Columbia scarcely noticed Capra's departure due to the imminent war boom. Like Universal and UA, Columbia's wartime surge was less dramatic than that of the theater-owning Big Five studios, but Columbia was able to sustain profits on a par with its Capra-era peak and to increase its revenues considerably. That enabled Cohn to increase A-class output and upgrade the production values on top releases (particularly with the use of Technicolor) and to expand his roster of top talent. Columbia continued to produce its signature romantic comedies, punctuating Capra's departure with two Hawks-directed hits, Only Angels Have Wings and His Girl Friday (1940), both of which paired Cary Grant (1904–1986) with a contract star—Jean Arthur and Rosalind Russell (1907–1976), respectively. A supporting role in the former went to Rita Hayworth (1918–1987), who emerged as a top star in a cycle of musical hits, teaming with Fred Astaire (1899–1987) in You'll Never Get Rich (1941) and You Were Never Lovelier (1942) and with Gene Kelly in Cover Girl (1944). Columbia also produced a steady supply of war films—both home-front and combat dramas—including a few A-class films like Sahara (1943), starring Humphrey Bogart (1899–1957) (on loan from Warners), but mainly composed of low-budget fare.
Dubbed "the studio's first superstar," Rita Hayworth was without question Columbia's most important contract star and thus the object of studio boss Harry Cohn's obsessive attention during the 1940s. She appeared in a total of seven films in 1941 and 1942 but only six for the remainder of the decade—and none from 1948 until 1952, during her ill-fated escapades with playboy Prince Aly Khan. Her half-dozen films from 1942 to 1947 included several of Columbia's biggest hits, however, and they trace Hayworth's evolution from the wholesome beauty of romantic comedies and upbeat musicals to erotic siren and consummate femme fatale. By decade's end her movie career was in limbo and her movie stardom eclipsed by her international celebrity status.
Hayworth's rise to stardom was circuitous, and it involved a radical transformation of her screen persona. The daughter of Eduardo Cansino, a Spanish-born dancer, and Volga Hayworth, a Ziegfeld Follies performer, she danced professionally before signing with Fox while still in her teens, but her early film career as dark-haired beauty Rita Cansino floundered. She was seemingly washed up before age twenty when the first of her many husbands revived her career and landed her a long-term contract with Columbia. Thus began her transformation into Rita Hayworth, whose second chance at stardom was jump-started by a supporting role in Columbia's Only Angels Have Wings in 1939.
Cohn exploited Hayworth's sudden value via loanouts while casting her in a few near-A comedies, and he then secured her full-fledged stardom by casting her in two musicals opposite Fred Astaire, You'll Never Get Rich (1941) and You Were Never Lovelier (1942), which gave her a chance to display her considerable dancing talents (if not her singing, which was dubbed). Hayworth partnered with Gene Kelly in two musicals, Cover Girl (1944) and Tonight and Every Night (1945), and then her star persona underwent another alteration with her role as sultry, potentially deadly siren in Gilda (1946), in which Hayworth created an instantly memorable moment singing "Put the Blame on Mame" while provocatively removing her long black satin gloves. Next Hayworth played a quintessential black widow in The Lady from Shanghai (1947), a disastrous project for Cohn and Columbia despite its eventual cult status. Written and directed by Hayworth's second husband, Orson Welles, who co-starred, the film was made in 1946 as their marriage was collapsing, then recut and shelved before Columbia finally released it in Europe late the following year and in the United States in mid-1948—just as Hayworth hooked up with playboy Prince Aly Khan, whom she wed in 1949 and divorced in 1953.
Hayworth returned to Columbia in 1951 and begged Cohn to reinstate her contract. He complied and cast her in top productions like Miss Sadie Thompson (1953) and Pal Joey (1957), but her career failed to reignite.
Only Angels Have Wings (1939), You'll Never Get Rich (1941), You Were Never Lovelier (1942), Gilda (1946), The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Miss Sadie Thompson (1953), Pal Joey (1957)
Leaming, Barbara. If This Was Happiness: A Biography of Rita Hayworth . New York: Random House, 1992.
McLean, Adrienne L. Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity, and Hollywood Stardom . New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004.
Thomas Schatz
Columbia's B-movie operation flourished during the war, cranking out Lone Wolf , Blondie , and Boston Blackie
series; serials adapted from radio and comic strips including The Shadow , Brenda Starr , and Terry 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 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,
Columbia's continued success in the 1950s was due in part to Cohn's experience in dealing with freelance talent and independent production, and also to Columbia's ready acceptance of television when the other studios were either dismissing or disparaging the upstart medium. Columbia was the first studio to undertake TV series production, via its Screen Gems division, which under the supervision of Ralph Cohn, Jack's son, produced hit series in multiple genres, from daytime variety ( House Party , 1952) and syndicated children's and family programming ( Captain Midnight , 1954; Jungle Jim , 1955; Circus Boy , 1956) to network prime-time sitcoms ( Father Knows Best , 1954; The Donna Reed Show , 1958), anthology dramas ( The Ford Television Theatre , 1952; Playhouse 90 , 1956; Goodyear Theatre , 1957), and crime dramas ( Naked City , 1958; Tightrope , 1959). TV series production absorbed much of Columbia's B-movie operation, as Cohn reduced feature film output from around sixty per year in 1950 and 1951 to less than forty by the mid-1950s. B-western programmers were phased out altogether, although Columbia still produced occasional A-class westerns like The Man from Laramie (1955), starring James Stewart, and a good many near-A's with contract stars Glenn Ford and Randolph Scott (1898–1987).
In terms of top feature production, Columbia's greatest strength during the 1950s was its dual output of weighty male-dominant dramas and hit romantic comedies. The dramas included film noir classics like In a Lonely Place (1950), directed by Nicholas Ray (1911–1979), and The Big Heat (1953), directed by Fritz Lang (1890–1976), as well as stage adaptations like Death of a Salesman (1951), The Member of the Wedding (1952), The Caine Mutiny (1954), and Picnic (1955). While these films clearly signaled their lineage and thus were of a somewhat derivative quality, Columbia also produced hit dramas in the 1950s that, like All the King's Men , remain inconceivable as anything but films, whatever their medium of origin, and stand among the very best films of that era. The most notable of these were From Here to Eternity (1953), On the Waterfront (1954), and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), which were solid commercial hits and multiple Academy Award ® winners, taking Oscars ® for Best Picture and Best Director (Fred Zinnemann, Elia Kazan, and David Lean, respectively)—and thus giving Columbia its best Oscar ® run since the Capra era. Columbia also sustained its trademark romantic comedy line, fueled by the talents of the emerging star Judy Holliday (1921–1965) and the director-writer duo of George Cukor and Garson Kanin (1912–1999), who teamed for Born Yesterday (1950), The Marrying Kind (1952), and It Should Happen to You (1954). The latter co-starred the fast-rising Jack Lemmon (1925–2001), who teamed with Holliday and newcomer Kim Novak (b. 1933) in Phffft! (1954), thus adding two more contract stars to Columbia's comedy mix.
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