1936: Supporting Actor

This is where it all started.

After 1935's Best Actor race had three nominees from the same film, and in the wake of Actors Guild protests against the ceremony, the Academy set a definite field of five for its directing, writing, and acting categories...and added two to the latter. Those two are Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress. Finally, the performers perennially below the title were finally getting their due! 

While recent years have seen the category go to either marquee names "slumming" it in character parts or lead actors campaigning as supporting to better their chances of winning (Kaluuya, Pitt, Ali, arguably Rockwell), the inaugural category is a who's who of 1930s supporting stars. Mischa Auer has twelve credits in 1936, including Oscar-nominated films That Girl from Paris, Three Smart Girls and Winterset; not all the roles have names, and some are even uncredited. Akim Tamiroff has seven credits, many of them not so much supporting as they are cameos, as in Anthony Adverse and The Story of Louis Pasteur. Stuart Erwin was a sometimes-leading man (we nominated him in Leading Actor at the 1931-32 Retro Hollmann Awards for Make Me a Star), but most of his six 1936 credits have him second- or third-billed - his nomination comes from a film where he's top-billed, but it's an ensemble flick and he's only ten minutes of it. Basil Rathbone was still three years away from Sherlock Holmes, but he appears in two Best Picture nominees (Romeo and Juliet, A Tale of Two Cities) and the Technicolor marvel The Garden of Allah.

And then there's Walter Brennan. 

Brennan had been working as an extra and stand-in since 1925. Sometimes he'd get a featured part - a line of dialogue here, a reaction shot there. He credits the growth of his parts to the fact that he was kicked in the face during one of those appearances, resulting in several lost teeth and a sudden aged appearance, being cast as old codgers at the age of 40. In 1935, he did 24 feature films, most of them uncredited, but among them is Barbary Coast, where he gives the film's best performance as Old Atrocity. It's the role that changed his career: in 1936, five of his six credits are major supporting parts, including parts in nominated films Banjo on My Knee, Fury, and These Three. Back in 1936, a committee of 50 decided the nominees, but all guild members could vote...including members of the Extras Union. It is believed their support led to Brennan's triumph as the first Best Supporting Actor winner - he was, after all, the extra who made it.

But maybe it wasn't just support from comrades-in-arms that led to that win. Maybe the performance itself is genuinely deserving. Let's discuss, shall we?:

Couple's Therapy: Love from a Stranger, 1937

It's Agatha Christie Month! All month long, we're celebrating the Queen of Crime as she and her works appeared on screen, with a grand finale of five Murder on the Orient Expresses the first full week of November. So far, we've focused on her series characters: we covered the cases of Hercule Poirot, explored small-town murder with Miss Jane Marple, and experienced international intrigue with Tommy & Tuppence. 

But man cannot live on bread alone, and Christie admitted that writing for the same detectives over and over could get boring. Luckily, Christie was prolific as hell, so besides the fifty novels featuring the previous characters mentioned, there are another seventeen that do not mention them at all....though some do feature supporting characters from their adventures. That's under her own name; under the name Mary Westmacott, she published six novels deemed "romantic", though this was a catch-all for "women's lit", books about non-murderous women and their relationships. She wrote a great many plays, too, even adapting her own novels for the stage - and when she did, she did not include her famous detectives. 

And then there are the short stories. A great many mysteries, yes, but it was in this medium that she really experimented with genres: ghost stories, adventure yarns, investigations into psychic phenomena. What stands out most, though, is not just the variety, but the bleakness of these stories: suicides, dead children, petty revenge.

Not that she completely abandoned her thrillers, but here she made them more, well, thrilling - less detective stories with clues than regular people confronting murder and madness around them. And for some reason, the most popular among these - for a while, at least -  was the short story "Philomel Cottage." It's of that oft-familiar Is My Husband Trying To Kill Me subgenre of thrillers. Here, a woman inherits a butt-load of money, has a whirlwind romance and marriage to a charming man she meets at a party, and only when she is whisked off to a secluded cottage does she begin to realize he may be a Black Widower.

First published in The Grand Magazine in 1924, it was later collected in The Listerdale Mystery (1934, UK only) and The Witness for the Prosecution (1948, US only). But it's real claim to immortality is in a popular stage production, written by and starring Frank Vosper. Popular and well-reviewed on both the West End and Broadway in 1936, the independent Trafalgar Films in turn adapted the production for the screen. In doing so, the filmmakers included some elements of Christie's source material - names, for example - and so were able to credit both the play and short story separately. The title, however, was all Vosper's:

Love from a Stranger

dir: Rowland V. Lee