Success or Snub? The Life of Emile Zola (10th Academy Awards Review Pt. 2)

 To see part 1, click here.

Lost Horizon Suite~Dimitri Tiomkin - Lost Horizon

The 10th Academy Awards ceremony has a few distinctions to it. It’s one of the few ceremonies where two different films won Outstanding Production and Best Director, the latter going to Leo McCarey for The Awful Truth (an award that McCarey himself said that the film did not deserve and felt that he should have won for the more mature Make Way for Tomorrow).

In addition, this is the first time that someone actually won more than one acting Oscar as Luise Rainer won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in The Good Earth after having won Best Supporting Actress the previous year for The Great Ziegfeld (1936). This isn’t an especially huge milestone since it’s something that was bound to happen sooner or later but, hey, it’s still a piece of history. (Supposedly this double-win ruined Rainer’s career as she and her fans considered the award so prestigious that she felt that nothing could have ever measured up again. This is just one of many lives that have been ruined by this damn ceremony but that’s a story for another day.) Also, we can use that to segue into The Good Earth, which was The Life of Emile Zola’s biggest competition that year.

The Good Earth revolves around the trials and tribulations of the Wang family, Chinese farmers who farm and till their land and… yeah, that’s about it. The film stars Paul Muni as the patriarch, Wang Lung, and Luise Rainer plays his spouse, O-Lan. Throughout the film, they balance a multitude of problems, dealing with famine, locusts, parenthood, toxic pride, culture shock and trying to convince the audience that they’re actually Chinese.

This is another one of those films that you have to watch knowing that the 30s were a different time and try not to be bothered by the whitewashing. In this case, the original plan for the film was actually to make it with exclusively Asian-American actors but that plan fell through as the producers weren’t sure if Americans at the time would want to go to the movies to watch a film with exclusively Asian actors. Thus, The Good Earth features Luise Rainer wearing yellowface and Paul Muni not wearing any makeup whatsoever but still passing himself off as Chinese.

Ignoring this (and it’s very hard to do so), the film is pretty good. It’s one of those grand, generational, slice-of-life epics that you see come out every now and then and for that genre, and the time it came out, The Good Earth is pretty solid. Definitely on the slow side but overall solid. In fact, this is actually a film that I think could warrant a remake in today’s “remake everything” craze.

This was also the last film that Irving G. Thalberg worked on before he passed away, which also means that this was the first Oscar ceremony to feature the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. One would think that the judges of the Academy would then vote The Good Earth to be the best movie of the year to memorialize their friend but I suppose not. Regardless, I would’ve complained about it anyway if that was the case.

This Academy Awards ceremony features one of the worst Oscar wins in Academy history. There were several really good films this year, such as Make Way for Tomorrow, The Prince and the Pauper, In Old Chicago, One Hundred Men and a Girl, Captains Courageous and Camille, but there’s three films in particular that we really need to hone in on that should have deserved the win. Of those three, one is more significant than the other two so we’ll tier this up accordingly.

First is Lost Horizon, yet another movie by Frank Capra. Considering how the Academy was (and still is) a good old boy’s club and Capra had already earned an Oscar back in 1934 and came close to winning one the previous year, it appears that the popular consensus was to give somebody else a chance. That’s a pretty stupid reason to judge great filmmaking but I digress. Lost Horizon is a really great movie.

Lost Horizon revolves around a group of British refugees, led by Robert Conway (Ronald Colman who was a severe snub for the Academy Award for Best Actor), who get lost in the Himalayas and find the fabled city of Shangri-La. The rest of the film is then them living in this utopic city while trying to find their way out. What follows is a very mature and interesting think piece about what a perfect society entails and the characters constantly waiting to find out what the catch is. This is one of the earliest landmarks in the fantasy genre and one that handles its subject matter in a very adult manner.

The movie was way ahead of its time, with the conversation between Conway and the leader of Shangri-La about halfway into the film being a very interesting and intelligent commentary on what a utopia could actually mean. It also has the classic feel-good ending that Capra is known for. Lost Horizon is easily one of the best films of 1937 and is ten times the film that The Life of Emile Zola was and probably some of the most intelligent filmmaking that Capra ever made. But that’s not the film we’re here to focus on.

That year also saw the original A Star Is Born, the quintessential Hollywood fairy tale that seems to get remade once every generation. A bright-eyed all-American girl named Esther Blodgett (Janet Gaynor) moves to Los Angeles to achieve her dream of becoming a movie star. From there, she is quickly thrown into the proverbial LA meatgrinder, struggling every day of her life to become a star. It isn’t long before she crosses paths with the biggest actor in Hollywood, Norman Maine (Fredric March), and the pair’s inevitable friendship/relationship leaves both questioning where they fit in.

Whilst being a Hollywood fairy tale, A Star Is Born does not shy away from some of the more sinister trappings of fame. The film does a great job at taking its time at showing how hard it is to become famous, how difficult and life-ruining being famous can be and, ultimately, what losing your fame can do to you. In a decade where Hollywood loved to profess itself as the dream industry, to help audiences forget about the Great Depression, A Star Is Born was not afraid to show just how much chasing a dream can cost.

Similar to 42nd Street (1933), I’m honestly stunned A Star Is Born did not win the Oscar for Outstanding Production. This is the film that I would imagine Hollywood circles back in the day adoring because if there’s one thing that people in show business love, it’s movies about people in show business. It still holds up, too, and hasn’t been outshone by any of its revolving door of remakes (all of which are also excellent). But, once again, this is not the big snub of the year. No, instead we must take a look at the proverbial mouse.

In 1934, Walter Elias Disney was pioneering the art of animation and its association with sound and color with his highly successful Silly Symphonies cartoons. An ambitious man with his eye always on the next big thing, Disney commissioned his staff to make a feature-length animated cartoon. Fast forward 3 years, $1.5 million ($32 million in today’s money), a mortgaged house, a $250,000 bank loan ($5.6 million today), near bankruptcy of his studio and a pissed-off wife later, and Walt Disney Productions released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (why it’s not spelled properly as “dwarves,” I don’t know).

This film is your typical fairy tale, and is the cinematic staple of the genre. In a far-off magical kingdom, the Wicked Queen (Lucille La Verne) desires to be the fairest one of all. Unfortunately, that title belongs to her housemaid, Snow White (Adriana Caselotti). The Wicked Queen, not one to shy away from an adjective, promptly orders her henchman (Stuart Buchanan) to murder Snow White. However, he finds he is unable to do it and Snow White flees into the forest where she runs into the house of the seven dwarves, a group of pint-sized miners whose names reflect their basic personality traits. From there, the film is about their living together while the Queen tries to track Snow White down and finish the job.

I have heard this movie referred to as both the first feature-length color film and the first feature-length animated film but neither of those records are really true. We’ve discussed color previously and the first feature-length Technicolor movie was Becky Sharp in 1935. Animation has also been tinkered with since the dawn of cinema, with the first animated film being the now-lost El Apóstol, made by an Argentinian filmmaker in 1916. Snow White, however, was the first to bring both of these traits to a wide audience appeal. Disney was very ambitious for his first feature, as the film has scenes of animation that not only would have blown audiences away back in 1937 but are still pretty impressive even by today’s standards.

Besides pioneering these aspects, Disney and his animators (particularly David Hand who was the actual supervising director of the film) established what would be many of the “rules” of the animated formula, particularly most Disney films. The genre would forever be associated with musicals and fairytales but there are also some principles of animation that were defined here after being toyed with in the Silly Symphonies. For example, serious characters (e.g. Snow White, the Queen) are animated more top-heavy, centered around their head, while comic relief characters (e.g. the Dwarves) are animated more bottom-heavy, centered around their butt. And while the animators are focused on having fun with their comic relief to entertain the family, there is a strong core story that is meant to make the audience feel. (Fun fact: there was actually a lot of debate in-studio about whether to make the Queen a funny character or a scary and serious character. The latter won out, which I think is a core reason for the film’s success.)

At the time this came out, the Queen was probably the greatest movie villain ever.

Of course, the film has more than a dozen plot holes and is pretty easy to riff nowadays (the Queen has an omnipotent Magic Mirror that knows everything and she uses it as a Hot or Not app?) but you have to remember when it came out. Great Depression-era America was serviced by fairytales to get their mind off of their problems and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was one of the best in this category. The movie doesn’t always follow what makes sense logically but it gives you what your emotions want to see. Who cares if the Queen dies by a Deus Ex Machina? We just want to see her get her comeuppance. And, c’mon, when you were a kid, who didn’t feel like cheering when Grumpy (Pinto Colvig) leads the other dwarves to save Snow White at the climax?

So how big of a deal was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs when it came out? Well, it was the film that dethroned The Jazz Singer (1928) for the title of the then-highest-grossing movie of all time. Adjusted for inflation, it remains in the top ten for highest-grossing movies, period, and is the highest-grossing animated movie of all time. It has been so consistently successful that any time that Walt Disney Studios needs/has needed money, they just re-release it and make it all over again. There’s records of rich and powerful people loving Snow White so much that they would buy copies of the film and projection machines so they could watch the movie at home whenever they wanted, pioneering home media over 30 years before the VCR was invented (granted, the most famous example of this is Adolf Hitler but I like to think that the point remains). It also turned Disney into a household name and helped him build the biggest media empire in human history. Finally, it established an entire genre of film easily identified as Disney films: animated musical features for the whole family, a genre that’s ongoing to this day.

And, when all of that was said and done, the film won diddly-squat. Similar to the last time that film was revolutionized with The Jazz Singer, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was wholesale snubbed at the Oscars. The only category it got a single nomination in was the Oscar for Best Scoring, which it lost to One Hundred Men and a Girl. And while One Hundred Men and a Girl is also a great movie with some great scoring, it pales in comparison to Snow White’s excellent score that always perfectly captures the mood of the story. It also didn’t receive a nomination for Best Song and the songs were already being heralded as instant classics even back then (e.g. in You Can’t Take It With You, released the following year, a character whistles “Whistle While You Work,” a reference that audiences back then would’ve instantly understood).

You can probably see where this judgment of history is going so that raises the question: why was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs so snubbed? Well, similar to The Jazz Singer, I think it’s mostly because Disney wasn’t really part of the “in” crowd in Hollywood circles. Disney was much more of a maverick, not really fitting in with the likes of Louis B. Meyer and Jack Warner. In addition, during Snow White’s production, most Hollywood insiders predicted the film flopping and ruining Disney’s career, referring to it as “Disney’s Folly.” When the film ended up showing them all up, many egos were probably bruised and they privately seethed rather than admit they’ve been wrong. (Again, this is all speculation on my part based on my understanding of the time so if you read anything to refute this, please believe that instead.)

The choice to snub Disney ended up causing such an uproar in Hollywood circles that the following year, Disney was awarded with an honorary Oscar as congratulations for his contributions to cinema for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. (Amusingly, the Oscar was a custom-designed statuette which had the big statue surrounded by seven smaller statues.) While that’s all well and good and a nice gesture but getting back to the point of this blog: there is no way that this was less of an outstanding film than The Life of Emile Zola. Revolutionizing cinema in this way is practically the very definition of outstanding.

Giving The Life of Emile Zola the Oscar for Outstanding Production was a…

SNUB!

Personal Favorite Movies of 1937:

• A Star Is Born (dir. William A. Wellman)
• Camille (dir. George Cukor)
• Captains Courageous (dir. Victor Fleming)
• Lost Horizon (dir. Frank Capra)
• Make Way for Tomorrow (dir. Leo McCarey)
• One Hundred Men and a Girl (dir. Henry Koster)
• Shall We Dance (dir. Mark Sandrich)
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (dir. David Hand)
• The Prince and the Pauper (dir. William Keighley and William Dieterle)
• Way Out West (dir. James W. Horne)

Favorite Heroes:

• Esther Blodgett/Vicki Lester (Janet Gaynor) (A Star Is Born)
• Harvey Cheyne (Freddie Bartholomew) (Captains Courageous)
• Maitre Labori (Donald Crisp) (The Life of Emile Zola)
• Peter Petrov Peters (Fred Astaire) (Shall We Dance)
• The Dwarves (Roy Atwill, Pinto Colvig, Otis Harlan, Scotty Mattraw, Billy Gilbert and Eddie Collins) (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs)

Favorite Villains:

• Colonel Henry (Robert Warwick) (The Life of Emile Zola)
• Fräulein Rottenmeier (Mary Nash) (Heidi)
• Judge Van Cassell (Frank Sheridan) (The Life of Emile Zola)
• Matt Libby (Lionel Stander) (A Star Is Born)
• The Wicked Queen (Lucille La Verne) (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs)