The Academy was still accepting write-ins and indicating who placed second and third. Paul Muni was not an official nominee, but he placed second in the voting. Charles Laughton came in third.
The nominees were ...
- Clark Gable in Mutiny on the Bounty
- Charles Laughton in Mutiny on the Bounty
- Victor McLaglen in The Informer
- Paul Muni in Black Fury
- Franchot Tone in Mutiny on the Bounty
... when they should have been ...
- W.C. Fields in David Copperfield
- Charles Laughton in Ruggles of Red Gap
- Fred MacMurray in Alice Adams
- Victor McLaglen in The Informer
- Roland Young in David Copperfield
And the Oscar went to ...
McLaglen had made films in Britain before coming to the United States in 1924. He spent his long career playing big lugs, most memorably in Gunga Din (1939) and numerous films directed, like The Informer, by John Ford. A story has it that Ford coaxed the Oscar-winning performance out of McLaglen by keeping the actor liquored up, disoriented, and thoroughly intimidated throughout the shooting. But it's the kind of showy part in which even a moderately competent actor, and McLaglen was considerably more than that, could make an impression. He was nominated again, as supporting actor, for Ford's The Quiet Man (1952).
... when it should have gone to ...
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| Frank Lawton as David Copperfield, W.C. Fields as Mr. Micawber, and Roland Young as Uriah Heep
See now, this is what they needed a supporting actor Oscar category for. Young and Fields were supporting players in David Copperfield, but then again the entire cast was. Even Frank Lawton had to share the title role with Freddie Bartholomew. And what a cast: Edna May Oliver, Basil Rathbone, Una O'Connor, Lionel Barrymore, Elsa Lanchester, Lewis Stone, Maureen O'Sullivan, and so on, all perfectly suited to their Dickensian equivalents. It was probably Fields's finest performance, blending his familiar character with Dickens's, so that we can no longer read the novel without hearing his drawling tones. But it's Young's Heep ("Heep! Of infamy!" as Fields proclaims at the climax) that really stands out. He's best known today, perhaps, as the henpecked, ghost-bothered Topper in the series of films that started in 1937, and as lecherous Uncle Willie in The Philadelphia Story (1940), but David Copperfield gave him a chance to shine as the 'umble, vicious Uriah. He had been a much-admired stage actor, playing Ibsen and Chekhov, in New York, to which he moved from London in 1912 when he was in his mid-20s. He made a few silent films, most notably Sherlock Holmes in 1922, playing Watson to John Barrymore's Holmes, but didn't really come into his own as a film character actor until the arrival of sound.
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