The Most Honored Producer Hal B. Wallis holds the record for the producer with the most Best Picture nominations (19, although the award was not officially given to a film's producer before 1951). What nominated Wallis film was a 1942 musical biopic starring James Cagney?
And don't forget to click on over to All Good Things for round two of the March Madness/Best Actress tournament. Some tough match-ups today: Garbo v. Loy, Lombard v. Dietrich, Stanwyck v. Dunne and Shearer v. Colbert. Don't get left out of the action.
Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy (Sons Of The Desert) Herbert Marshall (Trouble In Paradise) (here, with Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus) The Marx Brothers (Horse Feathers and Duck Soup) Michel Simon (Boudu Saved From Drowning)
If she'd just been another pretty face, a cut flower from yesterday's bouquet, she would have been forgotten long ago, one of the thousands of beauties who for a brief season capture the fancy of the paparazzi and the tabloids and the fickle paying public and then quickly fade from our memory. But more than just a platinum blonde beauty, Jean Harlow also possessed an unexpected gift for comedy and self-parody, and as the pre-Code era drew to a close, she became not only America's premier sex symbol but one of its premier actresses as well.
Of what I would call the five essential performances in her career—Red-Headed Woman, Red Dust, Dinner At Eight, Bombshell and Libeled Lady—three of them were released during the award year that ran from August 1, 1932 to the end of 1933, and she's my choice for the best actress in a comedy or musical.
The Girl From Missouri Born to a Kansas City dentist and the daughter of a wealthy real estate developer, Harlean Harlow Carpenter tried out for the movies on a dare, got the job and later signed with the Hal Roach Studios. Working under her mother's maiden name, Jean Harlow played the "swanky blonde" in four Laurel and Hardy comedy shorts and appeared in uncredited bit roles in more than a dozen movies (including City Lights) before Howard Hughes cast her in Hell's Angels. Hughes epic about World War I flying aces proved to be Harlow's big break. Although she was as skittish as a newborn foal, barely able to speak her lines, the public immediately responded to her beauty—the expressions "platinum blonde" and "blonde bombshell" were coined to describe her—and she soon landed better parts, including that of James Cagney's love interest in William Wellman's The Public Enemy, a part initially intended for Louise Brooks.
On the set, Cagney couldn't help but notice that Harlow never wore undergarments and asked her, "How do you hold those things up?"
"I ice them," she answered matter-of-factly.
She played a similar kind of role—the beautiful, unobtainable society girl—in Frank Capra's comedy Platinum Blonde (retitled from Gallagher to capitalize on Harlow's popularity) and while critics called the performance no better than "competent," the public was already clamoring for more.
Directors clearly had no idea what to do with Jean Harlow in these early efforts and mostly she stood around, serving as a symbol of something the hero thinks he wants and learns the hard way that he doesn't. The bombshell image may have packed the theaters with the curious and the salivating, but it blinded directors and producers to her talent.
"The newspapers sure have loused me up," she complained cheerfully, "calling me a sexpot! Where'd they ever get such a screwy idea?"
"One look at Harlow," screenwriter Frances Marion replied in print, "and whether you were male or female you could get no other idea; she was the Scylla and Charybdis of sex, from her provocative come-hither expression to the flowing lines of her beautifully proportioned body."
Red-Headed Woman and Red Dust: Red-Hot Harlow It was MGM's legendary producer Irving Thalberg who determined to mold a screen image for Harlow beyond that of sex symbol. Thalberg bought Harlow's contract from Howard Hughes and cast her in the screen adaptation of Red-Headed Woman, Katharine Brush's racy novel about a woman who sleeps her way into high society. F. Scott Fitzgerald took the first crack at the screenplay, but couldn't solve the puzzle of how to make the audience like a character he himself didn't approve of, and it was instead Anita Loos, a veteran screenwriter and author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, who drafted the final screenplay.
Although Harlow's Lillian Andrews is a manipulative gold digger—she seduces her married boss, poor sap, and breaks up his marriage—there was a sincerity to Lil's transparent scheming, and with Harlow serving up the brassier bits with humor and wounded pride, audiences found themselves rooting for her. The result was one of the biggest hits of 1932.
It was a remarkably nuanced performance from an actress who before this had always shown more leg than promise. Variety summed up the general reaction: "Jean Harlow, hitherto not highly esteemed as an actress, gives an electric performance."
Next up was an even better vehicle for Harlow, one that would both display her talent for comedy and pair her with fast-rising star Clark Gable.
Based on a failed stageplay, MGM had purchased Red Dust as a vehicle for Greta Garbo and John Gilbert, the studio's two biggest stars of the silent era. Once the couple's relationship ended, however, Garbo backed out and Thalberg cast Harlow to replace her. While adapting the play for the screen, writer John Lee Mahin recommended that Thalberg replace Gilbert with Gable, and his suggestion proved to be an inspired one. Harlow and Gable had an undeniable chemistry on screen and ended up making six pictures together, including Harlow's last, Saratoga.
Clark Gable is Dennis Carson, the overseer of a rubber plantation deep in the jungles of French Indochina. As the movie opens, Carson is on edge—production is behind schedule, his crew chief (Donald Crisp) is a drunk, and if that weren't enough to worry about, a prostitute on the run from the law decides to hide out in Carson's bed.
"You've got your yearly case of nerves," says his friend and mentor (Tully Marshall). "Why don't you go down to Saigon and blow the lid off. ... As a matter of fact, what came up from Saigon isn't so bad looking."
"I've been looking at her kind," Carson sneers, "ever since my voice changed."
But as Carson notes, the prostitute, Vantine (Harlow), is a "cute little trick" and she makes him laugh and, well, she's there and why not. Things get a bit complicated when she falls for him, but Carson is oblivious and at the end of the month, he puts her on the boat and hands her a wad of cash she doesn't want. "It isn't half enough," he tells her as her eyes fill with tears. "And when I get down to Saigon, there'll be plenty more." Harlow is terrific in this scene as we glimpse Vantine's vulnerability while never letting down the guard a woman of her profession would necessarily have developed.
And then things really do get complicated. As Vantine gets on the boat, Barbara Willis (Mary Astor) gets off it, and though she's the wife of his latest hire, Carson is immediately smitten. Mrs. Willis represents everything that he, as a poor kid with his nose forever pressed against the glass, has ever wanted and he sets out to seduce her.
When the boat soon after runs aground and Vantine is thrown back into Carson's care, a worldly-wise Harlow immediately sizes up the situation. "What a pleasant little house party this is going to be." The women's rivalry is not just one of sex and love but of class, education and manners—everything Mrs. Willis takes for granted, everything Vantine has struggled to survive without—and this is where Harlow really hits her stride as an actress. As Vantine competes with Mrs. Willis (and Harlow with Astor) with gestures both subtle (a mocking description of a fictional blue-blooded background) and not so subtle (bathing in the company drinking water), Harlow is funny, bawdy, hurt, angry, and then as much as her Vantine wishes she weren't, compassionate, too, protecting her rival when she could just as easily destroy her.
As the Movie Diva put it in her review of Red Dust, Harlow's "uniquely effortless vulgarity, humor and slovenliness create the rarest of Hollywood goddesses, the beautiful clown." It's one of the best performances of the pre-Code era.
The movie itself has been selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
Despite being known as a "man's director," Victor Fleming was remarkably adept at getting strong performances from actresses—Clara Bow in Mantrap, Judy Garland in The Wizard Of Oz, Vivien Leigh in Gone With The Wind—and he probably deserves more credit than he usually gets for establishing Harlow as an actress (he also directed her in Bombshell and Reckless). He liked to create onscreen the sort of women he preferred to spend time with in private—"resourceful, strong-willed and sexual," as David Denby put in The New Yorker (May 25, 2009).
The poll for best song of 1932-33 quickly turned into a neck-and-neck contest between "We're in the Money" from Gold Diggers of 1933 and "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf" from Three Little Pigs, with the Busby Berkeley dance number edging the classic Disney cartoon theme right at the wire, 14 votes to 12. The Rogers and Hart standard, "Isn't It Romantic," finished third with 6 votes and two more songs, "42nd Street" and "Remember My Forgotten Man," both penned by the winning songwriting team of Harry Warren and Al Dubin, picked up three votes each. And while "We're in the Money" won only a plurality of the vote, the three Warren/Dubin numbers, taken together, took 20 of the 38 votes cast, a clear win in my book for perhaps the most prolific pair of songwriters you've never heard of.
In a way, the story of "We're in the Money" begins with Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer way back in 1927—a story that so far has taken me more than a year to tell, so let me recap: when talkies supplanted silent films, studios actually had no idea what to do with the new technology. So movie producers, assuming audiences were just as dumb as they themselves were, copied The Jazz Singer formula over and over, dropping in songs and musical performances almost at random into every new film that came out, even into movies where a song made no sense at all. And audiences got sick of it in a hurry, so much so that by 1930, musicals were box office poison. (You can see Hollywood doing the same thing right now with 3-D, turning everything into a 3-D movie whether it makes sense or not.)
Come 1933, the only way Warner Brothers production chief Darryl F. Zanuck could convince his bosses to make a musical was to lie to them, telling them 42nd Street would be a gritty drama about the backstage intrigue typical of a Broadway show. He set up two separate film units, one for the dramatic material, one for the musical numbers, and hired a couple of Broadway veterans, composer Harry Warren and lyricist Al Dubin, to come up with the songs for the movie on the sly.
For a guy you've probably never heard of, composer Harry Warren was a hit-writing machine. He wrote twenty-one number one hits in his career (nine with lyricist Al Dubin), including "Jeepers Creepers," "Chattanooga Choo Choo," "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe" and "You Must Have Been A Beautiful Baby." He also wrote hits such as "That's Amore," "I Got A Gal in Kalamazoo," "Shuffle Off To Buffalo," "You'll Never Know" and "At Last." He was nominated for an Oscar eleven times, winning three. In addition to Al Dubin, Warren also worked extensively with Mack Brown and Johnny Mercer.
Al Dubin meanwhile had written the lyrics for several hit Broadway musicals and found himself paired with Warren for the first time on 42nd Street, mostly because the two had backstage Broadway experience that Zanuck wanted to draw on. Among the numbers they wrote were "You're Getting To Be A Habit With Me" (inspired by a line from a studio secretary explaining why she was dating a particular man), "Shuffle Off To Buffalo" and the title song.
Incidentally, the two can be seen at the beginning of 42nd Street as the authors of the stinker of a song, "It Must Be June," which stage director Julian Marsh (Warner Baxter) throws out of the show over their protests.
Providing choreography for the dance numbers was Busby Berkeley. Berkeley had gotten his start choreographing parades and marching bands, before going to work for Samuel Goldwyn on the hit Eddie Cantor movie, Whoopee! in 1930. Berkeley took a novel approach to filming the numbers, arranging the performers in geometric patterns and allowing the camera itself to do the dancing as it flew overheard or dollied underneath. As Daniel Eagan writes in America's Film Legacy, "For purists, this technique was the antithesis of true dance, but in 1933 it seemed fresh, even daring."
42nd Street was a huge success, saving the studio from near bankruptcy. A follow-up, Gold Diggers of 1933, immediately went into production, using most of the same team—hoofers Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell and Ginger Rogers, choreographer Busby Berkeley and the songwriting team of Warren and Dubin. Stock Warner Brothers players Joan Blondell, Warren William and Aline MacMahon were added to carry the story.
Like its predecessor, Gold Diggers is about the backstage shenanigans of a Broadway production, this time played for laughs instead of drama. To save time, Zanuck recycled the screenplay from 1929's hit Gold Diggers of Broadway, but instead of the original's rather dull numbers, such a nine-minute version of "Tip Toe Through the Tulips," Zanuck relied on Warren and Dubin to come up with something sizzling. The duo didn't disappoint.
Unlike 42nd Street which hid its intentions until the last twenty minutes, Gold Diggers of 1933 announces itself as a musical from the get-go. After the opening credits, the movie jumps straight to Ginger Rogers singing "We're in the Money" (called "The Gold Diggers Song" to tie the sheet music to the movie) while a bevy of beauties clad only in body stockings and giant gold coins dance around her. We're in the money, we're in the money; We've got a lot of what it takes to get along! We're in the money, that sky is sunny, Old Man Depression you are through, you done us wrong.
It's an ironically upbeat number, not just because the story is about chorus girls so broke they steal the neighbor's milk for their morning cereal, but because the country was mired in the depths of a Depression grinding along in its fourth year.
The screenplay had originally called for a dreary montage of shuttered theaters showing the effects of the Depression on Broadway, but Berkeley and director Mervyn LeRoy junked the script and opted to dazzle the audience right away. It turned out to be an inspired choice. The number's energy sweeps you right past the movie's hokey storyline and by the time you start to wonder why you're watching this cookie cutter claptrap, there's another song and dance number on the screen and you're carried away all over again.
Gold Diggers of 1933 is not currently available on DVD and the only way to watch this song at the moment is to click this link, head on over to TCM and watch the clip there. Or you can come over to my house and watch it on tape. I suggest the former. [Note: In the comments section, Brian tells me that Gold Diggers of 1933 is available as part of the Busby Berkeley collection which also includes 42nd Street, Footlight Parade, Dames and Gold Diggers of 1935. That, my friends, is a good collection.]
While you're watching and listening, here are some of the faces to look for:
Ginger Rogers—I hope you know who she is. Half of the greatest dance team in history, Rogers started as a contract player, appearing in ten movies in 1933, including small roles in both 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933. In the former, she played "Anytime Annie," a roundheels who said no only once "and then she didn't hear the question." Here she plays Fay Fortune, a down-on-her-luck chorus girl who pals around with the three leads, Joan Blondell, Ruby Keeler and Aline MacMahon. She may well have gotten this plum spot in the proceedings because she was dating director Mervyn LeRoy at the time, but once she was paired with Broadway dancer Fred Astaire in Flying Down To Rio seven months later, she wouldn't need favors from anybody.
And in case you're wondering why Rogers sings a verse in pig Latin, she was amusing her fellow dancers with pig Latin between takes, and either Darryl Zanuck or Busby Berkeley or Mervyn LeRoy—depending on whose story you believe—saw her and decided to make it part of the routine.
Ned Sparks—One of those ubiquitous character actors on the Warner Brothers payroll, his specialty was deadpan comedy delivered in a nasal, monotone voice of doom, so much a part of his persona that Lloyds of London insured his reputation for $10,000 in the event he was ever photographed smiling. At least that's what the New York Times reported in 1936, and they're never wrong. "I speedily realized that I was not destined to cause the ladies to swoon with romantic ecstasy as they watched me make love to one of their sex," he once said. "I have also divined that comedy and not romantic acting was my special forte." He appeared in over eighty movies and retired in 1947.
Ironically, Sparks's character Barney Hopkins growls at one point in the film "Cancel my contract with Warren and Dubin!" Obviously, Warner Brothers went in the other direction, hiring the duo to write songs for its next backstage musical, Footlight Parade.
Joan Blondell—I've written about her before, at length (click here). One of my favorite pre-Code actresses, Blondell made more than a hundred movies in her career, eight in 1933 alone. There was always something tough and no-nonsense about Blondell's sex appeal (she knew what she wanted, said yes when she wanted and only when she wanted) that made her a fan favorite during the Depression. She's the star of this picture, playing a chorus girl who tries to keep the snooty Warren William from breaking up the romance of Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler, only to fall for the big lug herself. I imagine this plot was already a cliche when Adam told it to Eve in the Garden, but Blondell looks great in her skivvies and it's all great fun, so who cares?
Ruby Keeler—The wife of Jazz Singer star Al Jolson, Keeler was the nominal star of Warner's backstage trilogy, with 42nd Street serving as her screen debut. "I couldn't act," she said later, "I had that terrible singing voice, and now I can see I wasn't the greatest tap dancer in the world, either." But she had a fresh-faced innocence that translated well with audiences and for a couple of years there, she was a big box office draw. She only made eleven movies and except for a handful of television appearances in the 1960s, was out of pictures by 1941. (For more on Keeler, check out "Shadow Waltz," a blog devoted to all things Ruby.)
Aline Mac Mahon— Like Ned Sparks, she was one of those faces you'd see in Warner Brothers films of the period, usually playing someone good, wise and long-suffering. She began on Broadway in the 1920s, broke into movies as Edward G. Robinson's loyal secretary in Five Star Final and continued to act until her retirement in 1975. Nominated for an Oscar for her supporting performance in 1944's Dragon Seed, you might also want to track her down in Skyscraper Souls, co-starring Gold Digger's male lead, Warren William.
The movie was supposed to end with "Pettin' In The Park," which would have made more sense narratively but didn't pack much punch, either visually or as a tune. Instead, producer Hal Wallis (who took over mid-production when Zanuck quit in a contract dispute) opted to end with the picture's final Warren-Dubin song, "Remember My Forgotten Man," an explicitly political number about the Depression.
Remember my forgotten man, You put a rifle in his hand; You sent him far away, You shouted, "Hip, hooray!" But look at him today!
Sitting as it does at the end of the picture, the song serves as a big fat middle finger to everything that's come before it. Eagan calls it "a song of epic chutzpah." That it is.
Audiences ate it up. Gold Diggers of 1933 was an even bigger hit than 42nd Street, grossing a million dollars more than its predecessor, an enormous amount of money considering ticket prices ranged from 10¢ to a quarter.
Looking to cash in on a trend, Warners quickly rushed Footlight Parade into production and gave the lead to its most popular star, James Cagney. In this one, they barely bother with a plot—more a case of "Did you see the other two? This is more of the same"—and gave Berkeley free rein. It's the most over-the-top of three, with numbers that wouldn't fit into an airplane hanger ostensibly taking place on a theater stage. It's worth looking up, though, to see Cagney in a pre-Yankee Doodle Dandy dancing role.
Harry Warren and Al Dubin wrote the songs for that one, too, and all three movies are preserved in the National Film Registry.
1933 represented the highwater mark for Berkeley's career. Within a year, his lavish production numbers were considered old hat and by the early '40s, even though he was still directing musicals, others, particularly Gene Kelly, had taken over his choreographing duties.
Ironically, it was the star of the "We're In The Money" number that hastened Berkeley's downfall. Over the course of the next three summers, in The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat and Swing Time, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire would, like Berkeley before them, redefine the movie musical, turning dance into a most intimate expression of love and romance. Suddenly by comparison Berkeley's choreography seemed gaudy, abstract and impersonal, and what had thrilled audiences in 1933 was dismissed as so last year by 1934.
Harry Warren and Al Dubin continued to crank out hits throughout the 1930s, with their last number one together being 1937's "Remember Me." After that, Dubin returned to Broadway and wrote musicals until his death in 1945, while Warren teamed up with other lyricists and continued to write hit songs into the 1950s. "The familiarity of Harry Warren's songs," said one drama critic, "is matched by the anonymity of the man" and Time magazine noted, "By silent consensus, the king of this army of unknown soldiers, the Hollywood incognitos, was Harry Warren, who had more songs on the Hit Parade than [Irving] Berlin himself and who would win the contest hands down if enough people have heard of him."
I'm still working on Part Three of my essay on Scarface. In the meantime, chew on some photographs for a while. This is a collection of those actors and actresses who turned in notable performances in 1931-32, but just missed out on a Katie Award nomination. Some of these faces you've seen before, some you will see again.
(To see the list of nominees for 1931-32, click here.)
Edward G. Robinson (Five Star Final) James Cagney and Joan Blondell (Blonde Crazy) Marie Dressler (Emma) (pictured here with Katie Award nominee Norma Shearer) Dorothea Wieck (Mädchen In Uniform) Raimu and Pierre Fresnay (Marius) Warner Oland (Shanghai Express) Jackie Cooper and Irene Rich (The Champ) Anita Page (Skyscraper Souls) Warren William (Skyscraper Souls) Constance Bennett (What Price Hollywood?) Maurice Chevalier and Claudette Colbert (The Smiling Lieutenant)
That, of course, was the famous grapefruit scene starring James Cagney and Mae Clarke from The Public Enemy. Even people who don't know gangster films from the early '30s know Cagney was the guy who'd poke you in the puss if you served him grapefruit for breakfast—and can you blame him? Give me Honeynut Cheerios or give me death, I always say.
But if that's all you know about the gangster films of the early sound era, boy, are you in for a tasty treat. A remarkable amount of violence and amorality showed up on the screen in the years before Hollywood began enforcing the Production Code in mid-1934 and except for a handful of phony disclaimers slapped on the prints in post-production, the purveyors of this fabulous filth were pretty unapologetic about it.
Several gangster pictures made it into theaters between 1928 and 1933 seeking to cash in on the much-publicized bootleg booze wars of the Prohibition era, but I'd call three essential—Little Caesar and The Public Enemy which were released in 1931, and Scarface, which was filmed at the same time but got hung up in endless wrangles with state censorship boards and didn't hit theaters for another year. Scarface I'll talk about at length after the New Year when we get to the movies of 1932, but the other two I've touched on before and now is the time to fulfill all those promises to talk about them at some length.
Little Caesar came first (either in December 1930 or January 1931 depending on who you believe; details are sketchy). Based on Al Capone's rise and fall, the story of a "tough mugg" (as Variety put it) who rises through the ranks to take control of an organized crime racket only to be done in by his own ambition was a familiar one to audiences when the film came out—"same formula and all the standard tricks," said the review in Variety—but Edward G. Robinson as Caesar Enrico Bandello was a sensation.
"Money's all right, but it ain't every- thing," Rico sneers in the very first scene. "Nah, be some- body, look hard at a bunch of guys and know they'll do anything that you tell 'em, have your own way or nothin'—be somebody!" It's this burning ambition that he doesn't yet know can never be satisfied no matter how high he climbs that drives him to murder his way up the organizational chart at an Eastern city's local mob office.
As with every role he ever essayed, Robinson played the part of a ruthless sociopath with utter conviction and was so convincing as a tough guy he was typecast for the rest of his life, a career that spanned more than fifty years and 93 movies, and every actor who afterwards stepped into the guise of a gangster had Robinson's template to deal with. In fact, Robinson was pretty much the opposite of the parts he played—cultured, sophisticated and well-educated, too, originally studying to become a rabbi until he received a scholarship to attend the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Later in life he collected fine art with the same gusto Rico used to collect corpses.
Little Caesar is far from a perfect movie. If you've ever seen a gangster film, you already know the plot; as I mentioned before, even audiences in 1931 knew what was coming. Plus the work of the supporting actors is pretty bad—both stiff and hammy at the same time, and utterly unconvincing. Even Edward G. Robinson, as great as he is, isn't quite up to Edward G. Robinson standards. Maybe the primitive sound technology of the day didn't capture the fullness of his growling timbre, or maybe the cinematographer lit him differently, hiding the deep shadows of his face, but whatever the explanation, Robinson doesn't quite look or sound like himself and it's just enough off-putting to say that if you're somehow not familiar with his work, this is not the movie I'd start with.
Still, somewhere along the line as you journey toward film fluency, Little Caesar needs to be on your itinerary.
A better film, less predictable and centering on an even more explosive performance, is William Wellman's The Public Enemy. If Little Caesar is the study of an ambitious man's rise and fall, The Public Enemy, starring James Cagney as Tom Powers, is a study of the sort of man Rico Bandello would have routinely used to do his dirty work, a small-time thug with no ambition other than to have a few bucks in his pocket and with no scruples about how to get them.
The Public Enemy starts out with a traditional "good brother-bad brother" conflict, a favorite trope of storytellers ever since Moses penned the fourth chapter of Genesis, but then Cagney, director Wellman and screenwriters John Bright and Kubec Glasmon upset our expectations and with them, societal norms, by making Cagney's Tom dynamic and exciting and the good brother (Donald Cook) a shellshocked, underemployed sad sack. Part of this was the result of a last minute casting change—Cagney originally had a supporting part until Wellman saw him in rehearsals and switched him with projected lead Edward Woods—and part is the result of some wicked subversion on the part of all involved, especially Cagney, but in any event, the lesson is clear: crime pays better than a straight job and since either way you wind up dead, what are you waiting for?
As with Little Caesar before it and Scarface after it, the studio forced a disclaimer onto the picture, stating there was no intention to glamorize violence. Unlike the other two, which clearly wanted to bask in Al Capone's limelight, the character of Tom Powers as written really isn't a glamorous guy. He's strictly small-time, not too smart, impotent despite his locker room boasts and has some definite Oedipal issues—the only woman we know for sure he has sex with is an older woman who mothers him, gets him drunk and takes him to bed, an act that so disgusts him, he flees his hideout and leads his best friend into a hail of bullets—what we in the trade call a "loser."
And yet Cagney is so dynamic in the part that, as Chris Barsanti put it for Slant, "you can imagine kids at the time flocking out of the theater and cocking their caps just like him." Maybe the result is at odds with the intent, but the truth is, without Cagney, The Public Enemy wouldn't have amounted to much and the movie and movie history benefitted immensely from Wellman's casting change.
Both Little Caesar and The Public Enemy have been preserved in the National Film Registry and both Robinson's Rico Bandello and Cagney's Tom Powers made the American Film Institute's list of the Top Fifty Film Villains of All-Time.
Yet while both pictures did get noms for their screenplays—an Oscar tradition, by the way, using the screenwriting category to recognize edgier fare—the Academy ignored their stars and directors, and would continue to do so for years to come.
Maybe this shouldn't come as a surprise. The awards were created in part to stave off various attempts at state and federal censorship by creating the illusion that movies were art—"Art" with a capital "A"—stuffy snoozefests that your mom and her preacher could feel comfortable watching. Gangster movies, along with comedies and anything with, say, a nearly-naked Joan Blondell, not only didn't fit this definition of "Art," they were the very movies potential censors wanted to get their hands and scissors on.
So come Oscar-time, Hollywood in the early 1930s had to pretend gangster movies—and the people who made them—didn't exist. After a while, the Academy began to believe its own claptrap, that gangster movies, comedies and naked Joan Blondell flicks were not Oscar worthy. The studios were happy enough to bank the money that Robinson and Cagney brought in—they would have gone bankrupt without them—but God forbid they actually honor them for the effort.
Cagney eventually broke through this hidebound prejudice, receiving a nomination for Angels With Dirty Faces in 1938, but only after proving so versatile not only as tough guy but as a song-and-dance man and even as a Shakespearean actor that the Academy simply couldn't ignore him. Even then, it took a tour de force effort right after Pearl Harbor in what was billed as the most patriotic movie ever made—Yankee Doodle Dandy—to actually win the thing.
Robinson wasn't so lucky. As great as he was, no role ever came along so far outside of his expected range that he was able to shatter the perception of him as "merely" a tough guy actor. Not only did he never win an Oscar, he was never even nominated, not for Little Caesar, not for Double Indemnity, not for nothing. The Academy finally did award him an honorary Oscar at the 1973 ceremony—two months after his death. Too little, too late.
"If I were just a bit taller," he once said, "and I was a little more handsome or something like that, I could have played all the roles that I have played, and played many more. There is such a thing as a handicap, but you've got to be that much better as an actor. It kept me from certain roles that I might have had, but then, it kept others from playing my roles, so I don't know that it's not altogether balanced."
Not exactly the way a tough guy would have put it but then again that's not who Edward G. Robinson was. Too bad it took so long for Hollywood to recognize that fact.
As with the best director award, the contest for best actor of 1930-31 is a virtual tie, so much so I drafted the spine of three different essays as I tried the award on first Edward G. Robinson then James Cagney before settling finally on Charles Chaplin.
In so choosing, I have the benefit of 20-20 foresight—I know both Cagney and Robinson have Katie Awards in their future—but even without that foreknowledge, I have to say, if I had been a voter in 1931 faced with these choices, I would have no doubt looked at both Cagney and Robinson as promising, if exciting, newcomers while regarding Chaplin as an overdue legend who had turned in the best work of his career. Either way, I think Chaplin is the right choice for best actor of the year.
The chief complaint about Chaplin is that he was sentimental—excessively or affectedly appealing to emotions, in his case, pathos and romance. He wore his heart on his sleeve and manipulated the emotions of his audience as well; he is decidedly un-modern in that regard. We prefer our comedy served cynical these days, and when we look back at the great comics of the Silent Era, it's Buster Keaton most now prefer.
It doesn't help Chaplin's cause to mention that what he did—the silent Tramp—is strictly a product of its time and cannot be equated with anything we'd see in a 21st century movie. Cagney, Robinson and Keaton could step right off a 1931 screen into a 2009 movie and without altering their styles or personas become stars today, while Chaplin would have to mine unexplored talents to make the transition.
I've written at length about Chaplin before (and no doubt will again) so I won't bludgeon you with all of it again. But I will say I think when we measure Chaplin strictly in terms of how he fits in or fails to fit in with our current tastes, we're shortchanging Chaplin the actor. That a guy who didn't speak and used title card sparingly could make us feel as well as laugh is a real testament to his talent as an actor. When the fictional Norma Desmond claimed, "We didn't need dialogue—we had faces," it was more a rationalization than a statement of fact, but in Chaplin's case, it was literally true. Charlie Chaplin was to Charles Chaplin (take a look at City Lights' credits to see the distinction) what John Wayne was to John Ford or Robert DeNiro was to Martin Scorsese—an actor who could interpret and perfectly execute the vision of his director as together they made some of the greatest movies in Hollywood history.
City Lights begins as a showcase for Chaplin's talents as a slapstick comedian, reminding you that in terms of grace and timing he was rivaled only by Keaton and Curly Howard. As the picture opens, the homeless Tramp (Chaplin) awakes in the lap of the ironically-named statue "Peace and Prosperity" and proceeds to make a mockery of the dedication ceremony, first dangling on a sword stuck up a hole in his britches, then thumbing his nose at the gathered dignitaries (and clearly at the age of sound movies as well). It was the sort of effortless slapstick he had perfected early in his career, first under the direction of Mack Sennett, then on his own at the Essanay and Mutual studios, as graceful as a ballet dance, as precise as a Swiss clock.
Indeed, to a degree City Lights is a series of sequences —a suicidal million- aire, a dinner at a swanky nightclub, a prize fight between the 5'5" Chaplin and his heavyweight opponent—that would have worked just as well as two-reel shorts.
Chaplin also reminds you in that first reel that the Tramp is not all the sweetness I think we tend to remember him for. He can also be pompous, such as when he admires a bronze nude (or pretends not to), angry (at a pair of newspaper boys who tease him) and cowardly (when the laborer he is taking to task turns out to be well over six feet). His shortcomings work as comedy though as Chaplin juxtaposes the Tramp's carefully-preserved dignity with his straitened circumstances.
But Chaplin also puts on display his gift for pathos and romance when in the second reel he introduces a girl—there's always a girl—in this case the blind flower seller (Virginia Cherrill) who mistakes the Tramp for a millionaire. The Tramp's hopefully hopeless longing links all the episodes together as he tries both to maintain the facade and pay for the operation that will restore the girl's sight.
It's this inevitable development in a Chaplin plot—the introduction of a damsel in need—that I suspect most often leads Chaplin's critics to call him sentimental, and I will concede that in a film such as The Kid (a film that I love by the way), Chaplin the filmmaker is sentimental, equating Edna Purviance's unwed mother with the Madonna, for example. But here in City Lights, I would argue while the Tramp is motivated by sentimentality, Chaplin sees clearly—even in the famous ending which I won't reveal here—a distinction that may not mean much to some, but which is important to me, anyway.
Chaplin the director is aiming for the truth even if the Tramp, like the blind flower girl, can't quite see it clearly. And it's Chaplin the actor who makes this dual vision work.
Postscript: If it makes you feel any better, while Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney turned in exciting, groundbreaking performances in 1930 and 1931, respectively, both had far better work in them, and when twenty years from now all the Katie Awards have been handed out and are gathering dust on the mythical mantlepieces of history's greatest actors, you'll know Cagney and Robinson won for the best work of their careers, not merely the first great performance they gave. In any event, in a couple of days I'll post my notes on Cagney and Robinson as the essay "A Gangland Double Feature."
Credit Where Credit Is Due: The wallpaper at the top of the article is by Sylvie whose work can be downloaded here. The artwork titled "Chaplin vs. Keaton" is by Damian Blake. You can check him out here.
The Most Honored Producer Hal B. Wallis holds the record for the producer with the most Best Picture nominations (19, although the award was not officially given to a film's producer before 1951). What nominated Wallis film was a 1942 musical biopic starring James Cagney?
