As Skyline is very nearly a lost film, it was quite an ordeal to track it down and get a screening. At last, hunched over a plastic table in the bowels of the UCLA Film & Television Archive on 02/20/2020, we were able to watch in its entirety the 1931 drama that launched famed Hollywood actress Myrna Loy to stardom.
For indeed, it is this forgotten film that jumpstarted Loy's career, with the starlet's performance receiving widespread recognition and acclaim from critics and executives on both coasts. In her autobiography, Loy credits Skyline as the film that led her to landing a contract with MGM, as top execs privately screened her performance based on the unusually strong reviews.
This Loy fan concurs: While the film itself was undistinguished, Loy's performance made it well worth the wait.
*THE BOOK*
The 68-minute Skyline was based very loosely on a lengthy bestselling 680-page book called East Side, West Side, which hit bookshelves in 1927.
This ponderous view of life in New York City during the '20s was written by Felix Riesenberg, a respected maritime writer and explorer who twice failed in explorations to the Arctic via airship in the early part of the 20th century, and the novel was more popular for its well-known author than for its actual content.
*THE ADAPTATION*
Most of the standout elements of Skyline the film had to do with, well, the skyline. The New York Daily News waxed eloquent about how director Sam Taylor came to New York and personally supervised shooting onsite the Empire State Building, with vistas from atop the structure, "nearly a thousand feet above the street level!"
The Empire State Building opened on May 1, 1931, just as Taylor was finishing the shots for the film, and it was still a hot item when the film premiered in October of that year. Wrote H. Miles Heberer of the Morning Chronicle of Manhattan, Kansas: "Fox succeeded in getting some good shots of New York skyscrapers, and if you haven't seen the old town for some time, here is your best immediate chance."
We saw what Heberer meant when viewing the film, as it offered a truly detailed look at the architecture of New York City and the East River in particular-not just towering views, but street scenes that made the viewer feel closer to New York City, displaying a real tempo of daily life and work. That's quite different than the usual canned backdrops of NYC in the '30s meant mainly to show that 'Yes, the setting of this romantic comedy or sordid drama is indeed New York City.'
While the setting certainly sizzled, much of the reaction to the story and main characters was tepid. The exception was for fourth-billed Myrna Loy, then a largely unknown quantity.
*THE PRESS SINGS LOY'S PRAISES*
Like the book, the movie is long forgotten, but back in its day Skyline received substantial media exposure, much of it focused on Loy-unusual, for a fourth-billed actress.
The Nebraska State Journal wrote, for example, "Myrna Loy as a platinum blonde is a real charm." The Richmond Times Dispatch emphasized Loy's stunning beauty in the role of Paula Lambert, while summing up top-billed Thomas Meighan's performance as "capable."
The lead in the Burbank Daily Review on December 9, 1931 featured Loy and little else. After several paragraphs regarding her scene-stealing vamp performance opposite former silent star Thomas Meighan, the article concludes, "Hardie Albright and Maureen O'Sullivan are the other featured players."
*THE OTHER FEATURED PLAYERS*
Meighan, in this humble critic's opinion, was merely OK: It was the same old solid citizen role he could have played in his sleep. Film buffs may recall his superb performance as the square-jawed detective in The Racket, back in 1928, but he seldom strayed from type:
"I will never step out of character," he told the Seminole Producer, a small-town Oklahoma newspaper, when discussing Skyline in an interview.
Even though still popular, Meighan retired in 1934 due to cancer, passing away less than five years after the release of Skyline.
Newcomer Hardie Albright as the second male lead-portraying Meighan's illegitimate son who, like his dad, loved skyscrapers-lacked much of the charisma of his literary counterpart, and his Hollywood career floundered after this, his first film.
"Hardie Albright somehow doesn't strike us as being one of the year's finds," wrote H. Miles Heberer of the Morning Chronicle of Manhattan, Kansas in his review. "He fails to be as interesting as some of the other beginners on screen, and he comes off as wishy-washy."
The female lead, a sweet, simpering Irish lass from the east side of New York, was played by Maureen O'Sullivan, who was just one film away from her career defining role as Jane in Tarzan, the Ape Man. Of O'Sullivan's fully clothed turn in Skyline, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle said, "Maureen O'Sullivan plays Kathleen, merely a cardboard role. The feminine acting credit goes to Myrna Loy, who is properly flippant as Paula."
*A BRIDGE TO STARDOM*
Indeed, Loy was that and more in Skyline, fresh off of a seven-year run at Warner Brothers and working freelance for Fox in this effort. The dialogue-banal for O'Sullivan, Meighan, and Albright-practically sizzled for her, and she uttered several phrases that she would use in her later, much bigger films:
"You make me sick," she tells Thomas Meighan, employing the same line and tone of voice nine years later to William Powell in I Love You Again.
"How could you?" she says disbelievingly to Meighan when realizing he was just pretending to be willing to marry her. This was said with the same disbelieving tone-again to William Powell-in Manhattan Melodrama after her seemingly heroic spouse tells her that it is his "sworn duty as the governor of New York" to send Blackie Gallagher, played by Clark Gable, to the electric chair for murder.
"I love you Mac," she says to Meighan with the same wistful sadness she does to Clark Gable in Manhattan Melodrama.
Indeed, many key emotional scenes are made poignant by Loy's acting. "I never thought you'd cheat in any kind of game," she says sadly and disbelievingly to Meighan upon realizing he gave her a wedding ring without any intention of marrying her.
These more than compensated for some cardboard lines elsewhere in the script, and there were plenty of them.
"You've fascinated him," says Meighan to Loy of her overtures to his son.
"Now, I will take him away from her wherever she is," Loy announces.
Yeesh.
Fortunately, MGM saw the qualities of a star actor in Loy in scenes where she wasn't vamping, beauty in the scenes where she was, and how she made the most of her part in an otherwise undistinguished Skyline. They signed Loy immediately after the film and groomed her for stardom.
Within three years she was one of the biggest stars in America.
