Light and Shadow

This month we shall look at the other Hollywood studios which came to prominence in the 1930s, although one (Universal) had been founded as early as 1912.

RKO radio, one of whose founders was the father of President John F. Kennedy, was a combined company with production and exhibition arms and was part of RCA. It prospered thanks to the charming and remarkably popular Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers musicals and classics like the original “King Kong” (1933), “Gunga Din” (1939) and the distribution of early Disney shorts and features such as “Snow White”. It was the company that made the film that consistently tops the polls of the best films ever made, “Citizen Kane” (1940).

Columbia, founded in 1924, was originally a “poverty row” studio (i.e. low budgets and no real stars) but evolved into a successful, Oscar-winning company on the strength of Frank Capra’s series of social comedies such as “It Happened One Night” (1934), “Mr Deeds Goes To Town” (1936) and “Mr Smith Goes To Washington” (1939) and by having under contract one of the top stars of the time, Cary Grant.

Universal, although an old studio, founded by the genial Carl Laemmle, only became a leader through its production of a series of classic gothic horror films starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, including the now creaky “Dracula” and the better “Frankenstein” (both 1931), “The Mummy” (1932) and “The Bride of Frankenstein” (1935), full of Germanic atmosphere, but it also produced very good musicals such as “Show Boat” (1936). It is now one of the most successful entertainment conglomerates in the world, owning various record labels including Decca & Deutsche Grammophon.

United Artists was more a distribution company than a maker of its own films. It was founded in 1919 by the distinguished quartet of Charles Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford to distribute their independent productions. It also distributed 1930’s classics by the Anglo-Hungarian Alexander Korda and by Samuel Goldwyn. The Korda films included the immensely popular “The Private Life of Henry VIII” (1933), “Rembrandt” (1936) and “The Four Feathers” (1938). This last film was a splendid example of late imperialist adventures (made in colour on location in Africa) and was so popular that Korda made another colour film - equally successful - “The Thief of Baghdad” (1940), which had to be completed in Hollywood because of the war.

The last major studio to be established in the thirties was 20th Century-Fox (1935), an amalgamation of the almost bankrupt old Fox studios with Darryl Zanuck’s newer and more vigorous 20th Century Pictures. Their big successes were “Les Miserables” (1935) and a string of sentimental films featuring the child star, Shirley Temple. The great John Ford directed some noteworthy films at Fox with classics like “Young Mr Lincoln” (1938), “Drums Across the Mohawk” (1939), another beautiful early colour film, and “The Grapes of Wrath” (1940), a superb documentary-style realisation of Steinbeck’s classic novel of Depression migration and poverty, a theme which may return to haunt us in these financially straitened times.

Next month, we shall examine the work of the great English film director, Alfred Hitchcock.  KR