Category: Best Supporting Actor

1937 – Thomas Mitchell

The Hurricane

I have never seen Thomas Mitchell turn in a bad performance.  No matter what film in his prolific career, he was always fantastic.  He just had natural skill as an actor.  He was in sixty films between 1923 and 1961, as well as numerous television, appearances all through the 1950s and early 60s, and around 43 years of live stage work between 1916 and 1960.  This guy just never quit, and he was always good.

In The Hurricane, he played Dr. Kersaint, a physician with French Colonizers on the Island of Manakoora in the South Seas.  He longs to return to his home in France, but is also content with the easy lifestyle on the peaceful Island with its happy natives.  Though he is a heavy drinker, he takes his job seriously.  He knows the people for whom he cares, knows that the liberties of freedom are essential to their simple natures, and it breaks his heart when an islander is imprisoned unjustly for sixteen years.

Mitchel was, as usual, perfect for the role.  He knew how to play drunk without going over-the-top.  He got to display a bit of barely suppressed anger towards the cold-hearted Governor who refuses to lift a finger to help the unfortunate Islander.  And I particularly liked him in his final scene, where he is one of the few survivors of the disastrous hurricane.  You can see the desolation in his eyes.  The blank stare born of shock and grief.  Mitchell was wonderful.  He just had a way of making his performance so real and believable.  It was a supporting role, but there was subtlety, as well as a certain amount of gravitas.  And it was all brought across by the incredible actor.

And I think that is what I have always liked about Thomas Mitchell.  He was a natural in front of the camera.  He played a likeable character and did so without being sappy or forced.  He almost just seemed to be playing himself, and yet when you watch him, you can tell that his performances are practiced and finely tuned.  I have rarely seen him in a lead role, but he was such a great character actor that he never lacked work in Hollywood.  He was just that good.  Whenever I see Thomas Mitchell’s name in the credits, I know I’m in for a great performance.

1937 – H. B. Warner

Lost Horizon

Henry Byron Warner did his job, and he did it well enough.  True, the character was white washed, as most ethnic roles were back in the 1930s.  Warner wasn’t even close to Chinese, nor did he look it, even under the makeup that did its best to make him appear Asian.  And no, dressing someone Chinese clothing does not make him look Chinese.  Maybe that’s why he had so many scenes in which his face was either partially covered, or in heavy shadow.

Chang was a rather simple character.  There was no complexity to the role, and I don’t think Warner was required to stretch himself as an actor.  The part was fairly uninteresting and unmemorable.  I’m not saying Warner did a bad job.  I’m just saying that the role wasn’t particularly Oscar-worthy.  There I said it.

Chang was a calm, mild-mannered man who took those qualities to the extreme.  He was educated, cultured, and clearly British, belying the ethnic name of Chang.  He was the host of the fabled Shangri-La, the mythical Himalayan paradise whose inhabitants live in peace and serenity, their lives measured in centuries instead of decades.  They have all the comforts of the outside world without its problems and unrest.  But now I’ve gone on to describing Chang’s environment instead of Chang, himself.  That’s how unremarkable the character was.

In fact, the most interesting scene in which Warner took part was one in which Chang was invited to a room with the story’s protagonists, and accused of lying to everybody.  They threatened him, saying that they would not allow him to leave the room until he told them all the truth.  His response was given with a gentle smile, saying that the enigmatic leader of the city of Shangri-La wanted to see Mr. Conway, at which point he was allowed to leave the room. 

And that was it.  No conflict, no complexity, no character arc, no development.  There just wasn’t much that H. B Warner could do with the part.  He played it the only way it could be played, and that was all he could do.  To be honest, I’m not really sure why he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor.

Honestly, I’m not exactly sure why Ralph Bellamy was nominated for Best Supporting Actor.  His performance was adequate and passable, at best.  At worst, he was a little one-note, and not at all dynamic.  As far as I could tell, he didn’t do anything or put anything into his performance that made him stand out.  He had only one or two facial expressions, which he used nearly every time he was on the screen.  And it wasn’t all the actor’s fault.  The part just wasn’t written to be that memorable.

In other words, Bellamy did his job, but the job just wasn’t anything special, certainly nothing that was worthy of an Oscar nod.  But he did have one thing going for him.  He really had the right look for the part.  The character of Dan Leeson was supposed to be good natured and eager, a little like a doe-eyed puppy.  But the film was a romantic comedy, and his scenes were neither romantic, nor comedic. 

Dan Leeson was a wealthy cattle rancher who was spending time in the big city with his mother.  He is introduced to Mrs. Warriner, and within a few days, he is in love, but when he eventually learns that she still loves her ex-husband, he leaves in the most civilized and curious way, making some kind of comment like, “I guess it’s true what they say. A man’s best friend is his mother.”

And the character was written as a bit of a social moron.  This is really brought to life when he forces Mrs. Warriner to dance, even after she attempts to decline.  Then, when Mr. Warriner pays the band to play the fast dance song a second time, he is enjoying himself so much that he pulls the reluctant Lucy back out to the floor for another go.  And that’s Dan Leeson, in a nutshell. 

It’s too bad that Ralph Bellamy was given a role that was so dull and lifeless, but he played the part exactly as it was written.  Unfortunately, it was just not a very memorable or dynamic part.  I think his mildly affable country-boy personality was supposed to be charming, but it just wasn’t.  The problem is, I don’t know how the character could have been fixed.  Could another actor have done any better?

1937 – Joseph Schildkraut

The Life of Emile Zola

The Life of Emile Zola was a film that was nominated for ten Academy Awards.  It won three of them.  The first was Best Picture, another was Best Writing, Screenplay, and the third was Best Supporting Actor.  Schildkraut was incredibly good, playing a character that is really put through the wringer, undergoing both an emotional and a physical transformation.  His was definitely a supporting role, but I think a movie where Captain Alfred Dreyfus was the main character would be fascinating to watch.

Alfred Dreyfus is first introduced on the screen as a family man.  He is a loving husband and an attentive father.  He is a kind and gentle man who is wrongly accused of the crime of treason.  He is dishonorably discharged from the French Army, and sentenced to years of solitary confinement on an island prison.  While he is being publicly stripped of his rank and commission, he continues to shout his innocence to the angry mob that thinks he is a traitor to his country.  Even after years of incarceration, he screams to his prison guards of his innocence.

I think Schildkraut was good.  Maybe not great, but very good.  The two scenes where his performance really stood out to me were both heartbreaking to watch.  In one, Dreyfus is cruelly parted from his wife, played by Gale Sondergaard, just before he is taken to his solitary cell.  In the other, he is finally let out of his cell, after a stay of five years.  In that scene, he exits his cell, then walks back into it twice, just to assure himself that he isn’t dreaming.  The disbelief and relief on his face was pretty powerful, and Schildkraut made you really feel for the character.

This is a character actor who I would never have even heard about if not for this film and his Oscar win.  But in fact, he acted in around sixty films over the course of his fifty-year acting career, starting in silent German films in 1915, and continuing until his final film appearance in 1965 as Nicodemus in The Greatest Story Ever Told.  The only other notable film I’ve seen of his is The Diary of Anne Frank in 1959, where he played Anne’s father, Otto Frank, though I remember that he did a pretty good job in that film, too.  Well-done Joseph.

1936 – Stuart Erwin

Pigskin Parade

It’s a good thing I’m only reviewing Stuart Erwin’s performance, and not the movie as a whole.  I didn’t really care for the movie.  As a quirky little musical comedy that bordered on screwball, I think it fell a little flat.  The comedy wasn’t that funny, and the music wasn’t that memorable.  But Stuart Erwin’s performance was acceptable.  Though the part was poorly written, Erwin did an OK job.

The problem is that there was very little to the character.  Erwin played a country bumpkin who was so uneducated that he bordered on mentally handicapped. I don’t care how out of touch you are with the real world.  You know what a football is.  But not this guy.  And that’s pretty much all there was to the character of Amos Dodd.  He spoke with an affected Texas drawl that was ridiculous.  “I’m a-gonna,” instead of “I’m going to,” and “Ah Cain’t” instead of “I can’t.”  It felt forced and unnatural, though the accent was even worse coming from Amos’s sister Sairy, played by Judy Garland.

Still, I suppose Erwin was well-cast.  He very much looked the part, like he was young, and had a head full of straw.  There was only one scene in which he showed any kind of personality.  Amos goes to a dance with a girl who he falls for.  While there, she ditches him for another guy who gives her a piece of jewelry.  Amos is so heartbroken that he is ready to leave college and go home to his farm.  You see, it was discovered he could throw melons, and thus footballs, with perfect accuracy.  In a mild fit of anger he clears a guy out of his room as he is packing his suitcase. But this was a light –hearted comedy, so things never really got violent.

I’m not saying Erwin’s performance was bad.  I’m just saying that the movie was silly, the role of Amos Dodd was silly, and the one dimensional role didn’t really stretch the actor or show off his abilities.  And just look at his fellow nominees.  Walter Brennan, Basil Rathbone, Akim Tamiroff, and Mischa Auer.  Erwin’s roll just wasn’t worth the nomination, especially when compared with them.  But this was the first year the Best Supporting Actor category existed, so maybe they were still trying to figure out what to look for.  For my money, it wasn’t this.

1936 – Walter Brennan

Come and Get It

So here we are with the first winner of the Best Supporting Actor award.  At the time of receiving his award, Walter Brennan was a character actor who had been acting for about eleven years, appearing in nearly 130 films in mostly uncredited roles.  But here he was brought a little more into the forefront, given a name and a unique character.  He plays lumberjack Swan Bostrom, a walking Swedish stereotype, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

First, I’d like to mention a little interesting tidbit I found concerning the character of Swan Bostrom.  The original novel was written by Edna Ferber.  Its focus was on the rape of the North American frontier in the late 1800s by the logging industry.  Instead, it became a story about a man who tries to recapture his youth by falling for the daughter of a woman he’d once loved.  In the novel, Swan was described as “the strongest man in the North woods.”  Clearly, that was not the slightly statured Brennan, who looked like he weighed all of 140 lbs.

Several times in the first act of the movie, he is called a crazy Swede.  He was more of a caricature than a character.  He greets his friend Barney by literally jumping on him and wrapping his legs around Barney’s waist while exclaiming “yumpin’ yiminey!” Sometimes his Swedish accent is overdone, while at other times it is nearly non-existent.  They dyed his hair and moustache blond, which looked a little fake at times.  Even as the character aged, he still talked about his yob, instead of his job.  He was so Swedish, he never learned to pronounce his “Js”

But Brennan played the part for all it was worth.  He made Swan one of the most likable characters in the film.  There was an innocence about him that bordered on naiveté, and he was always ready with a smile.  But he also handled the more sensitive parts with skill and care.  There were two scenes in particular where he shined.  The first was when he had to tell Lotta that Barney has left her to marry another woman.  The other is when he professes his love for Lotta on the day he marries her, saying that he hopes he is worthy of her.  It was a sweet moment, and Brennan did a good job.  A nice start to the Best Supporting Actor category.

1936 – Akim Tamiroff

The General Died at Dawn

This is the first acting review I’m writing for a film’s villain.  Tamiroff played General Yang.  True, he was a pretty standard bad guy, a foreign military dictator, who they put opposite the all-American boy Gary Cooper.  By today’s standards, his character might have bordered on offensive, as he was such an obvious Chinese stereotype, but 1936 was a different time.  As it was, he played the part he was given, and he did it with conviction, so props for that, I guess.

Another thing that the role would have received criticism for today was the fact that Tamiroff was not Asian.  He was Armenian-American.  But the makeup artists did a pretty good job making him appear Asian.  It was mostly in the eyes.  But just to make him appear even more evil, they gave him a scar running through his left eyebrow and the fu-manchu moustache.  He looked very menacing and dangerous.

I actually think he did a pretty good job with the script he was given, though the character was a bit one-dimensional… maybe two, every now and then.  He was just a psychotic leader of a thug army.  The way his troops followed him loyally was akin to something like a cult, where they were willing to commit suicide at his orders for causing offense. That was a little scary.  But it didn’t happen.  That might have been too much for a 1936 audience.

But despite the lackluster writing, Tamiroff gave the character of General Yang a little bit of dimension.  He was a tyrant, but through Tamiroff’s acting, I don’t think he thought of himself as one.  He may have thought of himself as a nice guy.  When he was in control of a situation, he behaved with easy civility, smiling and making jokes… as long as everything went his way.  That was well-done.  The scene where he is fishing and Cooper was his prisoner, was particularly good.

And then there was his death scene, which took place at dawn, of course.  We knew that would happen.  It’s in the title of the film.  He gets stabbed in the gut a few times by Fred Mertz.  His death is slow and drawn out, and Tamiroff milked if for all it was worth.  It was a great scene that probably earned him his nomination.

1936 – Mischa Auer

My Man Godfrey

Well, finally, they created the Best Supporting Actor category.  It so needed to happen.  There were too many supporting characters that were being nominated for Best Actor.  If not for the new Oscar category, Auer would have never been nominated for an acting award.  But that being said, I’m not sure why he was nominated.  He barely had any screen time, and while lengthy screen time is not necessary for a worthy nominee, it doesn’t hurt.  No, the real problem is that he was so unmemorable.  Part of that was because of a script that didn’t give him much to do, but for the rest, he just didn’t stand out.

Auer played the part of Carlo, The boorish, mooching protégée of the ditzy Mrs. Bullock.  He is always hanging around where he is not wanted, eating at the family’s table, and practicing depressing music at the piano.  He is clearly taking advantage of the family’s money and is quite unapologetic about it.  And Mrs. Bullock seems to be thoroughly enamored with him, or at the very least by his talent as a musician.  Either way her attitude concerning him borders on obsession. 

Auer had two scenes that gave him something to do.  The first was the one in which Mrs. Bullock instructs him to behave like a wild ape, which he reluctantly does, though once he gets started, he attacks the assignment with gusto.  He makes faces, makes the monkey “ooo, ooo, ooo,” sound, and scampers around the room, dragging his knuckles and climbing the pillars.  He makes a complete fool of himself at his patron’s request.  I believe this was actually Auer’s big scene.  The movie was a screwball comedy, so the scene fit the film.  But was this enough to give him an Oscar nomination?  I’m not sure.

His other big scene is where he is playing the piano and singing as if the music were a Puccini opera.  He was hamming it up for Mrs. Bullock and being as overly-dramatic as he could.  He even took the time to cover his face as if in utter despair because of the extreme pathos of his music.  But again, I have to ask, was this enough to give him an Oscar nomination.  I don’t think so. 

But hey, this was the first year the category existed and maybe he was nominated because he just delighted the voters.  Maybe he was just funny enough in that 1930s kind of humor, that he caught their attention.  But I’ll be honest, I was just not really impressed with his performance.  Aside from his monkey scene, the role was so low-key and lackluster that the only reason I remember his performance at all was because of his nomination.  But since this was the first year for the Best Supporting acting categories, maybe the Academy voter were still trying to figure things out… maybe.