My Own Private Oscars: 1931-32

Showing posts with label 1931-32. Show all posts

Honorary Award, 1931-32

Awards presented November 18, 1932
(Films released from August 1, 1931 through July 31, 1932 were eligible.)

Walt Disney, for the creation of Mickey Mouse

Awards presented November 18, 1932
(Films released from August 1, 1931 through July 31, 1932 were eligible.)

Almost annually now, someone calls for the abolition of the short film category, though it's usually in the context of thinking up ways to shorten the televised awards ceremony. That didn't matter so much when, in its fifth Awards year, the Academy decided to honor short films -- or "short subjects" as they were called -- before it had even got around to honoring music, or film editing, or costume design, or makeup. Short films today are often the work of students aiming for their first feature job and short animated films are sometimes hors d'oeuvres from the spare time of animators at Pixar or Dreamworks, designed to whet our appetites for the next full-length feature. It's hard for us today, when the only other things besides the feature that you're likely to see on the screen are commercials and trailers, how central short films once were to the movie-going experience. A few of us remember the buzz of enthusiasm when a Donald Duck or Bugs Bunny cartoon began to appear on the screen -- or the mutters of disappointment when the short turned out to be an "as the sun sets slowly, we take our leave of" travelogue.

The nominees were ...
(Cartoon)

Flowers and Trees, Walt Disney, producer
It's Got Me Again, Leon Schlesinger, producer
Mickey's Orphans, Walt Disney, producer

(Comedy)

The Loud Mouth, Mack Sennett, producer
The Music Box, Hal Roach, producer
Scratch-As-Catch-Can, RKO Radio

(Novelty)

Screen Souvenirs, Paramount Publix
Swing High, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Wrestling Swordfish, Mack Sennett, producer

And the Oscar went to ...

(Cartoon)

Flowers and Trees, Walt Disney, producer.

Lillian Disney holds her husband's first Oscar

(Comedy)

The Music Box, Hal Roach, producer.

Oliver Hardy, Hal Roach, and Stan Laurel

(Novelty)

Wrestling Swordfish, Mack Sennett, producer.

Mack Sennett

The names of the winners were no secret in those days, so when Sennett learned that his short had lost by only three votes to Swing High, he protested: The Academy's rules indicated that a three-vote margin was a tie. So the Academy put it to a second vote, and Sennett's short, the second in a series called "Cannibals of the Deep," was the winner. Prints of it, however, seem to be unlocatable today.

Best Sound, 1931-32

Awards presented November 18, 1932
(Films released from August 1, 1931 through July 31, 1932 were eligible.)

As in the previous year, no films or department heads were cited in the nominations or the award.

The nominees were ...

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studio Sound Department

Paramount Publix Studio Sound Department

RKO Radio Studio Sound Department

Warner Bros.-First National Studio Sound Department

And the Oscar went to ...

Paramount Publix Studio Sound Department.

Best Art Direction, 1931-32

Awards presented November 18, 1932
(Films released from August 1, 1931 through July 31, 1932 were eligible.)

The nominees were ...

... when they should have been ...

And the Oscar went to ...

Gordon Wiles, Transatlantic. Both Wiles and his film are little-known today. An art director at Fox, Wiles also directed a few B-movies on the order of Charlie Chan's Secret in the 1930s. Transatlantic is Grand Hotel at sea, as assorted characters and their stories intertwine. The sets included some lavish luxury suites and a large engine room where a climactic shootout takes place.

... when it should have gone to ...

Charles D. Hall, Frankenstein:

Hall received two Oscar nominations, for Merrily We Live (1938) and Captain Fury (1939), both of which were for work done after he had left the place where he did his most memorable work, Universal Pictures, creating the atmosphere of the studio's great horror films: Dracula (1931), Frankenstein, The Invisible Man (1933), and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). He also worked on such major films as All Quiet on the Western Front, Imitation of Life (1934), Magnificent Obsession (1935), and Frankenstein director James Whale's 1936 Show Boat.

Best Cinematography, 1931-32

Awards presented November 18, 1932
(Films released from August 1, 1931 through July 31, 1932 were eligible.)

The nominees were ...

... when they should have been ...

Arthur Edeson, Frankenstein
Lee Garmes, Shanghai Express
Lee Garmes and L.W. O'Connell, Scarface

And the Oscar went to ...

Lee Garmes, Shanghai Express:

Lee Garmes

Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express

Anna May Wong in Shanghai Express

"It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily." It took at least three, in fact: Jules Furthman to write that line, Josef von Sternberg to cast his protégée Marlene Dietrich in the role, and Lee Garmes to give us such lasting and evocative images. It was Garmes's only Oscar; he had been nominated for Morocco the previous year, and he would get two more nominations, for Since You Went Away (1944) and The Big Fisherman (1960). Shanghai Express is a wonderfully hokey melodrama of the kind that's usually called dated, but it probably never got taken seriously at any time. A more appealing leading man than the rather pasty-looking Clive Brook might have given the movie a real jolt.

Best Writing, 1931-32

Awards presented November 18, 1932
(Films released from August 1, 1931 through July 31, 1932 were eligible.)

The nominees were ...
(Adaptation)

Edwin Burke, Bad Girl
Percy Heath and Samuel Hoffenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Sidney Howard, Arrowsmith

(Original Story)

Lucien Hubbard, The Star Witness
Grover Jones and William Slavens McNutt, Lady and Gent
Frances Marion, The Champ
Adela Rogers St. Johns and Jane Murfin, What Price Hollywood?

... when they should have been ...

(Adaptation)

Ben Hecht, Scarface
Ernest Vajda and Samson Raphaelson, The Smiling Lieutenant
Robert Lord and Byron Morgan, Five Star Final

(Original Story)

René Clair, À Nous la Liberté
Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Henry Myers, Million Dollar Legs
Clarence Aaron "Tod" Robbins, Freaks
Adela Rogers St. Johns and Jane Murfin, What Price Hollywood?

And the Oscar went to ...

(Adaptation)

Edwin Burke, Bad Girl. Burke had been an actor and a playwright, mostly writing skits for vaudeville. In 1928, when his full-length play This Thing Called Love was optioned by the movies (it was filmed in 1929 and remade in 1940), he moved to Hollywood and began contributing dialogue to films. His first memorable work was his Oscar-winning screenplay, an adaptation of a novel by Viña Delmar (the husband-and-wife team of Alvina and Eugene Delmar). Aside from two Shirley Temple films, Bright Eyes and The Littlest Rebel, most of his others are forgotten.

(Original Story)

Frances Marion, The Champ. After her second Oscar, Marion received only one more nomination, for the 1933 film The Prizefighter and the Lady, but the films Dinner at Eight in 1933 and Camille in 1936, for which she also wrote the screenplays, are perhaps better-known. The Champ was unnecessarily remade by director Franco Zeffirelli in 1979, with Jon Voight, Faye Dunaway, and Ricky Schroeder

... when it should have gone to ...

(Adaptation)

Ben Hecht, Scarface. Hecht and Howard Hawks were an almost inevitable pairing. In addition to Scarface, they also collaborated on Twentieth Century (1934), Barbary Coast (1935), and Monkey Business (1952). His Girl Friday (1940) was based on Hecht's play (with Charles MacArthur) The Front Page. Hawks was an uncredited writer on Josef von Sternberg's Underworld (1927), for which Hecht wrote the story, and on Jack Conway's Viva Villa! (1934) which had a screenplay by Hecht. (Hawks began as director of the latter film but bowed out.) And Hawks and Hecht were both uncredited writers on The Thing From Another World (1951), on which Hawks was producer -- and even credited director Christian Nyby, an experienced film editor but a novice director, said that Hawks did a lot of the actual directing.

(Original Story)

René Clair, À Nous la Liberté.

René Clair

Clair both wrote and directed this generally sweet-natured satire on industrialized modern life, though much of the dialogue was improvised. Then, five years later, Charles Chaplin did another satire on industrialized modern life, Modern Times, and Clair's distributor, Tobis, filed suit. Clair protested, gracefully acknowledging Chaplin's genius, but was unable to stop the lawsuit. After World War II, Chaplin's lawyers finally agreed to a settlement, but Clair had no part in it. À Nous la Liberté was the first foreign-made film to receive a nomination -- for Lazare Meerson's art direction. (Ironically, it was nominated in the same year that the cinematographers' branch voted to exclude foreign-made films from consideration.)

Best Director, 1931-32

Awards presented November 18, 1932
(Films released from August 1, 1931 through July 31, 1932 were eligible.)

The nominees were ...

... when they should have been ...

And the Oscar went to ...

Frank Borzage, Bad Girl. Borzage's career peaked with his second Oscar, and his films are not much sought-out today. Of his subsequent movies, the best-known are the 1932 A Farewell to Arms, the interesting teaming of Charles Boyer and Jean Arthur in History Is Made at Night, and two movies with Margaret Sullavan, Three Comrades and The Mortal Storm, the latter with an anti-Nazi message that was unusually powerful coming from a pre-war Hollywood nervous about losing the European market.

... when it should have gone to ...

Howard Hawks

Scarface:

Paul Muni in Scarface

George Raft in Scarface

Boris Karloff in Scarface

Howard Hawks's "moment" came about a decade before his death, when critic Andrew Sarris put him in the pantheon of auteurs in his highly influential book, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968. He was already a favorite in France, of course, among the Cahiers du Cinéma set, and his movies with Humphrey Bogart, To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, were essentials for the 1960s Bogart cult that had its epicenter at the Brattle Theater near Harvard and spread to college campuses across the country. But in a career that spanned forty-four years and about as many films, he was nominated for best director only once, for Sergeant York. It's astonishing to run down the list of Hawks films that received no nominations at all, starting with Scarface and including the dizziest of screwball comedies, Twentieth Century and Bringing Up Baby; the greatest newspaper movie (or at least the best remake of The Front Page), His Girl Friday; the quintessential Bogart and Bacall movies mentioned above; and the star-making Marilyn Monroe musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. At the 1974 ceremony, responding to the urging of the younger generation of filmmakers who had rediscovered his works, the Academy gave Hawks an honorary Oscar, recognizing him as "a master American filmmaker whose creative efforts hold a distinguished place in world cinema."

Best Actress, 1931-32

Awards presented November 18, 1932
(Films released from August 1, 1931 through July 31, 1932 were eligible.)

The nominees were ...

Marie Dressler in Emma
Lynn Fontanne in The Guardsman
Helen Hayes in The Sin of Madelon Claudet

... when they should have been ...

And the Oscar went to ...

Helen Hayes in The Sin of Madelon Claudet. It's no accident that two of this year's best actress nominees, Fontanne and Hayes, were Broadway stars. The studios were falling all over themselves to sign actors who could talk. In Hayes's case, it also helped that her husband, Charles MacArthur, was in Hollywood a lot writing screenplays with his buddy Ben Hecht. And from what we know about Charles MacArthur, including the fact that the boy he and Hayes adopted, James, was actually MacArthur's son from an affair with an unknown woman, it seems likely that Hayes would want to keep an eye on him. Like many a stage actress, Hayes had made a couple of now-lost silent films, but her main interest from the start was the theater, and by 1931, when she returned to the movies, she had become famous. (One of her starring roles, which she played on Broadway and in London, was Norma Besant in Coquette, for which Mary Pickford had won the 1928-29 Oscar.) Right off the bat, Hayes was cast in three major films: Arrowsmith, A Farewell to Arms, and The Sin of Madelon Claudet. But she was unhappy with Hollywood, and the feeling (aside from the Oscar) may have been mutual: The next roles she was offered were mediocre ones, and in 1935 she returned to Broadway, where she stayed for the next two decades, becoming known as "The First Lady of the American Theater." (Who pasted the label on her is unknown, and she sometimes seemed to trade it off with that other idol of matronly matinee-goers, Katharine Cornell.) In the 1950s, she began to find the rigors of theater-work tiring, and decided to return to the movies as a character actress, playing the haughty Dowager Empress in Anastasia, but gravitating mostly to a series of cute little old ladies, like the stowaway in Airport, which won her a second Oscar. The Sin of Madelon Claudet is, as the title suggests, a forgettable weepie.

... when it should have gone to ...

Joan Crawford in Grand Hotel:

with Lionel Barrymore

Few stars have fought harder to become and to remain a star than Crawford, the former waitress, saleswoman, and chorus girl, who broke into movies in 1925 but was stuck in small parts, mostly playing flappers, until a leading flapper role in Our Dancing Daughters (1928) made her a star. Still, her contract at MGM put her in competition with a roster that included Norma Shearer, Greta Garbo, Luise Rainer, Jean Harlow, and Myrna Loy, and her career slumped in the later 1930s. In 1943 she signed with Warner Bros., which wanted to use her as an alternative to Bette Davis, who was perpetually locked in combat with the studio. Davis was the first choice for the title role in Mildred Pierce (1945), but she turned it down and the part, and an Oscar, went to Crawford. It also proved to be the film that established Crawford's most familiar persona: the hard-boiled, long-suffering, but ruthless career woman, which she played in a series of movies through the mid-1950s. So it's often surprising to go back and look at her earlier MGM films, in which Crawford is lively and fresh and even cute. In Grand Hotel she more than holds her own in the company of not only Garbo but also both Barrymore brothers.

Best Actor, 1931-32

Awards presented November 18, 1932
(Films released from August 1, 1931 through July 31, 1932 were eligible.)

The nominees were ...

Wallace Beery in The Champ
Alfred Lunt in The Guardsman
Fredric March in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

... when they should have been ...

And the Oscar went to ...

(Tie) Wallace Beery in The Champ and Fredric March in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. March led Beery by one vote, which under the Academy rules at that time constituted a tie. In fact, up to a three-vote difference would be ruled a tie; before Pricewaterhouse Coopers -- at that time just Price Waterhouse -- took over the balloting in 1934, the Academy seemed to want a sizable margin of error. (Today, only an identical number of votes counts as a tie.) Beery had worked steadily as a heavy or a comic in silent pictures, starting in 1913, including a series of one-reel shorts in which he played a drag role: Sweedie, the Swedish maid. He became a star with the arrival of sound, though he owed his stardom to two women: Screenwriter Frances Marion had teamed him with Marie Dressler in Min and Bill and Tugboat Annie; Marion had also written the role in The Big House that earned Beery his first Oscar nomination. The teaming with Dressler ended with her death in 1934, after which Beery returned to supporting roles. March, who would go on to a long screen career, winning a second Oscar for The Best Years of Our Lives, had been discovered by a Paramount scout in a touring production of The Royal Family, in which he parodied John Barrymore. He earned his first Oscar nomination when he re-created that role on screen.

... when it should have gone to ...

John Barrymore in Grand Hotel:

with Joan Crawford

with Greta Garbo

Unlike his brother, Lionel, and his sister, Ethel, John Barrymore never won an Oscar. He was never even nominated for one. He had been acclaimed as a stage actor, particularly as Shakespeare's Richard III and Hamlet, but we have only the reviews to go by. His one turn at Shakespeare on screen was in the 1936 MGM Romeo and Juliet, with its superannuated teenagers: thirty-six-year-old Norma Shearer as Juliet, forty-four-year-old Leslie Howard as Romeo, and fifty-four-year-old Barrymore as Mercutio. Even so, we have glimpses there of what Barrymore may have been like in his prime: His performance is amusingly over-the-top, containing the energy that the rest of the movie sorely needs. He had made silent films starting in 1914, but after a 1925 appearance as Hamlet in London, he gave up the stage and joined Lionel in Hollywood, where his good looks and rakish ways fit right in. His finest screen performance is probably in 1934's Twentieth Century, in which director Howard Hawks, the screenplay by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur (plus some uncredited work by Preston Sturges), and an uninhibited performance by Carole Lombard brought out the madcap best in Barrymore. Grand Hotel, of course, is melodramatic to the point of absurdity, but Barrymore gives it a center and a measure of credibility, especially in his scenes with Garbo, Crawford, and particularly his brother, Lionel. Eventually, Barrymore's alcoholism began to destroy his career, however, and at the end he was playing small roles in throwaway movies, unable to memorize lines and relying on cue cards to get through his scenes.

Best Picture, 1931-32

Awards presented November 18, 1932
(Films released from August 1, 1931 through July 31, 1932 were eligible.)

The nominees were ...

... when they should have been ...

And the Oscar went to ...

Grand Hotel. Although it's the only best picture winner that received no nominations in any other category, Grand Hotel remains one of the essential films of the early 1930s. The two Ernst Lubitsch/Maurice Chevalier musicals, One Hour With You and The Smiling Lieutenant, are more truly sophisticated entertainment, the unnominated Frankenstein may have left a more lasting influence on movie history, and I have a very different choice for best picture. But the opportunity to see Greta Garbo tell John Barrymore that she wants to be alone and Joan Crawford when she was lively and cute still makes people drop into Grand Hotel.

... when it should have gone to ...

Scarface

Even though it's by far the best of the three gangster movies (the other two are Little Caesar and The Public Enemy) that launched a genre now seen as essential to the 1930s, there's no way the Academy would have given Scarface the best picture Oscar, given its distaste for genre movies and preference for high seriousness. But it's intense and even funny in ways that make it a classic, thanks to Ben Hecht's screenplay and Howard Hawks directing Paul Muni to what may the best performance of this sometimes too-hammy actor. The movie scared the bejabbers out of distributors and spooked even the pre-Code censors, so it wasn't released until two years after it was made, and then only after a didactic crime-does-not-pay scene was added, along with the subtitle, Shame of a Nation. It's not surprising then that the Academy gave it not a single nomination.