Street Scene, The Easiest Way, A Free Soul, Frankenstein

1931's Movies

Elmer Rice's grim play, Street Scene, reached the screen in 1931, in a faithful adaptation directed by King Vidor. Sylvia Sidney played the role Erin O'Brien Moore had created on the stage. A perfect reproduction of a shabby New York street, on which most of the action took place.

M-G-M remade Eugene Walter's old play, The Easiest Way, with Constance Bennett playing the role that Frances Starr had created in the theater. Anita Page played the honest, hard-working sister (who wasn't in the original play), with Clark Gable, a promising leading man, as her truck-driver husband (who wasn't in the original play). Here be is ordering Constance Bennett out into the night with her baby who wasn't in the original play).

Norma Shearer had already embarked on a series of sophisticated roles. One of her 1931 pictures was A Free Soul, from the novel by Adela Rogers St. Johns, in which the daughter of a brilliant criminal lawyer falls in love with the gangster whom her father has saved from the chair. Lionel Barrymore played the father, and Clark Gable acted the gangster in a manner that established him as a definite box-office draw.

Another of Norma Shearer's pictures was Noel Coward's brilliant, slightly bawdy, and roughhouse Private Lives. She and Robert Montgomery took the roles originally played by Coward and Gertrude Lawrence.

Douglas Fairbanks' 1931 picture was, surprisingly enough, not a costume piece but a straight melodrama, called Reaching for the Moon. This in no wise prevented him from performing the characteristic Fairbanks gymnastics and turning the decks of a transatlantic liner into a one-man track meet.

Lon Chaney's death in 1930 robbed the public of a great master of grotesque make-up. However, Chaney ad a successor in Boris Karloff (born Charles Edward Pratt), who chilled millions of spines with a bloodcurdling performance as the monster in Frankenstein ( 1931). It was such a success that Universal followed it with The Bride of Frankenstein ( 1935) and The Son of Frankenstein ( 1939).

Someone once remarked that the present younger generation is going to grow up with the firm conviction that all the great men of history looked like George Arliss. In 1931 the distinguished actor continued his gallery of historical portraits with Alexander Hamilton, with Doris Kenyon as his leading lady.

Depressing as most persons find it, Tolstoy's novel Resurrection has been adapted several times for the screen. Dolores Del Rio made it as a silent in 1927, with Rod La Rocque playing the male lead; and Lupe Velez (of all people) remade it in 1931, with John Boles.