Old Hollywood Actors: The Studio-Era Leading Men and the Films to Watch

Put on It Happened One Night (1934) and wait for the hitchhiking scene. Clark Gable explains, with total confidence, the science of thumbing a ride, fails completely, and watches Claudette Colbert stop the first car by showing a little leg. Gable plays the joke on himself without losing an ounce of swagger, and that balance is the key to most of the old Hollywood actors who still hold an audience today. They were glamorous, but they were rarely precious about it.

This is a viewing guide to the leading men of the studio era, roughly the late 1920s to the early 1960s. Every actor here has died, and each entry points you to the one or two films where you can see why the public bought tickets on his name alone. The women of the same era get their own guide in our piece on old Hollywood actresses, and the supporting players who made these men look good are covered in our article on character actors.

How the studio system made old Hollywood actors

A leading man in the 1930s was a studio asset. MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., 20th Century-Fox and RKO signed actors to long contracts, often seven years, and decided which pictures they made, how they were photographed and what the fan magazines printed about them. Each studio developed a house style, and its stars fit it. Warner Bros. made fast, urban crime pictures, so its men were tough and quick. MGM made polished prestige films, so its stars were groomed to look expensive.

The system had obvious drawbacks for the actors, which is why several of the men below fought their contracts or went freelance as soon as they could. But it also gave them something modern stars rarely get: a steady run of three, four or five films a year, which let them refine a screen persona in front of a paying audience.

Clark Gable: the king who could laugh at himself

Gable was MGM’s biggest male star through the 1930s, but his Academy Award for Best Actor came on loan to Columbia for It Happened One Night, the Frank Capra comedy that swept the five major Oscars. Five years later he played Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind, the role that defined him for the rest of his life. Watch the comedy first. His big, easy charm reads as more modern there than in the epic.

Humphrey Bogart: the late bloomer

Bogart spent most of the 1930s at Warner Bros. playing gangsters who died before the last reel. The breakthrough came in 1941, first with High Sierra and then with John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, where his Sam Spade is clever, mercenary and quietly principled all at once. Casablanca followed in 1942 and made him an icon, and he won his Oscar for The African Queen (1951). Our review of Casablanca goes deeper into why that film still works.

Cary Grant: the freelancer

After leaving Paramount in the mid-1930s, Grant became one of the first major stars to work without an exclusive studio deal, choosing his own projects and directors. The run that followed is hard to match: The Awful Truth (1937), Bringing Up Baby (1938), His Girl Friday (1940), The Philadelphia Story (1940), then darker work for Alfred Hitchcock in Notorious (1946) and North by Northwest (1959). He never won a competitive Oscar and received an honorary award in 1970. If you only know him as the elegant man in a grey suit, start with His Girl Friday, where he talks faster than anyone in movie history and never seems to breathe.

James Stewart: decency with an edge

Stewart’s early persona was the honest, slightly gawky idealist of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). He won the Best Actor Oscar for The Philadelphia Story (1940), then served in the Army Air Forces during the Second World War, flying combat missions over Europe as a bomber pilot. He came back a different screen actor. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) is remembered as a Christmas movie, but its middle section is about a man close to despair, and in his 1950s westerns for Anthony Mann and his films for Hitchcock, especially Vertigo (1958), Stewart let real anger and obsession show through the nice-guy surface.

James Cagney: pure energy

Nobody moved like Cagney. A trained song-and-dance man, he became a star as the gangster of The Public Enemy (1931), the film with the grapefruit, and spent the decade as Warner Bros.’ most electric leading man. He won his Oscar playing George M. Cohan in the musical Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), which tells you how wide his range was. For the full Cagney experience, pair The Public Enemy with White Heat (1949), a late gangster film that ends in one of the most famous final scenes of the period.

Spencer Tracy: the actor’s actor

Tracy was the first actor to win Best Actor in two consecutive years, for Captains Courageous (1937) and Boys Town (1938). His style was almost invisible: he simply seemed to be thinking on camera. His nine films with Katharine Hepburn, beginning with Woman of the Year (1942), are the best entry point, and Adam’s Rib (1949), directed by George Cukor, is the sharpest of them.

Henry Fonda and Gary Cooper: the quiet Americans

Fonda and Cooper both built careers on stillness. Fonda’s Tom Joad in John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940) is the defining image of a decent man pushed to the edge, and his juror in Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men (1957) carries a whole film with patience. His only competitive Oscar came at the very end of his life, for On Golden Pond (1981).

Cooper won Best Actor twice, for Sergeant York (1941) and High Noon (1952). His drawling, understated manner was perfect for Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), and in High Noon, a western that unfolds in close to real time, his worn face does most of the acting.

More leading men worth your time

• Errol Flynn became Warner Bros.’ swashbuckler with Captain Blood (1935); The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), in early three-strip Technicolor, is still the gold standard of the adventure film.
• Fred Astaire made his name at RKO in the series of musicals with Ginger Rogers; Top Hat (1935) and Swing Time (1936) are the essentials.
• Edward G. Robinson broke through as the gangster of Little Caesar (1931) and later moved into noir with Double Indemnity (1944). He was never nominated for a competitive Oscar; an honorary award was announced shortly before his death in 1973.
• John Wayne spent the 1930s in low-budget westerns until John Ford cast him in Stagecoach (1939). The Searchers (1956) is his most complex role, and he won his Oscar late, for True Grit (1969).
• Gregory Peck belongs to the later studio years; Roman Holiday (1953) shows his lightness, and To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) won him the Best Actor Oscar.
• Sidney Poitier broke barriers at the end of the era and became the first Black actor to win Best Actor, for Lilies of the Field (1963).

How to watch them now

My advice is to watch by director as much as by star. Many of these men did their best work with a handful of filmmakers: Stewart with Capra, Mann and Hitchcock, Wayne and Fonda with Ford, Grant with Hawks and Hitchcock, Bogart with Huston and Hawks. Following one partnership through three or four films shows you how a persona was shaped and then tested. Several of these titles are long out of copyright and turn up in public-domain archives; others are available through licensed services and good disc restorations.

And watch the comedies. The dramas and westerns get the retrospectives, but the screwball films of the 1930s and 1940s are where these actors look most relaxed and most modern. Start with the ones directed by Howard Hawks, Leo McCarey and Frank Capra.