By now you've no doubt forgotten my list of nominees for best director of 1932-33 in the category of comedy or musical—an inevitable consequence of my leisurely working methods—and a pity that is, for a more distinguished list of directors you'll not find anywhere: Jean Renoir, Leo McCarey, George Cukor, Victor Fleming, Jean Vigo, Lloyd Bacon, any one of whom in another year would be a worthy winner. But for me, there was always just one choice, the one director who of all those on the list was at the top of his game in 1932-33, a man with a comedic touch so light, they named it after him.
I'm referring, of course, to Ernst Lubitsch who directed not one but two of the frothiest and funniest comedies of the pre-Code era, Trouble In Paradise and Design For Living. Not seen for decades—first thanks to Hollywood's self-censorship, later due to the vagaries of DVD marketing—these masterpieces of sparkling wit and easy sophistication are even now only just finding an audience, and Lubitsch himself is no longer as well-known as such classic directors as Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford. But in his day, he was the most famous director in the world and his influence is visible throughout the history of film, from Billy Wilder to Cameron Crowe.
"Lubitsch," said the great Jean Renoir, "invented the modern Hollywood."
I. From Berlin To America Born in Berlin in 1892, Lubitsch quit his father's successful tailoring business at the age of nineteen to join Max Reinhardt's theater company where he specialized in comedic roles. A year later, he began appearing in films and was soon writing and directing comedy shorts starring himself. He scored international hits in 1918 with a pair of Pola Negri vehicles, Eyes of the Mummy and Carmen, but really established himself in 1919 with The Oyster Princess, a farce about the excesses of the wealthy, punctuated by a manic foxtrot led by Curt Bois who later played the pickpocket in Casablanca.
Lubitsch followed up with a lavish costume drama, Madame DuBarry, again with Pola Negri, this time in the title role, and Emil Jannings as King Louis XV. This pattern of alternating comedies with costume dramas was one Lubitsch followed throughout the silent era, and during that time he was as much known for the latter as the former. Indeed, he received his first Oscar nomination for directing The Patriot, a biography of the mad Russian czar, Paul I, and never lost his fascination with exotic settings and the antics of the rich and powerful. (Alas, The Patriot, like so many silent movies, is now lost.)
In 1923 Hollywood's biggest star, Mary Pickford, invited Lubitsch to direct her next picture, Rosita. The resulting story of a peasant girl who becomes the object of a king's romantic obsession wasn't much to Pickford's liking, but the experience was still a positive one for the director. Lubitsch fell in love with America and but for two brief trips (including his honeymoon), he never returned to his native Europe. Instead, he relocated to Hollywood permanently and signed a lucrative contract with Warner Brothers that featured an unprecedented amount of control over his projects. Among the half-dozen pictures he made for Warners were two classics, The Marriage Circle and Lady Windermere's Fan. The latter, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's comedy about a woman with a secret past, is one of five Lubitsch films preserved in the Library of Congress's National Film Registry.
Despite their artistic and critical success, however, Lubitsch's silent films failed to find the wide audience the Warner brothers had hoped for, and coupled with the films' high costs, Lubitsch consistently lost money for the studio. "Lubitsch had a following," said film editor Rudi Fehr, "but they weren't coal-miners, they weren't steelworkers." In a cable to his brother Harry, studio head Jack Warner stated bluntly, "Small directors [are] making twice [the] money he [is] making," to which Harry replied, "His pictures are over peoples' heads here."
Lubitsch bought out the remainder of his contract, made one movie at MGM—a charming, non-musical version of The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg, starring Ramon Novarro, Norma Shearer and Jean Hersholt—then finally landed at Paramount Pictures where he remained for the next twelve years.
To the untrained eye, half of what the Mule says is gibberish (and the other half is nonsense), but to those with a discerning eye, The Mouth O' The Mule is nothing less than the finest performance blog around. By trade an actor, musician and, God help him, lawyer, the Mule plays a variety of character roles to explore the fractured world around him and communicate his findings to the rest of us. Like watching a drunken Abe Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address in pink polka dot boxer shorts, the result is by turns amusing, contentious, pedantic, bawdy, reflective, occasionally nauseating, but always thought-provoking.
Every person on this list was once a household name, better known in his or her day than Shia LaBeouf or Katherine Heigl is now. Harry Langdon, for example, briefly rivaled Charlie Chaplin as the most popular film comedian in America; and Constance Talmadge was the star of one of D.W. Griffith's biggest films. And yet if you walked down the street today and talked to a thousand people, unless you chanced to bump into a film historian, not one of these faces is recognizable today.
Something to keep in mind as you sacrifice everything to bed the bitch goddess, Fame ...
Mae Marsh Charley Chase Colleen Moore William Haines Mabel Normand Harry Langdon Constance Talmadge
I'm still on vacation, but that's no reason you should suffer. Some faces from the silent and early sound eras I have somehow failed to parade in front of you:
William S. Hart Alla Nazimova Noble Johnson Pola Negri Rudolf Klein-Rogge Lillian Roth Tom Mix
Until yesterday, June 8th was known nationally as "The Monkey's Birthday," but after yesterday it will forever be known as "Strasmus"—and a happy Strasmus it was.
For those of you unfamiliar with such things, Strasmus was the major league debut of much-ballyhooed Washington Nationals pitcher Stephen Strasburg. For those us who sat in near-empty stadiums watching back-to-back 100+ loss seasons while stumblebums I'm too polite to mention by name made you despair of ever seeing professional baseball in the nation's capital again, Strasmus was the first day of Spring after five years of nuclear winter.
"Anything different would be good," said Phil Connor after reliving three thousand consecutive Groundhog Days. And different it was. Fourteen strikeouts in seven innings, including the last seven batters in a row, no walks, and a 5-2 win. Bang zoom go the fireworks, a curly W is in the books!
That Strasburg not only lived up to the hype but exceeded it is regarded in these parts as nothing short of the Second Coming.
We'll soon be returning to the blessed business of writing about movie history, but we here at the Monkey wanted to take a moment to celebrate the truly important things in life. Amen.
Katie-Bar-The-Door is on vacation this week and thus so is the Monkey.
Although we will be taking in a movie this evening—Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon at the AFI Silver—the otherwise lucrative business of free film blogging is on hold for a few days ...
Going back to comment moderation for a while which may mean a brief delay before your comments show up, but at least we can keep this "Mythical Monkey" guy out of here.
Oh, wait, that's me.
The essay about the best comedy director of 1932-33 promises to be one of those five thousand word jobs so I'm going to start publishing it in pieces, the same way I did when I wrote about City Lights. I'm not telling you who I'm choosing (perhaps you can guess), but I think he's worth taking a bit of time talking about.
In the meantime, it's 1933 here in Monkeyland and Clara Bow is about to flee Hollywood permanently, moving with her husband Rex Bell to a ranch in Nevada where she spent most of the rest of her life. So how about we take time out for a few last photos before she drives off into the sunset.
The nominees for best director of 1932-33, Take Two.
As with the acting nominees, some of the nominees for best director could have gone into either the comedy/musical category or the drama category; I chose one or the other based on a complex and proprietary calculus known as "doing whatever I felt like."
Best Director (Comedy/Musical) Lloyd Bacon (42nd Street and Footlight Parade) (on left, with Jane Russell) George Cukor (Dinner At Eight and Little Women) (here with the cast of Little Women) Victor Fleming (Red Dust and Bombshell) (here with Clara Bow) Ernst Lubitsch (Trouble In Paradise and Design For Living) Leo McCarey (Duck Soup) Jean Renoir (Boudu Saved From Drowning) Jean Vigo (Zero For Conduct) Best Director (Drama) Frank Capra (The Bitter Tea Of General Yen and Lady For A Day) Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack (King Kong) (with Marguerite Harrison) Carl Theodor Dreyer (Vampyr) Fritz Lang (The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse) Mervyn LeRoy (I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang and Gold Diggers Of 1933) (on right) Rouben Mamoulian (Love Me Tonight and Queen Christina) (center, on set of Queen Christina) James Whale (The Old Dark House and The Invisible Man) (with Paul Robeson)
Well, I say it's the TCM schedule for June—it's the schedule of those movies I've mentioned in my blog that are appearing on TCM in June. If you want to get persnickety.
Of particular interest are A Nous La Liberte on the 6th, Duck Soup on the 13th and The Bitter Tea Of General Yen on the 23rd. I'm telling you, you absolutely don't want to miss those.
Remember: the TCM day runs from 6 a.m. EDT until 6 a.m. the following day.
3 Thursday 12:45 AM Arrowsmith (1931) A crusading doctor fights his way through tragedy to find his true calling. Cast: Ronald Colman, Helen Hayes, Myrna Loy. Dir: John Ford. BW-99 mins
6 Sunday 2:15 AM A Nous La Liberte (1931) An escaped convict creates a business empire that becomes a new prison for him. Cast: Raymond Cordy, Henri Marchand, Rolla France. Dir: Rene Clair. BW-83 mins
9 Wednesday 9:00 AM Our Blushing Brides (1930) Three roommates try to land rich husbands. Cast: Joan Crawford, Anita Page, Robert Montgomery. Dir: Harry Beaumont. BW-101 mins
12 Saturday 9:00 AM Monkey Business (1931) Four stowaways get mixed up with gangsters while running riot on an ocean liner. Cast: The Marx Brothers, Thelma Todd, Rockliffe Fellowes. Dir: Norman Z. McLeod. BW-78 mins
13 Sunday 8:00 PM Duck Soup (1933) When he's named dictator of Freedonia, a con artist declares war on the neighboring kingdom. Cast: The Marx Brothers, Louis Calhern, Margaret Dumont. Dir: Leo McCarey. BW-69 mins
20 Sunday 12:30 AM Battleship Potemkin, The (1925) In this silent classic, a Russian mutiny triggers revolutionary sentiments around the nation. Cast: Alexander Antonov, Grigori Alexandrov, Vladimir Barsky. Dir: Sergei Eisenstein. BW-69 mins
23 Wednesday 12:30 PM Bitter Tea of General Yen, The (1932) An American missionary falls in love with a Chinese warlord. Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Nils Asther, Walter Connolly. Dir: Frank Capra. BW-87 mins
As he frequently does, Erik Beck (of the Boston Becks) got me to thinking, this time about the director nom- inations for 1932-33. There were some names that got left off the list that in nearly any other year would have made it easily—Mervyn LeRoy, James Whale, Frank Capra, and others. And you know how I hate to leave anybody out.
Well, there is precedent from the Academy itself for a solution. At the very first Oscars, there were two prizes for best director—one for best director of a drama, one for best director of a comedy. How about, on a one time only basis, two best director trophies? We could throw Whale (The Invisible Man and The Old Dark House), LeRoy (I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang and Gold Diggers Of 1933), Capra (The Bitter Tea Of General Yen) and one other name into the drama category with Cooper and Schoedsack (King Kong); and Cukor, Lubitsch, McCarey, Renoir and one other name into the comedy category.
Or are there just too goshdarn many Katie Awards already? You're not going to hurt my feelings.
Any thoughts on the other potential nominees? If you need some suggestions, how about:
Lloyd Bacon (42nd Street and Footlight Parade) (musical/comedy)
* Carl Theodor Dreyer (Vampyr) (drama)
Victor Fleming (Red Dust and Bombshell) (drama or comedy)
Alexander Korda (The Private Life Of Henry VIII) (drama) (sort of)
* Fritz Lang (The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse) (drama)
Rouben Mamoulian (Love Me Tonight and Queen Christina) (comedy or drama)
Max Ophüls (Liebelei) (drama)
Jean Vigo (Zero For Conduct) (comedy)
... or anybody else who had a picture released between August 1, 1932 and December 31, 1933. [*—previous winner]
Think about it for a couple of days, leave a comment, speak your mind. I wasn't planning to post my essay on the best director of 1932-33 until the end of the week anyway.
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?
By now you've no doubt forgotten my list of nominees for best director of 1932-33 in the category of comedy or musical—an inevitable consequence of my leisurely working methods—and a pity that is, for a more distinguished list of directors you'll not find anywhere: Jean Renoir, Leo McCarey, George Cukor, Victor Fleming, Jean Vigo, Lloyd Bacon, any one of whom in another year would be a worthy winner. But for me, there was always just one choice, the one director who of all those on the list was at the top of his game in 1932-33, a man with a comedic touch so light, they named it after him.
Born in Berlin in 1892, Lubitsch quit his father's successful tailoring business at the age of nineteen to join Max Reinhardt's theater company where he specialized in comedic roles. A year later, he began appearing in films and was soon writing and directing comedy shorts starring himself. He scored international hits in 1918 with a pair of Pola Negri vehicles, Eyes of the Mummy and Carmen, but really established himself in 1919 with The Oyster Princess, a farce about the excesses of the wealthy, punctuated by a manic foxtrot led by Curt Bois who later played the pickpocket in Casablanca.
In 1923 Hollywood's biggest star, Mary Pickford, invited Lubitsch to direct her next picture, Rosita. The resulting story of a peasant girl who becomes the object of a king's romantic obsession wasn't much to Pickford's liking, but the experience was still a positive one for the director. Lubitsch fell in love with America and but for two brief trips (including his honeymoon), he never returned to his native Europe. Instead, he relocated to Hollywood permanently and signed a lucrative contract with Warner Brothers that featured an unprecedented amount of control over his projects. Among the half-dozen pictures he made for Warners were two classics, The Marriage Circle and Lady Windermere's Fan. The latter, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's comedy about a woman with a secret past, is one of five Lubitsch films preserved in the Library of Congress's National Film Registry.
Despite their artistic and critical success, however, Lubitsch's silent films failed to find the wide audience the Warner brothers had hoped for, and coupled with the films' high costs, Lubitsch consistently lost money for the studio. "Lubitsch had a following," said film editor Rudi Fehr, "but they weren't coal-miners, they weren't steelworkers." In a cable to his brother Harry, studio head Jack Warner stated bluntly, "Small directors [are] making twice [the] money he [is] making," to which Harry replied, "His pictures are over peoples' heads here."
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