Actress Round-up: 1934

Claudette Colbert, It Happened One Night

as ELLIE ANDREWS

Won: Academy Award - Best Actress

Claudette Colbert really didn't want to make It Happened One Night. The first picture she had ever made was directed by Frank Capra and it ended up being a complete failure. She had initially rejected the role of Ellie Andrews, but when Capra was told by Columbia head Harry Cohn that the "French broad likes money," Capra went to Colbert with the promises of doubling her salary and getting it all filmed within a month so that she could haul her ass off for a vacation. She agreed. She was allegedly difficult to deal with throughout the entire shoot. She told her friends right after production ended that she'd "just finished making the worst picture" she'd ever made. Colbert's relationship with It Happened One Night is almost as entertaining as the picture itself, but I'll be damned if you could clock any of that off-set bitterness in her performance. Because the woman is nothing less than an utter delight in the film, and despite everyone being so enraptured by Bette Davis' work and snub that year, it was really all about Claudette Colbert the entire time.

Bette Davis, Of Human Bondage

as MILDRED ROGERS

Bette Davis in Of Human Bondage is a performance that took the cinematic world by storm in 1934. This is a performance that the folks at Life Magazine cited as "probably the best performance ever recorded on the screen by a U.S. actress." This is a performance that so impressed the people of Hollywood that when Davis was unexpectedly denied a Best Actress nomination, there was such a backlash that the Academy was forced to allow write-in votes just so she could be in contention. I wanted to give Davis the typical nominee treatment despite her work not being an official Oscar-nominated performance firstly because she ending up getting enough write-in votes that year to place third, bumping out actual nominee Grace Moore into fourth. But above all, I wanted to honor this performance in appreciation of the legendary Miss Davis--a lady who wanted nothing more at the time than to nab roles in which she could sink her teeth into, to showcase the range and talent she knew she had--the very range and talent that Warner Bros. was stifling. This was the performance that got Oscar to notice her, whether he wanted to or not, and she would continue to get him to notice her for upwards of the next quarter century.

Norma Shearer, The Barretts of Wimpole Street

as ELIZABETH BARRETT

Another year, another melodramatic romance starring Norma Shearer. The Barretts of Wimpole Street is a film I didn't quite enjoy save for its rather shocking final act revelation. While the dynamics of the storyline is certainly interesting at times and kinda-sorta-maybe based off the real lives of poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, this is a drama done dull. I mean, I can't garner much excitement over a film that sees Shearer basically locked in a house the entire time and features two scenes in which the viewer has to guess whether or not Shearer can make it up/down a flight of stairs--very much a filmed play and not really cinematic. At the end of the day, this is an average to above-average picture with performances that are good but hardly worth fussing over.

Grace Moore, One Night of Love

as MARY BARRETT

If there was anything I took away from One Night of Love, it was learning that Grace Moore was an opera singer. That's the beauty of old school Hollywood--studio heads were actually interested in recruiting famous people from outside the realm of film to take part in their movies. Interestingly enough audiences would go and see these movies, and Oscar would reward these people with nominations. That doesn't happen anymore--we now live in world where all juicy female roles will automatically be given to Meryl Streep, and the idea of putting acclaimed stage stars much less opera stars in lead roles in feature films is not realistic by any means. So in a way, Moore's inclusion in the Oscar race is one of the more interesting ones out there. Whether or not it was worthy is an entirely different question.

1934 - 7th Academy Awards

and the nominees were:

Clark Gable, It Happened One Night

Frank Morgan, The Affairs of Cellini

William Powell, The Thin Man

Claudette Colbert, It Happened One Night

Grace Moore, One Night of Love

Norma Shearer, The Barretts of Wimpole Street

(plus a special appearance by write-in candidate)

Bette Davis, Of Human Bondage