Let's call this the Great Reconciliation. No, not between the Republicans and the Democrats — as if! Even the Monkey's not that good!
No, this is the reconciliation between what I used to call the Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (read about them here) and my alternate Oscar polls. I stopped working on the former seven or eight years ago as I took up the latter and now the two lists have greatly diverged. So I'm reconciling the two.
Blah blah blah ...
Follow the highlighted links to read about the movie or nominee in question.
1927-28 PICTURE (Drama) winner:Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (prod. William Fox) nominees:The Crowd (prod. Irving Thalberg); The Last Command (prod. Jesse L. Lasky and Adolph Zukor); Laugh, Clown, Laugh (prod. Herbert Brenon); The Man Who Laughs (prod. Paul Kohner); Wings (prod. Lucien Hubbard)
PICTURE (Comedy/Musical) winner:The Jazz Singer (prod. Warner Brothers) nominees:The Cat and the Canary (prod. Paul Kohner); The Circus (prod. Charles Chaplin); My Best Girl (prod. Mary Pickford); Speedy (prod. Harold Lloyd); The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg (prod. Ernst Lubitsch)
PICTURE (Foreign Language) winner:Un chapeau de paille d'Italie (The Italian Straw Hat) (prod. Alexandre Kamenka) nominees:Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt (Berlin: Symphony Of A Great City) (prod. Karl Freund); Oktyabr (October (Ten Days That Shook The World)) (prod. Sovkino); Spione (Spies) (prod. Erich Pommer)
ACTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner: Charles Chaplin (The Circus) nominees: Al Jolson (The Jazz Singer); Harold Lloyd (Speedy); Albert Préjean (Un chapeau de paille d'Italie (The Italian Straw Hat))
ACTRESS (Drama) winner: Janet Gaynor (7th Heaven; Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans and Street Angel) nominees: Eleanor Boardman (The Crowd); Gloria Swanson (Sadie Thompson)
ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical) winner:Mary Pickford (My Best Girl) nominees: Marion Davies (The Patsy); Norma Shearer (The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg)
DIRECTOR (Drama) winner:F.W. Murnau (Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans) nominees: Paul Leni (The Man Who Laughs); King Vidor (The Crowd); Josef von Sternberg (The Last Command); William A. Wellman (Wings)
DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner: Charles Chaplin (The Circus) nominees: René Clair (Un chapeau de paille d'Italie a.k.a. An Italian Straw Hat); Paul Leni (The Cat And The Canary); Ernst Lubitsch (The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg); Lewis Milestone (Two Arabian Knights); Ted Wilde (Speedy)
SUPPORTING ACTOR (Drama) winner: Lionel Barrymore (Sadie Thompson) nominees: Gary Cooper (Wings); Rudolf Klein-Rogge (Spione); William Powell (The Last Command); Bert Roach (The Crowd)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS (Drama) winner:Clara Bow (Wings) nominees: Olga Baclanova (The Man Who Laughs); Evelyn Brent (Underworld and The Last Command); Gladys Brockwell (7th Heaven); Mary Philbin (The Man Who Laughs)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical) winner: Eugenie Besserer (The Jazz Singer) nominees: Louise Brooks (A Girl In Every Port); Martha Mattox (The Cat and the Canary); Olga Tschechowa (Un chapeau de paille d'Italie (The Italian Straw Hat))
SCREENPLAY winner: Herman J. Mankiewicz (titles) and John F. Goodrich (writer), from a story by Lajos Biró and Josef von Sternberg (The Last Command) nominees:King Vidor and John V.A. Weaver; titles by Joseph Farnham (The Crowd); Elizabeth Meehan; titles by Joseph Farnham; from a play by David Belasco and Tom Cushing (Laugh, Clown, Laugh); Raoul Walsh; titles by C. Gardner Sullivan; from a story by W. Somerset Maugham (Sadie Thompson)
SPECIAL AWARDS
George Groves (The Jazz Singer) (Special Achievement In The Use Of Sound); "Toot Toot Tootsie" (The Jazz Singer) (Best Song); Charles Rosher and Karl Struss (Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans) (Cinematography); Roy Pomeroy (Wings) (Special Effects)
The most popular movie of 1927 was The Jazz Singer, which introduced synchronized sound to the movies at last. Audiences were thrilled not just to see Al Jolson singing but to hear him singing — and I can't say I blame them.
"Wait a minute, wait a minute, I tell you — you ain't heard nothing yet!" He wasn't kidding.
Even though "Toot Toot Tootsie" had been a hit for Al Jolson a couple of years before, its appearance in The Jazz Singer was a pivotal moment in the history of motion pictures. As co-star May McAvoy put it "In that moment just before 'Toot, Toot, Tootsie,' a miracle occurred. Moving pictures really came alive. To see the expressions on their faces, when Joley spoke to them ... you'd have thought they were listening to the voice of God."
Great moment.
Do you know the movie's story? Jolson plays Jakie Rabinowitz, who defies his father to become a vaudeville performer. While Jolson, now performing as Jack Robin, becomes a huge Broadway success, his father disowns him for defying his insistence that that his son succeed him as cantor at the local synagogue. There's lots of good singing and a tearful reconciliation at the end.
Audiences ate it up.
No doubt modern audiences will squirm as Jolson performs many of his numbers in blackface. This is one instance where I'd recommend you power through it. As film historian Corin Willis wrote:
"Of the more than seventy examples of blackface in early sound film 1927–53 that I have viewed (including the nine blackface appearances Jolson subsequently made), The Jazz Singer is unique in that it is the only film where blackface is central to the narrative development and thematic expression."
Blackface here plays as a metaphor for the mask Jack Robin wears to hide his Jewish heritage. Ironically, by putting on the makeup, Jolson can assimilate into a white Anglo-Saxon society that would otherwise reject him.
Only at the end, however, when he strips off the mask to sing "Kol Nidre" in the synagogue for his father does Jolson again become a complete man — the Jewish son and the jazz singer.
Well, at least that's the theory. Blackface may have been a staple of vaudeville and early Hollywood but it tends to take me out of a movie even as I understand the historical context.
Your mileage may vary.
Some notes of historical interest:
● Vitaphone, Warner Brothers' system for pressing sound onto 16-inch discs, was not the first technique for synchronizing sound and film but it was the first practical technology to do so, generating a sound loud enough for an audience to hear and with a higher fidelity than sound-on-film technologies could produce.
● Contrary to popular belief, the first feature-length film using the Vitaphone process was not The Jazz Singer but a John Barrymore movie, Don Juan, released on August 6, 1926. Don Juan, however, included only a recorded score and sound effects and the film was not enough of a hit to make back the costs of using the Vitaphone process. Only the persistence of producer Adolph Zukor convinced the Warner brothers — Harry and Sam — to make another feature-length sound film.
● The technology used to record The Jazz Singer was so primitive, no sound editing was possible. Al Jolson's songs were recorded and mixed as he performed them and what you saw was what you got. Except for a couple of spontaneous ad-libs — including the immortal line "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet!" spoken by Al Jolson as a bridge between "Dirty Hands, Dirty Face" and "Toot Toot Tootsie" — there's no spoken dialogue in the movie. Technician George Groves is credited with recording the sound.
In his career, Groves received eight Oscar nominations, winning twice, an incredible track record considering he only worked on twenty movies.
● Ironically, despite the enormous success of The Jazz Singer, the Vitaphone disc technology itself proved to be too uneconomical for large-scale use. The studio had to distribute a separate disc with each copy of the movie and each theater needed an operator skilled enough to synch the recording with the film, driving up costs. In addition, because assembling and editing a Vitaphone picture was not just a simple matter of cutting and splicing film, but also of mixing and pressing new recordings, directors and film editors found the technology difficult to use. In 1932, Warner Brothers gave up on the Vitaphone process and instead opted to add sound recordings to optical tracks that were laid over the edge of the film negative.
● Left to the voters, The Jazz Singer probably would have cleaned up at the first Oscars ceremony. But in a smoke-filled backroom, the powers that be figured that handing a bunch of awards to the most popular movie of the year wasn't going to help sell extra tickets — to The Jazz Singer or anything else — so they arbitrarily declared it ineligible and handed its producers an honorary Oscar instead. (Read the story here.)
And last but certainly not least, a bit of personal history involving Al Jolson and my wife Katherine's great-grandmother.
In 1912, on a whim, Katherine's great-grandmother decided she, her daughter and her chauffeur should take the Packard on a cross-country drive from New Jersey to California — a nutty idea, actually.
As recently as 1908, the United States only had some 600 miles of paved road. Conditions weren't much better in 1912.
Perhaps they could find a traveling companion to go with them, someone suggested. The New York Automobile Club hooked them up with a guy named Al Jolson.
Yeah, that Al Jolson.
Katherine's great-grandmother sent her chauffeur to meet this Jolson character who had recently headlined the Winter Garden in Manhattan, New York.
The daughter (Katherine's great-aunt) tells the story:
"Fred went to Jolson's suite where Jolson and a couple of pals were entertaining or being entertained by some girls.
"The next morning, Jolson left before we did. Fred's brief encounters were the only near contact we had with Jolson. He reached Chicago a couple of days ahead of us and reached San Francisco in two weeks while it took us a month!"
The story has a happy ending though — the daughter married the chauffeur!
As soon as we nail down the last of the pairings for the 2014 Favorite Classic Movie Actress Tournament, I'll start promoting the matchups—the tourney starts on March 2.
I've created a separate page for reader-voted alternate Oscars, here.
So far, I've only set up votes for 1926 and 1927, but I'll be doing other years eventually, not necessarily in chronological order—maybe I'll do 1939 next. Everybody knows 1939, right?
In the meantime, follow the highlighted link above and scroll down to vote on the films of 1927, a year that includes three contenders for the best silent movie ever made—The General, Metropolis and Sunrise. Oh, and stop along the way to vote for 1926's best director, supporting actor and supporting actress.
The vote never closes, so if you haven't seen all the movies, vote now, and come back later and vote again. Try not to be piggy about stuffing the ballot box, but by all means, participate.
While Katie-Bar-The-Door and I were vacationing in Alaska, I received an e-mail from Kate Corbett Pollack, a researcher with the American Pomeroy Historic Genealogical Association in Syracuse. Appropriately enough, given her place of employment, she's been researching Roy J. Pomeroy and she asked if I would spread word of his story and of a special request from the Association.
You remember Roy Pomeroy, don't you? If you're a silent film buff and an amateur Oscar historian like me, you immediately thought "Ah, yes, he won the first Oscar for special effects." Engineering effects, it was called then. He provided the sound effects for Wings, the first movie to win the Oscar for best picture, and invented what I guess you'd call rear-projection or maybe blue screen—dropping in a background behind an actor without requiring the actor to film on location.
He also worked, uncredited (nobody much got a credit in those days), on the special effects for Cecil B. DeMille's silent version of The Ten Commandments—remember the parting of Red Sea, using Jell-o? That was Pomeroy. And he was one of the original founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). For his efforts, he made over a $1 million a year in salary.
All around, well done, Mr. Pomeroy.
But then, as is often the case with triumphs, the world continued to turn and discovered it could live without Roy J. Pomeroy, particularly his salary demands and his autocratic behavior. Paramount fired him, no other studio would work with him, and his attempts to form his own company, Pomeroy Laboratories, were largely fruitless.
On September 3, 1947, Pomeroy was found dead in his laboratory of an apparent suicide. He was fifty-five.
And there the story of Roy J. Pomeroy sat until a few years ago when AMPAS began looking for Pomeroy's Oscar. Turns out no one has any idea where it is or even if Paramount forwarded the Oscar to him after it fired him.
"We would love to gain more readership for this story," Kate writes, "and perhaps an answer to the mystery of Roy's death (which looks like a suicide) and the missing Oscar. I thought by contacting others who write about Old Hollywood, this could be a way to do it."
So what say you, faithful Monkey readers? Can we spread the word and write a happy ending to Roy Pomeroy's story?
Today is Mary Pickford's birthday. One of the greatest stars of the silent era, and pound-for-pound the most powerful woman in Hollywood history, Mary Pickford's work is indispensable for the film fanatic. If you've never seen a Mary Pickford movie and don't know where to begin, here are five films to get you started.
The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917)
An unprecedented blend of comedy and melodrama that worried the studio but delighted its star, the story of a girl whose wealthy parents neglect her while others prey on her could easily have become sentimental claptrap. Instead, Pickford's Gwendolyn is, by turns, impetuous, flighty and sullen, but also curious, kind and fun—in other words, a real girl. The film was one of the biggest hits of 1917 and is a National Film Registry selection.
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917)
A cross between Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott, this story of a poor girl sent to live with a pair of maiden aunts is the most typical example of a Mary Pickford movie. Boasting plenty of comedy with a soupçon of pathos in the final act, Rebecca was Pickford's biggest hit yet.
Stella Maris (1918)
Based on a novel by William J. Locke, Stella Maris is a Victorian melodrama of the first water, the riveting story of two girls, one a rich shut-in sheltered from life's realities, the other, an ugly duckling orphan—both played by Pickford—whose paths intersect with tragic results. Variety called the performance "a revelation," the Los Angeles Times deemed it "brilliant, powerful and poignant" and studio chief Adolph Zukor later called it "the most remarkable thing which Mary Pickford has ever done for the screen." And they were right.
Sparrows (1926)
The other contender for Pickford's best movie, Sparrows is the harrowing tale of a group of backwoods orphans menaced by white slavers. In a sort of teenage take on Lillian Gish's gun-toting granny in 1955's The Night of the Hunter, Pickford attempts to lead her wards to safety while danger lurks at every turn—including the very real alligators director William Beaudine brought onto the set.
My Best Girl (1927)
In a rare adult role, Pickford plays a shop girl who falls in love with the owner's son. Played strictly for laughs, the result is a nifty little comedy, as fresh and light and funny as the actress who carries it on her back. As film critic Steve Vineberg says, the performance is "an extraordinary combination of spunk and delicacy." And as an added bonus, look for a brief, pre-stardom appearance by Carole Lombard as one of the shop girls.
This is my contribution to the Universal Backlot Blogathon hosted by Kristen at Journeys in Classic Film.
While many great films have come out of Universal Studios since its founding in 1912, the genre with it is most associated is and probably always will be horror. From silent era films starring Lon Chaney, to Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff during the early sound era, right up to Drag Me To Hell and Shaun of the Dead in the 21st century, the Universal logo at the beginning of a film promises a viewer 90+ minutes of scary thrills and chills.
You no doubt have your own favorites, but I prefer the horror films of directors Tod Browning (Dracula) and James Whale (Frankenstein) who worked during the late silent and early sound eras. They didn't just work in the genre, they defined it, inventing many of the visual and narrative cliches we love and demand when we wait in the dark to be scared out of our wits.
As great and influential as those two directors were, however, it was their contemporary, the German Paul Leni, who might have been Universal's greatest director of horror. He was responsible for three of the best horror films of the silent era, Waxworks and The Man Who Laughed—both starring Conrad Veidt, who you may better know as Casablanca's Major Strasser—and this one, The Cat and the Canary, which like The Man Who Laughed was filmed on the Universal backlot.
The plot of The Cat and the Canary has been recycled so many times, I scarcely need describe it—an eccentric millionaire leaves a will stipulating it not be read until the twentieth anniversary of his death, a will which when read names his sweet niece Annabelle as sole heir, provided she survive a night in his spooky old mansion.
I spent a year in law school studying decedents' estates and trusts—wills, to you—and let me tell you, this is one nutty way to pass money from one generation to the next.
Add in a houseful of greedy relatives, a stormy night and the fact that the will itself has been tampered with—the old man's lawyer opens the safe for the first time in twenty years only to find a still-living moth flapping its wings inside—and you've got yourself the making of a nifty, old-fashioned ghost story.
The cast is populated with unknowns—other than Tully Marshall and Lucien Littlefield, I wasn't familiar with any of them—and the story itself is a hoary old chestnut, but with Leni's expert direction taking full advantage of Charles Hall's set design, the film is a treat from beginning to end, moving like lightning, and fun and spooky in a kids telling ghost stories on Halloween kind of way.
The film is a fine example of what the Germans called "Expressionism"—an attempt to represent the world in subjective terms, that is to say, distorted to reflect an emotional state rather than an objective one—and as such films as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu and this one demonstrate, is well suited to evoking the heightened emotional state necessary for true horror.
Working with Hall, who later created sets for Frankenstein, Dracula and Bride of Frankenstein, Leni designed a mansion that looks like a cross between Charles Foster Kane's Xanadu and Dracula's lair, a backlit castle more suited to Transylvania than the Hudson River valley, full of impossible corridors narrow yet three stories high with curtains billowing from open windows; massive doors that look like they were carved whole from ancient oaks; chairs big enough to seat Goliath; acres of cobwebs; hidden passages; secret panels; and all of it lit from below as if told by half-frightened, half-giggling kids with a flashlight during a sleepover.
"I have tried to create sets so stylized that they evince no reality," Paul Leni explained in 1924. "[It] is not extreme reality that the camera perceives, but the reality of the inner event, which is more profound, effective and moving than what we see through everyday eyes."
Unfortunately, Leni died suddenly in 1929 at the age of forty-one, and his name and his films, along with most of the silent era, was quickly forgotten by a movie-going public hungry for the next big thing, talkies.
But even if Leni himself has been forgotten, his influence hasn't. The film was a huge hit, critically and commer-cially, and has been remade at least five times, the best of them starring Bob Hope. It has also been copied and ripped off, in one form or another, too many times to count, including as The Old Dark House featuring Boris Karloff and Charles Laughton, The Laurel-Hardy Murder Mystery, with, yes you guessed it, Laurel and Hardy, and If a Body Meets a Body starring the Three Stooges.
But don't take my word for it—watch it here yourself, courtesy of the Internet Movie Database and Archive.org, and reflect as you do, just how many times you've seen it, even if you've never seen it.
The first year of the Academy Awards covered films released between August 1, 1927 and July 31, 1928. Thus the oddly truncated Silent Oscar award season for 1927.
Plenty of good movies to choose from, though.
By the way, the Lon Chaney movie, The Unknown, is relatively unknown (hardy har har), but is actually a better showcase of his acting than The Hunchback of Notre Dame or The Phantom of the Opera. Not to mention it's the most macabre version of O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi" ever. Directed by the great Tod Browning (Dracula, Freaks), it's must-see movie watching.
Just make sure you've tamped your lunch down tightly ahead of time.
Picture:Metropolis (prod. Erich Pommer) Actor: Lon Chaney (The Unknown) Actress: Clara Bow (It) Director: Fritz Lang (Metropolis) Supporting Actor: Rudolf Klein-Rogge (Metropolis) Supporting Actress: Brigitte Helm (Metropolis) Screenplay: Thea von Harbou, from her novel (Metropolis)
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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