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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)
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!
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)
If that's not complicated enough, into this mix comes a sensational new act — a scullery maid turned dancer (Anna May Wong) — and overnight, what was once new is now old hat.
And that includes the boss's affections. He tracks Wong down to her room in back of a Chinese restaurant in Limehouse and the sparks fly.
I'd never heard of Gray or Ritchard, and I only knew Thomas as the "nose twitcher" in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, but Wong was a veteran of both the silent and early sound eras, and this is one of her best performances. In a supporting role, she steals the movie, turning what at first plays like a dull backstage romance into a tragedy of race, class and social manners, with Wong and the owner not welcome in his world, not welcome in hers.
That a silent film should deal so frankly with such subject matter will come as a surprise to no one familiar with the medium. Motion pictures of the era were considered adult fare and frequently dealt with themes — adultery, abortion, homosexuality, racism — that would soon become verboten under 1934's Production Code.
Not until the 1960s would Hollywood again wade into the shark-infested waters of such mature topics, and (I would argue) tentatively at that.
Wong made a name for herself in 1922's The Toll of the Sea, Hollywood's first technicolor feature. Ten years later, she would more than hold her own against the legendary Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express.
But the racism of the era largely relegated her talent to minor parts in forgettable movies with lead roles going to the likes of Helen Hayes and Myrna Loy in "yellow face."
In fact, Irving Thalberg rejected Wong for the lead in The Good Earth — based on Pearl Buck's award-winning novel about Chinese peasants — because she didn't fit his idea of what a Chinese woman should look like. He opted to cast German-born Luise Rainer instead.
Ironically, Wong also found disfavor among Chinese-Americans for playing stereotypical Asians on screen.
Wong left Hollywood in the early '40s and passed away in 1961 at the age of 56.
In 2022, the United States Mint included Wong as part of its American Women Quarters Program, the first Asian-American so honored. The following year, Mattel created an Anna May Wong doll for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.
Fun note: For the opening credits, the producers slapped ads on the sides of double decker buses featuring the names of the movie, director, producer, writer, and stars. The opening credits literally drive past the camera through London's West End traffic.
Self-sacrifice follows, set to peppy songs and dance numbers which in addition to the title tune, featured future chestnuts "You Were Meant For Me" and "Give My Regards To Broadway."
Out of necessity, sound man Douglas Shearer invented the concept of the "playback" — pre-recording a song that performers would then dance and lip-synch to — when the choreography on a huge dance number that had already been performed and recorded was deemed unsuitable. Rather than bring the orchestra back to the sound stage, Shearer figured out how to reuse the sound from the previous take, and the cast performed the dance number with its new choreography to a playback of the song.
This technique became the industry standard for decades.
The Broadway Melody was the top grossing movie of 1929 and the first sound film to win the Academy Award for best picture. Its success further cemented sound's commercial future.
So after all that, it's got to be a great movie, right? Uh, no, not even a good one.
The Broadway Melody is quite probably the weakest best picture winner ever, and that's saying something. As musicals go, it did feature the aforementioned classic songs, but the story is trite, the pacing is leaden, and the acting, especially among the supporting cast, is too awful to be believed.
And despite Douglas Shearer's technical innovations, the early sound equipment just wasn't up to the task. Lyrics get muddled, shoes hammer like cannon fire and the rustling of the actresses' dresses drown out the dialogue.
Which is a shame because Anita Page is as cute as a bug's ear! (Read more about her here.)
For Oscar historians and masochists only.
January is Joan Crawford month on TCM and they're kicking it off Thursday night with what I call the Flapper Trilogy—Our Dancing Daughters (1928), Our Modern Maidens (1929) and Our Blushing Brides (1930). They are an exploitative hoot, with Hollywood clucking its moralizing tongue at the antics of girls gone wild while raking in box office bucks.
Look for Monkey favorite Anita Page in all three.
The fun starts at 9 p.m. EST on Thursday, January 2, 2014.
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