Success or Snub? Gone With the Wind (12th Academy Awards Review Pt. 2)

 To see part 1, click here.

Of Mice and Men Suite~Mark Isham - Of Mice and Men

According to cinephiles, 1939 was the greatest year of the 20th Century. (According to people living in China and Poland, it was probably one of the worst.) As mentioned earlier, 1939 was the culmination of 1930s Hollywood and this wasn’t a feat just limited to Gone With the Wind. If you look at the rundown, the number of classic films that came out this year is freaking insane. Just about every film even nominated for the Oscar is considered a masterpiece, the sheer number of classics is legendary and the Great Depression was finally (somewhat) winding down so audiences had more money to spend on the movies than ever before. While calling any year the single best year for film is a tall order (I personally think both 1976 and 1999 could give it a run for its money), it’s still notable.

As a result, this might be a longer chapter as we have a ton of films that were nominated, great ones that weren’t nominated and then one final one that is also held up as one of the other greatest filmmaking achievements of all time. Let’s go down the list, shall we?

Of Mice and Men: The greatest adaptation of the John Steinbeck book and a very dark portrayal of the death of the American dream. Lon Chaney Jr.’s portrayal of Lennie Smalls is the most poignant version of the character and was a severe snub for the acting Oscar.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame: Also one of the best adaptations with a great make-up job on Quasimodo (Charles Laughton) and a chillingly good portrayal of Frollo (Cedrick Hardwicke). Considered the gold standard as most later film versions of Hunchback take its cues from this one (including one of my personal favorite Disney movies).

Ninotchka: A quirky Ernst Lubitsch rom-com that slowly and cleverly turns into a tragic portrayal of the grim realities of life under the Soviet Union.

Wuthering Heights: A tale of crushing classism and a man who tries to break out from its heel and ruin the lives of those who humiliated him.

The Four Feathers: An epic war story of a man who must rescue his compatriots from being POWs during the Mahdist War. The Technicolor cinematography feels like it's decades ahead of its time.

Each Dawn I Die: A phenomenal hybrid between the prison and gangster genres with complex, 3-dimensional characters that you don’t normally see in this sort of picture.

The Man in the Iron Mask: An adaptation of Alexander Dumas’ sequel to The Three Musketeers, and considered the basis for all later adaptations. Great adventure film with some pretty risqué scenes of torture for its time.

Gulliver’s Travels: Paramount’s animated cash-in of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Almost as magical and wonderful of a movie as the Disney classics.

Goodbye, Mr. Chips: A film about the importance of how teachers can impact their students, which is a bizarrely specific subgenre that exists. I’m personally not a fan, and don’t understand how Robert Donat won the Oscar for Best Actor over many of these other performances, but it’s still famous and regarded as a classic so we shall acknowledge it.

The Hound of the Baskervilles: The start of Basil Rathbone’s stint in the Sherlock Holmes franchise. While its sequels would get increasingly silly, this is one of the great Holmes films with shadowy cinematography that echoes the Universal monster movies.

Five Came Back: An enormously popular B-movie that started Lucille Ball’s career and acts as a fun pioneer of the survival genre.

The Women: Based off of the enormously popular play of the same name, featuring an all-women cast with some acidic commentary on the lives of then-contemporary women.

The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex: A political thriller/action-adventure that is very engaging to watch.

Dark Victory: A love story where the female lead dies of a brain tumor. Should be Oscar bait (and kinda is) but the medical procedural scenes are surprisingly engaging.

Gunga Din: Indian adventure movie that culminates the genre started by The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935).

Son of Frankenstein: Not as good as the first two but still restarted the Universal monsters craze going into the 1940s.

And even foreign cinema had some big deals as Russia made Alexander Nevsky (released in the Soviet Union in 1938), based on one of its great war heroes. Supposedly, its climactic Battle of the Ice broke ground and pioneered the great battle scenes that all later films would come from. This confuses me a bit since you had big battles in The Crusades, which came out in 1935. And, even before that, there were large sequences in The Birth of a Nation (1917).

There was also the American release of Triumph des Willens (Eng. title: Triumph of the Will), a Nazi propaganda film that a lot of film scholars seem to love for “perfecting” the propaganda genre though actually sitting through it is not worth your time. (The film is basically 90 minutes of Hitler crowd surfing and giving a speech.)

With allllll those movies, this blog would be the length of a novel if we gave the “serious talk” treatment to each and every one of them. I highly recommend any of them that you saw there that catches your eye but, like I said, we have 3 chief ones that could have been a plausible contender for most influential movie of the year. First is Stagecoach,

Stagecoach Suite~Richard Hageman, W. Franke Harling, John Leipold and Leo Shuken - Stagecoach

the film that brought the Western back into the public eye. Similar to the swashbuckler, the Western was a pretty big film genre during the silent era of filmmaking, going all the way back to The Great Train Robbery (1903). Due to the difficulties of gathering sound outdoors and some miscellaneous box office failures here and there, the genre quickly died and went to the gutter bin during the early 30s.

Stagecoach is the film that brought it back, setting the stage for a year that acted as a Western boom year. You thought we were done listing movies, did you? You fool! Stagecoach’s large success unleashed a whole deluge of Western films that would define the classic clichés of the genre in 1939 alone: Union Pacific,

Jesse James,

Dodge City,

Drums Along the Mohawk,

Destry Rides Again

and The Oklahoma Kid

(and, to a lesser extent due to it being an indie film starring African-Americans, Harlem Rides the Range).

Now, realistically, several of these were probably all in production around the same time but it still wouldn’t surprise me if the gargantuan success of Stagecoach led to them all being fast-tracked release dates.

Stagecoach was basically “Grand Hotel on wheels” as a bunch of strangers all pile into a stagecoach going from Arizona to New Mexico and get to know each other on the journey. And, true to the Grand Hotel (1932) genre, they’re all played by major actors such as Lionel Barrymore (playing the alcoholic, Doc Boone), Donald Meeks (as the whiskey salesman, Peacock) and George Bancroft (as the marshal, Curley). And, of course, our main character, the Ringo Kid, played by John Wayne, whose name would forever be associated with the rugged Western.

About 90% of the clichés that you associate with the Western comes from this movie. You have the frontier village, the beautiful landscape shots of the desert, the protagonist looking for redemption, the whacky and incompetent marshal who needs to be taught a lesson by our hero, the sharpshooter looking for revenge, the evil outlaw and the casual racism towards Native Americans (though this movie is not as bad some others (looking at you, Union Pacific) despite the Natives being the villains). The film also has some themes about seeking fortune and redemption and the frontier. In its day, it was considered textbook filmmaking at its finest and cemented John Wayne and director John Ford’s careers as forever being associated with the Western.

Of course, it also has the same problems as a lot of old-timey Westerns in that it’s definitely slow-paced and can be boring at times. While it is very good and a milestone in American cinema, it ain’t no Gone With the Wind.

One of the other great groundbreakers in a year filled with groundbreakers was yet another Frank Capra classic, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

If Stagecoach pioneered the Western film and made John Wayne into a star then Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was a pioneer of the political thriller and made James Stewart a star. Originally conceived as a sequel to Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington revolves around Jefferson Smith (James Stewart) who is appointed to become a Senator of the United States representing the state of… I actually just realized that his state is never actually once mentioned.

Well, regardless, he enters the Senate to try to help out his state and is quickly given a rude awakening as he discovers that his state’s fellow Senator, Joseph Paine (Claude Rains), is in the pocket of a corrupt political boss, Jim Taylor (Edward Arnold). From there, it hits most of the Capra notes of having the scrappy but lovable everyman who believes in the best of his community and is rewarded in good turn. However, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington also spells a bit of a darker turn in Capra’s style.

Whereas the villains in his earlier movies were also upper-crust jerkbags who liked to crush the average man, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington introduces the evils of the political machine and examines more of a changing America. The America where people like the Jim Taylors and Senator Paines can buy up Washington D.C. and put more money into their own pocket. It demands that Americans still be vigilant and be careful about who they send to Washington.

Making a movie about the dangers of representative democracy and corruption in Washington D.C. during a year when fascism was rising around the world, World War II officially began and everyone was concerned that the US might be pulled into it was one Hell of a ballsy move. Needless to say, more than a few politicians weren’t pleased, as the film was reamed by then-big deals, such as Al Barkley (Senator from Kentucky and future Vice President) and Joe Kennedy (Ambassador to England and patriarch of the Kennedy family). Though that probably means the film was doing something right and does demand honesty and vigilance from our elected officials, waaaaaaayyyyy before it was trendy to hate our government.

On the movie itself, I do personally consider this one of Frank Capra’s weaker films in that it’s a bit of a slow burn. Most of the first half kinda meanders and doesn’t feel as fun as Capra’s other films. But it makes up for it in the back half which centers around Senator Smith giving a marathon filibuster to try to stop the voting for a bad bill. Besides being an allegory for how much good one man can do, it’s also so much damn fun to watch and constantly leaves you wondering how Smith is going to find his way out of this.

But we’re just treading water here at this point. In this year of groundbreakers and classics, there really was only one film that was as revolutionary, as beloved and as all-American as Gone With the Wind: The Wizard of Oz.

Cyclone~Herbert Stothart - The Wizard of Oz

Based on L. Frank Baum’s book series of the same name, The Wizard of Oz is one of the most cherished films of all time. The film centers around the young, impressionable Dorothy Gale (Judy Garland in her most famous role) who lives with her dog, Toto, and her Aunty Em (Clara Blandick) on a farm in Kansas. One day, a tornado ravages the farm and whisks Dorothy away to the magical land of Oz. Desperate to return home, she’s instructed by Glinda the Good Witch (Billie Burke) to seek the mysterious Wizard of Oz (Frank Morgan). The rest of the movie then details Dorothy’s adventures through the land of Oz and the colorful characters she meets along the way, all while being pursued by the Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton).

Along with Gone With the Wind, this was MGM’s capstone to their heyday as Hollywood’s premier movie studio in the 1930s and, boy, did they ever pull out all the stops on this one. The color pops off the screen and the size, scale and number of sets, costumes and musical numbers is astronomical. The songs are, of course, classic, with “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” winning a well-deserved Oscar for Best Original Song. And the film is the right blend of silly while still having a warm heart to it. But what this excels at, especially compared to many other musicals of the 30s and 40s Hollywood, is that The Wizard of Oz is a good movie first and foremost. What do I mean by this?

After Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) smashed box office records, MGM took serious notes on how fantasy stories based off of children’s stories could make money but also, more importantly, how to do so. If you compare The Wizard of Oz to other, earlier fantasy films, you’ll notice how a lot of them usually come off as vehicles for a star to show off their comedic chops. There was an earlier version of The Wizard of Oz in 1925 that was a big piece for Larry Semon (a silent star in the 1920s who died of tuberculosis in 1928) and then Babes in Toyland (1934), which was mostly just a Laurel and Hardy gimmick. Combined with these relative failures, as well as actual failures like the bizarre fever dream of Alice in Wonderland (1933), it’s easy to see why the fantasy genre had a hard stumbling block out of the gate.

In The Wizard of Oz, the story comes first. The only really big stars were Frank Morgan, who’s interspersed throughout the film in a series of cameos and has a relatively small amount of screen time, and Judy Garland, who completely disappears into the role of Dorothy. (You could argue maybe Billie Burke and Ray Bolger as well, although they were more Broadway stars, not really so much in Hollywood.) While some audiences would have gone to see that girl from Andy Hardy Finds Love (1938), they were mostly there to watch one of their favorite books get adapted to the big screen.

Comparing this film to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs I think does hold water as they share most of the reasons why they both worked so well. They’re emotional storytelling at its finest as they give the audience exactly what they want to see when they want to see it. When things seem like they’re going bad, we’re brought back at the last moment to see things turn out okay, even if they don’t always make sense. Most, if not all, of the major problems in this film are resolved by Deus Ex Machinas. If you did this today, your film would be laughed out of the theater; but back then, and as a kid, you just wanted to see Dorothy and her friends get out okay.

It also helps that The Wizard of Oz is quite a bit more clever than your run-of-the-mill comedy musical of the day. Shooting all of the Kansas scenes in sepia tone and the Oz scenes in Technicolor was a stroke of genius. There’s the whole playing with how much of Oz exists versus just being in Dorothy’s head (almost all of the characters in Oz bear a striking resemblance to characters in Dorothy’s hometown). And it spoke to a generation of Americans about how “there is no place like home,” showing the Kansan prairie as this warm, loving place that, despite being drab and gray, is still home. Instead of being the Dust Bowl-ravaged, impoverished Hellhole it likely was, it’s the place that Dorothy (and, by proxy, the audience) will always belong.

From there, The Wizard of Oz has become a cherished part of Americana, to the extent that I think almost every scene in the movie is instantly recognizable and has been parodied in some way, shape or form. There have been countless attempted sequels and cash-ins (almost all of them terrible) that have tried to capture the success but never come close. The Wicked Witch of the West is one of the most famous movie villains of all time, even getting a book and Broadway play based off of her side of the story called Wicked (book: 1995, play: 2003), which has inspired a whole sub-genre of “fairy tales from the POV of the villains” becoming a thing (though, once again, almost all of them are terrible). And the film has countless urban myths swirling around it. Tackling them one at a time:

• Yes, the poppy snow falling on them was made out of asbestos.

• No, a munchkin did not hang himself on the set of Munchkinland.

• No, you can’t see it no matter how bad you swear you can because, even if he did, they wouldn’t have left the body in view of the cameras.

• Yes, the fireball effect on the Wicked Witch’s teleportation did almost kill Margaret Hamilton since her green makeup was flammable.

• Yes, stuff like this is why unions exist nowadays.

• No, Pink Floyd didn’t base Dark Side of the Moon (1973) on the film no matter how badly you insist it syncs up with the movie.

• But apparently cult classic Youtube pioneer, The Angry Video Game Nerd (2006-present), did for his review of the video game.

• Yes, there is a Wizard of Oz video game.

• No, a studio head didn’t eat the dog that played Toto after he outlived his usefulness.

• Yes, Judy Garland was treated horrifically by Louis B. Mayer and the studio and she spent most of the production being doped up on enough drugs to sedate Keith Richards.

Per the movie itself, it hasn’t aged with the greatest of graces. While the sets and costumes, and the sheer number of them, were groundbreaking at the time, it definitely has shown its age over 80 years later. If you didn’t watch this as a kid and aren’t in touch with your inner child, you might find it a bit hard to find it so great. If you’re in that category, just appreciate what it did for cinema and, that aside, I think that Bert Lahr and Margaret Hamilton’s scenery-chewing performances as the Cowardly Lion and the Wicked Witch are fun enough to make it worth a watch.

I feel that this doesn't get the kudos it deserves as one of the greatest comedic performances from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

What The Wizard of Oz, along with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Gulliver’s Travels, really accomplished, though, was making great, intelligent, quality entertainment for children that their parents could love too. Now, if you want to get technical about it then, yes, all films back then were technically made for children on account of the Hays Code, but movies usually still had a clear age group they were aiming at in terms of themes and tone. The Wizard of Oz helped to cement a legacy of something that could aim at children but still have enough things in it for adults to enjoy it too. In case you’re thinking that this was juvenile even by those standards, keep in mind that before Snow White, the best kids’ entertainment Hollywood had to offer was the Shirley Temple films. So, yes, these were giant steps forward.

Going back to the core question of Success or Snub, boy, is this one a doozy. While this was one Hell of a year for movies, it’s clear that it ultimately really comes down to Gone With the Wind or The Wizard of Oz. And this isn’t a clear-cut case of them both just being good films; these are two groundbreaking, generation-defining films. While it seems that nowadays, The Wizard of Oz is more definitive, that’s probably a byproduct of it being played on TV every Christmas ever since the 1950s.

Back then, in 1939, Hell if I know what was going through their heads. It honestly seems like the Academy might have just chosen it based on, or being influenced by, box office gross and, in that regard, Gone With the Wind clearly dominated. Supposedly The Wizard of Oz was a relative failure on its initial release but I’ve also heard that it was on its way to getting the highest-grossing movie ever title before Gone With the Wind came out later that year and crushed it. (Most likely what happened was that The Wizard of Oz fell victim to the infamous “Hollywood bookkeeping” where studio accountants will cook the numbers to make a film into a box office failure so they can claim it as a tax write-off. But this is pure conjecture on my part; just looking at the pure numbers, it took a few re-releases for The Wizard of Oz to recoup its budget though that’s also partially just because of how much money it cost to make.)

All that aside, Gone With the Wind is a very excellent film and did deserve its award. Also, let’s be frank here, this isn’t really something that matters since the movies were made by the same studio, same producers and even the same director. Considering how Louis B. Mayer was getting that gold statuette to offset his wicked black heart regardless, who cares? Calling Gone With the Wind the best movie of 1939 was a…

SUCCESS!

Personal Favorite Movies of 1939:

• Destry Rides Again (dir. George Marshall)
• Each Dawn I Die (dir. William Keighley)
• Gone With the Wind (dir. Victor Fleming)
• Gulliver's Travels (dir. Dave Fleischer)
• Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (dir. Frank Capra)
• Of Mice and Men (dir. Lewis Milestone)
• The Four Feathers (dir. Zoltan Korda)
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame (dir. William Dieterle)
• The Man in the Iron Mask (dir. James Whale)
• The Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming, George Cukor, Mervyn LeRoy, Norman Taurog, Richard Thorpe and King Vidor)

Favorite Heroes:

• George Milton (Burgess Meredith) (Of Mice and Men)
• Ninotchka Yakushova (Greta Garbo) (Ninotchka)
• Quasimodo (Charles Laughton) (The Hunchback of Notre Dame)
• Stacey (George Raft) (Each Dawn I Die)
• The Cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr) (The Wizard of Oz)

Favorite Villains:

• Chief Justice Jean Frollo (Cedric Hardwicke) (The Hunchback of Notre Dame)
• King Louis XIV (Louis Hayward) (The Man in the Iron Mask)
• Mr. McCoy (Donald Meek) (Jesse James)
• Pete Kassock (John Wray) (Each Dawn I Die)
• The Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton) (The Wizard of Oz)