Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1939)

That Dodge City trip taught Errol F I y n n about America — and taught Hollywood about Jean Parker (at right with Rosemary and Priscilla Lane) *<*»*<* CLOSE UPS SHOTS BY RUTH WATERBURY A TEN-DOLLAR tie and "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" . . . those two productions, during the last month, made me realize what a good deed Hollywood is doing for itself in its rediscovery of America . . . finding out about you and me, the ordinary ticket buyers, that is, on its location trips for pictures like "Jesse James" ... on its publicity tours like the premiere of "Dodge City" in the city of that name . . . the tour over the Union Pacific lines to exploit the film, "Union Pacific" . . . Jeanette MacDonald's and Nelson Eddy's concert tours in the cities throughout our wonderfully united United States. . . . Nelson Eddy told me it was that "united" feeling about our country that struck him more forcibly than anything on the tour he recently completed . . . "No matter where I went, whether to New York, Kansas City or Seattle, I found people united in thought, ideals and action," he said, "so in contrast to Europe where, even in one small country, you discover distinct groups and classes, one in opposition to another." One listener's response during this tour will affect all Nelson does next winter . . . I'll tell you about that . . . but first I must give you my routine about the ten-dollar tie and "Goodbye, Mr. Chips". . . . I was in New York when one of Hollywood's more promising younger players came to town . . . He's no millionaire or star . . . just a particularly swell guy getting along neatly ... in the course of our meal, he asked if I liked his tie ... I said that I did, very much indeed ... it was an excellent tie in excellent taste ... it looked to me, however, quite like any one of a hundred other ties I have seen ... I didn't realize it was a de luxe production until the young actor began discussing it. . . . "I've discovered a little woman who makes these ties for me," he explained. "She makes me a certain number of them each month so that I get them at bargain prices . . . only ten dollars apiece," he said. . . . Now, where I come from a really big-time tie can be had for two and a half clams while a good daily one costs about one, so the idea of ten shells handed out for one bowknot . . . well, I mean . . . the memory of this newest note of luxury was still with me that evening when I went to the preview of "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" . . . the thought that Hollywood's inflated earnings inflated prices so worried me . . . I wondered if this velveteen point of view was what made possible so dull and expensive a movie as "Broadway Serenade," for instance . . . and then that exquisite, heart-stirring "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" began . . . and while watching it, I began thinking about Hollywood's rediscovery of America . . . and concluded through this rediscovery how the movie colony could once more get to know about its own public. . . . "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" is pure Hollywood product, despite its English backgrounds and its all English cast ... it was the late Irving Thalberg, who first thought of making James Hilton's tender story into a movie . . . the enchanting script was the product of Metro's Hollywood studio . . . Sam Wood, its director, is a Hollywood veteran . . . but the greatness of "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" comes, I believe (always allowing for Robert Donat's magnificent performance which must be included in the screen's immortal portrayals, forever) from the blessed reality of it and from its true perspective . . . yet I do not believe this perspective could have been maintained if the film had been made in Hollywood proper . . . that feeling of old traditions, of time always marching on, yet never changing . . . that reflection of the pathos and beauty of life . . . got into the picture from the very fact that it was made in a city where just those values exist . . . that all around the film makers, as they recorded the story of a very average little man, there were in person just such average little men . . . their work done, the actors didn't walk off the set and out into an atmosphere composed in equal part:; of ermine capes, sixteen cylinder cars, five thousand dollar a week salaries and ten-dollar ties . . . not that there is any harm in these luxuries . . . we all long for them and would possess them if we could . . . it's only taking them for granted that dulls one's perspective . . . the English actors walked off the set and straight back into the world where men were thankful indeed for the meagerest job and incredibly thrilled when they got together the price of a very simple evening's entertainment "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" being so fine, that old, silly cry comes up again, "Will London-made movies surpass Hollywood movies?" . . . that is nonsense . . . the equipment, the workers, the (Continued on page 75) AUGUST, I 939