Best Actress 1928-29
Winner: Mary Pickford, Coquette
Nominees: Ruth Chatterton, Madame X
Betty Compson, The Barker
Jeanne Eagels, The Letter
Corinne Griffith, The Divine Lady
Bessie Love, The Broadway Melody

The Field: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★


Ranking Oscar's Ballot
 
 My Pick:
Jeanne Eagels, The Letter ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

From There:
Betty Compson, The Barker ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Compson played one tough cookie in Josef von Sternberg's The Docks of New York, a masterpiece that came out the same year as The Barker but somehow didn't cross the Academy's radar at all. Even when rough, stolid George Bancroft rescues her from an attempted suicide by drowning in the beginning of the picture, she sits there in a bed, smoking a cigarette and shooting spiteful looks at Bancroft as if to say, Why the fuck did you keep me alive? She softens a bit over the course of Docks, but not a lot, and though she's gentler in her other big film of this Oscar vintage, Frank Lloyd's Weary River, she's still nobody's simp. So I cannot honestly tell whether Compson's midlevel work in The Barker bears the aroma of disappointment no matter how you look at it, or whether I'm just so taken with her usual bent toward steely composure inside those delicate, reedy looks that it's just not my cup of tea. The opening movement of The Barker is full of moments where Compson has to pout about the inattentiveness of her putative boyfriend Nifty Miller (!), the older, thicker carnival barker of the title (Milton Sills). She's stuck posing several variations on the line, "How much do you love me?" and seeming pathetically jealous as Nifty increasingly dotes on his own pretty-boy son Chris (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) instead of her. Compson hits these notes of self-pity so hard that you can tell they don't come naturally to her; she plays a cryer and a pleader with the kind of strenuous effort that gorgeous actresses often bring to impersonations of "average" women, and though she's by no means terrible, the effect is comparably flat. The only early sign of promise is that Compson's Carrie, who plays a sexy hula dancer called "Neptune's Daughter" in this traveling fair (!), has a physical ease with her body, especially when she's not performing, so that at least some undercurrent of erotic possibility clings to the character even amid her perma-pout. We first properly meet her as her head and naked shoulders peek over the top of a backstage dressing screen. When Nifty casually drapes his elbow over the screen to speak with her, Compson not only resists any glimmer of modesty or prudishness, she goes right on dressing and undressing, in spite of the old-fashioned pap that's trickling from her mouth. Soon enough, the top will blow off any sense of Carrie's decorum. As the troupe boards a train for their next circuit date, Carrie pulls a quart of White Mule corn liquor out of her bloomers and, in her waspish inebriation, conceives a plan where her pert, tomboyish friend and co-worker Lou (Dorothy Mackaill) will seduce Chris and carry him off, so that Nifty's focus will pass back to Carrie and their frustrated engagement. Compson's barely got the tin cup in her hand before she's undoing her sad little necktie and her gaze starts to curdle. Even when Nifty catches the women sozzling young Chris on drink and definitely breaks with Carrie, which really gets her pissed, she collapses face-downward on a bed in anger rather than maudlin weakness. I don't, of course, think that acrid emotions entail automatically better acting than gentler ones, but Compson just has so much more vitality when she's seething, and it seems to free up mischief in other facets of the performance, as when she and Mackaill clearly conjure a Sapphic resonance to their scenes of conspiring, with the pajama'd Lou hopping in bed with the lingerie'd, cat-who-ate-the-canary Carrie so they can plot the stages of Chris's ruination. You can guess pretty much how this scheme works out, and though Compson's never quite as "on" or as mischievous as in the scenes of machination, she's rarely as insufferably wan as she started at the outset. True, there are some post-comeuppance scenes that get a little too Sin of Madelon Claudet for my taste, but her terror upon having her misdeeds exposed to Nifty has some real energy to it. In truth, Mackaill deserved the nod for her engagingly modern rendering of Lou, mirroring the look and the demeanor of Claudette Colbert, who originated the part of Lou onstage, though Mackaill is perhaps a more believable product of a shady past than it's easy to imagine Colbert being. Without trying, Mackaill steals a few scenes, as does some of the dialogue—nothing in Compson's performance, perhaps inevitably, measures up to the joyous thrill of those delicious lines by which Nifty hawks her hula-dancing act, including "She'll show you how they shake their shredded wheat on the beach at Waikiki!" and "She shakes a mean barrel of alfalfa, folks, a mean barrel of alfalfa!" But it's nonetheless a fine turn, commemorating what's almost certainly the proudest year of Compson's career.

Ruth Chatterton, Madame X ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Bessie Love, The Broadway Melody ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Corinne Griffith, The Divine Lady ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Mary Pickford, Coquette ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Pickford handily gives one of the worst performances ever nominated for the Best Actress Oscar, and she won for it, almost certainly because of her stratospheric celebrity and her crucial role in founding United Artists as well as the Academy itself, only two years prior to her copping this trophy. Awfully cheeky to be 36 years old and playing an airheaded chit who can't help flirting with every man in the room, from her father's peers to the local bad boy. Pickford looks suspiciously dowdy in Coquette (reviewed here), and not just because her infamous haircut has her looking so matronly, or because she's so perpetually clad in distressed housedresses and nightmarish effulgences of figure-killing tulle. Even amidst such intense internal competition, the most antique thing about Pickford's Norma is the actress's creaky performance style, yet this isn't an "old" style so much as a frantic, immature feint at what grand acting by established masters might look like. Dabblers in early cinema might assume that Pickford hasn't yet recalibrated her gestures or mannerisms to suit the new sonic capabilities of the medium, but you could watch silent films for days without seeing anything this garish. Pickford has no one to blame but herself for her insistence upon buttoning and almost corkscrewing her thin lips until her mouth looks like the knotted end of a balloon, and then calling greater attention to this bizarre mannerism by repeatedly pointing an index finger, inexplicably, to her face. She's a fright of uncontained energy, and not in that Clara Bow way that can be infectious in spite of itself; she looks harried and taxed, like she's somehow overthinking the part without actually thinking at all. She whinges, she scowls, she bends over backward as her boyfriend of ill repute whispers sweet pledges to her in a forest glade. She flails her arms in the air when she races across Southern streams to find him, and sinks like an eight-year-old into the lap of Louise Beavers, humming away as her loyal mammy (!). The close-ups are impossible to parse: if you didn't know that Johnny Mack Brown was playing the object of her adoring ardor, you'd wonder why she's sniffing and glowering at this fellow who has come to surprise her at a dance. Her odd vocalisms ("Ooh yoo doon't knoow my deddy!") make Singin' in the Rain's Lina Lamont seem like a creature drawn from life, and when her character gets dragooned into one of those fifth-act court-trial sequences that have felled many a better movie than Coquette, she quakes in her chair and whips her head about, letting her voice go so high and shrill that you worry she might be tearing it. In truth, such vulgar bathos represents the high point of what Pickford manages here: her spasms of grief and her wracking sobs of divided loyalty between her priggish dad and her rough suitor at least have some energy, unlike her unlovable take on the preening ingenue or her great-auntish lack of softness or ease in her mid-story clenches. Adding final insult to injury, I always misremember Coquette, which is subtitled A Drama of the American South, as a kind of mothy Hollywood pantomime of ante-bellum backwardness. Sadly, a series of party invitations that become key props about twenty minutes into Coquette confirm that this story is set in 1928, meaning that Sam Taylor thinks that women of the world were still saying things like, "Oh, what does it matter what I do? Oh, MICHAEL!" (when Michael isn't even around, incidentally), and Mary Pickford still thinks that the best use of her talents at 36 is to play an already specious character as 18-going-on-7, for maximum irritation and minimal sense of purpose. If the Academy has rarely got things as right as it did when it voted Janet Gaynor its first Best Actress, it's rarely (if ever) been as wrong as it did with Pickford.

Who gets your vote in this field, and on my dream ballot below? VOTE HERE!


My Favorites from 1929:

My Pick: Renée Falconetti, The Passion of Joan of Arc
Nominees: Clara Bow, The Wild Party
Nominees: Betty Compson, The Docks of New York
Nominees: Jeanne Eagels, The Letter
Nominees: Lillian Gish, The Wind
Nominees: Dorothy Mackaill, The Barker

Honorable Mentions: Betty Compson, Weary River

Also-Rans (alpha): Ruth Chatterton, Madame X; Betty Compson, The Barker; Corinne Griffith, The Divine Lady; Eleanore Griffith, Alibi; Bessie Love, The Broadway Melody; Mary Pickford, Coquette

Gourmet Prospects: Joan Crawford, Our Dancing Daughters; Marion Davies, Show People; Greta Garbo, Wild Orchids; Dorothy Sebastian, Spite Marriage; Fay Wray, Thunderbolt

Further Research: Renée Adorée, The Pagan; Lina Basquette, The Godless Girl; Marceline Day, The Cameraman; Colleen Moore, Oh Kay!; Marie Prevost, The Godless Girl; Mona Rico, Eternal Love; Fay Wray, The Wedding March

Stay Tuned: Because of the eligibility period of August 1, 1928–July 31, 1929, such famous 1929 releases as Applause, Diary of a Lost Girl, The Divorcée, Hallelujah!, and Pandora's Box were not eligible until the 1929-30 Oscar cycle.

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