Doll-A-Day 65: Oscar Week:Clark Gable as Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind by World Dolls

Today's doll is Clark Gable as Rhett Butler, made by World Dolls in 1980.

He's a big guy, at 21 1/2" tall.The clothing is super detailed and well made.He has a tie pin...

...and a ring! It's actually removeable.

The likeness to Clark Gable is quite good. (Except, where are those massive forehead wrinkles?)

Smooth as a baby's butt.

  As you can see from this picture, the one thing the doll doesn't have is the watch chain.I'm not sure if the doll originally had a hat, since I didn't buy him in the box.

 He's not especially poseable. His arms are molded in a slightly bent position, and just move up and down from the shoulders. His legs are jointed at the hip, but barely move at all.Also, his legs aren't equal length, which makes standing on his own practically impossible.Fortunately,his legs do move out a bit at the hips, allowing him a slightly  spread legged stance, which helps a little to keep him standing.His head is strung, and my particular Rhett has 'come undone' as the song says. His head is just sitting in that neck hole.It makes his head pretty easy to pose though!

 
  This World doll is  not quite as good as the 12" Mattel Timeless Treasures Rhett Butler doll though. I should have one of those to match yesterday's Scarlett doll.
  William Clark Gable was born in Cadiz, Ohio (A local boy!), in 1901. He made his first film in 1923, but played mainly uncredited bit parts until 1931. Darryl Zanuck, who later headed Twentieth Century Fox was working at Warner Brothers in the early thirties, and tested Gable for the lead in Little Caesar (A role which went to Edward G. Robinson.). His complaint of Gable was, "His ears are too big and he looks like an ape." His ears notwithstanding, women in the thirties were crazy about Gable. 
  Gone With the Wind producer David O. Selznick wanted Gary Cooper for the part of Rhett. Cooper turned it down. When Clark Gable got the role, Cooper commented that Gone With the Wind was going to be a big flop, and he was "glad it will be Gable falling on his face, and not me". Gable was the public's choice to play Rhett Butler, but he really didn't want to. He felt he couldn't live up to the public's expectations for the character. The book was amazingly popular and he felt the books readers had too much of an image of Rhett already in their minds. He finally acquiesced, and Rhett became the role he is most remembered for.
  Another problem with playing Rhett was the scene requiring Rhett to cry upon the death of his daughter. Gable didn't want to cry on camera. He thought it was unmanly. He was coerced in all sorts of ways, finally giving in to the urging of costar Olivia de Havilland,and producing real tears in a heartbreaking scene.

Rhett keeps a vigil at the body of the deceased Bonnie Blue.

  Gable was good friends with Hattie McDaniel, who played Mammy,and attended her frequent parties. During the scene where Rhett and Mammy share a drink to celebrate the birth of Bonnie Blue Butler, they were drinking water. McDaniel complained she was getting sick of the water, so between takes Gable slipped in actual alcohol. She was unaware until she knocked back the drink on camera.

Mammy and Rhett celebrate the birth of Bonnie Blue.

  He planned to boycott the world premier of Gone With the Wind, which was being held in Atlanta, Georgia, because Hattie McDaniel and the other African American cast members were forbidden from attending. He only consented after McDaniel herself convinced him to attend. I guess Gable was cooler than I thought.
  Although Rhett is his most well known role, and he was nominated for an Academy Award for it, Gable did not win his Oscar for Gone With the Wind. In 1934 he won the Best Actor Oscar for It Happened One Night,the first of what would come to be known as 'screwball comedies'. Legend has it that he was loaned by MGM, to whom he was under contract, to Columbia, as a punishment for refusing to accept roles he didn't like. The joke was on MGM when It Happened One Night became a huge success and Gable won the Oscar for it. (Incidentally, the scene in which Gable removed his shirt to reveal his bare chest caused sales of undershirts to plummet, and elicited complaints from textile manufacturers!)

Clark Gable in his Oscar winning role as reporter Peter Warne in It Happened One Night, with Claudette Colbert.

   Gable was also nominated for Best Actor for Mutiny on the Bounty in 1935.
Tomorrow we finish up Oscar Week with another doll.

Doll-A-Day 64: Oscar Week:Vivian Leigh as Scarlet O'Hara

  Today's doll is a bit of a cheat: she's not actually my doll. She's Ivy's. I hope to get one in the future though, and I did buy this one. Does that count? Besides, I did a Frank Sinatra recently, and I have put my Casablanca dolls away in such a good place I can't locate them!That leaves me a little short to finish out the week. So...
  Anyway, today's doll is Mattel's Timeless Treasures Scarlet O'Hara doll from 2001.

  The Scarlet doll is wearing a recreation of the 'Barbecue dress' from the early part of the movie 

 
The dress is a pretty fair duplicate of the real dress.
   Unlike the earlier Scarlet dolls by Mattel, this one doesn't have a Barbie head. Mattel made a head mold in the image of actress Vivian Leigh, who played Scarlet in the classic 1939 movie.

 

  1939 is known as THE year for movies.So many classic movies were released that year, including Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Wuthering Heights,Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Dark Victory, Stagecoach, and Gunga Din. Gone With the Wind, in spite of this stiff competition , won the Academy Award for Best Picture that year.

 The film was  based on the best selling book by Margaret Mitchell.Incidentally, Gone With the Wind was the only novel Mitchell ever wrote.

  
The film won 8 of the 13 Oscars it was nominated for, plus two honorary Oscars for Technical Achievement and use of colour. Vivian Leigh won Best Actress.

Vivian Leigh with her Oscar for Gone With the Wind.

Both Olivia de Havilland, as Melanie, and Hattie McDaniel as Mammy were nominated for Best Supporting Actress, along with Geraldine Fitzgerald for Wuthering Heights,Edna May Oliver for Drums Along the Mohawk, and Maria Ouspenskaya, (Perhaps   best known today as the old gypsy woman in The Wolfman.) for Love Affair, (The original version of An Affair to Remember). With her win, Hattie McDaniel became the first African American to win an Academy Award.

A proud Hattie McDaniel with her plaque Oscar, which was the type of Oscar given to Best Supporting actors in her day.

  Unfortunately, there was still enough racism in the room that at the awards ceremony Hattie and her escort were required to sit in the back of the room, at a separate table from the rest of the cast.
  It would be 10 more years before the next African American nominee, Best Supporting Actress winner Ethel Waters, for Pinky.
  Upon her death Hattie's possessions were sold to pay off the Internal Revenue. Her Oscar was listed as "no value" and was donated, as her will instructed, to Howard University. Sadly, the plaque disappeared in the 1960's and Howard University has no idea what ever happened to Hattie's Oscar.
  Many people criticized Hattie McDaniel for her frequent portrayal of  maids. Her answer to the criticism was, "I'd rather play a maid than be one." The choice of roles for her were undoubtedly pretty limited, so playing a maid was one of few options open to her. In any case,Hattie's maids were always strong characters who always said what they thought and never took any flack from anybody, including her employers.
  I always considered Gone With the Wind to be a bit over rated. It's a good movie, with good performances, but so are a lot of others. The character of Scarlet is an absolutely awful human being. I'm also uncomfortable with the way the movie leans toward the confederate side. But, seen as the story of how change and war affect the characters and their lives, plus the performances and the beautiful sets and costumes seen in the early Technicolour,the movie is still entertaining.
  Vivian Leigh is one of the actresses I always said I would trade looks with any day. She was beautiful.

Vivian Leigh in Gone With the Wind.

The other is Hedy Lamarr. I think she was even more beautiful, and I always wanted to look like her.

Hedy Lamarr

  Vivian Leigh was born Vivian Mary Hartley, in Darjeeling, British India in 1913. She attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, but did not finish her schooling there, as she left when she got married. Several years later she divorced, and married Laurence Olivier in 1940.
  Prior to the movie being made she had read Gone With the Wind, and had asked her agent to suggest her for the role of Scarlet. At first there was some worry that she was 'too British', but agent Myron Selznick eventually changed his mind.There had been such problems deciding on a "Scarlet" that time was running out.Filming had had to be started, using a double who covered her face, in the Scarlet scenes of the burning of Atlanta. In spite of the legend that tells of producer David O. Selznick being surprised by his brother Myron suddenly producing Leigh on the GWTW set during the 'burning of Atlanta' scenes,David had actually been considering Leigh, and the meeting with her on the set that night had been arranged.
  Margaret Mitchell's first choice for Scarlet had been Miriam Hopkins, born in Georgia and raised in Alabama, whom she said could portray Scarlet as she had been written in the novel.

Bette Davis (left) and Miriam Hopkins in "Old Maid". In real life the two were bitter rivals who hated each other.

Hopkins was never really in the running though, She was in her mid thirties and considered too old. Bette Davis was a favourite in the beginning, in spite of being under contract to another studio (Warner Brothers. Ironically, today Warner Brothers owns the MGM catalog, including Gone With the Wind.)When she didn't win the role of Scarlet she was cast the next year in a very similar role as a Southern Belle with attitude in "Jezabel", for which she won her second Best Actress Oscar.
  The possible actresses were narrowed down again and again. Paulette Goddard did several screen tests and very nearly had the role.

Paulette Goddard in one of her Technicolor screen tests for the role of Scarlet.

  In the end of course, Vivian Leigh was cast and Scarlett became one of her two her most well known roles.(The other being Blanche Dubois in "A Streetcar Named Desire".)
Tomorrow we'll see another Oscar winner.

Doll-A-Day 61: Oscar Week: Effanbee Legend series Judy Garland

  Tonight is the 86th Academy Awards,(The Oscars), so we are celebrating with a week of Oscar winners.Today's doll is Judy Garland by Effanbee.

The doll is a Limited Edition made in 1984 as part of Effanbee's Legend series.

She's approximately 14" tall. She's one of the best likenesses of Judy Garland I've ever seen in doll form. All of the Effanbee Legends dolls are really good likenesses.

Her head is a little bit big for her body though.

They did pretty well with the detail in her dress, and they did get the twist in her hair at the sides. A lot of dolls just have the hair pulled back.They did make a really common mistake though: Dorothy did NOT have braids. She just had ringlet-ish ponytails.

 The other inaccuracy is sort of necessary: The white in Dorothy's famous blue and white gingham dress was actually a very pale pink, since white was hard to film in early Technicolor.If you ever see a good close-up of the actual dress worn in the film,or are lucky enough to see it on display somewhere, (It still exists.),you can see that it's pink.
  Anyway, they did a good job with Dorothy. Toto, not so much...

Ahhh! Scary eyes!

  Judy Garland was born Frances Ethel Gumm,(No wonder she changed it!), on June 22nd, 1922, in Grand Rapids Michigan. Her parents were ex-vaudevillians who retired to Michigan and ran a theatre. Judy first performed on stage at the age of two and a half, when she sang in a Christmas show at her parents' theatre.
  MGM had originally wanted Shirley Temple to play Dorothy. Months of negotiation between MGM and Shirley's studio, Twentieth Century Fox,resulted in an agreement for MGM to loan Fox it's two biggest stars,Clark Gable and Jean Harlow, in exchange for Shirley for Oz. When Jean Harlow unexpectedly died in 1937 the exchange fell through and MGM eventually decided to go with one of their own contract actresses and Judy Garland got the role.
  At the Academy Awards in 1940 she was given a Juvenile Oscar for her 1939 work. After 9 year old Jackie Cooper, the first (and to this date,youngest), child nominated for the Best Actor award, (Best Actor for Skippy, 1931),lost to Lionel Barrymore it was decided by the Academy that it was unfair to have children compete against experienced adults, so the Juvenile award was invented. The statue was about 7" tall, half the size of the full size award.Since it was so small, many winners, including Judy Garland, lost theirs over the course of time. (How do you lose your Oscar?! I'd be sitting on that thing! It wouldn't be going anywhere!) The award wasn't given out every year, only when the Academy felt like it apparently. Between the first Juvenile Oscar in 1935, (Given to Shirley Temple for her 1934 work. The Academy eventually gave Shirley a full size Oscar because they felt they had short changed her.), and the last, (Given to Haley Mills for "Pollyanna", and by the way, she lost hers too.),there were only 12 Juvenile Oscars awarded. The idea was scrapped in 1961, and juveniles were nominated in the regular categories alongside adults. In 1963 16 year old Patty Duke became the first 'juvenile' to win an Oscar in a regular adult category, Best Supporting Actress. If you want to see what a Juvenile Oscar looks like, go to the official web page of Margaret O'Brien,awarded a Juvenile Oscar for her 1944 work, including her role as Tootie in Meet Me in St. Louis, with Judy Garland playing her older sister. She actually sells an autographed  photo of it. For the fascinating story of Margaret's Oscar being stolen,found 50 years later, and returned to her,check out her Wickipedia page.
  The Wizard of Oz itself won several Oscars, including Best Song, (Over the Rainbow, which ironically was originally deleted from the film because it was felt that the film was too long, the song slowed down the action too much, and it was degrading for Judy to sing in a barn yard!), and Best Original Music Score.  It was beaten out for Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, and Best Picture to another giant success of 1939: Gone With the Wind.
  My favourite bit of Oz trivia is this: The costume department was looking for the perfect coat for Professor Marvel, sort of elegance gone to seed. They finally found such a coat in a second hand store. It fit actor Frank Morgan, playing Professor Marvel, perfectly. One day on the set, Morgan happened to turn out one of the coat pockets. Inside he found a label bearing the name 'L. Frank Baum'. L. Frank Baum was, of course, author of the 17 original Oz books. The ownership of the coat was later confirmed by Baum's tailor and his widow. (Baum died in 1919.) The coat was presented to his widow after the completion of filming.
  All my kids went through their Oz stage. They all were Oz characters for Halloween, all of them more than one. (Emma was Tin Man, Dorothy, and Glinda. Fuzz was Tin Man and Scarecrow. Ivy was Dorothy and Glinda. Luckily for Ivy my sewing was much better by the time I made her Glinda costume. It turned out to be one of the best I've made. She got really mad though, because adults at the houses she Trick or Treated at thought she was "The Good Fairy"! Emma and Fuzz actually won a costume contest at Walmart the year they were Dorothy and Scarecrow.) Emma and Fuzz once had a Wizard of Oz party, a general one because we just didn't want to have two Oz birthday parties. We'd done that with Star Wars. I spent ages making yards of Yellow Brick Road to lay around the yard,and various bits and pieces for Oz themed games.Fuzz still hasn't forgiven me for the fact that he didn't get one of the Courage medals I made!
  Tomorrow we continue Oscar Week with another doll.