6. 1932/33 - Cavalcade

Fact Sheet:

Oscars:

• Art Direction - William S. Darling
• Directing - Frank Lloyd
• Outstanding Production - Fox

Nominations:

• Actress - Diana Wynyard

Best Picture Contenders:

• A Farewell to Arms
• 42nd Street
• I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
• Lady for a Day
• Little Women
• The Private Life of Henry VIII
• She Done Him Wrong
• Smilin' Through
• State Fair

Runtime: 110 min.

The tagline of Cavalcade was "The Picture of the Generation". It tells the story of two generations of two families (an upper class family and their servants) from New Year's Eve 1899 through New Year's Day 1933, set against several historical events such as the Second Boer War, the death of Queen Victoria, the sinking of Titanic and - again - World War I.

A cavalcade is a parade of horses, usually of a military nature, and this movie is a cavalcade of history. It doesn't tell the story of those historical events, much in the same way that All Quiet on the Western Front wasn't a movie on World War I. Cavalcade tells the story of regular people of all classes and all ages living through that history. We all know about those events (except the Boer war, the fight of the British empire against the Dutch settlers in South Africa), but we know about them from a third person perspective. We can look back at them and study them, see the bigger lines, see their consequences. But there are people who have lived it, there are people who have seen their children go off to the war, seen their children die on Titanic, and lived through the entire cavalcade of history, and this movie tries to show us their lives.

The premise of Cavalcade is quite marvelous, and it's this combination of fiction with characters we can care for against an interesting historical backdrop that, like Cimarron two years earlier, makes this a very watchable movie. However, it also still shows signs of the introduction of sound into Hollywood. The camera is rigid and stuck with making "tableau" scenes: the same total shot of a room and all characters talking in it, sometimes for over a minute, very few closeups which lead to us rarely actually getting into the emotions of the characters, and necessitating a "larger" style of acting: the women faint just too regularly in this movie, where much more emotion at the death of a child can be transferred by a closeup of a face in tears.

It is also funny that some of the events in the movie have in turn been made into OBP-winning movies (obviously World War I, which here has featured in its third OBP-film already in the six years of Oscar history, and the sinking of Titanic, which would go on to win the 70th OBP). History seems to be doing quite well at the Academy Awards so far, and there is much, much more of it to come.

5. 1931/32 Grand Hotel

Fact Sheet:

Oscars:

• Outstanding Production - Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Nominations:

• Won in every nominated category

Best Picture Contenders:

• Arrowsmith
• Bad Girl
• The Champ
• Five Star Final
• An Hour With You
• Shanghai Express
• The Smiling Lieutenant

Runtime: 112 min.

"Grand Hotel, always the same. People come, people go. Nothing ever happens." These words open this movie about Berlin's Grand Hotel, and the guests who reside there, and a great deal happens there. Some peculiar guests appear to be staying in the hotel, and their faiths ultimately become interconnected.

There is the unfortunate terminally ill mister Kringelein, who has come to the Grand Hotel with all the money he has in the world to live his last three weeks like a king, but finds himself not being treated as such, especially by his boss General Director Preising, who happens to be residing at the same hotel. Preysing tries to negotiate a merger, but faces bad luck in business. He uses a stenographer, Flaemmchen, for his dictations, but she winds up falling in love with Baron Von Geigern, a once wealthy but now bankrupt man trying to win back his fortune in gambling, and getting his betting money through hotel theft. He quickly becomes friends with Kringelein, and after trying to rob her falls in love with Grusinskaya, a mentally unstable ballet dancer.

As you see, the story seems quite difficult to follow, but it is a nice example of a so-called portmanteau film (such as 2005's Crash, but that's getting ahead of our list), where several stories are presented that are seemingly unrelated, but together do form a larger, complete picture. It is considered to be one of the first movies of this kind.

It is also historically renowned for being one of the first movies to use a so-called All-Star cast. This is an excellent time for a bit of moviemaking history. There was a time when a couple of studios, known as the Majors, held a near-monopoly on all three branches of the movie industry: production, distribution and exploitation. They were also trying to hold innovation back in a way that they thought would profit them, and one of the elements the Majors opposed (something a group of renegade Independent Studios such as Fox, Paramount, MGM and others wanted to introduce) was the Star System. This meant using stars that people loved (such as Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, etc.) to promote a movie, which is how we still know it today (seen that new George Clooney flic?). The Majors opposed it because they thought they would have to pay the stars too much, but the system worked, and the Independents won Hollywood, and still reign it to this day. The Star System is one of the things that made Hollywood great, and for it to work they even plundered Europe of its greatest stars.

And now we're back at Grand Hotel. This movie took the Star System just one step further, and it used stars for almost all the speaking parts. It has Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, and many of its day's greatest stars. People flocked to it in masses, and it was a great succes.

It's one of those movies that stood the test of time relatively well. The way the stories are weaved together is very well done, the acting is of course top notch, and there is some very nice cinematography in there as well. Funny trivia though, it is to this day the only film ever to win the OBP without being nominated in a single other category.

4. 1930/31 Cimarron

Fact Sheet:

Oscars:

• Art Direction - Max Rée
• Outstanding Production - RKO Radio
• Writing (Adaptation) - Howard Estabrook

Nominations:

• Actor - Richard Dix
• Actress - Irene Dunne
• Cinematography - Edward Cronjager
• Directing - Wesley Ruggles

Best Picture Contenders:

• East Lynne
• The Front Page
• Skippy
• Trader Horn

Runtime: 131 min.

Well, to be honest, I don't quite know what to write about this movie. It's the first western to win the OBP. But it's not really a western in the sense that we immediately think of, heroic cowboys shooting each other and those damned Indians. No, this movie tells the story of the expansion of the Oklahoma territories, from the opening of its unsettled lands in 1886, via statehood of Oklahoma in 1907, to near 'present day' in the late 1920's. It is the story of a man named Yancy Cravat, a newspaper editor who rises up as one of the leading men of Oklahoma and his communities, and his wife Scabra, a conservative woman who often strongly disagrees with her husband.

It is a fictional story set against a historical background, making it an interesting picture to watch. However, it also does come across as quite dated, the cinematography and direction tend to be quite archaic, and so does the dialog. It is also a very good example of the American perception of race in the late 19th, early 20th century. Scabra describes the Indians as dirty and vile, where Yancy recognizes they have had their land stolen by the white man and so the white man should be considerate of them. They also have a black fellow tagging along, clearly a descendant of the slavery era, who dies while trying to protect the children, and yells "Mastah!" as his last word, unheard by all. A tragic affirmation of a stereotype, leading to controversy surrounding this movie. But then again, many movies of that time are often accused of having racist undertones.

Personally I didn't really enjoy the film, probably because it is so dated. I thought it was interesting to watch as a historical document, but not so much as a great film, or one of the great historical movies.

3. 1929/30 - All Quiet on the Western Front

Fact Sheet:

Oscars:

• Directing - Lewis Milestone
• Outstanding Production - Universal

Nominations:

• Cinematography - Arthur Edison
• Writing - George Abbott, Maxwell Anderson, Del Andrews

Best Picture Contenders:

• The Big House
• Disraeli
• The Divorcee
• The Love Parade

Duration: 125 min.

Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori. It is sweet and glorious to die for the fatherland. That is what a German teacher tells his students in the beginning of All Quiet on the Western Front. He incites them all to go off to war, and fight bravely and gloriously for their country. They all enlist, and are all determined to be heroes.

But this isn't a story of heroism or bravery. This isn't even the story of a war. This is the story of those young men, who were disillusioned by the horrors they have seen. They went there to fight the war to end all wars, but instead they were met with death and destruction.

The story of World War I has been told many times. We have seen those heroes fight valiantly. We have seen love stories of those heroes (see Wings two years earlier). But All Quiet on the Western Front tells the story of what truly happens in the war. We really follow those young soldiers in the trenches, we live with them, we see the few brothers we have die in Flanders' Fields, we struggle for food, we struggle with our own despair in the desolateness of those trenches. We don't even know why we're there, we don't know if the war ever ended or who won (of course we do know, but the film never tells us - it ends where our main character ends).

There is almost no music - apart from the music the men make themselves with their harmonicas, killing time in their trench. The score of the film consists of the bombs, the gunfire, the screams of dying men. And it tells a story no music could.

I don't have many words for this movie, because solemn silence is truly what it deserves. It is the best tale I have seen of World War I, because it really allows you to feel the pain of those young men, sense their shattered lives. It is a beautiful film because it tells such an ugly story. I leave you today with a famous poem of Wilfred Owen, which tells the same war story this movie does.

DULCE ET DECORUM EST

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

8 October 1917 - March, 1918

2.1928/29: The Broadway Melody

Factsheet:

Oscars:

• Outstanding Picture - Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
  

Nominations*:
*NOTE: THIS IS NOT AN OFFICIAL NOMINATION. There were no announcements of nominations, no certificates of nomination or honorable mention, and only the winners (*) were revealed during the awards banquet on April 3, 1930. Though not official nominations, the additional names in each category, according to in-house records, were under consideration by the various boards of judges.

• Actress - Bessie Love (Hank Mahoney)
• Directing

Best Picture Contenders*:

• Alibi
• In Old Arizona
• Hollywood Revue
• The Patriot

Duration: 110 min.

There sure seems to have been a problem with people loving the wrong people in the 1920's. The Broadway Melody is about... two guys vying for the same girl, and another girl loving one of the guys. Sound familiar? If it doesn't, read yesterday's post on Wings.
The Broadway Melody tells the story of two sisters, Hank and Queenie, who come to New York to make it big with their singing and dancing act. They are coached by Eddie Kearns, who is planning to marry Hank. Soon however they find out that showbiz isn't as easy as it seems, and success doesn't come overnight. Eddie actually secretly loves Queenie, but she is seduced by a rich guy called Jock, and falls for him. Eddie and Hank try to convince him he's a bad seed, but Queenie goes for him anyway. Hank knows Eddie loves her sister instead of her, and tells him to go after her, but she really does love him herself... Eddie than scoots after Queenie and rescues her just as she is about to be violated by Jock, that dastardly fiend! Then of course she realizes money isn't everything, and she chooses the honorable Eddie. Hank finds a new partner for the act, and all ends well for everyone. All of this is interspersed with showtunes, some sung by the characters, some just by random other performers.
This is the first sound film, or talkie, to win the OBP. It is also characteristic of the transition to sound. At first, a lot of the developments in film were lost because of the coming of sound. Cameras became immobilized as they had to be shielded off, as they were very loud machines and having that noise on the sound recording would be inacceptable. Actors became immobilized as they had to talk into the microphone. And stories were thinned out, the spectacular value of sound was deemed to be enough. All of this can also be seen in The Broadway Melody. However, it is also credited as one of the first movies to really show what could be done with sound. It was one of the first movies to use sound to 'show' things that aren't happening on-screen. You could hear a door close in the background, and you'd know someone left the room without having to see it. For a modern audience, that is of course one of the most self-evident things in film, but in 1929, it was a huge step forward.
It is also the first Hollywood musical. True, some of the songs are almost entirely disconnected from the main story, and the song "The Broadway Melody" itself appears three times in the movie. But it was the first Hollywood musical, albeit a repetitive one.
Of course, it does have its flaws: all the flaws of an early sound movie, and then some. Apparently the story of glamour being not-so-glamorous had already lost its freshness in 1929, and the movie certainly does not add anything to it. The writing's a bit stale, and though the comedy does work in a lot of places, the romance tends to come across a bit cheesy. But, all in all, a very enjoyable movie to watch, and it certainly still is watchable today.
By the way, this is the only year from which one of the nominees for the OBP is presumed lost today, The Patriot. And there was a Technicolor sequence in The Broadway Melody, which has also been lost, only a full black and white print survives.
Tomorrow brings one of the greatest World War I epics of all time, All Quiet on the Western Front. The post will however most likely appear on Friday, as tomorrow's gonna be quite a busy day. But I'll just have to try to do two on Friday, in order to not get too much behind on schedule...

1. 1927/28: Wings

Fact Sheet:

Oscars:

• Engineering Effects - Roy Pomeroy
• Outstanding Picture - Paramount Famous Lasky

Nominations:

• Won in every nominated category

Best Picture Contenders:

• The Racket
• 7th Heaven

Duration: 139 min.

Golly, three days in and already a day behind. Well, that's why I left Sundays as a buffer, good thing!

So, on to Wings, the official first winner of the Oscar for Best Picture (OBP). It tells the story of two young men, Jack and David, vying for the hand of the same girl, Shirley, who loves David but doesn't dare to break Jack's heart. Jack in turn is loved by Mary, but he sees her more as a little sister. Alas, their lives are turned upside down because of the war, and the two men leave. In the first days in the army, Jack and David loathe each other, but living together as soldiers drives them to bond, and they become best friends.

One day, David is shot down by Germans, but manages to escape, and he steals an enemy airplane. He tries to fly across the Allied line, but Jack, seeking revenge for his fallen buddy, mistakes him for an actual German airplane and shoots him down. After landing, he sees David, and realizes his mistake. Going through David's stuff, he also finds letters from Shirley saying it's David she loves, and he realizes that Mary truly loved him all along, and as soon as he gets back home they finally kiss in the last frame.

The oscars this movie, and Sunrise, won apart from their respective OBP's actually tell you a lot about the movies. Whereas Sunrise was driven by its beautiful photography, Wings shines in its - for its day - incredibly impressive combat scenes. The 2004 movie The Aviator, chronicling the shooting of Howard Hughes' Hell's Angels, being shot concurrently with Wings, shows us what effort it must have cost to shoot the dogfighting scenes in this film. There are at times almost a dozen planes in the air, performing an aerial ballet. That, in 1928, truly is impressive, hence the Engineering Effects oscar. And they are very watchable even in this day and age.

However, in the 'story' scenes, Wings really does show its age. Murnau showed with Sunrise that he very fully understood the language of film, through the editing, photography, and mostly visual storytelling. Wings uses so many intertitles it sometimes feels as if you're reading a web page with some embedded Youtube clips. The video is fun, but the text is the meat of what you're taking in. The editing is slightly botched as well: the movie is full of jump cuts, discontinuous editing (a door closes, then a cut is made, and we see the same door closing; discontinuous editing was used with effect by Eisenstein, but here it just feels like a mistake), and the photography just lacks the spark that it did with Wings.

So, did Wings deserve its OBP? Surely, for the time it must have been an impressive picture. But Sunrise certainly has stood the test of time a lot better, and there is a reason that Murnau is still regarded as a moviemaking genius, and that Wings is simply known as 'the first movie to win the OBP'.

Next up: The Broadway Melody!

1. 1927/28: Sunrise - A Song of Two Humans

Fact sheet:

Oscars:

• Best Actress (Janet Gaynor - The Wife)
• Best Photography (Karl Struss and Charles Roshes)
• Unique and Artistic Production (Fox)

Nominations:

• Art Direction (Rochus Gliese)

Best Picture Contenders:

• Chang
• The Crowd

Duration: 95 min.

The first movie on this blog and in this massive undertaking immediately requires a thorough explanation. If you check any list of winners of the Oscar for Best Picture (OBP), you will see that the first movie in that list, and thus the first winner of the OBP, is Wings. That, however is only a small part of the truth.
You see, there was actually no OBP at the first Academy Award banquet. There were two categories that came close to what eventually would become the Best Picture category: Unique and Artistic Production, and Outstanding Production (other sources, including the Academy's own Oscar Database, mention the names Unique and Artistic Picture, and Outstanding Picture). Sunrise - A Song of Two Humans won Unique and Artistic Production, while Wings was honored for its outstanding production. Later it was decided that Outstanding Production would be the category corresponding to the current OBP, but some (including yours truly) feel that this does not give enough credit to Sunrise, as Unique and Artistic are arguably at least as honorable terms as Outstanding Production. And that is why on this blog there will be 82 movies after 81 Academy Award years, and why there will be two films to get the number 1. in their post title.
Now, on to the actual movie. It's actually also included here because it truly is a magnificent film. It was directed by the great Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, a German director who had already known great successes in Germany with his expressionist masterpieces Nosferatu: Symfonie des Grauens and Der Letzte Mann. He was brought to Hollywood in a master scheme of the American Studios (at that time, all the studios were bringing Europe's greatest stars and directors to Hollywood to enrich their cinema, robbing Europe of its masters), and the first movie he made there was Sunrise. It was the only acclaimed movie he would make in all his time in Hollywood (where he would die some years later), as he suffered the fate of many European stars: he found the studio system was too stringent for him to work in, and instead of bringing him to greater heights, the studios ultimately destroyed his career and life.
But Sunrise truly is a masterpiece. It tells the story of a farmer and his wife (prosaically named "The Man" and "The Wife"), who are visited by a tourist girl from the city. The girl falls in love with the man, and together they plot to murder the wife. However, as he is about to do it, the man is struck by remorse, and he cannot bring himself to murder his wife. He follows her as she flees to the city, and there he begs for her forgiveness and they rekindle their love.
What actually sets this movie apart however, and makes it the still revered classic that it is today, is the breathtaking photography for which Karl Struss and Charles Roshes quite rightly won an Academy Award. Every frame looks like a magnificent, frameable picture in itself. Murnau cleverly uses double printing to create ghostly visions and dreams, to show us the thoughts of his characters. And there is one beautiful one-shot scene where the couple walking in the city moves to the fields and back to the city (couple continuously, background changing), all in pre-green screen days.
As Norma Desmond would say 23 years later in Sunset Boulevard: "We didn't need words, we had faces." Because it is a silent movie (actually shot in Fox Movietone Sound-on-film, featuring music and some basic sound effects), the director can either tell the story through intrusive intertitles, or as Murnau has done, through the facial expressions and candid acting of its stars. The faces really do all the talking in this movie, and they make watching this film worthwhile all in themselves.
I leave you with a nice cameo of a famous Belgian in this movie. Check back in on Monday for the other first winner, Wings.

Drunken innkeeper from Sunrise.











Belgian minister for Pensions Michel Daerden