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Quick now, What major star of the 1940s is most ignored today?
The one who springs to my mind is Alan Ladd. Books on "The Films of..." are practically a glut on the market but poor Alan Ladd has yet to receive the honor,
It's true that Ladd made few really outstanding movies and perhaps only one classic, but in his prime he was immensely popular and most of the modest features in which he starred made inordinate amounts of money--so much so that one Paramount executive once stated that any time the studio needed to make money they simply turned out a new Alan Ladd movie,
In retrospect Ladd comes off as a rather limited actor with a calculatedly cool manner, but in 1942 he impressed most of us with his performance as Raven in THIS GUN FOR HIRE. I saw that movie as a youngster and after that I stuck with Ladd all through the 40s, through such films as THE GLASS KEY, LUCKY JORDAN, CHINA, THE BLUE DAHLIA, O.S.S., CALCUTTA and WHISPERING SMITH--none of them classics but all good, serviceable films which helped support Ladd's tough guy image,
Personally, I don't know why a book on the films of Alan Ladd would not be successful. Despite his “overnight” success in the film based on Graham Greene's novel, the actor's career in Hollywood dated back to the early 1930s and he was a star in his own right in close to fifty movies, As a young man Ladd worked as a grip at Warner Brothers and first appeared before the cameras as early as 1933, He was an extra in PIGSKIN PARADE (20th Century-Fox 1936), played unbilled parts in THE LAST TRAIN FROM MADRID (Paramount 1937), THE HOWARDS OF VIRGINIA (Columbia 1941) and CITIZEN KANE (RKO 1941). (Okay, who spotted Alan Ladd in Citizen Kane?) Even before his first big break he worked his way up in such films as CAPTAIN CAUTION, IN OLD MISSOURI, LIGHT OF WESTERN STARS and THE BLACK CAT, It was THIS GUN FOR HIRE which made him a star, however, and SHANE which immortalized him.
Despite his earlier popularity it is no secret that Ladd's last films were boxoffice failures and when he died in 1964 at the age of 50 most newspapers did little more than mark his passing. Why was Ladd's popularity so ephemeral? Pete Harris may have found the answer in the writings of Raymond Chandler who once wrote; "Laddis hard, bitter and occasionally charming, but he is after all a small boy's idea of a tough guy. Bogart is the genuine article..."
Even if for that reason alone, I'd still like to add "The Films of Alan Ladd" to my library of screen history. The only catch is that someone has to publish it first,
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Last week I wrote that Boris Dolgove (sic) was painting the Doc Savage covers for Bantam, Let me be the first to correct my own slip of the by@in typewriter; Boris Vallejo is doing the covers as well as those on many other fantasy-related books. Sorry about that, Boris.