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This is not true of male performers. Cagney, Muni, Robinson, Laughton, Spencer Tracy — all of them hole into their characters. When they play muggs there is no touch of Harvard,
Recently in listing the best actors and best actresses of the screen I found, to my surprise, three good actors to every first-rate actress. I take naturalness, freedom from affectation, as the first requisite. Second, the ability to personify an author's character. Few of our artists succeed in being themselves credibly, say nothing of realizing an author's conception.
The aim of most actors is to convince, the aim of actresses to charm. The violent attempts of some of our honeys to enchant by excess of vivacity is pathetic. They twiddle fake eyelashes at you, project the pearly fangs from between asphalted lips and gesture more lavishly than mutes. Eccentric make-ups offer further distraction ; complexions as glorious as a. corn starch rabbit's, eyebrows stenciled to resemble financial graphs, lashes like plumes on a hearse. The effects are often as ghoulish as anything Mme. Tussaud achieved in her wax works.
So saying, I hide behind Mae West while applauding such refreshing exceptions to my harangue as Kay Francis, Margaret Sullavan, Diana Wynyard, Jeanette MacDonald, Joan Bennett, Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Blondell, Ginger Rogers, Jean Muir, Loretta Young, Sylvia Sidney, Kitty Carlisle, Elisabeth Bergner, Janet Gaynor, Margo — yea, and the Misses West and Harlow because their tutti-frutti facades are compatible with the characters they play — and how them girls can play 'um! Incidentally, they are the only white girls I can think of whose personalities are not bleached by platinum hair.
In arraigning the screen Eves we must not forget the Eves of the audience who are responsible. Sam Goldwyn cites the guiding law of producers when he says pictures are made to please women, that no film can hope for financial success without their patronage. Women are responsible for the star system. Women demand love as the central theme of every picture. So Sam says. It's because they are idealists, he says. Idealism is responsible for "Riptide," "She Done Him Wrong," "The Divorcee"— for the Legion of Decency, in fact. Clark Gable recently took off in a plane from a Texas airport rather than risk passage through a crowd of three thousand Eves in a fever of idealism.
Men are not idolaters. They are realists favoring newsreels for diversion. They attend such documentary films as "The Last World War" while the tempting sex is beating it for "The Painted Veil." Men support stars solely for their ability to entertain. Their favorites have been men chiefly: Chaplin, Lloyd, Fairbanks, Will Rogers, W. C. Fields, Warner Oland, (Please turn to page 48)
ILLUSTRATED BY D. B. HOLCOMB
The New Movie Magazine, July, 1935
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