The New Movie Magazine (Jan-Sep 1935)

Coloring the Hollywood Beauties HAVING remodeled womanhood, Hollywood will now proceed to paint her. All shades are available at last in technicolor. Prepare for purple lips and plaid hair. Long ago the old glass stages were displaced by cold sound storages but Hollywood is still a hot house. The horticultural innovations of Luther Burbank are truck garden stuff compared with the beautiful flowers developed by Goldwyn, DeMille, M-G-M, and Paramount. The reason glass studios are no longer needed is that Hollywood has improved on the sun. The latter's working hours didn't always jibe with producers' schedules and he wouldn't turn from his course to back light Miss Garbo or front light Miss West. So now he's out, along with a lot of old time stars. No one is big enough to be temperamental in Hollywood, not even the sun. The great outdoors is also out. Mother Nature, who figured so big in silent movies, now only gets bits. She couldn't get rid of her bugs that made noises in the mike. Anyhow, art directors can make prettier scenery. If you saw "Flirtation Walk" you must have noted the Busby Berkeley influence on Hawaii. Once you have seen Warner Brothers' Hawaii you never could be content with the real thing. I wouldn't say as much for their West Point. Probably I'm of the hard-boiled old army school but I don't like to think of our West Pointers crying over one another all the time the way Pat O'Brien and Dick Powell did. True, Pat wasn't a West Pointer; he was a top sergeant, which only makes it worse. However, anything good old Sarge O'Brien does is jake with me, even sobbing at West Point. But to get back to this faulty planet which has caused producers so much trouble. What can you expect? It was produced in six days. That's what we call a "quickie" in Hollywood. Poverty Row stuff. Why, Sam Goldwyn spent more on Anna Sten than the whole earth cost originally. And to the naked eye Anna looked pretty all right to start with. I think he was fortunate in picking her instead of the Russian girl I saw in "Three Songs About Lenin" who was decorated for being the best hod carrier in the U. S. R. R. I'm afraid she would -■- -——-..■■-• ■ --■....;.-;>.;■- have taxed the national resources — even Sam's. If Jehovah could have had the benefit of Hollywood supervision we might be living in a DeMille spectacle today. And wouldn't that be cozy? Certainly this earth, looking the way it does, would never have been released by M-G-M. Mr. Mayer would have ordered retakes or else shelved it. Especially has female nature been improved. Compare Joan Crawford with the earliest pictures of Eve or, for that matter, with the earliest pictures of Joan and you will get what I mean. Lillian Gish, viewing her rushes, declared cameramen can make anyone appear beautiful. These wizards work their special magic by manipulating lights and by shooting their subjects through silk or gauze or burlap. Recently a historic beauty, weathered by many Winters and week-ends, appeared on the celluloid miraculously restored, all pleats and pouches wiped away. To rhapsodic exclamations a morose cameraman grunted: "Yuh, we shot her through concrete." Camera glorifiers constitute only one corps in the army of reconstruction. Margaret Sullavan has been telling the world how she was done over. While still flushed with flattery attending the signing of her contract in New York she received a wire from the coast studio. Tingling with complimentary anticipation she opened it and read: "Get rid of that wart." Until then pauvre Peg had labored under the delusion she possessed a beauty mole. Humbly she submitted to a surgeon and went West with a scab. There she was whirled about by beauticians and camera testers. "Lopsided face!" shouted one and set to work. "Short front tooth!" whooped another and affixed a shield. Eyebrows were yanked, make-up tried, legs okayed, figure studied for angles and lights. When she saw the results on the screen, Miss Sullavan said, "I wasn't looking at Margaret Sullavan. I was looking at a rather charming creation of expert and patient men and women." With similar detachment, though hardly the humility I should say, Pola Negri on beholding herself in rushes would burst into spontaneous ovation: "Vunderful! Gott, how beautiful, look at me!" One famous little beauty while stimulated by vino to Veritas uttered a classic line: "Papa and Mama gave me my face but God gave me my cameraman." In . glorifying the glorifiers I do not mean to detract from our little women's genius or to infer they do not earn every thousand of their weekly wages. They make their sacrifices. I mean they starve and get anemia and submit to beatings which, from a husband's hands instead of a masseur's, would get them heavenly alimony. I know because once I was pulped by a massaging Viking. My jackal Herb deplores our West Pointers crying over each other the way they did in "Flirtation Walk." From his hideaway among the cliff-dwellers of Manhattan Herb Howe muses upon the camera glorifiers ; the improvements the Movie Moguls have made on Mother Nature ; and the one gal whom neither remodeling nor color photography will affect Will Rogers seems to be the one beauty that Fox has been successful with. cries brought sneering scorn. Swede slapper, "Miss "Why," said the had her stomach pounded black and blue to get into line for a picture and she didn't swear half as much as you do." Subsequently I learned of greater martyrs. Not only are faces lifted but entire bodies, or large areas of them. One beauty bulging with the years was ripped open all along her boundaries, restuffed and resewn. Maybe the Viking told me this to frighten me. That was the effect, anyhow. Every time I see this hemstitched heroine I'm gripped with fear she may start unraveling before my eyes. All renovations are not successful. Lilian Harvey in "Congress Dances" was a lilting, fluffy little cantatrice. Fox snared her and plucked her down to her thin little frame around which they wound here and there those gosh-awful sequins. Her best song was "Gather Lip Rouge While You May"; her other ditties I've managed to forget. Ditto her pictures. Fox wasn't successful with Joan Bennett either. Now I'm alarmed over piquant Ketti Gallian, my heart of the moment. They certainly didn't launch her auspiciously with that spy-full "Marie Galante." Will Rogers seems to be about the only beauty Fox has been successful with, and he already had been glorified by Ziegfeld. Janet Gaynor is the sole star development, undeniably charming, though her pictures contain too much sugar for a man on a diet. M-G-M is the feminine paradise. All the girls hope to go there when they die if they can't make it before. They feel that once arrayed in raiment by Lord Adrian they will be heavenly bodies or look as though they were. From the box-office view, 28 The New Movie Magazine, March, 1935