Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Rita Hayworth in Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946). EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.
series; serials adapted from radio and comic strips
including The Shadow, Brenda Starr, andTerry and the
Pirates; and comedy shorts featuring the Three Stooges,
Buster Keaton, Charlie Chase, and Harry Langdon.
Western programmers composed roughly half of the
studio’s wartime B-movie output—and fully thirty percent
of Columbia’s total wartime releases (159 of 503
films). Most of these were subpar features that ran from
fifty-five to fifty-seven minutes and featured Charles
Starrett (1903–1986). He did seven or eight B westerns
per year from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s, including
some sixty-seven Durango Kid films. Columbia also
produced an occasional A-class western—Arizona
(1940), with rising star William Holden (1918–1981),
for example, and The Desperadoes (1943), a Glenn Ford
(b. 1916) vehicle that marked the studio’s first
Technicolor release.
By the end of the war, Columbia had built up a solid
roster of contract talent in all departments, including
stars like Hayworth, Russell, Holden, and Glenn Ford;
cinematographers Rudolph Maté (1898–1964) and
Columbia
Burnett Guffey (1905–1983); art directors Stephen
Goosson, Cary Odell (1910–1988), and Rudolph
Sternad; editors Gene Havlick and Viola Lawrence
(1894–1973); musical director Morris Stoloff (1898–
1980); and writers Sidney Buchman and Virginia Van
Upp (1902–1970). Cohn continued to rely heavily on
outside directors in A-class productions, with contract
directors Charles Vidor (1900–1959), Alfred Green
(1889–1960), and Henry Levin (1909–1980) handling
top projects as well. Columbia’s expanded talent pool
meant more A-films and more homegrown hits like
Gilda, a noir classic co-starring Hayworth and Glenn
Ford, and The Jolson Story, a biopic starring little-known
character actor Larry Parks (1914–1975). Those two
1946 releases set the tone for the postwar era’s continued
success, and after record years in 1946 and 1947,
Columbia managed to hold on as Hollywood’s fortunes
plummeted—thanks largely to two huge 1949 hits, Jolson
Sings Again, a sequel to the 1946 biopic and All the King’s
Men, directed by Robert Rossen (1908–1966), a stunning,
hyper-realistic portrait of political corruption,
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