Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're waiting for Part Two of my scintillating essay about Scarface. Well, you're not getting that right now. It's April 8, 1932 in the Monkey's world and working under the stage name "Cary Grant," young Archie Leach has just made his film debut in This Is The Night. It's a romantic comedy starring Lili Damita, Charlie Ruggles and Roland Young. Young, as you probably recall, is up for a Katie Award this year.
Here's a brief clip:
Also, I've been combing through my list of bookmarks and favorites, trying to consolidate them onto my blog so both you and I can find them. One that I've been toting around for years but which KC at "Classic Movies" only just recently reminded me of, is "The Ultimate Cary Grant Pages," just about everything you ever wanted to know about Cary Grant collected into one spot. I'd call it indispensable if you're a fan.
Here's a good example of the obscure goodies you'll find over there:
As always, click on the images to enlarge them. Personally, I'd print them out on 125-lb card stock (readily available from Staples or any decent office supply store; or if you happen to be visiting my office, in a box under my desk) and have at it with a sharp pair of scissors.
Of the seemingly endless series of movies Hollywood produced during Prohibition to cash in on the public's obsession with gangsters, three stand out today—Little Caesar, The Public Enemy and Scarface. The first two made stars of Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, respectively, but the best, and at the time most controversial, was Scarface.
The story of a ruthless thug's rise and fall was a familiar one to audiences when the film first appeared in theaters in 1932. But those lucky enough to see the uncut version of Scarface saw a more violent and more complex treatment of the subject than anything that had come before it. Both bucking censorship and helping to usher it in, the production of Scarface is the stuff of legend; the finished movie is a classic.
I. From Novel To Screenplay: "A Real Tough Shoot-‘em Up" The movie Scarface was based on a novel of the same name by a young writer of pulp fiction, Maurice Coons, whose friendship with the Sicilian gangs that ran the slums of Chicago gave his material an air of authenticity. Writing under the pseudonym Armitage Trail, Coons fashioned a tale of a small-time thug, Tony Camonte, who claws his way up the mob ladder only to fall once he reaches the top. It was a thinly-disguised portrait of Al Capone, the same sort of story that writers all over the country were churning out in novels such as W.R. Burnett's Little Caesar and for pulp magazines like Black Mask. As Hollywood sought to exploit the gang wars of the Prohibition Era for its own profit, studios snapped up many of these stories and began to adapt them into motion pictures.
Howard Hughes, the eccentric millionaire business man, aviator and movie producer, was eager to jump on the gangster bandwagon with a picture of his own that would "knock the audience out of its seats." Although he had successfully produced a number of movies, including The Racket, The Front Page and the Oscar-winning comedy Two Arabian Knights, Hughes's one experience as a director, helming 1930's Hell's Angels to financial disaster, convinced him that despite his money and his enthusiasm, he needed a real director to get his project off the ground.
Enter Howard Hawks.
Born in Indiana to a wealthy merchant, and raised in Southern California, Howard Hawks had studied mechanical engineering at Cornell and served in the United States Army Air Service before returning to California to work as a prop man for the Mary Pickford Company. That in the wide-open days of the silent era he went from prop man to director in just three years was not all that unusual. By the time Hughes acquired the film rights to Scarface, Hawks had already directed ten movies and was a veteran of the gangster genre, helming The Criminal Code to critical acclaim and commercial success the year before. Always independent minded, Hawks walked out on a contract with Jack Warner to take the job with Hughes, resulting in a lawsuit that Hawks ultimately lost.
W.R. Burnett took first crack at the screenplay. A native of Springfield, Ohio, Burnett had failed in his first attempt at fiction, writing a hundred unpublished short stories and five unpublished novels before throwing in the towel and taking a job as a night clerk at a hotel in Chicago. It was there that he became acquainted with Chicago's underbelly; his experiences and observations inspired his 1929 novel, Little Caesar, a smash hit that served as the basis for Edward G. Robinson's classic gangster film.
But evidently, Burnett's screenplay for Scarface failed to satisfy Hughes's vision of "a real tough shoot-'em up," and while enough of his work survived to earn Burnett a screen credit, Hughes and Hawks would look elsewhere for the final screenplay of their gangster thriller.
They next turned to Ben Hecht, arguably the greatest screenwriter of all time, certainly belonging near the top of a very short list. Before moving to Hollywood, he had worked as a journalist in Chicago and Berlin, written novels and co-authored the hit play The Front Page with Charles MacArthur (Howard Hughes produced the film adaptation in 1931). In 1926, Hecht moved to Hollywood after receiving a telegram from Herman J. Mankiewicz (who with Orson Welles won best original screenplay for Citizen Kane). The telegram read, "Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don't let this get around." Mankiewicz was right. Hecht eventually became the highest paid writer in Hollywood, earning as much as $100,000 a month, and won an Oscar in its first year of existence for the gangster picture Underworld.
Film historian Richard Corliss later called Hecht "the Hollywood screenwriter."
During their conversations about the project, which initially didn't interest Hecht, Hawks commented that Capone reminded him of the Borgias, whose unsavory stew of incest, murder and intrigue ruled Italy during the Renaissance Era. That was enough of a hook for Hecht who—to the consternation of his agent who had negotiated a salary of a $1000 a day instead of a flat $20,000—wrote a 60-page treatment of the story in eleven days.
As Hecht envisioned the story, Tony Camonte's ascension through the ranks to the position of crime boss is accomplished not through brains and cunning but through sheer aggression so irrational, unrestrained and often at odds with Tony's own best interests that it takes more calculating men by surprise, overwhelming them before they see the threat. One of Hecht's keenest insights, that criminals aren't so much masterminds as ruthless, undisciplined children, came from his conversations with gangsters while working as a journalist in Chicago, and Hecht portrays Tony as a child who, as Naomi Wise put in an essay for Take One magazine, "refuses to recognize the existence of the wills of other humans." As a result, despite the violence depicted in Scarface, the movie plays more as a comic satire about preening buffoons and apes in hats than the reverent portrait of larger-than-life anti-heroes too many gangster movies devolve into.
In adapting Scarface, Hecht cut out the novel's backstory and cop brother, and added a sister for whom Tony has incestuous desires apparent to everyone but himself, a desire that ultimately proves to be his Achilles heel. He also used Scarface as a vehicle for criticizing his fellow journalists whom he felt had helped glorify gangsters. Hecht based the character Johnny Lovo, Tony's boss, on Johnny Torrio, and North-side boss Big Louie Costillo on Big Jim Colosimo. He also drew on several incidents well-known to movie audiences, such as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, the murder of Legs Diamond in a hospital bed and Deannie O'Bannion's assassination in a flower shop.
After receiving Hecht's treatment, Hawks turned the story over to a pair of young writers, Seton I. Miller and John Lee Mahin, who are credited with their movie's "continuity and dialogue." Miller was a young writer who had worked with Hawks before, co-writing the early Louise Brooks effort A Girl In Every Port, and providing the dialogue for The Dawn Patrol and The Criminal Code (the latter scoring him an Oscar nomination). Like Miller, Mahin was twenty-eight; unlike Miller, Scarface was Mahin's first screenplay. He had been working in New York as a journalist (and was fired by William Randolph Hearst for writing a negative review of Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies) until heading for Hollywood at the invitation of fellow journalist Ben Hecht.
Handing a screenplay from writer to writer was not an unusual procedure in those days—Hollywood studios approached screenwriting as an assembly line process for decades, with one team of writers developing the story, another team working on the dialogue and yet another providing re-writes, with very little collaboration between the separate groups. In this case, Hecht fleshed out the novel's storyline, invented many new ideas, defined the characters, wrote dialogue, then Miller and Mahin worked out the "continuity"—the progression of the scenes—and wrote additional dialogue.
Whether Miller and Mahin worked together as a team or one after the other, I can't say (given the degree to which Miller later resented collaborating with other writers, the latter seems likely). It is also unclear which, if either of them, did the rewrites attempting to satisfy the censorship boys in the Hays Office. Hawks himself did some work on the script although as was often the case, did not take a credit.
In any event, the process of producing a screenplay for Scarface turned out to be relatively painless. Getting the movie from the page to the screen proved to be anything but.
Richard Barthelmess was born in 1895 to a theatrical family and was working on the stage when a friend of his mother, film star Alla Nazimova, offered him a part in her next film, War Brides. He made twenty-two movies over the next three years, but it was his performance as the Chinese immigrant Cheng Huan in D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms that brought him his most lasting fame. He followed that up with two more classics, Way Down East and Tol'able David, the former for Griffith again, the latter at Barthelmess's own newly-formed production company, Inspiration Pictures.
He was nominated for an Oscar in 1929, the first year of the award's existence, losing to Emil Jannings.
Barthelmess continued to make movies during the sound era, including The Last Flight which I reviewed earlier this week, and The Cabin in the Cotton with Bette Davis (the one where she says "I'd like to kiss you, but I just washed my hair"), but by and large his acting technique was too stiff for sound pictures and the size and number of his parts quickly diminished. Probably his last great film role was as Bat MacPherson in Howard Hawks's Only Angels Have Wings.
Barthelmess made his last movie in 1942 then joined the Naval Reserve. After the war, he returned to Long Island, New York, where he died of cancer in 1963.
I know not all of my readers get Turner Classic Movies on their cable systems (particularly if you're not living in the United States!), but for those of you who do, I'm recommending you set your various recording devices to catch Boudu Saved From Drowning on this coming Sunday night (Monday morning, actually) at 2:15 a.m. EST.
Boudu Saved From Drowning is one of French director Jean Renoir's best movies, a comedy about a suicidal bum who rewards his rescuer with anything but gratitude. Released in France in late 1932, it will be one of the highlights of the Katie Awards of 1932-33, a particularly rich seventeen month period in film history that takes in such classics as Duck Soup, King Kong, Trouble in Paradise and many, many others—at least thirty movies with a serious claim to some sort of award.
On the same night, 45 minutes earlier at 1:30 a.m., is a documentary Rediscovering John Gilbert. I haven't seen it, but I am familiar with the movies of John Gilbert, the star of such silent classics as The Big Parade and Flesh and the Devil. I've written about him briefly here and here. I'm interested in what this 2009 piece has to say about him.
I've got a number of essays in the works—the best screenplay of 1931-32, a special Katie award for cinematography, another for short subject—but in the meantime, I chased down William Dieterle's The Last Flight, one of the movies that didn't make the cut come Katie nomination time. It has a high rating on the Internet Movie Database, ranking thirteenth among those movies released in 1931—undeservedly, as it turns out, but not bad either if you keep your expectations in check.
Another in a cycle of World War I flyer movies, The Last Flight follows four wounded pilots—"spent bullets" one doctor calls them—as they nurse their physical and psychological wounds by boozing their way through postwar Paris and Lisbon. (The screen shots are from the websites Shadowplay and Booze Movies: The 100 Proof Film Guide.)
Richard Barthelmess plays Cary Lockwood, a pilot with badly burned hands and an even more badly burned psyche. Trained for war, ill-equipped for peace, Cary and his pals remain in Europe, drinking to anaesthetize the pain. Pretty soon they're drinking because they can't do anything else.
Taking up with the boys is an eccentric American girl, Nikki (Helen Chandler), who drinks, collects turtles in her bathtub and is not the least bit apologetic about her turned-up nose—very much the kind of woman you'd fall for whether in a movie, in a bar or across your neighbor's fence. She seems to grasp that the boys are as ready to crumble as stale cake and she makes no demands of them other than that they scrub her back and listen to her goofy, elliptical stories.
She's especially drawn to Barthelmess's Cary, the most fragile of the bunch, and to the extent that this character-driven study has any forward momentum at all, the budding relationship between the dotty Nikki and the desperate Cary provides it.
"What are you changing your shoes for?" ask the boys as she readies to chase Barthelmess to his favorite bar.
"On account of I can walk faster in red shoes," says Nikki.
You betcha.
The Last Flight suffers from the problems characteristic of many of Hollywood's early sound efforts—wooden line readings, awkward pauses and portentous, stage-bound dialogue. A good example of the latter would be that "spent bullets" line I mentioned earlier, a nifty metaphor pounded into utter submission with the following speech, typical of some of the screenplay's clunkier efforts:
"Spent bullets. (pause) That's it. They're like projectiles (pause) shaped for war and hurled at the enemy. (pause) They've described a beautiful, high, arching trajectory (pause) and now they've fallen back to earth. (pause) Spent. (pause) Cooled off. (pause) Useless."
I expected something in there about how a factory in Detroit had been converted over to wartime production and maybe even the pilots' dog tag numbers, but I guess the screenwriter (John Monk Saunders, who the year before won an Oscar for another WWI flyer movie, The Dawn Patrol) didn't want to hit that metaphor too hard.
The real problem with the movie, though, is not that it's over-written, it's under-written. I like a languidly-paced character study as much as the next man if the dialogue is sharp and the episodes are illustrative of something, but there's nothing much more at work here than to repeat over and over again that these guys left the best of themselves on the battlefield, an insight firmly established early then never deepened or built upon. It's as if Saunders started reading The Sun Also Rises, fell in love with the drunk scenes and determined to rip off as much as he could—there's even a bullfight!
"Road to hell paved with un-bought stuffed dogs," you can almost hear Hemingway saying, "Not my fault."
"Gary" at "Booze Movies" opines that "The film would have likely been even more powerful as a silent." I think he's right. William Dieterle, who later directed such movies as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) and The Devil and Daniel Webster and was nominated for an Oscar for The Life of Emile Zola, was an accomplished visual stylist whose pictures here almost overcome the limitations of the acting and the screenplay.
The movie catches Barthelmess in the middle of his long, painful transition from silent film star (Broken Blossoms, Way Down East) to forgotten character actor (e.g., Only Angels Have Wings, again as a pilot with burned hands). He often played his characters from a boxer's crouch—shoulders hunched, lips tight, eyes gazing into the distance like he's waiting for the next blow to land. Here his style suits the movie just fine.
Helen Chandler, who plays Nikki, was a highly-regarded stage actress who unfortunately never learned to dial it down for the movies and she overplays here. Still, she's adorable in a clumsy puppy dog sort of way and is the best thing in the movie. She left Hollywood in 1937, wound up in a sanitarium to treat an alcohol and drug addiction and was badly burned while smoking in bed. She and her lovely throat are perhaps best remembered now for playing Mina across from Bela Lugosi in the 1931 version of Dracula. (For a nice little biography, check out the TCM Movie Morlocks post "Lost in a Dream Sometimes.")
Of the other players, the less said the better. Johnny Mack Brown, a former running back at Alabama, made a sackful of B-Westerns that spanned nearly forty years. David Manners never found much success as an actor, spent less than a decade in Hollywood, then wrote novels until his death at the age of ninety-seven. Elliott Nugent worked primarily as a director, including five Bob Hope comedies.
The theme of men broken by war and lost in peace is explored to much greater effect in the novels of Ernest Hemingway and the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and in such movies as The Best Years of Our Lives, Three Comrades, The Enchanted Cottage, Coming Home and Key Largo. Nor does The Last Flight measure up to the movies that I have nominated for Katie Awards in any of the various categories. But if you stumble across it on cable one day or otherwise can dig up a free copy, The Last Flight is worth a look.
Note: After the movie's release, a stage version of the story, Nikki, ran on Broadway. The production starred Fay Wray, and in the role of Cary Lockwood, a young actor named Archie Leach. Sometime after, Leach changed his name to "Cary Grant," moved to Hollywood and made some movies which I suspect we here at the Monkey will wind up talking about at some length.
"You separate a man from what he loves the most, what you do is purge what's unique in him, and when you purge what's unique in him, you purge dissent, and when you purge dissent, you kill the revolution—revolution is dissent." Warren Beatty as John Reed in Reds (1981)
I can't honestly say I'm a revolutionary or that I have ever even aspired to being a revolutionary. I'm much too pragmatic in a Burkean sense—18th century political philosopher Edmund Burke, that is, who I believe once said, "You say you've got a real solution, well, you know, we'd all love to see the plan"—to want to sweep away everything that's come before just because I hope for a future that promises something better.
As a practical matter, I gravitate more toward evolution than revolution, or at least I prefer a messy compromise that gets me a step closer to my goals to a perfect plan that goes nowhere and leaves me mired in the status quo. Which means if to get you to watch Chaplin's City Lights I have to run down Pennsylvania Avenue with the blogging equivalent of boxer shorts on my head, so be it.
And a necessary component of compromise consensus and evolution is a healthy respect for what Warren "John Reed" Beatty called dissent. For without dissent, there is no revolution, no evolution, no change, no compromise, no cheese crackers, no nothing. There's no learning either. And learning is what we're all about here at the Monkey.
(Of course, we're talking about what I would call engaged dissent, dissent grounded in fact and reasonably logical argument and a respect for a difference of opinion without bullying or feeling bullied. But that's a subject for another day.)
I was thinking about the role of dissent this past weekend after "Zak in the ATL," a fan of Norma Shearer, took exception to my blithe dismissal of the Oscar-winning actress (here and here). And he's was right to, of course. As I wrote in reply, "It's a big tent we've pitched here at the Monkey and we encourage all points of view. Hopefully, your enthusiasm for Norma Shearer's work will counter my own crabbier response and will encourage readers who stumble across this blog to give her a try. ... The goal of this blog, for me at least, is to encourage my readers to see as many movies as possible. I hope you stick around to cheer Norma on in the future and argue in support of your favorites."
Because that's really the point of the blog, right? To inspire you to see movies you might otherwise have missed, if only to prove to yourself that I am an idiot. The only proper way for movie fans to address a difference of opinion is to watch the movie. (Coincidentally, the only way to celebrate complete agreement is to watch the movie—indeed, the answer to every question for a movie fan is to watch the movie. Which perhaps explains why so few world leaders ever blog about the movies.)
I have another reason, though, a more selfish reason, for encouraging your dissent.
As you may have already guessed, I've actually spent the last ten months telling you what I don't know about the movies, and I've had to do quite a bit of scrambling to develop a working knowledge of the films of the silent and early sound eras. I've enjoyed the effort and hopefully the pleasure I've felt researching old movies has translated into some interesting essays.
But as I (very) slowly grind on toward the future, I find I have seen more and more of the top movies of a given year or if I haven't seen them, I'm at least aware of them and am chasing them down. In other words, I am arriving at my comfort zone. And as I become more comfortable, I am convinced blind spots will develop, that I will ignore movies I've already seen and dismissed, or assume an opinion I formed in my youth is an opinion I would still hold in my dotage. I'm counting on you to keep me on my toes.
If you don't feel comfortable disagreeing with me, this blog will never get anywhere.
"For in this very thing lies the difference between freemen and those that are not free," said Edmund Burke. "In a free country every man thinks he has a concern in all public matters; that he has a right to form and a right to deliver an opinion upon them. They sift, examine, and discuss them. They are curious, eager, attentive, and jealous; and by making such matters the daily subjects of their thoughts and discoveries, vast numbers contract a very tolerable knowledge of them, and some a very considerable one. And this it is that fills free countries with men of ability in all stations."
"But when you talk about destruction," he added, "don't you know that you can count me out."
As the Depression, now its third year, ground on with no end in sight, movie goers and Oscar voters alike flocked to a big budget spectacle about rich people behaving badly. With its fabulous, impossible art Deco sets and its foreign locale, MGM's Grand Hotel was about as far removed from the daily lives of the audiences who paid to see it as a film was likely to get. On November 18, 1932, the Academy named Grand Hotel the best movie of the year, a triumph for producer Irving Thalberg who had bought the rights to Vicki Baum's 1929 novel Menschen im Hotel and shepherded it through every stage of production, honing the screenplay, choosing the cast and putting his personal stamp on the film's every detail.
Grand Hotel won for best picture despite being the only film in Oscar history to win the top prize without receiving a single nomination in any other category. The story of five very different people—a thief, a ballerina, a factory owner, his secretary and a dying man—who meet with tragic consequences, Grand Hotel was a star-studded extravaganza, perhaps the first movie in history to boast so many stars in its cast. It was the highest grossing film of the year for MGM, one of the few studios to turn a profit during this particularly harsh year of the Depression.
The category for best actor resulted in a tie with Fredric March (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) and Wallace Beery (The Champ) sharing the award. It almost didn't turn out that way. During the ceremony itself, Norma Shearer announced March alone as the winner. Moments later, the president of the Academy, Conrad Nagel, charged on stage to announce that under Academy rules, candidates for an award who finished within three votes of each other were deemed to have tied. Beery, who had finished a single vote in back of March, came up on stage and accepted a second best actor trophy.
The only problem was, while such a rule had been in place the year before, it had been discarded before the 1932 ceremony. Stories abound regarding the backstage shenanigans that resulted in the tie, the most fun of which is that Beery was so incensed at losing to March, he went to MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer and insisted he be given an Oscar, too. Whatever the story, by 1935, the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse would begin tabulating and certifying the results, another step out of Louis B. Mayer's smoke-filled office into the fresh air of Oscar democracy.
The best actress trophy went to Helen Hayes, a Broadway legend making her film debut in The Sin of Madelon Claudet, a 75-minute super-soaper about a woman who has a child out of wedlock and then endures unimaginable hardships to care for a son who doesn't know she exists. Her performance was a bit stagy and theatrical, not bad but not great, and she had better work in her.
Taken in the context of the times, the Academy's choice was not surprising. In light of the growing threat of state and federal censorship as well as Hollywood's insecurity about the artistic value of its product, it's understandable that the Academy's voters would latch onto any opportunity to enhance the prestige of the industry. The top Broadway actress of 1931 choosing to make a movie would be analogous to Meryl Streep deciding today to do porn—it wouldn't matter if the results seared your retinas and sent you screaming for the exits, she'd win the adult video industry's equivalent of the best actress award just for legitimizing a popular but decidedly unrespected medium.
The only real horror among the major winners was Frank Borzage who picked up his second career Oscar, this time for directing Bad Girl. It's the story of a couple struggling through Depression-era difficulties and while it's not quite as bad as its reputation, neither is it particularly remarkable either. It starts promisingly enough—a jaded girl meets a cranky radio salesman, gets pregnant, then gets married—and for half an hour, I thought Bad Girl might turn out to be a talkie version of The Crowd, a character-driven study of the dark side of the American Dream. But instead, the last hour resolves into an idiot plot and fizzles out, a damp squib now deservedly forgotten.
Jon Mullich calls Borzage's effort "hack work" and chalks up the award to social connections. That's stating the case pretty strongly, but the fact is, the Academy had nominated King Vidor (The Champ) and Josef von Sternberg (Shanghai Express), two great directors who never won an Oscar, and could have nominated James Whale (Frankenstein), Edmund Goulding (Grand Hotel), Howard Hawks (Scarface) and Rouben Mamoulian (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) who that year had made movies more commercial, more artistic and more interesting than what Borzage served up. At most all you can say is that the chord Bad Girl undeniably struck with audiences in 1931 has long since ceased to reverberate and there's little chance the modern movie fan will make sense of Borzage's award.
As good a choice as Grand Hotel was for best picture, the Academy's prejudice against comedy, horror and gangster movies kept it from recognizing such eligible films as Frankenstein, Monkey Business and Scarface, classics which between them received no nominations at all. The Katie Awards are designed to rectify just such glaring oversights.
As I was putting together my list of nominees, I wrestled with a number of questions—what to do with the cast of Grand Hotel, for one. Perhaps the first movie ever boasting an all-star cast, Grand Hotel ostensibly had five leads; yet except for the possible exception of John Barrymore, no one is on screen long enough or is involved enough in each of the plot's various threads to warrant the designation lead actor.
The Academy apparently didn't know what to do with them either and in the end nominated none of them.
These days, whether a studio pushes an actor in a lead or supporting category is more about billing and star egos than about the actual nature of the role in question. Me, I don't actually have to work with any of these people so despite their star status, I'm treating the members of this ensemble cast as supporting performers and have nominated three of them, Barrymore brothers John and Lionel, as well as Joan Crawford, in the supporting categories. Wallace Beery, who has already won a Katie award for his performance in The Big House, gets his third nom for The Champ. The fifth star of Grand Hotel, Greta Garbo who so famously begged "I vant to be alone," will have to wait another year for a Katie nomination, in her case 1933's Queen Christina.
Another question for me involved the Marx Brothers, no doubt the greatest comedy team of all time, who put on another great show, this time in Monkey Business, the first of their films not based on a Broadway stage play. I think the work of Groucho, Chico and Harpo during their years with Paramount Pictures was uniformly terrific, but despite their very different strengths, I think of them not as separate individuals but as a team, each playing an important part of a whole, even Zeppo, whose role as long-suffering straight man was filled by Allan Jones after the brothers moved to MGM. I could nominate them separately, with perhaps Groucho Marx in the lead actor role and his brothers as supporting players, but in the end I decided that these are my awards, I make the rules. I've nominated the Marx Brothers as a single contestant in the best actor category.
You might notice as you scroll down the list of nominees that I've nominated Norma Shearer for her comedic performance in Private Lives. Those of you who have been following this blog from the beginning probably know I'm no fan of her work. Yet, I would be doing you a disservice not to recognize that she was a big star in the 1930s and that she has legions of fans to this day. Private Lives, though little known now, was for my money the best performance of her career, perfectly suited to her personality and talents. She winds up with a nomination for best actress.
You may also notice I am breaking with this blog's tradition of nominating five movies for best picture and three nominees in each of the other categories. As you may remember, I recently conducted a poll to name the fifth nominee (see here) and wound up with a three-way tie. Rather than hold a run-off over the Christmas holidays, I decided in the spirit of the season to be generous and expand the field to include seven movies. Certainly if the Academy could nominate eight in 1931-32 (and ten this year), I can nominate seven.
Note: I subsequently went back and expanded the field of actor and actress nominees to four each.
I also expanded the other categories, in some instances, to include as many as five nominees. All I promise in the future is to nominate at least three in each category, but will allow for as many nominees as it takes to give you a well-rounded picture of the movie year as a whole. After all, the point of the Katie Awards is not to prove I'm right, but to entice you into expanding your movie repertoire. If I have to nominate a hundred movies to convince you to see something worthwhile that you might have otherwise missed, I see that as a small price to pay. Certainly I'm not worried about my integrity—anyone who practices law for any length of time has had to abandon all pretense of that. I am perfectly willing to humble myself in this greatest of all causes.
Here are the nominees:
PICTURE À Nous La Liberté (prod. Frank Clifford) Frankenstein (prod. Carl Laemmle, Jr.) Freaks (prod. Tod Browning) Grand Hotel (prod. Irving Thalberg) Monkey Business (prod. Herman J. Mankiewicz) Scarface (prod. Howard Hughes) Waterloo Bridge (prod. Carl Laemmle Jr.)
ACTOR Wallace Beery (The Champ) Fredric March (Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde) The Marx Brothers (Monkey Business) Paul Muni (Scarface)
ACTRESS Mae Clarke (Waterloo Bridge) Marlene Dietrich (Shanghai Express) Norma Shearer (Private Lives) Barbara Stanwyck (The Miracle Woman)
DIRECTOR René Clair (À Nous La Liberté) Edmund Goulding (Grand Hotel) Howard Hawks (Scarface) Rouben Mamoulian (Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde) James Whale (Frankenstein)
SUPPORTING ACTOR John Barrymore (Grand Hotel) Lionel Barrymore (Grand Hotel) Boris Karloff (Frankenstein) Roland Young (The Guardsman and One Hour With You)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS Joan Crawford (Grand Hotel) Ann Dvorak (Scarface) Miriam Hopkins (The Smiling Lieutenant and Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde) Anna May Wong (Shanghai Express)
SCREENPLAY René Clair (À Nous La Liberté) Frances Marion (story), Leonard Praskins (dialogue continuity) and Wanda Tuchock (additional dialogue) (The Champ) Christa Winsloe and Friedrich Dammann (as F.D. Andam); from the play by Christa Winsloe (Mädchen in Uniform) S.J. Perelman and Will B. Johnstone (screenplay); Arthur Sheekman (additional dialogue) (Monkey Business) Ben Hecht; continuity and dialogue by Seton I. Miller, John Lee Mahin and W.R. Burnett; from a novel by Armitage Trail (Scarface)
Bonus Feature: For the 1932 Oscar ceremony, Walt Disney produced a brief animated short featuring the year's Oscar nominees, which I found on the blog "Motion Picture Gems." "Tom" listed the identity of the caricatures as follows: "1.Wallace Beery (as "The Champ") - Won Best Actor (tied with Frederic March) 2.Jackie Cooper ("The Champ") (nominated the year earlier for "Skippy") 3.Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt (both nominated for "The Guardsman") 4.Helen Hayes ("The Sin of Madelon Claudet") - Won Best Actress 5.Frederic March ("Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde") - Won Best Actor (tied with Wallace Beery) 6.Marie Dressler ("Emma") - Nominated for Best Actress"
I present Disney's "Parade of the Award Nominees" here with an introduction from Leonard Maltin for your viewing pleasure.
Postscript: Since returning from Philadelphia the day after Christmas, I've posted some ten thousand words including the four-part essay on Chaplin's City Lights which I wrote from a standing start in as many days. And now, I'm taking a couple of days off. See you next week.
"But Mr. Monkey," I hear so often on the street, "while it's true our lives rise and fall on the rhythms of your wonderful prose poetry, a movie blogger can never aspire to the status of cultural icon without posting an end-of-the-year top ten list." And even as I'm running away, I'm thinking, yes, it's probably true, I must write an end of the year top ten list. So as the decade of the 'Naughties comes to a close, I give you a list of the ten best movies I not just mentioned but wrote full essays about this year (thus the absence of The Kid, Safety Last, Sherlock Jr., Metropolis and many other).
As always, my choices are a reflection of my values and are in no way binding on the universe as a whole.
In chronological order and suitable for mounting on your refrigerator door:
The Thief Of Bagdad (1924)—Loosely based on stories from One Thousand and One Nights, The Thief of Bagdad is the tale of a pickpocket who falls in love with a princess and who then sets off on a fantastic adventure to prove himself. With the graceful and athletic Douglas Fairbanks at its heart, The Thief of Bagdad is as fluid as a ballet while at the same time serving up a rip-snorting yarn filled with the best special effects 1924 could offer. The American Film Institute voted The Thief of Bagdad the ninth best fantasy movie of all time, the only silent film on the list, and along with City Lights, one of only two silent movies on any of the AFI Top Ten lists. In my opinion, it was the best fantasy movie made before The Wizard of Oz in 1939, and was probably the best action-adventure movie made before 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood.
The Gold Rush (1925)—A 72-minute comedy about a gold prospector in the wilds of Alaska, chock full of laughs, action and some of the most inventive bits of business ever committed to film. I mean, there is something pretty entertaining about watching a man eat his own shoe. This is also the movie that introduced two oft-imitated bits, the one where a starving man thinks his partner is a chicken and the one where Chaplin spears two dinner rolls with forks and does a little soft-shoe with them under his chin. Throw in a little romance, an attempted murder and a happy ending and you've got the recipe for a real good time.
The General (1926)—Not only is it one of the greatest comedies ever made, The General, which [Buster] Keaton wrote, directed and starred in, is also an action film that puts most of its modern counterparts to shame. Based on an incident from the American Civil War, the story—about a lovelorn engineer who finds himself battling spies who hijack his train—features a spectacular chase involving two, then three speeding locomotives, daredevil stunts, explosions, burning bridges, comic mishaps, sight gags, split-second timing, all while Keaton woos the girl. Keaton's famously understated reaction to the chaos around him—he was known as "The Great Stoneface"—only adds to the modern feel of the production.
Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (1927)—Directed by the great F.W. Murnau, who had previously helmed such classics as Nosferatu and The Last Laugh, Sunrise starts out as a silent era film noir with a beautiful temptress from the city persuading a handsome young farmer to murder his wife then becomes a surprisingly touching story of reconciliation and redemption. The exaggerated story is a prime example of Expressionism, an artistic style that appealed to emotions rather than intellect and influenced not only movies but also painting, literature and even architecture.
The Passion Of Joan Of Arc (1928)—The Passion of Joan of Arc, with its tightly-framed close-ups and unadorned emotions, is quite frankly something I'd never seen before in a silent movie—or any other movie, for that matter—an impossible, anachronistic artifact that proves once again that our forefathers were much more modern that we currently dream of being. More importantly, though, the movie reminded me that telling a story in such a simple and straightforward manner, letting the chips fall where they may, can uncover truths about human nature so eternal that even an eighty year old film based on a nearly six hundred year old historical event can be as relevant and timely as this morning's news. That, I think, is one of the hallmarks of true art, an ability to speak across generations in a unique and unforgettable way. Or leaving all that aside, it's just a great, very watchable movie.
Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928)—This Buster Keaton comedy is a classic fish-out-of-water story, the reunion of a ukelele-playing, college-educated fop (Keaton) with his strapping, working class father (Ernest Torrence). In the course of the seventy-minute story, Keaton contends with shipwrecks, hurricanes and an unreasoning prejudice against French berets to win over his father and get the girl. The most unforgettable sequence of Steamboat Bill, Jr., perhaps the most famous single sequence of Keaton's career, is the one where a cyclone blows a house over onto Keaton, who only misses being killed because he miraculously happens to be standing right where an open attic window allows him to pass right through. Keaton always dismissed talk of his greatness—"How can you be a genius in slapshoes?"—but there's no doubt in my mind, or anyone else's these days, that a genius is exactly what he was. Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert calls him simply "the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies."
All Quiet On The Western Front (1930)—In adapting the novel for the screen, writers George Abbott, Maxwell Anderson and Del Andrews retained the story's focus on the boys who fought and died in the war rather than on the generals and politicians who sent them, a focus that gave the book so much of its power. Director Lewis Milestone made the significant and risky decision to cast young unknowns in the primary roles—and not in a J.J. Abrams, populate-the-bridge-of-the-Enterprise-with-GQ-pretty-boys sort of way either. These are boys, raw recruits who soil their underwear during their first patrol, kids who've never been away from home, never had a drink, never so much as kissed a girl. Played by grown men, you might feel regret at their deaths, but you'd never get the same sense of how much is lost, how much of even the most basic aspects of life they've missed out on as when these parts are played by boys. The effect is tragic and poignant even now almost eighty years on.
City Lights (1931)—Released more than three years after The Jazz Singer's premiere ushered in the sound era, Charles Chaplin's City Lights represented both the peak of the actor-director's brilliant career and a definite exclamation point marking the end of the silent era. A sublime romantic comedy, City Lights was arguably the greatest silent movie ever made, a huge worldwide hit and, along with Buster Keaton's The General, the movie I would recommend to anyone who has never seen a silent movie and is wondering what all the fuss was about. The romance is as delicate as the flower the Tramp carries around with him throughout the movie, and if there's one thing I prize in a romance, it's delicacy. Still, what City Lights mostly is, is funny. Fully fifty-seven of the film's eighty-three minute running time is devoted to comedy, and even those moments of tenderness with the girl are usually punctuated with a laugh—the first meeting, for example, concluding with a dash of cold water in the Tramp's face as the girl rinses a flower pot. A masterpiece of comic timing and invention, on my short list of history's great comedies, great romances, and well, great movies, period.
Le Million (1931)—A musical comedy about a struggling artist, in debt to his landlord and every shop owner in town, who discovers he has won the lottery—if only he can find the ticket. He remembers it's in the pocket of a jacket he left with his fiancee, but she's given the jacket to a beggar on the run from the police and soon everybody is scrambling to get their hands on that jacket. Director René Clair gets great mileage out of the deference we pay to money and the people who have it regardless of their worth as human beings, and we laugh at the contortions of the shopowners to ingratiate themselves to a man they had just minutes before been chasing through the streets. The story is tight and precisely put together, the songs and dialogue are witty and memorable, and the resulting comedy is as light and frothy as a glass of cold champagne.
M (1931)—Fritz Lang's M is a masterpiece of psychology, not just the psychology of child murderer Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre in a performance that launched his career), but the psychology of the audience as well. Using nothing much more than sound and shadows, Lang created a genuine sense of suspense and horror by exploiting a basic fact of human psychology, that we are most afraid of what we can't see. Indeed, the most explicit act of violence Peter Lorre does in M is to the orange he surgically skins with a switchblade. Had it been just an exercise in style, M would still be one of the most effective thrillers ever made, but Lang is interested in more than just a resolution to his police procedural, instead shifting the focus to a study of vigilantism and mob rule. In so doing, Lang raises questions about the balance between freedom and security, justice and efficiency, and the rule of law and the rule of the mob, that are still relevant today. If you watch carefully, you realize nothing much has changed—we've just moved the proceedings to cable television.
Picture:City Lights (prod. Charles Chaplin) Actor: Charles Chaplin (City Lights) Actress: Marlene Dietrich (Morocco) Director: Fritz Lang (M) Supporting Actor: Peter Lorre (M) Supporting Actress: Joan Blondell (Sinners' Holiday, Other Men's Women and Night Nurse) Screenplay: René Clair (Le Million) Special Awards:M (prod. Seymour Hebenzal) (Best Picture-Drama); Edward G. Robinson (Little Caesar) (Best Actor-Drama); Marie Dressler (Min and Bill) (Best Actress-Comedy); René Clair (Le Million) (Special Achievement In The Use Of Sound); "Makin' Whoopee" (Whoopee!) (Best Song); Fritz Arno Wagner (M) (Cinematography) Must-See:L'Age d'Or; Animal Crackers; The Big Trail; City Lights; The Dawn Patrol; Dracula; Little Caesar; M; Le Million; Morocco; The Public Enemy In retrospect, the twelve months running from August 1, 1930, to July 31, 1931 (in the Academy's odd Oscar season of the day) turned out to be a year of beginnings and endings.
The best movie of the year, Charlie Chaplin's delicate, poignant comedy City Lights was the last silent movie Hollywood ever produced (like the website "Silent Era," I judge Modern Times to be a "mute sound picture"). For all practical purposes, the silent era had come to close by 1929, and only Chaplin's enormous popularity and the brilliance of City Lights could have induced an audience to accept the anomaly of a silent movie in 1931.
1931 marked the last gasp for a German film industry that had given the world F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, Marlene Dietrich, Peter Lorre, Expressionism, and such films as The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, Metropolis and M. Within two years, the Nazis would come to power and those artists who didn't flee or collaborate soon found themselves censored, arrested or murdered. Many German filmmakers, such as writer-director Billy Wilder, emigrated to Hollywood and had successful careers. But the German film industry as a whole would never again have the impact on cinema that it had in the 1920s and early years of the 1930s.
But 1930-31 was also a year for beginnings. James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson burst onto the scene, dazzling audiences in two of the essential gangster flicks of the early sound era, and continuing to dominate the Hollywood scene for years to come. American audiences also became acquainted with Marlene Dietrich for the first time. And in the space of twelve months, Clark Gable would rise from uncredited bit player to major star with tough but sexy roles in A Free Soul and Night Nurse.
I've written at length about all the titles on my list of the Must-See Movies of 1930-31. I leave to you the pleasure of hunting for them through the last three months of this blog's archives.
As great as 1930-31 was, the next twelve months would prove even better, especially for Hollywood which was at last getting the hang of the sound technology that had turned the old order upside down in 1927. On the horizon are Frankenstein, Scarface, Grand Hotel and many others. I'll have the list of nominees for you tomorrow in celebration of the New Year.
Oh, and later today: an end-of-year top ten list! Even the Monkey is not immune to the demands of traditional movie criticism.
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?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're waiting for Part Two of my scintillating essay about Scarface. Well, you're not getting that right now. It's April 8, 1932 in the Monkey's world and working under the stage name "Cary Grant," young Archie Leach has just made his film debut in This Is The Night. It's a romantic comedy starring Lili Damita, Charlie Ruggles and Roland Young. Young, as you probably recall, is up for a Katie Award this year.
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