Hollywood Cavalcade is a 1939 American film featuring Alice Faye as a young performer making her way in the early days of Hollywood, from slapstick silent pictures through the transition from silent to sound.
In 1913 New York City, movie director Michael Linnett Connors (Don Ameche), chooses Broadway ingenue Molly Adair (Alice Faye) to be in his next film. He makes her a major star in slapstick comedies. Although she is in love with him, she can't understand his preoccupation with the picture business, and wrongly thinks that Connors regards her only in terms of movies. When she marries her co-star Nicky Hayden (Alan Curtis), Connors misunderstands her and fires her. The disillusioned director's career quickly declines, but his ice-cold demeanor changes when he sees the first talking feature film. Inspired, he approaches Molly and eagerly plans her first sound film.[2]
In the wake of Alice Faye's 1938 success Alexander's Ragtime Band, which took a nostalgic look at the musical scene of the 1910s, screenwriter Lou Breslow approached studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck with an idea to do another period piece, this time in Technicolor, concerning the early days of silent movies.[3] The film was directed by Irving Cummings, with comedy sequences directed by Mal St. Clair.[4]
St. Clair's friend and mentor Buster Keaton staged some of the gags, and a host of silent-era comedians re-created slapstick sight gags. The romance in the storyline was based on the real-life relationship between pioneer producer Mack Sennett (he also served as technical advisor) and his first star, Mabel Normand.[5]
Atypical for Faye's 20th Century-Fox output, Hollywood Cavalcade has no musical numbers, and the tone is more dramatic than comic. (The working title was Falling Stars.) The film presents a fictionalized look at silent-era performers and their productions, and ends just after the silent-film industry converts to sound films.[6]
Silent sequences
St. Clair and Zanuck had collaborated on a number of projects in the silent era, among these the Rin Tin Tin films for Warner Bros. and Universal studio’s boxing-themed Leather Pushers series.[7] The Film Booking Offices of America series starring Alberta Vaughn were also re-created in Hollywood Cavalcade. This 1925 series, directed by St. Clair, is now thought to be lost. Film historian Ruth Anne Dwyer reports that St. Clair’s handling of these sequences in 1939 suggest that the series “might have been adventurous and high-spirited” in the originals.[8]
Dwyer observes that the St. Clair’s silent sequences in Hollywood Cavalcade appear as inflated recollections of the films of that era, rather than a precise facsimiles:
Like most nostalgia, the representation is not what really happened but an exaggerated “remembrance” of what happened...the characters, acting, pie-throwing are “overblown” for the purposes of parody.[9]
As a homage to the comedy “2-reelers” of Mack Sennett, of which St. Clair directed several, the 1-reel short, Why Beaches are Popular (1919) was recreated for Hollywood Cavalcade.[10]
Notes
^Dwyer, 1996 p. 42: Keaton was cast as himself in the film, as is Mack Sennett. And p. 229-230: Filmography
^Dwyer, 1996 p. 229-230: Filmography, plot synopsis
^Scott MacGillivray, Laurel & Hardy: From the Forties Forward, Second Edition, iUniverse, 2009, p. 13. ISBN 978-1440172373.
^Dwyer, 1996 p. 151: “St. Clair wrote and directed the silent sequences in Hollywood Cavalcade, a nostalgic film concerned with movie-making in ‘the good old days.’ The sound portions were written by Darryl Zanuck.” And p. 229-230: “...Irving Cummings (sound sequences).”
^Dwyer, 1996 p. 151: “...the plot chronicles the transition from silent to sound of two characters loosely based on Mack Sennett and Mabel Normand. And p. 3: Keaton-St. Clair friendship
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