Showing posts with label Camille. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Camille. Show all posts

Best Director, 1937

Awards presented March 10, 1938

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
McCarey almost deserved it. The Awful Truth has some side-splitting moments, but then it falls apart a little at the end, with some prolonged nonsense about adjoining bedrooms and figures in a cuckoo clock. But that's McCarey, who was the first to team Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, gave us the best of the Marx Brothers movies in Duck Soup, and made the comedy classic Ruggles of Red Gap. Later, however, he let his devout Roman Catholicism take over for the sugary sentimentality of Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's and his extreme anticommunism resulted in the incoherent My Son John; both make his last film, Satan Never Sleeps, nearly unwatchable.  

... when it should have gone to ... 
George Cukor, Greta Garbo, and Robert Taylor on the set of Camille 
If there is one film of Garbo's that gets singled out as her greatest, it's Camille. And let's give a lot of credit to Cukor for that. Not for nothing was he known as a "woman's director." He oversaw some of Katharine Hepburn's greatest performances, including her screen debut in A Bill of Divorcement, as well as prepared and coached Vivien Leigh after he was fired as director of Gone With the Wind, helped get Ingrid Bergman her first Oscar for Gaslight, made Judy Holliday a star (and an Oscar-winner) for Born Yesterday, and nursed Judy Garland through her last great screen performance in A Star Is Born. But it's worth noting that he also got Oscar-winning performances out of James Stewart, Ronald Colman, and Rex Harrison, and showed a sure hand at directing Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy, among others. Garbo should have won for Camille, and Cukor at the very least should have been nominated. He had to wait almost thirty years for his Oscar, for My Fair Lady, which made him, at sixty-five, the oldest person up to that time to win for directing. (The current record-holder is Clint Eastwood, who was seventy-four when he won for Million Dollar Baby.) 
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Best Actress, 1937

Awards presented March 10, 1938

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
And the Oscar went to ... 
The role of O-lan in the screen adaptation of Pearl S. Buck's novel was Oscar bait, given that it's two hours and eighteen minutes of suffering and struggling. It made Rainer the first person to win two consecutive Oscars for acting and, until Jodie Foster's wins for The Accused and The Silence of the Lambs, the only person to win two Oscars while still under the age of thirty. Unfortunately, Rainer's triumph was short-lived. MGM had trouble finding suitable roles for her, and when her marriage to playwright-screenwriter Clifford Odets hit the skids, she retired from films except for a few scattered performances over the years.    

... when it should have gone to ... 
It is, quite simply, one of the movies' definitive performances. Though you can't always see what Garbo's Marguerite Gautier sees in Armand Duval, as played by the pretty, wooden Robert Taylor, you're always convinced that she's a woman in love. And the death scene is shattering: somehow Garbo lets you see the exact moment when life leaves Marguerite. It's not only shocking that Garbo should have lost to the rather ordinary performance of Rainer (we could have put up with her losing to another definitive performance: Barbara Stanwyck's Stella Dallas) but also that the film received no other nominations, despite skilled direction by George Cukor and luminous camerawork by William Daniels. The only explanation is that MGM was determined to promote the far more expensive The Good Earth, which was seen as a memorial to its producer, Irving Thalberg, who had died in 1936 before its completion. 


Director George Cukor (standing, left) films Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor in Camille

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