F. Hugh Herbert is forgotten today, but in 1953 he would have been something of a household name in America. On Broadway, his stage-play The Moon is Blue was still playing to packed houses after more than two years (it would run uninterrupted from March 1951 to May 1953) and another of his plays, The Girl Can Tell, would open in New York in October. Meanwhile, Meet Corliss Archer, a comedy series featuring a teenage character of his imagining, first introduced to Americans through stories published in Good Housekeeping magazine, was then being broadcast both on US television and radio stations. Finally, audiences attending screenings of The Girls of Pleasure Island, a Columbia picture released in April 1953, may have noticed Herbert’s name in the opening credits for both writing and direction. He would also receive screenwriting credit for the film version of The Moon is Blue, released in July of that year.
Herbert was certainly well-known in Hollywood circles, being at the time president of the West Coast branch of the Screen Writers Guild, an organization set up to protect the rights of those writing for the movies. Granted, some movie-goers may have confused this man’s identity with another going by an identical name; the inane comic actor ‘Hugh Herbert’ had been a popular in motion pictures of the 30s and 40s, and had even featured in some of the films the former had co-written scripts for. (This confusion continues today among amateur film historians). However, it is F. Hugh Herbert; the initial stood for Frederick; who arguably deserves the more lasting recognition for his multi-faceted contributions to motion picture history, the most important of which are outlined in the following paragraphs.
According to internet sources, Frederick Hugh Herbert had been born Frederick Hermann Hirschler in Vienna on 29th May 1897 to middle-class parents. His father Leon was a successful financial trader. While still an infant, Frederick had moved with his parents and older sister Margaret to England, settling in Sydenham, where his younger sister Kathleen was subsequently born. Frederick had received his education in England, firstly at Gresham School in Norfolk, and later as an undergraduate at the School of Mines in London. The outbreak of war had put paid to his engineering studies, and in 1914 he’d entered the Officer Training Corp, later serving with the Royal Garrison Artillery though he seems not to have seen action on the Western Front. Immediately after the War, he’d found work as a ‘copy boy’ in the advertising department at Selfridges, one of London’s premier department stores, but in the early 20s, he emigrated to the US, initially settling in New York with his father. It was during this period that Herbert developed his taste for the American theater. However, he was soon lured to the West Coast and the center of movie-making, Hollywood.
Hollywood in the mid-20s was crawling with aspiring movie actors and screenwriters. Whether through good connections or merely good fortune, Herbert was hired to work in the scenario department at the newly-agglomerated studio MGM. At the time, many Hollywood ‘scenarists’ were women, and the earliest film Herbert received writing credit for, a Norma Shearer vehicle titled The Waning Sex, was alongside Frederica Sagor Maas. This was, Maas later recorded in her autobiography, a quarrelsome collaboration, and Herbert seems to have enjoyed a better working relationship with Florence Ryerson, another of the studio’s female screenwriters. The couple would receive co-writing credit on three subsequent MGM pictures, including The Demi-Bride, which also starred Norma Shearer. Perhaps owing to the involvement of women writers, all of these early scenarios featured strong female characters, which would remain a feature of Herbert’s later writing for both stage and screen. In fact, Ryerson’s influence may have run deeper. In the early 30s, she and her husband wrote two of the earliest books to focus on teenage girlhood; The Awful Age (1930) and Mild Oats (1933). Bearing in mind the preoccupation Herbert would later develop with female adolescent characters, it seems likely at some point he’d read both books. A prolific writer in her own right, Ryerson would go on to co-script The Wizard of Oz (1939).
Herbert continued to receive writing credit on a small number of MGM pictures as the studio cautiously adapted to the sound revolution. However, like many others in the film colony during this technological upheaval, he seems to have struggled to get sufficient work. Adding to his financial worries was the fact of his recent marriage to a studio secretary named Arlene LaVerne in September of 1927 [1]. By 1930, he was also father to two infant daughters, christened Diana and Pamela. With opportunities at MGM drying up, Herbert sought work from other studios including ‘Poverty Row’ concerns such as Tiffany and Allied Pictures [2].
Several of Herbert’s early screenwriting projects were adaptations of popular theater productions. These included one based on an Austrian play; the 1933 Universal comedy By Candlelight. Directed by James Whale, it related the efforts of a butler to emulate the playboy antics of his aristocratic employer. Herbert had in fact started writing his own plays in the mid-20s; the MGM comedy There You Are (1926) had been based on one of his earliest theatrical ideas, although the play itself had never reached the stage. In 1934, he had the satisfaction of seeing another of his plays taken up by a major film studio. Warner Brothers employed their own screenwriter, Carl Erikson, to rework his marital farce for the screen, the lead roles falling to effervescent contract players Joan Blondell and William Warren. Deeming Herbert’s original title, Hit Me Again, too suggestive, the studio renamed the picture Smarty. Opening in May 1934, this film was among the final batch of pictures to be released during the lightly censored Pre-Code era. It was panned by the trade paper Harrison’s Reports for a trite story, unsympathetic characters and objectionable theme. There’s no doubt that Herbert’s screenplay, which is peppered with sexual innuendo (and almost seems to condone rough sex!), would not have been approved by the Production Code Administration, the newly-established arbiter of screen morality, had it been submitted later that year. However, the play itself did subsequently run for a limited time under its original title at a theater in Los Angeles [3], giving Herbert the impetus to continue writing for the stage.
By this time, Herbert was also a published poet of sorts. In 1932, clearly drawing on his parental experiences, he’d published a volume of 54 poems for children under the title Growing Pains. He was, additionally working on his first novel, entitled A Lover Would be Nice, which would be published in 1935. In 1937, Herbert’s marriage to Arlene came to an end, and although he married again the following year [4], his divorce must have brought with considerable domestic upheaval. He seems to have sought solace by writing another novel, The Revolt of Henry being published in 1939.
Nevertheless, Herbert’s bread and butter remained writing for the movies. The table below illustrates the major studios he produced work for over four decades. Perhaps the best known of the Warner Brothers pictures he contributed ideas to was Fashions of 1934, a Busby Berkeley musical starring (a blonde) Bette Davis and William Powell, which he co-scripted with Erikson. He also worked on the screenplays for The Travelling Saleslady (1935) and We’re in the Money (1935), two of the five ‘blonde bombshell’ comedies that paired Joan Blondell with Warner’s other ‘sassy dame’, Glenda Farrell [5]. In 1939, he began writing for Republic Pictures, one of Hollywood’s more respected producers of low-budget pictures. Among his contributions, all of them 1940 releases, were the Raoul Walsh-directed crime-western Dark Command, the army nursing drama Women in War, another film based on one of his own stories, and Three Faces West, a John Wayne vehicle containing an anti-Nazi sentiment that proved controversial at a time when the prevailing political winds in America were still isolationist.
| Studio | Years | Number of contributions (some uncredited) |
| MGM | 1926-1933, 1957 | 13 |
| Fox | 1928 | 1 |
| First National | 1930 | 1 |
| Columbia | 1930, 1944-1945 | 4 |
| Universal | 1933, 1937-1938, 1945, 1958 | 7 |
| Warner Brothers | 1934-1937 | 15 |
| Republic | 1940-41, 1943, 1946 | 8 |
| Paramount | 1935, 1941-1942, 1953 | 6 |
| 20th Century Fox | 1946-1948, 1951 | 5 |
| RKO | 1937, 1950 | 2 |
| United Artists | 1953 | 1 |
In 1937, Herbert had sold another of his short stories to Universal, which was subsequently rewritten into a semi-musical format by a team of writers that included Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett. That Certain Age, which starred 15-year-old Canadian singing sensation Deanna Durbin, set the trend for much of Herbert’s future writing, focusing as it did on an adolescent female’s crush on an older man. One of the lines uttered by the latter character, a reporter returned wounded from the Spanish Civil War (played by Melvyn Douglas), seems to express Herbert’s own deep regard for the New York theater: ‘I’ll get my peace and quiet at 42nd Street and Broadway… What I need is a good steak every night, smothered in chorus girls, some excitement, some lights, some music, and some happy people’ [6].
In fact, three years later the writer managed to have one of his plays staged on Broadway for the first time. Quiet Please was co-written with Hans Kraly, with whom Herbert had collaborated on the screenplay to By Candlelight [7]. Opening on 8th November 1940 at the Guild Theater on 52nd Street, the play was a flop, lasting only 16 performances. Nevertheless, this clearly did not deter Herbert, and it would not be long before he was the toast of Broadway.
[1] According to one internet source, LaVerne had been born in Texas in 1909.
[2] According to a well-worn Hollywood anecdote, Herbert’s last screenwriting work for MGM, for the 1933 picture The Women in His Life, had only come about after studio head Irving Thalberg had mistakenly called at his apartment, believing it belonged to a female acquaintance. To cover his potentially embarrassing error, Thalberg had shared a drink with Herbert and invited him to meet with his story editor Samuel Marx the next day, where he’d presented his latest story idea. As the husband of Norma Shearer, Thalberg would surely have recognized the man who’d helped write two of her earliest parts, so there may be some truth in this anecdote.
[3] This production is often confused with another play initially using the name of the film, which had played off Broadway in 1927 under the new title Funny Face.
[4] His second wife Mary Alice Lankey was, according to internet sources, born in Canada in 1914.
[5] Both of these pictures featured Herbert’s namesake Hugh Herbert in comedic roles, as did Colleen (1936), another musical he co-wrote for Warner, showcasing the talents of Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler.
[6] The film contains a scene similar to one in Smarty, in which a female character is forbidden by a man from wearing a revealing party-dress and who reacts by refusing to attend.
[7] German-born Kraly had been a close professional associate of Ernst Lubitsch; until that is, his affair with the director’s wife had come to light in 1930.
CINEMATOGRAPHOMANIA 