Vintage '38
Wednesday, September 9, 2020 at 12:30PM The Supporting Actress Smackdown of 1938 arrives on Monday (and the voting is close) so get your votes in by Sunday morning! Before we get there it's time for more context of that year in history. The minimum wage was 40¢ an hour, the economy was in recession, and Howard Hughes was busy breaking aviation records. In sports Seabiscuit was the fastest horse, and Joe Louis was the Heavyweight champion of boxing. Meanwhile there was great unease in Europe with Hitler on the march and already claiming Austria and Czechoslovakia for Germany (the US turned a blind eye and European leaders were still trying to appease the madman).
Things were happy at the movies, though, where screwball comedies and adventure films were all the rage. If there's a link on a title, we've already written about the movie. Ready?
When do you think "hung" changed its meaning in the popular vernacular?
Great Big Box Office Hits:
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and In Old Chicago, both of which competed for the 1937 Oscars, weren't actually available to general audiences until 1938 and both became huge hits...
Alexander's Ragtime Band and Marie Antoinette were also hot tickets so Tyrone Power, who starred in three of those four films, was THE box office titan. He was only 24 years old. His chief rival for audience popularity was 18 year-old Mickey Rooney, who also had multiple hits that year (Love Finds Andy Hardy -- the fourth in that franchise -- and Best Picture nominee Boys Town). Beyond Mickey and Ty, audiences fell hard for Erroll Flynn and Olivia DeHavilland in The Adventures of Robin Hood, Gary Cooper in The Adventures of Marco Polo, Clark Gable and Myrna Loy in Test Pilot, the Jeanette MacDonald / Nelson Eddy musical Sweethearts and Frank Capra's Best Picture winning comedy You Can't Take It With You.
Oscar's Best Picture Nominees:
We've already discussed (and ranked) the Ten Best Picture nominees that year. We imagine that the gangster picture Angels With Dirty Faces was the unlucky #11 in that race since it scored both Director and Leading Actor nominations.
Films That Endured That Were Neither Oscar Nominees Nor Blockbusters:
The big title from 1938 is surely Bringing Up Baby. It was a box office flop AND, what's more, the critics also turned up their noses. Now it's considered one of the greatest of all screwball comedies. The other biggie is surely Alfred Hitchcock's fun train mystery The Lady Vanishes but Hollywood and American audiences hadn't yet become obsessed with him since he was still working in the UK.
Magazine Covers for Context...
(You can click to enlarge)
Popular cover stars were Carole Lombard, Erroll Flynn, Katharine Hepburn, Tyrone Power, Norma Shearer, Myrna Loy, Bette Davis, and Irene Dunne among others. You can click to enlarge for the fine print and headlines "Do You Think Norma Shearer Should Remarry?" "Has Bob Taylor Had a Change of Heart?" etcetera.
Radio: Television was still an experimental invention so EVERYONE went to the movies. The primary in-home entertainment in the 1930s and 1940s was the radio. The most infamous radio event of 1938 was Orson Welles Halloween broadcast of HG Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast which allegedly caused mass panic as some listeners thought its Martian invasion storyline was actually happening (the story was presented in the form of news bulletins).
baby Natalie Wood. She'd make her screen debut at 5, be a bonafide star by 9, an Oscar nominee by 17, and a superstar by 23
Oscar People Born in '38 -- Future Winners: Songwriter Don Black (Born Free), costume designer Eiko Ishioka (Bram Stoker's Dracula), director Jirí Menzel* (Closely Watched Trains), director István Szabó* (Mephisto), actor Jon Voight (Coming Home), and makeup artist Michael Westmore (Mask); Future Nominees: Victor Buono (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane), Lynn Carlin (Faces), Leonard Frey (Fiddler on the Roof), Elliott Gould (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice), screenwriter John Guare (Atlantic City), Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon), director Kay Pollak* (As It Is In Heaven), Terence Stamp (Billy Budd), Liv Ullmann (The Emigrants), Diane Varsi (Peyton Place), director Michael Verhoeven* (Nasty Girl), director Paul Verhoeven* (Turkish Delight), and the iconic Natalie Wood (Rebel Without a Cause)
* we're aware that directors of foreign film nominees/winners aren't "official" nominees/winners but we consider them to be in spirit; they had more to do with their movies than their home countries did!
Mix Tape (Select Hits of '38):
"A Tisket, A Tasket" by Ella Fitzgerald, "Jumpin' at the Woodside" by Count Basie, ""Whistle While You Work" from Snow White, "Begin the Beguine" by Artie Shaw, "Nice Work If You Can Get It" performed by Fred Astaire, and the first international hit of The Andrews Sisters (who'd become staple hit makers of the WW II years) "To Me You Are Beautiful"
Literature: Superman made his first appearance in comic books in Action Comics #1 (it's the most valuable comic book of all time selling just six years ago for $3.2 million). New books of 1938 included Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings "The Yearling," Edgar Rice Burrough's "Tarzan and the Forbidden City," Agatha Christie's "Hercule Poirot's Christmaas", Daphne du Maurier's "Rebecca," Graham Greene's "Brighton Rock", and T.H. White's "The Sword in the Stone"
Stage: Eventual three-time Tony winning sensation Mary Martin made her Broadway debut (and the cover of Life Magazine). The two most famous plays to premiere in 1938 were "Our Town" by Thornton Wilder, which premiered in January in New Jersey before moving to Broadway the next month and "Gaslight" by Patrick Hamilton which premiered in London in December. The latter play resulted in the creation of the term "gaslighting" which is still in the popular vernacular... and frankly more popular than ever in our "post-truth" era (sigh). The play received two quick movie adaptations in 1940 and 1944. The Tony Awards and the Olivier Awards were still a long way off from existing but New York and London Theater were already influential and hit plays were quickly adapted into movies.
We hope you're enjoying our 1938 retrospective and that you're salivating for the Smackdown. It'll be a good one!
Reader Comments (13)
Well, the Boys Town poster is just plain bad grammar. It should be "born to be hanged."
One of the current vernacular meanings of "hung" goes back to the 17th century, originally describing animal junk. (The other vernacular meaning, referring to juries, came later, in the early Victorian era.)
Fascinating,this age is so far removed from life today and the way films are made and the acting styles have changed to more real than theatrical.
By the way, isn't that Andrews Sisters hit the classic "Bei Mir Bist Du Schön" (popular with Nazis until they realized the song was originally Yiddish with composers of Jewish descent)? I don't think it's ever existed under an English title.
These background posts are so wonderful. Initially I wasn't terribly excited for the '38 Smackdown but it's been swell seeing the nominees' films and reading the ancillary posts from everyone. Looking forward to the results on Monday!
Tyrone Power may have had the luck to be in 3 of the biggest hits of the year, yet he ranked 10th as a box office star. #1 for the 4th year running was Shirley Temple and #2 for the 3rd year running and the 4th time ever was Clark Gable. #3 was frequent Tyrone Power co-star Sonja Henie (!) (I know I've seen 3 or 4 of her movies but I'll be damned if I can remember which ones), #4 - and next year's #1 Mickey Rooney, #5 was Spencer Tracy, #6 Robert Taylor, #7 Myrna Loy, #8 the still-living Jane Withers #9 another Tyrone Power co-star Alice Faye.
These roundups of the tops in different media of the time are always so fascinating to read adding some context for the Smackdown.
It's interesting to see who was born in the same year especially when a pair who belong to such separate eras as the still working Frank Langella and Diane Varsi whose active period the late 50's pop up.
I think working stiff is right about The Andrews Sisters song.
Can't wait for this Smackdown! Surprised to hear that the voting is close, after rewatching the five films I thought there was a clear winner so I'm curious who is duking it out.
Ken -- i've never personally trusted those lists with ranked box office stars in that they're as subjective as any list. For instance. ShirleyTemple was a huge box office draw, it's true, but in 1938 none of her three pictures were as popular as any of Tyrone's -- all three of his films made the top ten hits of that year.
working stiff - perhaps. i didn't know the song personally. i was just doing online research about popular songs so maybe someone americanized the title.
1938 was also the year of the infamous "Dead Cats" article in the Independent Film Journal which listed actors and actresses who were considered Box Office Poison. I assume Norma Shearer was the first on that list to break free of that label based on the success of Marie Antoinette. Interesting to note that Katharine Hepburn, also on that list, was in that 1938 "flop" Bringing Up Baby.
To expand on what Working Stiff said:
Though the poster's tagline would suggest otherwise, generally, if you're talking about a noose, you don't use the participle "hung" at all. In that case, you'd use the past participle "hanged," e.g. "The criminal was hanged." If you're talking about anything other than a person, you'd use "hung," e.g. "The new painting was hung in the dining room."
Yeah, big boxoffice star isn't really for the year you score, it's for the year or two afterwards, at least back then. I think it was voted on my exhibitors (also owned by the studios, so there's that).
Anyway, all of this info has made me feel better about 1938. 1939 always gets the acclaim and I always wondered how just the year before was so lackluster, but really it's just that 1939 had the wonder of having the ten Best Picture nominees actually be good, unlike 1938 - some good, some lesser.
PS that Boys Town poster belongs in a gay bar or something. I wonder if they knew what they were doing?
And yes, that Boy's Town poster is just......um. Gosh.
I don't know if Mickey Rooney was 'born to be hung,' but I read in an Ava Gardner interview from 2013 that Lana Turner used to call him 'Andy Hard-On.'
Love the posters back then. Lots of thought and detail since more hand drawn which creates more creativity.