Showing posts with label It Happened One Night. Show all posts
Showing posts with label It Happened One Night. Show all posts

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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