It Can't Happen Here - The movie that was never made.

It Can’t Happen Hereis possibly the most important movie that was never made. It did have a cast: Lionel Barrymore was to be the star, playing the lead role of the crotchety small-town newspaper editor Doremus Jessup. The plot told of an America in the 1930s where democracy was eroded into fascism in the wake of a populist and powerful figure elected to the presidency.  It was a kind of alternate universe dystopian story -- of the kind we are living out today. 

The script, based on the best-selling novel by Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis, was by Sidney Howard, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, who had already adapted Lewis’ book Dodsworth for Hollywood, released in 1936. Everything pointed to a most important smash hit for Hollywood with It Can’t Happen Here, and for M-G-M, which slated the movie to begin shooting in 1936.

Others in the cast were to include Basil Rathbone, Walter Connolly, and Virginia Bruce.  J. Walter Rubin was to direct.

The sets were built. But then something curious happened. The movie was canceled in February 1936. While it is uncertain on whom to pin the fault for pulling this film out of production, according to the introduction of the 2014 edition of the novel by Michael Meyer, it seems that the Hays Office had a hand in it because they did not wish to offend foreign film distributors in Germany and Italy, or their governments. Their governments, at the time, were fascist. It Can’t Happen Herewas an antifascist message of warning.

But it was not a tale of warning against Germany or Italy, or indeed, any European country. The victim and chief offender in the story was the United States of America. Hence the title It Can’t Happen Here.

But, of course, it can, it has, and it may continue to appalling degrees, with the right kind of complacence.

Some of the blame for not continuing with the film was also laid at the door of studio head Louis B. Mayer, not necessarily for wishing to avoid offending foreign governments by painting fascism as a bad thing, but for the amount of money that would be lost if those foreign markets decided to boycott the movie.

The novel continued Sinclair Lewis’ body of work of examining what he felt was the corruptive hypocrisy and choking materialism of middle-class America, in works such as Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, and Dodsworth. It Can’t Happen Here, however, took a sharp turn, a more imaginative and dystopic view of what was down the road, rather than what we recognized with familiar comfort as everyday life in the U.S.

The story takes place in a small town in Vermont. Doremus Jessup is the editor of the local paper, in his early 60s, married with one young son and two other grown children, and friends and colleagues and neighbors who are all affected by a strange new political upheaval in the land. The genius of the book is it portrays fascism as something that happens to a country slowly, very slowly, and with surgical precision, until the victims – its own citizens – are too helpless to do anything about it once they have recognized the crisis.

This is the template for fascism in every country. The most startling aspect of this book is that there is so much to reflect upon that is relevant today.

Doremus Jessup is acidic. He is not one to raise the call to alarm, and though we see the coming turmoil through his eyes, because, being a newspaper editor, he is observant, we see that much of the fault of not preparing for and warning people about the encroachment of fascism falls upon people like him. They are educated, but they have adopted the bemused attitude that morons may shout a little but will never carry the day, that intellectuals are protected in their own cocoons by their education, and that double-edged sword that damns us as a country – the belief that our own system of government is so perfect that it will protect us against anything, that we are so superior a people that we would never fall for a pack of lies. That the founding fathers set this nation on autopilot and that we don’t have to do anything to help steer the course.

But Doremus Jessup does observe the follies happening around him. Rather than protest, he smirks, and that is the extent of his indignation. He fluffs off much of what he sees as insignificant because the ultra-right-wing people coming into power in local, state, and national government are fools who admire bullying strongmen. Eventually, he is moved to call them out, not in angry tones, but in a merely dismissive attitude.  He scoffs, “Remember our Red Scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the OGPU were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won, the Pope would illegitimize their children?...Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?... Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how truckloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings?... Why, wherein all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours!”

A populist figure runs for the presidency. His name is Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, and he is low on intelligence but he has a great big mouth and a certain degree of charm for those who hate progressives.

Windrip’s campaign promises include several points. One of his planks is that “all Negroes shall be prohibited from voting, holding public office, practicing law, medicine, or teaching in any class above the grade of grammar school, and they should be taxed 100 percent of all sums in excess of $10,000 per family per year... Negroes shall, by definition, be persons with at least one-sixteenth colored blood.”

Another campaign promise, “All women now employed shall, as rapidly as possible, except in such peculiarly feminine spheres of activity as nursing and beauty parlors, be assisted to return to their incomparably sacred duties as homemakers and mothers.”

We see where this is going. As fairytale fantastic as this sounds, it still echoes the idiocy and meanness of the farthest right-wing Trumpanzees of today’s political climate. They have insidiously taken their inch; they hope eventually to forcibly to take their mile.

Windrip touts himself as the hero of “forgotten men”, he glories in big rallies where he is the center of attention, and he accuses the press of lying. His fans and supporters, encouraged by his message, heap hatred upon the intellectual “elite” and they take out their hatred on blacks and on Jews.

Doremus Jessup’s family is torn, with a grown son attracted by the new fascist government and rising in its ranks, and his courageous daughter rebelling against the new order in whatever method possible with the new underground resistance.

When President Windrip is disappointed that Congress fails to pass his whacko campaign promises into law, he declares martial law and takes over sole control of the government, with the help of his colleagues in office who have been waiting for such powerful coattails to ride.  And still, there are people who think it can’t happen here.

“The most liberal for members of the Supreme Court resigned and were replaced by surprisingly unknown lawyers who called President Windrip by his first name.”

A group of right-wing vigilantes who call themselves Minute Men make up his private army and are used to put down public protests. With little hope to overcome the fascism in their government, many people attempt to escape to Canada, as does Doremus and his family, but fail. Eventually, Doremus is sent to one of the new concentration camps for resistors. The descriptions of his experiences in the camp are chilling and vivid; he is subjected to beatings and sick torture.

Across the nation, opposition groups are kidnapped and arrested, journalists foremost among them, for they are the vanguard of freedom in any republic. Doremus’ greatest sin, which he comes to acknowledge himself, is that, as a member of the free press, he did not take this threat seriously, or have the courage to speak out about it when he finally did see the trouble.

“The charity of this dictatorship isn’t primarily the fault of big business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work,” he realizes. “It’s the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups, who have let the demagogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest.”

The media who surfed Trump’s campaign as a ratings-grabber failed their responsibility of due diligence in a time of impending crisis, which they should have foreseen and faced. 

One of the thugs who raids Doremus’ home upon his arrest finds many volumes of the works of Charles Dickens. One of the dumbbell vigilantes, looking for proof of Doremus’ lack of loyalty remarks, “That guy Dickens—didn’t he do a lot of complaining about conditions – about schools and the police and everything?” I had to smile at this; it reminded me of a comment left on my post about A Christmas Carol back in December by a reader who felt that my political views were “quite extreme” for writing about the “Dickensian” lives of the characters in A Christmas Carol, and for the IMPEACH TRUMP banner across the top of this blog that will remain as long as he remains in office. Apparently, there is, indeed, something in Dickens to rile the right and put them on the defensive.

How the characters in the novel, It Can’t Happen Here adapt to the new order, how they escape it, and how they resist, are compelling subplots to the main story, which is always in the background – that it can’t happen here. That is the greatest irony of the book, the irony on which the story is pegged. It does happen here in the story. It can happen here in real life. Even under a progressive president like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, we saw concentration camps for Americans of Japanese descent during World War II.

Eventually, the dictator Windrip is a deposed by another dictator – as we’ve examined before in our series on fascism in America, fascism is always and inevitably cannibalistic. Fascists will always sell out each other.

The movie which was not made did have a second chance with the possibility of Lewis Stone playing Doremus Jessup, but M-G-M again decided not to go through with the project. It was adapted for the stage in 1937 by the Federal Theatre Project, which was part of Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration – a federally funded program to keep alive vital theatre in America and to employ thousands of theatre professionals.  It was disbanded in 1939 when Congress cut its funding. However, the play opened in over twenty different productions simultaneously in eighteen different cities on
October 27, 1937, and was a smash hit.

The Berkeley Repertory Theater, of Berkeley California, produced the play in a timely offering in the fall of 2016, just before the November election.

It should be produced again. It should be produced for television for a mass audience to see. It should be made into a major motion picture.  I wish we could have seen Lionel Barrymore in it.

For Hollywood, It Can’t Happen Here is unfinished business.

Joy Cometh in the Morning

I think that classic film fans are idealistic.  We may differ in our lives in many ways, but we share that basic element of idealism that is likely the result of watching films from a more unabashedly idealistic -- and yet, no less troubled -- era of history.  "Watching" perhaps isn't a strong enough word; we absorb these films through a wonderful intellectual and emotional osmosis.  They give us ideas, stir up our feelings, add value to our lives in ways which I think we are actually acutely aware.  They also give us inspiration and courage.

James Stewart in the above photo comes with hat in hand to Lionel Barrymore, the Scrooge-like villain of Bedford Falls.  The great difference between Mr. Potter and Mr. Scrooge is that Scrooge will undergo redemption and become a decent human being again at the end of the story.  Mr. Potter will not.  

James Stewart as George Bailey is demoralized, defeated, crawling to him for money, for mercy.  He is at the end of his rope.  It is George, not Potter, who undergoes an epiphany with the help of supernatural aid. When his brother Harry announces at the end of the film, "A toast to my  big brother George, the richest man in town!" -- we cry, the church bells in our heads ring, and it is a moment to rejoice.  His family, his friends, his community have come to his rescue.

We are lucky to be classic film fans; those who are not may have more difficulty swallowing the idea that good can triumph over evil through something so simple as all of us helping each other.  We will need that lesson, and that kind of inspiration and courage to get through the years to come.  Fascism is evil, and it is with us in the White House, in the Senate, in the House of Representatives, and is bleeding downward to state and local offices.  There may be a time when a black and white movie about a wealthy man who strips the poor of what they have, destroying any possibility of their climbing into the middle class will be banned.  Consider how during the infamous House Un-Amercian Activities committee, which we covered in this previous post, a film like The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) could be criticized because it showed a character who was a wealthy banker merely for showing him in a less than flattering light; and for showing a character who embraced far right-wing politics being punched in the face.

We've had the draconian tax bill destroying our future.  We've had the encouragement of the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazis.  We've had the protections stripped away, the rules broken, the nation sold out to the highest bidders, foreign and domestic.  Now look for censorship, and erasing the Bill of Rights.

Let's remember our idealism in the face of this, and have courage, and help each other.

To all who visit this blog, may I wish a Merry Christmas for those who celebrate it, and a very Happy New Year to all.  May we discover, as George Bailey did so hopefully expressed in Psalm 30:5:  "Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning."

We'll see you next on Thursday, January 4, 2018, for another year of Another Old Movie Blog.

We Hold These Truths - Hollywood Broadcast

A week after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a program celebrating the 150^thanniversary of the Bill of Rights was produced on all four radio networks of the day – CBS, NBC Red and Blue networks, and the Mutual network.  It was narrated by James Stewart, and a host of Hollywood players joined him in bringing to life not only the struggles of post-Revolutionary War America to come up with this Bill of Rights, but how important it was to reflect on it, and rely on it, in a time of modern troubles.  The program was performed live.

It is a remarkable and deeply emotional dramatization that not only speaks to us today, but sings, shouts, cries, and cheers.  Norman Corwin wrote the beautiful script, performed on December 15, 1941, and it is estimated over half the U.S. population listened to it.  Performed in a Hollywood studio, live hookups also included performances in New York City, and an address by President Franklin D. Roosevelt from Washington, D.C.  Bernard Herrmann composed original music for the program, and at the very end of the show, Maestro Leopold Stokowski conducted “The Star Spangled Banner.”

James Stewart was, at that time, a corporal in the Army Air Corps, loaned to the project for the occasion.  His fellow players included Edward Arnold, Lionel Barrymore, Walter Brennan Marjorie Main, Bob Burns, Walter Huston, Edward G. Robinson, Rudy Vallee, and Orson Welles.

Walter Huston, rolling his r’s, introduces the program.  Then, the familiar voice of Lionel Barrymore is brought to the mic.

“My name is Barrymore. I’m one of several actors gathered in the studio in California….”  He joins 130 million fellow Americans in praise of a document “that men have fought for, that men are fighting for…”

He announces the cast, and adds, “Our names are meaningless unless your names are added.”  

Then one by one, the cast fills in, leaving their Hollywood personas and adopting the guise, in our imaginations, of post-Revolutionary Americans.  Jimmy Stewart like his character in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939),which we covered in this post, leads us on a tour of modern Washington, D.C., and as he describes monuments and their inscriptions, we are reminded of the movie, for he is intentionally channeling Mr. Smith’s awe and wonder.  

Not only the message, but the script beams with elegant writing, no longer in fashion.  Perhaps it is too idealistic, and we have learned to distrust everything.  

On the National Archives building it is written,  “ What is past, is prologue.”  We hear the clicking of footsteps as Stewart climbs the stone steps to see the Bill of Rights in glass – the old parchment with faded writing.  Then Stewart and the other actors proceed to bring it alive.  “The words are dim, but not the meaning of the words…”  Perhaps not.  Perhaps we need this lesson.

Stewart brings us to the hall as the great men rise to speak and call the roll, to sign their names the draft when Constitution is written, which is then brought back to the states for review, but the people are suspicious.  They want guarantees of certain protections.  And so, this is the story of how the Bill of Rights came to be added as the most important addendum in history.  

Other actors jump in to be those common people in the different states who express their curiosity for the new document, but who want more guarantees, more explanations of just what they have won in the Revolutionary War.

Walter Huston is a blacksmith.   He doesn’t want anyone telling him he has to pray the way somebody else tells him.  Doesn’t like state religion.  Wants to make sure there won’t be any.

Others are suspicious of authority.  They know that just wanting law and order isn’t enough—Nero had such.   

Marjorie Main plays a woman whose husband died in the war.  She wants guarantees that he didn’t die  in vain.

Edward Arnold is a bricklayer who argues that the work is unfinished.  There’s only a foundation and no house.

So many voices, so much dissent, so much yearning for rights.   We are taken on a journey not only through history, but through the minds and souls of this nation.

Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, James Madison lend their voices, and George Mason warning us not only about a monarchy, but a “tyrannical aristocracy” taking over, the monied class.

Now the First Congress begins sifting through the amendments to the Constitution and hammering them out for the future.  It’s not an easy job, but it’s important and they persist.  Stewart passionately narrates, cajoles, shouts.

Most profound is Orson Welles’ impassioned speech.  He takes over at this point and adds the other voices to the founders of the Bill of Rights – not just the men in Congress, but from the victims of the ages – “They had much help, the many nameless and unknown – from bleeding mouths, burnt flesh – from numberless and nameless agonies.  The delegates from dungeons, they were there.  The delegates from ashes at the bottoms of the stakes were there.”

We hear a voice, weak, pleading.

Orson continues, “The gallows delegates, whose corpses lifted gently in the breeze, they too…”

His voice grows booming, horrified:  “The Christians killed for being Christians, Jews for being Jews, the Quakers hanged in Boston town, they made a quorum also… The murdered men, the lopped off hands, the shattered limbs, the red welts where the whip lash bit into the back.  Must you know what they said?  Must you know how they argued?  Must you be told the evidence?

“Listen, then!”

We hear a blood-curdling scream.

“That was an argument for an amendment.”

They are words for our times, how shockingly, sickeningly current.

“How much of all this must be told to be believed?  How much of this must be diagramed: X marks the spot where decency was last observed?”

Nero was there, Caligula, Cotton Mather, all the tyrants were observing in the hall.  “All the long and bloody history of fanaticism, murder in the name of God.”  

Christ was there too.  “He, too, sat in the Congress, the mild Man, with scars in His hands and feet where the spikes went through.  He was a consultant in the business at hand.  Had He not died because the rulers of the realm denied free speech?  Was He not nailed up on a cross between two thieves because His preachments were considered treason?”

Orson growls, wails his words.  “Out of the agonies, out of crisscrossed scars of all the human race they made a Bill of Rights for their own people…To stand against the enemies within, connivers, fakers, those who lust for power, those who make of their authority an insolence.”

Listen to Orson’s impassioned speech, and think of now.

The Bill of Rights “Threw up a bulwark…and made a sign for their posterity against the bigots, the fanatics, bullies, lynchers, race haters, the cruel men, the spiteful men, the sneaking men, the pessimists…”

The Bill of Rights is ratified!  Jimmy Stewart breathes easier and brings the document to the thirteen states.

Then Edward Arnold, Walter Huston, Marjorie Main, Walter Brennan and others join in as the amendments are read, each one, and voices answer to illustrate what each one means.  We go to the homes of farmers, the blacksmith shop, all the new citizens.  The war gave them separation from Great Britain, but the Constitution and the Bill of Rights makes them citizens.

We hear a woman tending the grave of her soldier husband.  We hear a Colonial folk tune.  Through all, James Stewart’s folksy ruminating weaves a thread to guide us to the present.  Edward G. Robinson is a political protester who praises the rights that allow him to speak and fight corruption in city hall.

“A promise is a promise,” Jimmy Stewart says, “Has America’s been kept?”

It is a fair question, but in only a short time Japanese Americans would have their rights taken away by virtue of their ethnicity.  It was not the Bill of Rights that failed them; it was their fellow citizens and a president and government who shamefully allowed their mistreatment.  Even in those days when war was declared and Americans were coming together for mutual support, even in times of great pride, patriotism and cheerleading, something monstrously unfair could occur.  How much easier it is to occur in times when we are not one, when we are fighting amongst ourselves?  When a foreign enemy knows how to divide and conquer.  Abraham Lincoln said:

“From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia...could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.” 

We've come to that suicidal brink, however, with the aid of Vladimir Putin’s mafia, and the fascism that is rotting our government. We have far superior technology in our media than they did when this radio program was broadcast in December 1941, but we have lost the gift of eloquence that they possessed then.  Such well-written and carefully crafted words would today seem to be talking above the heads of the crowds whom the spokesmen try to reach.  Maybe because they are above the intelligence of the spokesmen.

This was a live program, so neatly coordinated, so passionately and intimately put together.  Listen to this program and marvel not only at how it was written, acted, and produced according to the technology of the day when we were only a week at war, but marvel – for God’s sake, marvel at the message of warning, of love, and of integrity, of pride for our Bill of Rights.

At the end of the program, James Stewart introduces in a soft, gentle voice President Roosevelt, who then speaks live from Washington, D.C.   “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the people of the United States.”

Of the people.

It was reported by Screen Guide magazine in the March 1942 issue, from which some of these photos are taken, that after James Stewart introduced the President, he ripped off his earphones at the mic, and burst into tears.

Listen to We Hold These Truths or download at the Internet Archive, or here at YouTube.

That's All There Is. There isn't any more. -- The Barrymores as Pop Culture Icons

 Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten Collection, 

[reproduction number, e.g., LC-USZ62-54231] , 1937

Ethel Barrymore appeared as a guest on Bing Crosby’s radio show on December 21, 1949.  It was his annual Christmas show, usually devoted to the singing of carols.  Miss Barrymore joined him for amusing patter about the new artificial Christmas trees that came in white and in pink, and they spoke wistfully of all the Christmases Barrymore spent on the road with her children as she played in theaters across the country.  

Announcer Ken Carpenter teased Bing on his wearing a suit and tie, getting all spruced up in honor of their esteemed guest, whom Bing respectfully addressed as “Miss Barrymore.”

They might speak with equanimity on baseball (she was a fan), but there was no chumminess with this famous guest, yet Ethel Barrymore deigned to do something the dignified thespian never would in her younger days: she parodied herself.

When Bing asked her opinion of his pseudo-rival Bob Hope, she replied, “Well, there’s his childlike simplicity.”

“And?”

She answered, “That’s all there is.   There isn’t anymore.”  

She hardly got the line out before cracking up, and the audience roared with laughter also.  It was a line from a play she had done almost fifty years earlier – a line that made her famous.

This post is part of The Barrymore Trilogy Blogathon hosted by In the Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood.  Please have a look at the other participating blogs for some terrific posts.

The “trilogy” in this case, of course, comes from the dynamic trio of siblings who dominated theatre in the early decades of the twentieth century, and came to have a prominent place in film—most especially becoming icons of pop culture in a way entertainers had never been before, or perhaps since.

We have a great book on the trio by theatre critic Hollis Alpert, The Barrymores (NY: The Dial Press, 1964), which dramatically demonstrates the siblings’ dominance of art and culture in the U.S. with an introduction that drops us down on Broadway in the first week of March 1920.

There, at the Plymouth Theatre, John Barrymore, the youngest of the trio at about 37, made his Shakespearian debut in Richard III.

Ethel, the middle child and the reigning grand dame of theatre at 40 years old played over at the Empire in the smash hit, Déclasée.

Lionel, the eldest at 41, known for being a versatile character actor, played at the Criterion in The Letter of the Law. 

These three siblings were stars on Broadway at the same time.  The media took note and around about this time began to refer to the Barrymores as “the royal family of theatre.”

The Barrymore boys have facing pages in 
Stars of the Photoplay, 1930

They became so well known by this moniker that when playwrights George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber wrote their comedy, and rather wicked parody, of the Barrymores, they titled it The Royal Family.  It opened at the Selwyn Theatre in 1927.  It poked fun particularly at John, known as a heavy-drinking womanizer; and Ethel, for being a prima donna of the stage.  John saw it when it played in Los Angeles (Fredric March played the character Tony, which was based on John, and March also appeared in the film version in 1930) and reportedly thought it was funny, but Ethel was not happy.  She had yet to learn to laugh at herself or shrug off the innumerable imitators of herself and her brothers.

Library of Congress

One of the first instances of being imitated occurred in 1904 over her famous “There isn’t anymore” line.  She was playing in a comedy called Sunday on Broadway where her role was a young orphaned woman raised by rough miners in the West, who comes to London to meet her aunts.  Charles Frohman, famous theatrical producer of the day, sat in on the rehearsal.  In a pivotal scene, she is supposed to read aloud a letter from her rough miner guardians to her genteel aunts, but she stops herself because there is a part that is too personal for them to hear.  She just runs offstage.

Ethel suggested to producer Mr. Frohman that it would make more sense for her to say something, in an awkward and embarrassed manner, before she runs off.  He asked what, not given to interference by young ingénues.  

She is reported to have said, “Oh, maybe something like, ‘That’s all there is.  There isn’t anymore.'”

He left it in.  She said it on stage, and because of situation in the plot, and undoubtedly her delivery, it brought the house down.  Author Mr. Alpert notes, “…that line of added dialogue became virtually her trademark—to a degree that annoyed her.” (p.111)

She began to be imitated by comics on the vaudeville stage with this line.

However, though she had a brief foray into silent films in the teens, she preferred the theatre, where she remained, for the most part, until the late 1940s and a string of films, one of which earning her an Academy Award.  We covered her work in The Spiral Staircase (1945) here and Portrait of Jennie (1948) here.  She and her brothers all appeared in Rasputin and the Empress in 1933, which we discussed in this previous post.

Library of Congress

Her brothers took to film early and remained there, Lionel as a character man who appeared in over 200 movies, including his long gig in the Dr. Kildare series.  As versatile in real life as he was in acting, Lionel was also an artist, a composer, a director, and a novelist.  He is also reported to have claimed to have invented the microphone boom for the movies when he suggested a mic be put on a pole above the actors when sound issues were a major problem in the early days of the talkies.

Lionel also was known to a generation for playing Mr. Scrooge on the radio every Christmas in A Christmas Carol.  And like Ethel, he was also parodied in pop culture.   According to author Mr. Alpert, “So familiar was his drawling voice that an imitation of it turned up every other week on the Major Bowes Amateur Hour.”  He is also lampooned in cartoons and the movies, including by his fellow MGM star, Mickey Rooney.

John, of course, was The Great Profile, who played romantic leads until his own dissipated lifestyle and his casual attitude toward his work led him to parody himself far more effectively than another comic probably could.  We discussed his Twentieth Century (1934) here.  He starred in The Great Profile (1940) as a famous actor who drinks heavily.  Two years later, John Barrymore was dead.

They were descended from a long line of actors on both their paternal and maternal sides of their family, the Drews,  and as children they watched the great Edwin Booth and Helen Modjeska and Fanny Davenport on stage in the theater in Philadelphia that their grandmother ran.   None of the trio were ambitious for theatrical careers despite this, but it pulled them in by circumstance and there they outshone all their contemporaries and their famous thespian ancestors.   John did not take his work seriously.  Lionel had other interests as compelling for him.  Ethel had no desire as a child to be on stage, and indeed, spent every opening night of her life nearly paralyzed with stage fright, and yet by the end of her career, her life, she was the most beloved actress the theatre had never known. 

Library of Congress

In 1901, she was appearing at the Garrick Theatre on Broadway in Captain Jinks, and staying at Mrs. Wilson’s boarding house on 36^thStreet, in walking distance.  She was about 22 years old.  Her brother John came to escort her to the theater that evening, and when they came in sight of it, she gasped at the her name lit up in the new-fangled electric lights.  She cried.  It became more than the family trade to fall back on then, it was something personal. When she died in 1959, the last of her siblings, the lights dimmed on the marquee and inside the house of the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.  She had appeared there when it opened in 1928, as the first leading lady on that stage.

The children of these Barrymores enjoyed varying degrees of success in their own acting careers (or not).  It seemed serendipitous for John’s granddaughter to be named Drew Barrymore after both sides of the acting family.   Though she has climbed the ladder of fame in a way her preceding generation did not,  it is unlikely that anyone in any acting family will achieve the kind of critical respect, and also pop culture fame of John, Lionel, and Ethel Barrymore. Today, we have celebrity, which is not the same thing. Those three were truly greats, we can neither replicate their brand of greatness or the times in which it shone.  Because...

That’s all there is.  There isn’t anymore.

Kindly have a look at the other posts on The Barrymore Trilogy Blogathon hosted by In the Good Old Days of Hollywood.

****************************

Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. 
by Jacqueline T. Lynch

The first book on the career of actress Ann Blyth. Multitalented and remarkably versatile, Blyth began on radio as a child, appeared on Broadway at the age of twelve in Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine, and enjoyed a long and diverse career in films, theatre, television, and concerts. A sensitive dramatic actress, the youngest at the time to be nominated for her role in Mildred Pierce (1945), she also displayed a gift for comedy, and was especially endeared to fans for her expressive and exquisite lyric soprano, which was showcased in many film and stage musicals. Still a popular guest at film festivals, lovely Ms. Blyth remains a treasure of the Hollywood's golden age.

The eBook and paperback are available from Amazon and CreateSpace, which is the printer.  You can also order it from my Etsy shop. It is also available at the Broadside Bookshop, 247 Main Street, Northampton, Massachusetts.

If you wish a signed copy, then email me at JacquelineTLynch@gmail.com and I'll get back to you with the details.

**************************
My new syndicated column on classic film is up at http://www.go60.us/govoice/advice-and-more/item/2025-ccc-movie-fan, or check with your local paper.