Dead End, The Good Earth, Lost Horizon, A Star Is Born

Sidney Kingsley's dramatic hit, Dead End, was brought to the screen by Samuel Goldwyn in 1937, with settings that were a faithful extension of Norman Bel Geddes' original set. William Wyler was the director. The Dead End kids, who had been such a striking feature of the play, were brought to Hollywood en masse.

Another spectacular production, still one of the high lights of motion-picture making, was M-G-M's adaptation of Pearl Buck's novel of Chinese life, The Good Earth. Irving Thalberg, the producing head of M-G-M, sent a cameraman to China to make background and atmosphere shots. Sidney Franklin directed the picture, and Paul Muni as Wang, and Luise Rainer as O-Lan, gave superb performances. Altogether, The Good Earth was three years in the making (the actual production took eleven months). Thalberg never saw the completed film, for he died before it was finished.

Columbia's Frank Capra made a beautiful and generally impressive picture from James Hilton's modern fairy tale, Lost Horizon. The cast was uniformly good. Outstanding, both for acting and make-up, was Sam Jaffe's performance as the two-hundred-year-old High Lama.

In writing the screen play for A Star Is Born, Dorothy Parker, Alan Campbell, and Robert Canon disproved the old movie superstition that the public is not interested in stories of movie life. Expertly directed by William A. Wellman, the film offered a deeply moving performance by Fredric March as the fading picture star whose career ends in drunkenness and suicide as his actress wife rises to stardom.

The same year saw the screen advent of Emlyn Williams' psychopathological chiller, Night Must Fall. Robert Montgomery, reprieved from an endless succession of light-comedy roles, gave a performance of sinister power that stamped him as a superb "straight" actor. Richard Thorpe directed the picture.

The year was rich in comedy, producing least three pictures that are still fondly remembered and frequently revived. One was The Awful Truth, directed by Leo McCarey for Columbia, in which Cary Grant and Irene Dunne gave splendid performances.

Another was Hal Roach's picturization of Thorne Smith's Topper, in which Roland Young played the title role. Constance Bennett, as a materialized ghost, contributed admirably to the general hilarity. The picture was directed by Norman McLeod and was replete with camera tricks--doors that opened by themselves; tools that changed tires; and, the best trick of all, Miss Bennett's taking a shower while she was invisible, with the water splashing off her invisible body.

Nothing Sacred was another of these comedies. William Wellman directed it, and Carole Lombard, Fredric March, and Walter Connolly were the leading players.