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January 19 - January 24, 2020
In the winter of 1932, 20 percent of theaters were closed. Moviegoers who could afford only one film chose Smilin’ Through. Consequently, Call Her Savage made a profit of only $17,407, and the Fox Film Corporation ended the year with a loss of $16,964,499.
This was true for most of the 1920s, and then, at the decade’s end, came radio, entering homes with an intimacy that movie theaters could not match. By 1932, sixteen million radios were competing with the
including Cab Calloway, who does a musical number, “Kickin’ the Gong Around.” The song refers to opium smoking, heroin, and cocaine, and the loose-limbed Calloway mimics the inhaling of cocaine. The Big Broadcast did “swell business,” in regional theaters, said Variety. “Hicks are natural huggers of radio.”
“I’d have to find one in a hurry because they had the two stars on five thousand a week, there was no picture, and the money was mounting up.”
Love Me Tonight, included lyrics by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Trotti made a few suggestions to Schulberg about some risqué verses, then concluded: “May I add that this is one of the most delightful scripts that I have ever read.” The finished film was even more delightful, with tunes like “Isn’t It Romantic”
Shanghai Express, Marlene Dietrich’s first film of the year, was as eagerly awaited as Greta Garbo’s Grand Hotel, and it had a similar plot—a group of disparate characters caught in an exotic setting. Josef von Sternberg used light, shadow, and sound to tell the story of Dietrich’s newest character, Shanghai Lily.
The film has Helen Faraday (Marlene Dietrich) sell her favors to a rich politician (Cary Grant)
Emanuel Cohen, an ambitious newsreel producer, ascended to power. He quickly signed Bing Crosby and Mae West. Then he bought Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, hired Frank Borzage to direct, cast Gary Cooper as Frederic Henry, and borrowed Helen Hayes from M-G-M to play Catherine Barkley.
The biggest scandal of 1932 involved the shooting death of M-G-M producer Paul Bern on Labor Day. It was called a suicide, but there was a sexual aspect to it. The middle-aged confidante of beautiful starlets was allegedly unable to consummate his marriage to Jean Harlow because of undersized genitals.
Breen’s moral indignation found an obvious target. “People whose daily morals would not be tolerated in the toilet of a pest house hold the good jobs out here and wax fat on it,” he wrote. “Ninety-five percent of these folks are Jews of an Eastern European lineage. They are, probably, the scum of the earth.”
At fifty, DeMille was the best-known producer-director in the world, whether for sex fables like Male and Female or biblical epics like The King of Kings, on which Lord had served as advisor.
It mattered not that DeMille had made Hollywood the film capital of the world.
Leisen lived with a pilot named Eddie Anderson, while married to an opera singer named Sandra Gale, none of which prevented him from approaching men at the studio; his behavior was excused because of his value to the company.
the Roman dancer executes the ‘Kootch’ Movement.
And every review criticized DeMille for including the most graphically violent and candidly sexual images ever committed to Hollywood gelatin.
“At the Rialto, some women put their hands across their eyes to shut out the dreadful views; others fainted.”
Watching with no little interest was a plump thirty-nine-year-old from Brooklyn. Years later, Mae West recalled the Hollywood of 1933.
1927 West had served ten days in jail for writing and appearing in a “wicked, lewd, scandalous, bawdy, obscene, indecent, infamous, immoral, and impure” play called Sex.
From the moment Mae West swaggered across the screen, viewers knew they were in the presence of a master—a master of exaggeration, innuendo, and humor. The ribaldry she had flashed in Night after Night shone full force in She Done Him Wrong, the story of Lady Lou, a Gay Nineties saloon singer.
For three years the screen had been dominated by languid stars like Garbo and Dietrich. Garbo thrilled her fans by reacting to situations; she rarely initiated them. “The drama comes in how she rides them out,” said Irving Thalberg. Dietrich was a stoic siren, sacrificing herself for an ideal love.
There was, of course, the line that became a catch-phrase, the endlessly quoted (and misquoted) “Why doncha come up sometime an’ see me?”
“This was a smash hit in the cities, but only average in the tank towns.
discovered that banks were shipping gold out of the country.
the Long Beach earthquake.
On Monday, March 13, the studios shut down until 50 percent cuts were agreed upon. The next morning, in studio after studio, the moguls broke the news. At M-G-M, Louis B. Mayer was unshaven and weeping. At Warner Bros., Darryl Zanuck promised to restore salaries within a month. “That night I went to the Brown Derby,” recalled actress Aline MacMahon. “Waiters were carrying large bowls of caviar behind a screen. And behind the screen were the Warner families, celebrating. It was a great break for them.”
Since Pickford was actually referring to She Done Him Wrong, the song in question could have been “Easy Rider,” “A Guy What Takes His Time,” or “Frankie and Johnny.”
At M-G-M, Louis B. Mayer took advantage of Irving Thalberg’s absence to remove him from his post and make him one of a group of “independent producers” on the lot.
Perversion was the order of the day. In Midnight Mary, gangster’s moll Loretta Young whispers in Ricardo Cortez’s ear what she will do with him when they are alone. “I didn’t know she was living with that man,” recalled Loretta Young.
“Terrance Ray was supposed to laugh, and he couldn’t,” recalled cameraman Charles van Enger. “And Stroheim had a guy tie a string around the end of his pecker, so when Stroheim wanted him to laugh, he would pull this string, saying, ‘Reaction! Reaction!’ And that made the guy laugh.”
visit the lavatories prior to each take and masturbate almost to the point of completion.”
RKO Radio Pictures was in receivership, too, but it saved its hide with the strangest love story of all. King Kong was the saga of a super-simian and his love object,
And then!” Girl without a Room featured a dance by the notorious Joyzelle. In it, she wears nothing but a coat of metallic body paint. Its setting is a Paris bistro, but it could be any dive in the “twilight world” of Manhattan.
In early 1933 the Hollywood Reporter was one of several trade journals reporting on the sudden prevalence of “lavender men” and “mannish” women on the screen.
There are innumerable examples and they are increasing.” This was true. Call Her Savage had a scene where Clara Bow goes slumming in Greenwich Village. The restaurant she visits has a floor show of two young men dressed as chambermaids, singing these lyrics:
In 1933, the studios turned a corner, transforming caricatures into characters. In Warners’ 42nd Street, the show’s director is conspicuously unmarried and invites one of his assistants to visit him because he is lonely. In Footlight Parade, Francis (Frank McHugh) asks Kent (James Cagney) to audition a special friend: “I simply had to tell you. This boy, Scott Blair. He’s a discovery. Just loads of talent and personality.”
The Fox Film Corporation had the distinction of being the first studio to use the word gay to denote homosexuality in a film. In My Weakness, Charles Butterworth and Sid Silvers are both hopelessly in love with Lilian Harvey. Butterworth suggests a solution: “Let’s be gay!”
perverted sex has crept so broadly into several items of recent product that it will be fortunate indeed if it escapes notice in the newspapers.” It did not. “Producers are going heavy on the panz stuff in current pix,”
What concerned Hollywood’s critics was how matter-of-factly it presented homosexual characters. In Preston Sturges’s script for The Power and the Glory, a railroad magnate (Spencer Tracy) endures for years the unspoken love of his best friend (Ralph Morgan).
“The reference to Any Time Annie: ‘She only said “no” once, and then she didn’t hear the question.’” The line stayed in, and 42nd Street was a hit. “What a box
for “women’s pictures, which inevitably means sex pictures.” The best of these starred Ruth Chatterton, who brought her clipped diction and slinky elegance to Female, in which she runs an auto factory and emulates Catherine the Great. Wingate wrote: “It is made very plain that she has been satisfying a too definitely indicated sex hunger by frequently inviting any young man who may appeal to her to her home and there bringing about a seduction. After having satisfied her desires with these various males, she pays no further attention to them other than to reward them with bonuses.
“St. Louis Blues.” (The W. C. Handy song was often used to create a whorish ambience.)
Supervisors, who were now called “producers,” were bucking Wingate’s “narrower considerations.”
exigent
One of the most revolting novels ever published is William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, but Paramount is making it under The Shame of Temple Drake.
and I’m No Angel surpassed She Done Him Wrong at the box office. A Louisiana exhibitor affirmed: “The church people clamor for clean pictures, but they all come out to see Mae West.”
Radio City Music Hall opened its doors on January 11, 1933.
Director Frank Capra was enamored of the concept, so he ignored the miscegenation laws of thirty states, including California.
It was the fable of a Southern society girl whose rebellious streak runs her afoul of inbred mountaineers and an impotent bootlegger named Popeye. He rapes her with a corncob and makes her work in a brothel,
“Any other actor might play it and maybe get away with it, but I look like that kind of a guy. There’d be just one thing for the public to think: ‘George Raft, himself, is like Trigger.’ Listen, do you know what I would have had to do in that picture? First I had to kill a feeble-minded boy. And then I had to rape a girl—in a corn crib, see. Then I take her to a sporting house. That’s the part they asked me to play. That’s the part I refused to play.”
Ann Vickers, which was based on a Sinclair Lewis novel forbidden to Catholics because its feminist heroine had two affairs and one abortion.
