Nancy Carroll at Shadow Waltz
Marcus Tucker in Shadow Waltz:
“More than likely you have seen Nancy Carroll’s face but very seldomly any of her films. Nancy Carroll was one of the biggest box office attractions in the early 1930’s and probably the first woman whose career benefited from talking pictures. But her reputation as a hellcat helped bring what is said to be a brilliant career to a grinding halt at the end of the 1930’s.”
Marcus goes on to talk about his impressions of Nancy Carroll in the 1933 melodrama Child of Manhattan, which was screened on Turner Classic Movies earlier this month.
Nancy Carroll was indeed considered very difficult. The text below is from Scott Eyman’s Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise:
“Part of the problem [with Lubitsch's failed 1931 melodrama The Man I Killed / Broken Lullaby] may have been an inability to establish a rapport with Nancy Carroll; Lubitsch told Miriam Hopkins that ’she doesn’t understand what I want her to do … she doesn’t want direction … I said to her … ‘If you would just put yourself in my arms’ [hands]. And she said, ‘That I should do that with you, [a] German?’”
Note: Eyman doesn’t cite his source for the above quote. Miriam Hopkins died in 1972; Eyman’s Lubitsch bio was written in the early 1990s; he most probably never got to talk to Hopkins though he may have gotten the quote from some old Hopkins interview. My point: I don’t know if the above quote comes from a reliable source or not — though Nancy Carroll was known to be very difficult. That’s one of the reasons her Paramount stardom was so brief.
Rudolph Valentino on Turner Classic Movies
Pre-Code Paramount at Film Forum
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Why aren’t more of Nancy Carroll’s films available?
Universal owns the rights to the old Paramount films. They should be pestered ad nauseam until they start releasing all their old Paramount (and Universal) films on DVD — or at least on cable.
It’s a crime to have all those movies locked away in a vault somewhere.