____________________________________________________________________________
Best Picture
____________________________________________________________________________
Best Picture
|
____________________________________________________________________________
Best Actor
THE WINNER:
They were excellent but, let's face it, Bela Lugosi leaves them all behind. It is one thing to play a part brilliantly, but it is something else to occupy a role so well that you end up owning the part forever. Lugosi's performance as Dracula has been lauded and exalted as one of the best performances in the horror film genre. So, it is a mystery to me why the academy chose to ignore his work. Perhaps because Dracula was deemed a simple-minded horror film, both Lugosi and the film went completely unnominated. That's a shame because between his performance and the brilliant set decoration by the legendary Karl Freund, Dracula contains some of the best work of the early years of talking pictures. The film is as much art as it is entertainment, and Lugosi is much of the reason why. Lugosi had been in America for a decade, working mostly on the stage. In 1927, he had even starred in Dracula - the version upon which the film is based. He was Hungarian and spoke with a thick accent. He was a very theatrical man who was rarely off-stage, a quality that lends the character an elegance and charm. Through Lugosi’s performance, we sense a creature that seems to have spent centuries on earth but has remained outside normal human contact. His speech is slow and deliberate. When he speaks, his words are evenly spaced. His physical movements are odd too. When he walks, it almost seems as if he is floating. We know that the count can periodically transform himself into a vampire bat, and his movement suggests that his brain has forgotten that his feet are suppose to be firmly planted to the ground. What Bela Lugosi created in Dracula would cement the vampire myth in the public imagination: The bloodsucking, the transformation into a bat, the eastern-European accent, the regal cape, his fear of daylight, the fact that he sleeps in a coffin and, of course, his erotic charm. These vampire myths had been set forth in Bram Stoker's original novel, but Lugosi put the living image of Dracula into the public’s bloodstream. Sadly, while Bela Lugosi gave us the definitive vision of Dracula, the role is the high point of his movie career. With his odd mannerisms and deliberate speech he seemed resigned to cheap horror films, playing loony scientists and other eccentrics (even Frankenstein's monster!). Though he was obsessed with the part of Bram Stoker's nightcrawler, he only played the character again in a negligible Abbott and Costello comedy a decade later. His later years found him even worse roles in Ed Wood pictures and he made his swan song Plan 9 From Outer Space - the movie that is, today, hailed as the worst movie ever made. It is left to wonder what might have become of Lugosi's career had he won an Oscar for his performance in Dracula. He gained immortality as Stoker's vampire but I always wonder if a little more affection from Hollywood might have shed some daylight on his movie career. |
THE WINNER:
The film is emotional, it is hard not to be moved by the plight of a woman who sells her dignity to make a better life for her son, but I think Hayes’ Oscar came mostly for her reputation and for the physical transformation of Madelon from young and beautiful to a tired-looking old hag - a credit that really goes to the make-up artists. It is the script that sinks her performance. There are no wounds to Lil, no shattered past that makes her this way. She's sexy, she likes it, and she likes what it does to men. Harlow displays such a joy at breaking down a man's moral wall that for a while, we are happy to go along. We can't believe that these men would be such dopes but if you study her body language you can see the seductive power. Her performance is not all that different from another gold-digger, the one played by Barbara Stanwyck a year later in a film called Baby Face. In that film, an equally trashy Stanwyck literally sexes her way from the gutter to the gold, seducing one man after another (including a 26 year-old John Wayne). But Stanwyck's Lily Powers had a reason for her machinations - she was trying to pull herself out of the gutter of prostitution provided by her no-good father. Harlow's character has no such reasoning; she just wants to get to the top because she has the organic tools to do so. She laughs at her seductive powers when they work and she gets vindictive when they don't. The only weakness in the film is the ending, which seems a little contrived and hurried. After getting herself into a hornet’s nest of trouble, Lile is forced to shoot Bill, who survives but won’t have her charged with murder. He returns to Irene. We catch up with her two years later as a race track in a scene that seems to have been added sometime later. There’s some indication that Lil is headed off to her death, but it is left somewhat ambiguous. That odd ending doesn't speak to Harlow's performance - just some bad writing. Harlow's performance is an act of depraved giddiness but as the film goes along, we begin to sympathize with those she is attempting to destroy. There comes a point at which every time she shows up in a doorway, we feel pity for anyone who tries to leave the room. |
 |
|
|---|
This site is neither endorsed nor affiliated with The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences The opinions expressed are purely those of the author. |
