It Happened in Hollywood

"It Happened in Hollywood" (1937)is a frothy little comedy with a brilliant gimmick. The star of the film is Richard Dix, a rugged actor who usually played two-fisted action roles but occasionally gave excellent performances in romantic comedies. It won't spoil your fun if I tell you the gimmick. Some of Hollywood's biggest stars of the time (1937) make brief appearances in this film, including Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, James Cagney, W.C. Fields ... plus Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, who hadn't officially retired from acting yet. Now here's the gimmick: all of those big stars are played in this film by THEIR OWN STAND-INS, the wanna-be actors and actresses who (unlike most actors) had full-time employment in the Hollywood studios, but who only kept working by copying the physical appearance of a better-known actor (or actress) and following that actor from one film role to the next. (Stand-ins, unlike stunt doubles, almost never appear onscreen: their chief job is to stand in for the "real" actor during time-consuming lighting set-ups, wearing a duplicate of that actor's costume. Stand-ins are required to maintain the same build, hairstyle and complexion as the person whom they're imitating, which limits their ability to get acting jobs in their own right.)

So, in "It Happened in Hollywood" we meet Bing Crosby, played by an obscure lookalike actor whose real-life job was to stand in for the genuine Bing during all of Crosby's films. John Barrymore (Drew's grandfather) is played here by Barrymore's full-time double. Victor McLaglen is played by his own brother, who was his real-life stand-in. Marlene Dietrich and Garbo are played by their own stand-ins: real-life sisters named Dietrich (no relation to Marlene).

This gimmick wouldn't work nowadays, because movie stars no longer have long-term relationships with a single movie studio; consequently, they use a different stand-in for each film, and they don't maintain ongoing working relationships with a particular lookalike.

I'll rate "It Happened in Hollywood" 4 out of 10.

It Happened in Hollywood (1938)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Richard Dix plays a silent screen cowboy who gets kicked out of Hollywood once sound pictures come into play. He loses all his money, which causes him to lose his ranch, which he was hoping to make a boy's home. He gets a chance at a comeback playing a gangster but can't stand letting down his fans by playing a bad guy. Since this was nearly twenty-years before Singin in the Rain it's rather interesting seeing a film take on the transition from silent to sound. This Columbia movie has been pretty much forgotten today but I think film buffs will find the story interesting and there's some more unique things here. There's a big subplot with Dix wanting to make good to a kid he made a promise to so he decides to throw him a Hollywood party. Greta Garbo, W.C. Fields, Charles Chaplin, Loretta Young, Mae West and Bing Crosby among others show up but it's their stand-ins doing the work. The whole point is to fool the kid into thinking he's surrounded by real stars but we see them as stand-ins, which is interesting as we're seeing the actual people who worked for the stars. I had heard about Eugene DeVerdi's take on Chaplin and must admit that it's pretty good. Fay Wray plays Dix's love interest and does a pretty good job even though her role is pretty much a throw away. Dix is his usual self and fans of his will enjoy his role here. This movie could have been a lot better but it's clear it was meant to be a "B" picture and on that level it works. I think silent buffs will get a kick out of its story while movie buffs will enjoy seeing the real star's stand-ins. Future director Samuel Fuller is credited as one of the three screenwriters.

This is a most enjoyable film which is of particular interest to film buffs for several reasons. The story commences in 1928, the last year of silent films. The amiable actor Richard Dix plays Tim Dart, a star of silent cowboy films (an idea doubtless inspired by Tom Mix). He is in love with another silent star named Gloria Gay, played by Fay Wray, who is glamorous and alluring but loves her cowboy, and wishes he would take more notice of her. (Who could ignore Fay Wray and be unaware of her devotion? But then cowboys can be ornery critters.) All is going well otherwise, and they are both close friends and top of the bill with their respective successful careers. Dix has nationwide fan clubs of young boys who worship him, and we see him whistle-stopping all over America and giving personal appearances at schools and boys' clubs. Suddenly his tour is interrupted by a telegram summoning him back to Hollywood for a 'talking test'. All the silent stars are being tested on the new sound stages for their ability to speak, which had never previously been necessary. (We need to remember that this film was made only 8 or 9 years after this painful transition, when it was all a fresh trauma in everyone's minds.) Dix is not able to deliver his lines properly, and is upset that he has to wear formal attire and pretend to be in a drawing room where the dialogue is absurd. He flunks the test and is jettisoned by his studio, while Fay Wray is retained. With the advent of sound, cowboy films were discontinued for the first few years because the clunky sound equipment could not be used outdoors! So 'we are only shooting plays now and everything must take place indoors,' he is told by the studio head. Exit the cowboy stars. Dix is forced to sell his huge ranch which he had wanted to turn into a giant boys' home, and moves into a small bungalow, completely broke. He avoids Fay Wray because she is still successful and he does not want to be a burden on her. This is an interesting historical dramatisation of the effects of the 'sound revolution' in films, made near enough to the time to ring true and be convincing. Indeed, despite being keenly interested in film history, I had never realized prior to seeing this film that 'outdoors was out' at the beginning of sound, and that cowboy films were a temporary casualty, until the clumsiness of the sound gear could be reduced. I had never actually seen or heard that mentioned before, and it is a detail which has escaped most people of today. A young boy who hero-worshipped Dix turns up on his doorstep and persuades him not to leave Los Angeles. The boy had been near death in a hospital when they met on Dix's tour, and it was only belief in the fact that Dix cared about him which had pulled the boy through. Touched by this intense and total devotion, Dix regains some faith in himself and decides to 'borrow' his old ranch for a day and throw a big party for the boy, so that he can meet all the other famous Hollywood stars, and still believe that Dix is one himself. At this point, the film contains one of the most remarkable and innovative scenes in films of that time: the party indeed occurs and the famous stars are impersonated by their professional imitators and stand-ins. Some are so convincing that one wonders if they are actually 'real' and came along to pretend to be their own imitators for a lark. Certainly 'Mae West' is an imitator, as she sashays too violently and does not look quite right. W. C. Fields seems to be an imitator, but Charlie Chaplin looks eerily 'real', and so does Harold Lloyd in the background. 'Greta Garbo' appears and tells the boy she has to leave now because she wants to be alone. This is a truly bizarre and surrealistic part of the film, and it is worth watching the film just to see the party full of doubles. Eventually Dix realizes that Fay Wray has also lost her place at the top, and all the talk in the trade papers about her thriving career is just pretence created by her publicist to try to get her back into pictures. So they come together again and express their true love at last. But that is not the end of the film. What will happen to them? Will their careers revive, or will they go to live on a ranch as cowboy and cowgirl? What will happen to the boy? Is there to be a happily-ever-after, or will it all be a bit of a downer? This cannot be revealed, but it is all there in the film for those who have an interest in this kind of thing and are lucky enough to get hold of a copy or see it on TV.

Wonderful flick about the transition from silent movies to talkies. For a B movie, the direction by Lachman is top drawer, and the acting by Dix and Wray (far better here than in famously screamy role in KING KONG, for instance) quite splendid.

The cherry on the cake is that it takes a touching approach to the problem of overnight joblessness in a glamorous, no failure accepted, world, without losing contact with reality. True love can really save the day!

There haven't been many movies on the subject of THE most fascinating and terrifying era of Hollywood history - the chaotic and brutal transition from Silents to Talkies (that period ended WAY more Hollywood careers than the McCarthy blacklist era). The best known, of course, are "Singin' In The Rain" (the most complete treatment of the subject, and DAZZLINGLY funny), and "Sunset Blvd" (oh-so-dark, and with razor-sharp teeth), and they were both 20+ years after the fact. Here's one that's less than 10 years removed, when the wounds of the victims were still pretty fresh and oozing, and it's flawed but TERRIBLY fascinating in that light. This page categorizes it as COMEDY, but I didn't detect any (intentional) laughs, except perhaps in the bizarre (and tacked-on-feeling) party sequence near the end featuring actual stand-ins for many major stars of the day. One suspects that Dix played a major role in bringing this story to the screen, and that it might have represented his own story (his thinly-fictionalized character fails to make the switch to talkies because of a mild drawl, and because, supposedly, Westerns are finished due to the inability to take the new technology outdoors). As I studied his filmography on this site, I'm seeing that he was never unemployed during that era, but that he DID go from making 5 or 6 films a year in the mid-'20s to 1 or 2 a year in the early thirties, so I guess that might have been a sufficient jolt to his lifestyle to embitter him a bit. REALLY interesting stuff, and Fay Wray is GORGEOUS and memorable (as always). Absolutely recommendable to any Hollywood history buff.