Prize Day

In Los Angeles' Biltmore Bowl, an enormous modern room shaped like a football sliced in half, 900 members and guests of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences last week sat down to that institution's annual banquet.

The production end of the cinema industry is in some respects like a large and highly eccentric school. The atmosphere of the Academy Banquet suggests that of a Commencement. It concluded, as usual, last week with the awarding of prizes, honorable mentions and special awards for every branch of excellence in the cinema industry, except possibly that of Best Dressed Actress or Producer Most Likely to Succeed. Major winners:

Picture : Mutiny on the Bounty (MGM).

Performance by an Actress: Bette Davis (Dangerous).

Performance by an Actor: Victor McLaglen (The Informer).

Direction: John Ford (The Informer).

Original story: Ben Hecht & Charles MacArthur (The Scoundrel).

Screenplay: Dudley Nichols (The Informer).

Cinematography: Hal Mohr (Midsummer Night's Dream).

Song: Lullaby of Broadway (Gold Diggers of 1935) by Harry Warren & Al Dubin.

Cartoon: Three Orphan Kittens (Walt Disney).

Among the innumerable intricacies of the cinema industry's politics, which are striking in their similarity to those of a college campus, is the circumstance that the Screen-Writers' and the Screen Actors' Guilds currently dislike the Academy, which they regard as a rival fraternity run by the producers. Awkward moments occurred at last week's ceremony when neither Director Ford nor Screenwriter Nichols appeared to claim their prizes--small gold statuettes which Hollywood calls "Oscars." Director Ford accepted his prize later. Author Nichols refused, out of loyalty to the Screen Writers' Guild. Biggest surprise in the balloting was the narrow margin by which Actor McLaglen nosed out Paul Muni. A write-in choice for his performance in The Story of Louis Pasteur, Muni beat Charles Laughton, whose work in Mutiny on the Bounty had been nominated on the ballot of Academy members which precedes final selection by the prize committees. Second best picture was The Informer. Second best job by an actress, Katharine Hepburn's in Alice Adams.

At the speakers' table, looking like a rather grouchy old professor, sat famed oldtime Director David Wark ("The Old Master") Griffith, who climaxed the affairs at 1 a. m. by awarding the three top prizes. Last week was a big one for Direc tor Griffith, now 56, comparatively poor, and apparently through with the cinema. In Manhattan two audiences invited by the Museum of Modern Art to its series of cinema classics agreed that his Intolerance (which, contrary to legend that it cost $2,500,000, was made for $330,000 in 1916) compared favorably in many ways with modern efforts of the same school. Having divorced his first wife in La Grange, Ky. last fortnight (TIME, March 9), Griffith was married for the second time last week to a 26-year-old amateur actress named Evelyn Marjorie Baldwin. At the Academy Banquet he received a special award for his "contribution to the advancement of the motion picture." In reply, the man who made The Birth of a Nation (1915) traced the history of the cinema industry in a recital that grew more & more dramatic until he finished by gulping back his tears and declaring that the cinema indus try was still the finest in the world. To the 900 banqueters, it was the Best Speech.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.