OVP: Their Own Desire (1929)

Film: Their Own Desire (1929)
Stars: Norma Shearer, Robert Montgomery, Lewis Stone, Belle Bennett, Helene Millard
Director: E. Mason Hopper
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Actress-Norma Shearer)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

If there's any period in film history I find the hardest to review, it is surely the early talkies.  Coming out of the Sound Era, the marvel of films from this period was more along the lines of "wow, you can actually see someone talk" and not about, exactly, what they were saying itself.  As a result, I usually sit in puzzlement in how to handle these early films with my "born literally decades later" self.  Grading them on a curve is essential, but more to the point I have to sort of change how I'm looking at a piece of work.  By doing so, I can kind of get, for the first time, the appeal of Norma Shearer, a woman who was a massive hit with Oscar in the first decade of his existence, even if I don't know that I'd ever subscribe to giving her the Oscar (at least not yet-I've got some nominations left to go).

(Spoilers Ahead) Shearer, it's worth noting, is proof that not all screen stars are remembered equally and that even the brightest of an era get lost to film history if they aren't careful (I'm talking to you, Jennifer Lawrence).  While Joan Crawford's campy divadom is still relevant enough today that she's the subject of a new TV series and Greta Garbo has become synonymous with reclusive stardom, Norma Shearer is at best remembered as a famous actress of the 1930's, no movie in particular being her calling card.  And yet she was nominated for 5-6 (depending on how you handle, oddly enough, this film) Oscars, a huge number that puts her in the same vein as someone like Amy Adams or Elizabeth Taylor in terms of Oscar.  For this reason, it's worth looking at her early acting style as she was one of the biggest names in the 1930's.

This movie centers around Lally (Shearer), a smart-talking young woman born to a rich writer who is appalled when he finds out that his father is leaving her mother for a more "rouge-using" woman.  She is aghast at him, but soon finds herself in a predicament as she falls for John (Montgomery) a charming young man who also happens to be the son of her future stepmother.  The two of them fight their attraction to one another, but to no use (even if it means her mother is wildly unhappy), and after nearly dying in a storm (a scene that is weirdly edited-we don't even get a hint that the two might be alive until we randomly see them in a cave, killing all suspense), they end up living their happily ever after.

This film is a strange one for a number of reasons, but I want to single out two.  One is the length-this is an extremely short movie, potentially the shortest film ever to win an acting nomination (I can't prove that, but at 65 minutes it's certainly the shortest I've ever seen...if I'm wrong, the comments are there).  That leaves us with an unusually compact script, even if it's predictable, and very little time wasted.  This isn't a bad thing-I quite liked the chemistry between Shearer and Montgomery, and though the acting is a bit dated, I didn't hate the politics if you ignored some of what Montgomery said, and they seem like a couple that would actually fall for each other rather quickly.  The second is that this film has a weird spot in Oscar lore.  This was back in the days of actors getting nominated for multiple films in the same nomination, which normally would have meant that Shearer would have won her Oscar for this and The Divorcee combined, but in reality she just won it for the latter.  This is a pity as I actually liked this performance better-Shearer is more vivacious and interesting, and I feel like the romance works better, but it begs the question of how to count this as a nomination-was she up six times and lost here, or did the Academy not feel a 65 minute film was worthy of getting the Oscar alongside the Best Picture-nominated The Divorcee?  Something to ponder, but Shearer is good but not great here.

Those are my thoughts-how about yours?  Anyone out there already seen Their Own Desire?  If not, share you thoughts on Shearer-what is the performance that will win me over?

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)?