Do not skip this episode, which premieres Nov. 22 and covers 1928 to 1941, in TCM’s outstanding Moguls & Movie Stars series on Hollywood’s history. Previous episodes include “Peepshow Pioneers,” “The Birth of Hollywood,” and “The Dream Merchants“.
Part four features the studio titans, stars and movies of the day in facts and pictures, from the demise of heroic Carl Laemmle, who saved hundreds of Jews from the Nazis, Sam Warner, who understood the importance of technology, and hardworking William Fox, on the eve of his takeover plans, to Shirley Temple, Bette Davis, the unsung (and, among today’s dominant black intellectuals, disowned) Hattie McDaniel, and the still-breathtaking 1939 screen adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s brilliant novel Gone With the Wind.
Both sound and the Great Depression brought changes to Hollywood, and one learns that most of the great studio titans, who were Republicans, risked their fortunes to make motion pictures. We also learn the widely unknown fact that America’s bankers, Wall Street capitalists, and businessmen like Howard Hughes rescued studios, investing huge amounts of money and building creative houses that sponsored such original talents as Barbara Stanwyck, Clark Gable, Fred Astaire, James Cagney and the “American Garbo,” Katharine Hepburn, who “knew what she was worth”, demanded it, and got it. Hepburn wasn’t alone in setting her terms; Astaire convinced studios to shoot his whole body during dance scenes, writers were granted autonomy in creating some of the best scripts, and, raising the ire of conservative Catholic Production Code chief Joseph Breen, comedienne Mae West combined wit and sex to become the highest paid woman in America in 1935.
Other highlights include a luminous photograph of actress Carole Lombard, a shot of scientist Albert Einstein with wealthy comedian Charlie Chaplin, the dedication of producer Irving Grant Thalberg to motion pictures as an art, actor Edward G. Robinson, artist Walt Disney compared to Thomas Edison, Columbia Pictures, the decline of scandalized Clara Bow, whose career ended at the age of 28, and the rise of dictatorship in the West. With a glaring exception, the absence of any mention of Soviet influence among Communists in Hollywood during the Red Decade (the 1930s), the badly titled “Brother, Can You Spare a Dream?” which airs Monday, Nov. 22, is interesting and entertaining.