1934 – Grace Moore
One Night of Love
Hmmm… Was the role worthy of a Best Actress nomination? I’m not sure. I mean, the character of Mary Barrett was a bit of a one-note part. Well, she was an aspiring opera star, so I guess she was a many-note part. All kidding aside, Grace Moore, herself, was a famous opera star in real life. She was an operatic soprano nicknamed the Tennessee Nightingale. Her films brought opera to a wider audience than her stage work.
In One Night of Love, the story was almost secondary to the music. The movie was nearly an hour and a half, and at least a third of it was made up of Grace singing. In order to nominate her for Best Actress, her performances in Bizet’s Carmen and Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, need to be considered as much as her performance as the romantic lead of the movie. But really those scenes were all about her singing rather than about her acting. Or maybe they were one and the same. Either way, she was nice to watch and a delight to listen to.
But that’s just it. Her acting was just fine, I guess, but I didn’t really see it as any better than her contemporaries. I mean, all you have to do is consider the two women she was up against in the Best Actress category. The winner was Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night, and the other nominee was Bette Davis in Of Human Bondage. Moore just wasn’t on the same level as the other two leading ladies. She was like a gimmick because of her fantastic voice. There was nothing wrong with her skills as an actress, but they paled in comparison to her rivals.
That being said, she did have a great voice. One of the things I’ve noticed about movies from those early sound films is that ladies’ voices, especially when they were singing, sounded shrill and sometimes squeaky, and I suspect it was because sound engineers and technicians were still perfecting their craft. The higher the voice, the more shrill the sound. But most of the time, Grace’s voice had a full and lustrous quality to it that was perfection. A few of her high notes were a little piercing, but for the most part her vocal production and the sound recording were wonderful, and I can easily see why she was such a popular opera star.