Robert Ingersoll Atken sculpted the first version of the Irving Thalberg Award for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

This 1941 photograph shows Norma Shearer with the artist’s proof of her late husband. 

Biography of a Bachelor Girl, 1935 with Ann Harding (photographed at Sky Forest in Lake Arrowhed by Frank Tanner)

George Cukor’s speaking to Greta Garbo and Lenore Ulric in Camille’s early scenes.
Photograph by William Grimes 

While waiting for his scenes to be shot, Basil Rathbone used his 35mm Leica camera to make this snapshot of Clark Gable, who was filming San Francisco on an adjoining soundstage.

Mutiny on the Bounty, 1935, with Clark Gable and Franchot Tone leaving Eddie Guillan on Tahiti; one of the many complex sequences shot on Catalina Island.

The Secret of Madame Blanche, 1933 with Irene Dunne and Phillips Holmes

No More Ladies, 1935 with Joan Crawford and Robert Montgomery

Rip-tide, 1934 — Norma Shearer’s first film in eighteen months would be a morality tale of an American girl who marries a British lord and then dallies with an American playboy. Apparently someone had misgivings about such fare when Hollywood was being censured for a surfeit of sex, so Shearer gave a series of interviews:

“Sophistication should not suggest vulgarity. It should be translated into characterisations of worldly wisdom, modern thinking and resolute freedom. After all, conventions are man-made laws. Like all laws, they are constantly changing to meet new standards. We wear our conventions the way we wear these clothes. With dignity, but with a touch of daring. Show me a woman who does not like to appear a trifle… shall we say ‘daring’— just every once in a while.”
“Women have learned how to manage their new freedom. In those early days, everything was so new that we overplayed our independence from conventions. We tried to be masculine and we succeeded in being only foolishly obvious. Women today are having careers, going places, and doing things, but they still are managing to be good wives and mothers. A woman can be free and independent, can act and think as she pleases, without losing a bit of feminine charm.”
“Since women have found and tasted their new freedom, I don’t believe that they will ever give it up. Various people have predicted a return to almost mid-Victorian conventions. They say that a pendulum of public opinion is bound to swing backwards. But I don’t think that women will ever go back to the old pre-war restrictions on thought and action. Women have tasted freedom, and they like it.” 

Alexander Kirkland and Norma Shearer in Strange Interlude, 1932
Photograph by William Grimes 

Norma Shearer portrait for Strange Interlude, 1932
Photograph by George Hurrell 

Tallulah Bankhead in Faithless, 1932

Boris Karloff in The Mask of Fu Manchu

Marion Davies and Billie Dove in Blondie of the Follies, 1932— which could have been a great film if William Randolph Hearst had not forced Thalberg to cut Dove’s best scenes, as they upstaged Davies’.

Myrna Loy in The Mask of Fu Manchu, 1932 as Fu Manchu’s “ugly and insignificant” daughter

Joan Crawford photographed by George Hurrell