Success or Snub? Grand Hotel (5th Academy Awards Review Pt. 2)

To see part 1, click here.

Overture~Bernhard Kaun - Frankenstein

Once again, we shall ascertain if Grand Hotel was truly the best movie of the arbitrary 12-month time frame of the year that it came out (August of 1931 to July of 1932). Thankfully, this is one of the last of those. Grand Hotel is on record as being the only movie that won the big prize and was nominated for absolutely nothing else. Not Best Actor or Actress, not Best Score, not Best Director, nothing. You’d think having a director who could work with so many divas and construct such a cool set and still churn out a project would make Edmund Goulding an easy shoe-in but apparently not. (The Best Director prize went to Frank Borzage for Bad Girl, a very style-less and dull movie that didn’t deserve it.)

In addition, this was the first Oscar ceremony to start handing out awards for short films. The first animated short win was Walt Disney’s Flowers and Trees, which is the first usage of a three-strip Technicolor process, which is the most refined usage of color up to that time and is arguably the first true color film as it featured all three of the primary colors (red, green and blue). Walt Disney also received an honorary Oscar at this ceremony for the creation of a cartoon mouse who was quickly becoming one of the most beloved icons in America at this time. If you don’t know the name of this mouse, you did not have a childhood.

The last thing to mention about the 5th Academy Awards is that this was the first and only time that the Oscar for Best Actor ended in a tie. I personally think that this is a trend that would be more than welcome to come back but I’ll dwell on it later. The two winners were Wallace Beery as Andy the Champ in The Champ and Fredric March as the two titular characters in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Both deserved it.

Moving onto the snubs, let’s take a look at Scarface, which, along with Little Caesar (1931) and The Public Enemy (1931), was the last piece of the trifecta of genre-defining gangster films, telling the rise and fall of Italian bootlegger, Tony Camonte (Paul Muni). It’s also by far the worst of these three movies because of how preachy it is. While Little Caesar and The Public Enemy are a bit preachy too, Scarface really feels like it has no respect for your intelligence and keeps whacking you over the head with how evil gangsters are. One scene about halfway through the movie is so bad about this that I had to force myself to not turn the movie off.

        It’s also really hard to talk about Scarface without mentioning the Brian De Palma remake that came out 50 years later (Hell, when I mentioned Scarface, that’s probably the first movie that came to your mind) and it’s interesting to compare the two. Despite their differences, the movies have many of the same plot points: the relationship with the sister, the boss backstabbing him, the gunfights, “The World is Yours,” they even have the last stand.

        Despite my complaints, Scarface still has its good moments. Many of the key scenes are based on actual moments from the Prohibition gang wars that were ongoing at this time, such as the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. Even the name of the movie is an homage (Scarface was one of Al Capone’s nicknames). And when it gets to the violent scenes, the movie is actually pretty fun. The montages and gunfights and montages of gunfights are entertaining and some of the ingenuity that Tony uses to get one over his enemies is engaging.

        Actually, on that note Paul Muni is a lot of fun as Tony Camonte though admittedly, not in the good way which is why I’m not complaining that he wasn’t nominated for Best Actor. He’s less ruthless gangster and more like an easily excited man-child. In the remake, they explain this whacky personality by showing that he’s coked out of his mind; here, he’s just a nutbag. It’s silly but I’ll be damned if it isn’t fun to watch.

        Similar to Little Caesar and The Public Enemy, Scarface was one of the last pre-Code films that would show an ubiquitous level of gunfights and violence that would later be condemned by the Hays Code. Unlike the previous films, where we can only speculate on them accelerating the Hays Code into circulation, Scarface is directly responsible. Several distributors objected to the level of violence in the film and the producer, Howard Hughes, responded by thumbing his nose and releasing it anyway. This decision is regarded as being the chief reason why the Hays Office inducted Joseph Breen as its President and tightened the screws on Hollywood.

       There was another gangster film during this time period as well called Taxi!, starring James Cagney. While it’s comparatively forgotten compared to these other three movies, it’s still a relevant picture on the crime wave that was sweeping American cities at the time. This one’s a bit different, though, as it’s more of a morality tale that shows the cycle of violence as Matt Nolan (Cagney) struggles with his explosively violent temper while managing a taxi driver’s union. It’s actually pretty damn good and still holds up and Matt Nolan is a very three-dimensional character.

        (Also, if you want to know just how much things have changed in Hollywood, and how terrible things used to be, during the production of Taxi!, the cast used live bullets in the guns and were instructed to just point them off-target. As a result, Cagney and several other cast members came dangerously close to getting killed. Cagney responded by demanding regulations to prevent this practice in the future and this decision was one of the keys to getting the Screen Actors’ Guild founded.)

        While I would like to keep talking about these two movies and how they brought to light the varied crime landscape in America and so on, these actually aren’t our chief icons from that year (arbitrary 12-month time frame, whatever). Instead, this was the year (arbitrary 12-month time frame, whatever) of horror as coming off of the heels of Dracula (1931), Hollywood went full swing into their horror lineup. 3 classic horror films were released in this time, two of which became horror icons: Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. (There was also Murders in the Rue Morgue but it’s neither classic nor an icon. We're also not reviewing Freaks as, despite being a modern cult classic, it was highly controversial in its day and stood a snowball's chance in Hell of winning anything.)

       Similar to Dracula, the plot of Frankenstein is so ingrained in pop culture that even if you’ve never seen the movie, you know the story. Dr. Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) is Hellbent on proving that it’s possible to create a totally artificial human from scratch. To this end, he frequently grave robs local cemeteries to stitch together this monster with the help of his hunchbacked assistant, Fritz (Dwight Frye). (While this hunchbacked lab assistant is commonly called Igor in pop culture, in the original film he was simply called Fritz, making the modern viewer wonder where Igor came from. The name Igor was used for a character in the sequels Son of Frankenstein (1939) and The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) though he had a limp, not a hunchback. A hunchback also appeared as the henchman of the doctor in The House of Frankenstein (1944), though his name is Daniel. I don’t think the name really caught on until Mel Brooks’ parody, Young Frankenstein (1974), which combined all of these lab assistants into one character.)

        Colin Clive is great as Dr. Frankenstein. While in the original novel and most other film adaptations of Frankenstein, the character is portrayed as a villain, here it’s treated much more like a morality tale. You get the sense that this guy has been cooped up in his tower too long and the major subplot is his friends and family trying to get him to refocus his priorities. It’s almost like he’s addicted to his research and they’re trying to stage an intervention. The movie works as a great cautionary tale of what happens when you play God. When it comes time for the showdown at the end of the film, it’s not a battle of good versus evil but, instead, a man confronting his own demons and mistakes.

        The monster is played by Boris Karloff who would go on to be one of the most successful villain actors ever. (The role was originally offered to Bela Lugosi, who turned it down to play the doctor in Murders in the Rue Morgue. Murders in the Rue Morgue’s failure, combined with casual racism from Hollywood producers, ended up ruining Lugosi’s career and he never had a hit as big as Dracula again. Allegedly, he always resented Karloff for the latter’s success.) While his role as the monster is iconic, with the clammy skin, flat-top head and electrodes attached to the neck, the role is pretty stock. He wouldn’t start becoming an interesting villain until the sequels but they still make the monster seem dangerous and have the danger ramp up at a nice pace

        It’s pretty funny to watch this and think that this would’ve been considered so scary to audiences today. There’s not many chair-jumping moments or any outright scares, it’s just some taboo commentary. In today’s society, this is nothing special but it still scared the pants off of audiences back then and ensured the movie would become forever enshrined in pop culture infamy. It’s also one of the biggest box office hits of the early 30s, grossing $12,000,000 (over $200,000,000 in today’s money and back when movie theater tickets cost a nickel).

       Looking at the other horror icon of the year, there was also Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. While it’s not as iconic as Frankenstein, this is still a story that you know even if you’ve never seen the movie. Dr. Henry Jekyll (Fredric March) enjoys a reputation of being a saint by pretty much everyone he meets. He has a loving fiancé, enjoys healthy friendships and makes enough money to pursue his research of creating a potion that’ll allow him to separate the good and evil parts of one’s personality (yeah, you see where this is going).

        Dr. Jekyll decides to test the potion on himself and it transforms him into the wicked Mr. Hyde (Fredric March), a really strange little man who likes to go out on the town and engage in every perverted desire you can imagine, getting Dr. Jekyll into trouble whenever he transforms back. As mentioned above, Fredric March won the Oscar for Best Actor for this role, playing such two radically different characters on the stop of a dime. It’s that kind of trick that actors love to do. It looks silly but, to his credit, they do seem like very different people.

        Also, while many films of this era were known for fairly static, plain-looking shots, this movie attempts for a lot more dynamic, stylized shots and it looks really cool. Unlike some of the other old-school monster movies, this one I can see scaring people today, both with its perverted commentary and some of the uncomfortable close-ups.

        The film moves at a good, if slow, pace and the theme song of this movie is that famous Bach riff from Toccata and Fugue in D Minor that most people associate with Dracula. It’s also a lot of fun watching Dr. Jekyll slowly go insane from realizing what he’s done and refusing to admit his mistakes. This is actually why I think this is the best interpretation of the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and what most other film adaptations fail to understand: Dr. Jekyll is just as evil as Mr. Hyde. It’s not that he’s a good person, it’s that he wants to be perceived as one. And the movie doesn’t whack you over the head with it either, it’s nice and subtle.

        Unfortunately, as good as March’s portrayal of Dr. Jekyll is, Mr. Hyde hasn’t really aged the best. The design of him is downright ridiculous and fake-looking and I love how the characters treat him like another ordinary human being as if it’s totally normal to see a hairy elf with gorilla teeth walking around London. While he can be menacing at times with how cruel he is, his actual personality is bouncing off the walls with so much rubber room material that he makes Paul Muni’s Tony Camonte look restrained by comparison. It also doesn’t help that the film’s style of utilizing many close-ups allows you to see up close and personal just how fake the make-up is and see those dentures in his mouth.

In total fairness, I see weirder people at my local bar every Tuesday night.

        To be fair, I think this is another case of it just being poorly-aged rather than being bad. Which is unfortunate as I think the rest of the movie surrounding him has aged tremendously well. They do a great job at making you feel sorry for Dr. Jekyll but also feel like he gets what’s coming to him at the end of the movie. Between this and Frankenstein, though, yeah, Frankenstein is the superior movie.

        So, that brings us back to the success or snub question which, in turn, allows us to segue into another issue with the Academy Awards and, in my opinion, one of the worst issues: genre snobbery. As mentioned in the previous blog, there’s definitely a type when it comes to Oscar winners as almost all of them are dramas, epics or war films. Comedies, horror movies, animated films and, in more modern times, action movies are often flat-out ignored.

        According to these people, these kinds of movies ipso facto cannot be the best movies of the year which I personally think is a crock of bull. C’mon, don’t you think that a horror movie can be culturally important? Can’t comedies be culturally important? Of course they can. A bad drama is not automatically better than a great comedy or horror just because one’s a drama and the other’s a “lesser” genre. 

        Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde would be one of only two or three times in the history of the Academy where a horror film would actually be a frontrunner at the Oscars (the others being The Silence of the Lambs (1991), which the Academy adamantly classifies as a thriller to avoid considering it horror, Get Out (2017), which I’m pretty sure only got nominated for Best Picture to fulfill their diversity quota but that’s a topic for later chapters, and Parasite (2019)). This is a continuous and long-running problem in their history that we’ll be talking about a lot. Hell, Frankenstein, which was a big hit, wasn’t nominated for anything and it definitely was at the very least one of the best movies that year (and Colin Clive should’ve deserved a nod for Best Actor). But, for now, we need to get back to the task at hand.

        While Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were great for their time, you do have to remember that so was Grand Hotel. It was such a success that it became a trend to make movies just like it, it proved all-star power and it defined several careers. And Frankenstein had a lot of influence too. It had smart religious commentary, helped launch the Universal horror craze and introduced some of the most iconic characters of all time. While Grand Hotel was forgotten over the course of the next few decades, Frankenstein still endures in pop culture to this day.

        This might make you think I’m going to label this choice a snub, but it’s actually a bit murkier than that. It would be very easy to label this a poor choice but if you’re going to chew out the Academy Awards, you do have to put yourself in the shoes of when they were making the choices, not way back in hindsight.

        So, sure, Grand Hotel was forgotten about, but they couldn’t have known that at the time. You could have made an argument for it being the best and most influential movie of that year. All things being fair and equal, Grand Hotel does have its place in cinematic history and I can see an argument being made at the time for it being the best movie of that year. But, again, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and especially Frankenstein are just as good, if not better, so, in that respect, we’ll call this one a tie. And since a tied win is still technically a win, that means that they got this one half-right. Calling Grand Hotel the outstanding production of 1931 and 1932 was a…

SUCCESS!

Personal Favorite Movies of 1931/32

• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (dir. Rouben Mamoulien)
• Frankenstein (dir. James Whale)
• Freaks (dir. Tod Browning)
• Grand Hotel (dir. Edmund Goulding)
• Taxi! (dir. Roy Del Ruth)

Favorite Heroes

• Andy the Champ (Wallace Beery) (The Champ)
• Dr. Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) (Frankenstein)
• Lieutenant Niki von Preyn (Maurice Chevalier) (The Smiling Lieutenant)
• Sue Riley (Loretta Young) (Taxi!)
• The Baron (John Barrymore) (Grand Hotel)

Favorite Villains

• Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) (Freaks)
• Dr. Henry Jekyll (Fredric March) (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)
• Dr. Mirakle (Bela Lugosi) (Murders in the Rue Morgue)
• Frankenstein's Monster (Boris Karloff) (Frankenstein)
• Matt Nolan (James Cagney) (Taxi!)