SEE! One of the WORST performances in Screen History!

March rightfully deserved his Academy Award as J&H; he clearly relished this dual role as opposed to his usual romantic leads. Miriam Hopkins was shamefully cheated out of a nomination by having the bulk of her part cut out by censors -the restored footage demonstrates how truly heartbreaking and pathetic in her misery she is as Ivy. It would be decades before another actress would bare herself so completely in a performance,

But on the other side of the art, what about the true stinker of all screen performances? I refer of course to Jimmie Eagles in the 1930 DW Griffith talkie of Abraham Lincoln. Eagles is displayed as the young deserter whom Lincoln pardons as "a leg case."

Eagles' is one of the most embarassingly bad performances ever captured on film. His performance is so painfully wooden, he is so obviously reading his lines, and he makes no attempt at all to "act" in anything but the most theatrically artificial manner that even in an era of so-called "bad" silent movie acting, his performance -or lack thereof- stands out as jaw-droppingly bad.

I would put Eagles on a par with the unidentified child actor playing Mary in the 1931 Dr. Jekyll & Mr Hyde, who infects the only blot in an otherwise flawless film classic. Her "acting" is mortifyingly awful as she exclaims that she can walk. It is literally as if they were auditioning girls for the part, having them repeat the same words over and over and then someone just stuck the aution footage into the film. I'm willing to wager that this scene was originally removed from the film for artistic rather than censorship reasons.

She also ranks just behind the supremely wooden performance of Mary Philbin in the Chaney Phantom of the Opera -a performance remarked on even at the time as being 'old-fashioned' and 'artificial.'


"If you don't know the answer -change the question."