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It was not until the following year that the full membership of the Academy voted on the awards.
The Broadway Melody, an MGM production — that is to say, Louis B. Mayer's baby — is the weakest best picture winner ever, which is saying something.
Mary Pickford, a co-founder of the Academy, took home the best actress trophy for her first talkie, Coquette, and while audiences flocked to see "America's Sweetheart" talk for the first time, critics reviled her performance and only the first Oscar campaign in history secured the award.
Likewise, best director Frank Lloyd, who won for the dull and overly-long The Divine Lady, was one of the founding members of the Academy and his win raised eyebrows among the press.
As for the best actor winner, In Old Arizona's Warner Baxter, the less said, the better. I know some of my fellow bloggers like his performance as the Cisco Kid, but let's just say I don't think his hammy fake Mexican stands up next to the likes of Buster Keaton, Douglas Fairbanks or John Gilbert, all of whom were eligible for the big prize that year.
Hopefully, this round of Katie awards will improve on the Academy's choices. At least I don't owe Louis B. Mayer anything.
Finally, I'll note that two of the Academy's choices, best screenplay winner, Ernst Lubitsch's The Patriot, and The Bridge Of San Luis Rey, which earned MGM set designer Cedric Gibbons the first of eleven Oscars (he was nominated thirty-nine times), have both been lost. That is, unfortunately, an all too common story when it comes to the early history of motion pictures — Hollywood took no care when it came to preserving these early films and let thousands of movies deteriorate or vanish altogether.
As national tragedies go, it's not exactly the Vietnam War. But it is a definite shame, like allowing the Louvre to go up in smoke because you can't be bothered not to play with matches.
1928-29
PICTURE (Drama)
winner: The Wind (prod. Victor Sjöström)
nominees: Blackmail (prod. John Maxwell); The Docks Of New York (prod. J.G. Bachmann); The Iron Mask (prod. Douglas Fairbanks); The Wedding March (prod. Pat Powers and Erich von Stroheim)
PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Steamboat Willie (prod. Walt Disney)
nominees: The Broadway Melody (prod. Irving Thalberg, Harry Rapf and Lawrence Weingarten); The Cameraman (prod. Buster Keaton); Show People (prod. Marion Davies and King Vidor); Steamboat Bill, Jr. (prod. Joseph M. Schenck);
PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: The Passion Of Joan Of Arc (prod. Société générale des films)
nominees: Un Chien Andalou (prod. Luis Buñuel); The Fall Of The House Of Usher (prod. Jean Epstein); Man With The Movie Camera (prod. VUFKU)
ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Douglas Fairbanks (The Iron Mask)
nominees: George Bancroft (The Docks Of New York); Warner Baxter (In Old Arizona); John Gilbert (A Woman Of Affairs and Desert Nights); Erich von Stroheim (The Wedding March)
ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Buster Keaton (Steamboat Bill, Jr. and The Cameraman)
nominees: William Haines (Show People); Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy (Two Tars)
ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Maria Falconetti (The Passion Of Joan Of Arc)
nominees: Betty Amann (Asphalt); Louise Brooks (Beggars Of Life); Betty Compson (The Docks Of New York); Greta Garbo (The Mysterious Lady, A Woman Of Affairs and Wild Orchids); Lillian Gish (The Wind)
ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Marion Davies (Show People)
nominees: Bessie Love (The Broadway Melody)
DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: Carl Theodor Dreyer (The Passion Of Joan Of Arc)
nominees: Victor Sjöström (The Wind); Josef von Sternberg (The Docks Of New York); Dziga Vertov (Man With The Movie Camera); Erich von Stroheim (The Wedding March)
DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Luis Buñuel (Un Chien Andalou)
nominees: Ub Iwerks (Steamboat Willie); Edward Sedgwick (The Cameraman); King Vidor (Show People)
SUPPORTING ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Wallace Beery (Beggars Of Life)
nominees: Donald Calthrop (Blackmail); Lewis Stone (A Woman Of Affairs); Gustav von Seyffertitz (The Mysterious Lady and The Docks Of New York)
SUPPORTING ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Ernest Torrence (Steamboat Bill, Jr. and Desert Nights)
nominees:
SUPPORTING ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Anna May Wong (Piccadilly)
nominees: Olga Baclanova (The Docks Of New York); Marie Glory (L'Argent); Mary Nolan (West Of Zanzibar); Anita Page (Our Dancing Daughters); Zasu Pitts (The Wedding March)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Marceline Day (The Cameraman)
nominees:
SCREENPLAY
winner: Frances Marion; from a novel by Dorothy Scarborough (The Wind)
nominees: Jules Furthman; story by John Monk Saunders; titles by Julian Johnson (The Docks Of New York); Joseph Delteil and Carl Theodor Dreyer (The Passion Of Joan Of Arc)
SPECIAL AWARDS
Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks (the creation and marketing of Mickey Mouse); Douglas Shearer (The Broadway Melody) (Special Achievement In The Use Of Sound); "The Broadway Melody" (The Broadway Melody) (Best Song); Un Chien Andalou (prod. Luis Buñuel) (Best Short Subject); John Arnold (The Wind) (Cinematography)
At first blush, Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall is a radical departure for its star Mary Pickford.
Based on a popular novel by Charles Major, Dorothy Vernon is a lavish costume drama set during the conflict between Queen Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots. Pickford plays the title character, a real-life aristocrat who for reasons history has not quite remembered managed to alienate both sides in the battle of royal succession. The film is full of court intrigue, murder plots, sword fights—in short, the sort of movie Pickford's husband Douglas Fairbanks might have made during this period.
But as the story develops, the Pickford we know and love quickly emerges. She plays an adult role for once, but an eighteen year old on the eve of an arranged marriage to a scheming cousin who wants to use the occasion to attract the presence of Elizabeth, whom he plans to murder in a plot to put Mary Stuart on the throne of England.
If you know your British history, you know Mary Stuart never sat upon the throne of England so I don't think it's a spoiler to say that the plucky, feisty, bonny Dorothy—the traits most typical of a Pickford character—saves the day. (For more background about Pickford, click here.)
She succeeds with the help of her true love, Sir John Manners, essayed by Pickford's brother-in-law, Allan Forrest. (The film was a real family affair, with Pickford's sister Lottie playing Dorothy's lady-in-waiting.) Forrest plays his part in the Douglas Fairbanks style, with lots of swashbuckling and leaping about, and even throwing his back and laughing uproariously, a patented Fairbanks move.
And therein lies the film's weakness—Forrest is no Douglas Fairbanks. That fact is made abundantly clear in his very first scene, a shot of his wide muscular back as a doctor attends to wounds received in battle. Forrest was, in fact, a quite slender lad, and the back is doubled by none other than Fairbanks himself, who was filming The Thief of Bagdad one set over. I couldn't help but wonder how much more fun the film would have been if Fairbanks had actually played the role of John Manners. Not only would the acting and swordplay have been better, but the outsized nature of his magnetic personality would have short-circuited the need for so much character exposition that bogs down the beginning of the film.
But, alas, Fairbanks and Pickford made only one movie together, the 1929 talkie, The Taming of the Shrew.
Still, a Pickford movie is primarily about Mary Pickford, and she does not disappoint. She had one of the most expressive faces of the silent era, and one of the most appealing personas. Throw in the wonderful costumes and Pickford's stunt work performed herself when her double was injured—including a particularly dangerous gallop up a three-foot wide stair to the top of a narrow stone wall—and you've got a pretty entertaining movie on your hands.
The film wasn't one of Pickford's blockbuster smashes upon its release in 1924, but it did turn a tidy profit and was a nice prestige release for Pickford's studio, United Artists.
A newly-restored 35 mm print of the film is playing now in a limited run in select cities. Film historian Christel Schmidt, author of Mary Pickford: Queen of the Movies, will be touring with the film, as will Ben Model, who provides live musical accompaniment. If you get a chance to see it before it heads back to the archives at the Cinematheque Royale de Belgique, by all means, don't miss it.
Along with Méliès's rocket hitting the moon in the eye and Chaplin as the Tramp, Harold Lloyd hanging from the hands of a clock is one of the most iconic images of the silent era. And the movie it comes from, Safety Last!, is quintessential Lloyd—the nebbishy nice guy with the glasses who winds up performing some truly outrageous and inventive physical stunts, all for love.
I'm going with Lloyd for best actor.
My choice for best picture is The Hunchback of Notre Dame. You've probably heard of it—stars a fellow named Lon Chaney in one of his most famous roles.
Finally, according to Alternate Oscar guru Danny Peary, I'm entitled to one tie in the actor category and one in the actress. I'm using my actress tie here, to recognize Colleen Moore and Norma Talmadge with what are essentially career achievement awards. Only one reel of Flaming Youth survives, but it was a trendsetter—much more than anything Louise Brooks would later do, Colleen Moore with this role established the "flapper look" in the minds of the public—and along with those films of Moore's that do survive, I think she's one of the top actresses of the silent era. As for Norma Talmadge, she was to the silent era what Bette Davis was to the Golden Age. Her best available movie is the 1926 comedy Kiki, but Within the Law is actually more typical.
Picture: The Hunchback Of Notre Dame (prod. Carl Laemmle and Irving Thalberg)
Actor: Harold Lloyd (Safety Last!)
Actress: Colleen Moore (Flaming Youth) and Norma Talmadge (Within The Law) (tie)
Director: Abel Gance (La Roue)
Supporting Actor: Adolphe Menjou (A Woman Of Paris)
Supporting Actress: Gladys Brockwell (The Hunchback Of Notre Dame)
Screenplay: Perley Poore Sheehan (adaptation) and Edward T. Lowe Jr. (scenario), from the novel by Victor Hugo (The Hunchback Of Notre Dame)
Those of you who have been following the Monkey for a while might remember that one of my favorite ongoing projects is the quest to see all the available Douglas Fairbanks movies—in chronological order, no less. Why? you might ask. To which I say, Why?!? Because he's Douglas Fairbanks, of course, the most unabashedly joyful actor ever to make a series of really entertaining movies!
So far, I've written thumbnail reviews of all his feature films from 1916 and 1917, his breakout years. You can read those reviews here and here.
Which brings us to 1918, and illustrates the single biggest problem with being a silent movie fan:
Swat the Kaiser (short)—presumed lost
Headin' South—presumed lost
Mr. Fix-It—print preserved at the George Eastman House; reportedly undergoing restoration, but otherwise currently unavailable.
Say! Young Fellow—presumed lost
Bound in Morocco—presumed lost
He Comes Up Smiling—presumed lost
Sic 'Em, Sam (short)—presumed lost
Arizona—presumed lost
That's quite a gap in the filmography of one of the silent era's biggest stars. You can only imagine what it's like trying to follow the careers of lesser known actors and actresses who didn't own their own studios.
And then there's his wife, Mary Pickford, who I think was, pound-for-pound, the most powerful woman in Hollywood history, simultaneously an international superstar, a studio owner, a producer, a de facto director, a multi-millionaire, an Oscar winner, and the queen of the Hollywood social scene.
And yet just try to buy her movies on DVD. Sure, there are some available, and at one point, the Pickford estate released her best films on a series of DVDs as part of the Milestone Collection released through Image Studios. But those DVDs are out of print and are now selling for $50+ on the internet. Fortunately, I taped most of these movies off Turner Classic Movies a decade ago, and can watch them on an old VHS player—but who wants to do that if they don't have to?
And, you know, she's Mary Pickford! If you can't buy her DVDs, what chance do you have of finding a Norma Talmadge DVD, say, out there in the marketplace? Many of her films are preserved in archives around the country, but beyond a bare handful of fairly unrepresentative films, just try to see them.
It is said that those who forget the past are destined to repeat it, which isn't exactly true—more like, those who don't study human nature through concrete examples from the past are destined to be perpetually taken advantage of. But I think you can say that those who don't bother with the best that the past has to offer are doomed to live dull and flavorless lives.
Which leads me to a plea, contained in a recent comment, from David Feldman asking the Monkey to join the grassroots movement to save the historic Pickfair Studios from imminent destruction.
Yes, Pickfair Studios—as in Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks—built in 1920 to serve as the filmmaking arm of United Artists, the independent film distribution company founded by Pickford, Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith the year before.
This month, the current owner of the Pickfair Studios, CIM Group, plans to raze the site's historic buildings. As Fairbanks' granddaughter Daphne so eloquently and angrily puts it, "This is a sacrilege—do the greedy people threatening this not have any pride in the history of Hollywood? Do they not have any respect for the founders of motion pictures, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. and Mary Pickford?"
Apparently not. But thousands of movie fans do. Will you count yourself among them?
Admittedly, there's a fine line between honoring one's history and fetishizing it, and I've been to places that were so keen on preserving their past that they left no room for a future. But I've also been to many, many more places that were in such a headlong pursuit of the new that there was no "there" there, just a carbon copy of every other bland, featureless place I've passed through and forgotten.
With the possible exception of Las Vegas, I doubt there's a city in the United States more dedicated to the "now" than Hollywood. And I get that. Long-term memory loss allows studios to bill the latest Adam Sandler movie as "the #1 comedy of all time!" to a gullible audience despite the existence of Some Like It Hot, Duck Soup or City Lights. And business is business.
But at some point, Hollywood should also recognize that it's not just selling a disposable product, a can of beans, if you will, consumed today, forgotten tomorrow. It's also selling an emotional involvement—with the actors, the stories, the hopes and the dreams—without which movies are just flickering images projected through strips of celluloid. And a historic place such as Pickford Studios is a tangible representation of that emotional connection.
To erase the history of movies is to erase the essence of what makes movies a lucrative product in the present and future.
That, of course, has never stopped Hollywood before, and many of the decisions made there to erase movie history have proven, financially speaking, to be foolishly short-sighted: allowing thousands of movies, including many classics, to rot into dust, thereby spinning potential gold into dross; selling its film libraries to television in the 1950s at pennies on the dollar; and tearing down every vestige of the past so that the only landmark left for a visitor to see in Hollywood is the Hollywood sign itself.
And you wonder why studio executives think the history of movies begins with Star Wars—Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, that is.
But here is an opportunity for Hollywood to step up and not only do the right thing, but also do the smart thing.
Join the movement to save Hollywood's history. Sign the petition urging the West Hollywood city council to block CIM's plan to destroy the Pickfair Studios.
Remember: preserve the past, ensure the future!
To sign the petition, click here.
In honor of Carole Lombard's 103rd birthday today, Carole & Co. is hosting the "Carole-tennial+3 blogathon." This is my meager contribution.
I'll be honest with you. When I signed up to write about Carole Lombard's career in silent movies—she made 36 between 1921 and 1929—I'd hoped to pass along to you a sense of a star in the making, a talent in training, that sort of thing. I figured I'd write something about how when we think of the transition from silent films to talkies, we focus on the careers that were destroyed—John Gilbert's, for example—but that there were also actors whose careers took off once the public could hear them speak (William Powell, Ronald Colman, Gary Cooper). And then I'd slot Carole Lombard into that list and go from there.
But after watching all of what little of her silent work is available, what I came away with instead was both a sense of frustration at the abysmal state of film preservation in this country and a wonder that Carole Lombard had a film career at all.
Born in Indiana as Jane Peters, Carole Lombard moved to Los Angeles with her mother at the age of eight when her parents divorced. In 1921, Alan Dwan (who would later direct Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood and John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima) spotted her playing baseball and cast her on the spot as a tomboy in A Perfect Crime. She was twelve years old.
The role seems in retrospect a presciently appropriate one—although she was one of the most beautiful actresses of her generation, Lombard was at heart a boisterous, small-town tomboy who swore like a sailor, and preferred duck shooting and fly fishing to fancy clothes and big parties.
"I can't imagine a duller fate," she once said, "than being the best dressed woman in reality. When I want to do something I don’t pause to contemplate whether I’m exquisitely gowned. I want to live, not pose!"
Lombard wouldn't appear in another film until 1924, when she signed a contract with the Fox Film Corporation where she languished in uncredited bit parts in forgettable movies. Few of these efforts survive and those that do don't tell us much of anything about Lombard's early career.
I watched her three surviving films from this period—Dick Turpin, The Plastic Age and the classic Ben-Hur—and I can tell you, she is completely invisible in all of them, playing roles that don't even rise to the level of a bit part. She was literally just a figure moving around in the deep background, less significant to the plot than a potted plant or a picture on a wall.
In fact, I must have blinked when she played these blink-and- you'll-miss-it parts, because despite my best efforts, I missed her in all of them. (Indeed, some Lombard fanatics have decided she's not even in Ben-Hur, based both on the absence of any still photos of her in the movie and her own assertion that she wasn't in it. You can't prove it by me one way or the other.)
In 1926, the eighteen year old Lombard was involved in an automobile accident that required multiple surgeries and left a permanent scar running from her nose to her left cheek. Fox canceled her contract, leaving her out of work and her career in jeopardy.
In desperation, she joined Mack Sennett's stable of "bathing beauties" that graced his low-budget comedies. Although by 1926 Sennett's career as the "King of Comedy" was in decline—he was notoriously cheap and stubbornly devoted to a style of comedy that had been out of date for a decade—he still had the unparalleled eye for talent that had led to his discovery of Charlie Chaplin, Roscoe Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, Gloria Swanson, and many others.
In the course of making nineteen two-reel shorts for the old master, Lombard learned to play comedy, a skill that would later define her. Potential disaster had turned out to be divine providence.
Although by and large these films survive, most are squirreled away in various archives and remain unseen by the public. Of course, we here at the Monkey tracked down what we could and this is what we learned:
Lombard tended to play athletic coeds who preferred—in the words of one title card—"Romeos, Roadsters and Rollerskates" to studying, serving in such films as The Campus Vamp and Matchmaking Mama as a distinct contrast to the good girl played by Sally Eilers, who at the time seemed destined to be the much bigger star. Top-billed in these comedies was usually Daphne Pollard, a 4-foot 9-inch, pear-shaped comedienne with a 6-foot personality who got laughs playing an authority figure while staring up at her younger charges.
Lombard features most prominently in Run, Girl, Run, in which she plays a "star athlete who once ran a mile in almost nothing—and was nearly expelled for it," while Pollard plays her oddly asexual coach who stops at nothing to keep her charge away from boys. The comedy mostly turns on coded references to lesbianism—homosexuality was almost always treated as a punchline in early Hollywood—with Pollard slipping into Lombard's bed to keep an eye on her and later kissing her on the lips when she wins a track meet (and then to prove how truly exciting the win is, Pollard kisses a boy, too).
I'll point out one other brief appearance Lombard made in silent films—Mary Pickford's My Best Girl, which I wrote about at length here and here—and then finish by saying that at this stage of her career, Lombard was just one of a parade of pretty girls who passed through Hollywood, nothing special. Without the benefit of her breathless voice, the stark contrast between her refined beauty and her raw, unaffected personality was largely lost, and it was only with the coming of sound that she blossomed into a star.
Even then, it's clear from her early sound films that Hollywood didn't have a clue what to do with her. Directors liked her personally, and I think they put her in movies because they liked having her around. But when it came time to cast her, they didn't think to offer her anything other than the role of a generically beautiful woman. Granted, she was never going to play the girl next door type—unaffected isn't the same as innocent—but the fact is, while Carole Lombard was a beautiful women, she never really figured how to play one on screen. She had no sense of entitlement, none of the slack indolence or rapaciousness, that was required to play the parts she was offered.
It was Howard Hawks who first had the wit to see that a beautiful woman who didn't mind making a fool of herself on camera was a rare commodity, and during the dark, bleak days of the Great Depression, a highly-marketable one. Lombard's breakthrough didn't come until 1934 when he cast her in Twentieth Century, the first of four classic comedies (including My Man Godfrey, Nothing Sacred and To Be Or Not To Be) that today largely define her screen appeal.
So what's the most difficult part of reviewing silent movies, you might ask. That's easy: the fact that something like 80% of them no longer exist.
For a case in point, take Cleopatra, the 1917 blockbuster starring Theda Bara. It was far and away the most popular movie of that year. Not only did it finish atop the list of top grossing movies of 1917, but you see references to it all over the place—for example, Roscoe Arbuckle spoofing Bara's famous dance in his comedy short The Cook (which you can see here).
Unfortunately,the last print of Cleopatra was destroyed in a fire in the 1930s, not an uncommon fate for films of that era which were printed on silver nitrate—nitrate being a key component of gunpowder.
All that remains of Cleopatra are some stills and a legend. Unfortunately, it's impossible to judge a silent film by its legendary status. Too many times, a lost film has acquired a reputation for greatness, then been rediscovered and turned out to be a tremendous letdown. Based on stills alone, Alla Nazimova's Salome, for example, was considered a classic; then the film itself was rediscovered and turned out to be a train wreck, nearly unwatchable.
Add in that Bara's fame was very brief—only about four years—and that her most famous surviving film, A Fool There Was (1915), reveals a rather stiff performance, and I'm inclined to think Bara's success was more a matter of notoriety than actual talent. I could be wrong—lots of people will disagree—and if a complete copy of Cleopatra turns up in somebody's attic one day, I'll cheerfully revisit the question.
Anyway, here's all that remains of the most popular movie of 1917, Cleopatra:
Forget auteur theory, formalism, genre studies or any of that other film school claptrap, the unifying thread running through any well-rounded and not so well-rounded film education is Oscar trivia. People who wouldn't know Follow Focus from the French New Wave can tell you every Oscar winner from the first ceremony to the present day; fanatics have known for years that Citizen Kane should have won best picture of 1941; and even the most casual filmgoers will fight ninety-nine rounds over the latest Oscar snub.
But when it comes to movies made before the Oscars were invented, well, for most of us, they might as well have never been made at all.
And why? Because we like a winner and even more, we like crabbing about our favorite loser. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences didn't start handing out awards until 1929, and no movie made before August 1, 1927, was eligible. If the Academy had come up with the Oscars in, say, 1924, we'd all have an opinion about whether Greed should have won best picture over Sherlock Jr. or The Thief of Bagdad. But the Academy didn't and even lifelong film buffs will cheerfully shrug and admit they've never seen any of those pictures, much less have an opinion about them.
Without winners and losers, there's no controversy—and in America, at least, no controversy means nothing to talk about. I tell you, silent movies will never be as popular as they ought to be until we have something to argue about.
So I'm starting the argument, here, now.
The "Silent Oscars" are my choices for best picture, director, screenplay and all four acting categories for the years before the Academy began handing out awards, beginning with 1915 and running through July 31, 1927. I might get every single pick wrong, but you've got start somewhere—and besides, based on past history, getting it wrong is what the Oscars are all about.
Let the argument begin.
PICTURE
winner: Les Vampires (prod. Société des Etablissements L. Gaumont)
nominees: The Birth Of A Nation (prod. D.W. Griffith); The Cheat (prod. Cecil B. DeMille); The Italian (prod. Thomas H. Ince); Regeneration (prod. William Fox)
Must-See Movies: The Birth Of A Nation; Les Vampires
Recommended Films: Assunta Spina;The Cheat; Fatty's Tintype Tangle; His New Job; The Italian; Posle Smerti a.k.a. After Death; Regeneration; The Tramp
Of Interest: Alice in Wonderland; The Coward; A Fool There Was
ACTOR
winner: George Beban (The Italian)
nominees: Roscoe Arbuckle (The Keystone Comedies); Charles Chaplin (The Essanay Comedies)
ACTRESS
winner: Francesca Bertini (Assunta Spina and La signora delle camelie)
nominees: Theda Bara (A Fool There Was); Geraldine Farrar (Carmen)
DIRECTOR
winner: Louis Feuillade (Les Vampires)
nominees: D.W. Griffith (The Birth of a Nation); Raoul Walsh (Regeneration)
SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Sessue Hayakawa (The Cheat)
nominees: Marcel Lévesque (Les Vampires); Henry B. Walthall (The Birth of a Nation)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Musidora (Les Vampires)
nominees: Anna Q. Nilsson (Regeneration); Clara Williams (The Italian)
SCREENPLAY
winner: Raoul Walsh and Walter C. Hackett, from the autobiography My Mamie Rose by Owen Frawley Kildare (Regeneration)
nominees: Louis Feuillade (Les Vampires); Thomas H. Ince and C. Gardner Sullivan (The Italian)
SPECIAL AWARDS: G.W. "Billy" Bitzer (The Birth Of A Nation) (Cinematography); D.W. Griffith, Joseph Henabery, James Smith, Rose Smith and Raoul Walsh (The Birth Of A Nation) (Film Editing); Robert Goldstein and Clare West (The Birth Of A Nation) (Costumes); Frank Wortman (The Birth Of A Nation) (Set Design)
Boy, what an obscure bunch of winners, you're no doubt thinking, and I agree with you. Two years ago, I doubt I had heard of any of them except Sessue Hayakawa and Raoul Walsh—the former you may remember for his Oscar-nominated performance as the commandant of the Japanese POW camp in The Bridge on the River Kwai, the latter for directing such films as White Heat and The Roaring Twenties. The rest of them? Not a chance.
But let's face it, other than Charlie Chaplin, The Birth of a Nation and maybe Theda Bara, all of 1915's potential choices are pretty obscure.
If the Silent Oscars were simply about trying to predict what the Academy might have chosen in 1915, then The Birth of a Nation would be the big winner, taking home awards for best picture, director, cinematography, editing, set design, costumes and acting awards for Lillian Gish and maybe Henry B. Walthall, making it the early silent era's equivalent of Gone With The Wind, which cleaned up at the Oscars a quarter of a century later.
But that's not quite what the Silent Oscars are all about. Aside from the fact that the Academy wasn't founded until 1927, its rather conventional wisdom is wrong more often than it's right. The Academy over the years has shown a real prejudice against comedies, commercial flops, foreign films and "mere" entertainment—which explains why Cary Grant and Alfred Hitchcock never won competitive Oscars—and there's no reason to think it would have done any better just because the films were silent.
The Birth of a Nation, the story of two families torn apart by the American Civil War and its aftermath, has some extraordinary sequences, particularly the battle scenes and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, but ultimately director D.W. Griffith's heedless devotion to the historical myths underlying the movie's source material—an unapologetically racist novel called The Clansman—renders the movie nearly unwatchable to a modern audience.
Even the most charitable reading of the movie, that it is a Faulkneresque tragedy about American apartheid told through the eyes of a triumphant white supremacist, can't explain away the tedious romance that dominates the film's second half. For all its importance to film history—its box office success pretty much guaranteed the future of the motion picture—The Birth of a Nation is a deeply-flawed, would-be masterpiece. (Read more about it here.)
Besides, just because you may not have heard of my choices doesn't mean that an audience in 1915 wouldn't have. Les Vampires was a huge hit in France, Francesca Bertini was Italy's most famous actress during the silent era, The Cheat and Regeneration were big hits in the U.S., and while The Italian flopped at the box office, it proved to be a major influence on directors of the time, with specific shots echoed in such films as The Immigrant, 7th Heaven and The Cameraman.
My choice for best picture, Les Vampires, you're familiar with, if only because I wrote 2000 words about it (here) last week. The ten-part, seven hour serial written and directed by Louis Feuillade tells the story of a criminal organization, The Vampires, that terrorizes Belle Époque Paris, corrupting those it can, murdering those it can't. Feuillade's serials, which both glamorized crime and anticipated the anxieties that came to define the 20th century—violence, paranoia, alienation, conspiracy, terrorism— influenced directors as diverse as Luis Buñuel, Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock.
"All the roots of the thriller and suspense genres," David Thomson has written, "are in Feuillade's sense that evil, anarchy and destructiveness speak to the frustrations banked up in modern society."
Although she doesn't show up until the serial's third chapter, Musidora as the sinister, seductive Irma Vep is the real star of the show, robbing, murdering and kidnapping her way into the hearts of a generation of Frenchmen. The surrealists worshiped her amoral sexuality," Tom Gunning wrote, "and the revolutionary poet Louis Aragon later claimed that Irma Vep's dark bodysuit inspired the youth of France with fantasies of rebellion."
Musidora also starred in Feuillade's next serial, Judex, and later produced and directed her own films.
The serial has a wonderfully nutty quality, showing us a simultanously whimsical and dangerous Paris 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. "[T]he orginality of Lang and Hitchcock" (Thomson again) "fall into place when one has seen Feuillade: Mabuse is the disciple of Fantômas; while Hitchcock's persistent faith in the man who wears high heels, in the crop-spraying plane that will swoop down to kill, and in a world mined for the complacent is inherited from Feuillade."
Simply put, despite being a product of the early silent era, Les Vampires more than any other work from the first thirty years of film history (1888-1918) feels like it was written for a 21st century audience and is my choice for best picture of 1915.
Francesca Bertini, my choice as 1915's best actress in a leading role, was Italy's first great star and inspired one of the two significant genres that characterized silent Italian cinema, the "diva" film. Similar to Hollywood's film noir of the post-war era, diva films told tales of beautiful, aristocratic women who destroy men as a sort of bloodsport.
In Assunta Spina, Bertini's seemingly trivial attempt to provoke her fiance to jealousy leads to a brutal beating, and her seduction of a corrupt judge to secure preferential treatment for her imprisoned fiance leads to disaster. Rather than playing a cartoonish vamp, however, Bertini's characterization is heartbreakingly three dimensional.
Likewise, her performance in La signora delle camelie, an early adaptation of the Dumas novel Camille, is both intimate and deeply-felt, and the anguish she conveys as she juggles true love, tuberculosis and the demands of her crass profession, rivals anything the great Greta Garbo managed in the 1936 version of the same story.
In her essay "Naturalism and the Diva: Francesca Bertini in Assunta Spina," Lea Jacobs argues that Bertini's "pictorial" style of acting—the broad, stylized gestures that modern audiences find so off-putting—is not so much representational as akin to a dance, with a rhythm and use of space reminiscent of Sarah Bernhardt. "An appreciation of this kind of acting," she writes, "involves not only an attention to the grace and aptness of the gestures employed, but also, how they mobilize the space of the set and exhaust the range of emotional possibilities of the situation. Rather than being 'read' for their meaning, they should be savored like a jazz musician's improvisations on a well known theme."
(The other Italian genre was the "Maciste" film, named for the heroic strongman at the center of Giovanni Pastrone's 1914 classic, Cabiria. Also known as "swords and sandals" cinema, the Maciste films focused on Italy's glorious past, a subject of particular interest at a time when the unified nation of Italy was only fifty-five years old and still groping for a national identity. After the debacle of World War I, Mussolini and his fascist supporters rode a wave of "strongman" sentiment to power.)
You might also want to check out Theda Bara in A Fool There Was. Bara was one of Hollywood biggest stars during this era, playing the original "vamp," a seducer and destroyer of men (in real life, she was a devoted wife and ardent feminist). The story of woman who seduces a married man and slowly destroys him, A Fool There Was serves as a reminder of just how long the plot of Fatal Attraction has been kicking around—since the Garden of Eden, I'm thinking.
Unfortunately, this Victorian morality tale doesn't answer the question of whether Bara's fame was based on talent or the notoriety of the roles she played. Nearly everything else she ever did, including her triumph, 1917's Cleopatra, was destroyed in a studio fire in 1937, so this is pretty much all you get. (Dawn at Noir and Chick Flicks posted a nice review of A Fool There Was yesterday. Check it out here.)
The best performance by an actor in 1915 was given by Sessue Hayakawa. The Cheat, directed by Cecil B. DeMille, is the story of a rich, spoiled housewife (Fanny Ward) whose profligate spending is driving her husband to financial ruin. Rather than give up her lavish lifestyle, she embezzles a charity's funds then turns to an Asian businessman (Hayakawa) for an emergency loan. Long on the receiving end of Ward's flirtatious attentions, and impatient to consummate their emotional affair, Hayakawa gives her the money but insists she sleep with him in lieu of payment.
When she takes the money but reneges on her end of the bargain, Hayakawa brands her flesh with a heated iron—one of the most startling scenes of this or any other era.
Like Francesca Bertini, however, Hayakawa elevated this potentially trashy material with a terrific performance.
At a time when The Birth of a Nation could play on Americans' fears of interracial sex to sell $16 million worth of tickets, DeMille no doubt intended the explicit attraction between Hayakawa and Ward as a means to provoke the xenophobic passions of his audience. But Hayakawa brings such elegance and subtlety to the role that, prior to his brutal act of violence, a modern audience is likely to find him the only sympathetic character on the screen.
The years before the United States' entry into World War I represented a brief moment of acceptance for Asians in the American film industry and with the box office success of The Cheat, Hayakawa became a major star. Later, he and his wife, actress Tsuru Aoki, formed their own production company and made several films together, most of which are now lost.
Rising anti-Asian sentiment in the early 1920s, however, put an end to Hayakawa's Hollywood career. After failing to find work in his native Japan, Hayakawa moved to France and launched a second film career. After World War II, he returned to Hollywood and earned an Oscar nomination for his supporting performance in The Bridge on the River Kwai.
An even bigger sensation at the box office was Raoul Walsh's film of crime and redemp- tion, Regeneration. Based on Owen Kildare's autobiography My Mamie Rose, Regeneration is the story of a small-time hood who meets a social worker and fights to go straight. The film is even-handed in its portrayal of Kildare, showing his suffering as a child at the hands of abusive stepparents, but not flinching from his crimes as an adult.
Walsh must have liked the basic story—a violent man goes potty over a dame—because he directed variations of it for the rest of his career, including High Sierra and The Strawberry Blonde.
Walsh filmed most of Regeneration on location in New York's slums and saloons, lending the film a documentary feel. His real coup, though, was the casting of veteran actress Anna Q. Nilsson, whom Walsh later accurately described as "ravishing." (You may remember her, along with Buster Keaton and H.B. Warner, as one of the "waxworks" who plays bridge with Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.)
With the Progressive politics of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in full flower, films with a social message were almost a cliche during this era. In addition to Regeneration, you might also check out A Corner in Wheat (1909), Traffic in Souls (1913), Where Are My Children? (1916) and the last film I'll mention in this post, Thomas H. Ince's The Italian, all of which are preserved in the National Film Registry.
While my other choices for the best films and perform- ances of 1915 are obscure by the standards of today, my choice for best actor in a lead role, George Beban in The Italian, is obscure by any standard. Although the film has been deemed worthy for inclusion in the Film Registry, it was not a box office success in 1915 and Beban himself appeared in only twenty films during his career. Still, it's one of the best films and best performances of the year and worth the effort to track down.
The Italian was one of several films about immigrants to emerge from this period of history, an issue understandably of interest to audiences since immigration from Europe to the U.S. had recently reached its peak of more than a million persons a year, with more than 13.5 million first-generation immigrants living in the U.S. The story of an immigrant who arrives in New York with the American Dream of prosperity and upward mobility in his heart only to find poverty, crime and disillusionment must have been a familiar one.
Despite a successful career on Broadway—Beban was able to command a salary of $7000 and percentage of the profits—The Italian was his first film and it takes him a few scenes to find his legs. In fact, I got the sense while watching the film that most everybody was learning on the job—and maybe they were—but by the time the film kicks into gear, with Beban's Beppo Donnetti traveling steerage from Italy to New York, Beban is in complete command of his craft.
"The actor's style is boisterous but grounded in psychological truth," wrote Daniel Eagan in America's Film Legacy. "He is also an astute judge of his audience. He knows when to appeal to viewers' sympathies and when to pull back, something that could not always be said about his contemporaries."
Beban's descent into despair as his child falls ill and then his icy rage at the politician who used him then spit him out in his hour of need is moving, and his planned revenge chilling—a terrific performance in a small, but unforgettable movie.
Even More Trivia: Lastly I want to mention Frank Keenan who played a supporting role as the father in another highly-touted movie, The Coward. Keenan isn't good in this or any other movie but I bring him up because in my researches I discovered that in his day he was known as a "furniture actor," which turns out to be an old theater term meaning an actor who habitually turns up for work drunk and has to lean on the furniture to keep from falling down
You learn something new every day.
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