Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/551510
59 SUMMER 2015 / CINEMONTAGE Greatest Role of His Career," Dick Powell, who as Lysander "Sings His Way into Your Heart," and, most famously, Mickey Rooney as Puck, among a cast of stars, the film did not find a popular audience. The soundmen, Charles David Forest (whose first credit was on the aforementioned Shrew) and Nathan Levinson (who had worked with Sam Warner to bring sound to the movies with 1927's The Jazz Singer), received no screen credit. This film too failed to make much money. Cartmell argues that while Hollywood tried to position filmed Shakespeare plays as cultural opportunities for those who thought him too highbrow, early sound films did not succeed in this, and they generally served to alienate critics and the intelligentsia who revered the playwright. The author also provides fascinating tidbits about many seemingly absurd promotional suggestions, particularly with Dickens adaptations. The MGM pressbook for Charles Conway's 1935 A Tale of Two Cities is typical in its suggestion, "Addressed especially to those theatres that cannot afford the expense of a Dickens float…" that they should employ people dressed as Dickens characters wearing sandwich boards in the shape of giant books featuring the movie's posters as covers. These walking books should then be deployed to "school and college locations" to emphasize the film's literary credentials. Cartmell also indicates that Dickens' portrayals of Victorian poverty were appealing to poor Depression-era audiences and that his work was more "popular" than "classic." Her research demonstrates that at least for the studios, these suppositions were true. More success was found in the horror genre. Early sound adaptations of gothic novels, such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (directed by James Whale), Bram Stoker's Dracula (Tod Browning) and Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Reuben Mamoulian) — all from 1931 — continue today as classic films, themselves considered as source material to be referenced and parodied. Cartmell ascribes this timelessness to two factors: 1) the fact that they stressed the horror genre over the original writing, and 2) the filmmakers recognized and used the power of silence. She cites the brilliance of the three directors and their understanding of mise-en-scène, editing and careful use of sound. Cartmell's analysis confirms that the marketing departments continued to stress original authors, but a poster shows that Look Who's Talking CONTINUED FROM PAGE 55 John Huston and his co-writers for the biopic Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940), among others. As a practical joke, the successful filmmaker accepted the prize by saying, "Mr. Sturges was so overcome by the mere possibility of winning that he was unable to come here tonight and asked me to accept it in his stead." Most of those present did not know what Sturges looked like, and everyone applauded — thinking the speaker was finished. The abashed winner just returned to his seat. Sturges was nominated for the same award twice more for The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero (both from 1944) — effectively cancelling out his chances to win. He might then have remembered something else the Boss told McGinty: "Yesterday you was a hobo on the breadline… Today you got a thousand berries and a new suit. If you keep on like you started today, there's no telling where you'll be tomorrow. This is a land of great opportunity." f McGinty CONTINUED FROM PAGE 18 Universal's "Carl Laemmle presents Dracula," while Frankenstein is "A Chilling Thriller based on a Novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley." Cartmell notes that in the latter, silence replaces dialogue "…as the increasingly articulate monster of Mary Shelley's tale becomes a mute in Whale's film." The studios were still very much ready to claim legitimacy through literary heritage when it served their purpose. In responding to the pressures of the Hays Code, the MPPDA's Head of the Studio Relations Committee apparently felt that Paramount could exploit Hyde's horrors in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde "since it was built upon a literary classic." Cartmell also makes a case for the influence of the Code in creating the cycles of often-derided biopics, in which stars become conflated with historical personages. She focuses on The Private Life of Henry the VIII (1933) as playing on audiences' prurient interest in "private lives" of movie stars. Charles Laughton's Henry became a standard popular image of the king, while Elsa Lanchester (Laughton's real-life wife) plays Henry's fourth, Anne of Cleves. In the later 1930s, when the Code was in full effect, advertising for adaptations of children's films emphasized purity and morality. Shirley Temple vehicles such as John Ford's version of Rudyard Kipling's Wee Willie Winkie and Alan Dwan's film of Johanna Spyri's Heidi, (both 1937) relied on the child star's innocent image. Heidi's pressbook unites the novel's character with the star, "In the Beloved Story Millions Wanted Her to Make" and offered bookmarks with pictures of the novel surrounded by fan letters begging Temple to take on the role. In Adaptations in the Sound Era, Cartmell provides fascinating tidbits about these and other seeming absurdities. Without overplaying obvious ironies, she investigates a little-studied area, wisely leaving it to readers to find their own enjoyment in the details. f Taming of the Shrew's tagline declares, "The big three — Mary, Doug and Bill," the latter being the Bard himself.