Best Pictures #21: 1928-29 (2nd) Academy Awards Outstanding Picture Nominee, The Patriot (1928)

by A.J.

Best Pictures #21: 1928-29 (2nd) Academy Awards Outstanding Picture Nominee

The Patriot (1928)

Ernst Lubitsch’s 1928 film, The Patriot, was the only silent nominee for Best Picture at the 2^nd Academy Awards and it was the last silent Best Picture nominee until The Artist in 2011. The Patriot also has the most unfortunate distinction of being the only Best Picture nominee that is a lost film: no full length print of the film exists. So, it is technically impossible to watch every Best Picture nominee, though this point can be argued since The Patriot is not an official nominee as no nominations were publicly announced for this year. The films and people listed as nominees for the 2^nd Academy Awards were determined later from in-house records by Academy researchers. I have read in numerous sources that the vast majority of silent films are lost to history. The Library of Congress estimates that 75% of all silent films are lost. This is a very dismal statistic for movie lovers.

I certainly cannot review a film I haven’t seen, so instead I will share some of the information I was able to find on The Patriot. Set in 18^th century Russia, the film is about the mad Czar Paul and the plot kill him and save the nation. Czar Paul is played by the first Best Actor Oscar winner, Emil Jannings. The planned assassination is led by the Czar’s closest and most trusted friend, Count Pahlen, played by Lewis Stone, who attempts to enlist the Czar Paul’s mistress, Countess Ostermann, played by Florence Vidor, in the plot. Count Pahlen is naturally conflicted because he wants be a good and loyal friend but knows that the Czar must be removed from power.

The most valuable resource for information on The Patriot I could find is the glowing review from the New York Times, written by Mordaunt Hall, published on August 18^th, 1928. Hall lauds the film with praise like: “This motion picture is indeed a credit to the screen… There is, as a matter of fact, hardly a flaw to be found in the whole picture… It is a gripping piece of work with subtle touches….” The only minor criticisms all concern the film’s synchronized soundtrack. Hall writes that the synchronized music score is too loud for certain scenes. A scene in which Paul cries out for Count Pahlen, with synchronized dialogue (appartently the only scene of synch speech in the film), would have been more effective in silence, and the sound of the Czar’s laughter “might better have been left to the imagination.”  Hall has heaps of praise for Jannings' performance as the mad Czar: “Jannings gives the addle-brained despot all the moods one could hope for, and in the last moments of fear Mr. Jannings brings to the screen something that is unrivaled.” The rest of the cast also receives high praise, especially Stone who is “capital” as Pahlen and also credits Lubitsch for his “skillful guidance” with Stone’s performance. Stone was under consideration for the Best Actor award that year, as was Lubitsch for Best Director.

Some segments of The Patriot have survived the degradation of time. Certain crowd scenes were reused for the 1934 film The Scarlet Empress and one reel of the film is preserved at the Portuguese Film Archive. A few clips and the complete trailer are preserved by the UCLA Film Archive. In the trailer, which is available to watch online, Emil Jannings looks like he does a good job performing Czar Paul’s mad, manic fits and his cowardly paranoia. The ornate sets and costumes look impressive and give the impression that The Patriot was an epic period piece; The Patriot’s art direction also received an unofficial nomination. There is a melancholic irony in watching an advertisement for a film that you can never see, especially since, from the trailer, The Patriot looks like it might be a good movie. There is no way to know for sure or make your own judgement. I can only wonder how The Patriot would hold up today. Good or bad, a part of film history is forever lost, which is an incredible shame because every film, good or bad, deserves to be able to be seen.

Nominee: Paramount Famous Lasky

Producer: Ernst Lubitsch

Director: Ernst Lubitsch

Screenplay: Hans Kraly, from the play by Ashely Dukes, and the play “Der Patriot” by Alfred Neumann, Paul Iby, and Dmitri Merezhkovsky

Cast: Emil Jannings, Florence Vidor, Lewis Stone

Release Date: August 17^th, 1928

Total Nominations: 5, including Outstanding Picture

Win: Writing-Hanns Kraly

Other Nominations: Actor-Lewis Stone, Director-Ernst Lubitsch, Art Direction-Hans Dreier

Best Pictures #20: 1928-29 Academy Awards Outstanding Picture Nominee, The Hollywood Revue (1929)

by A.J.

Best Pictures #20: 1928-29 Academy Awards Outstanding Picture Nominee

The Hollywood Revue (1929)

I’m not sure how one goes about reviewing a revue… The numbers are entertaining and with Jack Benny as one of the masters of ceremonies, Conrad Nagel being the other, it is hard to go wrong. The Hollywood Revue was put together by MGM to showcase its major stars making their talkie debut with this collection of comedy skits and musical numbers. The cast includes, Jack Benny, Conrad Nagel, Charles King, Anita Page, Bessie Love, Joan Crawford, Marion Davies, William Haines, Lionel Barrymore, Norma Shearer, John Gilbert, Marie Dressler, Laurel & Hardy ,and more. However, MGM’s biggest star, Greta Garbo, is noticeably absent from the star studded cast because she decided that Anna Christie would be her speaking debut.

The stars of MGM’s other big musical from 1929, The Broadway Melody, all make an appearance in The Hollywood Revue. Charles King sings and banters with Conrad Nagel, who then serenades Anita Page, King’s love interest in The Broadway Melody, with “You Were Meant for Me,” a droll reference to a scene from that musical. Bessie Love, the other co-star of The Broadway Melody, takes part in a special effects bit with Jack Benny. She appears in miniature size and sets up punchlines for Jack Benny who holds her in the palm of his hand. When he sets her down on stage she grows to normal size and performs a delightful number called “I Never Knew I Could Do a Thing Like That.” Bessie Love is also quite delightful herself in her banter with Benny and musical performance. She sings but doesn’t dance so much as she is literally tossed around by the male chorus line. It’s fun to watch, especially when they flip her completely over from one chorus line to the next, but I can’t imagine how disorienting that all must have felt for her.

The Hollywood Revue is the film debut of Jack Benny who, as you might imagine, is very entertaining and funny as the master of ceremonies. There’s a running gag of him being slapped by women he thinks he "recognizes." One of the several humorous interludes he has is with actor William Haines in which Haines tears a piece of Benny’s suit for every city where he has seen Benny on the stage. The next time we see Benny he is wearing a suit of armor. This is one of a few skits in which stage and screen actors take playful jibes at each other and have fun with the rivalry between stage and screen actors. What an actor could do on stage versus on screen had a clear and distinct delineation during the silent era but with the advent of sound that line was gone. Jack Benny’s one-liners and violin could now be heard on film the same way they could only previously have been experienced by attending a stage performance.

The screen could now be filled with elaborate musical numbers like “Tommy Atkins on Parade” performed by Marion Davies. A full marching band and dancers take up the entire screen. Davies does a tap number and dances with a line of men dressed like palace guards. Many people today, myself included, think of Marion Davies primarily as the mistress of publishing tycoon William Randolph Hearst, the inspiration for Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane. This was the first time I had seen any of Davies’ work and I’m glad to put a real face and voice to her name. Laurel and Hardy showcase their comedy in a skit in which they play inept magicians. Buster Keaton has a comical dance number, but he does not sing or speak. In the final musical number in which every cast member gathers on stage to sing “Singin’ in the Rain,” Buster Keaton is the only one not singing.

The Hollywood Revue might be most known, by those that know it at all, for the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene with John Gilbert and Norma Shearer. This sequence is thought by some to be the catalyst for the decline of Gilbert’s career after audiences heard his high pitched voice. Further rumors say that this sequence was the inspiration for the plot of the 1952 Gene Kelly musical, Singin’ in the Rain. It is thought that audiences felt Gilbert's voice did not match the onscreen persona he had cultivated in the silent era. There are other likelihoods for the decline of Gilbert’s career that have nothing to do with his voice, but this is the narrative that has persisted. The sequence itself is one of the more enjoyable ones in The Hollywood Revue. Gilbert and Shearer play themselves playing Romeo and Juliet and are being directed by Lionel Barrymore, also playing himself. Barrymore tells them he received studio notes to make the dialogue snappier and modern. Their performance of the updated balcony scene loaded with peppy slang of the era is pretty amusing. As for Gilbert’s voice, though he is certainly not a baritone, the phrase “high pitched” does not accurately describe his voice either. I think he sounds very contemporary and casual, and maybe that is not the tone of voice you would expect to hear from someone in a period costume. This scene is one of two that was shot in technicolor which I’m sure impressed audiences of the day, however, on the DVD, available through Warner Archive, it is the only scene in technicolor.

The Hollywood Revue is certainly a curio of the early sound era. It does a good job of giving the viewer the feeling that they are an audience member for a stage show. The camera is mostly stationary. There are some close ups and medium shots and an occasional pan, but the static shots of the actors and performances actually works for this particular movie. The camera is your POV from your seat in the theater watching this impressive all-star revue. The Hollywood Revue is pretty entertaining though it runs a bit long for a film of its era, nearly a full two hours. There isn’t much to The Hollywood Revue, but that is not necessarily something negative for this particular musical movie. It is certainly an interesting viewing experience for a modern moviegoer.

Nominee: MGM

Producer: Irving Thalberg, Harry Rapf

Director: Charles Reisner

Screenplay: Al Boasberg and Robert E. Hopkins

Cast: Conrad Nagel, Jack Benny

Release Date: June 20^th, 1929

Total Nominations: 1, including Outstanding Picture
Win(s): N/A

Classic Film Picks: June 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.)

6/3: Early Billy Wilder
10 PM - Five Graves to Cairo (1943)
12 AM - Double Indemnity (1944)
On Fridays this month, TCM is spotlighting one of my favorite filmmakers: Billy Wilder. Wilder made his Hollywood directing debut with 1942's The Major and the Minor (showing this evening at 8 PM). I'm not a huge fan of this comedy because the plot is just a bit icky -- basically grown-up woman Ginger Rogers pretends to be a child and grown-up man Ray Milland falls in love with her. However, it's not a bad movie and Paramount Studios was impressed enough to let Wilder and his writing partner Charles Brackett produce their next film, which ended up being Five Graves to Cairo. Wilder's second Hollywood film was a departure from his first, Cairo is a WWII spy adventure set in North Africa. Though Franchot Tone was the nominal star of the film, as you can see by the poster, Erich von Stroheim as Field Marshall Rommel came to dominate the film; however, Tone and the rest of the cast, including Anne Baxter and Akim Tamiroff, are all first-rate and make this a fun, engaging adventure. Wilder would soon follow these successes with a definitive film noir, and one of the best movies ever made, Double Indemnity. The story, about an insurance salesman who plots with a femme fatale to bump off her husband, is based on a novel by James M. Cain, but Wilder and Raymond Chandler, author of many a classic crime novel himself, are credited with the superb screenplay. Beautiful black and white cinematography contrasts the sunny California setting with the shadowy realms the characters inhabit. The banter, the look, plus excellent performances by Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, and Edward G. Robinson, all combine to make this a classic noir thriller.


Best of '73 or the Importance of Casting
6/14, 4:15 AM - The Last Detail (1973)
6/25, 8 PM - The Sting (1973)
In researching my picks for the month, I read that Jack Nicholson turned down the Robert Redford role in The Sting in order to make The Last Detail. It got me thinking about the importance of casting the right actor in the right role and how changes in casting can change the entire film. In The Last Detail, two Navy lifers, Buddusky (Nicholson) and Mulhall (Otis Young), transport a young sailor (Randy Quaid) to a military prison in another state and along the way befriend their prisoner and try to show him a good time before he gets locked up. Nicholson had originally envisioned that his good friend Rupert Crosse would play Mulhall; however, Crosse became ill and had to back out of the film. Crosse was a higher profile actor than Young, having received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for 1969's The Reivers. While Young does a fine job, I wonder if Nicholson and Crosse's real-life friendship would have brought a different sort of chemistry to their characters'  relationship and given the film more of a buddy-picture vibe. As it is, Nicholson dominates the film and he received his second Best Actor Oscar nomination. The film's profanity-laden script also brought notice for writer Robert Towne, who would collaborate with Nicholson again on 1974's Chinatown, which is considered a career-high for almost everyone involved.
 

The Sting is notable for the chemistry between the two stars, Robert Redford and Paul Newman. It was a re-teaming of the two actors with their Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid director George Roy Hill; and though the story of Depression-era con men bears little similarity to the former film, The Sting feels like an unofficial sequel to Butch. If Nicholson had been cast as Johnny Hooker, we can be certain that Paul Newman would not have taken the role of Henry Gondorff -- originally a much smaller part which was beefed up to capitalize on the Redford/Newman pairing. Yes, the script is excellent...but without Redford and Newman, would The Sting have been so well-received by critics and audiences? The film was named Best Picture at the Academy Awards and it garnered Redford his first, and only, Best Actor nomination. (Which, by the way, is crazy because he was amazing in All is Lost.)

Going further down the rabbit hole...I have to wonder if the success of The Sting influenced Nicholson's decision to make 1975's The Fortune, a now-forgotten film in which Nicholson and Warren Beatty play Jazz-age con men. Despite Nicholson and Beatty's star-power, The Fortune was a million-dollar flop.

One last thought on casting...while watching The Last Detail for the first time, I could not stop thinking that Sam Rockwell would be perfect for the Nicholson role if the film were ever remade. Are you listening, Hollywood? You can have that one for free because I just really want to see a remake of The Last Detail starring Sam Rockwell.


6/18: Adapting Jane Austen
8 PM - Pride and Prejudice (1940)
10:15 PM - Persuasion (1995)
I recently saw Love & Friendship, the latest film by writer-director Whit Stillman, which is adapted from the Jane Austen short story Lady Susan. It's delightful and very funny -- a wonderful confluence of one of my favorite contemporary filmmakers and one of my favorite classic authors -- and it has put me in the mood for more Austen adaptations. The 1940 version of Pride and Prejudice isn't strictly faithful to the novel; however, Greer Garson is lovely and spirited as Lizzie Bennet and Laurence Olivier is appropriately smoldering as Mr. Darcy. Though the novel is set in Regency England (late 1700s-early 1800s), the time period in the film has been moved forward to the Victorian 1830s, possibly so that the women could wear big, flouncy gowns rather than the nightgown-like Regency dresses. (I read one article which claimed that MGM didn't want to spend a lot of money on this film, so they repurposed costumes from Gone with the Wind for the background players.) Even more anachronistic (and barely accurate) is the film's promotional tagline: Bachelors Beware! Five Gorgeous Beauties are on a Madcap Manhunt!
Persuasion has not been adapted as frequently as Pride, so while I have read the novel I have not seen a screen version. The story centers on Anne Elliot, played by Amanda Root, who in age and character may be Austen's most mature heroine. Resigned to a life as an old maid in her late twenties, Anne gets a second chance at love when an old flame re-enters her life. The love interest is played by Ciaran Hinds who audiences may recognize for his more recent roles in the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Game of Thrones, and Rome.

6/28: Disney Vault Treasures
8 PM - The Parent Trap (1961)
11 PM - Waking Sleeping Beauty (2009)
1:15 AM - An Adventure in Color/Donald in Mathmagic Land (1961)
This is the seventh installment of TCM's series "Treasures from the Disney Vault" including feature films, cartoons, and documentaries. I always enjoy these periodic dips into the extensive Disney library of films and TV shows, but this month feels especially like a trip back to my childhood. The Parent Trap was made twenty years before I was born, but it seemed ubiquitous when I was growing up and its continued popularity spawned two tv-movie sequels in the 80s. Of course I was surprised to learn that twins Sharon and Susan were both played by one actress (I was a kid, ok!). The trick camera work used to show both twins side by side holds up pretty well, and Hayley Mills does a great job of giving each girl a distinct personality. It's pretty hard not to be charmed by this film.
Waking Sleeping Beauty is a documentary about Disney's animation studio which went from the brink of shutting down in the early 80s to producing a string of hits over the decade between 1984 and 1994, now known as the "Disney Renaissance." I grew up on classics like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and The Lion King, so it's fun for me to see the stories behind the scenes. If you are a fan of animation or like showbiz documentaries, this one is a must-see.
The real treasures of this bunch are the two cartoons Adventure in Color and Donald in Mathmagic Land, which were shown together on the first episode of the TV show Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color. As the name of the show implies, these were the first Disney cartoons to be shown on television in color (of course you had to have a color television to appreciate it). New character Ludwig von Drake explains color then Donald Duck learns the ways that math affects everything from making music to playing pool. As the comments on its entry in the unofficial Encyclopedia of Disney Animated Shorts reflect, this cartoon has been an essential educational tool for many a youngster. It should be required viewing in elementary school.