OVP: Come and Get It (1936)

Film: Come and Get It (1936)

Stars: Edward Arnold, Joel McCrea, Frances Farmer, Walter Brennan

Director: Howard Hawks & William Wyler

Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best Supporting Actor-Walter Brennan*, Editing)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Walter Brennan: click here to learn more about Mr. Brennan (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Walter Brennan spent much of his early career in bit parts, largely focusing on small roles that amount to what we would call "cameos" if he were famous, but really were extra work since he hadn't made a big name for himself yet.  It wasn't until 1935 that Brennan would start to get more significant work, but that history is important when you think about Brennan's most singular achievement to anyone looking back on his career today: that of winning three Academy Awards in the span of five years, unprecedented for an actor both then and now (it seems pretty much unthinkable that this feat will ever be matched).  This is because of a quirk in Academy voting laws in the early 1930's.  When the Academy introduced the supporting categories in 1936 (in part due to Franchot Tone being nominated for Best Actor in what pretty much everyone considered to be a "supporting" role), extras were still a part of SAG (this would end in 1946 when the Screen Extras Guild would be formed) and as a result, many were eligible to vote for the Oscars.  One of the primary reasons that people attribute to Brennan's unusual feat of winning three Oscars in rapid succession was of his popularity as a former member of the extras, who voted for him en masse to get all three of his trophies.  I have seen two of Brennan's three Oscar wins (he would later take trophies for Kentucky and The Westerner), so I figured I couldn't do a month devoted to him without getting to his first (and my final) Oscar win for him, Come and Get It.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie, based on the bestselling novel by Edna Ferber is about Barney Glasgow (Arnold), a cutthroat logging tycoon who rises up from the ranks as a foreman and (thanks to a lack of scruples and marrying for money) finds himself as the head of the logging industry in Wisconsin.  The film is split into two halves, the first of which shows Barney's rise, when he & his buddy Swan Bostrom (Brennan) form a partnership, and Barney must choose between the true love of his life, a saloon singer named Lotta Morgan (Farmer) and the wealthy Emma Louise (Mary Nash).  He chooses money, and Lotta ends up marrying Swan, even though her heart is broken.  Years later, when Barney is rich, he seeks out Swan, now a widower, whose daughter Lotta Bostrom (also Farmer) is the spitting image of her mother (apparently that's what happens when you cast the same actress to play both parts!).  Driven mad by his inability to have Lotta in his youth, he aggressively pursues her, even though he's married and there's a huge age gap, but the younger Lotta is more interested in his son Richard (McCrea), and despite Barney's protestations, Richard & Lotta end up together in the final moments.

There's a lot of good stuff here, and I get why this novel was a success.  Barney is not an antihero but a proper villain, but still a bad guy who learns a lesson by the film's end-that youth & love are far more precious than money, and you cannot buy them no matter how hard you try.  The final moments of the film work really well as Lotta rejects Barney not for his money or for his cruelty, but for his age, the one thing his fortune cannot do is buy back the time he's spent selling his soul.  It's solid plotting, and combined with the cruelty of his treatment of the elder Lotta, a great comeuppance.

But in the Hays Code world, you don't really get a lot of mileage out of the obsession that Barney has with the younger Lotta (in a different world, this could've served as inspiration for Vertigo), and Arnold isn't a good enough actor to get beyond what the page has in front of him.  Instead we largely get a slog, albeit one with a very talented Frances Farmer playing two women so differently you'll be forgiven for thinking they're different actresses (Farmer, of course, is the stuff of Hollywood legend given her tragic offscreen life, but it's nice to see her afforded the ability to actually act here, and prove that she was more than just a sad tale).  Brennan's performance is, charitably, fine.  He plays Swan as a comic relief stereotype, which would be fine except there's nothing really there.  I will admit that I generally like Walter Brennan (if you watch enough old Hollywood performances inevitably you see him in a lot of stuff), but I don't know that I've ever seen a movie where he actually deserved an Oscar nomination, much less a win.  This is true for his caricature of a person in Come and Get It.