For a limited time only, the Internet Movie Database is serving up free viewings of Charles Laughton's Oscar-winning performance in 1933's The Private Life Of Henry VIII. And we here at the Monkey pass it along to you, legally and free of charge.
If you've never seen The Private Life Of Henry VIII, I recommend you avail yourself of the opportunity. I nominated Laughton in the drama category, but between you and me, this is really a black comedy about divorce, beheadings, affairs, affairs of state, the sort of movie the studio promoted with the tagline "He gave his wives a pain in the neck—and did his necking with an axe!"
It made international stars of Laughton, Merle Oberon, Elsa Lanchester and Robert Donat, and director-producer Alexander Korda's name became synonymous with the finest in British filmmaking.
What the movie knows about history wouldn't fill out the back flap of Henry's biography, but what it knows about people would fill volumes. Korda and writer Lajos Biró basically threw the facts out the window and made up a very entertaining movie as they went along. It reminds me a bit of a book journalist Mark Shiper wrote thirty-plus years ago, Paperback Writer, a fictional history of the Beatles that includes such little-remembered facts as that their first album was named We're Gonna Change The Face Of Pop Music Forever and that the string-laden "Shake Your Booty" was one of their biggest hits.
If you're a history buff and want to know what Henry was up to with his six wives, look elsewhere. But if you're interested in history the way it should have been written, then this just might be your cup of Earl Grey.
Postscript: Remember to vote for best original song of 1932-33 in the latest Monkey Poll. Your vote will actually decide who wins the award. Herself, a.k.a. Katie-Bar-The-Door, voted for "Isn't It Romantic" and warned ominously that if it doesn't pick up the pace, "There'll be no lovin' in Monkey Town tonight." But don't let my problems sway your thinking. Click here to watch and listen to your choices, then head on over to the right hand side of the page to cast your vote.
Choosing the best actress of 1931-32 was a bit problematic—the two best performances by an actress during this award season, Miriam Hopkins (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) and Joan Crawford (Grand Hotel) were both supporting ones, Hopkins's obviously so, Crawford's not so clearly, since she and her co-stars all received star billing, but Grand Hotel was an ensemble piece, the first in Hollywood history, and to my mind at least, none of its stars were on screen long enough to receive a nomination in the lead category. The Oscars didn't have a supporting category back in those days so it's difficult to say which if any of the film's stars the Academy might have nominated in a supporting category; but none were nominated as lead performers and I'll follow suit here. (The Academy would be faced with an identical dilemma the following year with the star-studded ensemble piece Dinner At Eight and arrived at an identical solution—none of those wonderful performances were nominated then either.)
Which is not to say there were no good choices for the award. The Academy nominated three fine actresses—the ever-popular Marie Dressler (Emma) who had won an Oscar the year before for Min and Bill (and who won a Katie award for her supporting performance in Anna Christie); stage legend Lynn Fontanne (The Guardsman) in the only film appearance of her career; and eventual winner Helen Hayes (The Sin of Madelon Claudet), another stage legend making her feature-film debut. (Hayes would win a second Oscar in 1970 for Airport.)
And then there were unnominated performances such as Constance Bennett in What Price Hollywood?, Joan Blondell in Blonde Crazy and Dorothea Wieck in Mädchen In Uniform. The Academy similarly ignored all four of my nominees—Mae Clarke (Waterloo Bridge), Marlene Dietrich (Shanghai Express), Norma Shearer (Private Lives) and Barbara Stanwyck (The Miracle Woman).
I'm guessing that Marlene Dietrich would be the popular choice. The first phase of her career was in full swing, she was working with a great director, and Shanghai Express is one of the tastiest collaborations. But I gave Dietrich the award just last year for her Hollywood debut, Morocco, and I can't see giving her back-to-back awards, especially when Shanghai co-star Anna May Wong completely out-cools her and steals every scene they're in together. (Still, it's a must-see performance in a must-see movie. Go watch it. Now. I'll wait.)
As for Stanwyck, she was one of the greatest actresses in Hollywood history, and she has not one but two best actress awards in her future—I'm thinking The Lady Eve and Ball of Fire in 1941 and Double Indemnity in 1944. But while The Miracle Woman, a biting look at the sordid intersection of religion and money, is one of her most interesting pre-Code films, Stanwyck's best work is still ten years in front of us. She'll have to wait a little longer.
Which leaves Mae Clarke and Norma Shearer.
If you only remember Clarke as the good- looking blonde who got James Cagney's grapefruit in the kisser, you really should take time to explore her work during this period. No actress in 1931 appeared in more must-see movies than Mae Clarke. In addition to her memorable supporting role in The Public Enemy, she also played Molly Malloy, a hooker with a heart of gold who befriends a death row inmate in the comedy The Front Page; a mad scientist's much put-upon fiancee in Frankenstein; and in one of the few lead roles of her career, American chorus girl-turned-prostitute Myra Deauville in the first and best version of the tragic romance Waterloo Bridge. Myra meets a naive soldier boy on the bridge where she plies her trade and this being wartime, he falls in love quickly and asks her to marry him. Based on a play by Pulitzer Prize winner Robert E. Sherwood, there is no villain in this piece other than cold, hard reality. It's the sort of movie that critics of the day dismissed as a "woman's picture"—and dismiss now as a "chick flick"—and if you're tempted to do the same and give this one a miss because it features tears and romance, I urge you not to. In fact, if I thought doing so would convince you to expand your film-watching repertoire enough to include Waterloo Bridge, I would hand Clarke the award as best actress of 1931-32. And maybe she'd deserve it.
But there was another actress from 1931 who I think deserves your attention, certainly if you want a well-rounded sense of the era; and just coincidentally, her wickedly comic portrayal of a recently remarried divorcee who would rather fight with her ex-husband than honeymoon with her new one is my favorite performance of the year.
Much celebrated in her day, Norma Shearer's name is now met by many largely with derision, including I confess by me. Choosing her as the best actress of this or any other year will no doubt get me drummed out of the very exclusive alternate Oscar club—a year ago, in fact, I would have voluntarily resigned my membership before I would have chosen Norma Shearer for an award. But only a schmuck won't admit when he's wrong and I was wrong to dismiss Norma Shearer without first seeing her pre-Code work (and a few silents, too). As it happens, before she got culture and started playing those maddeningly starchy good girls in bloodless MGM literary adaptations, Shearer turned in some fine performances playing against type, including a terrific one here in the film adaptation of Noel Coward's comedy, Private Lives. It's the best of her career—sharp, witty, and here at least, appropriately theatrical. In an essay for Bright Lights Film Journal, Dan Callahan called it "Shearer's finest, most well-rounded performance, and it's the only film that you can show to the uninitiated without fear of the dreaded Shearer-isms."
If she'd made more movies like this one, you could safely admit to liking her without fear of making a fool of yourself in mixed company.
"She was hotter than a half-f***ed fox in a forest fire," said the ever-classy Mickey Rooney years later, and for those who find that assertion at odds with their preconceived notions of Shearer, well, it's time to dip into her pre-Code work.
Private Lives is what I'd call a divorce comedy, of which there were several in Hollywood's golden age, most of them starring Cary Grant for some reason—perhaps because he was so unbelievably good in them—comedies such as The Awful Truth, His Girl Friday and The Philadelphia Story. The formula required discord, divorce (or its threat), laughs arising from screwball attempts to undermine a new relationship and salvage the old one, and by the movie's end, of course, a tender reconciliation.
In Private Lives—a faithful adaptation of Noel Coward's popular stageplay—the twist is that two recently remarried divorcees, Robert Montgomery's Elyot and Shearer's Amanda, find themselves honeymooning in adjoining suites at the same resort. While most divorce comedies lean to varying degrees on the screwball comedy, Private Lives leans heavily on the discord. The two ex-spouses are less interested in tenderness than in tearing into each other, preferably with a wit so biting, the quips leave teeth marks, and when that's not enough, they turn to actual biting, along with fisticuffs and furniture throwing. (Indeed, while filming one particularly physical encounter, Shearer accidently knocked her co-star unconscious.)
"I think very few people are completely normal really, deep down in their private lives," Amanda observes in one of her few introspective moments. "It all depends on a combination of circumstances. If all the various cosmic thingummys fuse at the same moment, and the right spark is struck, there's no knowing what one mightn't do. That was the trouble with Elyot and me, we were like two violent acids bubbling about in a nasty little matrimonial bottle."
You'd be tempted to call this a comedy of mutual spousal abuse but for the fact that the two participants so thoroughly enjoy themselves. Elyot and Amanda are natural-born performers—drama queens, we'd call them now—and after a season apart, they realize each is the other's best audience. They can't live together, but to live apart means they'd have climb off their private little stages and start living with themselves, or more to the point, with their brand new spouses who, they quickly discover, bore them to tears.
"There isn't a part of you that I don't know, remember, and want," Elyot confesses to Amanda even while calling her a "slattern" and threatening to beat her like a gong.
In order to help both Shearer and Montgomery prepare for their parts, the studio filmed a stage performance featuring Gertrude Lawrence and Noel Coward himself in the leads. The result was what Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times called "a swift and witty picture ... one of the most intelligent comedies that has come to the screen." Coward was so pleased with the result, he immediately sold more of his plays to Hollywood.
So why don't we have a similarly positive reaction to the name Norma Shearer?
Well, for one thing, if it's true that the history of war is written by the winners, then it's equally true that the history of Hollywood is written by the ones with the biggest mouths, and a great deal of what we think we know about Norma Shearer is a product of one of the biggest, Joan Crawford's. "What chance do I have now?" she quipped when Shearer won an Oscar in 1930. "Norma sleeps with the boss."
But while it was true Irving Thalberg, as MGM's producer boy wonder could procure almost any role for his wife, if anything, Shearer's career and reputation suffered for her husband's interference. As Walter Clemons once wrote for EW.com, "Thalberg was fatally afflicted with gentility. He cast his wife in movies with literary pretensions—O'Neill's Strange Interlude, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, and as a mature Juliet in a suffocatingly tasteful rendition of Shakespeare. Norma gets a bad rap for these turkeys, but the reverence in which Thalberg's contemporaries held him is an unexamined delusion."
And maybe, too, Shearer craved the respect that roles such as Juliet promised. If only she'd always maintained the same cavalier attitude toward the so-called "legitimate" theater she evinced in answer to Noel Coward's early reservations about her ability to play Amanda. "I don't care what he thinks—he thinks in theater terms—I think in film terms. It doesn't seem to occur to Mr. Coward that we both may turn out to be right!" I suspect, though, that the forced smile she always seemed to wear masked a crippling insecurity, and in retrospect it's a wonder she was able to act at all. After her father squandered a fortune in her youth, leaving the family in poverty, Shearer's mother left him, taking Norma and the other children to New York. Shearer coped by retreating into a carefully-constructed fantasy world, and to a degree, she lived in that world for the rest of her life. That bipolar disorder ran in her family as well with Shearer herself suffering from depression, makes her subsequent climb to stardom all the more remarkable.
Her acting career was a sheer act of will.
"How did you ever become a star?" asked an incredulous Robert Morley on the set of Marie Antoinette.
"Because I wanted to!" she laughed.
Unfortunately, as Gary Morris points out (again in Bright Lights Film Journal), "While this description seems to point to Shearer as a sympathetic, even tragic character, she rarely moves far enough inside her characterizations to create a genuine sense of pathos. She seems to work too hard for her effects, almost desperately concerned with image and the mechanical aspects of performance, with measuring up to 'legitimate theatre' standards with their attendant excessive mannerisms."
He may be right. But at the same time, I am reminded of some- thing Norman Mailer wrote about Ernest Hemingway, not long after the latter's suicide. "It may even be that the final judgment on his work may come to the notion that what he failed to do was tragic, but what he accomplished was heroic, for it is possible he carried a weight of anxiety within him from day to day that would have suffocated any man smaller than himself."
The question is not why Norma Shearer made so many bad movies, but how she managed to make so many good ones.
... if I don't stop writing five thousand word essays about who I didn't pick for best director of 1931-32.
William Powell, Myrna Loy and Asta in The Thin Man movies Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in Holiday The movies of Val Lewton Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer The Thing (From Another World) Gene Kelly performing "I Got Rhythm" in An American in Paris
The films of Alfred Hitchcock The comedies of Alec Guinness Rio Bravo Anita O'Day in Jazz On A Summer's Day
The Apartment Paula Prentiss Julie Andrews Walter Matthau Manhattan The movies of Hayao Miyazaki Miranda Richardson Pierce Brosnan in The Matador Amy Adams
The results of the latest poll are in— despite intense lobbying efforts on behalf of both the Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers were your favorite comedy team of the 1930s, taking a plurality of the 37 votes cast, with 18. The Stooges received eleven heartfelt votes, and Laurel and Hardy and Our Gang 3 each. Burns and Allen and the Ritz Brothers closed out the voting with one vote each, although support for the latter was strongly suspected of being an inside joke between readers Muleboy and bellotoot.
"I knew it!" Zeppo Marx crowed at the awards ceremony. "I knew I'd win an award someday! I've been carrying these guys for years and finally it's my moment to shine. I'm king of the world!"
In an expansive mood at MGM Queen Norma Shearer's always raucous after-party, Chico Marx opined, "Comedy is a chair. I'm an artist and if you give me a tuba or perhaps a French horn or any of the wind instruments, I'll bring you a laugh out of it, either by falling into it or maybe by blowing on it and making a funny sound."
His brother Julius, who performs under the stage name "Groucho," was more subdued as he shared a quiet drink with his cigar and grease-paint moustache. "I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member. Those are my principles," he added, "if you don't like them, well, I have others."
Accepting the silver medal on behalf of the Three Stooges was an eloquent Jerome "Curly" Howard whose tearful speech was the highlight of the awards ceremony. "Woo woo woo!" he said at one point, which he followed quickly with, "Nyuck nyuck nyuck."
George Burns was philosophical in defeat. "Everything that goes up must come down. But there comes a time when not everything that's down can come up."
"They laughed at Joan of Arc," his wife and lifelong partner, Gracie Allen, interrupted, "but she went right ahead and built it."
"Gracie, did the maid ever drop you on your head when you were a baby?"
"Don't be silly, George, we couldn't afford a maid. My mother had to do it."
"Say goodnight, Gracie."
"Goodnight!"
On the other hand, Spanky McFarland, one-time star of the Our Gang comedies, now every day third baseman for the Washington Nationals, was inconsolable after the loss.
"I blame Buckwheat," he said bitterly. "The Little Rascals were a tight little comedy act—me, Darla, Alfalfa, Stymie. Even a no-talent stiff like Dickie Moore could get a rise out of an audience from time to time. Then Buckwheat goes on Saturday Night Live and gets himself shot and suddenly we're a national joke! Comedy is no laughing matter, dammit!"
For the first time in Monkey Blog history, intense lobbying efforts from outside interest groups attempted to influence the outcome of the poll, no doubt a result of the recent Supreme Court ruling allowing corporate spending in elections. Who Am Us Anyway and Thingy, who supported the Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy, respectively, sparred good-naturedly but passionately in favor of their candidates.
"Look what I'm up against," Who com- plained, "a basic misunder- standing on the part of the electorate regarding the actual question presented. And since there seems to be some confusion on this point, let me put it plainly: Comedy, to the aficionado, means 'falling, hitting and making funny noises.'"
His ardent support for the Stooges, he said, was motivated by "my continuing quest to drive away all high-class, intellectual readers who are smarter than me," and added that if you couldn't at least muster a wry grin at the antics of Moe, Larry and Curly, "I don't want to know you."
For her part, Thingy would stop at nothing to boost the chances of Laurel and Hardy, even at one point posting an enticing cheesecake photo of her legs. Yet afterwards, she shrugged off the duo's defeat. "I think I'll go watch The Thin Man," she said. "Now, that was a comedy team."
One thing I didn't realize before I set up this week's Monkey poll was the extent to which both of my brothers are fans of the comedy teaming of George Burns and Gracie Allen. My older brother is a fan of their television series which ran on CBS from 1950 to 1958; my younger brother listens to their old radio show (on XM), which ran from 1932 to 1950.
I got to wondering how many people are still aware of Burns and Allen. George Burns, sure; he won an Oscar for The Sunshine Boys and lived to be 100. But how many people remember he was primarily a straight man and that it was his wife, Gracie Allen, who was the real star of the show?
Both Burns and Allen began performing at an early age, Burns at the age of seven while he was playing hooky from his job in a syrup factory (we're talking the year 1903, long before child labor laws were in effect), Gracie not much older, performing with her three sisters in an Irish folk dance act called The Four Colleens.
"We called ourselves the Peewee Quartet," Burns said of his days as a child performer. "We started out singing on ferryboats, in saloons, in brothels, and on street corners. We'd put our hats down for donations. Sometimes the customers threw something in the hats. Sometimes they took something out of the hats. Sometimes they took the hats."
The two performers met in 1922 during a vaudeville show and soon formed an act, with Burns feeding straight lines to Allen who had a gift for what was known in vaudeville as a "Dumb Dora" routine.
"Gracie's the kind of girl," Allen explained, "who shortens the cord on the electric iron to save electricity."
Burns and Allen made the jump from the stage to the big screen in 1929 when Warner Brothers began filming vaudeville acts for their new Vitaphone sound system, and signed a contract with Paramount the next year. The team appeared in twenty-seven shorts and feature-length films during the 1930s. The team also were a fixture on radio, first appearing as regular guests on The Guy Lombardo Show in 1932 and headlining their own show beginning in 1934.
"Say good night, Gracie" became the team's signature line.
The team moved from radio to television in 1950 and starred in The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show on CBS for eight seasons. The show was nominated for eleven Emmy Awards, with Allen herself receiving five nominations for best actress. Ill-health though forced Allen to retire in 1958 and though the show continued on for another season, the show's popularity plummeted without her presence. She died of a heart attack in 1964.
Burns continued to produce television shows and work in nightclubs until 1974 when he replaced an ailing Jack Benny in the movie version of the Neil Simon play, The Sunshine Boys. For his supporting performance, Burns won an Oscar; at age eighty, he was at that time the oldest Oscar winner ever. Burns continued to work almost up to his death, forty-nine days after his 100th birthday. He was interred next to Allen where at last she received top billing: "Gracie Allen & George Burns—Together Again."
And now, without further ado, Burns and Allen in the 1931 comedy short 100% Service.
Marlene Dietrich began her career as a cabaret singer in Berlin and made several silent movies in Germany before rocketing to international stardom in Josef von Sternberg's noirish masterpiece, The Blue Angel. Dietrich's portrayal as the amoral and treacherous Lola Lola set the pattern for femme fatales for decades to come and had American audiences panting to see what all the fuss was about.
Morocco was the second of seven movies (eight if you count the German and English versions of The Blue Angel separately) with director Josef von Sternberg, but the first released in America—Paramount Pictures held back The Blue Angel for a year until it could launch Dietrich's Hollywood career with a more sympathetic role. Morocco proved to be a perfect vehicle for her, fully establishing the Dietrich persona—exotic, jaded, daringly androgynous (for example, she wears a tuxedo and kisses a woman; to quote Robert Osborne, "very European!")—lacking only the humor and self-parody she would later display in films such as Destry Rides Again and Foreign Affair.
Adapted by veteran screenwriter Jules Furthman from the stageplay Amy Jolly, Morocco is the story of a romantic triangle between a cabaret singer, her wealthy patron and a Foreign Legion soldier, who between them have experienced every kind of love but true love, and when at last it happens for each of them, they hardly know what to do with it.
Dietrich is the cabaret singer Amy Jolly (pronounced "Jolie," ala Angelina Jolie), down on her luck and traveling to Morocco for a job. On the boat she meets a wealthy playboy (the always dapper Adolphe Menjou) who as much out of habit as lust dangles jewelry in front of her—as the captain of the boat implies, the stop after Morocco is prostitution and if you're going to go, you might as well go in style—but Dietrich's Amy Jolly is too proud to jump at such baubles. Nevertheless, she turns to Menjou at a critical moment of need.
And all would be well but for the young, handsome soldier (Gary Cooper) sitting in the cheap seats at Dietrich's first performance. Predictably, the two are drawn to each other, at first simply because they are accomplished bed-hoppers who know they will look beautiful in each other's arms, but soon after because they discover in each other a longing for a past they can never reclaim.
"There's a foreign legion of women, too," confesses Amy Jolly, "but we have no uniform, no flag—and no medals." For these two, the single greatest act of passion they can perform is to not perform at all and to the surprise of all involved, genuine intimacy and tenderness develops, not just between the singer and the soldier, as you might expect, but between the singer and her wealthy patron as well.
The result is the warmest of the collaborations between Sternberg and Dietrich, maybe the only film they made together that suggests that the union of a man and a woman can produce something other than misery and obsessive, fetishistic self-destruction.
Morocco was a smash hit, earned four Oscar nominations (for actress, director, cinematography and art direction) and landed Dietrich the most lucrative contract in Hollywood. I should take time to mention the work of cinematographer Lee Garmes whose lighting of Dietrich was a key to the film's success. He positioned the key light above and slightly forward of her which (according to TV Guide's online review) "hollowed her cheeks, shadowed her heavy eyelids, and masked the dimensions of her wide nose." Dietrich was so pleased with the effect, she insisted on it for the rest of her career.
But despite the film's success, the set had not been a happy one. Sternberg focused his attention solely on making Dietrich look good to the annoyance of Gary Cooper, already a big star, and further underscored where his interests lay by speaking only German to Dietrich whenever Cooper was around.
The mutual animosity between director and star had no impact on Cooper's relationship with Dietrich though—shortly after filming commenced, the two began an affair that would continue for years. Despite the fact that she was living with Sternberg at the time, there was no slinking around for Dietrich. Reportedly, she and Cooper conducted their trysts in Sternberg's Hollywood home while Sternberg worked in the garden outside and silently seethed.
I share this anecdote, by the way, not because I am a fan of celebrity gossip but by way of explaining how the partnership of Sternberg and Dietrich, which began with such critical and commercial success, could wind up being a threat to both their careers. More and more, their collaboration became an exercise in voyeuristic excess, with Sternberg trying to control Dietrich with his camera in a way he couldn't control her off screen. And while these films have their champions (see, e.g., Kim Morgan on Blonde Venus or Roger Ebert on The Scarlet Empress), the public gradually turned away until they were turning away in droves.
Dietrich survived the fall by smirking her way through the worst of it—emerging for example from a gorilla costume in Blonde Venus with a half smile that seemed to say I'm so cool even this looks good on me—but Sternberg never recovered, earning only eight screen credits after his last picture with Dietrich (1935's The Devil Is A Woman) and even those credits are misleading, given that he was fired from at least two of those projects, Macao and the execrable Jet Pilot.
In 1939, after years of fading box office appeal, Dietrich reluctantly agreed to star in a comedy/Western, Destry Rides Again. The result was box office gold. Co-starring Jimmy Stewart as a pacifist sheriff armed only with folksy wit, saloon singer Dietrich parodied her own image so successfully she was able to reinvent herself as a comic actress and endear herself to audiences once again. (Madeline Kahn memorably spoofed the performance in Mel Brooks's comedy Blazing Saddles.)
After Destry, Dietrich's best performances were in a pair of Billy Wilder efforts, Foreign Affair, a romantic comedy set in postwar Berlin, and Witness for the Prosecution, a courtroom drama co-starring Charles Laughton, Tyrone Power and Elsa Lanchester. Many will also remember her cameo in Orson Welles's noir thriller, Touch of Evil.
Despite this impressive body of work, Dietrich was nominated for just one Academy Award, for the picture I've just written about, Morocco, losing to Marie Dressler. In 1999, the American Film Institute named her the ninth greatest actress of all time.
After a supporting role in 1961's Judgment at Nuremberg, Dietrich retired from acting, making only one cameo appearance after that, in David Bowie's 1978 misfire, Just A Gigolo. She spent the final decade of her life living in seclusion in her Paris apartment and died in 1992.
Postscript: Be sure to look for a young Cary Grant in the clip from Blonde Venus. This was just his sixth movie and he isn't given much to do—as the New York Times put it in its 1932 review, "Cary Grant is worthy of a much better role." Like Gary Cooper, Grant was the object of Josef von Sternberg's jealousy; unlike Cooper, Grant didn't yet have the clout to do much about it.
The word most often associated with MGM producer Irving Thalberg is "legendary," so much so that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences named an award after him to recognize "[c]reative producers, whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production."
Born in New York City to German immigrants, Thalberg contracted rheumatic fever as a boy and suffered from a weak heart for the remained of his life. Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal Studios, hired Thalberg right out of high school and by the age of twenty-one, Thalberg was producing movies. Thalberg later joined Louis B. Mayer Productions, which after mergers with Metro Pictures and Goldwyn Pictures became MGM, for years the dominant studio in Hollywood.
Thalberg preferred to remain uncredited which is why you don't see his name on such Katie winners as Greed, The Big Parade, Flesh and the Devil, The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg, The Crowd, Laugh, Clown, Laugh and Anna Christie, but he was widely recognized as the best producer in Hollywood and was responsible for every high-profile picture to come out of MGM between 1924 and 1933. He also rescued the Marx Brothers from oblivion after Paramount dropped their contract and (again, without credit) produced A Night at the Opera, arguably the best Marx Brothers movie ever (Katie-Bar-The-Door certainly thinks so; I'm a Duck Soup man, myself).
Thalberg married actress Norma Shearer in 1927 after a two year courtship conducted mostly by Thalberg's secretary over the telephone. Joan Crawford, Shearer's chief rival at MGM and history's primary source of anti-Norma quotes, was mystified at the attraction. "I don’t get it. She’s cross-eyed, knock-kneed, and she can’t act worth a damn. What does he see in her?" Writer Anita Loos opined, "Norma was intent on marrying the boss and Irving, preoccupied with his work, was relieved to let her make up his mind."
Or maybe they just fell in love. It happens.
If Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford were Holly- wood's number one power couple during the Silent Era, the "Boy Genius" and "The Queen of MGM," as Thalberg and Shearer were known, were the Power Couple of the Early Sound Era. They had two children together, Irving Jr. and Katherine.
After Thalberg suffered a heart attack in 1932, Mayer replaced him as head of MGM production with rising stars David O. Selznick and Walter Wanger, reducing Thalberg to a unit producer. Despite the demotion, motivated many have said by Mayer's jealousy, Thalberg continued to produce MGM's best movies including Grand Hotel, Mutiny on the Bounty, Camille and The Good Earth.
Always in poor health, Thalberg died suddenly in 1936 of pneumonia. He was thirty-seven years old.
Some say Shearer wanted to retire immediately after Thalberg's death but MGM pressured her to sign a six-picture deal to cash in on her popularity. Others suggest Shearer signed the deal after discovering her share of Thalberg's estate was a mere $1 million, no more than an 1/8th of what she had initially expected to receive. In any event, she made two of her best remembered pictures, Marie Antoinette and The Women, and then retired from the screen permanently in 1942.
Shortly thereafter, Shearer remarried, to a ski instructor twelve years her junior named Martin Arrouge, and remained married to him until her death in 1983. From all accounts, Arrouge was a pretty accommodating guy and it was a happy marriage.
In later years, he even let her call him "Irving."
The first in a series of essays about the Katie winners of the pre-Oscar era.
He was called "The King of Hollywood" and if any actor during the Silent Era might credibly have claimed to be more popular than Charlie Chaplin, it was Elton Thomas Ullman, better known to his adoring public as Douglas Fairbanks.
The star of forty-eight movies, including some of the greatest action films of all time, he was, along with Chaplin and his wife Mary Pickford, one of the three highest-paid and most-popular actors of his day. On his honeymoon with Pickford, Fairbanks and his bride drew crowds of 300,000 in Paris and London. At home in their mansion, dubbed "Pickfair," the two threw lavish parties and routinely entertained the world's most sought-after celebrities. To receive an invitation to Pickfair was to receive the social blessing of Hollywood royalty.
But Fairbanks was more than just a regular feature of the gossip columns and party circuit. He was also a fine actor and virtually created the modern action hero in a series of swashbuckling adventures that showcased an infectious joie de vivre and an extraordinary flare for stuntwork.
His lead performance in The Mark of Zorro, for which I awarded him a Katie as best actor of 1920, was his first foray into the genre of the period-costume action-adventure. Already a star of comedies, audiences responded with such enthusiasm to Fairbanks's new role that he cheerfully ended up playing variations on it for the rest of his career.
The per- formance was both ground- breaking and one of the most influential in movie history, esta- blishing many of the superhero and action hero conventions we now take for granted. His physique later served as the model for the comic hero Superman and the mask, secret hideaway and foppish alter ego inspired the creators of Batman.
As a co-founder of United Artists, Fairbanks had complete creative control over his pictures and he produced a string of action-adventure classics—The Mark of Zorro, The Three Musketeers, Robin Hood, The Thief of Bagdad, Don Q Son of Zorro, The Black Pirate, The Gaucho—before saying farewell to the genre with The Iron Mask. On each of these movies, he worked not just as an actor but also as a writer (under the name Elton Thomas) and a producer.
The Thief of Bagdad was the best of these movies, one of the finest of its type ever made. Loosely based on stories from One Thousand and One Nights, The Thief of Bagdad is the tale of a pickpocket who falls in love with a princess and who then sets off on a fantastic adventure to prove himself. With the graceful and athletic Fairbanks at its heart, The Thief of Bagdad is as fluid as a ballet while at the same time serving up a rip-snorting yarn filled with the best special effects 1924 could offer.
I selected it as the best picture of 1924 over such classics as Greed, The Last Laugh, The Navigator and Sherlock, Jr. and feel completely justified in doing so. The American Film Institute voted The Thief of Bagdad the ninth best fantasy movie of all time, the only silent film on the list, and along with City Lights, one of only two silent movies on any of the AFI Top Ten lists. In my opinion, it was the best fantasy movie made before The Wizard of Oz in 1939, and was probably the best action-adventure movie before 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood.
Fairbanks continued making swashbuckling adventures until the dawn of the Early Sound Era when he put down his foil and returned to the genre that had given him his start, comedy. He made four movies, including one, The Taming of the Shrew, with his by-then estranged wife, Mary Pickford, then retired from acting altogether.
He later received a commemorative Oscar in recognition of his work as the first president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and his "outstanding contribution ... to the international development of the motion picture."
Douglas Fairbanks died of a heart attack in 1939 at the age of fifty-five. His last words were "Never felt better."
For a limited time only, the Internet Movie Database is serving up free viewings of Charles Laughton's Oscar-winning performance in 1933's The Private Life Of Henry VIII. And we here at the Monkey pass it along to you, legally and free of charge.
What the movie knows about history wouldn't fill out the back flap of Henry's biography, but what it knows about people would fill volumes. Korda and writer Lajos Biró basically threw the facts out the window and made up a very entertaining movie as they went along. It reminds me a bit of a book journalist Mark Shiper wrote thirty-plus years ago, Paperback Writer, a fictional history of the Beatles that includes such little-remembered facts as that their first album was named We're Gonna Change The Face Of Pop Music Forever and that the string-laden "Shake Your Booty" was one of their biggest hits.
