The story of young acting hopefuls who come to Hollywood for screen tests and acting careers, Star Dust is actually based on the early careers of Darnell, Dorris Bowdon, and Mary Healy. Bowdon acted in a handful of films in the late 1930s and early 1940s before retiring to have a family with husband Nunnally Johnson, while Healy acted in more movies and television and also has a part in Star Dust as Mary Andrews, a composite character based on herself and Bowdon.
Darnell, Bowdon and Healy all went to Hollywood after being discovered by talent scouts, but Darnell, who was only thirteen at the time of that initial trip, was told to return when she was older -- which is exactly what happens to her character in this movie. Already an in-demand model, Darnell was so supremely beautiful that most people simply assumed she was older than she really was. When she was sixteen, she returned to Hollywood and a Fox contract, and was promptly cast in Hotel for Women (1939), Day-Time Wife (1939) and Star Dust. Her career was off and running, with the big hits The Mark of Zorro (1940) and Blood and Sand (1941) soon to come.
Darnell's discovery and instant stardom caught the public imagination so strongly that Fox decided even before Hotel for Women to begin work on a script that would use her story as movie fodder. Even Darnell herself got caught up in the spell. At the time of Star Dust, she told a columnist, "When I wake up in the morning, I keep my eyes closed as long as possible. I'm afraid it will all fly away when I properly awake." Years later, she was more reflective: "At first, everything was like a fairy tale come true. I stepped into a fabulous land where, overnight, I was a movie star. In pictures you're built up by everyone. On the set, in the publicity office, wherever you go, everyone says you're wonderful. It gives you a false sense of security. You waltz through a role, and everywhere you hear that you are beautiful and lovely, a natural-born actress. You believe what people around you say."
At one point in Star Dust we see a screen test for Darnell's character -- an exact recreation of Darnell's actual, original screen test on a park bench a few years earlier. She even wears the same outfit. Darnell later recalled, "I had a little less accent and a little more poise [in the new screen test]. I think I was dazed when I played the [original] park bench test, but I was almost as scared in the Star Dust one, because by then I knew how much depended on it."
The screen test wasn't the only thing she performed once in reality and the other on screen. At the end of the picture, Darnell's character plants her hands and feet in cement at Grauman's Chinese Theater. Around the time of the film's release, Darnell did it again, for real.
Also in Star Dust are John Payne as another young acting hopeful, Charlotte Greenwood as an amusing acting coach, Roland Young as an agent, and William Gargan as a producer directly modeled on Darryl Zanuck. In one scene where Greenwood was required to rush into Donald Meek's office and stumble over Meek, who is on his hands and knees examining photos on the floor, she accidentally kicked him too hard and he went sprawling down on his face, skinning his nose and keeping him out of the movie for two days. Greenwood felt so bad she had flowers delivered to him twice a day until he returned.
The New York Times called Star Dust "unlikely to stem the westward migration of youngsters with hallucinations of swimming pools and a six-figure apotheosis to stardom.... Miss Darnell, in the leading role, is not only well behaved, but one of the more comely starlets. Mr. Payne is refreshing and breezy." Variety called the picture "a top B that will deliver as an A attraction in the majority of spots."
Darnell died in 1965 after a fire broke out in a Chicago area house where she had just been watching Star Dust on television in the middle of the night. The cause of the fire was never determined, though it may have been a stray cigarette. Darnell suffered extreme burns and smoke inhalation and died a few hours later. She was 41.
Star Dust was shot by cameraman Pev Marley, who would marry Darnell three years later.
Producers: Kenneth Macgowan, Darryl F. Zanuck
Director: Walter Lang
Screenplay: Kenneth Earl, Ivan Kahn, Jesse Malo (story); Helen Logan, Robert Ellis
Cinematography: J. Peverell Marley
Art Direction: Richard Day, Albert Hogsett
Music: David Buttolph
Film Editing: Robert L. Simpson
Cast: Linda Darnell (Carolyn Sayres), John Payne (Ambrose Fillmore/Bud Borden), Roland Young (Thomas Brooke), Charlotte Greenwood (Lola Langdon), William Gargan (Dane Wharton), Mary Beth Hughes (June Lawrence), Mary Healy (Mary Andrews), Donald Meek (Sam Wellman), Jessie Ralph (Aunt Martha Parker), Walter Kingsford (Napoleon in Screen Test).
BW-90m.
by Jeremy Arnold
Source:
Ronald L. Davis, Hollywood Beauty: Linda Darnell and the American Dream
