Stage Mother (1933) and Cruel Climb To Show Biz Top
Alice Brady takes the lead as a hard-bitten
climber up vaudeville, and then B'way revues, daughter Maureen O'Sullivan the
object of machinations that don't stop at blackmail/extortion. Vaude was seldom
sugared by 30's Hollywood,
hardships of the life too fresh for writers of which many had served in variety
trenches, or knew well those who did. So had Alice Brady, who did oodles
of stock work, then prestige starring parts, and came from prosperous biz
background besides. Title character here loses an acrobat husband in the first
reel, his fall from high off a stage an event that must have happened often
among small and big timers. Ted Healy is a second spouse, loud-mouthed and
ultimately a faithless drunk, a near-home portrayal by Ted, who has but one
stooge for company (Larry Fine with a single line). Brady is a sort of Stella Dallas
of the stage that no polite society wants part of, this a same way variety
performers were treated when they tried breaking out of life on the road.
Boarding house signs that read "No Actors or Dogs" were no joke.
Vaudeville acts as shown in Stage Mother are strictly from hunger. We're given
to understand why the tradition fell to ruin well before this movie came along.
Movies served themselves with such unflattering depiction, as in look how much
better our entertainment is than what you used to sit through. So long as
vaudeville was dead,Hollywood had to be sure it stayed buried. Stage Mother benefits too for precode
arrival, a lot of situations here would not have survived even a year's later
scrutiny.
Were studio chiefs demanding that any competition be mocked or "exposed"? In the past you've reported how silents were aggressively dismissed not only as out of date, but only good for derisive laughter. When television appeared, it was often an object of comic contempt. Radio, in my limited experience, appears to have gotten off easy. Picture stars spent their evenings doing radio shows with studio blessings, and perhaps even under studio orders (picture plugs ubiquitous); radio stars were welcomed onscreen. At the same time, I don't recall any films ripping into radio the way they did television. At most you got the difference between what audiences heard and what happened at the microphones, usually comic riffs
I've always read how 1950s movie either avoided or insulted TV, but I've yet to see them (other than the great "Ace in the Hole"). Every living room has a TV, although it isn't always in use, and characters like Hopalong Cassidy are mentioned. Maybe I've been watching the wrong movies.
K.K.: Very few movies revealed a TV in a living room. Even fewer showed one that was turned on. On the other hand, you saw massive radio consoles quite often.
People could sit at home and listen to people talk over the telephone and sing on the radio before they could ever hear them talk and sing in the movies when out at the cinema, so in a sense talking movies had simply caught up and surpassed what telephones and radios had offered at home for some decades already - while the later change to TV from radio-only was home entertainment catching up to draw even with the movies. With the arrival of cable TV two decades after that, home entertainment surpassed the cinema by offering an expanded menu of choices - a menu of choices which the movie business a few years later sought to emulate through the use of multi-screen venues. But then in the late 1980s, and somewhat unexpectedly, the good old telephone - that antique pre-radio home communications technology - leap-frogged them all to bring the internet into our homes to give us all something to read on our screens, and an even greater novelty - the power to easily share our writings with many others from our own homes. It took a further decade or two of ever-cheapening and expanding computer processing power for the radio/music, movie and TV businesses, still busily and quite successfully competing amongst and between themselves, to even notice that beyond the enabling of the ever-easier infringement of their copyrights, the internet had also enabled something entirely new to get ahead of all of them in the entertainment race, as measured by and in raw revenues - computer games. As all of these forms of entertainment are in competition each with the other it is not surprising that all of them take shots from time to time at any or all of the rest of them - when they are not working hand-in-glove with each other to promote each others' wares, that is.
5 Comments:
Now that I've finally read "42nd Street," Ropes's novel of "Stage Mother" is a new Holy Grail.
Were studio chiefs demanding that any competition be mocked or "exposed"? In the past you've reported how silents were aggressively dismissed not only as out of date, but only good for derisive laughter. When television appeared, it was often an object of comic contempt. Radio, in my limited experience, appears to have gotten off easy. Picture stars spent their evenings doing radio shows with studio blessings, and perhaps even under studio orders (picture plugs ubiquitous); radio stars were welcomed onscreen. At the same time, I don't recall any films ripping into radio the way they did television. At most you got the difference between what audiences heard and what happened at the microphones, usually comic riffs
I've always read how 1950s movie either avoided or insulted TV, but I've yet to see them (other than the great "Ace in the Hole"). Every living room has a TV, although it isn't always in use, and characters like Hopalong Cassidy are mentioned. Maybe I've been watching the wrong movies.
K.K.: Very few movies revealed a TV in a living room. Even fewer showed one that was turned on. On the other hand, you saw massive radio consoles quite often.
People could sit at home and listen to people talk over the telephone and sing on the radio before they could ever hear them talk and sing in the movies when out at the cinema, so in a sense talking movies had simply caught up and surpassed what telephones and radios had offered at home for some decades already - while the later change to TV from radio-only was home entertainment catching up to draw even with the movies.
With the arrival of cable TV two decades after that, home entertainment surpassed the cinema by offering an expanded menu of choices - a menu of choices which the movie business a few years later sought to emulate through the use of multi-screen venues.
But then in the late 1980s, and somewhat unexpectedly, the good old telephone - that antique pre-radio home communications technology - leap-frogged them all to bring the internet into our homes to give us all something to read on our screens, and an even greater novelty - the power to easily share our writings with many others from our own homes.
It took a further decade or two of ever-cheapening and expanding computer processing power for the radio/music, movie and TV businesses, still busily and quite successfully competing amongst and between themselves, to even notice that beyond the enabling of the ever-easier infringement of their copyrights, the internet had also enabled something entirely new to get ahead of all of them in the entertainment race, as measured by and in raw revenues - computer games.
As all of these forms of entertainment are in competition each with the other it is not surprising that all of them take shots from time to time at any or all of the rest of them - when they are not working hand-in-glove with each other to promote each others' wares, that is.
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