And the Winner Is — 1935

Our family is working our way through Oscar winners and whichever nominees take our fancy. Also as they are available, since these early films continued to be hard to find.

For the 1935 Oscars we were able to see a lot of movies and were struck again by the variety of nominees, with a lot of light hearted films included.

WINNER

A rogue reporter trailing a runaway heiress for a big story joins her on a bus heading from Florida to New York and they end up stuck with each other when the bus leaves them behind at one of the stops along the way.

I love the fact that the stars' names were bigger than the movie name on the poster. Directed by Frank Capra during his most prolific period, this is a movie that is practically perfect in every way ... it's hard to believe this movie is 85 years old! It holds up so well! It was the first screwball comedy and has a lot to say about class distinctions, albeit in such an entertaining fashion that you don't realize it until later. 

I've seen this many times and it never disappoints. I suspect this will be my favorite Oscar winner for some years to come as we proceed.

I will add that Imitation of Life gave this a run for its money as a household favorite. Do try it.

 NOMINEES

A husband and wife detective team takes on the search for a missing inventor and almost get killed for their efforts.

We've seen this enough times that we didn't want to repeat it. Overall funny and enjoyable. Worthy of nomination but not as good as It Happened One Night.

Seeking a divorce from her absentee husband, Mimi Glossop travels to an English seaside resort. There she falls in love with dancer Guy Holden, whom she later mistakes for the corespondent her lawyer hired.

It was a real pleasure to watch Astaire and Rogers shine in this gorgeous piece of comic fluff. Their chemistry is undeniable and they are supported by talented comedic actors who enjoy their own minor scenes now and then. The ordering of tea, the silhouettes fooling the corespondent who I loved so much, the whistling with the bellboy - these all add richness to the movie.

The queen of Egypt barges the Nile and flirts with Mark Antony and Julius Caesar.

Here's Claudette Colbert again! (I think she made 6 movies that year.) This was a much grander spectacle than I expected and it could hold up today on that basis alone. However, I also liked Colbert's performance which is what I was really curious about since I've only seen her in It Happened One Night. Very enjoyable as an addition to our Oscar nominees viewing.

A struggling widow and her daughter take in a black housekeeper and her fair-skinned daughter. The two women start a successful business but face familial, identity, and racial issues along the way.

We were all surprised at how much we liked this tale of two mothers — one black, one white — who become good friends as they struggle together against the world in raising their daughters and earning a living. It tackled surprising issues when you consider everyday life for black Americans in 1934.

I really love the 1935 winner - It Happened One Night - but we thought Imitation of Life was robbed by not winning. I was especially interested to see Claudette Colbert in her third movie nominated for a 1935 Oscar. She was red hot that year and her performance here was good.

However, it was Louise Beavers who really stood out. We'd seen her previously in She Done Him Wrong, the Mae West film that was nominated for the 1934 Oscars. In that film Beavers played a stereotypical, giggling, joking maid. Here she was allowed a role that was very unusual for any black actor of the time. Most definitely she was robbed by having no Oscar nomination for her performance, most probably because she was black as newspapers at the time pointed out.

I especially liked the portrayal of the friendship between the two women after reading that the book from which the story was adapted was inspired by a road trip to Canada the author took with her friend, the African-American short-story writer and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston.

This is one worth watching for a lot of reasons.

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All the Oscar viewing is here.

And the Winner Is — 1934

 Our family is working our way through Oscar winners and whichever nominees take our fancy. Also as they are available, since these early films continued to be hard to find.

Also the Academy was still sorting out what years the movies had to be made in order to qualify. So there are some from 1932-33 in here.

WINNER

A cavalcade of English life from New Year’s Eve 1899 until 1933 is seen through the eyes of well-to-do Londoners Jane and Robert Marryot. Amongst events touching their family are the Boer War, the death of Queen Victoria, the sinking of the Titanic, and the Great War.

Our least favorite of the Best Picture winners so far. (Oh wait, now we've seen The Life of Emile Zola from 1938. Turns out Cavalcade isn't as bad as we thought at the time.) It isn't terrible but it also isn't great. It just kept going and going. I did enjoy Diana Wynyard and Clive Brook's performances a lot.

 NOMINEES

A World War I veteran’s dreams of becoming a master architect evaporate in the cold light of economic realities. Things get even worse when he’s falsely convicted of a crime and sent to work on a chain gang.

How do you not get excited about a movie with this title? And it paid off. Paul Muni was really effective in the role and, amazingly, the over-the-top story was very close to the autobiography that inspired it.

The book and film were both influences in publicizing the horrors of what life was like on the chain gangs and getting them abolished. So it was both a gripping story and social change maker. We're glad we watched it.

This was our favorite of the three movies we could find for viewing, beating She Done Him Wrong and Cavalcade in our personal awards.

New York singer and nightclub owner Lady Lou has more men friends than you can imagine. One of them is a vicious criminal who’s escaped and is on the way to see “his” girl, not realising she hasn’t exactly been faithful in his absence. Help is at hand in the form of young Captain Cummings, a local temperance league leader.

This is part of our cultural history almost 100 years later as evidenced by the fact that "Come up and see me sometime" is still a known line. Also, of course Mae West's image lives on in the cliches that she herself exploited to great effect.

We liked it well enough as an iconic film and for the funny double entendres as the plot zipped along with a seemingly endless stream of men entering and leaving West's bedroom.

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All the Oscar viewing is here.

A Movie You Might Have Missed #96 — The Good Earth (1937)

China, during the rule of the Qing Dynasty. The arranged marriage between Wang Lung, a humble farmer, and O-Lan, a domestic slave, will endure the many hardships of life over the years; but the temptations of a fragile prosperity will endanger their love and the survival of their entire family.

Wow, Louise Ranier definitely earned her Oscar! What a performance! She was also my favorite performer in The Zigfeld Follies for which she also earned an Oscar. To be fair, everyone gave top notch performances. This is the sort of movie that doesn't usually appeal to me - long dramatic sagas of families struggling to survive, especially since I'd read the book long ago and hadn't liked it much. This sold it though. By the end I was loving it.

I've seen plenty of negative comments about the fact that 1937 movie standards meant white actors portrayed Chinese characters, which would never be done these days. However, I've learned, as I read tons of old literature, that we have to keep the cultural ideas of the past in mind instead of rushing to judge by our standards. So let's just talk about the movie as it tells the story.

As I watched I kept thinking of the intended 1937 audience and how exotic and interesting this would have been to them. In fact, despite how it seems to dismissive viewers today, I feel it probably humanized the Chinese to Americans in a very positive way. Farmers certainly would've understood this family's struggles.

This was the last of the movies we viewed for the 1938 Oscar winner and nominees. It is the movie we'd have given the Oscar to, hands down. The winner, The Life of Emile Zola, is a movie that landed at the bottom of the list no matter what else we watched.

I'm really glad we embarked on Oscar project. I've seen so many movies I'd never have known I liked otherwise. This is one.

NOTE

Here's my list of all the Oscar movies we have watched. Here are the ones we liked so much that I reviewed them here to tempt you into trying them.

A Movie You Might Have Missed #91 — Imitation of Life (1934)

A struggling widow and her daughter take in a black housekeeper and her fair-skinned daughter. The two women start a successful business but face familial, identity, and racial issues along the way.

This was the final movie we watched  from the 1935 Oscars as we work our way through Oscar winners and selected nominees. We were all surprised at how much we liked this tale of two mothers — one black, one white — who become good friends as they struggle together against the world in raising their daughters and earning a living. It tackled issues in a manner really surprising when you consider everyday life for black Americans in 1934.

I really love the 1935 winner - It Happened One Night - but we think Imitation of Life was robbed by not winning. I was especially interested to see Claudette Colbert in her third movie nominated for an Oscar that year. She was red hot that year and her performance here was good.

However, it was Louise Beavers who really stood out. We'd seen her previously in She Done Him Wrong, the Mae West film that was nominated for the 1934 Oscars. Beavers played a stereotyped, giggling, joking maid in that one. However, here she was allowed a role that was very unusual for any black actor of the time. Most definitely she was robbed by having no Oscar nomination for her performance, most probably because she was black as newspapers at the time noted.

I especially liked the portrayal of the friendship between the two women after reading that the book from which the story was adapted was inspired by a road trip to Canada the author took with her friend, the African-American short-story writer and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston.

This is one worth watching for a lot of reasons.

A Movie You Might Have Missed #88: Grand Hotel

It's been 12 years since I began this series highlighting movies I wished more people knew about. I'm rerunning it from the beginning because I still think these are movies you might have missed.

Grand Hotel remains a classic masterpiece as the first all-star Hollywood epic with many high-powered stars of the early 1930s. The episodic film is set at Berlin's ritzy, opulent art-deco Grand Hotel, and tells of the criss-crossing of the lives of five major guests whose fates intertwined for a two-day period at the hotel. Its ensemble cast of stars were occupants of a between-wars German hotel, all struggling with either their finances, scandals, health, emotional loneliness, or social standing in multiple storylines.

Filmsite

This is the movie where Greta Garbo's famous "I want to be alone" line originated. An all-star cast acts their hearts out in this mother of all melodramas. Continuing our journey through early Oscar winners (Best Picture, 1932) and nominees, we thoroughly enjoyed this very good movie which can hold its own against stories of today. I especially enjoyed it as a look at life, from waiting for a new baby to someone preparing to leave this mortal coil. And lots of things in-between!

I will add that we were all quite concerned about the fate of Adolphus the dachshund.