OVP: Best Picture (1931-32)
The Nominees Were...
Arrowsmith (Samuel Goldwyn Productions)
Bad Girl (20th Century Fox)
The Champ (MGM)
Five Star Final (First National)
Grand Hotel (MGM)
One Hour with You (Paramount)
Shanghai Express (Paramount)
The Smiling Lieutenant (Paramount)
My Thoughts: And we officially have reached the end of our shortest season (ever?...perhaps ever, I haven't actually checked if there's a year with less categories) of the Oscar Viewing Project. We are also into the only category that had more than 3 nominations, and because of that, we're going to get to some films that we've not yet discussed, a first for us. Four of these movies received only Best Picture nominations, including the film that won Best Picture, which was the first, last, and only time that Oscar will ever do that. So not only did we not get tired of any films in a season this short, some of them we barely noticed.
Let's in fact start right out of the gate with Grand Hotel. I have seen Grand Hotel more than any other movie on this list (it's the only one I've seen more than once), and it still holds up every time. The movie's genius lies in the way that it's not just about people that are lost, but in many ways people who are damned. Everyone will go to Grand Hotel, everyone will find a way to its melodrama and its ability to force conversations about love and betrayal and the future, and I suspect, one person will always perish so the rest will find a way to move on from its elegant surroundings. The cast of this movie wonderfully inhabits that feeling-it really is the MGM factory working at all cylinders.
No one directs a film quite like John Ford, but that doesn't mean he's infallible, and that's true in Arrowsmith. The movie uses a now basically dead film genre (the medical drama is almost exclusively confined to our TV screens) but doesn't give us any of the tension we know it's capable of from years of ER and Grey's Anatomy. The film tamps down its most salacious aspects (Ronald Colman & Myrna Loy are clearly having sex), but doesn't fill it with anything more rewarding. Throw in Helen Hayes overacting, and you've got a big, boring misdirect.
Five Star Final is a really hard movie to judge on its overall merits because the screenplay is quite solid. The movie's take criticizing newspapers for ruining people's lives in the name of "journalism" when it's really just petty gossip is pointed (and sadly apt nearly 100 years later). But the picture doesn't work as well as the idea of it does. Most of the actors in the film feel an ill-fit. Even figures like Edward G. Robinson & Boris Karloff (both of whom I generally like), can't land their character arcs, and the story doesn't really know how to make up for it (they leave for larger stretches of the film than you'd think given the movie's shorter runtime). Honestly, and I don't say this often: the movie desperately needed to be longer.
Trying to keep the two Lubitsch films (both of which star Maurice Chevalier) apart is why I made a point of taking specific notes for this write-up. The Smiling Lieutenant is filled with absurdist humor and some truly saucy screenwriting involving the love triangle between Chevalier, Claudette Colbert, & Miriam Hopkins. Possibly the most "Pre-Code" film to ever be nominated for Best Picture, the movie is very naughty, including conversations about post-coital meals and songs about revealing lingerie. It all works really well-we need more horny musicals, and Chevalier is actually as sexy as filmmakers claim he is in later films (when he is not).
That said, One Hour with You is even better. Chevalier is not just sexy as hell, but he's also giving a really good performance, and is matched by delicious supporting turns from Genevieve Tobin & Roland Young. The writing in this is sublime ("Professor Olivier...Ancient History!") and like Smiling is filled with a bunch of raunchy double entendres that Will Hayes stole from us for the remainder of the decade. The movie doesn't need to be a musical, and unlike Smiling, the numbers aren't fun enough to work, but it's so funny and sophisticated that you should see it immediately if this is the first you're hearing of it.
Frank Borzage's Bad Girl is one of those movies I'm just never going to get the appeal of. Looking at the Letterboxd reviews, I'm clearly in the minority on this one, but Minna Gombell's sassy friend aside, I think it's a snore. The script makes zero sense (even in the world of the movies, the misunderstandings between the two leads are so asinine as to border on incredulity), and the entire concept of it being called "Bad Girl" goes out the window when Sally Eilers is as prim as a Colleen Dewhurst school marm. I just...it's so disposable.
You can not say that The Champ is disposable, and indeed, it's the film that is maybe the most beloved by modern cinephiles of these eight? The most surprising thing about it to me wasn't that it was a compelling drama, but that it was so obsessed with the concept of masculinity. Wallace Beery's father has to contend not just with finding a way to love his son, but also to understand if his son can have a better life without him (and what he gave up in his life by not fulfilling his greatest dreams in his youth). That the filmmakers smartly have Jackie Cooper's eyes be a reflection of that (with Cooper honestly giving an even better performance than Beery), makes the film's final moments that much more poignant.
Grand Hotel is the most insightful, The Champ the most moving, and One Hour with You the funniest, but when we get to Shanghai Express, we are met with the most beautiful. Few films have ever looked as good as what Josef von Sternberg is doing in this movie. The cinematography is exquisite, clouds of puffy smoke coming off of both the titular train and Marlene Dietrich's cigarette, the two intertwined for the whole picture. The movie doesn't quite have the guts to give us the ending the script is demanding, but you don't care while watching it-film is a visual medium, and von Sternberg understands that better than any other director of his time.
Other Precursor Contenders: Once again, we have no precursors. At the time, Scarface was expected to score somewhere and given that we have four films that only got Best Picture nominations, and also remembering that movie's box office, I wonder if that was probably in ninth place even if it didn't get a single Oscar nomination. If you want to go into the actual nominees, I would assume What Price Hollywood? and The Guardsman (given the categories they got into) would be a good place to start.
Films I Would Have Nominated: You'll find out tomorrow!
Oscar’s Choice: I'm assuming that the MGM star machine (and the box office that came with it) was too much for The Champ or Arrowsmith to overcome, and that's why Grand Hotel reigned supreme.
My Choice: I'm going to echo Oscar, but it's a close race with Shanghai Express. I think Shanghai is the more impressive feat, but movies are not just about cinematography, and the acting & screenwriting in Grand Hotel are better, and ultimately push the scales. Behind them, I'd go (in order) One Hour with You, The Smiling Lieutenant, The Champ, Five Star, Final, Arrowsmith, and then Bad Girl.
And there you have it-another OVP in the books. Are we all going to stay at the Grand Hotel with Oscar & I, or do you want to venture to another destination? Which of the four films that only got one nomination do you most wish made it somewhere else? And overall-what is your favorite movie of 1931-32? Share your comments below!
Also in 1931-32: Director, Actress, Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Original Story, Art Direction, Cinematography, Previously in 1931-32
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