Director: Mervyn LeRoy, Michael Curtiz (uncredited)
Production Company: Warner Bros.
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Top Billed Actors: Fredric March, Olivia de Havilland, Donald Woods

Won 4 Oscars:
Best Supporting Actress - Gale Sondergaard
Best Original Score - Warner Bros. Studio Music Dept. (score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold)
Best Cinematography - Tony Gaudio
Best Film Editing - Ralph Dawson
Nominated for 3 more:
Best Picture
Best Art Direction - Anton Grot
Best Assistant Director - William Cannon

Plot: An orphan grows up and has too many adventures and has to deal with too many devious women.

With seven nominations, Anthony Adverse (1936) shared the honor of the most nominations at the 9th Awards with two other films. With four wins, it had the most awards of the night. The number of accolades contrasts the perplexing Rotten Tomatoes score, which is 13% as of the date of this post. Granted, it has a very small sample size (only eight), but the relatively low IMDb score is also eye-opening. One of these four is the inaugural Best Supporting Actress award, which went to Gale Sondergaard. The legendary Erich Wolfgang Korngold, although not officially a winner due to the Original Score Oscar being awarded to the music department at the time, wins his first of two. Aside from all of these accolades, the film is also notable for being Warner Bros. most expensive and longest to date.

So what's going on here? Why the disconnect of the number of Oscars and generally negative reviews? I hope to explain why the movie was applauded at the time. The performance by the lead, Fredric March, is akin to his first Oscar win, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932). He shows a wide range as he portrays love and happiness, then bitterness and despair so wonderfully. It's a wonder why he wasn't nominated for the Best Actor award. The two Oscars that are apparent to why this was revered are for the Score and Cinematography. Korngold's score is unrelenting and make the movie bearable in the dull moments and downright exciting in the great moments. It sets the tone and sometimes even drives the story. For the time, it was ambitious and it is very listenable to today's audience. The camera-work was rightly commended at the Oscars and it's not difficult to see why. The advantage of going through this Project chronologically is that I can see the progression of filmmaking over time. The pans and zoom-ins and zoom-outs are meaningful as well as a breath of fresh air due to the mostly static cinematography of the time period.

Now why the low scores on film review sites? The biggest issue is the adaptation of the original source material. I have not read the novel, but the general consensus is that the film gets it completely wrong. I can't speak to the similarities and differences, but I can speak to how disjointed the narrative is. The opening scenes put the viewer right into a melodramatic situation. I actually had to check a plot description online after the first ten minutes to see if I was watching the right movie because it felt like I was watching the conclusion to a movie that resulted in a fatal love triangle. All it did was set up why Anthony Adverse was an orphan and his relationship with Don Luis. One of the thirty (exaggerated) title cards could have explained this without so much time invested before Anthony's birth. The jaggedness comes from those aforementioned title cards. A few scenes occur, then a block of text explains two to three years at a time. Then we have to take in a new set with new characters and circumstances all over again. It's challenging to the viewer, but not in a rewarding way.

Overall, the acting, music, and cinematography isn't enough to rise the movie out of the doldrums of the overly-long narrative that feels choppy, disjointed, and overly melodramatic.
My Score: 6/10

Director: W.S. Van Dyke, D.W. Griffith (uncredited)
Production Company: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)
Distributor: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)
Top Billed Actors: Clark Gable, Jeanette MacDonald, Spencer Tracy

Won 1 Oscar:
Best Sound - Douglas Shearer
Nominated for 5 more:
Best Picture
Best Director - W.S. Van Dyke
Best Actor - Spencer Tracy
Best Writing (Story) - Robert E. Hopkins
Best Assistant Director - Joseph M. Newman

Plot: A typical musical comedy gets all shook up from an earthquake.

There's a lot of trivia to get through for 1936's top grossing film, San Francisco (1936). Let's start with Spencer Tracy. This is his first of nine Best Actor nominations. It also might be the shortest amount of screen time for a lead nominee. He would go on to win the award the next two years in a row. As movie lore goes, he was tired of playing the supporting role behind Clark Gable so he went out on his own. I daresay this was a successful strategy and he has the Oscars to prove it. On the topic of Oscars, this is the first time someone has own consecutive awards in the same category, when Douglas Shearer won for Best Sound (he won for the same category the previous year for Naughty Marietta (1935), which also starred Jeanette MacDonald singing in an operatic style). The song "San Francisco" was written for this film. It is now considered an official city song and is sung at earthquake memorials. It's a little strange that it wasn't even nominated for Best Song, but at least the Sound category went to this movie.

If you like the aforementioned operatic singing of MacDonald, then you will like the music here. When I saw a musical starring Clark Gable was on the agenda, I had to do a double take. Alas, the musical aspects are all in-world and don't involve Gable breaking out in song. MacDonald's voice is as lovely as ever and it's such a joy to hear her sing. She gets to show her range a little bit by singing in actual opera conditions as well as in a night club. She pulls off both styles quite well. On the flip-side of the singing comes the disaster sequence in the film's closing moments. It was such a smart choice to include no music for the duration of the tremors, fires, and explosions. After hearing music for nearly two hours straight, the impact that just the sound of explosions and commotion is really felt when the music is absent.

It's said that MacDonald and Gable did not like working for each other. It's also said Gable didn't want to do this picture, but MGM had him under contract and he had little choice. I didn't know this going into the movie, but it does make sense upon review. There is absolutely no chemistry between the two and Gable's performance is not up to his usual standards. Some of this can be blamed on the culture of the time. Gable's character is supposed to be rooted in "evil" as his priest friend (Tracy) says. However, not much evil is shown. Sure there's some drinking and gambling, but not much else is going on. I don't think 1930's culture permitted to many sketchy things to be shown, so this whole part of the story falls flat. I can't connect to what Tracy is saying about Gable and I can't see why his operations are so beneath MacDonald. It comes off as pretentious, which is not the intended effect of the character interactions.

Overall, the music and disaster sequences hold the movie together. The typical romantic affairs between Gable, MacDonald, and her other suitor is not worth seeking out.
My Score: 6/10

Director: Frank Capra
Production Company: Columbia Pictures Corporation
Distributor: Columbia Pictures Corporation
Top Billed Actors: Gary Cooper, Jean Arthur, George Bancroft

Won 1 Oscar:
Best Director - Frank Capra
Nominated for 4 more:
Best Picture
Best Actor - Gary Cooper
Best Writing (Adapted) - Robert Riskin
Best Sound - John P. Livadary

Plot: A semple, small-town guy gets a boatload of money and plays the tuba.

The Academy was kind to Frank Capra in the 1930's and 1940's and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) signifies his third Directing nomination in four years and his second win in three years. After his monumental, Big Five win with It Happened One Night (1935), this movie almost seems like a disappointment with only a Best Director Oscar. Of course, I am being a tad facetious as any Oscar is worth its weight in gold, but Mr. Deeds did have a lot going for it. Gary Cooper gets his first Oscar nomination in his illustrious career and his counterpart, Jean Arthur, stars in her first featured role. We will see Cooper win two Oscars in the upcoming decades and Jean Arthur star in the following year's Best Picture winner as well as three Best Picture nominees from George Stevens.

Accolades aside, I reacted very strangely to this film. Much like how Arthur reacts to the lead character portrayed by Cooper, it took me a long time to warm up to it. But once I did, I look back upon it fondly. Cooper plays a very naive and gullible small-town man in the big city. He inherits $20 million so everyone wants a piece, of the money or of the character. Even Arthur's character, who plays an undercover love interest for her scoop at the newspaper, plays Cooper like a tuba. After a while, he only seems to trust Arthur and this presents many a dramatic scene with that classic Capra comedic overtones. The interactions between Cooper and Arthur soon become endearing while still presenting spare moments to laugh. It all culminates to a courtroom scene which also teeters on the border of drama and comedy in such an impactful way. Heart and laughs is the name of the game and Capra does it better than most.

Although it took me a while to warm up to Cooper, the first act is somewhat painful to get through. I know its by design that Cooper is so naive, but man is it obvious. It becomes almost difficult to root for him after spending ten minutes with him after the setting changes to New York City. Even though I love Capra's movies for having so much passion and so many laughs, I often can't forgive how unsubtle they can be. Ultimately, there is too much screen time devoted to the discovery phase of how good Cooper is in the lead. Even though the scales tipped in the overall positive favor, they were negative for a tad too long.

Overall, the heart overpowers these feelings of distaste. The culmination in the courtroom gives credence to everything that takes place in the movie so it is difficult to complain about anything that occurs before it. Cooper genuinely earns his first nomination and Capra genuinely earns his second Oscar win.
My Score: 8/10

Director: Robert Z. Leonard
Production Company: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)
Distributor: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)
Top Billed Actors: William Powell, Myrna Loy, Luise Rainer

Won 3 Oscars:
Best Picture
Best Actress - Luise Rainer
Best Dance Direction - Seymour Felix ("A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody")
Nominated for 4 more:
Best Director - Robert Z. Leonard
Best Writing (Story) - William Anthony McGuire
Best Art Direction - Cedric Gibbons, Eddie Imazu, Edwin B. Willis
Best Film Editing - William S. Gray

Plot: A lavish impresario spends a boatload of money to impress and make many a star, only to be the subject of a biopic that might be longer than his life itself.

And we arrive yet again to the Best Picture winner. The Great Ziegfeld (1936) is known for its lavishness as well as its length. It took exorbitant amounts of money to produce, which parallels the story of Florence Ziegfeld's life. Costumes, sets, trained animals, and M-G-M stars come together for one big spending spree and its truly a wonder to behold. The famous set piece, which is a spiraling "wedding cake," combines all of the above and it earns that Best Dance Direction Oscar; it costed over $220,000 and took weeks to shoot. The other Oscar the movie nabbed is for Luise Rainer's acting performance. Her filmography is not lengthy and she only appears twice in the Project, but she goes two-for-two and wins Best Actress two years in a row (for this and the following year in The Good Earth (1937)). The aforementioned length of the film is also noteworthy, To date, this was the longest talking picture, clocking in at nearly three hours (the copy I watched is over three hours, which I think is the Roadshow version).

Does all of this extravagance sit well? For the most part it does. The movie is pure spectacle at times and that;s not always a bad thing. For minutes at a time, a snippet of a Ziegfeld-esque show takes over and the music and staging is wonderful to watch. It admittedly doesn't make for a smooth cinematic experience, but if you are willing to sit back and enjoy a 1930s musical revue, these scenes are very much welcome. William Powell's performance as the lead is also a joy to watch. His charisma and wit makes Ziegfeld a likeable character that the audience can get behind. This is no small feat as any miscue could have made this portrayal as an opportunistic ladies' man. Instead, Ziegfeld is portrayed as a classy ladies' man, which is always fun to see on the silver screen.

Does the length of the movie sit well? For the most part, it does not. Although the extended musical sequences are a joy to watch, it doesn't bode well for the pacing of the movie. Even the scenes with Powell and his various woman recruits overstay their welcome. Also, the performance that got Luise Rainer her first Oscar is perplexing. I didn't see much justification for her win. I kept waiting for that Oscar moment, and I think it's the scene when she calls Flo to wish him well after his second marriage, but even that was over the top and not Award-worthy. I will only evaluate one other Actress nominee for this year (Norma Shearer in Romeo and Juliet (1936)) so I won't be able to get the complete picture, but I think this might just be a case of a performance not aging well, which is kind of a microcosm of the movie itself.

Overall, the abundance of resources that went into the film made this both a success and a failure. The showy set pieces and costumes are beautiful to look at, but the length and aged performances make this an uneven viewing experience.
My Score: 7/10

Director: William Dieterle
Production Company: Warner Bros.
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Top Billed Actors: Paul Muni, Josephine Hutchinson, Anita Louise

Won 3 Oscars:
Best Actor - Paul Muni
Best Writing (Adapted) - Pierre Collings, Sheridan Gibney
Best Writing (Story) - Pierre Collings, Sheridan Gibney
Nominated for 1 more:
Best Picture

Plot: A guy discovers germs and scientists spit in his face. Once the guy proves his discoveries, people stop being suckas and start washing their hands.

William Dieterle's second of three films in the Project, The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936) is what catapults the director into prominence with Warner Bros. Sure he directed a Best Picture nominee the year before (A Midsummer Night's Dream) but Pasteur won three major awards, including Paul Muni's only Oscar. The other two awards make a little history as this is the first time that someone (two people in this case) has won two Oscars for the same film. Pierre Collings and Sheridan Gibney each received both the Screenplay and the Story awards. This confused me at first as I thought the Story Oscar was what we now know as the Original Screenplay Oscar. However, the Original Screenplay did not come about until 1940. In 1940, there was a split between Adapted and Original. The Story Oscar is, I guess, just for the overall narrative of the movie. It sticks around until 1956. This means that there was a time when there were three writing categories at once - Adapted Screenplay, Original Screenplay, and Story. How confusing.

So this movie received two writing Oscars. Let's delve a little into the writing to see why. First of all, this is a very focused biopic. In my movie-watching experience, this is kind of an oxymoron. Most biopics cover unnecessary details about the subject's youth or old age. The only link between the scenes that are being presented is the main character. This movie, however, gets it right in that it goes from one major discovery to the next. We are introduced to microbes and how the world is ignorant of the potential harm they can do. Then, we go to the countryside and see the discovery of the cure for anthrax. Then we fast forward again and see Pasteur hard at work to try and cure rabies. Frivolous moments are nowhere to be found and the story is all the better for it. We don't see the history of Pasteur as a young man nor do we see him fall in love with his wife. The focus of the film is on these scientific discoveries and that's where it stays. This focus is helped by the wonderful performance of Muni. I've liked Muni since he first showed up in this Project, so much so that I selected the movie he starred in as the 'should have won' Best Picture for the 6th Awards. He's only 40 years old in this movie, but he plays the elderly man so well. He also gets many Oscar-worthy monologues, which always increases one's chances at the award.

Although I do like the overall story structure and the juicy monologues delivered from Muni, the writing does fall flat a few times throughout the feature. The scientists play the villain so blatantly, it is hard to imagine anyone acting like that. To keep the story on track, it seems like the writers were forced to get rid of any ambiguity. The Dr. Charbonnet character is so obviously ignorant of germs, it almost feels like an educational video, like "this is what you shouldn't do when preparing for a medical exam." Also, the romance between Donald Woods' character and Anita Louise's, Pasteur's daughter, is shoe-horned in the story. Overall, it's probably a good thing that there wasn't too much romance between the two per my praise of how focused this movie is, but I could have done with either more of it or none of it at all. Something that has nothing to do with the writing which lessens the impact of the film is the lack of music. The score is hardly present, which makes the movie feel like a relic of the past, as if it were made four years prior.

Overall, the writing is mostly superb and complements Paul Muni's strong performance as the titular character. The obviousness of the scientists' ignorance is grating after a while and the awkward silences between scenes takes away from the experience.
My Score: 7/10

Director: Jack Conway, Robert Z. Leonard (fill-in)
Production Company: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)
Distributor: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)
Top Billed Actors: Ronald Colman, Elizabeth Allan, Edna May Oliver

Won 0 Oscars
Nominated for 2 more:
Best Picture
Best Film Editing - Conrad A. Nervig

Plot: An alcoholic lawyer gets friend-zoned so hard. He deserves this as he keeps helping the husband of the woman he loves, despite his wish to be with her.

And we're off! The first entry for the 9th Academy Awards batch, which honors films from 1936, was actually released in 1935. It was released around Christmas 1935, so my guess is that it was released a week later in the Los Angeles area, which is part of the criteria for the Academy Awards. On the heels of MGM's David Copperfield (1935), A Tale of Two Cities (1935) indicates David O. Selznick perhaps had an obsession with Charles Dickens. There is even some shared actors between the two movies, which includes Edna May Oliver, Elizabeth Allan, and Basil Rathbone. The star here, howeverm is Ronald Colman, who shaved off his trademark mustache to play Sydney Carton (the same was true for Clark Gable in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)). Another note (pun intended) is that the trailer above and the credits features the piece Le Régiment de Sambre et Meuse, which is the march that The Ohio State University Marching Band plays when performing 'Script Ohio.' This piece has a special place in my heart as I performed with that band for four years.

As you could tell, the trivia to the movie isn't all that exciting. The movie itself is pretty good, however. Colman is a fantastic Carton. He could be sober and romantic or drunk and brash, but he is always endearing. He totally dominates the scenes opposite Allan (and pretty much any other actor). I recall being so enthralled by Colman during Arrowsmith (1931) and he is officially on my list for movies to be excited for when his name appears as a top billed actor. Although Colman may overshadow everyone else in the movie, there are still some great moments overall. The final shot that pans to the sky is cinematically sound and the music, which contains a lot of classical pieces of music, is also fitting. The narrative is also crisp and very engaging, especially for someone who has never read the book (like me). The characters and scenarios in London and Paris are introduced throughout the first half of the movie, and when the plot really gets going, its easy to care about the fate of France and, ultimately, the fate of Carton.

As I allude to above, Colman outshines everyone else on screen. The acting from nearly everyone not named Colman is below average, even when comparing the performances to others during this time period. This was Blanche Yurka's first movie since the silent film era and it really shows. She is very demonstrative with her gestures in the courtroom scene and it plays very hammy. Her sidekick has the most annoying laugh in the history of cinema. I recognized the voice right away and when I confirmed my hunch of who she was, I felt kind of proud. I am of course talking about the Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Her name was Lucille La Verne and she does the laugh of the Queen (after she transforms into the old witch) in every scene she is in. It makes absolutely no sense. There is also a lack of chemistry between Allan and her husband, Donald Woods. As I mentioned above, I have never read the book, but I would think there should be some conundrum for Allan to choose between both her suitors. As a viewer of this movie, I was just perplexed as to why Allan's character wanted to be with Woods' character when Colman was always there for her.

Overall, I'm glad to at least be acquainted with this classic narrative. Colman turns in an excellent performance amidst mostly poor ones, but there is enough momentum in the story to keep this going.
My Score: 7/10