Oscar Completism: Unfinished Business and Happy Endings?
Sunday, April 16, 2023 at 1:00PM Baby Clyde's Oscar Completist Diaries -- Part 2
(If you missed part one read that first!)
When COVID hit I happened to be in Colombia. I wasn’t frolicking on the beach in 90-degree heat or scuba diving in the beautiful clear blue Caribbean Sea but watching the Best Actress nominees of 1969 (That’s what holidays are for right?). Jean Simmons and Liza Minnelli had somehow passed me by over the years and with my new Russian pal I was able to fill in all the gaps. By the time I was back in London and lockdown had kicked in, I’d decided to make a project of it. Using Kevin Jacobson’s And The Runner-Up Is podcast as my companion I started watching every nomination in reverse order from 1969 down to 1927. I rewatched everything I’d already seen and added in the first-time watches along the way, noting everything down on a colour coded spreadsheet as I went and listening to the corresponding podcast episode (I promise I’m really not as sad as this suggests. I used to be a cool 90’s Club kid, remember!!!). This made for some very interesting stats on my Letterboxd Most Watched List – The best place on the entire internet.
2020 was full of stars of the 50’s and 60’s (Sophia Loren won) whilst 2021 was made up of the biggest names from the 30’ and 40’s (And Beulah Bondi). Cary Grant came out on top. By the end of the year Kevin had invited me on the podcast to discuss the Best Picture race of 1935. I waffled on for 2 hours and 20 minutes...
The further I went the harder it became...
Is Louise Dresser any good in this film? Who knows!
High-res copies of almost everything can be procured from the 40’s but things get trickier when it gets to the late 20’s and early 30’s. Some of the prints were in extremely bad condition. Thanks to Kevin I managed to get hold of a copy of A Ship Comes In (1928) but I have no idea if Louise Dresser’s performance was worthy of a nomination as the quality was so bad her entire face seemed to be made up of about 4 pixels.
By this time, I was nearly done. Every ropey early sound film and shonky musical with static camera work had been viewed. I’d seen Garbo talk; Swanson sing and George Arliss repeatedly make a total fool of himself. This just left me with the so called ‘Lost’ films to track down.
Turns out, there is no film that is entirely lost.
The first Best Actor Emil Jannings was awarded for two films The Last Command in which he’s brilliant and The Way of All Flesh a film of which there are only 3 minute of surviving footage.
The Rogue Song with Lawrence Tibbet’s Best Actor nomination from 1929/30 can only be seen in a few snippets that have been cobbled together as no complete print is available.
"The Rogue Song" - only snippets remain
There’s a trailer for The Patriot another Emil Jannings star vehicle for which Lewis Stone was nommed in 1928/29 and from the looks of it should have beaten all the other Best Picture contenders in that woeful year.
Which left three films for which I would have to make a pilgrimage……
From 1931/32 the Best Picture nominee East Lynne starring the shockingly charisma free trio of Ann Harding, Clive Brook, and Conrad Nagel. It was possible to watch the majority of this on YouTube, but the final reel is missing (The whole thing can now be viewed). From 1934 the nursing drama The White Parade starring Loretta Young and most importantly my final Best Actress nominee Betty Compson in 1928’s The Barker.
It had always seemed ridiculous to travel all that way from London to the UCLA Film and Television Archive in Los Angeles just for this reason but last summer I decided that the time had come and after years of being unable to go anywhere, 5,500 miles seemed like a small commitment to finally end my 37-year odyssey. It also helps that by the time you get to my advanced age you have friends around the world making international travel a lot less expensive. I emailed UCLA and after having a very pleasant exchange with one of their archivists and answering a few questions about my purpose and credentials I was told the requested films would be waiting for me on a set date. I felt like a fraud.
Seeing as this was such an important occasion, I decided made a big deal of it. Starting in Toronto I went to TIFF for my annual fix of that year’s Oscar Bait. I then travelled to New York to meet up with our esteemed editor and take in a Broadway show or two (And a very drunken sing along at Marie's Crisis), before heading to L.A. for a quick visit to my spiritual home the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures (It’s fine, if a bit dry; They really should have asked me for some input before opening).
Finally, the day had arrived and I spent nearly 2 hours on a bus travelling from the other side of Los Angeles to the UCLA campus (I love a bus), to finally watch these films which had loomed large in my life since I was a teenager. After a few wrong turns and getting myself hopelessly lost in the corridors of the college I eventually found the Powell Library, Instructional Media Lab and was ushered into a small screening booth with a TV and 3 DVD’s waiting for me. It was kind of surreal.
Loretta Young vehicle "The White Parade"
I started with East Lynne as I only needed to see the last reel, which turned out to be absolutely bonkers. It’s not a good film by any stretch of the imagination but far superior to some of the other tedious melodramas that were nominated in the same era. The ending was 100% worth the wait and has to be seen to be believed, which luckily you can now do on YouTube. I'd rank it 4th out of the 5 nominees that year.
The White Parade is a superior soaper with Loretta playing a trainee nurse encountering all the medical emergencies and romantic entanglements you’d expect in this kind of fare. It’s very odd that she wasn’t nominated as she’s the entire show and there were only 3 Best Actress nominees that year, but she was in good company as Myrna Loy was snubbed for The Thin Man as well. I ranked it 8 out of the 12 nominees that year.
Lastly came The Barker, the real reason I’d travelled all that way. It’s a real shame the film is so little seen because it’s really rather great. A weird combo of silent and talkie, sometimes changing from one to the other within the same scene. There’s a fantastically realised carnival setting and the four stars are all terrific. Whilst she would certainly be placed in Supporting these days it’s clear why Betty Compson got her nom. She’s a real stand-out as the manipulative show girl. It’s unfortunate that her career didn’t really take off from here as she had far greater star quality than many of her more successful contemporaries (Did I mention Ann Harding?). You can catch her a decade later though still stealing scenes in one of my all-time favourite screwballs Hitchcock’s Mr & Mrs Smith.
Once I’d finished, I wanted to tell the two college kids behind the desk all about my reason for visiting, but instead just meekly handed back the DVD’s and left. I really wish I’d taken a photo with them or something to commemorate the moment.
I finished my trip with a visit for the first time in 20 years to The Hollywood Walk of Fame, the skankiest tourist attraction in the world, and the rather more serene Hollywood Forever Cemetery where I was happy to see the graves of Mickey, Judy and Tyrone Power but overjoyed to find that of Virginia Rappe (I may have shed a tear).
What a trip.
Virginia Rappe's grave
The initial plan had been to make The Barker my very last nominated performance. It felt fitting I should end with the Best Actress category as that’s where I’d begun all those years before. Sadly, things didn’t quite go as I wished. Those pesky modern male acting nominees meant that I still had to work my way through recent clunkers I’d been avoiding like, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, American Sniper, The Last Samurai and finally the laughably bad Eastern Promises. To think I could have ended it in the movie capital of the world watching an elusive Best Actress nominee but instead the finale was a shonky accented Viggo Mortensen nakedly fending off knife wielding attackers in a London sauna. Total anti-climax.
It was October 30th, 2022 and I didn’t know what to do. It felt like some kind of celebration was in order, but I no longer know where the cool nightclubs are and haven’t spoken to my drug dealer in a decade, so I had a glass of red wine, called my brother to tell him the good news and watched Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Looking back now I should have watched The Trip to Bountiful again. Damn!
Best Actress journey - DONE!
So, what’s next?
I have vague plans to start all the Best International Feature nominees and I’ll be pestering you lot with my Best and Worst lists from this completist journey in the upcoming weeks, but the truth is I’m probably going to start all over again. I did 1969 – 1927 in totality during lockdown so I'll focus on 1970 – 2022 again any day now. Some of those 80’s films I don’t think I’ve seen since the 80’s so will relive the Video Van days and rewatch that 1986 Best Actress line-up.
I’ve also written a short film. It’s in the early stages of production now. They say write what you know so I wrote about a little gay boy in the 1980’s who is obsessed with the Oscars. I’ll be needing your help with a certain campaign in a few years’ time dear reader. It only seems fair.
I have a confession to make before we close.
A night on the town with Nathaniel
I lied to you. I’m a failure. A fraud. At the beginning of this series I said that I had seen every ‘available’ acting nomination, which is true if slightly disingenuous. There is one performance missing. One that I haven’t seen. One that wasn’t available. At the very first Academy Awards Richard Barthelmess was nominated for two films The Patent Leather Kid and The Noose. I’ve seen the former, but the only copy of the latter is apparently buried away in the archives of The Museum of Modern Art in New York. My trip to Manhattan had initially been to fit in some Broadway shows and a drunken night on the razzle with Nathaniel around viewing this rare cinematic classic. But then I spoke to MoMA who weren’t sure if they had it, or if it was possible to view it, or if it was even at that site, before discovering the archives were shut for the whole of the month anyway so all of this was irrelevant.
I’ll be going to back TIFF in September then heading to NYC as usual... only this year I have unfinished business!!!
Reader Comments (9)
Ummm... Eastern Promises is fantastic. I love that the Viggo movies somehow became the moment the Academy opened up to Cronenberg performances, even if I wished they'd opened up wider.
I've seen "The Noose" is available on the internet on two different websites (I haven't tried either yet myself). The Rogue Song is also available in a weird version. The entire soundtrack still exists, and someone syc-ed up the half hour or so of existing film clips to the soundtrack (I intend to get around to watching this, but, again, I haven't yet). As for Eastern Promises, I think it's one of the best films to ever get a nomination. Viggo Mortensen should have won Best Actor in 2007.And there have been plenty of worse films nominated lately, starting with CODA and Shape of Water, which even WON Best Picture (cough, cough, ptui, ptui).
I've seen the weird soundtrack version of A Rogue Song but haven't tracked The Noose down anywhere. Please DM me on Twitter if you know where it can be found.
As for Eastern Promises - https://boxd.it/3nAM9j
I saw it was on something called Otosection. As I said, I haven't tried this out myself, but when I looked at the site, it looked complicated. The other site was for a different film with the same title.
Dear Baby Clyde,
LOVED your writing about seeing old movies and the rest of it. I think I probably disagree with you about Eastern Promises, but that's what makes the world go round!
I truly appreciate and thank you for your outstanding work. It's very instructive; keep up the good work; it paid off. Bullet Train Green Jacket
Sorry but "Eastern Promises" is fantastic. For a totally overrated Mortensen movie, look to "Captain Fantastic" instead (though, imo, the fault doesn't lie with Viggo). Very enjoyable writeup otherwise!
This is such an engrossing story! I'm particularly drawn in by the thrilling ups and downs of the main characters' business. What really keeps me hooked more that this - is watching the constant fluctuations of the cryptocurrency exchange rates on this website https://icoholder.com/en/icos/ongoing It's incredible to witness how volatile the world of crypto can be, and I find myself eagerly anticipating each new twist and turn in the plot.
Greetings! With so many businesses going digital, it's essential to have a solid SEO strategy in place. I've found https://naturallinks.net/services/full-cycle-seo/on-page-seo/ to be an incredibly helpful resource for learning about on-page optimization. Their insights have helped me improve my website's performance and visibility.