OVP: Actress (1931-32)

OVP: Best Actress (1931-32)

The Nominees Were...

Marie Dressler, Emma

Lynn Fontanne, The Guardsman

Helen Hayes, The Sin of Madelon Claudet

My Thoughts: There are a lot of really terrific lineups that Oscar has pulled together through the years.  Some, like 2001 Best Score, it's so good it still haunts my dreams over what I picked to win, while others (like 2007 Cinematography) I stand tall in my victor choice, but I am just in awe of how strong the quintet that Oscar picked is.  Best Actress of 1931-32...is not one of those lineups.  I currently have 121 Best Actress nominations left to see (I'll hit one more this week, so watch me on Letterboxd if you don't already as I post every film review there rather than just ones that fit our series here), but of the years that I have finished, this is easily the worst Best Actress lineup I've encountered.  I don't even like any of these nominations (none of them will show up in my My Ballot later this week), but the rules of the OVP are simple-I gotta pick at least one of them to win, and so we shall proceed.

Marie Dressler is the best film actress of these three (the other two are such stage legends they both got Broadway theaters named after them but Dressler knew movies), and was coming off of an Oscar win the previous year with Emma.  But this has none of the fight of Min and Bill, and Dressler is largely relegated to window dressing in Emma.  The film plays out like a melodrama, and her broad-as-a-barn comedy style is a bad fit for a character that is meant to have some more tender feelings at the end of the picture that I don't think she connected with.  Dressler is very watchable, it's worth noting, but she's not super good in this (and neither is the film itself).

Helen Hayes film was a mixed bag even when it came out (I cannot remember which film critic called it this, but they dubbed it The Sin of Maudlin Claudet) which is both bitchy & accurate.  Hayes plays this character to the hilt, but unlike Dressler has a bit more fun with the camp.  She's not as good of a movie star as Dressler, but she's probably a better actor underneath it all, and it shows as the film progresses, with her getting to scenery-chew, but generally in a way that doesn't make you want to click the remote.  Neither of Hayes Oscar wins were for particularly good movies, which is a pity given how storied her acting legend was in her lifetime.

Speaking of storied acting legends, we have Lynn Fontanne.  Some actresses of her era, like Jeanne Eagels, were able to get to the big screen and just nail their first roles in the cinema.  Fontanne...does not.  The performance probably would've worked on a stage, but we aren't watching on a stage-we're walking on a big-screen, and neither she nor her husband Alfred Lunt can sell this one-note, staid affair, and it feels like they neither make sense as romantic partners in the film, nor as sentient human beings given how stupid the premise of this picture is.  Hard pass.

Other Precursor Contenders: I would assume that in fourth place was one of the women that had recently been nominated for Best Actress and were starring in Best Picture nominees, Marlene Dietrich (Shanghai Express) or Greta Garbo (Grand Hotel).  Perhaps the two (who had a frosty real-life relationship) split the gorgeous European-goddess vote, but it's weird that neither of them got into this field, especially as Dressler & Hayes were their films only citations.

Actors I Would Have Nominated: Dietrich, without a doubt.  The work she's doing in Shanghai Express is not the best she's ever done, but she looks so damned beautiful it's kind of another level of acting (and she is, for the record, terrific).

Oscar’s Choice: Oscar could not deny Helen Hayes playing a hooker (which would become a route that would work for everyone from Donna Reed to Elizabeth Taylor to Kim Basinger in the years that followed).

My Choice: I feel the need to point out that I give Oscars for the OVP in a vacuum.  Marie Dressler, for example, is the better movie star and by far my favorite performer of these three...giving her a statue right now would mean I don't have to worry about her getting bumped for Min and Bill the previous year, which is a field I haven't yet completed so I don't know if she's safe.  But that's not how this works, and of the three, based solely on what's in front of me, I think Hayes is more interesting and "deserves" the win in a field I don't like at all.  Dressler follows, then Fontanne.

Those are my thoughts, but now I want to hear yours!  Are you sticking with Oscar and I with Hayes, or do you want to strike out on your own?  Am I alone in thinking that this is Oscar's worst Best Actress lineup?  And why did Garbo & Dietrich not get layup nominations this year?  Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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

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

OVP: Anastasia (1956)

Film: Anastasia (1956)
Stars: Ingrid Bergman, Yul Brynner, Helen Hayes, Akim Tamiroff
Director: Anatole Litvak
Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best Actress-Ingrid Bergman*, Score)
(Not So) Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

As y'all know, I've been doing a bit of cleaning out of my DVR in recent weeks, and I decided on Thursday & Friday evenings that I was in the mood to both clean out the DVR and to watch something familiar to me, so I watched a trio of movies that we'll get to this week that are going to get the rare "Not So" in front of the Snap Judgment Ranking.  This is normally reserved for when I decide to re-watch a movie and put my thoughts for posterity on this blog, and more often it's for movies I've seen a dozen times.  This isn't the case for the films this week.  While I have seen Anastasia, I haven't seen it more than once, and it's been maybe 20 years since I last watched the picture, so while certain scenes of it are firmly in my memory, there are other sequences where I completely had forgotten they'd even existed.  Eventually we'll get to the 1956 OVP, and the main reason I wanted to re-watch this is the odd juxtaposition of my love for Ingrid Bergman (one of my all-time favorite actresses) and the fact that so many of her Oscar-winning roles are "meh" in my memory.  Anastasia was her second trophy, and one that came after a huge hibernation period (where, arguably, she had her most creative acting starring in five films with her then-husband Roberto Rossellini).

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is a highly fictionalized look at the life of Anna Anderson (here called Anna Koreff, but it's impossible to not see this clearly being about Anderson herself).  Anna (Bergman) is a woman who has been in-and-out of mental hospitals, and remembers little about her childhood.  She bares something of a resemblance to what the Grand Duchess Anastasia might have looked like in adulthood, and General Bounine (Brynner) smells an opportunity.  Along with his associate Boris (Tamiroff), they set about to train Anna to become the Grand Duchess, grilling her with facts, but as they continue they start to question if, in fact, she is the Grand Duchess, as she continues to know things that make them question whether or not she's real.  In the end, Anna never truly proves herself to be who she claims she is, but she convinces the Dowager Empress (Hayes), the Grand Duchess's grandmother, that she is her granddaughter, only to then leave her behind, realizing that she's in love with Bounine, and the two run off together, the Dowager Empress content in the knowledge that at least one member of her family is still alive, and now happy.

There's a weird sort of conundrum here.  The mystery of what happened to the Romanovs, and if in fact the youngest princess did escape and survive the Revolution, was one of the great unsolved mysteries of the 20th Century, something we assumed would never be conclusively proven.  This was certainly the case the first time that I saw this movie in the mid-90's.  However, in 2007, DNA testing was done that proved conclusively that the Czar, his wife, and their five children had all died (they found the body of what was assumed to be Anastasia and her brother Alexei, the final missing two, though it's possible that the other body was of Anastasia's sister Maria) were found and proved that this mystery had a rather sad, humdrum ending; there was not, in fact, a little girl out there who was actually a princess & didn't know it, but instead that little girl died during the Russian Revolution.

In some ways this diminishes this film and some of its grandeur.  We know that Anna Anderson wasn't Anastasia, and while you can suspend belief in the film, it takes something away from Bergman's work if you try to keep this grounded in historical accuracy at all.  The performance isn't great-my memory was correct.  She's fine, and regal, and looks great in a dress, and the one scene between she and Hayes where she has to convinced the Grand Duchess that she could in fact be her granddaughter is the best in the movie (random aside, but it's weird that Bergman won here when Hayes, who is better in the movie, didn't even get nominated considering she was staging something of a comeback at the time on the big screen).  But there's not enough beneath the eyes of this character-there's no sense of what Anna actually believes, which feels off to me.  The score, the only other nomination (again-where were the Costume nominations for this movie?!?) is much better, and thankfully doesn't just rely upon Russian cliches to fill out the music.