Unofficial Academy Awards Discussion Board

OscarGuy wrote:According to the Academy's own website, it was not a nominee for Best Picture and outside of Inside Oscar, I find no corroboration of it being a nominee. Maybe something in the text of that year in the main part of the book would explain the discrepancy.

It was always on the list in every Oscar book I've ever read, along with Wings, The Last Command, Seventh Heaven and The Racket. We have it in our Best Picture and Director 1927-28 poll thread. If it's been removed, it's a new development. And, given that the "nominees" in that first year amounted to whatever Louis B. Mayer and his cronies agreed upon in a smoke-filled room, I wouldn't take anything -- original list or correction -- as gospel.

According to the Academy's own website, it was not a nominee for Best Picture and outside of Inside Oscar, I find no corroboration of it being a nominee. Maybe something in the text of that year in the main part of the book would explain the discrepancy.

Big Magilla wrote:The Way of All Flesh was not a Best Picture nominee.

Inside Oscar disagrees.

The Way of All Flesh was not a Best Picture nominee.

The 1940 version with Akim Tamiroff and Gladys George can be found for those interested in seeing the story played out.

Sorrell and Son, nominated for Best Direction by Herbert Brenon at the 1927/28 awards was supposedly found and restored by the Academy in 2005 but but has never been released. That's the one I've been waiting for. I have read the good and seen the 1984 mini-series which is available on DVD, but I'd still like to see the Brenon version with H.B. Warner and Nils Asther.

The Way of All Flesh should be on that "didn't see" list as well, since only a few moments of it survive. TCM ran them a few years ago. That film East Lynne, The Patriot and The White Parade are the only best picture nominees I've been unable to find.

I actually expect TCM to one day put together as good a version of East Lynne as can be managed, as they have with other long-difficult-to-see films like The Constant Nymph.

Here's where you can find our 2013 discussion of East Lynne:

viewtopic.php?f=26&t=312&p=125988&hilit ... ne#p125988

Regarding 4 Devils, as noted on IMDb.:

In the 2003 release of Sunrise (1927) on DVD, Fox presented, as an extra, a reconstitution of what this movie might have been like. By combining voiceovers, photographs and conceptual sketches, this is the closest one can get to this lost masterpiece.

I've seen most of East Lynne. I say most because the last reel is lost which amounts to 10 to 15 minutes of footage. A search of the internet might undercover a bootleg of East Lynne on DVD-R which is how I saw the film years ago.

I'm not aware of any bootlegs of The White Parade being available. I recall The Original B.J. had seen it at the UCLA a few years ago. One can only hope that somehow it will find its way to a legitimate DVD release so we can all have the opportunity to see the film. If you ever to get to L.A. to watch The White Parade film I believe it will be a VHS copy they that created from the last remaining print.

Most say that I most sought after 'lost' films are The Patriot & F. W. Murnau's Four Devils. As time presses forward its more and more unlikely that any possible surviving copies remain.

Just wondering if anyone has seen East Lynne (1931) or The White Parade (1934) which I believe still survive in the UCLA archive.

I've still got a couple of DVDs to watch of early Oscar Best Picture nominees and then they will be the last ones (apart from The Patriot) that I haven't seen.

Obviously with the current problems it will be a while (if ever) that I could get to Los Angeles to watch them but I just thought I'd see if anyone else had watched them in the past.