1POPULAR CINEMA

office hits. Paramount’s reputation rested on its trademark sophisticated
comedies, which conjured up a world of luxury and refinement through
spectacular sets and attractive actors like Gary Cooper, Ronald Coleman,
and Claudette Colbert. In fact, It Happened One Night (1934), which established
Frank Capra as the master of romantic comedies and turned Colbert
into a leading Paramount star, was remade only two years later as Glückskinder
(Lucky Kids, 1936) with the “dream couple of the German film,”
Willy Fritsch and Lilian Harvey.
Meanwhile Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the largest Hollywood studio during
the 1930s, continued to make big-budget films with plenty of action, glamour,
beauty, and sex appeal. MGM stars with a large German following included
Jeanette MacDonald, Nelson Eddy, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Joan
Crawford, and above all Greta Garbo. The enthusiastic reception of Garbo
since the late 1920s, which recalls the Asta Nielsen cult of the early 1920s,
confirms how easily a product of the dream factory could be incorporated
into modernist dreams of cinema as well as racist fantasies about the body.
Thus earlier physiognomic reflections on appearance and character now
gave way to effusive tributes to Garbo as “the essence of race.” 5 Because of
the close identification of Hollywood with the star phenomenon, several rising
stars modeled themselves after the American originals, or were marketed
as such. For instance, Marika Rökk was called the Hungarian answer
to tap-dancing legend Eleanor Powell, Marianne Hoppe compared to screwball
heroine Katharine Hepburn, and Swedish-born Zarah Leander promoted
as “the German Garbo.”
The popular and critical reception of the Hollywood films followed patterns
established during the Weimar years. During the early sound period,
German audiences had developed a special liking for musical comedies that
combined elements from the musical and the operetta. Equally successful
were sophisticated comedies that used the new possibilities of dialogue to
offer spirited repartee between the sexes. Audiences continued to demand
stories that fit their romantic image of America as a frontier and wilderness;
hence their undiminished enthusiasm for Westerns and gangster films. The
enormous popularity of Mickey Mouse, and animated shorts in general,
must be explained through the association of American society with a mechanical
worldview; the same holds true for the clichés about American optimism
and innocence and the fairy-tale images conjured up by Disney productions
like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. 6
132 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich