Bonus: Best Unique and Artistic Picture

 Bonus: Best Unique and Artistic Picture

The Original Academy Awards Ceremony had three nominations for Outstanding Production, later known as Best Picture. But there were three other films that were nominated for a secondary category, considered equal in merit at the time. That one, titled Best Unique and Artistic Picture, is listed side by side with the Outstanding Production Award on the official Academy Awards My Oscar List. Some sites combine all six films into the Outstanding Production category (The Oscars Handbook does this), but the Academy doesn’t recognize this as the case, and the winner of the Unique and Artistic Oscar is not included in the various award ceremony lists as a Best Picture winner. I debated over whether to review these three films as part of this site and have settled on a compromise. I will touch on all three of them in this bonus post now that I have reviewed all 621 films on the official list. These reviews will not be as in-depth as the others and will be in this single post. As of this writing, all three are readily available to watch online should you choose to track them down as part of your own Oscar watch.

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

The subject of 1927’s Sunrise: Song of Two Humans is surprisingly offbeat, especially if you go into it cold. It opens with an unnamed man (George O’Brien) lounging about in the countryside with his mistress, The Woman From the City (Margaret Livingston). This mistress convinces him that he needs to dispense with his homely, and sickly, wife (Janet Gaynor) and move to the city with her. Though he is at first enraged at this suggestion, he soon is convinced by her to do this. The plan is to take his wife out on a boat and throw her overboard, making it look like she drowned. But when the time comes, he is unable to do so. She flees him in fear and he pursues her, professing his sorrow and begging for forgiveness. Shortly afterwards, he renews his vows to her and recommits himself. 

For an extended period of time, the film shifts focus to a carnival where the two are celebrating their newfound love for each other. This eventually leads to the two being out on a boat again, only this time a nasty storm rages up and she falls overboard, nearly drowning. The man gathers townspeople to help him try and find her before she can drown. Meanwhile, The Woman From the City assumes that he has gone through with his attempts to kill his wife after all. 

Watching this film nearly a hundred years after its initial release, it becomes obvious that the main reason this film secured the Best Unique and Artistic Oscar win is because of how innovative the effects are. This story is not particularly interesting and it goes on for far too long, especially during the middle third. But there are some amazing camera tricks at play here, especially during the storm in the final act, that are still astonishing to watch all these years later. These sequences remain one of the few reasons to seek out this film anymore. 

This is a silent era film that falls back too much on the comedy acting styles that were already starting to be replaced with more naturalistic acting. George O’Brien is particularly egregious, flinging his arms around wildly while over-exaggerating his features to play to the back row. This kind of performance works better in comedies, so when it is used here, it is distracting. Janet Gaynor is much better, and watching her, it is clear to see why she was such a popular star in her day. She would go on to appear in better films in the next few years, including 7th Heaven the same year as this and later in the original A Star is Born. 

Overall, this film is an interesting curiosity but not much more. It’s fun to watch Janet running in fear from her husband after he attempts to throw her into the lake, only to later willingly get back in the boat with him, fully trusting him again. But this film goes on for far too long and doesn’t have much else to recommend it aside from some amazing production values. 

Academy Award Nominations:

Best Unique and Artistic Picture: Fox

Best Actress in a Leading Role: Janet Gaynor (won)

Best Cinematography: Charles Rosher and Karl Struss (won)

Best Art Direction: Rochus Gliese

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Release Date: November 4, 1927

Runtime: 95 minutes

Not Rated

Starring: Janet Gaynor and George O’Brien

Directed by: F. W. Murnau

  

Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness.

In some ways, Chang reminded me of Trader Horn, in that there are many sequences that are there just to showcase the jungle and all of its many predators. The story is basically an excuse for this. It follows Kru and his family as they try to carve out a piece of land in the jungle, plant rice, and survive the various predators lurking around them. Throughout the course of the 70-minute film, we will see him, along with other natives of the area, Thailand, planting grain, trapping leopards, gunning down tigers on screen, and even capturing elephants (called Changs) for their own use. 

The highlight of the film is a sequence where a large herd of elephants lays waste to the entire village in a single stampede. This is the largest group of elephants I have ever seen on screen at any one time, and the chaos is truly a sight to behold. It is followed by a well-engineered trap to capture many of those elephants and curtail further destruction. The amount of production needed to make this film and capture it all for audiences that would have mostly been unfamiliar with this exotic locale is the main reason Chang landed on this nomination list. 

Modern audiences, however, will find many sequences in this film to be hard to watch, though. There is plenty of on-screen violence against animals to be seen, including the poor treatment of a baby elephant. Animals are slaughtered on screen, mostly by rifles, and then their bodies propped up for our amusement. This stuff is juxtaposed with some truly bizarre comedic moments, often surrounding a few wacky monkeys that hang around Kru and the family,  accompanied by title cards that attempt to add a childish level of humor to a film that is basically devoid of anything funny to begin with. It ends up being a weird mix of violence and children’s humor without doing either all that well. Of the three films nominated in this category at the Oscars, this one is the easiest one to skip.

Academy Award Nomination:

Best Unique and Artistic Picture: Paramount Famous Laskey

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Release Date: April 29, 1927

Runtime: 64 minutes

Not Rated

Starring: Kru, Chantui, and Nah

Directed by: Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack

The Crowd

Easily the best of the three, The Crowd is a domestic drama about marriage with a strong emphasis on “For Better or Worse.” In this film, we are following John Sims (James Murray), a young man in New York who has been told growing up that he is special, one who will rise up above the crowd. He gets a job in an insurance company, determined to make good on his father’s expectations, but finds himself just another cog in the wheel. On a whim, he accepts an invitation to lay off his studies for a night and go out on the town with a friend and two girls. One of those girls is Mary (Eleanor Boardman), a bright-eyed and attractive woman whom John falls immediately in love with. By the end of the day, he has proposed to her.

The film then follows the couple through their struggles with getting to know each other after marriage, the in-fighting that often accompanies those who marry too quickly, and the birth of their two children. When tragedy strikes, taking one of the kids from them, John cannot concentrate at work and loses his job. He tries a series of menial jobs, unable to find something he likes, and the stress of being out of work, the loss of the child, and the growing divide between these two leads to Mary packing her bags, determined to get out of what she sees as a doomed marriage. 

My wife and I have been married for nearly thirty years as of this writing. We have settled into a routine that comes from a lot of years of knowing each other. But I remember those early years and how bitter some of our fights were. I also remember thinking that the birth of our first child would settle things down, but it of course didn’t. We could have easily parted ways many times during those early years and some would have probably advised us to do just that. But we stuck it out and made it work. Watching this film brought back those painful, often shameful, memories of being young and impulsive, thinking that love was enough to make a relationship work. Money was an early factor in our struggles but not the only factor in that. Pride and taking each other for granted were big factors, too. This film turned a mirror on me and made me reflect on my own experiences with not a small degree of shame. 

A good film can hit those notes, making the viewer self-reflect. This one did just that, and I spent the majority of the picture emphasizing with both parties, riveted to the ups and downs of their marriage. I honestly didn’t know where this film would land up in the end. Hollywood productions would later create a template for these kinds of romantic dramas, robbing viewers of any real suspense. This one has a powerful message that kept me interested throughout. There is even a moment where John, filled with despair, considers throwing himself off a bridge and ending it all, saved at the last minute by the timely arrival of his son. This moment is all the more haunting knowing what finally happened to the man playing this part. His fate would go on to haunt director King Vidor, who, years later, tried to get a production financed that told this very story. It never happened, but you can see how much he was affected by the real events in James Murray’s life that ended with his death. 

I cannot emphasize enough how much this film moved me and urge anyone willing to watch silent dramas to seek this one out. It works on so many levels and is the only film of the three nominated in this category that could have been listed among the Best Picture nominees. Like the other two, there are sequences that are impressively shot that explain why it ended up in the Unique and Artistic Picture category, but it is better as a whole than the other two, making it one of the best films to come out that year. Had the Academy not had this secondary category, I have no doubt there would have been a fourth film nominated for Outstanding Production at that first Academy Awards.

Academy Award Nominations:

Best Unique and Artistic Picture: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Best Directing (Dramatic Picture): King Vidor

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Release Date: March 3, 1928

Running Time: 98 minutes

Not Rated

Starring: James Murray, Eleanor Boardman, and Bert Roach

Directed by: King Vidor

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In Closing

When I sat down to watch these three films, I watched them in the order that they were reviewed above. I was concerned that these three films would not fit in the theme of the best films of all time as voted on by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Fortunately, the final film did live up to that standard and made it worth watching these films to find this little gem. I also reflected on how some texts include these films as part of the Outstanding Production nominations for that first Academy Awards. Watching them made it perfectly clear that that is not the case. Sunrise won in this category but it did so not on the merits of the film as a whole but the artistic work that went into making this film. The best of the three is easily The Crowd and that one had the least artistic merit of the three, production-wise. It was worth checking these films out but two-thirds of these, though lauded in the day, are not worth revisiting again, at least for me. And with this bonus review, I wrap up this website until sometime next year when the 2027 Oscar nominations are released. Until then, adieu.