The machine depended, ultimately, on wayward human beings and on the X factor known as star quality, whose power everyone recognized but whose properties remained a mystery. The same system that could extract a long, profitable career from a middle-level talent like Clifton Webb could also stumble badly, as it did in trying to make a second Garbo out of the now-forgotten Anna Sten.
Basinger, the author of “Silent Stars” and the chairwoman of the film studies department at Wesleyan University, ingeniously picks apart the gears and levers of the machine, analyzing the careers of a handful of stars whose ups and downs illustrate the studio system at its smooth-functioning best, or reveal its hidden inefficiencies. Basinger writes, “A-list stars and B-list stars, male stars, female stars, dog stars, child stars, character actor stars, western stars for low-budget westerns, horror film stars for horror films, and, always waiting in the wings to step in when the established stars got too uppity were youngsters under consideration to become the next big stars.” In other words, Hollywood needed Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, but it also needed “its Priscilla Lanes and its George Brents.” “There were big-name stars and little-name stars,” Ms. Hollywood needed more than great headliners to satisfy the insatiable appetite for the hundreds of motion pictures it made each year. There was nothing accidental about his career or those of a hundred other names that are only answers to trivia questions. Although overshadowed by the Gables and the Garbos, he was a star of medium magnitude with his own assured place in the entertainment universe.Īs Jeanine Basinger amply demonstrates in “The Star Machine,” Hollywood excelled at manufacturing Dennis Morgans. Yet Morgan, a vaguely handsome leading man with a pleasant tenor voice, generated solid box office returns from the mid-1930s right through the 1940s.
On the roll call of names that made Hollywood shine in its golden age, Dennis Morgan comes well down the list.
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