Some of the Best (MGM, 1944)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Right after Die Austernprinzessin on Turner Classic Movies April 13, my husband Charles and I watched a peculiar 1944 MGM featurette called Some of the Best, a compilation running about 40 minutes of clips from the films some of the people running MGM thought were the best films the studio had made since its founding in 1924 from the merger of Metro Pictures (run by theatre owner Marcus Loew), the Goldwyn Corporation (two years after its co-founder Samuel Goldwyn had been forced out of it by corporate raider Pat Powers), and Louis B. Mayer’s independent studio on Mission Road in Hollywood. Part of the deal was that Mayer and his assistant, Irving Thalberg – whom he’d just hired away from Universal, where he’d got his start – would run the new studio and would take over Goldwyn’s physical plant. Though the first MGM release was a 1924 melodrama called He Who Gets Slapped with Lon Chaney, John Gilbert, and Norma Shearer, Some of the Best kicks off with the 1925 blockbuster hit The Big Parade, a World War I-themed drama with John Gilbert and the absurdly named French actress “Renée Adorée.” (She was actually French, but her real name was the considerably more prosaic Jeanne de la Fonte.) Some of the Best continues with the big dance to the “Merry Widow” waltz from Erich von Stroheim’s 1925 version of Franz Léhar’s operetta (though Lewis Stone’s narration discreetly doesn’t mention Stroheim and, indeed, no other directors are named either). Then it showcases the chariot race from the 1926 Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (a film I like better than its 1959 remake, partly because the scenes involving Christ are shot in two-strip Technicolor for a loftier air than the black-and-white used in the rest of the movie, and partly because Ramon Novarro, precisely because he wasn’t as butch, makes a better Ben-Hur than Charlton Heston did in the remake) and Greta Garbo’s first major U.S. hit, Flesh and the Devil (1927) – even though it was already Garbo’s third MGM film and fifth major starring vehicle overall. After that we get a clip from Tell It to the Marines! (1928) – in which Lon Chaney essentially plays a John Wayne part before John Wayne.

Then, as silent films give way to sound ones, the next clips shown are from The Broadway Melody (1929), the first all-talkie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture and a film that holds up pretty well today even though the cameras are static and the numbers filmed from such a distance the dancers look like ants on a wedding cake. The next film was the hard-edged prison drama The Big House (1930), for which screenwriter Frances Marion won the Academy Award (the first woman to win an Oscar outside of the Best Actress category). It’s basically a romance grafted on to a prison-escape movie, and in Marion’s original draft the characters played by Robert Montgomery and Leila Hyams were husband and wife. Preview audiences reacted negatively to the film, and Irving Thalberg decided that they didn’t want to see Chester Morris’s character having an affair with a married woman. So Thalberg ordered Marion to rewrite the script so Montgomery and Hyams would be playing brother and sister instead, Marion did so, director George Hill (who was then Marion’s husband) shot the retakes, and the film as modified was MGM’s biggest hit of the year. The compilers of Some of the Best clearly concentrated on MGM movies that had won Academy Awards, including Marie Dressler’s Best Actress win for her role in Min and Bill (1930); Lionel Barrymore’s Best Actor Oscar for A Free Soul (1931) – which, though it’s set in contemporary times, is essentially a prototype for Gone With the Wind in that it’s a two-man, one-woman romantic triangle and Leslie Howard and Clark Gable are the two men – and Helen Hayes’s Best Actress win for The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931). When Hayes was offered this role, an adaptation of an old French tearjerker called The Rosary, Hayes’s husband, Charles MacArthur, complained to Thalberg that the role was unworthy of his wife. Thalberg offered MacArthur the kind of dare he was famous for: he said, “You’re a writer – you fix it.”

After that MGM paid tribute to W. S. Van Dyke’s African jungle melodrama, Trader Horn (1931), which led to MGM producing Tarzan of the Apes with Johnny Weissmuller a year later because the studio had spent so much time and money shooting in Africa they had an enormous amount of footage left over that could be used in another Africa-set story. Then Some of the Best acknowledged MGM’s 1932 Best Picture winner, Grand Hotel, an all-star production of a type that was relatively easy to make under the studio system, in which actors, directors, writers, and all other personnel were under long-term contracts to the studio. Each star could shoot scenes for Grand Hotel in between their assignments to other films, and MGM ended up with a breathtaking cast: Greta Garbo, John and Lionel Barrymore, Wallace Beery, Joan Crawford, Jean Hersholt, Lewis Stone and many others. MGM followed that up with another all-star film, Dinner at Eight (1933), and re-teamed Beery and Dressler for Tugboat Annie (also 1933). Then Some of the Best showed another MGM Best Picture Oscar winner, Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), with Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian and Charles Laughton as a force-of-nature Captain Bligh, and the spectacular blockbuster San Francisco (1936) with Gable, Spencer Tracy, Jeanette MacDonald and reproductions of the 1906 earthquake and fire that even in this era of CGI still look spectacular. After that Some of the Best referenced Luise Rainer’s two thoroughly undeserved Academy Award Best Actress wins, The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and The Good Earth (1937), followed by a tribute to Spencer Tracy’s two consecutive Oscar winners, Captains Courageous (1937) and Boys Town (1938).

Captains Courageous is represented by a great confrontation scene between Portuguese fisherman Tracy and his first mate, John Carradine (a superb and underrated actor who gravitated between character roles in big movies like this and leads in “B” films, though one of his “B”’s, Edgar G. Ulmer’s Bluebeard, is superb and well worth watching). Captains Courageous is notorious as the film for which Tracy sought out a real Portuguese-American fisherman to be his dialogue coach. Tracy asked the man, “When you wanted to say, ‘Little fish,’ you’d say, ‘Leetle feesh,’ wouldn’t you?” Unfortunately for Tracy, this Portuguese-American fisherman was rightfully proud of his impeccable English; he told Tracy, “No, I wouldn’t. I would say, ‘Little fish.’” Tracy ignored his supposed dialogue coach and said things like “Leetle feesh” in an outrageously phony accent that had my husband Charles asking just what nationality Tracy was supposed to be playing. Then followed a scene between master underactor Spencer Tracy and master overacter Mickey Rooney from Boys Town. After that the compilation included scenes from the 1939 British-made MGM film Goodbye, Mr. Chips – shot at the Boreham Wood studio MGM opened so they could sign Robert Donat, an asthmatic who insisted he would only work for MGM if they would make all his films in his home country. Donat won the Academy Award for Best Actor, inexplicably since his competition included Clark Gable for Gone With the Wind (not included here because it was a Selznick International production and MGM was originally just the distributor) and Jimmy Stewart for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Then Some of the Best included scenes from the 1940 melodrama Boom Town, with Gable and Tracy as rival wildcat oil drillers, and The Philadelphia Story (also 1940), with Katharine Hepburn making her MGM debut and Cary Grant and Stewart as her male leads. She’d asked for Gable and Tracy but Louis B. Mayer said no; he said she could have Stewart because he was still under a contract that gave him no choice in his roles, but for the other male lead Mayer offered Hepburn a budget of $150,000 and told her to go hire someone herself. She came up with Cary Grant, with whom she’d already made three films, and if anyone deserved an Academy Award for The Philadelphia Story it was Grant. But it was Stewart who won the Oscar, partly because MGM had him under contract and was promoting him (Grant was a free-lancer) and partly as a “consolation award” for having been passed over for his genuinely award-worthy performance the year before in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The next MGM film represented in Some of the Best was Mrs. Miniver (1942), a major movie about the British home front during World War II which Winston Churchill called “propaganda worth a thousand battleships.” It won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Actress for Greer Garson in the title role, and Garson gave so extended an acceptance speech that the next year Academy Awards host Bob Hope joked that the Academy had made a new rule: your acceptance speech couldn’t be longer than your film. (That joked got revived this year when Adrien Brody went on quite a while in his acceptance speech for the award for The Brutalist.)

The final film represented in Some of the Best was Random Harvest (1943), which I remember running for Charles and our late roommate/home-care client John Primavera around the same time as The English Patient because it had a similar plot: an amnesiac war veteran returns to an old partner he barely remembers. I was amused that Some of the Best showed two sequences between Random Harvest stars Ronald Colman and Greer Garson, one of which was supposed to take place about two decades after the other, and it was an illustration of classic Hollywood’s sexism that Colman was put in age makeup so he looked 20 years older, while Garson looked about the same. Some of the Best is as intriguing for some of the films it didn’t include as the ones it did; to a modern audience the biggest surprise is there’s nothing from The Wizard of Oz, which had been so expensive to make it lost money at the box office and didn’t turn a profit until it was theatrically re-released in 1949 and then sold to television in 1956 for the first of what became an annual tradition of telecasts for the next 39 years. In fact Some of the Best contained nothing with Judy Garland, though 1944 was the year her performance in her husband-to-be Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis broke her through to superstar status at long last.