Un film de Yasujiro OZU | Comedie-Dramatique | Japon | 1932 | 94mn

Fadime
Its pretty scipsuious that he won if his direction is like what you say especially against the likes of Vidor and Sternberg.Suspicious, indeed.Jon Mullich, over at had this to say about Frank Borzage and Bad Girl, which he called the worst Oscar of 1931-32:Frank Borzage received his second Academy Award for Best Director for Bad Girl (the first was for Seventh Heaven in 1927/28). Bad Girl was a strangely titled (there was no bad girl in it) piece of hack work that was recognized more for Borzage's position as one of the Hollywood Social Elite than for artistic merit. Far more deserving of recognition were the nominated work of King Vidor for The Champ and Josef von Sternberg for Shanghai Express and the non-nominated work of Edmund Goulding for Grand Hotel, James Whale for Frankenstein or Rouben Mamoulian for Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, but since they lacked Borzage's social connections, all they had going for themselves was raw talent - a commodity not always valued by the Academy. The film itself is a forgettable little nonentity about the compromises and misunderstandings faced by a young couple (played by a hammy James Dunn and a wooden Sally Eilers) during the bumpy first years of their marriage. Borzage's movie career dated back to 1912 and he adored implausible, melodramatic material about young married life (Seventh Heaven followed a similar path of showing the early stages of a young couple's marriage, to even more dubiously melodramatic effect, although it had the advantage of the charming Janet Gaynor and the dashing Charles Ferrell in the leads) with simplistic conflicts (Eilers is thrown out of her Simon Legree-like brother's apartment under the slightest suspicion of improper behavior) and some rather crude attempts at humor (after Eilers gives birth to the couple's first child, a nurse inexplicably presents numerous other babies to the new mother who assumes them to be hers, only to be told that they are the children of other women in the ward). It is the type of material that D.W. Griffith could do alchemy with, but Borzage was no D.W. Griffith and his award-winning films now gather dust as forgotten museum pieces.I suspect the other thing Borzage had going for him was that Bad Girl was considered "important" and a "message picture," which always plays well at the moment but usually becomes dated pretty quickly. It does start well. The first half hour, I had real hopes for it, which makes the rest of it doubly disappointing.But I wouldn't let that dissuade you from tracking down his work. I haven't seen What Now Little Man, but would like to -- it stars Margaret Sullavan, one of my favorites from the 1930s.




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