The first Academy Awards

If you've ever looked at lists of Academy Award winners, you may recall that the first winner of the Best Actor Oscar is listed as Emil Jannings, usually for The Way of All Flesh. Unfortunately, The Way of All Flesh is presumed lost with the exception of one scene. However, in that first edition of the awards, the acting awards were technically supposed to be for an actor's body of work over that "season", the "seasons" running from August through July much like later TV seasons. (Note also that up until 1934, the lists give two years, eg. 1927-1928, for the period in question.) Jannings was also the lead in another movie that helped him win that Oscar, and that movie survives: The Last Command.

Jannings plays Sergius Alexander, who at the start of the movie is a Russian émigré in Hollywood taking work as an extra. Director Leo Andreyev (William Powell in an early role, unmistakable since he already has that moustache) is also an émigré, and is looking for someone to play the part of a Russian general. He sees Sergius, and realizes that Sergius would be perfect for the role, in part because Sergius was a general before the Revolution. Indeed, we're about to get that back story....

In one of Hollywood's most original plot devices, we get Yet Another Flashback, this time to the era of the Russian Revolution. Sergius isn't just a general; he's a Grand Duke and a cousin of tsar Nicholas II who of course would be executed a few months after the action of the flashback, so Sergius wouldn't exactly be liked by the communists. But he's not near Saint Petersburg with the tsar and his family; instead, he's out in the field commanding troops. An acting troupe is also traveling around Russia to entertain the troops, but a couple of Sergius' men inform him that two of the troupe at least are revolutionaries: the aforementioned Leo, and Leo's companion Natasha (Evelyn Brent).

With a revolution on, Sergius should probably have the two killed, but he makes the serious mistake of letting them live, in part to torment them and in part because Natasha is pretty. It's a big mistake, because they're not going to return the favor of leniency. Well, at least Leo isn't. Natasha finds herself falling in love with Sergius, so she keeps looking for reasons to keep Sergius alive even as the Bolsheviks close in. Now, of course we know that Sergius survives since he has to wind up in Hollywood (as does Leo), but how do the stories of these three characters play out?

Reading up on the reviews of The Last Command, it seems that it has acclaim from those in the know as a masterpiece. I personally wouldn't rate it quite so high, although it's definitely a darn good movie and one that's worth a watch. The story may be a bit unrealistic, but that doesn't take away from the fine acting.

The Angel of Color

Another movie I watched off my DVR this weekend is the 1930 German version of The Blue Angel.

The movie is probably best remembered for making a star out of Marlene Dietrich, but the movie is really about a different character. Prof. Immanuel Rath (Emil Jannings) is a teacher of English at the local Gymnasium, which in the old German system was the most advanced and academic type of secondary education, so even though the subtitles refer to the institution as a college, it's probably more accurate that the students are about 16 or 17 and not fully legal adults. Anyhow, Prof. Rath is very stuffy and old-fashioned, with his one real joy in life being a songbird that unfortunately dies in the opening scene. As his maid says, it stopped singing long ago.

When Rath gets to the Gymnasium, he finds that his students seem more interested in Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich), who is one of the acts at the local nightclub, except that this is one of those lower-class nightclubs. Rath thinks that somebody like Lola Lola is corrupting to the morals of German youth, and he's horrified that they would even buy postcards with her image! (For heaven's sake, these are pubescent men. Of course they're going to have sex on the brain.) Not only that, but Rath thinks it's his place to do something about it, making one wonder where the hell the parents are.

So Rath gets the brilliant idea to go off to the nightclub, Der blaue Engel (the titular "Blue Angel"), to see Lola Lola and what it is about her that make the students spend so much time there. But Rath is so strait-laced that at first, he doesn't get it at first. It isn't until the second visit, when another patron tries to enter Lola's dressing room and take advantage of her in a way that Rath doesn't approve of. What Rath doesn't realize is that he's actually been falling in love with Lola, so after the fight with the other patron, Rath, marries Lola!

This costs Rath his job at the Gymnasium, but gets Rath a new job as a clown in the nightclub act, which starts going around Germany. However, it eventually comes back to Rath's home town to perform at Der blaue Engel, only for everybody in town to mock him....

The Blue Angel is rightly known for Dietrich's performance, and it's certainly noteworthy even though Dietrich isn't as good a singer as her reputation might lead you to believe. Jannings is good, although I failed to develop much sympathy for his character. Couldn't he understand simple human biology would lead his students to tak an interest in Lola?

For me, it didn't help that the print TCM ran wasn't the best. My German is generally good enough that I could more or less get by with cpationing in German. Here, I found the German soundtrack very difficult to follow. The visuals also didn't look particularly crisp to me.

The Blue Angel is available on DVD and Blu-ray, with a two-disc set from Kino Lorber, which includes both the German version and an English version that was made simultaneously (Hollywood also made multiple language versions of movies in the early sound days, most notably Anna Christie).

An American Tragedy vs. A Place in the Sun

I finally got around to watching An American Tragedy off my DVR, having noticed that it's available on DVD courtesy of Universal's Vault Series, which is their MOD scheme. It's based on Theodore Dreiser's novel of the same name, which was probably more famously turned into a movie in 1951 is A Place in the Sun. So you probably know the story, but there are some differences.

Phillips Holmes plays Clyde Griffiths, the young man who gets a job at his wealthy uncle's factory, where he falls in love with a co-worker Roberta (Sylvia Sidney) against company policy. And then he meets the wealthy Sondra (Frances Dee) and falls in love with her (or probably her wealth), leaving Roberta up the creek without a paddle. And pregnant. So Clyde gets the idea to kill Roberta in a boating "accident", but chickens out at the last minute. Except that there's an accident anyway, leaving open the question of whether Clyde really did chicken out.

The first big difference is that we get to see Clyde's back-story here. A Place in the Sun opens up with Montgomery Clift playing the Clyde character (renamed George Eastman) hitching a ride into the town where his uncle's factory is located. We do learn that his mother ran the homeless mission, but in An American Tragedy we see it, and Clyde's life, in the opening scene. It looks even more run down than what studios put on screen in the 1950s, and you can see why Clyde would want to escape this life. More importantly, he has to leave as he and his friends got in a hit-and-run (Clyde was a passenger) and Clyde doesn't want to face the law. Already we see his moral cowardice which is a big theme of this earlier version.

Second, the wealthy girlfriend character is much bigger in A Place in the Sun> That's unsurprising, since that character is played by a 19-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, who looked stunning at the time and was a much bigger star than Frances Dee ever was. Of course they'd expand her character. But the meeting between her and Clyde/George is more natural in the later movie. George was over at his uncle's house to talk business, and thw young woman shows up for a party; sparks immediately fly. In An American Tragedy, the two meet on the sidewalk and you wonder why the young woman would give the time of day to Clyde.

The trial is also much more histrionic in the earlier movie, with a humorous scene of the DA and defense attorney nearly coming to blows! Yeah, I can't imagine that happening in a courtroom. There's also way too much histrionics and objections or lack of them in odd places. The DA gets the dead girl's age wrong and the defense attorney doesn't file an objection.

Still, I liked both versions, although I do prefer A Place in the Sun. It's probably because I saw it first. But An American Tragedy has a bit of a perfunctory feel to it, while A Place in the Sun has something special. Since I blogged about it, A Place in the Sun has received a DVD release, so now you can judge both side by side.