Columbia and Hollywood.

 Columbia Studios were always pretty slack about showing their early movies. You got the  impression that Frank Capra was the only director they had pre WW2. Jean Arthur, Jack Holt, Carol Lombard, Fay Wray and Victor Jory  have always been under-represented in my viewing, though a few collector copies and TV prints did slip through. Fortunately the company appears to have looked after the master materials and now some items are showing up on DVD and You Tube in beautiful copies. Bad news is that so far they have been uninspiring.

It Happened in Hollywood - Dix & Wray.

Harry Lachman’s 1937 It Happened in Hollywood however does have a number of claims on our attention. It appears to be Sam Fuller’s first screen credit - as the last name among the writers - not that his input is recognisable. More significantly it is probably the most revealing of those Hollywood accounts of the silent to sound period, again promoting the myth of the stars destroyed by recording. This keeps on surfacing in movies -  the Star Is Borns, Hollywood Cavalcade, Singing the Rain, You’re My Everything and of course Sunset Boulevard, The Buster Keaton Story and The Artist. Hard to quantify these things but the drop out rate seems to be greater among the Broadway imports of the early sound years ... Robert Ames, Talulah Bankhead, Osgood Perkins, Helen Morgan?

It Happened in Hollywood has probably the best coverage of that transition filmed, notably the crane round the studio where they are working with a dialogue director, two cameras in sound proof booths, number board and clap sticks. Throw in exterior shooting of a tracking shot walking with a hand held microphone and canvas & timber camera blimp or the always splendid William B. Davidson as a director peering at a miniature of the set using a viewfinder.

We see a board for one of the films within the film with "R. Maté" on it. A character in a beret steps up with a filter and I thought we might be getting treated to a glimpse of the cameraman of European films by Dreyer and Clair. One Cyril Ring is credited in the part.

Particularly notable here is the contribution of  lead Richard Dix, a powerhouse of the silent period (To the Last Man, Vanishing American) whose stardom carried on into sound with his Nothing But The Truth and Cimarron. In this one he gets to do the show piece scene, playing the awkward silent cowboy star in his Tuxedoed screen test with glamorous Fay Wray, where his delivery of the dialogue is so stilted that speech coach Franklin Pangborn (no less) playing perfectly straight, steps into the glamor decor wearing his business suit and repeats the lines more convincingly using the delivery of early sound films. Later in a nice scene alone with Wray on the sunny, flower covered hillside, Dix does this passage with his own phrasing making it sound sincere and touching. This detail alone, which most wouldn’t notice, gives the film some interest. No longer the giant of the movies he had been, Dix never the less owns this one.

Pangborn, Wray and Dix

It Happened in Hollywood starts with a fakey silent western with Dix & Wray, which proves to be being shown in a children’s hospital ward where young orphan Bill Burrud is about to be wheeled off for his operation. Dix the kid’s visiting cowboy hero,  bucks him up with the suggestion that he should come see him in the movie capital - Oh, Oh!

A man of integrity, Dix ignores the opportunity for publicity “I’m not gonna use cripples and orphans to get my name in the paper” and goes off on his personal appearance montage.

However sound arrives and, after seeing his test, studio head Granville Bates lets our hero go. “They’re not making outdoor pictures anymore.” This means that Dix has to sell the nineteen acre ranch, where he planned on setting up a boys’ camp, to nasty Edgar Dearing. Fay’s test was a hit so Richard bows out of her life though still smitten.

Outside the studio he gets into a punch up with Dearing while the cafe pianola plays and director Davidson watches and has an idea. “Cagney and Robinson - even Gable - are playing gangsters.” He cast Richard as a bank robber in Faye’s picture. When the script is modified however our hero walks, though they are behind schedule and losing the light (indoors!). Mindful of his fan base, he rejects the character of “low down, cop shootin’ gutter rat”. Faye, always gorgeous, even if she could never master the business of acting with sound, tells him “You’d have let me down if you’d played it.”

Our hero decides “When a cowboy can’t feed his horse, it’s time to move on.” However who should arrive in the rain that night but young Burrud run away from the orphanage.

The plot redemes the maudlin material with a curious and agreeable development where bungalow court neighbor and Mae Robson lookalike Zeffie Tilbury suggests they simulate a Hollywood celebrity gathering by having all the movie stars’ stand ins turn up in character at the hired ranch. Some of these are actually impersonators who appear only in this one film. They’ve got a Chaplin, a Harold Lloyd, a Joe E. Brown and a W.C. Fields. William Powell’s real stand-in does the star. The less convincing ones get to walk through and some get sustained scenes. His brother Arthur in a Captain Flagg uniform has Victor McLaglen down pat. Virginia Rendell, a convincing Mae West, vamps Dearing and Earl Haddon, their Bing Crosby, breaks out in a number. This is more fun than a barrel of monkeys.

Burrud and Joe E. Brown impersonator Charles Dow Clark

The venture however fails to raise the money needed to care for the Burrud so we swerve into crime movie - pouring rain, shoot out & car crash and Dix emerges as a hero signed for a new movie where he’ll again share the screen with Wray, whose own stardom had been fading. The ranch is made over for a boys camp - happy end.

More a curiosity than a success this one is beautifully filmed by Lachman who (rather like John Farrow) had a life more interesting than his films. He was a cartoonist who became a serious painter (Mary Meerson assured me he had a canvas in the Louvre) He moved to designer for Rex Ingram and into directing in Europe and the U.S. working through a string of B movies, including Charlie Chans. This is one of his better efforts.

Exploring old Hollywood  is  pastime that's seen me through a lifetime. Sometimes it pays off.

 

Barrie Pattison 2020.