Katie Award Nominees For 1932-33

Boy, oh, boy! We're finally getting to the heart of what I think of the era of classic movies—and not a moment too soon, I'm sure you're thinking.

Not that I've lacked for great movies to talk about. I've handed out best picture awards to the likes of All Quiet On The Western Front, City Lights and Frankenstein, among others, I've written about legendary sex symbols such as Marlene Dietrich and Clara Bow, and I've shown you comedies from Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin that are as funny now as the day they debuted.

But let's face it, many of the stars I've been talking about—Marie Dressler, Anita Page—are virtually unknown today even among film buffs, and the movies themselves—silents such as Sunrise, early talkies like Bulldog Drummond and Hallelujah!—feel alien at times, almost like they're a wholly different medium.

Which is why, as much fun as it's been for me so far, it's a bit of relief to reach a year in film history that I didn't have to research virtually from scratch, and hopefully one that for once won't leave you, my long-suffering readers, scratching your collective heads. As they say in Kathmandu, the ox is slow, but the earth is patient. And you've been very patient indeed.

Although rarely mentioned in the same breath with 1939, I'd suggest 1932-33 was perhaps the greatest year in movie history—well, year and a half, really, since the Oscar season ran from August 1, 1932 to December 31, 1933 as the Academy was bringing its confusing split-year award season in line with the calendar. Clark Gable was now a star, Jean Harlow discovered a flair for comedy, James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson were at the top of their games. Barbara Stanwyck was taking full advantage of the pre-Code era's permissiveness. And the Marx Brothers were funnier than ever.

Not to mention that Katharine Hepburn not only made her film debut, she won the first (of four) Oscars; Busby Berkeley, that master of wildly flamboyant choreography, was busy reviving the movie musical. And Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced together for the first time.

Among my nominees are such classics as Duck Soup, King Kong, Trouble in Paradise, Dinner at Eight, Design For Living, Red Dust, Boudu Saved From Drowning, The Invisible Man, Queen Christina, Sons of the Desert, Baby Face, The Bitter Tea of General Yen. And on top of that, Fritz Lang's classic M arrived in the United States in 1933, making it eligible for an award come Oscar time. Boy, what a year!

So how come you don't hear more about 1932-33 when it comes time to talk about the greatest years in movie history?

Well, let's put it this way: of those movies I listed above, how many Oscars did they win between them?

Zero.

Zero? Yeah, zero.

Okay, sure, sometimes the Academy screws up, but how many Oscar nominations did they receive between them?

Zero.

That's right, a baker's dozen of the best movies of all time and as far as the Academy was concerned, they didn't even exist. Still, the Academy did nominate some solid movies, traditional Oscar fare such as I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang, Little Women, The Private Life of Henry VIII, A Farewell To Arms, Lady For A Day, 42nd Street and the like.

So which of these fine movies did the Academy choose as the best picture of the year? Cavalcade.

Whoozitwhatsis?

A starchy, stage-bound adaptation of a Noel Coward play, Cavalcade is not much remembered now and may well be the worst movie to ever win the Oscar for best picture. (Aside: Here's a fun little game to play in your head the next time you're out walking the dog—well, fun, that is, if you're an unhinged film fanatic like me: Name the worst movie ever nominated for best picture, the worst movie to win the Oscar for best picture, and the worst movie to win the Oscar for best picture that nevertheless deserved to win. For me, so far, the answers are The Hollywood Revue of 1929, Cavalcade and possibly The Sound Of Music, but I haven't made up my mind about that last one and I have thirty-two years to think it over.)

It's not just that Cavalcade is slow moving and wholly lacking in action (that's true of a lot of good movies), but it's also repetitive and uninvolving. The story follows an upper-crust British family and their downstairs servants through the first thirty years of the Twentieth Century, certainly a volatile time in world history, yet the characters—two-dimensional ciphers at best—bear only passive witness to the passing parade and if you're not already emotionally invested in such moments as the death of Queen Victoria or Louis Bleriot's flight across the English Channel, nothing that happens on screen is likely to make you care.

I'll give you an example. Two newlyweds on a ship talk about how happy they are and if they were to die that very night, well, so be it, and then they step away from the railing to retreat to their cabin and reveal a life preserver with the name (wait for it) "Titanic" stenciled on it. Fade to black and now we're on a train two years later in 1914, just hours before Britain declares war on Germany, and you just know that in a few scenes, the mother of the enthusiastic boy-soldier next to her will be reading a telegram informing her of his death.

And on and on like that, hopping from one event to the next with no insight, no character development, just another "Where were you on the morning of November 11, 1918?" sort of thing. Maybe this was a nice catharsis for a London theater audience in 1933, a chance to remember and shed a tear or two without anything on stage getting in the way. But for a 21st Century audience? It's as dry and mystifying as a chatty Christmas newsletter from a complete stranger.

Basically, it's Forrest Gump without Gump, chocolate or a plot.

So why did it win the Oscar for best picture? A lot of reasons, I think. The threat of govern- ment censor- ship, for one. You see a lot of Oscars then (and now) handed out to movies with the stale whiff of "art" about them, and this was especially true during the early sound era when Hollywood was absolutely paranoid about its worth compared to the so-called "legitimate" theater. On display as well was America's insecurity about its young culture compared to Britain's venerable old one. Once America dropped the atomic bomb in 1945, it was never insecure about anything again. But in 1933, we still felt a bit like provincial rubes sitting at the grown-up's table.

Yet another factor may have been labor unrest among the Academy's ranks. Faced with mounting losses during the Depression, the studios had just announced an across-the-board pay cut of 50% for all its employees, a move that prompted the formation of the Screen Actors Guild and the Screen Writers Guild (the latter founded by Frances Marion, Hollywood's top writer who swiftly found herself unemployed in retaliation). Many of the voters simply refused to vote for a Hollywood product and opted for the British Cavalcade instead.

Whatever the reason, what was a popular choice in 1933 is a puzzler now.

(Another aside: one of Oscar's most embarrassing moments resulted from Frank Lloyd's win as best director of Cavalcade. In announcing the win, host Will Rogers said only "It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy! Come up and get it, Frank!" Frank Capra, nominated for Lady For A Day, was halfway to the stage before he realized it was Lloyd, not he, who had won. Capra called the trip back to his seat "the longest, saddest, most shattering walk in my life." He got the last laugh, though, winning three of the suckers over the next five years.)

The categories for best actor and actress were considered upsets and their winners received only lukewarm applause from the assembled guests. Maybe it was lucky neither winner bothered to attend the ceremony.

As the title character in The Private Life of Henry VIII, Charles Laughton chewed scenery with as much gusto as the king he portrayed chewed on those big turkey legs we always associate him with, and his narrow victory (vote totals were made public) over Paul Muni was not a popular one. The Private Life of Henry VIII is actually a very fine movie, something of a British bedroom farce disguised as a history lesson, and you could just as easily call it a comedy as a drama. But I'm willing to bet it's the least seen of all of Laughton's great performances.

As for the best actress winner, it had taken Katharine Hepburn less than two years to establish a reputation for being a snooty prima donna, and her win over the popular May Robson (Lady For A Day) was a shock. Still, Morning Glory, the story of a naive country girl who takes Broadway by storm, got good reviews, and she was even better in three other movies she made between 1932 and 1933, A Bill Of Divorcement, Christopher Strong, and especially in Little Women, in which she gave not only the definitive interpretation of Louisa Mae Alcott's tomboy heroine, Jo March, but the first indispensable performance of her great and illustrious career.

(Aside number three: On March 16, 1934, when Walt Disney won the award for producing the year's best cartoon short, Three Little Pigs, he thanked the Academy for giving him an "Oscar." This was the first time the term "Oscar" was used in public to refer to an Academy Award. How about that.)

Anyway, 1932-33 was a big year, too big, in fact, to stick with the conventional Oscar awards format I've been following—too much risk of skipping over too many good movies I think you'll want to see. Since we're on the cusp of Hollywood's Golden Age, let's adopt instead the Golden Globes format, with its separate acting and best picture categories for drama and comedy/musical. And let's throw in an award for best foreign-language film, too. The Nazis may have finished off the German film industry in 1933, but the French filmmakers were flourishing and there are a lot of good foreign movies to choose from.

You okay with this set-up? Yes? Good.

Among the actors, there are a lot of first-time nominees here, too many to mention, so I'll say instead that previous Katie winner Marie Dressler gets the third and final nomination of her career (she died a year later), and Miriam Hopkins and Joan Blondell, who also have previously won, each receive their second. Paul Muni, John Barrymore, James Cagney, the Marx Brothers, Barbara Stanwyck and Adolphe Menjou also receive their second noms.

All of the directors are first-time nominees. [6/1/10 After a an online discussion with my readers, here and here, I likewise split the director nominees in the categories of drama and comedy/musical. Better too many nominees than too few.]

Other than a handful of director-producer types, no one gets nominated in more than one category; thus, you get John Barrymore as supporting actor in Dinner At Eight, his best role that year, rather than for the lead in the less well-known Counsellor-at-Law. Mostly, I wanted to spread the wealth and encourage you to see as many movies as possible—thirty-two (plus one cartoon short) in all.

But to pull that off, I fudged a handful of nominations— Jean Harlow, for one. I've nominated her in the lead actress in a comedy category, based in part on her terrific performance in Bombshell. But of the other two movies I mention, Red Dust is a drama and her role in Dinner At Eight is supporting; still, all three performances are primarily comedic, classically so, and rather than nominate her in three categories or ignore any of her great performances from this period, I lumped them all together under one umbrella.

Likewise, Kay Francis receives a nomination in the drama category for a pair of little-seen but really-good movies she did with William Powell, Jewel Robbery and One Way Passage. The latter is a romantic weeper—Powell and Francis fall in love on an ocean voyage from Hong Kong to San Francisco, neither knowing the other hasn't long to live, she because of a terminal illness, he because he faces execution for murder—but the former is more a crime-caper-comedy-romance than strictly a drama. (Powell is a suave jewel thief who plays classical music and forces his victims to smoke marijuana while he robs them; during the movie's first robbery, Francis is so taken with him, she encourages a repeat performance.) One Way Passage is the indispensable one, so into the drama category her nomination goes, but you don't want to miss Jewel Robbery if you can find it.

And then, a couple of comedy acts—Laurel and Hardy, and the Marx Brothers—I treated as single entities for the purposes of best comedy actor nominations. This may strike movie fans, who aren't primed for ensemble awards, as odd, but music fans, I think, readily grasp, for example, that the Beatles as a group is a different animal from John, Paul, George and Ringo as individual solo acts—and if you don't believe me, compare "A Day in the Life" to, say, "Ebony and Ivory." The Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy are teams and I've nominated them as teams. So there.

Finally, there's the problem of when to nominate Carl Theodor Dreyer's horror classic, Vampyr, which was filmed in 1930, first premiered in Berlin in May 1932, then after scathing reviews was substantially reworked and re-premiered in Paris in September 1932. I can't say for sure when it showed up in America (under the title Castle Of Doom) but my guess it that it was some time after that. I probably could have chosen just about any year to nominate it for a Katie Award, but I went for 1932-33 on the theory that the version Dreyer wanted the world to see was released during that time frame.

If you would have handled these issues differently, I for one won't say you're wrong.

PICTURE (Drama)
The Bitter Tea Of General Yen (prod. Frank Capra)
I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang (prod. Hal B. Wallis)
The Invisible Man (prod. Carl Laemmle, Jr.)
King Kong (prod. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack)
Red Dust (prod. Hunt Stromberg and Irving Thalberg)

PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
Dinner At Eight (prod. David O. Selznick)
Duck Soup (prod. Herman J. Mankiewicz)
42nd Street (prod. Darryl F. Zanuck)
Gold Diggers Of 1933 (prod. Jack L. Warner and Robert Lord)
Trouble In Paradise (prod. Ernst Lubitsch)

PICTURE (Foreign Language)
Boudu Saved From Drowning (prod. Michel Simon)
Liebelei (prod. Herman Millakowsky)
The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse (prod. Fritz Lang and Seymour Nebenzal)
Vampyr (prod. Carl Theodor Dreyer and Julian West)
Zero For Conduct (prod. Jean Vigo)

ACTOR (Drama)
Nils Asther (The Bitter Tea Of General Yen)
Charles Laughton (The Old Dark House, Island Of Lost Souls and The Private Life Of Henry VIII)
Paul Muni (I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang)
Claude Rains (The Invisible Man)
Paul Robeson (The Emperor Jones)

ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
James Cagney (Footlight Parade)
Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy (Sons Of The Desert)
Herbert Marshall (Trouble In Paradise)
The Marx Brothers (Horse Feathers and Duck Soup)
Michel Simon (Boudu Saved From Drowning)

ACTRESS (Drama)
Kay Francis (Jewel Robbery and One Way Passage)
Greta Garbo (Queen Christina)
Katharine Hepburn (Little Women)
Barbara Stanwyck (The Bitter Tea Of General Yen and Baby Face)
Fay Wray (The Most Dangerous Game and King Kong)

ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
Joan Blondell (The Gold Diggers Of 1933)
Jean Harlow (Red Dust, Dinner At Eight and Bombshell)
Miriam Hopkins (Trouble in Paradise and Design For Living)
May Robson (Lady For A Day)
Mae West (I'm No Angel)

DIRECTOR (Drama)
Frank Capra (The Bitter Tea Of General Yen and Lady For A Day)
Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack (King Kong)
Carl Theodor Dreyer (Vampyr)
Fritz Lang (The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse)
Mervyn LeRoy (I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang and Gold Diggers Of 1933)
Rouben Mamoulian (Love Me Tonight and Queen Christina)
James Whale (The Old Dark House and The Invisible Man)

DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
Lloyd Bacon (42nd Street and Footlight Parade)
George Cukor (Dinner At Eight and Little Women)
Victor Fleming (Red Dust and Bombshell)
Ernst Lubitsch (Trouble In Paradise and Design For Living)
Leo McCarey (Duck Soup)
Jean Renoir (Boudu Saved From Drowning)
Jean Vigo (Zero For Conduct)

SUPPORTING ACTOR
John Barrymore (Dinner At Eight)
Edward Everett Horton (Trouble In Paradise and Design For Living)
Edgar Kennedy (Duck Soup)
Guy Kibbee (Gold Diggers of 1933, Lady For A Day and Footlight Parade)
Adolphe Menjou (A Farewell To Arms)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Billie Burke (Dinner At Eight)
Marie Dressler (Dinner At Eight)
Margaret Dumont (Duck Soup)
Elsa Lanchester (The Private Life of Henry VIII)
Una O'Connor (The Invisible Man)

SCREENPLAY
Jean Renoir and Albert Valentin; from a play by René Fauchois (Boudu Saved From Drowning)
Frances Marion and Herman J. Mankiewicz; additional dialogue Donald Ogden Stewart; from a play by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber (Dinner At Eight)
Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin (Duck Soup)
Howard J. Green and Brown Holmes, from the autobiography by Robert E. Burns (I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang)
Grover Jones and Samson Raphelson; from a play by Aladar Laszlo (Trouble In Paradise)

BEST SONG (Reader Voted)
"Forty-Second Street" music by Harry Warren, lyrics by Al Dubin (42nd Street)
"The Gold Diggers Song (We're In The Money)" music by Harry Warren, lyrics by Al Dubin (Gold Diggers Of 1933)
"Isn't It Romantic" music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart (Love Me Tonight)
"Remember My Forgotten Man" music by Harry Warren, lyrics by Al Dubin (Gold Diggers Of 1933)
"Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf" music and lyrics by Frank Church and Ted Sears (Three Little Pigs)

Katie Award Nominees For 1931-32

As the Depression, now its third year, ground on with no end in sight, movie goers and Oscar voters alike flocked to a big budget spectacle about rich people behaving badly. With its fabulous, impossible art Deco sets and its foreign locale, MGM's Grand Hotel was about as far removed from the daily lives of the audiences who paid to see it as a film was likely to get. On November 18, 1932, the Academy named Grand Hotel the best movie of the year, a triumph for producer Irving Thalberg who had bought the rights to Vicki Baum's 1929 novel Menschen im Hotel and shepherded it through every stage of production, honing the screenplay, choosing the cast and putting his personal stamp on the film's every detail.

Grand Hotel won for best picture despite being the only film in Oscar history to win the top prize without receiving a single nomination in any other category. The story of five very different people—a thief, a ballerina, a factory owner, his secretary and a dying man—who meet with tragic consequences, Grand Hotel was a star-studded extravaganza, perhaps the first movie in history to boast so many stars in its cast. It was the highest grossing film of the year for MGM, one of the few studios to turn a profit during this particularly harsh year of the Depression.

The category for best actor resulted in a tie with Fredric March (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) and Wallace Beery (The Champ) sharing the award. It almost didn't turn out that way. During the ceremony itself, Norma Shearer announced March alone as the winner. Moments later, the president of the Academy, Conrad Nagel, charged on stage to announce that under Academy rules, candidates for an award who finished within three votes of each other were deemed to have tied. Beery, who had finished a single vote in back of March, came up on stage and accepted a second best actor trophy.

The only problem was, while such a rule had been in place the year before, it had been discarded before the 1932 ceremony. Stories abound regarding the backstage shenanigans that resulted in the tie, the most fun of which is that Beery was so incensed at losing to March, he went to MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer and insisted he be given an Oscar, too. Whatever the story, by 1935, the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse would begin tabulating and certifying the results, another step out of Louis B. Mayer's smoke-filled office into the fresh air of Oscar democracy.

The best actress trophy went to Helen Hayes, a Broadway legend making her film debut in The Sin of Madelon Claudet, a 75-minute super-soaper about a woman who has a child out of wedlock and then endures unimaginable hardships to care for a son who doesn't know she exists. Her performance was a bit stagy and theatrical, not bad but not great, and she had better work in her.

Taken in the context of the times, the Academy's choice was not surprising. In light of the growing threat of state and federal censorship as well as Hollywood's insecurity about the artistic value of its product, it's understandable that the Academy's voters would latch onto any opportunity to enhance the prestige of the industry. The top Broadway actress of 1931 choosing to make a movie would be analogous to Meryl Streep deciding today to do porn—it wouldn't matter if the results seared your retinas and sent you screaming for the exits, she'd win the adult video industry's equivalent of the best actress award just for legitimizing a popular but decidedly unrespected medium.

The only real horror among the major winners was Frank Borzage who picked up his second career Oscar, this time for directing Bad Girl. It's the story of a couple struggling through Depression-era difficulties and while it's not quite as bad as its reputation, neither is it particularly remarkable either. It starts promisingly enough—a jaded girl meets a cranky radio salesman, gets pregnant, then gets married—and for half an hour, I thought Bad Girl might turn out to be a talkie version of The Crowd, a character-driven study of the dark side of the American Dream. But instead, the last hour resolves into an idiot plot and fizzles out, a damp squib now deservedly forgotten.

Jon Mullich calls Borzage's effort "hack work" and chalks up the award to social connections. That's stating the case pretty strongly, but the fact is, the Academy had nominated King Vidor (The Champ) and Josef von Sternberg (Shanghai Express), two great directors who never won an Oscar, and could have nominated James Whale (Frankenstein), Edmund Goulding (Grand Hotel), Howard Hawks (Scarface) and Rouben Mamoulian (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) who that year had made movies more commercial, more artistic and more interesting than what Borzage served up. At most all you can say is that the chord Bad Girl undeniably struck with audiences in 1931 has long since ceased to reverberate and there's little chance the modern movie fan will make sense of Borzage's award.

As good a choice as Grand Hotel was for best picture, the Academy's prejudice against comedy, horror and gangster movies kept it from recognizing such eligible films as Frankenstein, Monkey Business and Scarface, classics which between them received no nominations at all. The Katie Awards are designed to rectify just such glaring oversights.

As I was putting together my list of nominees, I wrestled with a number of questions—what to do with the cast of Grand Hotel, for one. Perhaps the first movie ever boasting an all-star cast, Grand Hotel ostensibly had five leads; yet except for the possible exception of John Barrymore, no one is on screen long enough or is involved enough in each of the plot's various threads to warrant the designation lead actor.

The Academy apparently didn't know what to do with them either and in the end nominated none of them.

These days, whether a studio pushes an actor in a lead or supporting category is more about billing and star egos than about the actual nature of the role in question. Me, I don't actually have to work with any of these people so despite their star status, I'm treating the members of this ensemble cast as supporting performers and have nominated three of them, Barrymore brothers John and Lionel, as well as Joan Crawford, in the supporting categories. Wallace Beery, who has already won a Katie award for his performance in The Big House, gets his third nom for The Champ. The fifth star of Grand Hotel, Greta Garbo who so famously begged "I vant to be alone," will have to wait another year for a Katie nomination, in her case 1933's Queen Christina.

Another question for me involved the Marx Brothers, no doubt the greatest comedy team of all time, who put on another great show, this time in Monkey Business, the first of their films not based on a Broadway stage play. I think the work of Groucho, Chico and Harpo during their years with Paramount Pictures was uniformly terrific, but despite their very different strengths, I think of them not as separate individuals but as a team, each playing an important part of a whole, even Zeppo, whose role as long-suffering straight man was filled by Allan Jones after the brothers moved to MGM. I could nominate them separately, with perhaps Groucho Marx in the lead actor role and his brothers as supporting players, but in the end I decided that these are my awards, I make the rules. I've nominated the Marx Brothers as a single contestant in the best actor category.

You might notice as you scroll down the list of nominees that I've nominated Norma Shearer for her comedic performance in Private Lives. Those of you who have been following this blog from the beginning probably know I'm no fan of her work. Yet, I would be doing you a disservice not to recognize that she was a big star in the 1930s and that she has legions of fans to this day. Private Lives, though little known now, was for my money the best performance of her career, perfectly suited to her personality and talents. She winds up with a nomination for best actress.

You may also notice I am breaking with this blog's tradition of nominating five movies for best picture and three nominees in each of the other categories. As you may remember, I recently conducted a poll to name the fifth nominee (see here) and wound up with a three-way tie. Rather than hold a run-off over the Christmas holidays, I decided in the spirit of the season to be generous and expand the field to include seven movies. Certainly if the Academy could nominate eight in 1931-32 (and ten this year), I can nominate seven.

Note: I subsequently went back and expanded the field of actor and actress nominees to four each.

I also expanded the other categories, in some instances, to include as many as five nominees. All I promise in the future is to nominate at least three in each category, but will allow for as many nominees as it takes to give you a well-rounded picture of the movie year as a whole. After all, the point of the Katie Awards is not to prove I'm right, but to entice you into expanding your movie repertoire. If I have to nominate a hundred movies to convince you to see something worthwhile that you might have otherwise missed, I see that as a small price to pay. Certainly I'm not worried about my integrity—anyone who practices law for any length of time has had to abandon all pretense of that. I am perfectly willing to humble myself in this greatest of all causes.

Here are the nominees:

PICTURE
À Nous La Liberté (prod. Frank Clifford)
Frankenstein (prod. Carl Laemmle, Jr.)
Freaks (prod. Tod Browning)
Grand Hotel (prod. Irving Thalberg)
Monkey Business (prod. Herman J. Mankiewicz)
Scarface (prod. Howard Hughes)
Waterloo Bridge (prod. Carl Laemmle Jr.)

ACTOR
Wallace Beery (The Champ)
Fredric March (Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde)
The Marx Brothers (Monkey Business)
Paul Muni (Scarface)

ACTRESS
Mae Clarke (Waterloo Bridge)
Marlene Dietrich (Shanghai Express)
Norma Shearer (Private Lives)
Barbara Stanwyck (The Miracle Woman)

DIRECTOR
René Clair (À Nous La Liberté)
Edmund Goulding (Grand Hotel)
Howard Hawks (Scarface)
Rouben Mamoulian (Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde)
James Whale (Frankenstein)

SUPPORTING ACTOR
John Barrymore (Grand Hotel)
Lionel Barrymore (Grand Hotel)
Boris Karloff (Frankenstein)
Roland Young (The Guardsman and One Hour With You)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Joan Crawford (Grand Hotel)
Ann Dvorak (Scarface)
Miriam Hopkins (The Smiling Lieutenant and Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde)
Anna May Wong (Shanghai Express)

SCREENPLAY
René Clair (À Nous La Liberté)
Frances Marion (story), Leonard Praskins (dialogue continuity) and Wanda Tuchock (additional dialogue) (The Champ)
Christa Winsloe and Friedrich Dammann (as F.D. Andam); from the play by Christa Winsloe (Mädchen in Uniform)
S.J. Perelman and Will B. Johnstone (screenplay); Arthur Sheekman (additional dialogue) (Monkey Business)
Ben Hecht; continuity and dialogue by Seton I. Miller, John Lee Mahin and W.R. Burnett; from a novel by Armitage Trail (Scarface)

Bonus Feature: For the 1932 Oscar ceremony, Walt Disney produced a brief animated short featuring the year's Oscar nominees, which I found on the blog "Motion Picture Gems." "Tom" listed the identity of the caricatures as follows: "1.Wallace Beery (as "The Champ") - Won Best Actor (tied with Frederic March) 2.Jackie Cooper ("The Champ") (nominated the year earlier for "Skippy") 3.Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt (both nominated for "The Guardsman") 4.Helen Hayes ("The Sin of Madelon Claudet") - Won Best Actress 5.Frederic March ("Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde") - Won Best Actor (tied with Wallace Beery) 6.Marie Dressler ("Emma") - Nominated for Best Actress"

I present Disney's "Parade of the Award Nominees" here with an introduction from Leonard Maltin for your viewing pleasure.



Postscript: Since returning from Philadelphia the day after Christmas, I've posted some ten thousand words including the four-part essay on Chaplin's City Lights which I wrote from a standing start in as many days. And now, I'm taking a couple of days off. See you next week.

Katie Award Nominees For 1930-31

August 1, 1930-to-July 31, 1931, was one of those movie years where looking at the list of the Academy's nominees and winners, you'd walk away with a completely distorted idea of what was actually going on in movie history.

1931 was a pivotal year. James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and Clark Gable all went from bit players to stars within the space of twelve months and in so doing, they gave the cinema a distinctly American feel for the first time. Instead of actors aping polished stage performers with British or faux-British accents, audiences heard for the first time the inflections and rhythms of urban wise guys like Cagney and Gable, or in the case of Robinson, who was born in Romania and raised in New York's Lower East Side, the voice of the American immigrant experience.

It was also the year of the gangster picture, a genre that dominated the rest of the 1930s. The Public Enemy and Little Caesar, starring Cagney and Robinson, respectively, proved to be big, if controversial, hits with critics and audiences both. Censors were not so thrilled, however, contending that the films (and Howard Hawks's Scarface the following year) glamorized crime, and Hollywood, as usual, proved to be of two minds on the subject, happy to bank the money that was rolling in while paying lip service at Oscar time to the notion that gangster pictures were bad for us.

It was the same story with Universal's cycle of great horror pictures, which began in 1931 with Dracula, and continued in November of that year (too late for a Katie nomination) with Frankenstein. Their stars, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, would dominate the genre and box office for years to come without either ever receiving any recognition from the Academy.

There was also the groundbreaking Western The Big Trail, starring an impossibly young John Wayne and featuring the first widescreen movie in history; two Joans—Blondell and Crawford—established themselves as major stars; and René Clair followed a winning lottery ticket from hand to hand in the French comedy Le Million.

And, of course, Groucho Marx gave us what was perhaps the most famous monologue of his career, confessing to audiences, "One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know."

If, however, you look at the list of winners and nominees from the Academy Award ceremony held on November 10, 1931, you won't see any of these films or performers. It wasn't the first time the Oscars would prove to be so clueless, nor the last. But if you care about this sort of thing, it's galling nevertheless.

Admittedly, although the Academy failed to recognize the revolution in their midst, the only truly inexplicable award was giving Norman Taurog the Oscar for direction. Skippy is a pleasant enough comedy with a fine performance from child star Jackie Cooper, but in terms of what went on in the director's chair, it isn't much unless you count Taurog's threat to shoot Cooper's dog if the kid didn't cry on cue (he cried buckets and earned an Oscar nomination). Nothing compared to the accomplishments of Charles Chaplin and René Clair, who were eligible for the award, or Josef von Sternberg and Lewis Milestone, who were actually nominated.

Not to mention Taurog might be the worst director to ever win the award—aside from nabbing the Oscar itself, Taurog is mostly remembered now for directing, among other things, nine Elvis Presley movies (and not the good ones either). Well, okay, he directed Boys Town, I'll give him that. But that hardly makes up for Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine.

The award for best picture went to the now largely reviled Cimarron. Based on Edna Ferber's prize-winning novel, it's actually a pretty entertaining yarn as historical potboilers go, and if I don't think it's the best movie of the year, I do think it's unjustly underrated.

The story begins in 1889 with the Oklahoma Land Rush—where 50,000 people lined up at the border of Oklahoma and raced to claim the two million acres the U.S. government had opened up for settlement, a perfectly insane way to parcel out land—and ends in 1930 with the descendants of these settlers marinating in oil money. (The movie is mute on the question of how the Indian tribes who were living in Oklahoma at the time of the Land Rush felt about having their homes stolen out from under them. Reportedly, when the tribes complained the action violated long-standing treaty obligations, President Benjamin Harrison replied, "You f*cked up! You trusted us!") Plenty of people in the audience would have been old enough to remember the events depicted, which were roughly as distant in time to them as the moon landing is to us, and the movie was a popular hit.

As hard as it is to believe, given that the intervening years gave us Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, Red River, Shane, The Searchers, Rio Bravo, The Magnificent Seven, The Good The Bad And The Ugly, The Wild Bunch and many, many more, Cimarron was the last Western to win the Oscar for best picture until Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves in 1991, and if you ever wonder what motivates otherwise seemingly sane people to start handing out crazy alternate Oscars like the Katies, there's a good part of your answer right there.

Cimarron was also the first of five Oscar nominations for Irene Dunne (no wins)—she lost to Marie Dressler in Min and Bill, one of the best performances of Dressler's career (I gave her a Katie for her supporting performance in Anna Christie just last year).

Lionel Barrymore won for best actor in A Free Soul, which was not just the only win of his career, but his only acting nomination (he got a best director nom the year before with Madame X). I have one problem with his win though: he's only the second best actor in the film, behind Clark Gable in a star-making performance.

The writing awards went to John Monk Saunders (for his original story, The Dawn Patrol) and Howard Estabrook (for his adaptation of the aforementioned Cimarron). Director Howard Hawks said later that Saunders hadn't written any of The Dawn Patrol, claiming instead that Saunders received $10,000 to attach his famous name to the screenplay to help Hawks get studio backing for the project. You can't prove it by me one way or the other.

Finally, I'll mention Fritz Lang's crime thriller, M, which premiered in Berlin on May 11, 1931. It didn't arrive on America's shores until 1933 and thus wasn't eligible for an Oscar this year, but when it comes to handing out Katies, I prefer to nominate them at the time of their initial release —gives you a better idea of their place in film history. I think that even if a general American audience hadn't seen it, the ideas and techniques Lang used in M were already percolating through the bedrock of Hollywood and had already influenced the movies by the time it officially premiered here. Thus, the three Katie nominations for M here rather than in 1933.

These are my nominees:

PICTURE
Animal Crackers (prod. Adolph Zukor)
City Lights (prod. Charles Chaplin)
Dracula (prod. Tod Browning and Carl Laemmle, Jr.)
M (prod. Seymour Nebenzal)
Le Million (prod. Frank Clifford)

ACTOR
James Cagney (The Public Enemy)
Charles Chaplin (City Lights)
Bela Lugosi (Dracula)
The Marx Brothers (Animal Crackers)
Edward G. Robinson (Little Caesar)

ACTRESS
Joan Crawford (Dance, Fools, Dance)
Marlene Dietrich (Morocco)
Marie Dressler (Min and Bill)
Irene Dunne (Cimarron)
Norma Shearer (A Free Soul)

DIRECTOR
Charles Chaplin (City Lights)
René Clair (Le Million)
Fritz Lang (M)

SUPPORTING ACTOR
Clark Gable (A Free Soul)
Peter Lorre (M)
Adolphe Menjou (The Front Page)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Joan Blondell (Sinners' Holiday, Other Men's Women and Night Nurse)
Margaret Dumont (Animal Crackers)
Sylvia Sidney (An American Tragedy)

SCREENPLAY
Morrie Ryskind (Animal Crackers)
Charles Chaplin (City Lights)
René Clair (Le Million)

The Katie Award Nominees For 1929-30

Six days after the April 3, 1930 Oscar ceremony in honor of the best movies of 1928-29—a public-relations debacle where a five-member panel of Louis B. Mayer's hand-chosen lackeys handed all the statues to insiders and Mayer's own entry for best picture—the Academy junked the Central Board of Judges and for the first time set in place procedures to leave the task of selecting winners to the full membership of the Academy itself. They didn't wait long to see the results of the new system, holding the next ceremony just seven months later, the only time in Oscar history awards were handed out twice in the same calendar year.

For a first exercise in democracy, the Academy did pretty well.

All Quiet On The Western Front, not just the best picture of the year, but one of the best pictures of any year, won both the top prize and an Oscar for its director, Lewis Milestone, the second Oscar of his career. George Arliss was the best actor with a solid performance in Disraeli, a role he had first crafted on Broadway. And The Big House, a highly-regarded prison drama, nabbed a pair of awards, one for legendary screenwriter Frances Marion, the other for sound editor Douglas Shearer, the first of his fourteen career Oscars.

The only controversy was generated by Norma Shearer's win for best actress in the movie The Divorcee. "What do you expect," said Joan Crawford afterwards. "She sleeps with the boss," referring to powerful MGM producer Irving Thalberg.

Whether you agree with Crawford's assessment may depend in part on your opinion of Shearer's abilities as an actress. Katie-Bar-The-Door can't stand her, but judging by the number of complimentary postings about her on various sites, somebody must love her. I myself have, at best, mixed feelings about Norma Shearer and will later share them at some length in a pair of postings, one about Shearer the actress, the other about Shearer and Thalberg as Hollywood's quintessential power couple.

As I put together my own list of Katie Award nominees, I realized that my only problem with All Quiet On The Western Front was that it was so good it obscured the fact that overall, 1929-30 was a very weak year for movies. Silent movies had all but disappeared from theaters, but unfortunately, the talkies that replaced them were saddled with a primitive technology that practically bolted the camera and the actors to the floor. Moreover, most directors clearly had no idea what to do with sound, treating it as a novelty rather than an opportunity, sticking in a song or two, or worse going overboard and cramming every nook and cranny with talk-talk-talk.

To fill out the roster of nominees, I had to range far and wide, drawing heavily from the German film industry for three best picture nominees and from the few remaining silent pictures for nominees in the acting and screenwriting categories. As for nominees from the pool of sound pictures, at times I based my picks as much on how well they overcame the limitations of the new medium as on their objective merits. But I believe that by the time I am done handing out Katies to this year's crop of nominees, the winners will be those who have established their worth through the ages.

At least I hope so.

PICTURE:
All Quiet On The Western Front (prod. Carl Laemmle, Jr.)
The Blue Angel (prod. Erich Pommer)
Diary Of A Lost Girl (prod. Georg Wilhelm Pabst)
Hallelujah! (prod. King Vidor)
Pandora's Box (prod. Heinz Landsmann)

ACTOR:
Lew Ayres (All Quiet On The Western Front)
Maurice Chevalier (The Love Parade)
Ronald Colman (Bulldog Drummond)
Gary Cooper (The Virginian)

ACTRESS:
Louise Brooks (Diary Of A Lost Girl and Pandora's Box)
Marlene Dietrich (The Blue Angel)
Greta Garbo (Anna Christie)
Jeanette MacDonald (The Love Parade)

DIRECTOR:
Lewis Milestone (All Quiet On The Western Front)
Josef von Sternberg (The Blue Angel)
King Vidor (Hallelujah!)

SUPPORTING ACTOR:
Wallace Beery (The Big House)
Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (Our Modern Maidens)
Louis Wolheim (All Quiet On The Western Front)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS:
Marie Dressler (Anna Christie)
Nina Mae McKinney (Hallelujah!)
Seena Owen (Queen Kelly)

SCREENPLAY:
George Abbott, Maxwell Anderson and Del Andrews (All Quiet On The Western Front)
Elliott Lester; adaptation and scenario by Marion Orth and Gerthold Viertel; titles by H.H. Caldwell and Katherine Hilliker (City Girl)
Frances Marion; additional dialogue by Joseph Farnham and Martin Flavin (The Big House)

The Katie Award Nominees For 1928-29

If the Academy was in the ballpark the first year it handed out Oscars, it completely blew it the next. This year the winners were chosen by a five-member panel—The Central Board of Judges—and while the previous year's smoke-filled room used the awards to settle scores and promote their own interests, at least they felt the need to pretend they were motivated by artistic concerns. This year the panel seemed interested only in handing out awards to the Academy's founders and the man who hand-picked them for the job, Louis B. Mayer.

It was not until the following year that the full membership of the Academy voted on the awards.

The Broadway Melody is one of the weakest best picture winners ever, and that's saying something. It's the story of two sisters who go to New York and fall for the same guy. As musicals go, it did feature the classic title tune, but the story is trite and the acting, especially among the supporting cast, is too awful to be believed.

At least the Board of Judges made Mayer happy—it was his studio, MGM, that produced The Broadway Melody.

Another two of the top awards went to co-founders of the Academy. Mary Pickford, who won the Katie as best actress in 1927-28, took home the best actress trophy for her first talkie, Coquette. Audiences flocked to see "America's Sweetheart" talk for the first time but critics reviled her performance and only the first Oscar campaign in history secured the award.

Likewise, best director Frank Lloyd, who won for the dull and overly-long The Divine Lady, was one of the founding members of the Academy and his win raised eyebrows among the press.

As for the best actor winner, I encourage you to go to Turner Classic Movies and watch some clips of Warner Baxter's performance as the Cisco Kid from In Old Arizona. If your head doesn't explode, you're made of sterner stuff than I am. Check out the clip entitled "Ham and Eggs." Ostensibly, the ham refers to the Kid's breakfast, but don't you believe it.

Two of the Academy's choices, best screenplay winner, The Patriot, an Ernst Lubitsch movie which also provided a best actor nominee, and The Bridge Of San Luis Rey, which earned MGM set designer Cedric Gibbons the first of eleven Oscars (he was nominated thirty-nine times), have both been lost. That is, unfortunately, an all too common story when it comes to the early history of motion pictures—Hollywood took no care when it came to preserving these early films and let thousands of movies deteriorate or vanish altogether. Aside from losing irreplaceable works of art, Hollywood's negligence makes my task of handing out coveted Katie awards all the more difficult. They have a lot to answer for.

Hopefully, this round of Katie awards will improve on the Academy's choices. At least I don't owe Louis B. Mayer anything.

The nominees for the 1928-29 Katie Awards are:

PICTURE:
The Cameraman (prod. Buster Keaton)
The Docks Of New York (prod. J.G. Bachmann)
The Passion Of Joan Of Arc (prod. Société générale des films)
Steamboat Bill, Jr. (prod. Joseph M. Schenck)
The Wind (prod. Victor Sjöström)

ACTOR:
George Bancroft (The Docks Of New York)
Douglas Fairbanks (The Iron Mask)
Buster Keaton (Steamboat Bill, Jr.)
Erich von Stroheim (The Wedding March)

ACTRESS:
Marion Davies (Show People)
Maria Falconetti (The Passion Of Joan Of Arc)
Lillian Gish (The Wind)
Bessie Love (The Broadway Melody)

DIRECTOR:
Luis Buñuel (Un Chien Andalou)
Carl Theodor Dreyer (The Passion Of Joan Of Arc)
Victor Sjöström (The Wind)

SUPPORTING ACTOR:
Wallace Beery (Beggars Of Life)
Lewis Stone (A Woman Of Affairs)
Ernest Torrence (Steamboat Bill, Jr.)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS:
Olga Baclanova (The Docks Of New York)
Mary Nolan (West Of Zanzibar)
Anita Page (Our Dancing Daughters)

SCREENPLAY:
Jules Furthman; story by John Monk Saunders (The Docks Of New York)
Joseph Delteil and Carl Theodor Dreyer (The Passion Of Joan Of Arc)
Frances Marion (The Wind)

I'll start handing out Katies a couple of days from now, beginning with Best Screenplay ...

A Little More Housekeeping: Katie Award Nominees For 1927-28

Again, more housekeeping, retroactively listing the Katie Award nominees for 1927-28. The winners, in case you've forgotten, are here. I'll be back on track with my next blog entry, an essay about Jean Hersholt (and Gary Cooper).

PICTURE:
The Circus (prod. Charles Chaplin)
Laugh, Clown, Laugh (prod. Herbert Brenon)
The Man Who Laughs (prod. Paul Kohner)
Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (prod. William Fox)
Wings (prod. Lucien Hubbard)

ACTOR:
Lon Chaney (Laugh, Clown, Laugh)
Charles Chaplin (The Circus)
Al Jolson (The Jazz Singer)
Harold Lloyd (Skippy)
Conrad Veidt (The Man Who Laughs)

ACTRESS:
Eleanor Boardman (The Crowd)
Marion Davies (The Patsy)
Janet Gaynor (7th Heaven and Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans)
Mary Pickford (My Best Girl)
Gloria Swanson (Sadie Thompson)

DIRECTOR:
Charles Chaplin (The Circus)
F.W. Murnau (Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans)
William A. Wellman (Wings)

SUPPORTING ACTOR:
Lionel Barrymore (Sadie Thompson)
Gary Cooper (Wings)
Jean Hersholt (The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS:
Clara Bow (Wings)
Gladys Brockwell (Seventh Heaven)
Mary Philbin (The Man Who Laughs)

SCREENPLAY:
King Vidor and John V.A. Weaver; titles by Joseph Farnham (The Crowd)
Elizabeth Meehan; titles by Joseph Farnham (Laugh, Clown, Laugh)
Raoul Walsh; titles by C. Gardner Sullivan (Sadie Thompson)