Modern Screen (Jan - Nov 1940)

When Voss was an extra in "The Big Parade," he never dreamed he'd someday be heading the strangest army in the world! MEET CARL VOSS, EXARMY MAN— AND HIS AMAZING BAND OF PROFESSIONAL SOLDIERS By Reginald Taviner IT WAS a motley army indeed. The troopers wore French pants, Russian tunics, German helmets; they marched with an exaggerated goose step and hauled a very, very big gun. A little guy with a padded chest covered with decorations stood reviewing the parade and inadvertently pulled the lanyard of the cannon. There was a deafening boom and the soldiers fell dead in all directions. You may never see that scene upon the screen because, currently, Charlie Chaplin is a bit up in the air about his "The Dictator." Late events in Europe have made him feel that his facetious slant may not be quite the thing just now. In that case he will shelve a cool million dollars and probably the funniest picture he has ever made. But it wasn't all fun for Carl Voss . . . Carl Voss is the man who staged the battle stuff in the Chaplin film just as he has staged most of the battles in most of the films made since "The Big Parade." Voss is Hollywood's military generalissimo, and he has fought upwards of two hundred wars without losing a man. He has fought them in every known uniform and under all flags, and he has many times performed the inconceivable feat of fighting on both sides at once, thus being both victor and vanquished. His "army" holds the record of having fought as many as five major engagements in one day, changing uniforms for each encounter and running the gamut of shot and shell from Bull Run to Belleau Wood between sunrise and sunset. The men were equally at home as backwoods frontiersmen in "Northwest Passage," as Foreign Legionnaires in "Beau Geste" or as British guardsmen in "Gunga Din." They were Russians in "The Cossacks," Italians in "White Sister," Swedes in "Queen Christiana," Turks in "Stamboul Quest" and so on; they know the correct manuals of arms for every period of every country in the world. They will fight any producer's battles for $8.25 a day, and they are the only enlisted men on earth who get steaks and chicken for lunch. They march through Hollywood, not Georgia, and to them war is swell, not hell. They have just finished being Nazi troopers in "Four Sons" and "The Man I Married," and they know exactly how a real invader feels from the way the rest of the studio population looked at their uniforms when they stormed the commissary at noon each day. Some of the more imaginative stenographers actually thought it was a real Hollywood blitzkrieg and that the tablecloths were parachutes! But even Hitler's mechanized columns are slow compared with the speed Carl Voss sometimes has to show. "Battle scenes cost the studios at least $1000 an hour," he explained, "so naturally they're in a hurry. Many a time I've had to get an army all equipped and in the field in fifteen minutes." It was during "The Man I Married," incidentally, that Voss had to train his only feminine army. They were little girls, from six to ten years old, who impersonated a platoon of Hitler Youth. There was a platoon of little boys, too, of the same ages, and now nobody can tell Voss that girls don't make far better soldiers than boys. "Those little girls got the steps and the gestures right off," he said. "They had everything down pat in ten minutes, but the boys took two hours before they were good enough for the cameras. Even then, they weren't half as snappy as the girls." Like so many things that happen in Hollywood, Voss' becoming a movie general was the result of a trifling incident. He is a regular American Army man who served in the 14th Infantry and, upon his discharge as sergeant, drifted into extra work. One day he got a call to shoulder a gun in "The Big Parade" and when he arrived on the set he found 800 other veterans milling around with nobody to tell them what to do. All of Voss' instincts as a drill sergeant immediately rebelled at that. He went to the assistant director "Can I help?" he asked "If you know how to get these men lined up, you certainly can," he was told. Voss stepped out in front of the men and clicked his heels. " 'Shun!" he yelled. The men fell in automatically. They heard a drill sergeant's voice and became soldiers again on the spot. For the duration of the picture, Voss remained in charge of military operations, and during the film he organized the nucleus of the movie army which has appeared as a unit in practically all war pictures since. Voss has kept the unit intact, found work and made (Continued on page 85) 24 MODERN SCREEN