Canadian Film Weekly (Apr 3, 1957)

ww April 3, 1957 CANADIAN F LM WEEKLY Observanda & Personalia GRAPEVINTAGE has it that the Globe and Mail Sunday paper will get going in June if The Telegram case stands up in court .. . Will All-Canada get the MGM TV block for this country? .. . Hamilton showfolk owe a lot to Ed Hocura and The Spectator for their support of the Variety Village benefit show. Some !ocal showbiz ad-pub types are kicking themselves for not realizing earlier that Ed columns in a 100,000-circ paper serving an area less than an hour from Toronto by automobile . . . Someone, to settle a bet, asked us if Shirley Harmer and Juliette were sisters. Next the story will get around that Alex Barris and Jackie Rae are brothers... Sylvia Regan, whose The Fifth Season will soon be a movie, is writing the book for a ge musical play about Daniel Mendoza (1763-1836) , bareknuckle champ of England, who was known in the literature of Fistiana as “The Star of the East”... You can add “Celluloid” to the long-time limn of the Salvation Army: ‘Soap, Soup and Salvation.” The SA has a big film program and a local studio, where Les Thatcher has been working closely with its reps ... Wise guy lamped a lushed pair and cracked ‘‘Rumeo and Juliep” . . . Observation: Life for drama critics is just one ham thing after another. LARRY MANN, doing the warmup for The Chrysler Festival: “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Foto-Nite’. . . Russ McKibbin, on whose Imperial screen | shared a Fox newsreel shot with Bob Mitchum, said all the customers asked: ‘Who’s that guy with Bossin?”’ Gee, I'll bet he was kidding ... The Louis B. Mayer chapters of Bosley Crowther’s MGM history began in the March 30 Maclean’s. Get with it. The first one is so good you could miss a meal... Pardon my I Poisoning, but last week’s Variety devoted more than six inches to Bob McStay’s review of my Stars of David. It took the word of that discerning gentleman, fascinating mugg, prize publicist, etc. that “Bossin has researched and written an enthralling story” ... The annual Gallery Follies, where people meet such interesting newspapermen, is an occasion when the Queen’s Park Press Gang give the legislators a good bad time. The Gallery Goons, as they billed themselves, spared nothing in sparing no one. The evening is interesting if only for the people you have a drink or break bread with. At our table: Star City Ed Borden Spears, Public Works Minister Griesinger, King Eddy Hotel Music Director Don Gordon, Municipal Affairs Minister Warrender, Commie ex-MPP Joe Salsberg and CNE Producer-in-Chief Jack Arthur. MAVOR MOORE, in Canadian Commentary, says that the Canadian critic of literature, television, music, painting, theatre, etc. “is generally esteemed abroad as a nonentity and at home as an impediment.” Our critics don’t express opinions but contrive views — “in many cases’? — which they hope will be in line with public reaction. Moore, who thus suggests that they’re not forthright, doesn’t name any names ... Lorne Greene really has it made. Here’s an actor who gets paid for talking about himself! He writes a column for The Weekend Telegram called Notes From An Actor’s Diary .. . Good reading in the current Liberty are Robert Walker’s article about the cockeyed capers of Montreal newspapermen and Editor Frank Rasky’s verbal rassle with Immigration Minister Pickersgill . . . Perry Como due here in mid-April, I hear. For the radio-TV corps annual Easter Seal show, perhaps? .. . Andy McPherson, he of the scribblers’ itch and the itchy foot, is now columning on The Calgary Herald. Does Passing Parade ... You ain’t livin’ if you ain’t heard the truly phenomenal Dukes of Dixieland on the Audio label—Volume I and/or II. I hope to catch up with these youthful makers of wonderfully happy sounds in New Orleans, their home base. Listen to them if you can use some kicks you couldn’t match with any kind of artificial stimulation. ee Page 5 On The Typodermic Injections SQUARE ALTHOUGH Phil Reisman, who died recently in New Rochelle, spent less than three years in Toronto—1923-5— the affection he commanded still endures in the hearts of such lads as Jack Arthur, Tom Daley and Harold Pfaff. Arthur, in particular, has a reason to remember him. In 1925, at the behest of J. P. Bickell and N. L. Nathanson, then president and managing director respectively of the recently-founded Famous Players Canadian Corporation, he staged the most colossal and lavish dinner ever held in Toronto. Reisman, here as sales chief for Paramount, FPCC’s parent company, was promoted to become aide to Sydney Kent in NY. A farewell banquet in honor of Phil was arranged for the top floor of the King Edward Hotel. Arthur made a Period party of it, beginning with the 1400’s and moving to the 1920’s. The banquet hall became a baronial castle, to be entered over a drawbridge. The waiters’ costumes, changed several times during the evening, came from New York. There was a floorshow between each course, the last, coffee, featuring a Charleston chorus.°The meat course coincided with the Henry VII period so roast pigs, boars’ heads and slabs of ham were served. The orchestras from the theatres gathered behind a scrim in the balcony and provided the music. The cost was about $75 per plate — tremendous money in those days. Bickell was the toastmaster and Kent and Adolph Zukor, the Famous-Lasky president, were among the guests. Anyone who was there has never forgotten it. It became an almost legendary occasion, one which has caused old-timers to become tongue-tied in efforts to describe it to me. It gave Zukor and Kent a new picture of the imagination and enterprise of their Canadian associates and Phil Reisman a recollection he cherished all his days. TOMMY VAN DUSEN, senior NFB information offcer. has resigned, preferring Ottawa to Montreal. So has Doug Tunstell, NFB film editor, who'll spend the next six months knocking around Europe. Tom Johnston, NFB information chief, can use two or three people in his department, so write to him at the National Film Board, PO Box 6100, Montreal 3 . Harold Jackson, some years ago a Twentieth Century Theatres manager in Toronto, died in Britain several months ago ... At the intermission of Oklahoma!, which breaks on a dream sequence, an old lady, on her way out of the Capitol, Sarnia, complained to the doorman that those offbeat endings were bunk. The doorman restored her faith in Hollywood with the info that there was an hour of feature left . . . Jim Hill of Mayfair won the Art Directors’ Prize at the annual Art Gallery exhibition for his full-page illustration of my June, 1956 article, Never to Return. He had a more important victorv in the same show—his Mayfair cover earlier this year won him a first in that category — for the second time. That boy has it. MARITIME film and theatre people have laughingly decided that they have been given the solution to all their troubles. They’re getting a kick out of a despatch which appeared in a number of newspapers. How could they, with so many years of experience in the business, be too stupid to think of the answer to their troubles, when a village council came up with it just like that? Here’s the despatch: “Annapolis Royal—This town feels Hollywood stars are hurting local entertainment—and something is going to be done about it. “At a recent meeting of the Board of Trade it was revealed that the local theatre may have to close because of a drop in attendance. “The board recommends that ‘the highly paid actors and actresses should take substantial cuts in salaries, thereby reducing the cost of films.’ “A resolution to this effect is being prepared to forward to the Annapolis Valley Affiliated Boards of Trade.”