Turn back the clock to a simpler time...

Dateline: 1921

Valentino as The Sheik

Today, his overripe sensuality – the flashing eyes, the flaring nostrils – seems coarse and ridiculous. But to millions of women in the early twenties, Rudolph Valentino was sweet carnality incarnate. “For lover,” gushed one female reporter, “the thesaurus gives us Lothario, Romeo, Casanova, Don Juan: most people, I discover, give you Valentino.” In 1921 he made the movie that cemented his fame and created a new breed of screen hero: suave, dashing, and menacingly hot. He was The Sheik.

Previous screen heroes has been clean-cut Joes who respectfully courted the girls. But the Sheik wanted more than a date, and women said yes.
The film tells the story of a proper Englishwoman in Arabia who is abducted by a smoldering sheik, with whom she eventually falls in love. In the title rose was a 26-year-old Italian immigrant and former taxi driver who had shortened his name from Rodolfo Alfonzo Raffaele Philibert Guglielmi to Rudolph Valentino. Valentino had been kicking around in Hollywood since 1918 scoring big in 1920 with The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, in which he danced an unforgettably steamy tango.

But not everyone was seduced. The trade newspaper Variety branded Valentino “a player with resource” and called The Sheik “inept.” A few years later, when Valentino appeared powdered and rouged in fey costume dramas, a Chicago Tribune columnist blames him for the decline of American manliness: This ideal lover, the writer fumed, was “a painted pansy.” (The star, outraged, challenged him to a duel.)

When Valentino died of a perforated ulcer in 1926, 30,000 women stormed the funeral home. For decades, a mysterious Lady in Black faithfully visited his tomb in Hollywood on the anniversary of his death. Today Valentino fan clubs still flourish, and there are always fresh flowers next to his crypt.
^{By Gerald Early from Our Lives & Times published by World Publications Group, Inc.}

Dateline: 1926

Lang’s Expressionist Epic
An epic fantasy about a worker’s revolt in a city of the future, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, completed in 1926, is the high point of the influential Golden Age of German filmmaking, the 1920’s. Expressionism held sway over the arts of postwar Germany. The style’s high-contrast light and shadow and distorted, weirdly angled space, expressive of the artist’s emotions, found their way into German movies with Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a 1919 horror film in which the nightmarish, fractured décor represents the mind of a madman. Tamed and made more realistic, expressionism appears hypnotically strange and gorgeous in the decades best German films: F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (the first Dracula film), E.A. Dupont’s Variety, Lang’s Dr. Mabuse the Gambler.

Lang began working on Metropolis in 1924, after returning from the United States. He’d been struck by New York City’s “crossroads of multiple and confused human forces (exploiting) each other and thus living in perpetual anxiety.” In the movie’s futuristic city, demoralized workers labor in the bowels of the earth while their merciless bosses dwell in skyscraper luxury. (The class warfare id resolved by a disastrous flood.) Metropolis’s soaring, superbly imaginative set design, rich in expressionist light and lines, and the bravura sequence in which the evil capitalist plots to create a villainous robot double of a beloved female workers’ leader, have inspired a generation of filmmakers.
^{By Gerald Early, Our Life & Times}

Dateline: 1929

First Academy Awards
When the two-year-old Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented its first “Awards of Merit” in 1929 (for work done in 1927-28), the ceremony – unlike today’s conspicuously long, overblown extravaganza – was a simple, five-minute affair. Yet even then, as now, the event’s overriding agenda was public relations, not merit.

The Academy was the anti-labor brainchild of MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer – a producer-controlled, pan-industry company union that virtually guaranteed that worker’s grievances would be resolved to the studios’ benefit. The awards were conceived as a sop to the very people Mayer sought to disempower – as well as a reminder to the general public of the young art form’s legitimacy.

Among the winners were actress Janet Gaynor for her performances in Seventh Heaven, Street Angel, and Sunrise, and actor Emil Jannings for his hamming in The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh. The best-picture award was split into two categories: best production (for big commercial movies) and artistic quality of production (for specialized highbrow films). Wings won the former, F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise the latter. Thereafter, the two categories were combined, with art usually getting short shrift.

The gold-plated statuette earned the sobriquet “Oscar” in 1931, after an Academy secretary cracked that it looked “just like my Uncle Oscar!” Notoriously blind – no best director award ever for Alfred Hitchcock or Orson Welles; no best actor for Richard Burton or Cary Grant – Oscar nevertheless has made some good calls, Katharine Hepburn received four awards, as did director John Ford, and each of the first two Godfather films was named best picture.
^{By Gerald Early, Our Life & Times}

Dateline: 1930

Sam Spade, Private Eye

As pioneered by Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle, the classic British detective story was fundamentally optimistic: once the mystery was solved, everything returned to normal. That genre was turned on its head by the American writer Dashiell Hammett, whose coldly cynical novels evoke a gritty, pitiless world where normalcy doesn’t exist and no mystery is ever truly solved. In 1930, with The Maltese Falcon, Hammett introduced his most famous character, a laconic, world-weary “private eye” named Sam Spade.

The book’s title refers to a statuette that is stolen and restolen. The double crosses multiply until the only honest person left is the proto-existentialist hero. Explaining to beautiful Brigid O’Shaughnessy why he must turn her in for murder, Spade cites professional honor, against which, he says, “All we’ve got is the fact that maybe you love me and maybe I love You.” The operative word is maybe. The only certainty in a world awash in deceit is one’s personal code.

The Maltese Falcon, as well as his 1932 novel The Thin Man made Hammett, in the words of playwright Lillian Hellman (his companion of many years), “the hottest thing in Hollywood and New York.” The Maltese Falcon was made into a movie three times, the last and most famous version starring Humphrey Bogart. The Thin Man sparked a five-movie series starring William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles, a couple of witty, martini-imbibing sophisticates who also solve crimes.

A passionate leftist during the thirties and forties, Hammett went to prison for six months in 1951 for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee – an experience that, along with his habitual heavy drinking and smoking, left him frail and haggard until his death in 1961.
^{By Stephen Spender from Our Lives & Times published by World Publications Group, Inc.}

Dateline: 1931

Memorable Monster

Boris Karloff launched his career as horror-film icon, delivering a surprisingly sensitive portrayal of the monster in 1931’s Frankenstein (a part turned down by Bela “Dracula” Lugosi.

^{By Stephen Spender from Our Lives & Times published by World Publications Group, Inc.}

Dateline: 1933

Marxist Anarchy, Movie-Style

The scenario: It’s 1933, and a garrulous little man with a mustache seizes absolute power in a bankrupt European country and provokes a war with its neighbor. The location: the fictional Freedonia, ruled by Rufus T. Firefly. The movie: the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup. This disreputable antiwar satire was so potent – “All God’s chillun got guns,” chorused the Marxes in a dark-humored “patriotic” production number – that it was actually banned in Fascist Italy.

The brothers were vaudeville and Broadway veterans who had made their talking-picture debut with The Cocoanuts (1929). There was no mistaking them: groucho had the mustache, the eyebrows, and the cigar; Harpo, the harp, the hair, and no voice. Chico was the phony immigrant; Zeppo, the pleasant straight man. In Duck Soup and other classic movies (Horse feathers, A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races), the anarchic Marx Brothers merrily deflated the grand rituals of the time.
^{By Stephen Spender from Our Lives & Times published by World Publications Group, Inc.}

Dateline: 1934

Fred and Ginger on the Rise

One of the silver screen’s most enchanting partnerships began in earnest in 1934, when Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers got top billing for the first time in “The Gay Divorcée” (the pair first appeared together the previous year in “Flying Down to Rio”). The Gay Divorcée and its featured dance, the Continental (which was too complicated to really catch on), introduced a genre that would be honed to perfection over the course of eight more movies.

With Astaire and Hermes Pan choreographing, gargantuan, stage bound production numbers were minimized. Instead, dances were placed in non-theatrical settings and integrated into the story. The dancers were shown full figure in long, seamless takes; solos and pas de deux dominated. Astaire and Rogers brought cohesion, intimacy, and especially, romance to the movie musical. (Indeed, in their pictures – produced during the days of strict Hays Code enforcement – the songs and dances function as an elaborate mating ritual; after one number in The Gay Divorcée, Cole Porter’s “Night and Day”, Astaire even flips open a cigarette case and offers an enervated Rogers a smoke.)

Rogers was never Astaire’s dance equal, but she was his best partner. He was coolly experimental; she was warmly craftsman-like. He was elegant, ethereal; she was streamlined and street-smart. As Katharine Hepburn allegedly said, “He gave her class, and she gave him sex.”
^{By Stephan Spender from Our Lives & Times}

Dateline: 1942

Grable’s Gams

Doing what any smart business would to protect a priceless asset, 20th Century-Fox insured Hollywood siren Betty Grable’s legs in 1942 with a million-dollar Lloyd’s of London policy. Grable’s shapely gams helped make her the favorite “pinup girl” of American GIs, who said the popular pictures gave them a good idea of what they were fighting for: long-legged beauties – sexy, and not entirely wholesome. A war phenomenon, pinups plastered the walls of every barracks by 1943.

"I went into show business when I was seven years old. Two days later the first comic I ever met stole my piggy bank in a railroad station in Portland. When I was 11 the comics were looking at my ankles. When I was 14 they were...just looking. When I was 20 I'd been stuck with enough lunch checks to pay for a three-story house. Naw, they're shiftless, dame-chasing, ambitionless..." - Barbara Stanwyck in " LADY OF BURLESQUE"

"And yet, Keyes, as I was walking down the street to the drugstore, suddenly it came over me that everything would go wrong. It sounds crazy but it's true, so help me. I couldn't hear my own footsteps. It was the walk of a dead man".
-Fred MacMurray in "DOUBLE INDEMNITY"

Go to Top