The Cine Technician (1938-1939)

128 THE C I N E-TEC H N IC I A N Nov.-Dec. L9£ TOO HOT! A Criticism of the new M.G.M. film Too Hot to Handle" T HIS film n!' American newsreel men featuring Clark Gable and Myrna Loy might bave been a aewsreel epic. The press critics have described the film as one you should leave your brains at home before seeing and as a film w ith an unconvincing plot with expert treatment. I say it's first-class entertainment, full of action, sizzling with thrills, and not so fantastic as may appear on first sight to the cine-technician. The screen play is b\ Laurence Stallings, Editor of Fox Movietone ws, and John Lee Mahin. This film may lead the public to believe that newsreel cameramen spend their time pinching other people's film and fighting rivals for the heart of some blonde or brunette damsel. Those who were engaged for a number of years in the British newsreel war know that it was for their Company^ prestige that they engaged in some of the baser tricks. The Grand Nationals, the Cup Finals (where at Stamford Bridge the first balloon barrage was used), the Test Matches, where the air-gun marksmen removed the balloons by deflating them, and other exclusive assignments where the battles between pirates and exclusive rightholders took place, were even more thrilling than scenes shown in this American film. One day creeping into some well protected enclosure in disguise, the next watching and protecting his firm's interests in the attempted holding of exclusive rights, was the newsreeler's everyday vocation. Pirating for his reel necessitated the cameraman being both quick and hefty, and the fight for the tower at Aintree would make a film as thrilling as anything in "Too Hot to Handle," with the bursting fireworks, the tottering 80-foot high steel tower, and the gang fight beneath. Anyhow, as the exchange of lavender prints is the order of today I'm afraid newsreel competitions have ceased. The China War sequences in this film will recall many a fruitles3 wait when newsreel units have at last packed up and at the last moment somebody lias shot out with an Eyerno and procured the picture. And how many times has the lid of an Eyemo or Devry fallen off and ruined on important picture scramble? Inaccuracies there are in this film, as when Clark Gable climbs out on the wing of his monoplane to take a picture of the pilot of his plane, although this has been done on a biplane where people can hang on to the cross struts. Anyhow, the back projection shots in this section of the film, where the cameraman is filming the burning munition ship, are excellent, although to have flown as near to the ship as shown would have courted disaster by the aeroplane being blown to pieces. W hen the hero and his lady friend are commentating they are shown with their backs to the screen, but this would be possible if they used a mirror above the microphone to reflect the shown image, which I believe is done in some newsreel recording theatres. The Eyemo used by Clark Cable only has a *2-inch lens, compared with the batteries of lenses used by the more up-to-date newsreels. In the jungle scene, in which M.G.M. appear to get Amazon Indians rather mixed up with African natives, and to which the cameraman and his sound engineer have travelled by small canoe, our hero at night puts on a lull film show with sound to scare the natives. He is using a portable 35 mm. projector. Of course electric current would be the snag here, although it would be possible to put on such a show using a small bicycle jiropelled generator for the current. (Continued on page 119)