 |
 |
|
||
|
|||
This Chapter is from Emeralds in Tinseltown: The Irish in Hollywood, written by Steve Brennan and Bernadette O'Neill, and published by Appletree Press
The Irishman, the Mermaid and the FoxThe Hollywood Career of Herbert Brenon - part 4 of 4Brenon set up his own independent company to make a film called Sorrell and Son. He borrowed heavily to buy the rights from Paramount and set up the production on the silent movie that would be remembered as one of his great masterpieces. The director was even nominated for an Oscar for this work on the film. The year was 1927 and Brenon could not have chosen a worse time to set out on his own. The business was about to undergo one of the most traumatic periods in its history: the Talkies. ‘Eet is a fad,’ declared the strongly accented silent screen star Pola Negri of the coming of sound to the movies. But Brenon was more inclined to believe the words of Al Jolson when he declared in the movie that is generally considered to be the first sound picture The Jazz Singer, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, you aint heard nothin’ yet.’ Sorrell and Son would become one of the last great silent movies ever made and it suffered at the box office as a consequence of this unfortunate timing. Brenon was devastated. He was not a young man now and the transition to sound could not have been more traumatic. Many of the great stars of the day were openly laughed at by the public for their strange accents or high-pitched voices. The microphone picked up and made thunderclaps out of clothes rustling or a fork being clanked. It was a nightmare for directors just beginning to figure out how to make talkies. But Brenon was game for the challenge. He began to master this new way of making movies, and things were looking up when the Wall Street Crash and The Great Depression hit him hard. The man that had once been at the pinnacle of the American film industry, an icon, was reduced to working with a second-tier producer, I.E. Chadwick, who released films through Monogram Pictures. A subsidiary of United Artists, Monogram put out the ‘second features’ which accompanied the major releases. Humiliated and depressed Brenon once again abandoned Hollywood for England announcing in 1935, “I feel it is too exciting a time in England to miss. Only now are the British beginning to increase the quality of their product.” He worked for five years in England and produced two more films, The Housemaster (1938) and, two years later, The Flying Squad – starring a young Jack Hawkins, who would become one of England’s most enduring stars – before once again landing back in Hollywood. But this time he had not come back to do battle, he had come “home” to retire. Brenon died in Los Angeles in 1958 without ever making another Hollywood picture.
|
[ Back to top ]
All Material © 1999-2009 Irelandseye.com and contributors
