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Hollywood Valentines: Romantic Films of the Studio Era

In 1896 two stage actors, May Irwin and John C. Rice, sat for Thomas Edison's motion picture camera and enacted The Kiss. It was a 22-second film loop and it is said, perhaps apocryphally, to be the first film shown on a screen to a paying audience. It also offended some viewers, for, although it recreated an embrace from 'The Widow Jones', which Irwin and Rice had done onstage, the projected image made it uncomfortably intimate. To our eyes the only jarring aspect is that the actors, who were in their thirties, look about 20 years older. If a film loop can have a genre, this was a romance.

Cinematic art matured in a single generation. Feature films arrived in 1912, and three years later The Birth of a Nation (1915) was seen as a major cultural event. The silent era was flamboyantly romantic. Irwin and Rice's two-shot kiss initiated the love story as a mainstay of film production. There were stars who built careers on the image of pure and winsome romance: Mary Pickford, Mary Miles Minter, Mae Marsh, Charles Ray, Ramon Novarro, Richard Barthelmess, and the silent Harrison Ford. Another group, which included Theda Bara, Gloria Swanson, Mae Murray, Clara Bow, Valentino, and John Gilbert, emphasized sultry passion.

Silence enhanced the magical qualities in stories. It could make comedies surreal, give melodramas the power of disturbing dreams, as in Lon Chaney's best films, and lend a gilded storybook quality to epics. It made romance glorious. When sound arrived, some audiences laughed at high-flown romantic dialogue, which seemed insipid when it was at last audible. The classic instance is John Gilbert's hapless struggle with the love speeches in His Glorious Night (1929).

Film technique leaped forward again. Along with improved recording came more natural, colloquial speech, and a general shift from exalted love stories to a more worldly approach, which included love in the workplace, love against the Depression background, and most memorably, a golden age of comic romance.

Opening a week after Valentine's Day 1934, It Happened One Night set new standards in romantic comedy. What Columbia Studios thought was a little film, inferior to the more expensive vehicles its stars Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable had made at their home studios, became a word of mouth smash hit. Americans took this film to heart, and it has never lacked for an audience since.

What makes this the perfect romance? Its sweep of Oscars (picture, actor, actress, director, screenwriter) tells us that an impeccable cast and production team had assembled at Columbia (Gable, ironcially, was being disciplined by MGM when they loaned him out for this 'bus picture'). It is saturated with Frank Capra's delight in human virtues and foibles, in scenes that take place on yachts, in bus stations, tourist camps, the open road, a press room, and a mansion. As in all Capra's hit comedies, there are wonderful character actors: Walter Connolly as the vexed father, Roscoe Karns as a salesman on the make, Alan Hale as a lecherous blowhard, Ward Bond as the gruff bus driver.

It is finally the story of Colbert and Gable getting over their differences and learning to love each other. Tender, funny details abound. Gable teaches Colbert the lessons he thinks she's missed in life: how to dunk a donut, how to eat raw carrots, how to ride piggy-back, and, daringly in 1934, how a man undresses at night. The stars are completely natural and at the peak of their charm. We believe that these two have fallen in love on their cross-country journey. Newcomers to classic films who are lucky enough to not yet know this movie should put it on their must-see list.

In the studio era, roughly speaking the 20s through the 50s, there were thousands of romantically themed pictures. It's difficult to list the films that don't have a romantic subtext. This explains a lot about the attraction vintage films have for today's buffs. Where today many screenplays are burdened with the need to be outre, snarky, or salacious, the romantic films of two and three generations back had a sweeter, more positive tone, and it came naturally. Fans went to see films with Jean Arthur and Irene Dunne because they knew there would be a classy love story, clever dialogue to savor, and a happy glow to the ending.

Box office pressure has always led to formula plots; then as now, the best films transcended cliché. Following are some of the classic storylines to romantic films.

Triangles: Usually, but not always, these had a leading lady torn between two men. Key examples are Greta Garbo, John Gilbert, and Lars Hanson in Flesh and the Devil (1926); Colbert, Fred MacMurray, and Ray Milland in The Gilded Lily (1935); MacMurray, Ralph Bellamy, and Carole Lombard in Hands Across the Table (1935); MacMurray, Melvin Douglas, and Jean Arthur in Too Many Husbands (1940); and Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and James Stewart in The Philadelphia Story (1940). A reverse of this pattern is found in My Favorite Wife (1940), with Cary Grant torn between Irene Dunne and Gail Patrick.

Misunderstandings: A couple is torn by suspicions or identity confusion. The Astaire-Rogers follow this pattern, with Top Hat (1935) leading the field in clever writing. Other classics are My Man Godfrey (1936) and Easy Living (1937).

Battling Couples: Lovers who are so competitive that they throw their relationship off balance. Among the most entertaining are Norma Shearer and Robert Montgomery in Noel Coward's Private Lives (1931), which includes a hilarious mutual smackdown with hyperactive dialogue; Irene Dunne and Cary Grant in The Awful Truth (1937), and Tracy and Hepburn in Adam's Rib (1949).

Hard to Get: One character's gruff exterior must melt for love to prevail. A dramatic example is Spencer Tracy in Man's Castle (1933); he spends most of the film treating his common law wife (Loretta Young) with callous neglect. A comic example is Greta Garbo's beautifully realized comic performance in Ninotchka (1939).

Love with a Lawbreaker: In 1932, audiences got three love stories that featured jewel thieves. Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins victimized Kay Francis in Trouble in Paradise. Francis matched wits with William Powell in Jewel Robbery (don't miss the closing shot in this one). Garbo fell in love with cat burglar John Barrymore in Grand Hotel. Later in the decade, Marlene Dietrich played a jewel thief pursued by Gary Cooper, in Desire (1936). Barbara Stanwyck was memorable as a shoplifter in Remember the Night (1940); the love interest was the prosecutor, played by Fred MacMurray. A year later, in The Lady Eve, she was a con artist putting the moves on a rich naif (Henry Fonda). The Talk of the Town (1942) successfully carried off the oddball plot of Jean Arthur falling for an escaped anarchist (Cary Grant).

Love in Wartime: Always a fertile source of film plots. Classic examples are Gone with the Wind (1939), Casablanca (1942), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), The Clock (1945), and The African Queen (1951). Love and Espionage is a sub-genre, in such films as The Emperor's Candlesticks (1937), with William Powell and Luise Rainer, a lush but farfetched production. Hitchcock's Notorious (1946), with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, is a passionate film, fully invested with the director's themes and visual style. It is one of the most romantic and suspenseful films of its time.

Love Between Unequals: Royalty dallies with commoners in films such as The King on Main Street (1925), The Student Prince (1927/1954), Love Me Tonight (1932), with Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier, a ravishing mix of comedy, romance, and music; and Roman Holiday (1953), which brought Audrey Hepburn to stardom. Possessed (1931), one of Joan Crawford's best MGM vehicles, has her as a runaway factory girl who enters the world of millionaire Clark Gable. In All This, and Heaven Too (1940), Bette Davis is a governess who falls in love with a duke (Charles Boyer), with tragic results. Ball of Fire (1941) is irresistible. Barbara Stanwyck plays a burlesque dancer who is thrown into the cloistered lifestyle of Gary Cooper and his fellow professors.


(Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck in a still from Ball of Fire, 1941)

Married Life: Stories of compromise, sorrow, joy, and devotion, sometimes in equal measure. Outstanding examples are Made for Each Other (1939), Woman of the Year (1942), Penny Serenade (1941), and It's a Wonderful Life (1946).

Other genres are Love Spans the Age Gap (Sabrina, Love in the Afternoon, Middle of the Night), Tragic Romance, Backstage Romance, and The Other Woman.

Some recommended romances that deserve a wider audience:

Her Night of Romance (1925) - Constance Talmadge and Ronald Colman. Silent. While sister Norma made soap operas, Constance made a series of romantic comedies that sparkled like drafts of champagne. Colman shared her touch for light comedy. They reteamed the same year for Her Sister from Paris, and both films have been released on a single Kino-Lorber disc.

The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (1927) - Ramon Novarro and Norma Shearer. Silent. Romance between a prince and a barmaid. Flamboyant and lyrical, this romance is given the full treatment in the classic silent style.

Hold Your Man (1933) - Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. A sassy Depression romance. Gable is a confidence man on the lam who barges into Harlow's apartment (a classic 'meet cute' scene).

I Know Where I'm Going! (1945) - Wendy Hiller and Roger Livesey. Beneath its reserved surface, there's a ruddy romanticism in this British film. A mail-order bride on her way to meet her husband is stranded on a Scottish island, where she meets a much different man. This bewitching film from The Archers (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger) stands with the best of Hollywood's romances, as does:

La Ronde (1950 France) - Anton Walbrook strides through this omnibus film in cabaret style, introducing the chapters and breaking into song at times as director Max Ophuls' gliding camera follows the course of multiple love affairs. If one seeks the continental attitude toward romance, it is in this film.