Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1938)

CLOSE UPS AND LONG SHOTS BY RUTH WATERBURY L" UGHS of the Hollywood Month— or— Occasionally the Life of a Movie Producer Isn't All Beer and Bonuses: M-G-M, early last ipring made "Yellow Jack," a very scholarly, listinguished (and pretty dull) production ibout the discovery of the yellow-fever germ . . it was a fine, big "A" production . . . when t went out to the theaters, the theater managers :ouldn't just buy it outright and take whatever nrofits they could get . . . no, siree . . . "Yelow Jack" was a class production ... a very a A" . . . theaters could have it only on a per:entage basis, paying back to M-G-M a cut on he fortunes it was expected to reap. . . . But as a "B" to run along with "Yellow Jack" —a simple little "B" which the managers could )uy outright — Metro issued "Love Finds Andy lardy" . . . the managers looked at the two )ictures . . . gave a whoop . . . and made 'Andy Hardy" their leading picture, "Yellow rack," the "and also" feature of the double bill, ["he result? . . . that's the laugh . . . M-G-M s getting almost nothing, the managers are geting the gravy, Mickey ("Andy") Rooney is geting the glory, and Robert Montgomery, the star )f "Yellow Jack," and all the people who worked in that serious film must be getting a pain in he neck . . . and it all goes to prove all over igain that we would rather be amused than instructed any day in our movie-going lives. . . . And take, as laugh two, the strange case of Vliss Hedy Lamarr. . . . Almost in one carload there were imported to Hollywood the Misses Rose Stradner, Ilona Vlassey and Hedy Lamarr. Each of the ladies lad beauty, distinction and talent and something Df a career behind her in Europe . . . but, shortly after their arrival, the whispers began, is those things will in Hollywood, that the only truly talented one of the three was Miss Massey . . . she was being given the great big ouild up . . . her pictures, very blonde and as seductive as the Hays office would allow, were circulated to newspapers and magazines . . . she, herself, was put in the Eleanor Powell picture, "Rosalie," and was expected to knock us all giddy . . . only she didn't . . . and Miss Stradner was quietly buried in a small part in "The Last Gangster," which she did very nicely, though almost nobody noticed it, and even those who did didn't seem to care greatly . . . Miss Lamarr alone stood still, right there at the starting post, with nothing being done about her. . . . lOU simply can't stand still in Hollywood without the rumor factories working overtime . . . the whispers said it was Lamarr's figure that wasn't right . . . they said it had been discovered, now that she was over here, that she couldn't act at all . . . they said and they said and they said some more. . . . When a dream died another Hollywood, marriage took the count. This month Miss Waterbury analyzes the reasons behind the Crawford-Tone separation and discusses the brilliant rise of Hedy Lamarr Finally Metro, which had Miss Lamarr under contract, loaned her down the river to Walter Wanger for "Algiers" . . . Boyer was to be the star of the production and Sigrid Gurie had the chief feminine role, so it just looked like one of those things for an untried actress . . . whereupon, Miss Lamarr proceeded to burn up the production like a bonfire and make herself the most dazzling and provocative new face seen on the screen in the last year. . . . Which recalls that lovely occasion almost five years ago when Paramount decided Claudette Colbert was pretty much washed up, and Metro decided the same thing about Clark Gable . . . so those two were loaned out to Columbia to make a little world-beater called "It Happened One Night". . . . TRAGEDY of the Hollywood Month— or the First Law of the Movie Village: is to remember, no matter if your heart is broken, that you must give out the right statement to the morning papers: To anyone in Hollywood, the only news in the Joan Crawford-Franchot Tone separation, when it finally did break into the headlines, was the fact that it had, at long last, happened. . . . Everyone in the picture world who had known Joan and Franchot even remotely had been aware for months that their parting had to take place eventually . . . for the increasing diver gence in their personalities had been all too apparent for months ... yet I do believe that those two, who started out with so much in common, might have worked out their life together to a happy conclusion, if they hadn't tried to be so average about everything. . . . For great fame doesn't permit you to be average about anything, least of all about love. . . . Joan and Franchot were idealists, both of them, and both of them most romantic . . . they aspired to being the most completely married couple . . . they wanted to be the most regular of husbands and wives . . . they were going to work together . . . and play together . . . and go on to the heights together ... it was the loveliest of dreams. . . . But Hollywood is brutal in its realism and you can't survive in the town unless you accept that realism . . . there was the brutal fact that Joan was the more important of the two when they met and that she was making a much greater income . . . and there was the even more brutal fact that, as the years passed, she kept on being the more important and making more and more money . . . which isn't at all the way it is with normal husbands and wives . . . trying to make a conventional, happy marriage out of such a setup was like trying to win a swimming meet on dry land. . . . In the Hollywood marriages where the strange, twisted facts of a mad industry are accepted . . . like Irene Dunne's and Dr. Griffin's . . . like Jeanette MacDonald's and Gene Raymond's . . . like Claudette Colbert's and Dr. Pressman's . . . love does survive where the romantic dream that Joan and Franchot had died . . . and the morning after its passing there were those careful statements in the papers, those polite statements that were tactful enough not to mention the broken hearts that lay behind them . . . and meanwhile Joan barred the white gates of her Brentwood house and Franchot closed the set on which he was working . . . and you knew from their very dignity how deeply they were hurt. . . . Speaking of operations, as nobody was, but as I have every intention of doing, having (Continued on page 86) OCTOBER, 19 3 8 15