Are you a Player?

Back in 1934 Player and Sons Cigarettes, based in England, started producing Movie Star Collector's Cards with their cigarettes, kind of a baseball card in the bubblegum pack idea for smokers. Smoking had been a man's game for decades with women "catching up" in this slow death pastime by the twenties. It was hoped Movie Star Cards might help Player and Sons capture the women's market. They released albums as well that contained the bios of the stars whose cards one would collect. As one acquired more, they were pasted into the album. Many of the pictures from these albums (they released several editions) can be found online, in various forms.

I recently acquired a completed album from the first edition, 1934, and have scanned it in its entirety for reproduction here. The album has 17 pages of stars, 50 stars in all. My comments for each page follow (and please feel free to click on the pictures to enlarge them to read the mini-bios provided. Some contain the actor's height, other's don't. Odd.)

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Gwili Andre may not be famous to many movie fans today but she is known to anyone who has ever read Hollywood Babylon, Kenneth Anger's 90 percent inaccurate, made-up, rumor-mongering slime bible. Books like Hollywood Babylon are part of the reason it was necessary for things like Snopes.com to come along. But I digress. She is in Hollywood Babylon because of her sad demise in 1959, when she committed suicide by self-immolation. She mainly did B pictures that I haven't seen but would like to. Her most recognizable role for most of us cinephiles would be in Joan Crawford's A Woman's Face (1941).

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Joan Bennett did plenty but for me her best work (both she and the movie) will always be Scarlet Street (1945). P.S. - Doesn't Tala Birell look like Greta Garbo?

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I love Clive Brook's bio, especially the opening line. Also, he's 5'11'' and he's a clever writer.

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Joan Crawford's bio mentions her latest "talkie" being Dancing Lady. This is odd. Throughout the album they use the term "talkie" as if both periods (silent and sound) are actively occuring. Like after Dancing Lady Joan's going to make another silent film and rotate between the two for the rest of her career.

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That's Bette Davis?!!! It looks like Linda Blair. This one's got my vote for worst likeness in the whole album.

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Shhhhhh. James Dunn is sleeping.

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Fairbanks has an inch in height on Clive Brook and is also a clever writer - and cartoonist! I bet Brook felt emasculated when he read that, poor guy. Meanwhile, Gable's height isn't listed at all. Guess he wasn't a six-footer. And lovely Kay is in the middle, a wonderful actress from the thirties recently showcased on TCM.

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William Haines is often called the first openly gay actor in Hollywood. The studios tried to hide it but he never did. Moving in with his lover and partner, Jimmy Shields, in 1933 he was given the choice by Louis B. Mayer to have a lavender marriage or hit the road. Haines took the road - the high road. He and Shields were together for fifty years until Haines death in 1973. And their marriage, minus the piece of paper from the state, lasted longer than most other marriages in Hollywood ever do.

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Who the hell's Katherine Hepburn?

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Dorothy Jordan retired in the thirties but came back for three small roles in the fifties, one of which was The Searchers, in which she played Martha Edwards, killed in the raid that propels the plot in motion. Also, she was 5'2".

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Gertrude, Carole and Myrna, all on one page. I love the bow Gertrude is wearing but am disappointed that Noel Coward is not mentioned or her height. In fact, I don't know how tall any of them are. Players, you have let me down again.

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Name me one Hollywood actress today who could pull off the name "Boots Mallory."

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Jessie Matthews is most famous for her musical work, including First a Girl (1935) which would later be remade in 1982 as Victor/Victoria.

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I like Joel McCrea more and more with each new film I see him in. I may have recommended it here before, but if TCM runs The Silver Horde (1930) again, check it out. It's not much of a movie, fairly average in execution, but its social attitudes and ending are years ahead of the game.

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Sylvia Sidney, Dead End, 1937. Great performance in a great movie. Highly underappreciated actress. By the way, Norma Shearer is 5'3".

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Johnny Weismuller, Olympic champion and Tarzan of the Apes. He was, as mentioned on the card, married in 1933 to Lupe Velez, one of the biggest smear jobs in all of Hollywood Babylon. For those who know the story from the book here's the reality: She was found lying peacefully on her bed, having committed suicide by swalowing sleeping pills.

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Diana Wynyard starred in Calvalcade, earning an Oscar nomination, the first for a British actress, and the first film version of Gaslight in 1940 with Cinema Styles favorite Anton Walbrook. I don't know if it's entirely true or not, but in theatre circles the name Diana Wynyard is famous, not only for her extensive Shakespearean experience, but for accidentally walking off the stage during the 1942 production of Macbeth (in which she played Lady Macbeth), tumbling twelve to fifteen feet, climbing back up and continuing with her performance. I've seen some miraculous things on stage in my time, in just the plays I've done, so I have no trouble believing that story is true.

And that's it. A very young Loretta Young wraps it up, although sadly, we are not informed of her height. I hope you have enjoyed this tour through the Player's Guide Album of Stars from 1934 as much as I enjoyed bringing it to you.

And by the way, I'm 7'2".