Henry O'Neill's Home Run

Oh, yeah, the wonderful Warners' stock company; like repertory theater for film but with each player filling their own specialty niche, keeping ones like Jenkins, O'Neill, McHugh, Guy Kibbee, Grant Mitchell, Lyle Talbot, Aline MacMahon, Ruth Donnelly, Glenda Farrell and so many others busy as bees. One month, audiences could see any one or more of them in a Perry Mason, next month in a hard-boiled Cagney picture, then a Berkeley musical followed by a Davis melodrama, Joan Blondell romantic comedy and so on. And if major names like Davis, Cagney or de Havilland sometimes felt they weren't treated with respect off screen, they were presented with something like affection on, with each leading and featured player displayed with a big closeup during the opening credits - along with their name and character billing - through most of the '30s, so audiences would always know who was whom.

You can tune into just about any in-progress Warners' film - including those you've never seen - from, say, 1932 to 1948 and identify the studio within a few seconds from the cast, look, sound, pacing and a handful of other stylistic signatures (which, depending upon one's point of view, may be considered either asset or liability). The same is true of MGM of roughly the same period, where O'Neill became as much a fixture in the '40s as he had been at Warner's in the '30s, and to some extent, the other majors as well. Ticket buyers became as familiar and comfortable with corporate images projected through their product as consumers later did with auto manufacturers, TV networks and even bands and record companies ("The Motown Sound," for instance). 

Those were different times, weren't they?