1939: Gone With The Wind

“Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn,” – Rhett Butler (Clark Gable), Gone With the Wind (Honestly, what other quote can you use?)

Gone With the Wind, 1939’s Best Picture, is a tricky film to tackle. Simultaneously beloved and loathed, both for very valid reasons, I’m pretty sure everybody knows  how it ends, even if they aren’t really sure what happens in the preceding 3 hours and 59 minutes (yes, a four hour film! Sadly, it’s not the only four hour best picture). People know it is embarrassingly racist at times, yet it also gave rise to the very first African American Oscar winner (albeit in a very unflattering role), and also features an ahead of her time feminist lead.

The star of Gone with the Wind is Scarlet O’Hare (Vivien Leigh), a bratty, conniving, intelligent, strong-willed, young woman who comes of age during the fall of the Old South to the Civil War and the Reconstruction. The opening title cards tell us up front this is a story that has romanticized the Old South and regrets its passage to the winds of time. Scarlett represents this shift, moving from a lady constricted by the manners and demands of the Old South society into an unscrupulous schemer who throws away the role of a lady to run her own business and manipulate men and women around her.

The movie starts with a bratty Scarlett flirting her way into the hearts of dozens of men at the stately Twelve Oaks ball, the home of her neighbor and one true love, Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard). This being the south, Ashley is determined to marry his cousin (I swear I am not making it up), Melanie (Olivia de Havilland). Melly may be the single dumbest character in the history of cinema, ignoring obvious signs that Scarlett wants Ashley for her own, or that Scarlett doesn’t really care for Melanie’s brother, Charles, who Scarlett marries out of spite (to show how little the movie thinks of Charles, he doesn’t even get to die a hero’s death in battle – he dies of pneumonia while camping). As the Civil War breaks out, Scarlett is put out by the constant sacrifices for “The Cause” particularly after Charles dies and she is forced to enter a formal period of mourning. At the same time, she runs into and flirts with an immoral and unscrupulous bandit – Rhett Butler – the only person who can see through Scarlett’s charade of being a polite lady.

After the war ends, Scarlett, her parents killed and family lands in ruin, becomes increasingly hardened as she tries to hold on to Tara, the family estate. She even steals her sister’s fiancé in order to take his money and pay back taxes on the land. Finally, she marries Rhett, but their marriage is strained by jealousy, greed and Scarlett’s selfishness.

One of the many strange aspects of the legend of Gone With the Wind is how Scarlett and Rhett are remembered as one of the great cinematic love stories. In fact, the two are at each other’s throats constantly. Scarlett very clearly and earnestly admits to marrying Rhett for his money (even though by this point she owns a thriving lumber mill) and very openly continues to long for Ashley Wilkes. Only too late does Scarlett realize her love of Ashley is a fantasy and that Rhett is her true equal.  And for me, Gone With the Wind is the least interesting when dealing with the domestic strife of Rhett and Scarlett. Scarlett’s struggles during the immoral and uncertain climate of the Civil War and Reconstruction are far more interesting and once history takes a back seat to the Rhett/Scarlett drama, the movie loses a lot of steam. As a future Best Picture would note, “In this crazy world, the problems of two people don’t amount to a hill of beans.”

Vivien Leigh

Vivian Leigh rightfully won the Best Actress award for her role as Scarlett. She owns the screen every time she appears, making small gestures to indicate her schemes. It’s easy to see why men are blinded by her beauty and unable to realize her deceits until far too late. Clark Gable (who did not wind Best Actor) plays the same role he has played in his other two Best Pictures, a wise-acre who believes he is the smartest man in the room and certainly is the most cynical.

I would be remiss of course to not mention Gone With the Wind’s greatest flaw – it’s support of institutional racism and even slavery. Even if you ignore the movie’s founding premise – that the south was significantly better in the old days, when the economy was supported through slavery ­– there’s a lot of embarrassing stereotypes and themes running throughout. Poor Hattie McDaniel basically invents the role of sassy servant for the movie in the role of Mammy. Even worse is Prissy, the high pitched junior maid who gives the infamous line (often incorrectly attributed to Mammy) “I don’t know nothing ‘bout birthing no babies.” Everywhere you look, slaves are shown mostly as happy servants (one character notes the good old days when she remembered hearing songs coming from the slaves quarters on a Sunday night), loyal to their owners. Those who leave after the Civil War are shown as deceitful and dangerous.

Hattie McDaniel

So what is there to say about Gone With the Wind? Even with its unforgivable moral flaws, I really think everybody should see Gone With the Wind at least once, since it’s such a pinnacle of early filmmaking and so widely known and remembered. And despite its length and reputation, it actually is a very good movie with incredible, gorgeous and lush cinematography and spectacular shots (the burning of Atlanta, done without special effects, is truly astounding). At its heart, the movie is the story of an astounding and morally ambiguous heroine who deserves all the attention she’s received for 80+ years.

Oscar Trivia: Gone With the Wind won a record (for its time) 8 Oscars. It was also the first color film to win Best Picture (Black-and-white movies would remain a staple of Hollywood into the 50s). It also is the highest grossing Best Picture of all time, when adjusted for inflation.

1938: You Can’t Take It With You

“It just seems like, in their own way, they’ve found what everybody is looking for. People spend their whole lives building castles in the air and then nothing ever comes of them. I wonder why that is? That takes courage. Everybody’s afraid to live – Tony Kirby (Jimmy Stewart), You Can’t Take It with You

“Maybe it’d stop you from being so desperate about making more money then you could ever us. You can’t take it with you, Mr. Kirby, so what good is it?” Martin Vanderhof (Lionel Berrymore) spells out the movie’s title to the slower members of the audience, You Can’t Take It With You

You Can’t Take It With You is one of the most unlikely movies to ever win Best Picture. An oddball comedy of manners (based on a play and modified greatly by director Frank Capra before it hit the big screen) the film is not the big, brash and loud movies that had typically been winning Oscar’s biggest prize up to that point (and would continue to win in the following years) nor does it pack the dramatic wallop we attribute to many Oscar films. Instead the film is an ideological fable about a snooty upper-class family feuding with a worldly-wise family of nutjobs who may hold the secret to real happiness in their unkempt hands.

The plot: For some poorly defined reason, Anthony Kirby, Sr., (Edward Arnold – the prototypical fat cat rich snob) needs to buy several blocks of land to create a monopoly on the munitions market (a seemingly unrelated business for a banker), but his plan will only work if he buys every single last parcel of land in a given area. Of course, there’s a sole holdout in the process: “Grandpa” Martin Vanderhof (Lionel Berrymore), the patriarch of a cadre of free spirited loonies. As luck would have it, Vanderhof’s granddaughter, Alice Sycamore, actually works for Kirby as a stenographer and is in love with Kirby’s son, Tony (James Stewart). The Kirbys and the Vanderhof’s don’t recognize this startling coincidence until much later because Kirby has gone through an intermediary to purchase the land.

The thing about Penny is her family is wacky. Just flat out nuts. Like a carbon copy of the Munsters wacky without all of the occult overtones (although there is a live raven flying around, assisting some of the men with their fireworks project) and Penny is the “Marilyn”, the normal girl in the midst of it all. For example, Essie, Alice’s sister, is a candy maker who is constantly practicing ballet. Alice’s mother, Penny, writes plays because a typewriter was accidentally delivered to the house one day. The whole crazy house stems from grandpa’s carefree attitude. Once a successful businessman, he one day realized he wasn’t having any fun and quit to focus on collecting stamps.

The worlds collide when Tony brings his family over to meet Alice’s, hoping that once the families are together they can get along and he and Alice can marry. Things break down in spectacular- and admittedly hilarious – fashion, leading to everyone getting arrested because of a misunderstanding involving poorly printed flyers and fireworks.
The thing about Berrymore is his character is incredibly annoying. Sure his “que sera sera” attitude seems pleasant enough but over time I felt like it became really overbearing. One scene I found particularly annoying was when he is visited by the tax man because he hasn’t paid taxes in 28 years. He acts unaware that taxes even exist – in 1938! And more so, he doesn’t seem to believe taxes are used for anything responsible, like schools or roads (the taxman of course is no help, saying the money is needed to pay for battleships and the president). Also of note: To today’s audiences, Grandpa’s tax bill seems like a fairly obvious plot device for Kirby to get his hooks into the property, but nothing comes of it and the matter is never mentioned again. Oh 1930s cinema.

Is he charming despite of – or because of – the cravat?

The best part of the movie – far and away – is Jimmy Stewart. His very distinctive voice has made him ripe for parody over the years, but this was one charming mo-fo back in the day. He is immediately likeable and natural. There are a couple scenes I really liked where he is courting Penny and just knocking it out of the park in the charming department. He also has a natural ease about him – he pauses mid-speech, as if looking for the right words or pondering what to say next. It’s not a hammy dramatic pause, but the sort of conversational tone a real person would have.

Jobs – clearly overrated

I was not a huge fan of You Can’t Take it With You. I found the movie very slow moving and often somewhat preachy, especially in espousing values that are nice and all, but ultimately not realistic. The meeting of the two families is the film’s highlight, but it takes more than an hour to get there. I find it odd that the hero of a movie would be a man whose philosophy boils down to “having a job doesn’t matter” when the country was literally just emerging from the Great Depression, when the value of having a job, both from an economic standpoint and a psychological position, had never been higher. Making the banker the villain is perfectly understandable in 1930s society (and works fine today) but Kirby’s plan to create a monopoly on munitions – a clear shout out to impending war in Europe – hits a little close to home given the current global climate and hampers the supposed whimsy of the movie.

Director Frank Capra is well known for his films on small town values and ideals and this movie trades well on these themes. Oddly, its sister movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, fared far less successfully at Oscar time (and at the box office) even though it has since eclipsed the former in terms of popularity and acclaim.

1927-1937: Oscar’s First Decade – A Look Back

As we reach the end of the first decade of Oscars, I thought it would be interesting to take a look back at the first ten Best Pictures and see what conclusions could be drawn about what the Academy saw as the “Best” pictures of its early sound era. Even more so than today, trying to determine trends is difficult because some of the Oscars were outright rigged (Louie Mayer turned away support for his movie The Crowd in return for getting the win for The Broadway Melody the next year, for example). The voting process had numerous kinks compiled by groups of people leaving and entering the Academy throughout the tumultuous decade. Still a few trends are evident. Here’s a look at some recurring themes I noticed in the first decade of Best Pictures and then a look at how those trends fit into the past decade’s Best Picture.

1927-1937

	Block-buster	War	Modern- ity	Bio-Pic	True Story	Based on a Book	Epic	Period Piece	Awards Won
Wings	X	X					X		2
Broadway Melody	X								1
All Quiet on the Western Front	X	X				X	X		2
Cimarron			X				X		3
Grand Hotel	X								1
Calvacade		X	X				X		3
It Happened One Night	X								5
Mutiny on the Bounty	X				X	X	X	X	1
Great Ziegfeld	X			X	X		X		3
Life of Emile Zola				X	X				3

2002-2011

	Block- buster	War	Modern- ity	Bio-Pic	True Story	Based on a Book	Epic	Period Piece	Awards Won
Chicago	X							X	6
Lord of the Rings	X					X	X		11
Million Dollar Baby									4
Crash									3
Departed									4
No Country for Old Men									4
Slumdog Millionaire									8
Hurt Locker		X							6
King’s Speech				X	X	X		X	4
Artist								X	5

Two trends immediately stick out: the onslaught of modernity (i.e. how technologically advanced society has become at such a rapid pace) and World War I were obviously at the forefront of voters’ minds. Movies dealing with these two subjects won four of the Best Pictures, and Emile Zola, although not specifically about either topic, was also set between 20 and 40 years in the past.   Movies about semi-recent history remain strong contenders today (Social Network in 2009, The Queen in 2007, Argo being a presumptive Best Picture nominee for 2012), but also aren’t usually big winners. By contrast, period pieces, which I am defining as movies about history greater than 50 years before the movie was released, had very little impact on the early Oscars. Even though these types of movies are generally considered Oscar bait today, not just for Best Picture but the various technical categories like costumes and set design, only one “period piece” movie, Mutiny on the Bounty, won best Picture in the first ten years.  Three movies I would designate as “period” films have won in the past ten years.

The Oscars were also quite clearly a popularity contest in their initial outing (with the caveat that any award based on subjective voting is to a great degree a popularity contest). The majority of the early Best Pictures were huge moneymakers. It Happened One Night literally rescued its studio from bankruptcy. Many of these Best Pictures were also trailblazer in the art – Broadway Melody was the first talkie musical; Wings was the biggest war-themed production ever undertaken at that time; Grand Hotel was the first “all-star Ensemble”; It Happened One Night was the first screwball comedy. Many of the last ten movies to win Best Picture, when adjusted for inflation, are among the lowest grossing Best Pictures in history. And while its arguable that there aren’t nearly as many trails to blaze in the medium today, a few that did “change the game” notably the technological advances of Avatar (also the highest grossing movie of all time), got a best picture nomination (after the Academy expanded the Best Picture nominees to ten), it instead lost the Best Picture to The Hurt Locker, the lowest grossing Best Picture ever (from a purely artistic standpoint, I’m still on the fence as to which really deserved to win. A topic I will tackle sometime in 2016). The outlier in this scenario is Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, which was a huge moneymaker with an epic scope, technological advances (Gollum) and in many ways a game changer in terms of how movies could be made. But in the 2010s, a quiet, high-browed movie like the King’s Speech is more likely to win than a big, epic loud Inception. One Best Picture that is hard to categorize in this sense is 2011’s The Artist, which was very groundbreaking in its embrace of the old ways (a silent movie in 2011 – preposterous!) But it is also exceedingly clever (it’s a silent movie about the onslaught of sound) and very intellectual in its approach (Check out the litany of references to “sound” and “talking” throughout the movie). But not everything can be easily cataloged.

True stories and biographies in particular also gained traction as the Oscar’s first decade wound to a close. The last three Best pictures were all true stories, and the last two biographies. Interestingly, despite the academies predilection for period pieces today, only one true story, The King’s Speech, took home the gold in the last ten years. In the 2011 Oscars, one true story (Moneyball) and one story with a root in truth (Hugo) were nominated.

Finally, a rather surprising statistic I came across in my research. Even though the early Oscars had less awards than today’s standard 24, the awards tended to be distributed more evenly. The first ten Best Pictures won an average of 2.4 awards total. Three movies, Broadway Melody, Grand Hotel and Mutiny on the Bounty only won one each. The most any movie won was 5. By contrast, the last ten Best Pictures won an average of 5.5 Oscars, with Crash winning the least of the ten with three. Even if you remove Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, which tied a record with eleven wins, the average is 4.9 awards per movie.  Basically, if you are winning Best Picture, you can expect some more hardware, typically in the director, writing, editing, some of the technical awards and at least one acting statue (Five of the last ten Best Pictures each won at least one acting award).  I assume this is partially an attempt by early voters to be more equitable and perhaps even some rigging of the system whereas today’s voters are more likely to latch onto one movie and hold on for dear life.

1937: The Life of Emile Zola

“While you continue to grow fatter and richer publishing your nauseating confectionary, I shall become a mole, digging here, rooting there, stirring up the whole rotten mess where life is raw, hard and ugly. You will not like the smell of my books. Neither will the public prosecutor.  But when the stench is strong enough, maybe something will be done about it.” ­­– Emile Zola (Paul Muni), The Life of Emile Zola

You may remember the story of the Dreyfus Affair from a high school history classes. The basic story is an information leak was found among the high ranks of the French Army around 1890, and a Captain of Jewish descent was framed for the crime, railroaded into a wrongful conviction and spent years fighting for his innocence. At least that was what I remembered about it, which is to say, mostly I got the gist. I can’t remember the context under which it was taught (I seem to remember my American history teacher telling the class about it, but that can’t be right because it all took place in France.) Whatever the case, The Life of Emile Zola, 1937’s Best Picture winner, takes a rather indirect look at the Dreyfus Affair through the biography of one of Dreyfus’s most outspoken supporters, crusading reporter Emile Zola.

The movie begins nearly 30 years before the Dreyfus Affair with a starving Zola (Paul Muni) living in a Paris ghetto with aspiring artist Paul Cezanne (Anthony Daniels). Both want to be pioneers in the realist movement, detailing the hardships and injustices of the modern world, despite (and because of) their own crushing poverty and the threats of men in power. Zola happens upon the life story of persecuted prostitute Nana and writes his first successful novel. He gains greater fame as he writes about the corruption in the army that led to France’s defeat in a war with Prussia.

Flash-forward to 1894, and Zola is now old, fat and rich (and sporting tremendous facial hair). As Cezanne tells him, Zola has forgotten his roots and his desires to fight for injustice. Meanwhile, Alfred Dreyfus is being found guilty of treason and sentenced to a life on the hellish penal colony of Devil’s Island (don’t worry, the name is just for tourism purposes). Dreyfus’s wife brings proof to Zola of an army cover-up that will exonerate her husband. Zola is convinced to pick up his poison pen once more, penning a scathing condemnation of the French Army and landing himself in court on libel charges.  The court is rigged against him, refusing to allow key testimony that would exonerate both Zola and Dreyfus.

I have mixed feelings on The Life of Emile Zola. On the one hand, I found this to be an interesting examination of a fairly important moment in world history (the Dreyfus Affair ultimately led to a complete changeover in French government). It is also a political drama with a story not dissimilar to the corruption and official misdeeds found The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo books (it’s not exactly a thriller, more of a courtroom drama, although there are some fairly exciting courtroom speeches.

On the other hand, the dreaded Hays Code rears its ugly head once more.  Remember the prostitute on which Zola begins his reputation? We’re never hear the world “prostitute” (frankly, I’m only guessing that’s what she is) and her hardships sound mostly like she has a mean boyfriend and lives in a loft not much smaller than the current New York City residential scene. Even worse is the handling of the actual Dreyfus Affair. Even though anti-Semitism was at the very heart of the real scandal, Dreyfus’s heritage is only alluded to once, very early in the story. It’s like the filmmakers were afraid to really look at the reasons behind the wrongdoing (They’d make it up in the 1947’s Best Picture Gentleman’s Agreement).

What’s even more astounding about this is Paul Muni is actually an accomplished Jewish actor (real name Muni Weisenfreund).

Now that’s a goatee!

I did not find Zola to be a particularly likable character, even after he redeemed himself from his rich spoiled ways by standing up for Dreyfus. He is prone to long pompous speeches (check out his lengthy diatribe on justice in the courtroom) and Muni continually gives smug looks to those around him. He is slightly redeemed by his increasingly awesome facial hair, which improves throughout the movie. In all seriousness I much preferred the performance of Joseph Schildkraut as Alfred Dreyfus (Schildkraut rightfully won the Best Supporting Actor award). His despair and torment, especially when he is stripped of his rank in front of a jeering public are powerful and not overwrought or hammy, like you expect from most actors of the time.   

Much like The Great Ziegfeld, I was pleasantly surprised by The Life of Emile Zola. It moves slowly at times, but provides a fascinating look at a small corner of turn of the century history.

Oscar Trivia: The Life of Emile Zola received ten nominations, a record at the time.