"He could be the romantic lead, the villain, the father, the best friend, the husband, the romantic rival, a historical figure, a sage older counselor - Pidgeon could even sing."
Not all stars were made. Some were simply packaged. Deanna Durbin, one of Basinger's extended case studies, was spotted at a Los Angeles singing school by the casting director for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Fresh-faced and exuberant, she was plucked from obscurity and made more than 20 enormously popular and profitable films between 1936 and 1948, nearly always playing a bright-eyed Little Miss Fix-It who solved adult problems while singing her little heart out.
Basinger lavishes fond attention on several actors, like Errol Flynn, Lana Turner, Tyrone Power, Irene Dunne and Jean Arthur, included because their careers illustrate the shortcomings of the star machine, or the ways in which a wily actor could game the system. In reality, these set pieces are full-throated appreciations, gushy yet pedantic, an odd combination.
As with baseball and jazz, something about film encourages its most ardent devotees to scour the credits in search of ever-diminishing minutiae. There is no joy like analyzing the performance of a minor actor in a second-rate film, although such actors are never minor, only underappreciated, and the films themselves never unwatchable but endlessly fascinating when looked at from the correct, extremely oblique, angle.
Basinger expends enormous energy trying to prove that Norma Shearer is a great, underappreciated talent (with "lovely ears") who seems dated only because modern audiences do not know how to watch her films. She argues passionately on behalf of Loretta Young, mentioning only in passing that Young's more than 90 films include "almost no truly superior ones."
It's hard not to get swept up in the lovefest, though. Basinger has a bouncy, bright style and a shrewd eye for identifying precisely the qualities that made this or that actor click with audiences, and, in machine terms, guaranteed durability. Sweet and a little prim, Jean Arthur conveyed to 1940s audiences "the true feeling of delicious sexual frustration."
The book is filled with happy observations like these, although I'm still not sure what it means to say that "Irene Dunne is Doris Day before Doris Day was Doris Day."
The star machine worked partly because failure was built into the system. A single bankable star paid for 20 disappointments who were often recycled in cheaper films and lesser roles, or thrown overboard entirely.
"If the machine somehow malfunctioned in the washing, nipping, tucking and creating process, everyone simply turned toward the next prospect," Basinger writes. Enter Shepperd Strudwick. Not a bad actor. Just underrated.
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