Who, overall, was the biggest (male) movie star of the Golden Era?

[FedoraFan112390]

Both in terms of being iconic for the era and box office draw (then)?

 

[Frunobulax]

I'm just spitballing here, but Bing Crosby. Depending on how/when you define The Golden Era, Crosby was the dominant figure in pop entertainment. He was a monster in every medium, and Wikipedia confirms what I've heard before, from 1934 to 1954 Crosby was a leader in record sales, radio ratings, and motion picture grosses.

 

[pilot error]

Clark gable

 

[Ed Bass]

Bogie.

OK, all finished. Next subject?

 

[Stanley Doble]

Gary Cooper was huge in the thirties and forties. Much bigger than Bogart. Does anyone remember his movies today?

 

[DNO]

Edward G. Robinson was also one of the top ranked actors. Bogart often had to play second fiddle to Robinson.

 

[LizzieMaine]

In terms of long-term box office gross and public impact, Gable was definitely the top actor from the start of the talkies to the start of the war. While he was rarely the number one man on the box office lists, he was in the top ten for a longer, more consistent run than any of his rivals.

But no talkie-era actor can top the impact of Charlie Chaplin in 1915-1917. He was by far the biggest star in the world, bar none, during this period, so much so that merely a photo of him on a sidewalk signboard was enough to fill a theatre. And he accomplished all of this in two-reel shorts. He remains, nearly forty years after his death, the single most recognizable movie actor of all time.

 

[Frunobulax]

Not to mention his contributions to filmmaking in general.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Lizzie how did Gary Cooper stack up in the thirties? I had the impression he was one of the top stars, if not the top. But his movies have not stood the test of time.

 

[LizzieMaine]

He was around the middle of the pack in the late thirties -- his big hit of the decade was "Mr. Deeds Goes To Town" in 1936, and that created the stereotypical "Yup" and "Nope" characterization that would stick to him for the rest of his career. "Deeds" is a very funny picture, and I'm surprised it hasn't been embraced by the hipster generation -- Deeds was a confirmed eccentric, who was accused of being "pixelated" by the Respectable Middle-Class Citizens who surrounded him. Seems like kids today ought to respond to that. Plus Deeds plays the tuba, which might be the most hipster-ironic musical instrument in the world. Probably the main reason the kids haven't taken it up is that the cynically-detached wiseguys are the villians of the picture.

 

[Fading Fast]

Interesting point on Cooper - big star, not that many movies of his that I care about. And the ones that I do - "High Noon" (my favorite), "Pride of the Yankees" (overly sentimental, but still enjoyable) and "Love in the Afternoon" (it shouldn't work, but it kinda does) - are from the middle to later part of his career. Also, he had some interesting pre-codes like "Design for Living," that aren't really "Cooper" movies and he is fine but not amazing in them, but they are wonderful for their "pre-codiness."

It also didn't hurt that while his movies might not have been at the "Casablanca" or "Gone with the Wind" level, he was stupid handsome and a line "Trying hard to look like Gary Cooper" in a famous song of the time.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Puttin' on the Ritz- it was that line that put it in my mind that Cooper was a major star.

 

[LizzieMaine]

That line was a later revision of the lyrics, written by Irving Berlin in 1946 to update and "deracinate" the original words. When it was composed in 1930, the song was specifically about the African-American residents of Harlem, and the idea that they'd dress up sharp and go "struttin'" on Lenox Avenue at night, despite barely having enough money to get by during the day. The original lyric went --

If you're blue and you
Don't know where to go to
Why don't you go where Harlem sits
Puttin' on the Ritz.
Spangled gowns upon a bevy
Of high browns from down the levee,
All misfits
Puttin' on the Ritz.

That's where each and ev'ry Lulu Belle goes
Ev'ry Thursday ev'ning with her swell beaus,
Rubbing elbows--
Come with me and we'll attend
Their jubilee and see them spend
Their last two bits
Puttin' on the Ritz.

When Berlin revised the song he changed the entire class thrust of the piece. The original lyric was written from the point of view of well-to-do "sophisticated" white people going uptown to gawk at the underclasses -- a pastime called "slumming," which was very popular with a certain class of white people in the twenties. The revised lyric turns the whole thing around -- the idea becomes one of ordinary working-class folk going to Park Avenue to snicker at the dandified upper-class swells. Berlin rather obviously reused that concept from a popular tune had written for an Alice Faye movie in 1937, "Slumming On Park Avenue." The Depression had, needless to say, made the twenties type of "slumming" extremely unpopular, and slummers were likely to get a few rocks to the head.

 

[Fading Fast]

Lizzie,

Fantastic information - despite thinking I knew that song well, I really knew nothing of its quite fantastic history. Do you think Berlin chose to use a line about Cooper (already past his prime in '46) because it fit the original time period of the song or simply because the words went well together?

 

[Stanley Doble]

I always figured the original was written when jazz music first became popular with white audiences. In the 1920s "Harlem Renaissance" black music, poetry, art and writing found a mainstream audience for the first time.

The song took advantage of the fad of going to Harlem jazz clubs to see the dancers and hear the music. I don't know that this was considered "slumming". It was more a daring, avante garde kind of thing. You would see the 1920s equivalent of hipsters there, but you wouldn't see their parents or grandparents. Slumming was a different thing altogether.

Ten years later the fad had blown over, jazz music was mainstream, and the song was dated. So Berlin wrote new lyrics to fit the fashions of the day. One of them was the sophisticated musical with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing in evening clothes, personating rich playboys and playgirls without a care in the world outside their love affairs.

I'm not sure why everyone thrilled to the sight of a glamor queen in diamonds and silk, and her handsome escort in his tuxedo and sixteen cylinder roadster, when people were standing in bread lines, but they did.

 

[Haversack]

Another all-but-forgotten bit about the original lyrics of Puttin' on the Ritz is that Thursday evening was the standard one night a week that maids had off. So an extra frisson of excitement for the slumming types was the possibility of seeing the Help dressed to the nines.

 

[Stanley Doble]

So Thursday night would be one of the "hot" nights to hit the clubs, along with Saturday night.

Harlem renaissance

http://www.1920s-fashion-and-music.com/Harlem-Renaissance-1920s.html

A night club map of Harlem, 1932

http://www.mikethibault.com/?p=11

This map gives a good idea of how New York jazz fans saw Harlem at the time.

I should also mention that some of the top night spots like the Cotton Club were very fancy, and no place for slummers. The Cotton Club belonged to Irish mobster Owney Madden.

 

[Stanley Doble]

"Slumming" was a completely different pastime from visiting jazz clubs and bars. The typical "slumming" tour would include low Bowery dives patronized by sailors and prostitutes, cheap brothels, opium dens, and the like. They were more popular in the 1890s and early 1900s and went out of fashion when Prohibition came in.

Patrons of Harlem jazz clubs were looking for hot music, dancing and bootleg gin.

 

[Stanley Doble]

I don't know why you think white jazz fans would get a "frisson" from associating with maids. More likely they would think "good for them, they are having a good time". Being too good to associate with anyone who did manual labor, was the kind of Old World snobbery the jazz babies were happy to throw overboard.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Dorothy Parker wrote an absolutely lacerating takedown of the kind of people Irving Berlin was writing about in her short story "Arrangement in Black and White."