Nominees For Best Picture Of 1932-33 (Drama)

The Bitter Tea Of General Yen (prod. Frank Capra)

I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang (prod. Hal B. Wallis)

The Invisible Man (prod. Carl Laemmle, Jr.)

King Kong (prod. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack)

Red Dust (prod. Hunt Stromberg and Irving Thalberg)

Remembering

From my post about the best picture of 1929-30, All Quiet On The Western Front

In the Twentieth Century, no war seemed like a better idea beforehand and a worse idea after than the First World War. Most of Europe, and eventually the United States, marched merrily into what turned out to be a highly-efficient meat grinder destroying for many nations an entire generation of young men, all in the pursuit of what turned out to be not much. I think we Americans don't fully grasp to what degree war ravaged Europe in the Twentieth Century. Britain, for example, during World War I suffered 2.6 million dead and wounded out of a population of 45 million; and France's loss of 6 million dead and wounded out of 40 million would be the equivalent of 45 million casualties for the present-day U.S., losses not only unthinkable today but incomprehensible.

Afterwards, the debate centered not so much on the question of "Should we have fought the war?" as on "How did we get suckered into it?" The level of disillusionment, grief and revulsion was so great, the key European powers sat back while Hitler gobbled up one country after another, and even after the Nazis had overrun most of Europe, invaded Russia and were bombing Britain on a daily basis, America's president, Franklin Roosevelt, had a hard time convincing the nation to even prepare for war, much less fight it. By the time the United States entered the conflict, it was damned near too late—and was, in fact, too late for millions of people.

The effort to make sense of World War I and the political, social and economic upheaval of its aftermath inspired some of the finest art and literature of the Twentieth Century—cubism, surrealism, Picasso, Hemingway, Proust. Possibly the best novel about the war itself was Erich Maria Remarque's best-selling novel, All Quiet On The Western Front, the story of a classroom of German schoolboys on their journey from enthusiastic volunteers to disillusioned veterans to buried corpses.

Carl Laemmle, the legendary head of Universal Studios, quickly bought the rights to the novel. Laemmle had worked as a bookkeeper for twenty years before investing in a string of nickelodeons, eventually founding his own film distribution company, Laemmle Film Service, which after a merger with three other film studios became Universal. He put his son, Carl, Jr., in charge of production and it was "Junior," as he was widely known, who produced All Quiet On The Western Front.

In adapting the novel for the screen, writers George Abbott, Maxwell Anderson and Del Andrews retained the story's focus on the boys who fought and died in the war rather than on the generals and politicians who sent them, a focus that gave the book so much of its power. Director Lewis Milestone made the significant and (given that the studio was investing more than a million dollars in the production, a huge amount for the time, just weeks after the crash of the New York stock market) risky decision to cast young unknowns in the primary roles—and not in a J.J. Abrams, populate-the-bridge-of-the-Enterprise-with-GQ-pretty-boys sort of way either.

This choice, casting schoolboys to play schoolboys, is nearly unique in the history of Hollywood.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Slaughterhouse-Five that the problem with war stories is that instead of being about the children who actually manned the front lines, they all pretend wars were fought by grown men, "played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men" which he said made war "look just wonderful, so we'll have lots more of them." And indeed, Frank Sinatra and John Wayne and William Holden and many others were too old, too mature, too poised, too experienced, for the parts they played. Even the superb Saving Private Ryan relied on a cast—Tom Hanks (42), Tom Sizemore (37), Edward Burns (30), Matt Damon (28)—too old for the parts they played.

With the exception of Louis Wolheim, a veteran of fifty movies including the Oscar-winning Two Arabian Knights, the cast of All Quiet On The Western Front is nearly as young as the parts they are playing. When the film went into production in November 1929, Russell Gleason and William Bakewell were twenty-one, Lew Ayres was twenty, Ben Alexander, eighteen. Richard Alexander (no relation) was the old man of the group at twenty-five.

These are boys, raw recruits who soil their under- wear during their first patrol, kids who've never been away from home, never had a drink, never so much as kissed a girl. Played by grown men, you might feel regret at their deaths, but you'd never get the same sense of how much is lost, how much of even the most basic aspects of life they've missed out on as when these parts are played by boys. The effect is tragic and poignant even now almost eighty years on.

The other significant choice Milestone made was to focus strictly on the war from the point of view of the unglamourous foot soldiers who fought it. No strategic overviews, no explanations of political objectives, not even a crane shot of the battlefield to let you know where the men are headed. Just a boot's level view (often literally) of the hunger, sleeplessness, fear, filth, lice, loneliness, rats, madness, amputations, shelling and unheroic death that was the daily routine for millions of men. Without a greater sense of the war's purpose, Milestone forced his audience to focus on the only goal that mattered to these boys, their survival.

At the same time, however, while Milestone is effective at making you feel the confusion of war, he himself is never confused about what he's trying to show you—and if you've seen some recent movies, where directors hide the limitations of both the action and their imaginations with a rapid blur of edits, you understand there's a big difference between the two.

A good example of this comes during the first great battle sequence, one the greatest cinematic achievements up to its time. The camera sweeps low to the ground, almost always at the eye level of the men in the trenches. Cinematographer Arthur Edeson—as anonymous these days as Milestone despite also working on Casablanca—reminds you once again of the power of live action over cartoonish computer-generated images, particularly with the shot of a machine gun panning down a line of charging soldiers, then the reverse shot of the charging soldiers falling as the camera sweeps past, human bodies falling in the unpredictable ways an animated image, unbound by gravity, cannot replicate.

The sequence includes an impressive artillery barrage, with real explosions running down the line, throwing fine particles of dirt and the dead into the air, and you feel an adrenaline rush as an overwhelming enemy charges. From the point of view of the soldier, it's all churning legs and rifles, bayonets suddenly at one another's throats as the line is breached and the men engage in hand-to-hand combat, and then as the battle rages, men collapse in exhaustion, gasping for breath, their faces grimy with sweat, blood, wincing in pain, Milestone showing you something you don't often see in a war film, the real sense of physical exertion, the weariness and thirst, just taking the time in the middle of battle to show a man knock the throat off a bottle of wine for a badly needed drink.

Milestone strove for an unprecedented level of realism as he directed the action, drilling his actors like soldiers and casting veterans of the German army in supporting roles. The effort especially paid off in an extraordinary sequence late in the film: an attack, counterattack and counterattack repulsed, nearly all of it shown from Lew Ayres' point of view as he shelters in a bomb crater, with, first, French soldiers leaping the hole in one direction, then leaping it in the other as the Germans drive them back, finally one unfortunate French soldier leaping on top of Ayres leading to a desperate struggle with a bayonet. Then during the day and night that follow as Ayres is trapped in no man's land between the two lines, he watches the French soldier's life slowly drain away, the plight of the Frenchman told in sound from his screams, his cries and finally his silence.

The movie concludes with a shot long thought lost but rediscovered in 1998 when the film was finally restored to its original length: the silent, ghostly image of the boys we've come to know marching off to war superimposed over acres of white crosses.

All Quiet On The Western Front premiered in Los Angeles on April 21, 1930, and was a critical and commercial success, grossing $3 million, more than twice its budget. The National Board of Review named it one of the ten best movies of the year, Photoplay magazine awarded Laemmle, Jr. the Medal of Honor for producing the best movie of the year. The movie even won Japan's Kinema Junpo Award for best foreign language film. On November 5, 1930, the Academy awarded it two Oscars, for best picture and best director.

Decades later, the National Film Preservation Board included All Quiet On The Western Front in the National Film Registry. In 1998, the American Film Institute included the film on its list of the 100 best American movies ever made and ten years later ranked it seventh among the list of best "epic" features. Steven Spielberg later acknowledged its influence on Saving Private Ryan. In my opinion, not only was All Quiet On The Western Front the best picture of 1930, it's one of the five best (anti-)war movies ever made and arguably was the best film of the entire Early Sound Era (1927-33).

Lew Ayres was so moved by the experience of making All Quiet On The Western Front that he became a conscientious objector during the Second World War, a controversial stand that led the U.S. military to broaden its definition of conscientious objection. After serving in the Medical Corps in the South Pacific, Ayres returned to Hollywood and was better than before he left. Already a star of the Young Dr. Kildare movies, Ayres went on to receive an Oscar nomination in 1949 for his role in Johnny Belinda. He worked steadily until 1994 and died in 1996 at the age of eighty-eight.

Best Director Of 1932-33 (Drama): James Whale (The Old Dark House and The Invisible Man)

Although he directed all sorts of movies, including the musical Show Boat, the name James Whale will always be linked with horror. During an age characterized by great horror films, Whale directed four of the greatest—Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man and Bride Of Frankenstein. If he didn't invent the genre, Whale redefined it so thoroughly that it's difficult, even now, to make a horror film without dipping into his bag of tricks.

Born in Worcestershire, England, in 1889, the son of a factory worker and a nurse, Whale discovered an interest in the theater while putting on productions for his fellow prisoners of war in a German POW camp during World War I. After the war, he worked as an actor and director in London, with his big break coming in 1928 when he directed Journey's End, R.C. Sherriff's anti-war play about life in the trenches. Starring Colin Clive, later the star of Frankenstein, the play ran on London's West End for two years and brought Whale to the attention of Hollywood. There, he directed a film version of Journey's End as well as an adaptation of Robert E. Sherwood's Waterloo Bridge, the latter starring Mae Clarke.

Seeking to cash in on the box office phenomenon of Dracula, the classic thriller about a vampire turned loose on Victorian England starring Bela Lugosi, Whale directed one of the most famous and influential movies ever made, a screen adaptation of Mary Shelley's horror novel Frankenstein. The story of a young scientist who soon regrets cracking the secret of creation, Frankenstein contains more iconic images than any other movie of the period and it made an international star of Boris Karloff, who was both menacing and sympathetic as the monster.

Although he began his career as a theater director, Whale took full advantage of the opportunities 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.

Frankenstein was 1931's box office champ, grossing $5 million (with an additional $7 million overseas) on a budget of $291,000.

Producer Carl Laemmle, Jr., wanted a sequel to Frankenstein, but Whale resisted. Ironically, despite helping to define the genre, he didn't much care for horror, and would have preferred to direct more movies like Waterloo Bridge—dramas and romances with literary antecedents. Business, though, was business, and after directing The Impatient Maiden, a little-seen drama starring Mae Clark and Lew Ayres, Whale turned back to the horror genre with an adaptation of J.B. Priestley's novel, Benighted, retitled The Old Dark House for the U.S. market.

The plot is a staple of the horror genre—strangers forced to spend the night in a scary house—although the threat, in this case, is not supernatural but based in the psychotic behaviors of the people who live there. Raymond Massey and Gloria Stuart play a quarrelsome couple stranded by a storm in the mountains of Wales with Melvyn Douglas, their good-natured traveling companion. The three seek shelter in a nearby farmhouse belonging to Horace and Rebecca Femm, an elderly brother-sister couple played by Ernest Thesinger (later Dr. Pretorius in Bride Of Frankenstein) and a particularly belligerent Eva Moore.

"What are they doing here? What do they want? No beds! No beds!"

Upstairs is their crazy father and an even crazier brother.

Playing the Femm's mute butler is Boris Karloff, so heavily made up the producers added a note at the beginning of the movie to say that, yes, he was the same Karloff who had portrayed the monster in Frankenstein. Soon added to the mix are two more stranded travelers, Charles Laughton in his American film debut, and his mistress, played by Lilian Bond.

The fun lies in trying to decide who's merely eccentric and who's a homicidal maniac. Whale and cinematographer Arthur Edeson (All Quiet On The Western Front, Casablanca) do a wonderful job of creating a sense of foreboding with shadows and Expressionistic camera angles. Whale was also one of the first directors to grasp the possibilities of the sound medium, and rain, wind, creaking boards, screams and howls, contribute to the mood.

TV Guide also praised Whale's ability to "emphasize an actor's entrances and exits, or to delay them as needed (as in the case of Saul). His striking flair for composition and editing works an audience over thoroughly, and he adds to the film's impact by deliberately playing with the buildup of suspense."

And Nick Pinkerton in The Village Voice noted that Whale—who was born in a working class slum and invented for himself a cool, aristocratic bearing—was particularly sensitive to class distinctions, an awareness that shows in Laughton's character, "a knighted bigmouth industrialist, still smarting from slights before his social rise."

Despite a generally warm critical reception, The Old Dark House was a box office failure in the United States (it set records in Whale's native England). The film was thought lost for decades until it's rediscovery in the 1970s and its reputation has grown over the last few years until it is now regarded as one of Whale's best.

For the subject of Universal's next "monster" movie, producer Carl Laemmle, Jr., settled on the H.G. Wells novel The Invisible Man, and following the released of a mystery starring Paul Lucas called The Kiss Before The Mirror, Whale began production in June 1933.

The Invisible Man is the story of Dr. Jack Griffin who discovers a process that will render a man invisible, a secret he initially plans to sell to the highest bidder until he realizes to his horror that there's no way to reverse the process. Its screenplay proved to be a tough nut to crack—no less a writer than Preston Sturges tried and failed, as did Garrett Fort and John Balderson, who had successfully adapted Dracula. Ultimately it was playwright R.C. Sherriff, whose Journey's End had provided Whale's break, who figured it out. He focused on the practical problems of invisibility—for example, Griffin must hide for an hour after he eats while his meal digests. In addition, Sherriff and Whale agreed that since the film's audience would believe that "only a lunatic would want to make himself invisible anyway," the story would emphasize Griffin's descent into madness.

"We'll begin with a reign of terror," Griffin says as his megalomania takes hold, "a few murders here and there, murders of great men, murders of little men, just to show we make no distinction."

To play the invisible man, Whale had initially planned on Boris Karloff, who had been such a sensation in Frankenstein, but when he proved to be unavailable, Whale opted for Claude Rains, a veteran of the stage and an instructor at the Royal Academy where he counted both Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud among his students. Although he was reluctant to begin his movie career with a horror film, Rains proved to be an inspired choice. Since the audience can't see him until the final scene, Griffin's entire character must be conveyed through his voice—and Rains had one of the richest, most melodious voices in movie history.

The other key to the success of The Invisible Man was, of course, its special effects, and those concocted by John P. Fulton and Arthur Edeson are among the best of its era. To create the illusion of invisibility, Fulton clothed Rains from head to toe in black velvet and filmed him before a black background. The footage was then optically printed over the scenes filmed on the set. In addition, to cover imperfections, Edeson retouched over four thousand frames of film by hand.

The result is startlingly effective, especially when Rains unwinds the bandages that conceal his face to reveal first empty eye sockets, then holes where his mouth and nose should be, and finally, nothing at all.

But as convincing as the special effects were, the movie would have collapsed had Whale not known how to move the story along, pull memorable performances from his actors—Una O'Connor as a terrified bar maid is unforgettable—and ratchet up the tension as the film races toward its conclusion.

The film was the critical and commercial hit Laemmle had hoped for. The New York Times named it one of the year's ten best and Whale himself won the special recognition at the Venice Film Festival for his direction. Even more important to Universal, the box office appeal of Whale's films helped keep the studio afloat during the darkest days of the Depression.

In 2008, the Library of Congress added The Invisible Man to the National Film Registry.

Despite reaching such heights, though, glory proved to be fleeting for Whale. After 1935's Bride of Frankenstein—the sequel he had resisted making for as long as he could—he never again directed a horror picture, and although credited with directing Show Boat, he was actually fired before production ended, having uncharacteristically gone over budget. Afterwards, he directed a string of commercially unsuccessful pictures and was pretty much out of movies by 1941.

In 1957, after a series of strokes, Whale committed suicide by drowning himself in his swimming pool. One of the few openly-gay directors working in Hollywood, Whale's life was the subject of the 1998 film Gods and Monsters, starring Ian McKellen.

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.

Best Fun-Stupid Movie of 1930-31: Dracula

In honor of Bela Lugosi's birthday today, I am moving my choice for the best fun-stupid movie of 1930-31 ahead by a few days.

The brain child of Oscar-winning producer Carl Laemmle, Jr., Dracula was the first of Universal Studios' classic "monster" movies, a series that included Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Black Cat and Bride of Frankenstein and continued well into the 1950s (see, e.g., Creature From the Black Lagoon). The title character was played by Bela Lugosi, a Hungarian film actor who had had a huge success on Broadway with a stage adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel. Although Lugosi was not Universal's first choice to play the title character (Lon Chaney was reportedly set to play the role until his untimely death; also considered were Conrad Veidt and Paul Muni), he became so closely associated with the role, he rarely appeared in any other kind of movie.

The story, based more on the stage play than the novel, is by now a familiar one. A young British lawyer (Dwight Frye in the movie's other great performance) journeys to Transylvania to arrange Count Dracula's sea journey to London. Once there, Dracula begins to prey on beautiful young women, first Lucy Weston then Mina Harker—famously conflating sex, seduction, virginity and horror, soon to become staples of the genre—until that old vampire hunter Professor von Helsing arrives and divines Dracula's true nature.

The movie was a big box office hit upon its release in February 1931 and continues to enjoy acclaim today. Just last month, the London Telegraph included Dracula on its list of the twenty-five best book to film adaptations in movie history. The American Film Institute chose Lugosi's Dracula #33 on its list of the fifty greatest villains, ranked the movie #85 on its list of the 100 top thrillers and voted the line "Listen to them. Children of the night. What music they make." one of the top 100 movie quotes of all time. In 2000, the Library of Congress selected Dracula for the National Film Registry.

Lugosi himself didn't fare as well. Although he continued to work right up until his death, even appearing posthumously in Ed Wood's camp classic Plan 9 From Outer Space, most of his roles after the early 1930s were in campy, low-budget horror films for poverty row studios. He did have a supporting role as a Russian commissar in the 1939 comedy Ninotchka and in the 1945 Val Lewton adaptation of Robert Lewis Stevenson's short story The Body Snatcher with Boris Karloff. Lugosi died of a heart attack in 1956.

Martin Landau won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Lugosi in Tim Burton's comedy Ed Wood.

Will you find Dracula scary? Not unless you under the age of four. I mean, the guy's wearing a tuxedo for crying out loud—how scary can he be? I'm not even sure audiences in 1931 found this movie scary and certainly by the time Bela Lugosi reprised the role for Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein he was playing the part strictly for laughs. But while it's true that one generation's horror becomes the next generation's camp, the appeal of Dracula has always rested not on its shock value but on its ideas and it's there you will find the lasting power of its horror.

You have to know what kind of a movie fan you are. If you're a sit back, arm's crossed "show me something" kind of viewer, you may find Dracula slow and campy. But if you're willing to give yourself up to it, particularly with Halloween just around the corner, I think you will find it fun. At least I did.

Best Picture Of 1929-30: All Quiet On The Western Front (Prod. Carl Laemmle, Jr.)

In the Twentieth Century, no war seemed like a better idea beforehand and a worse idea after than the First World War. Most of Europe, and eventually the United States, marched merrily into what turned out to be a highly-efficient meat grinder destroying for many nations an entire generation of young men, all in the pursuit of what turned out to be not much. I think we Americans don't fully grasp to what degree war ravaged Europe in the Twentieth Century. Britain, for example, during World War I suffered 2.6 million dead and wounded out of a population of 45 million; and France's loss of 6 million dead and wounded out of 40 million would be the equivalent of 45 million casualties for the present-day U.S., losses not only unthinkable today but incomprehensible.

Afterwards, the debate centered not so much on the question of "Should we have fought the war?" as on "How did we get suckered into it?" The level of disillusionment, grief and revulsion was so great, the key European powers sat back while Hitler gobbled up one country after another, and even after the Nazis had overrun most of Europe, invaded Russia and were bombing Britain on a daily basis, America's president, Franklin Roosevelt, had a hard time convincing the nation to even prepare for war, much less fight it. By the time the United States entered the conflict, it was damned near too late—and was, in fact, too late for millions of people.

The effort to make sense of World War I and the political, social and economic upheaval of its aftermath inspired some of the finest art and literature of the Twentieth Century—cubism, surrealism, Picasso, Hemingway, Proust. Possibly the best novel about the war itself was Erich Maria Remarque's best-selling novel, All Quiet On The Western Front, the story of a classroom of German schoolboys on their journey from enthusiastic volunteers to disillusioned veterans to buried corpses.

Carl Laemmle, the legendary head of Universal Studios, quickly bought the rights to the novel. Laemmle had worked as a bookkeeper for twenty years before investing in a string of nickelodeons, eventually founding his own film distribution company, Laemmle Film Service, which after a merger with three other film studios became Universal. He put his son, Carl, Jr., in charge of production and it was "Junior," as he was widely known, who produced All Quiet On The Western Front.

In adapting the novel for the screen, writers George Abbott, Maxwell Anderson and Del Andrews retained the story's focus on the boys who fought and died in the war rather than on the generals and politicians who sent them, a focus that gave the book so much of its power. Director Lewis Milestone made the significant and (given that the studio was investing more than a million dollars in the production, a huge amount for the time, just weeks after the crash of the New York stock market) risky decision to cast young unknowns in the primary roles—and not in a J.J. Abrams, populate-the-bridge-of-the-Enterprise-with-GQ-pretty-boys sort of way either.

This choice, casting schoolboys to play schoolboys, is nearly unique in the history of Hollywood.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Slaughterhouse-Five that the problem with war stories is that instead of being about the children who actually manned the front lines they all pretend wars were fought by grown men, "played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men" which he said made war "look just wonderful, so we'll have lots more of them." And indeed, Frank Sinatra and John Wayne and William Holden and many others were too old, too mature, too poised, too experienced, for the parts they played. Even the superb Saving Private Ryan relied on a cast—Tom Hanks (42), Tom Sizemore (37), Edward Burns (30), Matt Damon (28)—too old for the parts they played.

With the exception of Louis Wolheim, a veteran of fifty movies including the Oscar-winning Two Arabian Knights, the cast of All Quiet On The Western Front is nearly as young as the parts they are playing. When the film went into production in November 1929, Russell Gleason and William Bakewell were twenty-one, Lew Ayres was twenty, Ben Alexander, eighteen. Richard Alexander (no relation) was the old man of the group at twenty-five.

These are boys, raw recruits who soil their underwear during their first patrol, kids who've never been away from home, never had a drink, never so much as kissed a girl. Played by grown men, you might feel regret at their deaths, but you'd never get the same sense of how much is lost, how much of even the most basic aspects of life they've missed out on as when these parts are played by boys. The effect is tragic and poignant even now almost eighty years on.

The other significant choice Milestone made was to focus strictly on the war from the point of view of the unglamourous foot soldiers who fought it. No strategic overviews, no explanations of political objectives, not even a crane shot of the battlefield to let you know where the men are headed. Just a boot's level view (often literally) of the hunger, sleeplessness, fear, filth, lice, loneliness, rats, madness, amputations, shelling and unheroic death that was the daily routine for millions of men. Without a greater sense of the war's purpose, Milestone forced his audience to focus on the only goal that mattered to these boys, their survival.

Milestone strove for an unprecedented level of realism as he directed the action, drilling his actors like soldiers and casting veterans of the German army in supporting roles. The effort especially paid off in an extraordinary sequence late in the film: an attack, counterattack and counterattack repulsed, nearly all of it shown from Lew Ayres' point of view as he shelters in a bomb crater, with, first, French soldiers leaping the hole in one direction, then leaping it in the other as the Germans drive them back, finally one unfortunate French soldier leaping on top of Ayres leading to a desperate struggle with a bayonet. Then during the day and night that follow as Ayres is trapped in no man's land between the two lines, he watches the French soldier's life slowly drain away, the plight of the Frenchman told in sound from his screams, his cries and finally his silence.

The movie concludes with a shot long thought lost but rediscovered in 1998 when the film was finally restored to its original length: the silent, ghostly image of the boys we've come to know marching off to war superimposed over acres of white crosses.

All Quiet On The Western Front premiered in Los Angeles on April 21, 1930, and was a critical and commercial success, grossing $3 million, more than twice its budget. The National Board of Review named it one of the ten best movies of the year, Photoplay magazine awarded Laemmle, Jr. the Medal of Honor for producing the best movie of the year. The movie even won Japan's Kinema Junpo Award for best foreign language film. On November 5, 1930, the Academy awarded it two Oscars, for best picture and best director.

Decades later, the National Film Preservation Board included All Quiet On The Western Front in the National Film Registry. In 1998, the American Film Institute included the film on its list of the 100 best American movies ever made and ten years later ranked it seventh among the list of best "epic" features. Steven Spielberg later acknowledged its influence on Saving Private Ryan. In my opinion, not only was All Quiet On The Western Front the best picture of 1930, it's one of the five best (anti-)war movies ever made and arguably was the best film of the entire Early Sound Era (1927-33).

Lew Ayres was so moved by the experience of making All Quiet On The Western Front that he became a conscientious objector during the Second World War, a controversial stand that led the U.S. military to broaden its definition of conscientious objection. After serving in the Medical Corps in the South Pacific, Ayres returned to Hollywood and was better than before he left. Already a star of the Young Dr. Kildare movies, Ayres went on to receive an Oscar nomination in 1949 for his role in Johnny Belinda. He worked steadily until 1994 and died in 1996 at the age of eighty-eight.

Although Ayres was the only member of the cast to enjoy stardom after the film's successful run, the rest of the cast continued working in small roles, some well into the television age. Pat Collins, who played Lt. Bertinck, fought in both world wars and was a regular in Westerns until his death in 1959. Ben Alexander played Officer Frank Smith on the first television run of Dragnet in the 1950s, and Harold Goodwin, Richard Alexander and William Bakewell made regular appearances on television into the 1970s. Russell Gleason and Owen Davis, Jr., worked in the movies until they were killed in separate accidents, Gleason from a fall in 1945, Davis by drowning in 1949.

Louis Wolheim, the veteran actor who so memorably played Ayres's mentor, Sgt. Kat Katczinsky, died of stomach cancer within a year of the film's premiere.

For producer Carl Laemmle, Jr., All Quiet On The Western Front ushered in an era of big hits for Universal Pictures including Dracula, Waterloo Bridge (1931), Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, Bride Of Frankenstein and Show Boat. Unfortunately, Junior routinely spent more on his productions than they ever hoped to recoup at the box office and despite the lasting appeal of his films, Universal was virtually bankrupt by the mid-Thirties. In 1936, Universal's New York backers forced the Carl Laemmle and his son into retirement. Until his death in 1939, the elder Laemmle, himself a German Jewish immigrant, provided the financial support and political influence to bring hundreds of Jews from Nazi Germany to the United States. Carl, Jr. died forty years to the day after his father. Neither man ever again produced another picture.

Postscript: Arthur Gardner and Glen Boles, who had small, uncredited parts as students, are the only cast members still living as of this posting. Gardner, who went on to produce two long-running television series, The Rifleman and The Big Valley, later recounted his experiences working on All Quiet On The Western Front. "[Carl Laemmle] brought a man over from Germany who trained all of us in German military drills for two weeks on the back lot. That man was an early Nazi. I was a very happy-go-lucky kid, had a sense of humor which thank God I still have, and played practical jokes. One day, I played one that he didn't appreciate and he lost his temper, and said, 'Goldberg, you goddamn Jew, I warned you not to do that—you're fired.' The man was an idiot. Lewis Milestone, the director, was Jewish. George Cukor, the dialogue director, was Jewish. They called him up and fired him on the spot and put me back on the picture. But from then on, I was not quite so playful."

Hollywood Couples: Irving Thalberg And Norma Shearer

The word most often associated with MGM producer Irving Thalberg is "legendary," so much so that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences named an award after him to recognize "[c]reative producers, whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production."

Born in New York City to German immigrants, Thalberg contracted rheumatic fever as a boy and suffered from a weak heart for the remained of his life. Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal Studios, hired Thalberg right out of high school and by the age of twenty-one, Thalberg was producing movies. Thalberg later joined Louis B. Mayer Productions, which after mergers with Metro Pictures and Goldwyn Pictures became MGM, for years the dominant studio in Hollywood.

Thalberg preferred to remain uncredited which is why you don't see his name on such Katie winners as Greed, The Big Parade, Flesh and the Devil, The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg, The Crowd, Laugh, Clown, Laugh and Anna Christie, but he was widely recognized as the best producer in Hollywood and was responsible for every high-profile picture to come out of MGM between 1924 and 1933. He also rescued the Marx Brothers from oblivion after Paramount dropped their contract and (again, without credit) produced A Night at the Opera, arguably the best Marx Brothers movie ever (Katie-Bar-The-Door certainly thinks so; I'm a Duck Soup man, myself).

Thalberg married actress Norma Shearer in 1927 after a two year courtship conducted mostly by Thalberg's secretary over the telephone. Joan Crawford, Shearer's chief rival at MGM and history's primary source of anti-Norma quotes, was mystified at the attraction. "I don’t get it. She’s cross-eyed, knock-kneed, and she can’t act worth a damn. What does he see in her?" Writer Anita Loos opined, "Norma was intent on marrying the boss and Irving, preoccupied with his work, was relieved to let her make up his mind."

Or maybe they just fell in love. It happens.

If Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford were Holly- wood's number one power couple during the Silent Era, the "Boy Genius" and "The Queen of MGM," as Thalberg and Shearer were known, were the Power Couple of the Early Sound Era. They had two children together, Irving Jr. and Katherine.

After Thalberg suffered a heart attack in 1932, Mayer replaced him as head of MGM production with rising stars David O. Selznick and Walter Wanger, reducing Thalberg to a unit producer. Despite the demotion, motivated many have said by Mayer's jealousy, Thalberg continued to produce MGM's best movies including Grand Hotel, Mutiny on the Bounty, Camille and The Good Earth.

Always in poor health, Thalberg died suddenly in 1936 of pneumonia. He was thirty-seven years old.

Some say Shearer wanted to retire immediately after Thalberg's death but MGM pressured her to sign a six-picture deal to cash in on her popularity. Others suggest Shearer signed the deal after discovering her share of Thalberg's estate was a mere $1 million, no more than an 1/8th of what she had initially expected to receive. In any event, she made two of her best remembered pictures, Marie Antoinette and The Women, and then retired from the screen permanently in 1942.

Shortly thereafter, Shearer remarried, to a ski instructor twelve years her junior named Martin Arrouge, and remained married to him until her death in 1983. From all accounts, Arrouge was a pretty accommodating guy and it was a happy marriage.

In later years, he even let her call him "Irving."

Best Director Of 1929-30: Lewis Milestone (All Quiet On The Western Front)

For a guy who won two Oscars and directed one of the ten best war movies ever made, you don't hear much about Lewis Milestone anymore. He never shows up on the list of history's greatest directors, his movies aren't the subject of film festivals and retrospectives.

Yet when it came time to hand out the Katie for best director of 1929-30, I happily passed over many better-known names—Josef von Sternberg, King Vidor, Ernst Lubitsch, G.W. Pabst, F.W. Murnau—and went right for Lewis Milestone. By whatever standard you measure a director's worth, whether as an artist, an acting coach, a problem solver or a resource manager, this one time Milestone surpassed them all and in doing so, earned a seat at the table of his era's best directors.

As I mentioned in my essay about this year's best screenplay, All Quiet On The Western Front was one of the biggest novels of the late 1920s, selling 2.5 million copies in just eighteen months, and despite the gamble inherent in filming a big budget war picture right after the crash of the stock market, the head of Universal Pictures, Carl Laemmle, quickly snapped up the rights to the novel and slated it for production.

With only eight feature-length movies under his belt when he was tapped to direct, the relatively inexperienced Milestone wouldn't have seemed to be the obvious choice to helm such a prestige picture with the economic future of the studio on the line. But Milestone (born in Russia in 1895 as Lev Milstein) had already proven himself an adept storyteller with a style characterized by gritty realism and a fluid camera, and at the first Academy Award ceremony, he had taken home the only Oscar ever awarded for comedy direction, a war movie to boot, Two Arabian Knights, a lighthearted romp about two American soldiers captured by the Germans during World War I only to escape and wind up rescuing an Arabian princess (Mary Astor).

Despite its radically different tone, Two Arabian Knights was something of a dry run for Milestone, mixing battle scenes and daring escapes with realistic portrayals of the soldier's life. It even starred Louis Wolheim who provided such strong support in All Quiet On The Western Front.

One of the most significant choices Milestone made in directing All Quiet On The Western Front was the decision never to provide the audience with a strategic overview of the war, not just in terms of the story, which remains tightly focused on a group of young boys who have volunteered for war straight from their classroom, but in terms of his camera as well. There are no shots of maps, no soaring tours over the battlefield to give you a sense of where the warring armies are in relation to each other, no visual signals about their tactical or strategic aims.

At the same time, however, while Milestone is effective at making you feel the confusion of war, he himself is never confused about what he's trying to show you—and if you've seen some recent movies, where directors hide the limitations of both the action and their imaginations with a rapid blur of edits, you understand there's a big difference between the two.

A good example of this comes during the first great battle sequence, one the greatest cinematic achievements up to its time. The camera sweeps low to the ground, almost always at the eye level of the men in the trenches. Cinematographer Arthur Edeson—as anonymous these days as Milestone despite also working on Casablanca—reminds you once again of the power of live action over cartoonish computer-generated images, particularly with the shot of a machine gun panning down a line of charging soldiers, then the reverse shot of the charging soldiers falling as the camera sweeps past, human bodies falling in the unpredictable ways an animated image, unbound by gravity, cannot replicate.

The sequence includes an impressive artillery barrage, with real explosions running down the line, throwing fine particles of dirt and the dead into the air, and you feel an adrenaline rush as an overwhelming enemy charges. From the point of view of the soldier, it's all churning legs and rifles, bayonets suddenly at one another's throats as the line is breached and the men engage in hand-to-hand combat, and then as the battle rages, men collapse in exhaustion, gasping for breath, their faces grimy with sweat, blood, wincing in pain, Milestone showing you something you don't often see in a war film, the real sense of physical exertion, the weariness and thirst, just taking the time in the middle of battle to show a man knock the throat off a bottle of wine for a badly needed drink.

One other point I want to make, since we're now talking about the Early Sound Era, is that Milestone didn't let the primitive sound recording technology hobble him. Instead, he used the relatively new technology to ramp up his audience's emotional response—you hear the bombs constantly exploding, you hear men gasping for breath, and when during one of the greatest set pieces of this or any other movie, a French soldier passes through the various stages of suffering on the way to death, ultimately culminating in a terrible silence, Milestone largely conveys the scene with sound.

And earlier, in a set piece that acts as a mirror to the French soldier's death, Milestone lets a quiet moment when the young German soldier played by Lew Ayres sleeps with a French girl unspool entirely offscreen, with just the shadow of a bedpost on a wall and two voices unable to communicate with words and yet saying everything that needs to be said.

All Quiet On The Western Front premiered in April 1930 to immediately critical acclaim and box office success and that November, Milestone won the second Oscar of his career. The movie has lost none of its power over the years and remains one of the best war movies ever made.

Today, Lewis Milestone is largely forgotten by all but hardcore film buffs. Although he won two Academy Awards, was nominated for a third and made forty-eight movies over four decades—including, in addition to his two Oscar winners, The Front Page, Of Mice And Men, The Strange Love Of Martha Ivers and The Red Pony—most of his career after All Quiet On The Western Front lacked focus. He became head of production at United Artists in 1932, decamped for Columbia and a bigger paycheck in 1934, then moved on to Paramount in 1935, directing few movies along the way. Accused after the war of being a Communist sympathizer, in November 1946 he took the Fifth in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee and while he was not blacklisted, his choice of projects was limited.

After directing the original Ocean's Eleven with the Rat Pack in 1960 and the Marlon Brando remake of Mutiny On The Bounty two years later, Milestone retired and died in 1980 at the age of eighty-five.

Trivia: The famous last shot of the hand reaching for the butterfly is not in the book and was conceived in the editing room after the cast had been released. The hand in the close-up is Milestone's own.