Touchstone Plus-Or-Minus: Stella

Touchstone Pictures transformed Bette Midler into a reliable box office presence in just a few years over the back half of the 1980s. Her most recent picture for the studio, 1988’s Beaches, also revitalized her music career, sending her to the top of the charts with “Wind Beneath My Wings”. But Beaches had also represented a more dramatic turn following broad comedies like Ruthless People and Big Business. For her next project, Midler doubled down on the serious side, remaking one of the all-time classic melodramas from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

In fact, Stella was the third movie adaptation of Olive Higgins Prouty’s 1923 tearjerker Stella Dallas. The novel was first adapted for the stage before a silent film version, produced by Samuel Goldwyn and starring Ronald Colman and Belle Bennett, was released in 1925. Over a decade letter, Goldwyn remade the picture for the talkies. Directed by King Vidor and starring Barbara Stanwyck, the new version was released in 1937 and netted Oscar nominations for Stanwyck and costar Anne Shirley. That movie’s success inspired a radio soap opera which ran from 1937 to 1955, despite the best efforts of Prouty who hadn’t signed off on it and was not a fan.

Goldwyn’s son, Samuel Goldwyn Jr., got into the family business after serving in World War II, producing such films as the 1960 version of The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn and 1970’s Cotton Comes To Harlem. In 1978, he founded The Samuel Goldwyn Company. At first, the company focused on distribution, focusing on foreign, arthouse and independent films like Paul Verhoeven’s Spetters, Richard Elfman’s gonzo Forbidden Zone and the French comedy smash Three Men And A Cradle. Perhaps it was that last one, later remade by Touchstone as Three Men And A Baby, that brought Goldwyn into the Disney orbit.