June Collyer — When They Love Out Loud (1929) 🇺🇸

There was a time when sheiks of the screen could recite their laundry list, college yell, or telephone number in a love scene, and the sheba could reply with a dreamy memorandum of her grocery list — and it registered as torrid as a Dorothy Parker poem. But that was before Warner Brothers. Now they’re making love with real words and music, and if you think the technique isn’t just too different for anything, it’s because you haven’t talked it over with June Collyer.

by Laura Ellsworth Fitch

June’s the girl who knows. In the first place her recent pictures have seen and heard her opposite Buddy Rogers, Richard Dix, Conrad Nagel, Walter McGrail, George O’Brien, and other thrillers.

On top of that, she’s rumored around Hollywood as the leading lady they really get a “crush” on. And why not? June is as pretty and charming and debutantish off the screen as she is in the shadow. Thanks to her favorite brand of cigarettes and her sense of humor she misses the ingénue class, but is well up in the category of our very nicest girls.

Buddy Rogers has made no secret of liking June an awful lot. Nor was Richard Dix immune to the play of her dimples during “The Love Doctor.” Another gentleman used to write poems to her between scenes. Still another sent flowers to her dressing room daily.

Is it any wonder I became curious and asked June to take me to lunch, so that I could ask her whether or not the natural style is cramped by having to speak the other fellow’s love lines, and if there’s as much inspiration in loving out loud as there was in the silent days?

She wore a cream-lace dress, with a large picture-hat, and looked fussed when I brought up the subject.

“Oh, it’s different, all right,” she admitted and “acted nonchalant,” as advised by the cigarette ads, “but I don’t know whether it is more inspiring.

“You see, love scenes in dialogue are really very ticklish to handle. You have to be so careful not to make them silly. If they become too glowing, the audience laughs and the romantic effect is ruined. There is only one phrase in love-making that an audience can tolerate without feeling self-conscious. That is ‘I love you.’ When the hero launches into some glowing account of how madly he wants the heroine, or extols the beauty of her eyes, for some unaccountable reason it sounds terribly silly.

“Because of this, I think talking pictures will be the swan song of the very passionate love scene. When it was silent we could use our imagination about what was being said. But when they try to fit words to match the action it becomes faintly ridiculous.

“Maybe you have already noticed a tendency toward lighter love scenes in the talkies. I think they are trying to suggest rather than demonstrate. The fewer love phrases that are used the more convincing the scene. especially if there is a beautiful song running through.” June laughed. “Heaven knows what would have happened to the love scene if the theme song hadn’t stumbled along. It has helped us out of more than one tight spot. People will believe and feel music, where words leave them cold.”

But it wasn’t the reaction of the audience that particularly interested me. What about the players themselves? Wasn’t it vastly inspiring to have the lover actually sounding his emotions in his deepest and most Vitaphonic appeal?

June crinkled her nose in a characteristic mood. If a pretty girl could make a face that was it.

“Do you think it would he particularly interesting to hear your boy friend recite some other man’s thoughts while making love to you? You would feel that you were acting in a play, wouldn’t you? That’s almost the feeling we have. Certainly nothing very personal enters in.

“The picture I have just finished with Buddy Rogers is a perfect example of what I mean,” she said. I hope you haven’t forgotten what I said about Buddy and June really liking one another. It rather bears on what she said.

“The name of the picture is ‘Illusion’ and we have a beautiful love scene. The setting is perfect. A marble bench — a quiet lake — a sloping lawn — moonlight — evening clothes — music in the background. And the dialogue some one so kindly wrote for us was sweet. Certainly everything was conducive to romantic feeling, you’ll admit. But was it?

“We took that scene twenty-eight times. Because of the exterior setting, it could not he filmed on a sound stage. Consequently, just as we were getting into the mood of the thing, a street car would go by donging a bell. An airplane would hiss overhead. Truck drivers seemed to be inspired to honk just as they went by. Finally, when we believed we had succeeded in getting a fair degree of silence, an ambulance whirled along. Twenty-eight times Buddy told me he loved me.

“The Richard Dix picture didn’t offer much of a chance for really romantic love scenes. The story was in a comedy vein, so naturally the love interest was light. But Richard should make an awfully thrilling sound lover.”

Because I’m just that type, I asked if any of the charming gentlemen ever became so inspired with their love scenes with June that they junked the dialogue and substituted their own ideas?

“Heavens, no!” she gasped. “The director wouldn’t let them. Footage and the running length of a scene are even more important in sound pictures than in silent ones. No matter what the personal feeling of the actors — I mean their feeling for one another — they have to speak their lines and then quit. That’s one way in which the love scenes have changed. Some kind-hearted directors used to let them run on and on, and I bet more than one girl in pictures has had the experience of finding her own name substituted for that of the heroine — when movies were silent.

“Did you?” I asked.

“I’m not telling,” laughed Mrs. Collyer’s little girl.

“But don’t forget this angle,” she added. “Remember that not all scenes are played between people who are interested in each other. In that case the dialogue is a life saver. Having certain set phrases to speak covers the lack of natural inspiration, and no matter how hectic the finished scene may look to the audience, it was just business to the players.”

Somehow I got the idea that loving out loud was all right with any one, except the one who might have some ideas of his own on the subject. Or am I wrong, June?

When June Collyer is engaged as leading lady to a masculine star, he is almost sure to fall in love with her.

Photo by: Edwin Bower Hesser (1893–1962)

Collection: Picture Play Magazine, December 1929