(3 of 5)
"Not since the days of the Forty-Niners," wrote Novelist Upton Sinclair in 1933, "had there been such a way for the little fellow to get rich as in this new business." The little fellow Sinclair mentioned could have been Chaplin. Born in a London slum, the comic arrived in the U.S. in 1910. Three years later he signed his first movie contract, at $150 a week; four years after that, he was to make $1 million a year and become, for a time, the planet's most recognizable and cherished figure. Chaplin deserved no less; his poignant one-reel comedies taught the world how to love movies. Pickford, with her ringlets and coquettish ways, was hardly less popular, and no less resourceful. In 1909 the little girl from Toronto cadged an audition with Film Pioneer D.W. Griffith; by 1916 she could tell the bosses at Paramount Pictures, "No, I really cannot afford to work for only $10,000 a week" (which is precisely the fee she settled for). This sudden affluence did not short-circuit the masses' identification with the movie stars. It merely confirmed the public's image of them as extraordinary ordinary people. They were "us" on the big screen, with every wish of fame, charm, romance, wit and avarice fulfilled. They were their own movies.
As the industry's mantle spread around the world, new immigrant stars filled important character niches. The Latin lover: Rudolph Valentino (Italy); the noble warlord: Sessue Hayakawa (Japan); the tragic heroine: Pola Negri (Poland); the vamp goddess: Greta Garbo (Sweden). Nor was the flood stanched with the arrival of talking pictures in the late 1920s. Hollywood saw the Babel of exotic accents as one more earnest of its cosmopolitan reach. And so Maurice Chevalier and Charles Boyer brought their suavity from France; Marlene Dietrich (Germany), Hedy Lamarr (Austria) and Ingrid Bergman (Sweden) helped Garbo flesh out the fantasy of the European woman. From south of the border Carmen Miranda brought her fruity headdresses, Gilbert Roland his purring machismo. Half of England, it seemed, played cricket every Sunday in Griffith Park. And with bitter thanks to Adolf Hitler, Hollywood welcomed hundreds of refugees from the Third Reich. As performers, writers, directors or technicians, they would animate and dominate Hollywood for its next 30 years.
The pioneer immigrant directors -- Maurice Tourneur from France, the Germans Ernst Lubitsch and F.W. Murnau -- imported civilized modes of fantasy, comedy and folklore. But the new exiles had darker stories to tell, and through them Hollywood found its caustic maturity. Here were artists with an outsider's perspective and, suddenly, an insider's clout; they could celebrate the temple of American success while keeping an eye on the cracks in its facade. The industry, or at least that part of it that handed out awards, was grateful: eleven of the first 20 Oscars for best direction went to immigrants, from Frank Lloyd (Cavalcade) and Frank Capra (It Happened One Night) to William Wyler (The Best Years of Our Lives) and Elia Kazan (Gentleman's Agreement).