We have finished up the 1931-32 Oscars (links to all contests at the bottom of the page), and as we've done for every other season, we're going to finish up with a "My Ballot," where I say whom I would've voted for in all of the categories, including the nominees. I will totally own, that while I have seen tons of movies for each of these seasons, none felt quite as challenging as this ballot. When it comes to cinema, I think all time frames are able to create magical movies, and that's true here. Some of these Best Picture nominees have given me great movie memories, and the top three medalists are truly incredible. But if you're going to say that there are "favorite eras" of cinema (which for me is the 1940's into the early 1950's, the late 60's into the early 70's, and the early-to-mid aughts), there have to be less favorite eras, and the formative years of sound film are not my favorite. You'll note on this list that there is still one holdout from the silent era, but we have otherwise worked our way into the sound time frame, and some of the seams in the films I watched of this era did show. I essentially kept watching these movies until I was feeling genuinely bad about not including specific titles (as we discussed on our 4000th article, a nomination should feel like an achievement, and so if I'm not cutting a good nominee because they're in a very strong sixth place I don't feel like I'm doing right by the year), so I feel strong about what I'm giving you today, but like I said-it took a lot of work (and some research).
The research was necessary because of how we're going to approach this. We haven't really hit this much, other than extending the Animated Feature race into the pre-2001 races (and keeping Sound Editing post-2020), but the 5th Oscars looked a lot different than what we think of the current Oscars as. Categories like Best Costume, Score, Movie Song, Makeup, & Visual Effects weren't a thing yet, and they didn't yet have the supporting acting categories. My thought process was that we keep most of these-film still had makeup, costumes, visual effects, & supporting actors in 1931, so why shouldn't we include them? We did not include, however, Best Score or Movie Song-the reason for this is that in Silent Era films (and to a slightly lesser degree due to film preservation issues, early sound films) it's challenging to understand what scores were actually in the film when it was made. Silent films have been remastered, and in many cases the music that is played with the most recent iterations of these pictures is not necessarily what would've played in theaters at the time (in many cases, those were accompanied by an organist or a piano player), so it's hard to judge. We'll start to grade these in 1934 when Oscar introduces the category instead. We will therefore end up with 15 categories today-the fifteen categories we will include in every My Ballot throughout this project.
We will also be doing this for just 1931. I know that Oscar had these split into two calendar years, but I think (after confirming with my brother, who does this project with me), that this is silly, and we will just continue to do calendar years until 1927. That means that in 1932-33 I'll have to somehow cover two years of this, which will be a logistical nightmare and which is probably why we won't hit that year for a while. In doing this, though, I ran into two snags. First, I had to hunt-I like the uniformity of having 10-wide for Best Picture and 5-wide for all of the remaining categories that we'll profile this year when we did them in the 21st Century, and I wanted to keep that. But Oscar didn't go ten-wide (or 5-wide) in the remaining categories, which meant that, even if I kept all of Oscar's nominees (and I did not...in any category), I had to find additional ones. Without precursors, with this being the first year where I didn't actually live through the ceremony OR the year (I'm old, I'm not that old), and honestly without a lot of classic films (real talk-aside from Frankenstein, City Lights, & Dracula, no American movies have stayed in collective cinema pop culture too long from 1931) I had to scavenge a bit. What I came up with I'm proud of, but if your favorite film from 1931 is missing entirely, let me know as it might've gotten lost in the shuffle.
Lastly, the split years meant that I had a snag in my Oscar Viewing Project ethos. One of the biggest rules of this project has been that I see all of the Oscar nominees in every narrative, feature-length category. Otherwise it's not an accomplishment. But since the 1930-31 Oscars (aka the 4th Academy Awards) had at least some 1931 films in them, I had to make a point of seeking out any OVP-eligible films from that year that were made in 1931. And because I respect this project so much, I did do that even if it meant a bit of a delay in getting this done. So films like Trader Horn, East Lynne, and Skippy that came out in 1931 are eligible here...they just didn't get nominated because, well, they're terrible. The 4th Academy Awards, which thanks to this season I have a shockingly large head start upon, is going to be a chore. But that's a problem for a different day-we are back into the 21st Century to complete the recently finished 96th Academy Awards in the upcoming week, and without further adieu-our oldest My Ballot to date!
The Champ
City Lights
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Frankenstein
M
Marius
The Miracle Woman
The Smiling Lieutenant
Tabu: A Story of the South Seas
Waterloo Bridge
Gold: Charlie Chaplin's magnum opus, City Lights is a romantic picture, one that shows the Tramp in all of his glory. As he falls in love, we see why silent film was so special, and the loss that it's extinction represented to the artistry of film, even if sound opened up other doors. The look on his face as he becomes enamored with Virginia Cherrill-no script could ever produce that.
Silver: Staggeringly modern, and incredibly creepy, Fritz Lang's M shows us the humanity of a murderer, giving us a look at how mob mentality, even toward the worst amongst us, can sometimes give us a slice of the demonic. Totally original, and even today quite shocking.
Bronze: We have talked about the Frankenstein pictures on this blog (thanks to our October Horror Marathons) more than most, but if you don't know-I love them. So much. The way that this unfolds, Karloff's humanity in his terrible creature. Few films can approach it, and it would be modeled by so many after.
Charlie Chaplin (City Lights)
Alexander Korda (Marius)
Fritz Lang (M)
FW Murnau (Tabu: A Story of the South Seas)
James Whale (Frankenstein)
Gold: I'm going to double-down on City Lights here and give this one to Chaplin too. I think that's partially because it's hard to argue with Chaplin's visionary approach to film, using less title cards, and just trusting that the audience will be so enthralled with your love story they don't need any guidance of how to feel (which works).
Silver: Close behind it (closer than Best Picture) is a silver medal for Fritz Lang. I think Lang, similar to Chaplin, gets a lot of the strength from not spoon-feeding anything to the audience. They understand how truly wicked Peter Lorre is, and they know further still that the mob is not right in their approach to his justice. Lang's anti-Nazi views show pretty clearly here as we see the rise of Hitler in the film's many villains.
Bronze: We'll throw in a new name for the bronze though (as much as I do love James Whale). Instead, we'll name Alexander Korda, whose French epic shows a remarkable aptitude for sound. While other films (even sound films like Frankenstein and M) continued to get their strength more so through the visual, Marius is a story, one that has the guts to end ambiguously in an era where that simply wasn't done.
Charlie Chaplin (City Lights)
Pierre Fresnay (Marius)
Peter Lorre (M)
Fredric March (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)
Raimu (Marius)
Gold: Peter Lorre would spend much of the 1940's & 50's playing some version of the comic relief henchman that he played in The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, and he would do it well (he was marvelous in those movies). But watching M, you get the sense that we were cheated out of a great screen star, he so perfectly encapsulates the scared monstrosity of his Hans Beckert.
Silver: Chaplin doesn't get a threepeat of gold, but know that I was considering it, and he gets a solid silver. Comedy in the Silent Era was maybe its best form (that or horror), but you watch Chaplin's performances and they're just on another level. The way that he combines both his trademark "tramp" slapstick with a more sophisticated amour is heavenly.
Bronze: Raimu's work in Marius is so fascinating, especially in the film's final moments. He plays this part really well, a father who has an undying love for his son, but doesn't have an understanding of him. The "parents just don't understand" message was 50 years away, but that doesn't mean that he couldn't capture that sentiment beautifully in pre-war France.
Mae Clarke (Waterloo Bridge)
Claudette Colbert (The Smiling Lieutenant)
Orane Demazis (Marius)
Barbara Stanwyck (The Miracle Woman)
Barbara Stanwyck (Night Nurse)
Gold: Even early on in her career, Barbara Stanwyck finds a way to impart her "smarter-than-the-men" style into her characters. In The Miracle Woman, she plays an early televangelist, a phony who falls in love with one of the men she claims to have "saved." Stanwyck's moral dilemmas, and the way that Capra gives her both the bitter & the sweet in the ending, is something only she'd be able to pull off.
Silver: Mae Clarke is playing one of my favorite Vivien Leigh parts, and so it was a tall ask to put her into those shoes, but she does so beautifully. While Leigh finds the tragedy in the circumstances, Clarke does a better job of finding the morality of what happens-this is a woman gifted a better life, but isn't sure if she can take it knowing that she loves this man so much. It's a really tender performance from an actress most famous for getting a grapefruit in her face or having to marry a monster.
Bronze: Orane Demazis gets maybe the most complicated role in Marius, as a woman torn between a better life for herself by marrying a man with money, or pursuing her true love Marius, whom she cannot count on to be there for her even if she goes after him. She balances that really well, and honestly-I can't wait to see what's in store for her as I see the sequel next month.
Fernand Charpin (Marius)
Dwight Frye (Dracula)
Gustaf Grundgens (M)
Boris Karloff (Frankenstein)
Harry Myers (City Lights)
Gold: Boris Karloff would end up haunting the dreams of countless moviegoers for generations with his Monster, but it wasn't just that he's scary. Karloff gives him a grand deal of humanity, someone who has been thrown into an impossible situation, and who shows as much joy in destroying as he does in celebrating the world around him.
Silver: Fernand Charpin plays the "other man" in the principle love triangle in Marius, but he does so to both great comedic & adversarial effect. I loved the way that Honoré is not a true villain, but someone lonely, and being encouraged by Fanny's aunt to think that it's a viable match. He steals most of the scenes he's in, even against some stiff acting competition.
Bronze: Gustaf Grundgens' personal life is questionable when giving out a statue, but these need to be won solely on performance, and his work in M is extraordinary. A large part of Fritz Lang's story is that you will find a villainy in every character, not just the ones who are obvious, and Grundgens gives us maybe the film's scariest figure as the Safecracker and chief judge in Hans Beckert's court.
Joan Blondell (Night Nurse)
Virginia Cherrill (City Lights)
Miriam Hopkins (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)
Miriam Hopkins (The Smiling Lieutenant)
Alida Rouffe (Marius)
Gold: Like Best Actress, our Supporting Actress is getting a gold with a double nomination year (I don't follow Oscar rules-actors can get nominated twice in the same category). And you deserve two nominations if you're giving performances as good as Miriam Hopkins was in 1931. For her win, I'm going to go with her tragic turn in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. She brings something beyond just screaming victim here, and gives us a true loss of innocence as she is brought into the world of the nasty Edward Hyde.
Silver: Joan Blondell is one of those actresses you know is famous, but is rarely name-checked as a great actress of her era. But twenty years before her forgettable Oscar nomination, she totally earned one as the worldly best friend to Barbara Stanwyck in Night Nurse, giving us a counter to Stanwyck's noble heroine.
Bronze: Finishing off the acting contests is Virginia Cherrill's angelic Blind Girl in City Lights. If you're going to pull off the most romantic scene (possibly) in film history, you need to find a way to have strength, tenderness, & a different kind of shyness than Chaplin is bringing, and Cherrill does that in her work here.
Frankenstein
Marius
The Miracle Woman
The Smiling Lieutenant
Waterloo Bridge
Gold: Bringing Mary Shelley's epistolary novel to life on the big-screen was no easy task. It isn't entirely made for the movies (at least not the movies of 1931), and some of the choices (like making the monster unable to speak) are honestly really smart decisions by the screenwriters of Frankenstein-they'd set up nearly 100 years of lore around the creature we still see in the films today.
Silver: Close behind Frankenstein is Marius, which would've won if it wasn't competing with an icon. After all, this is a shockingly sophisticated story of love, dreams, & money, told at the dawn of the sound era but you'd be forgiven for thinking this was coming a decade later the story feels so perfectly plotted.
Bronze: Our final medalist is The Smiling Lieutenant, which gets on this list not just for being the funniest film of 1931, but also for being the bawdiest. Combined with some delicious musical arrangement (try not to grin during "Jazz Up Your Lingerie") the Lubitsch touch is in full effect as we get ribald humor between Maurice Chevalier, Claudette Colbert, & Miriam Hopkins.
The Champ
City Lights
M
Monkey Business
Smart Money
Gold: Few films of this era had such political insight and layered metaphors as Fritz Lang's M (which he also co-wrote). Look at the way that he handles the police and the criminals similar approach to capturing Hans Beckert...Lang wants you to know in 1931 Germany, even the institutions are rotten (and boy was he right).
Silver: Silent films obviously don't have spoken screenplays, and so a lack of dialogue sometimes feels a bit of a cheat for competing for an award like this. But Chaplin's City Lights is so wonderfully-plotted, giving us side adventures, but ones that always build back to the final moments of the film. All of his pictures have this attention-to-detail, but this one in particular is the best-constructed.
Bronze: We're finishing off with our first film that also won the Oscar (I really abandoned the Academy's choices this year, especially deprived of their much better 1932 films) The Champ, which is a tearjerker, but one that balances a sense of masculinity and forgotten dreams into what easily could've just been a family boxing flick. This became formative for a reason.
Dracula
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Frankenstein
M
The Miracle Woman
Gold: We're combining effects & mixing into one category (we'll split them starting in the 1960's when editing became more of a standard practice...and also something I could genuinely tell apart from the mixing), and we're giving this statue to a film that had both, Frankenstein, a movie that not only has angry mobs & a lumbering monster, but the staggering screams of "it's alive!" that ring as some of the most memorable in film history.
Silver: Following it, we're going to go to the other monster of 1931, always in Karloff's shadow: Dracula. Here the sound work is more sophisticated, more subtle, but nonetheless just as effective, particularly the way it seems to drip on Lugosi's accent in the early scenes to make him as menacing as possible.
Bronze: A trio of horror medalists (a first for this blog), we'll conclude with the nasty transformations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the way that it uses silence and screams to instill terror in its audience.
Dracula
Frankenstein
M
A Nous la Liberte
Transatlantic
Gold: I am a sucker for world-building when it comes to this category (look how many nominations I gave the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter films in the 21st Century), and no film is world-building quite like Frankenstein does in 1931. The castle, the moat, the village...it's all splendid.
Silver: The modernist designs of A Nous la Liberte are arguably more inventive than Frankenstein (which is more iconic...you decide which is more impressive but I lean toward the Monster). I love the way that it feels like it's pulling you into a world of the future that's not entirely happy. Capitalism has never looked so depressing (and that's a good thing).
Bronze: The thing about M is that the art direction feels like it's part of the film. The city streets become more claustrophobic the further we get into the film, as Hans Beckert can feel the world collapsing on itself, and the courtroom in the final scenes feels truly underground, somewhere where no one is going to escape.
City Lights
Frankenstein
M
Marius
Tabu: A Story of the South Seas
Gold: Few men of his era knew quite how to lens a film in as horrifying of a manner as Frtiz Arno Wagner, who was the genius behind such pictures as Nosferatu and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. With M, though, he gives maybe his best work, giving us some early tracking shots and a type of visual storytelling that would make the film the classic that it is.
Silver: Tabu is not a well-remembered film, but it won an Oscar for Cinematography for a reason-it's gorgeous. Floyd Crosby's camerawork here, particularly the swimming sequences, kind of have to be seen to be believed, they are so technically impressive & beautifully-captured.
Bronze: Frankenstein does better with lighting night scenes than most modern blockbusters do. The way that it captures moments in a graveyard, at a castle's doorsteps, and of course in Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory are a play of light-and-shadow, all marvelously lit but with an ominous sense of dread.
Dishonored
Dracula
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Frankenstein
Mata Hari
Gold: Few women are as fashionable throughout all of their careers as Marlene Dietrich, and her dresses in Dishonored are about as delicious as you can get. I particularly love the shiny black number with the silver cape and a chain necklace, looking like she's either been released from the Met Gala or the world's most expensive dominatrix club.
Silver: Sometimes you get in based solely on a dress into this category, sometimes it's a cavalcade of outfits strung together. For Frankenstein, it's a pair of looks. First you have Boris Karloff's lumbering corpse, in a stiff & slightly dated suit that looks like he was, well, buried in it, and then you have Mae Clarke's gorgeous bridal gown, a combination of elegant evening gown with a flapper headdress that, honestly, would still be in style.
Bronze: If you're going to unleash the most stylish monster in horror movie history, you need him to look good. That's what the costume team in Dracula does for Bela Lugosi, putting him in smashing evening wear, to go along with the increasingly sexy evening wear worn by Helen Chandler's Mina as the film progresses.
City Lights
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Frankenstein
M
Marius
Gold: Once again we are going with M for the gold medal (its total is one short of Frankenstein), but can you blame me? The building suspense in this picture, not just as we want to capture Hans Beckert, but the fear of what happens when we do, is gripping-your-seat sorts of horror, and the film's visual cues (particularly the use of the actual "M") are so well-considered.
Silver: Behind it we have Frankenstein, another film winning mostly because of its thrills, but that's not the only thing that makes it work. Think of a scene like the resurrection sequence-this isn't necessarily meant to be scary, but the way that it's pieced together (including Colin Clive's shrieks) makes it that way...we are about to tempt the hand of god.
Bronze: We'll complete the trio with Marius, which doesn't have the crutch of a horror film to guide it, but instead a growing series of storylines that are being intertwined. This was not something movies of this era did well. Part of the reason supporting performances weren't recognized until the mid-1930's was they weren't really consequential to the plot (B Plots or Side Plots weren't really a thing), but Marius does it aptly, feeling at times like it's inventing this style of moviemaking it's so advanced.
Dishonored
Dracula
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Frankenstein
M
Gold: Horror movies rarely get honored for makeup, but they should, and 1931 is about as perfect of an example as you could find as to why. Think of what Jack Pierce is doing in Frankenstein, giving us a monster that, quite honestly, we don't even see as green, but we can feel it in the way that he makes it decay, realistic but still clearly undead. It's chilling.
Silver: Fast behind him is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Wally Westmore (of the famed family) uses both visual trickery (we'll get into that in a second) and makeup effects to create the transformation, and when we get the actual Mr. Hyde, he's a brutal figure, one that cannot be denied (and you better not try).
Bronze: We are finishing off with Dracula. This isn't as showy (the prosthetics aren't as necessary on either Bela Lugosi or his brides), but most doesn't always equal best, and the placid, nearly translucent looks shown by he and the women he's entombed in his castle are really defining stuff for the vampire genre.
Dracula
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Frankenstein
Taris
Waterloo Bridge
Gold: We'll have a flip of the script and give this one to Dr. Jekyll. The movie's most famous sequence is the transformation scene, with Fredric March staring straight into the camera, no cuts away, and watching as he slowly gets blotches on his face and darkness under his eyes...it's insane this was done without CGI, but instead color filters on the lens and extensive (and precise) makeup. It's genius work.
Silver: Similar to Dr. Jekyll, the visual effects of Frankenstein in some capacity can be caught in the flashing lights, production design, and practical effects of the resurrection scene. We see a fission of sound, art direction, & glowing lights all in one breathtaking moment.
Bronze: We'll keep the three horror films together for a final time, and again Dracula is a bit less showy, a bit more subtle. But this one uses practical effects, including lighting tricks to highlight Lugosi's face and to have him vanish into a bat, to give us a complete ambience.
Also in 1931-32: Picture, Director, Actress, Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Original Story, Art Direction, Cinematography, Previously in 1931-32
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