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If you're a devotee, as I am, of both Turner Classic Movies and the Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards, you'll be glad to know that a pair of Katie nominees, King Kong and Jewel Robbery are airing on America's classiest cable channel tomorrow, Saturday, May 8. King Kong is up for three Katies, including best picture and director; Kay Francis is up for best actress in Jewel Robbery.
At 6 a.m. EDT is Jewel Robbery, starring William Powell as a suave jewel thief who forces his victims to smoke marijuana during the robbery, leaving them happy, giggling and quite unable to identify him to the police. One of his victims (Kay Francis) is so taken with the thief, she insists on a repeat performance.
After the film's release, thousands of people wrote the studio asking where they could get hold of some of this marijuana stuff for themselves.
The other film, King Kong, I dare say you've heard of. Released in 1933, this is the ultimate in fun-stupid summer-blockbuster entertainment. It's spawned many remakes and sequels, but the original is the one people keep coming back to, and with good reason. If somehow you've never seen this classic action-sci-fi-horror flick, set your recorder or block out some time.
It's on at Noon, EDT time.
From TCM's website:
6:00am [Romance] Jewel Robbery (1932)
A jewel thief falls for a tycoon's wife in Vienna.
Cast: William Powell, Kay Francis, Helen Vinson, Hardie Albright Dir: William Dieterle BW-68 mins
12:00pm [Horror/Science-Fiction] King Kong (1933)
A film crew discovers the "eighth wonder of the world," a giant prehistoric ape, and brings him back to New York, where he wreaks havoc.
Cast: Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot, Frank Reicher Dir: Merian C. Cooper BW-105 mins
The poll for best song of 1932-33 quickly turned into a neck-and-neck contest between "We're in the Money" from Gold Diggers of 1933 and "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf" from Three Little Pigs, with the Busby Berkeley dance number edging the classic Disney cartoon theme right at the wire, 14 votes to 12. The Rogers and Hart standard, "Isn't It Romantic," finished third with 6 votes and two more songs, "42nd Street" and "Remember My Forgotten Man," both penned by the winning songwriting team of Harry Warren and Al Dubin, picked up three votes each. And while "We're in the Money" won only a plurality of the vote, the three Warren/Dubin numbers, taken together, took 20 of the 38 votes cast, a clear win in my book for perhaps the most prolific pair of songwriters you've never heard of.
In a way, the story of "We're in the Money" begins with Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer way back in 1927—a story that so far has taken me more than a year to tell, so let me recap: when talkies supplanted silent films, studios actually had no idea what to do with the new technology. So movie producers, assuming audiences were just as dumb as they themselves were, copied The Jazz Singer formula over and over, dropping in songs and musical performances almost at random into every new film that came out, even into movies where a song made no sense at all. And audiences got sick of it in a hurry, so much so that by 1930, musicals were box office poison. (You can see Hollywood doing the same thing right now with 3-D, turning everything into a 3-D movie whether it makes sense or not.)
Come 1933, the only way Warner Brothers production chief Darryl F. Zanuck could convince his bosses to make a musical was to lie to them, telling them 42nd Street would be a gritty drama about the backstage intrigue typical of a Broadway show. He set up two separate film units, one for the dramatic material, one for the musical numbers, and hired a couple of Broadway veterans, composer Harry Warren and lyricist Al Dubin, to come up with the songs for the movie on the sly.
For a guy you've probably never heard of, composer Harry Warren was a hit-writing machine. He wrote twenty-one number one hits in his career (nine with lyricist Al Dubin), including "Jeepers Creepers," "Chattanooga Choo Choo," "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe" and "You Must Have Been A Beautiful Baby." He also wrote hits such as "That's Amore," "I Got A Gal in Kalamazoo," "Shuffle Off To Buffalo," "You'll Never Know" and "At Last." He was nominated for an Oscar eleven times, winning three. In addition to Al Dubin, Warren also worked extensively with Mack Brown and Johnny Mercer.
Al Dubin meanwhile had written the lyrics for several hit Broadway musicals and found himself paired with Warren for the first time on 42nd Street, mostly because the two had backstage Broadway experience that Zanuck wanted to draw on. Among the numbers they wrote were "You're Getting To Be A Habit With Me" (inspired by a line from a studio secretary explaining why she was dating a particular man), "Shuffle Off To Buffalo" and the title song.
Incidentally, the two can be seen at the beginning of 42nd Street as the authors of the stinker of a song, "It Must Be June," which stage director Julian Marsh (Warner Baxter) throws out of the show over their protests.
Providing choreography for the dance numbers was Busby Berkeley. Berkeley had gotten his start choreographing parades and marching bands, before going to work for Samuel Goldwyn on the hit Eddie Cantor movie, Whoopee! in 1930. Berkeley took a novel approach to filming the numbers, arranging the performers in geometric patterns and allowing the camera itself to do the dancing as it flew overheard or dollied underneath. As Daniel Eagan writes in America's Film Legacy, "For purists, this technique was the antithesis of true dance, but in 1933 it seemed fresh, even daring."
42nd Street was a huge success, saving the studio from near bankruptcy. A follow-up, Gold Diggers of 1933, immediately went into production, using most of the same team—hoofers Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell and Ginger Rogers, choreographer Busby Berkeley and the songwriting team of Warren and Dubin. Stock Warner Brothers players Joan Blondell, Warren William and Aline MacMahon were added to carry the story.
Like its predecessor, Gold Diggers is about the backstage shenanigans of a Broadway production, this time played for laughs instead of drama. To save time, Zanuck recycled the screenplay from 1929's hit Gold Diggers of Broadway, but instead of the original's rather dull numbers, such as a nine-minute version of "Tip Toe Through the Tulips," Zanuck relied on Warren and Dubin to come up with something sizzling. The duo didn't disappoint.
Unlike 42nd Street which hid its intentions until the last twenty minutes, Gold Diggers of 1933 announces itself as a musical from the get-go. After the opening credits, the movie jumps straight to Ginger Rogers singing "We're in the Money" (called "The Gold Diggers Song" to tie the sheet music to the movie) while a bevy of beauties clad only in body stockings and giant gold coins dance around her.
We're in the money, we're in the money;
We've got a lot of what it takes to get along!
We're in the money, that sky is sunny,
Old Man Depression you are through, you done us wrong.
It's an ironically upbeat number, not just because the story is about chorus girls so broke they steal the neighbor's milk for their morning cereal, but because the country was mired in the depths of a Depression grinding along in its fourth year.
The screenplay had originally called for a dreary montage of shuttered theaters showing the effects of the Depression on Broadway, but Berkeley and director Mervyn LeRoy junked the script and opted to dazzle the audience right away. It turned out to be an inspired choice. The number's energy sweeps you right past the movie's hokey storyline and by the time you start to wonder why you're watching this cookie cutter claptrap, there's another song and dance number on the screen and you're carried away all over again.
Gold Diggers of 1933 is not currently available on DVD and the only way to watch this song at the moment is to click this link, head on over to TCM and watch the clip there. Or you can come over to my house and watch it on tape. I suggest the former. [Note: In the comments section, Brian tells me that Gold Diggers of 1933 is available as part of the Busby Berkeley collection which also includes 42nd Street, Footlight Parade, Dames and Gold Diggers of 1935. That, my friends, is a good collection.]
While you're watching and listening, here are some of the faces to look for:
Ginger Rogers—I hope you know who she is. Half of the greatest dance team in history, Rogers started as a contract player, appearing in ten movies in 1933, including small roles in both 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933. In the former, she played "Anytime Annie," a roundheels who said no only once "and then she didn't hear the question." Here she plays Fay Fortune, a down-on-her-luck chorus girl who pals around with the three leads, Joan Blondell, Ruby Keeler and Aline MacMahon. She may well have gotten this plum spot in the proceedings because she was dating director Mervyn LeRoy at the time, but once she was paired with Broadway dancer Fred Astaire in Flying Down To Rio seven months later, she wouldn't need favors from anybody.
And in case you're wondering why Rogers sings a verse in pig Latin, she was amusing her fellow dancers with pig Latin between takes, and either Darryl Zanuck or Busby Berkeley or Mervyn LeRoy—depending on whose story you believe—saw her and decided to make it part of the routine.
Ned Sparks—One of those ubiquitous character actors on the Warner Brothers payroll, his specialty was deadpan comedy delivered in a nasal, monotone voice of doom, so much a part of his persona that Lloyds of London insured his reputation for $10,000 in the event he was ever photographed smiling. At least that's what the New York Times reported in 1936, and they're never wrong. "I speedily realized that I was not destined to cause the ladies to swoon with romantic ecstasy as they watched me make love to one of their sex," he once said. "I have also divined that comedy and not romantic acting was my special forte." He appeared in over eighty movies and retired in 1947.
Ironically, Sparks's character Barney Hopkins growls at one point in the film "Cancel my contract with Warren and Dubin!" Obviously, Warner Brothers went in the other direction, hiring the duo to write songs for its next backstage musical, Footlight Parade.
Joan Blondell—I've written about her before, at length (click here). One of my favorite pre-Code actresses, Blondell made more than a hundred movies in her career, eight in 1933 alone. There was always something tough and no-nonsense about Blondell's sex appeal (she knew what she wanted, said yes when she wanted and only when she wanted) that made her a fan favorite during the Depression. She's the star of this picture, playing a chorus girl who tries to keep the snooty Warren William from breaking up the romance of Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler, only to fall for the big lug herself. I imagine this plot was already a cliche when Adam told it to Eve in the Garden, but Blondell looks great in her skivvies and it's all great fun, so who cares?
Ruby Keeler—The wife of Jazz Singer star Al Jolson, Keeler was the nominal star of Warner's backstage trilogy, with 42nd Street serving as her screen debut. "I couldn't act," she said later, "I had that terrible singing voice, and now I can see I wasn't the greatest tap dancer in the world, either." But she had a fresh-faced innocence that translated well with audiences and for a couple of years there, she was a big box office draw. She only made eleven movies and except for a handful of television appearances in the 1960s, was out of pictures by 1941. (For more on Keeler, check out "Shadow Waltz," a blog devoted to all things Ruby.)
Aline Mac Mahon— Like Ned Sparks, she was one of those faces you'd see in Warner Brothers films of the period, usually playing someone good, wise and long-suffering. She began on Broadway in the 1920s, broke into movies as Edward G. Robinson's loyal secretary in Five Star Final and continued to act until her retirement in 1975. Nominated for an Oscar for her supporting performance in 1944's Dragon Seed, you might also want to track her down in Skyscraper Souls, co-starring Gold Digger's male lead, Warren William.
The movie was supposed to end with "Pettin' In The Park," which would have made more sense narratively but didn't pack much punch, either visually or as a tune. Instead, producer Hal Wallis (who took over mid-production when Zanuck quit in a contract dispute) opted to end with the picture's final Warren-Dubin song, "Remember My Forgotten Man," an explicitly political number about the Depression.
Remember my forgotten man,
You put a rifle in his hand;
You sent him far away,
You shouted, "Hip, hooray!"
But look at him today!
Sitting as it does at the end of the picture, the song serves as a big fat middle finger to everything that's come before it. Eagan calls it "a song of epic chutzpah." That it is.
Audiences ate it up. Gold Diggers of 1933 was an even bigger hit than 42nd Street, grossing a million dollars more than its predecessor, an enormous amount of money considering ticket prices ranged from 10¢ to a quarter.
Looking to cash in on a trend, Warners quickly rushed Footlight Parade into production and gave the lead to its most popular star, James Cagney. In this one, they barely bother with a plot—more a case of "Did you see the other two? This is more of the same"—and gave Berkeley free rein. It's the most over-the-top of three, with numbers that wouldn't fit into an airplane hanger ostensibly taking place on a theater stage. It's worth looking up, though, to see Cagney in a pre-Yankee Doodle Dandy dancing role.
Harry Warren and Al Dubin wrote the songs for that one, too, and all three movies are preserved in the National Film Registry.
1933 represented the highwater mark for Berkeley's career. Within a year, his lavish production numbers were considered old hat and by the early '40s, even though he was still directing musicals, others, particularly Gene Kelly, had taken over his choreographing duties.
Ironically, it was the star of the "We're In The Money" number that hastened Berkeley's downfall. Over the course of the next three summers, in The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat and Swing Time, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire would, like Berkeley before them, redefine the movie musical, turning dance into a most intimate expression of love and romance. Suddenly by comparison Berkeley's choreography seemed gaudy, abstract and impersonal, and what had thrilled audiences in 1933 was dismissed as so last year by 1934.
Harry Warren and Al Dubin continued to crank out hits throughout the 1930s, with their last number one together being 1937's "Remember Me." After that, Dubin returned to Broadway and wrote musicals until his death in 1945, while Warren teamed up with other lyricists and continued to write hit songs into the 1950s. "The familiarity of Harry Warren's songs," said one drama critic, "is matched by the anonymity of the man" and Time magazine noted, "By silent consensus, the king of this army of unknown soldiers, the Hollywood incognitos, was Harry Warren, who had more songs on the Hit Parade than [Irving] Berlin himself and who would win the contest hands down if enough people have heard of him."
Well, you've heard of him now, anyway.
One of two Marx Brothers movies preserved in the National Film Registry (the other is A Night At the Opera) and the last to include Zeppo, Duck Soup is the funniest of their films, an exercise in inspired anarchy that nevertheless works with the precision of a Swiss watch.
Without ever feeling overburdened by superfluous plot, Duck Soup is one of the few Marx Brothers movies that actually has one, or at least one that serves not merely as an excuse for humor, but as a catalyst for it. Considering how many chefs stirred this particular cinematic pot, however, not just the credited writers but also director Leo McCarey and the Brothers themselves, all concerned likely counted themselves lucky that the movie worked at all. A study of the screenwriting process reveals that the story was actually a mishmash of old vaudeville gags, Laurel and Hardy routines and entire scenes lifted nearly intact from the Marx Brothers' short-lived radio program. That Duck Soup wound up the most effortlessly brilliant entry in the Marx Brothers' oeuvre is something of a modern movie miracle.
Immediately after the release of the Marx Brothers' 1932 hit, Horse Feathers, work began on a follow-up, Firecrackers, to be set in the mythical Eastern European kingdom of Oo-La-La, with Ernst Lubitsch, whose resume was filled with comedies set in mythical Eastern European kingdoms, slated to direct. The script started as a handful of songs and a rough story idea from the songwriting team of Burt Kalmar and Harry Ruby, who had written songs for two other Marx Brothers movies, Animal Crackers and Horse Feathers.
His Excellency is due
To take his station
Beginning his new
Administration.
He'll make his appearance when
The clock on the wall strikes ten.
Zeppo, by the way, who sings this opening number, was initially to play Groucho's son, as he had in Horse Feathers, and only at the last minute was the part rewritten to be Rufus T. Firefly's secretary, Bob Roland. It was probably just as well—it's his smallest part in the five films he appeared in and he was ready to leave the act and pursue a career as a Hollywood talent agent.
For the opening scene, a long sequence in a palace ballroom where foreign dignitaries and government officials have assembled to await the arrival of Freedonia's new leader, Kalmar and Ruby wrote two other songs, the two-line Freedonian national anthem and a big song and dance number for Groucho.
The last man nearly ruined this place
He didn't know what to do with it.
If you think this country's bad off now
Just wait 'till I get through with it.
Together with "His Excellency Is Due," the scene plays out more or less as it did in the final film.
During these early stages of the story's development, Kalmar and Ruby also penned the opening lines of what would later become the song and dance number, "The Country's Going To War," which was a spoof of, among other things, the spiritual "All God's Chillun Got Wings," and a 1924 Eugene O'Neill play of the same name starring Paul Robeson.
Then it's war!
Then it's war!
Gather the forces!
Harness the horses!
Then it's war!
Taken together, the songs suggested something of a story arc—Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho) becomes leader of Freedonia and the country winds up in a war—but stitching those two bookends together proved to be a bit of a problem.
Grover Jones, a veteran of more than a hundred screenplays in his career, including the Ernst Lubitsch classic, Trouble in Paradise, made the first attempt at hashing out the storyline. Working with Kalmar and Ruby, Jones's draft of the script, now entitled Cracked Ice, imagined that Groucho, in addition to being president of Freedonia, is also an arms manufacturer who conspires with Chico to start a war to gin up a demand for his product, anticipating by nearly three decades Dwight Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex" speech, with Margaret Dumont throw in for comic relief.
Some of the jokes survive—the recurring bit with "His Excellency's car," the "gala day" line, opting for a "standing" army to save on chairs—as does the scene introducing Firefly and the garden party at Mrs. Teasdale's, but everything after the first act went out the window. (One of the rejected ideas was an opera sequence, with Chico and Harpo disrupting the performance. An expanded form of the idea was revived two years later as A Night At The Opera.)
Aside from the fact that many of his gags were belabored and not very funny, Jones fundamentally misunderstood the Brothers' appeal. It was one thing for Groucho to scam the sorts of people we instinctively root against—gangsters, gamblers and rich buffoons—or for Chico to scam Groucho; it was another thing altogether for Groucho and Chico to be those people we root against. (You can read this draft online here.)
Next the studio brought in Groucho Marx's favorite writer, Arthur Sheekman, who along with Nat Perrin, had been writing a radio show for the Brothers, Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel, which briefly aired on NBC radio from late November 1932 to May 1933. Arthur Sheekman had been a show business columnist for the Chicago Sunday Times where Groucho sought him out, befriended him and hired him to work on two Marx Brothers films, Monkey Business and Horse Feathers, the latter without credit, before becoming the chief writer on the radio show. Perrin, a former lawyer working in the Warner Brothers' publicity department, landed a job as a gag writer for Groucho after forging a letter of introduction from Broadway playwright Moss Hart.
The new script, now called Grasshoppers, was cobbled together from previous drafts and from the radio show. With minor refinements, Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel provided fifteen of Duck Soup's gags and routines, including Chico's trial for treason, and lines such as "Go, and never darken my towels again" and "Would you give me a lock of your hair—I'm letting you off easy, I was going to ask for the whole wig." (I knew there was a reason I bought the transcripts of the radio show some twenty years ago.)
Chico's first scene in Duck Soup was lifted nearly verbatim from the program's first episode. This, from the show's transcript:
"Hey, you remember when you giva me that picture of your wife?"
"Yes."
"Well, I start right out. Joosta like a bloodhound, I tell you. And in one hour, even less than one hour—"
"Yes ..."
"I losa da pisch."
...
"Then you didn't shadow my wife?"
"Sure, I shadow her all day."
"What day was that?"
"That was Shadowday. ... Monday I shadow your wife. Tuesday I go to the ball game—she don't show up. Wednesday she go to the ball game—I don't show up. Thursday was a doubleheader. We both no show up. Friday it rain all day—there'sa no ball game, so I go fishing."
For the movie, the jokes were further polished and the characters altered to suit the story. In addition, business was written for Harpo, who as a silent act was of course not on the radio.
[To read more about Grasshoppers, click here.]
(Producer Herman J. Mankiewicz, who later won an Oscar for co-writing Citizen Kane, also contributed to the finished product—what, exactly, I can't tell you.)
Finally, although director Leo McCarey wasn't credited with writing the script, I suspect he played a major role in the way the story played out. Originally a lawyer by trade, McCarey broke into the film business as a writer for the Hal Roach Studios; by 1929, McCarey was in charge of production there. A veteran director of comedy shorts, McCarey dipped into his past to provide the Brothers with new material. The scenes with Edgar Kennedy as the long-suffering owner of a lemonade stand are much more characteristic of the slow-burn frustration routines of W.C. Fields and Laurel and Hardy, whom McCarey had worked with extensively, than of the sort of comedy the Brothers had been doing. The scene where Chico and Harpo rob the safe is a reworked bit from Laurel and Hardy. And the famous mirror scene, which McCarey also suggested, was an old vaudeville routine.
McCarey was the first veteran comedy director the Brothers had ever worked with and to their delight, he encouraged improvisation on the set. And to the delight of many film fans, he also insisted on dropping the usual harp and piano interludes.
His main contribution, though, was knowing from experience what was funny and how to capture that comedy on film.
(For a more detailed and less adoring analysis of the film, stop by The Marx Brothers Council Of Britain.)
As filming came to an end in June 1933, the studio finally settled on a title, Duck Soup. The origin and meaning of the title has been the subject of speculation for years, and with his usual directness, Groucho explained it thusly: "Take two turkeys, one goose, four cabbages, but no duck, and mix them together. After one taste, you'll duck soup for the rest of your life."
In fact, though, "duck soup" was slang for "something easy to do," and Leo McCarey almost certainly suggested it—in 1927 while at Hal Roach's studio, he proposed pairing comedic actors Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy for the first time in short named, yes, that's right, Duck Soup.
In any event, Duck Soup was in keeping with the three previous Marx Brothers movies which had worked an animal into the title.
The movie premiered on November 27, 1933. Legend has it that Duck Soup flopped on its initial release, but in fact, it broke even at the box office, and although it did receive mixed reviews from critics, its relative lack of success (compared to its predecessors) may owe more to Paramount Pictures' lack of a marketing budget than to any inherent lack of interest on the part of the public. In any event, Paramount, which had been tottering financially throughout the Depression, soon after went bankrupt and the Brothers decamped for MGM where Irving Thalberg remade them in his own image. But that's a story I'll leave for another day.
Despite their ups and downs, Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby worked together as a songwriting team from 1920 until Kalmar's death in 1947. The pair wrote such songs as "Who's Sorry Now," "I Wanna Be Loved By You," and their biggest hit, "Three Little Words," which provided the title of the 1950 fictionalized film account of the partnership starring Fred Astaire and Red Skelton.
Grover Jones was twice nominated for an Oscar, for the original story Lady and Gent and for the screenplay for The Lives Of A Bengal Lancer (shared with four other writers). He also wrote Abe Lincoln in Illinois, and during the silent era, he directed twenty-one movies. Jones died at the age of forty-six following surgery.
After hopping a train from New York with Groucho and Nat Perrin to write Duck Soup, Arthur Sheekman continued to work in Hollywood, and met his future wife, Gloria Stuart, while writing the Eddie Cantor musical, Roman Scandals. (You may remember Stuart for her Oscar-nominated turn in the 1997 movie Titanic.) Sheekman and Stuart married in 1934 and remained married until his death in 1978.
Nat Perrin also stayed in Hollywood and did some uncredited script doctoring on Go West and wrote the screen story for The Big Store (recycling the name "Flywheel" and the plot of that movie from the radio show). He also wrote the hit play Hellzapoppin' and later produced The Addams Family for television. Although Duck Soup provided him with an entree into Hollywood, Perrin wasn't a fan of the movie. "[It] was so crazy—that was Leo McCarey's approach, and the boys loved working with him. But, to me, [A] Night at the Opera is a far better film. Of course, plenty of people disagree with me." He died in 1998.
Both Sheekman and Perrin remained lifelong friends with Groucho.
During a career which began in the silent era and ended in the early '60s, Leo McCarey directed 110 shorts and feature films. He was nominated for nine Oscars, winning four, one for directing Cary Grant's breakout performance in The Awful Truth, and three for writing, directing and producing 1944's best picture winner, Going My Way.
And as for the Marx Brothers? We'll be returning to them soon enough.
[To read about frequent Marx Brothers co-star Margaret Dumont, click here.]
The poll for best song of 1932-33 is shaping up as a two horse race between "We're In The Money" from Gold Diggers Of 1933 and "Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf" from Three Little Pigs. The other three songs between them don't have as many votes as either of the top two contenders.
Which really means this is a two man race between dance wizard Busby Berkeley and entertainment genius Walt Disney.
Yeah, yeah, technically the award will go to one of the songwriting teams of Harry Warren and Al Dubin or Frank Church and Ted Sears, but the fact is the guys who really figured how to sell these songs were Busby Berkeley on the one hand and Walt Disney on the other.
So who you got, Berkeley or Disney?
The tale of the tape:
Busby Berkeley
Birth Name: William Berkeley Enos
Nickname: Buzz
Born: November 29, 1895 (Los Angeles, California)
Died: March 14, 1976 (Palm Springs, California)
Height: 5'9"
Marriages: 4
Trademark: Grandiose dance choreography featuring overhead camera shots
Films: 36, including 42nd Street, Gold Diggers Of 1933 and Footlight Parade
Awards: 3 Oscar nominations for Best Dance Direction; no wins
Other Notable Achievements: single-handedly revived the movie musical
Little-Known Fact: never took a dance lesson in his life
Walt Disney
Birth Name: Walter Elias Disney
Nickname: Uncle Walt
Born: December 5, 1901 (Chicago, Illinois)
Died: December 15, 1966 (Los Angeles, California)
Height: 5'10"
Marriages: One, to Lillian Bounds, from 1925 until his death in 1966
Trademarks: innovative animation; making dreams come true
Films: produced 641 feature-length films, shorts, and television programs
Awards: 59 Oscar nominations, 26 wins (including 4 special awards), both records; Congressional Gold Medal, Légion d'honneur, Presidential Medal of Freedom, Special Katie Award
Other Notable Achievements: along with brother Roy, founded the Walt Disney Company, the world's largest media and entertainment conglomerate
Little-Known Fact: was a model train enthusiast
You've got until Sunday to cast your vote.
So since for the 1932-33 awards year I'm using the expanded "Golden Globes" format (splitting up awards for picture, actor and actress between drama and comedy/musical), I'm sure most have you have been wondering who would have won for the previous five years if I'd been doing the Golden Globes thing all along.
Good question, thanks for asking.
It's kind of a mixed bag, as it turns out, which is why I didn't use this format in the first place. For every inspired choice, such as Marion Davies (comedy, Show People) or Edward G. Robinson (drama, Little Caesar), you get somebody like Maurice Chevalier (comedy/musical, The Love Parade) who'd have readers running for the exits. And then you start wondering whether I would really have given Marie Dressler the best supporting actress award of 1929-30 knowing I'd also give her an award for 1930-31. And on and on.
Clearly, I have too much time on my hands.
Anyway, here they are. Make of them what you will. At least Al Jolson dressed for the occasion.
1927-28
Picture (Comedy): The Circus (prod. Charles Chaplin)
Actor (Comedy or Musical): Al Jolson (The Jazz Singer)
Actress (Drama): Janet Gaynor (7th Heaven and Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans)
1928-29
Picture (Comedy): Steamboat Bill, Jr. (prod. Joseph M. Schenck)
Actor (Drama): Erich von Stroheim (The Wedding March)
Actress (Comedy): Marion Davies (Show People)
1929-30
Picture (Comedy or Musical): Hallelujah! (prod. King Vidor)
Actor (Comedy/Musical): Maurice Chevalier (The Love Parade)
Actress (Comedy/Musical): Jeanette MacDonald (The Love Parade)
1930-31
Picture (Drama): M (prod. Seymour Hebenzal)
Actor (Drama): Edward G. Robinson (Little Caesar)
Actress (Comedy): Marie Dressler (Min and Bill)
1931-32
Picture (Comedy/Musical): À Nous La Liberté (prod. Frank Clifford)
Actor (Comedy/Musical): Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy (The Music Box)
Actress (Drama): Mae Clarke (Waterloo Bridge)
You know it's a great year in movies when these are the people who didn't get a Katie Award nomination ...
Clark Gable (actor) and Mary Astor (actress) (Red Dust)
Gary Cooper (actor, A Farewell To Arms and Design For Living)
Marlene Dietrich (actress, Blonde Venus)
Dick Powell (supporting actor) and Ruby Keeler (supporting actress) (42nd Street, Gold Diggers Of 1933 and Footlight Parade)
Boris Karloff (actor, The Mummy)
Marion Davies (actress, Peg O' My Heart)
Ginger Rogers (supporting actress, 42nd Street, Gold Diggers Of 1933 and Flying Down To Rio)
William Powell (actor, Jewel Robbery and One Way Passage)
Joan Crawford (actress, Rain)
Clara Bow (actress, Call Her Savage)
Jeanette MacDonald (actress) and Maurice Chevalier (actor) (Love Me Tonight)
Irene Dunne (actress, Back Street)
Ben Hecht (writer) (Design For Living)
Glenda Farrell (actress, The Mystery Of The Wax Museum)
Charlie Ruggles (supporting actor, Love Me Tonight and Trouble In Paradise)
Ann Dvorak (supporting actress, Three On A Match)
At 6 a.m. EDT is Jewel Robbery, starring William Powell as a suave jewel thief who forces his victims to smoke marijuana during the robbery, leaving them happy, giggling and quite unable to identify him to the police. One of his victims (Kay Francis) is so taken with the thief, she insists on a repeat performance.
The other film, King Kong, I dare say you've heard of. Released in 1933, this is the ultimate in fun-stupid summer-blockbuster entertainment. It's spawned many remakes and sequels, but the original is the one people keep coming back to, and with good reason. If somehow you've never seen this classic action-sci-fi-horror flick, set your recorder or block out some time.
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