Rouben Mamoulian

City Streets

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Sylvia Sidney and Gary Cooper look into each other's eyes

Gary Cooper was a long way from his craggy, motionless Mount Rushmore phase when he made City Streets in 1931. In fact he still looked boyish enough to play a character called Kid, a fairground worker who gets caught up with some gangsters, finds he has a taste for it and then lives to regret it. It’s a Dashiell Hammett story and it is typically Hammett – complex – with two interwoven fields of play, the romantic and the criminal, each providing the obstacle to the smooth progress of the other, before the two eventually switch about. So Cooper and co-star Sylvia Sidney are required to cover a lot of emotional ground. He’s the … Read more

Love Me Tonight

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Myrna Loy, Maurice Chevalier and Jeannette MacDonald

1932’s Love Me Tonight is one of the best comedy musicals of the 1930s, a light-as-air confection designed to show that the talkies, only four years into the new era of sound, could be as nimble as the silent movies, which could shoot anywhere there was light – background noise, whether from traffic, thousands of extras or the weather, not an issue. Director Rouben Mamoulian lays out this stall with his opening sequence, a “Paris wakes” dawn sequence which shifts from a workman pickaxing the cobbles on a street, to a man snoring asleep against the wall, a woman sweeping her step, a shutter creaking, a baby crying, a woodworker filing, children marching … Read more

Becky Sharp

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Miriam Hopkins as Becky

It’s remarkable that in film and TV adaptations of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, it’s always called just that. Thackeray lifted the title for his satire from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, where a fair at a town called Vanity was an allegory for all the delights of the realm of the physical. It’s hardly a punchy title, or one with any modern currency and yet it carries on being used. At least six movies and eight TV shows, not to mention various magazines, have used or are using its name. Apart from this 1935 adaptation, no one seems to have though to use the name of its principal character, Becky Sharp, instead. Not … Read more