Showing posts with label 1934. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1934. Show all posts

Honorary Award, 1934

Awards presented February 27, 1935  
Shirley Temple with 1934 best actress winner Claudette Colbert

Temple's honorary award citation read, "in grateful recognition of her outstanding contribution to screen entertainment during the year 1934." Five years old, younger than the Awards themselves, she remains the youngest person to receive an Academy Award. She was given a miniature Oscar, the start of a tradition of rewarding "outstanding juvenile performance" that continued, off and on, until the 1960 awards ceremony, after which child performers began to be considered alongside adults in the leading or supporting performance categories.  
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Best Assistant Director, 1934

Awards presented February 27, 1935  

The nominees were ...
And the Oscar went to ... 
Katherine DeMille (left) with Wallace Beery and extras in Viva Villa! 
Waters (not the John Waters of current fame) seems to have had his hands full as AD on this hokey but enjoyable picture ostensibly about the Mexican revolutionary, played by Wallace Beery. Howard Hawks, who was hired to direct, might have made a better movie of it, but he had small patience with the film's control-freak producer, David O. Selznick, and was replaced by the more docile Jack Conway. Lee Tracy was cast as an American journalist instrumental in creating the legend of Pancho Villa, but he was fired after an incident in which, while on location, he allegedly urinated on some Mexican cadets from a hotel balcony, and was replaced by Stuart Erwin. Waters had directed some films in the 1920s, but moved into the assistant director or second unit director role after 1929.  
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Best Short Film, 1934

Awards presented February 27, 1935  

The nominees were ... 
(Cartoon) 
(Comedy) 
(Novelty) 
And the Oscar went to ...  
(Cartoon) 



 (Comedy) 


Kenneth Macgowan
Macgowan had been a drama critic and one of the producers at the Provincetown Playhouse, where he formed a close friendship with Eugene O'Neill. He came to Hollywood in 1928 as a story editor and moved into producing in 1932. Among his films are the 1933 Little Women with Katharine Hepburn, Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) with Henry Fonda, and Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944). In 1947 he left Hollywood for the University of California at Berkeley, where he founded and became the chairman of the Department of Theater Arts. La Cucaracha was one of the first -- if not the first, for there's a dispute about this -- live action films the three-strip Technicolor. He also produced the first full-length three-strip Technicolor feature, Becky Sharp (1935).
(Novelty) 
City of Wax, Stacy Woodard and Horace Woodard, producers.   
The Woodard brothers, Stacy and Howard, produced a series of nature films under the rubric "Struggle to Live." This one, about the life cycle of a bee, is hard to locate today.  
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Best Film Editing, 1934

Awards presented February 27, 1935

Film editing remains a mystery to perhaps most moviegoers, which is as it should be: You should be watching what happens, not how it's put together. So especially for watchers of the televised Oscars, it can be one of those awards, like sound or short films, during which you fix another drink. But given how essential good editing is to a film, it's surprising it took the Academy so long to give out an award for it.  

The nominees were ... 

And the Oscar went to ... 
The cast of Eskimo with John Barrymore on the set of Reunion in Vienna
Nervig's win was for what might be called a "docudrama." Like White Shadows in the South Seas, it was directed by W.S. Van Dyke and shot by Clyde De Vinna, and blended documentary footage shot in Alaska with staged narrative footage. The screenplay was by John Lee Mahin from a book by Peter Freuchen about the problems caused by the confrontation of the indigenous peoples with white traders. Nervig's task was to blend the documentary sequences of animal hunts and daily life of the Inuit with the staged stuff. In a way, the editing Oscar started off much the way the cinematography Oscar did: favoring the exotic over the familiar. An extraordinarily expensive film for its day, Eskimo was a box-office failure. Nervig, who spent his career at MGM, would win another Oscar for another film that blended location footage with staged action, King Solomon's Mines (1950). He was also nominated for A Tale of Two Cities (1935).
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Best Music, 1934

Awards presented February 27, 1935

 Music was an inevitable category for the Oscars, particularly in the mid-1930s, when the golden era of popular song was in full sway: Kern, Berlin, Gershwin, Porter, Rodgers, Arlen, Carmichael and others were reaching their peak creativity. At the same time, composers and musicians were fleeing from Nazism, Stalinism, and the growing threat of war in Europe, bringing with them new ideas and new sounds for film scores. There would be controversies and various reshapings and renamings of music award categories as the years passed, the film musical flourished and faded, and popular music discovered new audiences. 

The nominees were ... 
(Scoring) 

(Song) 
... when they should have been ... 
(Song) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Scoring) 
One Night of Love, Columbia Studio Music Department, Louis Silvers, head of department (Thematic Music by Victor Schertzinger and Gus Kahn). 
Although the Oscar went to Silvers as head of the music department, the nomination at least cites the real composers, Schertzinger and Kahn. 

(Song) 
"The Continental," from The Gay Divorcee, Music by Con Conrad; Lyrics by Herb Magidson. 

... when it should have gone to ... 
(Scoring) 
The Gay Divorcee, RKO Radio Studio Music Department, Max Steiner, head of department.
Max Steiner


 It's hard to know how much Steiner had to do with the actual arrangement of the Cole Porter song Fred and Ginger dance to here, if anything. His nomination came about because for the first few years of the music Oscars, the award went to the head of the studio music department, and not to the composer. But he is credited with the score for the parts of the film that don't feature singing and dancing. And he was one of the most prolific and skilled composers of film scores in Hollywood history. Born in Vienna to a musical family -- his godfather was Richard Strauss -- he studied with Johannes Brahms. But he fell in love with musical theater and in 1906, when he was only eighteen, he went to London where he conducted the orchestras of various theaters. He was in London when World War I broke out, which made him an enemy alien, but he made his way to the then-neutral United States, and became a Broadway conductor. Scouted by RKO at the beginning of the sound era, he came to Hollywood in 1929. His score for King Kong caught everyone's attention, and he eventually won three Oscars and twenty-one nominations.  

 (Song) 
"Let's Fall in Love," from Let's Fall in Love, Music by Harold Arlen; Lyrics by Ted Koehler. 
Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler 


Arlen, who is heard singing his own song on the recording above (Ann Sothern sang it in the film), would win a real Oscar for "Over the Rainbow," of course, and would rack up eight more nominations, including one for another collaboration with Koehler on "Now We Know" for Up in Arms (1944). The best-known Arlen-Koehler collaboration, however, is on "Stormy Weather," which was written for Ethel Waters to sing at the Cotton Club in 1933. 

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Best Sound, 1934

Awards presented February 27, 1935

The nominees were ... 
And the Oscar went to ... 
One Night of Love, Columbia Studio Sound Department, John Livadary, Sound Director.

John Livadary
Livadary, who studied mechanical engineering at MIT,  began working in Hollywood in 1929. In addition to three Oscars and fourteen nominations, he also received four of the Academy's scientific and technical awards for innovations in sound.

One Night of Love was designed by Columbia to make a movie star of Grace Moore, a Metropolitan Opera soprano. Before making her debut at the Met as Mimi in La Bohème in 1928, she had appeared on Broadway in musical comedies with songs by Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin. Blond, slim, and beautiful, which opera singers tend not to be, Moore was thought of as a rival to Jeanette MacDonald, who had just moved from Paramount to MGM. In fact, Moore had made three MGM pictures in 1930 and 1932, but was lured to Columbia with the promise of a big PR campaign. Her subsequent films were not successful in establishing Moore's stardom, however, and she returned to the operatic stage. She died in a plane crash in 1948, and her life story became an MGM musical, So This Is Love, in 1953, starring Kathryn Grayson, who had replaced Jeanette MacDonald as the movies' reigning soprano. 
Grace Moore and Tullio Carminati in One Night of Love
Moore in One Night of Love
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Best Art Direction, 1934

Awards presented February 27, 1935

The nominees were ... 
.. when they should have been ... 
And the Oscar went to ... 
Cedric Gibbons and Fredric Hope, The Merry Widow. It edged out The Gay Divorcee by only two votes, according to Academy records, which would earlier have constituted a tie. (And maybe signified that the Academy, under the Production Code, was going to approve more of widows than of divorcees.) Gibbons put another Oscar on his mantelpiece, but as usual the MGM lion's share of work was probably done by the second name on the nomination, Hope, who had a brief career as an art director at MGM, starting in 1926 and ending with his death at the age of 37 in 1937. This was the last of the teamings of Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald under the direction of Ernst Lubitsch. They went their separate ways, MacDonald into the more familiar teaming with Nelson Eddy -- not a step upward.  

... when it should have gone to ... 
Hans Dreier
Dreier would rack up twenty-three nominations and win three Oscars, though they came late in his career, which was spent mostly at Paramount. Like Cedric Gibbons, he was head of a studio art department, and hence his work was primarily supervisory. On the other hand, he was less authoritarian than Gibbons, and liked to give free rein to the designers who worked for him. He chose to work closely with particular directors, including Ernst Lubitsch and Josef von Sternberg, who had strong ideas about the look of their films. Sternberg was the clear guiding hand on The Scarlet Empress, a film about Catherine the Great that seems to take place in an imperial Russia that exists only in fevered dreams. It's a remarkably silly film with the emphasis on remarkable. Dreier was greatly abetted in creating this phantasmagoria by the costume designs of Travis Banton, the gargoyles and other figures sculpted by Peter Ballbusch, and the paintings of Richard Kollorsz. 






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Best Cinematography, 1934

Awards presented February 27, 1935

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
And the Oscar went to ... 
Milner's win came on his second nomination, and he would be nominated again seven times. He had been a pioneering cameraman, first shooting newsreel footage, including the occupation of the Mexican seaport of Veracruz during the Tampico Affair in 1914. He moved to California in 1916, where he worked on the Westerns of William S. Hart and went to work for Paramount in 1925. He often shot the films of Cecil B. DeMille, including Cleopatra, which was a silly mess of DeMille's usual sin, sex, and sadism. But if the 1963 version with Elizabeth Taylor had been half as campy as the 1934 version, it might have made money. 

... when it should have gone to ... 
One of the most popular films of the year, The Thin Man was directed by W.S. Van Dyke, who was known as "One-Take Woody" for his no-nonsense get-it-done filmmaking. In fact, he was so speedy that he made four films that were eligible for the 1934 Oscar -- the others were Laughing Boy, Manhattan Melodrama, and Hide-Out. While working on Manhattan Melodrama, he had noticed the rapport between Myrna Loy and William Powell, and suggested them for the parts of Nora and Nick in The Thin Man. Howe had also been the director of photography on Manhattan Melodrama, so he was well aware of how the director worked. That they never worked together again could be only accidental, but Howe is universally recognized for his artistry and Van Dyke, well ... isn't, so there may have been an intentional parting of the ways. 
Howe, left, waits as director W.S. Van Dyke gives instructions to Myrna Loy and William Powell for a scene in The Thin Man
The Thin Man is so often thought of as a light-hearted comedy-mystery, with engaging banter between Nick and Nora Charles, and setups like the one in which Nick shoots the ornaments off of the Christmas tree with his new gun, as a mink-clad Nora watches, that it's worth remembering that it has moments of menace.

Howe brilliantly manages to give the film's serious moments a film noir look -- a decade before film noir became popular:



And at times he creates a fusion between the two, as in this shot of Myrna Loy:

Though not nominated for The Thin Man, Howe would eventually win for The Rose Tattoo (1956) and Hud (1964), and be nominated for eight more films, both black-and-white and color. 
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Best Writing, 1934

Awards presented February 27, 1935
The nominees were ... 
(Adaptation) 
(Adaptation) 
Robert Riskin
When Columbia bought the rights to several plays he had written for Broadway, Riskin came to Hollywood where he teamed with Frank Capra for the first time on 1931's The Miracle Woman. Riskin received five nominations for films made by Capra:  Lady for a Day, It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Can't Take It With You, and Here Comes the Groom. The last-named, however, was based on a previously unfilmed story by Riskin, who had split with Capra a decade earlier, accusing the director of taking credit for Riskin's work. After the split, Riskin did only a few more screenplays, including The Strange Love of Martha Ivers and Mister 880. IHON was his only Oscar-winner, but it's also probably his best work.   

(Original Story) 
Mauri was Maurice, and Hide-Out is his only story to be deemed Oscar-worthy, a forgettable movie about an injured gangster (Robert Montgomery) who hides out on a farm and falls in love with the farmer's daughter (Maureen O'Sullivan). Grashin got his start writing comedy shorts and moved into B-pictures. His last filmed story was for Elvis Presley's The Trouble With Girls (1969).  

... when it should have gone to ... 
(Original Story) 
Frank Craven
Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy and Charley Chase in Sons of the Desert
Craven was primarily an actor, best-known for playing the Stage Manager in the original Broadway production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town (1938), a role he repeated in the 1940 film version, for which he also wrote the screenplay. His story for Sons of the Desert is hardly "original," based as it is on an old formula: Two henpecked husbands want to get away from their wives for a good time with the boys -- in this case the convention of the Shriners-like organization named in the title. (As usual with Laurel and Hardy, who were the Bert and Ernie of their day, it's easy to spot a gay subtext.) It's hard to know the extent of Craven's contribution to the film -- the screenplay based on his story was written by Byron Morgan, and Laurel, Hardy, and director William Seiter, among others, contributed to it. But Sons of the Desert is one of the best Laurel and Hardy films, chosen for the National Film Registry in 1912, and Hide-Out is mostly forgotten.   
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Best Director, 1934

Awards presented February 27, 1935
The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
Frank came up and got it
Capra with Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable
I have no problem with this choice. I love Hawks and Lubitsch more, of course, and Capra's sentimental populism goes crosswise with me. (Honestly, am I the only one who puts It's a Wonderful Life alongside Forrest Gump at the top of his list of Movies I Hope I Never Have to Watch Again?) To my mind, everything Capra did after It Happened One Night is a long slide downhill into intellectual, political, and moral chaos. But except for the busload of passengers singing "The Man on the Flying Trapeze," there is little in IHON that foreshadows Capra's degeneration into mush-headedness. I'd like to think that it's because he had wonderful actors like Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable to work with, but Gary Cooper, James Stewart, Barbara Stanwyck, and Jean Arthur are at least as good -- if not better. Some may think it's screenwriter Robert Riskin's fault, but screenwriter Philip Dunne put it more convincingly: "Frank provided the schmaltz and Bob provided the acid." And it was Capra who finally judged the proportion of schmaltz to acid. In later life, Capra was even reluctant to admit that Riskin had anything to do with the success of his films. Riskin was a good New Deal liberal, after all, and Capra headed off into the kind of libertarianism that cozies up with the right wing. Anyway, Riskin had nothing to do with the somewhat hysterical Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and the sticky fantasy of It's a Wonderful Life. Still, let's give Capra the nod for his one great film and its huge influence on the golden age of romantic comedy.    
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Best Actress, 1934

Awards presented February 27, 1935


The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
As long as you don't remember that this is a competition, Colbert's win, like Gable's, is completely satisfying. Only a year before, Colbert had been taunting the censors by bathing nude in a tub filled with asses' milk as Poppaea in The Sign of the Cross, and even in the same year as It Happened One Night she was baring as much skin as the new Production Code would allow in Cleopatra. Yet here she is doing nothing more shocking than displaying a little leg while hitchhiking and sharing a motel room with Gable while outfitted in his pajamas, with a blanket hung between their twin beds. The point is, Colbert could be convincingly sexy while restrained by a censor who had the moral sense of an especially prudish and pious twelve-year-old girl. That's acting. In fact, it's worth noting the resemblance between Colbert and the actress who should have been one of her competitors for the Oscar, Myrna Loy. Loy had played vamps, slave girls, chorus girls, and a variety of exotic types with names like Azuri and Yasmani and Nubi in late silents and early talkies, and only a year or so earlier had been the flirtatious Countess Valentine, trying to lure Maurice Chevalier away from Jeanette MacDonald in Love Me Tonight. Yet in her breakthrough role as Nora Charles in The Thin Man, she's a happily married woman whose sexiness is communicated by her wit and intelligence (with the help of a few mildly revealing evening gowns). Both Colbert and Loy would have careers extending well into the late 1940s and beyond because they sensed the way to maintain their appeal was to become dream wives. Both, for example, played women with husbands off fighting in World War II, in Since You Went Away (1944) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). And in both movies, they were sexier than the actresses playing their grown daughters, Jennifer Jones and Teresa Wright. 

... when it should have gone to ... 
Leslie Howard and Bette Davis in Of Human Bondage
"After ya kissed me, I used to wipe my mouth! Wipe my mouth!" 


The Oscar almost did go to Davis. If anyone had ever been a shoo-in for a best actress nomination it was Davis, who had been working in Hollywood for three years, getting the occasional good notice but making little headway toward stardom until Warner Bros., with which she had signed a contract in 1932, loaned her out to RKO for Of Human Bondage. Her no-holds-barred performance produced raves. But when the Oscar nominations were announced, Davis was not among them. It's a measure of how significant the Academy Awards had become in just seven years that there was an immediate outcry from the Hollywood press. A campaign was started to add Davis's name to the nominees, and even actual nominee Norma Shearer joined in. And the Academy backed down: It would allow write-in votes. Moreover, there would be a rule change for next year's awards: Instead of having a committee make the nominations, they would be voted on by the entire membership, with the results to be tabulated by the accounting firm then called Price Waterhouse. Even with write-ins, Davis lost. The Academy had begun announcing second- and third-place finishers with the 1932-33 awards (a practice it would discontinue at the 1936 awards), and Davis came in third. (Norma Shearer was second, and opera singer Grace Moore, who was being touted by Columbia as a new star, placed out of the money.) But the winner, Claudette Colbert, had been so sure that Davis was going to win that she had skipped the ceremony and was about to get on a train for New York when a messenger arrived with the news. Though not dressed for the occasion, she hurried to the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles to accept.  
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Best Actor, 1934

Awards presented February 27, 1935
The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
Clark Gable in It Happened One Night.
Nothing wrong with this, really. Gable gives a great comic-romantic performance in a role for which he wasn't the first choice -- Robert Montgomery was -- and for which it's said that MGM loaned him out as a punishment for refusing a role they wanted him to play. In 1934 he was just one leading man among many in Hollywood, having begun his screen career as an extra and in small roles in 1923. He first attracted real notice as the villain in A Free Soul (1931), with Lionel Barrymore, who had seen him on stage and arranged for him to be cast in the role. It soon became clear that Gable was a good screen partner for Joan Crawford and Jean Harlow, both of them tough-girl types who needed a strong masculine presence opposite them. The Oscar helped him earn the publicists' title "King of Hollywood." But since I think he should have won the award a year earlier, I have another choice for the 1934 Oscar. 

... when it should have gone to ... 
Carole Lombard and John Barrymore in Twentieth Century 
Carole Lombard and John Barrymore in Twentieth Century
The other great screwball comedy of 1934 got no notice from the Academy -- not for Barrymore, not for Lombard, not for director Howard Hawks, not for the screenplay by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, adapting their own play with the help of Gene Fowler and Preston Sturges. Go figure. But the Library of Congress added the movie to the National Film Registry in 2011, noting among other things that it was the "last great film role" for Barrymore. They might have said, "the greatest." 
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Best Picture, 1934

Awards presented February 27, 1935

So many things working so right: the teaming of Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, the iconic moments (the hitchhiking scene, the walls of Jericho), and the launch of the golden age of romantic/screwball comedy. Its success inspired My Man Godfrey, The Awful Truth, Nothing Sacred, Easy Living, Bringing Up Baby, and Libeled Lady, among others. It Happened One Night was the first film to capture all five of the "top" Oscars: picture, actor, actress, director Frank Capra, and writer Robert Riskin. And for once, the Academy didn't shy away from honoring a "mere" comedy. It's also the first best picture winner that still shows up on people's lists of favorite films, a signal of the maturing of the sound film. 
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