TCM Schedule for Thursday, August 12 -- Summer Under The Stars -- Norma Shearer

[Staph]

It's a day full of wonderful performances by Norma Shearer, including her Oscar-winning role in The Divorcee (1930) (and five of her six Oscar nominations), as well as five of her six films made with Robert Montgomery. The missing Oscar nomination is A Free Soul (1931) and the missing Montgomery collaberation is 1933's Going Hollywood. Enjoy!


6:00am -- Lady of the Night (1924)
In this silent film, a young man must choose between a woman from the streets and a refined woman, both of whom are in love with him.
Cast: Norma Shearer, Malcolm McGregor, George K. Arthur, Fred Esmelton
Dir: Monta Bell
BW-61 mins, TV-G

Based on a story by Adela Rogers St. John.


7:15am -- A Lady Of Chance (1928)
In this silent film, a female con artist lures men to her apartment so she can blackmail them.
Cast: Norma Shearer, Lowell Sherman, Gwen Lee, John Mack Brown
Dir: Robert Z. Leonard
BW-78 mins, TV-G

The song "Just a Little Bit of Driftwood" (1928); music and lyrics by Benny Davis, 'Dohl Davis' and Abe Lyman was published in connection with the movie. Yes, you read that correctly -- a song associated with a silent film. Only in Hollywood!


8:45am -- Their Own Desire (1929)
A young couple's affair is complicated by her father's relationship with his mother.
Cast: Norma Shearer, Belle Bennett, Lewis Stone, Robert Montgomery
Dir: E. Mason Hopper
BW-65 mins, TV-G

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role -- Norma Shearer

The first of six collaborations between Shearer and the patron saint of the Classic Films forum!


10:00am -- Complicated Women (2003)
Documentary that looks at the phenomenon of "pre-code women" during the years 1929-1934.
Cast: Frances Dee, Kitty Carlisle, Molly Haskell, Mick LaSalle
Dir: Hugh Munro Neely
BW-55 mins, TV-PG

Jane Fonda narrates the story of the years between the ascent of talkies until late in 1934, when the Hays Office cracked down on what it perceived as immorality in Hollywood movies. The emphasis is on how women were portrayed, and focuses on how they were much more liberated and equal (or superior) to men, until 1935 when they once again took subservient roles to their male co-stars


11:00am -- The Divorcee (1930)
The double standard destroys a liberal couple's marriage.
Cast: Norma Shearer, Chester Morris, Conrad Nagel, Robert Montgomery
Dir: Robert Z. Leonard
BW-82 mins, TV-G

Won an Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role -- Norma Shearer

Nominated for Oscars for Best Director -- Robert Z. Leonard, Best Writing, Achievement -- John Meehan, and Best Picture

Prior to this film, Norma Shearer had primarily played very "proper," ladylike roles. She was eager to change her image and do parts that were more sensuous, so she launched a campaign to get the part of Jerry. MGM producers were skeptical - none more so than Irving Thalberg, who was also Shearer's husband. To convince him that she could handle a more "sexy" role, Shearer did a photo shoot with her posing provocatively in lingerie, and after seeing the pictures, Thalberg agreed to cast her. The decision paid off, as Shearer won Best Actress at the Academy Awards that year.


12:30pm -- The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934)
An invalid poetess defies her father's wishes to marry a dashing young poet.
Cast: Norma Shearer, Fredric March, Charles Laughton, Maureen O'Sullivan
Dir: Sidney Franklin
BW-109 mins, TV-G

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actress in a Leading Role -- Norma Shearer, and Best Picture

Concerned about the public's reaction, the disturbing subplot about Father Barrett's incestuous designs on his daughter was toned down by the studio. However, Charles Laughton famously remarked that they couldn't censor the "gleam" in his eye.


2:30pm -- Riptide (1934)
A chorus girl weds a British lord then falls for an old flame.
Cast: Norma Shearer, Robert Montgomery, Herbert Marshall, Mrs. Patrick Campbell
Dir: Edmund Goulding
BW-92 mins, TV-G

Snow was trucked in from the Sierra Mountains for use in the Alpine scene. This was also the last of the six films costarring Shearer and Montgomery.


4:04pm -- One Reel Wonders: Minnesota "Land Of Plenty" (1942)
This "Traveltalk" explores the history, land, and culture of Minnesota.
Cast: James A. FitzPatrick
C-10 mins

Featuring an appearance by then Minnesota governor, later perennial Presidential candidate, Harold Stassen.


4:15pm -- Escape (1940)
A Nazi officer's mistress helps an American free his mother from a concentration camp.
Cast: Norma Shearer, Robert Taylor, Conrad Veidt, Nazimova
Dir: Mervyn LeRoy
BW-98 mins, TV-G

Author Grace Zaring Stone used a pen name when her book was published to protect relatives living in Europe from Nazi retribution. Similarly, no composer credit was given in the film for the same reason, and some of the actors used fictitious names.


6:00pm -- Idiot's Delight (1939)
A hoofer and a fake Russian countess are caught behind enemy lines at the outbreak of World War II.
Cast: Norma Shearer, Clark Gable, Edward Arnold, Charles Coburn
Dir: Clarence Brown
BW-110 mins, TV-G

This was the only film in which Clark Gable performed a dance number. He spent 6 weeks rehearsing the steps with the dance director, George King, and practicing at home with his wife, Carole Lombard. Because of his fear of messing it up during a take, the set was closed during the filming of this sequence. Near the end of "Puttin' on the Ritz", the dancer second from the viewer's left is barely in step and not doing any of the arm movements because she is holding up the top of her costume, which has a broken right strap and is flopping about as she dances.


7:51pm -- One Reel Wonders: Victor Mclaglen Bio (1962)
BW-4 mins

In spite of being a powerful hulk his whole life (his huge shoulders making even John Wayne's look small), McLaglen was sixty-four and in declining health by the time he was in The Quiet Man (1952). Even prickly John Ford had to be sensitive to McLaglen's condition while shooting that movie's grueling fight sequence.


What's On Tonight: SUMMER UNDER THE STARS: NORMA SHEARER


8:00pm -- The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (1927)
In this silent film, a young prince attending college falls for a barmaid below his station.
Cast: Ramon Novarro, Norma Shearer, Jean Hersholt, Gustav von Seyffertitz
Dir: Ernst Lubitsch
BW-106 mins, TV-G

One of at least six versions of the story Old Heidelberg by Wilhelm Meyer-Förster.


9:56pm -- One Reel Wonders: Norma Shearer Biography (1962)
BW-4 mins

Six years after the death of first husband Irving Thalberg, she married a ski instructor 20 years her junior and retired from the screen forever.


10:00pm -- Private Lives (1931)
A divorced couple rekindles the spark after landing in adjoining honeymoon suites with new mates.
Cast: Norma Shearer, Robert Montgomery, Reginald Denny, Una Merkel
Dir: Sidney Franklin
BW-84 mins, TV-G

Glacier National Park in Montana doubled for the Swiss Alps in the film's mountain climbing scene.


11:30pm -- Romeo and Juliet (1936)
Shakespeare's classic tale of young lovers from feuding families.
Cast: Norma Shearer, Leslie Howard, John Barrymore, Edna May Oliver
Dir: George Cukor
BW-125 mins, TV-G

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actor in a Supporting Role -- Basil Rathbone, Best Actress in a Leading Role -- Norma Shearer, Best Art Direction -- Cedric Gibbons, Fredric Hope and Edwin B. Willis, and Best Picture

This was the last film producer Irving Thalberg (Shearer's husband) personally produced before his death. The film's Los Angeles premiere took place at the Carthay Circle Theater on September 14, 1936, the night of Thalberg's death. Frank Whitbeck, the radio announcer for the broadcast of the premiere, decided not to interview the stars of the movie on the air. The actors were so grief-stricken that Whitbeck was afraid they would break down crying, so he simply announced their names as they arrived.


1:45am -- Marie Antoinette (1938)
Lavish biography of the French queen who "let them eat cake."
Cast: Norma Shearer, Tyrone Power, John Barrymore, Robert Morley
Dir: W. S. Van Dyke II
BW-157 mins, TV-G

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actor in a Supporting Role -- Robert Morley, Best Actress in a Leading Role -- Norma Shearer, Best Art Direction -- Cedric Gibbons, and Best Music, Original Score -- Herbert Stothart

From its initial inception up until right before the cameras started to roll, the film was designed to be shot in Technicolor. All of the sets and costumes were designed with color in mind. MGM went so far as to send the fox cape that Norma Shearer wears (to see Henry Stephenson on the night she becomes Queen) to New York to be specially dyed to match the blue of her eyes. Fearing that the addition of Technicolor would swell the already mammoth 1.8 million dollar budget, the production went before black and white cameras instead.


4:30am -- Strangers May Kiss (1931)
A sophisticated woman risks her marriage for love of a ruthless schemer.
Cast: Norma Shearer, Robert Montgomery, Neil Hamilton, Marjorie Rambeau
Dir: George Fitzmaurice
BW-81 mins, TV-G

The cad in Shearer's character's life is played by Neil Hamilton, who later played Commissioner Gordon on the Batman television series, starring Adam West as the Caped Crusader.

[Staph]

1. Norma Shearer Profile

Get one idea out of your head right now: Norma Shearer did not become the queen of the MGM lot because of her marriage to production-chief Irving G. Thalberg. Sure, he had done his bit to help her career, making sure she was dressed, made up and photographed well, and he bought prestigious properties to showcase her talents. But he couldn't force audiences to buy tickets to her films. And they did, particularly large numbers of young women who embraced her as one of their own. Shearer's fans went to her films to learn how to dress and how to behave, but they kept coming back because her portrayals of demure women with a fire burning inside taught them how to dream.

In truth, Shearer's stardom was a product of one of the strongest wills in Hollywood. She literally willed herself to be glamorous, beautiful and a star. After some modeling work as a child, she convinced her mother to take her to New York in pursuit of acting roles. And even though Broadway producer Flo Ziegfeld and film legend D.W. Griffith told her she wasn't beautiful enough to become a star, she kept working, rising from extra work to featured roles to leads.

A supporting role as a sweet young thing in Warner's Lucretia Lombard (1923) caught the eye of Irving G. Thalberg, who signed her to the fledgling Metro Productions and set out to make her a star. Her career took a big jump in 1924 when Thalberg cast her opposite established stars Lon Chaney and John Gilbert in the first MGM release, He Who Gets Slapped. Shearer would later speak kindly of Chaney's help on the film and the influence he had on perfecting her acting style.

Shearer had no trouble making the transition to talking films, possessing a simple, natural delivery with a musical lilt to it. Her growing legions of fans got their first earful when Thalberg had a talking sequence added to the end of The Trial of Mary Dugan (1929), one of the many hit plays he bought for her. Often she wound up playing roles created on Broadway by some of the stage's greatest legends. She inherited her first all-talkie, The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (1929), from Ina Claire; The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934) from Katharine Cornell; Strange Interlude (1932) from Lynn Fontanne; and Private Lives (1931) from Gertrude Lawrence. According to Hollywood legend, Thalberg even made a film of Lawrence and co-stars Noel Coward and Laurence Olivier performing the latter play so the movie's cast could "steal" their performances, although any such film appears to have been lost.

Another 1929 film set the tone for many of Shearer's roles in the early sound days. In Their Own Desire, she played a young woman who falls in love with a young man (Robert Montgomery) who turns out to be the son of the woman who stole her father from his family. The film's combination of slightly daring sexual material with romance, sparkling wit and some sentiment would prove a surefire box office hit.

Shearer's marriage almost proved a disadvantage when MGM picked up the screen rights to a daring tale of divorce and infidelity, The Divorcee (1930). Thalberg didn't think she was sexy enough for the role of a woman who decides to match her straying husband infidelity for infidelity. To win the role, she enlisted George Hurrell, whom she would help become one of Hollywood's top still photographers, to shoot her in a variety of sexy poses. Thalberg gave her the role, which won her an Oscar® for Best Actress.

More sexy roles followed, most notably as the society girl involved with brutal gangster Clark Gable in A Free Soul (1931). Thalberg decided to make their scenes more powerful by having Gable rough Shearer up on camera. It made Gable a star and Shearer an even bigger star. This was also one of the first films for which, at her urging, designer Adrian had undergarments built into her slinky, bias-cut evening gowns. Even though Jean Harlow would eventually be most associated with that style, Adrian would always refer to them as "Norma's nightgowns." After another of her steamy romances, Riptide (1934), in which she leaves snobbish husband Herbert Marshall for old flame Robert Montgomery, Shearer cut back on her screen appearances, partly to care for her husband, who had developed heart problems, and partly to confine herself to prestige productions like Romeo and Juliet (1936).

When Thalberg died in 1936, she took a year off and wanted to retire from the screen, but MGM's stockholders convinced her to sign a new, five-year contract. At the same time, studio head Louis B. Mayer tried to con her out of her husband's MGM stock holdings, only to discover just how tough Shearer could be.

Thalberg had been planning another prestige production for Shearer when he died, and that would be her first film back at MGM. In period regalia and with an impressive cast including John Barrymore and Tyrone Power, she dominated the screen as the flighty Marie Antoinette (1938). But without Thalberg guiding her career, she started to falter at the box office. Idiot's Delight (1939) proved a mistake, with most critics comparing her unfavorably to Fontanne. Fortunately she bounced back with The Women (1939), standing toe-to-toe with accomplished comic actresses like Rosalind Russell and Mary Boland to play a woman fighting to win her husband back from opportunistic shop girl Joan Crawford.

Shearer ushered in the '40s with Escape (1940), a daring for its time anti-Nazi film. But then she took on two ill-advised stage adaptations. Adapted from a short play by Noel Coward, We Were Dancing (1942) seemed out of touch with the times, casting Shearer as a socialite in love with society freeloader Melvyn Douglas. It was a rare box-office dud for the star. When she followed it the same year with Her Cardboard Lover, adapted from a stage farce that had worked for Jeanne Eagels and Tallulah Bankhead (in the '20s), the film's failure convinced her to retire from the screen.

Earlier, Shearer had turned down the role of Scarlett O'Hara, knowing producer David O. Selznick had only offered it to her as a courtesy. She had even quipped that she'd rather play Rhett Butler. The year she retired, she turned down Mrs. Miniver (1942) because she didn't want to play a woman with a grown son. Shortly after her retirement, she shocked Hollywood by marrying a ski instructor 20 years her junior (but not until he'd signed one of the industry's first pre-nuptial agreements).

Shearer lived out her retirement in luxury. Although she never acted again, she maintained her ties with the industry and even recommended Janet Leigh for an MGM contract. When Universal filmed Man of a Thousand Faces (1957), the biography of Lon Chaney, she personally chose garment district executive Robert Evans to play her late husband, launching the career of one of Hollywood's most successful modern producers.

by Frank Miller

* Films in Bold Type Air on 8/12

[CBHagman]

2. Cue the Norma Shearer pictures....

Et voila...

[Matilda]

3. The focus on Norma Shearer this week celebrates her 108th birthday, on Tuesday.

Some of her films have been shown here too, but not, alas, any of her silents. I should so love to see the first two; I shall offer up little prayers regularly that TCM might be inspired to hold another season of Silent Sunday Nights soon. The only other hope is "World Movies", which sometimes screens silents.

The two photos below the portrait are from ""Their Own Desire" (which features one of the worst cinematic performances of all time from Belle Bennett, who played Norma Shearer's mother in this badly written and poorly executed film).

The bottom one is from "Strangers May Kiss", a slightly mixed-up film that wasn't always quite sure where it was going, but it was fun, and worth seeing for a good performance from each of the two leads. But IMO, Shearer married the wrong man in the end.