THE GREAT THALBERG

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3829, 4 November 1936, Page 7

THE GREAT THALBERG

NO. 1 PRODUCER. HIS INFLUENCE ON MOTION PICTURES. The sudden death of Irving Tha.l- - in Hollywood during September leaves the film industry with a gap that will prove very hard to fill. Irving Thalberg, husband of Norma Shearer, and No. 1 producer fa!) Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, was, at thirty-seven, one of the seven wonders of the film industry—a producer without flamboyance and with flair. To the public generally his passing may mean little. He w’as never a platform figune; the world audiences to whom he purveyed entertainment with sq uncanny a precision were little aware of him; ne stood back and let the pictures that he sponsored make ths headlines and the stars whom he created take the bows. To the film industry, both in Europe and America, Thalberg’s death represents the passing of a man who had for ten years or more upheld the most difficult office in the studio hierarchy with, courage and integrity. Continuously fighting with ill-health, with overwork, with a strain of responsibility too heavy for any young man’s shoulders, Thalberg literally gave his life in the cause of making good films well. In th ismiddle twenties, fresh from a secretarial job with Carl Laemmle of Universal, he took over his first assignment as associate produre for for Metro-Goldwyn. Amongst the other programme pictures allotted to him was a modest war film with John Gilbert and Renee Adoree, directed by King Vidor, then chiefly known for a small silent film called “The Jack Knife Man.” Thalberg saw the rushes of this war film, glimpsed the possibilities of the subject and the director, pleaded with his superior executives, and had the picture remade on the scale of what was then known as a “super film.” The result was the simultaneous justification of Thalberg, Vidor, and Gilbert, and the world-wide success of “The Big Parade.” That was the beginning of Thai berg’s great career as a producer. When, shortly afterwards, he risked a million dollars on a hunch, and 'pulled the half-made “Ben Hur” off the scrap heap to turn it into a world record-maker, he finally won the con. fidence of his employers and became the real lion of the Metro-Goldwyn studios. Since that time, Thalberg has been the power behind the careers of Mjarie Dressier, Clark Gable, Norma Shearer, Jean Harlow,

Joan Crawford, and most of Hollywood’s higher-priced players. He has been the sponsor and innovator of “Mutiny on the Bounty,” “China Seas,” “The Barretts of Wimpole Street,” “Romeo and Juliet,” and most of Hollywood’s more ambitious pictures. Again and again, he has played a hunch against all warnings and tradition, and made the cinema .richer by his daring. A temperate, man in all his ways of living, in this one respect he was an inveterate g’ambler. If he believed in a man, or a project, or a story, he would stake everything on his conviction. He was fortunate in having the whole resourdes of the Metro-Goldwyn organisation to play with, but a genius in that he never lost. Everyone who worked for Thalberg loved him. He had the quality, rare among showmen and precious among men, of standing back after an achievement and lotting the other fellow take the credit. There was nothing thrustful about Thalberg; he never wanted to be known as the big promoter. He just saw a little farther than most of the others, and •trusted his vision, and worked like a labourer until it came true. The good producer, the real producer, never comes in person before the public, but there is a touch of his handwriting on every work he sponsors. In the whole film-making world there are perhaps half a dozen producers whose caligraphy we can identify—Lubitsch and Pommer certainly, Goldwyn inevitably, Selznick and Stromberg possibly, probably Korda. Of them all, Thalberg was the most significant, and not alone because he had the resources of the world’s most important film colony behind him. Genius is an infinite capacity for taking chances, and that genius Thalberg hao in full measure What he also had was a great kindness, a love for his work, hjs workers, his friend, his audiences, which is one of the most generous qualities of the Jewish people. In the only speech which I ever heard him make in public, he begged for “a more sympathetic understanding of the cinema among all nations.” That was the real' Thalberg, who grudged the cinema nothing, but loved and fought and laboured for it till he died.