The title of the post pretty much says it all, doesn't it. Ronald Colman was my choice for best actor of 1929-30 for his lead role in the mystery Bulldog Drummond. To review it for this blog, I had to buy the movie on VHS tape for 48¢, but you can see it now (with limited commercial interruption) on Hulu—or better yet, right here.
In case you've forgotten what I had to say on the subject, here are some excerpts from my essay:
The story, ostensibly a mystery, is mostly an excuse for some lighthearted fun. Capt. Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond—mustered out of the army at the end of World War I, and "too rich to work, too intelligent to play, much"—is bored with his aimless existence. "I wish somebody would throw a bomb and wake this place up," he grouses at the funereal gentleman's club where he passes his days. On a lark, he places an advertisement in the London Times seeking adventure. "Legitimate, if possible, but crime of humorous description, no objection. Reply at once." And replies he receives, piles of them. ... For Colman, the result was a smash hit, an Oscar nomination and a long, successful career. ... Bulldog Drummond is mostly a comedic mystery, the kind where the hero pauses to make a wisecrack in the face of certain death, but make no mistake, Drummond is as quick with a gun as he is with a quip and in a scene more reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino than early Hollywood, strangles one of his adversaries with his bare hands.
Admittedly, the eighty year old film creaks with the burdens of early sound technology and a supporting cast uncomfortable speaking lines for the first time, and it may be difficult to appreciate it looking backward through the prism of all that came after but without it, we may never have enjoyed all the fun-stupid movies it influenced and it was certainly highly-regarded in its day. In addition to a pair of Oscar nods, the New York Times, the National Board of Review and Film Daily magazine all included Bulldog Drummond on their lists of the ten best movies of 1929.
Anyway, judge for yourself. Without further ado, Ronald Colman in Bulldog Drummond:
If you want to see silent film star Lillian Gish in the performance that won her a Katie, tune in Wednesday, October 14, 2009 at 12:45 p.m. EDT for Turner Classic Movies' presentation of The Wind. And if you show up early (say, 7 a.m. early), you can watch Lillian Gish all day long. I also recommend The Scarlet Letter, one of Gish's best silent movies. The White Sister also has a stellar reputation and it co-stars Ronald Colman in his breakthrough performance.
Finally, you might want to see Duel in the Sun at 5:30 p.m. You can watch legendary producer David O. Selznick's career come unglued before your very eyes with this trash-tastic potboiler designed to show off the talents of his future wife, Jennifer Jones, who despite an Oscar, didn't have any. Critics dubbed this crapfest "Lust in the Dust," but audiences ate it up and Gish received her only Oscar nomination for her supporting performance. It's a pity, really.
Check it out.
From the TCM website:
7:00am [Silent] White Sister, The (1923) Thinking her lover was killed in the war, a young woman becomes a nun. Cast: Lillian Gish, Ronald Colman, Gail Kane, J. Barney Sherry Dir: Henry King BW-135 mins
9:15am [Epic] La Boheme (1926) In this silent film, a starving artist falls in love with a sickly seamstress in 19th-century Paris. Cast: Lillian Gish, John Gilbert, Renee Adoree. Dir: King Vidor. BW-94 mins
11:00am [Silent] Scarlet Letter, The (1926) In this silent film version of the classic tale, a single mother in Puritan New England bears her shame alone rather than expose the child's father. Cast: Lillian Gish, Lars Hanson, Henry B. Walthall, Karl Dane Dir: Victor Seastrom BW-98 mins
12:45pm [Silent] Wind, The (1928) In this silent film, a sheltered southern girl fights to adapt to the rough-and-tumble life of the wild West. Cast: Lillian Gish, Lars Hanson, Montagu Love, Dorothy Cumming Dir: Victor Seastrom BW-82 mins
2:15pm [Comedy] One Romantic Night (1930) A princess engaged to a prince falls for her brother's tutor. Cast: Lillian Gish, Rod La Rocque, Conrad Nagel, Marie Dressler Dir: Paul L. Stein BW-108 mins
3:45pm [War] Commandos Strike At Dawn, The (1942) A Norwegian refugee leads the British in an attack against his country's Nazi invaders. Cast: Paul Muni, Anna Lee, Lillian Gish. Dir: John Farrow. BW-100 mins
5:30pm [Western] Duel In The Sun (1946) A fiery half-breed comes between a rancher's good and evil sons. Cast: Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten, Gregory Peck, Lionel Barrymore Dir: King Vidor C-144 mins
Picture:All Quiet On The Western Front (prod. Carl Laemmle, Jr.) Actor: Ronald Colman (Bulldog Drummond) Actress: Louise Brooks (Pandora's Box and Diary Of A Lost Girl) Director: Lewis Milestone (All Quiet On The Western Front) Supporting Actor: Wallace Beery (The Big House) Supporting Actress: Marie Dressler (Anna Christie) Screenplay: George Abbott, Maxwell Anderson and Dell Andrews (All Quiet On The Western Front) Special Awards: Hallelujah! (prod. King Vidor) (Best Picture-Comedy or Musical); Maurice Chevalier (The Love Parade) (Best Actor-Comedy/Musical); Jeanette MacDonald (The Love Parade) (Best Actress-Comedy/Musical); "Swanee Shuffle" (Hallelujah!) and "Falling In Love Again" (The Blue Angel) (Best Song); Arthur Edeson (All Quiet On The Western Front) (Cinematography); Rouben Mamoulian (Applause) and C. Roy Hunter and Lewis Milestone (All Quiet On The Western Front) (Special Achievement In The Use Of Sound) Must-See:All Quiet On The Western Front; The Big House; The Blue Angel; The Cocoanuts; Diary Of A Lost Girl; Hallelujah!; Pandora's Box
"Must see" in this case depends on what you mean by must. If it means "boy, you're absolutely going to want to see it no matter whether you're a casual movie goer or a film fanatic," then we're talking All Quiet On The Western Front and possibly nothing else. It's not just an intense, insightful and historically important movie, it's also one of the most entertaining and watchable movies of the entire era. I've written about it at length here, here and here.
If, on the other hand, by "must see" you mean "what you'll need to see to get a real sense of this moment in movie history and prepare you for what comes next," then I'd say the movies on the above list would do you.
Pandora's Box and Diary Of A Lost Girl show Louise Brooks at her peak. The Big House was Hollywood's first great prison drama, it's packed with action and it features a career-making performance by Wallace Beery. The Blue Angel and The Cocoanuts introduced Marlene Dietrich and the Marx Brothers, respectively, to audiences for the first time. And Hallelujah!, the King Vidor musical starring an all-black cast gives you a chance to see talent, particularly Nina Mae McKinney, that thanks to Hollywood's racism you might never see again.
After that there are a handful of movies I'd give thumbs up to without necessarily calling them essential.
Anna Christie, Bulldog Drummond and The Love Parade I've written about, although in the case of the latter, not extensively. Judging by my readers' reaction to Maurice Chevalier, perhaps that's a good thing.
Our Modern Maidens, which along with Our Dancing Daughters and Our Blushing Brides forms what I'd call Joan Crawford's Flapper Trilogy, is a slight but amusing tale of rich kids in formalwear dancing, drinking and, in general, behaving badly. The only downside is that apparently the trilogy is nearly impossible to come by. None are available on DVD and Our Dancing Daughters, the best of the bunch, is selling for nearly fifty bucks as a VHS tape. I happened to catch all three one weekend on YouTube before they were deleted again, not knowing how lucky I was. If any of them show up again, I'll let you know.
Under The Roofs Of Paris is René Clair's oddball French comedy about a few weeks in the lives of four young Parisians—a street singer, the girl he fancies, her abusive beau and a pickpocket. Clair obviously hadn't quite made up his mind how he felt about the introduction of sound into movies and this is a combination musical, silent pantomime and slap-and-tickle love story that amounts to exactly nothing, like drinking and people-watching in an all-night café. But sometimes drinking and people-watching can be an awfully pleasant way to pass ninety minutes and, if you're like me and that's your idea of a good time, so is Under The Roofs Of Paris.
Raffles is an amusing caper flick starring best actor winner Ronald Colman as a retired safecracker who must elude the police one more time to save a friend from ruin. Raffles's nickname, "The Amateur Cracksman," makes him sound more like the star of a straight-to-video porn movie but it's actually a pretty nifty showcase for Ronald Colman and is readily available on YouTube.
You might also check out The Virginian, Gary Cooper's first talkie (which gave us the oft-misquoted line, "If you're going to call me that, smile!"), and Rouben Mamoulian's Applause, starring Helen Morgan as a stripper who reunites with her convent-raised daughter.
And finally, you may recall that I mentioned Man With The Movie Camera during my two-part discussion of the avant garde movies of the late 1920s. This experiment in film editing by Russian Dziga Vertov is highly regarded by some, including Roger Ebert. Not by me, though.
One problem with following the split-year format the Academy used for the first six years it handed out Oscars is that it obscures the fact that between the release of The Jazz Singer on October 6, 1927, and the premiere of Frankenstein on November 21, 1931, Hollywood only produced one truly great talking picture, and that was All Quiet On The Western Front. Everything else I've written about so far is either silent, foreign or flawed.
The next set of awards won't change things much—1930-31 pretty much shakes out as a three-way slugfest between Charles Chaplin's silent masterpiece City Lights and two foreign-language films, M, Fritz Lang's portrait of a serial killer, and Le Million, René Clair's delightful musical comedy—but at least the stars who eventually gave us the great movies of the Early Sound Era (Cagney, Robinson, Gable, Crawford, Stanwyck, Blondell, etc.) finally make their mark.
The story of the leap from silent to sound pictures is so often one of career-ending failure that it's nice to read from time to time about one of the successes. Ronald Colman may well have made the most successful leap of all and he's my choice for the best actor of 1929-30.
Movie buffs now largely remember Ronald Colman for the dulcet tones of his melodious voice, one the best voices in film history, and trying to imagine him in a silent movie is like imagining Superman without his cape, but in fact, Colman was a silent film star, exuding that same jaunty confidence with a shrug of his shoulders, with the tilt of his head, without speaking. You'd think adding the voice would cement the deal, but it just as easily could have gone wrong—can you picture Ronald Colman as, say, a cowboy?—and it was important to prepare the audience for his refined, English stage actor voice.
Unlike studio chiefs Louis B. Mayer and B.P. Schulberg, who had wrecked the careers of silent legends John Gilbert and Clara Bow, respectively, with inferior first talkies, Samuel Goldwyn spared no expense in creating the right vehicle for Colman. Bulldog Drummond, a big budget mystery based on a popular stageplay by Herman McNeile (who wrote under the pseudonym "Sapper"), proved to be the perfect combination of comedy, romance and adventure to showcase the best of Colman's talents.
To direct, Goldwyn selected F. Richard Jones, a veteran of sixty-one films, including the Douglas Fairbanks adventure classic The Gaucho. Gregg Toland (Citizen Kane) and George Barnes (Rebecca) provided the cinematography and William Cameron Menzies justly earned an Oscar nomination for his looming, Expressionistic set design. Sidney Howard, who later won an Oscar for Gone With The Wind, wrote the screenplay.
For Colman, the result was a smash hit, an Oscar nomination and a long, successful career.
"Those who are wont to fling flip comments against talking pictures," the New York Times wrote after the movie's premiere, "had better spend an evening at the Apollo Theatre, where Samuel Goldwyn last night presented before an appreciative gathering his audible pictorial translation of that clever light melodrama, Bulldog Drummond. It is the happiest and most enjoyable entertainment of its kind that has so far reached the screen."
While many actors in the early talkies sounded as if they were speaking English for the first time (some of them probably were), Colman arrived fully-formed on the screen with an energy and pacing and cheeky comfort level audiences wouldn't see in other actors for another couple of years. His performance was a sensation, both at the box office and with the critics, and I think he might have won the Oscar if Academy voters hadn't demonstrated an all too familiar mindset, bestowing the award on George Arliss for what they perceived as a more "important" film, Disraeli.
The story, ostensibly a mystery, is mostly an excuse for some lighthearted fun. Capt. Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond—mustered out of the army at the end of World War I, and "too rich to work, too intelligent to play, much"—is bored with his aimless existence. "I wish somebody would throw a bomb and wake this place up," he grouses at the funereal gentleman's club where he passes his days. On a lark, he places an advertisement in the London Times seeking adventure. "Legitimate, if possible, but crime of humorous description, no objection. Reply at once." And replies he receives, piles of them.
"Here's one from a woman whose husband raises pedigree goldfish," says his upper-crust sidekick Algy (Claud Allister), who makes Bertie Wooster look like Charles Bronson. "She wants you to kill either the husband or the goldfish."
But the plea that piques Drummond's interest is from a young woman who is in "hideous danger," just the sort of adventure he's looking for, and imagining she's "dark, voluptuous and dramatic," orders his valet to pack his pajamas, his toothbrush and a gun. "On second thought," he says, thinking of the woman, "never mind the pajamas."
Colman's performance sets the tone for generations of wisecracking detectives to come, from Nick Charles to James Bond (and indeed, Ian Fleming later acknowledged the influence).
Drummond and his client (a blonde, voluptuous and overly-dramatic Joan Bennett in her first film) rendezvous in an out-of-the-way inn at midnight, where she tells a tale of a kidnapped uncle stashed away in an asylum. Drummond thinks the girl is delusional until the asylum's director, Dr. Lakington (played by Lawrence Grant, who more than any other cast member, thinks he's still in a silent movie—he does everything but twirl a handlebar moustache), shows up to make crude threats and soon it's clear that Lakington's band is after the rich uncle's money.
Bulldog Drum- mond is mostly a comedic mystery, the kind where the hero pauses to make a wisecrack in the face of certain death, but make no mistake, Drummond is as quick with a gun as he is with a quip and in a scene more reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino than early Hollywood, strangles one of his adversaries with his bare hands.
Admittedly, the eighty year old film creaks with the burdens of early sound technology and a supporting cast uncomfortable speaking lines for the first time, and it may be difficult to appreciate it looking backward through the prism of all that came after but without it, we may never have enjoyed all the fun-stupid movies it influenced and it was certainly highly-regarded in its day. In addition to a pair of Oscar nods, the New York Times, the National Board of Review and Film Daily magazine all included Bulldog Drummond on their lists of the ten best movies of 1929.
And as for those of you who prefer their awards to go to more serious fare, I'd remind you that boredom, midlife crises and wish fulfillment are among the most universal of human emotions, at least since the invention of leisure time. I'd submit Bulldog Drummond has as much to say in its own way about the human experience as, for example, In The Bedroom, which covers some of the same ground by a different route, and it's a great deal more entertaining to boot.
Bulldog Drummond inspired more than a dozen sequels, many of which are available on DVD. Interestingly, the two starring Ronald Colman—this one and Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back—aren't available on DVD. To see Bulldog Drummond for this blog, I had to buy it on VHS tape. Set me back 48¢. Don't say I never did anything for you. (Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back is posted on YouTube here.)
Colman was born in 1891 in Richmond, England and initially hoped to study engineering at Cambridge. Orphaned at sixteen, he instead joined the London Scottish Regionals and was severely wounded in combat in October 1914. After his discharge, he went to work on the London stage, mostly because it was one of the few jobs available. He made his first film in 1917, but his breakthrough role came in 1923 when he came to the attention of Lillian Gish who chose him to co-star with her in The White Sister.
Success allowed Colman to be selective and he made only 28 movies in the three decades after Bulldog Drummond, but they included such classics as Random Harvest, A Tale Of Two Cities, Lost Horizon, The Prisoner Of Zenda, Talk Of The Town and his Oscar-winning performance in A Double Life. My old pal, film fanatic bellotoot, also recommends Champagne For Caesar, Colman's last starring role, and it's on my Netflix queue, but I admit I haven't seen it.
Colman was twice married, the second time to actress Benita Hume to whom he remained married until his death. The two had a radio show together, The Halls of Ivy, and briefly a television show. Colman died of a lung infection in 1958 at the age of sixty-seven.
Postscript: The one member of the Bulldog Drummond crew you don't hear much about these days is its director, F. Richard Jones. At the height of his career with the triumph of Bulldog Drummond, Jones contracted tuberculosis and died shortly after the film's premiere. He was just thirty-seven years old.
I had planned to post the essay naming the best actress of 1929-30 today but as the cat said in The Manchurian Candidate, "My dear Yen, as you grow older, you grow more long-winded. Can't we get to the point?" No, no we can't. I'm at 1200 words and haven't even started talking about the movie yet!
Besides, I keep feeling this compulsion to pass the time with a little solitaire ...
In the meantime, as I promised faithful reader lupner, these are the nominees for best actor of 1929-30.
Lew Ayres (All Quiet On The Western Front)
Maurice Chevalier (The Love Parade)
Ronald Colman (Bulldog Drummond)
Hopefully, I'll get to the winner early next week, but in addition to the best actress post, I also plan to write about the actual Oscar winner of 1929-30, Norma Shearer, as well as the other half of her power couple marriage, Irving Thalberg. So no promises.
Trivia: For those of you who have forgotten or never knew, that wooden stick in Ronald Colman's right hand is called a "pencil." Way back in the day, people used it to text and twitter, only instead of tapping out messages on their phone, they scratched out a sort of hieroglyphics on paper, put the result into physical containers called "envelopes" and handed them over to a uniformed employee of the United States Postal Service who would sometimes take days to deliver the message to its intended recipient. To kill time while waiting, people drank a lot and had sex and whatnot. By the time the "letter" would arrive, of course, everybody had forgotten what had inspired the message in the first place, but nobody much cared either.
I'm not saying it was a better world—they also had polio and wars that killed millions—just a different one.
Your kids, too, will one day ridicule you as an old geezer. And they'll be right.
The title of the post pretty much says it all, doesn't it. Ronald Colman was my choice for best actor of 1929-30 for his lead role in the mystery Bulldog Drummond. To review it for this blog, I had to buy the movie on VHS tape for 48¢, but you can see it now (with limited commercial interruption) on Hulu—or better yet, right here.
For Colman, the result was a smash hit, an Oscar nomination and a long, successful career.
