Motion Picture Herald (Nov-Dec 1938)

40 For the man who borrows your copy of Motion Picture Herald We all know him. He doesn't mean to bother you. He really means it when he says he'll return your copy. But you know that for some reason or other he seldom does. Give this man the coupon . . . tell him for $5 he can get his own copy for the next 52 weeks. MOTION PICTURE HERALD >^ Rockefeller Center, New York. N. Y. Here's my check for $5*; enter my name on your subscription list for one year (52 issues). Name Theatre City State What is your position? * Subscription prices are $5 in the Americas, $10 foreign. MOTION PICTURE HERALD WE SAW IT HAPPEN— by thirteen correspondents of the New York Times, edited by Hanson W. Baldwin and Shepard Stone. 379 pages, no Illustrations, no index, a book for readers only. Simon & Schuster, New York, $3.00. It is a November morning's darkest hour. An owl, eagle of the night, is hunting on the meadow at our bend of the Silvermine river. The telechron, iiumming remotely of the sixty-cycle impulse of some far dynamo, says it is four o'clock. Your writer, in this fireside chair since midnight, has just come back from far places and high excitements, adventuring through the pages of a volume that is a cavalcade of the Now, a ride with the horsemen of the apocalypse into the hell and the humor that is our world. Little facts of touchable, immediate reality seem amazingly important at this moment of return, facts like the gleam on the andirons, the color in a waning decanter, the comforting blurring sound of an oil burner tending to its business against the chill of impending dawn. I have been away a long time and into trying places — at Washington with Arthur Krock, so sharply objective about deals, Old and New; G. E. R. Gedye, under the beguiling chapter heading of "Vienna Waltz," has made me die with Austria : and again I have thrilled and suffered, while Elliot V. Bell recorded "The Decline of the Money Barons," and Russell Owen has had me off to the South Pole, and then, damit, off to Hawaii and the Massie case again. But it appears that this preview volume came to me in part because M. Lincoln Schuster thought it might be provocative of interest by reason of its inevitable challenge to one congenitally condemned to reportorial interest and in part because of Douglas Churchill's probably well founded suspicion that I would be looking into it anyway. Under the indicting title of "Graustark" Mr. Churchill, who is the Hollywood correspondent of the Times, and Frank Nugent, of New York, motion picture editor, have allegedly collaborated. But when one reads in the first paragraph that: "Future generations will see 1938 on the screen and wonder if this truly has been the age of rebellion and war, TVA and SEC, of the ties of strength between dictatorship and democracy, of the intense scrutiny to which all the rules and laws of our twentieth century civilization have been subjected," one is aware of Mr. Nugent at the microphone speaking his standard piece about how the movies ought to get into the thick of the day's troubles. After all Mr. Nugent practically convinces one that "motion pictures are your best entertainment." He writes so blandly, engagingly well, with a sleek technique that has a certain shimmer even among the many able wordmongers of the Times. One can be almost sure that the reason he does not say anything is because he has decided not to. The words, though, have a certain annoying fascination like eating popcorn. It is made manifest that Mr. Nugent went to the Brown Derby and had a laugh — the tee-bone is the best buy there — and that he November 26, 1938 was about the studios and told some of them that the Times would print the news even if they did bar Mr. Churchill off the lot. Then there is (|uite a sequence-of-dig at "Beverly of Graustark," a certain, oh so certain, sloe eyed but weathered Juno, functioning in the region under letters of marque-and-reprisal from a publisher noted for his appreciation of costly antiques. That seems unfair, but a lot of fun to yours-theundersigned who was among the very first (1916) to get "the heat" from "Beverly." So far as she was concerned Chaplin was a bust until we bought large space. We didn't. Also we wrote her then publisher's obituary. We are going to write another. Under the title of "We Saw It Happen," after reading Mr. Krock m Washmgton, and several other penetrating surveys, one might wonder what these gentlemen of the Times cinema pages were doing with their lorgnettes through the careers in screenland of such personages as Harley Clarke, John Otterson and David Sarnoff, through the rise of both Balaban and Katz, the ledger matter of the charge off of $40,000,000 by the Chase National Bank, the spectacular -and imaginative and creative job that Joseph M. Schenck did with a notion and Darryl Zanuck, the special significances of the rise of Stanton Griffis, the suppressed report of Joseph P. Kennedy on Paramount, the extraordinary floration of interest in the American racehorse in Hollywood, etc., ad lib., and also ad infinitum. These boys mast have been at a preview when the business happened. Anyway they know how cojwebs are made by "the back lot." — Terry Ramsaye CHARLES LAUGHTON AND I— by Elsa Lanchester (Mrs. Laughton), 269 pages, illustrated. Harcourt Brace & Company, $3.50. Here is biographical, and autobiographical, entertainment with a deal of amazing shrewdness, candor without conceit, and most competent writing. Mrs. Laughton's work in this gay book about her husband presents a viewpoint, a technique and an order of thinking that might well be an example to many a contemporary with vastly more imposing literary pretensions. Her book calls for adjectives — pungent, poignant r alisms, all with a composed decency. But ii is loaded. Mr. Laughton has been quoted: "As in her style of writing, Elsa is a sweet unsophisticated person, but suddenly, through an apparently chance but invariably carefully worked out remark, which has probably taken weeks of thought, you feel somewhat as if you had been kicked by the hind leg of a giraffe." Mrs. Laughton is not unappreciative of Hollywood, and she expresses a conviction that America has done such a job with the motion picture that production overseas might profit by some of its examples. Most importantly she has written a book to read, filled with many the merry chuckle and a deal of hard sense. By an actress about an actor, it's a miracle. If you know an actor send it for Christmas. It might cure him. — T. R. REVIEWS OF BOOKS