Thalberg’s passionate concern for details could make you miss the truth that they were pretty much all he cared about. In the end, his beautiful story solutions are formulaic fixes laid over those details, meant to do little more than the eternal work of cajoling the audience into rooting for the leading players. They didn’t like the hero because he slept with another man’s wife? Make it another man’s sister. They didn’t like the boxer losing the bout and then losing his life? Have him win the bout and then die. In every case, narrative savvy comes to sound suspiciously like allegiance to the obvious formula, only with the obvious formula so thoughtfully considered that it seems to return as original insight. He was a confidence man who truly had confidence in his confidences. “In an industry where so few have the courage of their convictions,” he said, “I saw that if I made them do it my way, they’d never know if their way would have been better.”
It could pay off. Of all the movies he produced, the Clark Gable–Charles Laughton “Mutiny on the Bounty,” from 1935, may best display his virtues, since he made it, intently, while recovering from a heart attack and supervising relatively few other projects. At first, every moment feels studied and false—when two boys on a Portsmouth dock kick their legs, you can pretty much hear the director telling them to do it. Yet soon one is overcome by Charles Laughton’s creepy, convincing portrayal of Captain Bligh’s sadomasochism: most of the first fifteen minutes is taken up with floggings and other shipboard disciplining of half-naked men, shown in detail while Laughton looks on with long-lipped lasciviousness. In fact, sublimated sexual perversity seems an overlooked ingredient in the classy Thalberg formula. Laughton does something similar in another Thalberg production, “The Barretts of Wimpole Street,” in which, as Elizabeth Barrett’s dad, and under Thalberg’s specific guidance, he makes clear his incestuous attraction to his daughter; the lesbian undercurrent in the Garbo vehicle “Queen Christina” was also wholeheartedly encouraged by Thalberg. (“Handled with taste it would give us very interesting scenes,” he urged.) The films of the Thalberg system that seem most alive now have an erotic core: the “Thin Man” series with Myrna Loy and William Powell, for instance—or, in a campier way, the “Tarzan” movies, which are absurd but feature the still unmatched, and often nearly nude, pairing of Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan.