It might be best to describe The Dove as a partially lost film. Four of the film’s nine reels are in the Library of Congress, and they are not even consecutive reels. The film is based upon a play by Willard Mack and stars Norma Talmadge, Noah Beery, and Gilbert Roland, all of them major performers of the silent film era. IMDB summarizes the plot very tersely: “A despot falls for a dancing girl. After she rejects him, he has her other beau framed for murder.” So many of the plots of these lost films sound like they are very melodramatic, don’t they? It was one of the fashions of the times, I suppose. William Cameron Menzies won the first Oscar for Best Interior Decoration, later known as Art Direction and now known as Production Design, for The Dove and for Tempest. He would be nominated again in the same category the following year and would later receive a special Oscar for his use of color in Gone with the Wind.
Oscar Win: Best Interior Decoration
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