Hollyweird = mc2

During the first decade of the talkies, Hollywood 
was ever on the pilgrimage to find their philosopher's stone, hoping to secure a certain trademark and a special signature. This was all part of an attempt to stick a corporate identity on movies that would in turn attract consumer loyalty. MGM's desire was the aura of Ford for automobiles or Kelloggs for breakfast cereals. But studio signatures of this caliber, simply were ineffectual, not to mention the names of individual stars were far too risky, given they may unaccountably wax or wane according to the audience's fickle palate. What was most coveted to the studio, was to create packages - simple methods to band together stars, characters, stories, over and again, so that the public can rely on the comfort of it's repetition, a safe route that would surely discourage any such disappointment.

The means they decided upon were star teams, or 'love teams' so to speak, and also the series. Star teams could be shamelessly promoted and their films could also be re-released at will. Series could have indefinite extensions. Instead of the daunting possibility of story starvation. Producer B.P. Schulberg of Paramount's powers that were, reckoned that Hollywood would have to devise four hundred new and fresh stories per year in order to fill in the cracks between movies made and stage plays and novels to adapt. There was now an opportunity of having a smooth, cheap assembly-line production. Above all, there was a way to also enchant the audience's allegiance.

                    Nothing pleased the audiences more than predictability



Seen from the front office, the exotic escapades of Charlie Chan and the Thin Man, the domestic ructions of the Hardy brood and the moral quandaries of Doctor Kildare, the hanky-panky of Clark Gable and Jean Harlow, even Errol Flynn and Olivia De Haviland, Jeanette Macdonald and Nelson Eddy (and in a recent biography it was discovered they had some off-screen hanky panky to boot). These were all in their own right devices that were utilized to rationalize the one uncontrollable force in the movies, and that was - the audience.

                             Unlikely bedfellows, but screen-fellows, oh aye!


And now Ruby Keeler saw an undercover affluent man hoofing his way to the love of a showgirl, Judy Garland and diminutive dancing partner Mickey Rooney, whether in the movies about Andy Hardy - or the MGM musicals after 1939's Babes in Arms, exuded vibrant naivety. These names in fact made the product far too predictable. They were now brand names. Sometimes as with Garland and Rooney, star teams and series formulas can be seen to overlap and conflict. It is quite difficult to discern between the standard appeal of the star personalities. William Powell and Myrna Loy in the Thin Man series could be either a love team of particular charm and pepper, all the more remarkable for representing a married couple, or else the skilled functionaries of a decidedly contrived series package.




But love teams were never unbreakable, nor were they consistent. The producers would at times underestimate the power of a specific combination of personalities. Nelson Eddy and Jeanette Macdonald in fact, had breathed life into the revival of the operetta which Louis B. Mayer had decreed for the studio. In tandem, they made Naughty Marietta (1935) and this worked in a commercial market, where the cynicism of Lubitsch's The Merry Widow (1934) with Macdonald and Chevalier had not sat well with critics or audiences the like. In the following two years, Eddy and Macdonald would reunite for Rose Marie (1936) and the lavish Maytime (1937). When MGM had decided to gamble on their separate drawing-power, it would become clear that Eddy and Macdonald were a sell at the box-office, but only when they were presented as a team. Eddy and Macdonald were the signature brand, in the same light and exacting that was say, Rolls (and) Royce. The very same could be said for Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, who at first glance would be considered quite the unlikely couple, but their chemistry radiated via the screen, as can be seen in some unadulterated virtuous passion in 1929's Sunny Side-Up.

                           Ya see, I never really needed ya Ruby, toots.





Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler also fit this same bill, as their screen relationship illuminated movie after movie. They would begin their partnership in 1933 with 42nd Street, this was a Daryl Zanuck inspired production that revived the Warners musical. Keeler was a veritable rookie, only having starred once prior in a film, and that was a guest appearance in 1930's Show Girl in Hollywood. The role she was most famous for at that point was Mrs. Al Jolson.




Despite all this, Powell and Keeler emerged supreme, lovable and endearing, from the self-conscious spectacle around them. As Powell's radio career went into wild-fire mode, so did his billing, until he and Keeler made the grave mistake of having their names on separate lines. By the time of Colleen (1936) the duo had run their course. Powell by then was a concreted celebrity and Keeler after a handful of solo appearances, left Warners when her husband fell out with the studio hierarchy. She would make only one more screen appearance following her divorce from Jolson.

                      Sorry Harlow honey, you've got some Clark competition now




Clark Gable would boast two great partnerships during the Thirties, with Jean Harlow and Joan Crawford respectively. This would also prove how varied the actual movies of the most powerful love teams could be. Gable and Crawford would deliver in melodramas like Dance, Fools, Dance (1931) and on over to musicals with Dancing Lady (1933) and would even venture to production-line screwball funnyfilms. After the success of Gable with the inspired Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night (1934), Gable and Crawford made Love on the Run (1936) in which they went through the motions of the earlier movies' main plot points, but on European location. Each star in a love team had its own appeal, each of the movies were seperate products; the effect of the love team was to bolster the pulling power of the words on the cinema billboard and to improve the standing of the now treasured star.

                 Oh yeah Joanie? Na Na Na Na Na




The incomparable screen warmth between Gable and Harlow, was helped by perfect timing, Red Dust (1932) emerged before the Hays Code could bridle their fire and passions. They had previously teamed together in The Secret Six (1931), a wallop-packing gangster movie in which they supported Wallace Beery and went on to make various drama sundries of tropical passion on land and on sea, usually the Orient. They would even star together in a rare-form soap opera set in a publisher's office called Wife vs Secretary (1936) and here is where Gable is unaffected by Harlow's wiles, and the usual brute virilty is buried under a conventional, pedantic character. In the bedroom scene, the most physical action Harlow recieves is the act of removing Gable's shoes.




The vast majority of series hinged on two disparate devices, they took exotic matters, most commonly crime, and presented them through familiar and tried and true characters; or else they took domestic drama and would pass it off in the way of farce and of melodrama, which in turn made it seem all the more exotic.



The most remarkable example of the dramatization of domestic lives was the saga of the Hardy family, they were first seen in A Family Affair (1937) and substantially recast for the first of the fourteen movies in the series proper.

                                        Andy, we hardy even knew ye!



Andy Hardy's adventures in middle-class small 
town USA, were the pet project of Louis B. Mayer, who carefully vetted the films, the most impressive of which teamed Mickey Rooney as Andy alongside Judy Garland. MGM's script department worked out Judge Hardy's wages precisely and tailored everything in the movies to fit the family budget to up the believable ante . Compassionate and loving, with a righteous father, the Hardys were the golden ideal, to epitomize the standards and circumstances of the perfect American family. In fact, the plot-lines are remarkably exotic. Papa Hardy is a judge who may inherit (briefly) a colossal fortune, or be mandated to Washington, to head a committee. Andy Hardy is the all Ameircan apple-pie kinda lad who spends the entire movie attempting to gate-crash the Manhattan social elite. Since realities and factors like debt are methodically excluded as plot devices , all that does indeed remain is the extraordinary .

                                                     Poetry in Moto.




These exotic elements were tamed and domesticated by conventions in the crime series. Scripts were literally interchangeable. Fox had both Charlie Chan the aphoristic gentleman, and Mr. Moto the soft-spoken Japanese jujitsu champion. When Warner Oland, the more hailed of the Chans, died during production of one episode, both the script and the footage alike were converted into a Mr Moto adventure called Mr Moto's Gamble (1938), in which Charlie Chan's Number One Son makes a rather awkward appearance apparently as Moto's side-kick. The rules of the narrative were both general and rigid. Everybody knew a Thin Man mystery would ultimately end with characters assembled to be told what had happened. 

                             Take a Chan on me...



The matters of medicine always involved a problem-solving seasoned doctor, a type of shaman who could medicine all ills, rectify all conflicts. The Dr Kildare movies dealt with specific subject matter that ranged from the plague to the more risque territories of socialized medicine, but always stayed under the context of 'problem-solving' and therefore comforting, narratives.

                                    Whats Up Doc Kildare?





Crime is also as sanitized as medicine in the series. The good guy and the hero always win the day. equivocal characters like The Saint acquire virtue, while Boston Blackie, Lone Wolf and The Falcon beat their adversaries each and every time. In the end, plot values gave way to bedlam, which was infinitely easier to invent, and the Ellery Queen series in particular, simply piled fist-fight on fist-fight in place of elegant deduction 

         Jungle love, was driving them mad, was making them crazy, crazy.




One of the longest running and most prolific series reached its peak in the Thirties - the Tarzan films, which were based on Edgar Rice Burroughs stories and novels about a British aristocrat orphaned in the African jungle and reared by apes. The first Tarzan movie, starring Elmo Lincoln had reached the screen in 1918, but the King of the Jungle, did not become a noted box-office attraction until the late Twenties commenced, when thanks to the coming of sound, the audiences were permitted to experience and be enthralled by roaring lions, chattering monkeys, trumpeting elephants and Tarzan's own war cry.

In 1932, former Olympic swimming champion, Johnny Weissmuller became the first speaking Tarzan, in MGM's Tarzan the Ape Man, directed by W.S. Van Dyke. In addition to the movie's staggering jungle footage, its enduring merits derive from the charm of the script ( by Cyril Hume and Ivor Novello)and the playing of Weissmuller and co-star Maureen O'Sullivan (Mia Farrow's mama). The film's raging success resulted in a series of Tarzan adventures to follow. Weissmuller, however remained at post in the position of being virtually unchallenged in the lead role until the year 1948. Following his departure to far less taxing work, mainly in the arena of television, Gordon Scott, Lex Barker, Jock Mahoney, Mike Henry, Daniel Miller and Ron Ely all assayed the Tarzan character with  varying levels of success in low budget efforts and televisual series. In 1983, the British director Hugh Hudson fearlessly attempted to rekindle the audience's respect for the King of the Apes with his  spectacular Greystoke - The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes.

And also in the Thirties, yet another ex-Olympian and swimming champion would gain world-wide acclaim and celebrity, as a fantasy hero, Buster Crabbe who achieved notoriety and popularity playing Tarzan, Billy the Kid, Thunda and namely Flash Gordon. Universal's serial Flash Gordon (1936) was by far the most expensive ever produced and the first with a science-fiction theme. Its success resulted in several sequels and set the bar for both Republic's and Columbia's many sci-fi efforts that ruled the serial roost between the Thirties and the Fifties.