TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/031389/03138900.006

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 11.5 KB | 217 lines

                                                                                SHOW BUSINESS, Page 72

1939: Twelve Months of Magic


In those days, there really was gold in the Hollywood hills

By Gerald Clarke


    It all happened in a single year, just a half-century ago.
The dark days seemed to have ended at last -- the years of the
Depression and the dust bowl -- and Americans were regaining
their pride and self-confidence. They had touched bottom, but
they had pulled themselves up. As the '30s ended, the New York
World's Fair summed up the nation's suddenly buoyant mood with
its official march, Dawn of a New Day. And who, in the
atmosphere of optimism that marked the start of 1939, could
have doubted that it was so?

    Certainly not Hollywood, which was beginning the greatest
year of its Golden Age. In fact, it was to be the most
memorable twelve months in the history of the American cinema.
There was Gone With the Wind, of course, whose production
attracted more intense public curiosity than any other film ever
made. When Vivien Leigh -- beautiful, talented, but indisputably
English -- was cast in the role of the Old South's own Scarlett
O'Hara, thousands of Americans reacted with patriotic fury, as
if the Redcoats had burned Washington again. "Why not cast
Chiang Kai-shek and change the part to Gerald O'Hara?" a
correspondent indignantly demanded of Movie Mirror, one of the
era's many fan magazines.

    But Gone With the Wind was just one in the astonishing list
of movies released in 1939. There was also The Wizard of Oz, the
grandest and most glorious of all fantasies, and Stagecoach, the
model for all westerns to come. There was the dark, gothic
romance of Wuthering Heights; adventure stories like Gunga Din,
Beau Geste and Drums Along the Mohawk; sophisticated comedies
like Ninotchka, The Women and Idiot's Delight.

    Historical dramas? Of course. In 1939 there was something
for everyone. Try Juarez, Union Pacific and The Story of
Alexander Graham Bell. Tearjerkers? Take a box of Kleenex and
see Dark Victory, Intermezzo, Goodbye, Mr. Chips and The Light
That Failed. Politics? Just think of Frank Capra's populist
parable Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or that gritty tragedy Of
Mice and Men. The list goes on and on: Babes in Arms; Destry
Rides Again; The Hunchback of Notre Dame; W.C. Fields' You
Can't Cheat an Honest Man; The Roaring Twenties; and The Cat and
the Canary, which gave Bob Hope his first starring role.

    In those days of studio czars and long-term contracts, there
was no time to watch the waves in Malibu while waiting for
inspiration, the right script or more money. Everyone worked in
the fantasy factories of 1939, and nearly every major figure was
represented by at least one picture. Jimmy Stewart's fans, for
example, had no fewer than five to choose from (Mr. Smith Goes
to Washington, Destry Rides Again, Made for Each Other, It's a
Wonderful World and Ice Follies of 1939), and so did Henry Fonda
enthusiasts (Jesse James, Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the
Mohawk, Let Us Live and The Story of Alexander Graham Bell).

    Bette Davis was in four movies (Dark Victory, Juarez, The
Old Maid and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex), as were
Claudette Colbert (Drums Along the Mohawk, Midnight, It's a
Wonderful World and Zaza) and Mickey Rooney (Huckleberry Finn,
Babes in Arms and two movies in his enormously successful Andy
Hardy series). Rooney, incidentally, was No. 1 at the box office
that year. Greta Garbo laughed, as the ads triumphantly
proclaimed, in Ninotchka; Ingrid Bergman made her American
debut in Intermezzo; Marlene Dietrich saved her flagging career
with Destry Rides Again; the Marx Brothers clowned in At the
Circus; and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced through The
Story of Vernon and Irene Castle. Judy Garland, who was all of
16, was in only two pictures -- The Wizard of Oz and Babes in
Arms -- but her giant talent and irresistible personality
captured the screen and permanently touched the country's heart.

    Behind the cameras were almost all the directors whose work
is so avidly studied in the film schools, a group that included
John Ford, George Cukor, George Stevens, Cecil B. DeMille,
Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh, William Wyler, Busby Berkeley, Henry
King, Ernst Lubitsch and Victor Fleming. Behind them were the
producers, who were far more important then than they are now,
men such as David O. Selznick, Sam Goldwyn, Darryl F. Zanuck,
Pandro S. Berman, Hal Wallis and Arthur Hornblow Jr.

    The trouble with a Golden Age is that nobody sees the sheen
and shine until years later. In Hollywood's case, it was many
years later. East Coast intellectuals, who thought that the
only real acting was done on Broadway, sneered at Hollywood's
output. But, then, why shouldn't they have? The studio bosses,
after all, liked to brag that they were just businessmen whose
job it was to turn out movies -- no one in those days called
them films -- the way General Electric did refrigerators and
Ford did cars. The stories of their often comical obtuseness
have since filled several hundred memoirs. "Who wants to see
some dame go blind and die?" asked Jack Warner when Davis said
she wanted to make Dark Victory. But he reluctantly gave in, and
the story of the dame who goes blind and dies was one of Warner
Bros.' biggest hits.

    The directors and scriptwriters -- both William Faulkner and
F. Scott Fitzgerald were employed in Hollywood that year -- were
severely restricted, moreover, by Hollywood's rigid code of
self-censorship. Long kisses were forbidden, adultery always had
to be severely punished, and double beds were for sinners in New
York City. In Hollywood movies, even happily married couples,
like Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man series, slept in
widely separated twin beds, clad top to bottom in pajamas or
nightgown. Such now innocuous four-letter words as hell and damn
were proscribed, and Gone With the Wind titillated and sometimes
shocked audiences with Clark Gable's final words to Leigh:
"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

    For their part, Americans wanted only to be entertained, or
perhaps cooled on a hot summer's night. Until well after World
War II, movie theaters and department stores were about the
only places that could boast air conditioning. There were, by
today's standards, relatively few public diversions; television
was still a new invention. Sometime during the week, an
estimated 85 million people, about two-thirds of the U.S.
population, paid an average 25 cents to go to the movies, which
included a cartoon and newsreel as well as the standard double
feature. A double feature usually meant a big picture with big
stars and a B picture with little stars, like Charlie Chan in
Reno and Mr. Moto in Danger Island, to name only two from 1939.
To satisfy the insatiable public, the studios released 388
movies that year (compared with 349 in 1988), 378 in
traditional black-and-white and ten, including Gone With the
Wind and The Wizard of Oz, in that relatively new process called
Technicolor.

    To the studios, movies were products. To audiences, they
were cheap entertainment. To actors, directors and producers,
they were a paycheck. Why, then, were so many of the movies of
1939 so good? Clearly, something had gone wrong -- or
wondrously right -- on the Hollywood assembly line: the studios
were not merely churning out moneymaking products, as they
thought they were, but a magic that endures to this day.

    There is no formula for magic, and what happened then is
something of a mystery even today. Part of the explanation may
be that the studio system, which had been born 20 years or so
earlier, had come of age; it had reached its maturity but was
still full of zest. The bosses may have been crude and often
tyrannical, but they loved their business, they knew what they
were doing, and they had created huge organizations whose only
purpose was to send new pictures to thousands of theaters, most
of which, in the U.S., were owned by the studios themselves. At
the same time, moviemaking had reached a level of technical
perfection that would have seemed miraculous even five years
before. That technology has long since been surpassed, but a
film from 1939 still looks modern, whereas one from 1933 looks
like an antique.

    Other explanations for the magic of 1939 lie more in the
realm of metaphysics than economics or technology. Hollywood in
those days really was Hollywood, which is to say it was the
place where movies, as well as deals, were made. Very few
pictures were shot on location, and inventive scouts either
found or contrived every scene they wanted within a few miles of
Hollywood and Vine. The Yorkshire moors of Wuthering Heights
were so faithfully recreated in nearby Chatsworth that director
Wyler bragged that his field of heather looked more authentic
than a real field of heather.

    Hollywood was a community in which people played together
and fought together but always showed up at dawn to make movies
together. Commuting by jet from Los Angeles to New York was 20
years away, and only between pictures did the moviemakers and
stars leave town. Travel was still a time-consuming, albeit
luxurious, event: several days on the Super Chief and 20th
Century Limited to New York, then on to Europe aboard the
Normandie or Queen Mary. Pan American did not introduce the
first commercial flights to Europe until June 1939. But even
then, its majestic Boeing flying boats took more than 29 hours
to get from Port Washington, N.Y., to Marseilles.

    Though it liked to think of itself as the capital of
sophistication, Hollywood was in fact just as unworldly as such
places as Topeka, or Twin Falls, Idaho, where most of its
inhabitants came from. The movies they made reflected and gained
much of their strength from that innocence, and they resounded
with a sincerity that no amount of artifice can duplicate. Would
any scriptwriter today dare to type a corny line like this? "If
I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any
further than my own backyard, because if it isn't there, I never
really lost it to begin with." The writers of The Wizard of Oz
dared and thereby helped make a great film.

    They were the mirror of the country, those men and women who
made the movies of 1939. Like the country, they were confident,
certain of themselves and their future. They knew, or thought
they knew, the difference between good and bad, right and wrong,
and that confidence, which they took for granted, was the rock
upon which they built.

    But their Golden Age was soon to end, and 1939, which had
begun on a note of optimism in both Europe and America ended in a
new world war. With an uncanny prescience, the movies of 1939
seemed to anticipate what was to come. People may have gone
crazy over there, they seemed to say, but here, here in
America, there is still safety. Even that sunny musical, Babes
in Arms, ends in a curious and, in retrospect, quite poignant,
plea for peace. "We send our greetings to friendly nations,"
sings the chorus, led by Garland and Rooney. "We may be Yanks,
but we're your relations. Drop your sabers, we're all going to
be good neighbors here in God's country!"

    America was to maintain an uneasy neutrality for nearly two
more years, but Hollywood, that faithful mirror, soon reflected
the grim reality of 1940. Never again was it to have the brash
confidence and high spirits of that year of genius and glitter,
1939.