Mamoulian: Life on Stage and Screen

Chapter 5. Hollywood: The Breakthrough Years

51 Chapter 5 Hollywood The Breakthrough Years Mamoulian could have continued working without interruption on Broadway for many years if he had so chosen. No less an authority than the New York Times dubbed him “part of the Theatre Guild’s collection of Very Bright Young Men.” However, his fascination with filmmaking had been kindled and Paramount was willing to give him another chance. As early as August, the Times announced that Mamoulian “will supervise another production for Paramount in the fall. Claudette Colbert will probably have the leading role.”1 As it happened, the director did not depart New York for Los Angeles until late that year, however, and his leading actress would not be Colbert but a face little known to moviegoers , Sylvia Sidney. The film was finally announced as a gangster picture, City Streets (1931). “Took them a whole year,” Mamoulian groused years later about Paramount’s slowness in getting back to him, “and the whole rigmarole started anew.” Once again, the studio wanted to tie him to its usual seven-year contract and he refused. Instead, he signed for a single film.2 City Streets was Paramount’s answer to the wave of gangster movies inspired by the shocking headlines generated by the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929. The most popular picture was the Warner Brothers’ movie based on a fictionalized account of that gangland slaying, Little Caesar (1931), with Edward G. Robinson as a character based on Al Capone, the Chicago mobster who made a fortune defying Prohibition. Likewise, the underworld of alcohol trafficking would provide Mamoulian’s film with its milieu. Rouben Mamoulian shortly after his arrival in Hollywood. Hollywood 53 City Streets had a hybrid origin. Although originally conceived as a remake of the Clara Bow hit Ladies of the Mob (1928), it was based on an original story outline by hardboiled detective writer Dashiell Hammett, whose novels The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key would be filmed several times in Hollywood and provide one of the wellsprings for film noir. Producer David O. Selznik had brought Hammett to Paramount, hoping the author would conceive something “new and startlingly original.”3 Mamoulian claimed that Hammett “gave me a synopsis on two yellow pages and from that we worked the script out. I thought I’d take something familiar and stylize it.” Hammett’s biographers prefer a different version of events, with the novelist producing a seven-page plot treatment for the film under various working titles before he even met Mamoulian.4 It was Hammett’s sole screen credit for Paramount, but it marked the beginning of a long, successful career as a Hollywood screenwriter , including collaborating with Billy Wilder on the screenplay for Double Indemnity. Clara Bow, one of the sex symbols of silent Hollywood, was originally cast in the picture along with rising star Gary Cooper. Paramount’s publicity department claimed she withdrew after suffering a “nervous breakdown.” “I thought of Sylvia Sidney, who I knew in New York at the Theatre Guild,” Mamoulian said of Bow’s replacement. Waiflike but intense, Sidney had appeared in a few small movie parts, while the slim, almost preternaturally handsome Cooper was already a marquee attraction for his star turn in a popular talking western, The Virginian (1929). A natural actor who made little fuss over his craft, Cooper adapted easily to his role in City Streets as the Kid, a cowboy turned gangster turned good guy. The hurly-burly of the Hollywood studio system is illustrated by his memory of making the movie. “One day I was up in the mountains saving Lily Damita from the Indians. . . . Then I jumped in my car and made it to Hollywood, a hundred miles away, for my scenes with Sylvia Sidney in City Streets.” By day he was shooting I Take This Woman opposite Carol Lombard. At night he starred in City Streets. “In those days the average working day was 16 hours,” Mamoulian recalled. “I remember doing a scene at midnight with Cooper and Sidney; and they fell asleep during the take.” 5 Although his professorial bearing could suggest remote superiority, Mamoulian’s dark eyes shown brilliantly and MAMOULIAN 54 his face lit up with a warm smile. He was approachable on the set. Seated in a folding chair dressed for business in suit and tie, Mamoulian often directed with a pet cat perched on his lap. Much of...