Year's Best

At a dinner in Hollywood's Biltmore Hotel, attended by Tsar Will H. Hays, Vice President Curtis, Mrs. Dolly Gann and 2,000 others, there were read last week the annual awards of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences:

Best acting (female) Marie Dressier (Min and Bill)

Best acting (male) Lionel Barrymore (A Free Soul)

Best directing Norman Taurog (Skippy)

Best producing RKO (Cimarron)

Best story John Monk Saunders (Dawn Patrol)

Best adapting Howard Estabrook (Cimarron)

Best photography Floyd Crosby (Tabu)

Best art directing Max Ree (Cimarron)

Best sound recording Paramount

Seven years ago, Marie Dressier (born Lelia Koerber) offered to play in vaudeville for $2,000 a week, could find no takers. She was ready to give up acting to try running a hotel in Paris when Director Allan Dwan offered her a job in Hollywood. The part that made her a cinema star, as she had been a stage star 25 years before,* came later--a bit in Anna Christie. Said Cinemactress Dressier: "They make you a star and then you starve. All I want is a small part to come in and upset the plot."

Cinemactress Dressier's producers have not let her starve, but they have given her major roles which often seem to be bit parts arduously expanded. In Min & Bill, she was proprietress of a low-grade boarding house. Wallace Beery was her star boarder. Largely slapstick comedy, the picture included a six-minute fight between Dressier and Beery in which Cinemactress Dressier threw things, among them a pottie, at Cinemactor Beery. Cinemactress Dressier enjoyed making the fight scenes. When she and Beery were too tired to go on, she rested in a portable bungalow dressing room which she got for Christmas from Marion Davies.

An itinerant actress for 40 years, Marie Dressier has gathered about her an amazingly large circle of acquaintances, celebrated and otherwise. General Pershing writes to her; the Prince of Wales calls on her when she visits London. Last week, the award of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences came a day after her 60th birthday. Vastly pleased, she said: "I feel so important tonight that I think Mrs. Gann should give me her seat." Mrs. Gann stood up, Cinemactress Dressier sat down.

First suggested at a dinner given in 1927 by Louis B. Mayer of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to Director Fred Niblo, Cinemactor Conrad Nagel and Fred Beetson, the Academy now has 700 members--writers, actors, technicians, production executives, directors. Its main concern is the welfare of the cinema industry. Dissenters regard it as a company union since producers used it two years ago as a weapon to defeat Equity's attempt to organize cinemactors. Annually, each of the five Academy branches selects five nominees in its own branch for an award of merit. The five highest nominations are then submitted for balloting to the entire membership. The winners get gold-washed statuettes of a nude young man.

At last week's dinner, Jackie Cooper fell asleep on the bosom of Cinemactress Dressier. Director King Vidor drew a checkerboard on the tablecloth, played lump-sugar checkers with Cinemactress Eleanor Boardman (Mrs. King Vidor), beat her. Remarks:

Vice President Curtis: "A few weeks ago I stood on the steps of the Capitol and cheered for Polly Moran. . . ."

Producer President M. C. Levee: "I want to let you all in on a personal secret. Seventeen years ago tonight Mrs. Levee and I were married. She has stood by me all these years and I don't think, by God, that without her help I would ever have gotten to first base."

Author John Monk Saunders: "An author who has just been sued for plagiarism* is a little surprised to get a prize for originality. . . ."

*She had also been famed in cinema years before, in Tillic's Punctured Romance (1914)

*Dawn Patrol, for which Author Saunders received his statuette, resembled Hell's Angels in incident, Journey's End in theme. Caddo Productions (Howard Hughes) filed suit against Warner Bros, charging plagiarism of scenes and sequences from Hell's Angels.

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