Sonya Levien

Sonya Levien

Birth : 1888-12-25, Russia

Death : 1960-03-20

History

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Sonya Levien (born Sara Opesken; 25 December 1888 – 19 March 1960) was a Russian-born American screenwriter. She became one of the highest earning female screenwriters in Hollywood in the 1930s and would help a number of directors and film stars transition from silent films to talkies. In 1955 she received an Academy Award for her screenplay Interrupted Melody.

Profile

Sonya Levien

Movies

State Fair
Adaptation
Texan farmers the Frake family head for the Texas State Fair in Dallas. The parents are focused on winning the competitions for livestock and cooking. However, their restless daughter Margy and her brother Wayne meet attractive new love interests.
Pepe
Story
Mario "Cantinflas" Moreno is a hired hand, Pepe, employed on a ranch. A boozing Hollywood director buys a white stallion that belongs to Pepe's boss. Pepe, determined to get the horse back (as he considers it his family), decides to take off to Hollywood. There he meets film stars including Jimmy Durante, Frank Sinatra, Zsa Zsa Gabór, Bing Crosby, Maurice Chevalier and Jack Lemmon in drag as Daphne from Some Like It Hot. He is also surprised by things that were new in America at the time, such as automatic swinging doors. When he finally reaches the man who bought the horse, he is led to believe there is no hope of getting it back. However, the last scene shows both him and the stallion back at the ranch with several foals.
Jeanne Eagels
Screenplay
Biographical film based loosely on the life of 1920's stage star Jeanne Eagels.
Bhowani Junction
Screenplay
Anglo-Indian Victoria Jones seeks her true identity amid the chaos of the British withdrawal from India.
Oklahoma!
Screenplay
This joyous celebration of frontier life combines tender romance and violent passion in the Oklahoma Territory of the 1900s with a timeless score filled with unforgettable songs. Rodgers and Hammerstein's hit Broadway musical.
Interrupted Melody
Writer
Interrupted Melody is the inspirational filmed biography of world-renowned Australian soprano Marjorie Lawrence. She’s a foremost Wagnerian, equal to the vocal and physical demands of the composer’s oeuvre. And she’s a beacon of triumph to anyone who fights back when personal tragedy strikes.
Hit the Deck
Screenplay
Sailors on leave in San Francisco get mixed up in love and show business.
The Student Prince
Screenplay
A prince has a romance with a barmaid before he must give up personal happiness for duty.
The Merry Widow
Screenplay
Marshovia, a small European kingdom, is on the brink of bankruptcy but the country may be saved if the wealthy American Crystal Radek, widow of a Marshovian, can be convinced to part with her money and marry the king's nephew count Danilo. Arriving to Marshovia on a visit, Crystal Radek change places with her secretary Kitty. Following them to Paris, Danilo has a hard time wooing the widow after meeting an attractive young woman at a nightclub, the same Crystal Radek who presents herself as Fifi the chorus girl. Plot by Mattias Thuresson.
Quo Vadis
Screenplay
After fierce Roman commander Marcus Vinicius becomes infatuated with beautiful Christian hostage Lygia, he begins to question the tyrannical leadership of the despotic emperor Nero.
Three Daring Daughters
Screenplay
Three young girls try to help their divorced mother find the right husband.
Cass Timberlane
Adaptation
Judge Cass Timberlane marries a girl from the wrong side of the tracks, Virginia Marshland. A baby is stillborn and she turns more and more to attorney friend of of Cass' Brad Criley. While quarreling the Judge tells Virginia to stay with Brad, but when she becomes sick he brings her home.
The Green Years
Screenplay
An orphaned young boy is guided by his great-grandfather and strives to go to university to become a doctor. However, the boy's harsh grandfather stands in his way.
State Fair
Adaptation
During their annual visit to the Iowa State Fair, the Frake family enjoy many adventures. Proud patriarch Abel has high hopes for his champion swine Blueboy; and his wife Melissa enters the mincemeat and pickles contest...with hilarious results.
Rhapsody in Blue
Story
Fictionalized biography of George Gershwin and his fight to bring serious music to Broadway.
The Valley of Decision
Screenplay
Mary Rafferty comes from a poor family of steel mill workers in 19th Century Pittsburgh. Her family objects when she goes to work as a maid for the wealthy Scott family which controls the mill. Mary catches the attention of handsome scion Paul Scott, but their romance is complicated by Paul's engagement to someone else and a bitter strike among the mill workers.
The Amazing Mrs. Holliday
Story
A missionary tries to outwit the U.S. government and smuggle Chinese orphans into the country.
Ziegfeld Girl
Screenplay
Discovery by Flo Ziegfeld changes a girl's life but not necessarily for the better, as three beautiful women find out when they join the spectacle on Broadway: Susan, the singer who must leave behind her ageing vaudevillian father; vulnerable Sheila, the working girl pursued both by a millionaire and by her loyal boyfriend from Flatbush; and the mysterious European beauty Sandra, whose concert violinist husband cannot endure the thought of their escaping from poverty by promenading her glamor in skimpy costumes.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Screenplay
Paris, France, 1482. Frollo, Chief Justice of benevolent King Louis XI, gets infatuated by the beauty of Esmeralda, a young Romani girl. The hunchback Quasimodo, Frollo's protege and bell-ringer of Notre Dame, lives in peace among the bells in the heights of the immense cathedral until he is involved by the twisted magistrate in his malicious plans to free himself from Esmeralda's alleged spell, which he believes to be the devil's work.
Drums Along the Mohawk
Screenplay
Albany, New York, 1776. After marrying, Gil and Lana travel north to settle on a small farm in the Mohawk River Valley, but soon their growing prosperity and happiness are threatened by the sinister sound of drums that announce dark times of revolution and war.
The Cowboy and the Lady
Screenplay
Mary Smith decides after a lifetime of being a shut-in to do something wild while her father is out campaigning for the presidency, so she takes off for the family's home in West Palm Beach and inadvertently becomes romantically entangled with earnest cowboy Stretch Willoughby. Neither the dalliance nor the cowboy fit with the upper class image projected by her esteemed father, forcing her to choose.
Kidnapped
Writer
Robert Louis Stevenson's hero David Balfour joins rebel Alan Breck Stewart in 18th-century Scotland.
Kidnapped
Screenplay
Robert Louis Stevenson's hero David Balfour joins rebel Alan Breck Stewart in 18th-century Scotland.
Four Men and a Prayer
Screenplay
The sons of a disgraced British officer try to clear his name.
In Old Chicago
Screenplay
The O'Leary brothers -- honest Jack and roguish Dion -- become powerful figures, and eventually rivals, in Chicago on the eve of its Great Fire.
Reunion
Writer
Newspapers around the world proclaim the birth in Moosetown, Canada of the 3,000th baby brought into the world by the doctor, John Luke, known for delivering the famous Wyatt quintuplets. To honor the doctor on his retirement and to publicize their town, the Moosetown chamber of commerce decides to hold a reunion of all the babies delivered by the doctor, some of whom have become famous.
The Country Doctor
Screenplay
A doctor has a rough time obtaining the money for his services in a lumber town until he delivers quintuplets.
Paddy O'Day
Story
A wealthy, eccentric collector of stuffed birds and a beautiful Russian singer provide refuge to an orphaned Irish child who has arrived illegally in New York.
Here's to Romance
Story
Kathleen Gerard, a high society wife fed up with her husband's artistic "protegées", decides to take one of her own in Nino, a promising tenor, patronizing him to study in Paris. He and her girlfriend are perfectly happy until the Gerards pay a visit and Mrs. Gerard starts to show too much interest in him.
Navy Wife
Writer
A Hawaiian naval nurse weds a widowed officer partly because he has a crippled daughter.
Change of Heart
Screenplay
Catherine and Mack and their close friends Chris and Madge graduate from a West Coast college and fly to New York City to find work.
As Husbands Go
Writer
As Husbands Go charts the romantic misadventures of Lucille Lingard .
Mr. Skitch
Writer
After losing their Missouri home during the Great Depression, the Skitch family pulls up stakes and heads west to California to begin life anew. Comedy, released in 1933.
Berkeley Square
Screenplay
A young American man is transported back to London in the time of the American Revolution and meets his ancestors.
The Warrior's Husband
Writer
The Warrior's Husband is a satire of the male and female roles in society set in 800 B.C.. Queen Hippolyta (Marjorie Rambeau) rules Pontus with masculine authority; in fact, it is the women of Pontus who do all the laboring, fighting, and governing. Hippolyta's husband Sapiens (Ernest Truex) is truly a sissy of the first order, and is not unlike most of Pontus' male inhabitants.
State Fair
Screenplay
The children of Iowa farmers find love, with mixed results, at the state fair.
Cavalcade
Continuity
A cavalcade of English life from New Year's Eve 1899 until 1933 seen through the eyes of well-to-do Londoners Jane and Robert Marryot. Amongst events touching their family are the Boer War, the death of Queen Victoria, the sinking of the Titanic and the Great War.
Tess of the Storm Country
Writer
When Captain Howland decides that his daughter Tess is getting a bit to old to continue to go to sea with him, they move into a small cottage on the coast of Maine, but not for long. A local millionaire, Frederick Garfield, lays a false claim to the property and has them evicted. Later, when Tess saves a young man about her age from drowning, she is a bit dismayed to learn that he is Garfield's son. But when her father is jailed on a false-accusation charge of murder, the younger Garfield comes to their aid and proves he himself.
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
Screenplay
A young girl from Sunnybrook goes to live with her wealthy relatives and falls in love with a doctor. Adapted from Kate Douglas Wiggin's famous novel.
After Tomorrow
Screenplay
In the Depression, Pete and Sidney are good kids, working hard, giving money to their parents, and engaged for three years while they save to get married. Each has a selfish mother: Sydney's is cold, Pete's is clingy. Sidney's mother is looking for her own happiness, no matter how much that search harms her daughter and long-suffering husband; and, the longer the engagement lingers, the more pressure Pete's mom puts on Sidney to break it off and set her son free. "After Tomorrow" is Pete and Sidney's favorite song, but with illness, poverty, and temptation: will that good day ever come?
Delicious
Writer
A comic group of Europeans coming to the USA have romantic and immigration troubles.
Surrender
Writer
Story of French prisoner in Germany who falls in love with a German general's daughter. From the novel "Axelle" by Pierre Benoit.
The Brat
Writer
A society novelist brings a brash young chorus girl home in order to study her for inspiration for his new novel. His family is distraught, but soon her behavior has forever altered their snobbish ways.
Daddy Long Legs
Writer
Wealthy Jervis Pendleton acts as benefactor for orphan Judy Abbott, anonymously sponsoring her in her boarding school. But as she grows up, he finds himself falling in love with her, and she with him, though she does not know that the man she has fallen for is her benefactor.
The Man Who Came Back
Writer
A spoiled carefree rich kid gets into too much trouble for his father who sends him out on his own to prove himself capable of making a respectable man of himself.
Lightnin'
Writer
Lightnin' and Mary Jones are co-owners of a hotel built right on a state border, used by divorcing wives so they can pretend to be in California while establishing residency in Nevada. When Lightnin' refuses to sell his share of the hotel to a gang of crooks, Mary is coerced into divorcing her husband so that she can sign over the deed herself.
Liliom
Dialogue
A carousel barker falls in love with a young woman. Both are fired from their jobs, and when the young woman becomes pregnant, the carousel barker tries to help pull off a robbery, which goes wrong. Because of the robbery, he dies, and after spending time in hell, is sent back to earth for one day to try to make amends.
Liliom
Screenplay
A carousel barker falls in love with a young woman. Both are fired from their jobs, and when the young woman becomes pregnant, the carousel barker tries to help pull off a robbery, which goes wrong. Because of the robbery, he dies, and after spending time in hell, is sent back to earth for one day to try to make amends.
Song o' My Heart
Screenplay
Broken hearts in Ireland. Sean is a great tenor, in semi-retirement, living in a village close to Mary, the woman he’s always loved. Mary’s aunt convinced her to marry a man for his money; he has recently deserted her, leaving her penniless. She and her two children, Eileen and Tad, move in with the selfish and austere aunt. Eileen is falling in love with Fergus, a young man who’s off to Dublin to seek his fortune. Sean is drawn out of retirement and goes on tour in America. At his first concert, he’s nervous and out of sorts until the last song, when peace descends on him like a gift. What has happened, and can family life be set right?
So This Is London
Screenplay
Hiram Draper is an all-American self-made man who profoundly distastes everything British. Yet he must travel to London with his family. When Junior falls in love with an aristocratic girl, whose father despises Americans with equal intensity, fireworks are just about to start.
South Sea Rose
Writer
A French girl raised in the south seas is brought to prim and proper New England by her New England born and bred sea captain husband. She wears short skirts and shocks the puritanical New Englanders in her new home with her wild candid ways...
Frozen Justice
Writer
Drama set in Alaska
They Had to See Paris
Screenplay
Oklahoma mechanic Pike Peters finds himself part owner of an oil field. His wife Idy, hitherto content, decides the family must go to Paris to get "culture" and meet "the right kind of people." Pike and his grown son and daughter soon have flirtatious French admirers; Idy rents a chateau from an impoverished aristocrat; while Pike responds to each new development with homespun wit. In the inevitable clash, will pretentiousness and sophistication or common sense triumph?
Lucky Star
Writer
Mary, a poor farm girl, meets Tim just as word comes that war has been declared. Tim enlists in the army and goes to the battlefields of Europe, where he is wounded and loses the use of his legs. Home again, Tim is visited by Mary, and they are powerfully attracted to each other; but his physical handicap prevents him from declaring his love for her. Deeper complications set in when Martin, Tim's former sergeant and a bully, takes a shine to Mary.
Behind That Curtain
Writer
Sir George hires Hillary Gatt to find out more about Eric who wants to marry Lois. Gatt is murdered and the couple, married, run off to India. Old friend John Beetham sympathizes with the bride who sees that her hubby is a liar and drunk. John and Lois fly to San Francisco. Eric shows up and tries to kill John, but Scotland Yard's Lt. Charlie Chan intervenes. Chan fans may be disappointed in this globe-trotting mystery, however, as the detective only appears in a few scenes. The film is more noteworthy for its introduction of Boris Karloff to sound features, in a small role as a servant from Sudan who mutters inscrutable nonsense about the whims of the desert.
Trial Marriage
Screenplay
Constance Bannister enters into a trial marriage contract with Dr. Thorvald Ware and finds happiness with him. She defies his wishes by dancing at a charity ball in a revealing costume, however, and he dissolves the contract, not knowing that she is with child. A year passes. Constance marries Oliver Mowbray, and Thorvald marries Constance's sister, Grace. Both couples are quite unhappy and later obtain divorces. Oliver and Grace go to Europe, and Constance and Thorvald are married in a civil ceremony, united by their love both for each other and for their child.
The Younger Generation
Screenplay
Soap-opera about a social-climbing Jewish man and his old-world parents who are heartbroken by his rejection of them. Young Morris Goldfish follows his immigrant father into business. His ruthless business practices cause him to become a big success, and he moves the family to Park Avenue. They go, but were happier back on the East Side. Morris is ashamed of this parents and his humble origins, but learns in the end that there is more to life than money.
The Power of the Press
Writer
The naive newspaper cub Clem lands a scoop when he's sent out to cover a murder. In his enthusiasm he writes that the main suspect is Jane. When she confronts Clem, she convinces him to help her prove her innocence.
A Ship Comes In
Writer
Film which tells the story of immigrants coming to the United States.
A Harp in Hock
Writer
A Harp in Hock, also known as The Samaritan, is a lost 1927 American silent melodrama film directed by Renaud Hoffman, produced by DeMille Pictures, and distributed by Pathé Exchange. The film starred Rudolph Schildkraut, Junior Coghlan, May Robson, and Bessie Love, and was based on the short story by Evelyn Campbell.
The Heart Thief
Writer
The Princess from Hoboken
Writer
To enliven their business, the O'Tooles, restaurant owners in Hoboken, New Jersey, transform their restaurant into the Russian Inn when they hear that a famous Russian princess is stranded in Chicago. Sheila, the daughter, is persuaded to impersonate the princess, who unfortunately arrives at the restaurant on opening night.
Christine of the Big Tops
Writer
When her circus-performer parents die in an accident, Christine (Pauline Garon) is raised by other circus-performers, including Hagan, a balloon-vender, and Pete Barman as her guardians. When she grows up, she asks to also become a performer, and Barman agrees. Bob Hastings (Cullen Landis) joins the traveling circus as its doctor, and he and Christine fall in love. This angers Barman, who is also in love with her.
Why Girls Go Back Home
Screenplay
Trusting country girl Marie Downey falls in love with touring stage-actor Clifford Dudley. As he becomes a matinee idol on Broadway, she turns a chorus girl.
Salome of the Tenements
Writer
A young East Side Jewish reporter gets into a sticky situation when she finds that her new beau is indicting a banker she owes money to.
The Exciters
Writer
Ronnie Rand, Required to marry before she is 21 or lose her inheritance, Ronnie Rand meets Pierre Martel, member of a gang of thieves, and, convinced that he is a "real man," she marries him. Pierre's confederates attempt to blackmail Ronnie, and when she refuses to sign a check they try to kill Pierre; but police arrive in time to save him. Pierre is revealed to be a U. S. Intelligence Service agent. Ronnie, though somewhat disappointed that her husband is not at all a crook, accepts the situation.
Pink Gods
Writer
The owner of vast diamond mines, John Quelch is constantly fearful of theft and convinced that any woman will "sell her soul" for diamonds, he deals harshly with any employee caught stealing and has Lady Margot Cork watched while she is visiting Lorraine Temple. John and Margot fall in love, but she cancels their engagement when she learns of the "brutal" punishment of Jim Wingate for swallowing a diamond.
The Top of New York
Story
Hilda lives in a tenement apartment with her aunt, Mrs. Brady, and her crippled younger brother Micky, and works in a department store where her boss lusts after her. But happiness comes into her life when she meets artist Emery Gray. Gray's wife deserted him long ago, leaving him with their daughter Susan (Mary Jane Irving) to raise. While Susan and Micky become playmates, Hilda restores Gray's faith in womanhood.
First Love
Story
The O'Donnells are a typical, everyday family -- Tad (George Hernandez) is a sensible working man, his wife (Fannie Midgely) is a good mother and their daughter Kathleen (Constance Binney) is pretty and innocent to the point of naiveté. Kathleen works in a factory and its owner, Donald Holiday (Warner Baxter), has taken a shine to her. But instead she falls for slick cab driver Harry Stanton (George Webb), who insists, "Honest, kid, you're the only girl I ever loved." Kathleen falls for this, and when her perceptive father makes clear he doesn't approve of Stanton, she moves out on her own.
Cheated Love
Writer
Sonya Schnoema, a Jewish girl, comes to the United States as an immigrant and works in her father's ghetto grocery store, where she gains the affections of a young settlement worker, David Dahlman. But she loves Mischa, a young doctor who soon arrives from Odessa, and to aid him financially, she distinguishes herself in the local Yiddish theater.
Who Will Marry Me?
Story
Rosie Sanguinetti's parents arrange her marriage, against her will, to Antonio Mosconi, "Tony the Barber." At the wedding ceremony in her Little Italy, New York neighborhood, Rosie flees to the settlement house where she meets Jerry Van Tyne, a wealthy young man who agrees, in a drunken state, to marry her. The next day Jerry realizes the consequences of the situation.