Academy Award Winners: 1931-1939

 

My plan was to watch the Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Cinematography winners for each year, but sadly that's not going to happen.  It would seem that a lot of those movies aren't popular enough to be available now*, so instead of going through each year in turn I'll be discussing what I could find from the rest of the decade.

Consider this another "Some Other Movies From..." entry if you like, with the following entry being the Some Other Movies From 1940-1945 entry, which I wrote during September of last year.

 

Best Picture and Best Director: Cavalcade (1933)

 

You'll see the dramatic irony coming from a mile away, but this lavish production still packs a punch.  Cavalcade follows two families through the first three decades of the twentieth century, painting a vivid picture of love and sacrifice. 

Fun Fact 1: Director Frank Lloyd was one of the founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.  He was also named President of the Academy in 1934.  Cavalcade was his second win for Best Director, following 1929's The Divine Lady.

Fun Fact 2: Cavalcade might have been Adolf Hitler's favorite movie.

Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Alice Brady - In Old Chicago (1938)

Dirty politics and social mores come between two brothers in the late 1800s.  At the time In Old Chicago was one of the most expensive movies ever made, and Tyrone Power and Don Ameche are convincing as the two brothers.  

This was one of Alice Brady's last films.  She had a career stretching back to 1915, and she'd succumb to cancer in 1939 at just 47 years of age.

 

Best Director: Leo McCarey - The Awful Truth (1937) 

Cary Grant and Irene Dunne exercise their breezy charm in the service of this romantic comedy.  It's not laugh out loud funny, but I did find myself chuckling throughout.  Compared to many of the other movies here it's aged extremely well.

Fun Fact: A lot of this movie was improvised.  Director Leo McCarey and others involved in the production weren't that fond of the script or the play it was based on, and McCarey encouraged the actors involved to improvise.  Cary Grant, by that point accustomed to the factory approach used at Paramount, initially threatened to quit over McCarey's perceived "lack of organization."

 

Best Actor: Charles Laughton - The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933)

A mostly satirical look at the marriages of the famously promiscuous monarch.  Laughton was perfect for the lead, and his "moment of discovery" still hits hard 90 years since this film's release.

 

Best Director: Frank Capra - Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936)

Small town values meet the big city in the guise of a poet who comes into a sizeable inheritance.  I wasn't that fond of Gary Cooper in A Farewell to Arms, but he makes much more sense here.  Frank Capra, who was nothing if not a director driven by his belief in both the underdog and a nation's character, would revisit many of the themes present in this movie later in his career.

Fun Fact 1: 1939's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was originally going to be "Mr. Deeds Goes to Washington".  The trouble was that Gary Cooper was unavailable for that project, and Jimmy Stewart was.

Fun Fact 2: Adam Sandler's 2002 comedy Mr. Deeds was, unfortunately, based on Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.

Best Supporting Actor: Thomas Mitchell - Stagecoach (1939)

One of the movies that established John Ford as the leading director of Westerns, and also John Wayne's breakout performance.  With its Western tropes and racist depictions of Native Americans it's somewhat easy to overlook Stagecoach now, but this movie is worth watching for what the director does with the camera, and also for the occasional hypocrisies of Western life present in the story.

Fun Fact: John Carradine, father of Keith, David and Robert Carradine, appears in this movie as "Hatfield."  Actress Martha Plimpton is, by the way, John Carradine's granddaughter.

Best Supporting Actor: Walter Brennan - Kentucky (1938)

Stable "boys," huh?

This one's a bit weird.  It starts off with a great, dramatic sequence involving the requisitioning of horses on the eve of the Civil War, and then jumps ahead several decades to a love story centered around horse racing.

Note how the script attempts to explain away Richard Greene's accent.  A few years in England and his character's Southern accent changes that much?  I think not!

 

Best Director: Frank Borzage - Bad Girl (1931)

 

Best Director?  Really?  Bad Girl definitely isn't a bad movie; it's full of snappy dialogue and the acting's on point, but I'm not feeling "Best Director" here.  Perhaps the Oscar was awarded as a way of recognizing Frank Borzage's general popularity at the time, alongside the fact that he was one of the two Best Director winners during the first Academy Awards ceremony.

 

In Bad Girl a young woman falls for an extremely self-effacing young man, with various misunderstandings threatening to drive them apart.  In case the title puzzles you (as it did me), it's a reference to the night they spend together in the young man's apartment, which was a definite no-no back then.

 

Fun Fact: Borzage initially refused to direct this movie.  Apparently the novel it's based on (which incorporates premarital sex) scandalized many at the time, and when first approached he wanted nothing to do with it.

M (1931)

The only movie here which didn't win an Academy Award.  One of those strange quirks of fate I suppose.

 

Vigilante justice or simply "justice?"  In Fritz Lang's M a group of citizens band together to catch a killer, and the outcome of their search is both saddening and disturbing.  Lang directed M several years after Metropolis, and many (including the director himself) would argue that M is his masterwork.  

 

Given the state of film production at the time it is indeed a stunning achievement, and just as profound today as when it was released in 1931.

 

Best Cinematography: Victor Milner - Cleopatra (1934) 

Cecil B. DeMille paints an expansive (and expensive) portrait of Egypt's most famous woman.  For the record the 1963 version is much better, even though this take on Cleopatra does illustrate the connections between Roman diplomacy and Cleopatra's ambitions in some interesting ways.  Claudette Colbert was a serviceable Cleopatra, but Liz Taylor's portrayal casts something of a shadow over all previous (and subsequent) versions of that character.

 

Best Actress: Helen Hayes - The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931) 

Modern viewers might have some trouble determining what the "sin" is.  I'm guessing it's the fact that Madelon Claudet's son is illegitimate, and not the ways in which she funds her son's passage through medical school.  I could be wrong though.

Whatever the case, the highest praise I can give this movie is the statement that I knew right off who won the Academy Award for it and why.  Helen Hayes gives a great performance here, even if the the story is muddled and the way in which the director cuts between scenes toward the end of the film is a bit distracting.

Fun Fact: Helen Hayes' career in Hollywood lasted 77 years, from 1910 to 1987.  Her last "big" movie was 1970's Airport.

 

 

Best Cinematography: Floyd Crosby - Tabu (1931)

Like 1928's White Shadows in the South Seas, another Oscar winner set in that part of the world.  I suppose that in the late 1920s and early 1930s the south Pacific seemed a lot more remote than it does now, and filming there also offered the filmmakers a chance to put shirtless women on film without getting into trouble for doing so.

Tabu is F.W. Murnau's last movie, released not long after his death.  Unlike White Shadows in the South Seas, it's less concerned with the effects of colonization on indigenous peoples than with a love affair between a young tribesman and a virgin promised to the gods.  As with other Oscar winners of the time period, the Oscar seems to have been awarded more for the technical achievement of filming in a specific location.

 

Best Cinematography: Charles Lang - A Farewell to Arms (1932)

Nothing against director Frank Borzage, who should be better remembered; nothing against Helen Hayes, who was one of the greatest actresses of her generation; nothing against Gary Cooper, who had a big career in film yet ahead of him; and nothing against cinematographer Charles Lang, who brings this story to vivid life.  I'm just not a big fan of Ernest Hemingway.  It's a well done movie, I just wish it had been based on someone else's book.

Parting Thoughts

 

Which of these films do I regard as "required viewing?"  To be honest, I'd only recommend M, which didn't win any awards.  The remainder are good or bad to varying degrees, but I can't imagine any of them really capturing a modern viewer's attention for very long.  Cavalcade is worth seeing for the effect it had on subsequent propaganda films, The Awful Truth is a good example of the kind of movie Hollywood doesn't make anymore, Stagecoach is a genre-defining Western and the bigger-budget spectacles discussed here are all good examples of what a blockbuster movie was in the 30s.  But overall there's a talkiness to these films that modern audiences will find hard to digest, and also a slower pace which might not suit those who've grown up on more recent movies.

Related Entries:

Academy Award Winners: 1929-1930

Academy Award Winners: 1928-1929

Academy Award Winners: 1927-1928

Some Other Movies From 2022 (2)

 

*I could give YouTube money to watch them, but I'm not going to do that.