Popular films
included:
Destry Rides Again starring James
Stewart and Marlene Dietrich
Goodbye,
Mr.
Chips
directed by Sam Wood and starring Robert Donat and Greer
Garson
Gone With the Wind directed by
Victor Fleming and starring
Vivien
Leigh, Clark Gable, Leslie Howard and Olivia de Havilland
Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington
directed by Frank Capra and
starring
James Stewart and Jean Arthur
Stagecoach directed by John
Ford
and
starring John Wayne and Claire Trevor
The Wizard of Oz
directed
by Victor Fleming and starring Judy Garland
Wuthering Heights
directed
by William Wyler and starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon.
Gunga Din
directed by George Stevens and starring Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen,
Douglas
Fairbanks Jr., Joan Fontaine and Sam Jaffe
The Hound of the
Baskervilles
directed by Sidney Lanfield and starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel
Bruce
Drums
Along the Mohawk directed
by
John Ford and starring Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert
Fiction included: Sholem Asch’s The Nazarene, Raymond
Chandler’s The Big Sleep, Josephine Herbst’s Rope of Gold,
Norman MacLeod’s You Get What You Ask For, John P. Marquand’s Wickford
Point, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn, Katherine Anne
Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider, John Steinbeck’s The
Grapes of Wrath, Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, Robert
Penn Warren’s Night Rider, Nathanael West’s The Day of the
Locust and Thomas Wolfe’s The
Web and the Rock.
Popular songs included: “Heaven Can Wait” by Jimmy Van Heusen and
lyrics by Eddie De Lange, “I’ll Never Smile Again” by Ruth Lowe, “I Get
Along Without You Very Well (Except Sometimes),” by Hoagy Carmichael
and lyrics by Jane Brown Thompson, “In The Mood” by Joe Garland and
Andy Razaf, “The Lady’s In Love With You” by Burton Lane and Frank
Loesser, “Moonlight Serenade” by Glenn Miller and Mitchell Parish,
“South of the Border (Down Mexico Way)” by Jimmy Kennedy and Michael
Carr, and “Three Little Fishies” by Sadie Dwell.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York showed the work of the Bauhaus.
Valentina designed Katherine Hepburn’s costumes for Philip Barry’s play
The Philadelphia Story.
Grandma Moses (Anna Mary Robertson Moses) became famous after art
collector Louis Caldor bought her paintings and exhibited them at the
Museum of Modern Art.
The New York World’s Fair was televised by RCA, including speeches by
President Roosevelt and RCA president David Sarnoff.
February: The Golden
Gate World’s
Fair in San Francisco opened. It cost $40 million to construct.
February 15: The Little Foxes by
Lillian Hellman opened at the National Theater in New York.
March 18: The New Yorker published
“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” by James Thurber.
April 9: Black
contralto opera
singer Marian Anderson performed to an audience of seventy-five
thousand at the
Lincoln Memorial.
June 1: The first televised prize fight in
Yankee Stadium between Lou Nova and Max Baer ended with Nova winning in
11 rounds.
July-August: The New Deal programs
were dismantled and 775,000 WPA workers were let go.
June 20: The “Pirates of Penzance”
musical was first broadcasted on regularly scheduled television by NBC.
August 20: The first major league
baseball game, featuring the Brooklyn Dodgers versus the Cincinnati
Reds, was televised.
August 30: The first college
football game, Fordham versus Waynesburg, was broadcasted on television.
November 3: Margin for Error by
Clare Boothe Luce starring Otto Preminger premiered at New York’s
Plymouth Theater.
November 23: By
presidential
proclamation Thanksgiving Day was celebrated on the fourth Thursday of
the month rather than the last.