The Big Screen - The Story of the Movies by David Thomson

Author:David Thomson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Film & Video, Performing Arts, History & Criticism, Popular Culture, Art, Criticism & Theory
ISBN: 9780374191894
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2012-10-16T04:00:00+00:00

From about 1950 onward, the first generation of picture people began to die. By then, many of them were what was called old-fashioned. But they had invented a medium and given their lives to it, and some of them sensed that the medium was changing so fast they were in danger of being forgotten. All of a sudden there were funerals all the time.

In July 1948, D. W. Griffith died at the Knickerbocker Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard. He was seventy-three, broke, boozy, and his last wife had just walked out. As Lillian Gish put it, “He idealized womanhood on the screen, but when he had to live with it he could not make the adjustment.” The body was taken back to Kentucky to be buried. Writing of the grave site, Richard Schickel would say, years later, “We have new ways of seeing and thinking and perhaps even being which literally did not exist until the man who lies buried there began his work.”

In 1950, Al Jolson died, the man who had uttered the good news and the bad news—depending on your point of view. An unmatched celebrity in his time, he may be unknown to young people today. In 1954 three beloved figures, stalwart supports in fine films, died: Sydney Greenstreet, Eugene Pallette, and Lionel Barrymore. In 1955 we buried James Dean and Theda Bara; and in 1956 it was Alexander Korda and Bela Lugosi, a pair of Hungarians who had made it to the big time.

On January 14, 1957, Humphrey Bogart died, so physically reduced he went up and down his house in the dumbwaiter. Greer Garson had heard him coughing at a party and told him to get to a doctor. Was it the smoking that he had done so much to glamorize? One cherished shot from The Big Sleep is two cigarettes together on the edge of an ashtray, still smoldering. He was fifty-seven. In Paris, in May, Erich von Stroheim died: an assistant to Griffith, the maker of Greed, the commandant of the prison camp in Renoir’s La Grande Illusion, and Max to Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd. In October, in Los Angeles, Louis B. Mayer died. Since his removal from M-G-M he had labored to make a great movie, Joseph and His Brethren, but it never reached preproduction. He had presided over fifty pictures a year, or none.

In 1958 we lost two models of attractive men: Ronald Colman, and Tyrone Power, who actually dropped dead in Spain (sword in hand) while filming Solomon and Sheba for King Vidor. The descendant of actors, Power was forty-four. For 1959, the list was merciless: Cecil B. DeMille, Lou Costello, Ethel Barrymore, Preston Sturges, Errol Flynn, and Victor McLaglen. Flynn was fifty, though we were told he had used his time to the full. With Power and Flynn gone, what would become of sword fighting? In 1960, Clark Gable died, along with Margaret Sullavan and Mack Sennett. Gable was fifty-nine and there were cautious suggestions floated in the press

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