As promised, I'll be reposting my alternate Oscar polls every other day or so until we catch up to the present. But rather than drag you through the silent era — an era which even many film buffs don't know well — I'm starting with 1930 and moving forward from there. (You can always follow these links and vote for the Silent Oscars: 1888 to 1909; 1910s; 1920s)
Most of the races in 1930 are blowouts, but the best actor contest is nip-and-tuck between the Marx Brothers in Animal Crackers and that smoked Nazi ham, Emil Jannings. If you love the Marx Brothers, this is their only realistic shot at an alternate Oscar — they trail badly in 1933 and 1935.
As for Emil Jannings, he's running away with the 1928 alternate Oscar ...
Okay, let's call what we've been doing the last three months a dry run. Now let's do it for real.
The plan initially was to do polls of all the best pictures, followed by polls for the best actors, then the best actresses, etc., and then gather them all up on their own separate blog pages (see, e.g., the alternate Oscars for the 1910s and the 1920s). The idea was to pick the brains of the movie-knowledgeable crowd that drives by this site from time to time and reach some sort of consensus about all things Oscar.
But my pal Mister Muleboy noted at the ball game the other day that there's a powerful urge to vote for a movie not because you think it's the best picture of the year but because you like the actor in it or want to honor the person who directed it or because Jean Harlow gets nekkid in a rain barrel.
In other words, you need all the categories up and running simultaneously so you can split your vote.
The plan is to serve up one of these a week, on Sunday mornings, I think. If you want to lobby for a movie or nominee before I post an upcoming Oscar year, please do.
Anyway, these are alternate Oscars, not the real ones. I nominate, you choose. For the sake of fomenting revolution, my choices will be noted with a ★. (Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔.)
I encourage you to reveal your choices (and alternate nominees) in the comments section. Alternate Oscar guru Erik Beck of the Boston Becks is more than welcome to provide links to his thoughtful essays on Oscar history and his own Nighthawk Awards. In fact, if you have a blog about the Oscars, let us know about it!
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.
You know, the more I think about it, the more I realize that James Cagney's performance in The Public Enemy was some sort of line in the sand as far as acting in the sound era was concerned. Before it, actors were clearly influenced by the British stage actor model—reserved, refined and decidedly upper crust. Cagney was purely American—tough, urban, fast-talking, working class. He paved the way for Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, and even Gary Cooper in his slow-talking, Western, but just as purely American way.
PICTURE (Drama) winner:The Public Enemy (prod. Darryl F. Zanuck) nominees:The Big Trail (prod. Winfield R. Sheehan); The Dawn Patrol (prod. Robert North); Dracula (prod. Tod Browning and Carl Laemmle, Jr.); Morocco (prod. Hector Turnbull) Must-See Drama:The Big Trail; The Dawn Patrol; Dracula; A Free Soul; Little Caesar; The Miracle Woman; Morocco; Night Nurse
PICTURE (Comedy/Musical) winner: City Lights (prod. Charles Chaplin) nominees:Animal Crackers (prod. Adolph Zukor); Bimbo's Initiation (prod. Max Fleischer); The Front Page (prod. Lewis Milestone); Min And Bill (prod. George W. Hill) Must-See:Animal Crackers; City Lights; The Front Page
PICTURE (Foreign Language) winner:M (prod. Seymour Nebenzal) nominees:L'Âge d'Or (prod. Le Vicomte de Noailles); Le Million (prod. Frank Clifford); Prix de Beauté (prod. Romain Pinès); The Threepenny Opera (prod. Seymour Nebenzal) Must-See Foreign Language Pictures:L'Âge d'Or; M; Le Million
ACTRESS (Drama) winner:Marlene Dietrich (Morocco) nominees: Joan Crawford (Dance, Fools, Dance); Irene Dunne (Cimarron); Norma Shearer (A Free Soul); Barbara Stanwyck (Night Nurse)
ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical) winner:Jeanette MacDonald (Monte Carlo) nominees: Virginia Cherrill (City Lights); Ina Claire (The Royal Family Of Broadway); Marie Dressler (Min And Bill); Lya Lys (L'Âge d'Or)
DIRECTOR (Drama) winner:Fritz Lang (M) nominees: Tod Browning (Dracula); Howard Hawks (The Dawn Patrol and The Criminal Code); Raoul Walsh (The Big Trail); William A. Wellman (The Public Enemy)
DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner: Charles Chaplin (City Lights) nominees: Luis Buñuel (L'Âge d'Or); René Clair (Le Million); Lewis Milestone (The Front Page); G.W. Pabst (The Threepenny Opera)
SUPPORTING ACTOR winner:Peter Lorre (M) nominees: Dwight Frye (Dracula); Clark Gable (A Free Soul); Adolphe Menjou (The Front Page); Harry Myers (City Lights)
SPECIAL AWARDS René Clair (Le Million) (Special Achievement In The Use Of Sound); "Makin' Whoopee" (Whoopee!) (Best Song); Fritz Arno Wagner (M) (Cinematography)
The Academy did us amateur film historians a real disservice by using their wacky split-year eligibility scheme (August 1 through July 31 of the following year) for the first few years of the Oscars. Not only was it confusing and completely unnecessary, it also disguised just how much the quality of American movies suffered as Hollywood made the transition from the silent era to sound.
As you can see from yesterday's post, the tail-end of 1928 was chockful of some of the best silent movies in history. (Peter Bogdanovich says 1928 was the best year for movies ever. Who am I to disagree?) And this year's winner, All Quiet On The Western Front from 1930, is one of the best movies of the entire era.
But in between? Well ...
Let's put it this way. My list of the five best movies of 1929 would probably include Un Chien Andalou, Man With A Movie Camera, Pandora's Box, Diary of a Lost Girl and maybe The Iron Mask, the first four being foreign films and the fifth being Douglas Fairbanks's last silent movie. The best talkie of the year? Not sure. The Cocoanuts? Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail? The Skeleton Dance from Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks?
Fortunately, things got better.
PICTURE 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) Must-See Drama:All Quiet On The Western Front; Anna Christie; The Big House; Bulldog Drummond; City Girl; Our Modern Maidens; Raffles; The Virginian
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) Must-See Comedy/Musical:The Cocoanuts; Hallelujah!; The Love Parade
PICTURE (Foreign Language) winner:The Blue Angel (prod. Erich Pommer) nominees:The Blood Of A Poet (prod. Le Vicomte de Noailles); Diary Of A Lost Girl (prod. Georg Wilhelm Pabst); Earth (prod. VUFKU); Pandora's Box (prod. Heinz Landsmann); Under the Roofs Of Paris (prod. Films Sonores Tobis) Must-See Foreign Language Pictures:The Blood Of A Poet; The Blue Angel; Diary Of A Lost Girl; Earth; Menschen am Sonntag; Pandora's Box; Under The Roofs Of Paris
ACTOR (Drama) winner:Ronald Colman (Bulldog Drummond) nominees: George Arliss (Disraeli); Lew Ayres (All Quiet On The Western Front); Emil Jannings (The Blue Angel)
ACTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner:Maurice Chevalier (The Love Parade) nominees: The Marx Brothers (The Cocoanuts); Albert Préjean (Under The Roofs Of Paris)
ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical) winner:Nina Mae McKinney (Hallelujah!) nominees: Jeanette MacDonald (The Love Parade); Helen Morgan (Applause)
DIRECTOR (Drama) winner:Lewis Milestone (All Quiet On The Western Front) nominees: 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 winner:Wallace Beery (The Big House) nominees: Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (Our Modern Maidens); Lupino Lane (The Love Parade); Francis Lederer (Pandora's Box); Louis Wolheim (All Quiet On The Western Front)
SPECIAL AWARDS "Swanee Shuffle" (Hallelujah!) (Best Song); Arthur Edeson (All Quiet On The Western Front) (Cinematography); Rouben Mamoulian (Applause) and C. Roy Hunter and Lewis Milestone (All Quiet On The Western Front) (Special Achievement In The Use Of Sound)
Picture:City Lights (prod. Charles Chaplin) Actor: Charles Chaplin (City Lights) Actress: Marlene Dietrich (Morocco) Director: Fritz Lang (M) Supporting Actor: Peter Lorre (M) Supporting Actress: Joan Blondell (Sinners' Holiday, Other Men's Women and Night Nurse) Screenplay: René Clair (Le Million) Special Awards:M (prod. Seymour Hebenzal) (Best Picture-Drama); Edward G. Robinson (Little Caesar) (Best Actor-Drama); Marie Dressler (Min and Bill) (Best Actress-Comedy); René Clair (Le Million) (Special Achievement In The Use Of Sound); "Makin' Whoopee" (Whoopee!) (Best Song); Fritz Arno Wagner (M) (Cinematography) Must-See:L'Age d'Or; Animal Crackers; The Big Trail; City Lights; The Dawn Patrol; Dracula; Little Caesar; M; Le Million; Morocco; The Public Enemy In retrospect, the twelve months running from August 1, 1930, to July 31, 1931 (in the Academy's odd Oscar season of the day) turned out to be a year of beginnings and endings.
The best movie of the year, Charlie Chaplin's delicate, poignant comedy City Lights was the last silent movie Hollywood ever produced (like the website "Silent Era," I judge Modern Times to be a "mute sound picture"). For all practical purposes, the silent era had come to close by 1929, and only Chaplin's enormous popularity and the brilliance of City Lights could have induced an audience to accept the anomaly of a silent movie in 1931.
1931 marked the last gasp for a German film industry that had given the world F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, Marlene Dietrich, Peter Lorre, Expressionism, and such films as The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, Metropolis and M. Within two years, the Nazis would come to power and those artists who didn't flee or collaborate soon found themselves censored, arrested or murdered. Many German filmmakers, such as writer-director Billy Wilder, emigrated to Hollywood and had successful careers. But the German film industry as a whole would never again have the impact on cinema that it had in the 1920s and early years of the 1930s.
But 1930-31 was also a year for beginnings. James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson burst onto the scene, dazzling audiences in two of the essential gangster flicks of the early sound era, and continuing to dominate the Hollywood scene for years to come. American audiences also became acquainted with Marlene Dietrich for the first time. And in the space of twelve months, Clark Gable would rise from uncredited bit player to major star with tough but sexy roles in A Free Soul and Night Nurse.
I've written at length about all the titles on my list of the Must-See Movies of 1930-31. I leave to you the pleasure of hunting for them through the last three months of this blog's archives.
As great as 1930-31 was, the next twelve months would prove even better, especially for Hollywood which was at last getting the hang of the sound technology that had turned the old order upside down in 1927. On the horizon are Frankenstein, Scarface, Grand Hotel and many others. I'll have the list of nominees for you tomorrow in celebration of the New Year.
Oh, and later today: an end-of-year top ten list! Even the Monkey is not immune to the demands of traditional movie criticism.
Marlene Dietrich began her career as a cabaret singer in Berlin and made several silent movies in Germany before rocketing to international stardom in Josef von Sternberg's noirish masterpiece, The Blue Angel. Dietrich's portrayal as the amoral and treacherous Lola Lola set the pattern for femme fatales for decades to come and had American audiences panting to see what all the fuss was about.
Morocco was the second of seven movies (eight if you count the German and English versions of The Blue Angel separately) with director Josef von Sternberg, but the first released in America—Paramount Pictures held back The Blue Angel for a year until it could launch Dietrich's Hollywood career with a more sympathetic role. Morocco proved to be a perfect vehicle for her, fully establishing the Dietrich persona—exotic, jaded, daringly androgynous (for example, she wears a tuxedo and kisses a woman; to quote Robert Osborne, "very European!")—lacking only the humor and self-parody she would later display in films such as Destry Rides Again and Foreign Affair.
Adapted by veteran screenwriter Jules Furthman from the stageplay Amy Jolly, Morocco is the story of a romantic triangle between a cabaret singer, her wealthy patron and a Foreign Legion soldier, who between them have experienced every kind of love but true love, and when at last it happens for each of them, they hardly know what to do with it.
Dietrich is the cabaret singer Amy Jolly (pronounced "Jolie," ala Angelina Jolie), down on her luck and traveling to Morocco for a job. On the boat she meets a wealthy playboy (the always dapper Adolphe Menjou) who as much out of habit as lust dangles jewelry in front of her—as the captain of the boat implies, the stop after Morocco is prostitution and if you're going to go, you might as well go in style—but Dietrich's Amy Jolly is too proud to jump at such baubles. Nevertheless, she turns to Menjou at a critical moment of need.
And all would be well but for the young, handsome soldier (Gary Cooper) sitting in the cheap seats at Dietrich's first performance. Predictably, the two are drawn to each other, at first simply because they are accomplished bed-hoppers who know they will look beautiful in each other's arms, but soon after because they discover in each other a longing for a past they can never reclaim.
"There's a foreign legion of women, too," confesses Amy Jolly, "but we have no uniform, no flag—and no medals." For these two, the single greatest act of passion they can perform is to not perform at all and to the surprise of all involved, genuine intimacy and tenderness develops, not just between the singer and the soldier, as you might expect, but between the singer and her wealthy patron as well.
The result is the warmest of the collaborations between Sternberg and Dietrich, maybe the only film they made together that suggests that the union of a man and a woman can produce something other than misery and obsessive, fetishistic self-destruction.
Morocco was a smash hit, earned four Oscar nominations (for actress, director, cinematography and art direction) and landed Dietrich the most lucrative contract in Hollywood. I should take time to mention the work of cinematographer Lee Garmes whose lighting of Dietrich was a key to the film's success. He positioned the key light above and slightly forward of her which (according to TV Guide's online review) "hollowed her cheeks, shadowed her heavy eyelids, and masked the dimensions of her wide nose." Dietrich was so pleased with the effect, she insisted on it for the rest of her career.
But despite the film's success, the set had not been a happy one. Sternberg focused his attention solely on making Dietrich look good to the annoyance of Gary Cooper, already a big star. Sternberg further underscored where his interests lay by speaking only German whenever Cooper was around.
The mutual animosity between director and star had no impact on Cooper's relationship with Dietrich though—shortly after filming commenced, the two began an affair that would continue for years. Despite the fact that she was living with Sternberg at the time, there was no slinking around for Dietrich. Reportedly, she and Cooper conducted their trysts in Sternberg's Hollywood home while Sternberg worked in the garden outside and silently seethed.
I share this anecdote, by the way, not because I am a fan of celebrity gossip but by way of explaining how the partnership of Sternberg and Dietrich, which began with such critical and commercial success, could wind up being a threat to both their careers. More and more, their collaboration became an exercise in voyeuristic excess, with Sternberg trying to control Dietrich with his camera in a way he couldn't control her off screen. And while these films have their champions (see, e.g., Kim Morgan on Blonde Venus or Roger Ebert on The Scarlet Empress), the public gradually turned away until they were turning away in droves.
Dietrich survived the fall by smirking her way through the worst of it—emerging for example from a gorilla costume in Blonde Venus with a half smile that seemed to say I'm so cool even this looks good on me—but Sternberg never recovered, earning only eight screen credits after his last picture with Dietrich (1935's The Devil Is A Woman) and even those credits are misleading, given that he was fired from at least two of those projects, Macao and the execrable Jet Pilot.
In 1939, after years of fading box office appeal, Dietrich reluctantly agreed to star in a comedy/Western, Destry Rides Again. The result was box office gold. Co-starring Jimmy Stewart as a pacifist sheriff armed only with folksy wit, saloon singer Dietrich parodied her own image so successfully she was able to reinvent herself as a comic actress and endear herself to audiences once again. (Madeline Kahn memorably spoofed the performance in Mel Brooks's comedy Blazing Saddles.)
After Destry, Dietrich's best performances were in a pair of Billy Wilder efforts, Foreign Affair, a romantic comedy set in postwar Berlin, and Witness for the Prosecution, a courtroom drama co-starring Charles Laughton, Tyrone Power and Elsa Lanchester. Many will also remember her cameo in Orson Welles's noir thriller, Touch of Evil.
Despite this impressive body of work, Dietrich was nominated for just one Academy Award, for the picture I've just written about, Morocco, losing to Marie Dressler. In 1999, the American Film Institute named her the ninth greatest actress of all time.
After a supporting role in 1961's Judgment at Nuremberg, Dietrich retired from acting, making only one cameo appearance after that, in David Bowie's 1978 misfire, Just A Gigolo. She spent the final decade of her life living in seclusion in her Paris apartment and died in 1992.
Postscript: Be sure to look for a young Cary Grant in the clip from Blonde Venus. This was just his sixth movie and he isn't given much to do—as the New York Times put it in its 1932 review, "Cary Grant is worthy of a much better role." Like Gary Cooper, Grant was the object of Josef von Sternberg's jealousy; unlike Cooper, Grant didn't yet have the clout to do much about it.
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?
You know, the more I think about it, the more I realize that James Cagney's performance in The Public Enemy was some sort of line in the sand as far as acting in the sound era was concerned. Before it, actors were clearly influenced by the British stage actor model—reserved, refined and decidedly upper crust. Cagney was purely American—tough, urban, fast-talking, working class. He paved the way for Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, and even Gary Cooper in his slow-talking, Western, but just as purely American way.
The Academy did us amateur film historians a real disservice by using their wacky split-year eligibility scheme (August 1 through July 31 of the following year) for the first few years of the Oscars. Not only was it confusing and completely unnecessary, it also disguised just how much the quality of American movies suffered as Hollywood made the transition from the silent era to sound.
Picture: City Lights (prod. Charles Chaplin)
1931 marked the last gasp for a German film industry that had given the world F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, Marlene Dietrich, Peter Lorre, Expressionism, and such films as The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, Metropolis and M. Within two years, the Nazis would come to power and those artists who didn't flee or collaborate soon found themselves censored, arrested or murdered. Many German filmmakers, such as writer-director Billy Wilder, emigrated to Hollywood and had successful careers. But the German film industry as a whole would never again have the impact on cinema that it had in the 1920s and early years of the 1930s.
I've written at length about all the titles on my list of the Must-See Movies of 1930-31. I leave to you the pleasure of hunting for them through the last three months of this blog's archives.
Marlene Dietrich began her career as a cabaret singer in Berlin and made several silent movies in Germany before rocketing to international stardom in Josef von Sternberg's noirish masterpiece, The Blue Angel. Dietrich's portrayal as the amoral and treacherous Lola Lola set the pattern for femme fatales for decades to come and had American audiences panting to see what all the fuss was about.
And all would be well but for the young, handsome soldier (Gary Cooper) sitting in the cheap seats at Dietrich's first performance. Predictably, the two are drawn to each other, at first simply because they are accomplished bed-hoppers who know they will look beautiful in each other's arms, but soon after because they discover in each other a longing for a past they can never reclaim.
The result is the warmest of the collaborations between Sternberg and Dietrich, maybe the only film they made together that suggests that the union of a man and a woman can produce something other than misery and obsessive, fetishistic self-destruction.
But despite the film's success, the set had not been a happy one. Sternberg focused his attention solely on making Dietrich look good to the annoyance of Gary Cooper, already a big star. Sternberg further underscored where his interests lay by speaking only German whenever Cooper was around.
Dietrich survived the fall by smirking her way through the worst of it—emerging for example from a gorilla costume in Blonde Venus with a half smile that seemed to say I'm so cool even this looks good on me—but Sternberg never recovered, earning only eight screen credits after his last picture with Dietrich (1935's The Devil Is A Woman) and even those credits are misleading, given that he was fired from at least two of those projects, Macao and the execrable Jet Pilot.
After Destry, Dietrich's best performances were in a pair of Billy Wilder efforts, Foreign Affair, a romantic comedy set in postwar Berlin, and Witness for the Prosecution, a courtroom drama co-starring Charles Laughton, Tyrone Power and Elsa Lanchester. Many will also remember her cameo in Orson Welles's noir thriller, Touch of Evil.
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