Thursday, March 4, 2021

Thursday Movie Picks #347: Best Actor/Actress Oscar winners

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. Being the first Thursday of the month, we're getting another Oscar-themed edition of the blogathon, this time looking at Best Actress and Best Actor winners. This is obviously a fairly easy one, as one need only look at a list of winners. I thought for a bit about exactly how I wanted to go with this week's blogathon, and eventually decided upon three early Best Actress winners, but not the first three:

Coquette (1929). Mary Pickford got what was essentially a career award for what is frankly a pretty dire movie, an early talkie with a lot of silent film overacting and a melodramatic plot that, well, will either leave you rolling your eyes or howling with laughter. Pickford, who was pushing 40, plays a southern belle whose doctor father thinks her boyfriend (Johnny Mack Brown) compromised her, so in a fit of honor Dad shoots the boyfriend, leading to the way over-the-top courtroom climax.

Min and Bill (1930). Marie Dressler runs a rooming house on the waterfront for the fishermen, one of whom (Wallace Beery) is her lover. She's been foster mother to Dorothy Jordan, who has a well-to-do fiancé. But Jordan's biological mother (Marjorie Rambeau) shows up to spoil everything when she figures out that her daughter is about to come into a bunch of money. Dressler, who won the Oscar) has tremendous chemistry with Beery, and the finale is heartbreaking.

The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931). You may have seen or heard of the Lana Turner movie Madame X. It's a hoary story that was remade multiple times under that title, and the basic story was cribbed for several other movies with different titles, including this one. Helen Hayes wins her first Oscar, forty years before Airport, playing a rural Frenchwoman who gets knocked up by an American (Neil Hamilton) who returns home; after falling afoul of the law with jewel thief Lewis Stone the child is taken from her and she resorts to prostitution to give the kid enough anonymous benefits that he can go on to medical school. Years later, when Madelon is old and sick, she gets tended to by... Dr. Claudet, who doesn't realize that he's taking care of his mom. In the other Madame X stories, the son becomes a lawyer who defends his mom in court not knowing her true identity. And then there's the similar To Each His Own (1946), wich won Olivia de Havilland the Oscar for sacrificing her son in World War I and only meeting him decades later....

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