I started putting these polls together a while back, got busy, forgot. Think I'll revive them in the run up to the Favorite Classic Movie Actress Tournament which begins in March. A shake down cruise, if you will.
The nominees are mine rather than the Academy's. The winner is up to you. Voting never closes. I think it's possible to share the poll on your own blog or Facebook page, but I'm not sure — just how tech savvy do you expect a Monkey to be?
You can find and vote in previous polls by clicking here.
"There is no Garbo, there is no Dietrich, there is only Louise Brooks!"
Or so curator Henri Langlois said when asked why he had chosen to prominently display a huge portrait of Louise Brooks rather than Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich at the entrance of the Musee National d'Art Moderne in Paris on the occasion of its retrospective of the first sixty years of motion pictures.
I wonder how many essays about Louise Brooks begin with that quote. All of them, probably.
Langlois was overselling his case—after all, I wouldn't want to imagine a movie history without Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich—but I wouldn't want to imagine one without Brooks either. She made just twenty-three movies and she's not nearly as celebrated as her two counterparts, but in 1929 at least, there was no actress better than Louise Brooks, and when Langlois reintroduce her to a world that had forgotten her after a twenty-five year exile, perhaps he was entitled to a bit of hyperbole.
Brooks's brief but unforgettable film career followed the trajectory of an early NASA rocket—straight up, then straight down, with some crazy loops in the middle and a spectacular explosion at the end. She combined brains, elegant beauty, and scorching sex appeal with a party-girl work ethic self-destructive enough to end ten careers. She made no apologies for preferring sex, jazz and alcohol to a steady job, and she burned every bridge she ever crossed, some while she was still standing on them, until finally there were no bridges left to burn.
"I have a gift for enraging people," she once said, "but if I ever bore you, it'll be with a knife."
Twice married, twice divorced, Brooks conducted well-documented affairs with Charles Chaplin, Washington Redskins owner George Preston Marshall, movie producer Walter Wanger, and many others, including an experimental one-night stand with Greta Garbo. CBS founder William Paley, who was briefly involved with Brooks in his youth, was so fond of her that when she hit the skids after her movie career, he helped her with a monthly stipend for the rest of her life.
Born in Cherryvale, Kansas, in 1906 to an indulgent lawyer father and a social-crusading mother with the maternal instincts of an "alligator," Brooks became a dancer at an early age and as a teenager joined the Denishawn Dancers (working with the legendary Martha Graham). Later she danced with the George White Scandals and the Ziegfeld Follies. "I learned how to act by watching Martha Graham dance," Brooks said, "and I learned how to dance by watching Charlie Chaplin act."
She made her movie debut in 1925 for Paramount Pictures, appearing in eleven films over a three year period, playing the quintessential flapper across from such actors as Adolphe Menjou and W.C. Fields. She had an insatiable appetite for the Hollywood nightlife, was a regular at William Randolph Hearst's San Simeon castle, and was a fixture in the gossip columns. Her "black helmet hairdo" was one of the ten most influential haircuts in history, according to InStyle magazine, and she was one of the most photographed celebrities of her time.
But it wasn't until 1928, when she made Howard Hawks's A Girl In Every Port and William A. Wellman's Beggars of Life, that she really made an impression as an actress.
Her contemporaries, schooled in the art of silent film overacting, thought she was doing nothing on screen; years later, it's clear she was a method actress before the method had been invented. "The great art of films does not consist in descriptive movement of face and body," she said, "but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation." As with the works of Buster Keaton, Brooks's understated, internal approach gives her performances a modern feel, very much in contrast to her contemporary, Greta Garbo, who wouldn't completely shed her silent film theatrics until 1933. Brooks never had any to lose.
With her work in A Girl in Every Port and Beggars of Life, Brooks came to the attention of German director Georg Wilhelm Pabst, a collaboration that would result in the best work of both their careers.
Pabst, an Austrian born in what is now the Czech Republic, was one of the leading directors in Germany's important and influential film industry. After making movies with Greta Garbo (The Joyless Street, her first outside of Sweden) and Brigitte Helm (who later played the lead in Metropolis), Pabst set his sights on a movie version of a pair of stage plays, Erdgeist (Earth Spirit) and Der Büchse Die Pandora (Pandora's Box), two well-known works by German playwright Frank Wedekind.
In his two plays, Wedekind had set out to expose the secret lusts and private immoralities of Berlin's ruling class, with the action centering on the manipulations and cruelty of a prostitute named Lulu. Wedekind described Lulu as a "monster," but Pabst re-envisioned her as "sweetly innocent" and unaware of the evil she inspired, shifting the moral responsibility for the resulting tragedy to a flaw in her upper class patrons.
It was bold idea for a story well-fixed in the mind of a German public in no mood to acknowledge their role in the decadence and growing weakness of the Weimar Republic. "[M]y playing of the tragic Lulu with no sense of sin," Brooks wrote later, "remained generally unacceptable for a quarter of a century."
In Brooks, Pabst saw the precise combination of innocence and unapologetic sexual appetite he was looking for in his Lulu. The problem was, she was under contract to Paramount Pictures and the studio had its own plans for the actress. Sitting in post-production was a silent movie, The Canary Murder Case—Brooks played the "Canary" of the title, a blackmailing singer turned murder victim—which the studio wanted to re-shoot as a "talkie."
Typical of the industry as a whole, though, Paramount saw the advent of sound not just as a technical challenge, but also an opportunity to slash salaries and dump difficult stars (such as Wallace Beery and Clara Bow), using the cost of converting to the new technology as an excuse. Never a fan of the business side of acting to begin with, Brooks balked when the studio informed her she would be doing the work of dubbing The Canary Murder Case for less pay. She quit on the spot, at which time studio head B.P. Schulberg informed her of Pabst's offer.
Legend has it that Marlene Dietrich was waiting in Pabst's outer office to test for Pandora's Box when a cable arrived saying that Brooks had left Paramount and was available to play Lulu. For Brooks, it was a fateful decision.
The first scene of Pan- dora's Box sets the tone. We first see Lulu in her spacious apartment in the city, friendly, smiling, fresh-faced—with a bottle of brandy tucked under her left elbow to pay off the meter reader with less than what she owes, and even though he's old enough to know better, he can't help thinking such a lovely, innocent smile is for him only. And it is for him only, at least until the next man arrives at the door.
Any number of men open this particular Pandora's box without much regard to the cost to their dignity, social standing or bank accounts: Schigolch, a pimp and a leech, Lulu's first "patron," respectable until he met her, now an alcoholic bum with holes in his shoes; Dr. Schön, a wealthy publisher with a high-society fiancee, who lusts after Lulu and hates himself for it; and his son, Alwa, who adores her even as she cheerfully tells him she is incapable of love. There's even a Countess (played by a reluctant Alice Roberts, who didn't realize she was to play what was perhaps the first overtly lesbian character in movie history) who longs for Lulu with an unrequited passion.
Like Josef von Sternberg who was busy making a very similar movie, The Blue Angel with the aforementioned Marlene Dietrich, Pabst had men pegged as nothing much more than big animals with pants on—in one scene he shows Schön rutting like a pig in white tie and tails—and it comes as no great surprise that the last man in Lulu's life, Jack the Ripper, proves to be the biggest animal of all, albeit with a different agenda on his mind.
Lulu is blessed with a sort of short-term moral amnesia that it makes it possible to forget from moment to moment that her relationships with other people flow, or should flow, in two directions. As Brooks plays her, Lulu is a child in a woman's body, and that childlike innocence at the core of Brooks's approach is the key to the movie. Lulu is a flame who attracts men to their destruction, but because there's no malevolence in her, the audience never turns on her as they might a typically scheming femme fatale.
No doubt that's why Pabst so preferred Brooks to Dietrich. "It's a part that can't be played by her type," Brooks said later of Dietrich in a rare interview. Pabst agreed, saying, "Dietrich was too old and too obvious—one sexy look and the picture would have become a burlesque."
Pandora's Box is not a perfect movie. At 133 minutes, it's about half an hour too long for a silent film, and Pabst never really solved the structural problem of stitching two stories together. But Brooks's performance is extraordinary, quite unlike anything that had come before it and so far ahead of its time, years would pass before it found an audience.
Premiering in Berlin in January 1929, Germans were outraged that Pabst had chosen an American to play their beloved Lulu and were offended that he had dared show Berlin's upper classes in a less than flattering light. The movie fared no better when it reached the U.S. in December of that same year. Already a relic of the Silent Era, Pandora's Box sank without a ripple.
Undeterred, Pabst began work on a follow-up to Pandora's Box in June, 1929. Diary Of A Lost Girl (Tagebuch einer Verlorenen) is an adaptation of Margarete Böhme's novel about a girl who is seduced and raped only to be sent to a brutal reform school by a hypocritical father who himself has a taste for young girls.
In choosing to make Diary of a Lost Girl, Brooks turned down an offer of $10,000 from a Paramount Pictures now desperate to avoid the expense of finding another actress to dub her voice in The Canary Murder Case. With this second rejection, Brooks burned all but the last of her Hollywood bridges. B.P. Schulberg, the head of Paramount, put the word out that Brooks's voice was unsuitable for talkies and she was blackballed from most of the major studios. It was years before Brooks grasped the significance of her decision.
The resulting collaboration between Brooks and Pabst is not quite as good as Pandora's Box, but Brooks's performance may be even better. The movie blogger L'Eclisse has observed that while she's not convinced the movie works, "What is indisputable ... is the gravity of Brooks’ performance. She is delicate, subtle, vulnerable, intuitive, and a host of other immortal adjectives."
Certainly the performance proves Pandora's Box was no fluke.
As an innocent victim made to suffer outrageously at the hands of others, Brooks's character in this one, Thymian, is very nearly a polar opposite of Lulu. Yet in both movies, Brooks serves as a prism refracting upper class hypocrisy into its full spectrum of hidden sin. Discovering her father has seduced and impregnated the family housekeeper, a woman not much older than herself, Thymian turns to her father's lecherous business partner for solace, an unscrupulous lech who takes full advantage of the opportunity.
Brooks noted she played the scene as a ballet, an emo- tionally complex scene in which an "'innocent' young girl" (the quotation marks around "innocent" are Brooks's own) subtly maneuvers a "wary lecher" without any idea of what is at stake, knowing only that her father has hurt her. For Thymian, to faint dead away in her lover's arms was the consummation promised in romance novels. For the lecher, consummation was something else.
The subsequent rape, implied but not shown, leaves Thymian pregnant which, in the eyes of the hypocrites who raised her, is her own fault, a sin worthy of harsh punishment.
Filming those scenes must have been an uncomfortable reminder of a pivotal incident from Brooks's own childhood when as a nine year old she was sexually molested by a neighbor only to have her mother blame her for seducing the man when she came home crying. Brooks wrote later that the episode haunted her for the rest of her life and shaped her feelings about love and sex.
"Love is a publicity stunt," she said bluntly, "and making love—after the first curious raptures—is only another petulant way to pass the time waiting for the studio to call."
After Thymian gives birth, her baby is given over to a midwife and Thymian herself is sent to a girl's reformatory, which like the girl's school in Mädchen In Uniform, which followed two years later, seethes with authoritarian cruelty and repressed desire. That Thymian's life improves when she escapes the reform school to work in a brothel should tell you everything you need to know about Pabst's opinion of reform schools, and I think Pabst, like fellow German directors Fritz Lang (M) and Leontine Sagan (Mädchen In Uniform), was groping to diagnose the very real sickness in German society that would soon bring Adolf Hitler to power.
Censors heavily edited Diary of a Lost Girl on its release, the French version being so cut up (the entire brothel sequence was excised), the movie's screenwriter thought the film had broken half way through its premiere. Still, despite making no impression in America, Diary of a Lost Girl was enough of a success in Europe that Brooks made a third movie, Prix de Beauté, a truly European effort with a screenplay from Pabst and French director René Clair, and direction by Italian Augusto Genina.
The film was a hit, yet despite Pabst's promise to turn her into an international star to rival Garbo, Brooks was bored with Europe and after three movies there, returned to an indifferent America. The hard work of making films in a language not her own held no interest for her, no matter how much fame or fortune was in the offing.
"Your life is exactly like Lulu's," Pabst angrily told her on parting, "and you will end the same way." He wasn't far wrong.
Although her European films had had no impact on the American market and she was still in bad odor after snubbing Paramount, Brooks did find small roles in four pictures, and made her belated sound debut in the execrable comedy short Windy Riley Goes Hollywood, directed by the still-disgraced Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle under an assumed name. All four movies are terrible and Brooks, who admitted she knew nothing about how to project her voice for the microphone, is pretty bad in them.
Still, in 1931, William Wellman, who had directed Brooks in Beggars of Life, offered her the female lead in his next picture, James Cagney's gangster classic, The Public Enemy. Brooks initially said yes, then changed her mind and abruptly left Hollywood to be with then-lover George Preston Marshall. The role went instead to Jean Harlow and made her an instant star.
Brooks had burned her last bridge. There was nowhere to go but down.
"That Hollywood treatment is murder, just murder," she said later. "It isn't that people turn their heads not to speak to you, they don't see you, you're not a person anymore. The people who've dined with you and you've spent weekends with, they look right at you, you don't exist."
By the time she realized she missed acting, it was too late. "I never gave away anything without wishing I had kept it," she said later, composing her own epitaph, "nor kept anything without wishing I had given it away."
Brooks returned to Hollywood in 1936 and appeared in a pair of Westerns, including her last film, Overland Stage Raiders with John Wayne a year before his breakthrough in Stagecoach, then spent another two years in Hollywood waiting for offers that never came. When she left California in 1940, she left for good. She was thirty-four.
Brooks fell back on dancing for a while, working on the stage in Chicago, and even opened a dance studio in Wichita, Kansas, but she was as impatient and ill-tempered as ever, alienating clients and driving away business. Eventually she retreated to New York, working as a salesgirl, maid and finally as an "escort."
She said later that only Paley's monthly stipend kept her from suicide. "How I have existed fills me with horror," she wrote, "for I have failed in everything—spelling, arithmetic, riding, swimming, tennis, golf, dancing, singing, acting, wife, mistress, whore, friend. Even cooking. And I do not excuse myself with the usual excuse of not trying. I tried with all my heart."
She was "a very strong woman," a friend said after her death, "but whose strength annihilated her, I think, and I always felt she was a lost soul."
Then by chance in 1953, Brooks's neighbor had a conversation with James Card, curator of the George Eastman House of Photography in Rochester, N.Y., who mentioned that he had been searching for years to find Brooks. The neighbor introduced the two, and Brooks and Card began a correspondence that led Brooks to relocate to Rochester and begin writing a series of respected essays about the Silent Era, collected under the title Lulu in Hollywood. In 1957, Henri Langlois held his film retrospective in Paris and reintroduced Brooks to a world finally ready to recognize her talent.
More than a quarter of a century after she had turned her back on fame, fame forgave her. She is now regarded as one of the greatest actresses of the Silent Era.
Brooks lived out the rest of her life in Rochester, writing, painting, reading voraciously, entertaining friends, occasionally lecturing to students at the Eastman House, but otherwise avoiding the public that had rediscovered her. In her later years, she suffered from arthritis and emphysema, living, like a character from the Proust she loved, in memories of things past.
"In my dreams," she said not long before her death, "I am not crippled. In my dreams, I dance."
As the first day's voting draws to a close, Marlene Dietrich finds herself ten votes behind Joan Crawford. She's pulling out all the stops to win your vote and knows just how to get a (mythical) monkey's engine running ...
A look ahead at the Monty's March Madness Favorite Actress Tournament, part of which we'll be hosting here at the Monkey.
Voting begins March 5.
Marlene Dietrich Birth Name: Marie Magdalene Dietrich Tourney Bracket and Seeding: "Tough Broads and Pre-Code Babes" #2 Birth Date: December 27, 1901 Birthplace: Berlin, Germany Height: 5' 6" Film Debut:So sind die Männer (The Little Napoleon) (1923) Academy Awards: 1 nomination, 0 wins Katie Awards: Best Actress (Drama) (1930-31) (Morocco) and Best Actress (Comedy/Musical) (1948) (A Foreign Affair) Three More To See:Shanghai Express, Destry Rides Again, Witness for the Prosecution
versus
Elsa Lanchester Birth Name: Elizabeth Lanchester Sullivan Tourney Bracket and Seeding: "Tough Broads and Pre-Code Babes" #7 Birth Date: October 28, 1902 Birthplace: London, England Height: 5' 4½" Film Debut:The Scarlet Woman (1925) Academy Awards: 2 nominations, 0 wins Katie Awards: Best Supporting Actress (1935) (Bride of Frankenstein) Three More To See:The Private Life of Henry VIII, Witness for the Prosecution, Bell Book and Candle
The winner of this match-up will face the winner of:
Joan Crawford Birth Name: Lucille Fay LeSueur Tourney Bracket and Seeding: "Tough Broads and Pre-Code Babes" #3 Birth Date: March 23, 1905 Birthplace: San Antonio, Texas Height: 5' 5" Film Debut:Pretty Ladies (1925) Academy Awards: 3 nominations, 1 win (Best Actress, 1945) (Mildred Pierce) Katie Awards: Best Actress (Drama) (1945) (Mildred Pierce) Three More To See:Grand Hotel, The Women, Humoresque
versus
Norma Shearer Birth Name: Edith Norma Shearer Tourney Bracket and Seeding: "Tough Broads and Pre-Code Babes" #6 Birth Date: August 10, 1902 Birthplace: Montreal, Quebec Height: 5' 1" Film Debut:The Star Boarder (1919) Academy Awards: 5 nominations, 1 win (Best Actress, 1929-30) (The Divorcee) Katie Awards: Best Actress (Comedy/Musical) (1931-32) (Private Lives) Three More To See:The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg, A Free Soul, The Women
A long, long time ago, I promised myself that if anyone ever came up to me and said, "Can you stake a fellow American to a meal," I'd give him twenty bucks. But no one ever has, and anyway, $20 doesn't go nearly as far as it used to.
PICTURE (Drama) winner:The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre (prod. Henry Blanke) nominees:The Fallen Idol (prod. Carol Reed); Force Of Evil (prod. Bob Roberts); Fort Apache (prod. Merian C. Cooper and John Ford); Key Largo (prod. Jerry Wald); The Lady From Shanghai (prod. Orson Welles); Letter From An Unknown Woman (prod. John Houseman); The Naked City (prod. Mark Hellinger); Red River (prod. Howard Hawks)
PICTURE (Comedy/Musical) winner: The Red Shoes (prod. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger) nominees:Easter Parade (prod. Arthur Freed); A Foreign Affair (prod. Charles Brackett); Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (prod. Melvin Frank and Norman Panama); Unfaithfully Yours (prod. Preston Sturges)
PICTURE (Foreign Language) winner:Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) (prod. Giuseppe Amato and Vittorio De Sica) nominees:Germania anno zero (Germany Year Zero) (prod. Roberto Rossellini and Salvo D'Angelo); La terra trema (The Earth Trembles) (prod. Salvo D'Angelo); Xiao cheng zhi chun (Spring in a Small Town) (prod. Wenhua Film Company); Yoidore tenshi (Drunken Angel) (prod. Sôjirô Motoki)
ACTOR (Drama) winner: Humphrey Bogart (The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre) nominees: Montgomery Clift (The Search and Red River); John Garfield (Force of Evil); Alec Guinness (Oliver Twist); Laurence Olivier (Hamlet); Edward G. Robinson (Key Largo); Takashi Shimura (Yoidore tenshi a.k.a. Drunken Angel); James Stewart (Call Northside 777); John Wayne (Red River)
ACTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner: Rex Harrison (Unfaithfully Yours) nominees: Fred Astaire (Easter Parade); Cary Grant (Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House); Bob Hope (The Paleface); Anton Walbrook (The Red Shoes); Clifton Webb (Sitting Pretty)
ACTRESS (Drama) winner: Olivia de Havilland (The Snake Pit) nominees: Irene Dunne (I Remember Mama); Joan Fontaine (Letter From An Unknown Woman); Rita Hayworth (The Lady From Shanghai); Jennifer Jones (Portrait Of Jennie); Barbara Stanwyck (Sorry, Wrong Number); Jane Wyman (Johnny Belinda)
ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical) winner: Marlene Dietrich (A Foreign Affair) nominees: Linda Darnell (Unfaithfully Yours); Judy Garland (Easter Parade); Myrna Loy (Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House); Moira Shearer (The Red Shoes)
DIRECTOR (Drama) winner: John Huston (The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre) nominees: Vittorio De Sica (Ladri di biciclette a.k.a. Bicycle Thieves); John Ford (Fort Apache); Howard Hawks (Red River); Akira Kurosawa (Yoidore tenshi a.k.a. Drunken Angel); Max Ophüls (Letter From An Unknown Woman); Orson Welles (The Lady From Shanghai)
DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (The Red Shoes) nominees: Preston Sturges (Unfaithfully Yours); Billy Wilder (A Foreign Affair)
SUPPORTING ACTOR winner: Walter Huston (The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre) nominees: Lionel Barrymore (Key Largo); Charles Bickford (Johnny Belinda); Melvyn Douglas (Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House); Thomas Gomez (Key Largo and Force Of Evil); Tim Holt (The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre); Everett Sloane (The Lady From Shanghai)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS winner: Claire Trevor (Key Largo) nominees: Ethel Barrymore (Portrait Of Jennie); Agnes Moorhead (Johnny Belinda); Jean Simmons (Hamlet); Marie Windsor (Force Of Evil)
SCREENPLAY winner: John Huston, based on the novel by B. Traven (The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre) nominees: Graham Greene, from his short story "The Basement Room" (The Fallen Idol); Howard Koch, from the novel by Stefan Zweig (Letter From An Unknown Woman); Borden Chase and Charles Schnee, from the short story by Borden Chase (Red River); Preston Sturges (Unfaithfully Yours)
SPECIAL AWARDS Charles Lawton, Jr. (The Lady From Shanghai) (Cinematography)
What time frame constitutes the so-called "Golden Age" of Hollywood movies is open to debate, but to my mind, 1934 is a good starting point. It was the year that studios began enforcing the Production Code; Clark Gable grew his trademark pencil-thin moustache and won an Oscar; William Powell and Myrna Loy teamed up for the first time; Astaire and Rogers danced their way to stardom; Frank Capra and Howard Hawks invented the screwball comedy; and Bette Davis gave a blistering performance in Of Human Bondage that pretty much finished the job James Cagney started in The Public Enemy, putting a fork in the genteel British stage style that had dominated the early sound era. Not to mention that, on a technical level, sound recording had improved to the point that it's no longer an issue for a modern viewer.
When the Golden Age ended is a bit murkier. The artistic and commercial quality of Hollywood movies continued unabated at least into the post-war era, and then came the challenges of television, the Supreme Court's 1948 antitrust decision, foreign competition and the cultural upheaval of the 1960s. The studio system cracked up, the Production Code fell by the wayside and nothing was ever quite the same again.
Not that Hollywood wouldn't continue to make great movies in the 1960s and beyond (I'm no Luddite, nor am I a prude), but the economic model Hollywood studios followed changed radically and with it, so did the look, content and feel of the movies. In some ways, that's a welcome development. But we'll get to that when we get to that.
By the way, this is the first of what we might refer to as the "future" Katie Awards—which is to say, I haven't written about any of these movies yet. So a little context is in order.
As always I've picked three "best" picture awards in three different categories, but don't kid yourself, all winners are not created equal. The fact is every comedy/musical nominee of 1934 and nearly every foreign language nominee is better than the winner of best drama, The Scarlet Empress, at least in my book. Frankly, I have less affection for The Scarlet Empress than just about any picture I foresee handing an award to. My appreciation of it is purely intellectual as perhaps the ultimate example of the concept of "auteur theory" and I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge it. Doesn't mean I much like it, though.
The fact is that during the course of his celebrated collaboration with Marlene Dietrich, director Josef von Sternberg behaved less and less like a professional storyteller and more and more like a neurotic voyeur trying to possess what had already eluded him, and the movies he made with her became a peephole through which he watched as she paraded before him a progression of imaginary and not so imaginary lovers.
I'll give Sternberg this: his films are not the chilly, disinterested exercises of a theoretician—they are the fevered dreams of a director increasingly no longer in control of himself or his passions, the celluloid confessions of a man obsessed with a woman who no longer loves him, needs him or even thinks much about him except in moments of bemused contempt.
In later years, Sternberg liked to imply that Dietrich was a no-talent hack who existed only in the lens of his camera. That to me sounds like the ranting of a rejected suitor—Don José in Bizet's Carmen killing his ex-lover rather than letting anyone else have her—because what I see and what he evidently failed to see is the amused smile playing on Dietrich's lips as she toys with her director, allowing him to photograph her but never truly possess her. It's why she survived Sternberg's fetishistic excesses unscathed while he was destroyed—she was sharing a private joke with her audience at his expense. "Watch me make him jump through another hoop," she seems to be saying, even as she emerged from, say, the gorilla costume in Blonde Venus. The harder he tried to possess her with his camera, the more ridiculous the effort looked. Nobody was ever going to pin Dietrich down.
The other award I should mention is that for Louise Beavers in Imitation of Life. Modern viewers often have trouble wrapping their heads around what to our eyes looks like condescending noblesse oblige racism on the one hand, and passive "Uncle Tom-ism" on the other. What can I tell you. That which was subversive in 1934—a black woman as the secret brains of a lucrative business empire—is puzzlingly dated and racist now.
I think there are two ways of dealing with racism in the movies of the past: You can judge it by the standards of today and shun every performance by a black actor before, say, Sidney Poitier in 1967's In The Heat Of The Night, leaving your viewing habits even more lily-white than the lily-white Hollywood of the time; or you can watch these roles in context and judge them by how much the actor was able to do given the crippling limitations they worked under. Since option one would require me to ignore Louise Beavers, Nina Mae McKinney, Paul Robeson, Hattie McDaniel, Eddie Anderson, Ethel Waters, Lena Horne, Dooley Wilson, Rex Ingram, and many, many others, I'm going with option two.
Mind you, I'm not grading the performance on a curve—I think Louise Beaver's gentle portrayal of a mother who sacrifices everything for an ungrateful daughter is the best supporting performance of the year regardless of the historical context—but I am cutting the role some slack.
If your conscience leads you to weigh these issues differently, though, I can't say you're wrong.
The rest of these movies you've probably heard of.
PICTURE (Drama) winner:The Scarlet Empress (prod. Josef von Sternberg) nominees:The Black Cat (prod. E.M. Asher and Carl Laemmle, Jr.); Imitation Of Life (prod. Carl Laemmle, Jr.); The Man Who Knew Too Much (prod. Michael Balcon)
PICTURE (Comedy/Musical) winner:The Thin Man (prod. Hunt Stromberg) nominees:The Gay Divorcee (prod. Pandro S. Berman); It Happened One Night (prod. Frank Capra); It's A Gift (prod. William LeBaron); The Merry Widow (prod. Ernst Lubitsch and Irving Thalberg); Twentieth Century (prod. Howard Hawks)
PICTURE (Foreign Language) winner:L'Atalante (prod. Jacques-Louis Nounez) nominees:Les misérables (prod. Raymond Borderie); Mauvaise Graine (prod. Georges Bernier); Shen nu (The Goddess) (prod. Minwei Tian); Ukikusa monogatari (A Story Of Floating Weeds) (prod. Shochiku Company)
ACTOR (Drama) winner: Robert Donat (The Count Of Monte Cristo) nominees: Harry Baur (Les misérables); Leslie Howard (Of Human Bondage and The Scarlet Pimpernel); Bela Lugosi (The Black Cat)
ACTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner: William Powell (The Thin Man) nominees: Fred Astaire (The Gay Divorcee); John Barrymore (Twentieth Century); W.C. Fields (It's A Gift); Clark Gable (It Happened One Night); The Three Stooges (Punch Drunks, Men In Black and Three Little Pigskins)
ACTRESS (Drama) winner: Bette Davis (Of Human Bondage) nominees: Marlene Dietrich (The Scarlet Empress); Dita Parlo (L'Atalante); Margaret Sullavan (Little Man, What Now)
ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical) winner: Myrna Loy (The Thin Man) nominees: Claudette Colbert (It Happened One Night); Carole Lombard (Twentieth Century); Jeanette MacDonald (The Merry Widow); Ginger Rogers (The Gay Divorcee)
DIRECTOR (Drama) winner: Josef von Sternberg (The Scarlet Empress) nominees: Raymond Bernard (Les misérables); Robert J. Flaherty (Man Of Aran); Yasujiro Ozu (Ukikusa monogatari (A Story Of Floating Weeds)); Jean Vigo (L'Atalante)
DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner: Frank Capra (It Happened One Night) nominees: Howard Hawks (Twentieth Century); Ernst Lubitsch (The Merry Widow); Norman McLeod (It's A Gift); W.S. Van Dyke (The Thin Man)
SUPPORTING ACTOR winner: Michel Simon (L'Atalante) nominees: Edward Everett Horton (The Merry Widow and The Gay Divorcee); Sam Jaffe (The Scarlet Empress); Charles Laughton (The Barretts Of Wimpole Street); Peter Lorre (The Man Who Knew Too Much); Frank Morgan (Affairs of Cellini)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS winner: Louise Beavers (Imitation Of Life) nominees: Alice Brady (The Gay Divorcee); Louise Dresser (The Scarlet Empress); Una Merkel (The Merry Widow); Merle Oberon (The Private Life Of Don Juan and The Scarlet Pimpernel)
SCREENPLAY winner: Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, from the novel by Dashiell Hammett (The Thin Man) nominees: Robert Riskin, from a short story by Samuel Hopkins Adams (It Happened One Night); Jean Vigo and Albert Riéra (adaptation and dialogue), Jean Guinée (scenario) (L'Atalante); Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, from a play by Charles Bruce Millholland (Twentieth Century)
SPECIAL AWARDS Man Of Aran (Documentary Feature); Joseph Walker (It Happened One Night) (Cinematography); Sergei Prokofiev (Poruchik Kizhe a.k.a. Lieutenant Kije) (Score)
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?
Or so curator Henri Langlois said when asked why he had chosen to prominently display a huge portrait of Louise Brooks rather than Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich at the entrance of the Musee National d'Art Moderne in Paris on the occasion of its retrospective of the first sixty years of motion pictures.
Brooks's brief but unforgettable film career followed the trajectory of an early NASA rocket—straight up, then straight down, with some crazy loops in the middle and a spectacular explosion at the end. She combined brains, elegant beauty, and scorching sex appeal with a party-girl work ethic self-destructive enough to end ten careers. She made no apologies for preferring sex, jazz and alcohol to a steady job, and she burned every bridge she ever crossed, some while she was still standing on them, until finally there were no bridges left to burn.
Born in Cherryvale, Kansas, in 1906 to an indulgent lawyer father and a social-crusading mother with the maternal instincts of an "alligator," Brooks became a dancer at an early age and as a teenager joined the Denishawn Dancers (working with the legendary Martha Graham). Later she danced with the George White Scandals and the Ziegfeld Follies. "I learned how to act by watching Martha Graham dance," Brooks said, "and I learned how to dance by watching Charlie Chaplin act."
Pabst, an Austrian born in what is now the Czech Republic, was one of the leading directors in Germany's important and influential film industry. After making movies with Greta Garbo (The Joyless Street, her first outside of Sweden) and Brigitte Helm (who later played the lead in Metropolis), Pabst set his sights on a movie version of a pair of stage plays, Erdgeist (Earth Spirit) and Der Büchse Die Pandora (Pandora's Box), two well-known works by German playwright Frank Wedekind.
In Brooks, Pabst saw the precise combination of innocence and unapologetic sexual appetite he was looking for in his Lulu. The problem was, she was under contract to Paramount Pictures and the studio had its own plans for the actress. Sitting in post-production was a silent movie, The Canary Murder Case—Brooks played the "Canary" of the title, a blackmailing singer turned murder victim—which the studio wanted to re-shoot as a "talkie."
The first scene of Pan- dora's Box sets the tone. We first see Lulu in her spacious apartment in the city, friendly, smiling, fresh-faced—with a bottle of brandy tucked under her left elbow to pay off the meter reader with less than what she owes, and even though he's old enough to know better, he can't help thinking such a lovely, innocent smile is for him only. And it is for him only, at least until the next man arrives at the door.
Like Josef von Sternberg who was busy making a very similar movie, The Blue Angel with the aforementioned Marlene Dietrich, Pabst had men pegged as nothing much more than big animals with pants on—in one scene he shows Schön rutting like a pig in white tie and tails—and it comes as no great surprise that the last man in Lulu's life, Jack the Ripper, proves to be the biggest animal of all, albeit with a different agenda on his mind.
Premiering in Berlin in January 1929, Germans were outraged that Pabst had chosen an American to play their beloved Lulu and were offended that he had dared show Berlin's upper classes in a less than flattering light. The movie fared no better when it reached the U.S. in December of that same year. Already a relic of the Silent Era, Pandora's Box sank without a ripple.
Brooks noted she played the scene as a ballet, an emo- tionally complex scene in which an "'innocent' young girl" (the quotation marks around "innocent" are Brooks's own) subtly maneuvers a "wary lecher" without any idea of what is at stake, knowing only that her father has hurt her. For Thymian, to faint dead away in her lover's arms was the consummation promised in romance novels. For the lecher, consummation was something else.
Censors heavily edited Diary of a Lost Girl on its release, the French version being so cut up (the entire brothel sequence was excised), the movie's screenwriter thought the film had broken half way through its premiere. Still, despite making no impression in America, Diary of a Lost Girl was enough of a success in Europe that Brooks made a third movie, Prix de Beauté, a truly European effort with a screenplay from Pabst and French director René Clair, and direction by Italian Augusto Genina.
Brooks returned to Hollywood in 1936 and appeared in a pair of Westerns, including her last film, Overland Stage Raiders with John Wayne a year before his breakthrough in Stagecoach, then spent another two years in Hollywood waiting for offers that never came. When she left California in 1940, she left for good. She was thirty-four.
She said later that only Paley's monthly stipend kept her from suicide. "How I have existed fills me with horror," she wrote, "for I have failed in everything—spelling, arithmetic, riding, swimming, tennis, golf, dancing, singing, acting, wife, mistress, whore, friend. Even cooking. And I do not excuse myself with the usual excuse of not trying. I tried with all my heart."
Brooks lived out the rest of her life in Rochester, writing, painting, reading voraciously, entertaining friends, occasionally lecturing to students at the Eastman House, but otherwise avoiding the public that had rediscovered her. In her later years, she suffered from arthritis and emphysema, living, like a character from the Proust she loved, in memories of things past.
As the first day's voting draws to a close, Marlene Dietrich finds herself ten votes behind Joan Crawford. She's pulling out all the stops to win your vote and knows just how to get a (mythical) monkey's engine running ...
Birth Name: Marie Magdalene Dietrich
Birth Name: Elizabeth Lanchester Sullivan
Birth Name: Lucille Fay LeSueur
Birth Name: Edith Norma Shearer
A long, long time ago, I promised myself that if anyone ever came up to me and said, "Can you stake a fellow American to a meal," I'd give him twenty bucks. But no one ever has, and anyway, $20 doesn't go nearly as far as it used to.
What time frame constitutes the so-called "Golden Age" of Hollywood movies is open to debate, but to my mind, 1934 is a good starting point. It was the year that studios began enforcing the Production Code; Clark Gable grew his trademark pencil-thin moustache and won an Oscar; William Powell and Myrna Loy teamed up for the first time; Astaire and Rogers danced their way to stardom; Frank Capra and Howard Hawks invented the screwball comedy; and Bette Davis gave a blistering performance in Of Human Bondage that pretty much finished the job James Cagney started in The Public Enemy, putting a fork in the genteel British stage style that had dominated the early sound era. Not to mention that, on a technical level, sound recording had improved to the point that it's no longer an issue for a modern viewer.
When the Golden Age ended is a bit murkier. The artistic and commercial quality of Hollywood movies continued unabated at least into the post-war era, and then came the challenges of television, the Supreme Court's 1948 antitrust decision, foreign competition and the cultural upheaval of the 1960s. The studio system cracked up, the Production Code fell by the wayside and nothing was ever quite the same again.
I'll give Sternberg this: his films are not the chilly, disinterested exercises of a theoretician—they are the fevered dreams of a director increasingly no longer in control of himself or his passions, the celluloid confessions of a man obsessed with a woman who no longer loves him, needs him or even thinks much about him except in moments of bemused contempt.
In later years, Sternberg liked to imply that Dietrich was a no-talent hack who existed only in the lens of his camera. That to me sounds like the ranting of a rejected suitor—Don José in Bizet's Carmen killing his ex-lover rather than letting anyone else have her—because what I see and what he evidently failed to see is the amused smile playing on Dietrich's lips as she toys with her director, allowing him to photograph her but never truly possess her. It's why she survived Sternberg's fetishistic excesses unscathed while he was destroyed—she was sharing a private joke with her audience at his expense. "Watch me make him jump through another hoop," she seems to be saying, even as she emerged from, say, the gorilla costume in Blonde Venus. The harder he tried to possess her with his camera, the more ridiculous the effort looked. Nobody was ever going to pin Dietrich down.
I think there are two ways of dealing with racism in the movies of the past: You can judge it by the standards of today and shun every performance by a black actor before, say, Sidney Poitier in 1967's In The Heat Of The Night, leaving your viewing habits even more lily-white than the lily-white Hollywood of the time; or you can watch these roles in context and judge them by how much the actor was able to do given the crippling limitations they worked under. Since option one would require me to ignore Louise Beavers, Nina Mae McKinney, Paul Robeson, Hattie McDaniel, Eddie Anderson, Ethel Waters, Lena Horne, Dooley Wilson, Rex Ingram, and many, many others, I'm going with option two.
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