Calling all Classic Film Lovers!

I'm surprised that phenomenon didn't happen to other actors from the studio era. They made so many films it would make sense that it would happen to more than one person.

And Long Tall Sally also made a page for The Ex-Mrs. Bradford.

You know, I got ten minutes into that movie when I realized it was The Thin Man without Myrna Loy, and then I bailed. Kind of like how I got 20 minutes into Comrade X, realized it was a ripoff of Ninotchka, and bailed.

Meanwhile, I made a page for a Rudolph Valentino vehicle called The Eagle. He plays a dashing cavalryman. It's pretty fun, with some action and some comic business and not just Rudy making google eyes at pretty ladies. Apparently Valentino was trying to make something like a Douglas Fairbanks film to change his image after he'd had a few flops.

It's a blatant rip-off, for sure, but Powell and Arthur are surprisingly good together.

ALSO, Jean Arthur is fantastic. Don't be dissing, jamespolk.

edited 20th Jan '17 5:30:15 PM by LongTallShorty64

I just realized you called me Long Tall Sally which, honestly, sometimes I confuse both, too.

edited 20th Jan '17 7:11:05 PM by LongTallShorty64

Oscars out today.

Sometimes I wish the Academy would cast a vote and award Oscars to all the films made before the eligibility date of the first awards.

I would like to give reminder #1,360 to skip the ceremony and watch 1966's The Oscar, a film that you will have more fun watching and will enjoy more.

Seriously. Check the damn thing out.

I added some quotes about the Oscars to the Academy Award page:

You should add William Holden giving out the best acceptance speech of all time:

"Thanks."

Hitchcock said "Thank You". You can add quotes as well you know. I am no admin.

The thing is the Oscars were an organization that slowly built up prestige over time and it was absolutely not something insiders took as seriously as others did. It built up when television happened and saying "Oscar winner" was a way to advertise for repertory screenings.

Best Picture

• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
• The General
• The Gold Rush
• Intolerance
• Metropolis

Best Director

• I'll take four of those five dudes, scratch Keaton, and add F. W. Murnau for Nosferatu

Best Actor

• Richard Barthelmess, Tol'able David
• Charlie Chaplin, The Gold Rush
• Douglas Fairbanks, The Mark Of Zorro
• John Gilbert, The Big Parade
• Gibson Gowland, Greed

Best Actress

• Theda Bara, A Fool There Was
• Greta Garbo, Flesh and the Devil
• Lillian Gish, Broken Blossoms
• Mary Pickford, The Love Light
• Constance Talmadge, Intolerance

I'd give awards of Best Picture and Best Director to The Battleship Potemkin and Sergei Eisenstein, then The Passion of Joan of Arc and Carl Theodor Dreyer, and The Big Parade, The Crowd for King Vidor, Foolish Wives, Greed, The Merry Widow, The Wedding March for Erich von Stroheim (which were it to happen or be remotely possible would have overnight changed Hollywood and film history forever). And a special award to Josef von Sternberg for The Salvation Hunters for making a film outside Hollywood and with independent means "yet arriving at the same technical expertise and professionalism that motion picture audiences of major films have become accustomed to".

Ernst Lubitsch made a number of great silents too but I think his talkies were better...I always found it shocking that someone as beloved, popular, consistent, and commercially successful as him never won a competitive Oscar (though he won Lifetime). The fact is Award Snub will always happen especially in the era of the Golden Age when so many talents were working side-by-side. Ideally the academy should has it out on which master gets an award a certain year.

The problem is that the academy never awarded the real talent, so some passing and forgotten title from that period gets attention and the hack who has credit for it, but real masters almost never win, and not for the film they deserved for. Like William Wyler was a great director for sure and he won three Oscars for directing, but only of those films (The Best Years of Our Lives) is a real masterpiece and another of those films (Ben Hur) was a movie Wyler himself disliked making and was sheepish about, and is indeed a really bad film: Wyler's better films (Dodsworth, The Letter, The Heiress, The Little Foxes to name a few) didn't get the prize.

About the only Best Film winners that I think are genuinely great films (masterpieces): It Happened One Night, How Green Was My Valley, The Best Years of Our Lives, All About Eve, On the Waterfront, The Apartment, Lawrence of Arabia, The Godfather (and its sequel), Annie Hall, The Last Emperor and Unforgiven. That's about it.

The following are if not great then good films: Rebecca, Casablanca, An American in Paris, Gigi, My Fair Lady, The Silence of the Lambs, The Departed, FilmSpotlight.

The rest are mediocre, average and forgettable, and some are outright bad films that are an embarassment to the artform.

edited 24th Jan '17 10:21:10 PM by JulianLapostat

When I was compiling my list of hypothetical Silent Oscars above, my idea was to list films that were released before the start of eligibility for the first awards, which was August 1927. So that would exclude late silent films like The Passion of Joan of Arc or The Crowd—The Crowd actually being nominated for a couple of Oscars at the first ceremony.

If one may use an old cliche, the Oscars are what they are. They're awards given to "prestige" productions in the English language. So you're not going to see micro-budget indies or foreign films or inaccessible art films getting nominated. If you look at the Oscars for what they are instead of what they aren't, I think that on the whole they do a pretty good job of representing that output. Sometimes they do it better than others. The list of winners and nominees 1939-1941 is pretty damn solid. On the other hand, that year that steaming turd Cimarron won is a very bad year, with not just an awful winner but a weak field when there were movies out there like City Lights and Frankenstein begging to be nominated.

I think they're entirely defensible as a starting point into cinema. If I had somebody who didn't know beans about our particular topic—which if the Live Action Film activity list is any indication, is about 95% of TV Tropes users—I'd point them to the Oscars list as a starting point.

Well, that and the National Film Registry, which is a better barometer but has the benefit of decades of hindsight.

Well if we mean mainstream American cinema, its a fact that the Oscars didn't go to any of the really important and popular films of that era. Like say early 30s, the Pre-Code era: Lubitsch didn't win and he was popular certainly. None of the classic gangster films won and they were major box-office gold. Screwball comedy lucked out with Capra and Mccarey winning so that's to their credit. Busby Berkeley didn't win. King Kong won nothing, got no nominatons either.

The Western didn't win awards until the 90s when Unforgiven and Dances with Wolves won. Okay Unforgiven deserved to win (being that it is a masterpiece and the "last Western") but Dances isn't fit to touch the hem of Samuel Fuller's Run of the Arrow which it has ripped off. None of the great classic westerns: Ford, Mann, Wellman, Hawks, Daves among others won. Then Film Noir and B-Movie didn't win. Douglas Sirk made some of the most successful films of the 50s and he didn't win.

So no I dispute the assertion that the Oscars serve even as an introduction of the classic films or the popular cinema of that time. What it represents is simply middle-of-the-road film-of-quality mediocrities which deserve to be forgotten.

I mean the film-makers themselves knew which movies matter and they had none of the snobbism. Like Billy Wilder loved Joseph Lewis's Gun Crazy, a B-Movie, and was obsessed with how Lewis shot that famous long take bank robbery. William Wyler screened Delmer Daves Pride of the Marines (a masterpiece) during the production of The Best Years of Our Lives. Citizen Kane inspired everyone. John Ford would visit the sets of every Samuel Fuller production while he was still alive and fit.

So it's not a representation of the industry either. What it represents is merely the image the establishment wanted to sell to the public. Not the Public, not the establishment and not quality either.

Well, I can't agree. All Quiet On The Western Front is important. It Happened One Night is great. Say what you will about the moral messages behind Gone with the Wind, but it was both wildly popular and important.

If I confine myself only to winners and nominees, here's what I could come up with for a list just from 1927 to 1941:

• Sunrise
• The Crowd
• 7th Heaven
• All Quiet On The Western Front
• The Love Parade
• The Front Page
• Grand Hotel
• Five Star Final
• One Hour with You
• The Smiling Lieutenant
• 42nd Street
• I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
• It Happened One Night
• The Thin Man
• Mutiny on the Bounty
• Captain Blood
• Top Hat
• The Life of Émile Zola
• The Awful Truth
• The Adventures of Robin Hood
• The Grand Illusion
• Every film from 1939 except for Wuthering Heights
• Every film from 1940 except for Kitty Foyle
• Every film from 1941 except for Blossoms in the Dust and One Foot in Heaven

That is a solid list. Of course, I was cherry-picking; most of those films didn't win, there were a whole bunch of lesser films I didn't list, and I didn't list anything from 1936 because I don't think any of the movies that got nominated that year were all that good. And as we well know, no City Lights, no M, etc, etc, etc.

But the point is that one can derive a pretty damn good list from the Oscar nominees. I can't agree that the Oscars are completely worthless as a measure of merit or as a gateway into film.

WHAA? His Girl Friday wasn't even nominated?

It's undeniable that the old Oscar noms are a good gateway to some great classics. But from personal experience, I would read AFI's Greatest whatever list to get introductions to classic films. Unfortunately, it has a tendency to favor obvious classics and New Hollywood, which is fine, but it doesn't go into much depth. Also, the AFI has a massive crush on Hitchcock that I don't understand and I like his movies! If you want a more historical approach, choosing Oscar noms is probably the better introduction.

His Girl Friday was in fact stiffed and should have gotten the nom that went to Kitty Foyle, but the rest of that list for 1940 is pretty darn good.

Looking at the Academy website, I found out Trumbo wrote the screenplay for Kitty Foyle. The more you know!

What I found useful as guides for exploring classic cinema was:

Jonathan Rosenbaum's 1000 Films of the 20th Century which he organized by year and decade helpfully enough. http://mapage.noos.fr/screenville/highlights/rosenbaum1000.htm

The AFI List to some extent (especially the new and latest one that is more obviously cinephile inspired).

Martin Scorsese's A Personal Journey Through American Movies

and François Truffaut's The Films in My Life (a collection of his essays) which is an anthology of his classic criticism and I would devotedly see a movie he mentions and then come back and read about it and so that book ended up pretty fairly dogeared.

Haven't been watching a ton of movies from our time period of late, more documentaries and foreign films.

But I did just make a work page for Wife vs. Secretary, a pleasant enough comedy more notable for having Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, Jean Harlow, and James Stewart all in the same movie.

And speaking of Jean Harlow, the Fake Shemp in Saratoga is goddamn creepy.

Are you sure it was Mary Rees or Dees who was the Fake Shemp? Because a cursory look shows it's Dees not Rees.

And, of course, there's a youtube video of the bad voice over and the very obvious hiding of Mary.

edited 26th Jan '17 9:10:59 AM by LongTallShorty64

Dees it is, I guess.

The finished movie is just unsettling. You can tell, Harlow looks puffy. That of course is a symptom of kidney failure, retaining water.

They really should have canned the movie; it's so obvious and depressing.

Supposedly Mayer wanted to can the movie but fans wrote in wanting to see Harlow one last time. Plus no doubt he probably didn't want to kiss the money MGM had spent on production goodbye.

I'm taking another break from my voyage through Foreign Language Oscar-winners to watch the 1935 A Tale of Two Cities. Ronald Colman sure could talk. And I guess if you wanted a sneering villainous aristocrat in 1935 you pretty much had to cast Basil Rathbone.