Rags...Riches...Rags?

Film: Valiant is the Word for Carrie
Format: Internet video on laptop.

Adolysti has come through once again, and in a big way—another email reminded me of the Ok.ru site that has a number of streaming movies, including a bunch that I’m having trouble otherwise finding. What this means is that you’ll be seeing a chunk of Oscar pictures in the weeks ahead. For instance, Valiant is the Word for Carrie was one of the pre-1940 Best Actress movies I hadn’t seen before today.

The truth about Valiant is the Word for Carrie is that it plays with one of the classic tropes of movies. The “hooker with the heart of gold” trope clearly had to start somewhere, and while I don’t think this is specifically the first place where it shows up, it’s clearly one of the early versions of this when it comes to movies. Our gold-hearted hooker in this case will be our title character, Carrie Snyder (Gladys George), the woman of ill repute in the tiny little fictional town of (and yes, this is what they called it) Crebillon, Louisiana. She is barely tolerated, but when she is befriended by Paul Darnley (Jackie Moran as a child, John Howard as an adult), the 12-year-old son of a local businessman.

Devil's Island

Film: Condemned
Format: Internet video on laptop.

There’s a simplicity to early talkies that is attractive. While movies weren’t new, sound in movies was, and that meant that so much focus was put on that new innovation that plots were often simple, east-to-follow, and entertaining because of it. A single complication, typically associated with a romance, and you’ve got enough for something close to 90 minutes. Sure, they often tended toward melodrama and also had acting that was geared toward the back of the theater, but when they’re done well, there’s a particular charm to them. Condemned, which I found on YouTube today, is one of these movies, and it’s a pretty darn good one.

As mentioned in the paragraph above, the plot here is almost painfully simple. We start by witnessing prisoners being transferred to Devil’s Island, the French penal colony in Guyana. We’re then introduced to our main players. We have the warden, Jean Vidal (Dudley Digges), who is constantly upset with his wife, Madame Vidal (Ann Harding, and no, we don’t get a first name for her). His main problem is that he is ashamed that, as the wife of a prison warden, she demeans herself by doing all of the work around the house and won’t let him conscript a convict to act as combination butler/housemaid.

Watching Oscar: Cimarron

Film: Cimarron
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on laptop.

It would be really easy for me to say rude things about Cimarron. It was the first Western to win Best Picture (and it’s only marginally a Western), and it evidently left such a bad taste in the collective mouth of the Academy that another film from the genre didn’t win until 1990. And it’s not even a real Western; it just takes place in the Old West. There’s a single shoot out, a lot of posturing, and something that I flat can’t make a lot of sense of. But times have changed. A film like Cimarron, made today, would be vastly changed from this version.

In addition to being the only Old West film to win in the first 60+ years of Oscar history, Cimarron is also the only Best Picture to lose money on its initial release, and it lost a lot. That’s what you get for producing a big-budget film in the middle of one of the worst years of a terrible economic depression. But hey, it won the top prize, and for that reason alone, it has some historical significance.