Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Director 1930-1931

The Contenders:

Wesley Ruggles: Cimarron
Clarence Brown: A Free Soul
Lewis Milestone: The Front Page
Josef von Sternberg: Morocco
Norman Taurog: Skippy (winner)

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actress 1930-1931

The Contenders:

Irene Dunne: Cimarron
Norma Shearer: A Free Soul
Ann Harding: Holiday
Marie Dressler: Min and Bill (winner)
Marlene Dietrich: Morocco

Legionnaire's Disease

Film: Morocco
Format: Video from The Magic Flashdrive on laptop.

There are plenty of conceits in older films that one learns to deal with, with enough of the films watched. One learns, for instance, that comedy tends toward the physical (which is fine) and that drama tends to mean melodrama. Directors and the talent hadn’t yet learned the art of being subtle with anything. The farther away we get from the silent era, the less this becomes a problem. I can deal with most of these conceits. The one I’ve never really been able to handle is the idea that many a director and moviegoer in the 1930s thought Marlene Dietrich could sing. She couldn’t, and so any film that involves multiple Marlene Dietrich torch songs is alternately comedic and painful for me. That’s what we’re signing up for with Morocco; Dietrich plays a vaudeville singer.

So strap in, because we’re getting a pair of Dietrich numbers before the first thirty minutes are up. We travel by map to exotic Morocco, where Amy Jolly (Dietrich) has arrived in Morocco to perform at a local club for the wealthy residents as well as the common troops of the local Foreign Legion regiment. She is accosted off the boat by a man named La Bessiere (Adolphe Menjou), but Amy Jolly is far too jaded to be interested in some fancy boy who tries to pick her up at the docks. As it happens, as Amy arrives, the legionnaires also return, one of those being a man named Tom Brown (Gary Cooper).