Constance Bennett movies on TCM: What Price Hollywood?
Constance Bennett movies on TCM
Constance Bennett is Turner Classic Movies’ Star of the Month of November. TCM will be presenting six Constance Bennett movies tonight, including what is probably the actress’ best-known vehicle: What Price Hollywood? (1932). (See this evening’s schedule further below.)
Based on an original story by Hollywood insider Adela Rogers St. Johns, the George Cukor-directed drama tells the story of a young waitress fast on the way up the Hollywood ladder while her alcoholic director / discoverer is just as fast on the way down. If the What Price Hollywood? plot sounds familiar, it’s because five years later it was used as the basis for A Star Is Born, which in the ensuing decades led to two official remakes and several other cinematic variations (e.g., Up and Close and Personal, starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer). The story, in fact, remains popular. A third official A Star Is Born remake to be directed by Clint Eastwood was announced just a few months ago.
Neil Hamilton, a former D.W. Griffith actor best remembered as the Batman TV series’ Commissioner Gordon, is Constance Bennett’s leading man in What Price Hollywood?, while the doomed Hollywood filmmaker is played by Lowell Sherman – himself a respected director in the early 1930s (e.g., Morning Glory, which earned Katharine Hepburn her first Best Actress Academy Award). Not coincidentally, What Price Hollywood? was produced by David O. Selznick, the independent mogul who was also behind the first A Star Is Born.
Pre-Code melodramas
TCM’s other Constance Bennett movies this evening include four pre-Code melodramas, all but one RKO releases: Our Betters (1933), with Joel McCrea and also directed by Cukor; Archie Mayo’s Two Against the World (1932), a Warner Bros. release featuring Neil Hamilton; another Cukor-directed melo, Rockabye (1932), also featuring Joel McCrea and future Oscar winner Paul Lukas; and George Archainbaud’s After Tonight (1933), which has Constance Bennett as a Russian spy who falls in love the enemy – Mexican Gilbert Roland (as an Austrian captain), whom the actress would marry in 1941 and divorce five years later. I should add that the year before After Tonight was released, the similarly themed Mata Hari, starring Greta Garbo and Mexican Ramon Novarro (as a Russian aviator), was a huge grosser for MGM.
Constance Bennett’s sixth TCM movie is Law of the Tropics (1941), made after her stardom had become a thing of the past. In this near-B movie, Bennett plays a nightclub singer who marries a South American rubber planter to escape the law. Jeffrey Lynn is her leading man. Ray Enright directed.
Constance Bennett TCM movie schedule PT (Nov. 13)
5:00 PM WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD? (1932)
Director: George Cukor.
Cast: Constance Bennett, Lowell Sherman, Neil Hamilton.6:45 PM OUR BETTERS (1933)
Director: George Cukor.
Cast: Constance Bennett, Gilbert Roland, Violet Kemble-Cooper, Phoebe Foster.8:15 PM TWO AGAINST THE WORLD (1932)
Director: Archie Mayo.
Cast: Constance Bennett, Neil Hamilton, Helen Vinson.9:30 PM LAW OF THE TROPICS (1941)
Director: Ray Enright.
Cast: Constance Bennett, Jeffrey Lynn, Regis Toomey.11:00 PM ROCKABYE (1932)
Director: George Cukor.
Cast: Constance Bennett, Joel McCrea, Paul Lukas.12:15 AM AFTER TONIGHT (1933)
Director: George Archainbaud.
Cast: Constance Bennett, Gilbert Roland, Edward Ellis.