Hollywood Spectator (Apr-May 1939)

icanism is cleverly instanceo with a hymn-like melody based on My Country 'tis of hee, expressive also of President Jackson's devotion to his country. Altogether Young has done more by way of thematic development than can be pointed out here. Quite unusual is his process of transforming an oldfashioned polka dance theme into a love motif. (Houston meets his second wife at a dance in the White House.) There is an earlier love theme — the first Mrs. Houston was a Tennesseean — and so Young has gone to a Southern courting song: I Knew a Lady So Kind and Sweet. A Reaction Score <1 All in all. one might describe Victor Young’s Man of Conquest music a “reaction” score, although the tie between action is close. The music never attempts to stampede emotions. In the midst of battle, for instance, Houston’s aide hauls down the enemy flag and hoists the Stars and Stripes. A bullet strikes him down, but sinking to the ground he pulls the colors to the full height of the mast. Young enters neither into tonal heroics nor a dirge, but over the tide of sound rises a bugle call, softly, yet in significant triumph. Or, to come back to his music for the charge: No blaring bugles; the piccolo trills that quaint Come to the Bower motif over sustained notes of drums and strings. (From a modernist standpoint the bunching of E-flat, E-major and Fmajor is noteworthy.) It tells enough of onrush and tension. I have already mentioned the psychological effect of the retreat motif, showing weary riders and weary horses. The clinging sound of a dull vibraphone emphasizes the heaviness of spirit and body dragged on seemingly without aim. The use of Indian themes or that naive barn dance with a little plumage borrowed from Turkey In the Straw bring the score again down to immediate reality. Man of Conquest is not a grandiloquent picture although it does recite sentiments which will re-echo in an America of sane patriotism. Young has not turned out the musical honor guard and fired his musical musketry just for the love of banking away. I say again that I wish he had added more music yet, for this is a score of unusual blending of action and reaction music, written with an unusual and inventive craftsmanship. ★ Foreign films are growing in popularity in this country. There are now eight houses in Los Angeles screening such films. This growth of cosmospolitan taste is one of the factors which eventually will force Hollywood to abandon the making of shoddy films and concentrate upon quality products. ikti Holllficeod GOOD sized nail is hit resoundingly on the head by B. R. Crisler, writing in the New York Times on the stereotyped “glamour” with which Hollywood is wont to encase its feminine players. One of the most baneful influences on the motion picture art, he opines, is the artifice of make-up and costuming, which have slowly ripened into “monstrous perfection . . . through the activities of those painstaking pygmalions” of the make-up and wardrobe departments. “For,” Crisler contends, “in the movies glamour is strictly an applied art: a beauty not even skin deep which melts in the sun, streaks in the rain . . . a mask to be removed at night, exposing the tired, all-too-human tissues beneath. And this, precisely, is the basic fallacy of the glamour concept: that it violates the most fundamental canon of what remains, after all, an inescapably naturalistic art. Hollywood’s denatured dream girls are, of necessity, spiritually static, with no more ‘soul’ than a geisha. With the make-up man constantly standing by to pat the perspiration from her face and with ‘wardrobe’ dancing attendance to guard. her gown (specially designed to minimize anatomical defects) from wrinkles, she is far above the plane of mortal infirmities, and consequently is as uninteresting, psychologically, as a statue in a museum." Who Is Who? €J Truly spoken. Moreover, it is not only humanness actresses are robbed of by this striving for superficial perfection, but also individuality, so standardized have the methods of the glamour craftsmen become. Make-up men arc by far the greatest offenders. Many young actresses are placed under an actual handicap in impressing themselves on the public mind. Almost all of them look alike. Especially is this to be noticed in the publicity stills appearing in the press. Not uncommonly I have difficulty in recognizing an established player, and more often than not in the case of a newer actress I have to consult the caption before the photograph conveys any impression of an entity, and this despite the fact that I am in close touch with the industry. Such pictures are dominantly but a repetition of the familiar sweepingly arched eyebrows, suspiciously long eyelashes, and lips bowed like ravens’ wings. Anachronism Created CJ Where the standardized make-up has its most distracting influence, with respect to the dramatic values of motion pictures, is in costume dramas, where the faces of the feminine players generally create a gross anachronism. BY BERT HARLEN The other day, while lunching at a studio commissary, I looked forth upon an aggregation of women at a near-by table who were arrayed in costumes of the Civil War or late Victorian period, at least of an era when make-up was used sparingly, if at all, by women. Each actress, however, was done up as though she were in the Follies. Why directors allow such violations of the visual compositions upon which the dramatic potency of motion pictures principally is dependent, is something I could never understand. Sums of money and great pains and time are expended on gathering historical data and working for authenticity in the screen play, the sets, properties, costumes, and then feminine players are permitted to insert faces into the scene which look made-up for a burlesque. * * He Carries On WICE I have seen him alight late at night from one of those rickety and grimy “V" street cars which service Vermont Avenue of Los Angeles, and disappear into the darkness of a neighborhood of apartment houses which is barely respectable. At first glance one might think his clothes nobby. They are well pressed, of good tailoring, and the brim of his hat is jauntily turned down all around. But closer inspection, especially of the slanting heels of his shoes, tells a different story. Once his creation of a country boy on the screens of the world, a strangely wistful, dreamy fellow, sprung from the earth, appealed to millions. His name was as important in the motion picture firmament as that of Charles Chaplin or Mary Pickford: had his own studio. It is a name which would be prominent in any history of the great industry. To No One's Credit <J The circumstances attending his apparent difficulty I am not acquainted with. Maybe he is too proud to accept financial assistance. More than likely little or none has been proffered. It would seem, though, that some one among the famous and influential Hollywood personalities he has known in the past, could offer or procure for him some position in motion picture work which would enable him to live on a respectable scale — out of sentiment, if for no other reason: out of respect for a figure who played so great a part in the building of the industry which has showered them with success and riches so abundantly, and partly through the grace of Providence. From some aspects Hollywood seems a very callous place. PAGE SIXTEEN HOLLYWOOD SPECTATOR