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The results are in from this week's Monkey Movie poll, Who would you choose as best director of 1930-31?
Fritz Lang who directed Peter Lorre in the serial killer classic, M, ran away with it, receiving 6 of the 10 votes cast. The immortal Charlie Chaplin picked up 2 for directing City Lights and René Clair (Le Million) and Luis Buñuel (L'Âge d'Or) received one vote each.
Tod Browning who directed Dracula had admitted last week in a interview conducted strictly between the left and right lobes of my cerebral cortex that he feared he was just in this poll to round out the field and this proved to be the case.
Raoul Walsh, William A. Wellman and Josef von Sternberg were annoyed not to be in the poll at all and called for an investigation.
After the win, Lang and his (alleged) mistress, actress Joan Bennett, shared a celebratory cigarette on the set of their current movie project, the film noir thriller Scarlet Street.
"Winning this poll," said Lang at a hastily-arranged press conference, "means as much to me as winning the Katie Award itself. Well, almost. I mean, I'm not crazy. The Katie Award is big and will provide some real leverage at contract time. But this is nice, too."
By the way, perhaps I'm telling stories out of school, but the vote for René Clair came from none other than our own beloved Katie-Bar-The-Door. She felt Clair's work on Le Million was innovative, clever and warm, not to mention it's her favorite movie of the five listed here. She's right, of course. Le Million is on the short list for most pleasant surprises I've received while working on this blog and I give it my highest recommendation. But, well, I went with Lang for the reasons I've previously stated at length.
In any event, whoever you voted for, you're right, their work was the best of the year. A good year for directors all the way around.
Although Cimarron won the Oscar for best picture of 1931, the Western that garners the most attention now was a little-seen, big-budget flop called The Big Trail. Directed by veteran Raoul Walsh and starring John Wayne, I almost nominated this one for best picture because of its historical significance as the first big budget widescreen movie. That, and because I like Westerns.
Raoul Walsh was one of the Fox Film Corporation's hardest working directors when he was tapped in 1930 to helm The Big Trail. Best known for directing the James Cagney classic White Heat (or, if you're a fan of this blog, Douglas Fairbanks's best movie, 1924's The Thief of Bagdad), Walsh worked in Hollywood for more than fifty years, racking up nearly 140 directing credits, including as an assistant director on The Birth of a Nation in 1915. He received his last film credit (as a writer) in 1970.
Walsh had also worked as an actor, appearing in forty films, and was set to star as the Cisco Kid in the Western In Old Arizona when his car struck a jackrabbit, shattering the windshield and costing Walsh his right eye. (After the accident, he opted to wear what became a trademark eye patch, reasoning that with a glass eye, "Every time I'd get in a fight, I'd have to put it in my pocket.") (Warner Baxter, incidentally, went on to win an Oscar in the role.)
Shot on location in Fox's new 70 mm Grandeur process, The Big Trail was one of the first feature-length widescreen movies and the first big budget one. Its $2 million budget was enormous at the time and represented something of a gamble for the studio during the early days of the Depression. Walsh spotted a young unknown named Marion Morrison working with director John Ford and, renaming Morrison "John Wayne," cast him in the lead.
The Big Trail is the story of a young wagon master (Wayne, just 23 at the time) who leads a band of settlers across the frontier while battling Indians, weather and a murderous gambler. It's a beautiful film to look at and if I were handing out awards for cinematography, Arthur Edeson (All Quiet On The Western Front, Casablanca) would certainly have received a nomination.
That said, The Big Trail suffers from the same problem all Westerns of that era suffered from—simplistic storylines and characterizations—and it flopped at the box office. It took John Ford and his 1939 masterpiece Stagecoach to turn the Western into adult fare.
It didn't help that few theaters were able to exhibit a widescreen movie and most theaters received the inferior 35 mm print, filmed at the same time as the 70 mm version (actually, five versions were shot on location, with French, Spanish and German language editions, filmed mostly with different casts, accounting for the other three). After its premiere, a half hour was reportedly trimmed from its run time, but the changes made no difference—audiences just weren't interested in The Big Trail.
John Wayne took most of the blame for the failure and was relegated to low budget B-Westerns for the rest of the decade. Though gifted, he was raw and maybe his long exile in the cinematic wilderness was just what he needed. By the time Ford fought to cast him as the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach, Wayne was a screen veteran with sixty movies under his belt. Though still unbelievably young, by 1939 he knew how to carry a movie—and if you think there's no skill involved in commanding the screen, that it's just a matter of a movie star with looks and charisma "playing himself," then you should compare The Big Trail to, say, The Searchers or Rio Bravo.
Widescreen movies took even longer than John Wayne to catch on. As a cost-cutting move during the Depression, studios abandoned the effort to convert movie houses to widescreen which audiences had never been much interested in anyway. It would be more than twenty years before Hollywood took another crack at a widescreen movie.
In 2006, the National Film Preservation Board included The Big Trail in the National Film Registry. If you're going to watch it, make you sure you get hold of the widescreen version. It is available as part of a two-disc set from Fox and shows up on the Fox Movie Channel from time to time.
No time for blogging today. Busy doing something close to nothing. Here's a look at those who almost got a Katie nomination for 1930-31 ... but didn't.
Jackie Cooper (actor, Skippy)
Bela Lugosi (actor, Dracula) (almost forgot him—MM, 11/2/09)
Irene Dunne (actress, Cimarron)
Louise Brooks (actress, Prix de Beauté)
Mary Astor (actress, Other Men's Women)
William A. Wellman (director, The Public Enemy)
Raoul Walsh (director, The Big Trail)
Luis Buñuel (director, L'Age d'Or)
Dwight Frye (supporting actor, Dracula)
Harry Myers (right, with Charles Chaplin) (supporting actor, City Lights)
Paul Ollivier (left) (supporting actor, Le Million)
Mae Clarke (supporting actress, The Front Page)
Virginia Cherrill (supporting actress, City Lights)
Marjorie Rambeau (supporting actress, Min and Bill)
John Monk Saunders (with wife Fay Wray) (screenplay, The Dawn Patrol)
The first in a series of essays about the Katie winners of the pre-Oscar era.
He was called "The King of Hollywood" and if any actor during the Silent Era might credibly have claimed to be more popular than Charlie Chaplin, it was Elton Thomas Ullman, better known to his adoring public as Douglas Fairbanks.
The star of forty-eight movies, including some of the greatest action films of all time, he was, along with Chaplin and his wife Mary Pickford, one of the three highest-paid and most-popular actors of his day. On his honeymoon with Pickford, Fairbanks and his bride drew crowds of 300,000 in Paris and London. At home in their mansion, dubbed "Pickfair," the two threw lavish parties and routinely entertained the world's most sought-after celebrities. To receive an invitation to Pickfair was to receive the social blessing of Hollywood royalty.
But Fairbanks was more than just a regular feature of the gossip columns and party circuit. He was also a fine actor and virtually created the modern action hero in a series of swashbuckling adventures that showcased an infectious joie de vivre and an extraordinary flare for stuntwork.
His lead performance in The Mark of Zorro, for which I awarded him a Katie as best actor of 1920, was his first foray into the genre of the period-costume action-adventure. Already a star of comedies, audiences responded with such enthusiasm to Fairbanks's new role that he cheerfully ended up playing variations on it for the rest of his career.
The per- formance was both ground- breaking and one of the most influential in movie history, esta- blishing many of the superhero and action hero conventions we now take for granted. His physique later served as the model for the comic hero Superman and the mask, secret hideaway and foppish alter ego inspired the creators of Batman.
As a co-founder of United Artists, Fairbanks had complete creative control over his pictures and he produced a string of action-adventure classics—The Mark of Zorro, The Three Musketeers, Robin Hood, The Thief of Bagdad, Don Q Son of Zorro, The Black Pirate, The Gaucho—before saying farewell to the genre with The Iron Mask. On each of these movies, he worked not just as an actor but also as a writer (under the name Elton Thomas) and a producer.
The Thief of Bagdad was the best of these movies, one of the finest of its type ever made. Loosely based on stories from One Thousand and One Nights, The Thief of Bagdad is the tale of a pickpocket who falls in love with a princess and who then sets off on a fantastic adventure to prove himself. With the graceful and athletic Fairbanks at its heart, The Thief of Bagdad is as fluid as a ballet while at the same time serving up a rip-snorting yarn filled with the best special effects 1924 could offer.
I selected it as the best picture of 1924 over such classics as Greed, The Last Laugh, The Navigator and Sherlock, Jr. and feel completely justified in doing so. The American Film Institute voted The Thief of Bagdad the ninth best fantasy movie of all time, the only silent film on the list, and along with City Lights, one of only two silent movies on any of the AFI Top Ten lists. In my opinion, it was the best fantasy movie made before The Wizard of Oz in 1939, and was probably the best action-adventure movie before 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood.
Fairbanks continued making swashbuckling adventures until the dawn of the Early Sound Era when he put down his foil and returned to the genre that had given him his start, comedy. He made four movies, including one, The Taming of the Shrew, with his by-then estranged wife, Mary Pickford, then retired from acting altogether.
He later received a commemorative Oscar in recognition of his work as the first president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and his "outstanding contribution ... to the international development of the motion picture."
Douglas Fairbanks died of a heart attack in 1939 at the age of fifty-five. His last words were "Never felt better."
The results are in from this week's Monkey Movie poll, Who would you choose as best director of 1930-31?
"Winning this poll," said Lang at a hastily-arranged press conference, "means as much to me as winning the Katie Award itself. Well, almost. I mean, I'm not crazy. The Katie Award is big and will provide some real leverage at contract time. But this is nice, too."
