OVP: Lady for a Day (1933)

Film: Lady for a Day (1933)
Stars: May Robson, Warren William, Guy Kibbee, Glenda Farrell, Ned Sparks, Jean Parker
Director: Frank Capra
Oscar History: 4 nominations (Best Picture, Director, Actress-May Robson, Adapted Screenplay)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

We leave the 1980's today and head all-the-way-back to the 1930's with our weeklong theme of Best Actress at the Oscars, here looking at a film from a one-time nominee, and one who had a very late-in-life bit of success at the Oscars.  May Robson had spend much of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries as a leading lady of the stage, and by 1933 was in her mid-70's.  At that point, she was transitioning from the stage into a cinematic career, but not so much as a leading lady as as an aging character actress, and Lady for a Day was one of the few films that she got above-the-line-billing; if you haven't seen this Frank Capra film, you're probably more familiar with Robson for her small parts in the 1937 A Star is Born (as Granny) and Bringing Up Baby (as Aunt Elizabeth).  But at the time, Lady for a Day was a big hit, and Robson likely came very close to besting her future Baby costar Katharine Hepburn at the Academy Awards.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about Apple Annie (Robson), a beggar woman who sells fruit and lives a ragtag life where the one joy she has is writing letters to her daughter Louise (Parker), whom she sent to live in a Spanish convent when she was quite young.  Louise thinks that Annie is a sophisticate, a wealthy lady-of-class (there's hints throughout the movie that there's some truth to this lie, that Annie probably was from a more moneyed background & eventually fell on rough times), and this lie becomes a problem when Louise decides to visit her mother with her wealthy fiancee, the son of a wealthy count.  With the help of a mobster named Dave the Dude (William), who thinks Annie's apples bring him luck, they find a way to borrow a fancy apartment, and even get a pool hustler named Henry (Kibbee) to pose as Annie's husband.  The scheme works, though not without a lot of shenanigans (namely the kidnapping of a reporter who wants to expose Annie's story to sell papers based on the Count's celebrity), and in the end Annie gets to be the person she always pretended to be in the eyes of her loving daughter, able to have successfully given her the life she dreamt of by sending away the only person she ever cared about.

The movie is schmaltzy, but you'll be forgiven if you love it.  Lady for a Day is not the classic movie that later Frank Capra films like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It's a Wonderful Life would be-it doesn't have the kind of orderly plotting that stands up against the really hokey ideals of the script.  It also never properly explains why Annie is able to pull off such a turnaround from a loud-mouthed beggar dame into a grand doyenne of society, but you won't care.  It's overlong, but the cast is fun, and you genuinely end up cheering for Annie to succeed in her increasingly screwball attempts to maintain the charade.  The supporting cast is also solid, particularly William as a mobster-with-a-heart-of-gold.

Robson, as I said, struggles occasionally with the script-there's no Eliza Doolittle moment here indicating that she suddenly learned how to behave in "polite society," and there should be considering how boorish she makes Apple Annie in the film's opening scenes.  That said, Robson knows how to play a broad part (the stage roots show pretty quickly in her performance), and she nails some of the emotional closing scenes, especially her goodbye to her daughter, finally having a success after what seemed like a lifetime of failures.  The film's best moment is upending what we'd expect, where we'd assume Louise would find out the truth about her mother, and then still love her anyway, but Capra (always willing to give a little of the bitter with a lot of the sweet), doesn't do that.  Louise will never know the sacrifice her mother made, giving up her daughter to have a life that she couldn't have, and her willingness to call in every favor as a gift to her daughter, and that's kind of beautiful in a melancholy way.  Robson captures that so well in the film's final moments, when it seems the gig is up, and I loved that aspect of her performance.  I haven't seen all of the nominees here (still missing Diana Wynward in Cavalcade), but if Robson had taken away one of Kate Hepburn's Oscars, it wouldn't have been something to mourn too ferociously.