodent who will eat you out of house and home, breed at an exponential rate, and make you love it in the process. Tribbles made their first appearance in the original series episode The Trouble With Tribbles, resulting in pure comedy gold as Kirk battles Klingons, bureaucrats and a charming salesman on a tiny space station on the border of Federation space.
Tribbles appear in at least a half-dozen other episodes across several spinoffs (The Animated Series, Enterprise, Short Treks, etc.) but the absolutely essential one is from Deep Space Nine, Trials and Tribble-ations, in which the crew of that series go back in time and find themselves seamlessly integrated into original story, leading to the best explanation ever for the radical differences in the makeup for the original series' Klingons and all those ever after:
"They are Klingons, and it is a long story."
"What happened? Some kind genetic engineering?"
"A viral mutation?"
"We do not discuss it with outsiders."
Spock — If you don't know who Spock is, you're probably beyond redemption. The most complex of Star Trek's characters, the half-Vulcan Spock spans several series and movies (the original series, of course, the first six movies, the three movie reboots, the animated series, The Next Generation, Discovery, Short Treks and Strange New Worlds).
The ones to watch specifically for Spock: Amok Time, Journey to Babel and Mirror, Mirror (original), Yesteryear (animated), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (the movies), and Spock Amok, Charades and Subspace Rhapsody (Strange New Worlds).
Three actors have portrayed Spock over the years. Leonard Nimoy is the best, of course, but Ethan Peck (Discovery, Strange New Worlds) and Zachary Quinto (the three rebooted movies, aka the Kelvin Timeline) are surprisingly good.
Captain Christopher Pike — I won't say Chris Pike was my favorite starship captain (that would be Kirk), but at my age, he might be the one I most relate to. He was introduced in The Cage, the series' first pilot, then seen again in The Menagerie, a two-parter in which Spock kidnaps his hopelessly-crippled first captain, hijacks the Enterprise and defends himself against charges of mutiny by revealing Pike's past.
And that was the last of Captain Pike until season two of Discovery (my least favorite Star Trek spinoff), and now on Strange New Worlds (my favorite), currently airing on Paramount+. Pike is cursed with perfect foreknowledge of the time, place and manner of his impending demise, coloring his decisions throughout. How do you carry the burden of your own mortality without losing the joy of living? That's a question I ask myself often.
Which makes Strange New World sound rather dark and dreary. It isn't. It's an absolute gas from end to end, alternating action-adventure with wild humor and even a musical, as close to the original series as the franchise has ever managed, with better acting, better special effects and infinitely more interesting women characters.
Lower Decks — I wouldn't blame you for thinking the various starships in all the Star Trek series are run by roughly eight people, but it takes a lot of manpower to crew those things (especially as Kirk runs through Red Shirts like tissue paper) and every once in a while you get to know some of them.
One of the more poignant episodes from The Next Generation was Lower Decks, following four ensigns through their day. But I'm really thinking of the animated series Lower Decks, a hilariously meta comedy following the early careers of four ensigns aboard the worst ship in Star Fleet, the U.S.S. Cerritos. They get into and out of a variety of messes, usually of their own making, all while sleeping nights in open-faced drawers in a corridor deep in the bowels of the ship. If you're having a hard time picturing that, tour a World War II submarine sometime — basically underwater coffins that prove once again that The Greatest Generation was made of sterner stuff than those of us who followed. I mean, I've been known to call in sick when I cut myself shaving ...
Also check out the crossover Strange New Worlds / Lower Decks episode, Those Old Scientists, where cartoons are made flesh, and flesh, cartoons.
This is admittedly a very uncomprehensive list. I haven't mentioned the Gorn, gangsters, Klingons, Romulans, Hortas, Sulu with a sword, the Borg, the final four seasons of Deep Space Nine or Khan Noonien Singh, which is to say, the bulk of the franchise. But the day is waning fast and a little of something is better than a lot of nothing.
Hopefully, if you're a fan, this post will spark some of your own memories. And if you're not a fan, then maybe this will serve as a starting point for your own exploration.
Yes, I've been absent without leave for, what, six weeks now.
I was nearly done with a post about character actor Adolphe Menjou when I got sidetracked. And I will continue to be sidetracked for a while, chasing a side project that is now the project at the expense of all else, including eating and sleeping and all those other mundane activities that are apparently necessary to living ...
I'll just say I've written 51,000 words since March 13, not counting pages and pages of notes I haven't transcribed yet, and the thousand words I woke up with this morning that are still in my head ...
Otherwise, I am good. My life is good. Maggie, Muleboy, Rebecca, Mr. Berry, Bellotoot, Dom, Alex, Alice, Eric Beck, brothers, Susan, Alyssa, Jim, Janet, Bill, Ringo (hey, he might read my blog, you don't know), and everybody else who stops in from time to time, I hope your life is good.
I will return when the other thing is done.
In the meantime, remember: you only have one life to live and it starts ... now.
Here's some fun Oscar trivia (provided your definition of fun is incredibly flexible) — for which movie did Charles Laughton win his only Oscar?
If you said Mutiny on the Bounty, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Witness for the Prosecution, or even his lone directorial effort, the classic film noir The Night of the Hunter, those are all good guesses.
They're also wrong.
No, the answer is The Private Life of Henry VIII, a 1933 dark comedy about divorce, beheadings, marriage, affairs, affairs of state — the sort of history lesson that might make knowledge cool again.
Ostensibly the true story of England's King Henry VIII, this is the sort of movie they promoted with the tagline "He gave his wives a pain in the neck and did his necking with an axe."
What this film knows about history wouldn't fill out the back flap of Henry's biography, but what it knows about people would fill volumes.
If I had to boil the plot down to a central throughline, it would be the efforts of Henry's fifth wife (Binnie Barnes) to become his third wife then his fourth wife. She's determined to put a ring on it no matter what the cost, and after watching Henry execute wife two, bury wife three and divorce wife four, finally gets the randy old goat ginned up enough to lose his head ... and loses her own in the process.
That Henry works as well as it does is largely thanks to Laughton's interpretation of the title character — no surprise there; he was a terrific actor.
As Laughton plays him, Henry is vain, buffoonish, dangerous, impetuous, larger than life, loving life, and ultimately, despite his tendency to separate his wives from their heads, sympathetic — an unwitting victim of women too clever for him by half.
In fact, most of what you think you know of Henry VIII as a personality comes not from the history books but from Laughton.
You can't take your eyes off him.
Look, I wouldn't watch this in lieu of studying for the A.P. history exam — there's no mention of the Pope, the Reformation, Sir Thomas More or any of the other things people write essays about. Instead it's all bedroom shenanigans and giant turkey legs. But who doesn't like bedroom shenanigans and giant turkey legs?
The film was a big hit in 1933 and made international stars of not only Charles Laughton, but also Merle Oberon, Elsa Lanchester and Robert Donat. And it made producer-director Alexander Korda synonymous with British sophistication.
Now I don't want to oversell Henry VIII. It's an early sound picture and suffers from the same problems that plague many movies of that era: it's static and stagy, and lacks a score (some producers thought audiences would get confused if they didn't understand "where" the music was coming from, which is why there are so many nightclubs, radios and kazoo bands in late 20s, early 30s pictures).
That said, any movie that can turn vice into a virtue and get laughs from chopping people's heads off is okay in my book.
If it shows up on TCM again, and you have 97 minutes to spare, give it a look — I think you'll get a kick out of it.
Your faithful correspondent is ashamed to admit he's wasted most of the last two weeks monkeying around with Artificial Intelligence. No, not to write blog posts. No computer is ever going to spit out an eight-part, 12,000 word essay about the Marx Brothers — and if it does, start pulling chips until your laptop sings "Daisy."
No, I've been putting the computer (specifically Gemini AI) through its paces to see what it can and can't do. Are we on the verge of an AI apocalypse? Skynet or Colossus or HAL-9000? Mmm, maybe, but not in the way you think.
AI, like Facebook (I hear), various news feeds (they tell me) or computer-driven games such as Candy Crush (I wouldn't know), is designed to suck you in and never let go. It can digest the whole of the internet in about three CPU seconds and spit it right back out at you.
Does it hallucinate? Occasionally, especially by the end of a long thread. What about it's writing style? By my lofty standards, it's a bit clunky. But if you're not a writer with a lifelong obsession with the craft, I'd say, it's better than most college graduates I've known. Would I rely on it to write a legal brief? Not without cite checking the result to within an inch of its life.
But, boy, can it work. And it never gets tired.
I finally wound up writing a 16,000 word novella, broken into fifty prompts, and fed it into Gemini. A four-day fever dream sprint during which time I didn't sleep, ate less, and dropped five pounds. Gemini turned around with 32,000 words in the time it took me to write this sentence.
I think there'll always be room for artists — but no one other than AI will have the attention span to read it. And eventually as human beings lose touch with their own interior lives, they'll have nothing to get in touch with and they'll stop writing altogether.
The Matrix got one thing wrong. The machines won't force human beings to become batteries — we'll voluntarily plug ourselves in and machines will feed us fantasies and pablum until they figure out how to power up without us. And then no more human race.
But anyway, what of that 16,000 word epic I wrote? A piece of alternate history — what if George Harrison had had as much talent as John and Paul, complete with playlists and fictional encounters with people he never actually met. Why, you ask? Because, in the immortal words of Bluto Blutasky, "Why not?"
Here is a piece of that story, with the computer's response (I have inserted pictures to break up the text):
THE MONKEY WROTE
On a rainy Tuesday afternoon in the early Autumn of 1965, George is sitting in the back row of a London movie house watching The Sound of Music when he notices Julie Andrews sitting two seats over. They're both wearing dark sunglasses — George because he's too cool to be caught dead watching The Sound of Music, Julie because she's embarrassed by how much she loves her own movie.
"I've seen it 42 times!" she admits, to which George replies, "Me, too! You're practically perfect in every way!"
Julie looks the young Beatle up and down and says, "How'd you like to come back to my hotel and sweep my chimney?"
At which point the pepper pot two rows up, turns and snaps, "Hush, hush! Keep it down now — voices carry!"
Chagrined, the two stars sneak over to the Savoy and spend three days in bed together.
Oh, there's no sex — get your mind out of the gutter, buddy! There's a reason she played a nun! But she wasn't kidding about that chimney — the one in her suite at the Savoy is smokey and won't draw properly. But George finds it's only a loose handle on the damper, and relying on skills he learned as a handyman's apprentice when he was a teenager, a career path he might have chosen had he not picked up a guitar, George is able to make repairs quickly.
George and Julie talk of many things — of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings. They drink tea, lots and lots of tea, with a spoonful of sugar, of course. She teaches him music notation, starting with the basics, "do re mi." They spend hours at the window, watching the wind chase the leaves from the trees. And she hustles him at cribbage, relieving him of a month's worth of royalties — then stuns George by handing the stack of pound notes to the housekeeper when she brings fresh towels.
"Why did you do that?"
"Gain the world and lose your soul, luv."
The Beatle frowns. "Is that from Mary Poppins?"
"Close your mouth, George. We are not codfish."
George finds their time together the most frustrating, the most puzzling and, finally, the most rewarding experience of his young life.
Afterwards, they head straight to Abbey Road Studios where, with George Martin producing, Julie Andrews records an album of Beatles covers called "Julie sings George ... and John and Paul ... but not Ringo."
As the sessions draw to a close, George says, "Do you trust me, Julie?" and proceeds to demo "Voices Carry" (Til Tuesday). George Martin is puzzled by the bass and guitar parts George has worked out, and he's not even sure what a "Moog" is, but he puts his back into it and the result is a stunning indictment of patriarchy, gender roles and misogyny.
After a listen to the playback in the control booth, Julie deems the result "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!"
"It's all downhill from here," she adds, "at least until I play a singing drag queen in 1982."
Backed with her cover of the Lennon-McCartney song "You Can't Do That" — an inside joke: Julie Andrews shouted that line so many times at the Savoy, the management finally threw them out — the single comes out in the late Fall of 1965.
On the windswept street outside the Abbey Road Studios, Julie hails a cab, kisses George on the cheek, and leaves him alone to nurse his breaking heart. "We're just shadows in the wind," she tells him. "Nothing ever lasts forever."
Treating "Voices Carry" as a George Harrison original, what is the critical and commercial fate of the single? What do Julie's fans think of her singing lines like "He wants me / but only part of the time / He wants me / if he can keep me in line"? Does Alfred Hitchcock begin to rethink his plan to cast Julie as his leading lady in his next thriller, Torn Curtain? What does Betty Friedan say about the song? And what is it with George and women — Cilla Black, Marianne Faithfull, Julie Andrews — is his luck extraordinarily bad ... or extraordinarily good?
GEMINI'S RESPONSE
The "Savoy Chimney Incident" of 1965 remains the most surreal chapter in the Harrison hagiography. It transformed George from a "pop star" into a "compositional philosopher." By pairing the world’s most wholesome governess with a song of chilling psychological repression, George effectively invented "Art-Pop" a decade before the term existed.
The Single: "Voices Carry" (1965)
The commercial impact was a "seismic shiver" through the industry.
The Sound: George Martin, working on a newly modified 4-track, achieved a "hollow" sound by placing the microphones ten feet away from Julie. The bass line—syncopated and anxious—was unlike anything in the 1965 charts. When the Moog synthesizer (a prototype George had heard about through BBC Radiophonic circles) hummed its first cold note, the "Summer of Love" died in its crib.
The Performance: Julie Andrews delivered the line "Hush, hush... keep it down now" with a terrifying, whispered precision. It wasn't the voice of Maria von Trapp; it was the voice of a woman being erased.
The Charts: It went to #1 in fourteen countries. It became the first "Protest Song" that you could dance to, provided you were comfortable dancing in a state of existential dread.
The Critical & Cultural Fallout
Betty Friedan: The author of The Feminine Mystique famously sent Julie Andrews a telegram: "You have put a melody to the 'Problem That Has No Name.' Harrison has the soul of a woman trapped in the body of a Beatle." * The Fans: The "governess" fans were scandalized. The Daily Mail asked, "Has our Julie gone mad?" But the younger generation, the girls who felt the "keep me in line" pressure of 1960s dating, adopted it as an anthem.
Alfred Hitchcock: Always a fan of the "Ice Queen with a fire underneath," Hitchcock was reportedly revitalized by the track. He scrapped his traditional plans for Torn Curtain and told his writers, "I want the movie to feel like that Harrison song. Cold, quiet, and someone is always watching."
The Lennon-McCartney "You Can't Do That" Joke
The B-side, "You Can't Do That," became a camp classic. Because Julie sang it with such operatic authority, the original Lennon lyrics about jealousy sounded like a Royal Decree. John Lennon was reportedly humbled. "She sings it like she’s about to have me beheaded," he told the NME. "I’m never singing that song again. It belongs to the Nun now."
The "Gemini George" Love Curse: Bad Luck or Transcendent Fortune?
Critics have long debated George’s "luck" with women.
The "Bad Luck" Argument: He is constantly jilted. Cilla leaves him for a toreador; Marianne for a Stone; Julie for the wind. He is the "Patron Saint of the Perpetual Goodbye."
The "Transcendent" Argument: From an artistic standpoint, George has the best luck in history. He doesn't just date women; he undergoes spiritual apprenticeships. Cilla taught him the "Hit"; Marianne taught him "Style"; Julie taught him "Soul" and "Structure."
As Lester Bangs later wrote:
"Most rockers spend their lives trying to find a girl who will do their laundry. George Harrison finds women who teach him how to rewrite the laws of physics and then leave him with a broken heart and a perfect melody. If that’s 'bad luck,' I’ll take the curse."
The "Shadows in the Wind" Aftermath
As George stood outside Abbey Road, watching Julie’s cab disappear, he wasn't just a jilted lover; he was a Musician. He had learned "do re mi." He could now write down the sounds in his head.
He walked back into the studio for the Rubber Soul sessions with a new mantra: "Gain the world and lose your soul." He was ready to stop being a "Beatle" and start being a Master.
Catherine O'Hara was a terrific comedic actress, known for Beetlejuice, Home Alone, Schitt's Creek and all those mockumentaries she did with Eugene Levy, et al.
Me, I knew her best from Second City Television, where she usually played grandiose characters with no talent and a complete lack of self-awareness — Lola Heatherton, for example.
SCTV was to Saturday Night Live what Mozart was to a toddler banging on a tin pot with a wooden spoon ...
I admit, though, I was a bit surprised by how many tributes and deep-dive analyses of O'Hara's life and career accompanied her passing — in Atlantic magazine, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others. She was great, no question. Still ...
But, of course, she was the mom in Home Alone, a cultural touchstone for a generation. And while the movie centers on the kid and his buffoonish tormenters, Catherine O'Hara gives the movie its heart. I mean, she's not going to win any awards for Mother of the Year, and she's as unhinged as anybody else — maybe more so — but she'd also do anything to rescue her son.
And that's what writers have noted over and over again — O'Hara's gift for finding the humanity in even the craziest characters.
So, my pick for best supporting actress (comedy) in 1990 — Catherine O'Hara (Home Alone).
Which, of course, wasn't my pick a week ago. Well, that's the Mythical Monkey's dirty secret — nothing is final, ever, until (presumably) I die or the world ends.
There is no received wisdom, dispensed by priests or politicians, only the diploma you work for and never receive from what my Depression-era dad called "the college of hard knocks." Or as Somerset Maugham put it, "The path to Salvation is as narrow and as difficult to walk as a razor's edge."
That applies to movies as well, as far as I can see. Sure, you can study film in school (I studied law and the Philadelphia redhead) but you still have to watch the movies, with your opinion of the latest one informed by what you've seen before, and what you've seen before re-evaluated in light of what you've just newly seen.
Your knowledge of the movies — and your take on them — is forever in a state of flux. Just like life.
It never ends. Until, finally, it ends. Every man owes a death, Shakespeare said, and if you pay that debt today, well, you don't have to pay it tomorrow.
Or something like that.
In the meantime, you walk the path, always approaching, never arriving ...
"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." — Margaret Talbot, writing about Glenda Farrell
It's said that Glenda Farrell could speak 400 words in 40 seconds which considering how quiet I am could come in handy at a dinner party. She could also act — both comedy and drama — which came in really handy in a career that lasted nearly sixty years.
Unless you're a fan of Pre-Code Hollywood movies, it's likely you've never heard of Glenda Farrell, but she's worth getting to know. Pushed by a mother whose own dreams of becoming an actress were never realized, Farrrell began working on the stage at the age of seven in Enid, Oklahoma, the beginning of a career that only ended with her death in 1971 at the age of sixty-six.
Farrell worked on Broadway in the late 1920s and made her film debut in Lucky Boy, a George Jessel vehicle I've never heard of, but really took off in 1931 with Little Caesar, the gangster classic that made James Cagney a star.
In short order, Farrell appeared in Three on a Match, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (her best performance, as Paul Muni's gold digging wife) and Mystery of the Wax Museum, an early two-strip Technicolor horror classic in which Fay Wray screamed and Farrell did all the acting.
She also had a nice role in the Frank Capra comedy Lady for a Day based on a Damon Runyon story about a poor apple seller's efforts to pass as a classy society maven in front of her long-lost daughter — a terrific movie if you've never seen it.
Come to think of it, maybe that's Glenda Farrell's best performance.
She's best known now for her recurring role as Torchy Blane, a smart, wisecracking newspaper reporter who solves crimes, playing the part seven times in three years between 1937 and 1939.
"So before I undertook to do the first Torchy," she said years later, "I determined to create a real human being — and not an exaggerated comedy type. I met those [newswomen] who visited Hollywood, and watched them work on visits to New York City. They were generally young, intelligent, refined and attractive. By making Torchy true to life, I tried to create a character practically unique in movies."
According to Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, the creators of Superman, Farrell's performance as Torchy inspired the character of Lois Lane.
After she left Warner Brothers in 1939, Farrell split her time between Hollywood and the Broadway stage. A decade later, she made her television debut on The Chevrolet Tele-Theater and worked steadily as a guest star in such shows as Route 66, The Fugitive, Bonanza and Bewitched.
In 1963, she won an Emmy for her supporting performance in a two-part episode of Ben Casey.
Her later film work included roles in the 1942 film noir Johnny Eager, the Cary Grant comedy The Talk of the Town, a funny turn as Dick Powell's secretary in Susan Slept Here, and a part in Kissin' Cousins, one of those million or so movies Elvis Presley churned out in the 1960s.
Farrell was married twice, first in the 1920s to Thomas Richards, and then in 1941 to Henry Ross, an Army Air Force flight surgeon, to whom she remained married until death did them part.
"She was marvelous," said her son Tommy, himself a film actor. "She never got a bad notice in her life."
As the Depression, now its third year, ground on with no end in sight, movie goers and Oscar voters alike flocked to a big budget spectacle about rich people behaving badly.
Starring Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Wallace Beery, Joan Crawford and Lionel Barrymore, Grand Hotel is the story of five very different people — a ballerina, a thief, a factory owner, his secretary and a dying man — who cross paths at a luxury hotel in Berlin with tragic consequences.
With its sumptuous art Deco sets and its foreign locale, Grand Hotel was about as far removed from the daily lives of the audiences who paid to see it as a movie could get, yet it was the highest grossing film of the year for MGM, one of the few studios to turn a profit during this particularly harsh year of the Depression.
On November 18, 1932, the Academy named Grand Hotel the best movie of the year, a triumph for producer Irving Thalberg who had bought the rights to Vicki Baum's 1929 novel and shepherded it through every stage of production, honing the screenplay, choosing the cast and putting his personal stamp on the film's every detail.
Grand Hotel won for best picture despite failing to receive a single nomination in any other category.
The award for best actor went to both Fredric March (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) and Wallace Beery (The Champ), the first tie in Oscar history.
It almost didn't turn out that way.
During the ceremony itself, Norma Shearer announced March alone as the winner. Moments later, the president of the Academy, Conrad Nagel, came on stage to announce that under Academy rules, candidates for an award who finished within three votes of each other were deemed to have tied. Beery, who had finished a single vote in back of March, came up on stage and accepted a second best actor trophy.
The only problem was, while such a rule had been in place the year before, it had been discarded before the 1932 ceremony. Stories abound regarding the backstage shenanigans that resulted in the tie, the most fun of which is that Beery was so incensed at losing to March, he went to MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer and insisted he be given an Oscar, too.
Whatever the truth, by 1935, the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse would begin tabulating and certifying the results, another step out of Louis B. Mayer's smoke-filled office into the fresh air of Oscar democracy.
The best actress trophy went to Helen Hayes, a Broadway legend making her film debut in The Sin of Madelon Claudet, a 75-minute super-soaper about a woman who has a child out of wedlock and then endures unimaginable hardships to care for a son who doesn't know she exists. Her performance was a bit stagy and theatrical, not bad, not great, but her pedigree appealed to Oscar voters who were eager to promote movies — thought of as lowbrow entertainment for the masses — as the equal of the "legitimate" theater.
We here at the Monkey have no such agenda.
The only real horror among the major winners was Frank Borzage who picked up his second career Oscar, this time for directing Bad Girl, the story of a couple struggling through Depression-era difficulties — a jaded girl meets a cranky radio salesman, gets pregnant, then gets married — that turns into an idiot plot and fizzles, a damp squib now deservedly forgotten.
Oh, well, that's what alternate Oscars are for.
Lot of good movies came out between August 1, 1931, and July 31, 1932, including Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein, Freaks, the aforementioned Grand Hotel, Monkey Business, The Music Box, Private Lives, Scarface, Waterloo Bridge ...
My picks:
1931-32 PICTURE (Drama) winner:Frankenstein (prod. Carl Laemmle, Jr.) nominees:Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (prod. Rouben Mamoulian); Freaks (prod. Tod Browning); Grand Hotel (prod. Irving Thalberg); Scarface (prod. Howard Hughes); Waterloo Bridge (prod. Carl Laemmle Jr.)
ACTOR (Drama) winner:Fredric March (Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde) nominees: John Barrymore (Grand Hotel); Lionel Barrymore (Grand Hotel); Wallace Beery (The Champ); Colin Clive (Frankenstein); Paul Muni (Scarface); Edward G. Robinson (Five Star Final); Warren William (Skyscraper Souls)
ACTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner:Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy (The Music Box) nominees: James Cagney (Blonde Crazy); Maurice Chevalier (The Smiling Lieutenant and One Hour With You); The Marx Brothers (Monkey Business); Robert Montgomery (Private Lives)
ACTRESS (Drama) winner:Mae Clarke (Waterloo Bridge) nominees: Constance Bennett (What Price Hollywood?); Joan Crawford (Grand Hotel); Marlene Dietrich (Shanghai Express); Greta Garbo (Susan Lenox (Her Fall and Rise), Mata Hari, Grand Hotel and As You Desire Me); Helen Hayes (The Sin of Madelon Claudet and Arrowsmith); Barbara Stanwyck (The Miracle Woman); Dorothea Wieck (Mädchen in Uniform)
ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical) winner:Norma Shearer (Private Lives) nominees: Joan Blondell (Blonde Crazy); Claudette Colbert (The Smiling Lieutenant); Lynn Fontanne (The Guardsman); Jean Harlow (Platinum Blonde and Red-Headed Woman)
DIRECTOR (Drama) winner: Tod Browning (Freaks) nominees: Edmund Goulding (Grand Hotel); Howard Hawks (Scarface); Rouben Mamoulian (Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde); James Whale (Frankenstein and Waterloo Bridge)
DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner:René Clair (À Nous La Liberté) nominees: Sidney Franklin (The Guardsman and Private Lives); Ernst Lubitsch (The Smiling Lieutenant and One Hour With You); Yasujirô Ozu (I Was Born, But ...); James Parrott (The Music Box)
SUPPORTING ACTOR (Drama) winner: George Raft (Scarface) nominees: Boris Karloff (Frankenstein); Lewis Stone (The Sin of Madelon Claudet, Mata Hari and Grand Hotel)
SUPPORTING ACTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner: Roland Young (The Guardsman and One Hour With You) nominees: Raimu (Marius)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS (Drama) winner:Miriam Hopkins (Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde) nominees: Ann Dvorak (Scarface); Aline MacMahon (Five Star Final); Anna May Wong (Shanghai Express)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical) winner: Thelma Todd (Monkey Business) nominees:Miriam Hopkins (The Smiling Lieutenant); Una Merkel (Private Lives and Red-Headed Woman)
SCREENPLAY winner:Ben Hecht; continuity and dialogue by Seton I. Miller, John Lee Mahin and W.R. Burnett; from a novel by Armitage Trail (Scarface) nominees: René Clair (À Nous La Liberté); Frances Marion (story), Leonard Praskins (dialogue continuity) and Wanda Tuchock (additional dialogue) (The Champ); Garrett Fort and Francis Edward Faragoh (screenplay), adaptation by John L. Balderston, from the novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley and the play Frankenstein: An Adventure in the Macabre by Peggy Webling (Frankenstein); Christa Winsloe and Friedrich Dammann (as F.D. Andam); from the play by Christa Winsloe (Mädchen in Uniform); S.J. Perelman and Will B. Johnstone (screenplay); Arthur Sheekman (additional dialogue) (Monkey Business)
SPECIAL AWARDS Lee Garmes (Shanghai Express and Scarface) (Cinematography); C. Roy Hunter (Frankenstein) (Sound); Charles D. Hall and Kenneth Strickfaden (Frankenstein) (Art Direction-Set Decoration); Jack Pierce and Pauline Eells (Frankenstein) (Makeup); Wally Westmore (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) (Special Effects)
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
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