Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Picture 1937

The Contenders:

The Awful Truth
Captains Courageous
Dead End
The Good Earth
In Old Chicago
The Life of Emile Zola (winner)
Lost Horizon
One Hundred Men and a Girl
Stage Door
A Star is Born

One Hundred Men and a Girl

Format: VHS from Freeport Public Library through interlibrary loan projected on screen.

Frequent readers here may have noted that I get a lot of the movies I watch from a variety of libraries. Every now and then I request a film through interlibrary loan and it pops up in the form of a VHS tape. I no longer have a working VCR, which means that when I get a tape, I have to find a different way to view it. Fortunately, I can sometimes find a spare classroom and project the movie on a screen. As it happens, One Hundred Men and a Girl is one of those rare VHS films. It’s been sitting on my desk for a week or two waiting for me to get to it. Tonight, I finally got the chance to watch it.

I wasn’t really looking forward to this one, although I was pleased to note that it was really short. So I put it in and started to watch. It’s not a terrible film. It’s just not a great one. It seems like something far too lightweight to be considered for something like Best Picture. The story seems pretty textbook for the mid-1930s. It’s a baby step away from Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland getting the gang together and puttin’ on a show.