Showing posts with label Lewis Milestone. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lewis Milestone. Show all posts

Best Director, 1929-30

Awards presented November 5, 1930
(Films released from August 1, 1929 through July 31, 1930 were eligible.)

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
Douglas Fairbanks, left, presents the Oscar to Lewis Milestone for All Quiet on the Western Front 
In sober truth, I would have preferred to go with Lubitsch here because he is in my pantheon of directors whose films I can always watch with unlimited pleasure: Hitchcock, Hawks, Preston Sturges, and ... oh, well, there may be one or two others. And I admire the dedication with which King Vidor made Hallelujah. Instead of the plodding, reliable Robert Z. Leonard, I threw in Howard Hughes and Hell's Angels on my nominee list because the film shows what a megalomaniac with all the money in the world can do when he decides to produce and direct. But I'll go with the Academy's choice of Lewis Milestone because he made the first Oscar-winning talking picture that still looks today like a real movie, and not just an experiment with sound. Milestone had already won an Oscar, for "comedy direction" of Two Arabian Knights, which was produced by the man who first hired him as a director: Howard Hughes. (In fact, Milestone is said to have directed some of the scenes in Hell's Angels.) He was never really a major director, though he made some good movies, including the first version of The Front Page in 1931, for which he received another nomination, and Of Mice and Men in 1939. He ended his career working as a TV director in the late '50s and early '60s, though he was called on to replace Carol Reed as director of the ill-fated Mutiny on the Bounty remake in 1962. He constantly refereed the battle between Marlon Brando and Richard Harris on that film, while also dealing with Brando's determination to take over as director of it. 
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Best Director, 1927-28

Awards presented May 16, 1929
(Films released from August 1, 1927 through August 1, 1928 were eligible.)

The division of the directing category into comedy and drama was abandoned by the Academy after this year.

The nominees were ...
(Comedy Picture)
(Dramatic Picture) 
... when they should have been ... 
And the Oscar went to ...
Lewis Milestone, Two Arabian Knights. Milestone's Oscar two years later for All Quiet on the Western Front is the one that really counts. The comedy direction would be abolished after this year, leaving Milestone its sole winner. The film itself, starring Louis Wolheim (whom Milestone would use to more lasting effect in All Quiet) and William Boyd (yes, he'd become Hopalong Cassidy), was almost lost, but has been restored.  
Frank Borzage, 7th Heaven. Borzage would win another Oscar three years later for Bad Girl, but his films aren't much remembered today, perhaps because they tend to be on the romantically mushy side. He also made the mistake of going to work in the 1930s for MGM, where directors were under the heavy thumb of producers and were usually unable to develop their individual strengths.   

... when it should have gone to ...
F.W. Murnau 
Movies would not see the fluidity of Murnau's direction of the camera in Sunrise again until the studios mastered sound recording. But the fact that his first American films were box-office flops (and perhaps some squeamishness on the part of the studios about his homosexuality) made Hollywood nervous, despite his distinguished career in Germany. It also perhaps cost him a nomination for Sunrise. He went off to collaborate with the documentarian Robert Flaherty on Tabu in the South Pacific. But Flaherty didn't get along with Murnau and quit the film. Murnau returned to Hollywood and was about to begin his first sound work for Paramount when he was killed in an auto accident at the age of forty-three. 

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