Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Sound Comes In, Vaudeville and Silent Pictures Go Out
- 2 From Broadway to Hollywood with Groucho, Fred, and Ginger
- 3 Radio Nights
- 4 From the Thirties to the Forties with Kate, Bud, and Lou
- 5 Bogie, Bob, and the Boys at War
- 6 The Postwar Movie Scene
- 7 Make Room for TV
- 8 Putting It Together: Walt Disney Introduces the Baby Boom to Television
- 9 The End of an Era?
- Notes
- Movie, Radio, and TV Listings
- Index
4 - From the Thirties to the Forties with Kate, Bud, and Lou
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Sound Comes In, Vaudeville and Silent Pictures Go Out
- 2 From Broadway to Hollywood with Groucho, Fred, and Ginger
- 3 Radio Nights
- 4 From the Thirties to the Forties with Kate, Bud, and Lou
- 5 Bogie, Bob, and the Boys at War
- 6 The Postwar Movie Scene
- 7 Make Room for TV
- 8 Putting It Together: Walt Disney Introduces the Baby Boom to Television
- 9 The End of an Era?
- Notes
- Movie, Radio, and TV Listings
- Index
Summary
In the spring of 1939, Phillip Barry’s The Philadelphia Story, a play about a rich Philadelphia family about to hold a wedding in an elegant Main Line home, became Broadway’s hottest ticket. Katharine Hepburn, whose career had lurched like a roller coaster across the 1930s, played the lead. She enjoyed a spectacular initial success in movies, then was humbled by a series of mid-decade setbacks, and finally reclaimed her prominence in the entertainment world with The Philadelphia Story. Her precarious path illustrated the pitfalls that the studio system of the 1930s’ movie industry contained for ambitious artists who wanted to control their careers. In Hepburn’s case, she overcame adversity and positioned herself to become a big movie star of the wartime era.
The comedy team of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, also major stars of the early 1940s, appeared on Broadway during that same 1939 season. Although they lacked the sense of refinement that Katharine Hepburn brought to her acting, they received a cordial reception from critics, who appreciated their skills at broad physical comedy and their ability to put over the routines they had learned from performing in burlesque. Like Hepburn, they managed, against considerable odds, to establish themselves as leading movie stars in the period just preceding World War II. In their case, not only Broadway, but also radio, figured in their rise to stardom.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Mass AppealThe Formative Age of the Movies, Radio, and TV, pp. 57 - 75Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010