If the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences handed out an Oscar in the category of "What Were They Thinking?" 1929's hands-down winner would have been Queen Kelly. In fact, this production was so misconceived and ill-executed, the Academy would have had to retire the award immediately afterwards, for everything that followed would have been mere anticlimax.
Queen Kelly's director—at least to start with—was Erich von Stroheim, and as soon as you see the name Erich von Stroheim attached to a project, you know there's going to be more drama going on behind the camera than ever appears in front of it. Gene Siskel, the late film critic for the Chicago Tribune, often said his criterion for judging a movie was whether it was more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch. It's a hard question to answer in this case: from all reports, the director and his stars were too busy fighting to eat any meal together.
Ostensibly, Queen Kelly is the story of a young prince (Walter Byron), who on the eve of his wedding to the mad Queen Regina (Katie nominee Seena Owen), meets a naive young schoolgirl (Gloria Swanson) and falls hopelessly in love. When the queen discovers the prince's betrayal, she takes her revenge including, in von Stroheim's original vision, exiling the schoolgirl to work in an East African brothel. (The movie took its title from this last twist—the schoolgirl, named Kitty Kelly, was to have eventually become the brothel's madam, it's "queen," so to speak.)
It's really the story, though, of unchecked egos and terrible decision making, leading ultimately to an unfinished, virtually-unseen movie that has developed an undeserved reputation as one of Erich von Stroheim's lost masterpieces.
As the mo- tivating force behind this project, star Gloria Swanson deserves a lion's share of the blame for its failure. She convinced her married lover, Joseph P. Kennedy, to bankroll the movie, picked the overmatched Walter Byron as her co-star, and then cast herself in the title role. Swanson was thirty at the time and is, to put it bluntly, ridiculous as the naive teenage girl living in a convent school.
Worse, she chose von Stroheim to write and direct the movie, and then gave him part ownership of the film and control of the final cut of any U.S. release. Given that von Stroheim had a well-known penchant pouring extravagant amounts of money into uncommercial nine hour movies, perhaps Swanson should have known what she was letting herself in for.
This doesn't even address the fact that they were making a silent movie well over a year after the release of The Jazz Singer.
Without a finished script in hand, principal photography began on November 1, 1928, and it became clear to Swanson on day one that von Stroheim was making up the movie as he went along. In fact, she predicted after the first day's shooting that the movie would never be finished. How right she was.
If my in- formation is correct, the first scene von Stroheim shot was the initial meeting between the prince and the schoolgirl, and let me tell you, this was no ordinary "meet cute"—while hiking with school friends, Swanson's underpants fall off as the prince rides past on horseback, and naturally, he snatches them up and gives free rein to what must have been movie history's first panty sniffing fetish. Wow! And von Stroheim got more and more out there. In addition to the panty sniffing, he gives us arson as a conversational gambit, a whip-wielding queen, and, of course, the promise of a second act brothel setting and a minimum four-hour running time.
This inability to rein in any impulse—legend has it that the prostitutes who accompany the prince in an early scene were played by real prostitutes, recruited from the best brothel in Hollywood—was typical of von Stroheim, and Swanson realistically had no choice but to fire him, which she did at the end of January 1929. The film was only half finished.
Two years later, Swanson hired cinematographer Gregg Toland to shoot a truncated ending to the film and although von Stroheim's contract barred Swanson from showing this version in the United States, it was released in Europe in November 1932. A partially restored version of the unfinished film was finally released in the United States in 1985.
Like many movies of that time that no one had actually seen, it's reputation grew until it was regarded as von Stroheim's lost masterpiece, on par with the "butchered" nine-hour version of Greed. When it finally surfaced, it proved not to be quite what people had convinced themselves it was.
Auteur theorists love von Stroheim for the mad passion of his vision, but to be honest, the guy was probably nuts. He was certainly an egomaniac and I think the notion he was a genius derailed by the crass concerns of the studios is essentially a false one. He made pretty pictures, but he wasn't a sharp thinker—he was one of those guys (like a law clerk I knew, way back when) who if you asked him the time, would build you a clock.
Judging from what survives, the end product, here and elsewhere, didn't justify von Stroheim's means.
Trivia: To stand in as an example of the kind of silent movies Norma Desmond made, Billy Wilder used a scene from Queen Kelly (Swanson praying among an array of flickering candles) in his classic Sunset Boulevard.
Beginning today, Sunday, August 2, 2009, and running through August 22, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. will be hosting a film program on Sunday afternoons, "Carl Theodor Dreyer: The Late Films," focused on, yes, Katie Award winning director Carl Dreyer (The Passion of Joan of Arc) and his later films.
Four rarely shown sound features and one short film by Carl Theodor Dreyer (1889–1968) are presented in recently restored or preserved prints to mark the 120th anniversary of his birth. While the director's dedication to the form and contributions to world cinema are now celebrated, his first sound film Vampyr was a commercial failure, and the war and other material matters interfered with the accomplishment of these later works. Ultimately, however, they became his most remarkable achievements. The Gallery wishes to thank the Danish Film Institute for its cooperation in loaning these films.
The schedule:
Today, August 2 at 4:30 p.m. Vampyr (1932) and the short film They Caught The Ferry (1948)
She had a face like a bulldog, if someone had been cruel enough to stamp on that bulldog with the heel of his boot—lantern jaw, bulbous nose, heavy bags under deep-set eyes. Her pear-shaped body sagged, her voice growled and the characters she played often wore their clothes as if a field of potatoes had crawled into a burlap sack and been too tired to crawl out again. But she was a gifted actress—Buster Keaton often called her "the greatest character comedienne I ever saw"—and for a brief time, from 1931 until her death in 1934, Marie Dressler was the most popular actress in America.
It was Dressler's supporting performance in this adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's stage play that, at the unlikely age of 62, set her on the path to stardom.
Anna Christie is the story of an immigrant's daughter, Anna (played by Greta Garbo), who returns to her father for the first time in fifteen years. Each has idealized memories of and hopes for the other only to discover that time hasn't been kind to either of them. It's best known now as Greta Garbo's sound debut—"Give me a whiskey, ginger ale on the side. And don't be stingy, baby"—but it also launched Marie Dressler's comeback and made her the biggest box office draw of the Early Sound Era.
Dressler plays an aging, alcoholic "tramp" named Marthy who's shacking up with the father who suddenly finds her presence embarrassing when he gets news that the daughter he long ago sent to Minnesota to live with relatives is coming to visit.
By chance, the two women meet over a drink and it doesn't take Marthy long to size up Anna as a younger version of herself. They meet again later, in a scene screenwriter Frances Marion invented especially for Dressler, after Anna has met yet another man who has an idealized view of her and Marthy reminds her that life is too short to spend it apologizing for who you are and pretending to be something else, a brief but important scene that illuminates Anna's subsequent actions.
In their scenes together, Dressler eats the more-celebrated Garbo alive. To be sure Dressler possessed a theatrical talent that straddled the divide between the silent and modern eras, but I distinguish in my mind between an actor who chews scenery (Garbo, still relying on exaggerated, silent film techniques) and a character who chews scenery (Dressler's self-described "wharf rat" who hides her pain beneath a swaggering pose of indifference).
Garbo eventually shed the exaggerated techniques that had served her well during the silent era and mastered the subtleties of the new sound medium. But not before Dressler had bested her in their one head-to-head outing.
Long before Anna Christie, Dressler had starred in the Mack Sennett comedy classic Tillie's Punctured Romance, which also featured Charlie Chaplin in one of his earliest roles. By the end of World War I, though, Dressler had pretty much disappeared from the movies. Reduced to working as a maid, Dressler later admitted she found the fall from stardom so devastating, she had seriously considered suicide.
But back when she was still a star, Dressler had befriended a young, struggling writer from San Francisco named Frances Marion, and when their roles were reversed and Marion was the top writer in Hollywood and Dressler was out of pictures altogether, Marion remembered her old friend and began including parts for her in various comedies. Later, when Marion was adapting Eugene O'Neill's play as the vehicle for Greta Garbo's sound debut, she expanded the part of Marthy specifically with Dressler in mind.
It was a pivotal opportunity for Dressler and proved to be her comeback role.
She starred in a dozen movies over the next three years, including Min and Bill (another Frances Marion screenplay) which won Dressler an Oscar, Emma which secured her a second Oscar nomination, Tugboat Annie with Wallace Beery, and possibly her best role, that of aging stage actress Carlotta Vance in the classic dramedy, Dinner at Eight. Even people who don't know Dressler's name remember the last scene she does with up-and-coming Jean Harlow.
"I was reading a book the other day," says Harlow as the unforgettable social-climbing vamp, Kitty Packard.
"Reading a book?" says Dressler's Vance after the greatest double take in movie history.
"Yes. It's all about civilization or something. A nutty kind of a book. Do you know that the guy says that machinery is going to take the place of every profession?"
Dressler looks Harlow up and down and then says, "Oh, my dear, that's something you need never worry about."
A year later, Dressler was dead of cancer. She was 66.
Note: There were a lot of good choices for supporting actress this year, far too many to write about at any length. In addition to nominees Nina Mae McKinney and Seena Owen (both of whom I will write about in later postings), and, of course, winner Marie Dressler, I also considered the underappreciated Margaret Dumont for her role as Groucho's comic foil in the Marx Brothers' debut film, The Cocoanuts; personal favorite Anita Page as a naive virgin who falls for smoothie Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., in Our Modern Maidens; Lilyan Tashman as a criminal mastermind in Bulldog Drummond; Leila Hyams as the sister of a prison inmate in The Big House; and Alice Roberts as possibly the movie's first onscreen lesbian in Pandora's Box.
Any one of them might be your choice for best supporting actress of the year. You won't get any kick from me.
My one hundredth posting—it's nice that it can be about one of the reasons I became a movie fan in the first place, the Marx Brothers. Just wait until we get to 1933 and I explain how Duck Soup landed me a job in Washington!
For faithful reader Who Am Us, I post here a famous sequence from their first movie (not counting a now-lost silent short from 1921 called Humor Risk, which Groucho later said was lousy), the 1929 hit The Cocoanuts.
The Marx Brothers' first movie, The Cocoanuts, was based on a stage play that has the distinction of being the only Irving Berlin musical not to feature a hit song.
This wasn't Berlin's fault, however.
The original song list he submitted included "Always" which went on to become a standard. The playwright, George S. Kaufman, whose friend was having an affair with a younger woman at the time, joked to Berlin that he should change the song's first line from "I love you always" to "I love you Thursdays."
Berlin—who had written the song as a tribute to his wife—was so offended, he withdrew the song from consideration until he could find a more suitable vehicle for its debut.
Now this is how you adapt a classic novel for the big screen.
Being a (failed) writer myself, it has often struck me how few great movies have been based on great books. They are such radically different media—one visual, one verbal—that what works brilliantly in a book doesn't work at all on the screen, and vice versa. I mean, despite at least four attempts (and a reported fifth on the way), no one has ever figured how to translate the last line of The Great Gatsby—arguably the greatest last line in all of literature—into anything other than the most banal cinema.
Faithful attempts to film great books often wind up turgid (For Whom The Bell Tolls), incomprehensible (Even Cowgirls Get The Blues) or nine hours long (Greed). And that's when Hollywood is bothering to be faithful at all. Who can forget the liberties Demi Moore took with The Scarlet Letter to disastrous effect, or the unmitigated mess Brian De Palma made of The Bonfire of the Vanities?
That an adaptation of the best book ever written about World War I should have resulted in the best movie ever made about World War I is, in context, a bit of a miracle.
If you don't know the novel All Quiet On The Western Front, you certainly should. Written by Erich Maria Remarque, it's the story of a schoolboy's journey from gung-ho volunteer to disillusioned war veteran. Remarque had been a soldier, conscripted along with his friends at the age of eighteen, serving in the trenches with the German army in France, and the novel captures both the horrors of war and the lust for empire and glory that led to it. The novel sold 2.5 million copies in the eighteen months after its publication in 1928 and was quickly acquired by Universal Pictures.
The adaptation of Remarque's novel was handled by two celebrated Broadway playwrights with an assist from a veteran Hollywood director of silent B-pictures.
Maxwell Anderson is best remembered now for such Broadway hits as What Price Glory, Anne of a Thousand Days and The Bad Seed. He worked on screenplays throughout his career, with All Quiet On The Western Front earning him his only Oscar nomination. He primarily wrote political dramas and often wrote his plays in blank verse, including Key Largo, later adapted into the classic movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson. In 1933, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his play Both Your Houses, a polemic aimed at seedy Washington politics.
George Abbott began his Broadway career as an actor before turning exclusively to writing. Like Anderson, he was a successful playwright, penning mostly musicals such as Pal Joey and Damn Yankees. He won five Tony awards, became a Kennedy Center honoree in 1982, and, for his play, Fiorello!, a musical based on the life of reform-minded New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, Abbott was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Unlike his two co-writers, Del Andrews was primarily a director, and not a well-known one either. He directed forty movies, mostly westerns at a time when westerns were strictly B-picture kiddie fare, and comedy shorts featuring actors you've never heard of. So far as I can tell, none of these films still exist, although the westerns did star Fred Thompson and Hoot Gibson, two of the biggest western stars of the Silent Era. I can't tell you much more about him than that—he was born in 1894, he died in 1942, he was married and he had a son—but I'm willing to bet he knew plenty about how to get a story on film in a hurry and I suspect he was paired with Anderson and Abbott, who were great playwrights but knew little about Hollywood, to tutor them on the finer points of movie-based storytelling.
Despite the feeling that you are watching a completely faithful adaptation of the novel, the movie actually differs significantly in its structure. The novel begins in medias res, the novel's hero Paul already a grizzled veteran of a long and pointless war, revealing most of his back story through a series of flashbacks as he muses on how he and his classmates moved from the classroom to the trenches, and for most of them, to the grave. The book is elegiac, both haunting and haunted, and one of the finest anti-war novels ever written.
The movie straight- ens out the chro- nology, beginning with a school teacher's patriotic harangue and then following the students as they first volunteer and then discover the reality of war's horrors. As an audience, you arrive at Paul's conclusions at the same time he does, giving the movie an immediacy and growing tension. Both approaches are effective, but I suspect each approach is best suited for its respective medium.
Writing credits in old Hollywood movies are often confusing and the credits for All Quiet On The Western Front are no different. Del Andrews was credited with the "adaptation," Maxwell Anderson with the "adaptation and dialogue," and George Abbott with the "screenplay." The technical meaning of each is a bit murky, especially since they've evolved over the years, but my understanding is that in 1930, "adaptation" referred to the overall structure of the piece, "dialogue" to the words the actors spoke and "screenplay" to both dialogue and the physical staging of the work.
Further confusing the issue is that the studio released two versions of All Quiet On The Western Front, the sound version we know today and a silent version, with Walter Anthony providing titles, for those theaters which had not yet made the conversion to sound.
Judging from the way the credits read, I would guess that Anderson, with the guidance of veteran director Andrews, decided on the basic flow of the story—which scenes to include and in which order—and then went on to write a draft of the screenplay's dialogue. Then for whatever reason, I'm guessing that the producers brought in Abbott to significantly rework Anderson's draft. But I could just be talking through my hat.
What I do know is that All Quiet On The Western Front is a terrific movie based on a terrific book and for that miracle, its screenplay wins the Katie Award for best screenplay of 1929-30.
Six days after the April 3, 1930 Oscar ceremony in honor of the best movies of 1928-29—a public-relations debacle where a five-member panel of Louis B. Mayer's hand-chosen lackeys handed all the statues to insiders and Mayer's own entry for best picture—the Academy junked the Central Board of Judges and for the first time set in place procedures to leave the task of selecting winners to the full membership of the Academy itself. They didn't wait long to see the results of the new system, holding the next ceremony just seven months later, the only time in Oscar history awards were handed out twice in the same calendar year.
For a first exercise in democracy, the Academy did pretty well.
All Quiet On The Western Front, not just the best picture of the year, but one of the best pictures of any year, won both the top prize and an Oscar for its director, Lewis Milestone, the second Oscar of his career. George Arliss was the best actor with a solid performance in Disraeli, a role he had first crafted on Broadway. And The Big House, a highly-regarded prison drama, nabbed a pair of awards, one for legendary screenwriter Frances Marion, the other for sound editor Douglas Shearer, the first of his fourteen career Oscars.
The only controversy was generated by Norma Shearer's win for best actress in the movie The Divorcee. "What do you expect," said Joan Crawford afterwards. "She sleeps with the boss," referring to powerful MGM producer Irving Thalberg.
Whether you agree with Crawford's assessment may depend in part on your opinion of Shearer's abilities as an actress. Katie-Bar-The-Door can't stand her, but judging by the number of complimentary postings about her on various sites, somebody must love her. I myself have, at best, mixed feelings about Norma Shearer and will later share them at some length in a pair of postings, one about Shearer the actress, the other about Shearer and Thalberg as Hollywood's quintessential power couple.
As I put together my own list of Katie Award nominees, I realized that my only problem with All Quiet On The Western Front was that it was so good it obscured the fact that overall, 1929-30 was a very weak year for movies. Silent movies had all but disappeared from theaters, but unfortunately, the talkies that replaced them were saddled with a primitive technology that practically bolted the camera and the actors to the floor. Moreover, most directors clearly had no idea what to do with sound, treating it as a novelty rather than an opportunity, sticking in a song or two, or worse going overboard and cramming every nook and cranny with talk-talk-talk.
To fill out the roster of nominees, I had to range far and wide, drawing heavily from the German film industry for three best picture nominees and from the few remaining silent pictures for nominees in the acting and screenwriting categories. As for nominees from the pool of sound pictures, at times I based my picks as much on how well they overcame the limitations of the new medium as on their objective merits. But I believe that by the time I am done handing out Katies to this year's crop of nominees, the winners will be those who have established their worth through the ages.
At least I hope so.
PICTURE: All Quiet On The Western Front (prod. Carl Laemmle, Jr.) The Blue Angel (prod. Erich Pommer) Diary Of A Lost Girl (prod. Georg Wilhelm Pabst) Hallelujah! (prod. King Vidor) Pandora's Box (prod. Heinz Landsmann)
ACTOR: Lew Ayres (All Quiet On The Western Front) Maurice Chevalier (The Love Parade) Ronald Colman (Bulldog Drummond) Gary Cooper (The Virginian) ACTRESS: Louise Brooks (Diary Of A Lost Girl and Pandora's Box) Marlene Dietrich (The Blue Angel) Greta Garbo (Anna Christie) Jeanette MacDonald (The Love Parade)
DIRECTOR: Lewis Milestone (All Quiet On The Western Front) Josef von Sternberg (The Blue Angel) King Vidor (Hallelujah!)
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Wallace Beery (The Big House) Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (Our Modern Maidens) Louis Wolheim (All Quiet On The Western Front)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Marie Dressler (Anna Christie) Nina Mae McKinney (Hallelujah!) Seena Owen (Queen Kelly)
SCREENPLAY: George Abbott, Maxwell Anderson and Del Andrews (All Quiet On The Western Front) Elliott Lester; adaptation and scenario by Marion Orth and Gerthold Viertel; titles by H.H. Caldwell and Katherine Hilliker (City Girl) Frances Marion; additional dialogue by Joseph Farnham and Martin Flavin (The Big House)
Just a couple more photos of Early Sound stars to remind you what you have to look forward to—this from 1934's The Black Cat, but of course we've got Frankenstein and Dracula coming, too—and then it's on to the Katie nominations for 1929-30 ...
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?
If the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences handed out an Oscar in the category of "What Were They Thinking?" 1929's hands-down winner would have been Queen Kelly. In fact, this production was so misconceived and ill-executed, the Academy would have had to retire the award immediately afterwards, for everything that followed would have been mere anticlimax.
As the mo- tivating force behind this project, star Gloria Swanson deserves a lion's share of the blame for its failure. She convinced her married lover, Joseph P. Kennedy, to bankroll the movie, picked the overmatched Walter Byron as her co-star, and then cast herself in the title role. Swanson was thirty at the time and is, to put it bluntly, ridiculous as the naive teenage girl living in a convent school.
If my in- formation is correct, the first scene von Stroheim shot was the initial meeting between the prince and the schoolgirl, and let me tell you, this was no ordinary "meet cute"—while hiking with school friends, Swanson's underpants fall off as the prince rides past on horseback, and naturally, he snatches them up and gives free rein to what must have been movie history's first panty sniffing fetish. Wow! And von Stroheim got more and more out there. In addition to the panty sniffing, he gives us arson as a conversational gambit, a whip-wielding queen, and, of course, the promise of a second act brothel setting and a minimum four-hour running time.
Auteur theorists love von Stroheim for the mad passion of his vision, but to be honest, the guy was probably nuts. He was certainly an egomaniac and I think the notion he was a genius derailed by the crass concerns of the studios is essentially a false one. He made pretty pictures, but he wasn't a sharp thinker—he was one of those guys (like a law clerk I knew, way back when) who if you asked him the time, would build you a clock.
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