Carole as Her Own Critic

A brief photo-essay from Life Magazine, September 1940:

This episode in the making of a movie is a dramatic moment rarely, if ever, photographed before. The movie is RKO’s version of They Knew What They Wanted, from the play that won Sidney Howard a Pulitzer Prize in 1925. The characters are director Garson Kanin, Actors Carole Lombard and Charles Laughton. For two months they have worked like beavers on what they beleive is to be a great movie script. They have had the usual quarrels. On location at Napa, Calif., 550 miles from home, they have run into the usual location troubles: bad weather, delays, throngs of bothersome autograph hounds.

Now the filming is over. Director Kanin has spent three hectic days editing, cutting and piecing together a first working print. Then, to show the result, he calls into the small projection room at RKO his stars and LIFE’s Hollywood photorapher Peter Stackpole. Laughton arrives with his usual sloppy clothes and uncombed hair. Ordinarily an uncommunative individual, he is strangely excited, declares volubly that, to him, They Knew What They Wanted is the most significant film of the decade. Finally Carole, who rarely attends her own previews, comes and the show begins.

Photographer Stackpole sits on the floor midway between screen and people. He tells them to ignore him, and they do. What follows is recorded in these pictures. To the photographer’s amazement the two veteran stars laugh, twist their hands, act as if they were seeing, for the first time, their earliest screen tests.