Eighteen years after Goldwyn had seen his first Broncho Billy western, motion pictures entered a state of awkward adolescence. Just when films were mastering the mechanics of sound and bringing more complex material to the screen, the Depression forced most people to give up their regular moviegoing habits. Many writers of the day thought motion pictures could help the nation through the crisis by elevating its consciousness; they called for more reality and social responsibility in motion pictures.
Theodore Dreiser visited the film capital and discovered that even when studios set out to film such works as his American Tragedy or O‘Neill’s Strange Interlude, the decisionmakers were “not artists but business executives,” men who pandered to “the intelligence, moral views, etc. of the masses.” Dictates from the Hays Office helped create “Hollywood versions” of even classic works of literature.
Two days after taking hold of Art Cinema, Sam Goldwyn paid $150,000 for the motion picture rights to Street Scene. Arthur Hornblow, Jr., had talked Goldwyn into buying Elmer Rice’s Pulitzer Prize-winning hit of the 1928—29 season. Goldwyn had balked before purchasing the urban drama, afraid it could not be made into a satisfying motion picture. Street Scene was a naturalistic slice of New York tenement life, one of the first American plays in which proletarians were depicted as heroes. The entire play was set outside a brownstone in New York City. One of the building’s occupants, Anna Maurrant, is carrying on a love affair with Sankey, the milkman. Anna’s suspicious husband returns to his apartment unexpectedly, finds Anna with Sankey, and shoots them both. Around the front stoop of the apartment, the play probes the squalid lives of all the building’s tenants, especially the Maurrants’ daughter, Rose. In the end, she flees with her boyfriend for a new beginning elsewhere.
Adultery and murder were red flags to the Hays Office; characters who were overtly Jewish had always been anathema to Hollywood producers; the play had but one exterior set, with no action other than people walking in and out of the building and stopping by the steps to talk; and Goldwyn himself had an aversion to stories that were in any way sordid. He believed people went to the movies—especially in the Depression—to see glamour, not the grime that was outside their windows every day. Arthur Hornblow convinced him that producing Street Scene would add the luster he wanted to his name. Hornblow suggested that the play was not Jewish so much as urban, and that it could all be modulated simply by casting a pretty Gentile actress as Rose.
Goldwyn promptly negotiated with Paramount for the services of a button-nosed, blue-eyed colleen called Nancy Carroll. Shortly before the contracts were signed, she suddenly became unavailable. Unknown to Goldwyn, Paramount’s general manager, B. P. Schulberg, was trying to throw the part to another actress.
Sophia Kosow was the only child of Russian immigrants. After losing her father, young “Sylvia” was adopted by her mother’s second husband, Dr. Sigmund Sidney. At fifteen, she studied at the Theatre Guild School and accelerated to Broadway. In 1930, she appeared in Bad Girl, which Schulberg saw with his wife, Adeline, who would soon open a successful talent agency. She raved about the girl. With the older generation of actresses bowing before the “new breed who could both dazzle and speak,” said the Schulbergs’ son Budd, “B.P. was anxious to keep his studio abreast of L.B.’s, and so it was logical that he would back Mother’s judgment and sign young Sylvia before Mayer and Thalberg or the Warner Brothers snapped her up.” Months later, young Budd found himself awakened by his parents’ fighting; he heard his mother screaming about this “little hoor” and “cheap little kike.” B.P. had fallen in love with Sylvia Sidney while starring her in City Streets, a Dashiell Hammett gangland melodrama in which she played opposite Gary Cooper. By her next picture for Paramount, An American Tragedy, they had become Hollywood’s number one topic of gossip.
Budd Schulberg noted that Miss Sidney’s “New York waif-like quality ... was coming into style with the Depression”; in fact, Elmer Rice had wanted her to play the ingenue in Street Scene onstage and recommended her for the film. “SYLVIA SIDNEY FINE ACTRESS BUT QUITE HOMELY,” Joe Schenck warned Goldwyn in a wire from New York the instant he heard she was being considered. “STREET SCENE NOT ANY TOO COLORFUL IN STORY AND BACKGROUND STOP IN MY OPINION YOU SHOULD HAVE GOOD LOOKING PEOPLE.” Fifty years later, Miss Sidney herself conceded, “He took a big chance with me. That was the craziest step in the world ... taking someone in the process of being developed. But Goldwyn was a man who took chances. And Schulberg figured I should do it—that I’d come back pretty well established.”
She returned to Paramount a better actress for the experience. The unusual production allotted almost two weeks for rehearsal—with Elmer Rice always present on Richard Day’s authentic set, complete with elevated train station. Another twenty-three days were spent in front of the cameras.
Goldwyn recognized that the confines and the conscience of Street Scene demanded the talents of an extraordinary director. No American had made such vivid social statements on screen as King Vidor had in The Big Parade, The Crowd, and Hallelujah (with its all black cast)—all of which were Goldwyn favorites. And no director was more interested in new photographic technique, anything to liberate the camera from its tripod. “I think I was one of the few American directors to study what the Germans were doing in the late Twenties and early Thirties,” said Vidor, referring to the experimentation of such cinematographers as Karl Freund and Fritz Arno Wagner.
Vidor was “anxious to work for a producer who was aiming high,” but he thought Street Scene’s greatest strength as a play could be its primary weakness as a film:it would be a mistake to tamper with the simple form and mood of the play and to try to transpose any of the action or scenes to the interior of the house or to any other interior settings. At the same time I feared that the static, immobile quality of that one stoop and that one section of sidewalk would offer little opportunity for movement. The result might prove monotonous.
In Street Scene, he decided,we would never repeat a camera setup twice. If the setting couldn’t change, the camera could. We would shoot down, up, across, from high, from low, from a boom, from a perambulator, and we would move back and include not only the sidewalk but the street as well. This flexibility would actually make the film more deserving of Elmer Rice’s title than the play had been. The street, the sidewalk, the facade of the building would be our arena in which all the drama could happen.
This battle plan in mind, Vidor accepted the job, with George Barnes manning the camera.
Goldwyn populated most of his New York street with the original Broadway players. Eight of them came west, including John Qualen and Beulah Bondi, film novices who became two of the medium’s most durable character actors. Goldwyn did not even meet Miss Bondi until the wrap party for Street Scene, and then it was to offer her a contract. “I was told if I wanted to have a career I would have to submit to the seven-year contract,” she later recalled. “But I knew that those things meant seven years of slavery, so I didn’t take it.
On Saturday at the end of the rehearsal period for Street Scene, Vidor gave a full-dress performance before a small audience that included Sam and Frances Goldwyn, Arthur Hornblow, and Helen Hayes, whom Goldwyn was courting for a future picture. Occasionally, Vidor would lean over and whisper how the camera would be moving, but Goldwyn could not have cared less. He kept shushing Vidor, saying he was busy watching the play. At the end, Vidor approached him for any comments. “He was telling Miss Hayes what a great picture ‘Street Scene’ was going to be,” Vidor remembered. “She seemed to be in agreement, but suddenly Sam blurted out, ‘If you don’t believe me, come up to my office and I’ll read you the letter I wrote to New York only this morning!’” Both Vidor and Miss Hayes swallowed their laughs. “You will be crazy about Sylvia Sidney—she is marvelous,” Goldwyn wrote the skeptical Joe Schenck. “Believe me Joe, this is not said to make you feel good, but I truly believe everything I say.”
Street Scene came in under its modest $584,000 budget
, the cheapest Goldwyn picture in years. Because Vidor had choreographed so much of the camera movement before shooting began, he had cut most of the picture in his head. The only serious altercation in making the film came between producer and director over sound effects: Just as the play had been one of the first stage productions to include realistic sound effects throughout the performance, so too, Vidor hoped, the film would have a sound track rich with urban cacophony. Goldwyn violently refused. “At the time, he was right, of course,” acknowledged King Vidor. “Movies were still being made in which you could barely make out some of the dialogue, and a lot of background noise was generally a sign of poor quality. Sam would never stand for that.”
What Street Scene lacked in honks and sirens it more than made up for in music. In fact, the score of the picture remains its most enduring element. Movie music was going through its own metamorphosis in these first years of talking pictures, changing from constant accompaniment to more selective “commentative” use. Max Steiner, who was scoring as many as two motion pictures a month at RKO, recalled, “At this time, music for dramatic pictures was only used when it was actually required by the script. A constant fear prevailed among producers, directors and musicians, that they would be asked: Where does the music come from? Therefore they never used music unless it could be explained by the presence of a source like an orchestra, piano player, phonograph or radio, which was specified in the script.” In time, filmgoers proved willing to suspend audio as well as visual disbelief.
Filmmakers realized the great power of silence in talking pictures. According to Max Steiner, producers and directors “began to add a little music here and there to support love scenes or silent sequences” in the spring of 1931. Alfred Newman’s score of Street Scene that season helped the medium make the leap, illustrating how music might be utilized in the future.
Newman spent much time on the set during the making of the film, looking for places where he could “intersperse the dialogue with musical phraseology that [would have] the effect of intensifying each line.” The tight eighty-minute film ended up with only five infusions of music, most notably a theme that brackets the story and creeps in in the middle of the picture as a kind of entr‘acte at the start of a new day.
Newman’s theme owed a lot to his idol, George Gershwin. The film opens with a montage of Manhattan, over which plays a brief brass fanfare that gives way to a lone clarinet warbling the same low trill and ascent of the scale that opens Rhapsody in Blue. A full orchestra then plays the main theme, sounding like a pastiche of Gershwin fragments—lush in melody but full of the flatted seventh tones characteristic of blues and the popular jazz of the day. Newman folded it all together into a lingering theme that has come to be synonymous with Manhattan mornings. He later incorporated its opening two bars—nine notes of yawning melody 1—into a dozen other films.
Even without a single element of glamour to promote, Goldwyn got more advance publicity on this—his twenty-fifth film since starting his new company—than on any film he had yet produced. Street Scene firmly established Sylvia Sidney’s career. She took several bows from the stage of New York’s Rivoli Theater on the night of August 26, 1931, at what was another of Goldwyn’s star-studded openings. The dozen New York newspapers were unanimous in their praise; and, to Goldwyn’s surprise, Street Scene did respectable business.
Goldwyn, through Art Cinema, bought another Broadway hit, this time to complete the two-picture deal Joe Schenck had made in an attempt to get Gloria Swanson out of her career slump. Tonight or Never was an Americanized version of a popular Hungarian play about a temperamental diva whose teacher (and fiance) tells her that unless she ventures out and experiences life she will never become a great singer. She falls in love with a dashing gigolo, an impresario in disguise, who provides her with both love and a career. Goldwyn thought it was an ideal role for Swanson and that it would give him the chance to produce a film every bit as resplendent as Street Scene was drab.
After working with Ziegfeld, Goldwyn made it his contention that women went to movies to see how other women dressed. Many studio wardrobe departments were still headed by theater costumers, who were little more than seamstresses. Producers hired dress designers to make the clothes of important leading ladies in special productions. For many of Gloria Swanson’s early films, Cecil B. DeMille had brought over a couturier from Paris. Sam Goldwyn outdid all his colleagues when he commissioned Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel—whom costume designer Irene Sharaff credits with nothing less than laying “the foundation of present fashion”—for her first Hollywood assignment.
Chanel and her retinue of dress cutters, seamstresses, and press secretaries arrived in New York in early March 1931. Their advance on Hollywood was delayed by Mademoiselle’s bout with the grippe, but she rallied her way through Goldwyn’s rigorous schedule of interviews and press receptions in New York. She even took him aback by grabbing all the headlines for herself. The newsworthiness of her work on Tonight or Never, she said, had nothing to do with motion pictures; it was that Chanel had at last come to America.
Shooting began in September 1931, under the direction of Mervyn LeRoy. He had broken into motion pictures less than ten years earlier, when his cousin Jesse Lasky gave him a train ticket to Hollywood and a job in his studio’s wardrobe department. Most recently, LeRoy had directed the hit picture Little Caesar for Warner Brothers. Their studio in financial disarray, they gladly loaned out that year’s hottest young director. Never having heard a first name like LeRoy’s, Goldwyn called him “Moiphy.”
Swanson’s performance in Tonight or Never did not command the newspaper space her personal life did. (During the production, she and the Marquis de la Falaise divorced, and she eloped with the Irish playboy whose baby she was carrying.) Chanel’s costumes drew raves; and the leading man, Melvyn Douglas, in his film debut, walked away with the best notices. When Miss Swanson went off to have her baby, Joe Schenck invoked several clauses in her contract and canceled it. She made one more picture, in England, with a young hopeful from the London stage, Laurence Olivier; but the film’s failure meant a virtual end to her career as both a producer and a star. United Artists bought up her company stock and completely severed their relationship.
Goldwyn shopped on Broadway a third time that year. Zoë Akins’s hit comedy The Greeks Had a Word for It had three choice female roles. At worst, it would provide Goldwyn with an opportunity to audition women for the vacancy in his operation since Vilma Banky’s downfall. The bubbly farce followed a trio of gold diggers, known as the “Three Musketeers of Riverside Drive,” on their quest for millionaires. Sidney Howard’s script fleshed out the characters, playing up the girls’ camaraderie while holding down the sexuality to the censors’ standards. In fact, the simple allusion to “It” was enough to alarm Will Hays. In order to conform to the Hays Office’s newly drafted code, Goldwyn changed the title of the movie to The Greeks Had a Word for Them.
Casting a picture invariably comes down to actors’ availability. When Goldwyn found most stars under contract to the major studios and busy, he grew desperate. “He grabbed me in an elevator,” remembered Ina Claire, who had not seen Goldwyn since he was called Goldfish. In the late spring of 1931, Goldwyn passed through New York and saw her at the Hotel Pierre. “I want to talk to you!” he called out, rushing to catch the elevator she was in. “You’re my favorite actress, and I was just thinking about a great movie for you.” In the time it took to get from the lobby to the tenth floor, Goldwyn had bolted through the pleasantries and offered her a contract. Miss Claire had no interest in a Hollywood career; but, as with so many others exposed to his charm, she said, “I liked Sam’s enthusiasm and so I signed for a year with him.”
Goldwyn told her she could play Schatze, the dizzy blonde with most of the script’s zingers, but his eye still roved for more of a “bombshell” in the role. When he heard that Jean Harlow would be available, he set his heart on her, until both Frances Marion and Darryl Zanuck told him—as
he wired Joe Schenck—“SHE PROBABLY WORST ACTRESS THEY HAVE EVER KNOWN STOP ZANUCK SAYS IT TOOK DAYS TO DO ONE SCENE WITH HER STOP MARION SAYS THEY HAD TO CUT HER ROLE [in The Public Enemy] DOWN TO HALF AND EVEN THEN DIFFICULT GETTING HER TO HANDLE IT STOP UNDER CIRCUMSTANCES I CANNOT AFFORD TO TAKE CHANCE USING HER IN GREEKS WHERE ROLE REQUIRES QUICK REPARTEE AND MARVELOUS ACTING ...”
Then Goldwyn learned that Paramount was willing to loan him one of the most popular young women in town, if not yet to the public at large, Carole Lombard. Twenty-two and blonde, with big blue eyes, the former Jane Alice Peters, from Fort Wayne, Indiana, had lived in Los Angeles most of her life with her divorced mother. When she was twelve, Allan Dwan had spotted her playing baseball on the street with the neighborhood kids and put her in a picture. Five years later, she became one of Mack Sennett’s bathing beauties. Now Paramount did not quite know how to exploit her, but they knew she had unthreatening glamour and sly comic timing that made her appealing to both men and women. Ina Claire was recast as Jean, the man-stealer of the group.
The role of Polaire, the most romantic of the threesome, went to Madge Evans, a pretty actress who would play opposite Robert Montgomery, James Cagney, Spencer Tracy, and Clark Gable in a series of forgettable films in the thirties. Under the direction of Lowell Sherman—an actor who also appeared in the film—shooting began August 21, 1931.
The first scenes were Lombard’s, and after a few days she complained of being ill. By the second week of shooting, she said she was so sick that Lowell Sherman shut down the set for the day and drove her home. She never returned, and her condition was never fully explained. (Aborting a child by William Powell was the popular rumor.) Goldwyn gracefully sent her roses to cheer her while she convalesced. “Regardless of newspapers and talk,” she wrote him back, “I do feel very badly about stopping the picture. If it had been in my power to be back at work, I would have been there.” Ina Claire thought her co-star was more clever than anybody gave her credit for: “Nobody believed she was sick. I think she knew it was a lousy movie and she just wanted out.” Goldwyn quickly replaced Lombard with Joan Blondell, the daughter of a vaudevillian, whom Warners had signed the year before. After The Greeks, she proceeded to play a number of dizzy blondes and goodhearted gold diggers in Warner musicals.
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