TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/031389/03138900.006

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 12KB | 203 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.