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Bette Davis was in four movies (Dark Victory, Juarez, The Old Maid and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex), as were Claudette Colbert (Drums Along the Mohawk, Midnight, It's a Wonderful World and Zaza) and Mickey Rooney (Huckleberry Finn, Babes in Arms and two movies in his enormously successful Andy Hardy series). Rooney, incidentally, was No. 1 at the box office that year. Greta Garbo laughed, as the ads triumphantly proclaimed, in Ninotchka; Ingrid Bergman made her American debut in Intermezzo; Marlene Dietrich saved her flagging career with Destry Rides Again; the Marx Brothers clowned in At the Circus; and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced through The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle. Judy Garland, who was all of 16, was in only two pictures -- The Wizard of Oz and Babes in Arms -- but her giant talent and irresistible personality captured the screen and permanently touched the country's heart.
Behind the cameras were almost all the directors whose work is so avidly studied in the film schools, a group that included John Ford, George Cukor, George Stevens, Cecil B. DeMille, Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh, William Wyler, Busby Berkeley, Henry King, Ernst Lubitsch and Victor Fleming. Behind them were the producers, who were far more important then than they are now, men such as David O. Selznick, Sam Goldwyn, Darryl F. Zanuck, Pandro S. Berman, Hal Wallis and Arthur Hornblow Jr.
The trouble with a Golden Age is that nobody sees the sheen and shine until years later. In Hollywood's case, it was many years later. East Coast intellectuals, who thought that the only real acting was done on Broadway, sneered at Hollywood's output. But, then, why shouldn't they have? The studio bosses, after all, liked to brag that they were just businessmen whose job it was to turn out movies -- no one in those days called them films -- the way General Electric did refrigerators and Ford did cars. The stories of their often comical obtuseness have since filled several hundred memoirs. "Who wants to see some dame go blind and die?" asked Jack Warner when Davis said she wanted to make Dark Victory. But he reluctantly gave in, and the story of the dame who goes blind and dies was one of Warner Bros.' biggest hits.
The directors and scriptwriters -- both William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald were employed in Hollywood that year -- were severely restricted, moreover, by Hollywood's rigid code of self-censorship. Long kisses were forbidden, adultery always had to be severely punished, and double beds were for sinners in New York City. In Hollywood movies, even happily married couples, like Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man series, slept in widely separated twin beds, clad top to bottom in pajamas or nightgown. Such now innocuous four-letter words as hell and damn were proscribed, and Gone With the Wind titillated and sometimes shocked audiences with Clark Gable's final words to Leigh: "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."