Canadian Film Weekly (Oct 28, 1953)

4 October 28, 1953 Observanda ARE YOU UNDER-RATING the long-hair movie market? Film societies are sprouting up everywhere, the largest in Canada being the 900-member one in Edmonton. Carnival in Flanders, The Baker's Wife, Brief Encounter and The Green Pastures are on its 107-film schedule . . . Butcher's is taking over the UK’s IFD organization from David Coplan, former local lad, who is just getting over a divorce from his appendix . .. To Lorne Greene: Are you going to wait until 1984 to return my Orwell book, 1984? . . . Anybody know what’s with Rediffusion in Montreal and what Real Rousseau is doing? . . . Don’t be surprised if some CanadianUK co-production pops up soon .. . J hear they made a big deal out of the RCMP raid on some muggles-smoking performers in Ottawa. FBI guys, looking for the smuggling channel, were in on it. Good subject for a film—Mounties and FBI together . . . Distributor asks what we meant by writing that Canada was ten per cent territory for Hollywood revenue, Said we were wrong. We quoted him Eric Johnston’s 1952 report. “Oh, you mean the world! I thought you meant the domestic market, which is Canada and the United States,” he chided. “You should have said the world.” All right, then—‘“the world.” Ten per cent for the world is bad? THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER says: “The golden gimmick for newspaper columnists these days is radio and television. They light cigarettes with their checks and revel in luxury.” Personal ad: Columnist open to checks and luxury. Not old, really. Good gab, have hair and tux . . . Toronto flesh fare was all buttered in Fry last week. The town’s two dramas were by Christopher Fry and the blank-verse boys had themselves a ball . . . Puzzle: How can CBC-TV hope to match USA studios for production numbers on sound stages not much bigger’n the main men’s room of the Royal York? .. . Js there some ritual which requires a TV interviewer to open with “Glad to have you here” and the interviewee to reply “Glad. to be here”? .. . Wish some record company would put out An Album of Ricky-Tick as played in the Stalag 17 dance sequence. Incidentally, the Stalag 17 line, “I believe it, I believe it,’ is beginning to rival “I just want the facts, ma’am, just the facts” as a jocular phrase. PANTAGES, VICTORIA is now the Totem Theatre, having been known in the past also as the Empire and the York. This caused W. S. Henderson to observe in the Victoria Daily Times that: “To geographers a stream which has changed its course at least once is known as a mature river and, by analogy, playgoers will be understood if they call the Totem a mature theatre.” Henderson’s article, Vaudeville and the Bard, is a sentimental recollection of the storied and gloried plays and players the house has known, and concludes with this: “If the theatre, as it nears its half-century, could speak, perhaps it would say with Chesterton: 999 ‘I also had my hour’. HEARD LOU JACOBI, Toronto comic in London, on a radio transcription of a Variety show and he told about the drunk who asked the time and was told that it was 12 o'clock. “I’m going crazy,” he moaned. “All day long I keep getting different answers!” . . . Love in Pawn, first film in which the Bradens, Bernie and Barbara Kelly, appear together, was panned badly in Britain. Heard Mr. B on the CBC-TV bond show and he came on with his “He-I-l-o there!” shout, used by him for years but which must have been borrowed from Megs Lexing, the old-time top banana. I thought BB would be too big for that now . . . Dig this funny image and crack to go with it, as carried in the Montreal Star. At the Coronation some of the guys in the different services got juiced and began fooling with each other’s headgear. A sailor put on the tall bearskin busby of a guardsman, topped it with his own hat, staggered back to the depot, woke up his superior officer, and asked: “D’you think I need a haircut, sir?” . . . Hilda Cunningham has sure carried the ball frequently and well at MGM publicity during the unsettled periods, as press and circuit departments can testify, and Chet Friedman is lucky to have so capable an aide. CANADIAN FILM WEEKLY Typodermics FREEDOM OF THE PRESSURE? In the Ontario Archives’ CNE display there was a letter, dated May 6, 1909, in which Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier answered a complaint of James P. Whitney, Premier of Ontario, that the contents of an Order-inCouncil mailed to Ottawa had been printed in the papers before being officially received. Laurier regretted it. “I can however well understand how the thing happened,” he wrote, “as in these days of modern publicity nothing can be kept away from the enterprising reporter.” It’s that damned deathless deadline and those white empty spaces. Get it first, get it fast, get it right or half-right, but get it. And that brings me to my No. | fellow-irker. You think of a story and you call a certain guy about it. He readies the information gladly, because he or his company will benefit from the publicity, and sends it to you. But he sends copies to the other trade papers too. And some of them reach the reader before yours does. No. 2 fellow-irker is the jerk whom you call up about some news you heard. He asks you not to print the story now and promises faithfully that he will call you first when he is ready to release the information to all. He doesn’t. You get the press release everyone else did. Or later. What can you do about guys like that? Just assign them to your categories of second-class and third-class human beings. You remember to forget them when you're writing a story in which they belong with the others. Or, when important strangers ask you what they’re like, boy, you really tell ’em. WHILE ON THE SUBJECT of press relations, when are the New York home offices going to outgrow the kind of harmful thinking that treats Canada like a 49th state and adds to the suggestion that the Canadian motion picture industry is nothing but a colony of the American one? How can a Canadian trade paper have Canadian character if New York won’t admit that a company’s senior Officials in Canada have more stature with the Canadian trade than their USA executives? Announcements of every kind affecting Canada come out of New York offices but the men the exhibitor and press deal with hardly exist where these are concerned, for they almost always carry the names of home office officials. And no effort is made to change them so that they will make sense here. Nor do they give any consideration to Canadian deadline problems. Releases and pressbooks reflect the fact that Canada is not a nation but an afterthought in New York minds, Why not let Canadian sales and press representatives tell Canadians what the score is? TWO WRONGS DON’T make a right? A friend of mine got down from a shoeshine stand to discover that he was wearing different shoes. The next day he wore the mates to the odd pair, had them shined, and everything was right again. The third day he had two shined pairs to pick from. AT THE SIMPSON’S-SPONSORED Red Feather talent finals emcee Ken Watts asked band leader Benny Louis, onstage with his orchestra, if it was true that later that evening they would play the dance that would close the convention of the American Prisons Association. “Yes,” answered Ben, “and we’re going to start with Don’t Fence Me In” . . . Overheard: “She’s so rich she owns a custom-built Scrabble set with diamond-studded tiles”... I don’t believe the rumor that AGVA will picket wrestling arenas on the grounds that the bone benders are non-union actors .. . Someone called the International Cinema and asked what was playing. “Rome 11 O’clock,” was the answer. “Oh, a midnight show!” exclaimed the asker . . . Daffynition of a retarded child, according to the Wall Street Journal: “Youngster still sporting a Gene Autry outfit in these days of space cadets”... Not thievery but that extreme heat wave of this summer, which melted the glue, caused raised letters in metal nameplates to come off, a fellow insists to us. . . “They should outlaw in-laws,” said a guy who just lost his job to the man that married the boss’ daughter . . . Clifford Barclay of Lunnon-’Arf-the-Bloomin’-World, CEA chief accountant, here in company with Simmy Greenberg, who lived in our West when it was a lot wilder than now. Page 7