Showing posts with label Walter Brennan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Walter Brennan. Show all posts

Best Supporting Actor,1945

Awards presented March 7, 1946
The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 

The role of the easygoing alcoholic father was the best one that Dunn ever had. A former vaudevillian who made his first films in 1929 and 1930, and had a leading role in Bad Girl in 1930, Dunn became a contract player at Fox, but aside from four Shirley Temple features he appeared mostly in B-movies. Like Jimmy Nolan in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, he was an alcoholic, and the Oscar did little to help him establish a major career. Despite bouts with the disease he continued to work, mostly in television, up to his death in 1967, including a successful sitcom, "It's a Great Life," in the 1954-56 seasons. In it he played a character not far from the one for which he received the Oscar: a deadbeat dreamer.  

... when it should have gone to ...    
Walter Brennan in To Have and Have Not. 

Walter Brennan
Maybe it was the fact that Brennan already had three Oscars that kept the Academy from giving him another chance at one for what is probably his best screen performance: the simple-minded drunk, Eddie, in To Have and Have Not. His rapport with Humphrey Bogart and, in her first film, Lauren Bacall, is a miraculously canny bit of scene-stealing. It helps that he is given the benefit of Howard Hawks's direction, not to mention Jules Furthman and William Faulkner's dialogue. Watch Eddie's befuddlement when Bacall turns his own catchphrase, "Was you ever bit by a dead bee?" back on him.  

Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, and Walter Brennan in To Have and Have Not 

No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

Best Supporting Actor, 1940

Awards presented February 27, 1941

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ...   

It was Brennan's third Oscar, and his record for most acting wins would stand until the 1968 awards, when Katharine Hepburn got the third of her record-setting four, followed by three-timers Ingrid Bergman (1974), Jack Nicholson (1983), Meryl Streep (2011), and Daniel Day-Lewis (2012). Brennan was nominated one more time, for Sergeant York. 

... when it should have gone to ... 

Edmund Gwenn in Foreign Correspondent
Only Alfred Hitchcock would have had the perversity (or the good sense) to cast George Sanders as a good guy and Edmund Gwenn as a villain in Foreign Correspondent. Gwenn, who would later become the Oscar-winning embodiment of Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street, plays a creepy little man who almost succeeds in shoving Joel McCrea off the Westminster Cathedral tower. And then, in the same year, he's the gentle but ineffective Mr. Bennet, saddled with a foolish wife and five marriageable daughters in Pride and Prejudice. Gwenn had established himself on the London stage in the early years of the 20th century, attracting the attention of George Bernard Shaw and appearing in numerous Shaw plays. He made his first film in 1916 and appeared in one of Hitchcock's early films, The Skin Game, in 1931. Before World War II he divided his screen appearances between England and Hollywood, but settled in the latter, where he became a major character actor in the 1940s, working steadily until a few years before his death in 1959. 
Mary Boland and Edmund Gwenn as Mr. and Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice 

No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

Best Supporting Actor, 1938

Awards presented February 23, 1939

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
A Technicolor feature, handsomely filmed by Ernest Palmer, this Romeo and Juliet in the bluegrass story about lovers (Loretta Young and Richard Greene) from rival horse-raising clans gave Brennan the second of his three Oscar wins. 

... when it should have gone to ... 
Ayres plays the trapped, alcoholic son of the Seton clan in this superb romantic comedy starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, and directed by George Cukor. The film was a disappointment at the box office, which may explain why it received only one nomination: for art direction. Today it's regarded as a classic, thanks to the sparkling performances of its leads, but also to Ayres's poignant role, a melancholy counterpoint to the generally comic tone of the movie. Ayres began as a bit player and first gained notice when he was cast in the leading role in All Quiet on the Western Front. In 1938 he began playing Dr. Kildare in the popular series of MGM programmers, but his career was interrupted by World War II, during which, having been influenced by the antiwar sentiment of All Quiet, he declared himself a conscientious objector. Although there was a great deal of public outrage at his decision, Ayres served with distinction as a combat medic in the South Pacific. He resumed his career with an Oscar-nominated role in Johnny Belinda, and continued to work in film and television well into the 1980s. 

Lew Ayres, Doris Nolan, and Cary Grant in Holiday 

No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

Best Supporting Actor, 1936

Awards presented March 4, 1937

 This new category was a necessary addition to the Awards, recognizing the importance of performances other than in the lead roles. It may have been created in response to the 1934 Oscars, when Frank Morgan, in a supporting role in The Affairs of Benvenuto Cellini, received a nomination for best actor instead of Fredric March, who had the leading role, the title character. But the problem the Academy has always been up against is determining what constitutes a leading role and what a supporting one. The first list of nominees shows by its diversity how hard it is to define what constitutes a "supporting" performance. Auer and Erwin were comic types in roles that asked them to do little more than adhere to their established types. Tamiroff was an Armenian-born actor trained by Stanislavski at the Moscow Art Theater whose career consisted almost entirely of playing whatever ethnicity the movie needed, from Russian to Turkish, from Spanish to -- in his nominated role -- Chinese. Rathbone, a classically trained actor, became best known as Sherlock Holmes and as a swashbuckling villain, and was nominated for playing a swashbuckling Shakespearean villain, Tybalt. And Brennan was the actor for whom the award seemed to be invented, since he won it three times.

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
Brennan had been in Hollywood since 1923, working as an extra and a stuntman and gradually moving into character roles. But not until 1935, when director Howard Hawks cast him as a character called "Old Atrocity" in Barbary Coast, did Brennan become the prime scene-stealer that won him three supporting actor Oscars -- one every other year from 1937 through 1941. Before he was fired from the film, Hawks also cast Brennan in Come and Get It and built up what was originally a much smaller role. Brennan and Hawks made four more films together: Sergeant York, To Have and Have Not, Red River, and Rio Bravo. 

... when it should have gone to ... 
Basil Rathbone as Tybalt confronts John Barrymore as Mercutio
Leslie Howard as Romeo with Barrymore as Tybalt
Barrymore's Tybalt listens in as Juliet's nurse (Edna May Oliver) speaks with Howard as Romeo
Well, no, it really won't do as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. But as MGM's attempt to pass off some aging, balding actors as Shakespeare's teenagers, it has its moments, especially when Barrymore is around to lighten things up with some prime hamming. He and Rathbone are well-matched as antagonists, though Rathbone is a good ten years younger and in much better physical shape. This would be Barrymore's last distinguished film performance, with the possible exception of a smaller role in Midnight (1939), before alcoholism took its toll.  
No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)