MovieChat Forums > The Broadway Melody (1929) Discussion > Bessie Love should have won the Oscar!

Bessie Love should have won the Oscar!


What do you think?

All right Mr. de Mille, I'm ready for my close-up...
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But we can't do anything with the competition back then. Mary Pickford was one of the founding members of the Academy!

All right Mr. de Mille, I'm ready for my close-up...
Regards, THE GODFATHER

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True, Mary Pickfored desired an Oscar (having set up the Academy and all...) and invited the members to Pickfair for dinner........and won the Oscar......
Ah well, she deserved the Oscar more the body of work she had produced than for 'Coquette'- it's nice that she got a competetive one and not only her honorary award.

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Yep, she was robbed. Mary Pickford winning was straight politics. People complain about Oscar politics today. It's always been there.

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Actually it's not quite true. COQUETTE may be seem a creaky picture in 2009 but the fact is in 1929 it was a box-office smash and received rave reviews and Mary Pickford's performance was widely hailed. There's a 1930 movie magazine article where stars list their own choices of the five greatest film performances ever and Mary's work in Coquette is repeatedly noted.

Bessie Love is very good in this movie but it's that one scene, her breakdown at the mirror that is extraordinarily fine and it's what everybody remembers. She well deserved an Oscar nomination for this but I still believe Mary's performance has the edge although I might have voted myself for Dolores Del Rio's unnominated work in one of the last silents, EVANGELINE, that year. Now that was a heartbreaking performance!

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Yes. By all means poor Bessie Love should have won the Oscar. She breaks your heart in the sequence she is crying her eyes out in the dressing room after telling her boyfriend to go fight for his true love. Bessie went on to entertain the troops in WWII a very admiral thing she did. She wrote a prize winning play The Homecoming and did bit parts until she passed away in the 80s. I hope she died happy and content with her accomplishments even if she didn't get the Oscar. God bless you Bessie you were lovely.

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Haven't seen the work of the other actresses nominated that year, but Bessie's performance in this movie is totally Oscar-worthy. She was absolutely superb; tough and touching at the same time.

Animal crackers in my soup
Monkeys and rabbits loop the loop

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She was definitely the highlight, that's for sure.


They've got cars big as bars, they've got rivers of gold

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