A Glimpse of Hollywood Then and Now

Sidelined with Bushman during the destruction of Ben Hur in Italy
By John W. Harding
BearManor Media 286 pages

Butterflies in the Rain: A Story of Old Hollywood The life, art, and tragic death of silent film starlet Regina Doyle
By Stephen Brown
BearManor Media, 524 pages

Catholic Girl: The Life and Times of Mabel Normand
By Sean Crose
BearManor Media, 318 pages

Joan Crawford in Film Noir: The actress as author
By David Meuel
McFarland, 225 pages

Marlon Brando: the Hollywood rebel
By Burt Kearns
Applause Books, 296 pages

A matinee idol in 1911, Francis X. Bushman appeared in as many as 20 films a year, but his career nearly collapsed before his huge starring role in Ben Hur. (1925), considered by the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress to be culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant. After production problems in Italy, the film was parked in Hollywood, where Mussolini's policies of fascism would not apply, or so it seemed, until the interventions of a studio mogul in the piquant new novel. by John W. Harding.

The fate of Regina Doyle is one of those sad stories from old Hollywood. She died in a car accident at just 24 years old and on the verge of stardom. Stephen Brown makes his research a focal point, as he turns Doyle into a sort of Sister Carrie character in Hollywood fantasyland. The biographer's visits to the sites of his subjects near fame and death provide a fascinating insight into Hollywood then and now.

Mabel Normand teaches Charlie Chaplin a trick or two in a biography that contains chapters on Chaplin, Samuel Goldwyn, Mary Pickford, Hal Roach, Mack Sennett and other Hollywood greats. She appeared in many films with Chaplin, but she is also known for her involvement in the famous Hollywood scandals involving the suspicious deaths of a director, William Desmond Taylor, and a star, Fatty Arbuckle, accused of rape and 'manslaughter. As Sean Crose's title suggests, Normand had an integrity and sense of charity informed by his religious upbringing.

David Meuel insists that his book is not a biography, and yet by focusing on how Joan Crawford chose and developed her roles in genre films, her relationships with her co-stars, directors and producers, a biography sometimes emerges simply from the way Mr. Meuel reports her insistence, for example, that Henry Fonda and Dana Andrews, two of Twentieth-Century Fox's biggest male stars, appear with her in Daisy Kenyon, which catapulted genre production to the ranks of premier films.

Mr. Meuel is correct that neither male star wanted to be subordinate to Crawford, but as I discovered in my own research, Andrews wanted the role of Fonda, since Fonda's character wins the love of Crawford much to the dismay of Andrews' legal character. Crawford realized that if Fox brought in second-tier stars to play against her, the film's dramatic tension would relax. The film needed a constellation of stars, and that's where Crawford, the auteur, emerged.

Marlon Brando was not the first star to be seen as a rebel in Hollywood, as Burt Kearns notes: There were other actors who were cantankerous with the press, who had feuds with big-city gossip writers. , but few of them really seemed to care, one way or another, about their image or Hollywood in general. Mr. Kearns is right, but in terms of Hollywood history his assessment could be refined.

One of Hollywood's great stars, Ronald Colman, really didn't care, but he nevertheless observed the protocols of courteous treatment of the press, even though he was reluctant to cooperate with the media hype of Hollywood. He was the gentleman hero that Brando all but destroyed when asked in The Wild One: What are you rebelling against? He replied: What is the matter with you?

In old Hollywood, Ronald Colman could break his contract with Samuel Goldwyn even if it meant staying off-screen for a few years before signing a new contract. Brando, meanwhile, heralded a generation of actors like Paul Newman, Jack Nicholson and Robert DeNiro who not only broke Hollywood's rules regarding star behavior, but also changed Hollywood itself, so that today Today, what major star is not also named a leader. producer in the credits?

Mr. Rollyson is the author of Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews and Ronald Colman: Hollywoods Gentleman Hero.