Showing posts with label 1932-33. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1932-33. Show all posts

Best Assistant Director, 1932-33

Awards presented March 16, 1934
(Films released from August 1, 1932 through December 31, 1933 were eligible.)

A very odd choice of category for the Academy to add at this point, before it started giving Oscars for music or film editing or supporting players (not to mention the ones that came much later, costumes and makeup) or revived the special effects category that it had given at the first awards. Especially because "assistant director" is a kind of catch-all title. The AD does everything that the director doesn't have time to do (or in the case of a powerful director doesn't want to do). This can be everything from making sure everything is on schedule to kicking ass and taking names. Most films today have a multitude of ADs, and most of them have assistants. Sometimes the title "assistant director" is used for a "second-unit director," who directs crowd scenes, establishing shots of scenery, and sometimes retakes of scenes, especially when the director has moved on to another set or location. Obviously, this category doesn't give us much opportunity to comment on alternative nominations, especially since in this first of the only five years in which it was awarded, there were multiple winners -- seven of them, out of eighteen nominations -- and no specific films were cited. But it's interesting to take a closer look at what happened to them later in their careers.  

The nominees were ... 

And the Oscar went to ... 
Charles Barton (Paramount). 
Charles Barton
Barton was AD on Horse Feathers (1932), the Marx Brothers' movie. He moved into the director's chair in 1934, mostly on B pictures. In 1945 he went to Universal, where he directed many of the Abbott and Costello movies. In the early 1950s he began a long career as a TV director. 

Scott Beal (Universal).
Beal was AD on such 1932-33 films as Murders in the Rue Morgue, Back Street, and Only Yesterday. He began as an actor, and directed a few films, but most of his career was spent as an assistant director. He received another nomination in the category for Imitation of Life (1934). 

Charles Dorian (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer)
A former actor in silent pictures, Dorian worked on such films as Red-Headed Woman and Night Flight during the eligibility period. 

Fred Fox (United Artists). 
In addition to his work as AD, Fox, who was born in London, played small parts in movies in the 1940s, including Mrs. Parkington (1944) and Forever Amber (1947). The films that made him eligible for the 1932-33 Oscar include Baby Face, The Bowery, and Broadway Through a Keyhole. 

Gordon Hollingshead (Warner Bros.). 
Gordon Hollingshead
The most successful of all of the 1932-33 AD winners, Hollingshead would go on to collect five more Oscars plus ten nominations as a producer of more than two hundred short films. The movies that qualified him for the 1932-33 AD win include 42nd Street, Footlight Parade, Picture Snatcher, and Tugboat Annie. In 1960 he was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. 

Dewey Starkey (RKO Radio). 
Starkey was AD on A Bill of Divorcement, The Silver Cord, and Professional Sweetheart. He remained an assistant director until 1944 when he switched to production manager, ending his career as a production supervisor on such TV series as "Gunsmoke" and "Perry Mason." 

William Tummel (Fox). 
Tummel's work on the 1932-33 best picture winner, Cavalcade, put him in contention for the assistant director Oscar. 
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Best Short Film, 1932-33

Awards presented March 16, 1934
(Films released from August 1, 1932 through December 31, 1933 were eligible.)

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



One of the most popular Disney cartoons of the 1930s, The Three Little Pigs, and particularly Frank Churchill's song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf," was widely viewed as a parable about the Depression and the attitude needed to survive it.

(Comedy)
So This is Harris! Louis Brock, producer.



This pre-Code short, featuring some near-nudity, stars Phil Harris and Walter Catlett as themselves. Catlett hates to hear Harris sing, and goes out of his way to try to stop him. Brock, an RKO producer, oversaw the first teaming of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, in Flying Down to Rio (1933), but most of his work was focused on short films. The director of So This Is Harris!, Mark Sandrich, would go on to direct Astaire and Rogers in The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat, Follow the Fleet, Shall We Dance, and Carefree.

(Novelty)
Krakatoa, Joe Rock, producer.
Joe Rock
Rock, né Joe Simburg, had been a stunt man and comedian in movies as early as 1915, but he turned producer, signing Stan Laurel (pre-Hardy) to a series of twelve two-reel comedies in 1924 and 1925, and producing a series called "A Ton of Fun," featuring three comedians padded into obesity and known as The Three Fatties. In 1933, he formed a separate production company to film a serious documentary, Krakatoa, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the explosion of the Indonesian island. It was distributed by Fox Film Corporation, and won him an Oscar. But he was out of the country when the award was announced, and by the time he returned his production company had gone out of business and he couldn't locate the documents that would establish his right to the award. Shortly before his death in 1984 he came across the necessary documents and the Academy gave him his Oscar.
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Best Sound, 1932-33

Awards presented March 16, 1934
(Films released from August 1, 1932 through December 31, 1933 were eligible.)

After two years in which the Academy decided not to name names, it returned the sound category -- Sound Recording -- to one in which specific films were cited and the names of the studio sound directors were listed. 

The nominees were ... 


And the Oscar went to ... 
A Farewell to Arms, Paramount Studio Sound Department, Franklin B. Hansen, Sound Director.
Franklin B. Hansen
This was Hansen's only Oscar win. He had been nominated before, for The Love Parade (1929-30), and would receive three more nominations, for Cleopatra (1934), The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), and The Texas Rangers (1936). After that, his name disappears from film credits until after World War II when he re-emerges as a sound recording engineer on B pictures, though his later credits include more important films such as Pal Joey (1957) and By Love Possessed (1961), as well as some TV work. He is not to be confused with the head of the 20th Century-Fox sound department, Edmund H. Hansen, to whom he seems to have been unrelated. 

It strikes me as odd that the Academy overlooked two films that made significant use of sound. King Kong had innovative sound effects under the direction of Murray Spivack, who would later win an Oscar for Hello, Dolly! (1969). And the remarkable "Isn't It Romantic" montage in Love Me Tonight carries the song from location to location and singer to singer, a sound recording and editing tour de force that seems to have been accomplished under the supervision of the uncredited M.M. Paggi. In the latter case, the Oscar would have gone to the studio sound department head -- Franklin B. Hansen. 




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Best Cinematography, 1932-33

Awards presented March 16, 1934
(Films released from August 1, 1932 through December 31, 1933 were eligible.)

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
And the Oscar went to ... 
Charles Bryant Lang Jr., A Farewell to Arms. Lang shares with Leon Shamroy the record for most nominations (18) for cinematography. This was his only win. Shamroy, on the other hand, won four times. Lang spent most of his career at Paramount, then in 1951 began a career as a freelance director of photography until his retirement in 1973. 

... when it should have gone to ... 
Sol Polito
Helen Vinson and Paul Muni in the final scene of I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang: "How do you live?" "I steal." 
Though Charles Lang was known for his expressive use of limited lighting sources, Polito takes it to the utmost in the haunting final scene of I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang. At the time, Muni's withdrawal into the darkness was so startling that director Mervyn LeRoy claimed he had the idea when a fuse blew on the set, but the scene is actually described in the script. Throughout the movie, Polito plays with light and shadow, often to echo the convict's stripes that Muni and the other chain gang members wear. Though Polito became one of the leading directors of photography at Warner Bros. by developing his skill at shooting in black and white, he was also a pioneer in color cinematography, acclaimed for the rich, lush use of color in one of the studio's first color films, The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). He was nominated three times, twice for color films, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939) and Captains of the Clouds (1943), and once for black and white, Sergeant York (1942), but never won.   

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Best Art Direction, 1932-33

Awards presented March 16, 1934
(Films released from August 1, 1932 through December 31, 1933 were eligible.)

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
And the Oscar went to ... 
William S. Darling, Cavalcade. The first of three Oscars from a total of seven nominations for the Hungarian-born art director. 

... when it should have gone to ... 
Anton Grot points out a set detail for director Mervyn LeRoy, choreographer Busby Berkeley, and some dancers
"The Waltz of the Shadows" 
Joan Blondell sings "Remember My Forgotten Man" 
"We're in the Money"
 Grot came to the United States from Poland in 1909, bringing with him an awareness of the latest trends in expressionist and modernist design. His breakthrough in film came when he was hired in 1922 to design the sets for Douglas Fairbanks's Robin Hood. In 1928 he began a frequent collaboration with director Michael Curtiz on Noah's Ark, and eventually became head of the art department at Warner Bros., a position he held until he retired in 1948. His imagination happened to mesh beautifully with that of dance director Busby Berkeley, and they also worked together on Footlight Parade (1933) and Gold Diggers of 1935. Grot was nominated five times, but never won, though he shared in the Warners art department's win in 1941 for a "water ripple and wave illusion machine."

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Best Writing, 1932-33

Awards presented March 16, 1934
(Films released from August 1, 1932 through December 31, 1933 were eligible.)

The nominees were ... 
(Adaptation)
(Original Story) 
(Adaptation) 
(Original Story) 
(Adaptation)
Victor Heerman and Sarah Y. Mason, Little Women. The collaboration of Heerman and Mason, husband and wife, goes back to 1920 when he directed a film called The Poor Simp from her scenario. They married the following year. Mason claimed to have been Hollywood's first "script girl," having suggested to Allan Dwan, writer of the screenplay for Arizona in 1918, that someone needed to keep track of how much of the script had been shot each day and to make sure that continuity -- the placement of the actors and props, details in their costumes and hairstyles, and so on -- remained consistent from day to day and shot to shot. Heerman and Mason worked together, often uncredited, on the screenplays for such films as Stella Dallas (1937), Pride and Prejudice (1940), and Meet Me in St. Louis (1944).  

(Original Story) 
Robert Lord, One Way Passage. A former New Yorker writer, Lord came to Hollywood in 1925 when one of his stories, The Lucky Horseshoe, was filmed, and was hired by Warner Bros. in 1927. One Way Passage tells the story of a shipboard romance between a dying woman (Kay Francis) and a man (William Powell) who is headed for prison when the ship docks. It won him his only Oscar, but he was nominated for another for The Black Legion (1937), which starred Humphrey Bogart. When Bogart founded his independent production company, Santana, he hired Lord as a vice president in charge of production.  

... when it should have gone to ... 
(Adaptation) 
I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang
It may be one of the least subtle titles in movie history, but the title of the book in which Robert Elliott Burns told the story of his experiences was even less subtle: I Am a Fugitive From a Georgia Chain Gang! Warner Bros. decided not to offend the state further and edited the title a bit for the film version. Directed by Mervyn LeRoy, with one of Paul Muni's best and least-mannered performances, it still has the power to shock and startle. It actually led to the abolition of the chain gang system in the South. Green and Holmes, contract writers at Warners, never received a nomination, and the rest of their work is generally unremarkable, leading me to suspect that then-production head at Warners, Darryl F. Zanuck, and perhaps producer Hal B. Wallis, had a good deal to do with the shaping of the film. 

(Original Story) 
Harry Ruby and Bert Kalmar 
Groucho Marx, Louis Calhern, and Margaret Dumont in Duck Soup
 Kalmar and Ruby were a songwriting team who had done the songs for the Marx Brothers' Broadway hit Animal Crackers. Their friendship with the brothers, particularly with Groucho, led to their writing the screenplay for Duck Soup. There are those who will say that giving Oscars (even imaginary ones) to Kalmar and Ruby for Duck Soup's screenplay is a bit like crediting Hamlet to the pen Shakespeare wrote it with. Would it have been a classic if the roles had been played by, say, Robert Montgomery, Franchot Tone, Fredric March, and Lew Ayres instead of Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Zeppo? Nevertheless, the brothers needed a place to jump off from into madness, and Kalmar and Ruby knew how to give it to them. It was the last and best of the five films the Marxes made at Paramount, and their relationship with the studio was never good. On the other hand, their relationship with MGM would be worse. Kalmar and Ruby were the subjects of a pleasant musical biopic, Three Little Words, which starred Fred Astaire as Kalmar and Red Skelton as Ruby, in 1950, so perhaps that's all the honor they really need.
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Best Director, 1932-33

Awards presented March 16, 1934
(Films released from August 1, 1932 through December 31, 1933 were eligible.)

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
Frank Lloyd, Cavalcade. The oft-told story goes that on Oscar night, when Will Rogers presented the award for best director, he chatted on about his friend Frank before calling out, "Come up and get it, Frank!" Whereupon Frank Capra, who had expected to win for Lady for a Day, which had been a big hit, leaped from his seat and headed for the dais, only to realize that the spotlight was on Frank Lloyd instead. Capra slunk back to his seat in embarrassment. It was Capra himself who told the story in his autobiography, so there's no reason to doubt it except that no contemporary accounts of Oscar night mention it. This was Lloyd's second Oscar, but after a third nomination, for Mutiny on the Bounty, his career began to slump into mediocrity. 

... when it should have gone to ... 
Rouben Mamoulian
Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier in Love Me Tonight 
Myrna Loy, Chevalier, and MacDonald in Love Me Tonight 
Is it a tribute to Mamoulian that I always forget that this film was directed by him and not by Ernst Lubitsch? It's a wonderfully giddy musical, with the Rodgers and Hart songs ("Isn't It Romantic?," "Mimi," "Lover" and the title song) seamlessly and wittily woven into the texture of the film. It's also probably the best of the four musicals starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. (The other three were directed by Lubitsch.) Mamoulian became a celebrated stage director, helming the premieres of Porgy and Bess, Oklahoma!  and Carousel, but Love Me Tonight shows that he had a fine touch with movies, too, though the Academy never took note of him. He seemed to get crosswise with the studios: He was hired to direct Laura (1944), but fired from the picture because his ideas were so different from those of the producer, Otto Preminger, who took over directing it. In 1959 he was set to direct the film version of Porgy and Bess, but disagreed with producer Sam Goldwyn, who replaced him with (again) Preminger. And he was the first director hired for what became Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra (Mamoulian wanted Dorothy Dandridge instead) and quit when it became clear that the project was going to be uncontrollable.

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Best Actress, 1932-33

Awards presented March 16, 1934
(Films released from August 1, 1932 through December 31, 1933 were eligible.)

 The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
Katharine Hepburn in Morning Glory. The Academy had four Hepburn pictures to choose from: A Bill of Divorcement, Christopher Strong, Morning Glory, and Little Women were all eligible. It's easy to see why they chose this one over the first two -- A Bill of Divorcement was her debut and Christopher Strong was a notorious flop. Morning Glory to some extent recapitulates Hepburn's own experiences. In it she plays a small-town girl who comes to the big city determined to become a Broadway star. Born to a well-to-do New England family, Hepburn was also stagestruck, and she managed to launch an acting career in 1928 without much training or experience. An RKO scout saw her in her first stage success in 1932, a play called The Warrior's Husband, and signed her to a contract. But in Morning Glory she's still tentative as a screen actress and director Lowell Sherman does little to help. She needed a "women's director" like George Cukor to bring out her strengths. 

... when it should have gone to ... 

Joan Bennett, Spring Byington, Jean Parker, Frances Dee, and Katharine Hepburn in Little Women 
And for Little Women she got Cukor, who did just that. Plus, she had a beloved classic American novel with a role -- the tomboyish Jo March -- that fit her perfectly. It could be said that the Oscar for Morning Glory was as much for her work on Little Women, which was a box-office hit, but on the other hand it also seems prophetic. Again and again, the Oscar went to Hepburn for the wrong movies: the didactic Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, the talky The Lion in Winter, and the slushy On Golden Pond. She now holds the record for most Oscar wins, but it's something of a fluke that she got them for some very weak movies instead of for films that she helped make into classics, such as Little Women, Alice Adams, Stage Door, Bringing Up Baby, Holiday, The Philadelphia Story, Adam's Rib, Pat and Mike, The African Queen and Long Day's Journey Into Night.  
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Best Actor, 1932-33

Awards presented March 16, 1934
(Films released from August 1, 1932 through December 31, 1933 were eligible.)

This was the last year in which the eligibility period didn't coincide with the calendar year, and in preparation for that, the Academy extended the eligibility from the end of July 1933 to the end of the year. Which meant, for one thing, that 1933 was the only year without an Oscar ceremony. It also meant that there were more eligible films than ever, but since the Academy stuck to the practice of making only three nominations in most categories, a lot of good, even great films, went without nominations. I am trying to remedy that, in my own hindsighted way. 

 The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
And the Oscar went to ... 
Charles Laughton in The Private Life of Henry VIII. More actors have received Oscar nominations for playing Henry VIII than any other figure in literature or history. There are Robert Shaw in A Man for All Seasons and Richard Burton in Anne of the Thousand Days, but Laughton's is the only one honored by the Academy. He plays Henry more for comedy than for history, permanently establishing the popular image of the monarch as a gluttonous lecher. The movie is entertaining if you're not looking for insight into Tudor statecraft. It established Laughton as a leading character actor, particularly in historical roles: In the 1930s he also appeared as Nero in The Sign of the Cross, Mr. Barrett in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Javert in Les Misérables, Captain Bligh in The Mutiny on the Bounty, and Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. But he was a miserably insecure man, tormented by his need to conceal his homosexuality, and his later screen career is marked by highs and lows. One high is his sole movie directing effort, the critically acclaimed The Night of the Hunter in 1955, but it was unfortunately a box-office failure. 

 ... when it should have gone to ... 
Clark Gable in Red Dust: 
Clark Gable in Red Dust  
Mary Astor and Clark Gable in Red Dust 
Jean Harlow and Clark Gable in Red Dust 
The Production Code was looming, and Red Dust is perhaps the last chance we get to see Gable at his sexiest, choosing between two women, Mary Astor and Jean Harlow. The film is terrifically entertaining, but the heat generated by Gable and his co-stars is unsurpassed. Red Dust was remade in 1953 as Mogambo, when Gable was twenty years older and coasting on his status as King of Hollywood, but even in that one, in which he barely tries to act at all, he has no trouble convincing us that Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly were falling over each other for him. It will be argued that, in comparison with Charles Laughton, Gable is hardly acting at all in this movie, but let us now recall that there are two types of Oscar-winning roles: those in which the acting shows, and those in which the star simply has to be a star. San Francisco film critic Mick LaSalle likes to distinguish between "chameleon" roles and "apotheosis" roles when talking about Oscar-winning performances: Laughton's in this case is a "chameleon" role, in which the pudgy British actor tries to convince us that he's the powerful and charismatic King Henry VIII. Gable's would be an "apotheosis" win: a star being a star.   
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Best Picture, 1932-33

Awards presented March 16, 1934
(Films released from August 1, 1932 through December 31, 1933 were eligible.)

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ...
And the Oscar went to ...
Cavalcade. Early 20th-century history seen through its effect on a well-to-do English family and its servants. If that sounds like "Upstairs Downstairs" and "Downton Abbey," you've got it. But while the movie, based on a play by Noël Coward, touches on the same Anglophilia that made the TV series so popular, it remains one of the least-seen best picture winners. It's not bad, but on the other hand, it's been done better.

... when it should have gone to ...
King Kong
Let's face it: What other 1933 film has had a longer and stronger effect on Hollywood, inspiring more sequels, remakes, and ripoffs? Or has initiated more social, racial, or anthropological commentary? The special-effects industry owes everything to its success. Yet King Kong received not a single nomination in any category. (It was in good company in that regard: neither did Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise, Clark Gable and Jean Harlow's Red Dust, the star-studded Dinner at Eight, or the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup.) But 80 years have passed, and the myth of Kong and the beauty who killed the beast is still alive.



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