The Stars of the 1930's

Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis:

Young Katharine Hepburn appeared in her Hollywood film debut, co-starring with John Barrymore in a serious drama entitled A Bill of Divorcement (1932). In the mid 1930s, Hepburn starred in Alice Adams (1935), famous for its painful-to-watch dinner scene. Later in the decade, she would star with Ginger Rogers in Stage Door (1937), a backstage look at prospective New York theatrical actresses living together in a boarding house.
Bette Davis emerged as a star at Warner Bros. only after being loaned out to RKO and starring as a sluttish, wicked Cockney waitress in the studio's Of Human Bondage (1934). Snubbed for an Academy Award for her performance, she was given a consolation Oscar for Best Actress in Warners' Dangerous (1935), a lesser role.
In 1938, Bette Davis again demonstrated her star status with her portrayal of a selfish Southern belle in William Wyler's Jezebel (1938), a role she was given (again as consolation) after failing to win the coveted role of Scarlett O'Hara in the following year's epic, Gone With The Wind. For Davis' performance, she won her second Best Actress Award. In the following year, she starred in two of her best-known roles: in Dark Victory (1939), and The Private Lives of Elizabeth & Essex (1939). One of the most famous weepers of all time, King Vidor's Stella Dallas (1937) starred Barbara Stanwyck as the sacrificial-mother figure.

Charlie Chaplin:
Comedian-director Charlie Chaplin survived the arrival of sound by deliberately remaining silent in his two comedy films in the 30s. [He did not perform in a film with a speaking role until the 1940s.] One of his finest films as The Tramp, City Lights (1931) featured a soundtrack and sound effects, but its dialogue was provided by title cards. Chaplin, again as the pantomiming Little Tramp with co-star Paulette Goddard, satirized the dehumanizing industrial society in his still-silent production of Modern Times (1936) - considered the last great silent film. It had synchronized sounds (various noises) and included a nonsense song that Chaplin actually sang with gibberish. The masterful film symbolized how technology, mass production, and machinery could literally suck victims into its gears. Other silent film comedians, such as Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd did not survive into the 30s.

The Marx Brothers
The mad-cap, anarchic comedians, the Marx Brothers dominated the 1930s. Their first films were made by Paramount Studios (first on the East Coast and then in Hollywood) - the Marxs' second film comedy in the sound era was Animal Crackers (1930). They also starred in Norman McLeod's Horse Feathers (1932), a take-off on college education and football. Their last film for Paramount was Leo McCarey's critically-acclaimed, surrealistic, anti-establishment, anti-war classic Duck Soup (1933) - a flop in the year of its release. Their biggest hit, their first film for MGM, was Sam Wood's classical music/comedy A Night at the Opera (1935), teaming them with the legendary Margaret Dumont. At the peak of their success, the Marx Bros. repeated their comedic formula in Sam Wood's A Day At The Races (1937), an enjoyable film - but the last of their great comedies.

The Popular Thin Man Series:
The first of six popular comedy/mysteries from 1934 to 1947 in The Thin Man series, based on the Dashiell Hammett novels, opened in 1934 - The Thin Man (1934). It starred the married, sophisticated detective duo William Powell and Myrna Loy (as Nick and Nora Charles), famous for their witty quips. [The two were first paired in Manhattan Melodrama (1934).] Fox Studios was responsible for launching the classic Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes mystery series, popularized in the 1940s by Universal Studios with almost a dozen further installments. The first of fourteen appearances, pairing Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson, was in Fox's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) and soon after in Fox's follow-up The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939).

famous movies and stars of the 1930's

Early Gangster Films at Warners:

Warner Bros. developed its own style by producing gritty narratives, social problem pictures and a succession of tough, realistic gangster movies in the sound (and Depression) era, reflecting the era's shaken confidence in authority and the country's social traditions. The major stars of Warners to emerge in the 30s were: Muni, Flynn, Edward G. Robinson, Cagney, Bogart, and Davis (with Warners from 1931-1949).
Always an early adopter, Warners launched the gangster genre with Mervyn LeRoy's Little Caesar (1930) - a star-making role for Edward G. Robinson as snarling, fast-talking mobster Caesar Enrico Bandello who met his inevitable fate with the words, "Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?" William Wellman's The Public Enemy (1931) starred a swaggering, cocky urban gangster portrayed by James Cagney (in his first film after a stint as a song-and-dance man in vaudeville) - in a film most-remembered for the scene in which the hoodlum abusively stuffed a grapefruit half into Mae Clarke's face, and the scene of Cagney's death at his mother's door.
Billionaire Howard Hughes' and United Artists' hard-hitting gangster film Scarface (1932), directed by Howard Hawks and produced outside the Hollywood system, was delayed for two years due to censorship, and was required to add the qualifying sub-title "The Shame of the Nation" to its main title. With a script from hard-hitting newspaperman Ben Hecht, it starred Paul Muni (who was better known for playing historical characters such as Emile Zola and Louis Pasteur) as a psychopathic Chicagoan crime boss (based upon Al Capone). The spectacular and controversially-violent film (with incest in a sub-plot) included a record number of killings - 28, and inventively used a visual "X" motif throughout to signal that a murder was imminent.
After the previous three gangster films, the genre branched out to other uncompromising, "serious" social drama films, including Best Picture-nominated I Am A Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932) that dealt with such subjects as chain gangs and prison reform (an expose specifically referring to Georgia's brutal treatment) and promoted social reform of a corrupt court system. William Wellman's social problem film Wild Boys of the Road (1933) told the story of two disillusioned teens forced to travel cross-country rails to find work during the height of the Depression. Michael Curtiz' hard-hitting melodrama Black Fury (1935) also starred Paul Muni as a coal miner caught in the middle of a labor dispute. In one of his first important screen roles, Humphrey Bogart re-created his stage role as gangster Duke Mantee in a starring film role opposite Bette Davis in The Petrified Forest (1936). James Cagney starred as a gangster who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, in Michael Curtiz' Angels With Dirty Faces (1938). At the end of the decade, Cagney was gunned down in the finale of The Roaring Twenties (1939) in another gangster role.

Clark Gable - Example of a Mega-Star:

MGM stars Clark Gable and Joan Crawford (who were paired in eight films - the first of which appeared in 1930) were crowned the "King and Queen" of Hollywood (Tinseltown) in 1937 at the El Capitan Theater, after a popularity poll. (Leading lady Myrna Loy was also crowned with Gable). After a few small roles in silents, Clark Gable, the future King of Hollywood, was first noticed by the public in Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1931) with co-star Greta Garbo, then in a hot romantic pairing opposite Joan Crawford in Possessed (1931), and next co-starring with Jean Harlow and Mary Astor in the sensationally steamy drama Red Dust (1932). Famed gangster John Dillinger was gunned down outside Chicago's Biograph Theater on July 22, 1934 after viewing Gable in the crime drama Manhattan Melodrama (1934). The Hollywood community (and world) were stunned when in June of 1937, sexy actress Jean Harlow passed away from a serious bladder infection, in the midst of filming Saratoga (1937) for MGM with Gable.
Tragically, Gable appeared in only one film - No Man of Her Own (1932) - with his own wife Carole Lombard (she died in an airplane crash in early 1942). Among the films that increased Clark Gable's popular pre-eminence in films was director Frank Capra's hit It Happened One Night (1934) (in which his removal of a shirt revealed his bare chest and the absence of an undershirt - setting the US underwear industry into a tailspin). In a strange twist of fate, Gable had been loaned out to Columbia to make It Happened One Night (1934) and ended up winning his first (and only) Best Actor award with the rival studio.
Other films that propelled Gable further into stardom, upon his return to MGM, were Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), The Call of the Wild (1935), one of MGM's most successful films and one of the earliest 'disaster' films - San Francisco (1936) (known for its spectacular 20-minute earthquake sequence), Test Pilot (1938), and of course, Gone with the Wind (1939) with Gable's most famous leading role as roguish Rhett Butler in Margaret Mitchell's best-selling story.
The Effects of the Depression on the Film Industry:
The Great Depression hit hard. Nearly all of the Hollywood studios (except MGM) suffered financially during the early 30s, and studios had to reorganize, request government assistance, cut budgets and employees, and close theatres when profits plummeted. Attendance at theatres was drastically affected, although during even the darkest days of the Depression, movie attendance was still between 60-75 million per week. Special incentives and giveaways (such as 2-for-1 features, dish nights, and other contests and attractions) helped to maintain a patronizing audience. The balancing act for film-making was to both reflect the realism and cynicism of the Depression period, while also providing escapist entertainment to boost the morale of the public by optimistically reaffirming values such as thrift and perseverance (without offending the censors).
During most of the Depression Era, Hollywood responded with expensive, mass-produced entertainment or escapist entertainment. The best example of an all-star production heavily bankrolled by the studios was MGM's Best Picture-winning Grand Hotel (1932), with "Garbo" (speaking her oft-quoted line: "I want to be alone"), John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery, and Lionel Barrymore. The film set a pattern for future films, telling stories about the lives and destinies of several individuals - including a vivacious office worker, a dancer, a jewel-thief - that were woven together into a whole

Film History of the 1930s

The Golden Age of Hollywood: From 1930 to 1948

The 1930s decade (and most of the 1940s as well) has been nostalgically labeled "The Golden Age of Hollywood" (although most of the output of the decade was black-and-white). The 30s was also the decade of the sound and color revolutions and the advance of the 'talkies', and the further development of film genres (gangster films, musicals, newspaper-reporting films, historical biopics, social-realism films, lighthearted screwball comedies, westerns and horror to name a few). It was the era in which the silent period ended, with many silent film stars not making the transition to sound (e.g., Vilmy Banky, John Gilbert, and Norma Talmadge). By 1933, the economic effects of the Depression were being strongly felt, especially in decreased movie theatre attendance.
As the 1930s began, there were a number of unique firsts:

Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich:
Although Austrian-born director Josef von Sternberg's best works were in his silent films (Underworld (1927), The Last Command (1928), and The Docks of New York (1929)), he acheived greatest notoriety during the 30s. Exotic German actress Marlene Dietrich's stardom was launched by von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (Germany, 1929) with her role as the leggy Lola Lola, a sensual cabaret striptease dancer and the singing of Falling in Love Again. It was Germany's first all-talking picture.
Dietrich would soon go on to star in many other films - usually with characters that were variations on Lola - jaded femme fatales. Dietrich was 'discovered' and appeared in her first Hollywood feature film, Morocco (1930), again as a nightclub singer with co-star Gary Cooper as a French legionnaire. Dietrich was subsequently promoted by Paramount Studios as a 'continental' German rival to MGM's imported star Greta Garbo. A few years later, Dietrich collaborated further with von Sternberg in Dishonored (1931), Shanghai Express (1932), Blonde Venus (1932) (with Dietrich as a demure wife who is transformed into a cabaret star), The Scarlet Empress (1934) (with Dietrich as Russia's Catherine the Great), and in The Devil is a Woman (1935) (as a money-hungry, seductive vamp). Dietrich and von Sternberg made a total of seven films together. By 1946, von Sternberg was the uncredited assistant to director King Vidor for Duel in the Sun (1946).
The Sound Era's Coming-of-Age:
Mastery of techniques for the sound era were also demonstrated in the works of director Ernst Lubitsch, who advanced the action of his films with the integrated musical numbers. The first filmic musical was Lubitsch's first talkie, the witty and bubbly The Love Parade (1929/30) with Jeanette MacDonald (in her debut film) and Maurice Chevalier (in his second picture) - the recipient of six Academy Awards nominations (including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor). After directing three more musical comedies in the next three years, including Best Picture-nominated One Hour with You (1931/32) with the same leads, Lubitsch filmed his last musical, The Merry Widow (1934) with equally naturalistic musical expressions and the winner of the Best Art Direction Academy Award.
Also, in the first filming of the Ben Hecht-MacArthur play, Lewis Milestone's The Front Page (1931), a mobile camera was combined with inventive, rapid-fire dialogue and quick-editing. Other 1931 films in the emerging 'newspaper' genre included Mervyn LeRoy's social issues film about the tabloid press entitled Five Star Final (1931) (with Edward G. Robinson and Boris Karloff in a rare, non-monster role), Frank Capra's Platinum Blonde (1931) (with Jean Harlow), and John Cromwell's Scandal Sheet (1931).
After 1932, the development of sound-mixing freed films from the limitations of recording on sets and locations. Scripts from writers were becoming more advanced with witty dialogue, realistic characters and plots. Hecht adapted Noel Coward's work for Lubitsch's Design for Living (1933), starring Gary Cooper, Fredric March and Miriam Hopkins, and Dudley Nichols adapted Maxwell Anderson's play for director John Ford's screen version Mary of Scotland (1936).
Two-Color and Three-Color (Full-Color) Technicolor Development:
One of the first 'color' films was Thomas Edison's hand-tinted short Annabell's Butterfly Dance. Two-color (red and green) feature films were the first color films produced, including the first two-color feature film The Toll of the Sea, and then better-known films such as Stage Struck (1925) and The Black Pirate (1926). It would take the development of a new three-color camera, in 1932, to usher in true full-color Technicolor.
The first film (a short) in three-color Technicolor was Walt Disney's animated talkie Flowers and Trees (1932) in the Silly Symphony series. [However, others claim that the first-ever color cartoon was Ted Eschbaugh's bizarre Goofy Goat Antics (1931).] In the next year, Disney also released the colorful animation - The Three Little Pigs (1933). Its optimistic hit theme song: "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" (based upon the tune of Happy Birthday) became a Depression-era anthem. It was one of the earliest films displaying 'personality animation' - each of the three pigs had a distinctive personality.
In 1934, the first full-color, live-action short was released - La Cucaracha (1934).
Hollywood's first full-length feature film photographed entirely in three-strip Technicolor was Rouben Mamoulian's Becky Sharp (1935) - an adaptation of English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray's Napoleonic-era novel Vanity Fair. The first musical in full-color Technicolor was Dancing Pirate (1936). And the first outdoor drama filmed in full-color was The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936).

film history of the 1920's

Films really blossomed in the 1920s, expanding upon the foundations of film from earlier years. Most US film production at the start of the decade occurred in or near Hollywood on the West Coast, although some films were still being made in New Jersey and in Astoria on Long Island (Paramount). By the mid-20s, movies were big business (with a capital investment totaling over $2 billion) with some theatres offering double features. By the end of the decade, there were 20 Hollywood studios, and the demand for films was greater than ever. Most people are unaware that the greatest output of feature films in the US occurred in the 1920s and 1930s (averaging about 800 film releases in a year) - nowadays, it is remarkable when production exceeds 500 films in a year.

Even the earliest films were organized into genres or types, with instantly-recognizable storylines, settings, costumes, and characters. The major genre emphasis was on swashbucklers, historical extravaganzas, and melodramas, although all kinds of films were being produced throughout the decade. Films varied from sexy melodramas and biblical epics by Cecil B. DeMille, to westerns (such as Cruze's The Covered Wagon (1923)), horror films, gangster/crime films, war films, the first feature documentary or non-fictional narrative film (Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922)), romances, mysteries, and comedies (from the silent comic masters Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd.

the Big Five Studios

1. Warner Bros. Pictures

incorporated in 1923 by Polish brothers (Jack, Harry, Albert, and Sam); in 1925, Warner Brothers merged with First National, forming Warner Bros.-First National Pictures; the studio's first principal asset was Rin Tin Tin; became prominent by 1927 due to its introduction of talkies (The Jazz Singer (1927)) and early 30s gangster films; it was known as the "Depression studio"; in the 40s, it specialized in Bugs Bunny animations and other cartoons Warner Bros.

2. Adolph Zukor's Famous Players (1912) and Jesse Lasky's Feature Play - merged in 1916 to form Famous Players-Lasky Corporation; it spent $1 million on United Studios' property (on Marathon Street) in 1926; the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation became Paramount studios in 1927, and was officially named Paramount Pictures in 1935; its greatest silent era stars were Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks; Golden Age stars included Mae West, W.C. Fields, Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and director Cecil B. DeMille
Famous Players-Lasky(Paramount)

3. RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum) Pictures- evolved from the Mutual Film Corporation (1912), was established in 1928 as a subsidiary of RCA; it was formed by RCA, Keith-Orpheum Theaters, and the FBO Company (Film Booker's Organization) - which was owned by Joseph P. Kennedy (who had already purchased what remained of Mutual); this was the smallest studio of the majors; kept financially afloat with top-grossing Astaire-Rogers musicals in the 30s, King Kong (1933), and Citizen Kane (1941); at one time, RKO was acquired by eccentric millionaire Howard ughes RKOs.

4. Marcus Loew of Loew's, Inc.- was the parent firm of what eventually became Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Metro Pictures Corporation was a production company founded in 1916 by Richard A. Rowland and Louis B. Mayer. In 1918, Mayer left this partnership to start up his own production company in 1918, called Louis B. Mayer Pictures. In 1920, Metro Pictures Corporation (with its already-acquired Goldwyn Pictures Corporation) was purchased by early theater exhibitor Marcus Loew of Loew's Inc. In another acquisition, Loew merged his 'Metro-Goldwyn production company with Louis B. Mayer Pictures. So, in summary, MGM, first named Metro-Goldwyn Pictures, was ultimately formed in 1924 from the merger of three US film production companies: Metro Pictures Corporation (1916), Goldwyn Pictures Corporation (1917), and the Louis B. Mayer Pictures Company (1918); Irving Thalberg (nicknamed the 'boy wonder') was head of production at MGM from 1924 until his death in 1936; the famous MGM lion roar in the studio's opening logo was first recorded and viewed in a film in 1928; its greatest early successes were The Big Parade (1925), Broadway Melody (1929), Grand Hotel (1932), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), A Night at the Opera (1935), The Good Earth (1937), Gone With the Wind (1939), The Wizard of Oz (1939), as well as Tarzan films, Tom and Jerry cartoons, and stars such as Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, and Spencer Tracy Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

5. Fox Film Corporation/Foundation- founded in 1912 by NY nickelodeon owner William Fox (originally a garment industry worker), was first known for Fox Movietone news and then B-westerns; its first film was Life's Shop Window (1914); it later became 20th-Century Fox, formed through the 1935 merger of 20th Century Pictures Company (founded in 1933 by Darryl F. Zanuck) and Fox; it became famous for Shirley Temple films in the mid-30s and Betty Grable musicals in the 40s