1930-31 Alternate Oscars

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)

ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Edward G. Robinson (Little Caesar)
nominees: James Cagney (The Public Enemy); Gary Cooper (Morocco); Walter Huston (The Criminal Code); Bela Lugosi (Dracula)

ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: The Marx Brothers (Animal Crackers)
nominees: Eddie Cantor (Whoopee!); Charles Chaplin (City Lights); Jackie Cooper (Skippy); René Lefèvre (Le Million)

ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Marlene Dietrich (Morocco)
nominees: Joan Crawford (Dance, Fools, Dance); Irene Dunne (Cimarron); Norma Shearer (A Free Soul); Barbara Stanwyck (Night Nurse)

ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: 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 (Drama)
winner: Joan Blondell (Sinners' Holiday, Other Men's Women and Night Nurse)
nominees: Sylvia Sidney (An American Tragedy)

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)

SCREENPLAY
winner: René Clair; from a play by Georges Berr and Marcel Guillemaud (Le Million)
nominees: Morrie Ryskind; from a play by George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, Burt Kalmar and Harry Ruby (Animal Crackers); Charles Chaplin (City Lights)

SPECIAL AWARDS
René Clair (Le Million) (Special Achievement In The Use Of Sound); "Makin' Whoopee" (Whoopee!) (Best Song); Fritz Arno Wagner (M) (Cinematography)

Orson Welles: What To See (And What Not To See)

I'm currently writing a glowing review of My Lunches With Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles which will be up in a day or two. In the meantime, if you don't know Welles as well as you should, here are some recommendations:

Indispensable

Citizen Kane (1941)—love it or hate it (I love it), you can no more call yourself a film buff without seeing Kane than you can call yourself literate without knowing the alphabet. As Jean-Luc Godard said of Welles, "Everyone will always owe him everything."

The Third Man (1949)—Welles didn't direct this suspense classic (Carol Reed did), but his supporting performance as the charming arch-criminal Harry Lime is one of the most memorable in movie history.

Highly Recommended

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)—the studio re-shot the ending and the film flopped at the box office, but this story of a spoiled rich kid and his tragic comeuppance is a masterpiece anyway.

The Lady From Shanghai (1948)—starring his soon-to-be ex-wife Rita Hayworth, this film noir thriller boasts the legendary shoot-out in a hall of mirrors.

Touch of Evil (1958)—from the twilight of the film noir era, Welles is a cop run amok terrorizing both good guys (Charlton Heston) and bad guys (Akim Tamiroff).

Chimes at Midnight a.k.a. Falstaff (1965)—the least seen of his classic films, Welles plays Shakespeare's fat fool as a tragic-comic figure and a meta-commentary on his own career.

Recommended

The Stranger (1946)—Suspected Nazi (Welles) plays a deadly game of wits with Nazi hunter (Edward G. Robinson).

Macbeth (1948)—One of Welles's three Shakespeare films, this atmospheric interpretation made a lot more sense after it was restored in the 1990s.

Othello (1952)—personally, I think the only way for a white actor to play Othello is the way Patrick Stewart did it at the Shakespeare Theater back in 1997: with an otherwise all-black cast. Except for the matter of pigmentation, Othello was right in Welles's wheelhouse.

Mr. Arkadin a.k.a. Confidential Report (1955)—the studio messed around so much with this whodunit about a private detective hot on the trail of the mysterious Mr Arkadin, that the Criterion dvd contains three versions.

Compulsion (1959)—another acting-only movie, Welles plays a lawyer defending two killers based on the infamous Leopold and Loeb.

Meh

Journey Into Fear (1943)—director only. Joseph Cotten should have chosen a different cruise line: this one is full of Nazis and nonsense.

Jane Eyre (1944)—acting only. Welles is pretty good as Mr. Rochester, but Joan Fontaine obviously didn't read the novel about a feisty girl who marries above her station.

Tomorrow is Forever (1946)—acting only. I waited forever for this three-hanky weeper to finish. Co-starring Claudette Colbert.

Catch-22 (1970)—acting only. Alan Arkin is good, but the screenplay makes too much sense to capture the flavor of the classic Joseph Heller novel.

F for Fake (1973)—Welles's last feature-length directorial effort, this documentary about art forger Elmyr de Hory and his biographer Clifford Irving who got rich off a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes is beloved by some, but I'm not some.

Burn Before Watching

The V.I.P.'s (1963)—acting only. One of those group-of-strangers-stuck-in-one-place potboilers, this time in a fog-bound airport. Worst layover ever. Glossy, high-toned stupidity starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor at their worst.

Casino Royale (1967)—no, not the Daniel Craig classic. This is the swingin' 60s spoof. Incoherent, self-indulgent and painfully unfunny. Acting only.

It Happened One Christmas (1977)—made for tv remake of It's A Wonderful Life with Welles as Mr. Potter and Marlo Thomas in the Jimmy Stewart role. Saw it as a teenager and was scarred for life. Acting only.

The Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (1944)

When in 1946 the French, who thanks to the war hadn't seen an American movie in five years, finally caught up with the backlog, they noticed something that Hollywood had apparently missed—that such movies as The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Laura and Murder, My Sweet, were shot through with an anxiety and pessimism wholly uncharacteristic of the screwball comedies and glossy MGM musicals they had seen in the 1930s.

The French dubbed these dark movies "film noir"—and a genre was unwittingly born.

Which movie you would crown as the best film noir of all time depends in part on what you think of as film noir. The French didn't really define the term and Hollywood's studios never thought of themselves as producing something called film noir—they were just making movies that they hoped would sell tickets.

For me, the essence of noir is not about lighting or femme fatales or crime gone wrong, but simply a guy who ought to know better heading down a moral rathole anyway with the worst possible consequences. You see that over and over again in these movies—guys who think they're smarter than everybody else or who think they're luckier than everybody else or who, like Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past, just don't care. Watching film noir is a little like watching a train wreck—you can see it coming but you can't stop it and you can't turn away, all you can do is brace yourself for the impact.

In that sense, Double Indemnity might be the best of the noirs. Fred MacMurray commits murder, ostensibly for money and a woman, but in fact simply to see if he can get away with it. Boredom is a lousy reason for doing anything, but I'll bet you as many harebrained schemes have been hatched out of boredom as for any of the more conventional reasons.

In any event, Double Indemnity is a great movie featuring career performances from MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck and Edward G. Robinson.

(And before you ask—yes, I think the wig plays. It's just the sort of thing a half-smart floozy like Stanwyck's Phyllis Dietrichson would think looks good. That and that "honey" of an anklet. It's the sort of thing women did in the 1940s in lieu of a tramp stamp.)

PICTURE (Drama)
winner: Double Indemnity (prod. Joseph Sistrom)
nominees: The Curse Of The Cat People (prod. Val Lewton); Gaslight (prod. Arthur Hornblower, Jr.); Laura (prod. Otto Preminger); To Have And Have Not (prod. Howard Hawks)

PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Meet Me In St. Louis (prod. Arthur Freed)
nominees: Arsenic and Old Lace (prod. Jack L. Warner); Going My Way (prod. Leo McCarey); Hail The Conquering Hero (prod. Preston Sturges); The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek (prod. Preston Sturges and Buddy G. DeSylva)

PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: Ivan Groznyy (Ivan The Terrible, Part I) (prod. Sergei Eisenstein)

ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Charles Boyer (Gaslight)
nominees: Humphrey Bogart (To Have And Have Not); Charles Laughton (The Suspect); Fred MacMurray (Double Indemnity); Laurence Olivier (Henry V); Dick Powell (Murder, My Sweet); Orson Welles (Jane Eyre)

ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Eddie Bracken (The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek and Hail The Conquering Hero)
nominees: Bing Crosby (Going My Way); Cary Grant (Arsenic and Old Lace); Bob Hope (The Princess and the Pirate)

ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Barbara Stanwyck (Double Indemnity)
nominees: Lauren Bacall (To Have And Have Not); Joan Bennett (The Woman In The Window); Ingrid Bergman (Gaslight); Claudette Colbert (Since You Went Away); Joan Fontaine (Jane Eyre); Elizabeth Taylor (National Velvet); Gene Tierney (Laura)

ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Betty Hutton (The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek)
nominees: Judy Garland (Meet Me In St. Louis); Priscilla Lane (Arsenic and Old Lace)

DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: Billy Wilder (Double Indemnity)
nominees: George Cukor (Gaslight); Sergei Eisenstein (Ivan Groznyy a.k.a. Ivan The Terrible, Part I); Howard Hawks (To Have and Have Not); Otto Preminger (Laura); Robert Wise (The Curse of the Cat People)

DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Vincente Minnelli (Meet Me In St. Louis)
nominees: Frank Capra (Arsenic and Old Lace); Leo McCarey (Going My Way); Preston Sturges (The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek and Hail The Conquering Hero)

SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Edward G. Robinson (Double Indemnity)
nominees: Walter Brennan (To Have And Have Not); William Demarest (The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and Hail The Conquering Hero); Barry Fitzgerald (Going My Way); Clifton Webb (Laura)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Margaret O'Brien (Meet Me In St. Louis)
nominees: Josephine Hull (Arsenic and Old Lace); Angela Lansbury (Gaslight); Diana Lynn (The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek); Anne Revere (National Velvet)

SCREENPLAY
winner: Preston Sturges (The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek and Hail The Conquering Hero)
nominees: Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler, from the novel by James M. Cain (Double Indemnity); Jules Furthman and William Faulkner, from the novel by Ernest Hemingway (To Have And Have Not)

SPECIAL AWARDS
John F. Seitz (Double Indemnity) (Cinematography); "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" (Meet Me In St. Louis) music and lyrics by Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin (Song); David Raksin (Laura) (Score)

The Missed It By That Much Awards: Golden Globes Edition

So since for the 1932-33 awards year I'm using the expanded "Golden Globes" format (splitting up awards for picture, actor and actress between drama and comedy/musical), I'm sure most have you have been wondering who would have won for the previous five years if I'd been doing the Golden Globes thing all along.

Good question, thanks for asking.

It's kind of a mixed bag, as it turns out, which is why I didn't use this format in the first place. For every inspired choice, such as Marion Davies (comedy, Show People) or Edward G. Robinson (drama, Little Caesar), you get somebody like Maurice Chevalier (comedy/musical, The Love Parade) who'd have readers running for the exits. And then you start wondering whether I would really have given Marie Dressler the best supporting actress award of 1929-30 knowing I'd also give her an award for 1930-31. And on and on.

Clearly, I have too much time on my hands.

Anyway, here they are. Make of them what you will. At least Al Jolson dressed for the occasion.

1927-28
Picture (Comedy): The Circus (prod. Charles Chaplin)

Actor (Comedy or Musical): Al Jolson (The Jazz Singer)

Actress (Drama): Janet Gaynor (7th Heaven and Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans)

1928-29
Picture (Comedy): Steamboat Bill, Jr. (prod. Joseph M. Schenck)

Actor (Drama): Erich von Stroheim (The Wedding March)

Actress (Comedy): Marion Davies (Show People)


1929-30
Picture (Comedy or Musical): Hallelujah! (prod. King Vidor)

Actor (Comedy/Musical): Maurice Chevalier (The Love Parade)

Actress (Comedy/Musical): Jeanette MacDonald (The Love Parade)


1930-31
Picture (Drama): M (prod. Seymour Hebenzal)

Actor (Drama): Edward G. Robinson (Little Caesar)

Actress (Comedy): Marie Dressler (Min and Bill)


1931-32
Picture (Comedy/Musical): À Nous La Liberté (prod. Frank Clifford)

Actor (Comedy/Musical): Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy (The Music Box)

Actress (Drama): Mae Clarke (Waterloo Bridge)