OVP: The Divine Lady (1929)

Film: The Divine Lady (1929)
Stars: Corinne Griffith, Victor Varconi, HB Warner, Ian Keith, Marie Dressler
Director: Frank Lloyd
Oscar History: 3 nominations/1 win (Best Director*, Actress-Corinne Griffith, Cinematography)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

All week we've been taking a look at Best Actress nominees whose films I saw for the first time during quarantine, and I've been trying to make the list as eclectic as possible.  Today we head to a relatively obscure nomination from the very beginning of the Academy Awards, at their second ceremony: The Divine Lady.  For Oscar trivia buffs, The Divine Lady has one clear distinction-it is the only film to have ever won Best Director without getting nominated for Best Picture; it's common, though not frequent that a director is nominated for the category without a Best Picture citation, but they never win...except for Frank Lloyd (and if you want to get technical, Lewis Milestone, though that has an asterisk behind it).  But it also features a very early Oscar nomination for Best Actress, one of the rare "silent" performances to be cited, and the only nomination for a once major star of the Silent Era, Corinne Griffith.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is technically based on real-life events, so I normally wouldn't let a Spoiler Alert be issued, but it plays fast-and-loose with history so I'll keep it up there for now.  The movie is about the relationship between Lady Hamilton (aka Emma Hart aka Corinne Griffith) who is the daughter of a cook (Dressler), and marked by her beauty & inability to conform to social norms.  She falls madly in love with Charles Greville (Keith), who can't find a way to compromise her free-spiritedness with his own ambitions, and so he sends her to live with his uncle Sir William Hamilton (Warner), in hopes that he'll reform her so she'd make a proper wife.  He does, but not in the way that Greville wants-he marries her instead, despite knowing she loves his nephew, and as a result gives her a position in society she'd always dreamt of achieving.  Soon after, she meets, and falls truly in love with Lord Horatio Nelson (Varconi), who is a high-ranking officer in the Navy during the Napoleonic Wars.  The back-half of the film alternates between elaborately-shot naval battles (including the one that would be Nelson's deathbed, Trafalgar), and the relationship between Lady Hamilton & Lord Nelson, scandalous in its day since both of them were married while openly having an affair.  The film ends with a heartbroken Lady Hamilton learning that her lover has died, but in the process won an enormous victory for England at Trafalgar.

The movie's unusual in the sense that it has a full forty minutes of us watching Lady Hamilton fall for a guy in the way we'd normally assume in a film that he's "the love of her life," and then sort of discards him.  I kind of liked it, even if it felt more like two episodes of a miniseries than a cohesive story, but it does make it harder to appreciate the second half's nuances of her falling for Lord Nelson.  It was unusual story structure, but it would have been more interesting if Nelson & Greville had been at all different, and the actors that play them are so similar in height & stature that you'd be forgiven for thinking they were being played by the same person.  Still, it's nice to have a movie heroine who falls in love, truly, twice, and it isn't the first guy who is her eventual "true love."

The film won three Oscar nominations.  Lloyd's direction is interesting, and I think it's better than the movie (which goes on too many tangents and never develops its supporting cast).  The battle scenes are stunted for obvious (pre-CGI) reasons, but still glorious, and he makes Griffith genuinely romantic in the way that she's lit.  John Seitz surely got this nomination for the battle scenes, but his best work is the way that Griffith's beauty feels bold & shocking the way that he frequently will light her face with some shadow in closeups.  It's great work, and would carry him well throughout the rest of his career (he'd eventually lens such classics as Sullivan's Travels, Double Indemnity, and Sunset Blvd).

And in the lead there's Griffith, who is well-written for the part, and I get why she was a big star at the time.  She's beautiful, and fun, and her musical moments are lovely (I cannot tell based on some googling whether or not she's actually singing in the movie, and I will take hints if you have them).  But it's the sort of performance that more constitutes compelling movie starring, rather than great acting.  I feel like we're watching a star at the peak of her charisma, which is awesome, but it's not necessarily showing off her actorly talents, and during the melodramas she either under-emotes or chews the scenery.  Still, there's something there in her eyes and the way the she knows how to play her emotions in quieter scenes to Seitz's generous camera that will make you want to keep watching.  She retired pretty quickly into the Sound Era and became a successful businesswoman (with a long life-she lived to be 84), but I'm curious what that magnetism might have been like as screwball comedies become popular in the ensuing years.