Talking Screen (Jan-Aug 1930)

Lawrence Tibbett as the fascinating bandit, Yegor, in The Rogue Song. Congratulations \_Continued from page 61] saw him in his new home in Beverly Hills • — and I came away with a sharpened sense of that vivid charm which the camera caught in The Rogue Song. In the first place, Lawrence Tibbett is that extraordinarily attractive thing — a thoroughly healthy person. His skin is tanned, his eyes are bright (bright, bright blue, in case you failed to catch their color in The Rogue Song), and his handclasp is magnetic. He's at home in the world and happy to be in it — completely capable of enjoying life. And singing for him is — and has always been — just a natural way of expressing his feelings. He carries with him, even when he sings before the microphone, a sense of the audience response, of the give and take of emotion — a picture of bodies that move in response to his singing, that strain forward and relax again as he sings to them of love and happiness, hardship and adventure. BUT don't for a moment think that Lawrence Tibbett gets that emotional power of his across to you on the screen without effort. A perfect performance of The Rogue Soig is a matter of months of effort. And Tibbett says that with him, singing is at its best an expression of extreme emotional excitement. 'Where talking leaves off, singing begins ! Yet he had to get himself into the proper mood to sing The Lash Song. He sang it exactly fifteen times before they got a perfect recording of it. They worked that day from nine o'clock in the., morning until one-thirty at night. "Either the recording mechanics would fail to get the effect we wanted, or a light would blow out — or, if none of these things happened, my voice that particular time would not be at its best. And so — all to do over. "But I found so much difficulty in keeping pitched up emotionally for that whipping scene — which I think is the best scene in the whole picture — with long waits in between, that I finally kept at it steadily. "The hot technicolor lights flooded over me, the perspiration poured off me — and I sang it, and sang it, and sang it. "If that music moves you at all, when jou hear it, it will be because it moved me first in exactly the same way." TIBBETT is unmistakably a "real" person, and not a step in the whole course of his life to this day contradicts it. He was born in the little town of Bakersfield, California. The son of a sheriff. "When Lawrence was only a youngster, his father was killed by a bandit. Sheriff Tibbett's death left his wife and small son pretty much forced to fend for themselves. Th^y moved to Los Angeles,, then, and Lawrence, when he reached high school, not only sang in the glee club, but took any chance that came his way to sing for money outside. He sang at lodges and churches and banquets and motion picture houses — and his voice, instead of suffering from the strain, got steadily better. In 1918 he took him a wife — a girl he had known in high school. And in another year they had twin boys — Lawrence, Jr., and Dick. HE KNEW he had talent. So did everybody else. But he had no money. Finally he borrowed on his life insurance to make that precarious long journey to New York — the trip that many a hopeful young artist has made in vain. But with Tibbett it was different. For five months he studied with Frank Laforge and then his chance came to appear at the Met. The rest is history. "And now," he says casually, "I appear' to be in the movies — and making records — and singing ten concerts in exactly twelve evenings. And buying a house, and a new car with a special body . . ." BUT nothing that comes the Tibbetts' way is going to turn their heads. Acclaim hasn't done it and the luxury that his new contract with M-G-M assures will not do it either. He is to make two pictures in the next three years, and he will come back to Hollywood in May to begin work. The famous operetta. Rose Marie will be first. THERE are thousands of people who, seeing The Rogue Song, have sensed in Lawrence Tibbett that infectious charm to which one cannot accurately give a name, but which one feels and responds to. In the presence of that radiant quality of his we are all of us — like that first audience at Grauman's Chinese Theatre — intensely human. Mr. Tibbett, congratulations are in order. playing the leading feminine role in Women Love Brutes, a Paramount picture starling George Bancroft. Hers is a dramatic role in which pathos and humor intermingle, a role entirely different from anything she has hitherto attempted. Mary was taking her first screen tests for this picture at the moment Hawkes was killed. ON the set she is a silent, pitiful figure until she steps before the camera. There, if the script requires that she smile, her old vivacity returns. • No one watching and not knowing of her recent bereavement, would guess the inner heartache that her laughter conceals. ' "It is at times like these," says Mary, "that the demands of the talkies prove stringent. I'd never thought of it before, but it's much easier to keep the tears out of one's eyes than out of one's voice." ■When Mary started her career in the movies at the age of fourteen, she wasn't particular about the parts she played. She was glad to get any kind of a part while waiting for her "chance." It was when she signed a contract with First National that she realized she had been branded as a type. Fate Steps In [^Continued from page 21] She was "a goody goody girl" in the best old melodramatic sense. It was then that she started to fight for more human roles. "I wanted to be something more real than the garden variety of heroine," Mary said. "But no one would believe I could be anything else. •! begged and pleaded to be allowed to try something different, but all I ever got was a conciliatory pat on the back." THE majority of Mary's pictures preached the doctrine of virtue as its own reward, and she was beginning to think that her entire life would be spent in driving home that moral when she got a break. "It's not your type," Sol "Wurtzel began, when he suggested that Mary play the female lead in Dressed to Kill. If Mary had had any hesitation about accepting the offer, the statement that it was not her type would have settled it. She was willing to try anything that would get her away from the despised 'type'. "In Dressed to Kill I was a bad girl," said Mary, "and I liked it. I smoked and I drank, I flirted and did many things no really nice girl is supposed to do, and I felt very wide awake and very much alive. Diessed to Kill was followed by Dry Martini .and The Woman from Hell. Mary made a convincing and charming girl crook. "But still I wanted something different," said Mary. "I liked the crook pictures, but they weren't exactly real. I wanted something bigger and better, something that would give me a chance to show what I really could do." Mary Astor's case is not the first in which personal tragedy has made for the discovering of latent screen talents. The ablest directors in the industry have always claimed that no emotion is vitally portrayed upon the screen unless the man or woman portraying it has experienced that emotion. While the gay scenes in Mary's present picture prove her a capable actress, it is in the tragic sequences that she excels. Her own suffering has given her a new insight into the lives of others, and her years of experience before the camera enable her to convey that insight to her audience. Mary Astor has taken this gireat trial as courageousfy as she took lesser ones. She goes bravely and uncomplainingly about her work — proving that she is both an actress and a trouper. 86