In the 1930s, MGM’s top directors were Clarence Brown (a favorite of Garbo’s), the prolific W. S. Van Dyke, of whom I’ve written for FF, and Victor Fleming. In 1939, MGM observed its silver anniversary. Since it was the biggest American movie studio, it launched a campaign to make 1939 known as Hollywood’s greatest year
I’ve just finished reading what is sometimes called Shakespeare’s Ovid because the playwright borrowed from it extensively. The passage below comes in the twelfth of the poem’s fifteen books.
On the supposition that lightning strikes twice, the movie industry loves remaking box office bonanzas. There are six Hollywood versions (and one Japanese) of Peter B. Kyne’s short novel, The Three Godfathers (1913). In 1929, when the talkies were taking, if not baby, then toddler, steps, everything clicked.
Frank Capra never made a bad movie (unless some of the lost or unavailable silents are clinkers). His particular brand of sentimental, ordinary-joe appeal and content came to be dubbed Capracorn…
Few other first features involved so many future luminaries as the documentary-style German silent, People on Sunday (1930). Not the actors, but directors Edgar G. Ulmer and Robert Siodmak and writers Billy Wilder and Curt Siodmak, all of whom had long careers in Hollywood.
Four of these movies are genuine anomalies for their makers. The fifth is the best film by a very famous and successful director-writer whose other movies—and I’ve seen nearly all of them—reliably disappoint me.
Of the first generation of top Hollywood directors—Griffith, DeMille, Stroheim, Walsh, Curtiz, Chaplin, Dwan, Fleming, Brown, Lubitsch, Sternberg, Ford, Borzage, Vidor, Keaton, Hawks, Wellman, Capra, McCarey… W(oodbridge) S(trong) Van Dyke II (1889-1943) is the most unjustly forgotten and underrated.
The Jazz Singer (1927) is said to have brought down the curtain on silent movies. Sound shorts were made before The Jazz Singer, but few theaters were set up for them, and it was Al Jolson’s hit feature that first pushed exhibitors hard to install sound.
Everybody interested in movies has heard of Leni Riefenstahl. She made the famous, though now quite dull, film of the spectacular 1934 Nuremberg Nazi Party rally, Triumph des Willens (1935), and Olympia (1938), a far more durable record of the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
The silents were perforce the medium in which most masters of the talkies learned their profession. Indeed, many first showed their mastery in silent features. Four titles on my list of favorite silents attest to their makers’ gifts very early on.
