Tag: The Golden Age of Hollywood

Categories
Dear Reader

Dear Reader #169

Dear Reader,

By 1924 film producer B.P. Schulberg was guiding Clara Bow’s career. Under his guidance, she made her eighth movie, Poisoned Paradise: The Forbidden Story of Monte Carlo, a silent romantic drama.

Clara played Margot Le Blanc. Left a small fortune by her foster mother, Margot goes to Monte Carlo and loses the fortune gambling. She finds support, and love, from an artist, Hugh Kildair.

Throughout her life, Clara needed sound people around her to guide her. At this time, she had Schulberg along with her agent, Maxine Alton. However, an affair between Alton and Schulberg shattered Clara’s confidence in them. Clara was trusting and naïve, and it’s fair to say that Alton and Schulberg exploited her trust and naivety.

🖼 Lobby card for Poisoned Paradise

Highest Grossing Movie of 1928 (joint) The Singing Fool.

A part-talkie musical melodrama, The Singing Fool starred Al Jolson. Following hot on the heels of The Jazz Singer, this movie established Jolson as a leading entertainer. The Singing Fool was more popular than The Jazz Singer mainly because many movie theatres were not equipped to show talkies when the The Jazz Singer was released in 1927.

Although heavily reliant on its musical interludes, The Singing Fool was released as a silent movie, alongside the sound version. The film ran for 102 minutes with 66 minutes devoted to dialogue and singing.

Reviews were, in the main, positive. “The Singing Fool is the finest example of sound pictures made to date.” – the Film Daily. The New York Times felt that the dialogue was “a little halting” and “not convincing”, but concluded that the main point of interest was “Mr Jolson’s inimitable singing”, and on that basis the movie was “capital entertainment.”

My latest translation, the Italian version of Operation Sherlock, Eve’s War Heroines of SOE, book five.

Clara Bow Quotes: “During my recent troubles, when broken in health and on the verge of despair, my many friends of the vast motion picture audience came to my assistance with countless messages of faith and good cheer. To them, I am profoundly grateful. If I do make another motion picture, it will be to please to the best of my ability those fans and friends who at no time lost faith in me.”

The Golden Age of Hollywood Winter 2022

Intertitle #9

As ever, thank you for your interest and support.

Hannah xxx

For Authors

#1 for value with 565,000 readers, The Fussy Librarian has helped my books to reach #1 on 34 occasions.

A special offer from my publisher and the Fussy Librarian. https://authors.thefussylibrarian.com/?ref=goylake

Don’t forget to use the code goylake20 to claim your discount 🙂

Categories
Dear Reader

Dear Reader #167

Dear Reader,

Clara Bow’s sixth movie was Maytime, a silent romantic drama produced during August and September 1923 and released on December 11, 1923. The movie starred Ethel Shannon, Harrison Ford and William Norris, with Clara fourth on the bill playing Alice Tremaine. 

After a stunning screen test, producer B.P. Schulberg gave Clara the part of Alice in Maytime. Within a week, the film’s crew were urging Schulberg to ditch Ethel Shannon and give Clara the lead role. He didn’t. Nevertheless, Clara had made her point and established her breakthrough.

📸 Clara Bow and Ethel Shannon in Maytime.

Highest Grossing Movie of 1926, For Heaven’s Sake.

A silent comedy, For Heaven’s Sake starred Harold Lloyd and was directed by Sam Taylor. The movie was a great success for Lloyd and earned $2,600,000 at the box office, which made it the twelfth highest grossing film of the silent era.

In the 1920s, Lloyd alternated between making what he called “gag pictures” and “character pictures”. He regarded For Heaven’s Sake as a “gag picture”. Despite the film’s success, Lloyd wasn’t happy with it. Indeed, he was so disappointed with the final cut that he considered abandoning the project.

A large number of scenes were filmed and later cut from the final movie. Some of those scenes, especially an underworld sequence, resurfaced (no pun intended) and were incorporated into Lloyd’s 1928 film Speedy.

My latest article for the Seaside News appears on page 34 of the magazine.

Roundabout, Series 1, Episode 22 of The Rockford Files was the last broadcast episode in the first series. This episode contained some great one-liners. Obnoxious Hirer: “I should warn you, I have a blackbelt in judo.” Rockford (picking up a golf club): “And I have a blackbelt in seven-iron.” 

Bank Manager: “She’s strange.” Rockford: “You don’t call people with $300,000 in their account ‘strange’.” Bank Manager: “What do you call them?” Rockford: “Eccentric.”

The climactic chase scene at the Hoover Dam was originally scripted as a car chase. However, someone suggested that Rockford and the villain should run through the Hoover Dam instead, creating one of the iconic moments in the first series.

Time for a break. I look forward to catching up with series two of the Rockford Files in the new year.

Coming soon, our new magazine, The Golden Age of Hollywood, available from all leading Internet outlets. Here’s a preview of the cover.

Clara Bow Quotes. After the director cut her role in Beyond the Rainbow, Clara enrolled in a business training school. However, Fate intervened again. “A month or so after my first motion-picture ‘flop’ I was called one day to the telephone. The man speaking at the other end of the wire introduced himself as Mr Elmer Clifton, and asked if I could see him that afternoon. My heart took a leap. Elmer Clifton was a motion-picture director and, hardly daring to believe my good fortune, I readily agreed to see him. I was so excited, I could hardly talk.”

Clifton offered Clara a two-week trial period and a salary of $35 a week. The two-week trial period stretched to thirteen weeks as, impressed by Clara’s natural talent, Clifton developed her role as Dot Morgan in Down to the Sea in Ships (pictured). This time, Clara was truly setting sail.

Intertitle #7

As ever, thank you for your interest and support.

Hannah xxx

For Authors

#1 for value with 565,000 readers, The Fussy Librarian has helped my books to reach #1 on 32 occasions.

A special offer from my publisher and the Fussy Librarian. https://authors.thefussylibrarian.com/?ref=goylake

Don’t forget to use the code goylake20 to claim your discount 🙂

Categories
Dear Reader

Dear Reader #165

Dear Reader,

Coming soon, our new magazine, The Golden Age of Hollywood, available from all leading Internet outlets. Here’s a preview of the cover.

Clara Bow’s fourth movie was The Daring Years aka The Folly of Youth. The movie was produced in New York during the first half of 1923 and released on September 15, 1923.

The Daring Years was adapted from a photoplay by Richard Ellison. Clara was listed fourth on the bill, as ‘John’s Sweetheart, Mary’. Unfortunately, this movie is regarded as lost.

A silent melodrama, The Daring Years features a love triangle and a man wrongly accused of murder. The man, John Browning, is strapped into an electric chair when a lightning bolt (!) and Clara Bow save the day. 

The premise for The Daring Years, an accidental shooting, is sound, but maybe the movie could have done without the lightning bolt.

After the completion of The Daring Years, Clara embarked for Hollywood where she released a few lighting bolts of her own.

🖼 Advertisement for The Daring Years.

Joint Highest Grossing Movie of 1925: The Big Parade.

The Big Parade was a silent war drama directed by King Vidor. It starred John Gilbert and Renée Adorée. Written by World War One veteran Laurence Stallings, the movie has been praised for its realistic depiction of warfare. Furthermore, it heavily influenced a great many subsequent war films, especially All Quiet on the Western Front.

Regarded as one of the great World War One movies, The Big Parade told the story of an idle rich boy who joined the US Army’s Rainbow Division. Sent to France to fight in the war, he befriends two working class men, experiences the horrors of trench warfare, and finds love with a French girl, played by Renée Adorée.

Through public records, I’m tracing the ancestry of actress Eva Marie Saint. I’ve discovered that she’s directly descended from Sir Thomas Pope, 1507 – 1559, founder of Trinity Church Oxford, Councillor to Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth. Further royal connections are highly likely.

At this stage, I need to pause and double-check because it’s probably that one of these branches will connect with noble pedigrees.

The Four Pound Brick, Series 1, Episode 20 of The Rockford Files was written by the all-female team of Leigh Brackett and Juanita Bartlett from a story by Leigh Brackett. 

Leigh Brackett wrote science fiction and fantasy, and novels in the style of Raymond Chandler. Indeed, there are noirish elements to The Four Pound Brick that suggest Chandler’s influence. Leigh Brackett also wrote the screenplay for Chandler’s classic The Big Sleep.

Rocky, Becker and Angel are well to the fore in this episode, and the closing scene with Becker in Rockford’s trailer highlights how these characters have become members of the Rockford ‘family’.

Clara Bow Quotes: “What a thrill! I was now a fully-fledged motion-picture actress, and only fourteen years old (census returns suggest that Clara was sixteen when she broke into the movies). I was the idol of the neighbourhood. Those children who had heretofore passed me by now were my staunch friends. For hours I had to relate my experiences in the motion-picture studio. This certainly was the ultimate in happiness. But little did I know how fickle Fate can be…”

Intertitle #5

As ever, thank you for your interest and support.

Hannah xxx

For Authors

#1 for value with 565,000 readers, The Fussy Librarian has helped my books to reach #1 on 32 occasions.

A special offer from my publisher and the Fussy Librarian. https://authors.thefussylibrarian.com/?ref=goylake

Don’t forget to use the code goylake20 to claim your discount 🙂