OVP: Director (1931-32)

OVP: Best Director (1931-32)

The Nominees Were...

Frank Borzage, Bad Girl

King Vidor, The Champ

Josef von Sternberg, Shanghai Express

My Thoughts: Coming off of yesterday's Best Actress field, I am happy to report that we are in much better territory for Best Director.  Unlike Best Actress, this features at least one truly worthy nominee, and one nominee that is no slouch.  It also features three distinctive film directors.  King Vidor & Frank Borzage would gain reputations as some of the better "directors for hire" of Hollywood's Golden Age, sometimes getting lost in their reputations the fact that they had gifts.  Vidor's The Crowd and Borzage's Moonrise, for example, are pretty much perfect films, and their best work (in my opinion).  But only one of these guys is generally given the title of "auteur" and given his cinematic output in the early Sound Era, it's easy to see why.

Josef von Sternberg is that director, who from 1927-1935 was one of the most interesting filmmakers working in cinema, first in Germany, then in the United States.  In that time, he made seven movies with Marlene Dietrich, two of which won him Best Director nominations (the other one was Morocco).  Watching Shanghai Express, it's sometimes confusing how good the movie is because it looks so incredible.  Von Sternberg did impossible things with a camera, giving us a beautiful depth in his films that no American filmmaker would be able to achieve until Orson Welles.  I love the way he moves the camera from different shots, sometimes giving us the action at the center, sometimes moving it to the side, playing with the script visually to the point where you don't really care that the story doesn't make a lot of sense.

Frank Borzage's work in Bad Girl isn't nearly as stylized or sophisticated, and that's especially true when it's paired with such a defanged screenplay.  For a movie literally called Bad Girl, it's quite prudish in its approach, and Borzage doesn't know how to make the weakest of film setups (just a series of misunderstandings between a married couple) elevate into something special.  I know there are people who are champions of this movie, and lord knows in 1932 there were given its Oscar history, but I don't get it at all.  It's less bad and more just confusing in its critical acclaim.

The final nomination is much easier to understand.  Vidor does a superb job of framing the fighting scenes against the action outside of the ring.  I loved the way that the story is built around "the big fight" but by the time it's come, the stakes of what it's supposed to be about have completely changed.  Vidor knows that this movie is not just about economy (and it so easily could've been only about that), but instead about the ways that masculinity (and how it is valued over love) can weaken the resolves of even the strongest of men.  Watching Beery lose his battles to his former glory is heartbreaking.

Other Precursor Contenders: Of the five films that didn't get a Best Director nomination, but did get in for Best Picture, we have Ernst Lubitsch directing two (likely cancelling himself out), and while it would be tempting to pick the Best Picture winner, Edmund Goulding has no Oscar history and Grand Hotel is more of a call sheet film.  Therefore I'm going to assume it was either John Ford for Arrowsmith or Mervyn LeRoy for Five Star Final, and given Ford has the longer Oscar history, he'd be my guess.

Directors I Would Have Nominated: Howard Hawks is one of the most consistent filmmakers in Classical Hollywood, directing classics in every genre from film noir (The Big Sleep) to screwball comedy (Bringing Up Baby) to westerns (Red River) to Science Fiction (The Thing from Another World).  He somehow only got one nomination, for the total snooze Sergeant York.  A perfect time to honor him would've been for 1932's Scarface with Paul Muni, a total achievement and the best early gangster film of the 1930's.
Oscar's Choice: I cannot explain it, but Frank Borzage won.  Given he already had a statue and Vidor & von Sternberg would never win one, it feels like a particularly stupid indulgence from the Academy.

My Choice: It's absolutely von Sternberg, who is in another class with Shanghai Express.  Behind him is Vidor, and then Borzage is forgettably in third.

Those were my thoughts-how about yours?  Are you sticking with me and giving this statue to von Sternberg (his personal life aside) or do you want to go with AMPAS and Frank Borzage?  What would you consider to be the best film of these three men, all quite prolific directors in their day?  And was it Ford, LeRoy, Goulding, or Lubitsch in fourth place?  Share your thoughts in the comments!

Also in 1931-32: Actress, Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Original Story, Art Direction, Cinematography, Previously in 1931-32

Past Best Director Contests: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022