Btw, I know what you mean about turning off a movie such as The Trail of the Lonesome Pine. One not only doesn’t know when it may appear again, but if it will…

I relish your challenging comments whenever they appear and feel as though maybe I’ve done something right when you respond to a blog.

Hi abwhittem,
I agree. We need to see the films of people like Sylvia Sidney to appreciate them. That’s one reason why the upcoming dvd of Merrily We Go to Hell (1932) with her and Fredric March in the cast is a cheerful prospect.

Thank you both for your additional remarks.

Walter Wanger was certainly associated with many classic and/or well known movies: Stagecoach, Foreign Correspondent, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the Fritz Lang movies. And others, of course.
Now on the titles I just mentioned I suspect that the strong directors (Ford, Hitchcock, Don Siegel, Lang) were mainly responsible for the quality – but who knows?

I did notice that you mentioned Wanger in your article but I didn’t see the mention of Budd Schulberg. Sorry.

This happens to me once in a while when I write free lance articles and features for newspapers. People tell me that they are disappointed that I didn’t put a particular fact in an article and they’re wrong because I did include it. I feel that on occasion I need to go over to their homes and read the article aloud to them.

Oh well. I don’t expect to have you knocking on my door any time sooner.

Back to Wanger. He is fascinating. He served prison time for the shooting incident, was released and then made two movies critical of the prison system -Riot in Cell Block 11 and I Want to Live (both part of my VHS movie collection).

The connection between Sidney, Wanger and Schulberg seems interesting.
Lets see if I got this straight. Sidney had a romantic relationship with Schulberg. She signs to make movies with Wanger. Schulberg’s son Budd then works for Wanger as a screenwriter on the film Winter Carnival. F. Scott Fitzgerald is also a writer for the film and is drunk as usual and is fired. Budd writes a novel about the incident later. I believe it was called The Disenchanted. Maybe he talks about this in his Hollywood Prince book, which I missed.

Is it just us? Are we the only movie Geeks that care about this stuff? I guess I care because time is moving on, this stuff will get forgotten and the kids today don’t know who Bogart, Gable, Brando or even Robert Redford are.

Have a good day.

There are a couple of very rare Sylvia Sidney movies from the ’30s that I have not been able to snag a peek at–though being Paramount pics from the ’30s, almost all of Sylvia Sidney’s movies are rather rarely screened and rather hard to find.

One of these is Accent on Youth (1935), one of the actress’ too few comedies with none other than Herbert Marshall(1935), which was apparently a well-reviewed May-September romance. Btw, the same Samson Raphaelson material was eventually re-fashioned to produce the Clark Gable-Carroll Baker movie, But Not For Me(1959)

Another obscure movie with S.S. is the WPA production of the agitprop play “One Third of a Nation” filmed by the Federal Theater Production Company in New York in 1939 and distributed by Paramount. The actress, finding herself rather unhappily typecast in Hollywood movies, began to work with the Group Theater after returning to NYC around the time that she became involved and eventually married a leading light of the Group, Luther Adler. Many members of the Group Theater are among the cast in One Third of a Nation. One of Sylvia Sidney‘s very young co-stars in this film was a teenage Sidney Lumet, (who did not enjoy the experience of working with the demanding Ms. Sidney, based on his comments in an interview he conducted with Peter Travers of Rolling Stone magazine). This movie, which once again took Sylvia to the tenements, is lovingly described rather well by Danny Miller in an appreciation linked below:
One Third of a Nation

Patricia,
Shhh, don’t tell anyone, but I like Blood on the Sun a lot too–even though it has its ragged moments, none of them are between Cagney & Sidney. I guess I’m not politically correct, but the movie is most charming when she is on the screen and Jimmy is trying to thwart the Tanaka Plan single-handedly.

Jenni,
I find Oscar Homolka, even in I Remember Mama a formidable and usually intimidating presence. What a contrast between his casting in Sabotage and Hitchcock’s original hope of having Robert Donat in that role! I do love this very dark movie, however, especially because of the quicksilver expressiveness of Sidney and the director’s brilliant composition of the movie.

Al,
Thanks for mentioning those additional and highly imaginative casting dreams of the always interesting producer, Walter Wanger. As mentioned in my piece, Sidney was under contract to Wanger, whose independent projects show that he was not afraid to have his reach exceed his grasp. In one of the many interviews that Sylvia Sidney gave near the end of her life, she claimed that Wanger lost interest in her career after she rejected the part that eventually won Hedy Lamarr acclaim in Algiers.

I would love to see a retrospective of Wanger‘s movies someday, even though the collaboration between him, his then wife Joan Bennett and Fritz Lang has received a great deal of attention, there are many interesting, sometimes pretentious and almost always ambitious movies in his filmography. I think it’s rather sad that Wanger is best remembered, if at all, at the lowest moment of his life in 1951 for his violent encounter with MCA agent Jennings Lang in a parking lot. If others are interested in reading more about Walter Wanger, you might enjoy the Hollywood Renegades website biography of him, found here

Btw, you will see that I had mentioned that Budd Schulberg was the son of B.P. very briefly within the text of the blog. The age discrepancy between the Paramount exec and actress was mentioned repeatedly in articles and memoirs from the mid-30s concerning the divorce of Benjamin P. Schulberg and Ad Schulberg. The age difference between the mogul and the actress was notable to many, in part because the elder Schulberg first spotted and signed Sylvia to a contract when he saw her on Broadway around 1928, when she was still only 17. Budd Schulberg also mentions the age and status difference between the two in the notes of his memoir, Moving Pictures, Memories of a Hollywood Prince (Stein and Day, 1981).

I’m so glad that you mentioned the colorful Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936). That movie seems to have been forgotten, though I remember loving the outdoor adventure when I saw it as a kid on tv. Hope to see it again someday!

Mongo,
I’d forgotten that Sylvia was in Used People…I bet she did that one in order to meet Marcello Mastroianni, though it was a great part and fun to see her with Jessica Tandy on screen as the two adventuresses seeking naughty fun before the sun sets.

Thanks to each of you for your thoughtful comments.

“Gene Raymond, an actor whose presence in most movies is a trial for me” (much chuckling here).

Thank you for a most informative piece that brought back lovely memories from “Street Scene” to “Ryan’s Hope”. Is it wrong of me to enjoy “Blood on the Sun”? Shhh. Don’t tell anybody.

I’m not sure it is fair to refer to B.P. Schulberg as the “much older mogul.” According to my reference books, the pair hooked up in 1930 or 1931 and he was 39 and Sylvia was 21.
Joan Collins and Demi Moore were older than that when they wedded and bedded their young mates and they received compliments from some women.
Anyway, 39 is not that old. Jack Benny referred to himself as being 39 for years.

I know you know this – but his famous son was Budd Schulberg, who wrote On the Waterfront and A Face in the Crowd.