Articles from 1939
A fabulous three page article from STAGE MAGAZINE on the early career of Cary Grant:
Cary Grant appeared in six Broadway productions and twenty-seven Hollywood pictures before anybody took notice. Then he played a dead man.
This article was written by the war correspondent Fairfax Downey (1894 – 1990) for a magazine that catered to American veterans of W.W. I, and it seemed that he simply could not contain his enthusiasm for the U.S. infantry’s newest rifle: the M-1 Garand:
What a gun it is! Its nine pound weight swings easily through the manual of arms. The eight-round clip (three more shots than the we used to have with the ’03 Springfield) slips in easily and the breech clicks closed. The old range scale slide has vanished; range and windage adjustments are made simply by turning two knobs… The new semi-automatic means, among other things, that the fire power of troops armed with it has increased at least two and a half times over the old Springfield.
For further magazine reading about John Garand and his rifle, click here.
The night before [the Miami] citizens went to the polls to decide among 15 candidates for three commissionerships, the old specter of the Ku Klux Klan was raised to scare away the colored votes.
The scheme didn’t work.
This article about Adolf Hitler and women appeared on the newsstands two months prior the start of the Second World War, when the world learned how evil a man the lunatic truly was. The journalist wanted to confirm that there was no truth to the 1939 rumor that Hitler was dead and quickly began musing about other rumors:
More feasible is the theory that the sexless madman of Naziland is still alive and has merely discovered that he gets a vicarious thrill out of having women around him and likes to watch acrobatic dance routines.
Photographed in this article is Frau Scholtz-Klink, who had been dubbed the perfect Nazi woman by the Reichfuehrer, in addition to three curvy American burlesque dancers who performed before Hitler.
Click here to read about the dating history of Adolf Hitler.
Five months before the Second World War began an American journalist paid a visit to a German middle school and watched an eighth grade German history pageant; these are his observations:
Sitting in Germany’s schoolrooms are 20 million boys and girls. It is the custom, in democratic countries, to think that Hitler is engaged in pulling wool, or at least some cheap non-import substitute for it, over their eyes every school day.
For two years , for instance, all German boys and girls have been exposed to the following clear-cut lesson:
‘Where e’er I gaze, as German,
My soul with pain o’erflows,
I see the German nation
Girt round and round with foes.’
Click here to read about the Allied effort to re-educate the German boy soldiers of W.W. II.
This is a 1939 article about the Adolph Hitler Schools; a (thankfully) short-lived institution that was created to ill-educate the chosen of Hitler’s Germany in order to create a ruling elite.
Their education, in the proper sense of the word, lays emphasis above all on biology, and naturally, on the racial question – on the philosophy of the National Socialist State, on the Common Law, and on the history of Germany and of the Nazi Movement. Foreign languages, literature, and philosophy finds no place.
A short notice from a Hollywood fan magazine announcing that Vivien Leigh (born Vivian Mary Hartley: 1913 – 1967), an actress largely unknown to U.S. audiences, had been cast to play the roll of ‘Scarlet’. Accompanied by two breathtakingly beautiful color images of the actress, this short announcement outlines her genetic makeup, her previous marriage to Leigh Holman, and her thoughts concerning the upcoming roll.
Click here to read magazine articles about D.W. Griffith.
Jack Wade, one of the many Hollywood reporters for Photoplay, must have let loose a big girlish squeal when he got word from the Selznick-International man that he would not get bounced off the set of Gone with the Wind
if he were to swing by to take a look.
First of all, a report on Vivien Leigh…Hollywood already agreed that she’s the happiest choice any one could have made. Even swamp angels from deepest Dixie put their okay on her accent…Clark Gable looks like the real Big-Man-From-the-South. In a black frock coat, starched bosom and ruffles, he makes a menacing, impressive Rhett, and he’s a little pleased about it, too.
This page from Click Magazine contrasts three Civil War photographs by Matthew Brady (1822 – 1896) with three production stills snapped on the sets of Gone with the Wind. The editors refused to weigh-in on the slowly building case regarding Hollywood’s questionable abilities to portray historic events with any degree of accuracy, preferring instead to praise the filmmakers as to how carefully they checked details.
The Matthew Brady images provided on the attached page only serves to condemn the otherwise flawless work of Gone with the Wind costume designer Walter Plunkett (1902 – 1982) who historians and reënactors have slandered through the years for failing to fully grasp the look of the era.
This page from Click Magazine contrasts three Civil War photographs by Matthew Brady (1822 – 1896) with three production stills snapped on the sets of Gone with the Wind. The editors refused to weigh-in on the slowly building case regarding Hollywood’s questionable abilities to portray historic events with any degree of accuracy, preferring instead to praise the filmmakers as to how carefully they checked details.
The Matthew Brady images provided on the attached page only serves to condemn the otherwise flawless work of Gone with the Wind costume designer Walter Plunkett (1902 – 1982) who historians and reënactors have slandered through the years for failing to fully grasp the look of the era.
