The Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (1948)

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)

The Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (1936)

To me, the key component of screwball comedy is frivolous people behaving as if their actions have no consequences—that is to say, as if they'll live forever—which, as God himself would tell you, is always funny. In that sense, William Powell's Godfrey is the opposite of a screwball character. His back is so bent with the weight of his own mortality that he's something of a tragic figure, and while his story features all the attributes of comedy, it reveals something much darker about the human condition—and why for my money this is the best of the classic screwballs.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus asks a central question: if life has no point, then what's the point of living? For an existentialist, his answer is surprisingly upbeat (figure out what you enjoy doing, even if it's just rolling a rock up a hill, and stop worrying so much), but you need not have wondered whether existence is pointless to occasionally ask yourself whether the empty materialism at the heart of the American Dream is a worthwhile purpose, especially if, like Godfrey—and millions of other men in 1936—the American Dream has turned into your personal nightmare.

Godfrey has had plenty of time to ponder this question, and as he's turned it over and over in his mind, he's drifted—down, down, gently down, until he's finally come to rest in a cardboard shack in a garbage dump on the banks of the East River. It's a journey many men took as the Depression sent them reeling to live life on the bum. As the film opens, Godfrey has found no answers to his questions, and logic dictates that he has but one more move to make—to load up his pockets with stones and move permanently into the river itself.

And then into his life comes the Bullock family, a collection of upper class twits who—like the cast of a modern-dress production of The Cherry Orchard—live their lives oblivious to their impending ruin. Through the twisted logic typical of the genre, Godfrey becomes the butler to the Bullocks and in a mere 94 minutes, effortlessly and hilariously butles them—and himself—back into shape.

I guess as the title character in Eugene O'Neill's Lazarus Laughed discovered, once you've been dead, everything thereafter is a bit of a breeze.

I have one quibble with the movie—and it's the sort of quibble they used to burn people at the stake for—and that's Carole Lombard as Irene Bullock, her most famous and beloved role. She's the one character who never learns anything and the ending that puts her together with Godfrey feels to me more like the result of the genre's Rube Goldberg-like plot requirements than any deep connection between their characters.

Still, I always at least try to read a movie on its own terms, and maybe Irene and Godfrey do belong together. Maybe Godfrey loves her, deep down, because it was her nuttiness that breathed life back into the empty sack of his existence. Or maybe their union tells us that true happiness can only be found through a marriage of cool reason and inspired insanity. Or maybe when you look like Carole Lombard, all the other reasons go out the window.

And maybe I just talked myself out of my one quibble with the film.

Even so, I'm not sure—after all, Irene is awfully noisy—but after years on the banks of the East River with nothing to listen to but the sound of dump trucks, passing ships and his own fading heartbeat, maybe noisy is exactly what Godfrey is looking for.

PICTURE (Drama)
winner: Dodsworth (prod. Samuel Goldwyn)
nominees: Camille (prod. Bernard H. Hyman and Irving Thalberg); Flash Gordon (prod. Henry MacRae); Fury (prod. Joseph L. Mankiewicz); The Petrified Forest (prod. Hal B. Wallis)

PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: My Man Godfrey (prod. Gregory La Cava)
nominees: Libeled Lady (prod. Lawrence Weingarten); Mr. Deeds Goes To Town (prod. Frank Capra); Modern Times (prod. Charles Chaplin); Swing Time (prod. Pandro S. Berman); Theodora Goes Wild (prod. Everett Riskin)

PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: Le crime de Monsieur Lange (The Crime of Monsieur Lange) (prod. André Halley des Fontaines)

ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Walter Huston (Dodsworth)
nominees: Errol Flynn (The Charge Of The Light Brigade); Leslie Howard (The Petrified Forest); Spencer Tracy (Fury)

ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Fred Astaire (Swing Time)
nominees: Charles Chaplin (Modern Times); Gary Cooper (Mr. Deeds Goes To Town); William Powell (The Great Ziegfeld, The Ex-Mrs. Bradford, My Man Godfrey, Libeled Lady and After The Thin Man)

ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Greta Garbo (Camille)
nominees: Ruth Chatterton (Dodsworth); Bette Davis (The Petrified Forest); Sylvia Sidney (Fury and Sabotage)

ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Irene Dunne (Show Boat and Theodora Goes Wild)
nominees: Jean Arthur (Mr. Deeds Goes To Town); Jean Harlow (Libeled Lady); Carole Lombard (My Man Godfrey); Myrna Loy (After The Thin Man and Libeled Lady); Ginger Rogers (Swing Time)

DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: William Wyler (Dodsworth)
nominees: George Cukor (Camille); Fritz Lang (Fury)

DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Charles Chaplin (Modern Times)
nominees: Frank Capra (Mr. Deeds Goes To Town); Gregory La Cava (My Man Godfrey); George Stevens (Swing Time)

SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Paul Robeson (Show Boat)
nominees: Humphrey Bogart (The Petrified Forest); Walter Brennan (Come and Get It); Eugene Pallette (My Man Godfrey); Akim Tamiroff (The General Died at Dawn)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Gail Patrick (My Man Godfrey)
nominees: Mary Astor (Dodsworth); Alice Brady (My Man Godfrey); Helen Morgan (Showboat); Luise Rainer (The Great Ziegfeld)

SCREENPLAY
winner: Sidney Howard (Dodsworth)
nominees: Charles Chaplin (Modern Times); Morrie Ryskind and Eric Hatch, from a novel by Eric Hatch (My Man Godfrey)

SPECIAL AWARDS
Charles Chaplin (Modern Times) (Score); James Basevi, Russell A. Cully, A. Arnold Gillespie, Max Fabian and Loyal Griggs (San Francisco) (Special Effects/Visual Effects)

Postscript:

Has anybody ever owned a song the way Paul Robeson owned "Ol' Man River"? Lots of people have sung it, but I doubt anybody has ever felt it the way Robeson felt "Ol' Man River."

Later in his career, Robeson turned this song of despair into an anthem of defiance, but here he embodies the weariness and desperation central to, first, his character, then the African-American experience in a Jim Crow society, and finally, the human condition itself—because let's face it, you haven't really lived life as most people live it until you've reached a point where you feel the line "I'm tired of living and scared of dying" right down in the queasy pit of your stomach.

Hopefully, if you've ever sojourned in that dark place, you've managed to climb back out again. After all, we'll be dead soon enough, and for a long, long time, so there's no point in getting a head start on it. But rest assured, triumph or fail, or something in between, eventually we all get plowed under just the same.

And Ol' Man River? He just keeps rolling along.

The Wavishing Kay Fwancis

Some quick facts about Kay Francis, star of the Ernst Lubitsch classic, Trouble In Paradise.

● Born in Oklahoma City to an actress mother and a father who left when Kay was four, Francis made her Broadway debut at the age of twenty in a modern-dress version of Hamlet. In 1928, she appeared in a play with future Oscar-winner Walter Huston who was so impressed with her that he arranged a screen test with Paramount Pictures. The test was a success, and Francis made her film debut the following year in the Marx Brothers' first film, The Cocoanuts, which was filmed at Paramount's Astoria Studio in New York.

● Francis had a lisp and was known around the backlots of Hollywood as "the Wavishing Kay Fwancis." Generally, dialogue was carefully tailored to conceal her speech impediment, but Ernst Lubitsch refused to rewrite key scenes of Trouble In Paradise for her and you can hear traces of her lisp if you listen closely.

● She left Paramount in 1930 for Warner Brothers. During the early sound era, she was the highest paid actress at Warners.

● At the time she was known for soap opera-style pictures about long-suffering women who wore great clothes, and much to her chagrin, these productions often focused on the clothes more than the dialogue. This eventually led to a protracted dispute with Warners she was destined to lose.

● She was married five times, divorced five times, and kept a diary that included details of numerous affairs with both men and women. George Cukor later said that all the great stars carry a secret which is revealed in their faces, and that Kay's face suggested her secret was particularly wicked.

● Along with Katharine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo and Mae West, Francis was labeled "box office poison" in 1938 by a group of independent theater owners.

● She made her last movie in 1946. Among her best films were Jewel Robbery, One-Way Passage, Trouble In Paradise and In Name Only.

● She died of breast cancer in 1966. Her estate was valued at around $1 million, the bulk of which went to Seeing Eye, Inc., a company that trained seeing-eye dogs.

Once More, Anita Page

I have to confess, before I started writing this blog, I had never heard of Anita Page, but now that I've seen half a dozen of her movies and read a bit about her, it's clear that she was just as cute as the proverbial bug's ear and no doubt somebody you would have been lucky to know. Certainly Herschel House must have thought so—the Navy pilot was married to her for fifty-four years, until his death in 1991.

Mostly Page played sweet innocents who found themselves in a melodramatic load of trouble (see, for example, Our Modern Maidens), but her turn as a self-absorbed, gold-digging be-yotch in Our Dancing Daughters was unforgettable and should have presaged a longer career. Louis B. Mayer, a warped frustrated old man, and Irving Thalberg, a warped frustrated young man, saw to it that it didn't.

Well, you take what you can get.

She appeared in films with Lon Chaney, Buster Keaton, Clark Gable, Walter Huston and Joan Crawford; starred in the first movie musical (best picture winner The Broadway Melody); and most importantly, received a Katie nomination. (Make that Katie Award!—The Mythical Monkey (2/11/10)

She'll not soon be forgotten.