STACK #147 Jan 2017

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EXTRAS

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. Chips  and Gone with the Wind.  Furthermore, alongside those nominations were yet another British Prime Minister Winston Churchill stated that Mrs. Miniver was propaganda well worth 100 battleships 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

Hollywood Goes To War: 1939-1946

Part 2

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

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

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

“More Stars Than There Are In Heaven”:- MGM’s 20th anniversary, 1943

JANUARY 2017

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