Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1939)

WE COVER THE STUDIO Buzzing around the sets — Hollywood proves a busy, balmy beehive, with a bumper crop of honeys in the offing BY JACK WADE . . . "Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Epic movies every time. . . ." WE sincerely hope Mr. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow doesn't whirl in his grave as we streamline his famous verse in up-to-date Hollywood style. It's only because on our monthly stalk of elusive big pictures, we discover more and more biographies and famous lives supplying your eventual film fare. This trip it's Abraham Lincoln who gets a Hollywood break. Our first studio stop is Twentieth Century-Fox where the number one picture is "Young Mr. Lincoln." Frankly, we couldn't see good-looking Henry Fonda as the homely string bean that was young Lincoln — that is, we couldn't until we arrived on the set. Then the surprise! The towering tousle-headed, mole-marked, rawboned fellow we encounter doesn't look much like Handsome Henry. Built-up boot soles have added inches. A backwoods antebellum haircut has changed his head shape. Plaster moles and wens and a putty nose decorate his face. The wart and nose give Hank the most trouble. It takes him three hours each morning to put the make-up on, which is bad enough, but the big cheek mole falls off and gets lost in action scenes and the putty nose — "Well," says Hank, "it itches!" And he can't scratch it without ruining three hours' work and upsetting production! "YOUNG Mr. Lincoln" is limited to Lincoln's youth. The picture ends before the great drama and tragedy of Lincoln's life — the presidency — begins. It shows him as a backwoods philosopher, business failure, bumbling lover and legal tyro. But it climaxes the story with a murder trial in which young Abe's great gifts for law and justice emerge dramatically. The case is right from the Illinois court records, too. For romance, both Ann Rutledge and Mary Todd get a ghost break in the picture. Pauline Moore plays Ann and Marjorie Weaver is the plump, nagging Mary Todd. Alice Brady, Richard Cromwell, Arleen Whelan and Eddie Collins (Snow White's Dopey model) fill out the cast. Director John Ford has assembled the company on an outdoor set representing the ramshackle, dilapidated main street of New Salem, Illinois, circa 1840. On the front porch of Abe's general store is a barrel of whiskey and a dipper, around which a bunch of idlers, including Eddie Collins, are gathered. Alice Brady drives up in a covered wagon and Abe has to break up the drinkers before he can do business with her. An orgy for music lovers — when Jascha Heifetz, the world's most famous violinist, makes his longawaited film debut in Goldwyn's "Music School" The treat of the month is the jungle set of RKO's "Five Came Back," where Pilot Chester Morris and Lucille Ball romance, but there's an unexpected laugh, too, the day our reporter visits it The warning whistle blows, the cameras turn. Abe Lincoln Fonda spies the lady in the wagon, bestirs himself from his cracker barrel, ambles lazily out and scatters his tipsy townsmen. He lifts Eddie Collins up, kicking, and hoists him over the rain barrel. He's about to dunk him in. "Stop!" cries Eddie. "Wait a minute." "Cut," orders John Ford. "Now what?" "Br-r-r-r-r!" shivers Eddie. "That water's awfully wet. Can't you heat it or something?" He looks so pitiful that Ford relents. They're warming Eddie's barrel bath as we leave for the "Second Fiddle" set, Sonja Henie and young Mr. Power. "Second Fiddle" interests us particularly this month — not only because it's Sonja's Hollywood return picture after a long screen vacation, and the next big Twentieth Century-Fox musical extravaganza — but because it includes Irving Berlin's latest score of sure-hit tunes, dances you'll be doing soon and a mild burlesque on the "Gone with the Wind" talent hunt. We confer about all this as we sit, very elegantly, at a table and stare dowTn at a big dance stage, an exact replica of Hollywood's glamorous Earl Carroll nitery. Our conferee is pretty Mary Healy, a decollette and delicious darling from New Orleans, who came to Hollywood, got a contract at TC-F, and the personal and professional attention of Rudy Vallee. She gets her first movie break in "Second Fiddle," singing the song of the very number we watch, Berlin's gay "Back to Back." "Second Fiddle" casts Sonja Henie as a Minnesota schoolteacher who is yanked out of private life to Hollywood for one of those Cinderella parts, a la the "Scarlett" search. Tyrone Power is a demon press agent who must keep 64 .