4. Marie Dressler in 'Min and Bill' (1930/31)

Plot Intro

Min (Marie Dressler) is a working class woman who runs a tavern on the docks, much frequented by Bill (Wallace Beery), a fisherman. Min has been raising Nancy (Dorothy Jordan), who was left with her as a baby by her disreputable mother, Bella (Marjorie Rambeau). Min has kept Nancy’s parenthood a secret from her. But the authorities are closing in, and questioning why Nancy isn’t attending school…

Paul says...

We encounter a rarity in the Best Actress canon - a woman winning the award over the age of 40! It may come as little surprise that while the average age of a Best Actress winner is 36, the average age of a Best Actor winner is significantly older - at 44. The theory that age in men is revered while age in women is rejected is verified here. More so when we consider that the average age of a Best Supporting Actress is 40 and a Best Supporting Actor is 49. Furthermore, 32 women have won the Best Actress award before they turned 30. Only one man has ever done that- Adrian Brody at 27.

Marie Dressler was 63, and at the time she was very much enjoying a resurgence in her career. She started even before movies were invented, in vaudeville during the Victorian era. She moved into silent movies. But her career declined in the '20s leading to some tough financial times for her. Fortunately, she managed to break back in at 59 in 1927, crossed the border into talkies, and then, in 1930, Min and Bill ended up being one of her biggest hits, so much so that she and Wallace Beery were reunited for a similar movie, Tugboat Annie. She also had a remarkable string of successes (and other Oscar nominations) in the early '30s before she died of cancer in 1934, making her the first Best Actress winner to have died. 

I’m glad that Min and Bill is our Dressler movie, because even at a minuscule 66 minutes, it’s a perfect portrayal of her talents. In contrast to the first three winners who prioritised glamour and poster-girl femininity, we’re seeing now an actress who, after decades of experience and hard-work, is at the pinnacle of her abilities. She combines the iron-faced aggression of the working class woman in the Depression - defensive, hugely protective of what little money she has, belligerent, and constantly frightened as the stability of her life sits on a knife’s edge. 

But where Dressler truly succeeds is when she installs humour into the mix. Her frustratingly simple-minded values often make sense, and other times end up with her falling into the sea (seriously). Her bickering with Beery as Bill feels natural and was considered a hugely successful pairing. The scene in which they have a full on physical brawl shows that, even at their age, they have just as much vibrancy and energy as the younger players. Beery himself was very popular at the time, and went on to win Best Actor the next year. 

As a result of this duality between being a Trunchbull and being a Charlie Chaplin, Dressler establishes one of the most empathetic characters I’ve ever seen. I won’t go into much detail about her actions as she tries to protect her tavern and her beloved Nancy, but by the end you see a woman who has been driven to very extreme actions, but sits safe in the knowledge that these actions have led to good fortune in others. 

I highly recommend Min and Bill. It’s funny and sweet but provides sometimes dark insight into the desperation and fear that the poorer classes must have felt in the '30s. And of the first four Best Actress winners, Dressler is, for me, the best (so far that is!)

Highlight

The closing scenes. In fact, the closing shot of Min’s face. Dressler has no lines but conveys many layers of emotions about what has occurred at the movie’s climax.

Lowlight

There’s a scene involving a runaway boat that goes on a bit longer than it should. It has the slapstick humour of a Laurel and Hardy film but it could have been quicker and sharper.

Marks

9/10

Doug says...

This one was tricky for me because on the one hand I could tell that Marie Dressler was very very good, on the other hand because of poor sound quality and no subtitles I couldn’t hear a word of what was going on. Thank god for Wikipedia Plot Summaries…

It’s a whistle-stop tour through the poorer areas of the docks that we get in this just-over-an-hour film, and whistle-stop is really the only way to describe it. We very quickly meet young tearaway Nancy, rough-voiced Bill and then the woman of the hour: the dour, unflinching Min. The film belongs to Marie Dressler really because without it, this would be a simple piece of melodrama complete with ill-intentioned prostitutes and rather odd moments of utter slapstick shoehorned in (a scene where Min chases Bill angrily around the bed and throws things at him is just plain weird). 

But this film does encapsulate what we set out to do on this second project - namely discover and celebrate great actresses. And it’s clear Marie Dressler slots neatly into this category. She’s utterly watchable, and bizarrely naturalistic against a cast of still-silent-film-acting actors. At point she’s doing nothing with her face or body, and yet managing - as the best actors do - to just emanate those feelings. We see her upright nature and refusal to crumble into emotion displayed fully throughout, which makes the slight smile in the last scene say so much. We immediately understand her priorities and her lack of regret despite her pretty melodramatic actions. And because we understand why she did all this - we empathise with her and like her. 

She’s matched well by Wallace Beery but even he with his infamous ego (apparently insisting he was paid more than any other actor on set) knows this isn’t his film. She’s so good in fact that the next evening we went on to watch Dressler’s other film of 1930 - Anna Christie - starring Greta Garbo in her first speaking role. And it’s clear from this, that Dressler wasn’t a one-trick pony. In Christie, she played a drunken tart with a heart (Kat Slater but in her 60s), and did it tremendously well with sympathy, wit and a fair amount of guile. It’s great to meet her, and see her at work. 

Elsewhere, the film for me lacked any real oomph, with a simple tale that didn’t particularly grab me. If it wasn’t for Dressler’s singular, naturalistic and compelling performance, I don’t think this would have much of an effect. 

Highlight

Marie Dressler, in her 60s after a career in music hall, theatre and film, effortlessly knocking everyone else out of the spotlight. Glorious.  

Lowlight

A dreary and not massively compelling plot. 

Marks

6/10

3. Norma Shearer in 'The Divorcee' (1929/30)

Plot Intro

Jerry (Norma Shearer) and Ted (Chester Morris) are head-over-heels in love with each other and get married. But trouble in paradise arises when Jerry later meets a woman with whom Ted had a brief affair. Filled with jealous rage, Jerry then goes on a big night out with one of Ted’s male friends while Ted is away. When she tells him, it leads to marriage-destroying consequences.

Paul says...

This must have been a very timely movie on its release in April 1930. It tackles the frivolities, the childishness and the glamour of the New York in-crowd in a similar way to The Great Gatsby, mere months after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 sent these very people into a spiral of financial ruin. The Divorcee certainly puts a lot of emphasis on how much fun these people are having whilst doing some rather bizarre activities. One of the most eccentric members of the group dresses up as a stereotypical Italian peasant with a giant accordion, and this is hilarious fun for everyone (apparently). 

Where the film fails quite significantly is that the story doesn’t have the emotional punch it might have had in days of yore. Most of the plot’s suspense depends on the idea that divorce is a shameful and embarrassing thing that must be rectified by the two divorcees reconciling. The Divorcee does well to point out the hypocrisy in both Ted and Jerry. Both are hurt by the other’s flirtations with other people, and both want retribution against the other when actually they could talk it out, perhaps after two to three months of self-isolation together. But a modern take on the film would be that they’re not meant for each other, and their relationship has more of the torridness of Romeo and Juliet than the steadiness of Richard and Judy. So their eventual reconciliation feels contrived and thrown in just to provide a happy ending for the audiences.

Perhaps this is the intention, perhaps the movie is tackling the superficiality of wealthy, high-class relationships. But the plot was so underdone and lacking in consequence that I found it hard to care what happens. 

To her credit, Norma Shearer doesn’t shy away from displaying the vindictiveness of Jerry. In the scenes where she has taken Ted’s friend with, I presume, the intention to seduce him, it shows her face in a harsh and solemn light in stark contrast to the smiley, bubbly Jerry we have seen up until then. From what I have read, this is a very quintessential Shearer role- feisty, exuberant, fun, and, above all, sexy. Like the previous year’s Best Actress winner, Mark Pickford, she was usually associated with those razor-sharp ingenue personas in contrast to the virginal demureness of Janet Gaynor. That is, until after the Hayes Code came into practice when she took on more motherly, noble roles. 

Shearer had an extremely successful career. Immensely driven and ambitious, she used Greta Garbo as a model for her acting persona, as she realised that Garbo had cultivated a specific but desirable niche. She married Irving Thalberg (who was essentially her boss at the time), one of the creators of MGM studios who died before he turned 40 in 1936. Although she had to fight for it, Shearer managed to inherit many of the profits from other MGM productions which helped to retain her career. This led to other actresses showing resentment, notably Joan Crawford during the making of The Women in 1939, a great example of Shearer’s post-Code roles. Crawford allegedly once said “How can I compete with Norma when she’s sleeping with the boss?”

Shearer took early retirement in 1942 and moved away from the Hollywood social scene. This led to her fame declining and she’s sadly a bit of a forgotten name despite her huge success. She married again to Martin Arrouge, a former ski instructor and they remained together until she died in 1983. 

Highlight

Norma Shearer’s acting during the scenes in which she plots to cheat on Ted. She does a complete turn around from bubbly and breezy to plotting and self-hating. It’s pretty effective.

Lowlight

The quick, contrived ending is a disappointment. 

Marks

3/10

Doug says...

There’s not much I can add to the above, really - except I have slightly contrasting opinions to Paul on the success of the film’s controversial moments. While I agree that it doesn’t read as clearly by today’s far more liberal society, I think this - together with the similarly plotted The Women - make a case for Hollywood writers desperately trying to push the boundaries to more relevant stories. 

Allow me to make a digression. In the weird and wonderful global drag scene, if you go to see a drag queen perform at a bar, you can expect to hear jokes that cut right to the knuckle, and could never be aired in a less underground space. Meanwhile on RuPaul’s Drag Race, we still see a fun and inventive form of drag, but it’s much more sanitised for the television authorities’ approval. 

It feels similar here. If the film-makers were making The Divorcee in a safer, more underground spot, I wonder how different this would have been. We see an unhappy couple, openly cheating on each other. We see the difference between the man and woman in the case - the man feels vindicated in cheating and utterly disgusted by his wife cheating. We see the woman go into her adultery with eyes wide open. There’s a lot here that speaks of screenwriters and directors trying to push the boat out storytelling, and get to the heart of something real. That’s the underground drag scene bit. 

The RuPaul’s Drag Race bit is how they’ve managed to get this film approved. They’ve wrapped this story up in the gaiety of rich Bright Young Things, having games and dancing and playing the piano. They’ve tacked on an astonishingly false happy ending which involves the couple reuniting - one can almost see a Hollywood Producer saying ‘oh alright they can divorce - as long as they get back together.’ It’s the same with Shearer’s later picture The Women which seems to really be about something very different to what the plot indicates. There’s a darkness which the writer is pushing for that is being appropriately sanitised by the plot. And that undercurrent for me, kept it from descending into mawkish sentiment. 

Norma Shearer, as Paul says, is a bit of a lost name. She does seem to play the same sort of character, and her delivery of it is excellent. Quick, startling movements and a broad smile sum her up for me, but it’s nice to see her fully embrace some darker moments in this, including when she’s heading home with a man who isn’t her husband and has the expression of a waiting cobra. Ultimately this piece does feel fairly throwaway but she commits to it and although she and her fellow castmates still have the overacting silent film style coursing through their performances, she’s still entertaining in what she does. 

An interesting film - but definitely a time capsule. You couldn’t make this again! 

Highlight

The scene with a car crash is so obviously done in a studio with moving backgrounds that it made me cackle delightedly. Not intentional, but hilarious. 

Lowlight

The tacked on ending, despite being clearly mandatory, is irritating. 

Marks

4/10

2. Mary Pickford in 'Coquette' (1928/29)

Plot Intro

Southern Belle Norma Besant (Mary Pickford) is flitting between men despite her father’s (John St Polis) preference for dull but well-to-do Stanley Wentworth (Matt Moore). But Norma suddenly falls in love with Michael Jeffrey (Johnny Mack Brown), a man whom her father distrusts immensely...

Doug says...

This is a hilariously melodramatic film involving shootings, suicides and lots of very inaudible dialogue. Clocking in at 1 hour 15 minutes, this is setting a trend for the next few years for very short films drawing attention for their lead female performances. The storyline is ridiculous and reflects my thoughts already that the audiences of the 1920s wanted melodrama, almost-Shakespearean plot convolutions and MANY shots of heroines pressing the backs of their hands to their foreheads in despair. In this case, Coquette delivers entirely. 

It feels a little mean to judge by our modern standards therefore, as clearly the desires of cinema-goers were very different. But I’m going to judge it anyway. 

The plot is ridiculous and yet somehow they manage to crowbar lots of scenes of dialogue in - mainly because most of the action happens offstage, Greek Tragedy style. I also struggled in that we had no subtitles and the sound quality was so appalling that I think I genuinely caught about three lines of dialogue in the whole thing. Luckily for me, they’re still doing Silent Film Acting (lots of eye-rolls, large dramatic poses, quick elongated movements) so I managed to stay pretty much aware of what was going on. 

However, I can see why they chose to reward Mary Pickford (a renowned name) with this second Best Actress award. She doesn’t have much in a lot of it, but suddenly towards the end she gets a deathbed scene and a courtroom scene in which she displays stunningly modern naturalistic acting, and makes the acting of her peers seem wooden and dusty. She’s doing a lot at once - keeping the movements and expressions of silent film acting, while somehow making it seem entirely real and spontaneous. It’s a bit of a Luise Rainer moment (when she won an Oscar for a telephone call scene in The Great Ziegfeld) - she’s given a good meaty moment to prove her talent, so she does exactly that. 

I feel like this may be setting a new trend that we’ll see in this project, where the film itself may be not that great, or quite flawed, but the lead performance is so good that it draws acclaim. In fact the most recent example of this would be Renee Zellwegger winning for Judy, where the film was widely described as a let down, but her performance regarded as peerless. It’ll be interesting to see how this continues. 

Highlight 

The courtroom scene, where - despite not being able to hear a word - Mary Pickford slowly showed us her skill with naturalistic acting as Norma emotionally breaks down. 

Lowlight

The ridiculous and frankly silly plot. 

Mark 

6/10

Paul says...

As with the Best Pictures, the second Best Actress winner is the first in sound. The transition from silent to sound was shockingly quick, sending a great deal of silent movie stars into a career black hole. One of them just so happened to be this week’s actress, Mary Pickford.

Pickford is one of the most important and prolific stars of Hollywood’s early years. She was not only a co-founder of the Academy itself, she was also a co-founder of United Artists in 1919 along with Charlie Chaplin and her second husband, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. On top of this, she spearheaded various Hollywood initiatives to help the war effort during the First World War. Truly am outstanding businessperson. Her first movies date back to 1909, a year in which, at the age of 17, she featured in 51 different movies. Her cascading ringlet hairstyle became her signature look and she became one of the biggest stars of the silent era.

Coquette was her first foray into sound, and the first time audiences heard the voice of such a well-established star. Chopping off her ringlets for the shorter, tighter hairdo she sports here was front page news, apparently. Interestingly, her win of Best Actress is considered quite controversial because, as a founding member of the Academy, Pickford was aware of her nomination and invited the judges over for tea. The other nominees were not aware of their nominations until later.

Without the prior knowledge, she may well not have won for her performance alone. She’s pretty good in some scenes, particularly a final one where, weak and broken, she slowly leaves the courthouse. She’s also careful to ensure that Norma isn’t an immoral, manipulative brat like, say, Scarlett O’Hara. She’s actually very kind to everyone including the dull suitor Stanley who she knows loves her. But for a lot of it, I found Pickford a bit lugubrious. In her defence, so is everyone else. We’re at that weird period of cinema where you could hear what the actors were saying, but they were still overacting as if they were in silent films. It took a few more years for directors to twig that, with a more full-bodied script, you don’t need the leading lady to throw herself weeping and screaming onto the floor at the drop of a hat.

Coquette itself feels like a very silly little melodrama, a histrionic play about characters seeking vengeance and declaring love within a matter of seconds. It’s tricky to know on which side you’re meant to be (Doug pointed out that it’s trying to be a Greek tragedy in that way) which I usually enjoy, but it’s also difficult to work out what the film is trying to achieve. Sheer entertainment? A commentary on the southern states’ obsession with propriety? If either of these are correct, it still falls short. 

Although Pickford machivellianed her way to the Oscar, her career dive-bombed. She was known for playing ingenues and fiery young women which is very much her character here. The problem is that, presumably, Norma Besant is meant to be barely 21. Pickford was 36. With her usual roles going to new generations of actresses, and struggling with the new art form of sound acting, Pickford retired from acting just five years after the release of Coquette, in 1933, although she had a hand in producing every now and then. She struggled with alcoholism, particularly after her divorce from Fairbanks, but re-married another actor, Buddy Rogers. They adopted two children but apparently Pickford was quite horrid towards them and struggled to show love in what sounds like a very Mommy Dearest sort of situation. She died in 1979. 

Highlight

When Pickford finds her dying beloved, she does do a great job of tenderly denying his death and coming to terms with it. Her histrionics in the next scene are less moving but highly entertaining nonetheless.

Lowlight

Like Doug, I’m not a fan of the plot in general. I know Americans all have guns (and this is a film set in the South) but seeing Norma’s father immediately grab a gun just because he doesn’t like the bloke she wants to marry is a bit daft. As are a couple of other plot points later on.

Mark

3/10

1. Janet Gaynor in 'Sunrise', '7th Heaven' and 'Street Angel' (1927/28)

'Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans' Plot Intro

An unnamed husband (George O’Brien) living in a rural community has an extra-marital affair with a city femme fatale (Margaret Livingston). The two then plot to murder the husband’s pious wife (Janet Gaynor). But will he go through with it?

'7th Heaven' Plot Intro

Diane (Janet Gaynor) is a weak-willed young woman with an abusive, alcoholic older sister. To escape her, Diane ends up pretending to be married to a dashing street-cleaner named Chico (Charles Farrell). As the two begin to genuinely fall in love, war suddenly tears them asunder…

'Street Angel' Plot Intro

Angela (Janet Gaynor) is forced to resort to prostitution to pay for her ailing mother’s medicine. But when the police catch her, she has to flee and join a troupe of circus performers. She falls in love with a painter named Gino (Charles Farrell) but her past returns to haunt her…

Paul says...

Picture it! Hollywood, 1929. We’re back at the first ever Academy Awards and epic war movie Wings takes the coveted Best Picture crown. Meanwhile, Janet Gaynor made history by becoming the first person to win Best Actress, an award that’s seen the likes of Streep, Fonda, Dunaway and both Hepburns literally tearing each other apart just to get a nomination. Yes, in my world, the Oscars is basically The Hunger Games.

At the remarkably young age of 22, Gaynor also remained the youngest actress to win the award for nearly six decades. She is also the only winner to win for more than one film. For the first three ceremonies, actors and actresses were nominated for their body of work throughout the year rather than for a particular performance. By the fourth ceremony, this was changed to the format that we know now. 

Gaynor was a major box office draw from the late '20s to the late '30s. She’s listed alongside other Best Actress winners such as Mary Pickford and Marie Dressler as being among the most defining female leads of the era. She successfully survived the rapid transition from silent to sound (something that destroyed many movie stars’ careers), and is probably best known for playing the lead in the original 1937 version of A Star is Born, a role later redone by Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand and Lady Gaga in the three remakes. Her career was so lucrative that she retired at 33 (lucky bitch) and focussed more on oil painting and her marriage to an openly gay costume designer called Adrian (Gaynor herself was rumoured to be either gay or bisexual too). 

In these three films, she very much displays her niche for the vulnerable, pious, loyal-wife-with-a-strong-heart characters. She has big, mournful eyes and a diminutive figure, making her perfect to display an impoverished but wilful underdog, comparable to Disney’s fragile Snow White. She does do this ever so well, and it’s easy to support her. However, as with all silent movies, it’s hard to judge them by today’s standards. Their structure, story-telling and acting/directing styles are quite alien. 7th Heaven especially suffers from a need for too many dialogue cards to convey what’s going on, and beef up the running time for a frustratingly lightweight plot. Meanwhile Street Angel’s plot resorts to one melodrama after another, because what it lacks in dialogue it has to make up for in action.

Sunrise is by far the most engaging of the three, and I highly recommend it. Ironically, it was the least successful of the three at the time (7th Heaven nabbed more nominations than any other film at the ceremony). But it’s incredibly watchable because thanks to the German Expressionist influences of director F.W. Murnau, who directed the famous Nosferatu, the story is told more abstractly, through action and visuals, and with minimal dialogue cards (which Murnau apparently hated). The story is ridiculous (Gaynor forgives her husband for plotting to murder her far too quickly), but the build-up to the attempted murder has genuine suspense and the climactic storm is gripping. The contrast between the fairytale crookedness of the peasants’ village and the over-sized glitz and glamour of the city is stunning to see, and Gaynor herself gives her strongest example of meekness equating to strength. It is now not only considered one of Gaynor’s defining movies, but also one of Murnau’s, and one of the most important of the silent era. 

Gaynor only returned to acting in nondescript and sometimes unsuccessful forms from the late '50s onwards, but her Best Actress win keeps her name hugely important in cinematic history. She lived a long life before dying in 1984 from injuries sustained from a car crash two years beforehand. 

Highlight

The “will-he-won’t-he” suspense in the build-up to the attempted murder scene in Sunrise is very Hitchcockian. It may even have influenced the Master of Suspense.

Lowlight

Charles Farrell delivers a lengthy speech about how non-religious he is in 7th Heaven which requires about 8 dialogue cards when it only really needed one. If we can’t hear the dialogue, speeches like this just seem a bit overdone.

Marks

Sunrise: A Tale of Two Humans: 9/10
7th Heaven: 4/10
Street Angel: 6/10

Doug says...

This is a difficult article because we have to sum up three separate films of which the one connecting factor is Janet Gaynor, all of which are very different and yet in which she plays a similar role each time. 

By far and away Sunrise is the best one, and is still considered a high watermark of filmmaking. It matches Hitchockian menace with clear innovation. At one point, the Other Woman describes the city to the Man and visions of what’s available at the city are overlaid on the main film footage, all while the Other Woman is dancing vividly. It’s a metaphorical way of showing how he is being seduced by her grand words, and doesn’t involve a single title card. 

In fact the title cards are perhaps the best way to judge these films. Sunrise, full of innovation and power, uses hardly any title cards (apparently the director F.W. Murnau hated them) which means we watch it carefully, piecing it together without dialogue to help us. Gaynor excels in this film, despite a frankly terrible wig, showing a meek and mild doormat-type person gradually gain confidence and strength. Sure it takes her husband trying to kill her to do it, but hey you do you boo. 

Both 7th Heaven and Street Angel are more second-rate and feature far more title cards. Street Angel is set in Paris and the script moves frighteningly fast, with her mother dying, being arrested for prostitution, joining a circus and meeting a painter all within 30 minutes. The moment when she decides that the sensible option to raise money is to be a sex-worker is frankly ridiculously overplayed and happens well before she’s considered other options. The film then drags on further with me losing track of what happens quite far in. Ultimately it has a saccharine ending that feels bizarrely tacked on. 

7th Heaven is a little better but has a similar vibe, of a downtrodden woman meeting a sewer worker and for various reasons pretending to be married to him and living with him in his small flat on the seventh floor of a Paris building. He then goes off to war and she is pursued by another man when it’s thought her original beau has died. Again, by the end of the film, a saccharine finale feels rather forced, although one can imagine the cinema-goers of the 1920s might have lapped up the endings, much as we love a romantic drama today. 

Janet Gaynor throughout is an interesting example of what cinema-goers wanted to see at this period. Always shown as poor and working class, she flees the police in both 7th Heaven and Street Angel but is unjustly accused or oppressed. She has wide eyes and a tiny delicate frame, which each film seeks to highlight. In one moment in 7th Heaven, she is embraced by her husband who physically picks her off the ground and swings her round like a rag doll. Gaynor is clearly at home in the silent movie acting style, with subtler choices than her co-stars which still translate to the screen. In the Hitchcock-style boat scene in Sunrise she shows a growing uncertainness about her husband’s actions with a slick, underplayed style that ultimately makes the scene shimmer with fear and ominousness. 

I can’t say I would ever seek out more works by her, but after three silent films on the trot, that may be more a comment on the difference of watching this very different medium. It requires total focus and comes hand in hand with the ‘20s style of storytelling - very melodrama with a required happy ending. But regardless of that, we have our first winner - and with that Janet Gaynor sets off our next project! 

Highlight

The innovation and new ideas that are present constantly across Sunrise. 

Lowlight

The murky and confusing storytelling that hits 2/3 of the way in, in Street Angel. 

Marks

Sunrise: A Tale of Two Humans: 9/10
7th Heaven: 5/10
Street Angel: 5/10