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)
She had a face like a bulldog, with a lantern jaw, bulbous nose, and heavy bags under deep-set eyes. Her pear-shaped body sagged, her voice growled, and the characters she played often wore their clothes as if a field of potatoes crawled into a burlap sack and was too tired to climb out again.
But she was a gifted actress — Buster Keaton often called her "the greatest character comedienne I ever saw" — and for a brief time, from 1931 until her death in 1934, Marie Dressler was the most popular actress in America.
Dressler got her start as part of Mack Sennett's stable of comic actors that included Charlie Chaplin, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, Gloria Swanson and the Keystone Kops.
In 1914, she starred in history's first feature-length comedy, Tillie's Punctured Romance, which also starred Chaplin in one of his earliest roles.
By the end of World War I, though, Dressler had pretty much disappeared from the movies.
Reduced to working as a maid, Dressler later admitted she found the fall from stardom so devastating, she seriously considered suicide.
But back when she was still a star, Dressler had befriended a young, struggling writer from San Francisco named Frances Marion, and when their roles were reversed and Marion was the top writer in Hollywood and Dressler was out of pictures altogether, Marion remembered her old friend and began including parts for her in various comedies.
When Marion was adapting the Eugene O'Neill play Anna Christie as the vehicle for Greta Garbo's sound debut, she expanded the part of an over-the-hill hooker specifically with Dressler in mind.
It was a pivotal opportunity for Dressler and proved to be her comeback role.
In the film, Dressler steals every scene she shares with the more-celebrated Garbo. To be sure Dressler possessed a theatrical talent that straddled the divide between the silent and modern eras, but I distinguish in my mind between an actor who chews scenery (Garbo, still relying on exaggerated, silent film techniques) and a character who chews scenery (Dressler's self-described "wharf rat" who hides her pain beneath a swaggering pose of indifference).
Garbo eventually shed the exaggerated techniques that had served her well during the silent era and mastered the subtleties of the new sound medium. But not before Dressler had bested her in their one head-to-head outing.
Dressler starred in a dozen movies over the next three years, including Min and Bill (another Frances Marion screenplay) which won her an Oscar.
In Min and Bill, a comedy-drama also starring Wallace Beery and Marjorie Rambeau, Dressler plays a dockside innkeeper who is raising the daughter of a prostitute as her own. As the girl grows up, Min (Dressler) does everything she can to protect the girl, eventually sacrificing herself for the girl's happiness.
The final shot of a deeply-conflicted Min — I'll let you discover the movie's plot twists on your own time — is the best acting of Dressler's career.
The film was a huge hit, and at a time when Norma Shearer, Marlene Dietrich and Joan Crawford were plying their trade, Dressler became the biggest star in Hollywood.
Emma secured her a second Oscar nomination, and the classic dramedy Dinner at Eight gave Dressler her best-known role, that of an aging stage actress reduced to begging favors of her closest friends.
Even people who don't know Dressler's name remember her in that film's last scene with up-and-coming Jean Harlow.
"I was reading a book the other day," says Harlow as the unforgettable social-climbing vamp, Kitty Packard.
"Reading a book?" says Dressler after the greatest double take in movie history.
"Yes. It's all about civilization or something. A nutty kind of a book. Do you know that the guy says that machinery is going to take the place of every profession?"
Dressler looks Harlow up and down and then says, "Oh, my dear, that's something you need never worry about."
A year later, Dressler was dead of cancer. She was 66.
This review is adapted from my (in)famous eight-part, 12,000 word essay on the Marx Brothers which you can start reading here ... if you're so inclined.
After the Broadway success of The Cocoanuts, playwrights George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind set to work on a follow-up, aided by songwriters Harry Ruby and Bert Kalmar.
Concluding that the Marx Brothers played best as a collision of anarchy and high society, they set the play on Long Island at the estate of a stuffy socialite (Margaret Dumont). Groucho, as African explorer Jeffrey T. Spaulding, was the guest of honor, with Chico as Emanuel Ravelli and Harpo as The Professor providing the weekend's musical entertainment.
"I used to know a fellow who looked exactly like you by the name of Emanuel Ravelli. Are you his brother?"
"I am Emanuel Ravelli."
"You're Emanuel Ravelli?"
"I am Emanuel Ravelli."
"Well, no wonder you look like him. But I still insist there is a resemblance."
"Heh, heh, he thinks I look alike."
The play was a big hit and included some of Groucho's most famous monologues, including a description of his most recent safari ("One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know"), a letter to his lawyer, and a spoof of the Eugene O'Neill play Strange Interlude, with Groucho addressing the audience directly.
There were also subplots involving the socialite's daughter, a painter named John Parker and a wealthy art collector who in a previous life was Abie the fish peddler. Unlike the movie version, there is also a journalist character modeled on gossip columnist Walter Winchell, several songs and a final act revolving around a costume party.
The play opened on October 23, 1928, at the Forty-Fourth Street Theatre and played 171 performances. As with its predecessor, Animal Crackers acquired several gags along the way, including this speech which a despondent Groucho ad libbed the night his savings were wiped out by the stock market crash of October 1929:
"Living with your folks. Living with your folks. The beginning of the end. Drab dead yesterdays shutting out beautiful tomorrows. Hideous, stumbling footsteps creaking along the misty corridors of time. And in those corridors I see figures, strange figures, weird figures: Steel 186, Anaconda 74, American Can 138..."
Shooting of the film began at Paramount's Astoria Studios in Queens, New York, at the end of April, 1930.
Most of the cast of the Broadway show was retained for the film. One exception was the part of the socialite's daughter, here played by Lillian Roth. An alcoholic who would later be the subject of the film I'll Cry Tomorrow, Roth claimed in her autobiography that she was sent to work with the Marx Brothers as punishment for her bad behavior.
Roth said working with the Brothers was "one step removed from a circus." She wrote:
"First Zeppo, the youngest, sauntered into the studio, about 9:30. At 10 somebody remembered to telephone Chico and wake him. Harpo, meanwhile, popped in, saw that most of the cast was missing, and strolled off. Later they found him asleep in his dressing room. Chico arrived about this time. Groucho, who had been golfing, arrived somewhat later, his clubs slung over his shoulder. He came in with his knees-bent walk, pulled a cigar out of his mouth, and with a mad, sidewise glance, announced, 'Anybody for lunch?'"
In technical terms, Animal Crackers is far superior to The Cocoanuts — better sound, better sets, more movement — but where you rank it in the Marx Brothers' oeuvre depends in no small part on what it is you value in a Marx Brothers movie.
Animal Crackers is the most quotable of all their films, with every line, particularly those from Groucho's monologues, a winner.
And in terms of having worked out in advance what they were going to do, it's the most polished film they made before moving to MGM in 1935.
Personally, I rank it third behind Duck Soup and A Night At The Opera.
But if what you respond to is the sense that anything can happen, as it often did when the Brothers were ad libbing, subverting not only the society the Brothers moved in but the conventions of film itself, then you might find the anarchic quality of their subsequent Paramount era pictures more to your taste — perhaps one of those the Marx Brothers made next, Monkey Business and Horse Feathers.
Rank it where you will, though, the movie was a big hit, grossing over $3 million, fourth among those movies released in 1930.
Note: For the 1936 re-release of Animal Crackers, several double entendres were cut from the original 1930 release — including the line "I think I'll try and make her" from Groucho's song "Hooray for Captain Spaulding." For years the cut material was assumed to be lost but in 2016 an original print turned up at the British Film Institute and is now available as part of The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection Restored Edition.
This review is adapted from my (in)famous eight-part, 12,000 word essay on the Marx Brothers which you can start reading here ... if you're so inclined.
By the time they filmed their first movie, the Marx Brothers were a well-oiled comedy machine with 25 years on the vaudeville circuit and three smash Broadway hits to their credit.
The Cocoanuts was worth the wait. It was one of the biggest hits of the year and, more importantly, introduced Americas to a brand of humor they had never seen before.
The movie was based on the stage play of the same name, a musical comedy (nominally) written by George S. Kaufman.
With half a dozen hits in five years, Kaufman was one of the leading young playwrights working on Broadway and his quick wit turned out to be a perfect fit for Groucho, who years later referred to Kaufman as "his God." (Kaufman later went on to win two Pulitzer Prizes.)
Kaufman built the play around the then-ongoing real estate boom in Florida and those of you familiar with the movie know the basic plot — with the help of a couple of disreputable guests (Chico and Harpo), the owner of a ramshackle hotel (Groucho) attempts to con a wealthy society maven (Margaret Dumont) into buying a worthless real estate development.
As always, though, the plot of a Marx Brothers production is simply a framework for a lot of gags, and The Cocoanuts featured some of the best of the Brothers' career.
"Think of the opportunities here in Florida. Three years ago, I came to Florida without a nickel in my pocket. Now? I've got a nickel in my pocket!"
"That's all very well, Mr. Hammer, but we haven't been paid in two weeks and we want our wages!"
"Wages? Do you want to be wage slaves, answer me that."
"No."
"No, of course not! Well, what makes wage slaves? Wages!"
To Kaufman's consternation, the Brothers also tended to ad lib throughout the show ("I think I just heard one of the original lines," he quipped at one performance) and in fact the best-remembered bit in the entire show — the "why a duck?" sequence — evolved from just such an ad lib.
The Cocoanuts ran for 377 shows before heading out on the road, a stripped-down production Groucho called "inferior," by which he meant that the chorus girls were neither as pretty nor as willing as their Broadway counterparts.
The audiences weren't inferior, though. The road show version of The Cocoanuts was big business, and the Los Angeles opening was attended by the likes of Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and Greta Garbo.
United Artists had first approached the Brothers a year earlier about turning The Cocoanuts into a film (imagine the Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin working out of the same studio), but balked at the Brothers' asking price of $75,000 for the film rights.
Paramount's Adolph Zukor balked, too, but then found himself upping the offer to $100,000 during dinner with a particularly eloquent Chico.
In January 1929, with the Brothers still performing their follow-up hit Animal Crackers on Broadway every evening, filming of The Cocoanuts began at Paramount's Astoria Studio on Long Island, New York. Paramount's east coast studio had been used for years to film New York-based acts such as W.C. Fields, but it had yet to fully convert to sound (or even sound proofing) when principle photography began.
Most of the filming took place in the early morning before the noise of traffic made sound recording impossible.
As a finished product, The Cocoanuts suffered from all the problems associated with early sound pictures. Primative sound recording equipment required the camera — and thus the actors — to remain rooted in place, a particular problem for Groucho who had trouble finding his marks anyway.
In addition, early microphones picked up sound indiscriminately. To muffle the sound of crinkling paper, every telegram, letter or map you see was soaked in water before each take (there was no muffling the sound of the crew's laughter, however, which ruined many takes).
The initial cut of The Cocoanuts ran nearly two-and-a-half hours, quickly trimmed after a preview to 96 minutes, mostly by dropping musical numbers. The film premiered in New York on May 3, 1929. The Brothers, who were performing down the street in Animal Crackers missed the show, but their mother Minnie was in attendance.
New York's critics were, at best, mixed in their reviews — prompting the Brothers to offer to buy back the negative from Paramount so they could burn it — but in the rest of the country, The Cocoanuts was a sensation.
Only two years into the sound era, movie audiences had never before seen, or more to the point, heard anything like Groucho's nonstop wordplay, and the film wound up grossing $1.8 million on a budget of $500,000, enough to rank seventh on the year's list of top-grossing films.
So where does The Cocoanuts rank among Marx Brothers films?
In the context of the times, there was nothing like it. Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd had made better comedies during the silent era, but (naturally) nothing relying on lightning quick verbal wit.
On the other hand, the Marx Brothers themselves quickly surpassed The Cocoanuts with their next film, Animal Crackers (more about that later), and would continue to surpass themselves with the likes of Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, Duck Soup, A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races.
Not until the dud Room Service in 1938 did the Brothers fall short of their own lofty standards. After that, the Marx Brothers made a series of serviceable comedies (mostly to keep the spendthrift Chico out of hock).
Should you see The Cocoanuts? Absolutely! And then see Animal Crackers and keep seeing the Marx Brothers until there are no more then start over again.
And why a duck? Cause if you try to cross over on a chicken, you'll find out why a duck!
One of the most enduring tropes of the early sound era is that of the silent film star who finds his career in ruins when his voice proves unsuitable for the new medium. Isn't that what Singin' in the Rain is all about?
More often than not, the tale of an actor's vocal woes was simply a cover story for a studio's own greed, spite or incompetence (see, e.g., Louise Brooks, John Gilbert and Clara Bow, respectively).
But in the case if Russian-born Olga Baclanova, the myth is right on the money.
A native of Moscow, Baclanova was a star of stage and screen in the early days of the Soviet Union, and received the title of Merited Artist of the Russian Federation, the USSR's highest honor for artistic achievement.
In 1925, Baclanova toured the United States with the Moscow Art Theatre then stayed behind to try her luck in Hollywood.
She made a handful of films in the two years before talkies — including a pair of classics (below) — then found herself, thanks to a thick Russian accent, limited to "exotic" parts and B-pictures.
Baclanova abandoned Hollywood for the Broadway stage in 1933 and had at least one big hit, Claudia, which ran for two years. Baclanova returned to Hollywood briefly in 1943 to make a screen version of her Broadway hit and then permanently retired from the movies.
She died in Switzerland in 1974 at the age of 81.
Although her movie career was relatively brief, Baclanova made three classics which have stood the test of time:
The Man Who Laughs is a macabre little love story that begins with a decadent king's order to carve a permanent grin into the face of a boy whose father has been convicted of treason. The boy grows to manhood earning an unhappy but lucrative living as a circus attraction, shunning all human contact but that of the young blind woman who travels with him.
Through a series of twists plotted by the great Victor Hugo, whose novel L'Homme Qui Rit was the basis for this movie, the man (Conrad Veidt in a first-rate performance) finds himself elevated to Britain's House of Lords and ordered against his will to marry a brazen duchess (Baclanova) with a fetish for his ruined face.
Depending on who you believe, either Bill Finger and Batman creator Bob Kane concocted the Joker from a photograph of Veidt in full Man Who Laughs makeup; or illustrator Jerry Robinson conceived the Joker from a playing card and then fleshed out the character based on a photograph of Veidt that Finger provided.
In The Docks Of New York Baclanova plays Lou, an abandoned wife making ends meet as a prostitute in a waterfront bar.
Two of Hollywood's most successful writers, Jules Furthman and John Monk Saunders, wrote this story in the style of Eugene O'Neill, with all the action taking place in one evening and the following morning. A sailor on shore leave (George Bancroft) pulls a suicidal young woman (Betty Compson) out of New York's harbor and over the course of an evening, takes a liking to her and proposes marriage.
It sounds like the stuff of Hollywood fantasy, an early stab at Pretty Woman, say, but everyone involved handles the story soberly and realistically and the movie reminds me more than anything of O'Neill's Anna Christie which would be adapted the following year as a vehicle for Greta Garbo's first talkie.
Baclanova in particular breathes life into what could have been a stock character, playing Lou as a hardened cynic when plying her trade in the dive bar that sees most of the movie's action but as a beaten down survivor in private, defeated and without illusions.
"Do you think he can make you decent by marryin' you?" she asks Compson after hearing of Bancroft's proposal. "Until I got married, I was decent!"
While The Docks Of New York is not as visually interesting as von Sternberg's later work featuring his greatest star, Marlene Dietrich, it's more relatable and moving. Here — before he descended into wretched excess and maybe even madness — von Sternberg was still in touch with the needs and interests of his audience, still trying to tell a story, still trying to connect with real universal human emotions. I think it's possibly the best work of his career.
Finally, you don't want to miss Freaks, which is wildest and most modern of all the horror movies that were released during the early sound era.
Helmed by Tod Browning, who not only directed Dracula but also ten Lon Chaney vehicles, Freaks is a story of exploitation and revenge centering on the lives of those circus performers once described as "sideshow freaks."
In this one, Baclanova plays the cruel circus performer Cleopatra. She seduces and marries the star of a traveling carnival (little person Harry Ealres), hoping to loot his fortune. Things don't work out quite like she planned.
Despite Browning's sensitive treatment of his stars, the combination of sex, horror and forbidden love proved too much for audiences and censors alike, and after a brief release, the film was withdrawn from circulation for more than thirty years.
Admittedly the acting is at times amateurish, but if you like your horror genuinely disturbing, this is a must-see movie. And I don't mean faux disturbing like Hostel or Saw or any of those other slaughterhouse cheesefests with stock characters and recycled plot lines. Freaks is too real to dismiss as playacting and no pose of ironic detachment can shrug off the violence done to the "freaks" and in turn by them. It's a movie that will get under your skin — or anyway, it got under mine.
The most popular movie of 1927 was The Jazz Singer, which introduced synchronized sound to the movies at last. Audiences were thrilled not just to see Al Jolson singing but to hear him singing — and I can't say I blame them.
"Wait a minute, wait a minute, I tell you — you ain't heard nothing yet!" He wasn't kidding.
Even though "Toot Toot Tootsie" had been a hit for Al Jolson a couple of years before, its appearance in The Jazz Singer was a pivotal moment in the history of motion pictures. As co-star May McAvoy put it "In that moment just before 'Toot, Toot, Tootsie,' a miracle occurred. Moving pictures really came alive. To see the expressions on their faces, when Joley spoke to them ... you'd have thought they were listening to the voice of God."
Great moment.
Do you know the movie's story? Jolson plays Jakie Rabinowitz, who defies his father to become a vaudeville performer. While Jolson, now performing as Jack Robin, becomes a huge Broadway success, his father disowns him for defying his insistence that that his son succeed him as cantor at the local synagogue. There's lots of good singing and a tearful reconciliation at the end.
Audiences ate it up.
No doubt modern audiences will squirm as Jolson performs many of his numbers in blackface. This is one instance where I'd recommend you power through it. As film historian Corin Willis wrote:
"Of the more than seventy examples of blackface in early sound film 1927–53 that I have viewed (including the nine blackface appearances Jolson subsequently made), The Jazz Singer is unique in that it is the only film where blackface is central to the narrative development and thematic expression."
Blackface here plays as a metaphor for the mask Jack Robin wears to hide his Jewish heritage. Ironically, by putting on the makeup, Jolson can assimilate into a white Anglo-Saxon society that would otherwise reject him.
Only at the end, however, when he strips off the mask to sing "Kol Nidre" in the synagogue for his father does Jolson again become a complete man — the Jewish son and the jazz singer.
Well, at least that's the theory. Blackface may have been a staple of vaudeville and early Hollywood but it tends to take me out of a movie even as I understand the historical context.
Your mileage may vary.
Some notes of historical interest:
● Vitaphone, Warner Brothers' system for pressing sound onto 16-inch discs, was not the first technique for synchronizing sound and film but it was the first practical technology to do so, generating a sound loud enough for an audience to hear and with a higher fidelity than sound-on-film technologies could produce.
● Contrary to popular belief, the first feature-length film using the Vitaphone process was not The Jazz Singer but a John Barrymore movie, Don Juan, released on August 6, 1926. Don Juan, however, included only a recorded score and sound effects and the film was not enough of a hit to make back the costs of using the Vitaphone process. Only the persistence of producer Adolph Zukor convinced the Warner brothers — Harry and Sam — to make another feature-length sound film.
● The technology used to record The Jazz Singer was so primitive, no sound editing was possible. Al Jolson's songs were recorded and mixed as he performed them and what you saw was what you got. Except for a couple of spontaneous ad-libs — including the immortal line "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet!" spoken by Al Jolson as a bridge between "Dirty Hands, Dirty Face" and "Toot Toot Tootsie" — there's no spoken dialogue in the movie. Technician George Groves is credited with recording the sound.
In his career, Groves received eight Oscar nominations, winning twice, an incredible track record considering he only worked on twenty movies.
● Ironically, despite the enormous success of The Jazz Singer, the Vitaphone disc technology itself proved to be too uneconomical for large-scale use. The studio had to distribute a separate disc with each copy of the movie and each theater needed an operator skilled enough to synch the recording with the film, driving up costs. In addition, because assembling and editing a Vitaphone picture was not just a simple matter of cutting and splicing film, but also of mixing and pressing new recordings, directors and film editors found the technology difficult to use. In 1932, Warner Brothers gave up on the Vitaphone process and instead opted to add sound recordings to optical tracks that were laid over the edge of the film negative.
● Left to the voters, The Jazz Singer probably would have cleaned up at the first Oscars ceremony. But in a smoke-filled backroom, the powers that be figured that handing a bunch of awards to the most popular movie of the year wasn't going to help sell extra tickets — to The Jazz Singer or anything else — so they arbitrarily declared it ineligible and handed its producers an honorary Oscar instead. (Read the story here.)
And last but certainly not least, a bit of personal history involving Al Jolson and my wife Katherine's great-grandmother.
In 1912, on a whim, Katherine's great-grandmother decided she, her daughter and her chauffeur should take the Packard on a cross-country drive from New Jersey to California — a nutty idea, actually.
As recently as 1908, the United States only had some 600 miles of paved road. Conditions weren't much better in 1912.
Perhaps they could find a traveling companion to go with them, someone suggested. The New York Automobile Club hooked them up with a guy named Al Jolson.
Yeah, that Al Jolson.
Katherine's great-grandmother sent her chauffeur to meet this Jolson character who had recently headlined the Winter Garden in Manhattan, New York.
The daughter (Katherine's great-aunt) tells the story:
"Fred went to Jolson's suite where Jolson and a couple of pals were entertaining or being entertained by some girls.
"The next morning, Jolson left before we did. Fred's brief encounters were the only near contact we had with Jolson. He reached Chicago a couple of days ahead of us and reached San Francisco in two weeks while it took us a month!"
The story has a happy ending though — the daughter married the chauffeur!
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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