The Iron Mask (1929)

Film: The Iron Mask (1929)

Stars: Douglas Fairbanks, Belle Bennett, Marguerite de la Motte, Dorothy Revier, Vera Lewis

Director: Allan Dwan

Oscar History: Most of the categories that would've been an option (Costume, Makeup, Visual Effects) were decades away, though one wonders why it wasn't an option for Art Direction given the rather impressive sets.

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.: click here to learn more about Mr. Fairbanks (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

A lot of the conversations about Douglas Fairbanks to modern audiences focus on one of two things.  First, there is his "storybook" marriage to Mary Pickford, one that started with a scandalous affair (while Fairbanks was still married) and would end with a shocking divorce (at least to the public) that we'll get into next week during our final Fairbanks movie.  But the second we'll talk about today, and that is Fairbanks' uncomfortable position as one of the quintessential actors whose career was destroyed by the coming Sound Era.  There are other actors (including Pickford) who didn't have as much success in the Sound Era, but they aren't shown as an example of the stars who couldn't make it at all in the new era of Sound.  And while actors like John Gilbert & Norma Talmadge certainly saw their careers disappear with the Sound Era due to their voices, it's Fairbanks that has lasted the longest in the public's memory as not being "suitable" for the Sound Era, perhaps in recent years due to The Artist, the 2011 Best Picture winner that is based in part on Fairbanks' life, enough so that star Jean Dujardin referenced Fairbanks in his Golden Globes speech that year.

(Spoilers Ahead) So in many ways The Iron Mask, a sequel to a previous film of Fairbanks (1921's The Three Musketeers), is a swan song for our January star.  The film is much in-line with what we've come to expect from the actor.  Despite being in his mid-forties at the time, The Iron Mask has a number of impressive stunts and fighting sequences, and is honestly a really lavish and gorgeous production (I'm not doing my typical plot recap because this story has been told countless times on big-screens and in TV parodies like The Simpsons, and it doesn't break a lot of new ground, though it is notable as the only major film of Fairbanks' Silent Era career where he dies in the end).  I referenced above that this movie didn't get an Art Direction nomination, but one thinks it should have-it looks really good, and very rarely appears to be a sound stage in the way that a lot of films of this era (even some which Fairbanks did).

But this is where I will own that I did not see the film that Academy voters in 1929 would've seen, so I want to caveat that a bit (and why I'm giving this 3/5 stars here instead of rounding down like I normally would given I gave it 2.5 stars on Letterboxd).  The first fully sound film featuring Fairbanks was The Taming of the Shrew, a movie we profiled when we talked about Mary Pickford in Season 6, which is bad (and Fairbanks is bad in it), but this is not the first sound film he did-The Iron Mask included an opening narration from Fairbanks at the time of release.  What it did not include, but was added in the 1950's, was a narration of the plot by his son Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., which was used in replacement of title cards, likely to help it for television audiences (at the time, it was quite common to have movies running at off-times during the day, or eventually late in the evening).  It is possible to see both versions of the movie...but the one I saw on Amazon was the one reedited with Fairbanks Jr.  This gives off the effect of a Disney nature film (where you are being spoon-fed the plot even if you're seeing it with your own eyes), and takes away a lot of the beautiful work that the late-Silent Era acting is doing here.

Fairbanks is fun in The Iron Mask, and over 85 years after the fact, I don't get the same sense of how passé this was likely becoming after a decade of box office dominance with similarly-themed movies.  But this is considered by many to be his last big hurrah, and it's worth noting that it wasn't Fairbanks' voice that really cost him in the new era.  Fairbanks voice wasn't bad (this isn't like, say, Clara Bow or Emil Jannings where their strong accents made them impossible to see in the same types of moves in the United States), and probably would've worked...but like many action stars we'll profile this year, he was physically at an age where he couldn't continue to outdo his stunts, and this type of movie (which wouldn't be particularly popular in the early 1930's from even younger stars like Tyrone Power or John Wayne) wouldn't be in fashion again until the 1940's, by which time Fairbanks would be dead (again, which we'll get to next week).  Therefore, the idea of Fairbanks as a victim of the Silent Era isn't really a fair assessment-it wasn't his voice, but his age (and changing tastes), that was more the culprit in why he couldn't stay a movie star in the 1930's while others of his era (like Greta Garbo & Joan Crawford) would become even bigger names with the introduction of Sound (and in part, would become lasting legends in a way that Fairbanks never could).  We'll talk about the final chapter of Fairbanks life, and what he did when movies dried up, next week.

Blackmail (1929)

Film: Blackmail (1929)

Stars: Anny Ondra, John Longden, Cyril Ritchard, Donald Calthrop

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

(Throughout the year, in connection with our 'Saturdays with the Stars' series, I am watching every gap I have in Alfred Hitchcock's filmography in what we're calling 'Sunday Leftovers.'  Every Sunday, I'll be watching a Hitchcock film that I've never seen before as I spend 2021 completing his filmography)

As I mentioned last week, Hitchcock is officially entering the Sound Era with this week's Sunday Leftovers, never to return back to silent pictures.  Blackmail, though, wasn't just the first moment for Hitchcock in the Sound Era, but in fact the first sound film, period from British cinema, making it the historic equivalent in the UK to what The Jazz Singer is to American audiences.  As I've mentioned on here a couple of times, The Jazz Singer is not a good movie, a reputation pretty much everyone who discusses it admits, even if the film itself is an inescapable part of film history if you're a completionist.  Blackmail, however, still enjoys a solid reputation amongst both Hitchcock enthusiasts and film fans in general, so I was curious what it would entail, particularly as the title indicated we were headed into Hitchcock's strong suit.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie follows Alice White (Ondra), whose boyfriend Detective Frank Webber (Longden) has just gotten into a fight with her.  As a result, she storms off, perhaps to make him jealous or perhaps just to see what else is out there, with Mr. Crewe (Ritchard), an artist.  While they are flirty together, it's quickly clear that Mr. Crewe has other intentions, and though it happens off-screen, it's pretty evident in the movie that he intends to rape Alice...until she pulls out a knife and kills him.  She quickly tries to cover up her crime, but forgets her gloves in the studio.  When the body is found the next day, Frank is one of the detectives on the case and finds one of Alice's gloves, and goes to talk to her (where she neither confirms nor denies her involvement in Crewe's death).  Meanwhile, a local man called Tracy (Calthrop) finds the other glove, and soon starts to blackmail the two, assuming they are covering up for each other in terms of the death.  Frank tries to reverse and say they'll blame Tracy, a former felon.  This causes a chase, and in the process, Tracy dies, with everyone assuming he's the killer.  In the end Alice does confess to Frank the real cause of the crime (that it was self-defense), and they live happily ever after...though with the canvas that Alice painted with Mr. Crewe still in evidence, a permanent admission to her involvement in the death.

The film, like a number of films in 1929, was originally intended to be silent (if you look hard enough you can apparently find silent versions of the picture, though I saw the sound one for this review).  You can see this in that the dialogue does feel ancillary to the plot-much of the movie is about visual storytelling.  What's great here, though, is that Hitchcock is given giant leeway with the plot.  The story of Alice's self-defense reads as shocking, and though the word "rape" doesn't get uttered in the picture, it hangs so ferociously it might as well have.  I'm curious as we get into the rest of Hitch's pre-Code films in the coming weeks how often he uses this looser, more jaw-dropping ability to amplify his script to his advantage.  I also loved Hitchcock's use of the British Museum for the chase sequence, foreshadowing everything from Mt. Rushmore to the Golden Gate Bridge in future pictures (the man loved his monuments).

This is a tightly-scripted film otherwise.  Short, without much fat on the plot, it works well.  Like all prototypical films (it's clear that Blackmail influenced not just Hitchcock's later films, but everyone from Fritz Lang to Michael Powell (the latter of whom worked on the picture for their on-set publicity photography), it reads as a bit provincial to modern audiences, mostly because you know that something better would be coming out of this (like The Lady Vanishes or Notorious), but this is an impressive sound debut from Hitchcock, even if much of the film's strength still resides in silent movie techniques.

The Manxman (1929)

Film: The Manxman (1929)

Stars: Carl Brisson, Malcolm Keen, Anny Ondra

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

(Throughout the year, in connection with our 'Saturdays with the Stars' series, I am watching every gap I have in Alfred Hitchcock's filmography in what we're calling 'Sunday Leftovers.'  Every Sunday, I'll be watching a Hitchcock film that I've never seen before as I spend 2021 completing his filmography)

We are hitting a precipice in our Sunday Leftovers season on Alfred Hitchcock today.  For months we have been focusing on Hitch's Silent Era films, the many movies he made before he became, well, "HITCHCOCK."  This week we are still in the Silent Era, but we are in the final Silent Era picture of the Master of Suspense's career.  Next week we will enter the sound era (as will all of British cinema, in what is generally considered to be the first British talking picture) with Blackmail, but today we need to talk about yet another sudsy romance when Hitch was still something of a (prominent) director for hire: The Manxman.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is essentially a (very messy) love triangle tale.  Pete (Brisson) and Philip (Keen) are best friends from different walks of life; Pete is a broke, handsome fisherman while Philip is a middle-class lawyer that could become the city's chief magistrate if he plays his cards right.  They both fall for Kate (Ondra), the daughter of a local pub owner.  Initially Pete is rejected when Kate's father doesn't want her marrying some poor schlub, but she promises to wait for him while he's off making his fortune.  While he's away, Philip & Kate fall in love, though both are reluctant to acknowledge their passionate affair since they are betraying Pete's trust.  When Pete returns, he is rich & Kate's father insists she marry him, but her heart belongs to Philip, and soon we learn it's more than her heart he's gained access to, as she's pregnant with their love child.  When the baby girl is born, Kate leaves Pete, who is bereft but takes solace in fatherhood, but when Philip won't acknowledge their love affair, Kate attempts to kill herself.  This all leads to a court case where Philip confesses that he has made Kate a "lost woman" and must step down as chief magistrate.  The film ends on a dour note, with Philip & Kate getting their daughter, but their lives upended & ruined by scandal, while Pete goes out into the sea once again with nothing, his wife & daughter lost to him forever.

The movie is too long-I think there are different cuts of the picture, but I definitely got the one that is nearly two hours.  The plot gets repetitive, and while there is a lot of juice in this plum in terms of sudsy storylines, they start to peter at the hour mark.  This is honestly more to do with Ondra than anything.  It's not clear early on why she prefers Philip to Pete.  Keen is utterly charmless as Philip, and well, Pete is an affable hunk.  You don't get the sense that she's after Philip initially for her money or his prestige, particularly since it's not clear she cares a lick when Pete comes back and is even richer than Philip.  Her motivations are so core to the film that I felt lost at times since she wasn't giving us much intuition into how she saw Kate, and in silent films, subtle acting is not your friend.

That said, Brisson is excellent as Pete.  He plays the guy as this lug-headed himbo, and honestly, it's one of my favorite performances we've seen so far this year for Sunday Leftovers.  He's such a sweetheart, and has a sort of Chris Pratt vibe going for most of the film.  You see his final break, when he realizes that Kate has betrayed him, and he doesn't react with anger, but more sorrow & confusion.  This is a nice change-of-pace for an era where the jilted husband would most-often come armed with a gun rather than a broken heart, and it's a nice modern touch that doesn't ruin what is the movie's best asset.

The Wind (1928)

Film: The Wind (1928)
Stars: Lillian Gish, Lars Hanson, Montagu Love, Dorothy Cumming, Edward Earle
Director: Victor Sjostrom
Oscar History: Early on with the Oscars, they were quite reluctant to nominate silent films past the first ceremony, and so it wasn't nominated despite it being considered a landmark film today.
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

One of the great tragedies of The Jazz Singer coming along when it did was that the Silent Era arguably hit its creative peak around 1927-28.  While there had been classics made before, some of the movies we think of as the best films of the Silent Era (The Crowd, Sunrise, The Passion of Joan of Arc) all were released at the very end of the period, becoming relics but also examples of lost promise-an indication that we might have been in for more sweeping stories during the period.  One of the best examples of this, that I had not seen until Criterion called my cards (by taking it off their platform & making me finally get to the movie) is The Wind, the last major silent film released by MGM, and generally considered to be one of the studio's best.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about a poor woman named Letty (Gish), who moves from Virginia to live with her cousin Beverly (Earle) on his ranch in Sweetwater.  While she's going there, she meets a sneaky man named Wirt Roddy (Love), who flirts with her on the train and tells her about how the winds in Texas make women crazy.  When she gets there, Beverly is delighted to see her, but his wife Cora (Cumming) is jealous of their relationship and how Letty is more beloved by her children than Cora is, and she throws her out of the house in a rage.  She then is forced to marry one of her local suitors, and after she finds out Wirt is married, she goes for a sweet-but-simple neighbor, Lige (Hanson), who learns on their wedding night that she doesn't have any desire for him.  As the film progresses, the winds drive Letty more mad, and during one particular wind storm, where she resists Wirt but after she passes out he rapes her (this isn't said explicitly, but it's heavily implied), she kills him when he says they must run away together (insinuating that he thinks it was consensual).  She does kill him, and buries him, and then confesses what happened to Lige when he returns.  Magically the winds have disappeared the body (Lige says that they do this when a death was justified), and Letty realizes that she has loved him the whole time, falling into his arms & no longer fearing the winds.

The plot kind of sounds silly (cause it is a little silly), but it doesn't feel that way in the film.  The Wind is really good, and its best aspects are showing the cruelty of men when it comes to their attitudes toward women.  Letty goes through hell in this film, enduring indifference, cruelty, and ultimately sexual violence, and the film doesn't shy away from that, and neither does Gish's performance.  This is the sort of film that just a few years later would have surely been flagged by the Hays Code for its frank (for the 1920's) take on sexuality.  However, the performances, particularly Gish and Cumming (the sort of supporting role that Oscar might have noticed had the category existed at the 2nd Oscars), are astounding.  This is the best silent work that I've seen from Gish, and maybe her best work period, give-or-take Night of the Hunter.

The other thing I want to call out here is the score.  The film exists in multiple different prints, and I am going to insist if you're seeing this for the first time that you catch the one scored by Carl Davis (this appears to be the one most often shown on TCM).  The score is unreal-it's one of the best scores, possibly the best score, I've ever seen attributed to a silent movie, and it's so effective in the film.  It really captures the passion of the winds, the terror of them, and adds an element to Gish's performance that probably wasn't there initially, but is a sign of a great composer who can see a way to add an element to the movie that is beneficial.  I don't normally get in for a conversation of "you have to see the X cut of a movie" as I think films should stand on their own merits regardless of the cut (and if they can't, that cut shouldn't be available to the film-going public), but I'm making an exception here.

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.

OVP: The Letter (1929)

Film: The Letter (1929)
Stars: Jeanne Eagels, O.P. Heggie, Reginald Owen, Herbert Marshall, Lady Tsen Mei
Director: Jean de Limur
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Actress-Jeanne Eagels)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

It has not been a super progressive weekend in the John apartment, at least in regard to film-watching.  First we had Kentucky, which had some horribly stereotypical portrayals of African-Americans.  Then came Bachelor in Paradise, which showed us how little was thought of women in motion pictures before the feminist movement.  And now we come to The Letter, a tiny film from 1929 that features a stunning performance from Jeanne Eagels, but also incredibly racist undertones in its portrayal of Chinese women.

(Spoilers Ahead) This is unfortunately the curse of watching old movies-with the great actors of long ago also comes the outdated and terrible ideals of that era as well.  The movie takes place in Singapore, with Eagels playing Leslie Crosbie, a neglected woman who has taken up an affair with another man named Geoffrey (Marshall), who in turn has become involved with a local woman, Li-Ti (Mei).  Leslie, fueled by a jealous rage after being scorned by Geoffrey, shoots him in cold blood.

We then cut to Leslie's trial, which is what the rest of the film is about (Marshall, despite being the most well-known actor in the film now, only is in the movie for a brief appearance).  Leslie makes up a lie on the stand, claiming that she shot Geoffrey in self-defense, and the judge and prosecution seem to eat it up; she is a respectable woman on paper, and there is no one to speak otherwise for the victim.

However, Leslie wrote Geoffrey a letter (thus the title) the night he died begging her to come over, and this could doom the case.  After a conversation with her lawyer, Leslie takes her husband's life savings to Li-Ti and bribes her to get the letter back (life was so much simpler and more trusting before Xerox). She is successful, and in an odd twist, Leslie gets away with the murder in court.  The film's final scene, though, shows her husband finding out about the letter.  She confesses the crime to him, how she was driven to Geoffrey's arms because she had been neglected for years by her husband, and how she even now still loves Geoffrey.  Her husband's punishment to her is to snatch away her hopes of returning to London and her old life; they will stay in Singapore and she will remain miserable.  In an odd twist (I didn't see this coming for such an early film), this is where the story ends.  There is comeuppance for Leslie, but she never has to go through another trial over her crimes.

The film is a weird juxtaposition for me as a reviewer on whether I would recommend it (I consider anything at three stars or higher to be a recommendation).  On the one hand, the film's racist overtones are hard to ignore.  Li-Ti and On Chi Seng (a Chinese man who helps in the blackmail scheme) are both depicted as duplicitous and always through the lens of how they are perceived by the film's white characters.  Despite Leslie being the murderer and Li-Ti being the wronged woman, the film doesn't really proceed that way during their only scene together; instead, we see Li-Ti being the "evil" one and Leslie being the frightened victim.  The movie lacks any sort of shading for the Chinese characters, and treats them all as stereotypes.  The cinema's treatment of people of color would unfortunately take decades to make much progress in this department.

On the other hand, Eagels is aces in the main role in the film.  While many performers of this era were hindered by moving from silent film acting to sound, Eagels had been a huge star on Broadway, and so the more theatrical speaking world of the talkies wasn't a stretch for her as an actress.  Thus, we got a more complete performance here, and she nails the melodrama of the role, while still finding ways to layer a confused woman.  She's not entirely willing to admit to herself what she has done, much less those around her.

Eagels died at the age of 39 after a really remarkable and adventurous life (seriously, check out the woman's IMDB biography page), and so with The Letter she became the first actor ever to receive an Academy Award nomination posthumously.  She lost to Mary Pickford in Coquette (generally considered one of the worst performances to ever receive an Academy Award), and as a result of her untimely death, is little mentioned today.  Have you seen any of her films?  If so, what are your thoughts on Eagels?  And don't you wish that instead of doing yet another biopic on someone we already know by heart (say, Marilyn Monroe) that Hollywood would reinvestigate one of the great early stars onscreen?

OVP: The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1929)

Film: The Hollywood Revue of 1929
Stars: Conrad Nagel, Jack Benny, Joan Crawford, Marion Davies, Anita Page, Marie Dressler, Buster Keaton, John Gilbert, Norma Shearer, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy
Director: Charles F. Reisner
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Picture)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars (with a caveat below)

Contrary to what it says below, this is not my first Best Picture nominee-it's actually my 275th.  But it is the first nominee since I've started chronicling the OVP on the blog, so hooray for Best Pictures!  And what a strange but spectacular film to start with.

There's a part of me that wants to address the caveat right now, and so I will (hell, I'm the one who is writing here).  This film is not a narrative film in the traditional sense, and so therefore it's difficult to rank it alongside the other films of the year, and indeed, alongside other Best Pictures).  There are parts of the film, which I'll get to in a minute, that are pure and utter joy-a 5/5 star cavalcade if there ever was one.  But this is essentially a variety program-it's not the sort of film you'd ever see today, because you'd see it on television (or you would, if we still did variety programs instead of just results night on American Idol and The Voice).  So I'm going with a 3/5 because some of the musical numbers work well, some are horribly dated and probably weren't that great to begin with, and that seems to be a solid compromise.  I've seen none of the other 1928-29 nominees (and one of them is purportedly lost for all time-The Patriot by Ernst Lubitsch, check your attics!), but if none meet the 3/5 star ranking, this will almost certainly be my strangest Best Picture choice.

But let's get into the movie.  A musical revue, our masters of ceremony are Jack Benny and Conrad Nagel, though Nagel seems to disappear after about twenty minutes (being one of the studio's biggest stars at the time, he was probably rushed off to a different film), and so Benny does most of the heavy lifting in his film debut.  From a retrospective angle, the fascinating thing for me was the sort of, "where are they now?" aspect of the movie.  Not the actual question (this film is from 1929-they are all long gone), but the celebrity status of everyone.  In 1929, these were some of the biggest stars in the world, largely on equal footing from the poster.  Over eighty years later, Joan Crawford and Buster Keaton are still huge names, and Laurel & Hardy and Norma Shearer are somewhat familiar at least to cinephiles, but Marie Dressler, Conrad Nagel, and John Gilbert are names only known to the most devoted of film fans.

Crawford, by the way, does a song-and-dance to start the film, which is thoroughly enjoyable for the sheer sake of seeing Joan doing her flapper routine for the world to see.  Crawford, one of the biggest stars in film history, was always a trooper, doing whatever a film required, and she dances and sings with the best of them at the beginning of the film.  The bits with Keaton and Laurel & Hardy are slightly less adventurous, as anyone familiar with them have seen these bits a zillion times before.  The truly amazing performances are the ballet contortions and extended sequences, which include, and I'm not kidding here, a woman being used as a jump rope by three other men in a scene that OSHA would have killed in a nanosecond decades later.  There's a number of random song-and-dances, including hammy late-in-life success Marie Dressler (who was about to have two of her biggest career successes and her only two Academy Award nominations in the next couple of years).

And of course, there's the technicolor sequences, so vibrant and bold, and the two scenes that were ripped off by the most classic of musicals, Singin in the Rain.  The first, the balcony scene from Romeo & Juliet (played by Norma Shearer and John Gilbert), which Jean Hagen and Gene Kelly would memorably spoof, which isn't nearly as awful as you would think-Gilbert would be the most high profile of actors to lose their career from the silent-to-sound transition, and though he has a serviceable tenor, it is markedly different from the strong lady's man he was trying to portray on-screen.  Shearer, of course, would find mad success in the "talkies" and become one of MGM's biggest stars in the coming decade, with an incredible six Oscar nominations.

And finally, the film ends with the classic Hollywood song "Singin in the Rain," with the entire cast coming out for the number (if you ever wanted to see Joan Crawford channel Gene Kelly, here's your chance, and notice Buster Keaton, who was not yet allowed to speak on screen, being the only person on stage not singing).  I do have to admit that it would have made the film twice as nice had they figured out a way to get Garbo into the movie (can you even imagine Garbo in a vaudeville act?!?), but as I stated above, a fun but hit-and-miss movie the likes of which you wish you could see again today, if only for the nostalgia of it all.

What about you-do you have a favorite number from this movie?  Are you, like I, not as well-versed in the late 1920's cinema or are you secretly listing the filmographies of Marion Davies and Bessie Love right now?  And what do you think Garbo would have done had she been in the picture (she was scheduled to star, but was pulled due to scheduling)?