Mary Pickford's Stella Maris (1918)

In honor of Mary Pickford's 120th birthday today, here is my long-delayed review of her masterpiece, Stella Maris.

After the critical and commercial triumphs of 1917 made her the most popular—and most powerful—actress in the world (read the story here), Mary Pickford declined to rest on her laurels. Instead, she opted for an even more ambitious project, a dual role that would push the boundaries of both special effects technology and her talent as an actress. The resulting film, Stella Maris, the story of an orphan girl struggling to find love and acceptance in a cruel and indifferent world, was a resounding success with both audiences and critics, and ensured Pickford's place as the most popular actress of the silent era.

Based on a novel by William J. Locke, with a screenplay from the legendary Frances Marion, Stella Maris is a story very much in the tradition of Charles Dickens—and if you regard Dickens as highly as I do, you know that's not a bad thing—filled with melodrama, improbable coincidences, shameless moralizing, biting social commentary, and grim depictions of alcoholism, child abuse and grinding poverty.

Unlike most of Dickens, though, there's no happy ending, at least not for the character we care most about, and while some might call Stella Maris a hokey Victorian melodrama, it's a hokey Victorian melodrama of the first water, a riveting story from beginning to end, and featuring the best performance of Mary Pickford's career.

The film opens on the first of Pickford's two roles, the eponymous Stella Maris. Orphaned in childhood and paralyzed by a mysterious ailment, the beautiful, cheerful Stella lives in a carefully-constructed fantasy world created by a wealthy aunt and uncle, "unaware of sorrow, poverty or death." Her aunt and uncle, a houseful of servants, a dog (played by "Teddy" courtesy of the Mack Sennett studios) and most importantly, a distant cousin, John Risca (Conway Tearle), attend to Stella's every need while cautiously sheltering her from life's harsh realities.

Although Stella was a typical Pickford role—the plucky, perky girl with the curls that America had fallen in love with—the movie is really about Pickford's second character, Unity Blake, an "ugly duckling" with no swan in her future.

In stark contrast to Stella's life of sheltered luxury, Unity has grown up in a grim orphanage, unwanted and unloved, and inured to life's disappointments. She knows that, the old cliche notwithstanding, God frequently doles out more trouble than we can handle, and seemingly for no other reason than a perverse indifference to what human beings call fairness. Through the course of the story, Unity learns many of life's harshest lessons: pretty people flock together; character doesn't trump position, power or money; and regardless of how well we play the hand we're dealt, the game ends the same for everybody—just sooner for some than for others.

From its earliest scenes, the film symbolically establishes Unity as a Christ-figure—note how she is photographed through a sanctuary rood screen, her praying figure framed by a cutout of the cross—and she is the essence of innocence and purity made to suffer for our sins. But if she were only an allegory, Unity would quickly become an insufferable bore. Instead, she's a heartbreakingly three-dimensional girl, hard-working but mischievous, an ugly duckling with a lovely soul, as hopeful as her situation is hopeless.

The lives of Unity and Stella intersect through the man they both come to love, John Risca, who is not only Stella's cousin but who also adopts Unity as a housemaid-servant for his abusive, alcoholic wife. Played with exquisite cruelty by Marcia Manon, Unity's new stepmother goes out of her way to snuff out what light remains in the orphan girl's eyes. Only John's kindness keeps her going.

One of Unity's most poignant scenes is when caressing John Risca's hat and coat, she imagines a romance that will never be, a scene that the staff of the Mary Pickford Institute for Film Education compared to the famous "jacket scene" in the Oscar-winning The Artist. "Mary Pickford's moment is even more affecting, because we know that unlike Peppy Miller, little Unity's dream of romance is doomed from the start, and we fear she will never get her happy ending."

That the result is riveting and moving rather than dreary and overwrought is a testament to Pickford's performance.

To create the character of Unity, Pickford's teeth were darkened, her trademark curls slicked down and pulled into a tight bun, her clothes suitably drab and tattered. But it was the actress's body language and facial expressions that made the transformation from "Little Mary" to Unity so effective. Her back curved from malnourishment, Pickford's Unity carries herself like a dog who's been beaten too much. Her eyes are downcast and look at the world sidewise, and she flinches from very human contact, revealing the years of verbal and physical abuse, and the constant disappointment she has endured.

The transformation is complete yet subtle, and utterly convincing.

"To test the Unity make-up," wrote Felicia Feaster for Turner Classic Movies, "Pickford wandered the studio under the pretense of finding work as a cleaning lady. She was delighted when she discovered that no one recognized her."

To allow Mary Pickford to appear on screen as Stella and Unity simultaneously, director Marshall Neilan and cinematographer Walter Stradling used a "split-screen" technique, exposing one side of the film then the other, to allow the same actor to play two roles in the same scene, a common enough technique now, but here one of the earliest examples if its use in a feature film. (Georges Méliès used both double exposure and matte shots to interact with himself in such early short films as Un homme de tête (1898), Le portrait mystérieux (1899) and L'homme orchestre (1900), while Lois Weber used split-screen in 1913's Suspense to show two people having a phone conversation at the same time.)

For a tale with its feet planted so firmly in the 19th century, it's ironic that Stella Maris should rely so heavily on the most cutting-edge technology that the 20th century then had to offer.

Upon its release in January 1918, the film was an immediate hit with both critics and audiences. Variety called the performance "a revelation," the Los Angeles Times deemed it "brilliant, powerful and poignant" and studio chief Adolph Zukor, who was initially horrified when he visited the set, later called Stella Maris "the most remarkable thing which Mary Pickford has ever done for the screen."

More recently, Dean Thompson at Silents Are Golden wrote, "It is the valiant, hesitant, tender, scrappy figure of Unity Blake, played with truth and immediacy by the most famous and beautiful film star of her day, that stays with us, haunting us still. Mary Pickford, the actress occasionally hidden by the towering figure of 'America's Sweetheart,' could have no finer testimonial to her talent."

Stella Maris was the top grossing movie of 1918.

For director, Marshall Neilan, Stella Maris represented something of a peak. Although he directed three more Pickford films and would continue to direct into the sound era, Neilan suffered from acute alcoholism that often left him unable to work. In fact, on at least one of their collaborations, Pickford is alleged to have directed the entire film (uncredited) while the chronically intoxicated Neilan watched in amusement. In 1933, she gave him one last chance to direct, Secrets which turned out to be her final film, but quickly replaced him with Frank Borzage when Neilan couldn't function on set. He died in 1958.

Pickford, meanwhile, followed up Stella Maris with an unbroken string of hits—Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley, M'Liss, Daddy-Long-Legs, Pollyanna, Suds, a remake of Tess of the Storm Country, Sparrows (the last of her little girl roles and one of her best), and My Best Girl (which I wrote about here), before winning the Oscar as best actress for 1929's Coquette.

She retired in 1933, another silent victim of the sound era's changing tastes.

As I recently wrote, Mary Pickford "was, pound-for-pound, the most powerful woman in Hollywood history, simultaneously an international superstar, a studio owner, a producer, a de facto director, an Oscar winner, and the queen of the Hollywood social scene." Stella Maris didn't feature Pickford most typical performance, but it was her greatest.

Stella Maris is my pick for the best movie of 1918.

Best Picture Of 1932-33 (Drama): King Kong (prod. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack)

And the Prophet said, "And lo, the beast looked upon the face of beauty. And it stayed its hand from killing. And from that day, it was as one dead."—An Old Arabian Proverb

Is there anyone here who doesn't know at least the gist of King Kong's plot—a giant ape falls in love with a beautiful blonde and winds up on top of the Empire State Building as a squadron of airplanes plays pin the tail on the forty-foot monkey. It's one of Hollywood's most enduring stories, inspiring two big-budget remakes, several sequels and countless imitations. But in all its various iterations, none of have had the lasting impact of the 1933 original. It's fun, it's stupid, it's a landmark, it's iconic—and it's my choice as the best drama of 1932-33.

Depending on which of producer-director Merian C. Cooper's tall tales you believe, the plot of King Kong was either the product of a nightmare in which a giant gibbon attacked New York City or it came to him full-blown after he watched an airplane fly past the city's skyscrapers. Whichever its origins, the idea certainly appealed to his sensibilities. Raised on tales of adventure and exotic locales, Cooper had already filmed documentaries in Persia and Siam, as well as traveling to Africa for an adaptation of The Four Feathers, and had pondered filming a drama inspired by a family of baboons he had observed while filming the latter movie, going so far as to write an 85,000 word monograph on the subject.

Too, Cooper had been a pilot in the U.S. Air Service in World War I, later flew seventy combat missions for Poland during that country's intervention against the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War, and in 1927, became a founding member of Pan American Airways. Surely the thought of flyers shooting up downtown Manhattan had occurred to him at least once.

In any event, Cooper pitched the story to Jesse Lasky at Paramount at the end of 1930. Lasky thought Cooper was nuts and that any resulting picture would likely bankrupt the studio, but David O. Selznick, who had just taken a job at RKO-Radio Pictures, decided the maverick producer was just what his struggling studio needed to goose its lackluster box office. Cooper didn't disappoint him. After producing a successful adaptation of Richard Connell's short story The Most Dangerous Game (with direction by Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel), Cooper turned his attention to his giant gorilla movie in earnest. He commissioned special effects wizard Willis O'Brien to shoot two test scenes of the giant ape, and best-selling mystery writer Edgar Wallace to draft a screenplay.

A veteran of the 1925 silent version of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, O'Brien was the foremost expert in stop-action animation (the process of creating the illusion that an object is in motion by moving it incrementally between individually-photographed frames of film). He and Cooper conceived two test sequences, one of the ape attacking a crew of sailors as they cross a deep gorge, the second of the ape battling a Tyrannosaurus rex as a woman looks on in terror.

To people the test footage, Cooper borrowed two cast members from The Most Dangerous Game, Robert Armstrong in the role of Carl Denham, and as the heroine, Fay Wray, promising the latter a chance to work with "the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood." (She thought he meant Clark Gable.) When Game's third star, Joel McCrea, balked at performing the necessary stunts, Cooper substituted bit player Bruce Cabot. Fleshed out with footage of a Triceratops killing a man that O'Brien had prepared for an aborted film project called Creation, Cooper presented the test to RKO's board which immediately approved the project.

With frequent collaborator Ernest B. Schoedsack directing the live-action sequences and Cooper supervising the special effects work, filming was set to begin in August 1932.

Now all Cooper needed was a story.

Edgar Wallace wrote the first draft of the screenplay in just five days at the beginning of 1932, but died of pneumonia a month later. To replace Wallace, Cooper brought in James Ashmore Creelman who had written the screenplay for The Most Dangerous Game. Creelman made the ape more fierce and played up the beauty and the beast aspect of the story, adding the famous final line, "It was Beauty killed the Beast." Schoedsack's wife, writer Ruth Rose, then streamlined Creelman's script, eliminating, for example, an explanation of how the captured gorilla is ferried to New York. She also added autobiographical elements of her experiences with Cooper and her husband when the pair worked on those documentaries in Persia and Siam.

Among those autobiographical elements Rose added was the fictional movie director, Carl Denham, who heads the expedition to find Kong and film the encounter. Characterized as "crazy" and with a reputation for "recklessness," Carl Denham is not a man cursed by self-awareness and only his own half-crazed dreams can make his eyes light up. "It's money and adventure and fame!" he's after, the cost to those around him be damned.

"If he wants a picture of a lion," one character says, "he just goes up to him and tells him to look pleasant."

Armed with a cargo hold full of guns, explosives and gas bombs, Denham and a crew of "tough mugs" have everything needed to shoot a movie except an actress, but no matter how much he's willing to pay, no reputable agent will work with Denham and he winds up hiring a homeless waif right off the streets of New York—Ann Darrow, played by Fay Wray, of course. Going on nothing but a tale told by a Norwegian sailor in a Singapore bar, they set sail for an island "not on any chart" in search of a mythical beast, with Ann along in the role of Beauty—or perhaps bait.

"[T]his low-rent monster movie," Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert wrote for his Great Movies series, "and not the psychological puzzle of [Citizen] Kane, pointed the way toward the current era of special effects, science fiction, cataclysmic destruction, and nonstop shocks. King Kong is the father of Jurassic Park, the Alien movies and countless other stories in which heroes are terrified by skillful special effects."

King Kong is one of the most aggressive examples of a movie that bypasses your rational mind to work directly on the emotional centers of your limbic system, and much of the plot is a hodgepodge of cliches, culled from a variety of sources—Beauty and the Beast, King Solomon's Mines, The Lost World, The Perils of Pauline, and even the films of silent era director D.W. Griffith. (Indeed, in some ways, King Kong plays like a parody of the by-then passe Griffith, whose movies, when stripped of their art and their politics, can be seen as celluloid records of Griffith's neurotic dread that someone somewhere was about to relieve preternaturally pure Lillian Gish of her virginity, with Kong standing in for the freed slave, the Chinese shopkeeper, the Southern rogue and the French aristocrat of The Birth of a Nation, Broken Blossoms, Way Down East and Orphans of the Storm, respectively. Cooper even drove the joke home by having Denham put Ann through a series of cheesy silent-era poses while filming her with an old hand-cranked movie camera of the sort directors hadn't used since the advent of sound.)

But smarter stories have been told and instantly forgotten and a smart, sensible story isn't the point of King Kong anyway—fun-stupid terror is, and after a long tension-filled build-up, Kong finally makes his first appearance, thrashing through the jungle toward a screaming Fay Wray whom island natives have staked out as a sacrifice to their terrible gorilla god.

KING KONG 1933 -

MICHAEL STEVER | Myspace Video

The wait is well worth it—Kong's entrance is one of the greatest in film history.

To create the special effects at the center of King Kong, O'Brien designed a half-dozen eighteen-inch models of the gorilla, using jointed armatures of aluminum for the skeleton, covering it in cotton and rubber for the muscles, latex for the skin, and rabbit fur for Kong's hair. (Sculptor Marcel Delgado, working from O'Brien's designs, objected to using rabbit fur, fearing it would retain the impression of his fingertips as he moved the model between shots—it did—but RKO executives were thrilled with the result. "Look!" one exclaimed watching the test footage, "Kong is angry—his fur is bristling!")

For close-ups of Kong eating islanders and New Yorkers alike, E.B. Gibson built a full-size bust of Kong's head from wood and cloth with an air compressor to move the metal hinges of his jaws. Similarly, a hand mounted on a crane was built of steel, rubber and bearskin. The various models of Kong scaled out to eighteen, twenty-four, forty and seventy feet, depending on the scene, a fact which drove the meticulous O'Brien to distraction but which satisfied Cooper's dramatic instincts, and moviegoers knew only that Kong was as big as he needed to be at any given moment to scare them out of their wits.

In post-production, Murray Spivak, the head of RKO's sound department, created the sound for all the movie's special effects sequences, which had necessarily been recorded silently. For Kong and prehistoric creatures, Spivak recorded animals at the Selig Zoo, slowing the recordings to deepen their growls and stitching recordings together to make them longer. For Kong's grunting, Spivak recorded his own voice through a megaphone. Kong's chest-beating was the sound of Spivak hitting his assistant Walter Elliott with a drumstick while holding the microphone against Elliott's back. Spivak also provided all of the screams in the movie, with the notable exception of Fay Wray's.

Another innovation, one we very much take for granted these days, was Max Steiner's heart-pumping score which underlined the action and ratcheted up the tension. As hard as it may be to believe now, at the time producers such as Irving Thalberg were firmly opposed to the use of a musical score in a film. He and others believed that music playing in a film from a source not immediately obvious—from a radio, in a nightclub—would only confuse the audience. A quaint notion now, but it took films such as King Kong to prove Thalberg and his ilk wrong. (Check out the blog A Shroud of Thoughts for an interesting article about Steiner's score.)

The real technical achievements, though, involved the processes necessary to integrate the models into the live-action sequences so that instead of dwarfing an eighteen inch model, the actors were battling a full-size ape. Sydney Saunders of the RKO paint department developed a new process for rear-screen projection (used for the first time in Kong's fight with the Tyrannosaurus). Linwood Dunn engineered a new optical printer that made composite and "traveling matte" shots (for example, Kong pushing open the gate at the wall of the native village) practical and economical. And O'Brien himself patented a projector that allowed full-scale live-action footage to be mixed with the miniature on a frame-by-frame basis. Each of these breakthroughs in optical effects technology quickly became the industry standard for decades to come, and while the film's effects are dated by today's lights, personally I find them more satisfying than many of the computer-generated images that have dominated the film industry for the last decade or so. (For a fuller discussion of Kong's groundbreaking special effects, check out Ray Morton's book King Kong: The History of a Movie Icon From Fay Wray to Peter Jackson.)

If I were handing out a complete set of alternate Oscars, I'd give King Kong awards for sound, score, special effects, visual effects, art direction/set decoration (what, at the time, was called interior decoration) and film editing, which along with the award for best drama, comes to seven, making it the biggest winner of the year.

Of course, none of these innovations would have meant much if King Kong hadn't fulfilled its basic promise of scaring the pants off its audience, and it most certainly accomplished that, with stories of audience members fainting in the aisles during the film's screening. Whether you congratulate Cooper, Schoedsack, O'Brien, et al. for their achievement or blame for the thousand pale imitations that followed is up to you.

Which brings us to the acting.

I can't say I disagree with Stephen Hunter's assessment, who for Washington Post wrote that "Bruce Cabot [who played the nominal hero, first mate Jack Driscoll] gave what was probably the worst performance in a great movie on record—he seemed more wooden than a tobacco store Indian and not nearly as colorful." (Indeed, Cabot played "Sam the Indian" in John Wayne's 1971 western, Big Jake.) And Robert Armstrong as Carl Denham isn't much better, although his eyes do shine with the evangelical fervor of a true believer.

But I do take issue with James Berardinelli's assertion that the overall acting is "barely adequate." As I've said before, Fay Wray made a vital contribution to the horror genre, teaching a generation of damsels in distress how to scream—and scream she did. Think about it: just six years before King Kong's premiere, it hadn't even been possible to hear an actress scream in a movie. After Fay Wray, we knew it was the only proper way to enjoy a horror movie. And while she couldn't bring to the table the nuance a talent like Naomi Watts brought to the 2005 remake, ultimately Wray brought something better—fear. And fear, after all, is what we go to a horror movie to experience.

Still, the most likeable and sympathetic character in the entire film, and the only one who feels completely original, is a stop-action model of a forty-foot gorilla.

And that, ultimately, is the genius of King Kong. I suspect that audiences of the time, mired as they were in the worst economic Depression in American history—25% unemployment, a third of the nation "ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed," the stock market worth only ten percent of its previous value—saw in Kong a reflection of their own plight, first as a representation of those outside forces we can't understand—the tornado, the flood, the economic turmoil that punishes the just and unjust alike—but then, as Kong is uprooted from the only home he's ever known and dragged in chains halfway around the world for the jaded amusement of Upper East Side popinjays, as the farmer who has lost his land, the man who has lost his job, the descendant of a slave oppressed by Jim Crow, the recent immigrant adrift in a hostile culture he doesn't comprehend.

"How did you ever get into this fix?" Denham asks.

Speaking for people the world over, Ann replies, "Bad luck, I guess."

In deeply anxious times, King Kong allowed audiences to express their anxieties without confronting them directly, and afforded them, in addition fun-stupid escapism of the first order, a satisfying emotional catharsis.

King Kong opened in New York City on March 2, 1933, to rave reviews and enthusiastic crowds, with lines stretching around the block to see the sold-out show at the 6,500 seat Radio City Music Hall. The film's Los Angeles premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theater featured a seventeen-act stage show as well as the forty-foot "big head" bust of Kong which was placed in front of the theater. Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times called Kong "fantastic" and "compelling," Edwin Schallert of the Los Angeles Times dubbed it "sensational," and Relman Morin, writing for the Los Angeles Record wrote that "King Kong is the supreme product of the coordination of human imagination and human skill."

The film was a solid winner at the box office, too, grossing $2 million in its initial run, enough for ninth on the year's list of top movies. More importantly to RKO executives, the film helped the studio turn its first profit in five years, rescuing RKO from receivership.

After the success of King Kong, Merian Cooper worked primarily as a film producer, first as the vice president of production at Pioneer Pictures, then as the vice president of Selznick International Pictures. During the Second World War, Cooper joined the United States Army Air Force and was stationed in China, eventually rising to the rank of brigadier general. After the war, he formed Argosy Productions with John Ford and produced some of that legendary director's most beloved films, including The Quiet Man, The Searchers and the cavalry trilogy.

Ernest B. Schoedsack continued to direct, working on sixteen movies in all, including the Oscar-winning King Kong knock-off Mighty Joe Young. He and his wife, screenwriter Ruth Rose, remained married for fifty-two years, until her death on Schoedsack's eighty-fifth birthday. He died a year later, in 1979.

Willis O'Brien continued to work as a special effects expert and he was the "Technical Creator" on the 1949 film Mighty Joe Young which won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects. Although no individuals were officially named on that award—it went to "RKO Productions"—O'Brien did receive a statue from the Academy.

Max Steiner went on to compose some of the most famous film scores in history, including those for Gone With The Wind and Casablanca. His scores were nominated for Academy Awards twenty-four times, winning three.

Of the lead actors, Fay Wray remained the most visible, appearing in ninety-nine movies, though never again in a movie of King Kong's renown. "At the premiere," she said later, "I wasn't too impressed. I thought there was too much screaming. I didn't realize then that King Kong and I were going to be together for the rest of our lives, and longer." She was to have made a cameo in the 2005 remake directed by Peter Jackson, cast to speak the famous final line, but passed away before the scene was filmed.

Both Robert Armstrong and Bruce Cabot also worked steadily, but aren't much remembered today outside of the context of King Kong. Indeed, the actor connected with the movie who fared best was Joel McCrea, who turned down the part of Jack Driscoll. He went on to star in such classics as Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The More The Merrier and Ride The High Country.

In 1991 the Library of Congress selected King Kong for preservation in the National Film Registry. The American Film Institute has twice listed Kong as one of the fifty best films of all time (in 1975 and again in 1998) and in 2008, ranked it as the fourth best fantasy film ever made.

Trivia: The "Great Wall" set from King Kong appeared in several other movies over the next five years then was redressed as Atlanta and burned to the ground for the filming of Gone With The Wind.

More Trivia: Look for director-producer Merian Cooper as the pilot of the plane that finally kills Kong and Ernest Schoedsack as the gunner.

Best Picture Of 1932-33 (Comedy/Musical): Duck Soup (prod. Herman J. Mankiewicz)

[To read an eight-part biography of the Marx Brothers, click here. To read about Margaret Dumont, my choice for best supporting actress of 1932-33, click here. And to read about the drafting of Duck Soup's screenplay, click here.]

The award year running from September 1, 1932 through the end of 1933 was an unusually rich one for both comedies and musicals with more than a dozen must-see movies, including a pair from Ernst Lubitsch, three by Busby Berkeley, comedies starring Mae West, Charles Laughton, Jean Harlow, Marie Dressler, Laurel and Hardy, and even a groundbreaking cartoon short from Walt Disney. But the best work of the year came from the Marx Brothers, who contributed two indispensable classics, Horse Feathers and my choice for the best comedy of the year—or indeed, any year—Duck Soup.


In case you don't know, the Marx Brothers—Julius, Leonard, Adolph and Herbert, better known to the world as Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo—were the premiere comedy team of an era that also boasted such classic acts as Laurel and Hardy, and the Three Stooges. Duck Soup was their fifth film and despite being delayed for nine months by a contract dispute with Paramount, proved to be the best of their career, featuring some of the funniest and most famous scenes in the Marx Brothers canon.

Duck Soup is the story of a nation in crisis: Freedonia's economy is in shambles, with a prohibitive increase in taxes ("I've got an uncle in Taxes—Dollars, Taxes!") in the offing if the rich widow Mrs. Teasdale (Margaret Dumont) won't come through with another $20 million. And if that's not enough, Freedonia's bellicose neighbor, Sylvania, is massing troops on the border, threatening not only death and destruction, but also to introduce a plot into the picture's foreground, a development which in previous Marx Brothers movies tended to bring the comedy to a grinding halt.

With a month's rent already paid on the battlefield, war seems inevitable and the country teeters on the brink of anarchy. Desperate for a savior, Freedonia turns to that fearless man of the people, Rufus T. Firefly.

"If you think this country's bad off now," he promises, "just wait 'til I get through with it!"

Playing Firefly is Groucho Marx, he of the lacerating wit, the greasepaint moustache and the most impeccable timing in the history of comedy. While the chief obstacle to achieving peace in our time is ostensibly Sylvania's conniving ambassador Trentino (Louis Calhern), in fact, it's Firefly himself—his temper, his paranoia, his inability to make heads or tails of things a four year old child would understand.

"I'll be only too happy to meet Am- bassador Trentino, and offer him, on behalf of my country, the right hand of good fellowship. And I feel sure that he will accept this gesture in the spirit in which it is offered. But suppose he doesn't. A fine thing that'll be! I hold out my hand and he refuses to accept it! ... Why the cheap, four-flushing swine—so you refuse to shake hands with me!"

And thus just like that, Freedonia finds itself at war.

The humorist Roy Blount, Jr., in his recent book Hail, Hail, Euphoria!, called Duck Soup "the greatest war movie ever made," and while I wouldn't say Harpo carrying a sandwich board reading "Join the Army and See the Navy" around a battlefield is as harrowing as the Omaha Beach scene in Saving Private Ryan, I will agree that it's the best treatment ever of the causes of war. As a student of history, majoring in the subject in college and maintaining a lifelong interest in the to-ings and fro-ings of elected officials, I've concluded that nobody has ever launched a war thinking it was a bad idea, no matter how uninformed, misinformed or half-formed his reasons may have been for thinking so. (Yes, yes, I'm thinking of the War of Jenkins' Ear. Sue me.)

Don't get me wrong. Occasionally the world finds itself in a death match with, say, fascism, and it would be futile, not to mention suicidal, to sit on the sidelines, but more often than not, from the Crusades to Iraq's invasion of Iran and a hundred other major conflicts in between, the thinking leading to war is typically characterized by ego, paranoia, stupidity and shortsightedness, with very little afterwards to show for it but a pile of corpses, and when the smoke clears, everybody scratches their heads and promises to do better—until the next time, that is, when they go off and do it again.

And thus I believe Rufus T. Firefly when he says, "There's no turning back now! This means war!" Or I believe he believes it anyway. But a classic movie, like a well-written history, strips away the comforting lies and the self-delusion and leaves only the truth—in this case, that Rufus T. Firefly might not have been, shall we say, the best choice to lead a country in crisis. (Filmed shortly after the Nazis seized power in Germany, Harpo said later he and his Jewish brothers listened to Hitler's speeches on the radio between scenes and were quite consciously targeting both him and his fascist ally Mussolini with their humor. Indeed, Mussolini banned the film in Italy as a personal attack.)

Egging Firely on are Chicolini and Pinky (Chico and Harpo), who serve not only as Secretary of War and chauffeur, respectively, but also as the most incompetent double agents in history, infiltrating Freedonia's government on behalf of Trentino only to get sidetracked by scissors, doorbells and a cantankerous lemonade vendor.

"Well, you remember you gave us a picture of this man and said follow him? Well, we get on the job right away and in one hour—even-a less than one hour—"

"Yes?"

"—we lose-a da picsh. That's-a pretty quick work, heh?"

Providing brilliant support are Margaret Dumont and Edgar Kennedy. Kennedy was a veteran of the Hal Roach Studios, and a master of what is known as slow-burn comedy, with laughs derived from a gradually increasing show of anger. Dumont, simply put, was the most talented straight-(wo)man in the history of movie comedies.

In consciously setting out to make the best Marx Brothers movie ever, director Leo McCarey ruthlessly streamlined the story, eliminating every element not directly related to producing laughs. In addition to cutting the usual harp and piano solos, he also cut a scripted romance between Zeppo and Raquel Torres (who played dancer Vera Marcal) as well as Zeppo's number "Keep On Doin' What You're Doin'" (recycled a year later for the Wheeler and Woolsey comedy, Hips Hips Hooray), effectively reducing the youngest Marx Brother to a bit player in his own movie.

McCarey also beefed up the supporting cast, calling in veteran actors Calhern and Kennedy for key parts, writing two classic sequences involving Harpo, Chico and a lemonade stand for the latter (it was Groucho himself who talked Margaret Dumont into playing Mrs. Teasdale). As a result, the Brothers finally found themselves working with a cast of expert straightmen whose set-up lines and reaction shots heightened the payoffs of the Brothers' already brilliant jokes.

In addition, McCarey's experience as a director of top comedy acts (Laurel and Hardy especially) shows in his ability to tether otherwise unrelated gags and one-liners to the framework of the story. On paper, Duck Soup is no more cohesive than Monkey Business or Horse Feathers, but McCarey is forever stitching scenes together with repeated dialogue, visual cues and recurring gags. $20 million is mentioned several times and many scenes are introduced with the Freedonian national anthem. Three times you see Groucho in bed, three times you see Chico or Harpo at the peanut stand. Several scenes involve eating—peanuts, donuts, crackers, apples. We see Groucho at his desk more than once—first in the newspaper photo that introduces him, then for a cabinet meeting, then yet again for a conversation with Zeppo and a sequence involving Harpo and the telephone. For that matter, we see Harpo on the telephone in two scenes, and Chico once as well. And, of course, there are recurring gags involving Harpo and scissors, a blow torch, a motorcycle, an alarm clock and Edgar Kennedy's hat.

These links, though unobtrusive, satisfy the mind's instinctive need for order and create a resonance that keeps the momentum of the picture from jerking to a halt every time the story changes gears.

"Duck Soup," wrote Roy Blount in Hail, Hail, Euphoria!, "is a seamless blend of just about every form of American comedy up to its time," and I attribute this versatility to Leo McCarey. As a source of inspiration for many of Duck Soup's gags, McCarey dipped into the bag of silent comedy tricks he had learned at the legendary Hal Roach Studios and came up with several scenes crucial to the film's success, including the three-hat gag, the break-in scene from Laurel and Hardy's Night Owls and most unforgettably, the mirror scene, which the Schwartz Brothers originated for the stage, and which showed up again in Charlie Chaplin's The Floorwalker and Max Linder's Seven Years' Bad Luck, but which was never essayed more brilliantly than by the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup.

Most importantly, McCarey provided visuals that for the first—perhaps, only—time in the Marx Brothers' career matched their subversive, surreal wit. I'm thinking particularly of the battle scenes at the tail end of the movie, when Groucho changes uniforms with every shot and the army of elephants, monkeys, dolphins, swimmers, fire engines, etc. that responds to his call for help. But there's also the scene where a dog emerges barking from Harpo's chest, and another scene where Harpo climbs out of Edgar Kennedy's bath in full-dress uniform. (That McCarey used these tricks to turn what in previous movies would have been a plot-heavy resolution into an surrealist's dream is just another reason why he was the best director the Marx Brothers ever worked with. In fact, I'm willing to bet all the surrealists' efforts combined had less impact on attitudes about war and authority than this one Marx Brothers movie. But I digress. Again.)

But of course ultimately Duck Soup is about the Marx Brothers and simultaneously reigned in and unleashed by an expert director of comedy, they were never better. Groucho was never more comfortable in front of the camera. Harpo, the act's unrestrained id, is not as wild as he was in such movies as Animal Crackers, but his bits are better integrated into the flow of the film than ever before. And Chico has the best role of his career, serving not just as a foil for Groucho's wit and Harpo's destructive impulses, but as a showcase talent in his own right. (If you want to read more about the Marx Brothers themselves, click here, but I'm warning you in advance, few who venture there ever return to talk about it.)

In terms of box office, Duck Soup wasn't quite the flop of legend, turning a modest profit, but nevertheless grossing less than any of its predecessors. Ironically, we most desperately seek meaning at those moments when the world most forcefully reminds us that life has no meaning, and in 1933, as the world teetered at the edge of the abyss, audiences had no taste for Duck Soup's bitter recipe. Because let's face it, while at first blush Duck Soup is delightfully silly and absurdist, its underlying riff—that our leaders are fools, that our institutions are corrupt, that young men and women die in wars for no reason, and that, above all, people are born to torment each other without hope of ever getting along—is as bleak and jaundiced a world view as Hollywood ever committed to film. That's not a message a paying audience is prepared to receive on an empty stomach, and in 1933, there were plenty of empty stomachs to go around.

Fortunately, the Marx Brothers signed with Irving Thalberg shortly after Duck Soup's premiere and at MGM, the Brothers made two of their most successful movies, A Night At The Opera and A Day At The Races. Audiences were in the mood to laugh at the Marx Brothers again. They've been laughing ever since.

Best Picture Of 1932-33 (Foreign Language): Zero For Conduct (prod. Jean Vigo)

Considering that by the end of 1933 the Nazis had all but shuttered the German film industry and that the Depression had crippled the rest of Europe's studios, the field of contenders for best foreign language picture of 1932-33 is remarkably deep:

●Boudu Saved From Drowning, a comedy by Jean Renoir, is ostensibly the story of a suicidal bum fished from the waters of the Seine, but is really a biting satire about the unsatisfying nature of charity when the object of your care won't transform himself into your image.

●Also released in 1932 was Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr, which our friend Erik Beck of the Boston Becks ranks seventh on his list of the all-time greatest horror films, writing "Dreyer does far more with mood and atmosphere than with the kind of effects laden vampire crap that modern directors use."

●Liebelei is an exquisite romance by the master of moody, doomed love, Max Ophüls, who would go on to direct such masterpieces as Letter From An Unknown Woman and The Earrings Of Madame de ....

●And then there's The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse, Fritz Lang's sequel to his 1922 film Dr. Mabuse The Gambler. The Nazis took Lang's story of an insane criminal mastermind who controls his victims through hypnosis as a criticism of Hitler and his henchmen—it was—and Lang fled Germany shortly after production was completed.

I'm a fan of each of these films and, depending on my mood, I could champion any of them—you might particularly want to track down Vampyr as Halloween approaches—but this week I'm going with Jean Vigo's funny, poetic and influential look at life in a boy's boarding school, Zero For Conduct.

If you put the Our Gang comedies, Animal House and The Dead Poets Society in a blender, strained out the sentimentality and added a dash of Jean-Paul Sartre, Charlie Chaplin and Luis Buñuel, you'd get either a really awesome smoothie or Zero For Conduct (Zéro de conduite). The film's French subtitle, Jeunes Diables au Collège—"Little Devils At School"—is a pretty accurate description of the story's nominal heroes, three scamps, maybe age ten, who plot to take over their rundown school during a Commemoration Day ceremony and pelt the faculty with garbage.

"War is declared! Down with teachers! Up with revolution!"

And revolution is just what this school needs. With the exception of a newly-hired instructor (Jean Dasté) who imitates Chaplin and does handstands in class, the boys' teachers—led by a wizened dwarf with a preposterous beard and a hat he keeps under glass—are a wholly unsympathetic collection of spies, toadies, dimwits, bores and martinets, as small in spirit as the dean is in body. The boys rebel at every turn, instigating food fights (the cook serves nothing but beans) and pillow fights before finally leading the full-scale insurrection that caps this brief forty-one minute film.

"Zero For Conduct," wrote Terrence Rafferty for New Yorker magazine in 1990, "was a celebration of the pure freedom of children's imaginations, a stirring expression of resistance to the forces of authority and order—to anything that would impose discipline on the diverse, unruly energy of play." Nearly eighty years after it was made, "Zero For Conduct still seems ... like one of the few truly subversive movies ever made."

But while planning for "revolution" provides a unifying theme, the narrative of Zero For Conduct is primarily episodic, as life generally is at the age of ten, with director Vigo taking time to remember moments that a kid would find important—playing a toy trumpet with your nose, smoking purloined cigars, following an absent-minded teacher through the streets, chasing him as he tries to introduce himself to a pretty woman, then somehow getting sidetracked as they mistake a priest's flapping cassock for the girl's skirt.

At times Zero For Conduct reminded me of Yasujiro Ozu's I Was Born, But ..., the 1932 Japanese silent film about two school age brothers who play hooky, fake test scores and bribe a delivery boy to beat up the local bully. Of that movie I wrote "It's not that nothing happens, it's that nothing feels as if it's made to happen simply to satisfy the mechanics of plot."

Think of how the quest for the Red Ryder BB gun in A Christmas Story pulls together what are otherwise unrelated episodes in the life of little Ralphie Parker, and you'll get an idea of how Vigo uses talk of revolution to weave the various threads of Zero For Conduct into a single tapestry.

Visually, Zero For Conduct almost plays as a documentary, with most of the movie shot on location. Vigo comments on the action and the players with the placement of his camera, often photographing the students from below, emphasizing their oversize sense of their own maturity, while shooting their instructors from high-angle positions which tends to diminish them in our eyes. Vigo was a key figure in a loosely-defined movement called "Poetic Realism," which focused on marginalized characters, told stories tinged with nostalgia and fatalism, and relied on "heightened aestheticism" to emphasize the "representational aspects" of the film. No, I don't know what that means either, but I do recognize that there is a look and feel in the films of Jean Vigo that reminds me of Jean Renoir, Julien Duviver and Marcel Carné—like Vigo, members of the Poetic Realism movement—whose films were highly naturalistic in their look yet which featured action that clearly was scripted and staged.

As the film continues, though, Vigo also plays around with surrealism, which was still a hot ticket item in Europe. In addition to the films of Luis Buñuel, several directors working in France had taken stabs at the form including René Clair, Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, Man Ray and Jean Cocteau, and Jean Vigo underscores his theme of rebellion against convention with several surreal scenes—a teacher's drawing comes to life, sheepishly transforming itself, as the lone sympathetic teacher is rebuked by a colleague, from a man in swim trunks into the cloaked visage of Napoleon; a student does a slow-motion backflip into a chair; and a professor is tied to his bed and suspended from the wall while he sleeps. There's also one brief, surprising shot of full-frontal male nudity, not in the least sexual, more in the tradition of "I wave my private parts at your auntie," which I suspect was Vigo's way of giving French authorities the finger.

The spirit of rebellion that infuses Zero For Conduct was not lost on French authorities—after the film's premiere on April 7, 1933, it was banned and was not shown again in France until February 1946, nearly twelve years after Vigo's untimely death.

I confess it took more than one viewing for me to appreciate Zero For Conduct—I carried into my first viewing certain Hollywood-bred expectations of what should/would happen and I kept waiting for the predictable plot-twists and the ending wrapped up with a bow. It wasn't until the second time through that I allowed myself to enter into the spirit of the thing and remember what it was really like to be a kid. Sometimes as adults we forget how momentous little episodes are to children and to their development, and while you know that in one sense nothing will change after the boys have taken over the school, in more important ways, everything will change as their perceptions of themselves will forever be altered—there's a big difference between being someone who "could" do a thing and being someone who "has done" that thing.

Zero For Conduct was a flop at the box office, won no awards and was barely seen outside of Paris until after World War II, yet it directly influenced Francois Truffaut's greatest film, The 400 Blows, and the French New Wave generally. That's pedigree enough for me.

Born in Paris in 1905, Jean Vigo was the son of the French anarchist Eugeni Bonaventura de Vigo i Sallés, better known as Miguel Almereyda. When Vigo was twelve, his father was arrested and later murdered in his prison cell, presumably by his jailers. Hustled out of Paris, Vigo was educated under an assumed name in the south of France, yet despite the outrage he felt for French authorities, Vigo found things to love—his fellow students, later his wife and friends—and he found ways to translate that tenderness into film. Suffering from the tuberculosis he had contracted at the age of twenty-one, Vigo literally worked himself to death, directing his follow-up film, L'atalante from a stretcher and dying a few months after its completion in 1934.

Postscript: To my knowledge, Zero For Conduct is not readily available in the U.S. There are better copies floating around the internet, but at least I can show this battered, murky print legally.

Best Picture Of 1931-32: Frankenstein (Prod. Carl Laemmle, Jr.)

Any one of the Mythical nominees for best picture of the awards year running from August 1, 1931 to July 31, 1932 would be a good one—Grand Hotel was the first movie to boast an all-star cast, Freaks is a genuinely disturbing horror flick that holds up even by the standards of today, and Scarface, directed by the legendary Howard Hawks, is the best gangster movie of an era characterized by great gangster movies.

But only one film can boast both of being the top grossing film of the year, a sensation that spawned countless sequels, spoofs and remakes, and of being so influential that it defined its genre for generations with imagery and film language so much part of the vocabulary of Western culture that even people who've never seen it know what it's about—the only movie of 1931-32 that can make that claim.

That it's also a great movie makes Frankenstein my choice for best picture of the year.

I don't think I'm going out on much of a limb here to say that Frankenstein contains more iconic images than all the year's other nominees for best picture combined, so many, in fact, I could probably name the scenes in order and you could skip the picture altogether—grave robbing, brain stealing, thunderstorms and monster making, "It's alive," the monster's first appearance, fire, the tragic death of the little girl, the villagers with torches and pitchforks. These scenes were so well established in our collective consciousness, in fact, that more than forty years later Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder could spoof it in Young Frankenstein without having to stop and explain anything to their audience.

What movie from 1967 (which like Frankenstein in 1974 is now forty-three years in our rearview mirror) could you spoof in a full-length feature without leaving your audience scratching its collective heads—The Graduate, maybe, but what fun would that be?

The story of a young scientist who soon regrets cracking the secret of creation had its genesis in the ghost stories nineteen year old Mary Wollstonecraft, her lover and soon to be husband Percy Shelley, and the poet Lord Byron told each other while vacationing together in Switzerland. In 1818, Wollstonecraft, now Mary Shelley, turned one of these stories, a combination of a nightmare she had about a lab experiment gone awry and conversations Shelley and Byron had about the origins of life, into her first novel, Frankenstein.

"Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds," Robert Oppenheimer said to himself as he watched the first atomic bomb explode on the testing grounds of the New Mexico desert, and after the Second World War, a generations of science fiction writers made a cottage industry out of the question of whether we as human beings have the right to monkey around with things that before the advances of science had been the sole provence of God, and what moral culpability do we owe when our experiments go horribly awry—or worse, don't.

But Mary Shelley asked the question first and asked it so well that the phrase "Frankenstein's monster" has become shorthand for "unintended consequences."

The novel was an immediate sensation and spawned dozens of stage adaptations over the years. The earliest of these, Richard Peake's 1823 stageplay Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein (read it here) introduced elements such as the elaborate creation scene, the mute monster and a lab assistant named Fritz that became as much a part of Frankenstein's literary tradition as the key elements of Shelley's original novel. Peggy Webling's 1927 stage version (credited as a source in the movie's titles) telescoped the time frame of the story, eliminated the Arctic chase that bookended the novel and, in the third act, added a bride for Frankenstein's monster which became the basis of the 1935 movie sequel. (Webling also, for the first time, named the monster itself "Frankenstein" after its creator.)

The success of Webling's stageplay caught the attention of Carl Laemmle, Jr., the head of production at Universal Studios and he bought the film rights for $20,000. The head of the studio, Carl Laemmle, Sr., wasn't keen to do Frankenstein, but Junior, who had been in charge of production since 1929, was enthusiastic and given the successes of All Quiet On The Western Front and Dracula, which he had previously produced, the father was inclined to give the son free reign. It was a good decision. The cycle of Universal horror movies that had begun with Lon Chaney during the silent era and which continues even to the present day with the studio's recent remake of The Wolfman, owes much to the enormous success of Frankenstein, which proved once and for all that the horror genre was viable box office.

James Whale, fresh off his successful screen adaptation of the play Waterloo Bridge, was slated to direct. For a man who had real reservations about the horror genre, he soon became its master—arguably the greatest director of horror in movie history.

In directing Frankenstein, Whale cast his gaze both to the past and to the future, drawing the movie's look from the German Expressionism of the 1920s—for example, in the graveyard sequence that opens the film—but using sound to generate fear and in the process, inventing many of the cliches of the horror genre we now take for granted. As British film historian David Thomson pointed out recently, Tod Browning's Dracula showed the potential that sound had for generating fear—"the wind in the trees, the wolves howling in the distance ... the women screaming in their sleep ... Lugosi's forbidding welcome, 'I am Drac-u-la'"—and then Whale took the ball and ran with it, giving us thunderstorms, shrieking laboratory equipment, groaning monsters, and a screaming Mae Clarke, that combine to keep the hair standing up on the back of our necks for an hour and ten minutes.

Although he began his career as a theater director, Whale took full advantage of the oppor- tunities film presented, using any number of techniques to distance Frankenstein from its literary and stage antecedents. In addition to the memorable use of sound effects, Whale abandoned the so-called proscenium arch—that is, the now long-forgotten habit of photographing a set from only one position, as if the camera had bought a ticket in the third row of a Broadway theater, that makes early sound movies feel so stagy—moving the camera around the room to get interesting angles, indeed, actually moving the camera, rather than leaving it bolted to the floor, such as for the long tracking shot of the father carrying his drowned daughter through the village square.

Whale also broke the rules of the early cinema with the introduction of Frankenstein's fiancee Elizabeth and the secondary character Victor. In this early scene, Whale shows us a series of quick close-ups and only then cuts to an establishing shot of the room, rather than the traditional approach which would have made clear where we were, that there were people in the room, and finally providing close-ups to introduce the characters, an effective bit of editing that further distances the film from the staginess of its contemporaries.

But the most effective sequence in the movie is the build-up to the introduction of the monster.

We're so familiar now with the look of Frankenstein's creation—the flat head, the hooded eyes, the bolts in his neck—that it's easy to forget that an audience in 1931 had no clear idea what the monster would look like and the final choice, which was critical to the movie's success, could have gone in any number of directions. The 1910 silent movie version of Frankenstein, a fifteen minute short which may have been the first horror movie ever made, presented the monster as a sort of Mr. Hyde to Frankenstein's Jekyll. On stage, the creature was a shaggy hunchback. And as conceived by the film's initial star, Bela Lugosi, the monster had a featureless face and wore a bushy fright wig. (Lugosi dropped out of the project shortly after the test footage was shot. Laemmle, Jr. thought Lugosi's choice of makeup, based on the clay monster in the 1920 silent film Der Golem was ridiculous and in any event Lugosi wasn't interested in playing a mute—and in the early versions of the script, wholly unsympathetic—monster.)

The monster as we know it was a collaboration between makeup expert Jack Pierce and the English actor chosen to replace Lugosi, Boris Karloff. Depending on who you believe, Whale cast Karloff (born William Henry Pratt) either after seeing Karloff brooding over lunch at the Universal commissary or at the suggestion of Whale's companion, David Lewis, who had seen Karloff in Howard Hawks's prison drama The Criminal Code. Either way, the choice was inspired. Karloff's tall, lean build (along with some very clunky shoes) allowed the monster to loom over the rest of the cast and Karloff accentuate his already thin features by removing a bridge of molars from the right side of his mouth and then sucking in his cheek. He also suggested the heavy eyelids made of wax that gave the creature a look of dim confusion.

"We had to surmise that brain after brain had been tried in that poor skull," Karloff said, "inserted and taken out again. That is why we built up the forehead to convey the impression of demoniacal surgery. Then we found the eyes were too bright, seemed too understanding, where dumb bewilderment was so essential. So I waxed my eyes to make them heavy, half-seeing."

It took three hours every day to put the makeup on and almost as long at the end of the day to take it off.

After an elaborate creation scene (Mary Shelley had summed up the entire creation sequence in a single paragraph) which Whale felt was essential to convincing the audience of the monster's reality, he then delays Karloff's first appearance until the moment just after Frankenstein learns for the first time that he's gifted his creation with a defective "criminal" brain (which along with the opening grave robbing scene was an addition of the screenplay). As Frankenstein (Colin Clive) and his colleague Dr. Waldman (Edward van Sloan) talk, we hear the sound of heavy footsteps coming up the stair—an early example of the role sound plays in horror—the characters at last react to the approaching footsteps and we know something important is about to happen. The door to the lab opens, the monster backs into the room, then turns, and at the speed of a tripping heartbeat, a pair of axial cuts—a jump cut directly along the line from the camera toward its subject—brings us eye to eye with the monster for the first time.



Thirty-one minutes into the picture, it's one of the greatest entrances in movie history, up there with that dolly shot that zooms in on John Wayne in 1939's Stagecoach.

Audiences of the time were completely sold. Frankenstein premiered on November 21, 1931, and immediately set box office records. Shot in thirty-five days at a cost of $291,000, Frankenstein grossed over $5 million in its initial run, despite hitting theaters at the depths of the Depression. The critical reception was just as enthusiastic and the movie made the New York Times top ten list for the year.

"Whale and I both saw the character of the monster as an innocent one," Karloff later said. "This was a pathetic creature who, like us all, had neither the wish nor the say in his creation, and certainly did not wish upon itself the hideous image which automatically terrified humans whom it tried to befriend."

And therein lies the lasting appeal of Mary Shelley's story, I think, and why we feel such empathy for the monster, because it dares to ask the question "Why, oh Lord, did you make us, as Frankenstein did his monster, so poor, so ugly and so ill-equipped to face a world that is so unforgiving of all but the rich, the beautiful and the talented?" It's a question many of us ask on a daily basis, whether we're a starving refuge in the war-torn Sudan or simply a befuddled suburbanite wondering why Kate Gosselin is on television and we're not.

I've been re-reading Mary Shelley recently, and I think she was asking, albeit surreptitiously, a question even more fundamental than that of what duty scientists owe humanity, which is to say, What duty does the creator, i.e., God, owe his creation, us. That's a question religion doesn't usually ask; religions primarily concern themselves with the duties a man owes his god. To even ask the question the other way around (forget trying to formulate an answer) would have for centuries been to invite the stake as the penalty for blasphemy, and even in the nineteenth century such speculation meant financial ruin and social exile—afterall, Mary's own husband, Percy Shelley, was expelled from Oxford and became estranged from his family for touting atheism.

So I ask you, what duty does the creator owe his creation? Because let's face it, if I neglected my dog, say, the way God has neglected the earth, the SPCA would be on me so fast my head would swim.

But I digress.

Frankenstein was a huge hit but, of course, received no Oscar nominations. Admittedly, there were few technical awards in those days—no awards for special effects, costumes or makeup— but it was overlooked even in the categories of sound and set decoration, never mind screenplay, acting, directing and best picture. So I say let's give Katie Awards to the key figures behind the production of this classic movie: Charles D. Hall for interior decoration, what is now known as art direction-set decoration, and Kenneth Strickfaden, who designed the electronic gear in the laboratory out of odds and ends he collected from radios, airplane motors and industrial machinery; Jack Pierce and Pauline Eells for their iconic makeup job; and to C. Roy Hunter for sound.

And now for what I suspect is a key question for many: will Frankenstein scare you? Probably not, to be honest, but then again that depends on what scares you. I happened to catch a goodly chunk of some cable network's Saw marathon a few weekends ago (while Katie-Bar-The-Door was working ungodly hours keeping America safe for democracy) and to be honest with you, I wasn't just not scared, I was bored most of the time. For me, anyway, a good horror movie has to do more than simply test your gag reflex or your autonomic reactions to cats-jumping-out-of-closets kind of shocks, otherwise you might as well head on over to the supermarket and watch the butcher chop meat. Frankenstein is stylish, exciting, has a few genuinely disturbing moments, such as when the monster accidentally kills the little girl, and raises some fundamental questions about our role in the universe. For me, that's just about all I could ever want out of a horror movie—or any other kind of movie, for that matter.

In the end, I chose Frankenstein as best picture from among the dozen or so must-see movies released between August 1, 1931, and July 31, 1932, because more than the others, it is a fundamental building block, not just of movie literacy but of cultural literacy. Its look, its feel, its conventions and its concepts have so permeated the bedrock that even if you've never seen the 1931 version of Frankenstein, you've drunk from its well.

I say, time to drink from the source.