Picture Play Magazine (1938)

51 Defense of Double Bills. — A large and flourishing organization has sprung up all over the country that is demanding the abolishing of two pictures for the price of one. They maintain that dual bills just encourage Hollywood to turn out a lot of limp and careless productions. Not a voice was raised in their defense until Herbert Marshall at a lunch in New York faced the leaders of the antidouble bill movement. "Gentlemen," he pleaded, "what chance would I have of being seen on the screen if it were not for the second feature on double bills?" She Learns Fast. — When Danielle Darrieux, enchanting young French star imported to make pictures for Universal, has time to sort out her kaleidoscopic impressions of these United States, she says that she will find it all enchanting. She bore up brilliantly under receptions and sight-seeing tours, but began to wonder if New York was entirely populated by news photographers and reporters, she met so many of them. She wanted to visit Harlem, and wagered that she could learn the Big Apple, Truckin' and the Suzy-Q in one visit. She learned to speak English in three months, didn't she? And delightful English it is, too, with slang tucked into the most unexpected places. Elissa Landi, above, is stuck in a rut of mild successes and no hits. Annabella, left, comes from France with a name that everybody can pronounce. Her advantage over others is enormous. At a party in her honor she wore a very full skirted black tulle dress incrusted with dots of dull gold, and her blond hair was piled high on her head in a quaint pompadour effect. If your local theaters do not show French pictures regularly, beg them to show "Mayerling," Miss Darrieux's favorite of all her twenty-three films. You'll love her. New Mode in Heroines? — Hardly had the town subsided from welcoming Danielle when 20th Century-Fox put down the red carpet, took orchids out of the ice box, and beat the drums for the arrival of Annabella, known here for her work in "Wings of the Morning." An-nabella, too, is young, sensitive, candid, ingenuous. If you know a more pleasant word that means cute, she is that, too. This all looks like a concerted effort to bring back the ingenue heroine, but in brand-new guise of Parisian chic. And just as we were so happy with our dashing and slyly humorous Lombard and Colbert, our willowy Loretta Young and Virginia Bruce, our intense Joan Crawford, and our mature Kay Francis and Rosalind Russell. Honeymoon Without Bride. Tony Martin rushed to New York during one of his lulls between pictures, but Alice Faye could not come because illness had delayed the final scenes of her film. When she did finally get off, Tony had been summoned back to Hollywood. Meanwhile Tony had the Broadway gossips a little upset. They saw him around with an attractive woman and he seemed brazen about it — didn't go to obscure places or dash for a taxi when old pals of Alice showed up. It never occurred to him that people would not know that his companion was Alice's mother. This Is Fame. — When a newspaper identifying Constance Collier for its readers dismissed her lightly as "An RKO film player," shrieks of startled laughter echoed through Actors' Equity, the Authors' League, and haunts of socialites, but the philosophical Miss Collier only smiled ruefully as we chatted in the Algonquin lobby. "I wonder how long you have to act and write before you become known," she said. It would be impossible to tell in brief who Constance Collier is, unless you just said that she is a thoroughly grand person who has done so much in ana for the theater that anything shorter than "Harlequinade," her book of memoirs, couldn't hit even the highest of high spots in her career. Twenty years ago she was lured from the stage to films as the one who would lend most luster to an ambitious production. A painter commissioned to paint America's most blue-blooded dowagers complained because they weren't as I Continued on page 76