Post by Coopsgirl on Jun 2, 2010 17:59:11 GMT -6
Gary made multiple films in 1928 including Doomsday which is the last one I wrote about. The next three after Doomsday were Legion of the Condemned (released Mar 10, 1928), Half a Bride (released Jun 16, 1928) and The First Kiss (released Aug 25, 1928). These are all considered lost films as no known copies have survived.
As you can see from the release dates, Gary was a busy man as these were bunched close together. He was considered an A list star during this year which is pretty impressive since the year before he was making mostly B level westerns and had just begun getting leading actor roles. His rise was faster than most in that he went from being a stunt rider and extra for a few bucks a day in 1925 to a featured A list leading actor in three years. By comparison another huge star and contemporary of Gary’s, Clark Gable, began as an extra in films at around the same time as Gary yet it wouldn’t be until the early 1930s that he began to get leading roles. I am a fan of actors like Clark Gable and Cary Grant who are still well thought of today and considered movie icons, but I think it’s neat that Gary was a star long before either one of them. ;D
Since I haven’t seen the three movies being discussed here, I’m going to post the AFI synopsis of each film instead of giving you my review.
Here are my fave pics from each film:
Half a Bride
Legion of the Condemned
The First Kiss
Each one sounds like a movie I would like and judging by the pictures I’ve seen they were all high quality productions.
Half a Bride starred Gary and Esther Ralston who also costarred with him in Children of Divorce (1927). She liked Gary very much and thought he was sweet and a good actor. There was no funny business between them though as she was married at the time and he was with Clara Bow. Esther is one of my favorite actresses from the silent era but unfortunately she has largely been forgotten and many of her films have been lost. She was known as the “American Venus” for her beauty and she was an A level star during the silent years and had actually been in the entertainment industry since she was a toddler as her family worked in vaudeville. She had a very interesting and sometimes tragic life but she always kept an upbeat outlook and when times got tough she pulled herself up by the bootstraps and kept going (she died aged 91 in 1994). She was for the most part run out of the movies in the mid 30s when she wouldn’t give in to Louis Mayer’s (the head of MGM) sexual advances. Mayer, upset about being rejected by Esther, gave her parts in bad B movies and this is what eventually caused her to leave the studio. She then worked for other smaller studios but that didn’t last long. I have a lot of respect for her in that she kept her dignity instead of giving in like so many other actresses undoubtedly did in similar situations.
In Esther’s autobiography, Some Day We’ll Laugh, she recounts a very sweet story about Gary from 1933:
One day, I was on my way to the commissary to have lunch and, walking by the patio in the main court of the studio, I spied Gary Cooper on the other side of the court. Now that I was no longer a star and Gary had progressed and blossomed into a superstar, I decided to pretend I hadn’t seen him, for if he were to snub me, I felt it would break my heart. Suddenly, a wild cowboy whoop sounded across the patio and Gary came leaping over the hedges and, grabbing me up in his arms swung me around. “You weren’t going to speak to me,” he scolded. The tears welled up in my eyes and, putting my head against his chest, I said, “Oh, Gary, I was so afraid it would be the other way around. And if you had ignored I don’t think I could bear it.”
What a sweetheart!!
In Legion of the Condemned and The First Kiss, Gary was paired with a young up and coming actress named Fay Wray (many of you are probably more familiar with her than Esther). Fay was 21 when she made these films and like Gary she had started in films playing bit parts a few years earlier in 1923. Like Esther, Fay was a natural beauty and had a real sweetness about her.
Paramount billed Gary and Fay as “the new young lovers” and tried to build them up as a leading screen team. It didn’t really take however as audiences liked them together but didn’t really latch on to them as a couple like they did with other pairs such as Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor, and John Gilbert and Greta Garbo.
Despite appearing in over 100 films, Fay Wray is best known as playing the beauty to King Kong’s beast. King Kong (1933) is one of my very favorite movies and one of the first classic movies I remember seeing as a kid. I just saw this morning that it will be released on bluray dvd this September and I guarantee you, I’ll be one of the first to buy it. It wasn’t until a few years ago when I began watching more of her films that I realized she wasn’t a blonde as she was in King Kong; it was just a wig. She was beautiful either way, blonde or brunette, but I like her best as a blonde.
Along with King Kong, I also very much love the two early Technicolor films she made in the early 30s: Doctor X (1932) and Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). These were made at Warner Brothers as other studios tried to capitalize on the success of Universal’s horror films like Dracula (1931). In order to make their films stand out, WB not only filmed them in color but also set them in the present day as opposed to other horror films that were often set in the 1800s. If you like this genre you should give these films a try as they do a great job of mixing a little pre code risqueness with humor and horror.
Fay, in another comparison to Esther, also had a somewhat tumultuous personal life. She had a very dysfunctional first marriage to screenwriter John Monk Saunders but fared better the next go round with Robert Riskin, also a screenwriter. He was director Frank Capra’s main writer and partner and together they made such classics as It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Can’t Take it With You, and Meet John Doe. He’s my favorite screenwriter as he had a very natural style and the conversations between characters seem real. Unfortunately he passed away after 13 years of marriage and Fay married one last time after that and then herself passed away in 2004 at age 96.
My pal John Mulholland who has the best job in the world as a film historian told me a cute story about Fay. He was in a restaurant in the late 90s in New York and as he was leaving he saw Fay sitting at a table and she asked him to sit down and talk for a few minutes and she brought up Gary so they were talking about him. Fay told him how much she still loved Gary and that in her bedroom closet at home she had pictures of him on the walls and other memorabilia from the movies they made together. He said it was so cute how much she adored him and how unembarrassed she was about her little Gary shrine. He also said a couple years later at an event where she was being honored, she told everybody there about her ‘Gary closet’. I just love that she didn’t even try to hide how big a fan of his she still was. When I read John’s email I laughed out loud because I also have a ‘Gary closet’. I imagine there are a lot of women out there that do too.
My Imaginary Conversation with Gary:
“Boy, 1928 was sure a busy year for you.” “Yeah, thankfully I was young and able to keep up. I really didn’t know any better either. The studio told me to jump and I said ‘how high’. I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth and I was just thankful for the work” he says with a half smile. “The year before you did mostly Westerns but in ’28 you got to do war, adventure, and romance stories. What was that like?” “It was fun. Children of Divorce was so hard for me and I was happy to go back to westerns but by ’28 I had more experience under my belt and was starting to feel like a real actor a little bit so it was becoming easier to do those different genres.” “You seem equally at home in those types of films as you did in westerns.” “Thanks, I always tried to make the characters seem as real as possible so they’d be believable which isn’t always easy. I mean with westerns I had actually done some of those things on our ranch back in Montana but I’d never been in the foreign legion or been a ship captain. You just have to imagine what those characters would really be like and then try and portray it.” “You also got to work with a lot of beautiful young actresses that year like Esther Ralston and Fay Wray. As a single young man I bet you enjoyed that” I say with a wink and a smile. “Nice work if you can get it” he says joking. “Seriously though I really enjoyed working with Miss Ralston and Miss Wray. They were fine actresses and when we worked together they both had more experience than I did. Miss Ralston especially since she had been in films since the teens so she knew a lot more about the process and that was nice. I really learned a lot from the people I worked with in those early years as nearly all of them had more experience than me and I was like a sponge just soaking it all in.” “One thing I noticed from some of these films is the crazy names your characters had like Mulligan Talbot from The First Kiss.” He laughs a minute and then says, “I had forgotten about that one. Some of them were pretty outlandish. As an actor though that’s just part of the deal. Heck, I’ve been through so many names sometimes I forget my real one. Even my ‘real name’ isn’t my ‘real’ one!” he says as we both laugh again.
As you can see from the release dates, Gary was a busy man as these were bunched close together. He was considered an A list star during this year which is pretty impressive since the year before he was making mostly B level westerns and had just begun getting leading actor roles. His rise was faster than most in that he went from being a stunt rider and extra for a few bucks a day in 1925 to a featured A list leading actor in three years. By comparison another huge star and contemporary of Gary’s, Clark Gable, began as an extra in films at around the same time as Gary yet it wouldn’t be until the early 1930s that he began to get leading roles. I am a fan of actors like Clark Gable and Cary Grant who are still well thought of today and considered movie icons, but I think it’s neat that Gary was a star long before either one of them. ;D
Since I haven’t seen the three movies being discussed here, I’m going to post the AFI synopsis of each film instead of giving you my review.
Here are my fave pics from each film:
Half a Bride
Legion of the Condemned
The First Kiss
Each one sounds like a movie I would like and judging by the pictures I’ve seen they were all high quality productions.
Half a Bride starred Gary and Esther Ralston who also costarred with him in Children of Divorce (1927). She liked Gary very much and thought he was sweet and a good actor. There was no funny business between them though as she was married at the time and he was with Clara Bow. Esther is one of my favorite actresses from the silent era but unfortunately she has largely been forgotten and many of her films have been lost. She was known as the “American Venus” for her beauty and she was an A level star during the silent years and had actually been in the entertainment industry since she was a toddler as her family worked in vaudeville. She had a very interesting and sometimes tragic life but she always kept an upbeat outlook and when times got tough she pulled herself up by the bootstraps and kept going (she died aged 91 in 1994). She was for the most part run out of the movies in the mid 30s when she wouldn’t give in to Louis Mayer’s (the head of MGM) sexual advances. Mayer, upset about being rejected by Esther, gave her parts in bad B movies and this is what eventually caused her to leave the studio. She then worked for other smaller studios but that didn’t last long. I have a lot of respect for her in that she kept her dignity instead of giving in like so many other actresses undoubtedly did in similar situations.
In Esther’s autobiography, Some Day We’ll Laugh, she recounts a very sweet story about Gary from 1933:
One day, I was on my way to the commissary to have lunch and, walking by the patio in the main court of the studio, I spied Gary Cooper on the other side of the court. Now that I was no longer a star and Gary had progressed and blossomed into a superstar, I decided to pretend I hadn’t seen him, for if he were to snub me, I felt it would break my heart. Suddenly, a wild cowboy whoop sounded across the patio and Gary came leaping over the hedges and, grabbing me up in his arms swung me around. “You weren’t going to speak to me,” he scolded. The tears welled up in my eyes and, putting my head against his chest, I said, “Oh, Gary, I was so afraid it would be the other way around. And if you had ignored I don’t think I could bear it.”
What a sweetheart!!
In Legion of the Condemned and The First Kiss, Gary was paired with a young up and coming actress named Fay Wray (many of you are probably more familiar with her than Esther). Fay was 21 when she made these films and like Gary she had started in films playing bit parts a few years earlier in 1923. Like Esther, Fay was a natural beauty and had a real sweetness about her.
Paramount billed Gary and Fay as “the new young lovers” and tried to build them up as a leading screen team. It didn’t really take however as audiences liked them together but didn’t really latch on to them as a couple like they did with other pairs such as Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor, and John Gilbert and Greta Garbo.
Despite appearing in over 100 films, Fay Wray is best known as playing the beauty to King Kong’s beast. King Kong (1933) is one of my very favorite movies and one of the first classic movies I remember seeing as a kid. I just saw this morning that it will be released on bluray dvd this September and I guarantee you, I’ll be one of the first to buy it. It wasn’t until a few years ago when I began watching more of her films that I realized she wasn’t a blonde as she was in King Kong; it was just a wig. She was beautiful either way, blonde or brunette, but I like her best as a blonde.
Along with King Kong, I also very much love the two early Technicolor films she made in the early 30s: Doctor X (1932) and Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). These were made at Warner Brothers as other studios tried to capitalize on the success of Universal’s horror films like Dracula (1931). In order to make their films stand out, WB not only filmed them in color but also set them in the present day as opposed to other horror films that were often set in the 1800s. If you like this genre you should give these films a try as they do a great job of mixing a little pre code risqueness with humor and horror.
Fay, in another comparison to Esther, also had a somewhat tumultuous personal life. She had a very dysfunctional first marriage to screenwriter John Monk Saunders but fared better the next go round with Robert Riskin, also a screenwriter. He was director Frank Capra’s main writer and partner and together they made such classics as It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Can’t Take it With You, and Meet John Doe. He’s my favorite screenwriter as he had a very natural style and the conversations between characters seem real. Unfortunately he passed away after 13 years of marriage and Fay married one last time after that and then herself passed away in 2004 at age 96.
My pal John Mulholland who has the best job in the world as a film historian told me a cute story about Fay. He was in a restaurant in the late 90s in New York and as he was leaving he saw Fay sitting at a table and she asked him to sit down and talk for a few minutes and she brought up Gary so they were talking about him. Fay told him how much she still loved Gary and that in her bedroom closet at home she had pictures of him on the walls and other memorabilia from the movies they made together. He said it was so cute how much she adored him and how unembarrassed she was about her little Gary shrine. He also said a couple years later at an event where she was being honored, she told everybody there about her ‘Gary closet’. I just love that she didn’t even try to hide how big a fan of his she still was. When I read John’s email I laughed out loud because I also have a ‘Gary closet’. I imagine there are a lot of women out there that do too.
My Imaginary Conversation with Gary:
“Boy, 1928 was sure a busy year for you.” “Yeah, thankfully I was young and able to keep up. I really didn’t know any better either. The studio told me to jump and I said ‘how high’. I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth and I was just thankful for the work” he says with a half smile. “The year before you did mostly Westerns but in ’28 you got to do war, adventure, and romance stories. What was that like?” “It was fun. Children of Divorce was so hard for me and I was happy to go back to westerns but by ’28 I had more experience under my belt and was starting to feel like a real actor a little bit so it was becoming easier to do those different genres.” “You seem equally at home in those types of films as you did in westerns.” “Thanks, I always tried to make the characters seem as real as possible so they’d be believable which isn’t always easy. I mean with westerns I had actually done some of those things on our ranch back in Montana but I’d never been in the foreign legion or been a ship captain. You just have to imagine what those characters would really be like and then try and portray it.” “You also got to work with a lot of beautiful young actresses that year like Esther Ralston and Fay Wray. As a single young man I bet you enjoyed that” I say with a wink and a smile. “Nice work if you can get it” he says joking. “Seriously though I really enjoyed working with Miss Ralston and Miss Wray. They were fine actresses and when we worked together they both had more experience than I did. Miss Ralston especially since she had been in films since the teens so she knew a lot more about the process and that was nice. I really learned a lot from the people I worked with in those early years as nearly all of them had more experience than me and I was like a sponge just soaking it all in.” “One thing I noticed from some of these films is the crazy names your characters had like Mulligan Talbot from The First Kiss.” He laughs a minute and then says, “I had forgotten about that one. Some of them were pretty outlandish. As an actor though that’s just part of the deal. Heck, I’ve been through so many names sometimes I forget my real one. Even my ‘real name’ isn’t my ‘real’ one!” he says as we both laugh again.