The Middle-brow and the Moviemakers

...he is fearful of revealing more than he should, of giving offense...

...It is interesting to speculate as to how Thalberg himself, that deflator of pretensions and pretenders, would have reacted to the institutional tones and rhetoric in which his life and works are smothered, the hollow ring of "Time was running out for the producer who had used time so prodigally," "Thalberg was driving, ever driving...

...Greer Garson was our mother-figure, and we expected love's first kiss to come to us as it came to Andy Hardy...

...Among this incipient class of showmen there was not one to the manor born...

...having a little good-natured fun at the expense of the official panegyrists...

...Tears came to her eyes...

...For one thing, he is a peculiarly tasteless and inept writer...

...Crowther has sought, in The Lion's Share, to trace the history of MGM's follies and fortunes...

...Crowther's method throughout is to go easy, to play it safe, to write, as it were, with a rueful, tolerant smile at the excesses, the vulgarities, the Goldwynisms that must, of necessity, fill his pages...

...If the Czar had arrived he would have got the job, and perhaps a percentage of the profits...

...For example: "One day Mayer got her [Jeanette MacDonald] in his office and he undertook to convince her that Naughty Marietta was the picture she should do...

...I have always felt, like William Poster, that "A Metro picture, good or bad, usually manages to seem just the right length, to hold your attention to the full extent of your powers of response whether you like what you are responding to or not...

...The mishmash of ideas and platitudes take on a certain comic force, and one hopes, somehow, that Crowther is only pulling one's leg...

...Though he is widely read and feared by the film trade—indeed, he presides over it like a kind of gray eminence—he has always seemed to me too humorless, too inflexible, afflicted with an oppressive piety that seeks to pass as "seriousness" of the highest order...

...Now, MGM is not only a powerhouse among studios...

...as against a half-page for Birth of a Nation, or that he lets slip through certain minor and not-so-minor errors of fact and allots only two chapters to the tremendous shifts and swavs within the industry since World War II...

...He praised her, he told her touching stories of the stars whose careers he had planned, then he offered courteous suggestions as to how she should strive for an emotional quality in her singing style...

...They were the Carnegies of the movies...

...This is the real story, the story Crowther hasn't told...

...He was born in a dark and dingy chamber of a slum on the lower East Side of New York, the son of a Jewish restaurant waiter and a widowed German girl...

...contributor, "Partisan Review" I have never been able to respond very strongly to Bosley Crowther as a critic...

...Crowther, in contrast, suppresses such touches and discourages the reader from looking beyond the hard and fast boundaries he has set by his tempered, stilted narrative...

...It was a cablegram, sent paid, which, translated from the Russian, read about thus: 'nicholas romanoff petrograd, russia when i was poor boy in kiev some of your policemen were not kind to me and my people stop i came to america and prospered stop now hear with regret you are out of a job over there stop feel no ill will what your policeman did so if you will come new york can give you fine position acting in pictures stop salary no object stop reply my expense stop regards you and your family selznick new york' "Selznick was disappointed when he did not get a reply...

...it is also, by any standards, the most fascinating: It gave us the star system...

...Suddenly, to her astonishment, he got down on his knees and began singing the Jewish lament Eli, Eli in a most serious and tremulous way...

...This, of course, is the standard technique of the film biography...

...They were hobbled by no preconceptions of the canons of propriety and good form as then recognized and cherished in higher literary and theatrical realms...

...Following Crowther over the years, one has the constant, nagging suspicion that movies make him uneasy and give him little pleasure unless, in some fashion, they are serving or pretending to serve the public good...

...Immigrants and sons of immigrants in a fluid society which was peppered heavily with new Americans from whom Old World ties were quick to fall, these middlemen of amusement were prophetic of the culture-history they came to run...

...Selznick wrapped a brocaded silken dressing gown about him, rang for [his Japanese butler] and demanded tea from the samovar...

...All in all, given such material, it would seem virtually impossible to turn out a dull book...

...I exclude Terry Ramsaye's classic A Million and One Nights—a source Crowther has drawn upon heavily, though he gives it only one grudging mention on page 14—which is saved by a generous-hearted warmth, coupled with a kind of unabashed innocence that views the movies as sheer magic...

...To Crowther, the quintessential middle-brow, the multiplicity of events and people and motivations can be understood only if they are referred to categories, constricted within the framework of a limp, pellucid sociology that draws its few pathetic, banal ideas from a misreading of everything that has ever been written about mass culture...

...Marcus Loew...

...And Marcus's reply: "Please, Momma, just one more look through my Kineto-scope...

...Some couldn't even write or read...

...Miss MacDonald was genuinely affected by the uninhibited sentiment of the man...

...Unlike a good many others of the early promoters of films, Loew did not have his birthplace in some Middle European or Russian town...

...We get dribs and drabs of human interest—the story of his wedding night, when Norma Shearer's bracelet would not come undone, his passion for fast cars and card playing, his habit of flipping coins during conferences...

...This is set down with a verve and brashness that sums up not only Selznick, but an entire era...

...Item: "It is a significant feature of the American motion-picture industry that it was grappled and guided into being by men from what we call the common herd—men from the moving masses of the people whose tastes they discovered and served...

...resides in his basic premise that the history of MC.M "presents a clear and characteristic pattern of how the film industry developed...

...Their standards were picked up entirely from what they found the paying public would buy —and the public with which they had contact was the public with small change...

...Crowther's chief flaw, it seems to me...

...But this does not take into account the fact that the MGM stable of stars is now and has always been of a quality and order unlike those of any other studio, that an MGM film is different from all other films...

...Few of them had much education...

...it was able to develop and use and consistently replenish, as no other studio could, a huge stock of magnificent movie-talents...

...That's the way you should sing,' he said...

...as though nothing more is needed to mark off and define the man...

...Of MGM it can be said that, more than any other studio, more than we are willing to admit, it helped make and mirror us, giving us a good many of the images by which we live...

...And, again more than any other studio, MGM imposed its will upon us...

...the increasing momentum of his progress was stretching the tension of his nerves...

...hence, perhaps, his exaggerated respect for films with messages and moralities, films which examine broad social problems and can be commented on as ideology rather than art...

...his is the style the Saturday Evening Post might use if it were some day to run The Norman Vincent Peale Story— as told to Pete Martin...

...Compare this to the way Ramsaye tells another of the great apocryphal tales of the movie-makers: "One morning [Lewis] Selznick awoke to discover that the news headlines screamed of revolution in Russia and the overthrow of the Czar...

...who emerges here as a somewhat neurasthenic, mother-loved Jewish boy, "a hard worker" who "knew how to look after himself...

...But above all, it persisted, it flourished and added something fine and memorable to films...

...They made their home in a tenement building at 173 Fourth Street, on Avenue B. It was there, on May 8, 1870, that Marcus arrived in the world...

...one can easily summon up Ida Loew leaning from a window that overlooks a dreary tenement landscape and shrieking "Marcus...

...The Goldwyns, the Selznicks, the Thal-bergs, the Scharys are not so much explained, as explained away, ciphers, really, fixed in a twilight zone that lies somewhere between the Power Elite and the Lonely Crowd...

...it gave us, for a good quarter-century, the most technically perfect films to see the light of the screen...

...Nobody pinned a steerage ticket to the lapel of his threadbare coat and sent him forth, with tears and kisses, to seek his fortune in the American promised land...

...it set the cycles and the fashions...

...But of the Wunderkind, the romantic, ill-starred prototype of Fitzgerald's Last Tycoon, we gain no fresh understanding...

...the pressures were beginning to tell...

...His father, Herman, had come from Austria onlv a few years before and had married the young Ida Sichel, who was already the mother of two small sons...

...How smug and smooth the "to the manor born," the "fluid society," the "canons of propriety," the "moving masses...

...Significantly, Ramsaye does not refuse the invitation to comedy—albeit "low" comedy—to particularize and highlight with significant detail (the brocaded dressing gown, the samovar...

...The whole mythic lore of the industry is approached stiffly and prissily, in the chiding manner of a human relations expert relating a Lou Holtz story...

...The abundances of cliches and gaucheries in The Lion's Share could be forgiven (though it takes a good deal of forgiving to overlook such beauties as "Right away trouble began happening," and "it was a large break," "It had to do with a Jewish rabbi's son," "Here was the rub of the tension"), since film histories have seldom been informed by wit or grace or freshness of approach...

...But this Crowther has managed...

...But if anyone is short-changed, it is poor Irving Thalberg...

...A secretary came panting, pencil poised, to take dictation...

...Thus, he leaves us, finally, with an image of Louis B. Mayer as a bumbling, benevolent grandpa...

...Those who ran it were strong, colorful personalities—"good copy"—and they left their impress upon us in ways we have not even yet begun to understand...

...Ramsaye, unlike Crowther, responds with all his might to his material, without giving the impression that he is engaged upon what is, essentially, a lowly enterprise...

...Such was Marcus Loew...

...we begin with a stereotype and end with a legend...

...He got up humbly...

...Alas, he is nothing if not serious: He is giving us the "essential" facts—as though the date of birth, the house and street numbers, the "dark and dingy" slum chamber represent something vital in themselves, symbols of the greatest importance...

...As a writer of Rulturgeschichte...

...Crowther is just as unrewarding: I won't dwell on the fact that three-and-a-half pages are devoted to a plot summary of Ben Hur...