August 1, 1930-to-July 31, 1931, was one of those movie years where the list of the Academy's nominees and winners would give you a completely distorted idea of what was actually going on in movie history.
1931 was a pivotal year. James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and Clark Gable all went from bit players to stars within the space of twelve months and in so doing, they gave the cinema a distinctly American feel for the first time. Instead of actors aping polished stage performers with British or faux-British accents, audiences heard the inflections and rhythms of urban wise guys like Cagney and Gable, or in the case of Robinson — who was born in Romania and raised in New York's Lower East Side — the voice of the American immigrant experience.
Gangster pictures starring Cagney and Robinson — The Public Enemy and Little Caesar, respectively — proved to be big, if controversial, hits with both critics and audiences. Censors were not so thrilled, however, contending that the films (and Howard Hawks's Scarface the following year) glamorized crime.
Hollywood, as usual, proved to be of two minds on the subject, happy to bank the money that was rolling in while paying lip service at Oscar time to the notion that gangster pictures were bad for us.
It was the same story with Universal's cycle of great horror pictures, which began in 1931 with Dracula, and continued in November of that year (too late for an Oscar nomination) with Frankenstein. Their stars, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, would dominate the genre and box office for years to come without either ever receiving any recognition from the Academy.
There was also the groundbreaking western The Big Trail, starring an impossibly young John Wayne and featuring the first widescreen movie in history.
And, of course, Groucho Marx gave us what was perhaps the most famous monologue of his career, confessing to audiences, "One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know."
If, however, you look at the list of winners and nominees from the Academy Award ceremony held on November 10, 1931, you won't see any of these films or performers:
Picture: Cimarron
Actor: Lionel Barrymore (A Free Soul)
Actress: Marie Dressler (Min and Bill)
Director: Norman Taurog (Skippy)
Admittedly, although the Academy failed to recognize the revolution in their midst, Cimarron makes sense in the context of the times — it was based on a best-selling novel, critics loved it, and helped sell the notion that movies were high art. Not to mention the opening sequence is spectacular.
As for Marie Dressler and Lionel Barrymore, they were big stars and turned in good performances in solid films.
The only truly inexplicable award went to Norman Taurog for his direction of the comedy Skippy.
Skippy is pleasant enough, with a fine performance from child star Jackie Cooper, but in terms of what went on in the director's chair, it isn't much unless you count Taurog's threat to shoot Cooper's dog if the kid didn't cry on cue (he cried buckets and earned an Oscar nomination).
Nothing compared to the accomplishments of Charlie Chaplin and René Clair, who were eligible for the award, or Josef von Sternberg and Lewis Milestone, who were actually nominated.
Not to mention Taurog might be the worst director to ever win the award — aside from nabbing the Oscar itself, Taurog is mostly remembered now for directing nine Elvis Presley movies (and not the good ones either).
Well, okay, he directed Boys Town, I'll give him that. But that hardly makes up for Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine.
Anyway, these are my picks:
1930-31 PICTURE (Drama) winner:The Public Enemy (prod. Darryl F. Zanuck) nominees:The Big Trail (prod. Winfield R. Sheehan); The Dawn Patrol (prod. Robert North); Dracula (prod. Tod Browning and Carl Laemmle, Jr.); Morocco (prod. Hector Turnbull)
PICTURE (Comedy/Musical) winner:City Lights (prod. Charles Chaplin) nominees:Animal Crackers (prod. Adolph Zukor); Bimbo's Initiation (prod. Max Fleischer); The Front Page (prod. Lewis Milestone); Min And Bill (prod. George W. Hill)
PICTURE (Foreign Language) winner:M (prod. Seymour Nebenzal) nominees:L'Âge d'Or (prod. Le Vicomte de Noailles); Le Million (prod. Frank Clifford); Prix de Beauté (prod. Romain Pinès); The Threepenny Opera (prod. Seymour Nebenzal)
ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical) winner:Marie Dressler (Min And Bill) nominees: Virginia Cherrill (City Lights); Ina Claire (The Royal Family Of Broadway); Lya Lys (L'Âge d'Or); Jeanette MacDonald (Monte Carlo)
DIRECTOR (Drama) winner:Fritz Lang (M) nominees: Tod Browning (Dracula); Howard Hawks (The Dawn Patrol and The Criminal Code); Josef von Sternberg (Morocco); Raoul Walsh (The Big Trail); William A. Wellman (The Public Enemy)
DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner: Charles Chaplin (City Lights) nominees: Luis Buñuel (L'Âge d'Or); René Clair (Le Million); Lewis Milestone (The Front Page); G.W. Pabst (The Threepenny Opera)
SUPPORTING ACTOR (Drama) winner:Peter Lorre (M) nominees: Dwight Frye (Dracula); Clark Gable (A Free Soul); Fredric March (The Barkleys of Broadway)
SUPPORTING ACTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner: Harry Myers (City Lights) nominees: Adolphe Menjou (The Front Page)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical) winner: Lotte Lenya (The Threepenny Opera) nominees: Mae Clarke (The Front Page); Margaret Dumont (Animal Crackers); Marjorie Rambeau (Min And Bill)
SPECIAL AWARDS
René Clair (Le Million) (Special Achievement In The Use Of Sound); "Makin' Whoopee" (Whoopee!) (Best Song); Fritz Arno Wagner (M) (Cinematography)
An empty exercise in style, Baby Driver is a compilation of every heist movie cliche — the big boss, the last job, the loose cannon, the dream girl — set to a 4-star soundtrack.
My good friend Mister Muleboy and I met at the AFI-Silver last night to see the classic 1974 heist flick, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, part of film historian Eddie Muller's annual Noir City DC film series. By the Czar of Noir's own admission, Pelham isn't really noir, but this year's focus is on heist films and Pelham is one of that genre's finest examples — it'd be a crime to leave it out.
If you're not familiar with the story, four heavily-armed men hijack a New York City subway train and hold its passengers hostage; their demands: the city must deliver $1 million in cash within the hour or they start shooting the hostages.
Nobody can quite believe someone would hijack a subway train —
"You know me, I'll believe anything."
"A train has been hijacked."
"I don't believe it."
— but the machine-gun wielding hijackers, led by Robert Shaw's Mr. Blue, are serious. Deadly serious.
We pick up the caper already in progress with four men perfectly timing their boarding of a subway train at four different stops with nothing but David Shire's propulsive industrial-jazz score to clue us into the unfolding drama. And then Robert Shaw quietly shoves a pistol in the motorman's face and announces he's taking his train.
Negotiations ensue. On the other end of the tense back-and-forth is Walter Matthau as the deceptively sluggish and slovenly transit police lieutenant Zachary Garber. He's sleepy-eyed, fashion-challenged, politically incorrect and bored stiff with the public relations aspects of his job.
But as the drama unfolds and the stakes are raised higher and higher, he reveals himself to be a precise, pacing, fidgeting coiled spring — a true professional, a perfect New York match for Shaw's dapper English mercenary.
I won't spoil the ending for you other than to say that the last scene is completely surprising, utterly perfect and absolutely fearless in its quiet simplicity. I can't imagine a Hollywood studio now having the guts and audacity to pull it off.
In some recent reviews (here and here), I've been struck by how little backstory and context you can get away with and still have a coherent movie with three-dimensional characters — Hemingway's iceberg principle played out not on the page but on the screen.
The screenplay by Peter Stone (Charade) is based on a novel by John Godey, but while the novel is larded with typical backstories for the villians and their hostages, and cliched interior monologues all around, Stone wisely trusts good casting to flesh out the novel's characterizations.
Pelham reminded me again how a great actor wears his backstory on his face and tells it in his voice, his walk, his gestures or even in his silences.
With a minimum of exposition, Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam (as the sneezy, wheezy Mr. Green) and Hector Elizondo (as the psychotic Mr. Grey) fully inhabit their characters, leaving no doubt about who what and why they are, and giving you a pretty good guess how they got there and where they're going.
Likewise, with the same lack of fuss, director Joseph Sargent tells the story of the city itself. Filmed in Manhattan, Pelham is down there in the gutters with the garbage at a time when a great city had lost faith in itself.
A scene with Tony Roberts as the deputy mayor and Lee Wallace as an Ed Koch-style mayor (four years before Koch actually held that office) tells you everything you need to know about the dire state of the local government. The comic tensions between the terrifically cartoonishly Tom Pedi as the brash loudmouth "Fat Caz" Dolowicz and Beatrice Winde as the new African-American female hire covers changing social mores. And the subway car full of characters identified in the credits only as The Salesman, The Hooker, The Spanish Woman, etc. speaks to the city's changing demographics.
You can practically taste the grime.
But a movie that's nothing more than a slice of the current reality isn't much of a movie. Pelham is also one of the all-time great heist films, intricate in its planning, taut in its execution. There's a lot of humor and a lot of talk but there's never a slack moment, never a word or gesture wasted. You're wonderfully on edge from beginning to end.
A classic.
Four stars (out of four).
End Notes:
1) The four hijackers have code names based on colors: Mr. Blue, Mr. Green, Mr. Brown and Mr. Grey. Quentin Tarantino recycled the idea for 1992's classic Reservoir Dogs.
2) Peter Stone's most important contribution to the film's adaptation was to consolidate multiple police detectives into the single character of Matthau's Lt. Garber, creating the perfect counterweight to Shaw's Mr. Blue.
3) Before the movie, I got to meet film historian Eddie Muller, author and host of TCM's Noir Alley, and whom the great James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential) has dubbed "The Czar of Noir." I had just bought his book Gun Crazy about the making of the classic 1950 movie when I turned around and there he was sitting alone at a café table. I asked him if he'd be signing books after the show and he said, heck, he'd sign it right now! borrowed my blood red ink pen and whipped off an amusing little note along with his signature — one of the few times I've met a fellow writer and walked away feeling like anything other than a witless hillbilly dilettante. Thanks, Mr. Muller!
One of my favorite of the early silent directors, Louis Feuillade, made a big splash in France with Fantômas, five interlinked feature films (each running between fifty and ninety minutes) based on a series of novels about the eponymous master criminal, one of film history's first anti-heroes. Feuillade alone of the great early directors anticipated the chief maladies of the coming century—violence, anxiety, paranoia, alienation—and even this century's scourge, terrorism.
His film serials Les Vampires, Judex and Tih Minh directly influenced filmmakers as diverse as Luis Buñuel, Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock. Throw in the fact that Feuillade's films are extraordinarily entertaining—not just as film history but in a 21st century sense—and he winds up, along with Charlie Chaplin, as my favorite director of the first three decades of film history (1888-1918).
It's no wonder the surrealists loved Feuillade—his Paris is simultaneously whimsical and deadly, a place where you can lean out a second-story window and wind up with a lasso around your neck, where every cupboard hides a body, every hatbox a head, and your neighbor's loft conceals a cannon. There's no sense of safety—or sanity—anywhere. People are murdered on trains, in cafes, and even in their own beds. Perhaps that's why I, as a 21st century movie fan, find Feuillade's work so engaging—he anticipated the anxieties that came to define the 20th century and continue to plague us to this day: violence, paranoia, alienation, conspiracy, terrorism.
It also has a wonderfully nutty quality, the sense that anything could happen and often does.
"Feuillade's cinema," said Alain Resnais, "is very close to dreams—therefore it's perhaps the most realistic."
One of my favorite of the early silent directors, Louis Feuillade, made a big splash in France with Fantômas, five interlinked feature films (each running between fifty and ninety minutes) based on a series of novels about the eponymous master criminal, one of film history's first anti-heroes. Feuillade alone of the great early directors anticipated the chief maladies of the coming century—violence, anxiety, paranoia, alienation—and even this century's scourge, terrorism. His film serials Fantômas, Les Vampires and Judex directly influenced filmmakers as diverse as Luis Buñuel, Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock. Throw in the fact that Feuillade's films are extraordinarily entertaining—not just as film history but in a 21st century sense—and he winds up, along with Charlie Chaplin, as my favorite director of the first three decades of film history (1888-1918).
ACTOR winner: Roscoe Arbuckle (The Keystone Comedies) nomiees: René Navarre (Fantômas); Ford Sterling (The Keystone Comedies); Paul Wegener (Der Student von Prag)
ACTRESS winner:Hilda Borgström (Ingeborg Holm) nominees: Lillian Gish (The Mothering Heart); Mabel Normand (The Keystone Comedies)
PICTURE winner:Intolerance (prod. D.W Griffith) nominees: The Chaplin Mutuals (prod. Charles Chaplin); Hell's Hinges (prod. Thomas H. Ince); Judex (prod. Société des Etablissements L. Gaumont) Must-See Movies:Intolerance Recommended Films:Behind The Screen; The Count; The Fireman; The Floorwalker; The Habit of Happiness; Hell's Hinges; Judex; The Matrimaniac; One A.M.; The Pawnshop; Police; The Rink; The Waiter's Ball Of Interest:Civilization; Flirting With Fate; Hævnens nat a.k.a. Blind Justice; His Picture in the Papers; Hoodoo Ann; Joan the Woman; The Mystery of the Leaping Fish;Reggie Mixes In;Snow White; The Social Secretary; Sold For Marriage; 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea; Where Are My Children?
ACTOR winner: William S. Hart (Hell's Hinges) nominees: Charles Chaplin (The Chaplin Mutuals); Douglas Fairbanks (The Fine Arts Film Company Comedies); Tyrone Power, Sr. (Where Are My Children?)
ACTRESS winner: Mae Marsh (Hoodoo Ann and Intolerance) nominees: Marguerite Clark (Snow White); Lillian Gish (Sold For Marriage); Norma Talmadge (Going Straight and The Social Secretary)
DIRECTOR winner: D.W. Griffith (Intolerance) nominees: Charles Chaplin (The Chaplin Mutuals); Louis Feuillade (Judex)
SUPPORTING ACTOR: winner: Eugene Pallette (The Children In The House and Going Straight) nominees: George Fawcett (The Habit Of Happiness); Theodore Roberts (Joan The Woman); Fred Warren (The Matrimaniac)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS winner: Constance Talmadge (Intolerance) nominees: Dorothy G. Cumming (Snow White); Bessie Love (Reggie Mixes In); Musidora (Judex)
SCREENPLAY winner: Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley, from a story by L. Payton and F. Hall (Where Are My Children?) nominees: Charles Chaplin (The Chaplin Mutuals); D.W. Griffith (scenario); Anita Loos (titles) (Intolerance)
SPECIAL AWARDS Eugene Gaudio, George M. Williamson and J. Ernest Williamson (20,000 Leagues Under The Sea) (Cinematography); D.W. Griffith , James Smith and Rose Smith (Intolerance) (Film Editing); Walter L. Hall (Intolerance) (Art Direction-Set Design)
Coming to terms with D.W. Griffith is like coming to terms with life itself—you either demand perfection of everyone you meet and wind up alone, or you accept that everyone (including yourself) is deeply flawed and you enjoy what you can.
As I wrote in my essay about the films of 1915, Griffith's The Birth of a Nation is so profoundly offensive to a modern audience (and to an audience of 1915, for that matter) that it overshadows everything else the director accomplished, and some of my readers have admitted that they've given the entirety of Griffith's output a miss as a result. And while that's an understandable reaction—life is short and we'll never have time to do all we'd like, much less what we don't like—Griffith made at least two films, Broken Blossoms and my choice for the best picture of 1916, Intolerance, that are not only indispensable for a student of film history, but also are among the best, most entertaining movies of the silent era.
In case you know nothing about it, Intolerance weaves four separate story lines—the life of Christ, the fall of Babylon, the massacre of the Huguenots, and a modern-day story about the victims of a overreaching reform movement—into a three-plus hour spectacle that might be the most ambitious movie ever made. Accounts vary as to how much of his personal fortune Griffith poured into the production—some say as much as $2 million, the most for any film before Gone With The Wind—but there's no question that this was the most lavish production of the silent era.
Or to put it another way, to show the sack of Babylon, Griffith basically built a full-scale replica of the ancient city on a Hollywood backlot and then laid siege to it.
"Imagine," wrote Daniel Eagan in America's Film Legacy, "how audiences in [1916] must have reacted to the sight of walls and battlements four and five stories high, to courtyards set on three different levels and filled with hundreds of costumed extras, to visuals so expensive it's like they were filmed on and made out of gold."
The film opens with the story of a modern-day reform movement determined to improve the spiritual life of the working class if it kills them. Fueled by jealousy and financed by an autocratic mill owner, the reformers crush the life out of their would-be beneficiaries, particularly "the Dear One" (played so memorably by Mae Marsh), the embodiment of youthful joy and innocence. Only a crabbed, self-righteous hypocrite could find fault with someone so pure; that the reform movement's machinations lead to Dear One's fall is a testament to its destructive purposes.
To underscore the point, Griffith cuts to a scene from the life of Christ, that of a Pharisee praying in public so that others might better observe his piety. "Oh Lord, I thank thee that I am better than other men."
The film's third storyline focuses on the political intrigue in the court of King Charles IX that led to the massacre of Protestants in Paris in the late sixteenth century, while the fourth and final story, about the jealousy between rival religious factions that led to the sack of Babylon, rounds out Griffith's theme, a rousing condemnation of the humorless, meddling, Puritanical impulses that characterize so much of America's reformist zeal on both ends of the political spectrum. Watching it, I thought it was a pity that Griffith never directed a screen version of Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry.
Structurally, Intolerance is as audacious as anything ever attempted on film—four simultaneous stories linked only by a common theme and the generally rising action—with the editing style growing more complex as the action in each story reaches its climax. The film's last half hour, with quick cross-cut shots between a marauding army, a racing car, a speeding train, the slaughter of the Huguenots and the crucifixion of Christ, has been described as a fugue, a concept borrowed from music where two or more voices entering successively and sung in either imitation or counterpoint to build on a common theme.
Griffith's visual fugue later inspired Sergei Eisenstein and other Russian directors to develop the montage—quick shots cut rapidly together to condense several events or a lengthy period of time into a single short sequence.
Questions have persisted almost from the beginning as to Griffith's motives in making Intolerance. For years, historians assumed Intolerance was his apology for the racism of The Birth of a Nation, but more recently, biographers have suggested Griffith was lashing out at those who were looking for an apology. Personally, after watching it in the context of the times, Intolerance looks like the act of a supremely self-confident artist determined to top both himself and his chief competition, Cecil B. DeMille and Thomas H. Ince, who that year directed ambitious historical epics of their own, Joan the Woman and Civilization, respectively.
Whatever his motivations, Griffith succeeded brilliantly.
Which is not to say that all four of Griffith's stories are created equal. Christ's life, for example, gets the least amount of screen time, presumably because Griffith assumed his audience knew the story so well, he needed only reference a particular well-know incident to underscore a point he wanted to make in one of the other story lines.
Too, the story of Protestant-Catholic infighting in sixteenth century France isn't all that interesting even if it does result in a satisfyingly bloody slaughter by the film's end. Without a central figure as compelling as the Dear One or Babylon's Mountain Girl (Constance Talmadge), the court intrigue becomes a bit opaque, delving too deeply into the minutiae of history without giving us someone lovable to root for.
But when it focuses on the modern and Babylo- nian stories, the film soars. It's telling that in the role of the Dear One, Griffith cast Mae Marsh from his stable of performers instead of his usual go-to girl, Lillian Gish. For truly tragic suffering—and for an ideal of Victorian womanhood that existed only in Griffith's head—no one was better than Gish. But Marsh, with her kewpie doll face, bow-tie mouth and round, startled eyes, was better suited for a role that required joy, passion and an almost childlike innocence. Along with her work in Judith of Bethulia, The Birth of a Nation and Hoodoo Ann, this represents Marsh at the peak of her career.
After Intolerance, Marsh left Griffith's studio for Samuel Goldwyn's where the pay was better—$2500 a week instead of $35—but to Marsh's chagrin, the roles weren't nearly as good. Her career went into a gradual decline and she wound up playing bit parts in sound pictures, mostly in John Ford films such as My Darling Clementine and The Quiet Man. Marsh made 198 films during her career, the last in 1964.
She was married to the same man for fifty years, had three children and passed away at the age of seventy-three.
The film's most unforgettable performance—and for me, the best in any film in 1916—came from Marsh's co-star, Constance Talmadge. In the Babylonian sequence of Intolerance, she plays "the Mountain Girl," a pretty, perky, petulant teenage beauty who finds herself fighting against a palace conspiracy that threatens to topple the kingdom. Wide-eyed and gangly-limbed, Talmadge is as hyperactive as a puppy amped up on kibble and amphetamines, windmilling her way across the screen, and you can't take your eyes off her. Neither could audiences in 1916 and she quickly became a star.
"[I]t's a mark of her skill," Eagan wrote, "that she stands out in a segment filled with orgies, sacrifices, semi-nudity, wild animals, and wholesale destruction."
Working primarily in comedies, Talmadge would excel throughout the silent era—look for her in The Matrimaniac, the best of the dozen films Douglas Fairbanks made in 1916, a wild, stunt-filled romantic comedy that no doubt later served as a blueprint for the get-me-to-the-wedding-on-time story lines of Harold Lloyd's Girl Shy and For Heaven's Sake—then retired with the advent of sound, famously telling her sister Norma, "Quit pressing your luck, baby. The critics can't knock those trust funds Mama set up for us."
Among actors, William S. Hart gave the best performance of his career in the National Film Registry western, Hell's Hinges. The father of the taciturn Western hero—or more accurately, antihero—Hart came to movies late, at the age of forty-nine, but he quickly established himself as the first movie cowboy superstar. As different from his contemporary Tom Mix as John Wayne was from Roy Rogers, Hart preferred playing morally-ambiguous characters—violent men who find a measure of redemption—to the white-hatted good guys who came to dominate the genre.
Hart's close-set eyes glowered from a hollow, weather-beaten face that looked like it had been chiseled out of granite, a face "as rugged as the plains," wrote Jen at Silent Stanzas. Because he had been a real cowboy before he became an actor, there's an authenticity in the way he carried himself, with a rolling gait, simultaneously loose-limbed and stiff-legged, and you can see shades of Hart in the later work of John Wayne and Gary Cooper, who no doubt saw his films.
Hell's Hinges tells the story of Blaze Tracy, a roughneck gunslinger in a roughneck western hamlet, who falls for a preacher's sister and winds up turning on his gang. It sounds like the makings of the hokiest sort of B-western, but thanks to Hart's quiet, intense performance, the drama plays out on an intimate scale, and even when he settles down, it's not without the sense that he knows his best days are behind him.
Audiences gradually tired of Hart, who retired in 1925 at the age of sixty, but mark Hell's Hinges down as the forerunner of such "serious" westerns as The Searchers, Bend of the River and the Man With No Name trilogy, and Hart himself as the first in a line of classic western heroes that includes Wayne, Cooper and Clint Eastwood.
In preparation for this essay, I tracked down and watched more than forty films, and saw a number of great movies and performances, but the most startling revelation of the year came in form of Eugene Pallette.
You remember Eugene Pallette, don't you? During Hollywood's Golden Age, he was one of that army of supporting actors whose name you might not recognize but whose face—in Pallette's case, a fat round face with wobbly jowls—you never forget. Coupled with his squat, round body and bullfrog voice, he's one of the most recognizable supporting actors of his era, and most of us remember him as the long-suffering father in My Man Godfrey, as Friar Tuck in The Adventures of Robin Hood and as the fat-bellied pol who can't get out of a phone booth in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington.
But it turns out Pallette was young once, and thin, too. With silent films concealing his trademark voice, Pallette wasn't limited to comic relief and starting in 1913, he appeared in over 130 silent films including such classics as Intolerance, The Birth of a Nation, The Three Musketeers and The Ten Commandments.
In 1916, he appeared in seven movies, but in giving him the award for best supporting actor, I chose two of them, Going Straight and The Children in the House, to give you a sense of his range.
In the former, where he plays a career criminal who threatens Norma Talmadge with her secret past, Pallette is the nastiest of thugs, guilty of attempted rape, murder, theft, blackmail, Faganism—you name it. His introduction is startling: a close up as he spits tobacco juice on the sidewalk, and not nice, clean movie spit either, but a flowing stream of foul, brown saliva that he must have been saving up between takes. You get a nice look at his eyes in that same scene, glowering and menacing under a Neanderthal brow.
Contrast that with The Children in the House where you first see him in a tuxedo, not handsome but elegant, a prototypical noir antihero adulterously involved with a beautiful dancer who ropes him into a bank robbery with her rapacious demands. Pallette once again shows a flair for naturalistic gestures—stifling a yawn, for example—but also demonstrates a mastery of the artificial ones that enabled him in film after film to sketch a character quickly. Watching him convey a man's entire life just by the way he enters a room, I was reminded again that while the Method gave us some of the best acting in movie history, we also lost something when actors abandoned studied artifice.
Finally, I want to mention Lois Weber, who wrote and directed one of the year's most controversial films—then and now—Where Are My Children? As you may know, Weber was the first American woman to find real success as a director, and I've briefly written about her before, here, where I also showed you what is probably the best work of her career, the short Suspense.
Perhaps because she began her career as a street-corner evangelist before becoming an actress then writer-director, Weber's feature films tended to tackle the social issues of the day and Where Are My Children? is no exception. This is the story of, as one reviewer put it, a "curiously infertile" woman whose husband is a crusading district attorney bent on prosecuting back alley abortion doctors—maybe you can see where this is going.
Weber's film advocates birth control as a means of avoiding abortion, which she abhors, positions which still manage to offend politically-active film fans of both the right and left. She also seems to support the notion that birth control is an effective means of combating poverty, which to some smacks of eugenics, which pretty much offends everybody.
Still, as Daniel Eagan wrote, "The film is remarkably forthright: it would take many decades before movies would be this open again about abortion. Weber didn't concentrate on salacious details, but on the human costs of betrayed relationships, something that many modern-day filmmakers still find uncomfortable."
Effectively marketing the controversy surrounding the film's subject matter, Where Are My Children? was a big hit for Carl Laemmle's Universal Studios. In 1993, the Library of Congress selected Where Are My Children? for preservation in the National Film Registry.
Weber continued to direct movies into the 1920s, but her style didn't adapt to changing tastes and her film company eventually failed. Following a divorce from her abusive husband, co-writer Phillips Smalley, Weber suffered a nervous breakdown and her career ground to a halt. Working mostly as an uncredited script doctor for Universal, Weber directed only one talkie and died penniless in 1939. She was sixty years old.
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
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