Stars Are Born.

I've always been drawn to the films that ushered in the Golden Age of Hollywood. It's a buzz to watch the techniques and personnel that established the most influential body of entertainment the world is ever likely to know, falling into place. I just saw a couple which ilustrate both their faults and qualities. Ready for Love is a 1934 romcom from Paramount, made at the point where underage Ida Lupino was making a determined run for star status. It's deft by the standards of its director, Marion Gering, whose output was usually soggy melodramas with Cary Grant, Silvia Sidney or Ruth Chatterton.

Surprisingly, this one is proto Frank Capra with a city/small town contrast and newspaper background, even running to a 'phone gossip montage. Just to remind us it's still Pre-Code, the piece opens with titles over a dim background of Ida, or her body double, in her scanties as her character packs to run away from boarding school, blackmailing milkman Irving Bacon with the threat of screaming, into taking her to the train station, to join mother Marorie Rambeau doing her blackface theatre act backed by her string combo. When Ida’s little dog follows Rambeau onto stage, Ida shows the right spirit by having mum pick him up and carry him back for another curtain call.

Packed off on the train to rural town aunt Esther Howard, Ida arrives when the funeral of a local Burke family bigwig is in progress and the dog runs off (what happens to him?) leaving Ida at the station in tears and everyone thinking she’s the dead man’s bit of stuff. Local editor Richard Arlen, who has had to duck printing a bulky family-prepared obit. runs with the story, starting a scandal -  not much fact- checking here.

  Ready for Love - Rambeau & Lupino

Burke heir Junior Durkin is smitten with Ida and throws rocks through the window wrapped in his love poems. At the town’s Puritan Park basket social, he falls into the pond and Ida has to dive in and rescue him, outraging the womenfolk who put the dunking chair back into action. Dick splashes some more water on Ida and puts the photo of the incident on the wire, getting him an offer from big city paper. They & his local news sheet, now run by type-setter Charles Sellon, conduct the courtship in headlines. 

Ends with a double wedding, Aunt Esther and her ten-year fiancé joining Ida & Dick at the altar.

  It's all got a couple of things going for it. They are well on the way to turning Lupino into a  Hollywood movie star. The blonde curls will have got to go but she is a plausible 19 yr. old runaway schoolgirl with a mean sense of humour. The other thing is the depiction of the small rural community with the  Puritan ducking pond still functional. Sellon tells his boss, "This town hasn't got enough news to support a newspaper." It's a match for contemporary efforts like William Seiter's 1932 Hot Saturday or Alfred E. Green's 1934 Dark Hazard. In fact, come to think of it, these scandal-wracked sleepy whistle stops are the rule rather than the exception in 30s Hollywood. Once again, Beula Bondi asserts in a nothing role. "No one in my family ever fell in love." Husband Ralph Remley, who she tells to stay away from the cider, is delighted when her moralising gets her into strife. 

Ready For Love - Puritan pond with Bondi & Lupino

Ford Sterling is a half-familiar name that only the most determined will recall as the Keystone Kops' Dare Devil Chief. Even fewer will have followed his career from circus clown to sound movie star. He seems to have peaked in the 1920s in his collaboration with fellow Sennett alum, Director Malcolm St. Clair. They did the original film version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which has now vanished and also the first time out for George Kelly’s The Show Off, which has been lost in plain sight down the years. Kelly is now remembered, if at all, as Grace Kelly’s uncle, though his Craig’s Wife and The Show Off  were Pulitzer Prize contender stage successes of the twenties. 

The Show Off did twelve weeks on Broadway and was filmed at least five times (Spencer Tracy, Hal Skelly, Red Skelton, Jackie Gleason). Once again the silent is the most credible.  It is sustained by Sterling as blow hard Aubrey Piper, who his fellow thirty dollar a week clerks call Carnation Charley because of his attempt to pass himself off as their superior. The other versions struggled to make his character sympathetic at feature length.  

This “blatherskite” is sparking lady-like Lois  Wilson (The Covered Wagon) and feeding her an “applesauce” pitch about his importance. Her mum, Griffith star Claire McDowell dreads Sterling’s visits “He eats more than he talks, if such a thing is possible.” However, Ford makes a fake ‘phone call (hand on receiver rest) postponing his important meeting to dine with the family, slapping dad C.W. Goodrich on the back, which the old man resents. They see through him. “If that man has thirty clerks under him, they’re on the floor below.”

Nevertheless, the marriage to Wilson goes ahead and, instead of the pipe organ and sunken pools he’d promised, they rent a tacky tenement his salary won’t cover, meaning they have to move in with her folks. He wins the office raffle car and mimes a stick shift to the delivery man, unable to master the controls and getting into Keystone-style road chaos, until he ends with a traffic cop pinned against the wall. The real street views and the Philadelphia history beginning nicely set the piece in a way the stage production never could do.

Sterling at the wheel.

The traffic material is a welcome opening out. Much of what precedes it had been played in the family home’s three-wall set where chandeliers were hung into shot from the studio roof to suggest there’s a ceiling. Busy domestic interiors give way effectively to the severe, white-walled hospital setting. No art director credit is given.

Sterling performs without the heavy make-up that the others use, making his character seem more modern and he has the set piece of miming the car smash, where he claims to have rescued a baby. His career may be considered to have peaked here though it continued into the forties. The nice everybody-stands gag from this film does duty again with him in the 1937 Many Happy Returns. Mal St. Clair was also at his peak as “the American Lubitsch” with a run of polished comedies using people including Joan Crawford, Pola Negri and Adolph Menjou. His career would decline into making the last, feeble, Laurel & Hardy features.

Show Off - Brooks

 However there is another reason The Show Off  has continued to circulate, where it’s contemporaries have sunk into obscurity. It was recently featured in the promotion of the Paris Cinémathèque’s Louise Brooks season and there she is at her still unspoiled most appealing, as the girl next door, her modern look and short hair already eye-catching. St. Clair put moves on her and here he gives her a couple of the film’s most memorable moments - ridiculing Sterling’s rescue-account gestures and being the one to turn on him when his stupidity has caused real harm. They did a couple more together - The Social Secretary and The Canary Murder Case. 

… and to put a cherry on it, there is a nice, sharp, close to correct-speed copy on You Tube. I’m not all that gone on the score or the decorative back ground they use to get the shape right but this one is better served than most productions of its day.

The DVDs of Ready For Love are OK and the copy of The Show Off  @  https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+show+off+1926 is sharp.  

                                                                                                                              

                                                                   

Barrie Pattison - 2026.