OVP: Min and Bill (1930)

Film: Min and Bill (1931)
Stars: Marie Dressler, Wallace Beery, Dorothy Jordan, Marjorie Rambeau
Director: George W. Hill
Oscar History: 1 win (Best Actress-Marie Dressler*)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

So, as part of the Comcast eviction, I will also be losing my beloved TiVo (it makes zilch sense not to go with the Genie, and so my friend and I must part).  In the process, I'm going to be cleaning out all of my TiVo films in the next week or so before I cancel (I stock up films that I can't find on Netflix that are part of the OVP to view and peruse), so we're going to A) be getting a slew of reviews in the next couple of weeks and B) they're going to seem very, very sporadic.  We're talking almost every decade imaginable, every category imaginable.

The first of these, though, is a Best Actress winner from near the Academy's infancy, Min and Bill.  It's fun to imagine that once upon a time, Marie Dressler, a woman who made her name in Vaudeville became a star in the era of Jean Harlow and Norma Shearer and Greta Garbo, despite being in her early sixties and overweight, and regularly beat them in popularity polls.  One of the key launching pads for her late career blitz was with this film, opposite Wallace Beery, which was a huge hit and won her an Academy Award.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about a woman, a cranky, no-nonsense type with a heart of gold (this was Dressler's raison d'etre) who has raised a young girl (Jordan) as her own and has a flirtatious relationship with one of her tenants, a fisherman named Bill (Beery).  The film, made in the early 1930's, follows a fairly straight-forward pattern: Dressler at first is frosty to the idea of Jordan's Nancy growing up, and being forced to go to school, but eventually warms to the idea.  This warming is aided by the reappearance of Nancy's morally loose mother Bella (Rambeau), who is clearly bad for Nancy, and whom Nancy has been told by Min is dead.

The film continues on at this rate at a stunningly short 66 minute clock time, with Dressler occasionally indulging in comic touches-a boat ride with Nancy that goes horribly wrong, a number of fights with both Beery and Rambeau, but the film is far more dramatic than the casting and pictures from the film would allow you to believe.  The film takes a dark note later in the film as Min refuses to see Nancy, even though she throws her life savings at trying to keep Nancy and her birth mother apart, and eventually kills Bella to keep her from ruining Nancy's happiness (eventually Nancy marries a handsome and successful young man).  The movie ends not on a happy note, but a bittersweet one at best-Nancy will get her happily ever after, but Min will be arrested for murder as a result.

When you're grading acting of this era, you may find yourself grading slightly on a preconceived curve.  The acting of the film doesn't have the method naturalism that has been expected of the likes of Brando and de Niro and Streep in later years.  Instead, you have a woman that does what she does best-perform to the rafters, as she's trained in the theater.

That's not to say that she's not good in the movie, and I liked Dressler considerably better here than in Emma, one of her followups to this film.  Her best moments are when she looks like she's about to lose everything, particularly the great scene where she shoots Bella.  You can see the determination in her eyes, seeing her think through the consequences of what she's about to do, repeating empty threats to Bella before you find the gravitas in her voice and you realize they've no longer become empty.  The film loses some of its spark when Rambeau and Dressler aren't at the helm-Beery, charming in his own way, is a bit too much of a camera-mugger to really earn his top billing on the title and Jordan's Nancy is completely interchangeable with the dozens of performances of women trying their best to be Mary Pickford.

Those are my thoughts on a very short movie, but what are yours?  Have you seen Min and Bill, and if so, are you a fan of Dressler's work?  Whom do you think should have taken the Best Actress Oscar?  And what Dressler film should I check out next?