As
we know Grand Hotel won the Best Picture prize at the 1932 ceremony,
this was a film about a seemingly disparate group of people all
connected by their surroundings, Shanghai Express. The surroundings are
that of the Shanghai Express train which is travelling from Beijing to
Shanghai during the Chinese Civil War. The passengers include an elderly
English boarding house keeper, a missionary, an opium dealer, a gambler
and a French soldier. Also on board is British war hero Doc Harvey who
encounters his old girlfriend Magdalen who has now become a courtesan
known as Shanghai Lily. The train is soon stopped by government soldiers
who arrest a man and then by rebels loyal to fellow passenger Chang who
turns out to be a powerful Chinese Warlord and uses Harvey as a hostage
to exchange with the kidnapped passenger who is one of Chang's men.
Just as Harvey is about to be blinded by Chang he is killed by Lily's
courtesan companion and at the end Lily and Harvey are united. The film
is impressively shot for a 1931 picture, the material is quite frank and
honest about what the courtesans do for a living and it also looks at
the issue of religion in terms of sex and love. I found it a very
powerful picture and it also depicted the Chinese Civil War in a unique
way by involving a group of outsiders in the conflict. This is also the
first film on the list that features Marlene Dietrich and, as Lily, she
holds the screen whenever she features while Clive Brook is a more than
adequate male lead as Harvey. Thankfully the film did win cinematography
and was also nominated for direction as well as picture. I don't think
it was as tightly plotted and accomplished as Grand Hotel but it
certainly more than deserved its place on the Best Picture contender
list.
In
the 1960s My Fair Lady won the award for Best Picture, this was around a
time when musicals dominated the Best Picture category but the story on
which the film was based, Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, was first nominated
for Best Picture in the 1930s. This version starred Wendy Hiller as the
eponymous heroine - Eliza Doolittle and Leslie Howard as Professor Henry
Higgins. Most are aware of the story, Higgins bets fellow dialect
expert Colonel Pickering that he can pass Dolittle off as a lady at a
society ball and in the meantime they start to fall for each other.
Having seen My Fair Lady I thought both of the leads were charming and
portrayed the story fairly favourably. However I found this first
version fairly jarring and most of the reason for this can lie at the
feet of Howard whose Henry Higgins seemed to be overly harsh and instead
of stern and bookish he came off as quite monstrous .I previously
watched Howard in Romeo and Juliet and wasn't impressed by him there and
that perception didn't change with Pygmalion despite this he was
nominated for Best Actor. In its defence I thought Hillier, a Best
Actress nominee, was fairly likeable and portrayed Eliza fairly well
while the film was also shot and plotted fairly well and was rewarded
with the Best Adapted Screenplay award. A fairly decent film this does
seem fairly dated when compared with its fellow nominees like The
Adventures of Robin Hood and La Grand Illusion.
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