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January 19 - January 24, 2020
The Public Enemy was shot in twenty-one days at a cost of $151,000, and Zanuck invited Irving Thalberg to its preview. Thalberg was stunned. “That’s not a motion picture,” he told Zanuck. “It’s beyond a motion picture.”
Even Al Capone had a comment: “These gang pictures—that’s terrible kid stuff. They’re doing nothing but harm to the younger element of the country. I don’t blame the censors for trying to bar them.”
What kind of package could Junior offer them? Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula had become a million-dollar Broadway hit.
“My audiences were women,” said Lugosi. “They came—and knew an ecstasy dragged from the depths of unspeakable things. Came—and then wrote me letters of a horrible hunger, asking me if I cared only for maidens’ blood.”
Then Lon Chaney, only forty-seven, died of throat cancer.
Playing on his need, they offered him a paltry $3,500.
Dracula premiered at the huge Roxy Theatre in New York on February 12, 1931.
“Yes, they do, Pop,” Junior pleaded. “They do want that sort of thing. Just give me a chance and I’ll show you.” Before long, Junior announced: “As a result of the reception given Dracula, we’re pushing plans for Frankenstein and Murders in the Rue Morgue.
Peabody’s publicist Joseph Breen,
One day Whale spied a British character actor eating lunch in the Universal commissary. Boris Karloff was Anglo-Indian, gaunt, and soulful.
Whale rewarded her courage with two dozen boiled eggs; her mother was depriving her of food to make her obey.
Whale was accompanied by Paramount producer David Lewis, who was also his live-in lover.
Before long, Paramount got its own horror film, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Rouben Mamoulian made his version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel as much a study of sexual release as a horror film.
Fredric March’s
Dumb Dora,”
Having made Dietrich a star in The Blue Angel and Morocco, he continued to design her every gesture. In one talked-about scene, Dietrich slouches in a chair and dangles her leg over its armrest. Within weeks, teenage girls were scandalizing their mothers by sitting like Dietrich, and a fan-mag controversy was brewing.
Sure enough, Strangers May Kiss was heavily cut by censor boards and banned outright in Canadian territories for showing “promiscuous prostitution.”
A Free Soul was heavily cut by local censors and banned entirely in Ireland,
diaphanous
peignoir.
James M. Curley. “The mayor has banned Five Star Final,” Joseph Breen notified Jason Joy.
“I was watching The Easiest Way, when there came the exact moment when I had had enough sex. The makers of screen entertainment may continue to earn dividends by selling the immorality of women, but no longer can they sell it to me. Every sex picture I review from now on is going to be estimated for what it is—a filthy thing manufactured by businessmen.” Many censor boards felt the same way.
The stampede to hear Greta Garbo speak in her first two talkies had created a phenomenon called “Garbomania.” Her fans did not care that she played a prostitute in Anna Christie and a rich man’s mistress in Romance.
Perhaps in response to her critics, Norma Shearer gave Gladys Hall of Motion Picture magazine a widely quoted interview. “Economic independence has put woman on exactly the same footing as man,” said Shearer.
He was, however, grooming the silent-film star Billie Dove. Even by Hollywood’s lofty standards, Dove was a raving beauty, and by Hughes’s exacting standards, well endowed.
He saved them the trouble. He spent so much of his Hughes money on food and drink that he died of a heart attack at the downtown Paramount Theatre in October of the same year. He was twenty-eight.
But no. Hughes and Quarberg preferred the stance of the bullied new kid in the playground, forgetting that this particular kid had been playing the arrogant arriviste for five years. The millionaire aviator from Texas was, after all, only twenty-six years old.
Goulding was a brilliant eccentric, too careless to cover his indiscreet drinking, drug-taking, and orgies.
Harlow’s claim to fame was her platinum-blonde hair,
Massachusetts and Pennsylvania cut scenes of Lil’s romance with her chauffeur (Charles Boyer).
When Darryl Zanuck heard that Joy had used audience reaction as an argument, he wrote the SRC: “I insist that you give Warner Bros. the same privileges you gave Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.”
Red Dust.
On July 2, twenty-one-year-old Harlow married forty-two-year-old Paul Bern. On July 22, filming commenced, and easygoing Clark Gable found the first scenes vulgar. On September 5, Paul Bern was found dead of a bullet wound.
M-G-M was known for its Art Deco gloss. And for sex.
The Pennsylvania board cut a scene of Johnny (Joel McCrea) and a “small boy with Johnny’s shirt on, standing with back to camera, when you see a shadow of his sex on the shirt.”
While visiting Montevideo, she becomes a sex slave to a sloe-eyed homme fatal, Emile Renaul (Nils Asther).
kept. Murchison, [the oil magnate, played by Douglas Dumbrille] is after Blondie. He’s a climber. He’s a Joe Kennedy. She’s a chicken, and he’s definitely after her.”
The bilateral gender-bending was no doubt conceived to honor a Hearst requirement: every Marion Davies film had to include a sequence in which she donned men’s clothes.
She and her best friend, Lurline (Billie Dove), fall off a yacht, and Blondie replaces her wet clothes with a captain’s uniform.
out of a convent and shoves her into a brothel. “There was a ‘house,’” says Ann. “From a convent… to a house in Zanzibar… I ‘graduated.’” Flint’s vengeance degrades Ann into an alcoholic, fever-ridden prisoner until a drug-addicted doctor (Conrad Nagel) stumbles onto the plantation, recovers, and takes her away.
Finally titled Rasputin and the Empress, the film justified its ballyhoo; there was a riot when it opened in New York.
Loy. “I’ve done a lot of terrible things in films,” said Loy, “but this girl’s a sadistic nymphomaniac!”
In Freaks, Thalberg and Browning populated a circus sideshow with a bearded lady, a human skeleton, a hermaphrodite, Siamese twins, simpering pinheads, and an armless, legless man. The hero is a little person named Hans (Harry Earles). The villain is a narcissistic strongman, Hercules (Henry Victor), who plots with the vain acrobat Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) to murder the frugal Hans—after she marries him.
exit.” Thalberg cut twenty-five minutes from the film, discarded the ending in which the freaks castrate the strong man and mutilate the acrobat, and replaced it with an improbable reunion between Hans and his wife (played by Earle’s sister, Daisy). These measures failed to save Freaks.
Somerset Maugham’s short story Miss Thompson,
“The role of Sadie Thompson should have died with Jeanne Eagels,” wrote Mollie Merrick in the Los Angeles Times. “She could say more with those twitching calves than a whole world of actresses can do with makeup and costuming.” Hays approved the project only after Schenck agreed to change the cleric “Reverend Davidson” to the secular reformer “Mr. Davidson.” Walter Huston was cast as the man obsessed with a prostitute in a steamy Samoan hotel.
blunt: “Fox had the best distribution organization in the business—and the worst films.”
Besides having such elements as incest, masturbation, transvestism, and venereal disease, the book was patently racist, blaming its heroine’s personality problems on her Native American blood.
plot gave Bow what most actors crave, a role with multiple identities. In one film Bow plays a wild teenager, an impulsive debutante, a jilted newlywed, a thrill-seeking party girl, a young mother, a prostitute, an aloof society gal, a slumming brawler, a sexy drunk, and a repentant daughter.
scene.” Fox replaced La Roy with Margaret Livingstone, who was willing to expose her chest and let a man roll on top of her in the back of a covered wagon.
