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The average screen time for a Best Actress Oscar nominee is one hour, three minutes, and 28 seconds. Not surprisingly, over 45% of those who have contended for the award (and 47% of those who have won) have not even reached the one hour mark froo screen time. Here is a look at the category’s 10 shortest nominated performances, including four winners:

10. Frances McDormand (“Fargo”)

26 minutes, 29 seconds (27.01% of the film)

McDormand earned her first of two Best Actress Oscars in 1997 for playing the role of Marge Gunderson, a pleasant yet shrewd Minnesota police chief. Since she is absent from the first third of the film, her screen time is remarkably low, and even ranks 38 seconds below that of William H. Macy, her Best Supporting Actor-nominated castmate. To date, none of McDormand’s five Oscar-nominated performances have reached the one hour screen time mark.

9. Julie Christie (“McCabe & Mrs. Miller”)

25 minutes, 2 seconds (20.71% of the...

The Scarlet Empress (1934), starring Marlene Dietrich, John Lodge, Sam Jaffe, Louise Dresser and “a supporting cast of 1,000 players,” is director Josef von Sternberg at his most grandiose and excessive, which is just another way of saying “at his best,” at the height of a state of expressive delirium no other director has ever really matched. (Though many have, either consciously or subconsciously, tried– I wonder if Ken Russell ever admitted envy for von Sternberg or this film.) Von Sternberg’s paints his pictures with gasp-and-giggle-inducingly broad strokes, but his approach is no joke. There’s an exhilarating strain of claustrophobia in the director’s films which is given its freest rein here. His frames are burdened with grandeur, luxury and horror closing in, and he achieves a genuine sense of epic sprawl and decadence, despite the orchestrated sense that the whole of Russia, royalty as well as the entirety of its oppressed,...

Desert Nights with John Gilbert and Mary Nolan: Enjoyable Sahara-set adventure – which happened to be Gilbert's last silent film – dares to ask the age-old philosophical question, “Is there honor among thieves?” John Gilbert late silent adventure 'Desert Nights' asks a question for the ages: Is there honor among thieves? The Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer release Desert Nights arrived in theaters at the tail end of the silent era. By 1929, audiences wanted lots of singing and dancing – talkies! And they might have been impatient to hear John Gilbert's speaking voice. I can't tell whether sound would have improved it or not, but Desert Nights has a lot of title cards filled with dialogue. Directed by the prolific William Nigh,[1] the film tells the story of diamond thieves who get stranded in the Sahara and almost die of thirst. (At first, Desert Nights' was appropriately titled Thirst.) Cinematographer James Wong Howe perfectly captures the hot, dry...

The Goose Woman (1925), directed by Clarence Brown, just screened at the Hippodrome Festival of Silent Cinema, accompanied by one of the finest and most remarkable live scores it's ever been my privilege to experience. Jane Gardner's soundtrack, incorporating piano, violin and drums, but also baby cries and a musical saw, was so good I wondered if it might be causing me to overrate the movie, in essence a moderately soapy melodrama, but the fact that no less a figure than Kevin Brownlow, who rediscovered and restored the lost film and supplied the print for the screening, considers it one of his very favorites, reassures me that I haven't taken leave of my critical faculties in a musical rapture.

The plot derives from a true-life murder case, still unsolved, but such open-ended stories have never been Hollywood's bag so this Universal production wraps things up neatly by the end. Part...

Frederica Sagor Maas, a Hollywood screenwriter in the 1920s, died January 5 at the Country Villa nursing facility in La Mesa, in the San Diego metropolitan area. She was 111. The daughter of Jewish Russian immigrants, she was born Frederica Alexandrina Sagor on July 6, 1900, in New York City. According to her autobiography, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim: A Writer in Early Hollywood, she studied journalism at Columbia University, but quit before graduation to work as an assistant story editor at Universal Pictures' New York office. While at Universal, she kept herself busy going to star-studded premieres and parties, and — as found in her book — having the studio buy the rights to Rex Beach's novel The Goose Woman, thus giving a solid boost to the careers of actresses Louise Dresser and Constance Bennett, and of future five-time Oscar-nominated director Clarence Brown. Sagor left Universal when film executive Al Lichtman and future...

Several shorts directed by film pioneer Georges Méliès, played by Ben Kingsley in Martin Scorsese's well-received Hugo, will be featured throughout January 2012 at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum's Edison Theater in Fremont, Calif. The Méliès screenings will be held at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 7, 21, and 28. On Jan. 7, the Edison Theater will show Méliès' 1910 short The Doctor's Secret prior to the main feature, the William S. Hart 1916 classic Western Hell's Hinges, which also features Clara Williams (excellent in the highly recommended The Italian) and Louise Glaum, a film vamp who four years later would star in Sex. Musical accompaniment by Frederick Hodges. On Jan. 21, the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum will celebrate "seven years of showing great films" with a screening of future two-time Oscar winner Lewis Milestone's 1928 The Garden of Eden. The romantic comedy stars one of the great beauties of the silent era, Corinne Griffith,...

The Goose Woman (1925) Direction: Clarence Brown Cast: Louise Dresser, Jack Pickford, Constance Bennett, Marc McDermott, George Nichols, Gustav von Seyffertitz Screenplay: Melville W. Brown, titles by Dwinelle Benthall; from Rex Beach's story Highly Recommended Louise Dresser, Jack Pickford, The Goose Woman At the 2011 San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the Clarence Brown-directed 1925 Universal release The Goose Woman was introduced by author and film historian Kevin Brownlow. For me, Brown's family drama was the best film I saw at this year's festival. [Spoilers ahead.] Based on a Rex Beach story (itself inspired by a real-life murder trial), The Goose Woman stars future Best Actress Academy Award nominee Louise Dresser as Mary Holmes, a former opera star known as Marie de Nardi. Once the toast of Paris, Mary is now a drunken slattern, living in an old farmhouse where she raises geese. She openly resents her son, Gerald (Jack Pickford), whom she bitterly...

Marlene Dietrich on TCM Pt.2: A Foreign Affair, The Blue Angel Schedule (Et) and synopses from the TCM website: 6:00 Am The Monte Carlo Story (1957) Two compulsive gamblers fall in love on the French Riviera. Dir: Samuel A. Taylor. Cast: Marlene Dietrich, Vittorio De Sica, Arthur O'Connell. C-101 mins, Letterbox Format. 7:45 Am Knight Without Armour (1937) A British spy tries to get a countess out of the new Soviet Union. Dir: Jacques Feyder. Cast: Marlene Dietrich, Robert Donat, Irene Van Brugh. Bw-107 mins. 9:45 Am The Lady Is Willing (1942) A Broadway star has to find a husband so she can adopt an abandoned child. Dir: Mitchell Leisen. Cast: Marlene Dietrich, Fred MacMurray, Aline MacMahon. Bw-91 mins. 11:30 Am Kismet (1944) In the classic Arabian Nights tale king of the beggars enters high society to help his daughter marry a handsome prince. Dir: William Dieterle. Cast: Ronald Colman, Marlene Dietrich, James Craig.

Marlene Dietrich is Turner Classic Movies last "Summer Under the Stars" star of 2011. Today, TCM is showing 12 Marlene Dietrich movies, in addition to J. David Riva's 2001 documentary Marlene Dietrich: Her Own Song. Riva, I should add, is the son of Maria Riva and Dietrich's grandson. [Marlene Dietrich Movie Schedule.] Unfortunately, TCM isn't presenting any Marlene Dietrich movie premieres today. In other words, no Dietrich opposite David Bowie in Just a Gigolo, or Dietrich next to Jean Gabin in Martin Roumagnac / The Room Upstairs, or any of Dietrich's little-known German-made silents, e.g., Ich küsse Ihre Hand, Madame / I Kiss Your Hand, Madame; Das Schiff der verlorenen Menschen / The Ship of Lost Men; and Gefahren der Brautzeit / Dangers of the Engagement. None of the silents are exactly what I'd call good movies — nor is Just a Gigolo — but they all are worth a look if only because Dietrich is in them. Another option for...

Lon Chaney on TCM: He Who Gets Slapped, The Unknown, Mr. Wu Get ready for more extreme perversity in West of Zanzibar (1928), as Chaney abuses both Warner Baxter and Mary Nolan, while the great-looking Mr. Wu (1927) offers Chaney as a Chinese creep about to destroy the life of lovely Renée Adorée — one of the best and prettiest actresses of the 1920s. Adorée — who was just as effective in her few early talkies — died of tuberculosis in 1933. Also worth mentioning, the great John Arnold was Mr. Wu's cinematographer. I'm no fan of Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), or The Phantom of the Opera (1925), but Chaney's work in them — especially in Hunchback — is quite remarkable. I mean, his performances aren't necessarily great, but they're certainly unforgettable. Chaney's leading ladies — all of whom are in love with younger, better-looking men — are Loretta Young (Laugh, Clown, Laugh), Patsy Ruth Miller...

Marlene Dietrich in Kurt Bernhardt's The Woman Men Yearn For Among the silent-film classics to be featured at this year's San Francisco Silent Film Festival are Victor Sjöström's He Who Gets Slapped (1924), starring Lon Chaney, Norma Shearer, and John Gilbert in the newly founded MGM studios' first production; five-time Oscar nominee Clarence Brown's The Goose Woman (1925), starring Louise Dresser and Constance Bennett, and which was recently restored by UCLA; and William Desmond Taylor's Huckleberry Finn (1920). Taylor's 1922 murder — unsolved to this day — was one of the major scandals that rocked Hollywood in the early '20s. Other festival highlights include [...]...