Hollywood: Style Center of the World

A small town girl wants to impress her date, so she goes to the town's fashionable store to buy a dress modeled after one that JOAN CRAWFORD wore in SUSAN AND GOD.

The influence Hollywood had on fashion is evidently far reaching--at least that's the point the short subject is trying to make. But it seems more like an advertisement for all the forthcoming MGM films soon to hit the theaters and takes a different direction after the first few minutes.

Clips from films like THE MORTAL STORM, ESCAPE, NEW MOON, ANDY HARDY MEETS DEBUTANTE, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and many others are then flashed across the screen in an endless parade of future MGM product.

Adrian is seen at his drawing board, sketching the latest fashion--but it's primarily film clips and close-ups of MGM's parade of stars--"more stars than there are in heaven" says the announcer--that comprises the bulk of this promotional short.

Hollywood: Style Center of the World (1940)

** (out of 4)

MGM short tries to teach us how styles in Hollywood eventually find their way to the mid-West but instead it turns out to be just another promo for several of their features. The film starts off with a woman wanting her dad to buy her a dress that looks like the one Joan Crawford wore in SUSAN AND GOD. We then get the narrator explaining how modern women can wear what their favorite actresses do on the big screen. Clips from NEW MOON, ANDY HARDY MEETS DEBUTANTE and THE MORTAL STORM are just a few that we see. The "story" here is pretty weak and the previews themselves aren't all that entertaining considering they're just chopped down versions of the trailer. The strangest part of the film is when we get a clips from the latest Dr. Gillespie and Tarzan flicks but they certainly don't show any "fashion" that women would want to copy.

Here's one of MGM's previews of their forthcoming films. It casts it as Hollywood's influence on style by "annihilating space."

Yikes! Joan Crawford sets the styles for small towns, Robert Taylor's uniforms look better, and the wardrobes of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE will cost $75,000, thanks to the work of Adrian. Then, of course, we get clips from forthcoming movies. It's noteworthy that the MGM production of THE YEARLING is announced for the forthcoming season; various factors would delay it and result in extensive recasting, with Spencer Tracy being replaced by Gregory Peck, Ann Revere with Jane Wyman, and Gene Eckman by Claude Jarman Jr. Even the directors switched, from Victor Fleming to King Vidor, to, ultimately, the ever-dependable Clarence Brown. All of whom, no doubt, looked fabulous.