Category: Best Actor

1939 – James Stewart

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

OK, I can understand why this was such a popular movie, especially considering when it was made.  It was only a few years before the start of WWII, and it was a movie that was designed to inspire patriotism and good old fashioned American values, as if America was the only place in the world where there were good and wholesome people.  Just look at how our presidents of old like Lincoln, Jefferson, and Washington were so prominently displayed.  Just don’t look too hard…

And James Stewart could so easily be seen as the embodiment of that idealistic small town goodness that ends up saving the day.  He plays the title character of Mr. Smith, someone whose wholesome naiveté, whose stalwart belief in the rightness and purity of his own convictions, and whose unwavering determination to always do what’s right in the face of evil, teaches others to abandon their nefarious ways to become honest and repentant.  Doesn’t Stewart just have that kind of face?  But on top of that, he could actually act.

In the beginning of the movie he played someone who was unrealistic.  I’m sorry but when I see a grown man using the phrase “gee whiz“ I need to roll my eyes, just a bit.  But the sinful city of Washington DC soon leaves its mark on him and he begins to see the world more clearly.  Obviously, Stewart could pull off the naïve small town boy.  But the more calloused righteous crusader allowed him to show more strength, determination, and conviction than he could at the beginning.  He got to portray physical toughness, mental stamina, and the sheer exhaustion of both.  It was in those climactic scenes where Stewart really got to show the audiences his strong skills as an actor.

The filibuster scene was so well done, and I suspect that it’s what earned Stewart his nomination.  The sweat on his face, the hoarseness of his voice, and his unstable movements really drove home the illusion that he had been on his feet and talking without ceasing for nearly twenty-four hours.  It is what made the rest of the heavy-handed patriotism of the film worth wading through.  And I guess that after watching that sequence, I don’t begrudge Stewart his Best Actor nomination.

1939 – Mickey Rooney

Babes in Arms

It’s a good thing I’m rating Mickey Rooney’s performance and not the movie.  It may have been acceptable in 1939, but dear God, this one didn’t age well.  The movie was shamefully racist, even going so far as to show an entire stage of white performers wearing black-face in one of the films many musical numbers.  And both Rooney and Judy Garland were there in the forefront of that scene.

 Rooney was only nineteen years old when Babes in Arms was released.  But as could many actors of the day, he could sing… well, sort-of… and he could dance.  I’m just saying that singing clearly wasn’t his best talent.  He was primarily an actor, and he could do that pretty well… uh… most of the time.  But I wouldn’t have nominated him for Best Actor.  And I have two very specific reasons why.

First, this was a musical.  You’d think that a lead actor in a musical should be able to sing.  And yes, he sang a few lines passably well, but the lion’s share of the male singing in the film was given to Douglas McPhail, who had an incredible voice.  Rooney only sang in fairly soft passages and for only a few measures at a time.  The rest of his singing was done in what I sometimes call speak-singing.  He basically spoke his lyrics rhythmically.

Second, and I know I might be a little unpopular for saying this, but I’ve never been a huge fan of Rooney’s over-the-top style of acting during his younger years.  Most of the time, he was fine, good even, like when he was arguing with his father, or when he had a romantic scene with Garland.  His comedy bits were good, too, like when he was impersonating Clark Gable and Lionel Barrymore.

But then there was that small scene where he hammed up his performance so much that it took me out of the story.  Early in the movie, he is given a hundred dollars for a song he has written.  He suddenly turned into a looney-toons cartoon character, hooting, screeching, and gibbering like he belonged in an insane asylum.   To me, that’s not good acting.  That’s just ridiculous.  Maybe I should blame the director for that, but his performance in that scene wasn’t at all Oscar-worthy.

1939 – Laurence Olivier

Wuthering Heights

Laurence Olivier did a fantastic job in this movie.  The role was emotionally dynamic and had a wildly intense climax.  The character of Heathcliff was not particularly a likeable character, but then, he wasn’t supposed to be.  He was angry, vengeful, and passionate to a fault, all traits that, as a typical British actor, Olivier was not supposed to display.  Case in point, look at the roll David Niven portrayed in this movie.  But Olivier broke that mold in an incredibly powerful way.

Heathcliff was so madly in love with Cathy that his every action in life was with the goal of either being with her, or being near her.  Even his loveless marriage to her husband’s sister was done with the goal of being close to her in mind.   And when she was dying, he attended her on her deathbed, supplanting her husband’s rightful place at her side, he sobbed over her dead body.  And in that climactic scene, he begs her ghost to haunt him and drive him mad until he could join her in death.

That was where Olivier showed those raw emotions that, as a Brit, he was not supposed to show.  But he knew that the part demanded the sobbing, the deep emotional trauma, the reckless giving in to his passions.  Olivier really delivered.  And I think that maybe his performance seemed just a little more over-the-top than it otherwise might have been, because the incredibly subdued David Niven was standing right next to him.

But his performance was more than that one final scene.  The role required a distinct difference of portrayal from the beginning of the movie to the end.  Heathcliff came from humble peasant beginnings, but later became an angry and vengeful man of wealth and power.  Olivier played both facets of the character well, one with a mix of humility and fire, the other with aggression and obsession.  Though he was only thirty-two when he played the part of Heathcliff, Olivier did a great job with the complex character.  He seemed to carry himself like an older actor with more experience.  There was a confidence about him that was unmistakable.  In fact, had I been one of the Academy voters, I would have voted for him instead of Robert Donat.  Just sayin’.

1939 – Clark Gable

Gone With the Wind

This was an incredible epic movie, and Gable, playing the iconic part of Rhett Butler, was perfectly cast.  He was awesome, and honestly, he was my favorite part of the movie.  This was the perfect combination of a well-written character, and a skillful actor who knew exactly what he was doing.  Not only did Gable look the part, he understood the role. 

What I loved about Rhett and the way Gable played him was that he wasn’t a typical Southern Gentlemen.  He was crude, honest, charming, manipulative, and completely unapologetic about it.  He told the truth whether or not it was what people wanted to hear, or whether or not he would become popular.  He’s the kind of guy, who, if asked, “Does this dress make me look fat?” would answer, “Nope.  Your fat makes you look fat.”  But he’d say it with such charm that you wouldn’t be able to get mad at him.

Part of it was the way the character was written, but the rest was how Clark Gable played it.  He exuded confidence and affability.  He had a swagger that was disarming.  And his genuine smile certainly didn’t hurt much.  And he had a way of laughing in the face of danger.  He rarely lost his composure or his sense of humor, and when he did, it was almost always because of his Achilles heel, Scarlet O’Hara.

He loved her because, as he stated more than once, she was like him.  They were survivors, resourceful, and pragmatic, but also passionate at the same time.  Rhett Butler was actually a pretty complex character.  The dichotomy of his outward persona and his weakness when it came to Scarlet, constantly pulled him in different directions. But this wasn’t Gable’s first rodeo.  He seemed to handle each facet of Rhett with an easiness about him that had to have been innate.

I especially liked him in the scene where he is drunk and taunting Scarlet, just before he ended up… well… raping her.  Where he was usually cheerful, logical, and easy going, he was really dangerous in this scene.  It was so well played by both the actors and it was a really powerful moment.  Great job, Clark!

1939 – Robert Donat

Goodbye Mr. Chips

Ok, so Robert Donat won the award for Best Actor, and I’m not so sure I agree with his win.  Don’t get me wrong, he turned in a pretty good performance, but I might have voted for Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind.  And the reason is that Donat didn’t create so much of a character, as he created a caricature.  He played the title role of Mr. Chips, and was required to play him in different stages of life between the ages of twenty-five and eighty-eight.  And in true British fashion, he played a nearly emotionless stick-in-the-mud.  That is, until he becomes really old.  Then he becomes a nearly spry cartoon character.

I don’t know.  In his youth, he acted old, and when he was old, he acted young.  Maybe that was the way the part was written, but there was a little bit of a disconnect in my brain.  Still, Mr. Chips was a likeable enough character, no matter what age he was portraying.  And Donat did a fine job bringing him to life.  I think maybe he was a little overshadowed whenever he shared the screen with Greer Garson, but that actually lent itself well to the story being told.

Still, I suppose there were a couple of scenes in which Donat earned his award, like the scene in which he proposes to his future wife, while chasing down the train that is taking her away from him.  That was well-acted.  And then there was the scene in which his wife dies in childbirth.  The utter devastation in his face was powerful.  And then there was the scene where he is reading the names of his former students and colleagues who have died in the first World War.  There was no doubt that Donat was a skilled actor.

But I’ll go back to my earlier argument.  When he played the old man, I just didn’t buy it.  He behaved too much like a young man who was pretending to be old.  The makeup artists did a fantastic job, and he really looked the part, but there was just something in the way he behaved, the brightness in his eyes, the bounce in his step, that ruined the illusion of age for me.  So what am I saying?  Did he deserve his Oscar?  Yes, he did.  Did Clark Gable deserve it more?  I think, yes, he did.  At the very least, Gable’s performance displayed a lot more passion.

1938 – James Cagney

Angels With Dirty Faces

I have not seen many films with James Cagney, but I have liked him in those I have.  He was one of those actors who could whip out that quick dialogue and make it seem easy.  And there was a presence about him that was attention-grabbing.  He was handsome in an unconventional way and he knew how to turn on the charm.  Even though he was the movie’s bad guy, you ended up liking him anyway.  He was a gangster who was involved with the mob, a thief, an extortionist, and a murderer.  And on top of all that he was charismatic and likeable.

Not having seen any other movie in which he played a gangster, I don’t know if he used a set of traits of movements every time, but I have seen other actors impersonating him and using his moves.  That sharp little shrug when he was getting ready to do something, the way he walked with that tough-guy attitude, that fire in his eyes that never left his gaze, whether he was pointing a gun at someone or trying to put the moves on a girl. 

And I liked the way he played Rocky.  He wasn’t just bad for the sake of being bad.  He had a softer side.  He made a connection with the Dead End Kids who were pretty important characters in the movie, and you could tell, through his acting, that Rocky felt somewhat paternal towards them.  He clearly saw a version of his younger self in them.

There was only one thing that Cagney did that had me rolling my eyes a little.  In the big shoot-out scene where Rocky gets captured, he is firing six-shooters.  But he looks like he is, I don’t know, furiously working some kind of hand pump, when he is shooting multiple slugs in a row.  It’s like he is emphasizing each shot with a forward thrust of his hand, like he is hammering a nail.  I’m not a marksman, but it just seems like his accuracy would be zero without a steady hand, and never-mind the recoil of the weapon.  The silly motion just made him look like an actor who was playing at shooting a toy gun.  Yet somehow, he was more accurate than the police trying to capture him.  But that’s ok.  Cagney was really a song and dance man, like in Yankee Doodle Dandy, not a real gangster.

1938 – Leslie Howard

Pygmalion

Well, here we are with another British actor who goes out of his way to keep his emotions hidden.  But Leslie Howard benefited from a script for which this is a necessary personality trait.  Howard was perfect for the part.  As a matter of fact, the lack of emotion in the character of Professor Henry Higgins is a major plot point in the story.  So I paid close attention to the subtext, the subtlety, and the intentional lack of emotion in Howard’s performance.

Higgins’ insensitive nature was played perfectly.  The point is driven home in a single exchange near the end of the movie.  He says, “My manners are exactly the same as Colonel Pickering,” to which Eliza responds, “That’s not true.  He treats a flower girl as if she were a duchess.”  Higgins quickly quips, “And I treat a duchess as if she were a flower girl.”  That sums up the character pretty well, and Howard played the part that way throughout the entire film.  He clearly understood the character he was playing, and based on other film’s I’ve seen the actor in, I think it was because it somewhat resembled his own personality, but that’s just conjecture.

There was only one scene in the narrative where Higgins really loses his temper and nearly strikes Eliza.  He yells at her, barely raising his voice, but the emotion actually shows through his eyes and his furrowed brow.  It was a good scene for the actor to let loose, but only a little.  Howard gave the camera just enough to let us know the power of the character’s anger, but kept it under tight, careful control, preventing it from erupting into actual violence.

The rest of the movie, he played things pretty even keel, which again, was a defining characteristic of Professor Higgins.  Yes, there were moments of exhaustion, amusement, frustration, and surprise, but like the anger, it was all kept to small, measured amounts.  The only scene in which I think I would have liked a stronger reaction from Howard, is when Eliza makes her entrance into the ball.  Yes, Higgins was supposed to be worried about the grand deception, but I wanted a more profound moment when he sees her in all her glory, looking like true royalty, admiring her not for what he’d created in her, but for who she was in that moment.

1938 – Robert Donat

The Citadel

Robert Donat was ok.  He wasn’t great, he wasn’t bad.  He was ok.  It seems to me, there was a kind of a trend in movies from the 1930s and 40s, especially if they are historical dramas, which the Academy seemed to really like.  The movie goes along without resolving the main conflict until the last few minutes.  There, the protagonist delivers an impassioned speech that usually is one of those “how can you be so short-sighted / narrow-minded” speeches, after which, the end credits immediately start to roll.  And it seems to me that this is the big scene that earned Robert Donat his Oscar nomination.

I want to make it clear that I think his performance in the rest of the film was just fine, but I don’t see how he really stretched himself as an actor.  I don’t think he displayed more than 4 emotions in the entire movie.  And when he did show us something new, it was rarely very dynamic or impactful.  There was a scene in which he saves the life of a newborn baby.  That one was a good scene, but that was about it.

But I have a notion that it was a decidedly British performance.  British actors, especially the male actors tended to keep their emotions in check.  The proper Englishman was the calmest and most subdued.  Unfortunately, this often comes across as dispassionate on the screen.  And the trick is, I’ve seen Robert Donat in other films where he displayed more gravitas, more emotionally animated.  Still, he played the part pretty well, as it was written.

The movie followed professional career of Dr. Andrew Manson.  As a younger physician, he is idealistic with a desire to work for the betterment of all mankind.  But after years of poverty and being underappreciated, he falls into a cushy job where he gets paid a lot of money to pamper wealthy socialites without having to do any real work or altruistic research.  But once his new ways inadvertently cause the death of his best friend, he remembers why he got into medicine in the first place, and he returns to the passion of his youth.  Cue the power speech.  Still, I have to give Donat credit for making a distinct difference between the two doctors. 

1938 – Charles Boyer

Algiers

I’ll be honest.  I’m not exactly sure how I feel about Charles Boyer’s performance in this film.  On the one hand, he was good, though I wouldn’t call him great.  On the other, I’ve seen him play the exact same character before in other films.  On the one hand, he seemed perfectly appropriate for the part.  On the other, I got the vague sense that he was trying too hard to be… something, and I couldn’t pinpoint what that was.  The performance didn’t feel labored, but it also didn’t feel at ease.

He played a notorious thief called Pepe le Moko, who is trapped like a prisoner in the Casbah, the seedy, criminal-laden quarter of Algiers.  He wants to escape and return to his beloved France.  But both the Algerian and French police are waiting for him to come out of hiding so they can capture him.  The way Boyer played Pepe was mostly dark and brooding.  There were a few scenes where he showed a different side, like his love scenes with Hedy Lamarr, who, incidentally, also turned in a performance that felt a little forced.

Now, to his credit, he didn’t let his own native French accent get in his way.  In fact, it was a distinct advantage within the narrative.  And I never had any problem understanding him.  His accent was thick, but it was appropriate.  At one point, he even had a conversation with Gaby about places in Paris that he loved, and it was nice to hear him speak in his own language, if only briefly.

As I reflect on the film, I’m trying to pick a scene that stood out to me as great, something that might justify his Oscar nomination, but nothing really comes to mind.  As a criminal and a thug, he was never overtly intimidating.  As a lover, he was only mildly romantic, though there was a darkness and a bit of danger in his pursuit of Gaby, which I kind of liked.  And then there was that weird scene where he breaks out into song because he’s in love.  Boy, that scene came out of nowhere and didn’t fit the rest of the movie in any way.  He starts singing from his balcony, everyone stops to listen and dance a little, and you hear musicians accompanying him.  And you know it was “in story” because he asks someone, if they liked his singing.  It made no sense.  This was not a musical, but there he was, singing???

1938 – Spencer Tracy

Boys Town

Spencer Tracy was really the hot ticket in the late 30s.  He had won the Best Actor award the previous year for Captains Courageous, and here he is again, winning for Boys Town.  And he played a completely different character in each film.  I mean night and day difference.  And there was a reason for all the recognition.  He was really a skilled actor who never failed to look completely at ease in front of the camera.  And his role in Boys Town, Father Flanagan, seemed to suit him perfectly. 

He played a saint of a man, a priest, whose motives were as wholesome as anyone could want.  He seemed to be perfect, maybe a little too perfect.  But I don’t blame Tracy for that.  That was how the script was written.  But Tracy was a natural in the part.  He always had the right motives, and always knew the right things to say.  He was calm and mild mannered, until the climax of the film where a strong right hook was needed to save the day.  He took being good and kind and gentle to a whole new level.  Such a man could easily have been a caricature, but I don’t think he was.  Tracy was good enough to prevent that from happening.

Tracy played Father Flanagan as the priest we all whished we knew.  He had a burning desire to help people, and he didn’t just talk about it.  He took action to improve the lives of those in need.  When he saw a need to help young boys who were living on the streets, he moved proverbial mountains to give them food, a home, educations, activities, and a sense of social responsibility.  He did things that should have been impossible, accomplishing miracles through the strength of his convictions and his devout faith in God.  And when you watch Tracy play the part, you feel that it isn’t just a role in a movie for him.  It’s as if the actor is playing out his own beliefs.

If the character had any flaws, it would be that he was a bit of a bully, except that his motives were always in line with Godly behavior and wholesome Christian values.  The thing is, he would use his faith and the weight of his position as a man of God to pressure and manipulate people to do what they normally wouldn’t do.  Now, was that a bit of mild thuggery, or just a priest being passionate, and being able to convince people to do what he needed them to do.  Maybe a bit of both, I think.  It’s a fine line.

But another thing that stood out to me about Tracy’s performance is that he was obviously good with children.  He loved the young boys in a completely wholesome and acceptable way.  He seemed to put his own love for children into his performance, and it showed.  So, nicely done, Tracy.