If the Academy was vaguely in the ballpark the first year it handed out Oscars, it completely blew it the next. This year the winners were chosen by a five-member panel — The Central Board of Judges — and while the previous year's smoke-filled room used the awards to settle scores and promote their own interests, at least they felt the need to pretend they were motivated by artistic concerns. This year the panel seemed interested only in handing out awards to the Academy's founders and the man who hand-picked them for the job, Louis B. Mayer.
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)
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)
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 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)
Carole & Co., the great site devoted to all things Carole Lombard, is hosting The Great Silent Recasting Blogathon, today through the 4th. The rules are simple enough:
[S]elect a film from 1965 onward ... then re-imagine it with silent-era actors and a director, as well as a studio and year of release. ... If an actor or actress appeared in a silent, even in bit parts, he or she is eligible as long as the fictional fllm is made at a time when he or she was actually working.
Four days, four posts—at least that's how we're playing it here at the Monkey. First up: Mary Pickford and Mary Pickford as mother and daughter in a silent era pre-make of the Disney classic Freaky Friday.
The 2013 Library of Congress National Book Festival is this weekend down on the National Mall. Among those authors present will be one of the Monkey's favorites, Christel Schmidt whose book Mary Pickford: Queen of the Movies is indispensable for fans of Mary Pickford, silent cinema or movies generally.
She'll be making some sort of speech (no doubt a good one) on Saturday at 10:55 a.m. in the History & Biography tent (near the Smithsonian Metro stop) and then signing copies of her book between Noon and 1 p.m.
Here's a picture of Christel. If you don't have an autographed copy of her book (I've got mine!), toddle on down there and tell her the Monkey sent you. That'll put you in solid!
The Monkey has spent most of the summer reading the collected works of Alexandre Dumas—or, more accurately, The Three Musketeers which is long enough to feel like the collected works of Alexandre Dumas. It's a sprawling epic, crammed to the gills with plots and subplots enough for a dozen novels.
Even if you haven't read it, you probably have some sense of the story: a young Frenchman named d'Artagnan pals around with three of the king's elite guardsmen—the musketeers Athos, Porthos and Aramis—wielding swords, battling bad guys, and getting into all sorts of scrapes. It's two tons of fun, with memorable heroes and villains, lots of action and pretty girls, and very little angst to slow you down.
No wonder movie makers have been so fascinated with it.
The first film version of the novel (a short fencing scene) appeared in 1898 and people have been retelling the story ever since. At 700+ pages, there's enough here to make any kind of movie you want—a historical romance, a swashbuckler, a buddy comedy, a political thriller, even a sex farce—and there are versions in French, English, Russian, Latvian and Dutch, feature-length versions, musical versions, television versions, and even one version starring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy—and that's just in the last ten years!
As a silent film fan, I'm most interested in the one starring the legendary Douglas Fairbanks. Released in 1921, this version of The Three Musketeers opts to emphasize the palace intrigue, specifically focusing on an episode from the first half of the book where Cardinal Richelieu—the real power behind Louis XIII of France—hopes to catch the queen in an affair with England's Duke of Buckingham, thus discrediting her and removing her as a counterweight to his influence on the king.
Riding to the rescue are d'Artagnan and the three musketeers.
Fairbanks had already established the conventions of the movie action hero with The Mark of Zorro in 1920, and after one last foray (The Nut, 1921) into the kind of modern comedy that had previously defined his career, Fairbanks spent the rest of the silent era making the lavish historical action-adventures he's now known for, beginning with The Three Musketeers.
It wouldn't take Fairbanks long to perfect the formula—The Thief of Bagdad, The Black Pirate and The Iron Mask are among the era's best films—but here, he was still figuring out the proper balance between swashbuckling and plot, in this case erring on the side of the latter. The long set-up introducing all the scheming court figures will serve only to tax the patience of some viewers without making what follows any clearer. The movie also tries to squeeze in as many incidents from the book as possible without necessarily investing any emotion in them or tying them together, dissipating the narrative momentum and proving once again that it's possible for a book adaptation to be too faithful.
At those moments, though, when it turns its attentions to d'Artagnan, the film takes off. A young rube from the country, he initially alienates Athos, Porthos and Aramis, but quickly wins them over with his bravery, ingenuity and superior swordsmanship. He falls in love with his landlord's niece who, as it turns out, is moonlighting as the queen's go-between to Buckingham, thus drawing d'Artagnan—and the three musketeers—into the royal intrigue.
When the time comes to act, all the bad guys in Paris can't stop him from succeeding.
Fairbanks, as usual, was in fine fettle. At thirty-eight, he was too old to play the twenty-one year old d'Artagnan, but once the swordplay begins, you don't care. With grace and gusto, he fends off a dozen men, scales walls, leaps through windows, and saves enough energy to woo the girl and outsmart the Cardinal. And his one-handed handspring to stab a man and save his friends ranks with his best stunts and is worthy of a man half his age.
Admittedly, he was not a subtle actor, but then he rarely played subtle characters, and d'Artagnan is no exception. While modern audiences may find Fairbanks's style amusingly outdated, the d'Artagnan he plays is an impetuous, inexperienced youth, untrained in the manners of an urban gentleman, unable to harness his raw emotions, and always looking in his youthful insecurity to pick a fight with anyone he thinks has looked at him wrong. A more subdued, modern style would only wind up highlighting the silliness of the storyline without adding to the fun.
As for the other actors, Adolphe Menjou is well-cast as the ineffectual Louis, and Nigel de Brulier is so good as Richelieu that he played him three more times, in 1929, 1935 and 1939. A long list of nobody-much plays the various female roles, including Mary MacLaren as Anne of Austria, Marguerite De La Motte as Constance Bonacieux and Barbara La Marr as Milady de Winter. The three musketeers wind up being minor characters in a film bearing their name, with Leon Barry playing Athos, George Siegmann as Porthos, and Eugene Pallette (yeah, the frog-voiced tub who played the father in My Man Godfrey and Friar Tuck in The Adventures of Robin Hood) as Aramis.
Director Fred Niblo (best known for the 1925 silent version of Ben-Hur) and cinematographer Arthur Edeson (All Quiet on the Western Front and Casablanca) made a good team, allowing us to easily follow the swordplay as well as using visuals rather than intertitles to reveal the character of Richelieu—showing, for example, his lurking shadow in the background as the king unwittingly sets the trap designed to ensnare the queen. (Richelieu sometimes also strokes a cat while devising his plans, decades before Ernst Blofeld, Don Corleone and Dr. Evil made it the signature move of the truly wicked.)
Edward M. Langley designed the sets; and Paul Burns and Edward Knoblock were responsible for the costumes.
The film was released in August 1921 to good reviews and a solid box office. Its $1.5 million gross placed it among the top earning films of the year, finishing behind only Rudolph Valentino's The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Charlie Chaplin's The Kid.
Overall, this is not top shelf Fairbanks, but it's pretty good, and once you've seen The Mark of Zorro, The Thief of Bagdad and The Black Pirate, I can recommend this one as a worthwhile follow-up.
P.S. Fairbanks returned to the character of d'Artagnan in 1929 with his last silent film, The Iron Mask. Based on a pair of sequels to The Three Musketeers penned by Dumas himself, the second go-around is even better than the first and it proved to be the perfect cap to Fairbanks's swashbuckling career. You don't have to see The Three Musketeers before you see The Iron Mask, but doing so will add to the fun—and poignancy—of the latter.
(Subsequent to posting this earlier today, I decided to tie in my movie recommendations below with the Oscar-winning film The Artist which Thingy was watching when she gave me the Thingster Award.)
My blog pal Thingy over at Pondering Life has bestowed upon me the coveted Thingster Award. She was watching The Artist—the silent movie that won the Oscar for best picture in 2011—the other day and thought of yours truly.
"Mythical Monkey. The go to guy for great insight on the classics, and not so classic movies."
Thingy created the "Thingster Award" back in April. After winning the Liebster Blog Award, she wrote, "I came up with a scathingly brilliant idea. I shall give out my own awards at the end of each week to blogs I find especially appealing to me. You get no trophy, although, you can take the special banner I have made. I also assume many of you will never know of your special prize, for I shall not tell you. (I'm lazy that way)."
And she's been handing out the Thingster Award ever since.
Just not to me.
Now, I don't usually brood about this sort of thing, but every time she handed one out I thought, "Gee, I wish I had me one of those Thingster Awards." And now I do! To quote Mister Roberts, "I'd rather have it than the Congressional Medal of Honor" (you know, in my case because the Medal of Honor would require an act of extraordinary bravery and heroism, a hard thing to accomplish while sitting in front of a computer in the suburbs of Baltimore).
To return the favor, and since Thingy is apparently in a silent movie mood, here are five suggestions to follow up The Artist:
The Black Pirate—Jean Dujardin, the Oscar-winning star of The Artist, cheerfully acknowledged that he was channeling silent film legend Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., during his performance. So why not cut out the middle man and see Fairbanks for yourself. The Black Pirate is a swashbuckling classic, and if you have a Blu-Ray player, you can see the original color version.
Stella Maris—Remember the scene in The Artist where Peppy Miller fondles the jacket and imagines herself with the hero? That's a direct quote of a scene from the classic Mary Pickford melodrama, Stella Maris, my favorite of all of Pickford's films. There she plays two roles, and so convincingly that if you didn't know better, you'd swear it was two different actresses.
Show People—The story of an unknown girl from the country who makes it big in Hollywood was a staple of the silent era (see, e.g., A Girl's Folly, Souls for Sale, The Extra Girl and Ella Cinders), so much so that Marion Davies (with King Vidor directing) spoofed the genre with this 1928 classic comedy. Look for cameos from just about everybody who was anybody including Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, John Gilbert and even Marion Davies and King Vidor as themselves.
Flesh and the Devil—Speaking of John Gilbert, was his fall from box office grace with the coming of the sound age the inspiration for The Artist? Well, actually it could be any number of silent film greats, but if it was Gilbert, here's one of his best, a noirish romance pairing him with off-screen lover Greta Garbo.
Behind the Screen—And finally, a very funny behind-the-scenes look at the making of a Hollywood movie from the silent era's most popular comedy star, the legendary Charlie Chaplin.
Hope that's of use to you, Thingy, and once again, thank you very much for the award!
My purely idiosyncratic list designed to promote the Funny Lady Blogathon now up and running at Movies, Silently. "A baker's dozen" implies pies will be thrown and some of these funny ladies, particularly Mabel Normand, threw a mean one. Things might get messy so dress appropriately—you've been forewarned.
13. Daphne Pollard—standing 4' 9", this diminutive comedienne was a star in Mack Sennett's stable in the mid-1920s.
12. Bebe Daniels—co-starred in the early Harold Lloyd shorts then jumped to Cecil B. DeMille's sex comedies.
11. Jobyna Ralston—the "girl" in most of Harold Lloyd's latter-day features, including Girl Shy, The Freshman and The Kid Brother
10. Constance Talmadge—remembered now for her turn as the "Mountain Girl" in D.W. Griffith's Intolerance, in her day she was beloved for her comedy.
9. Edna Purviance—made more movies with Charlie Chaplin than any other actress.
8. Ossi Oswalda—maybe the least known to American audiences, she was Ernst Lubitsch's go-to girl before he moved to Hollywood.
7. Colleen Moore—this fresh-faced girl-next-door had a knack for finding trouble.
6. Gloria Swanson—long before Norma Desmond, she was playing second fiddle to superstar Teddy the dog for Mack Sennett then graduated to DeMille's groundbreaking sex comedies.
5. Marion Davies—Orson Welles owes somebody an apology: this woman was talented and funny.
4. Clara Bow—the original "It" girl: beautiful, tender, funny and ultimately doomed.
3. Marie Dressler—the star of the first feature-length comedy, 1914's Tillie's Punctured Romance, she made a comeback in 1928 and eventually won an Oscar. (Dressler's the one on the right.)
2. Mary Pickford—number one at the box office, number one in our hearts, number two on this list.
1. Mabel Normand—sometimes credited with throwing the first pie in movie history, she was the beauty who starred with such beasts as Charlie Chaplin and Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle.
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
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