If any of the 15 million unemployed Americans learned that, on 15 April 1933, a movie executive left his $5,000-a-week job at one studio to move to another that had just started up, he or she would have wondered if Zanuck were living in a utopia where there were no bank runs, foreclosures, breadlines, rioting farmers, store windows smashed in frustration, lootings, school closings, and suspension or curtailment of garbage collections. Didn’t he have faith in the new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had been inaugurated less than a month earlier? Zanuck had faith in himself. In terms of religion he was atypical of the movie moguls. He was not born in eastern or central Europe, or even New York, but in Wahoo, Nebraska, to parents with Swiss and British roots. Zanuck was a Christian in an industry founded by Jewish immigrants or their sons. When he formed Twentieth Century-Fox in 1935, the amalgamation of the Fox Film Corporation and Twentieth Century, it was nicknamed the “Goy Studio.”
Zanuck had no dearth of offers after leaving Warner’s. Columbia beckoned, but he would be facing the same problem he just left: two brothers, Jack Cohn in the New York office, and Harry in Los Angeles. And then there was the location: Gower Street, in the shadow of Poverty Row. Jack Cohn would have been easier to deal with than Harry Warner, but Harry Cohn could not brook a superior; he was president and production head. Exactly what Zanuck’s title would have been is another matter. Executive producer, perhaps. Titles would not have mattered to Harry; he ran the show.
By now, Zanuck had changed jobs more often than some countries changed boundaries. At seven he was a movie extra; at fourteen, an underage army recruit; then a writer for the pulps; a gag writer for Charlie Chaplin; a short story writer; and a screenwriter who did not think it was beneath his dignity to write for Lassie’s predecessor, the canine star Rin-Tin-Tin. In 1933, Zanuck knew he was one of the haves and would not suffer the fate of the have-nots. When MGM’s production head, Louis Mayer, wanted to find a place for his son-in-law, William Goetz, later a distinguished producer (but not as famous as Mayer’s other son-in-law, David Selznick), Mayer and Joseph Schenck of United Artists joined forces to create a new studio, Twentieth Century, with Goetz owning one-third of the stock, and Zanuck serving as vice president for production.
Zanuck needed talent. Even then, he was thinking of his own studio, not Twentieth Century, even though Joe Schenck was an improvement over the brothers Warner. He wanted contract players, recognizable names. Zanuck was well aware of Loretta. As one familiar with stars both in their ascendancy and their decline, he knew Loretta was destined for the firmament. Any producer would have been impressed by her work in Platinum Blonde, Man’s Castle, and Midnight Mary. Zanuck also knew she was studio-shopping and therefore available. What Loretta did not know is that Zanuck thought of her as an actress who could shuttle between the ordinary and the exotic—a course she had run for the past five years. At Twentieth Century, it was more of the same, but the schedule was less hectic, the productions costlier, the costumes more elaborate, and the scripts, for the most part, more literate—as one might expect from Zanuck, a published author and occasional pseudonymous screenwriter. The problem was the leading men, many of whom (e.g., Clark Gable, Tyrone Power, even Don Ameche) stole the spotlight from her.
Her first year at Twentieth Century seemed no different from her last year at Warner’s, except that instead of nine movies in one year, she only made five, none of which tarnished or enhanced her reputation. Zanuck—hoping to cash in on the popularity of the “tough dame” movie (e.g., the Barbara Stanwyck films, Ten Cents a Dance, Ladies of Leisure, and Baby Face), and perhaps inspired by the offbeat casting of Loretta in Midnight Mary—thought she would be a natural for the lead in Born to Be Bad (1934). Loretta’s character, Letty Strong, was an unwed mother with an incorrigible son she is raising to be a survivor like herself, even if it means conning, finagling, and stealing. Despite the presence of Cary Grant who, compared to Loretta, was a newcomer (he made his first movie in 1932), Born to be Bad was the kind of film in which “bad” was applicable to both Letty and the film. Loretta was mired in an impossible role, in which the character alternates between neurotic possessiveness and motherly gush. The problem is the bratty son, who should have been sent to reform school, so his mother could ply her trade, flirting and teasing to get her way—and steering the script in another direction. But smother love wins out over promiscuity, and the son’s fate becomes more important than Letty’s, even though, dramatically, it is of little interest.
When the boy is slightly injured by a dairy truck, Letty, with the help of a wily lawyer, turns the incident into a major accident that has impaired his ability to think and walk. When the defendant company provides evidence that the boy is mobile enough to jump down steps, Letty is judged morally unqualified to raise her son, who is then sent to an orphanage. At this point, the script turns sappy: Grant proposes to adopt the boy because he and his wife cannot have children, offering him a dream life that the boy sneeringly rejects. Letty, the professional mother, still wants him back and even crashes a party, dragging Grant onto the dance floor and pressing against him so tightly that they seem to be lovers.
What happens next makes verisimilitude seem like an academic artifact. Letty spends the night with Grant, who then confesses his infidelity to his wife. For no apparent reason; other than to resolve the plot, Letty has a change of heart and leaves the couple to patch up their tattered marriage, while she returns to her old job in a book store—and presumably begins a new life. Even at Warner’s, Loretta was never saddled with such a script. Except when she turned shrill at any attempt to separate Letty from her son, Loretta knew exactly how to play the role: coy, when required; seductive, when necessary; and maternal, when warranted. In the early scenes, she looks as if she were “on the town”—glamorous, inviting, and available. But Letty is also a tough dame, who uses her classy wardrobe as bait for unsuspecting males so she can provide a comfortable life for her son. The problem was that the son does not deserve it. But that did not prevent Loretta from playing the role as if he merited the moon. Lowell Sherman, who directed the Mae West classic She Done Him Wrong (1933), also costarring Grant, could do nothing with Born to be Bad, except shoot it. The film was atypical of what Loretta would be offered at Twentieth Century. Her other films received more elaborate productions, but never measured up to what she had expected. Understandably, her tenure at Fox would be brief, lasting from 1934 to 1939, with three return engagements.
The most interesting of Loretta’s 1934 films was not The House of Rothschild, but Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back, in which she plays the proverbial damsel in distress to the true star, Ronald Colman, as the former British army officer turned adventurer and amateur sleuth. Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond first appeared in 1920 as a series character in the novels of “Sapper” (H. C. McNeile), which inspired a similar series of films, lasting from 1922 to 1971. There were various movie Drummonds (Ray Milland, John Howard, Ron Randell, and even Walter Pidgeon and Ralph Richardson), but the actor who captured the suavity and worldliness of Sapper’s Drummond was Ronald Colman. His devilish urbanity was even reflected in his eyes, which looked amused by all the plot twists, never mocking them but simply treating the preposterous goings on as a parlor—or rather, drawing room—game.
Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back opens in fogbound London, exquisitely photographed by J. Peverell Marley, with enough cones of light filtered through the gloom to spotlight Lola (Loretta), who emerges out of the swirling mist. She seems disoriented, and after speaking incoherently to Drummond, disappears into the night. Explanations are eventually forthcoming, if not always plausible. Lola is the niece of the man whose body Drummond finds in a spectacularly appointed mansion, the home of an Asian prince (Warner Oland, a popular Charlie Chan of the 1930s), who has disposed of the body and plays dumb when Drummond and the Bobbies arrive. This is the kind of film whose plot points were recycled in the “nobody believes me” movie, wherein husbands try to drive their wives mad (Gaslight, Sleep, My Love), an
d avengers make the innocent suffer for another’s actions (The Secret Fury, A Woman’s Vengeance).
The McGuffin, as Hitchcock would say, is an encoded radiogram confirming that the furs the Prince is importing are infected with cholera, and that they could, if unloaded, precipitate an epidemic. Drummond not only trumps Scotland Yard but gets Lola, while his sidekick, Archie (Charles Butterworth), has to defer consummating his own marriage to be Drummond’s best man. The film, which declared itself a “Darryl F. Zanuck Production,” did not stint on sets; the prince’s mansion was a museum piece that looked as if it belonged to an eccentric millionaire. Although Loretta’s wardrobe was properly British, prim and unglamorous, it does not stop Drummond from proposing to her once he discovers that Lola shares his fondness for hollyhocks. Loretta’s British accent had improved considerably since The Devil to Pay. But she still hoped for one more chance to show her dream lover that she was a worthy costar. She did a year later, and again in the next decade—but then it was on radio.
Zanuck had nothing to do with Caravan (1934), which ranks high among Hollywood’s misconceived films as Fox’s disastrous foray into operetta, a genre best left to MGM with its resident warblers, Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. Caravan’s director was the German-born Erik Charell, whose signature scrolls across the screen before the title appears, heralding his authorial status. Although few in the industry knew who he was, Charell was hired because he had been a successful director of European operetta, particularly in Berlin; his knowledge of film, however, was rudimentary. Ernst Lubitsch might have turned Caravan into inexpensive champagne that at least had some fizz; in Charell’s hands, Caravan was vin ordinaire.
Caravan was a clone of Sigmund Romberg’s The Student Prince, the paradigm of the prince and the commoner romance that is doomed from the start because of the disparity in the lovers’ classes. In Caravan, the sexes are reversed. A frivolous Hungarian countess (Loretta) discovers that she can only inherit the ancestral estate, with its profitable vineyards, if she marries before her twenty-first birthday. Forced to find a husband within a day, she balks at marrying a lieutenant from a prominent family, preferring a gypsy (Charles Boyer), solely because of his music—especially one song that begins as a violin solo and then swells into a chorus of gypsies, lip synching badly and acting like last-minute recruits from a road show. In his attempt to establish himself as a Hollywood director, Charrel resorted to elaborate tracking shots, with the camera pulling back from rows of gypsies with artificial smiles. Not knowing how to deal with a script that, without music, would have been a seventy-minute feature, Charell threw in production numbers, drawing on original music and snippets of familiar classics—for example, one of Listz’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, which, instead of relieving the tedium, increased it.
The countess embraces the gypsy life, even exchanging her imperial wardrobe for a peasant blouse and skirt. Soon she realizes that she and her gypsy lover are from two different worlds and that her best bet is the lieutenant. From the way Boyer was made up, with a hairstyle that was a combination of Julius Caesar’s and Napoleon’s, one would never know that he would inherit Valentino’s title, the Great Lover. That would not happen until The Garden of Allah and, especially, Algiers.
Perhaps a better director might have helped Loretta reveal the various stages of the countess’s maturation, as she comes to realize that she can only marry within her class. But there was no character development, only a last-minute epiphany that writers resort to when they have driven the plot into a dead end from which it needs to be towed.
Loretta’s most prestigious film during her first year at Fox was The House of Rothschild (1934), although it has never been associated with her, but with the great stage and screen actor, George Arliss, who played both Mayer Rothschild and his son, Nathan. Arliss had a magisterial voice that lent credence, at least vocally, to the historical figures he was so adept at portraying: Alexander Hamilton, Voltaire, Disraeli, and now the dual role of the founder of an international banking empire and his most successful son. In many ways, it was a daring film, addressing the subject of anti-Semitism, which became increasingly prevalent after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. In that same year, Jews were dismissed from universities, and anyone with Jewish grandparents was denied employment. Book burnings replaced bonfires; works by Thomas Mann and Arnold Zweig were tossed into the flames. The rise of German anti-Semitism, fruitlessly denounced by the League of Nations, was too controversial a topic for the major studios, whose heads (MGM’s Louis Mayer, the brothers Warner, Universal’s Carl Laemmle, Columbia’s Harry Cohn, Paramount’s Adolf Zukor) were Jews. They feared a backlash, particularly in view of the growing popularity of the “radio priest,” Rev. Charles Coughlin, whose broadcasts grew more anti-Semitic as the persecution of German Jews intensified.
Zanuck, on the other hand, did not shy away from controversy, tackling postwar anti-Semitism (Gentleman’s Agreement [1947]), racism (Pinky [1949], No Way Out [1950]), and mental illness (The Snake Pit [1948]); he even demythologized 7 December 1941, the “day that will live in infamy,” in Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970). Zanuck was not, to quote the subtitle of Neal Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own, one of “the Jews who invented Hollywood,” men who, despite their extraordinary inventiveness, preferred to downplay their Judaism. They wished to avoid antagonizing Christian audiences who preferred their clergymen to be white and either Catholic or Protestant, and Jews who wished to remain as anonymous as possible—as was apparent even in a movie like Columbia’s The Jolson Story (1946), in which little is made of Al Jolson’s religion, with his parents behaving like a comedy team doing ethnic shtick.
At Warner’s, Zanuck produced two major films in which the main characters were Jews: The Jazz Singer (1927) with Al Jolson and Disraeli (1929) with George Arliss. Zanuck had no qualms about making The House of Rothschild. The film premiered in March 1934. Since Twentieth Century Films was still a year away from merging with Fox, it was distributed by United Artists; it also proved a critical and commercial success. As a historical film, The House of Rothschild was better documented than the typical Hollywood product depicting a straight Cole Porter in Night and Day (1946) and a straight Larry Hart in Words and Music (1948), or a Woodrow Wilson (Wilson [1944]) promoting his long cherished dream of a League of Nations in a film that makes no mention of the fact that the United States did not join the organization.
The House of Rothschild opens with Frankfurt Jews being herded into “Jew Street” (actually, Judenstadt, “Stadt” suggesting a city, or, in this case, a ghetto) before curfew. Among the residents of the Judenstadt are the Rothschilds: Mayer with his wife Gudula (the great character actress, Helen Westley, who played a memorable wife and mother without resorting to caricature), and their five sons, of whom Nathan becomes the most prominent. Perhaps if there had been a stronger Jewish creative presence behind the film it might have seemed more authentic. The writer, Nunnally Johnson, director Alfred Werker, producer Darryl Zanuck, and star George Arliss were all Christians, as were some of the supporting cast, including Boris Karloff, Loretta, Robert Young, C. Aubrey Smith, and Florence Arliss. Someone might have suggested that Arliss not play Mayer as if he were Shylock in a touring production of The Merchant of Venice, appearing before an audience that considered Jews a colorful but alien race. Mayer’s groveling before the tax collector is understandable in view of the latter’s patent contempt for Jews, but there is a way to bow before authority and at the same time keep one’s dignity. Before Mayer dies, he instructs his sons to establish five branches of the Rothschild dynasty, with each son staking out a city: London, Paris, Vienna, Frankfurt, and Naples (which turned out to be short-lived). Since Arliss would also play Nathan, the London branch becomes the most significant in terms of plot.
Loretta, in a blonde coif with curls, was part of the subplot. Johnson knew that audiences expected a love interest, not the kind between Mayer and Gudula, or Nathan and Hannah (well played by Florence Arliss, George’s wife), but between a nu
bile young woman and her suitor: Loretta as Nathan’s daughter, called Julie in the film, and another Young, Robert, as the historical Captain Henry Fitzroy, a Christian. The difference in their religions left audiences wondering, “Will they or won’t they marry?” They will, but at the end.
Historical films, like historical novels, collapse time, simplify genealogies, and romanticize the past, as if it were a myth needing to be recreated rather than an aggregate of facts awaiting fresh interpretation. To Johnson’s credit, history, for the most part, is not upended, even though three decades—roughly 1783 to 1815—are subjected to year-jumping, which is not always that easy in an eighty-eight-minute movie. Loretta’s character’s name, Julie, contrasts sharply with the preponderance of Jewish names, such as Mayer, Nathan, Gudula, Solomon, and Amschel. Nathan Rothschild’s daughter was Hannah, not Julie. Since Hannah was also the name of Nathan’s wife, Johnson probably decided that two Hannahs in one film could be confusing. Although Julie refers to herself as a “Jewess,” Loretta does not come across as one. “Julie,” a name without any ethnic or religious associations, would suit Loretta Young better than “Hannah.” Also, the historical Hannah was born in 1815. Since Loretta was almost twenty-one (but could pass for eighteen) when she was making The House of Rothschild, Julie must have been born at the end of the eighteenth century.
No matter. Loretta had virtually nothing do in the film, although she did appear in the final sequence, shot in Technicolor, in which Nathan is honored for averting a financial crisis in Britain. Color added nothing to the film. Zanuck probably wanted to test the new three-strip Technicolor process, a vast improvement over two-strip Technicolor, before introducing it in Ramona (1936), Fox’s first color feature film, with Loretta in the title role. The finale is anticlimactic; The House of Rothschild reaches its peak in the penultimate scene, with Nathan at the London Exchange. Since Napoleon’s victory over Wellington seems inevitable, “Sell!” becomes the buzzword. When Nathan, who has his own way of obtaining information (via carrier pigeon), learns that Wellington has actually defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, he immediately countermands with “Buy!” Apparently, there was a rumor spread by the anti-Rothschild faction that Nathan knew in advance about Wellington’s defeat, but withheld the information to fill his own coffers. The rumor has now been discredited; even if Johnson believed it, which is doubtful, adding it the screenplay would have marred his loving portrait of the Rothschilds. Still, it was the climax, not the coda, that audiences took home with them.
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