The Year: 1929
What the Nominees Were: Broadway Melody of 1929, Alibi, The
Hollywood Revue of 1929, In Old Hollywood, The Patriot
Other Movies That Should Have Been
Considered: 1929 was a weak
year for American movies: Silent cinema had been abruptly abolished at its
artistic peak and everybody was adapting to sound with much difficulty. Only one American movie, our winner, is
remembered as having made good use of it.
If the Academy had been more willing at this point to consider foreign movies,
they might have found another filmmaker who instantly mastered sound: Alfred
Hitchcock, with Blackmail. Meanwhile, there were still great
silent movies being imported from abroad, if the academy had been willing to
consider them: the Soviet city-symphony Man
with A Movie Camera and two German films starring expatriate American
ingénue Louise Brooks: Diary of a Lost
Girl and Pandora’s Box.
What Did Win: Broadway Melody of 1929
How It’s Aged: Poorly. As the first all-talking musical with a
story, it was very impressive at the time, but it’s a very bland backstage
melodrama with forgettable songs and stars.
How Hard Was the Decision?: Tough... Time after time in
this series, we’ll have a great year with far too many good choices, like
1928, followed by a year with no ideal choices, though Applause is still great. It was tempting to go with Pandora’s Box, but we all know that no
European silent film could ever win Best Picture in the sound era, right? That’ll never happen! (Until last week.)
Director: Rouben Mamoulian
Writer: Garrett Fort, based on the novel
by Beth Brown.
Stars: Helen Morgan, Joan Peers, Fuller
Mellish, Jr., Jack Cameron, Henry Wadsworth
The Story: Burlesque star Kitty Darling
finds out she’s pregnant on the same night that her Boss-Tweed affiliated husband gets the chair. She sends her daughter off to Swiss
boarding schools, but twenty years later her rotten new husband insists on
bringing the daughter home and putting her in the act.
Any Nominations or Wins: None
Why It Didn’t Win: For the second and
final time, the awards were determined in a back room, and this time it caused
a scandal because, post-crash, the moguls tossed artistic considerations aside
in favor of their most commercial product. Nominee Broadway
Revue consisted of nothing but every MGM star standing in front of the
camera one by one singing a song! Melody tried a little harder than that and it was a
big hit, so it got the award. The
scandal would lead to a new voting system the next year…
Why It Should Have Won:
- Besides,
this never would have won with Louis B. Mayer still in charge since it’s the
ultimate anti-MGM movie: a painfully naturalistic look at the most un-glamorous
side of show business. Mamoulian’s gaze is withering yet still affectionate
towards his tawdry subjects. If
anything, as the title implies, it’s the anonymous audience that are the real
villains here, insatiably stripping the entertainers of their hopes, dreams and
illusions along with their clothes.
- The opening
is wickedly symbolic of what Hollywood was going through: A dead, quiet,
street… A discarded, old-fashioned vaudeville poster blows along in the dust
until it briefly sticks to a building so we can read it: Kitty Darling, Queen
of Hearts. It falls the ground again and underfed dogs tear it apart. Where is
everybody? Then, from the
distance… sound! A marching band
approaches! All the doors open and
crowds come pouring out to hear it, trampling over the old posters.
- Astoundingly,
this was Mamoulian’s first film.
He was one of the theater directors rushed into town to replace the
old-fashioned silent guys, but the brilliant silent sequences here are the equal of
the dialogue scenes. He was simply
an instant genius, but, because he’s mostly associated with the
frequently-ignored early-sound, pre-code era, he remains very underrated.
- Terrified of
camera noise, directors hid the camera inside a heavy box. Mamoulian not
only had the bright idea to put wheels on that box, he also found ways to get back out on location, staging
a dialogue scene on the Brooklyn Bridge and elsewhere around Manhattan. Even more amazingly, he opened the
windows, creating dense sound collages of the city’s cacophony of noises,
providing one last round of applause for a fading star.
How Available Is It?: It’s got a nice Kino disk with a few
features.
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