MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY 1935

Mutiny on the Bounty 1935

Mutiny on the Bounty was nominated for eight Oscars, but won the only one that counted: Best Production.

It contained myriad historical accuracies:

Captain Bligh was never on board HMS Pandora, the ship that caught the Bounty crew who remained on Tahiti. Bligh wasn’t present at their trial.

Bligh might not have been the brutal sadist depicted by the movie. Keelhauling had been abandoned as a punishment long before Bligh’s time.

The ship’s log indicates few sailors were flogged. The Bounty had only two deaths: a seaman, of scurvy, and the ship’s surgeon, apparently of his own drinking.

Mr. Christian likely was not inspired to take over the ship after several crewmen have unjustly been cast into irons by Bligh.

Instead of founding an idyllic society on Pitcairn Island, all the mutineers died from drunkenness and murder. Rape of the island women was frequent. Many of their ancestors remain there today.

There was a real-life mutiny aboard the real HMS Bounty, led by Fletcher Christian against Captain Bligh. Fictional Midshipman Roger Byam really did try to stop the mutiny, failed, and was convicted by the lords of the admiralty. Real-life middie Peter Heywood, 15, was convicted of the mutiny of 1789, but later acquitted and served 29 years, retiring as a captain.

Bligh and the 19 other loyal officers and crew were put aboard a lifeboat, and Christian went back to Tahiti for the native women they’d fallen for when they had stopped to buy breadfruit plants. They were to deliver the breadfruit (a fruit which can be roasted and tastes like bread or potato) for slaves.

But enough about the facts. The movie was inspirationally cast with Charles Laughton as the toadish Captain Bligh, the boyish Franchot Tone as Mr. Byam, and Clark Gable (the Oscar winner the previous year for It Happened One Night, which also won for Best Production). All three were nominated for Best Actor, but none won.

Gable is the rakish buccaneer who hated his tyrannical captain, and Laughton is captain who resented his popular and wise first officer. (Christian: “He doesn't punish men for discipline. He likes to see men crawl.”)

A 1962 remake starring Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard would result in a three-star movie, not the four-star production the 1935 film turned out to be (don’t be confused. Like the Super Bowl, the films of 1935 were up for the 1936 Oscars).

What’s interesting about watching Oscar-winning movies from the first Academy Awards in 1928 through the eighth in 1936 is how performances toned down so quickly from the overacting of the 1927’s Sunrise and even 1931’s Cimarron to the relatively realistic Gable and Laughton, just eight years later.

Film quality also improved: Sunrise was dark and softly fuzzy; Mutiny on the Bounty was an excellent black and white with sharp edges and realistic skin tones.

Trivia

Despite directing three men who received Oscar nominations, Frank Lloyd was nominated but lost to John Ford’s The Informer, which also grabbed the golden icon for Best Screenplay.

It wasn’t memorable year for movies. The other nominees: Alice Adams, Broadway Melody of 1936, Captain Blood, David Copperfield, The Informer, Les Miserables, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Naughty Marietta, Ruggles of Red Gap, and Top Hat.

IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT 1934

It Happened One Night is the first romantic comedy to win Best Picture, and it became the model for screwball flicks like When Harry Met Sally and the Runaway Bride.

The plot: when a rich heiress marries her boyfriend without her father’s permission, he isolates her on a boat in Miami.  Ellen Andrews swims to shore and hocks her jewelry to buy dry clothes. Alexander Andrews hires detectives to find Ellie, and her sensational escape makes the front page of every East Coast newspaper.

When she buys a bus ticket and sits beside a newspaper reporter who just got fired, Peter Warne realizes who she is and strikes a bargain: if she sticks with him, he’ll get her to New York and he’ll have the scoop of the year.

She detests Peter, but, of course, anyone who spends time with Clark Gable falls in love pretty quickly, and Claudette Colbert (colBEAR) is no exception. One reason: he calls her a spoiled brat, and shames her when she insists on special treatment.

However, he’s a good man, and he cares for her. When they fjord a stream, he carries her over his left shoulder.

“You know this is the first time in years I've ridden piggy-back.”

“This isn't piggy-back.”

“Course it is. I remember distinctly my father taking me for a piggy-back ride.”

“And he carried you like this, I suppose? Your father didn't know beans about piggy-backing. I never knew a rich man yet who could piggy-back ride.”

“You're prejudiced.”

“You show me a good piggy-backer and I'll show you a real human. Now you take Abraham Lincoln for instance. A natural born piggy-backer.”

When they rent a kitchenette cabin for the night and he cooks breakfast, It Happened One Night becomes one of the most charming movies ever.

Ellie dunks a donut in her coffee.

Peter Warne: “Say, where'd you learn to dunk? In finishing school? “

“Aw, now don't you start telling me I shouldn't dunk.”

“Of course you shouldn't. You don't know how to do it. Dunking's an art. Don't let it soak so long. A dip and plop, in your mouth. You let it hang there too long, it'll get soft and fall off. It's all a matter of timing. Aw, I oughta write a book about it.”

“Thanks, professor.”

“Just goes to show you, $20 millions, and you don't know how to dunk.”

“Oh, I'd change places with a plumber's daughter any day.”

Minutes later, two detectives looking for the heiress barge into their cabin. Peter and Ellie don’t miss a beat: You think this plumber’s daughter is a millionaire? He starts screaming at her as if they’ve been fighting years, and it becomes apparent why this audacious, clever script becomes the first mega Oscar winner: Best Production, Best Writing, Best Actor Clark Gable, Best Actress Claudette Colbert, and Best Director Frank Capra.

When they lose their bus ride, they must hitchhike to New York, which leads to one of the most famous scenes in film history: Clark Gable shows Claudette Colbert the most effective way to stick out one’s thumb. But by now, she realizes he’s a congenital braggart.

He shows her the hitchhiker’s hail: “It's a long sweeping movement like this. Gotta follow through, though.”

“That's amazing.”

“But it's no good if you haven't got a long face to go with it. Keep your eye on the thumb, baby.”

Cars pass.

“I still got my eye on the thumb. You mind if I try?”

“You? Don't make me laugh.”

“I'll stop a car and I won't use my thumb.”

She hikes her skirt, shows one skinny leg up to her thigh, and the first car stops.

This is classic Capra, matched only by It's A Wonderful Life and maybe Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Trivia

Myrna Loy turned down the role of Ellie Andrews. Robert Montgomery turned down the male lead, saying the script was the worst thing he had ever read.

When Clark Gable showed up for work, he reportedly said, "Let's get this over with."

Claudette Colbert was the sixth to be offered the role; she accepted because Capra doubled her salary and promised she’d be done in four weeks. She disliked it so much she didn't attend the Oscars; she was leaving on a trip and was rushed to the ceremony.

Looney Tunes animator Friz Freleng's unpublished memoirs contain three scenes upon which the film character Bugs Bunny was based: womanizer Oscar Shapely's personality, an imaginary character named Bugs Dooley that Peter Warne mentioned to frighten Oscar, and the manner in which Peter ate carrots and talked quickly.

Ten films were nominated in 1934, including classics Cleopatra, The Thin Man and An Imitation of Life. Clark Gable competed with only two others, William Powell and Charles Laughton. Colbert was up against a write-in: Bette Davis.

Source: www.imdb.com

Cavalcade 1933

Cavalcade

1933 110 minutes

This movie isn’t on Netflix. When it becomes available, I’ll review it.

Clive Brook and Diana Wynyard star. Frank Lloyd adapts and directs Noel Coward's retelling of the Romeo and Juliet theme. Two English families, the upper-class Marryots and the working-class Bridges, love, lose and change from 1899-1933 due to the Boer War, Queen Victoria's death, the Great War and the Depression.

GRAND HOTEL 1932

GRAND HOTEL  1932

Each of the first five Oscar winning Best Productions began as yawners. Sunrise, Broadway Melody, All Quiet on the Western Front, Cimarron and Grand Hotel appeared simplistic; the actors lacked today’s naturalness.

However, it’s a mistake to dismiss these films. Each is more complex and character rich than, say, the Last Samurai, whose point is that Tom Cruise can train in martial arts for a few months and then kill a thousand Japanese in 154 minutes.

Grand Hotel’s nothing-is-as-it-seems plot is as sophisticated as Hitchcock. Its setting is Berlin’s plush, modern hotel where, in the words of Dr. Otternschlag, "People come, people go. Nothing ever happens."

The first scene sets the cast: Baron von Geigern (John Barrymore), a down-on-his-luck aristocrat who is so broke, he’s compelled by a mobster posing as a chauffer to steal a Russian dancer’s pearls to repay a 5,000 mark debt.

There’s Kringelein (Lionel Barrymore), a terminally ill bookkeeper who wants to spend his savings in the months he has to live. And coincidentally, there’s his boss, factory owner Preysing (Wallace Beery), who must arrange a merger between his troubled company and an English firm.

A pervasive theme is that there are courageous and unsavory qualities in each man and woman. Preysing, a dedicated family man and a captain of German industry, preys on others and connives to cheat on his wife with stenographer Flaemmchen (Joan Crawford, a major hottie in 1932).

With eyes wide open, Flaem submits to Preysing’s overture:

“I’d like to take a secretary to England. Do you understand me?”

Flaem: “I understand you perfectly.”

Preysing: “How much would you need?”

Flaem: “I would need some clothes, shoes. You’d want me to look nice, wouldn’t you?”

Preysing: “Oh, of course.”

Flaem (sardonically): “Yes. I thought you would. A thousand marks.”

And he gets her an adjoining room at the Grand. It’s an astonishing sellout, but we’ve all seen it happen, haven’t we?

Flaem tells the baron what’s happened, but he doesn’t judge her, because he’s a classy gentleman. Both Flaem and dancer Grusinskaya (Greta Garbo) fall for the baron, a lady’s man who’s also a cat burglar with a conscience: he gives back her pearls and Kringelein’ wallet with $14,000.

Grusinskaya couldn’t be much closer to real-life Garbo: flawless performer, lonely, rich, eccentric, successful, but mortified by performance fright. One line encapsulates both her character and the actress: “I just want to be left alone.”

A few minutes later, there’s a classic scene: Garbo sneaks away from the theater before performing. The baron slips into her hotel room. Then her secretary walks in, looking for Grusinskaya. The baron, trapped, hides in the closet. Grusinskaya arrives and changes in the bathroom. The secretary leaves. The baron races across the room and gets to the exterior curtains before the dancer reenters.

In a soliloquy, she laments her life and wishes for death. The baron could leave, but he comes out of hiding to convinces her to live. They talk all night, and they’re revealed as soul mates.

Which exposes all of us, doesn’t it? Without careers, without spouses, without children, what reason is there to live?

That’s why cringing Kringelein can display the fearlessness of the old: “Who do you think you are? You can’t do anything to me anymore. I’m going to die.”

And that’s how the doctor-philosopher, in the final scene, depicts the hotel as a metaphor for life: “What do you do in the Grand Hotel? Eat, sleep, loaf, flirt a little. A hundred doors leading to one hall. No one knows anything about the person next to them. When you leave, someone occupies your room, lies in your bed.”

Kringelein, who is dying, pays no notice to the doctor’s words, and in the background, a woman laughs outrageously.

Trivia

John and Lionel are the brothers of Ethel Barrymore. John is the father of John Drew Barrymore, and the grandfather of Drew Barrymore.

Two classics missed the Best Picture Oscar: The Champ, also starring Wallace Beery (who tied for an Oscar), and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Fredric March, the other half of the tie).

CIMMARON 1931

CIMMARON  1931

When the Beverly Hillbillies debuted in 1962, people were stunned to discover that spry old Granny Clampitt was played by Irene Dunn. Newspapers ran then-and-now photos of the Best Actress nominee of 1931.

Today, few people remember Irene Dunn, but folks, she was a slim, stunning brunette and one of the most talented stars in early Hollywood.

Richard Dix, it seems, is the star as Yancey Cravat, a larger-than-life lawyer, upright newspaperman, fearless gunfighter and ne’er-do-well carouser who spends a few months in Oklahoma during the land rush of 1889.

When he returns from Kansas with his wife, Sabra (Irene Dunn), he’s well known and adored by everyone. And why not: he’s a hail fellow well met, he defends the downtrodden, including Sol Levy, a little Jewish peddler, from the town bully.

He gets achieves everything he tries – the best home, newspaper, prestige, money, civilizing Osage (his new hometown) – but he needs new challenges, and he’s positively A.D.D. about making the land run of 1893. So he leaves his wife, his son, and his business for years, again and again, and each time, he baby’s and darling’s and sweetheart’s his way back into his own home.

At first, the dowdy, narrow-minded racist homebody Sabra doesn’t deserve Yancey’s true grit, but this script is good at spinning around each theme and character. It’s Sabra who raises the children, runs the house, leads the business to success and becomes the most honorable person in her town, and eventually in the whole Sooner State.

There are racist themes: a black boy lusts for watermelons and shucks and jives: “I shore am glad I came to Oklahomy.” Sol Levy is stereotypically small, weak and driven to make money. Sabra’s caucasian view is that Indians are dirty and filthy. When her son wants to marry an Osage chief’s daughter, Sabra is sarcastic: “There’s a nice problem, an Indian in the family.”

Isaiah – Negro servants didn’t have last names in pre-civil rights movies – is depicted as lazy and stupid, hanging from the chandelier while fanning the family at the dinner table. But by the end of the film, the race theme also spins around: Isaiah risks his life to save Sabra’s son, Cimarron, from a drive-by shootout, and Sabra learns that her bigotry is wrong.

Yancey is really a terrible father and husband; but his character spins a third time to he prove he’s caring and self-sacrificing when he defends the reputation of the town tramp, Dixie Lee, from the so-called good women, who include his wife.

That’s why Cimarron isn’t the overrated antique it seems to be, because it’s actually a portrait of complex human beings with Biblical qualities and outrageous flaws.

Trivia

Cimarron won the 1931 Academy Award for Best Production, and Best Art Direction. It missed in Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Director and Best Cinematography.

It’s hard to believe that Richard Dix – who hammed it up as if he was still in a silent movie – could get an acting award, but even then the Academy made strange choices.

This was one of Hollywood’s first big-budget films: 5,000 extras, 28 cameras, scenes of wagons racing across grassy hills and prairie. It was also a critical success at the time.

Public Enemy, the starting point for all gangster films, was nominated only for Best Writing and Original Story. This was James Cagney’s breakout classic, but he and Jean Harlow were also overlooked.

The Front Page was nominated for Best Picture and Best Director, and Adolphe Menjou for Best Actor, but it’s another classic that won no golden statues.

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT 1930

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT 1930

1930’s Oscar-winner may be the first that people today have heard of, even if they’ve never watched it. They can see a remake in 2012, starring Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter).

Themes

Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel sold 2.5 million copies in 25 foreign languages, but it was banned and burned in Nazi Germany and several other countries. Why? It exposed war’s myths and propaganda.

In the opening 1914 scene, Professor Kantorek hyped the Great War to his teenage pupils – these “iron men of Germany” – that it was the duty of every gallant German to enlist, to repulse the enemy, and to heap glory on the Fatherland.

Flattered by unwarranted praise, intoxicated by heroic ideas, they rose and convinced each other – including the reluctant Behm – that they all must go to war.

Afghanistan and Iraq’s recruiting propaganda was more sophisticated. Think of the heroic pose struck by Bush when he declared “Mission accomplished!” on the aircraft carrier. Think of how Cheney and Rumsfeld demonized  Saddam Hussein and the Taliban. Think of how Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch were lionized, and how investigations later showed those official tales were just lies.

Happiness is a warm gun

After four years of battle, creative, compassionate soldier-writer Paul Bäumer inhaled poison gas and was given 14 days leave. By now, he was the only surviving classmate of Kantorek’s original students. Bäumer returned to the classroom just in time to hear the professor lecture his latest students: “In one of the schools, the boys have risen up in the classroom and enlisted in a mass. But of course, if such a thing should happen here, you would not blame me for a feeling of pride.”

The professor turned to Bäumer for corroboration, but the disillusioned veteran owed these boys the truth: “I thought maybe the whole world had been learned by this time. Only now, they're sending babies, and they don't last a week… Three years we've had of it, four years… And our bodies are earth. And our thoughts are clay. And we sleep and eat with death… War isn't the way it looks back here. I heard you in here, reciting that same old stuff. Making more iron men, more young heroes. You still think it’s beautiful and sweet to die for your country, don’t you?”

The boys called Bäumer a coward, even though they’d never fired a gun and he’d fought with comrades who’d been killed and maimed. Bäumer’s response: he was no good for “back home” anymore; he wanted to return to his mentors and comrades at the front.

The themes, then, are that glorious war is a lie, that the thrill of combat is actually the agony of killing other human beings, that returning soldiers isolate themselves from family and friends because war itself destroys soldiers, not just bullets and bombs and gas, and they’re unable to revert to civilian life after such extreme physical and mental stress. Governments know all this, of course, which makes what they do to these young men all the more dastardly. After every war, movies have hit similar themes: The Best Years of Our Lives, Coming Home, Apocalypse Now, The Hurt Locker.

Ignored

Howard Hughes was the Stephen Spielberg of his time. Hell's Angels was a technically perfect high-budget movie, but it wasn’t selected for Best Production, nor was the Marx Brothers classic “Animal Crackers.”

Norma Shearer was nominated for two movies and won for The Divorcée, but 18-year-old Hell’s Angels star Rita Hayworth was snubbed.

Greta Garbo was also nominated twice for movies largely forgotten, but Marlene Dietrich’s star-making role in The Blue Angel – still one of the all-time most sensual films – was overlooked.

BROADWAY MELODY 1929

BROADWAY MELODY 1929

Although it was the second film to win an Academy Award, Broadway Melody was a film of firsts: It was the mother of all musicals, it was the first talkie to win the Best Production award, and it was the first subject of sequels (Broadway Melody of 1936, Broadway Melody of 1938 and Broadway Melody of 1940).

1929-30 was first year for secret awards: winners were announced during a one-hour L.A. radio broadcast.

Also, the George M. Cohan classic “Give My Regards To Broadway” was the first hit song to arise from a movie.

With a $4 million take, Broadway Melody was the top grossing picture of 1929.

Here’s the story: two sisters, “Hank” and “Queenie” Mahoney, come to Broadway. Hank loves song-and-dance man Eddie Kerns. But when Eddie sees Queenie, all grown up now, he falls for her.

To brush off Eddie, Queenie dates Jock Warriner, a New York high-society swell who wants her for no-good reasons.

It’s a simple love triangle, the subject of countless movie scripts. Although Broadway Melody is considered one of the weakest films to ever win best motion picture Oscar, Stephan Eichenberg’s script has complex elements: Hank, Queenie and Eddie all recognize the danger created by the triangle, and all three sacrifice themselves for each other.

Bessie Love, who starred as Hank Mahoney, was beat out for Best Actress by Mary Pickford, America’s Sweetheart, starring in her first talkie. Insiders said Pickford’s win was actually an undeserved political honor, because Douglas Fairbanks, the academy president, was her husband and her acting was good enough for silent films but unrealistic for talkies.

It’s interesting to see how body types have changed in the past 80 years: Bessie Love, Anita Page and Janet Gaynor all had baby legs – short and chubby. They would have been considered fat by modern Hollywood.

Who didn’t win?

The Hollywood Revue of 1929, even though it cast superstars Norma Shearer, Buster Keaton, Joan Crawford and Lionel Barrymore.

Who didn’t get nominated?

A great silent film, The Wind, and its star Lillian Gish.

Erich von Stroheim was ignored as Best Director for The Wedding March.

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent film masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc received no nominations.

Greta Garbo’s last silent film, The Kiss, was not nominated, and Buster Keaton was ignored for his last independent film, Steamboat Bill Jr.

SUNRISE 1928

SUNRISE  1928

I had a thought one day: I’ve seen nearly every Best Picture film since 1952. What about the rest? I googled the first-ever Oscar film.

Actually, there were two in 1927-28: WINGS for Best Production, and SUNRISE for Best Unique and Artistic Picture, a category that was dropped after the first year.

WINGS isn’t on DVD, so I Netflixed SUNRISE, which turned out to be silent.

I gave up TV last summer (cable and satellite cost too much, TV sucks too much time, and I’d rather write), so it was my only form of entertainment that night. But voila, I liked it.

In SUNRISE, the Woman from the City convinced The Man to row The Wife – who was just too plain – to the center of the lake and overturn their boat. However, a funny thing happened on the way to her execution. They went to the city first, they drank, they ate, they danced, and in that incredible night, he realized why he loved this simple woman. He was rowing home when their boat overturned in a sudden squall. He was inconsolable.

I thought another 1927-28 film, 7^TH HEAVEN, was the better, even though its plot was simplistic: the cruel Nana regularly whips her sister, Diane. Why? Well, it’s simplistic. One day, sewer cleaner Chico stops Nana from strangling Diane to death.

Unaccountably, the gendarmes try to arrest Diane too, but Chico swears they’re married. Diane poses as his wife when a police inspector comes to Chico’s loft. They stay together for two days, they fall in love, and they really do marry.

Two 1927 classics that didn’t win Best Picture: the German film METROPOLIS and THE JAZZ SINGER.

Can the 1927-28 Oscar winners compare to 2010’s $100 million productions? Yes. They’re like today’s independent film, which we must experience to realize they’re art. You can argue the point: If you thought watching Tom Cruise kill a thousand Japanese in The Last Samurai was the highest entertainment in 2003, then you might have missed some great indies that year: LOST IN TRANSLATION, A MIGHTY WIND, SHATTERED GLASS, HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG and THE STATION AGENT.

Here’s a trivia question: name the woman who starred in SUNRISE, and also won the first-ever International Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences best actress award that same year for 7^TH HEAVEN. That was Janet Gaynor, a 21-year old who changed her name from Laura Gainor. Why she thought Janet was more glam than Laura, or why “y” was better than “i,” has been lost to history.

Anyway, after Gainor graduated from high school in San Francisco, she moved to L.A., got a job selling shoes for $18 per week, and in two years won a starring role as Anna Burger in THE JOHNSTOWN FLOOD.

Four more silent film roles followed that same year, and by 1927, she was cast in two classics, 7^TH HEAVEN and SUNRISE: A SONG OF TWO HUMANS. For those two roles, by the way, she was paid $100 a week and $300 a week.

If you’re still wondering who the heck is Janet Gaynor, she played the title role in A STAR IS BORN. Until 1986, when Marlee Matlin won for CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD, Gaynor was the youngest leading actress to win an Oscar.

Next: 1928-29 winner THE BROADWAY MELODY