Captain Blood, A Tale of Two Cities, The Story of Louis Pasteur

Another spectacular sea picture of 1935 was a screen version of Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood, produced by Cosmopolitan-First National and featuring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. As this shot indicates, it was a boon to the extras.

Ronald Colman had one of his most congenial and successful roles as Sydney Carton in the 1935 screen version of A Tale of Two Cities. The picture was notable for the size and historical fidelity of its sets. Here is one of the film's most impressive sequences, the storming of the Bastille, as reconstructed by M-G-M.

In 1927 Garbo had played Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, with John Gilbert as her leading man--a silent picture, of course, and entitled Love. Eight years later she remade Anna Karenina, this time with Fredric March as Vronsky. Clarence Brown directed this version for M-G-M.

What is a "character actor"? He was an actor who can step completely out of his own personality to become, for the moment, a completely different person. He may be good or bad. He may be a ham, or he may be a great actor. Paul Muni was a character actor, and a first-rate one. In 1935 he made what was, at the time, a daring experiment--The Story of Louis Pasteur, the life of the great scientist with no concessions to the supposedly indispensable "love interest." The picture won him an Academy award and embarked him on a series of biographical pictures.

Samuel Goldwyn produced The Dark Angel in 1935 and starred Merle Oberon, Herbert Marshall, and Fredric March in it.

In the summer of 1934 Max Reinhardt staged a spectacular production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the Hollywood Bowl. The great Max had never considered the films, but confessed that he found them "interesting." It was no surprise to the knowing ones, therefore, when he agreed to collaborate with William Dieterle in a screen version of the play, for the Warner Brothers. The cast was large, the ballet was trained by Bronislava Nijinska, Erich Korngold wrote the music, and Hal Mohr did the photography, all of which cost well over a million dollars. Unfortunately, the public was not amused.