Classic Movie Picks: February 2016

by Lani

Each month, I scour the Turner Classic Movies schedule for upcoming films that I can't miss. The highlights are posted here for your reading and viewing pleasure! (All listed times are Eastern Standard, check your local listings or TCM.com for actual air times in your area. Each day's schedule begins at 6:00 a.m.; if a film airs between midnight and 6 a.m. it is listed on the previous day's programming schedule.)

It is awards season in Hollywood, which means that it is also time for TCM's 31 Days of Oscar festival featuring Academy Award-nominated films from February 1 through March 2. This year, as a play on the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game, each film in the 31 Days schedule is linked to the next by a common actor; no actor is repeated and the last film is linked to the first. For my monthly movie picks, I've linked an actor from each classic film to a 2016 Oscar nominee. Each is linked in less than six degrees and no actor is repeated.  As an added bit of fun, or difficulty, the last link must include the current nominee's co-star in the movie from which he or she was nominated. Make sense? Let's get to the picks...

2/5, 8 PM - The Love Parade (1929)
The Love Parade is a light, airy musical comedy directed by Ernst Lubitsch starring Maurice Chevalier as a raffish count who marries the queen of a small European country, played by Jeanette MacDonald, only to find that being the man behind the great lady isn't a role he's willing to play. The film has an interesting take on gender politics, but ends on an unfortunately conventional note. However, it's pretty fun along the way. The film is at its most crackling when Chevalier and MacDonald trade flirty dialogue and Lubitsch employs his talent for telling risqué jokes in a tasteful fashion. 
The film received seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director for Lubitsch, and Best Actor for Chevalier. MacDonald is most associated with the string of wholesome operettas she starred in opposite Nelson Eddy. The Love Parade was MacDonald's first film and I was surprised to learn that it was Lubitsch who discovered her. As Queen Louise she shows off a talent for comedy and singing, as well as her legs. The rest of the cast includes colorful character actors like silent film comedian Lupino Lane, gravel-voiced Eugene Pallette, and plucky Lillian Roth (whose thick New York accent is a bit of an anachronism, but who cares?).
To connect The Love Parade to this year's Oscar nominees, we'll go from Chevalier to Leslie Caron (Gigi) to Juliette Binoche (Chocolat) to Steve Carell (Dan in Real Life) to Christian Bale in The Big Short. I've been a fan of Bale for a long time (hello, Newsies!) and I'd love to see him try a romantic role again after his latest streak of intense dramatic and action roles. Has it really been 21 years since he stole hearts as Laurie in Little Women? I know Bale has it in him to channel his inner Chevalier in a light romance again.

2/10, 3:45 AM - This Land is Mine (1943)
Charles Laughton stars as a timid school teacher living in a World War II occupied town and suspected of being a Nazi collaborator. Though we're told the setting is "somewhere in Europe," it is likely meant to be France, the home country of director Jean Renoir. Renoir, who had made the great anti-war film Grand Illusion in 1937, aimed to show American audiences what the day-to-day life of an occupied country was like for its citizens. In addition to Laughton, the cast includes the very capable Maureen O'Hara, George Sanders, and Walter Slezak.
The film won an Academy Award for Best Sound. It was the only competitive Academy Award ever received by a Renoir film, though the director did receive an honorary award in 1974. 
I'm going to connect This Land is Mine to a 2016 Oscar nominated film which also looks at paranoia and suspicion during wartime, Bridge of Spies: from star Maureen O'Hara to John Candy (Only the Lonely) to Tom Hanks (Volunteers) to Best Supporting Actor nominee Mark Rylance. Rylance's understated and unexpectedly wry performance as a convicted Russian spy during the Cold War is one of my favorites of the year.

2/26, 3:30 PM - Day for Night (1973)
Francois Truffaut directed, co-wrote, and stars in Day for Night as a film director struggling to complete his movie on-location in the French Riviera. Frequent collaborator Jean-Pierre Leaud plays the lead actor in the film-within-a-film and the glamorous Jacqueline Bissett is the leading lady. It's a movie about making movies - a favorite topic for the Academy Awards - and the title refers to the technique of filming a scene set at night during the daytime with the help of a camera filter. 
Day for Night received Oscar nominations for Truffaut in the categories of Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, as well as a Best Supporting Actress nomination for veteran Italian actress Valentina Cortese as an older actress who can't remember her lines. However, the only Academy Award it won was Best Foreign Language Film, as the entry for France, which isn't too shabby.
Day for Night is about creating an illusion, a fiction which we accept as reality; so, I'll connect it to current nominee which is also about constructing reality from illusion, but with a much more dramatic tone: Room. Jacqueline Bissett connects to Sean Connery (Murder on the Orient Express) to Kevin Costner (The Untouchables) to Joan Allen (The Upside of Anger) to the star of Room, Brie Larson. Larson's affecting performance as a young woman held captive in a single room, striving to create a loving and healthy reality for her son, has made her a front-runner for this year's Best Actress award.

2/27, 12 AM - Apollo 13 (1995)
Apollo 13 tells the true story of the 1970 mission to the moon in which three astronauts were left stranded en route after an explosion crippled their spacecraft. Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, and Kevin Bacon play the astronauts who, with the help of Mission Control in Houston, must draw upon all their training to devise solutions which will bring them home. Director Ron Howard has made many good films and I think this is one of his very best; surprisingly though, Howard was not even nominated by the Academy for Best Director (the award that year ultimately went to Mel Gibson for Braveheart). Howard would win an Oscar six years later for A Beautiful Mind, but I think Apollo 13 is a better film and a better testament to his skill. (And it isn't even my favorite film of 1995; that would be fellow Best Picture nominee Sense and Sensibility whose director, Ang Lee, was also not nominated...it was a strange year.)
The film received eight Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay, and Supporting Actor and Actress nominations for Ed Harris as the Mission Control flight director and Kathleen Quinlan as Marilyn, the wife of astronaut Jim Lovell (played by Tom Hanks). However, it won only two awards, for sound and editing.
I have a hard time thinking of any film about space exploration that doesn't involve some sort of accident which jeopardizes the entire mission. Maybe A Trip to the Moon from 1899? Of course, in that adventure from film's early days, the voyage was all a dream; but since mankind actually started taking trips to the moon, filmmakers have devised all manner of calamities to befall such missions - some based on fact, but mostly fiction. One such story is current Best Picture nominee The Martian. Like Apollo 13, the veteran director of The Martian, Ridley Scott, was not nominated by the Academy. I really liked The Martian and I'm disappointed that it isn't more of a front-runner this awards season; though star Matt Damon has a long-shot chance for Best Actor. For this last connection from Oscar nominees past to present, I have to start with Mr. Six Degrees himself, Kevin Bacon: from Bacon to John Lithgow (Footloose) to Jessica Chastain (Interstellar) to the titular "martian" Matt Damon. 

The 2016 Oscars, honoring films from 2015, will be given out on February 28. I'll be watching to see if any of my favorite films win, hope you'll join me!

Best Pictures #8: 1927-28 (1st) Academy Awards, My Picks for Unique & Artistic Picture and Outstanding Picture

by A.J.

1927-28 (1^st) Academy Awards
My Picks for Unique & Artistic Picture and Outstanding Picture

There would never be another Academy Awards like the first awards. The films eligible for nomination had to have been released in the Los Angeles area between August 1, 1927 and July 31, 1928 (the reasoning for this seemingly arbitrary time-period is lost to history). The winners were announced to the press in February of 1929, and the ceremony was held on May 16, 1929. Individuals could be nominated for a particular film or for their body of work in the qualifying year. For example, Janet Gaynor won the first Best Actress award for her performances in Sunrise, 7^th Heaven, and Street Angel. The award for Best Titles was given to Joe Farnham for his body of work; however, that category was omitted the following year because the birth of talkies had rendered title cards unnecessary. Winners received a statuette, which picked up its nickname “Oscar” sometime in the first decade of the awards. Runners-up and honorable mentions received plaques and certificates. The selection board of judges was made up of only 5 people, some of which were studio heads, including MGM studio boss Louis B. Mayer. There were two categories for Best Director—comedic and dramatic and, most notably, there were two categories for Best Picture: Outstanding Picture (awarded to Wings) and Unique and Artistic Picture (awarded to Sunrise). Both Best Picture categories were considered equal, but when the Unique and Artistic Picture category was eliminated and only Outstanding Picture continued for the 2^nd Academy Awards (to be renamed Outstanding Production for the 3^rd Academy Awards), people came to think of the Outstanding Picture award Wings won as the top Best Picture award and the Unique and Artistic Picture award as a sort of specialty award. This might lead people to think of Sunrise as the more substantial, quality picture and Wings as the well-executed, big budget spectacle. There certainly is some merit to that perspective, but it also discredits both films of the sum total of their different qualities.

Among the nominees of both Best Picture categories we see the types of films that the Academy would often show favor in years to come: socially and politically relevant films (The Racket), historical epics (Wings), sentimental romantic dramas (7^th Heaven), art films and films about personal struggles and pains (The Crowd, Sunrise), and even odd, peculiar, but popular films (Chang). It is also clear that silent filmmaking was at its zenith. Film stories and techniques had reached an incredible level of sophistication since the birth of the medium just over 30 years before the first Oscars. In less than a year, it would all be over.

The Jazz Singer received a special Academy Award for its technical achievements. The Jazz Singer is thought of as the first sound film, but this is not entirely accurate. Only the musical numbers in The Jazz Singer have synchronized sound. The rest of the film plays like a regular silent film. The first synchronized words said on film by Al Jolson (“You ain’t heard nothing yet”) were said between songs and were recorded unintentionally. Sunrise has a complete synchronized soundtrack with music, sound effects, and even unsynchronized words shouted by a crowd. 7^th Heaven and Wings were rereleased with synch soundtracks, but no actors speaking. Silent film audiences would have been used to having sound accompany films. There would be music, and sometimes sound effects, either performed live or prerecorded, but what they had not experienced was actors speaking from the screen. It is clear that studios were hesitant for audiences to hear actors talk, but after those first few words spoken by Al Jolson there was no going back.

Many people today think of silent movies as antiques, quaint precursors to the modern films. I confess I had the same view for a long time. Silent movies are a huge blind spot in my movie watching experience. Even after watching these six films, I still have not seen many silent movies, but I realize now that silent film was a complete, sophisticated, and mature storytelling medium. The films of the late silent era had mastered this new medium of storytelling and were pushing boundaries both thematically and technically. More importantly I realize now that silent film is just another genre, like any other, with great movies, as well as mediocre and bad ones. A new and vast era of cinema has been opened for me to explore and I am very excited.

My Pick for Unique and Artistic Picture: Sunrise

The Crowd and Sunrise were considered experimental films at the time of the first Academy Awards not because of their technical approaches, but because of their subject matter. Showing characters face ordinary problems and live less than idyllic lives was considered unconventional storytelling. It is still unconventional today. These are films about ordinary, everyday people reaching for happiness, but who are surrounded by overwhelming obstacles. Both are considered masterpieces today, and rightly so, but were box office disappointments. I went back and forth many times on which one I think should have won for Best Unique and Artistic Picture, but after re-watching Sunrise, I had to side with the Academy. The Crowd delivers powerful emotional impact and pathos with its images, as does Sunrise, but the latter film also made me feel like I was watching movie magic. Not the magic of special effects and camera tricks, but the magic of living another life, of seeing and feeling hopes and dreams through images that are, for a time, as real as my eyes taking in these images and my heart feeling them. This is fiction that seems tangible. Those flickering images of two souls, the Man and his Wife, breaking and mending, create real emotions from illusion. That is real movie magic. That is what is in every frame of Sunrise.

My Pick for Outstanding Picture: Wings

I wasn’t expecting to agree with the Academy in both Best Picture categories, but of the three nominees for Outstanding Picture, Wings is the clear standout. Straight away from the opening scenes Wings has the definite style that signifies the work of a skilled filmmaker. William Wellman managed to combine mainstream Hollywood romanticism and sentimentality with creative technical flair. The characters and story run thin for such an epic movie, but overall I found Wings an exciting experience. The action scenes are as exciting as those of any film made since and the aerial sequences are thrilling even by today’s standards. Aside from its Best Picture win, Wings also won Best Engineering Effects (a category later changed to Special Effects). Wings set the standard for the big, elaborate productions that the Academy would tend to favor henceforth, for better or worse. Cinephiles and film buffs will likely come across Wings at some point, but I think that casual film fans would also be dazzled and entertained by this silent Best Picture winner.

Best Pictures #7: 1927-28 (1st) Academy Awards Outstanding Picture Winner, Wings

by A.J.

1927-28 (1^st) Academy Awards Outstanding Picture Winner

Wings

Wings, a romance and adventure epic set among WWI pilots, is the pinnacle of silent era spectacle and storytelling. Paramount executives were skeptical about hiring William Wellman to direct what would be the studio’s big road show picture for 1927. Wellman had been a flier during World War I and had seen combat, but he was younger and less experienced than the other directors in Paramount’s stable. In the end, he was able to convince Paramount producer and executive, Jesse Lasky, that he was the right man for the job. According to Welllman’s son, his father said to Lasky, “I’ll make this the best goddamn picture this studio’s ever had.” “Wild Bill” Wellman did just that and made one of the last great films of the silent era.

What sets Wings apart from any other war film, then or now, is its astonishing aerial sequences. For the close ups in the cockpits, actors Charles “Buddy” Rodgers and Richard Arlen actually flew their own airplanes. Arlen had flying experience from WWI, but Buddy Rodgers had to learn how to fly. A number of adventurous stunt pilots flew planes for the dogfight scenes. The planes fly very close to each other and dive straight towards each other and towards the ground. The fire from plane explosions and machine gun barrels are in color, which was painted in later. The shots of planes crashing to the ground are as real as they can be. In one shot, a stunt pilot broke his neck when the plane did not hit the ground in the way intended. The pilot survived and returned to the shoot six weeks later. The U.S. Army cooperated in the production by supplying hundreds of planes, tanks, pilots, and soldiers to be extras. A field was bombarded with real artillery to give it the right look of a battlefield. Perhaps most important of all, Wellman knew that the planes would only appear to whiz and zip through the air at incredible speeds if the sky was filled with big puffy white clouds to provide perspective for the audience. He halted production for 33 days waiting for clouds to appear over Kelly Field outside of San Antonio, TX to shoot the aerial combat scenes, much to the chagrin of Paramount executives. The wait proved to be a wise decision. The scenes in the air are thrilling and beautiful and you feel that the sky is full of peril. The final air battle sequence is incredibly elaborate; everything on screen looks hectic and dangerous.

The plot of the movie is about the friendship of Jack (Rodgers) and David (Arlen), two young men from the same town that dream of flying. Unbeknownst to each other, they are in love with the same girl from back home, Sylvia. Clara Bow plays Mary, Jack’s neighbor who harbors an unrequited affection for him. She enlists as an ambulance driver and crosses paths with Jack again in Europe. The romance in Wings is its weakest element, probably because it was added into the script last, to give Paramount’s biggest star, Clara Bow, a role in their big-budget roadshow production. Bow receives top billing and is appealing as the sweet girl-next-door Mary, but she did not like her role. She thought her character was merely a decoration and said Wings was “a man's picture and I'm just the whipped cream on top of the pie." She still gave a good performance along with the rest of the cast, both major and minor players. One notable standout is Gary Cooper, as Cadet White. He only has one scene early in the movie, but it demonstrated his considerable screen presence and launched his career.

Wings has a few cinematic “firsts” aside from its Outstanding Picture/Best Picture win. Wings was the first widely released film to feature, albeit very briefly, nudity—nude men are briefly seen from behind in a medical exam room at the recruitment office. Later in the film, a pair of military policemen walk in on Clara Bow changing and she is topless for a second. Wings is also the first of only four films to win Best Picture without also having its director nominated (the other films are: Grand Hotel, Driving Miss Daisy, and Argo).

For years Wings was thought to be a lost film until a print was found in the archives of the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris. It was selected to be preserved in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 1997. In 2012, it was restored by Paramount Pictures. I am so glad that Wings was not lost and is readily available to watch on DVD because this is a film that everyone should see not only because of its place in film history, but also because it is an exciting and thrilling movie. It showed audiences something they had never seen before and presents flying as a dazzling adventure and also a seriously dangerous adventure. Wings leans heavily on spectacle and melodrama, but it is not an outdated antique. The story is simple, but when combined with technical mastery Wings becomes a film that would influence numerous great war films yet to come.

Nominee: Paramount Famous-Lasky

Producer: Lucien Hubbard
Director: William Wellman

Screenplay: Hope Loring and Louis D. Lighton, story by John Monk Saunders

Cast: Clara Bow, Charles “Buddy” Rogers, Richard Arliss

Release Date: August 12^th, 1927

Total Nominations: 2, including Outstanding Picture

Wins: Outstanding Picture, Engineering Effects-Roy Pomeroy

Best Pictures #6: 1927-28 (1st) Academy Awards: Outstanding Picture Nominee, The Racket (1928)

by A.J.

1927-28 (1^st) Academy Awards Outstanding Picture Nominee

The Racket (1928)

The silent crime film The Racket was based on a popular Broadway play which starred Edward G Robinson as a mob boss. Robinson was subsequently brought to Hollywood by Warner Brothers to star in several of their gangster pictures, while the rights to the play were purchased by Howard Hughes. The film was produced for the Caddo Company and Paramount Famous-Lasky under the direction of Lewis Milestone, but without Robinson. The story centers upon honest policeman captain McQuigg and his clash with the powerful gangster Scarsi, who is protected by corrupt politicians. The implied setting of the film is Chicago, though the city is not named, and mob boss Nicholas Scarsi is a reference to real life Chicago gangster Al Capone, who was nicknamed “Scarface.” Both the play and film portray Chicago’s politicians as corrupt and police force as ineffective, as well as corrupt. The Racket was a hit with audiences and critics, but it was banned in Chicago (the play had also been banned by the city).

Though The Racket was a hit at the time, I think that this film stands out among all the nominees as being least worthy of a nomination – in either of the “best picture” categories. Straight away the movie has a conventional look and feel that lacks the artistic flair of the Unique and Artistic nominees, or even the other two Outstanding Picture nominees. There is one interesting visual effect in a scene set at a gangster’s funeral: as Scarsi looks at all of the other gangsters holding hats on their laps, the hats dissolve away to reveal that the men are all holding guns under their hats, ready to shoot. Aside from that moment, and a quick shot using silhouettes of police officers in the station, the cinematography is not noteworthy. In a film as dialogue and plot-heavy as this one, a degree of visual style is essential for keeping the viewer engaged.   

The film begins with Captain McQuigg and Scarsi not-so-casually meeting after McQuigg has been involved in a shooting. The two have obviously met before and they refer to each other by their nicknames: Mac (for McQuigg) and Nick (for Nicholas Scarsi). Scarsi makes a few gestures to try to charm McQuigg. He tells the policeman to stay clear of a street corner where Scarsi’s men plan to rob a rival gang and also invites McQuigg to his kid brother’s birthday party. We then see each man go to his office where it is clear each one is the boss of his respective racket. Scarsi’s office is in a brewery with bootleg barrels of alcohol. McQuigg’s office is, naturally, the police station. McQuigg later shows up to the street corner he was warned about where there is a shootout and he arrests one of Scarsi’s men. McQuigg eventually arrests Scarsi, but the gangster uses his political connections to get himself and his men freed from jail and to get McQuigg transferred.

As soon as there are reports of a shootout, the press arrive and they offer good comic relief. There is a humorous scene of reporters from rival newspapers sizing each other up, all of them trying to get the scoop on McQuigg’s sudden transfer. The reporters are all hoping for something to spark another fight between Scarsi and McQuigg, even if they have to start it themselves.

The Racket is a top-heavy film; the scenes on the streets and in night clubs, as well as the shootouts and car chases are all in the first half of the film. Once the arrests are made, McQuigg hatches a plan to put Scarsi away once and for all before his transfer, but the action and pace of the film go into low gear. The film begins to resemble a stage play with the plot advancing through dialogue, rather than action, and the characters are confined to a couple of different rooms making the film visually uninteresting. Throughout, the film uses mostly medium and wide shots, which sometimes makes it difficult to tell which characters are speaking, especially since the policemen all wear uniforms and the reporters and gangsters are dressed in similar-looking suits and hats. Since there are few to no close ups, it is difficult to distinguish the faces of minor characters. This is all very unfortunate since the story in the last half of the film depends so heavily upon the dialogue.

It was very difficult to find a copy of The Racket. For many years it was considered a lost film, but after Howard Hughes’s death the only existing print was found in his film collection along with another film he produced, Two Arabian Nights (also directed by Milestone in a more interesting style). It was restored by the film department of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and occasionally airs on TCM. The only copy I could track down is part of a DVD collection of early Best Picture nominees called Academy Collection: The Envelope Please Vol. 1. I could find no other legitimate sources for watching The Racket, aside from catching it on TCM whenever it happens to air. The picture quality is not very clean, but it is acceptable; however, there is a DVD distributor watermark in the lower left hand corner of the film, which, while unobtrusive, is still annoying.

I wonder what about this film struck a chord with audiences and critics of the time? Perhaps it was The Racket’s portrayal of the ubiquitous crime and corruption caused by Prohibition, which was then in effect. Because the story was inspired by news and events of the day, it probably felt unfortunately true-to-life and had an immediate resonance. It shows an honest man’s struggle against seemingly insurmountable corruption and how trying to change just one part of the system means taking on the whole machine. But it’s all in a day’s work for good policemen like McQuigg.

Nominee: The Caddo Company, Paramount Famous-Lasky

Producer: Howard Hughes

Director: Lewis Milestone

Screenplay: Bartlett Cormack, based on his stage play; scenario by Del Andrews

Cast: Thomas Meighan, Louis Wolheim, Marie Prevost

Release Date: November 1^st, 1928

Total Nominations: 1, including Outstanding Picture

Best Pictures #3: 1927-28 (1st) Academy Awards, Unique & Artistic Picture* Nominee, The Crowd (1928)

by A.J.

1927-28 (1st) Academy Awards, Unique & Artistic Picture* Nominee

The Crowd (1928)

The story of King Vidor’s silent film The Crowd sounds simple and familiar: the joys and tragedies of a married couple as they struggle to get by in the modern world. However, a movie like this, with such subject matter and of such quality, is a rare thing even today. This film was a passion project for Vidor. Irving Thalberg, head of production at MGM, believed that occasionally films should be made for prestige instead of profit, and since Vidor had directed many hits for MGM, Thalberg greenlit The Crowd.

The Crowd is a film in two parts. The first half is an optimistic romantic comedy. John Simms grows up believing and telling everyone that he is destined for great things. As a young adult, he moves to New York City. He has a job in a skyscraper and meets Mary on a double date. They quickly fall in love and things are great, for a while. We expect a bright future for John and Mary, just like they do; one filled with happy times and easy to solve problems. The second half of the movie is a heavy drama about married life. John and Mary are befallen by small troubles like broken appliances, unfriendly in-laws, and a frustrating day at the beach followed by larger troubles like a lost job, money problems, and a painful tragedy. John’s daydreams and Mary’s pragmatism are an ill match for each other and strain their marriage more and more.

When John arrived in New York harbor, a fellow traveler told him, “You’ve got to be good in that town if you want to beat the crowd.” To our main characters “the crowd” is every other faceless person in the city equally uninterested and unhelpful in their lives and problems. The only help John can hope to get is from himself, something he is painfully slow to realize. John is, of course, as much a part of “the crowd” as he is apart from it; every average person is the main character of their own life, unbeknownst to anyone else.

MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer thought The Crowd was depressing and “obscene” because of a scene that shows a toilet as John tries to fix the tank. Mayer hated this film and urged fellow Academy judges to vote against it. I cannot deny that The Crowd is a depressing film, but it is also an extraordinary one. It is a film of major defeats and small victories. It is not a spoiler to say that the film has a bittersweet ending. Not every problem is solved, but the characters are happy and smiling. Seven different endings were shot for The Crowd. Louis B. Mayer wanted the film to end at Christmas with John and Mary and their children living in a mansion; an ending that would have been wildly out of place and too absurdly positive to be meaningful. I cannot think of a more positive ending that still remains true to the film than the one used. There are only a few other films I can think of that feel as true to the simultaneously harsh and beautiful nature of everyday life.

King Vidor received a well-deserved nomination for Best Director, Dramatic Picture (there was also a Best Director, Comedy category). The Crowd is shot with such skill that it is clear the filmmakers are not only masters of their craft but also creative and inventive minds. In the most famous shot of the film, indeed one of the most famous shots in cinema, the camera pans up a monolithic skyscraper then dissolves to inside and glides over a sea of uniform and anonymous desks aligned in perfect rows before finally pushing in on the desk of John Simms #137. It is a truly beautiful piece of cinema and has been repeated in homage, albeit on a smaller scale, in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960) and Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire (1996). There are number of other visually interesting shots in The Crowd. On John and Mary’s date at Coney Island we see them and their friends slide down a big slide right towards the camera. The production design of the city is impressive and captivating. It is plain and void of character, but seems vast, futuristic, and imposing; it reminded me of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, also from 1927.

The Crowd is a rare kind of film which is powerful and moving while also entertaining. It is loaded with pathos and catharsis for audiences yesterday and today. The Crowd does all of this while being artistic, inventive, and thematically challenging. The Crowd is unfortunately a hard film to track down. It was never issued on DVD and is only available on VHS. However, there is hope for the preservation of this movie. It was one of the first films selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. A most wise choice.

Nominee: MGM

Producer: Irving Thalberg

Director: King Vidor

Screenplay: King Vidor & John V.A. Weaver

Cast: Eleanor Boardman, James Murray, Bert Roach

Release Date: February 18th, 1928

Total Nominations: 2, including Best Unique & Artistic Picture

Other Nominations: Director, Dramatic Picture- King Vidor

*The 1st Academy Awards had two categories for Best Picture: Unique & Artistic Picture and Outstanding Picture. The Outstanding Picture category is widely considered to be the forerunner to Best Picture since the Unique & Artistic Picture category was discontinued the following year. Since at the time each category was thought of as equally the top award I have included the Unique & Artistic Picture nominees as Best Picture nominees.

Best Pictures #2: 1927/28 (1st) Academy Awards, Unique & Artistic Picture Nominee: Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927)

by A.J.

1927/28 (1^st) Academy Awards, Unique & Artistic Picture* Nominee:

Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927)

Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness, a silent film from 1927, had only one nomination at the first Academy Awards for Unique and Artistic Picture. Since at the time of the first Academy Awards, the Unique & Artistic Picture category and the Outstanding Picture category were considered equal, Chang can be considered to be the only documentary ever nominated for Best Picture. Unique & Artistic Picture is certainly the right category for Chang because it is, if anything, a unique picture. Directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Shoedsack spent several months in the jungles of northern Siam learning about the native Lao people and their way of life in preparation for their documentary for Paramount Famous-Lasky. The result is an exciting and entertaining picture about Kru, a Lao tribesman, his family, and their daily struggles to live deep in the unconquerable jungle.

I think the best way to describe Chang is as a quasi-documentary since many, if not all, of the scenes are staged reenactments. Kru is a real Lao tribesman, he was the guide for Cooper and Shoedsack on their expedition in northern Siam. His children in the movie are his actual children, but his wife, Chantui, is actually the wife of a fellow tribesman. The Kru family home is a hut built on stilts deep in the jungle away from the main village. Lao homes are actually built on stilts to keep jungle animals out, but the house we see was built specifically for the film and the interior is a separate set. Staged reenactments were not uncommon in documentaries of the silent era; the technique was used notably in Nanook of the North from 1922, which is nearly universally thought of as the predecessor to modern documentaries. If audiences and critics at the time knew about the staging of scenes, they did not mind as Chang was a hit with both.

Many scenes in the movie are reenactments of things Cooper & Schoedsack witnessed, but did not capture on film. There is no scene that is a complete fabrication, except maybe for the scene of a monkey dropping coconuts on stampeding elephants which is the only scene of the movie not shot in Northern Siam (it was done in New York’s Central Park Zoo). Other moments of humor come from certain animals having their own dialogue cards. There was a script written for Chang, but it had to be thrown out due to the unpredictability of the wild jungle animals. The scenes with the jungle animals are the highlight and tragedy of Chang. Kru’s livestock is being killed by leopards, so he enlists the people from the main village to help him in a hunt. The hunting techniques used by the tribesmen are accurate; rifles, spears, deadfalls, pitfalls, and wooden decoy men are all deployed. The leopards and two tigers we see killed in the hunt are real animals that were killed for the film.

However, it should be noted that the Lao people do not kill tigers, according to the DVD commentary by filmmaker and author Rudy Behlmer. The Lao people believe tigers to be possessed by evil spirits that would exact horrible revenge on anyone who killed one, so the rate of death by tiger was very high for the villages of Northern Siam. They would only hunt a tiger if it carried off too many babies. Cooper told the natives that he would bear the responsibility for the deaths of the tigers and any vengeance the evil spirits would unleash. My only solace in seeing those leopards and tigers killed is that they actually were a menace to the people of the region and Cooper and Schoedsack were told by a missionary that the number of people killed by tigers had decreased greatly after their filming in the jungle was done.

Still, I find incredible excitement in the scenes with the tigers. First, a tiger emerges slowly from the dense jungle to drink from a stream. Later, we see a group of hunters running away from a tiger and climbing up a tree in a shot that is almost certainly staged. However, there is no way the wide shot of a hunter up in a tree with the tiger prowling below could be staged. In another shot the camera looks down from a tree and a tiger jumps up, its face filling the screen. A shot that feels even more dangerous when you realize that it was done without the aid of zoom lenses (there were none). Schoedsack was up in the tree on a platform setting up a different shot with his hand cranked camera when a tiger bounded up mere feet, if not inches, from the platform.

The climatic elephant stampede was achieved with much planning and cooperation between the filmmakers and the natives. The tribe used elephants that had been trained as livestock. A low angle shot looking up at the legs of stampeding elephants was captured by Schoedsack in a pit dug by the tribesmen and covered with logs and a low turret that they assured him would hold under the weight of elephants. Cooper and Schoedsack had respect for the native peoples and it shows from the amount of cooperation they received and in the portrayal of the Lao people. In an era of motion pictures when casual racism was, well, casual and political correctness was not even the wild idea of a fantasist, Cooper and Schoedsack show us a non-exploitative portrayal of a people and culture far from Hollywood.

Though scenes may be staged, Chang still creates an authentic feeling of the life of Kru and his family living in the jungle. And, yes, Chang should be thought of as a documentary. In some ways Chang can be looked at as a forerunner to Disney’s short nature documentaries of the 1950s and 60s and the current Disney Nature film series which create a familiar narrative from hours and hours of documentary footage and seek to impart a message of environmental awareness to the audience. Chang is the story of a family living a vastly different way of life than the audience, but also delivers the message that the jungle and nature in general, despite all of mankind’s innovations, is unconquerable. I can’t think of too many documentaries I’d describe as thrilling the way an adventure movie is thrilling while also being informative and entertaining. This is certainly not a well-known film, but fortunately it is readily available on DVD. The sense of adventure and awe of wild beasts and the untamable natural world that Cooper and Schoedsack capture here would be evoked six years later with incredible effect on a much grander, and completely fictional, scale in the duo’s 1933 film King Kong. 

Nominee: Paramount Famous-Lasky

Producer(s): Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack 

Director(s): Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack 

Screenplay: N/A

Cast: Kru, Chantui

Release Date: April 29th, 1927

Total Nominations: 1, including Unique & Artistic Picture

*The first Academy Awards had two categories for Best Picture: Unique & Artistic Picture and Outstanding Picture. The Outstanding Picture category is widely considered to be the forerunner to Best Picture since the Unique & Artistic Picture category was discontinued the following year. Since at the time each category was thought of equally as the top award, I have included the Unique & Artistic Picture nominees as Best Picture nominees.

Best Pictures #5: 1927-28 (1st) Academy Awards Outstanding Picture Nominee, 7th Heaven (1927)

by A.J.

1927-28 (1^st) Academy Awards Outstanding Picture Nominee

7^th Heaven (1927)

7^th Heaven received a total of 5 Academy Award Nominations, the most of any film at the 1^st Academy Awards. It had 3 wins for Best Actress-Janet Gaynor (her award was given for her performance in this and 2 other movies that year), Best Writing Adaptation-Benjamin Glazer, and for Best Director, Dramatic Picture-Frank Borzage. Borzage brings style and skill to the production of 7^th Heaven making this film worthy of its nominations. There may not be as much artistic use of the camera and memorable shots as in the Unique and Artistic Picture nominees, but there are still some visually impressive moments and a good story.  

In this silent film, Charles Farrell plays Chico, a sewer cleaner in Paris. He dreams of climbing the “Ladder of Courage” from the sewer to the stars. He sees himself as remarkable, full of courage, and destined to rise up out of the sewer. Janet Gaynor plays Diane, who flees her abusive, alcoholic sister and ends up on the streets where she is found by Chico. She tries to kill herself with Chico’s knife and though he says she’d be better off dead, he stops her. Diane’s sister is arrested and tries to get Diane arrested too, but Chico tells the police officer that Diane is his wife and that prevents her from being arrested, but now they have to pretend to be married until a police inspector follows up with them. Chico takes her to his apartment which is on the 7^th floor of the building. In an impressive shot, as Chico and Diane ascend up the stairs, the camera pans up each floor of the building. To create this shot a seven-story set was built and the camera placed on an elevator along the side to rise as the actors climbed the stairs. Chico tells Diane, “I work in the sewer—but I live near the stars!” and we see a pretty shot of city rooftops and the starry night sky. For this humble pair, this modest apartment filled with dreams is the titular 7^th Heaven.

The tone of 7^th Heaven is optimistic and sentimental, despite the obstacles the characters face. Chico and Diane at first just pretend to be married, but then actually do fall in love and his courage rubs off on her. She has the courage to stand up to her sister and to reach for happiness. Chico, an unrepentant atheist, begins to regain his faith slowly as his love for Diane grows and his fortunes take a turn for the better. He is awarded a job as a street washer by a bishop (who can do that apparently). It is a rise not only in occupation, but also in the social class. His neighbor Gobin can now be friends with him since he is also a street washer. Chico and Diane decide they want to get married for real, but then, seemingly out of nowhere, World War I breaks out and their plans for a happy future are suddenly threatened.

You have little doubt that things will turn out all right for Chico and Diane, but you still worry about them and wish the best for them. 7^th Heaven is a film full of hope and meant to uplift its audience. The characters are fully fleshed out, sympathetic people. Chico is arrogant, but likably so; he is a good natured, good hearted person. Diane is meek and timid, but also kind and loving. The themes and content in this film are not as challenging as The Crowd or Sunrise, but 7^th Heaven is no less effective or moving.

7^th Heaven is an adaptation of a play and it does what all good adaptations of stage plays should do: it gives us a version of the story that we could not experience by attending a stage performance. In the stage play when Chico first takes Diane to his apartment the curtain lowers and rises again on Chico’s 7^th floor apartment. In the scene after Chico stops Diane from killing herself we see Diane sitting head in hand utterly defeated in the foreground. In the background we see Chico from the waist down as he walks away from her, then turns back, then away again, then back to her again. The scenes of WWI, the Battle of the Marne specifically, are very impressive. The battalions of marching troops are real people and seeing that many extras assembled for a scene in a movie is quite a sight. The battle sequence uses miniatures, process shots, and matte paintings mixed with real actors to create the kind of grand spectacle you could only experience at the movies. The miniatures are the only special effect that has not aged well. Everything else about the battle sequence holds up well, even better when you remember that the visual effects were made almost 90 years ago.

7th Heaven has gone out of print on DVD, but, as of the time of this writing, is available to watch in its entirety on Youtube.com. I have not seen very many silent films, but I imagine that 7^th Heaven is what good but typical Hollywood melodrama was like. I do not mean to belittle the qualities of this movie, but merely note that 7^th Heaven was more likely to give audiences what they wanted to see -- characters bettering themselves and each other and overcoming obstacles with romance, some laughs, and a happy ending – rather than challenging their expectations. There is of course nothing wrong with that at all, as long as it is done well, and in 7^th Heaven it is done very well.

Nominee: Fox

Producer(s): William Fox, Sal M. Wurtzel

Director: Frank Borzage

Screenplay: Benjamin Glazer, based on a play by Austin Strong

Cast: Janet Gaynor, Charles Farrel, Ben Bard

Release Date: May 6^th, 1927

Total Nominations: 5, including Outstanding Picture

Wins: Actress-Janet Gaynor, Director-Frank Borzage, Writing, Adaptation-Benjamin Glazer

Other Nominations: Art Direction-Harry Cliver