Where Have All the Moguls Gone? : THE HOLLYWOOD STUDIOS House Style in the Golden Age of the Movies<i> by Ethan Mordden (Alfred A. Knopf: $24.95; 317 pp., illustrated) </i>

The conflict between art and commerce has been constant in the history of the movie business, ever since the first, originally unidentified movie actors so captured the public’s imagination (and nickels) that they had to get credit. It was then that the first Stars were born. But of course, from the standpoint of the producers, it was then that the product started to talk back. When you were in the glove or fur business (as some of the early moguls had been), the gloves and furs did not talk back. The Stars were different. You had to deal with them, and doing so required more than business smarts: It also required passion.

The 25-year-old Orson Welles called the movie industry “the greatest train set in the world” while he was making “Citizen Kane.” The moguls owned the train set, but to make it work they needed the artists, and a symbiotic relationship was formed: without moguls, no artists; without artists, no moguls. But movies made money, a lot of it, and so the founding moguls found a way to share the wealth with the artistic/creative well enough to keep the enterprise going.

What they found was the contract. And in time, the contract system grew, feeding the ever-hungry theaters that the moguls also owned. The moguls--through the artists they chose to employ and the pictures they chose to let them make--put their personal stamp on each studio, and through the studios, on the American culture. Ethan Mordden’s book is a book about the studios--and about those personal stamps.

Here is MGM, under Louis B. Mayer and boy-mogul Irving Thalberg, defined by its stars (Gable, Garbo, Tracy, Crawford, Hepburn et al), outspending and outclassing its rivals; the cream rising to the top.

Ethan Mordden’s discussion of “Thalberg-ing”--sifting and combining resident talents to produce a sum greater and more interesting than the parts--is particularly convincing. We know who starred in “Grand Hotel,” but who directed it? (Edmund Goulding.) At MGM, the mogul was the true auteur.

Under the moguls, the budget became an art form, and the cult of The Big One was born as well as that of the cost-efficient sequel cycle. You think “Rambo III” and “Star Trek IV” are bad--what about seven “Tarzan” movies, or 14 “Andy Hardy” films? Nothing is so new, it seems, as something old that once worked.

From MGM we turn to Paramount under Adolph Zukor, the New York-based mogul, his sophisticated sex comedies aided by the urban placement of his theaters. Here we find Dietrich and Lombard; Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder; the Lubitsch touch, and the much heavier one of Cecil B. De Mille. They had careers in those days.

Over at Columbia, we find Frank Capra and Harry Cohn, the revered and the reviled. Cohn was a mogul so hated that his funeral brought out record crowds--just to make sure he was really dead. Capra and Cohn: An oxymoronic combination, but it worked; Capra made lots of movies, and Cohn made lots of money. Aside from the Gary Cooper Americana, the screwball comedy also got its start here with “It Happened One Night,” whose sweep of the top five Oscars finally propelled Columbia into the ranks of the majors.

And on to Universal and Fox and RKO and Warner, as well as the independents: UA, Goldwyn, and Selznick, whose search for the biggest Big One finally culminated in “Gone With the Wind,” the most epiphanic “event movie” since “Birth of a Nation.”

This book gives us all of them, once over lightly, like a “Halliwell’s Film Guide” organized by studios, or a collection of Pauline Kael reviews in a time warp, addictively fascinating to any authentic film junkie.

For this reviewer, however, the book also brings forth a strange nostalgia--not for the films, which were old long before my time, but for the era when people wrote (and talked) this way about films as opposed to deals; a nostalgia for the obsessive, contentious, opinionated passion of the true cineaste.

Nonetheless, everything old gets new again--and again and again. And the films discussed in this volume most certainly will always be with us in one form or another, an enduring part of our cultural heritage. And industry people will read a book like this one with their own kind of keen attention. As screenwriter Robert Towne once said, “If you’re going to steal, steal from the best.” There is much in here worth at least, well, borrowing for a scene or two.

Finally, during this current period of labor/management strife, it is also worth remembering that the entertainment business, despite the death of the old studio system, which Mordden so joyously eulogizes, is still enormously healthy, producing last year a $4 billion foreign trade surplus-- second only to aircraft among all industries in the nation.

The talent, it seems, is still here. And, after a period of excessive conglomeration, the moguls are also coming back--visionary, passionate men and (finally) women who love making movies, not just money and deals.

But in this new era of growth and change, it is well for all parties to remember that for the business to continue to live long and prosper, all sides must share in the rewards. As the old moguls knew so well, it’s no fun owning a toy train if you can’t make it run around the track.