1937: Fay Bainter in "Make Way for Tomorrow"

We're revisiting 1937 this month leading up to the next Supporting Actress Smackdown. As always Nick Taylor will suggest a few alternates to Oscar's ballot.

We begin 1937 with Fay Bainter, the third-ever winner of the Supporting Actress Oscar for Jezebel in 1938 (you may have heard about it last year!) in Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow. McCarey viewed the film as his greatest achievement, to the point that when he received his Best Director Oscar for The Awful Truth the same year Make Way for Tomorrow earned no nominations, he opened his acceptance speech by saying he won for the wrong movie. We can discuss the considerable merits of both films about couples splitting up and staying together, along with how brilliantly they showcase McCarey’s skills with tone, blocking, performance shaping, scene construction, as well as its enduring legacy in films like Tokyo Story and Love is Strange. Bainter distinguishing herself with the best supporting turn in either McCarey film, taking on what might have been the film's most unsympathetic role and turning her into a thoughtful, utterly human figure...

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"Make Way for Tomorrow" across film history

by Cláudio Alves

"Thanks, but you gave it to me for the wrong picture." 

Those were Leo McCarey's words upon winning the Best Director Oscar of 1937. His victory was for the screwball classic The Awful Truth, though the filmmaker would have preferred if the honor had been bestowed upon another of his films. In 1937, McCarey not only directed one of Old Hollywood's most beloved comedies, but he also helmed one of its most devastating tearjerkers. According to Orson Welles, Make Way for Tomorrow could make a stone cry…

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75th Anniversary: In Old Chicago's Stolen Oscar!

On this very day in 1938, 75 years ago, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences met for the 10th time to honor the films of 1937. There was still no television to compete with but that also meant no televised ceremony. Which is too bad really because how great would it be to see one of Oscar's very oddest anecdotes happening "live"? According to legends, though the legends conflict either an Alice Brady impostor or a impostor Brady representative accepted the trophy which was never recovered! Drama. What then? Either the statue was replaced 12 days later or the more dramatic the statue was never replaced. This much is true: Brady, the second winner of this then brand new category, died a year and a half later at only 47 years of age.

In Old Chicago
Alice Brady plays the matriarch of the O'Leary clan (anniversary aside, since we're approaching St. Patrick's Day, it felt like appropriate viewing). After the father dies in a dumb luck tragedy on the way to the big city in 1854, dragged to his death by runaway horses, widowed Brady raises her three sons alone in the rapidly rising city described in the title cards as "a fighting, laughing, aggressive American city". Within seconds of arriving she makes a name for herself as a talented laundry woman.

Two of her sons become major power players, one an honest crusading lawyer (Don Ameche), the other a charming playboy (gorgeous Tyrone Power) with a taste for money and women of questionable provenance.

Yes, by all means Tyrone, find a reason to get your shirt off...

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