Many moons ago and down on Poverty Row, there were two studios that stood out from the pack, the first of which was Monogram, who made their presence known with their steady successful output of series films as with the Charlie Chan mysteries that derived from an original story bought from 20th Century Fox and The Bowery Boys/Dead End Kids were taken over from Warners. Republic, on the other hand had flirtations with the big league, thanks to a contract they held with actor John Wayne. Having loaned him out specifically for Stagecoach (1939) the film that would catapult his career. Republic would topline Wayne in 1940's Civil War western The Dark Command even though that meant also borrowing a director from Warners in the name of Raoul Walsh and soon would be knocking on MGM's doors to ask Walter Pidgeon to come out and play, all to ensure first-feature quality.
Republic's head honcho Herbert J Yates also had viable Western stars Gene Autry and Roy Rogers on contract; but it was Wayne's films that lassoed in the masses and made the most moolah until Yates reneged on a deal to permit Wayne to make his cherished project The Alamo in 1951, and as a result lost the star's services for good. Yates further handicapped Republic by insisting Vera Ralston who later became Mrs. Herbert J Yates, be cast in the company's pictures even though her actual box-office appeal was dubious.
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| Across the road from the now defunct Poverty Row studio |
The studio system was never so rigid as to justify the undermining 'factory production line' label that was at times ascribed to it, but it is essential to recognize a consistency in the product of each respective studio.
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| Another MGM GEM |
And while it was a natural fact that Warners specialized in topical and tautly-edited realistic films in the early 1930s and that MGM continued to turn out classy comedies and musicals whilst Paramount encouraged a Continental sophistication in their 1930's pictures and on to their Technicolor productions of the 1940s, each studio produced films that ran counter to its prevailing image.
When a studio is said to have cultivated a certain visual style, often this would simply refer to the 'look' of the film as determined by the laboratory processing favored by each particular studio. A seasoned film editor could easily detect at a glance which studio from which made the according film simply from the graininess of the black and white or the specific tones of color.
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| Name that Studio |
An easier though decidedly less reliable guide to the studio origins of a particular picture lay in the recurrence of select stars in one studio's movies; Tyrone Power a prime example who was easily identified with 20th Century Fox, in fact the actor and contemporaneous sex symbol was once the studios' most famous product ' Alan Ladd, a veritable staple at Paramount, Clark Gable an MGM mainstay and so forth down the list of supporting players and technicians.
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| Oh how the mighty fall - The MGM backlot on its last legs circa 1980 |
The studio system always encouraged high standards of technical excellence. Most independently produced films of the 1930s and 1940s appeared tatty by comparison, lacking strong casts and lavish settings that the big studios would be known for. Goldwyn and Selznick indeed spent money on a scale that was congruous with the majors - if not in absolute excess of it - but other independents were usually either lacking in budget or keen to spend as little money as possible, complacent with adequate production results.