Category: Best Actor

1931-32 – Fredric March

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Without putting too fine a point on it, Fredric March rocked this performance.  He was fantastic.  You wouldn’t think that such a powerful character could be created in what is essentially a horror film, but it did.  But it wasn’t just his portrayal of the evil Mr. Hyde that caught my attention.  It was his wonderful performance as the tortured Dr. Jekyll that sold it.  March played both parts perfectly.

The effects for this movie must also be mentioned.  The transformation scenes were amazing.  According to Wikipedia, “The secret of the transformation scenes was not revealed for decades (Mamoulian himself revealed it in a volume of interviews with Hollywood directors published under the title The Celluloid Muse). Make-up was applied in contrasting colors. A series of colored filters that matched the make-up was then used which enabled the make-up to be gradually exposed or made invisible. The change in color was not visible on the black and white film.

When playing Jekyll, March was a good and earnest young man, maybe a little too much of a slave to love, but certainly honest and with good intentions.  This is proven in the final act, when he realizes he cannot control his alter ego.  His breakdown as he releases his beloved fiancée from her engagement obligations was very well played, honest and fraught with self-pity.  You could really feel the emotion of the character.

But when playing Mr. Hyde, March gave us something special.  According to the story, his primitive self was released.  The makeup of Wally Westmore turned him into a simian horror with canine-like teeth.  Even with my modern desensitization to such things, March really gave us a truly terrifying performance.  Maybe it was his horrifyingly abusive treatment, both physically and mentally, of the character of Ivy Pierson, that got to me.  March was fantastic!  Not only that, but in the film’s climax, he had to run and jump around his lab like a monkey on a rampage, climbing up walls and leaping over banisters.  Of all the translations of this classic story to film, this one is still considered the benchmark of excellence.  I think March really deserved his Oscar, even if he had to share it with Wallace Beery.

1930-31 – Fredric March

The Royal Family of Broadway

This was a crazy movie, and Fredric March played the craziest of all the characters.  He played Tony Cavendish, a man who was the son, brother, and uncle to three great actresses.  The family is already chaotic, but he is even more over-the-top than all the rest of them put together.  Every time he was on the screen it was like a hurricane.  The film was a kind of screwball comedy, so his bombastic antics actually fit the bill, but I have never seen him in a role like the one he played here.

So aside from being a charming womanizer / playboy, he clearly loved his family.  But he was, as one might imagine, a supreme narcissist.  Everything was about him, and he was quite unapologetic about it.  But when his mother’s health began to decline, he was the first to kneel at her bedside.  He was an interesting character, but I think it is important to note that if the category of Best Supporting Actor had existed at the time, that’s where his nomination would have fallen.  He was very much a supporting character in the narrative.

But the role also seemed to tell me something about March, himself.  He was unafraid of being silly, wild, bombastic, and naked.  Yes, that’s right, naked.  In his first scene in the film, he says he is going to take a shower, and that his mother and sister should follow him so they could talk to him while he did.  So as he goes up the stairs with his family in tow, he strips down.  In the bedroom, he removes his shoes and socks.  And before crossing to the bathroom, he unbuttons his boxers and begins to remove them.  We very nearly got full-frontal before he went through the door.  And then we get an entire scene of watching him under the water with his mom and sister sitting by the shower door.

That was a bit of a surprise, but it was tame enough.  The truth is, he was a lot of fun to watch on the screen.  He did a great job of drawing my attention every time he was in a scene, whether he was fencing, screaming about getting a passport so he could flee the country, or pining over his ailing mother.  He was wild, irreverent, silly, and had an absolutely captivating presence.  Incidentally, this was his first Oscar nomination of five over his long career.  I’d say it was a good start. 

1930 – 1931 – Jackie Cooper

Skippy

OK, I’m going to apologize to all the Skippy fans out there, but this review is going to be a bit brutal.  This was one of those movies that baffles me.  Why did people like it enough for it to me nominated for Best Picture?  It was a terrible movie, and subsequently, the acting was beyond terrible.  That being said, Jackie Cooper was the best of the bunch, which isn’t saying much.  But the script was just bad.  It’s just hard to find many redeemable qualities in this piece of mind-numbing shlock. 

The problem is that I was never a fan of The Little Rascals, and that’s all this movie was.  The Little Rascals, or Our Gang, were TV shorts that capitalized on what I sometimes call the cardinal sin of movie making.  Cute for the sake of cute is never cute… never.  Kids being cute does not a good movie make.  But you see, I know Cooper could act.  He could act very well.  Just watch him in the movie The Champ, which came out the very next year.  He was very good in that film because he was given a good script to work with.

Cooper’s performance felt forced, like he was trying too hard to be… well, cute.  And I’m guessing he only did that because that’s how the director wanted him to act.  The director wanted him to draw the same audience that The Little Rascals did, and it must have worked.  He was playing the living embodiment of a newspaper comic strip character.  Skippy was a liar, a bully, and a con artist.  But he supposedly had a heart of gold, which somehow made everything ok.  His big scene, the one in which, I’m guessing, he earned his acting nomination, was the one in which he breaks into tears and sobbing, all out of concern for his friend, a friend, I might add, he had known for less than forty-two hours.  He cries and blubbers his way through a, “You just gotta help him,” prayer. And that scene was good, not the slow speech from a child who can’t pronounce every word he is saying.  Isn’t that cute? Skippy can’t pronounce that word because he’s too young! Ugh.  Still, Cooper’s acting far outshined every one of his child co-stars.  And I suppose he looked exactly like the comic strip character he was supposed to be playing, and that had to count for something.

1930-31 – Adolphe Menjou

The Front Page

Every time I see a film with Adolphe Menjou in it, I like him more and more.  In this movie, he played a devious, fast-talking, die-hard newspaper man.  The movie is a true example of a screwball comedy.  The jokes, the quips, the insults, and the lies and misdirections, were all delivered at break-neck speed, and Menjou was fastest talker of them all.  When he got going, he delivered his dialogue faster than an auctioneer.  But as fast as he spoke, you can hear every word clearly if you listen.

There was only one place where he flubbed a line, but he immediately picked it up again and kept going like a professional.  He was trying to say, “I’m going to get Sipperdy to make up a prayer for our fair city…” but he got caught up on the name Sipperdy, repeating the first syllable.  That was the only time I caught him with a slightly twisted tongue.  In other words, he was brilliant.  And more than that, he made the character, who was really an ass, likeable at the same time, and I bet that wasn’t exactly easy to do.

The only problem I have with the Best Actor nomination has nothing to do with Manjou’s performance.  You see, I don’t think the roll of Walter Burns was the male lead of the film.  That honor belonged to Pat O’Brien, playing the part of Hildy Johnson.  But, of course, the Best Supporting Actor category was still a few years away from existing.  However, he did get top billing, and his acting earned the movie one of its three Oscar nominations, though it won none.  Menjou lost his Oscar to Lionel Barrymore in A Free Soul, and it’s kind-of hard to argue with that.

To his credit, Menjou had a wonderful sense of comedic timing, and the quick and complicated dialogue must have been a particular challenge, but the role was a little one-note.  The script, and the nature of screwball comedies, in general, don’t demand as much emotional depth or range as a good drama.  However, I have to mention that I’ve seen Menjou in dramatic films, in which he showed just how good of an actor he really was.  I’m not saying he didn’t deserve the Best Actor nomination.  On the contrary, I think the nomination was well-deserved.  But I can understand why he didn’t win, and it wasn’t his fault. 

1930-31 – Richard Dix

Cimarron

I’m having a difficult time with Richard Dix’s performance in this movie, and here’s why.  This is my third time watching this movie, and each time I see it, I like his character less and less.  In light of that, one might ask how his performance of the despicable character was executed.  But the film doesn’t portray him as a bad person.  They seem to set him up on a pedestal, showing how he was the most noble and forthright character in the whole movie, and the way Dix played Yancy Cravat seemed to confirm this stance.

The problem is that Richard Dix’s performance was like a steamroller that turned all the nobility written into the character into that of a simple bully, a jerk, and a terrible husband and father.  So I have to question, was there really any other way for him to play the part?  Did Richard Dix competently play the part as it was written, or could he have been a little less heavy handed in his acting to soften the character of Yancy so that I wouldn’t dislike him so much?  In other words, Dix’s acting made me think of the character as an ass, and I don’t think I was supposed to feel that way.  The filmmakers wanted me to think of him as the noble hero.

So I have to conclude that it was the way the character was written, and not the actor’s fault, that I didn’t like him.  Richard Dix did just fine.  He had been an actor in the silent era, and successfully made the transition to the world of talking films.  Unfortunately, he still had some of those over-exaggerated mannerisms and facial expressions that he’d learned.  There was one scene, however, where this worked to his advantage.  When Yancy learned that new Oklahoma territories had been opened for settling, his conflicted desire to stay with his family, and his need to be a free pioneer was well-played, and Dix sold the scene without any dialogue.

I also have to applaud the final scene in which Yancy returns to Osage, a weathered old nameless man who sacrifices his life to save some oil workers.  It was a brief scene, and he was almost unrecognizable under all the old-age makeup, but Dix made me feel for Yancy, despite my dislike of the character.  The sacrifice didn’t excuse the character’s shortcomings, but it did strengthen his nobility… a little.

1930-31 – Lionel Barrymore

A Free Soul

This was the first year that more than one actor was nominated for the same movie.  Lionel Barrymore took home the Oscar for his performance in the film, though Norma Shearer, who was nominated for Best Actress did not.  Incidentally, I think they both deserved their nominations.

I’ve seen Lionel Barrymore in two other films that come to mind.  Grand Hotel, and You Can’t Take It With You, both of which took home the Oscars for Outstanding Picture in their respective years.  On the one hand, he seemed to almost be playing himself in each of those films, as well as A Free Soul.  There was that core personality that was so natural to his acting and the characters he created.  He seemed like a loveable old grandfatherly figure.  It was him, plain and simple.  But I also recall another role for which he is famous that did not fall into the same pattern.  He played the mean and crotchety Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life.

But despite the similar characters he played in the two Oscar winning films, each character he created offered something different.  In this film, he played Stephen Ashe, a hopeless alcoholic.  He was used to drinking until he could barely stand, the kind of addict that had no will to resist the drink, no ability to choose sobriety. But at the same time, he was functional despite his constant inebriation.  He was intelligent, and honest, and he clearly loved both his daughter and his mother.  In other words, he was a real person, obviously good natured, but deeply flawed. 

I imagine playing a convincing drunk must be difficult.  Too over the top, and you create a caricature, a parody of a drinker, like Regis Toomey’s character in 1929’s Alibi.  Not enough, and it comes off as lackluster and uninspired.  Barrymore had that balance, and a good grasp of the realism of Stephen Ashe, and he played it perfectly.  One scene in particular stood out as outstanding.  It was when his beloved daughter takes him away from the city on a three month camping trip.  When he began to detox, Barrymore really gave us a convincing performance with his restless movements, his constant irritation, It was a short scene, but his mannerisms and vocal inflections really sold it.  Well done, Lionel!

1929-30 – Lawrence Tibbett

The Rogue Song

OK, so this may be a review that maybe I shouldn’t be writing.  After all, I technically haven’t seen the movie, as no copy of the movie actually exists any more.  What I found on YouTube is made up of the surviving scraps of the footage, and the complete soundtrack.  Most of the hour and forty-four minute long video is made up of production stills, promo shots, posters, and even photos of the actors from entirely different films.  So kudos to the person who put the video together, though I am having difficulty finding an individual’s name to thank.

In all, there is about half an hour of footage that has been pieced together.  Tibbett was a lyric baritone, and most of the footage in which he appears, is of him singing.  And as to that, I must say that he had an incredible voice.  It had a sweet and soft lilt in his upper-range, a full and warm core sound in his mid-range, and a deep and powerful sound in his low-range.  Just a beautiful voice.

And I have to say that I really loved his look.  He was a very handsome man.  I think it was his gorgeous eyebrows.  I know that’s a strange thing to focus on, but there you have it.  I loved their shape.  Also, he didn’t have that typical slicked-back, leading man hair style.  His hair was bushy, and wild, like his character, the Russian bandit, Yegor.  And even though I only saw a few scant clips of his acting in motion, I think his unkempt appearance made him seem even more attractive.

The part seemed like a pretty weighty one, despite this being a romantic musical.  There was a great scene in which he murders the brother of the Princess he loves as an act of revenge for the rape, and subsequent suicide, of his beloved sister.  And there was another scene where he is caught by the royal family and publicly whipped.  Of course he sings of his love for Princess Vera while the torture goes on, and all the while, his vocal production was marvelous!

It really is too bad there is no surviving copy of this movie.  I bet it would have been a great one to see, especially since it was MGM’s first all-talking Technicolor film. And of all the films Tibbett ever made, this was apparently one of his favorites.

1929-30 – Bulldog Drummond

1929-30 – Condemned

1929-30 – Ronald Colman

Bulldog Drummond / Condemned

Ronald Colman was really a fantastic actor.  But I don’t think his performance in Bulldog Drummond was an Oscar-worthy effort.  It was a nice enough film to watch, and even though I’ve never heard of Bulldog Drummond before, apparently, it was a huge franchise back in the day.  Based on a series of books, the character appeared in 24 films, beginning in 1922 in the silent era, and finishing in 1969.  The only one to star Ronald Colman was this little gem.

The problem with the role was not the actor, but the part.  Colman did his best with the material, but he didn’t have much to work with.  There was no character arc, no deep drama, no emotional turmoil.  He started the film as a happy-go-lucky adventurer who tends to laugh in the face of danger, and he ended the same way.  He even struck a “Superman” pose with his hands on his hips when confronting the mad doctor Lakington.  Ha-hahahaha!  Was he charming?  Yes.  Was he fun to watch?  Yes.  Was he in any way dynamic?  No, not really.  Colman played the part well enough, but the part just didn’t demand much of the actor.

But I’m quite happy to say that Condemned was a much deeper role that gave Colman a chance to show more range, more emotional gravitas.  He got to really show off his skill in the art, his dedication to the craft.  He played a convict in an island penal colony that falls in love with the warden’s wife.  The part was more introspective and weighty.  There was a wonderful scene in which he has been put in solitary confinement.  The rest of the prisoners in the cell block were screaming and jabbering as if they were in a madhouse.  It was there that Colman’s character, Michelle, began to lose his grip on his own sanity, and Colman began to display some real gravitas.

And then, in the climactic scene, where the escaped Michelle is reunited with his girl, there was a desperation in his affections that Colman really played into.  The story was good and I enjoyed watching the actor on the screen.  Incidentally, this was the last year in which it was common for a single actor to be nominated for multiple performances, and I for one am glad that little change was made.

1929-30 – Wallace Beery

The Big House

This isn’t the first movie with Wallace Beery that I’ve seen.  In fact, it’s the third, and every time, he turns in an outstanding performance.  I would have no problem with the fact that he was nominated, except that this was the Best Actor category.  Beery’s part in the film wasn’t the lead actor.  But I have to keep in mind that this was only the third Academy Awards.  The Best Supporting Actor category had not yet been created.  If it had, I have no doubt he would have taken home that Oscar.

The character he played could have been so one dimensional, but Frances Marion, the screenwriter who wrote the story and dialogue, gave him some depth, some layers.  She made the violent criminal Butch a sympathetic character, and Beery really brought that out.  There was a touching little scene where, while in prison, Butch learns that his mother has died.  He fondly remembers the woman and even gets a little emotional in front of his cellmate, Morgan.  Beery did a fantastic job.

But he also played the hardened criminal part perfectly, as well.  When he started the row in the mess hall, Beery showed some real anger and sold the scene.  You see, Butch may not have been the main character of the story, but he was the main antagonist.  The main character was actually Morgan, played by Chester Morris, who had been nominated for Best Actor only a year earlier.  Most of the conflict inherent in the plot was instigated by Butch

But Butch’s death scene also stood out to me.  He gets shot by Morgan, and shoots Morgan in return before falling.  Then the two men crawl across the floor to each other.  An inmate shouts that Morgan had not been the one to rat Butch out.  The two men apologize for shooting each other.  Beery then brought out Butch’s softer side again, revealing his true feelings of friendship for Morgan before dying.  Beery made the death scene almost touching.

Even though I cannot now find the Oscar winning performance of George Arliss in Disraeli, I have seen that film, and based on my memory, I actually think Beery’s performance was more nuanced, and more worthy of the coveted award.

1929-30 – George Arliss

Disraeli

George Arlis was nominated, and won, for two different films this year, the other being The Green Goddess.  Both films were coming right out of the Silent Era, and Talkies were still trying to learn the new medium.  The actors spoke slowly and they over-enunciated every word.  They spoke in almost sing-song tones, and it is unfair to judge the acting by modern standards.  So if you watch this film, you have to keep that in mind.  It was simply the style of the time. But I think he did a fine job, though perhaps no better or worse than his competitors.

Before I cover what I liked, let me just mention one thing that I didn’t.  Does the actor apply his own makeup, or was that someone else’s job?  Whoever was responsible, the makeup on Arliss was terrible, and not because it made him look like a cross between the old silent film version of the Phantom of the Opera and a circus clown.  If they were trying to give him the look of a historical figure, fine.  But the fact is, it looked like makeup.  It looked unnatural and creepy.  That makeup job might have been good for the stage play that the film was based on, but in front of a film camera, it looked awful.  And he was the only one.  None of the other actors had the same problem with bad makeup.

But as for his acting, his presence, the character that he created, and the emotional range he was able to display, I think he did a good job.  I really liked the way he interacted with his wife.  The love in his mannerisms was genuine and he played it very sweetly.  But I also liked the way he played excitement, cunning, despair, feigned sickness, and sorrow, all with equal skill.  It was clear that he knew how to act, and so I think his Oscar was well-deserved.  He still had that silent film practice of overdoing the emotions and facial expressions, but because of his mastery of his craft, it actually seemed to work in his favor.  And on top of all that, he played a nice guy.  He was likeable, which can go a long way, despite his disturbing appearance. Disraeli was a character that was kind to everyone, and yet deeply passionate about his convictions, which, I suppose is why the real Disraeli is such a revered figure in British history.

1929-30 – George Arliss

The Green Goddess

This was one of two films in 1930 that earned George Arlis his Oscar. The other was for Disraeli. In both cases, he played the same role on the Broadway stage before starring in the Hollywood film. But The Green Goddess had the distinction of being adapted for film before. Again, Arliss played the same character, the Raja. So he did the stage play, and two silent films, playing the same role each time. Apparently, audiences didn’t want to see anyone else play the part.

I found it interesting that though The Green Goddess was filmed first, Arliss, himself, felt that Disraeli was a better film to be his sound film debut. Unfortunately, this was a difficult film to watch, not because of the content of the film, but because the film itself is so old. The picture image was often so out of focus, faces were blurred. You could sometimes see the flickering of the film projector light. The dialogue cards were often unreadable, or just missing. But every now and then, Arliss would have a close-up shot, so you could see his face clearly.

Now, you might say Arliss was miscast. He was a white guy playing an Indian Raja. But I suppose, that didn’t mean as much back in 1930. However, he was, by no stretch of the imagination, a native Indian. But I suppose he played his part well enough, and I suppose he did a good enough job as an actor. But being a silent film, he had the overexaggerated facial expressions that were the style for the times.

Throughout the entire movie, the Raja was portrayed as the bad guy, the heathen Indian. He is a murderer, who who tries to force the pretty girl to marry him. In the film’s climax, he is ready to sacrifice the surviving white people to the Green Goddess. But when the British Air Force shows up to save the day, not only does he escape punishment, he shrugs it all off, as if to say, ”Oh well… You win some, you lose some.” It took all the teeth out of his villainous plots. But that wasn’t the actor. It was the script, and Arliss made the evil Raja seem more sympathetic in that moment.