Silver Screen (May-Oct 1939)

Making A Thoroughbred On location with "The Lady's From Kentucky" company, in the blue grass fields of California. | By Kathleen Coghlan DOWN the coast of Southern California, ninety-five miles from Hollywood, a modern romance of the Blue Grass country is being enacted before the cameras for the picture "The Lady's From Kentucky," with George Raft, Ellen Drew and Hugh Herbert. We left Hollywood at six o'clock in the morning and were whisked down the coast highway to Oceanside where we turned in from the blue Pacific ten miles along the El Camino Real (this means "The King's Highway" in Spanish, and was the original route travelled by the Franciscan friars who first settled California when it was a Spanish possession.) We are puzzled at the thought of a Kentucky Blue Grass farm being photographed in this typically California countryside. But, upon arriving at the site of the Louis D. Lighton ranch, loaned to us for this film, we can understand why Al Hall chose this spot for the re-creation of the Kentucky horse farm. The fifty or sixty-year old white-washed stables seem to have been lifted bodily from a pasture below the Mason-Dixon line. Negro mammies and pickaninnies are loitering about the barnyard, and ducks, geese and fowl are going about their quiet lives in the lazy sunshine. But in the background of this rural scene we see the evidence of a movie company. Sound trucks, camera trucks, camera booms, waiting limousines with chauffeurs, racks of wardrobe, make-up tables, etc., dot the scene. We look up the long winding driveway toward the ranch house on the hill. A scene is being shot on the driveway. Hugh Herbert is running up the hill and after him chases a wobblylegged chestnut colt and follows him into the house. The scene is taken four or five times, the colt each time chasing Hugh wildly up the driveway. Upon investigating how a colt so young could be so easily trained to follow a person, we discover that the young one's mother has been installed inside the house out of view and the colt is running to its mother. Clever, these movie directors, in getting the desired effect. Back to the stableyard moves the entire crew for a shot where George Raft invites Ellen Drew to go to the county fair with him on the following day. They are standing outside the stall of Roman Son, the horse about whom the main 28 action of the story takes place. Behind them a colored groom leads another horse past the camera for "atmosphere." "There's a sad case," comments Hugh Herbert, from the sidelights. "That extra used to be a star." "What extra — the colored man?" asks one of the technicians. "No," says Herbert, "the horse. Don't you recognize him? That's 'Broadway Bill. And it's true. The "atmosphere horse" is Gallant Knight, featured with Warner Baxter a few years ago in Frank Capra's "Broadway Bill." He was barred from the featured equine role in this picture by that bogey of all picture stars, Time. Gallant Knight is nine years old. Another famous horse that you'll see in "The Lady's From Kentucky" will be War, half-brother of War Admiral, looking every inch what he was meant to be — a champion. A brief account of his history is interesting. When he and War Admiral were colts, War was regarded as by far the more interesting of the two. So promising that Mrs. Alfred G. Vanderbilt paid $46,000 for him. But something went wrong with him in training, Mrs. Van Silver Screen