Not Much Ado About Sally Eilers

Don't have much to say about her other than she was the star of Bad Girl which won Frank Borzage a much undeserved Oscar for best director of 1931-32. She made 68 movies in a career that stretched from the late silent era to 1950, but other than Bad Girl and uncredited bit parts in Sunrise and The Crowd, I've never seen any of them, and neither have you, I'll bet.

Dan Callahan for Slant had this to say about her: "Eilers's good looks can't make up for her lack of acting ability."

Once you've said that, you've said it all.

But I collected a couple of photos of her off the internet while researching Borzage and I feel I would be remiss if I didn't share them with you.

That's it, that's all I've got. No five thousand words for you today.

By the way, be sure to vote in the latest Monkey Poll, "Which of these Katie nominees for best picture of 1931-32 have you seen?"

More of a survey really. Vote for all that apply. Remember, there are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.

Best Director Of 1931-32: Part One

I. And The Winner Was
In selecting the best director of 1931-32, I had a deep field of fine directors to choose from, but with the exception of Howard Hawks, they are by modern lights an obscure lot, none more so than the Academy's pick, Frank Borzage who at the 1932 ceremony picked up his second best director trophy in five years. Like most of his films, Bad Girl focuses on the trials of a young couple in love—in this case, the girl (Sally Eilers) conceives a child out of wedlock and the boy (James Dunn, who later won an Oscar for A Tree Grows In Brooklyn) gives up his dreams of owning his own business in order to marry her—but there's nothing memorable about the direction, not by the standards of today or 1932, and after a promising first half hour, the picture devolves into an idiot plot and fizzles like a damp squib.

While admittedly, Bad Girl is not as bad as its reputation, neither is it very good, and like the picture that won Borzage his first award, 7th Heaven, both he and Bad Girl are virtually unknown today. As I have previously written, "At most all you can say is that the chord Bad Girl undeniably struck with audiences in 1931 has long since ceased to reverberate and there's little chance the modern movie fan will make sense of Borzage's award."

So who should have won the award in 1931-32? Well, the Academy also nominated King Vidor (The Champ) and Josef von Sternberg (Shanghai Express), two great directors at the top of their games. Vidor was already a Hollywood legend, having previously directed the 1925 blockbuster war movie The Big Parade, and von Sternberg had not yet worn out his welcome; Shanghai Express was a big hit in 1932. Neither men had won before (or would ever win, for that matter). Either of them would have been a solid choice for the award this year.

And then there are my five nominees, all of them having directed critically and/or commercially successful movies during the Oscar season: René Clair, whose comedy À Nous La Liberté was the first foreign language picture to ever receive an Oscar nomination (for set design); Rouben Mamoulian, who directed Fredric March to a best actor Oscar in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; James Whale who directed one of the true blockbusters of the age, the groundbreaking and influential horror movie Frankenstein; Edmund Goulding, who directed the movie that won best picture, Grand Hotel; and Howard Hawks, at the front end of what would become one of the greatest careers in Hollywood history.

I could have also gone with Yasujiro Ozu for the silent Japanese comedy I Was Born, But ..., Tod Browning for his cult classic Freaks or Ernst Lubitsch for the musical comedy The Smiling Lieutenant. They're all great directors, they're all great movies. Maybe one of them would be your choice for best director of 1931-32. You won't hear me say you're wrong.

But one thing I'm sure of: you could pick a name out of a hat and draw a better one than Frank Borzage.

[To continue to Part Two of this essay, click here.]

Katie Award Nominees For 1931-32

As the Depression, now its third year, ground on with no end in sight, movie goers and Oscar voters alike flocked to a big budget spectacle about rich people behaving badly. With its fabulous, impossible art Deco sets and its foreign locale, MGM's Grand Hotel was about as far removed from the daily lives of the audiences who paid to see it as a film was likely to get. On November 18, 1932, the Academy named Grand Hotel the best movie of the year, a triumph for producer Irving Thalberg who had bought the rights to Vicki Baum's 1929 novel Menschen im Hotel and shepherded it through every stage of production, honing the screenplay, choosing the cast and putting his personal stamp on the film's every detail.

Grand Hotel won for best picture despite being the only film in Oscar history to win the top prize without receiving a single nomination in any other category. The story of five very different people—a thief, a ballerina, a factory owner, his secretary and a dying man—who meet with tragic consequences, Grand Hotel was a star-studded extravaganza, perhaps the first movie in history to boast so many stars in its cast. It was the highest grossing film of the year for MGM, one of the few studios to turn a profit during this particularly harsh year of the Depression.

The category for best actor resulted in a tie with Fredric March (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) and Wallace Beery (The Champ) sharing the award. It almost didn't turn out that way. During the ceremony itself, Norma Shearer announced March alone as the winner. Moments later, the president of the Academy, Conrad Nagel, charged on stage to announce that under Academy rules, candidates for an award who finished within three votes of each other were deemed to have tied. Beery, who had finished a single vote in back of March, came up on stage and accepted a second best actor trophy.

The only problem was, while such a rule had been in place the year before, it had been discarded before the 1932 ceremony. Stories abound regarding the backstage shenanigans that resulted in the tie, the most fun of which is that Beery was so incensed at losing to March, he went to MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer and insisted he be given an Oscar, too. Whatever the story, by 1935, the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse would begin tabulating and certifying the results, another step out of Louis B. Mayer's smoke-filled office into the fresh air of Oscar democracy.

The best actress trophy went to Helen Hayes, a Broadway legend making her film debut in The Sin of Madelon Claudet, a 75-minute super-soaper about a woman who has a child out of wedlock and then endures unimaginable hardships to care for a son who doesn't know she exists. Her performance was a bit stagy and theatrical, not bad but not great, and she had better work in her.

Taken in the context of the times, the Academy's choice was not surprising. In light of the growing threat of state and federal censorship as well as Hollywood's insecurity about the artistic value of its product, it's understandable that the Academy's voters would latch onto any opportunity to enhance the prestige of the industry. The top Broadway actress of 1931 choosing to make a movie would be analogous to Meryl Streep deciding today to do porn—it wouldn't matter if the results seared your retinas and sent you screaming for the exits, she'd win the adult video industry's equivalent of the best actress award just for legitimizing a popular but decidedly unrespected medium.

The only real horror among the major winners was Frank Borzage who picked up his second career Oscar, this time for directing Bad Girl. It's the story of a couple struggling through Depression-era difficulties and while it's not quite as bad as its reputation, neither is it particularly remarkable either. It starts promisingly enough—a jaded girl meets a cranky radio salesman, gets pregnant, then gets married—and for half an hour, I thought Bad Girl might turn out to be a talkie version of The Crowd, a character-driven study of the dark side of the American Dream. But instead, the last hour resolves into an idiot plot and fizzles out, a damp squib now deservedly forgotten.

Jon Mullich calls Borzage's effort "hack work" and chalks up the award to social connections. That's stating the case pretty strongly, but the fact is, the Academy had nominated King Vidor (The Champ) and Josef von Sternberg (Shanghai Express), two great directors who never won an Oscar, and could have nominated James Whale (Frankenstein), Edmund Goulding (Grand Hotel), Howard Hawks (Scarface) and Rouben Mamoulian (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) who that year had made movies more commercial, more artistic and more interesting than what Borzage served up. At most all you can say is that the chord Bad Girl undeniably struck with audiences in 1931 has long since ceased to reverberate and there's little chance the modern movie fan will make sense of Borzage's award.

As good a choice as Grand Hotel was for best picture, the Academy's prejudice against comedy, horror and gangster movies kept it from recognizing such eligible films as Frankenstein, Monkey Business and Scarface, classics which between them received no nominations at all. The Katie Awards are designed to rectify just such glaring oversights.

As I was putting together my list of nominees, I wrestled with a number of questions—what to do with the cast of Grand Hotel, for one. Perhaps the first movie ever boasting an all-star cast, Grand Hotel ostensibly had five leads; yet except for the possible exception of John Barrymore, no one is on screen long enough or is involved enough in each of the plot's various threads to warrant the designation lead actor.

The Academy apparently didn't know what to do with them either and in the end nominated none of them.

These days, whether a studio pushes an actor in a lead or supporting category is more about billing and star egos than about the actual nature of the role in question. Me, I don't actually have to work with any of these people so despite their star status, I'm treating the members of this ensemble cast as supporting performers and have nominated three of them, Barrymore brothers John and Lionel, as well as Joan Crawford, in the supporting categories. Wallace Beery, who has already won a Katie award for his performance in The Big House, gets his third nom for The Champ. The fifth star of Grand Hotel, Greta Garbo who so famously begged "I vant to be alone," will have to wait another year for a Katie nomination, in her case 1933's Queen Christina.

Another question for me involved the Marx Brothers, no doubt the greatest comedy team of all time, who put on another great show, this time in Monkey Business, the first of their films not based on a Broadway stage play. I think the work of Groucho, Chico and Harpo during their years with Paramount Pictures was uniformly terrific, but despite their very different strengths, I think of them not as separate individuals but as a team, each playing an important part of a whole, even Zeppo, whose role as long-suffering straight man was filled by Allan Jones after the brothers moved to MGM. I could nominate them separately, with perhaps Groucho Marx in the lead actor role and his brothers as supporting players, but in the end I decided that these are my awards, I make the rules. I've nominated the Marx Brothers as a single contestant in the best actor category.

You might notice as you scroll down the list of nominees that I've nominated Norma Shearer for her comedic performance in Private Lives. Those of you who have been following this blog from the beginning probably know I'm no fan of her work. Yet, I would be doing you a disservice not to recognize that she was a big star in the 1930s and that she has legions of fans to this day. Private Lives, though little known now, was for my money the best performance of her career, perfectly suited to her personality and talents. She winds up with a nomination for best actress.

You may also notice I am breaking with this blog's tradition of nominating five movies for best picture and three nominees in each of the other categories. As you may remember, I recently conducted a poll to name the fifth nominee (see here) and wound up with a three-way tie. Rather than hold a run-off over the Christmas holidays, I decided in the spirit of the season to be generous and expand the field to include seven movies. Certainly if the Academy could nominate eight in 1931-32 (and ten this year), I can nominate seven.

Note: I subsequently went back and expanded the field of actor and actress nominees to four each.

I also expanded the other categories, in some instances, to include as many as five nominees. All I promise in the future is to nominate at least three in each category, but will allow for as many nominees as it takes to give you a well-rounded picture of the movie year as a whole. After all, the point of the Katie Awards is not to prove I'm right, but to entice you into expanding your movie repertoire. If I have to nominate a hundred movies to convince you to see something worthwhile that you might have otherwise missed, I see that as a small price to pay. Certainly I'm not worried about my integrity—anyone who practices law for any length of time has had to abandon all pretense of that. I am perfectly willing to humble myself in this greatest of all causes.

Here are the nominees:

PICTURE
À Nous La Liberté (prod. Frank Clifford)
Frankenstein (prod. Carl Laemmle, Jr.)
Freaks (prod. Tod Browning)
Grand Hotel (prod. Irving Thalberg)
Monkey Business (prod. Herman J. Mankiewicz)
Scarface (prod. Howard Hughes)
Waterloo Bridge (prod. Carl Laemmle Jr.)

ACTOR
Wallace Beery (The Champ)
Fredric March (Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde)
The Marx Brothers (Monkey Business)
Paul Muni (Scarface)

ACTRESS
Mae Clarke (Waterloo Bridge)
Marlene Dietrich (Shanghai Express)
Norma Shearer (Private Lives)
Barbara Stanwyck (The Miracle Woman)

DIRECTOR
René Clair (À Nous La Liberté)
Edmund Goulding (Grand Hotel)
Howard Hawks (Scarface)
Rouben Mamoulian (Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde)
James Whale (Frankenstein)

SUPPORTING ACTOR
John Barrymore (Grand Hotel)
Lionel Barrymore (Grand Hotel)
Boris Karloff (Frankenstein)
Roland Young (The Guardsman and One Hour With You)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Joan Crawford (Grand Hotel)
Ann Dvorak (Scarface)
Miriam Hopkins (The Smiling Lieutenant and Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde)
Anna May Wong (Shanghai Express)

SCREENPLAY
René Clair (À Nous La Liberté)
Frances Marion (story), Leonard Praskins (dialogue continuity) and Wanda Tuchock (additional dialogue) (The Champ)
Christa Winsloe and Friedrich Dammann (as F.D. Andam); from the play by Christa Winsloe (Mädchen in Uniform)
S.J. Perelman and Will B. Johnstone (screenplay); Arthur Sheekman (additional dialogue) (Monkey Business)
Ben Hecht; continuity and dialogue by Seton I. Miller, John Lee Mahin and W.R. Burnett; from a novel by Armitage Trail (Scarface)

Bonus Feature: For the 1932 Oscar ceremony, Walt Disney produced a brief animated short featuring the year's Oscar nominees, which I found on the blog "Motion Picture Gems." "Tom" listed the identity of the caricatures as follows: "1.Wallace Beery (as "The Champ") - Won Best Actor (tied with Frederic March) 2.Jackie Cooper ("The Champ") (nominated the year earlier for "Skippy") 3.Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt (both nominated for "The Guardsman") 4.Helen Hayes ("The Sin of Madelon Claudet") - Won Best Actress 5.Frederic March ("Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde") - Won Best Actor (tied with Wallace Beery) 6.Marie Dressler ("Emma") - Nominated for Best Actress"

I present Disney's "Parade of the Award Nominees" here with an introduction from Leonard Maltin for your viewing pleasure.



Postscript: Since returning from Philadelphia the day after Christmas, I've posted some ten thousand words including the four-part essay on Chaplin's City Lights which I wrote from a standing start in as many days. And now, I'm taking a couple of days off. See you next week.

The Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards For 1927-28

PICTURE: Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (prod. William Fox)

ACTOR: Lon Chaney (Laugh, Clown, Laugh)

ACTRESS: Mary Pickford (My Best Girl)

DIRECTOR: F.W. Murnau (Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans)

SUPPORTING ACTOR: Jean Hersholt (The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Clara Bow (Wings)

SCREENPLAY: King Vidor and John V.A. Weaver; titles by Joseph Farnham (The Crowd)

SPECIAL AWARDS: The Circus (prod. Charles Chaplin) (Best Picture-Comedy); Al Jolson (The Jazz Singer) (Best Actor-Comedy or Musical); Eleanor Boardman (The Crowd) (Best Actress-Drama); George Groves (The Jazz Singer) (Special Achievement In The Use Of Sound); "Toot Toot Tootsie" (The Jazz Singer) (Best Song); Charles Rosher and Karl Struss (Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans) (Cinematography)

MUST-SEE MOVIES OF 1927-28: Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans; The Man Who Laughs; The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg; The Circus; Wings; The Crowd; Laugh, Clown, Laugh

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 after plowing through dozens of silent movies in the past couple of weeks, I can't say I blame them. You forget how much information you process through your ears and how much pleasure you can get from a human voice—at least until you do without for a while.

Only one problem with The Jazz Singer: it's a terrible movie. Really. I mean, yeah, being able to put sound in a movie was a tremendous breakthrough and audiences ate it up with a spoon, but beyond it's importance now as a historical footnote, I can't recommend it.

As for everything else that was released between August 1, 1927 and July 31, 1928 (I'm following Oscar's convention of straddling the two years), the Academy actually did a pretty good job of distinguishing the wheat from the chaff even if the awards were largely parceled out as a result of insider politicking and studio manipulation.

Wings (Best Production) and Sunrise (Unique and Artistic Production) won the two best picture awards, Emil Jannings was a well-respected actor and won for The Way Of All Flesh and The Last Command (remember, the award in those days was handed out for a body of work rather than a specific picture), and best actress winner, Janet Gaynor, was the star of the best movie of the year, Sunrise.

There were two best director trophies that year, one for comedy, one for drama. Lewis Milestone, who would win another Oscar for directing the classic All Quiet On The Western Front, won for the former; Frank Borzage, another two time winner, won the latter.

All respectable choices. With the benefit of more than eighty years worth of hindsight, however, I think the Academy could have done better.

That's where the Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards come in.

I've done away with the splitting of categories—one director instead of two, one best picture award instead of the unexplained and unexplainable Best Production and Unique and Artistic Production awards.

I'm also doing away with Academy's habit of spreading the award for writing across a wide variety of ever-changing categories, including best original screenplay, best adapted screenplay, motion picture story, story and screenplay, screenplay and even this year's award for "title writing." With the Katies, it's one award, Best Screenplay, regardless of whether it's based on another source, wholly original or, as is often the case, a thinly disguised rip-off of last year's popular movie.

As I did with the career achieve- ment awards for the Silent Era, I will explain my choices in a series of essays over the next couple of weeks.

I've also included here a list of what I think are the must-see movies of the year, and will include a must-see list for each year I hand out awards.

Finally, I have included choices for best supporting actor and actress even though the Academy did not create those categories until 1936. I felt I otherwise would have ended up ignoring too many performances worth recognition. Besides, it gave me another excuse to see even more movies—and what could be wrong with that?

Notes: I don't have an official Fun-Stupid movie pick for 1927-28, but two might fit the bill: Wings is overly long for a silent movie and a bit corny but it also has at least an hour's worth of some of the best stunt flying and aerial dogfights ever filmed; and Charlie Chaplin's The Circus features a lot of physical comedy and acrobatic stunts and is readily available.