The New Movie Magazine (Jan-Sep 1935)

REVAMPING THE MALES not only their clothes and their hair and their teeth ios change, not only their roles, but their souls By KATHRYN WHITE IT wasn't so long ago that I burbled a story in this magazine for you about how the Hollywood make-'em-over gang utterly remakes your favorite she-star. Like popping her into a dentist's chair and coaxing most of her teeth out with a pair of forceps, so they could install a new set that'd photograph swell! Just because Wally Beery started out tough he may end up playing parts something like this. And having a hefty masseuse lay her out on a slab and slap a half dozen pounds or more off her too protuberant you-know. And devising a set of harnesses to give her that maewestian oomph above the equator. And things like that until the poor gal, looking into a mirror, wouldn't recognize herself as Mama Nature made her at all. BUT in that story I never did mention a word about how Hollywood remakes its bee-oo-tee-ful boys, did I? No — and New Movie's editor noticed it and asked, with the dearest irony: "H'm — and are the men so perfect to start with that Hollywood doesn't have to make them over?" So here's the answer to that — THE Hollywood make'em-over machine does its stuff on the screen's men as well as on its women. But in a different way, it seems. With the women it's almost entirely a physical job. Hollywood takes the original chassis and mounts a more or less new body on it. Teeth, hair, eyelashes and brows, and other things like waddayucallems — all these are Look at Clark Gable. And he started out as cave man changed over before Li'P Miss Baby Star steps before the camera. But with the men — well, it's a character change, rather than mere looks. Oh, I don't mean to say, understand, that handsome Mr. G. flaps the same ears and bares the same teeth he stepped into films with, for instance. Or that pretty Mr. R. doesn't do things to make that lovely blond wavy hair lovely and blond and wavy. Or that a plastic surgeon doesn't deserve the credit-line for a certain star's nose. And things like that. But what I do mean is that these are just side-issues with the men, and that the real male Hollywood changeling is one whose character undergoes a presto-change-o metamorphosis. And that goes for offscreen as well as on. TAKE, for instance, Jimmy Cagney. He muscled in on the movie racket with all the hard-boiled toughness that he picked up as a kid in the gas-house alleys of New York. He was tough, and he squished many a grapefruit in Blondell's movie face to prove it. But today — why, if they keep on changing Jimmy's characterizations the way they have, you'll be able to set him down in a bed of blooming viola tricolor (you'll find it in your dictionary under Viola) and hardly be able to pick Cagney out from the rest of 'em. . . . ! Or on the other hand, take Adolphe Menjou for example. . . . Adolphe you could never have called beautiful. But he was alwaj/s the unexcellable pinnacle of sartorial splendor and sophisticated brilliance. Society words, those — but you have to use 'em to describe Adolphe. But Hollywood's make-'emover machine got to work even on Adolphe — and in "Little Miss Marker" he wore baggy trousers and an ungilletted chinful of stubble! — and a sloppy nightgown in "Barnum"! — and in "Gold Diggers of 1935," he gawks through sequence after sequence in a character wherein he looks simply like what the newspapers have to spell aitchdash -dash -ell, and the characteristic Menjou class is all rubbed off. Now, there are a couple \J%f J^-/ >y of examples of what the screensters are doing today to change the men. It seems that they've gotten the idea that you get tired of seeing your favorite star in picture after picture in the same old role. And so presto! — all of a sudden he's something else. And as for that debonair fashion-plate, Mr. Adolphe Menjou, all he can wear today is old night-shirts. At first they let Randolph Scott say "I love you" only to horses, but now he's a real Romeo. Decorations by Charles Mulholland TAKE our Gable, then. When Clark first stepped into screen fame, 'way back there in the dim, dark ages of nearly five years ago, he was just an extra-heavy lover. He was male sex-appeal with a wallop. Big, stuh-rong, hair-on-the-chest sort of stuff; and we gals were supposed subconsciously to sense that if we dicjn't give in an' give all when Clark whistled, why he'd just as like as not smack us one in the facade and make us! That went over big. You remember? And then, odd as it seemed to the producers, Clark's sex-appeal power suddenly waned. And there was a slump. Was it, maybe, because Mrs. Gable had been publicized? Or was it just too much of a good thing for the movie palates of the screen goers? Anyway, somebody got wise. And then you saw "It Happened One Night." In that Clark Gable, the heman of the fillums, suddenly snapped out of it and became a perfectly elegant comedian. And all of a sudden, then, Clark Gable was re-discovered. He'd been sunk in that welter of other gablesque leading men the various studios had thrown into the movie pot to skim off some of the box-office cream Gable was collecting for M-G-M. There were so many secondGables that the original Gable was almost lost in the shuffle. And so, when he suddenly blossomed out as a comicker instead of a dame-knocker-overer, he was a hit all over again. Smart M-G-M cashed in on Columbia's motion picture award opus. They threw him into "Forsaking All Others," with la Crawford and wisecracking Montgomery. And they told 'em to make it funnier and lower. So low, in fact, that Gable, not to mention the others, did some stuff that would have gladdened the vulgar haw-haw-haw heart of oF Mack Sennett himself, in his Keystone-iest days. Therein Gable even descended — or ascended, if you prefer— into the ne-plus-ultra of (Please turn to page 46) 30 The New Movie Magazine, September, 1935