Best Supporting Actress Of 1927-28: Clara Bow (Wings)

When I first decided to hand out Katie awards for supporting actress (despite the fact that the Academy didn't create the category until 1936), I kicked around a number of choices for the first one—Mary Philbin and Olga Baclanova in the horror classic The Man Who Laughs, Gladys Brockwell as a hooker with a heart of stone in Oscar-winner Seventh Heaven, Louise Brooks in A Girl In Every Port, Margaret Livingston in Sunrise and even Norma Shearer who was uncharacteristically fun in The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg—but it was Clara Bow's turn in Wings that I kept coming back to.

Wings is the story of two pilots who have volunteered for the American Expeditionary Force headed for France and the First World War. They're both in love with the rich girl on the hill. She only has eyes for Richard Arlen but the third member of the triangle, a young and naive Buddy Rogers, is sure he's the one.

Ironically, Bow who was known as the "It Girl," the greatest sex symbol of the day, was not part of the triangle. Instead, she's on the outside looking in, playing an atypical role for her, the fresh-faced girl next door. She's been in love with Rogers ever since she was a kid, but he's never seen her anything other than a pal.

Clara Bow's part was not in the original story, penned by future Oscar-winner John Monk Saunders (The Dawn Patrol), but was instead inserted into the picture to take advantage of Bow's popularity. Director William Wellman, for one, was delighted—Bow's presence guaranteed a bigger gross at the box office.

As it turns out, it also guaranteed someone on the screen knew something about acting.

In order to achieve authenticity in the truly spectacular flying stunts, Wellman (himself a flyer during World War I) and special effects man Roy Pomeroy bolted cameras onto biplanes and hired actors based on their ability to fly. While the result is still some of the most spectacular aerial combat and trick flying ever filmed (Pomeroy won a well-deserved Oscar for his efforts), the acting, outside of Clara Bow's supporting role and Gary Cooper's three-minute star-making appearance, is spotty at best.

Bow, hopelessly in love with Rogers, follows him to France as a volunteer ambulance driver. While on furlough, she sees him with a Parisian hooker while he on the other hand is too drunk to recognize his old pal. In the best scene of the movie, Bow hustles him out of the bar just ahead of the MPs and takes him to a hotel room where he's too drunk to perform. As he sleeps it off, she sees a locket with the other woman's picture and finally realizes the truth about his feelings.

Victor Fleming, who directed Bow in two movies and who would go on to direct Gone With The Wind and The Wizard Of Oz, compared her talent to "a great violin; touch her, and she answered with genius."

Watching her in Wings (then in It and everything else I could get my hands on), I saw the same thing in Clara Bow that others saw in her at the time, that when she's on the screen, you simply can't take your eyes off her.

It's not that she was the most beautiful woman of the era; to be honest, she often wasn't even the most beautiful woman in whichever movie I was watching. But she had what all the great stars had, a quality that attracts attention no matter what else is happening on screen and an ability to make us root for her no matter what part she's playing.

Maybe in Bow's case that quality had something to do with the odds she had to overcome to succeed, both on-screen and off. Although she usually played a bubbly modern woman who knew just what she wanted, there was often (as there is in Wings) a vulnerability and pathos just below the surface. That contradiction—fighting for what she wanted when she's secretly afraid to—is called courage and that courage gives her characters a humanity her audience could relate to.

In what I suppose you could describe as proto-Method acting, Bow added depth to her characters by drawing on emotional memories of her horrific Brooklyn childhood—her mother was a mentally-ill prostitute who routinely assaulted Bow before finally trying to kill her; her father abandoned Bow at birth only to return when she was a teenager and rape her.

Those who worked with Bow said that whenever a scene called for tears, she would have someone play "Rock-A-Bye Baby" and real tears flowed. Given her childhood, I can only imagine what the song meant to her.

"All the time the flapper is laughing and dancing," she once said, "there's a feeling of tragedy underneath. She's unhappy and disillusioned, and that's what people sense. That's what makes her different."

I think Bow was describing herself.

Wings was a huge hit and won two Oscars, for best picture and for "engineering effects." In 1997, it was included in the National Film Registry.

Although she was one of the most popular actresses of her day, Bow was out of the movies within six years. Producer B.P. Schulberg of Paramount Studios shoved Bow into an interchangeable series of underwritten flapper and shopgirl parts then handled her transition to sound carelessly—MGM gave Greta Garbo two years to prepare for her first sound picture; Paramount gave Bow two weeks. Even though her Brooklyn accent was fine for the parts she played, Bow developed an odd phobia that left her terrified of the microphones that recorded her voice which led to numerous production delays.

In addition, Bow was a favorite target of the gossip columnists, particularly after she sued her personal secretary for embezzlement. Although she won the suit, the details of Bow's private life that emerged from the trial were scandalous and turned the public against her.

Schulberg took to calling her "Crisis-a-day-Clara" and dropped her from her contract when, exhausted from overwork and savage publicity, she suffered a nervous breakdown.

Bow made a brief comeback in 1932 for Fox and though both movies, Call Her Savage and Hoop-La, were critical and commercial successes, Bow was worn out from years in the public eye. She retired from acting at the age of 28, never to return to the screen.

"A sex symbol is a heavy load to carry," she later wrote, "when you're tired, hurt and bewildered."

At the time and for years after, Bow's notoriety obscured her talent. But she was, as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it, "the real thing," and the more I see of her work, the more I am convinced she was one of the greatest actresses of the Silent Era.

In addition, I would say that more than with any other performer or picture so far, watching movies for this blog has completely altered my perception of Clara Bow. When I began writing, I saw her as the empty-headed glamour girl the gossip columnists of the time so gleefully tore into. Watching her movies, I realized she was actually something quite special.

It's a measure of the lasting damage celebrity gossip can do when we so casually tar someone with the brush of scandal. The tabloids of Bow's day recycled their rumors, sold their papers, wrapped fish in them the next day and moved on. But the perception they created has lingered now for eighty years.

Best Actress Of 1927-28: Mary Pickford (My Best Girl)

Mary Pickford was the most popular actress of the Silent Era, earning the nickname "America's Sweetheart" with a series of winning performances as the plucky girl who overcomes long odds in such movies as Stella Maris, Rebecca Of Sunnybrook Farm and Tess Of The Storm Country. Film historian Scott Eyman has called her the "perfect incarnation" of the sweet but strong-willed girl and audiences flocked to her movies in record numbers, making her at her peak the highest paid performer in Hollywood.

My Best Girl was Pickford's last silent performance and arguably her best.

The story was a typical one for Pickford. "Maggie" is a working class shopgirl who meets and falls in love with Joe (played by Charles "Buddy" Rogers, who was quickly cast in the part after his success in the blockbuster war picture Wings), not realizing he is the son of the store's owner.

It's a fairly conventional set-up, but it's what Pickford does with it that makes it worth watching. In the opening scene, she carries an armful of pots and pans through a crowded department store, gets a pot stuck on her foot and in trying to shake it loose, ends up losing her bloomers instead. As Pickford scrambles to free her hands, another woman steps into Pickford's undies, assumes to her horror that they are her own, and winds up hiking them up under her own skirt.

That Pickford then meets the boy of her dreams while she feels a cool breeze blowing up her skirt is implied rather than explicitly stated, but you have to wonder what Charles Rogers was thinking when he knelt at Pickford's feet in the scene pictured here—the two fell in love and married after Pickford's divorce from Douglas Fairbanks.

Naturally, the course of true love never runs smooth, at least not in the movies. Joe has a wealthy fiancee and an overbearing father, and Maggie has family problems of her own: her mother is a slovenly depressive who attends the funerals of strangers—"I haven't had such a good cry since our wedding"—her sister is a flapper dating a gangster, and her father is an ineffectual milquetoast who sits in his wingback chair, chews on his moustache and frets as his family comes unglued.

Just bringing a man home for dinner requires more courage and finesse than most of us can muster in our greatest moment of crisis.

If you played this stuff seriously, you'd have Katharine Hepburn in Alice Adams; if you played it half way, you'd have Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. My Best Girl is played strictly for laughs and what you wind up with is a nifty little comedy, albeit one only as good as the actress playing the title role. Pickford straps this potentially creaky vehicle to her back and carries it the whole way, making it feel fresh and light and funny while steering effortlessly clear of the pathos that would have brought it crashing down.

As film critic Steve Vineberg says, the performance is "an extraordinary combination of spunk and delicacy."

It's also at times unusually physical. I hadn't thought about it before until I saw Pickford doing physical comedy here—pratfalls and slapstick—that Hollywood has tended to shy away from asking women to do the sort of physical comedy Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Curly Howard and even Cary Grant did routinely. Lucille Ball had a gift for it, at least on her television shows, and occasionally an actress in a screwball comedy, Carole Lombard, say, would do some bit of business that required a little slapstick. But not often. Mary Pickford showed a flair for it throughout her career and is near the top of a pretty short list.

My Best Girl was released just three weeks after The Jazz Singer and was Pickford's last silent movie.

Pickford wasn't thrilled with the introduction of sound—"Adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo"—but she was perceptive enough to realize that it added an extra degree of realism to the movies that made the prospect of a thirty-five year old actress playing nineteen year olds untenable. She was tired of that kind of role anyway. "I'm sick of Cinderella parts," she said, "of wearing rags and tatters. I want to wear smart clothes and play the lover."

The next year, she bobbed her hair—a controversial act because of her iconic status as the perfect representative of traditional womanhood—and took on a more sophisticated role for her first sound picture, Coquette. She won an Oscar for the effort, but critics panned the performance and to be honest, the award had more to do with Pickford's skills as a party hostess—she's credited with being the first person in history to lobby for an Oscar—than with the quality of anything she did onscreen.

The public rejected her attempts to play more adult roles and, being too old to any longer play feisty shopgirls and teenage ingenues, Pickford retired from acting in 1933.

According to TCM's Robert Osborne, she attempted to make a comeback in 1947, testing for the movie Life With Father, but when that role went to Irene Dunne instead, Pickford made her retirement permanent.

During her career, Pickford appeared in 249 movies, produced 34 more (including one as late as 1949) and authored twelve. Along with Charlie Chaplin and then-husband Douglas Fairbanks, she founded United Artists. Despite her screen image as a sweet, innocent working class girl, she was actually a tough, smart businesswoman who remained an active owner at the head of the studio she founded.

As her biographer Eileen Whitfield wrote, "She knew what she was worth, and she didn't hesitate to ask for it. She was a woman in complete control."

In 1976 the Academy which she herself had co-founded awarded her an Oscar for lifetime achievement. She died at the age of 87.