The Dawn Patrol, The Vagabond King, Moby Dick

Another Barthelmess picture of 1930 was the successful The Dawn Patrol, an aviation picture directed by Howard Hawks.

From the musical-comedy stage came Dennis King, in one of his former stage triumphs, The Vagabond King. Just to make sure of its being a hit--which it was--Paramount filmed it in technicolor, and co starred him with Jeanette MacDonald.

In photography, the impossible is so simple to achieve that most attempts at transferring phantasy to the screen have left nothing to the onlooker's imagination. Fox's production of Liliom, with Charles Farrell and Rose Hobart, was painstaking and elaborate, but it failed to capture the imaginative persuasiveness of the Theater Guild's original production.

Warners starred John Barrymore in a version of Mel ville 's great novel, Moby Dick, notable for Barrymore's extraordinary make-up and distinguished acting. Barrymore had played this role in the silents, the film then being called The Sea Beast.

Howard Hughes sank well over a million dollars into Hell's Angels, which he began as a silent film in 1927 and finally released in 1930. When sound came to stay, he was obliged to scrap much of what had already been shot and begin over again. Accidents and the difficulty of retaining the services of his actors for long periods of time were other handicaps that Hughes had to face. He was determined, however, to make this air thriller of thrillers, and eventually be succeeded. The flying sequences (the airplanes were the real stars of the picture) have seldom been surpassed.

Greta Nissen was originally cast as the vamp of Hell's Angels, but either because of her accent or because she was no longer available, she had to be replaced. Jean Harlow, who had been playing minor roles, was given her chance in the part and revealed herself as a good actress and the embodiment of sex appeal.

Fox brought John McCormack, the great Irish tenor, to Hollywood and starred him in Song o' My Heart, released in 1930. You see him here. In the carriage is Maureen O'Sullivan, whom the director, Frank Borzage, had discovered in Dublin.

Another scene from Song o' My Heart, showing McCormack and lovely Alice Joyce, who played opposite him. This was one of the few pictures he ever made. His own explanation for the shortness of his screen career was, "They said I had no sex appeal."

It was inevitable that, sooner or later, Jackie Coogan, whose performance in Chaplin's The Kid had made him a child star, should grow up to play America's legendary boy character, Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer. This he did, in a talking picture of 1930, ten years after his screen debut.