How Talmudic
I borrowed a book of film criticism from the library. Someone had underlined a lot of the text and written "right" or "wrong" in the margins. At first I was annoyed, but then I thought, it's only fair, isn't it?
I also took out a biography of Ernst Lubitsch. Late in the book, the author states:
After Shirley Temple hit puberty and saw her career disappear, about all Zanuck could offer were Tyrone Power, Alice Faye, Betty Grable, or Don Ameche, most of whom would have been lucky to get second leads at Metro.
After 306 pages of silence, one reader could take it no longer, and wrote: "POWER WAS A SUPER STAR."
posted by LAGuy @ 12:47 AM
2 Comments:
I wouldn't have lasted 308 pages. Tyrone Power was #2 at the box office in 1939, the year of Gone with the Wind - way ahead of Metro's Mr. Gable.
Thanks for your comment.
It's hard to measure how much a "star" someone is. If you just look at box office (which was always a slippery concept anyway, even moreso back them), some of your biggest stars of the 30s and early 40s would be Marie Dressler, Will Rogers, Shirley Temple, Sonja Henie, Deanna Durbin, Abbot & Costello and, indeed, Fox's Tyrone Power, Betty Grable and Alice Faye, as well as Metro's Mickey Rooney. Look at the situation today--Christian Bale stars in the biggest hit film, much bigger than Will Smith's hit film, whose film is bigger than Meryl Streep's hit film, whose film is bigger than anything Al Pacino's done lately. But who's the bigger star? (Though Gable was a huge star in the 30s no matter how you measure him--box office or glamor or respect.)
Lubitsch wasn't thrilled about getting Don Ameche for Heaven Can Wait, but he tested well enough so he got the job. Ameche was not a "Lubitsch" sort of actor. But some Lubitsch fans think he did a great job. We'll never know how things would have worked out otherwise.
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