The 6th Academy Awards Assessed (1934)

The 6th Academy Awards represented the end of an era. Up to and including this ceremony, held on March 16, 1934 at the Ambassador Hotel, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences considered films straddling August of one year to July of the next. To remedy this with a calendar year solution, the 6th Academy Awards had a seventeen month eligibility period for films released from August 1, 1932 to December 31, 1933. So the 7th Academy Awards, held in 1935, would focus solely on the work of 1934 and 1933 as a calendar year actually didn’t see an event held.

In addition to the structural change, the Academy added another category to bring the total up to 13: Best Assistant Director. There are some quirks with that honor, which I’ll address by the end of this piece. The Oscars, as they would now be publicly known after the nickname for the event was used by gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky in print, also announced second and third runner-ups at this ceremony. Although there doesn’t appear to be much footage from the event, an anecdote of the 6th Academy Awards has lived on. Host Will Rogers, when announcing the Best Director, said “Come up and get it, Frank!” The problem was two Franks were nominated: Capra and Lloyd. Capra thought it was referring to him, ran up to get the award, and was corrected that Lloyd was the winner. To save face for a faux pas that might not have been totally accidental (I just love to think that Rogers was being a rascal), the host invited the third nominee, George Cukor, on stage as well. What a fun moment; see, Warren Beatty wasn’t the first one to make a big winner announcing mistake!

PILGRIMAGE — John Ford

As for the biggest winner: Best Picture winner CAVALCADE took home two additional awards for a total of three. But as ever, the Oscars made some significant snubs in its sixth year. My personal favorite movie of 1933, John Ford’s PILGRIMAGE, didn’t receive any nominations, nor did other favorites DESIGN FOR LIVING, QUEEN CHRISTINA, KING KONG, and COUNSELLOR AT LAW. What were they thinking!?

I’ll rank the films in each category from top to bottom, bolding my “what should have won” choice and marking the actual winner with a * and lost films/films that are not easy or possible to track down with a ~, removing the latter from consideration.

Outstanding Production

• A FAREWELL TO ARMS
• I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG
• LITTLE WOMEN
• STATE FAIR
• LADY FOR A DAY
• 42ND STREET
• SMILIN’ THROUGH
• SHE DONE HIM WRONG
• THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY VIII
• CAVALCADE*

CAVALCADE is famously regarded as one of the worst Best Picture (or as it was called at this time, Outstanding Production) winners of all time. Up to this point, it was indeed the worst in my eyes, so it’s a shame that Lloyd’s film was also the biggest winner at the 6th Academy Awards. A familial epic based on a Noël Coward play, in the mode of many other early ’30s films that packed a million plot points and crusty aging makeup into a relatively brief runtime, CAVALCADE is “stiff upper lip” British propaganda and limply performed and visually executed. At the exact opposite end of the spectrum is A FAREWELL TO ARMS, my favorite 1932 film and a Romantic masterwork from another Frank who should have been nominated for Best Director: Borzage. I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG is another 1932 fave for very different reasons, as Mervyn LeRoy paints a grim and thrilling Great Depression-era portrait of carceral culture and poverty. LITTLE WOMEN is a near 1933 favorite for another set of distinct reasons: Cukor’s adaptation is incredibly warm and moves with a pace that indicates a changing Hollywood plot structure, one much more familiar to audiences today in spite of the film’s advanced age. STATE FAIR is appealing for similar reasons. Rogers’ folksy charm is part of an ensemble conjuring the bucolic beauty and special excitement of cosmopolitan conveniences, sights, and sounds in the form of a rural festival. LADY FOR A DAY’s central scheme is a delight to see pulled off, and as is often the case with even the biggest box office successes of the Pre-Code era, it incisively satirizes the rich at a time when class differences were at their starkest. 42ND STREET is rightfully praised for its streamlining of the musical experience for film in one respect, but I also think its pleasures are too uneven (as in, all the exciting numbers are at the very end) to consider it too highly among its peers in this category. SMILIN’ THROUGH is a relatively pleasant surprise, in that I didn’t expect as much from the sentimental romance as I did from 42ND STREET, but that doesn’t mean its quiet moments and heartfulness totally overwhelms the musical’s heights. SHE DONE HIM WRONG is probably Mae West’s most famous movie, being the one that truly introduced her dynamic personality to viewers, but I’M NO ANGEL, released later in 1933, is clearly the superior vehicle for her risque talents. THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY VIII is a decent biopic for its time, anchored by Charles Laughton’s impactful performance, but like many other films dealing with the passing years at the time, its sequence of episodes don’t totally cohere into something super affecting. This addresses the ten nominees for Outstanding Production, a large list that is not replicated for other categories.

Best Director

• George Cukor — LITTLE WOMEN
• Frank Capra — LADY FOR A DAY
• Frank Lloyd — CAVALCADE*

The ranking from Cukor/LITTLE WOMEN to Capra/LADY FOR A DAY to Llloyd/CAVALCADE is representative of the final film’s quality, pretty much divorced from any perception and evaluation of directing “skill.” I will say, however, that Lloyd was a workhorse who was a mainstay in early Oscars noms and wins. I think that’s indicative of his chamelon-like style and ability to be reliably plugged into prestigious and big budget productions. That doesn’t make CAVALCADE a good movie, though. Cukor was of a handful of filmmakers pushing Hollywood into the later ’30s mode that typified its Golden Age, with a pacing and sumptuous look that quickly and easily eclipsed the creakiness of early talkies and LITTLE WOMEN was nearly his greatest success yet. Capra had made quite a few better films before LADY FOR A DAY, but his deft touch was still very much on display for light satire, and of course he would make even greater movies in short order.

Best Actor

• Paul Muni — I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG
• Charles Laughton — THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY VIII*
• Leslie Howard — BERKELEY SQUARE

Who should actually have won this category is as clear as day to me. Now, Laughton is one of the great actors. His egomaniacal yet constantly worn down performance in THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY VIII is almost the only reason it’s a modest success. If we were talking about his role as Nero in Cecil B. DeMille’s THE SIGN OF THE CROSS, we might be having a different conversation. But as it stands, Paul Muni’s part in I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG is a humanistic ode to the everyman, an immensely sympathetic portrayal of a man pushed into extreme circumstances that nevertheless ring true with our everyday existence. And I’m just not a huge fan of Leslie Howard in general, especially not in the bland time traveling fantasy BERKELEY SQUARE; there’s a certain appeal to Howard’s cluelessness as he constantly says things he shouldn’t without learning, but it doesn’t last.

Best Actress

• Katharine Hepburn — MORNING GLORY*
• May Robson — LADY FOR A DAY
• Diana Wynyard — CAVALCADE

Katharine Hepburn had given a couple of good performances before MORNING GLORY, but this first Oscar win on the road to history was certainly deserved. While the movie itself runs a bit out of steam by conforming to the show business success tropes it had so successfully made unique in the first half, Hepburn transitions from naïve earnestness to a different kind of self-assuredness wonderfully. A transformation is also at the center of May Robson’s performance in LADY FOR A DAY, as she affects wealth and class out from her everyday life as a poor apple seller. I suppose constant change was at play for Diana Wynyard in CAVALCADE, as the matriarch whose family’s existence is charted over decades. But for the most part, that role is defined by a constant limpness that doesn’t leave much of an impression.

Best Original Story

• ONE WAY PASSAGE — Robert Lord*
• RASPUTIN AND THE EMPRESS — Charles MacArthur
• THE PRIZEFIGHTER AND THE LADY — Frances Marion

ONE WAY PASSAGE is a supremely underrated romance, directed by Tay Garnett and starring the vibrant William Powell and Kay Francis. Its beauty is defined more by the couple’s performance and Garnett’s direction down beautiful art deco passenger ship hallways, but the story on which it is all based of course serves the foundation for the magic to visually flourish. The conception of RASPUTIN AND THE EMPRESS as the only film to star all three Barrymore siblings (John, Lionel, and Ethel) is the main reason to watch Richard Boleslawski’s film, but its total Hollywoodization of history offers achingly and inaccurately dramatic fun. A similar casting stunt defines THE PRIZEFIGHTER AND THE LADY, which stars real-life professional Max Baer as a rags-to-riches boxer. He’s not the worst athlete-turned-actor in the history of film, that’s for sure, but even still, an evaluation of the movie’s story/script doesn’t exactly paint its fraught/aspirational story as a supreme success.

Best Adaptation

• LITTLE WOMEN — Victor Heerman and Sarah Y. Mason*
• STATE FAIR — Paul Green and Sonya Levien
• LADY FOR A DAY — Robert Riskin

LITTLE WOMEN’s pace and storytelling structure are so integral to its success, so any script that adapted Louisa May Alcott’s story in such a powerful way had great potential to turn out well visually as well. Thankfully, we had Cukor give his masterful interpretation! Now, I am not familiar with the source material for STATE FAIR or LADY FOR A DAY, but rather than try to point to some kind of faithfulness for them, it’s more important to praise the folksy/charming and often cynical/wry dialogue of the two, respectively.

Best Art Direction

• A FAREWELL TO ARMS — Hans Dreier and Roland Anderson
• WHEN LADIES MEET — Cedric Gibbons
• CAVALCADE — William S. Darling*

From luminous courtyards to muddy warfronts, A FAREWELL TO ARMS’ incredibly Romantic look undeniably stems from Hans Dreier and Roland Anderson’s art direction. Borzage’s direction, Charles Lang’s cinematography (more on that in a second), and Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes’ faces are of course essential facets as well, but the fantastical settings are the enablers for all these things to cohere into a truly stirring film. By comparison, A FAREWELL TO ARMS’ two competitors in Best Art Direction are quite plain, but the airiness of WHEN LADIES MEET’s countryside manse is unique for its love triangle/rectangle melodramatic genre of the time. It also feels lived in, a feat not replicated by the standard yet well-executed look of CAVALCADE’s sets, reflecting the “march of time” for its aristocratic family without much visual aplomb.

Best Cinematography

• A FAREWELL TO ARMS — Charles Lang*
• SIGN OF THE CROSS — Karl Struss
• REUNION IN VIENNA — George J. Folsey

A FAREWELL TO ARMS’ whole look, as has been established, is sumptuous and dramatic to match its tone and subject matter. Lang spearheads a lighting and soft focus approach, clashing with stark war montages, that, while not the origin point for the “classic Hollywood” look, fits into the general trend of visual refinement in the earliest sound years. Karl Struss’ work for SIGN OF THE CROSS, however, is a fine rival. DeMille’s epic is great for a lot of reasons (it was the best movie he had yet made) and the expansive looks Struss creates, as one of the great cinematographers of all time, matches the director’s epic ambitions. REUNION IN VIENNA’s nomination for this category, I must admit, puzzles me. Filmed in a more “traditional” stagebound early talkie way, and serving relatively adroitly the monologuing John Barrymore was pulling off quite well at this stage in his career, the light drama is by no means a remarkable film on the whole. And its visual approach, with some slight exceptions of movement, matches.

Best Live Action Short Subject, Comedy

• SO THIS IS HARRIS!*
• MISTER MUGG~
• A PREFERRED LIST~

Well, this is an easy win. And not quite deserved. SO THIS IS HARRIS!, a vehicle for Phil Harris of future Disney voice fame, is a not very good collection of gags and scenes of the “unfaithful husband” variety. Apparently, MISTER MUGG is preserved by the Academy, but it isn’t readily available online, so I can’t well judge the short from Hal Roach stalwart James W. Horne, now can I? Same goes for A PREFERRED LIST, produced by Lou Brock, same as SO THIS IS HARRIS! (directed, by the way, by Mark Sandrich of future HOLIDAY INN [1942] notoriety).

Best Live Action Short Subject, Novelty

• MENU
• KRAKATOA*~
• THE SEA~

As with the comedy live action short category, only one nominee for Best “Novelty” Short is readily available today. That one, MENU, is still essentially a comedy, although its classification in this category must ostensibly be because of its “educational” qualities. You see, this two-strip Technicolor short (I’d imagine one of the last productions of the sort, along with the great Michael Curtiz feature MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM, also from 1933) is produced and narrated by Pete Smith of cheesy voiceover repute, stemming from his 5th Academy Awards nominee SWING HIGH (1932). He communicates how to cook a duck while a hapless housewife performs the necessary steps, with lots of mistakes in the process. It’s pretty regressive stuff and not very funny to boot, although its format should be familiar from the rash of parodies in this “infotainment” vein; think the Goofy shorts where he’s “demonstrating” how to do something. As for KRAKATOA, an explanation of the 1883 eruption of the titular volcano, and THE SEA, a nature doc of sorts from female Polish Communist director Wanda Jakubowska, I’m sure I would have greatly preferred them had I been able to view them.

Best Short Subject, Cartoon

• THE THREE LITTLE PIGS*
• BUILDING A BUILDING
• THE MERRY OLD SOUL

THE THREE LITTLE PIGS is an iconic cartoon for a reason. This Disney Silly Symphony is whimsical and bright and epitomizes the pre-SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS (1937) quality of the legendary studio. It’s not even the best Silly Symphony from the eligibility period, but it’s undeniable that I am transported to a magical world watching the misleadingly simple display of ever-advancing animation. A healthy dose of nostalgia from a Silly Symphonies picture book I owned as a child, which adapted a number of the series’ most iconic cartoons, doesn’t hurt. THE THREE LITTLE PIGS is certainly better than the other Disney nominee, the Mickey Mouse short BUILDING A BUILDING. Once again, it’s not the best Mickey cartoon from this time, but it is a worthwhile bit of chaotic interplay between the mischievous hero and Pete. The third nominee, the (former Disney property) Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoon THE MERRY OLD SOUL, really paints the disparity in recognition for other animated work at this time. It’s true that Disney was doing some cutting-edge stuff, but much more than a decent Oswald cartoon from Universal, which under Walter Lantz’s direction was often just doing decent-to-pretty-good, something from the Fleischers, for one example, deserved nominating. A number of middling Betty Boop shorts were certainly more exhilarating visual feasts than the Old King Cole/celebrity caricature fusion that was THE MERRY OLD SOUL…in fact, more than the other two nominees as well.

Best Sound Recording

• GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933 — Nathan Levinson
• 42ND STREET — Nathan Levinson
• A FAREWELL TO ARMS — Franklin Hansen*
• I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG — Nathan Levinson

Wow, Warner Bros. by way of Nathan Levinson really dominated this category. I always have trouble evaluating something like “Best Sound Recording” because I’m not sure what to take aim at. The literal fidelity of the aural quality? The nature of the sound that I’m hearing? In any event, I have to consider the exhilaration afforded by the showtunes of the two musicals. GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933 is the better film between it and 42ND STREET, but they’re just about tied in terms of great song quantity; the way GOLD DIGGERS integrates them into the story more fluidly accounts for its edge as I’ve given it here. I have to imagine A FAREWELL TO ARMS’ win was due to its ambient and direct sounds of war, but it also has some beautifully underscoring music; see, I’m not sure if I should really consider the very composition of the music for this. Regardless, as great of a movie as it is, it remains clear that I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG’s sound did not immediately stand out to me. However, on reflection, its ambience afforded by pained inmates, African American spirituals and working songs, and dramatic montages driven home by dramatic stings is not without audible merit.

Best Assistant Director

• Arthur Jacobson — Paramount
• Joseph A. McDonough — Universal
• Charles Dorian — MGM*
• Fred Fox — United Artists*
• Frank X. Shaw — Warner Bros.
• Edward Killy — RKO
• William Tummel — 20th Century Fox*
• Charles Barton — Paramount*
• Sid Brod — Paramount
• William J. Reiter — Universal
• Scott Beal — Universal*
• John S. Waters — MGM
• Orville O. Dull — MGM
• Ben Silvey — United Artists
• Gordon Hollingshead — Warner Bros.*
• Al Alleborn — Warner Bros.
• Dewey Starkey — RKO*
• Percy Ikerd — 20th Century Fox

And here we come to the strangest category of the 6th Academy Awards. First of all, as with Best Director, it’s somewhat hard to evaluate certain behind-the-scenes skills from a finished product. That’s even more the case with Best Assistant Director, a crucial role that is nevertheless underrepresented in many evaluations of the filmic arts. Then, we’re working with the fact that all nominees, all 18 of them (!), are listed for their general output for the eligibility period, not a particular film. And finally, a group from each of the major (and mini major) studios was nominated for a winner representing their company. There is no ultimate Best Assistant Director, just one for each of the seven studios from three possibilities, except for just two for United Artists, RKO, and 20th Century Fox; can you figure out who those mini majors were? So in the spirit of this weird criteria, I also didn’t select a best assistant director above all, just one per studio as well. Rather than address every nominee as I usually do, let me associate my picks with their best or most noteworthy work in the period. Paramount’s Arthur Jacobson did A FAREWELL TO ARMS. Universal’s Joseph A. McDonough did THE OLD DARK HOUSE and THE INVISIBLE MAN. MGM’s Charles Dorian did QUEEN CHRISTINA. United Artists’ Fred Fox did BABY FACE and THE BOWERY. Warner Bros’ Frank X. Shaw did MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM and THE KEYHOLE. RKO’s Edward Killy did CHRISTOPHER STRONG, MORNING GLORY, LITTLE WOMEN, and FLYING DOWN TO RIO. And 20th Century Fox’s William Tummel did CAVALCADE. Whew. If there’s something to take away from this category, it’s that great legions of people work on “the pictures;” these guys have relatively fleshed-out IMDB pages, but even the full scope of their careers is lost to history.

As usual, the frequency of my agreement with the Academy of the past is in the minority. Including each of the assistant director nominations per studio, I aligned nine times out of 19. With such a wide eligibility period, it’s hard to get a full sense of how much was missed or unrecognized. But within the framework of the 6th Academy Awards nominations, I am more than happy with A FAREWELL TO ARMS being my winningest film with three, considering it is also my favorite movie of 1932.