Almost There: Barbara Stanwyck in "The Lady Eve"

by Cláudio Alves

Since its inception, the Academy has shown a certain reluctance to awarding great acting within the comedy genre. It often feels that the sillier the role, the less likely it is to win plaudits for the performer who fleshes it out on screen. That's not to say that comedy is wholly absent from the acting races – it's just rarer, more prone to reductive judgment and dismissal. Considering all this, the recent SAG results feel even more miraculous. They point us toward a scenario where a wild genre riff might win over half of the acting prizes. So with that mind, a comedic episode of "Almost There".

Let's reflect upon an achievement that might be justly named the pinnacle of screen comedy – Barbara Stanwyck's stunning turn in 1941's The Lady Eve…

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Judy Garland @ 100: "Babes on Broadway"

Team Experience is revisiting a dozen Judy Garland movies for her Centennial. Here's Nathaniel R...

A behind the scenes shot of Judy's first scene in "Babes on Broadway". She's a fountain of tears in the scene but laughing between takes.

History has a way of shifting truth from facts to a more universally agreed upon fiction. Though The Wizard of Oz is now the movie most associated with Judy Garland, it was not as universally beloved in 1939 when it first premiered. Though it was ostensibly "a hit," the sixth highest grosser of Hollywood's most mythic year, it also carried the whiff of failure since its large budget prevented initial profits. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayor got a much much bigger immediate return on their Garland investment through her other 1939 musical. Babes in Arms (1939) opened just two months after Oz and proved a slightly bigger hit (again "at the time"). The Wizard of Oz proved that Judy could carry a massive picture all on her own but as follow up, the studio didn't get ambitious but reverted to the easier sell -- more "Mickey & Judy!'; Andy Hardy Meets Debutante (1940), Strike Up the Band (1940), Life Begins for Andy Hardy (1941) and today's topic Babes on Broadway (1942) followed... 

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Almost There: Ida Lupino in 'The Hard Way'

by Cláudio Alves

Last week in the Almost There series, we took a look at Cher's performance in Robert Altman's Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. That film's part of a new Criterion Channel collection in celebration of Mother's Day. Beyond that program, the channel is bursting at the seams with enticing new offerings. So much so that we'll choose all of our May subjects from the streamer. Today we're talking Ida Lupino, whose career is featured in a selection of 13 movies spanning from 1935 to 1956. Though she was a popular Hollywood actress and even found success as a director, the British-born thespian was never nominated for an Oscar.

She got relatively close a couple of times, though. Regarding the Best Actress Academy Award, Ida Lupino's best bet was surely 1943's The Hard Way…

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And the runner up is... Rosalind Russell? Joan Crawford? Susan Hayward?

I had the pleasure of joining Kevin Jacobsen on his great podcast series "And the Runner Up Is..." for a fourth time. Kevin opted to assign me 1947 when I asked for this decade. So listen in to hear us talk about the following lineup which has two great performances, one coaster nomination, a bullet dodged, and one of my mother's favourites from her childhood.

• Joan Crawford, Possessed
• Susan Hayward, Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman
• Dorothy McGuire, Gentleman's Agreement
• Rosalind Russell, Mourning Becomes Electra 
• ★ Loretta Young, The Farmer's Daughter

Which of those performances do you love?

Almost There: Hattie McDaniel in "In This Our Life"

by Cláudio Alves

The Criterion Channel is currently featuring an extensive collection of John Huston movies. Considering his directorial debut, The Maltese Falcon, was nominated for three Oscars, including Best Picture, it's fair to say that Huston's films have always been on the Academy's radar. Consequently many of his actors gained Oscar buzz though just as often they were egregiously snubbed. With that said, I'd like to focus on a performer that was already an Oscar winner before she starred in a Huston flick, a Black actress whose career was limited by institutional racism and confined to playing second fiddle to white stars, often in peripheral roles. Nevertheless, Hattie McDaniel always spun gold from straw, injecting complicated humanity, humor, and pathos into the tiniest of parts. Such is the case of In This Our Life…

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