So what has the Monkey been up to recently, other than posting trivia questions straight out of TCM's Now Playing? Working on another of those mammoth essays, this one about early silent comedy, from its beginning around 1890 up to 1914. So far from the era I've watched one hundred sixty-eight comedy shorts and counting. Some are funny, but most of them, I can emphatically assure you, are not.
Anyway, this has nothing to do with any of that. Instead, this post harkens back to Part Two of my essay covering the films of 1906-1914, specifically the paragraph I wrote about Segundo de Chomón, a.k.a. "the Spanish Méliès." Chomón specialized in trick photography and surreal optical effects. Here's one, Le théâtre de Bob from 1906, that relies on stop-action animation and hand-tinted frames.
Just part of our continuing effort here at the Monkey to load you up with useless information ...
Documentaries and Animation ● In the years between The Great Train Robbery (1903) and D.W. Griffith's first film in 1908, the most interesting films were documentaries. Although in form, they more resemble "newsreels" than what we now think of as documentaries, these short films provided audiences of the time a window into people and places they might otherwise have never seen and continue to offer an insight into the era for historians.
● The first great documentarians were the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, who I wrote about at some length in a previous post. Their forays into documentary film making were more in the nature of experiments with their newly-invented camera, mostly recording scenes from the world around them although they did occasionally film newsworthy events, such as the arrival of delegates to a conference on photography in 1895. The Lumière brothers abandoned movies altogether in 1900, famously declaring "the cinema is an invention without any future."
● One of the first American docum- entarians was G.W. "Billy" Bitzer. Better known now as D.W. Griffith's cinematographer, Bitzer began his career making film shorts, first collaborating with W.K.L. Dickson after the latter left Thomas Edison's lab, then later at the American Mutoscope Company, the forerunner of Biograph. Bitzer filmed hundreds of shorts, such as Film Registry title Westinghouse Works and Arrival of Immigrants at Ellis Island. In 2003, the International Cinematographers Guild named Bitzer one of the ten most influential cinematographers of all time.
● Footage of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake proved once and for all the power of the new film medium. Perhaps the most interesting of the many shorts emerging from the disaster is A Trip Down Market Street Before The Fire, which by happenstance was filmed four days before the San Francisco earthquake. Coupled with footage shot at the same locations immediately after the earthquake, the devastation is still shocking. Imagine what it must have been like to see this footage in 1906, the first time in history the public could bear witness to a catastrophe that had happened a world away. (I encourage you to click the fullscreen function when you watch this.)
● A pair of feature-length documentaries from 1914 show the diverging approaches to the form. In the Land of the War Canoes, Edwin S. Curtis used staged re-enactments and fictional events to show the life of an aboriginal tribe in British Columbia, aiming more for entertainment than veracity. That same year Vilhjálmur Stefánsson brought back actual footage of his own disastrous expedition to the Arctic. (I'd tell you that the latter style of documentary eventually won out, but the fact is documentarians such as Michael Moore stage events for the camera to this day.)
● The fields of animation and stop-action photography also made significant strides during the pre-Griffith film era.
● Émile Cohl was a well-known caricaturist working in Paris who got into the motion picture business when he spotted a movie poster design obviously stolen from one of his drawings. To placate Cohl, the management of the Gaumont Film Company (the oldest studio in the world) offered him a job on the spot, mostly turning out short animation sequences for insertion into live-action films. In 1908, Cohl drew and directed a two-minute film, Fantasmagorie, believed to be the first all-animated film in history. [But see the discussion in the comments section where Matthew Blanchette and I agree that the distinction should go to Charles-Émile Reynaud's Pauvre Pierrot.] ● In America, J. Stuart Blackton took an early stab at animation with such shorts as The Enchanted Drawing and Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, a series of faces chalked up on a canvas and a blackboard, respectively, but it was Winsor McCay who earned the title as America's first great animator. Already a successful newspaper cartoonist, McCay was inspired by his son's cartoon "flip" book to turn four thousand ink drawings based on his comic strip "Little Nemo" into a film cartoon.
After the success of Little Nemo, McCay signed with the William Randolph Hearst newspaper chain where he continued with his work in the field of animation. In 1914, he produced his most famous character, Gertie The Dinosaur, often credited as the first anthropomorphic cartoon character. McCay toured with the country with the film, "interacting" with Gertie in front of the audience, using a whip to coax her out from behind an outcropping of rock and even feeding her an apple.
● Known as the "Spanish Méliès," Segundo de Chomón special- ized in surreal optical effects films. Working in France for Pathé, Chomón successfully combined miniatures and live-action, pioneered hand-tinted film and invented the "film dolly" which allowed complex tracking shots. As a director, he was known for his trick photography—for example, building one short (The Electric Hotel around a suitcase that unpacked itself, and another (Les Kiriki) around a troupe of Japanese acrobats who perform impossible stunts. Later he provided the special effects work in important feature-length films such as Cabiria (1914) and Abel Gance's Napoleon.
● For my money, though, the best of these early animation pioneers was Wladyslaw Starewicz (he later changed his name to Ladislas Starevich when he moved to France). Born in Moscow to Polish parents, Starewicz was the director of the Museum of Natural History in Lithuania when he inadvertently embarked on a film career. Attempting to document on film a fight between two male stag beetles, Starewicz was frustrated by the insect's nocturnal nature—whenever the camera's lights were turned on for filming, the bugs invariably rolled over and went to sleep—but rather than give up, Starewicz made two models of the beetles with wax and wire, and staged the fight using stop-motion photography.
The result, Lucanus Cervus, was a sensation and Starewicz became a full-time director. In 1912 he made his best film, The Cameraman's Revenge, in which an adulterous insect is captured on film by her cuckolded husband then invited with her unwitting lover to the film's premiere at the local cinema:
Starewicz was decorated by the czar and won the Gold Medal at an international film festival in Milan in 1914, but fled Russia after the October Revolution in 1917. He continued to make films for the rest of his life, dying in 1965 while working on the film Like Dog and Cat.
Last year we here at the Monkey celebrated America's birth with a post about Walt Disney, Ub Iwerks and their all- American creation, Mickey Mouse, who made his debut in the 1928 cartoon, Steamboat Willie.
This year, we celebrate July 4, 1933, with a sneak peak at another all-American icon, Popeye the Sailor, who is set to make his big screen debut in a Betty Boop cartoon on July 14, 1933. Based on a character in E.C. Segar's long-running comic strip Thimble Theater, Max and Dave Fleischer of Fleischer Studios brought Popeye to life in a series of animated shorts for Paramount Pictures.
A middle-aged sailor with a squinty eye, powerful forearms and a fondness for the stimulative powers of spinach, Popeye was actually a late addition to the comic strip. Created in 1919, Thimble Theater for years focused on the adventures of Olive Oyl and her boyfriend Harold Hamgravy. Popeye himself wasn't introduced to the strip until 1929, and even then only as a minor character, when Olive and Ham hire the old salt to pilot a ship for them.
Segar intended that Popeye leave the strip after that one adventure, but reader reaction was so positive, he kept Popeye around and gradually began expanding his role. Eventually, Olive left Ham for Popeye, although the relationship between the old sea dog and the willowy Ms. Oyl was less than smooth sailing.
In 1932, the Fleischers, the creators of the hugely popular Betty Boop cartoons, signed a deal with Segar to produce a series of animated cartoons based on the Thimble Theater characters. The Fleischers introduced Popeye to the theater-going public through a Betty Boop cartoon, Popeye the Sailor, then thereafter produced stand-alone Popeye cartoons. William Costello initially provided the character's voice, but was eventually replaced by animator Jack Mercer.
Sammy Lerner contributed the series' theme song, "I'm Popeye the Sailor Man."
Perhaps the most famous entry in the Popeye series is the 16-minute technicolor short Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor (1936) which is preserved in the National Film Registry.
After Segar's death in 1938, various artists continued to produced Popeye comic strips. Fleischer Studios animated Popeye until 1941 when Paramount took control of the studio and produced Popeye cartoons under the "Famous Studios" banner until 1957.
And now for your viewing pleasure, Popeye the Sailor.
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)
... if I don't stop writing five thousand word essays about who I didn't pick for best director of 1931-32.
William Powell, Myrna Loy and Asta in The Thin Man movies Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in Holiday The movies of Val Lewton Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer The Thing (From Another World) Gene Kelly performing "I Got Rhythm" in An American in Paris
The films of Alfred Hitchcock The comedies of Alec Guinness Rio Bravo Anita O'Day in Jazz On A Summer's Day
The Apartment Paula Prentiss Julie Andrews Walter Matthau Manhattan The movies of Hayao Miyazaki Miranda Richardson Pierce Brosnan in The Matador Amy Adams
The best director of 1930-31, Fritz Lang, is celebrating a birthday today. He has lots of company.
Coincidentally, his cinematographer on M, Fritz Arno Wagner, was also born on this day, just four years after Lang. Wagner was cinematographer not only on M, but also on Nosferatu, the first two Dr. Mabuse movies—144 in all. That's Wagner on the right, Lang on the left. No idea who's lurking behind the camera. Probably some extra looking to wangle a piece of cake.
It's also Emeric Press- burger's birthday, who teamed up with Michael Powell to produce the best movies ever to come out of Great Britain (see, e.g., The Red Shoes). Born in Austria before the Great War, Pressburger was writing screenplays in Berlin at the same moment Lang and Wagner were filming their crime masterpiece.
"The worst things that happened to me were the political consequences of events beyond my control," Pressburger later said of fleeing Nazi Germany for England. "The best things were exactly the same."
I like to think the three men celebrated their birthdays together by watching this 1931 animated comedy produced by another December 5th-born legend, Walt Disney. In honor of these famously hard working men, I give you the 1931 Walt Disney cartoon, The Busy Beavers.
In the summer of 1928, around the time Buster Keaton's latest comedy, Steamboat Bill, Jr., hit theaters, a young animator named Walt Disney was looking for a vehicle to launch his struggling studio's latest creation, a cartoon mouse by the name of Mickey. On November 18, 1928, the animated short Steamboat Willie premiered at New York's 79th Street Theater.
The rest, as they say, is history. Mickey Mouse soon eclipsed Felix the Cat as the movies' most popular cartoon character, appearing in hundreds of shorts, feature-length films and television shows over the next eighty years, as well as serving as the corporate symbol of the largest media conglomerate in the world. But if Disney had had his way, the famous mouse would have been a rabbit and history's most beloved pants-wearing rodent might never have made it off the drawing board.
Disney had only just launched his own studio when he and his chief animator, Ub Iwerks, created a series of animated cartoons centered around a character named Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. The series was a smash hit but unfortunately for Disney, distributor Universal Studios wound up owning the character. Universal hired away most of Disney's animators (all but the loyal Iwerks), wrested control of Oswald from Disney and left his fledgling studio on the verge of bankruptcy.
Desperate for a new franchise to fill the gap, Disney and Iwerks quickly came up with an animated mouse they dubbed Mortimer—soon changed to Mickey at the insistence of Disney's wife, Lillian. After two silent Mickey Mouse shorts, Plane Crazy and The Gallopin' Gaucho, failed to find a buyer, Disney produced a short with sound, a loose parody of Keaton's latest film.
Steamboat Willie was an immediate hit and is still considered one of the most important cartoons ever produced. In 1994, a group of one thousand animators chose it as the thirteenth greatest cartoon of all time and four years later, the National Film Registry selected Steamboat Willie for preservation in the Library of Congress.
Walt Disney, by the way, was nominated for fifty-nine Oscars, winning twenty-six of them, including four in one year, all records. Ironically, though, he didn't win for Steamboat Willie, one of the most important works of his career—there simply was no category of "cartoon short" at that time.
We'll correct that oversight now. For creating Mickey Mouse in 1928, I'm giving Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks honorary Katie Awards.
Make a little more room on the mantlepiece, fellas.
Trivia: Maybe you knew this, but I didn't: Walt Disney himself provided the voice of Mickey Mouse until 1946.
Speaking of Clara Bow, the character she played so famously in It, Betty Lou, inspired the cartoon character Betty Boop.
You remember Betty Boop, don't you? She was one of Max Fleischer's creations, an overtly sexual flapper who along with her dog, Bimbo, got herself into a number of surreal scrapes, often with men who had only one thing on their sex-obsessed minds. Betty Boop first appeared in 1930 and her early adventures were definitely aimed at an adult audience.
The character started out as an anthropomorphic poodle, with a dog's ears and a dog's nose, but with a woman's legs, dress and cleavage, and at first Betty Boop was more of a sidekick to Bimbo than the other way around. Fleischer settled on Boop as fully human around the same time Mae Questel began providing the voice, an impossibly high-pitched girlish squeak with a decidedly Brooklyn accent.
In addition to drinking and fending off the advances of men, Betty Boop sang Jazz Age scat numbers in the style of Helen Kane and made appearances with some of the most famous Jazz stars of the era. Here's the 1932 cartoon short "Minnie The Moocher" pairing Betty Boop and Cab Calloway:
Helen Kane later sued Fleischer and his distributor, Paramount, claiming they had used her image and singing style for Betty Boop without her permission. The suit failed when evidence established that Kane herself had ripped off African-American performer and Cotton Club regular, Baby Esther.
With the enforcement of the Production Code in 1934, Ms. Boop's skirts descended below her knee and she gave up the flapper lifestyle. Nevertheless, as the Depression wore on, she seemed more and more an unwelcome reminder of the excesses of a previous era. In addition, her singing style also became increasingly dated and attempts to change her from a Jazz singer to a Swing artist failed. The last Boop cartoon was produced in 1939. In all, she made over one hundred appearances through the course of a decade.
Mae Questel reprised her role as Betty Boop in the 1988 hit film Who Framed Roger Rabbit where she laments, "Work's been kinda slow since cartoons went to color. But I still got it!"
You might want to stop in at the Official Betty Boop Site to scoop up your Betty Boop collectibles. I myself have no Boop memorabilia, so I can't vouch for the merchandise, but there it is.
Ms. Boop also has a myspace page loaded with cartoon shorts and images. She even blogs occasionally. You know, if you're the kind of person who reads blogs.
Maybe I should arrange an introduction between her and Lon Chaney ...
So what has the Monkey been up to recently, other than posting trivia questions straight out of TCM's Now Playing? Working on another of those mammoth essays, this one about early silent comedy, from its beginning around 1890 up to 1914. So far from the era I've watched one hundred sixty-eight comedy shorts and counting. Some are funny, but most of them, I can emphatically assure you, are not.
