Canadian Film Weekly (Aug 24, 1955)

i Hf | August 24, 1955 CANADIAN FILM WEEKLY Page 9 Short Throws ASTRAL FILMS is reissuing Samuel Goldwyn’s _ classic, Wuthering Heights, which stars Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, and has dated the film into the Odeon, Winnipeg; Odeon, Edmonton; Studio, Vancouver; and Kent, Montreal. APPOINTMENTS made recently by Ira Dilworth, director for Ontario for the CBC, included W. Hugh Clark, assistant supervisor of commercial sales, being named supervisor; Donald J. Macdonald will step up from assistant to manager of national TV news and his position will be filled by Kenneth P. Brown, formerly a TV news editor; and Gunnar Rugheimer, previously with national TV news, will transfer to the commercial di * vision as senior sales represen tative. CHARLES WRENSHALL has been named manager of Master Film Studios Limited of Calgary by A. Bruce McLean, president. FORMATION of Canadian News Film Co-operative to exchange news films among Canadian TV stations has taken place in Toronto. President is Walter Blackburn, head of CFPL-TV in London, Ontario, and members of the organization so far are the CBC, CFQCTV in Saskatoon, CKCW-TV in Moncton and Blackburn’s London station. Plans are to distribute ten minutes of international and domestic newsreel, with member stations contributing to the local content. ADDITIONS to the Adult Entertainment List of the Ontario Board of Censors include MGM’s The Cobweb, Alliance’s Crashout, Fox’ Dark Corner (reissue), IFD’s Fingerman, Astral’s Gang Busters, Fox’ House of Bamboo, UA’s Not as a Stranger, IFD’s Outlaw Girl and IFD’s Sensualita (Italian version). ABANDONMENT of the Motion Picture Exposition and Hall of Fame project was announced in Hollywood by Edmund L. dePatie, president of the committee. Donations will be returned. PROJECTOR designed to improve the quality of color television film programs by providing a continuous, uniformly-illuminated image, has been announced by Canadian Kodak Company, Limited. It’s called the Eastman 16mm Continuous Projector, Model 300, and has an automatic compensation for film shrinkage. The arms will accommodate 3,000-foot reels. | On The SQUARE FRANK HALL, writer of The Wetback for Pacific Coast Pictures, stopped off here to chat with Jack Chisholm, then went on to Newfoundland to do research for a feature on whaling. I hear the Crangs of Toronto, who have a big stake in whaling, will do some of the bankrolling . . . Various foreign governments keep directing enquiries to different Canadian bodies about a company called Orbit Films of Toronto, which has asked professional courtesies and official cooperation. They’re not in the phone book but its lawyer has been traced and he won’t say anything ... Tony Wright, a good helpful lad, quit the NFB info div ... That nice girl, Portia of The Merchant of Venice, also has color prejudice. After the colored Duke of Morocco fails in his suit for her, she says: “A gentle riddance: draw the curtains, go: Let all of his complexion choose me so” . Where Science fails: odorless gasoline. With traffic what it is, strolling down the street in summer is getting to be a horrible experience ... Blue ruin for the movies because of TV? Not while OI Jess Huffenpuff, Industry Saver No. 1 and Stainless Steel’s only rival as Public Hero No. 1, can rush to the rescue, hindered only slightly by an overstuffed shirt . . . Overheard: “He gets in sharp at nine but he’s stupid by ten” . . . Lou Chesler, who built the Odeon Danforth, has a piece of the deal that bought RKO, I’m assured. THIS BALLPLAYER, the current fable goes, was strictly a good field, no hit fellow. Then from nowhere he started having big days at the plate. Figured it might be the new shipment of bats so he went to see the manufacturer. “It’s our bats, all right,’ he was told. “You see, we’ve put a secret ingredient in them that would make a power hitter out of a peewee. We call it ‘Belfry’.” ‘So that’s why I’m hitting,” said the ballplayer. “I’ve got Belfry in my bats.” ANOTHER NOTE: Canadian Picture Pioneers’ golf tournament, St. Andrew’s Golf Club, Thursday, September 15, tickets $5, general chairman Dan Krendel . . . Herman Taylor has succeeded Gerald Mooney as manager of the Uptown .. . Fellow was trying to say that a friend had been found dead in bed. “Imagine,” he said. ‘“‘“He woke up dead!” . . . Pat Jackson, now directing The Feminine Touch at Ealing, was in Canada recently and is anxious to make features here . . . Movies aren’t the only form of expression prejudged through censorship in Canada instead of being subject to the course of the law, as other things are. A friend tells me that the Customs branch has a list of hundreds of pocket books banned for their literary content. It would be interesting to learn how such things are judged and by what persons . . . Molson’s opened its new and marvelous Fleet Street plant with an inspection party which ended in its beautiful Anchor Room. I learned that 30 per cent of Toronto drinkers prefer lager to ale. East of Toronto is ale country but to the west it’s lager. Lager preference grows in each community until it ends at the Windsor border, where it has reached 95 per cent... “If a play is a flop, it just closes and you forget about it,’ writes Stanley Kramer in Theatre Arts. “But a movie dies slowly and it goes on dying for months and months on end” ... Did it ever occur to you that the scrumptious bumper, Gypsy Rose Lee, is an impressionist? She does takeoffs, doesn’t she? NO MERE SCRAPER is the blind fiddler whom you must have passed on the street at one time or another. He’s usually on Yonge, near the corner of College, in front of Eaton’s. A younglooking man. Like many another, whenever I hear his sweet, familiar music I am happy to stand yokel-like and listen. He had studied in Europe under fine teachers. He won a great international competition and his future seemed nothing to worry about. Came blindness. He took his art to the streets. There you'll find him yet. So if the lovely music of a violin reaches through the din of the city and plays hippity-hop on your heartstrings, stop a while and listen. That’s him. And don’t forget the bit of silver. News Clips The Robe has grossed $44,000,000 to date, says Twentieth Century-Fox and it will give the same playoff pattern to The Tall Men, which Clark Gable claims is his finest picture since Gone With the Wind ... “The most stupid thing I have come across,” is what Oscar Morgan, Paramount shorts’ chief, called double bills to Frank Morriss, critic of the Winnipeg Free Press. “The trouble is, we haven’t enough showmen. Exhibitors are screaming about bad business and they’ve cut down on everything but the double bill. The double bill cuts down receipts.” The Toronto Daily Star, in an editorial called Why Not Our Own Movies, says: “It is a pity that the vision and spirit of adventure responsible for Stratford is not employed in another Canadian venture, the establishment of a national movie industry.” It suggests that Tom Patterson, founder of the Stratford festival, “might be persuaded to broaden his field” . . . Mori Krushin, UA exploitation chief, told The Vancouver Sun _ that “Bingo can’t be blamed. Neither can television. It’s the public. Their senses are becoming dulled to films.” The Burmese government requires theatres to play native films 60 days per year ...A 15-year-old boy took a hand grenade into the Grand Theatre, Calgary but it proved to be a dud on examination. It was a war souvenir of his father... Thomson Newspapers have acquired the Oakville-Trafalgar Journal, bringing its chain to 21 dailies and seven weeklies .. . The projectionists’ union in Vancouver claims that the two big chains, in seeking one-man booths, would put 70 operators out of work ... Paramount is said to be assuming control of Dumont Television, USA network. The Ottawa Journal, in an editorial called Hollywood Hails the Murderer, gets its ire up because nothing happened to Jim Cagney in Love Me Or Leave Me after he tried to commit murder. It asked for censorship and warned producers ... Henry James Highlands, projectionist of the Strand, Dryden, Ontario, passed away at 60 recently 2 Eighteen-year-old Dolores Vipond of the Capitol, Winnipeg, was chosen the bathing queen at the recent picnic of the Manitoba Motion Picture Exhibitors Association . . . Manitoba and Saskatchewan sales agency for Peerless Films is Theatre Posters.