(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 ...
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 ...
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| 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.
