The stars (1962)

semi-retirement in Hollywood. Her only genuine difference from the other vamps was that she was blonde and they tended to be dark. Colman, of course, with his well-tuned British accent, prospered mightily in sound pictures. He was, in the words of one observer, "the middle-aged woman's hope and despair." The romances of the love teams were indeed aimed at an older audience, an audience not seeking identification so much as it was the restoration of belief. Colman and Banky cavorted in Graustarkian situations, by and large, but Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor, who costarred for over seven years, were quite a different thing. They were "average" — in the sense that the characters in soap operas are said to be average. Farrell was, in the words of a competitor, "the oldest choirboy," just as Miss Gaynor was, until her memorable appearance in A Star Is Bom { 1937 ) , the oldest schoolgirl. Undoubtedly they offered a false nostalgia, recalling the fun, romance and heartaches of young love, which moviegoers delightedly imagined had been part of their own early lives. It is perhaps a measure of the slightly-increased sophistication of screen content that there are no love teams now working with the steadiness that these did, and that no pairing of actress and actor has achieved the kind of adulation that these and the greatest team of them all, Gilbert and Garbo, achieved.