1939

Articles from 1939

Anticipating the Television Juggernaut (Stage Magazine, 1939)

This 1939 article was written by a wise old sage who probably hadn’t spent much time with a television set but recognized fully the tremor that it was likely to cause in the world of pop-culture:

Of all the brats, legitimate and otherwise, sired of the entertainment business, the youngest, television, looks as if it would be the hardest to raise and to housebreak…


Click here to read about the early Christian broadcasts of televangelist Oral Roberts…

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Charlie Chaplin Joins With Pickford, Fairbanks and Griffith to Form United Artists (Film Daily, 1939)

Restless with the manner in which the film colony operated, Chaplin joined forces with three other leading Hollywood celebrities to create United Artists; a distribution company formed to release their own films. Attached is a printable history of United Artists spanning the years 1919 through 1939 which also outlines why the organization was so original:

[United Artists] introduced a new method into the industry. Heretofore producers and distributors had been the employers, paying salaries and sometimes a share of the profits to the stars. Under the United Artists system, the stars became their own employers. They had to do their own financing, but they received the producer profits that had formerly gone to their employers and each received his share of the profits of the distributing organization.

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Charlie Chaplin Joins With Pickford, Fairbanks and Griffith to Form United Artists (Film Daily, 1939)

Restless with the manner in which the film colony operated, Chaplin joined forces with three other leading Hollywood celebrities to create United Artists; a distribution company formed to release their own films. Attached is a printable history of United Artists spanning the years 1919 through 1939 which also outlines why the organization was so original:

[United Artists] introduced a new method into the industry. Heretofore producers and distributors had been the employers, paying salaries and sometimes a share of the profits to the stars. Under the United Artists system, the stars became their own employers. They had to do their own financing, but they received the producer profits that had formerly gone to their employers and each received his share of the profits of the distributing organization.

Charlie Chaplin Joins With Pickford, Fairbanks and Griffith to Form United Artists (Film Daily, 1939) Read More »

A Word on New York Waiters (Stage Magazine, 1939)

Waiters are to New York City what lobbyists are to Washington and celebrated illustrator, author and all-around foodie Ludwig Bemelmans (1898 – 1962) had some thoughts on this very diverse group:

New York is full of waiters, Chinese, American, Congo, French, Italian and German waiters, Jewish and Christian waiters, Vegetarian and Greek waiters, many good waiters, many bad waiters.

Click here to read an article by Benny Goodman concerning the arrival of Swing on Park Ave.

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American Playwright Lillian Hellman (Stage Magazine, 1939)

The attached profile of playwright Lillian Hellman (1905 – 1984) is accompanied by a rare photo of the thirty-four year old American writer, snapped shortly after the opening of her play, The Little Foxes:

Four seasons ago when ‘The Children’s Hour’ was produced, that labeling which is the destiny of every important new playwright began. Second Ibsen…American Strindberg…1934 Chekhov…the rumors ran. In this finest example of Miss Hellman’s highly individual contribution to the current theater, the Ibsen heritage seems most likely to win out.

In 1945 Hellman wrote about much of what she had seen on the W.W. II Soviet front; click here to read it

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Emily Post on Society Language (Photoplay Magazine, 1939)

At the tail-end of a very long interview concerning the problems with Hollywood movies, Emily Post (1872 – 1960), America’s high-priestess of good manners, was asked just one more question – this one involved the English language and here is Emily Post’s 1939 list of what to say and what not to say.


• Don’t say ‘brainy’ – say, ‘clever’.
• Don’t say ‘wealthy’, say ‘rich’.
• Don’t say ‘Charmed or pleased to meet you’, say ‘how do you do’.
• etc, etc, etc.
Emily Post had so many opinions…

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Warner Brothers Opens Fire on Nazi Germany (Stage Magazine, 1939)

STAGE MAGAZINE correspondent Katherine Best was not shy about giving credit where credit was due, as you will read in this article that stands as one big pat on the back for the producers at Warner Brother’s for possessing the testicular fortitude needed to launch the first anti-Nazi movie in Hollywood: Confessions of a Nazi Spystyle=border:none (1939).


In October of 1940, Charlie Chaplin released his anti-fascist masterpiece: The Great Dictator. Click here to read about that.

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Horst Wessel: Nazi Martyr (Ken Magazine, 1939)

This 1939 article from Ken Magazine lays out the real story of the life and death of Nazi storm trooper Horst Wessel (1907 – 1930) – not the one believed by the fascists he left behind:

In Germany, 1930, a pimp killed another pimp for cutting in on his girl’s territory. The slain pimp was a Nazi named Horst Wessel. Then Hitler came into power, and propagandist Goebbels, in need of a ‘Hell-rouser’, dreamed up the Wessel legend, made him an official Nazi martyr-saint.’

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Bauhaus Exhibit Smeared by Critics (Art Digest, 1939)

With all the best wishes in the world, it is impossible to suppress the feeling that there is something essentially heavy, forced and repellent in most of the Bauhaus work. They are under suspicion of being modern for the sake of being modern and not because of any necessities of their system of living.


-so wrote the well-respected art critic Henry McBride (1867 – 1962) in response to the groundbreaking 1938 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, Bauhaus 1919 – 1928. McBride did not mince words in expressing his belief that the Bauhaus was not a genuine art school and that the MoMA showed poor judgment by lamenting it’s passing. McBride is remembered as having been a longtime advocate of modernism, a champion of the 1913 Armory Show, and supporter of the new and untried, but for him, the Bauhaus represented the art of the poseur.

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