The Star Machine

by Jeanine Basinger

  Today, scholars, critics, and magazine writers define a movie star’s “type” by calling it “persona.” “Persona”—typecasting with its hat on—means the creation of a second self that is believed to be the original self. (It was a word unknown in old Hollywood.) Today we can understand that some movie star “types” were so utterly believable in their particular roles—and they lasted so long playing them—that we can cut them out of the herd and say that, in fact, these unique personalities really do have what we can call a special “persona.”* Nevertheless, they, like everyone else, would originally have had to deal with a star machine that thought of them as a product. For those who are movie legends, the elevated few, their “persona” that we “see” today is less a fact than it is an accolade we bestow in retrospect. “Persona,” simply stated, is highly successful typecasting, a product with a very long shelf life.

  Sadly, Hollywood’s typecasting is often believed to reflect a lack of talent. “Clark Gable can’t act, so he always played the same guy, and that’s because that’s the only guy he could play.”† The business saw it differently. They knew Clark Gable always played the same guy because that was the guy the public wanted him to play—and “that guy” was a performance. It was such a good performance, in fact, that people believed it. The studios learned that to succeed, actors had to “become” the role, because film was an up-close, in-the-dark, one-on-one, intimate medium. This is both the glory of movie stardom and its curse. When people want to describe the appeal of a star, the words are very flattering: unique, talented, memorable, believable, honest. But when they want to criticize a star, they say “He just plays himself.” Movie stars, it’s sometimes thought, not only don’t act, they can’t act. While many movie stars were indeed actors with limited skills (by the standards of the theatre), making an audience really believe (in close-up) that you are the character you’re playing may be the hardest kind of acting there is. No one expects to leave the theatre having been convinced that Laurence Olivier is really a Danish prince who’s a bit indecisive and that he was generously sharing with us how that looked and felt to him. Yet that is what movie audiences (and the studios) expected from a movie star.*

  The question shouldn’t be, Can movie stars act? The question should be, Are they believable on-screen? John Cromwell, a director who worked with many of the biggest names in film (Cary Grant, Carole Lombard, Barbara Stanwyck, Irene Dunne, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Charles Boyer, Hedy Lamarr, Ronald Colman, Claudette Colbert, Tyrone Power, and more), commented, “All of these people could act, some, of course, better than others. But the point is, the audience believed in them. That’s what movies call acting. People forget that acting for film is different from acting in the theatre.”

  Lucille Ball said, “What you were encouraged to do at the studios was to become a flapper girl, a glamour girl, or some type. You were that type of girl belonging to that type of picture. It was very limiting.” It was limiting, but it was the price of movie stardom. Furthermore, the studios considered it the crowning achievement for a performer. If an audience responded to the actor or actress as a type—and they liked that type—they’d pay money to see it many times. The public wanted to go to the diner that made meatloaf the way they wanted it made—no curries, glazes, or à la françaises, please. The public wanted to know what it was going to get for its money. “Give me Clark Gable as Clark Gable in a Clark Gable kind of movie.” In old Hollywood, everything audiences knew about star “types” they learned by accumulation, by going to movie after movie. Roles were added up to create an unarticulated dialogue between fans and the star on-screen. It was a high level of nonverbal communication, yet a simple language of sex, desire, and pleasure that everyone could speak. Ultimately, all you needed to write a movie character was: Bang! Door opens. It’s Clark Gable. Everyone knew whom they were looking at and what his character would be. As Alfred Hitchcock put it, “Casting is characterization.” Once star products were typed, the factory knew how to build movies around them, and they could do it rapidly and economically.

  After Marlene Dietrich became “Marlene Dietrich”—the exotic, the androgynous, the foreign—and was understood as such, no lengthy explanations about her characters were needed to bog down her plots. When she first appears in Manpower, fresh out of prison and ready to fall in love with George Raft but marrying Edward G. Robinson (his fate was always to marry them when they loved someone else), it is understood that she will behave selfishly (marry Robinson), sin (go for Raft), redeem herself (try to be honest, go away, and leave the poor man alone), and earn the right to live happily ever after (having sex with Raft). The audience expects this, wants it, waits for it, and goes home satisfied that they’ve seen a Dietrich movie. Furthermore, because Dietrich is familiar, there is no explanation offered as to why she has a German accent. Hollywood, having developed her, did not need to explain her. Of course, she has a German accent—she’s Dietrich! She’s German! Everyone knew.

  Star persona was a shared common knowledge for the audience. They didn’t get it wrong because they had been clearly taught how to see (and thus interpret) the star presence. Did Bogart appear to be callous, unfeeling, a bad guy who wouldn’t help out? Wrong! Everyone knew he just seemed to be that way until he changed. It enriched his story to have him appear bad, but it was reassuring to know in advance he wasn’t really that way. In Gilda (1946), when Glenn Ford tells Rita Hayworth he hates her and she replies, “Hate is a very powerful emotion. I hate you, too. I hate you so much I can hardly stand it,” we all know to be on her side, full of sympathy, because it means she really loves him. She’s Gilda, and she’s ever so misunderstood (especially when she’s stripping in public to “Put the Blame on Mame”). We learned many movies ago that Rita Hayworth is easily mistaken for a bad woman because she’s so erotic, but that she’s really swell underneath. Typecasting became screenwriting shorthand and created an intimate layer of shared subtexts between audience and star.

  Type usually needed gradations and shades to it (though not for the Shirley Temples and the Rin Tin Tins). There’s the general category (tough guy, girl next door, sex symbol, romantic hero, et cetera), but the star that fits one of these labels has to bring something personal to it—a soupçon of glamour, originality, imagination—or make it really sexy. Thus, you had Jimmy Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, George Raft, and Bogart all in the “tough guy” category. For a time, they were all at the same studio, Warner Bros. Why would Warners want four tough guys? Because Cagney, Robinson, Raft, and Bogart weren’t just four tough guys. They were four movie stars who had been typecast as tough guys, but each had shaded the cliché into something of his own. These guys were not the same and could never be mistaken for one another. Ironically, being typecast liberated their uniqueness. Cagney was wired and dangerous. Robinson was smart and cynical. Raft was sexy and sensuous. Bogart was weary and philosophical. But all were tough about it. What the practical business thought of as simply “typecasting”—an outward, quotidian function like “tough guy”—can today be analyzed for the mysterious inner workings that happened between an actor and the celluloid. There’s mathematics there, but also moonlight. The moviemaking business understood the mathematics (and took its chances on the moonlight).

  Most stardoms began in these generalized types like “tough guy,” “all-American girl,” “sex symbol,” “gentlemanly leading man.” It was the subtle refinement to the category—à la Bogart, Cagney, Robinson, and Raft—that created the true star and ultimately, possibly, the legend. Yet one of Hollywood’s most successful actors of the 1930s didn’t have that specialized category—and certainly not that subtlety—and he still found a way to make the system work for him. Since Paul Muni didn’t appear to be someone who was going to become a movie star, he confiscated that category and made it his general type. “I am not a movie star,” was his self-definition, and he refined it with a subtext that said, “because I am a very great and serious actor unlike those other people.” Amazingly, this
worked for him. Though he made only twenty-three movies, he earned one Oscar and four nominations for Best Actor. Muni’s “type” was, in fact, a bit of a con, since Muni (that is, Mr. Paul Muni, as he was billed for The Life of Emile Zola [1937]) had two acting selves: with makeup or without. “Without” Muni roles were some of his best performances, including such excellent movies as I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Scarface (1932), Bordertown (1935), and We Are Not Alone (1939). These were modern roles in which his sturdy body and fairly handsome looks were put to good use. “With makeup” was when Muni put on his whiskers, or his sombrero, or his Asian eyelids. In these frequently outrageous performances, he took on accents the way a leaky rowboat takes on water, adopted mannerisms, and bowed and scraped and minced and pranced like a road company Laurence Olivier. (In fact, it might be said that he was Olivier before there was an Olivier.) Muni could be a real headache, but everyone took him seriously, so the machine, not being stupid, just left him alone.* Muni’s mojo was working, so why tamper with it? To be fair, it’s to Muni’s credit that he found a way to carve out his own territory in a world of handsome competition. He wasn’t a Gable, although he could play a lover of women; he wasn’t a Cagney, although he could be very tough; and he wasn’t a Tracy, although he could espouse noble sentiments as needed. He found his type by not becoming a type.

  Gary Cooper lasted for decades because he developed a type that incorporated its own opposite. His image today is sometimes defined as an actor whose dialogue was “yep” and “nope,” but it’s astonishing to review his filmography and see how often he played a sly con artist who could talk himself out of any jam (The Westerner) or a character who articulates the most important issues of a film (The Court Martial of Billy Mitchell). Cooper had impeccable comic timing, as well as the capacity to convey deeply felt pain. He could play a real hick—shy and clumsy—or the ultimate sophisticate. He could act cowardly as well as heroic. He was unquestionably one of Hollywood’s sexiest men on-screen, but he could make himself believable as a guy who had no idea what to do around a woman. After he reached the top, he was absolutely “Gary Cooper” on-screen, and recognized as such, yet he played many real-life modern heroes with great credibility: Lou Gehrig, Billy Mitchell, Dr. Corydon Wassell, Sergeant Alvin York. He was able to make his audiences see them and not “Gary Cooper.” (Director Andre de Toth said, “Whatever he did, Gary Cooper was the truth.”)

  It was Cooper’s appearance in Frank Capra’s 1936 Mr. Deeds Goes to Town that elevated him to the top. Deeds became Cooper’s template. The character was a small-town American who was naïve yet shrewd; corny, yet poetic; shy, yet sexy; and who could slide down a banister with boyish glee, yet be brought into a painful catatonic state by the cruelty of the corrupt city people he encountered. Although he didn’t win the Oscar for Deeds, the two movies he did win Oscars for are riffs on that role: Sergeant York and High Noon. As York, he’s Mr. Deeds Goes to War, a hick who turns out to be better at the game being played than those who first laugh at his efforts; as Sheriff Will Kane in High Noon (Mr. Deeds Goes West), he’s forced to face down the bad guys with no one to help him but the woman who loves him. Although his portrayal of Deeds defined him, it never strangled him. He found endless shadings for it. In one of Cooper’s last movies, Ten North Frederick (1958), his role is that of a sad and aging Mr. Deeds, the one for whom no Jean Arthur stayed the course at his side, the one who didn’t win out over the corrupt money-grubbers who duped him. Gary Cooper had a rare gift—he seemed to be himself when he was Mr. Deeds, and Mr. Deeds seemed to be Gary Cooper no matter what era, what genre, or what shading any film laid over his presence. Cooper’s stardom is grounded in flexibility, a male/female ambivalence that gives him a subtle range that’s often hidden under the surface of his considerable movie star glamour.

  Typecasting was discussed and planned for any newcomer right from the very beginning of his or her buildup. Yet it was also the step that depended on the public’s responses and perceptions. The studio’s job was to present the hopeful in a variety of different kinds of roles during the buildup; the public’s job was to choose its favorite of those types. For example, the public found out fast whether it liked Jean Harlow better as a rich society girl (as in Platinum Blonde [1931]) or a chippie on the make (Red-Headed Woman [1932]), and it would write fan mail to the studios and say so. It was the studio’s job to respond to this. (“Better cast Jean Harlow as another sexy mama.”) The final control rested with the public.

  Hollywood bosses, however, weren’t about to let any part of star making get away from them if they could help it. Although they realized it would be the public that would crown a star with popularity and endorse a type, they still created a business plan for the typecasting process. They reversed engines. Whereas control during the buildup was kept inside the studio and evaluated according to how things were going with the dance lessons, the plants, and the star bios, control in typecasting was exercised passive-aggressively by learning and then mirroring the public’s point of view. Moviegoers watching stars in progress often had little sense of this manipulation. They thought they were making their own private discoveries about stars, but they were, of course, working from a preselected menu. The studios knew that a moviegoer’s amazing “stars are born because I found them” response to their products could be identified, tracked, and capitalized on. Usually, it involved three key movies: the one in which the audience first noticed and responded to the acting presence; the one in which they “discovered” the type they really wanted the actor to play, securing stardom; and the one that repeated the “magic” role in which the “discovery” had taken place and nailed down the type that had triggered the response so that the studio could make the star constantly repeat it.* This “three key movies to type” is well demonstrated by Errol Flynn’s career. Captain Blood brought him to the public’s attention and they responded enthusiastically to him; The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936) defined his stardom and located him where audiences wanted him to be; and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) forever secured his type as an adventurous devil-may-care personality, a face-danger-with-a-grin kinda guy who could also be a graceful lover. The years 1935 to early 1938 took Flynn from unknown to star to type. With Robin Hood, he was locked into position as “Errol Flynn,” and audiences understood what that meant.

  Humphrey Bogart’s career in the 1930s shows how long a studio might work to locate type. Throughout the decade, Bogart played a series of gangsters, a casting that grew out of his stage success playing Duke Mantee in 1936’s The Petrified Forest (a role he repeated in the movie version). But Warners tried him out in other ways, too, because they felt they might be able to turn him into an all-purpose character actor for their stock company. (He didn’t seem to be a romantic leading man.) Bogart was cast as everything from a mad scientist, in The Return of Doctor X (1939), running around with a skunk stripe in his hair, to the “Irish” stable keeper in Bette Davis’s Dark Victory (1939). It was against all odds that, suddenly, in 1941, he would become the quintessential cynical American tough-guy romantic existentialist hero. When George Raft turned down the leading male role of Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941), the part was given to Bogart, who then found his type. His career is a great example of how the actor becomes the character and the character in turn becomes the actor. After Bogie’s star type was found, he grew to be a legend.*

  Finding the right type for an actor could be a problem:

  …Gary Cooper without his horse, mustachioed and foppish in Peter Ibbetson.

  Finding the right type for an actor could be a problem:

  …Two stars in the wrong hats: Clark Gable with a bowler in Parnell and James Cagney with a tall beaver in Frisco Kid.

  And remembering not to “cast against type” was sometimes hard, too:

  …Katharine Hepburn, a long way from Philadelphia, as a barefooted Ozark mountain faith healer in Spitfire…

  And remembering not to “cast against type” was somet
imes hard, too:

  and Ginger Rogers, the perfect sassy modern gal, all costumey and grand as Dolly Madison in Magnificent Doll.

  Bogart wasn’t the only legendary star of the past who frequently wasn’t cast the way we think of him. We can look back and see Katharine Hepburn playing a faith-healing Ozark Mountains girl (really scary), Cary Grant as a javelin thrower, Gary Cooper as Peer Gynt, Rosalind Russell as a drab secretary—all roles played during the search for type. Many stars underwent fairly long periods not being given a chance, never being moved up to the star plateau, simply because no one really could understand who they might become on-screen. John Wayne spent a decade as a singing cowboy. Jane Wyman, a fine actress, played ditzy blond chorus girls. Lucille Ball was cast as a clotheshorse, and Myrna Loy had an entire “Eurasian” beauty period. What looks obvious to us today often wasn’t so obvious at the beginning of a star’s development period. Even an actor as utterly distinctive as James Cagney was questioned. Today, it might seem to us as if there could never be any doubt about the roles he might play, but Cagney was an accomplished song-and-dance man, as well as both a serious actor and a good comedian. There were decisions to be made about what direction to take him. Since he wasn’t a traditional romantic hero, the studio wondered if he could ever be cast as a real leading man for their glamour girls. (He was short, and he gave off dangerous vibrations.) Anyone today who wants to think Cagney’s “type” was always predictable might want to check him out in Frisco Kid (1935) to see how he looks in a curly wig, mustache, ruffled blouse, satin waistcoat, and full period garb. He’s on the Barbary Coast and fighting his way to the top—they got that right—but James Cagney in ruffles? Like everyone else, he had some oddball assignments while his perfect type was being secured. (He seemed pretty urban playing a cowboy in The Oklahoma Kid [1939].)