Two Girls On Broadway 👯 starring Lana Turner and Joan Blondell!

Why did Lana Turner become a major star and others who were just as pretty and perhaps just as talented as Turner was, fall by the wayside? Lana Turner had impact on the movie-going public, she could command the attention of the audience no matter what else is going on around her, and when the camera focuses on her beautiful face, she seems to be thinking something that can be specifically understood. Turner can get audiences to respond to her in all situations, and she seems so alive, full of juice, she's a force to reckon with. It's a quality that has nothing to do with theatrical acting but everything to do with film stardom. As a result of possessing it, Lana Turner became one of Hollywood's most famous stars. A movie star must have the ability to create a relationship with the audience. That is the secret of what stardom can be.Hollywood had some many beautiful faces male or female that sometimes a star was better off by having a distinctive feature, something to make them noticeable, and thus memorable. Gable's ears are too big, James Stewart is too tall and gangly, June Allyson has a raspy voice, Norma Shearer has a cast of some sort in one eye, Joan Crawford's mouth is a wide gash and Bette Davis has eyes that you can't forget. Lana Turner did not have many flaws. But Turner's voice, however, is distinctive, and seems too low and husky for her tiny frame. Plus, her potential for stardom was enhanced by the fact that she could play in comedies, musicals, or dramas. And once the public picked her out, MGM cast her in all kinds of roles: as a shop girl, an heiress, a cub reporter and even as a college sociology major! Lana Turner in the 1940s became the equivalent of Joan Crawford in the 1930s.Even though Turner and Crawford were unalike physically, they both came from hard scrabble childhoods and were willing to work hard and cooperate with the Studio. Turner even played the Crawford role in the remake of Grand Hotel (1932) now titled Weekend At The Waldorf (1945). Turner developed a strong and significant sense of herself, and her personal tragedies shaped the audience's view of her in a way that was linked only to her. Many actresses created for themselves their own image, a role that was entirely theirs. There was a Joan Crawford type who would reinvent herself every ten years or so, a Bette Davis heroine, and a Rosalind Russell comedy career woman type. It becomes impossible to think of the career of someone like Barbara Stanwyck as being limited to a simple list of labels like, "mother," "wife," and "sister." She was Barbara Stanwyck in a Barbara Stanwyck role, and that was that. She was someone special, distinctive, She was an actress who could murmur, "Oh really?" and give it the weight of the Magna Carta. Longevity has always been a problem for female stars, who rarely lasted as long as their male counterparts. When a woman reached the age of forty, she was considered too old and "over the hill" to play opposite a 20-year-old-male. Male actors could romance a twenty-year-old, since grey hair and wrinkles was thought to be elegant and sophisticated. For woman it was harder to maintain and more difficult to stretch their careers. The great actresses like Crawford, Davis, Stanwyck, and Hepburn, who kept going for thirty or forty years, represent formidable forces indeed. When I think of "Glamour" I immediately see Lana Turner onscreen doing what came naturally to her. In 1936 Julia Jean Turner originally from Wallace Idaho was cutting school at Top's Cafe at Sunset and Highland (not, as the myth perpetuates, at Schwab's) the publisher of The Hollywood Reporter spotted her, and that sighting led to a contract with producer-director Mervyn LeRoy; the role in his film created a furor which made it clear that hers were ingredients for stardom. The precocious seventeen year old's five-minute part was that of a nubile, high-school murder victim in Warner Brothers' courtroom drama They Won't Forget (1937).

Her brief appearance, like that of Harlow in Hell's Angels and Monroe's in The Asphalt Jungle, had an impact far beyond its length, and made the sweater she wore a symbol of feverish sexuality, sweeping it into vogue throughout America. Columnist Walter Winchell, who coined 'oomph' to describe Ann Sheridan's asset, dubbed Lana 'America's Sweater Girl Sweetheart'. Suddenly every young girl wished she could look like her, and her boyfriend wished she could too. In 1938 LeRoy took Lana with him to MGM, where she was groomed to fill the slot Jean Harlow had left vacant with her death, and stayed till the late fifties as one of the studio's proudest accomplishments. Yet its success was not in making her a star -- the public had done that -- but in turning her potential into one of the most enduring, glamorous careers. Early on in her contract, the studio had considered dropping her as a risky proposition because of the frequency with which she made dubious headlines, but the pubic, having chosen her, continued to support her. Box office reports on her films continued to climb. Whatever problems the headstrong teenager might cause the publicity department, it clearly had no effect on her popularity. MGM czar, Louis B. Mayer, gave the go-ahead for the final stage in her elevation to full-fledged stardom: her hair was dyed platinum blond, her roles were tailored to her image, the brashness balanced by comeuppance, and in the lavish Ziegfeld Girl (1941), co-starring Judy Garland, Hedy Lamarr and James Stewart, it was Lana, as the happy-go-lucky, doomed showgirl, who walked away with the picture. Over the next fourteen years and eight husbands, the studio's decision to keep her proved to be the right one.

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