STACK January 2017 Issue 147

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from media headlines found a home at Warner
Bros. along with Bette Davis’s female dramas.
Director Frank Capra’s patriotic themes and
screwball comedies set up at Columbia. Astaire
and Rogers' dancing routines, performed on
lavish Art Deco sets, were firmly ensconced at
RKO. And cute little Shirley Temple was the top
moneymaking star at 20th Century Fox.
Each studio’s stable of big stars became
cultural icons, whose movies brought to life
onscreen all forms of adventure, romance and
fantasy for audiences. By having actors under
contract, the studios' costs didn’t rise but
profits soared the more popular the actor
became. By 1938 there were more movie
theatres than banks within the US, and the box
office receipts from those theatres totalled over
$670 million per annum. The American public
were well and truly hooked on the habit of
regularly “going to the movies”.
As the decade ended, 1939 – as far as the
major Hollywood studios were concerned
– had been just another year of profitable
business. However, with the release of an
unprecedented bounty of quality Hollywood
movies, it would mark the peak of studio
system production. Amongst the ten films
nominated by the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences that year were Mr.
Smith Goes to Washington, The Wizard of
Oz, Stagecoach, Dark Victory, Goodbye Mr.
Chipsand Gone with the Wind.Furthermore,
alongside those nominations were yet another
plethora of superb films that would have easily,
in any other year, been contenders for the Best
Picture category. They included Only Angels
Have Wings, Young Mr. Lincoln, Gunga Din,
Destry Rides Again, The Rains Came,and a
host of other exceptional films – the majority
of which have all stood the test of time. As
a consequence, film historians agree that by
delivering such a diverse list of powerfully
entertaining cinematic classics, unmatched
before or since,1939 was indeed “The Greatest
Year in the History of Hollywood”.
Whilst the 1939 Academy Award winners
congratulated each other at
the Ambassador Hotel in Los
Angeles on the 29th February
1940, the discussion amongst the
movie moguls was the growing
concern about the war in Europe
and how it might impact on
their international market. 40 per
cent of the industry’s revenues
were generated overseas and
for the moguls, business was
business. Subsequently, they
had no intention of deliberately
antagonising Mussolini’s new
Roman Empire or Herr Hitler’s
Nazi Germany.
But President Roosevelt had
T hroughout the 1930s, the individual
Hollywood studios with their
“homegrown” movie stars developed
different visual and dramatic styles: Metro-
Goldwyn-Mayer, with its roaring lion symbol
and boast of having “more stars than there
are in heaven”, became synonymous with
expensive glitzy musicals as well as romantic
melodramas starring the archetypal leading
man, Clark Gable. Paramount had Gary Cooper,
the zany Marx Brothers, Marlene Dietrich and
Bing Crosby. Gothic horror became associated
with Universal. Tough gangster movies torn
Hollywood
Goes To War:
1939-1946
16 JANUARY 2017
EXTRAS
visit
Part 2
British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill stated
that Mrs. Miniver was
propaganda well worth
100 battleships
“More Stars Than
There Are In
Heaven”:- MGM’s
20th anniversary, 1943