Stolen Heaven, Girl of the Golden West, Morocco

1930's Movies

Nancy Carroll starred in Paramount's Stolen Heaven, with Phillips Holmes, the son of the stage favorite, Taylor Holmes, as her leading man.

Warner Brothers, with Little Caesar, started that cycle of gangster pictures that made "taken for a ride," "on the spot," and a dozen other underworld phrases such household words during the early thirties. It was this picture, too, that started Edward G. Robinson on his long career of tough-guy impersonations. Little Caesar was directed by Mervyn Le Roy from an adaptation of W. R. Burnett's novel.

Two other promising youngsters attracted considerable attention in 1930. They were Fredric March and Claudette Colbert, both of whom had been in pictures for about a year. Paramount remade Manslaughter, a former Thomas Meighan silent, and featured them in it.

Ann Harding's long, authentically blonde hair, her well-modulated voice, and her transparent sincerity made her as popular in films as she had been on the stage. She retired temporarily from the screen to marry Werner Janssen, the orchestral conductor, but recently returned.

The wave of musicals that had engulfed 1929 subsided somewhat a year later, but the producers still reckoned that there was gold in them thar trills. The call went out for opera singers. Lawrence Tibbett went from the Metropolitan to make the successful film, The Rogue Song. M-G-M then put him in The New Moon, with Grace Moore. Tibbett went on to greater popularity, but the producers shook their heads over Miss Moore. She was not, they said, photogenic. More of that, later.

Marlene Dietrich's first American picture, Morocco, made her a sensation. Josef von Sternberg directed, as lie did so many later Dietrich films. Gary Cooper was starred opposite Dietrich in this Paramount production.

The life of Abraham Lincoln has been the basis of many pictures. One of the best was Abraham Lincoln, directed by D. W. Griffith in 1930 for United Artists. Walter Huston played the title role, with Una Merkel as Ann Rutledge.

In Son of the Gods, Richard Barthelmess went back to the Oriental atmosphere of Broken Blossoms. This Warner Brothers production had elaborate sets and intricate lighting that outreached even Hollywood's usual extravagant standards.