Best Unique and Artistic Picture Nominee 1st Academy Awards 1929: The Crowd

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Now comes time for the Best Picture category! Or rather, two Best Picture categories. At the first Oscars, what would later be known as the Best Picture category was divided up into two separate categories: Best Unique and Artistic Picture and Outstanding Picture. While not too much information has been given on what the distinction was between the two categories, it appears that the former was for pictures that were made more for art’s sake, the kind of experimental, artistic pictures that today are nominated  when no one in the general public has even seen them. They tend to go more outside the box with how they present stories, editing, scenery, and acting. The latter category, to be blunt, is basically for the more popular pictures. That’s not to say popularity is a bad thing! There’s many popular pictures that are absolutely fantastic and deserve all the hype they get. But they do tend to fall more inside the box, taking less risks while presenting more palatable stories for the public.

The Crowd is the first nomination in the Best Unique and Artistic Picture category. Having had time to reflect since my last review, I think I was perhaps a touch harsh on this picture. It’s fitting as the picture is a tale of having to soldier on through life even when it’s not letting up while you are going through hard times. But I think maybe I was looking too much at the parts instead of the sum of its whole. There’s a great quote that was made by Jean-Luc Godard the French director in the 60s as to why no one was making films about ordinary people. In response, he said, “Why remake The Crowd (1928)? It has already been done.”

I think that sums up nicely what this film is all about. In what could have been a very ordinary, run-of-the-mill film about one family in the middle of a big city, instead came a picture in which everyone could relate to. Haven’t we all gone through the struggles of wanting to be a somebody even when we’re stuck in a boring job where we’re seen as just another cog in the wheel? Haven’t we all experienced the tragedy of a death that seemed so crushing it felt like we couldn’t continue on in life anymore? Haven’t we had to pick ourselves back up when we’ve gone as low as we can possibly go, to the point where we nearly thought not living would be better then the shadow of a life we currently had?

The Crowd hits home because it’s not just the story of a group of people we’re following. It’s the tale of us, humanity at its absolute finest. It could be any family in any city in any country. That’s why people responded to it so well and continue to do so today. One especially powerful scene is when John becomes obsessed with the idea that his dying toddler will somehow make a miraculous recovery if only everything remains quiet. He runs out into the street half-crazed, trying to somehow get the whole city to be silent, only to have a slap in the face when a policeman callously tells him the entire world isn’t going to stop just because his baby is sick. When the girl dies, the grief shown by both John and Mary is some of the finest acting you’ll ever see portraying that emotion on camera.

The story can seem bleak, but ultimately, there’s a message of hope at the end. You don’t have to be successful or famous in order to have a life that is worthwhile. What makes you a somebody is having the good opinion of your family and friends around you. While some might think the picture has a bleak ending, I disagree. It’s true to life. Sometimes, the golden goose doesn’t always land in your lap, and you don’t always end up with the mansion because it’s what you deserve. Sometimes you have to be content with having the job as the juggling sandwich board wearing clown and going with your family to see the vaudeville show.

Do I think it deserved the win? No. Having seen all three movies in this category, I can definitely say that while it was a great picture, it wasn’t the best picture of the year in this category. That’s still to come.

Honorary Oscar 1st Academy Awards 1929: The Jazz Singer

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Now here’s the other Honorary Award given that year. Warner Brothers Production won it for The Jazz Singer. I think the reason given, “For producing The Jazz Singer, the pioneer outstanding talking picture, which has revolutionized the industry,” pretty much says it all. I don’t really think it can be overstated how much this picture changed things. It is very rare that a movie can come along, changing and influencing the entire industry for the rest of time.

That mind sound dramatic, but remember, The Jazz Singer was the first talkie. The very first one. It completely changed the landscape of what could be done with motion pictures and what the movie-going public was clamoring to see. For the first time in a picture, they saw a man singing and then talking with his mother, two simple things that had never even been seen before ever. People went in expecting a simple film following the formula that had been seen time and again before. Instead, their minds were blown by seeings something they had never even seen or thought would ever happen before. They came out clamoring for more, and more, and more. The advance of the talkies put an end to the art form known as silent films forever.

Within a year, silent films had virtually disappeared. Stars that were worth millions of dollars and living in mansions turned into nobodies almost overnight. For an example, look no further then Clara Bow, who starred in Wings, Best Picture winner, Emil Jannings, winner of the Best Actor award that year, or Gloria Swanson who was nominated for Best Actress. Clara Bow was still a huge actress when the talkies came along, and made several, but “mike fright” which kept her unable to keep her eyes off of it, as well as other factors led her to abruptly quitting Hollywood. Emil Jannings’ thick German accent made it impossible for him to transition to talkies and his ego made him refuse any attempts to dub him. He went back to Europe, where making propaganda films for the Nazis in his native Germany nuked his career into oblivion. Gloria Swanson had no such troubles as the other two, but there was an indescribable “it” factor she was missing when the talkies came along. Some poor choices in roles meant her star faded into near obscurity until Sunset Boulevard revived it twenty years later.

The Oscars deliberately decided to give The Jazz Singer the Honorary Award to prevent it from being nominated for Best Picture. Much like The Circus, they feared it would overshadow any of the other pictures that were nominated that year. They were likely right, for with how popular and groundbreaking it was, there would have been no way it wouldn’t have won Best Picture just by virtue of being the first talkie alone.

I personally am glad they decided to do it this way, for as much as I like The Jazz Singer, silent films needed to have at least one year where their art form had its day in the sun before it would set forever on the horizon. As shown, I’ve enjoyed almost all the films this years. No matter how bad a silent film is, there haven’t at least been parts that I haven’t enjoyed in all of them, and a great majority of them I’ve outright loved. It’s been such a joy to see them in their heyday before the landscape of making films changed forever.

Honorary Oscar 1st Academy Awards 1929: Charlie Chaplin for The Circus

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One of the first honorary Oscars ever given out was given to, appropriately enough, Charlie Chaplin. To say this man was a superstar is like saying Niagara Falls is just a waterfall. Charlie Chaplin was the first superstar. There had never been anyone like him before. While there were stars, his was the first name that was instantly recognizable to anyone passing on the street. His image has remained so fixed in the public mind as a whole that even those who don’t know his name recognize the many parodies and pastiches of his character the “Little Tramp.” It’s been over a hundred years since some of his films were made and they are still being watched today. That shows the staying power and the way he paved for not only comedy, but film as a whole.

At the first awards ceremony, The Circus was originally nominated for Outstanding Picture, Best Director, Comedy Picture, Best Actor, and Best Original Story. But when the Academy decided to give Chaplin the Honorary Oscar, they rescinded the nominations for the other categories. Honestly, I think they did it because they rightfully feared that Chaplin’s star power would have such sway that it would have influenced the voters to the point where he would have swept the categories and not given the chance for any other movies to really get the chance to win. They may have been right.

Regardless, the picture that was nominated was Chaplin at his very peak artistically, visually, and creatively. The story isn’t anything extraordinary. It’s very much the usual Little Tramp adventure: he’s down on his luck when he ends up being chased by a policeman after he ends up accidentally being a thief. The chase leads him into a lackluster circus and the ringmaster realizes he’s got a hit on his hands, so he hires the Tramp, who is unaware that he’s a star, for he can’t be funny on command, only in an accidental fashion. The meta of how carefully Chaplin would choreograph and map out each segment just to make it seem like it was all slapdash and natural-looking is felt very strongly here.

As usual for the Tramp, he falls in love with a pretty girl, the ringmaster’s stepdaughter, who doesn’t love him back, instead falling in love with the much more glamorous and handsome tightrope walker. This leads to the scene that this film is likely most remembered for, Chaplin forty feet up in the air trying to walk a tightrope while monkeys swarm around him. Apparently he actually taught himself to walk a tightrope specifically for that scene, but was quite miffed when the first negative got damaged, and he had to redo the scene, which he said was inferior to the first.

Eventually, the Tramp gets fired, and the girl tries to runaway with him. Realizing that he can’t do anything for her, he convinces the tightrope walker to marry her so that the ringmaster won’t be able to harm her any longer. While he assures them he’ll be right behind on the last wagon as the circus pulls out, the Tramp instead watches it all pull away in a cloud of dust before wandering off into the distance, going on to find his next adventure and meal. A scant story, and one that would’ve been unremarkable, save for Chaplin dusting it all with his brilliance.

The care that Chaplin took with this film is evident in every frame. He wrote, directed, starred in, and did just about everything except possibly make the film stock with his own two hands. It really shows just how magnificent he was at creating his craft. Some say comedy is easy, but it is not. A good comedy picture needs twice as much care and practice to make it a success as a drama. Chaplin was very deserving of this award. So taken was I with this picture that I immediately watched another Charlie Chaplin feature because I wanted to just have more. So I watched The Kid, another of his best features. That’s in public domain, so if you feel like a double feature, it’s quite interesting to watch them back-to-back for a comparison on how his craft started off in the early 20s and only got better.

Best Director, Comedy Picture Winner 1st Academy Awards 1929: Lewis Milestone for Two Arabian Knights

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Now we come to the winner of the Best Director, Comedy Picture category, Two Arabian Knights! Now, this picture is very different from the other nominated picture in this category that we talked about last time. I described Speedy as being a a “gag-a-minute” type of comedy, where the hits just keep on coming one after the other in a fast, breezy manner. Two Arabian Knights is a different type of comedy: it’s the quintessential buddy flick, where two guys, usually who are complete opposites, end up in all sorts of wacky hijinks in a loosely-held together plot. As cliched as such a type of pic has become, I’m still rather fond of them because the core of the movie is usually about friendship, so I will give even the worst ones a try.

Fortunately, this was far from the worst one. Now, before anyone huffily points it out: Yes, this is probably the most fictional portrayal of Arabia this side of Aladdin. The movie doesn’t even try for historical accuracy, most especially in the presence of the typical “mysterious foreign love interest”, who I might add was played by Mary Astor, who was an American of German, Irish, and Portuguese ancestry who hailed from the very exotic state of Illinois. The thing is, with movies from this time period, you gotta let go of some of the moral outrage of the present. It might sound trite, but things were very different back then. Society has evolved and moved on, but if you can’t appreciate art in the form of movies from the past, well then, I guess we shouldn’t look at statues and paintings that date back farther then the last twenty years, because otherwise they’ll all be filled with problematic content.

So after getting over the initial hurdle of the “Arabian Nights” Days trope,  the picture is actually quite witty and funny. The picture starts off in, no surprise here, World War I. (For those of you making a drinking game out of this, take a shot!) The two soldiers are complete opposites, one a dashing young cultured ladies man and the other an older, brash, and uncouth sergeant who makes his living as a criminal back in the States. They hate each other so much that they get into a brawl in the middle of the battlefield, finally realizing they’ve been caught when surrounded by a whole ring of German infantry, who are clearly entertained by the spectacle.

They end up in a prison camp, and despite their initial dislike, they eventually become friends. After escaping, the hijinks really start rolling. Mistaken for Arab prisoners, they’re put on a train to Constantinople. Phelps, the younger one, keeps saying to follow his plan, while Sergeant O’Gaffney quips that if he follows him any longer, they’ll end up in China. After causing a distraction, they escape, and board a ship bound for Arabia.

That’s when a sailboat capsizes, sending a beautiful Arabic woman into the sea. Phelps gallantly jumps in to save her and quickly ends up being the one needing to be saved by his friend. They’re both entranced with Mirza , the Arabian woman they rescued, who keeps most of her face covered by a veil. This proves handy, as the skipper of the boat keeps creeping on her in a way that clearly signals he has no good intentions for her. No matter what faults these two have, at least they’re honest and not creepy as they make some moves on her.

She quickly falls for Phelps after the two men try to keep sabotaging each other, which at one points leads to a great visual gag as Phelps wonders how the hell O’Gaffney got out of the room he locked him in. The camera then switches to a shot of the bottom of the door completely busted open by force. But Mirza’s man servant, who may or may not be a eunuch (trust me, it’s a joke that makes sense in the movie) catches her kissing Phelps without her veil on, a sure sign of trouble to come. Worse yet, when she goes back to her room, the skipper is waiting there in the dark on her bed. Fortunately, this is a comedy and not a drama, so the two buddies come running to her rescue. The skipper covers the moment by demanding fare from her. Phelps, once again the gallant gentleman, offers to pay the lady’s fare…which completely backfires as O’Gaffney is quick to point out they don’t have anymore money.

They’re forced to leave the ship by swimming after O’Gaffney robs the purser to pay Mirza’s fare. Phelps is saddened to learn she has a fiance, one that was arranged for her. After they end up in the city, Phelps wants to go to the American consulate while O’Gaffney wants to go to Mirza’s father, for she promised them he would give them a large reward for saving her. This might have been true until he finds out that she kissed a man without her veil on, at which he declares they must die. This part is a lot less funny in the modern-day world where things like honor killings are much more prominently talked about, but it’s not enough to take me out of the picture entirely.

Through a series of mishaps, they end up not being able to go to the consulate, instead ending up in a bar brawl that eventually seems to include half the city. It’s pretty damn funny as the two fight their way out by doing things like throwing chairs at people. They’re about to be torn apart by a mob when one of the funniest gags in the movie happens. An imam calls the people to the midday prayer and the whole city drops to the ground to fulfill it, leaving the two heroes to get away.

They decide Mirza’s father is the best option. She tries to warn them with a note she throws to them, but it’s too late. They’re taken inside, where they’re told the mobs of the city will “never bother them again.” Well, that is true, from a certain POV at least. When they finally read the note, they make their escape. Now they have to get to the consulate if they want to keep their heads.

But Phelps, the lovestruck buffoon, is determined to go back for Mirza to save her from her arranged marriage. O’Gaffney tells him this is insane and bows out. But of course he comes back to help Phelps in the end. There’s another great gag where Mirza’s fiance comes in to duel Phelps. He sets out two swords, and when a shooting duel epically fails, Phelps picks up a sword, and is promptly disarmed in a gag similar to the one in The Mask of Zorro.

Fortunately, things have a happy ending as O’Gaffney, after beating up an alarming amount of guards off-screen, comes in and helps Phelps rescue the girl. The fiance, realizing he’s beat, relinquishes her, and allows the pair to drive off in a carriage driven by O’Gaffney.

This movie honestly is a lot better then my description is making it sound. I highly recommend checking it out because it really is a barrel of laughs. Anyone who thinks a movie solely needs to rely on witty dialogue to make something like a buddy comedy work needs to take a look at this film. But is it better then Speedy?

I honestly can’t decide. Both of these have such great comedy to them, but they’re such different forms of comedy that it’s hard to compare them. It’s not quite apples and oranges, but it is oranges and tangerines. Both are good and it’s moments like this you wish there was more ties in Academy history. (There have been a few, look them up!)

Alright, with only the two main categories to go, I’m going to take a chance to do the next two reviews for the Honorary Oscars that were given out that year. The first one will be for the master of all comedy and film’s first superstar, Charlie Chaplin. See you then!

Best Director, Comedy Picture Nominee 1st Academy Awards 1929: Ted Wilde for Speedy

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Now we come to other category that the Best Director award was split into that year: Best Director, Comedy Picture. Sometimes, I wish they still did it this way, for I feel like solid comedy performances oftentimes get drowned out at the Oscars by all the dramatic and therefore more well-known performances. But perhaps that’s for the best because for every Speedy out there, there’s also a Little Man. The one we’re discussing today is Ted Wilde, nominated for the comedy Speedy.

To move onto the picture itself, I will say that the day I was watching this, I was not in a good mood, and a comedy picture was just what I needed after all the pics about WWI, the fall of Russia, and basically a bunch of other heavy, depressing plots. Speedy was something I could just sit back and enjoy without worrying my head off that something bad would happen to the characters. Speedy was the last silent film Harold Lloyd ever did and really signaled the end of comedy in silent films as we know it. Don’t know who Harold Lloyd is? He was the third member of the trifecta of silent era comedians that included Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.  If you still can’t picture him, this iconic image from Safety Last! might jog your memory.

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Unlike Chaplin, who had the downtrodden but hopeful “Little Tramp” character who was a bit of an intentional oddball, and Keaton’s stone-faced persona that remained stoic no matter what was going on around him, Lloyd’s “Glasses” character was more of the everyman of America: hopeful, winsome, a bit scatterbrained at times, but ultimately full of the joie de vivre that had captured the American spirit in the 20s.

This last silent appearance by the Glasses character is an absolute gem. The movies seems to run at the “gag-a-minute” pace, with each new comedic moment barely letting the audience breathe or process it before the next one occurs. There isn’t so much a plot as a series of vignettes that follows most of the film: Speedy working as a soda jerk more obsessed with following the score of the Yankees game then doing his job, taking his girl to Coney Island and dealing with the various mishaps there (including a nosy stray dog that won’t leave them alone), and dealing with all the madcap insanity that happens when he gets a new job as a taxi driver that brings him into contact with Babe Ruth, one of the first instances on film of a celebrity cameo.

What the ultimate plot of the film ends up being is a railroad executive’s plan to force out the last horse-drawn car in NYC, which coincidentally owned by the grandfather of Speedy’s sweetheart. Speedy has to prevent the car from being taken over by a gang of thugs, engaging a bunch of old geezers from the neighborhood and his newly adopted dog to help him take them down. Then when the car is stolen, he has to find it with the help of his loyal pooch, and get it back before 10:00 so that the railroad can’t buy it.

As an aside, one of the old geezers is a stereotypical portrayal of a Chinese laundry man, but aside from just the cringeworthy inclusion from a modern-day perspective, he’s played for laughs just as much as everyone else is instead of being singled out. Indeed, he plays a comedic and heroic role as one of the geezers fighting the toughs, burning their butts with the hot iron from his shop.

Each sequence is so well put-together one will wonder exactly how many takes it took to get all the carefully planned choreography put together just right. A ballet company couldn’t have much more finesse then what it takes to get each gag just on point, especially the end sequence where the horse-drawn car is careening through the streets of New York. Indeed, a crash caught on film wasn’t even planned, but they decided to incorporate it into the picture.

Even the dog, played by the smartly-named King Tut, has quite a few tricks and stunts to do himself, such as one where he runs between a man’s legs with a baseball bat to cause a carefully timed pratfall. There’s a reason good animal actors were appreciated back then, for they had no other way to film besides finding one smart enough to take direction.

It was said that Harold Lloyd controlled many of the aspects behind the scenes of his films including writing and directing, but never was credited, so it’s impossible to know how much of the genius that went into this picture was the director Ted Wilde and how much was Lloyd’s. Either way, this is a smartly-made and well-executed comedy that will have you chuckling and smiling all the way through. Considering this was just an nominee, I can hardly wait to view the winner, Two Arabian Knights.

Best Director, Dramatic Picture Winner 1st Academy Awards 1929: Frank Borzage for 7th Heaven

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Now we come to the winner of the only year that the specific category of Best Director, Dramatic Picture was given out. The winner of this category was a film that had already won several awards that year that we have covered: 7th Heaven. Frank Borzage, a prominent director of the silent era, was the director. Borzage was known for romanticism that tended to permeate the entire film and had a reoccurring theme in his pictures of love which must overcome adversity. He was also the director of Street Angel, a film I covered in Janet Gaynor’s win for Best Actress. The two films definitely give a sense of both those traits listed above.

7th Heaven shows the strength of being able to make a romantic picture into something more then pure drippy schlock. He succeeds on all accounts, which coming from a grumpy cynic like me who tends to despise the modern-day romance found in movies, is saying something. Part of what I dislike about modern-day romances is that oftentimes the man and woman are so unequal in personality. One is developed far more then other, leaving the other to be a flat cardboard cutout instead of a character. Or worse yet, the woman gets transformed into the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, the character who is designed to come into a man’s life and “shake it up” and be a cheerleader on the sidelines for him while he accomplishes his goals, all the meantime being full of meaningless quirks and not ever having a real personality or dreams of her own. The MPDG is not a character, she’s a prop, and yes, she’s so overwhelmingly female in portrayal that I’m referring to the stereotype as “she” for a reason.

But the strength of this film relies on the fact that we get to know both characters separately before we ever see them together. We see Diane’s sad home life and her desire for a loving home, as well as Chico working in the sewers and his dream to someday have a better job in the sun. They’re established so that when we meet them, neither one overwhelms the other, and rather then one being the main character while the other is just there to stand on the sidelines, they both stand on their own merit.

Borzage also makes frequent use of how to follow dramatic scenes with comedic ones. Right after Diane is nearly choked to death in the gutter by her horribly abusive sister Nana, Chico has a funny dialogue with his fellow workers…while Diane’s unconscious body is still lying in the streets behind them. Borzage seemed to know he had something special in the pairing of Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, making frequent use of close-ups to really get their emotions across.

The other thing that Borzage seems to love in this picture is the long shot. It’s something that would be lost for a time with the limitations of sound film not allowing a camera to track a shot from one area to another for an extended period of time. But with silent film still in its heyday, he was able to make full use of it. First, for the shot where Nana chases her sister down the street as she whips and beats her, and secondly, for an amazingly well-crafted shot of Chico leading Diane up a full seven flights of stairs to their new shared apartment. Apparently, they actually had to build an elevator for that shot!

Borzage really knew his craft in making this film and that is why it is a shining example of silent film even to this day. Much as The Crowd was big and loud, 7th Heaven comes across a little quieter, but no less strong of a picture. I can honestly say Borzage likely won the award because there is more of a message of hope in the latter picture. Chico comes home, even if he is blinded, and their love has stood the test of World War I. With so much sadness to come to the American public soon enough in the decade to follow, small wonder they wanted hope instead of pragmatism in their movies.

Best Director, Dramatic Picture Nominee 1st Academy Awards 1929: King Vidor for The Crowd and Herbert Brenon for Sorrell and Son

 

 

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Now we come to the Best Director category. Like quite a few categories that year, the Academy still seemed to be finding their feet. They divided up Best Director into two categories, one for Best Dramatic Picture and one for Best Comedy Picture, not unlike how the Golden Globes eventually ended up dividing some of their categories. I’m sure they soon realized that some years this wouldn’t have ended up feasible, for while there’s always a ton of great dramatic films each year, it’s much harder to find good comedies. It’s much harder to make someone laugh then make someone cry. I will stand by this no matter what anyone says.

The first picture nominated in the category was Sorrell and Son, directed by Herbert Brenon. Maddeningly, as much as I scoured the internet, I was unable to find a copy of it anywhere, though the Academy Film Archive is said to have a partially restored print. Someone tell them to get that out on a DVD and for download toot-sweet!

So that takes us to the other picture nominated that year: The Crowd. As finding a copy of this film on the net is an exercise in maddeningly ever getting closer to the edge of the abyss while you tear your hair out, I’ve included a link for it above. Now, I am all for paying money to watch films in a legal format and supporting good films that way, but that’s only if they’re actually available. But TCM, who runs this movie occasionally, has not done so, so I was forced to watch the pirated version. I feel no shame in telling you to do the same.

The Crowd is an All-American tale of a young man named John who moves to the big city with the intent of making it big. He wants to be a somebody that people will remember as his late father always wanted him to be. Rather hard in New York City, where there’s millions of people right along side you who want the same thing. Now, The Crowd managed to make this picture feel larger-then-life by filming right on the streets of NYC, sometimes covertly for crowd scenes. You get a sense of just how massive the place is as people stream about going from place to place. The camera has large, sweeping shots all over the place, as well as a lot of tracking shots, a style which would be lost for quite some time due to the limitations that sound pictures would soon present.

Now, just to get the elephant out of the room right away, there are a few moments in the picture where black actors are portrayed in the title cards to have the “black minstrel accent”, examples like ‘Did I hear you-all speakin’ ’bout havin’ yo’ bed made up?’ and ‘I detend to be a preacher man! Hallelujah!’ There’s also a moment you might cringe as the token black boy in John’s childhood town is nicknamed Whitey. So if you’re a bit sensitive to these things, which are somewhat common in this silent era, turn it off or fast-forward a bit. Remember, not everything in the past conforms to today’s standards. To be fair, in a nice bit of solidarity, Whitey is shown to be playing with the white children of the neighborhood without being ostracized or shown to be anymore comical then any of the other little boys, a scene that would begin to be lost as films progressed. Alright, with that out of the way, time to move onto the rest of the picture.

As usually happens in these kinds of pictures, he finds a nice girl named Mary, and they soon marry, with his best friend cynically saying it’ll last maybe a year. Despite her disapproving brothers and mother, and a few small squabbles, the two weather the storm together, and soon Mary is pregnant. They have a boy and then soon a little girl some time later. The picture skips ahead five years and everything is going along alright.

The family is at the beach on a picnic and their characters are laid out nicely for us: Mary is trying her best to make the picnic nice while John sits there lackadaisically playing a ukulele instead of contributing any help at all. When Mary asks him why he hasn’t gotten anywhere in his company, he protests it takes time. But based on what we’ve seen thus far between young John blowing off his studies to go on a date with Mary, then blowing off spending time with Mary’s family to get drunk with Bert, and this idea of letting his wife do all the work while he futzes around, it comes off more like he’s just lazy. She points out his best friend Bert has gotten somewhere and again he protests that rubbing elbows with the big bosses will get you anywhere. Well…yeah, and what’s wrong with that? A little hard work plus kissing up to the bosses never hurt anyone in my opinion.

But things seem to be turning around for the family as John, who keeps sending in slogan after slogan to contests that will select them as the new one for their brand finally wins a bit of money in the form of $500. ( That’s $7,345.99 in today’s money, people!) They happily pay off debts, buy a new dress for Mary, and buy new toys for their children. They excitedly tell them to come inside and that’s when tragedy strikes. In a masterful series of shots that hype up the tension by never showing us the actual moment of impact, their little girl is struck and badly injured by a truck.

The scene fades to a sad one as the little girl starts to slip away. Small wonder that John seems to lose it a little bit, hyperfixating on the idea that if it’s just quiet enough, she’ll get well. He goes all the way to running into the crowded streets of the city, battling against the crowd and futilely trying to get them and the fire trucks to be quiet. There’s a wonderful parallel here as the crowd which was once a source of inspiration and happiness has now turned cold and unfeeling, with a policeman flat-out telling him that the world isn’t going to stop just because his baby is sick.

The little girl dies, and in a scene full of pathos that never goes over the top, we see Mary and John in the throes of grief, both trying to be comforted by their family and failing. What happens next is best summed up by the title card: “The crowd laughs with you always… but it will cry with you for only a day.” John can’t focus on his work anymore and quits his job. This proves to be a dumb mistake as he then spends his time getting jobs and losing them just as quickly. This would be eerily prescient for the Americans watching this film, soon to be plunged into the Great Depression. By the time the story picks back up, they’ve moved to a small, dingy house, Mary is forced to take in sewing to make ends meet in addition to all her other work, and their poor firstborn son Junior is completely neglected.

Mary’s brothers sum it up nicely when they bitingly ask John if he plans to go on a vacation from life for the rest of his life. At this point, I started to lose my sympathies for John a bit. He just sits around in a daze, which is understandable, but in the meantime, his wife is holding the family together by taking on the lion’s share of the work. To contrast, while he’s throwing a fit and impulsively quitting his job, she’s busy making a feast for the company picnic while still in the throes of her own grief. As I’m sure all of you well know who have lost any beloved family member, life doesn’t stop just to let you spend your days grieving. Eventually, you have to get back out there and try.

Then comes the part in the picture where I wanted to smack him. Mary’s brothers say they’ll give him a job, but he refuses, saying it’s a “charity job.” This comes from a 2019 perspective, and I’m sure things were different ninety-one years ago, but this seems to me to stink with a bit of toxic masculinity. So it’s “charity” to take a job from relatives because of your stinking pride but sitting on your ass day after day moping is what…heroically supporting your family? Men have their pride, but they also have families that need to eat. Mary rightfully calls him out on this stupid line of thinking and slaps him, saying she almost wishes he were dead.

Junior follows his father as he walks around town depressed. He considers killing himself by jumping off a bridge but then reconsiders. After all, what’s the point? The shots here of the train and bridge are beautifully done. Junior, the poor little neglected son, finally breaks through to his father by telling him he believes in him. This finally snaps John back into action. He looks all over town for a job, eventually finding one as a clown wearing a sandwich board who juggles. It’s a contrast to the start of the picture when he made fun of just such a man with the same job when they were on a date.

But it appears to be too late, as when he returns, Mary seems set on departing with her brothers and taking Junior with her, even after he reveals he’s gotten a job. It’s a very tender scene, and at the end of it, Mary can’t do it. She stays with her husband and her brothers exasperatedly toss her luggage onto the porch when it becomes clear she’s not coming. The picture ends with the family attending a vaudeville show and seeing John’s winning slogan from earlier in the program. The shot fades out into a masterfully done tracking shot, pulling back from the little family we’ve followed until once again, they are lost in the crowd of people that make up the audience.

Now with such a good picture done about ordinary people, it is a bit of a headscratcher as to how it didn’t win a single award that year at the Oscars, though even I will admit the eventual winner was a smidge better. However, it makes a little more sense when you discover Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM, hated the picture and vocally urged his fellow members at the Academy not to vote for it, which honestly might have caused it to lose in both categories that it was nominated in. Small wonder, with the country going into the Depression five months after the awards ceremony, that people didn’t want to see movies with downer endings. Honestly, by today’s standards, it seems pretty optimistic, but back then, it was a bit of a bummer to see the family still struggling.

King Vidor was actually forced to shoot anywhere between reportedly seven to nine alternate different endings so that theaters could choose which one they wanted to show. To quote IMDB, one of the alternate endings was “set in a mansion showing John and Mary by a glittering Christmas tree. John has become a success at writing ad slogans. Mary’s new dialogue title was to read: ‘Honest, Johnny, way down deep in my heart, I never lost faith in you for a minute.'” Overwhelmingly, the theaters still showed the original ending, which says something about how people viewed it despite the negativity the ending might have stirred up.

Best Actor Winner 1st Academy Awards 1929: Emil Jannings in The Way of All Flesh and The Last Command

 

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Now we come to the winner of the Best Actor award: Emil Jannings, a German actor, for the roles he played in The Way of All Flesh and The Last Command. Unfortunately, The Way of All Flesh is a completely lost film, without anything but a fragment or two surviving, which is a crying shame. Considering how good Jannings’ performance is in the other film, we’re missing out on what was sure to be another great performance. This happened with many of Jannings’ films and The Last Command is the only one he made in Hollywood that has survived. Despite winning this award, he would soon be forced out during the talkie era due to his heavy German accent, and return to Germany, where he unfortunately became completely blacklisted from making films anywhere else due to making Nazi propaganda films. Humorously, when the Allies invaded Germany, he carried his Oscar statuette with him as proof of his association with Hollywood.

But I don’t judge films based off what their creators and stars might have done at the time or done later on. If I did, I wouldn’t be able to watch any films that had involvement from Roman Polanski, Harvey Weinstein, or even Clark Gable. At a certain point, you have to disassociate the art from the person creating it. Everyone has their faults, as we are only human, so I’m not going to judge unless the art is inspired by actual abhorrent real-life acts that the artist has carried out.

Getting back on track, I can only really judge the one film, but what a film it is! I talked quite a bit about this already in the Best Original Story nominee post, so I’ll try not to rehash what I already said there, but emphasize more on Janning’s performance. They say that silent actors acted with the eyes and no more is that clearer then in his performance as Grand Duke Sergius Alexander. The performance is entirely carried through his body language and his eyes, and at one point in the film that lasts nearly twenty minutes, through those solely alone without any dialogue whatsoever.

He goes from the regal, proud bearing of a Grand Duke, cousin to the Tsar, and being called one of the most important men in Russia to a downtrodden, beaten and broken shell of a man eking out an existence in Hollywood as a extra. It’s like watching the difference of Christopher Reeves playing both Clark Kent and Superman as two completely separate people in the Superman series.

Watching the haughty man break down slowly by inches is an agonizing, tortured experience, and Jennings plays the part to perfection. You can see part of him die inside as the revolutionaries beat, spit on, jeer, and pour drinks on him. His loyalty is to Russia, but Russia is made up of its people, who now have a new idea of what they want in their government. The Russia the general knows is now completely gone and he no longer has a place in it. This idea crushing down on him hurts far more then any of the injuries accumulated during his humiliation.

The character tic Sergius has in the present of shaking his head continuously in a side-to-side fashion as if saying “no”, which starts as he sees the train carrying his lover Natalie go off a bridge and into an icy river below, is the highlight of showing how far he’s come from the proud figure who would whip men in the face for being insolent and threaten to shoot a subordinate who wore his fur-lined coat. Besides the twitching, his eyes are dull, posture slumped, and overall there’s just the sense of someone who broke long ago in his demeanor.

The only two times the tic disappears is when Sergius firsts lays eyes on Leo, seeing the revolutionary he’d treated so harshly in the past now the director in charge of his fate on the picture, and the very end, when he hallucinates that he is back on the battlefield in Russia. The transformation at the very end back into the man who so passionately loves his country that he is willing to die for it is the finest moment in the picture. Unable to tell fiction from reality in a PTSD-fueled flashback of seeing the mobs turning against him, he makes a fervor-filled speech about leading his men onto victory to save Russia, and collapses from a heart attack afterwards.

The speech is even enough to move Leo, still his enemy after all these years, once he realizes they both loved Russia in their own way. His dying words are asking if they won and Leo responding in the affirmative. Then he dramatically dies. (The moment here loses a slight bit of gravitas as Jennings can still be seen obviously breathing after he’s supposed to be dead.) This is one of the finest performances I’ve seen in reviewing all the films from this year. It holds up even today, and while Richard Barthelmess made a fine performance in The Patent Leather Kid, it took a while to make the performance shine. Here, Emil Jannings carries the picture from start to finish. This was an Oscar well-deserved.

Best Actor Nominee 1st Academy Awards 1929: Richard Barthelmess in The Noose and The Patent Leather Kid

 

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Back again and this time we’ve moved onto the Best Actor category! Our subject today is Richard Barthelmess, a popular actor of the silent era whose star faded a little as the talkie era came along. He was arguably one of the most popular male actors of his time, especially among female audiences who considered him a bit of a heartthrob with his chiseled good looks and black hair. One can hardly blame them, for he is very striking to watch on film, with intense eyes that seem to contain a lot of passion for whatever he’s doing in a particular scene. But did he deserve to win Best Actor?

Much like the nominee who won, Emil Jannings, Barthelmess was nominated for two pictures, but try as I might, there exists no copies of The Noose on the web. A full copy of it is being housed at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, so someone needs to give them a kick in the butt to get moving on making this film available to the public. Maybe in 2024 when the film becomes public domain, they’ll be forced to. If his performance in the second film, The Patent Leather Kid, is anything to go by, we’re missing out on a treasure and spectacular performance.

But moving onto the picture itself. This was a hard film to get through. The first half took me many more days then I ever wanted to spend watching on a singular film. Why? I hate to say it, but simply, it’s boring. There’s a fine line between stoicism and flat acting, and unfortunately, Barthelmess tends to waver a little too close to the second one then the first. The film follows the titular “Patent Leather Kid”, a rising boxing star who finds love one night in the unlikely place of a woman heckling him from the audience while on a date. Intrigued, he meets her afterwards, and she blows off her current date in favor of this tall, dark stranger.

Unfortunately, after this beginning, the film drags for the entire first half. I’m not one of those people to say “Oh, just get through [X] amount of [episodes, the film, the album] and it totally gets better!” because most of the time, I don’t want to devote my time to patiently waiting out drivel just so I can get to the good stuff. So I warn you, if you go into this film, it literally takes till the second half for it to really get good. So the film drags on with “The Kid” who is never officially named (and really, at age 33, I hate say that Richard Barthelmess could hardly be called a “kid” by anyone) and his troubles with his girl Curley. They fight, they get back together, he does a boxing match, there’s a little humor, some kissing, yadda yadda yadda. It’s all pretty standard stuff and the acting of Barthelmess leaves quite a bit to be desired with a face that never seems to change expression.

Things pick up a modicum of speed when World War I breaks out. Yep, it’s another film set in that era. At this point, I think we can all agree to form a drinking game based on this blog, so take a shot every time a film is set in WWI. The Kid, unusual for most films portraying the war, is reluctant to go fight for his country. Fighting in the ring is one thing, but fighting to kill people is another. He seems to find it tiring when his boxing team keeps talking about enlistment and their draft notices. Still, even he gets a little swept away one night hearing the band play the national anthem, and ends up getting knocked out. A short time later, he’s hit with a double blow. Curley gives him a letter stating her intent to go be a nurse in Europe to help the cause and then almost directly after that his manager gives him his draft notice.

Now with no choice, he’s off in the Army serving with one of his boxing team members Puffy. (To quote The Crow, “Don’t any of your street-demons have real grown-up names?”) The picture finally starts to pick up here at the second half. The two are put on the front lines and the Kid confesses how scared he is. It’s an interesting angle to choose to portray. It’s a symptom of masculinity in movies, almost to a point of toxicity, for men to never show that they’re afraid. Who wants to show someone in an action scene being afraid? That’s the sign of a “wimp”, “pussy”, “faggot”, or whatever other demeaning name is fashionable this day to call men who express their emotions.

But indeed, the film goes out of its way several times to show that the Kid is scared and not at all enthralled with the glorious nature and glamour that war is supposed to have. His emotions finally start to break through and the picture is better for it. He’s so scared that he can’t even leave his foxhole when Puffy tries to encourage him to take down a belltower that the Germans are using to shoot at everyone from. Puffy dies in the attempt and the Kid finds enough courage to finish what he started. Unfortunately, the cost of doing so causes a beam and an immense amount of rubble to fall on top of him, burying him from sight. Did he survive?

Yes, he did, but since this is a realistic war movie, he looks unlikely to survive when he’s brought into the building serving as a surgical facility. Curley doesn’t even recognize him at first because he’s so bad off, but when she does, she screams her head off, begging the doctor to help him even after the man says he’s doomed. She finally convinces him to try to save his life, even though they have to perform without surgery. The Kid wakes up (during the middle of it no less!), with he and Curley finally mending their strained relationship.

The last scenes of the picture are the Kid in a wheelchair, unable to move his legs, arms, or even his hands. Curley optimistically says he’s only “maybe” paralyzed, but the doctor seems more realistic in thinking that this is permanent. The Kid seems quite down, but resolves to make the best of it, with Curley promising to work to make enough to support both of them. There’s a gentle ribbing from the Kid at having “a dame” be the one being the breadwinner, but it’s clear he doesn’t mind all that much.

When the army band starts to play the national anthem, he expresses his sadness and frustration that he can’t salute, and asks Curley to do it for him. Then, in a miracle, he’s shakily able to raise his hands up. Curley cries happy tears and the picture ends with him getting out of the wheelchair and standing up, proudly saluting the flag.

The cynic in me says perhaps it would have been better for him to remain paralyzed, since that’s a more realistic ending then a random deus ex machina miracle. But the optimist in me likes this much better. It’s also prudent to note that there was already a lot of films with a downer ending in Hollywood at the time, including one I’ll talk about next time, and with the war still on so many people’s minds, I’m sure no one wanted to see things ending sadly on the screen.

So, was this actor worthy of the award? It’s a close neck-in-neck finish on this one, but I think Emil Jannings got ahead just by a nose or so. This picture is dragged down too much by the first half and I shouldn’t have to wait an hour to see the better parts of an actor’s performance. Well, next time, we’ll discuss the winner of this award, Emil Jannings. Till next time, Oscar fanatics!

Best Actress Winner 1st Academy Awards 1929: Janet Gaynor in Sunrise, 7th Heaven, and Street Angel

 

 

 

 

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Now we come to the winner in the Best Actress category. At the first Oscars, the award was given out based not just on one film, but on an entire person’s body of work, provided they’d made more then one picture in the last two years. In some categories, the contenders have been close, but not in this one. Janet Gaynor blew her competition completely out of the water that year with three stunning films: 7th Heaven, Street Angel, and Sunrise. Two of the three films, Sunrise and 7th Heaven, are still considered the pinnacle of what silent films could achieve for their sheer quality. The importance to which Gaynor played in making these pictures what they are can’t be overstated. Each role is done with such depth and sensitivity that you understand the emotions perfectly going on in those big eyes and upon her innocent-looking face. She managed to win at the ripe old age of twenty-two, becoming the youngest Oscar winner in this category until 1986, a whopping fifty-seven years later!

We’ll go through her body of work here going from what I believe is weakest to strongest in this body of work she was nominated for. First up is Street Angel. Now if you watch these films back-to-back-to-back, it becomes very obvious that Gaynor was typecast into a certain role: that of the sweet, sad, innocent waif who has been through many hardships already in her short life and is bound to go through more before finding her happy ending. She might be tarnished in certain ways, but there’s a purity about her which shines through.

While the other two pictures take such a role and give it more depth, here in Street Angel, well, that’s where her role starts and stops. Had she been nominated for this film solely, I wouldn’t have thought she would win. It’s a fantastic part, but I just feel there’s something a little lacking. Plus, there’s a little too much emphasis on the madonna-whore complex running throughout the picture for my liking. Gaynor stars as Angela, (meaningful name, anyone?) a pure and winsome poor young woman whose mother is gravely ill. With no way to get the money she desperately needs, Angela decides to resort to prostitution in order to get it. There is a bit that wavers between amusing and dramatic as Angela tries to imitate the prostitutes walking the streets to solicit a client. She’s unsuccessful, and in one last desperate attempt, tries to steal the wallet of a rich man.

She’s caught and sentenced to one year of hard labor, escaping from the line before she can be put in prison. (My, my, was there even a trial? Most people contesting parking tickets in the modern world seem to take at least a month and this all seems to happen on the same day!) For once, the police are shown to be quite competent, and she can’t shake them off for more then a few minutes. She returns home to find that her mother has, conveniently for the plot so that she won’t be weighed down by an obligation to her parent, died in her absence without the medicine. There’s a tender scene where Angela lays down next to her mother and says goodbye for the last time, the first real good bit of dramatic acting in the picture.

Angela ends up getting hidden with some circus folk who then take her with them. She becomes an acrobatic performer with them, cheerful, carefree, and cynical about love. She meets Gino, a wandering painter, played by Charles Farrell. This was the second of a full twelve pictures the two would make together. It’s easy to see why. Their chemistry shines through right away and two bounce off of each other wonderfully, something that will also be seen in 7th Heaven, the first picture they made together. The two predictably fall in love amidst the hubbub and bustle of the circus. This is easily the most interesting part of the picture to watch as there’s quite a lot visually going on.

During this time, Gino paints a lovely portrait of Angela as he sees her. She warns him that he only sees what he wants to, clearly thinking of her tarnished past, but he’s not listening. Apparently even in 1928 men were more in love with the idea of a woman then the reality that was in front of them. Soon after, Angela spots the police skulking about, and nervous that they’ll find her, she falls while doing an acrobatic stunt and shatters her ankle. She and Gino are forced to leave the circus and go back to what he doesn’t know is her hometown of Naples. It’s not really clear why their only option is to leave the circus. I mean, it’s a broken ankle, not an amputated limb. Surely there’s still work she could do while she heals before being able to possibly perform again and Gino still is able to paint to support them. It also doesn’t make sense as to why she doesn’t suggest going to, oh, any other town in the entirety of Italy besides the one where she’s a wanted woman. But anyway, they leave, and the most interesting part of the picture is over almost before it began.

The picture falls a little too much into the standard romantic drama as Gino and her are forced to sell the beloved portrait of her to make some money. At this point, comparing it to the other two pictures, Street Angel just seems to lack a certain spark that makes it unique. It’s pretty standard fair, and while Gaynor gives a strong performance as she does in all three pictures, I’m just not seeing any standout moments. During this time, she finds out Gino has a massive madonna-whore complex, in which all prostitutes are soiled beyond redemption in his eyes, while Angela is a beautiful saint by comparison because she’s “pure”. She does try to suss out what he might think if she reveals her past, but he dismisses all prostitutes as somehow choosing the life they’re in and wanting to do it. Perhaps this is just the gap of too many years between 1928 and 2019, but ninety-one years later, this slaps as being horribly misogynistic and judgmental to the extreme. What, has he remained pure and virginal up until this moment too? You get the feeling that Gino would immediately dump Angela’s ass and condemn her if she ever told of her past.

Predictably to cause some angst, Angela is found out by the police just as things start to look up for the couple as Gino gets commissioned to do a giant mural. She begs for an hour to say goodbye to him, a request which is granted. This is also one of Gaynor’s shining stand-out moments in the picture, for she beautifully portrays Angela as giving Gino a wonderful night where she agrees to marry him the next day, all while the audience can see the sadness and tears that are barely being held back. So she leaves with the police officer while Gino sleeps.

There is a bit of an idiot plot moment here even more then the one I pointed out earlier. If she loves Gino so dang much, why doesn’t she just tell him she’s going to prison? I think any man would prefer knowing where the love of his life is, even if it’s in a horrible place that he disapproves of, instead of disappearing into the night without a trace. She wouldn’t even need to give out the full story: just fudge a few details and he’d understand without all his self-righteous judgment. But instead she disappears, Gino is left heartbroken and unable to paint, losing the commission of painting the mural while Angela is happy in prison, convinced that he’s doing great things and was able to get over her disappearance…somehow. Tell me, does she know the personality of her fiance at all? Or is she too only seeing what she wants to?

When she gets out, she’s devastated to realize that Gino lost the commission and has long since either abandoned or been kicked out of the home they shared together. Gino in the meantime has fallen into despair and meanness, which you can totally tell because he’s now wearing a not-subtle-at-all entirely black outfit. A prostitute who had known both of them before and who met Angela in prison, colloquially referring to her as a “street angel” like she was, reveals to Gino what Angela was in prison for. He basically says all women are liars, whores, and sent from the Devil…remind me again why we’re supposed to root for this guy as a protagonist?

We’re treated shots of the two of them wandering around the foggy docks, both lost in their own thoughts. This is another good moment for Gaynor as she portrays Angela’s sadness and despair at realizing how she messed things up. The two coincidentally meet, for Gino is searching the face of every prostitute he meets to paint the perfect picture of a woman with the face of an angel and the soul of Satan.

He goes into a killing rage when he recognizes her, which to me feels like far too much of an overreaction. Like, dude, she abandoned you and has a past as a streetwalker. That’s not enough to condone murder in my book. He’s about to strangle her when he sees that the portrait of Angela he painted is coincidentally hanging on the wall of the chapel they had run into. That’s enough to snap him out of it, but he’s still about to abandon Angela before she protests that he saw that purity in her and that it still remains. Just why she doesn’t just explain to him that the whole prostituting herself thing was to get money for medicine for her dying mother is a mystery. Maybe she thinks he’ll still dump her cold flat, which I wouldn’t put past someone this self-righteous and hypercritical. Sure, a woman who is a whore is terrible, but somehow a man who tries to murder said whore is still somehow a good guy? Give me a break. Even with all his judgment, Gino looks into her eyes, and sees the truth. The two reconcile and leave into the night to start a new life together.

Overall, not either my favorite movie of the three or Gaynor’s strongest performance. It certainly cements that she could do the troubled, innocent waif roles with ease, but there’s not a lot of meat to the role besides a few stand-out bits of acting, and much of the message of the picture has not aged well since the time of women’s liberation and rise of feminism. Slut shaming is not something I want to see in the films I watch, silent or otherwise.

Up next is 7th Heaven, which I feel is in the middle between the other two films. Whereas in Street Angel Gaynor’s role was a young waif attempting unsuccessfully to prostitute herself, in 7th Heaven, she’s already been a hooker for quite some time, albeit the stereotype that Charles Dickens made popular in the book Oliver Twist with the character Nancy: a hooker with a heart of gold. Diane is trapped in an abusive home where her sister Nana regularly beats her and whores both of them out to feed her absinthe habit. While she doesn’t say much for the first part of the film, her sad eyes and hunched body posture speak a great deal. One can see the torment in her eyes when her wealthy uncle and aunt promise to give them a home if they have remained “clean and good girls.” There’s anguish on Diane’s face, and not just because Nana’s literally twisting her arm behind her back to say what she wants. To be lawful or to be good? She answers truthfully, which sends Nana into a rage where she chases Diane out of the house and down the street in a remarkable tracking shot that’s all one take.

Diane is strangled in the gutter until a sewer-worker Chico rescues her. Chico is loud, boisterous, and fearless, the exact opposite of the shrinking, downtrodden sad sack of a figure Diane is. There’s a great dramatic moment where Diane plans to commit suicide. Every bit of her body language just conveys so well how much pain and despair she’s in, unable to “go on living without hope” as she puts it. Chico saves her, and they start to bond, but no sooner does that happen then the police try to round her up in a sting arresting prostitutes, the bitter Nana telling them she’s “no better then me”.

Chico impulsively says she’s his wife to save her from arrest and the police say they will check up on them later. Chico despairs of losing the new job he just got until Diane says she’ll stay with him to keep the ruse up, and then leave afterwards. There’s a charming scene that starts out with another long tracking shot as he takes her up to the seventh floor upon which he lives. They then begin to bond a little more.

I will admit Chico does say some coarse and misogynistic things, but unlike Gino in Street Angel, there’s enough charm and goodness in him to make the viewer still sympathize with him. It also helps most of his words revolve around a woman’s place in the home, such as saying all women try to get through a man through his stomach, as opposed to slut-shaming Diane for her past. Indeed, Chico doesn’t seem to care one whit that Diane was a hooker.

The rest of the movie is pretty standard dramedy: just as they come into happiness and plan to get married, WWI breaks out. They have their own private ceremony where they used religious medals given to them earlier in place of wedding rings, with Chico promising to talk to her every day at eleven o’ clock. When Nana shows back up after Chico has left for the war, Diane is terrified…until Nana tries to take her precious medals. Then the tables are turned as she starting beating Nana around the apartment until she gets her medals back and drives her out. It’s a nice bit of character development that Gaynor pulls off well.

Diane is pursued by an officer at home, but she staunchly is loyal to Chico. On the front line, Chico is gravely wounded, and tells the chaplain to give his medals to his wife. When Diane receives the news, there’s a great bit of emoting as she at first refuses to believe the news until the medals are given to her. She falls into despair and then rages at the heavens, cursing God for giving her happiness only to take it away. Then Chico, who is miraculously still alive but blinded, comes back. There’s a tearful reunion between them, with Diane unable to believe he’s alive at first until she touches his face. Diane promises to be his eyes while Chico optimistically tells her it will only be until he regains his sight.

While this all sounding like a typical dramedy plot and hardly original to today’s audience, it’s a film that really has to be seen to believed. The ultimate strength is carried on the two main actors’ shoulders. Gaynor wouldn’t be nearly as strong in the role as she is if she didn’t have Farrell to bounce off of. The chemistry between them leaps out at the viewer, making them empathize very quickly with them, and root for their happy ending when it seems like all is lost. This honestly could have won Gaynor the Oscar, but if you can believe it, there’s an even stronger performance for me to tell you about.

Now we come to the stand-out of the pictures. I believe this more then the other two won her the Oscar. Sunrise is more than just a film meant to entertain, this is a work of art that should hang inside a museum. It’s like watching a poem unfold, the picture already on the screen instead of the mind’s eye. Even in the era of silent films, it has very little dialogue, so the viewer is deliberately meant to understand it purely through the visual medium.

Can an actress portray a character convincingly when she doesn’t have any dialogue to fall back on? The answer is yes! Gaynor stars as “The Wife”, a sad and downtrodden farmer’s wife whose husband, “The Man”, has fallen in love with “The Woman From The City.” As you can see, they didn’t give the characters names to instead evoke a sort of timelessness, like this was a fable that could have happened at any point in time.

To contrast The Woman’s persona of dark hair and dark, fashionable clothes, Gaynor was put into plain, drab practical clothes meant for a farm setting and a stiff blonde wig that doesn’t move. Apparently, viewers at the time were almost outraged to see her without her usual dark brown hair. Guess people still would fuss at nothing even ninety-one years ago.

So The Man and The WFTC come up with a plan to drown The Wife and make it look like an accident so that he can be with his new mistress. The Wife, upon hearing her husband wants to spend a day together, is rapturous with joy, a complete 180-degree turn from the sad and hopeless expressions she’d been wearing. Once they’re out on the lake, The Man tries to kill her, but finds he simply can’t do it. Terrified of her husband, The Wife runs to the trolley stop, and climbs aboard.

Despite trying several times to show how sorry he is, The Man can’t seem to console his wife. Gee, can’t imagine why she wouldn’t forgive you after selling off a majority of your farm, cheating with another woman, and then trying to kill her. She wanders through several scenes sobbing, crying, and unable to pull herself together. Finally, when they reach a church and see a couple reciting their wedding vows while being married, The Man realizes how far he’s fallen in how he should be treating his wife. Suddenly, the roles are reversed, as The Man sobs while The Wife tries to console him. Admittedly, this is the one portion of the picture where not having dialogue, even on cue cards, does seem to make it fall a little flat. It’s hard to see a woman forgiving her husband for such abuse just because he feels really, really sorry now.

But they make up and the dramatic portion of the picture shifts into more of an “about the town” style comedy. They go to a beauty salon, get their pictures taken, and go to a fair where they play games, get a little drunk, and dance together. The tonal shift is actually to the benefit of the characterization, for it shows both the couple becoming close again and also shows that The Wife is just as beautiful and exciting as The WFTC can be. There’s a transformation in her, not at all physical, but mentally, and Gaynor pulls this off tremendously.

Heading home, there’s a horrendous storm on the lake. Funnily enough, The Wife sleeps through the first portion of it, only awakening when there’s a huge clap of thunder. To be fair, she was likely still a little tipsy and probably had more alcohol in her system then her hubby since she was smaller. When she awakens, her husband lashes reeds to her to keep her afloat when they are inevitably capsized by the waves. The tense drama fills the scene as one wonders if she will survive or not. Is she to be an early example of a woman dying to further a man’s characterization? But no! Not in this picture where The Wife has just as much importance as The Man.

She’s discovered, weak and barely hanging on, but alive. Her blonde hair is seen for the first and only time being down. Combined with the white nightgown she is put in and the white pillow with her hair framed all around her, it’s clear she’s meant to represent an angelic, pure figure. The last scene of the movie shows her waking up to her devoted husband by her side, a contrast from the beginning where she wept because he was out with The Woman From The City instead of being home with her.

Overall, this is the strongest of Gaynor’s performances. She could have won just based on this one alone. She can transmit The Wife’s emotions so clearly in the span of a single scene, showing her going from being a downtrodden housewife to one full of joy at the thought that her husband at last wants to spend more time with her. She connects with the audience so much that at the end, when it appears she might be dead, the audience shares the despair of The Man at the thought of losing such a good, innocent soul. If you see only one of these three movies, watch Sunrise.