OSCAR’S
CANADIAN GIRLS
 |
| America's Sweetheart. Toronto native Mary Pickford |
Back in the day, as the Great Depression descended on the
world, when the Academy awards were brand new and Canadian hockey supremacy was
unchallenged, there was another very different kind of Team Canada building a
minor dynasty.
After Janet Gaynor won the very first Best Actress Oscar
in 1929,for her portrayal of a prostitute in Street Angel, Canadian women monopolized the award for the next
three years. Unless you know something I don’t, none have won ever since though
one did come close decades later.
They are three fascinating stories and I shouldn’t be
burning them all in one post it is a little known tribute to the stature and
influence Canadians had in the early days of Hollywood film and myth.
From 1930-32, Canadian women had a lock on the Best
Actress statuette.
First there was Mary Pickford, aka America’s Sweetheart,
arguably the biggest movie star of all time. Her fame and power at the time
can’t be overstated. She was a poor young girl from Toronto who made a career
of playing poor young girls in the silent movie era. Born Gladys Smith in 1892,
she made her stage debut at the age of six and went on to make over 230 movies,
be a founding partner of United Artists studio (with Charlie Chaplin) and a
founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Sadly, her superstardom was abruptly ended with the
invention of sound. The poor-young-girl well ran dry wit the advent of sound
She did win Best Actress in 1930 for her first speaking
role in Coquette.
But either the Academy could see the writing on the wall
for her or she twisted many arms to get enough votes. To put it kindly, it is
often regarded as the first Lifetime Achievement Award because it was a truly
dreadful movie. Pushing 40, her attempt to reprise her winning formula of
portraying plucky young girls failed miserably. Still, the award can be seen as
a tribute to the box-office force she had been for a decade. A major
achievement for a Canadian artist.
Next was one of Hollywood’s original glamour queens.
Norma Shearer was an ambitious Montreal girl who, unlike Pickford mastered the
transition to sound and went on to receive five Best Actress nominations. There
is to this day a Shearer Street in a legendary working-class part of her home
town. It was named after the lane in which her grandfather had a lumber yard.
She overcame the potentially fatal flaw for a femme
fatale of a cast in one eye. OK she was cross-eyed and cured it with the help
of a hideously expensive and renowned New York doctor. But you can still see it
in some scenes in her later films if you know what you’re looking for.
She won for performance in The Divorcee, itself a fascinating movie from what is known as the
Pre-Code days.
The Hollywood brand was so threatened by a series of
scandals involving sex, drugs, alcohol and other deadly sins Hollywood studios banded together under former Postmaster
General Will Hays to come up with a list of 36 cinematic no-no’s. “The Code
sets high standards for motion-picture producers…the sympathy of the audience
shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.”
From 1934 on threats to
moral standards such as “lustful kissing” “suggestive dancing” or God forbid
interracial romance were banished from mainstream movies.
It was a desperate
attempt to avoid full-fledged government censorship. It was so intensely
self-inflicted that decades later married couples on TV, the Cleavers, Ozzie
and Harriet, still slept in separate beds. It was partly why Spencer Tracy was
so gob smacked by the prospect of having Sidney Poitier as a son-in-law in
1967’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”
In 1930 there was no such code in effect. Women were
allowed to be promiscuous, like Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face. Or to have extramarital affairs like Shearer’s character
in The Divorcee.
Before you dial up that porn site to see Garbo naked or
something, it was all somewhat less than hard core.
The infidelity of Shearer’s character Jerry is conveyed
by the window of the house she’s been visiting a man not her bonehead husband,
goes dark without her seen leaving.
It might have been seen as cutting-edge or risqué or
courageous, ground breaking social commentary because otherwise it doesn’t
stand out as one of the great performances of all time.
But it did give Shearer the singular achievement besting
not only the great Garbo, but herself for another film the same year, Their Own
Desire. Talk about a good year. You might enjoy her best in The Women, a minor
classic with the crackling dialogue of a cat-eat-cat world. “There is a word
for those women but it’s not supposed to be used outside a kennel.”
Which leaves the best story for last.
The bittersweet tale of Marie Dressler, the Best Actress
Winner of the Fourth Academy Awards for her performance in Min and Bill.
Min runs a dockside dive of a hotel and has a soft spot
for a hard-drinking fisherman played by Wallace Beery. She is homely as only Dressler
could be, beset by troubles which are of course defeated by her good intentions
and heart of gold.
The description of her as homely is her own. She did
entitle her autobiography “The Memoirs of an Ugly Duckling.” Her life is
one of those rags to riches to rags to riches stories.
She was born just a year after Canada’s Confederation in
the bucolic Ontario town of Cobourg, which even now has a population of about
20,000. She went from a stage career to become a silent movie star. But she
fell out of fashion into destitution. She was blacklisted by the little
dictators that ran the entertainment business when she supported a chorus girl
strike on Broadway.
Ironically but not uncoincidentally, her career rebounded
and soared just as the Great Depression wreaked its devastation.
Tragically, at the peak of her considerable fame, she had
only a few years left to bask in the glow.
She was the exact antithesis of her fellow expat
superstar Norma Shearer. The anti- Glam Queen. The everyman to whom the
afflicted could relate. And there were more and more of the afflicted as the
economy disintegrated.
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were among her biggest fans.
And as unlikely as it might seem that you got this far without knowing stuff
like this Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the 32nd President of the
United States also with many fans among the afflicted.
She beat Marlene Dietrich and Shearer for that Oscar.But she would lose her battle with
cancer just three short years later.
She received no nominations for her role of Carlotta in Dinner at Eight. But it is a great
movie and probably her best performance. Or at least a nice way to remember
here.
That makes it an 80-year winless streak for Canadian
women at the Oscars. Only a stunningly precocious performance by Geneviève
Bujold opposite Richard Burton in Anne
of a Thousand Days , came close. She did win the Golden Globe in 1968 but
lost the Oscar to the sublime Maggie Smith for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
Maybe it was just a historical accident, but the little
streak does show the profound influence Canadians had on the emerging art form
and entertainment industry. Is there another streak coming together? And what
about the track record of Canadian men? Those would be other posts. I’m not
going to blow them all now.
