Photoplay magazine, November 1941 - Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea...

The November 1941 issue of Photoplay magazine features lovely Claudette Colbert, photographed by Paul Hesse, in warm autumn tones.

BUT FIRST, A COMMERCIAL!!!

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The magazine is a manual of gossip of romances among the Hollywood community, reviews of movies, and lots of photos of stars provide a lush and lightweight publication all for ten cents.  

It does, however, feature an interesting editorial by Managing Editor Ernest V. Heyn defending the industry from the notoriously Nazified Senator Burton K. Wheeler (R-Montana) and Senator Gerald K. Nye (R-North Dakota) whose America First Committee were against all bad representations of Nazism, and accused the film industry of being communist and run by Jews.  Any negative portrayal of the Nazis was regarded by these two fascists as being warmongering.  

As the editorial begins somewhat incredulously, "Who would have thought six months ago that Wendell Wilkie would have to be called in by the Motion-picture industry to defend Hollywood against the accusations of war propaganda by the Wheelers and Nyes?"  

With admirable spirit and a light, almost humorously wry touch, Editor Heyn stands up for the industry and his magazine and introduces a companion article by columnist Walter Winchell, then recently appointed Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve, to write about some of the Hollywood rank and file who joined the service.  We were still a few weeks away from Pearl Harbor and so we were a peacetime Navy that he describes, but it is telling to see how many men were willing to compromise or even give up their film careers in anticipation of what might be coming.

We could use such courage, practicality, and foresight today to stand up to authoritarianism, at home and abroad.  Dictatorship does not look good on us.

Among those already enlisted then were Ensign Wayne Morris; Lieutenant Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.; Commander Wallace Beery; Lieutenant Robert Montgomery; and writer-producer Lieutenant Commander Gene Markey.

Winchell was famous for his staccato delivery on the radio with..."Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea..."  So long ago, but it might have been yesterday.

The issue does not provide the typical Thanksgiving salutation (with stars posed with turkeys), but I will add it here: for those Americans out there celebrating the holiday, may I wish you very Happy Thanksgiving!

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

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Rationing - 1944

Rationing (1944) pokes fun at a wartime home front nuisance while at the same time staunchly upholding support for this act of civilian sacrifice.  It is one example of many from that era where decency was expected, sometimes enforced, and lauded as noble in a way that was genuinely and charmingly American. 

Wallace Beery, whose career was an example of that rare character actor-as-star, runs a general store in a small town. Wartime rationing is his nightmare and having to deal with irate customers is the sacrifice he makes to his country during wartime. 

Marjorie Main, in a role unlike her usual crusty maids and aunties, plays the humorless administrator of the local Office of Price Administration, which regulated the ration system and issued books of ration stamps and tokens. They are adversaries and constantly spar, but there is more to their fractious relationship—they were once headed for the altar, but when her mother did not approve, Wallace married someone in France when he was in the Army in World War I, and she married someone else because he was reported missing.

Beery, who makes deliveries to his customers in his car, drives by road signs that illustrate how pervasive rationing has become to society: mile markers are replaced by signs that tell us how many gallons is it to the next town.  Poor Wallace runs out, and has to push his auto.  

Here are some gasoline ration stamps from that era.  Each state issued its own.  Here we have a set from California, and another from Connecticut. The owner of the vehicle wrote the license plate number on the stamps, and they could not be used by anybody else.  See this previous post on gasoline rationing stickers on cars in the movies.

Back at the store, customers clamor for meat, which, of course, could be purchased only if one had the required number of red meat tokens.  Blue tokens were for milk and cheese.

Marjorie Main’s office is next door at the post office.  Wallace petitions her for more gas coupon books.  She won’t give them to him. She lives behind the post office.  Not her usual frumpy role, Miss Marjorie looks quite stylish in her upsweep hairdo and business suit.

She is a model of efficiency, gives him forms to fill out in triplicate and cautions him that he must not sell any merchandise in his store that require tokens, or “points’ without the customer turning in those points with the payment.  The audience at that time surely could relate and smile.

Marjorie Main, a widow, has a daughter played by Dorothy Morris, who is in love with Wallace Beery’s adopted son, played by Tommy Batten. He is preparing to go into the Army.  They want to marry right away, and though Uncle Wallace doesn’t object, they are all afraid Marjorie Main will not give her consent. Marjorie actually does approve of the marriage, but want to make sure practical matters are addressed: What if Tommy is killed in the war and Dorothy is left with nothing, what if she has a child alone.   He must have savings put by before they can marry. Tommy agrees they should wait; it is Dorothy who wants to marry immediately, and they fight. There is a touching moment when Wallace gives him the medal he won in World War I as a good-luck piece before he goes off to war.

Young Richard Hall plays Teddy, a boy whose mother is away looking for work in a war plant, so Wallace his minding him and entertaining him with the rationing book version of Little Red Riding Hood.   His tangled tale gives us an idea of the complexity of the rationing book system.

The movie has villains far worse than the wolf, two of them.

Donald Meek is the equivalent of a home front villain: he is a hoarder.  Wallace admonishes him, and all the crabby ladies who come in for meat and such that the country must save its resources for the fighting troops.

A subplot involves a lady barber with whom Wallace is comically infatuated.  She’d like to wheedle a rationed rubber girdle from Wallace, who must sneak one under the watchful eye of Marjorie Main (and will later have to sneak it back). Marjorie comes to him for a preparation for a toothache, and he sarcastically teases her.  The two old pros play well off each other.

Fed up with the OPA rules, and Marjorie, Wallace takes a train to Washington, D.C., to visit with his senator, who is also his old Army pal, to loosen up the rationing rules for his store. 

The senator reminds him of the vital patriotic nature of rationing, and appoints Wallace to work alongside Marjorie on his local board.  Now the shoe is on the other foot and his added responsibility turns him from a guy who wants to bend rules to a guy who has to make sure the rules are upheld.

And he runs smack into a black market plot right under his nose.  In an effort to raise money for his son to marry, he sells half interest in his store to Howard Freeman, who as it turns out, runs a local black market ring. He is the second villain. In a two-fisted he-man confrontation at the local ice house, Wallace proves himself to be a hero as he uncovers the black market ring and he pummels Mr. Freeman with blocks of ice.  His ex-partner’s share in the store is now bought by Marjorie Main – Wallace’s once and future partner in life.  To avoid a 72-page form to dissolve the partnership in the store, Wallace takes the lesser of two evils: he signs a marriage license instead.

The movie is a lighthearted look at what was really a pain for Americans on the home front, but in reminding them through films, ads, and cajoling by their favorite stars on radio, the civilian population was also painted as heroic and patriotic for cooperating.  It was an effective program for giving the populace a sense of mission.  This is not to say that there wasn’t plenty of irritation felt by people, or that they had a Pollyanna-ish attitude toward rationing.  

Woody Woodpecker in Ration Bored (1943) is, as usual, unrepentant in his exaggerated antics to get enough gas for his car, and a prolonged fight with a cop in a junkyard after he is caught siphoning gas from the cop car, results in the two of them being blasted to kingdom come. We have to assume moviegoers took the hint even if they cheered for Woody.

Masters of the obvious will refer to this movie as dated.  Indeed, for in today’s world where we will die and kill others by not cooperating with simple social distancing restrictions, we have to marvel at how many people in this country put self over country.  And how the more despicable of them do it waving a Nazi flag.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.

Cartoons Caricature Hollywood

There are two aspects that immediately grab the viewer: first, the sometimes extreme ugliness of the caricatured images of stars who were otherwise celebrated for glamour; second, that these stars were marketed like products and brands of the studio based on their physical "type."  Nowhere is this more glaringly apparent than in their animated cartoon likenesses. 

Today we join the Classic Movie Blog Association's Hollywood on Hollywood blogathon.  Have a look here for more entries.

The cartoons we discuss today that lampooned the stars were produced by every studio.  One of the earliest, Mickey's Gala Primier (1933) was a black and white cartoon put out by Disney.  Mickey and Minnie Mouse attend a Hollywood premiere of one of Mickey's cartoons, and all the stars are there, emerging from a single limousine, as klieg lights arch into the sky.  Wallace Beery and Marie Dressler, the three Barrymores in their Rasputin guises (a movie we covered here), Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Eddie Cantor, Jimmy Durante, Joan Crawford--a huge list of greats. Some like George Arliss would not be as identifiable possibly even ten years later, that is to say he would not have been worthy of parody in popular culture.  Greta Garbo, however, who was much parodied in these cartoons (in particularly unflattering jibes), was a star whose greatness can be measured by the fact that her name was still identifiable long after she stopped making films, and was therefore still the butt of jokes.

The Hollywood Bowl (1938) was put out by Universal under Walter Lantz, known for Woody Woodpecker, which, again in black and white, showed all the major stars of the day attending a performance at the Hollywood Bowl.  Bing Crosby, W.C. Fields are among the most well-known here--and Garbo is again skewered, invariably portrayed as a somewhat somnolent stooge--but Jean Hersholt is on hand, and the Ritz Brothers, all probably less identifiable to later audiences.

Ned Sparks seems to pop up with great regularity in these cartoons too.  For film buffs, trying to name the actors flashing on screen for only seconds at a time is great fun and quite challenging.

Katharine Hepburn's angular features and distinctive voice always make her a good target for caricaturists and she appears in this cartoon, as well as others in the 1940s.  Joe E. Brown, the enormous mouth that devours the entire screen is another regular, but in this cartoon, Benny Goodman, Cab Calloway, Rudy Vallee, and Leopold Stokowski, his  long hair in a snood, also get the works.  What may be surprising to young fans of classic films and cartoons today was that conductor Stokowski was actually something of a "rock star" in his day. 

He also appears in Hollywood Steps Out (1941), which, as you can see by the screen caps here, has some of the best drawn, and least offensive, caricatures of the stars.

Included in this one are Ann Sheridan, Sonja Henie on skates, Cesar Romero, Mickey and Judy, Henry Fonda, but I'd have to say my favorite is of C. Aubrey Smith. 

The Golden State (1948) is a travelogue type cartoon (that ends in a singalong of "California Here I Come") with cameos of Dorothy Lamour, who is of course, in a sarong, as well as Johnny Weismuller in Tarzan garb. 

Hollywood Picnic (1937) gives us, along with Garbo and Joe E. Brown, without whom no cartoon lampoon of the stars is complete, a brief glimpse at Edward Arnold, which seems surprisingly without any exaggeration, and a stereotyped Stepin Fetchit.  Young audiences today will justly be offended at the racism, however they will likely be ignorant that this portrayal of Fetchit was on the mark: this was his act.  This was his brand.  Joe E. Lewis had a great career on Broadway, but in Hollywood, his brand was his large mouth.  James Stewart was a terrific stage and screen actor: to Hollywood, he was a lanky, stammering twit.

Edna May Oliver, likewise, an esteemed stage actress whose screen roles were exquisitely nuanced, had her value to Hollywood, especially the publicity departments that pushed these cartoons, reduced to an ugly old lady.

Hollywood Detour (1942) brings the gang back for a bus tour of the town.  This one was Columbia.  Garbo is back with her large feet and sleepy affect.  Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth, however, get off without being cruelty teased.

Mother Goose Goes Hollywood (1938), another Walt Disney offering, gives comic sendups of Hepburn, Spencer Tracy and Freddie Bartholomew, Edward G. Robinson, Martha Raye, and most of the others mentioned above.

There seemed to be less cartoon parodies of the stars by the mid 1940s--though Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall would pop up in Slick Hare (1947) and in Eight Ball Bunny (1950).  Here the caricatures are not unkind.

When the studio system began to break up and the actors were free agents, they were less likely to be marketed according to their branded caricature. 

Did audiences of the day discover through these cartoons what brilliantly blue eyes William Powell had, an actor they normally saw only in black and white films?

Take a look at the other swell blogs participating in the Hollywood on Hollywood blogathon.

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The audio book for Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. is now for sale on Audible.com, and on Amazon and iTunes.

Also in paperback and eBook from Amazon.

Previews and Playing to the Audience

The film industry in its early years was extremely sensitive to audience reaction. This sometimes went as far as changing the movie they had just finished if an audience viewing a preview didn’t like the ending.

At the end of “The Champ,” Wallace Beery lost the fight and died. At least, he was dead until the preview audiences saw, were horrified, and wrote as much on their questionnaires. The studio, horrified, released a new version. Wallace Beery won the fight, lived and everybody was happy.

Keeping the audience happy was more important than what might be defended today as artistic integrity. Actually, artistic integrity is not always terribly common today, either. A bit more business is sometimes added to films today to bring an otherwise G-rated film to a more sophisticated audience and to what the producers may feel is a more acceptable film to today’s paying customer.

Making the film more acceptable to the paying customer back then required sometimes the opposite effect: making things nicer, not nastier. Gene Kelly played such a rat in “For Me and My Gal,” that audiences couldn’t stand to see him paired with Judy Garland. They felt such a nice girl was much better off with a swell guy like George Murphy. But, since Kelly was the actor the studio wanted to showcase, they re-vamped his character and made him a hero at the end of the film. This took some doing, because his character maimed his hand trying to dodge the World War draft, but Hollywood always has a way of making things better.

Gary Cooper, at the end of “Meet John Doe” was supposed to jump off a building in protest to Edward Arnold’s group of big-business fascists trying to take over the country. The preview audience again intervened, not liking one bit the idea of Gary Cooper splattered all over the pavement. The film was released with the version of Barbara Stanwyck stopping him in time, and Cooper carrying her off the rooftop in his arms, with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony swelling in the background.

Hollywood of the time is sometimes mocked for its happy endings, but it evidently gave the customer what the customer wanted. It was the audience that wanted happy endings.