Close Up (Mar-Dec 1933)

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204 CLOSE LP MISCASTING DIRECTORS Welford Beaton, who has appeared again on the fringe of filmdom with his Hollywood Spectator, has churned up the thought page by suggesting that directors should be cast for stories just as carefully as actors are cast for roles. Which goes all the way to show how far this bad system has gone. No two pictures a director tackles should be alike. A director should find in each story the mental stimulation for entirely new presentation. The truth being — that it is much harder to be a film director than it is. Otherwise, photograph the stars in their poses and fix them, via the Dunning Process, into any background needed or suitable groupings. O. B. NOTES FROM AMERICA. At this writing, dinosaurs are running rampant amid the incredible pile of stone, steel and glass that is Radio City — and where King Kong, that ne plus ultra of the diseased American movie mind is completing (we hope) the cycle of the trick film started by Melies, for the edification of those whose idea of entertainment is synonymous with saying " Boo !" in the dark. " King Kong — Or How Beauty Laid The Beast Low — it's Stucolerrific ! " (This latter word was coined from three others — stupendous, colossal, terrific — by the press agents). Children will not like it because of its unwholesomeness : and if they do, their parents are to be censured for having made them susceptible to its patent absurdities. Those of us who relish Gulliver's Travels hope that Karl Freund will not make just another trick film out of Swift's deathless satire. Surely there is some creative imagination left in the man who photographed The Last Laugh and Variety, though Freund's work until now in Hollywood could have been duplicated by half a dozen others. But the idea of those delightful countries of Brobdingnag, Liliput and Houyhnhnms on the screen is decidedly welcome — and it's been the best news since the rumor that Walt Disney, the creator of the inimitable Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony cartoons was planning to do Alice In Wonderland with Mary Pickford as the only human player. All the characters in Alice's dream — the Mad Hatter, the Doormouse, the King and Queen, etc., are to be animated from Disney's drawings. Lubitsch, who can always be counted on to do something unusual, and do that thing well, is toying with the possibility of filming The Czarina, which served him so well as a silent vehicle for Pola Negri (known as Forbidden Paradise), some years ago. The surprise comes in his selection of Mae West as the czarina. This buxom and beateous lady has made a name for herself in roles delineating the seamier side of American underworld life, as courtesan-de-luxe. As Catherine the Great she should find the dramatic role worthy of her, and with the sly Teuton of Hollywood behind the camera, the result should be something worth going miles to see. (It is interesting to note that Lubitsch rejected Noel Coward's Design for Living, a raging hit on the stage in New York with the Lunts, as not being suitable motion picture material). But Mae West as the indefatigable Catherine of Russia — there's a theme for you ! The sanctimonious Hays organization, which sees to it that the America movie does not soil its bib and tucker, has already taken some of the sting out of Gabriel over the White House, a rather subversive and invidious film to be made at this time. Dealing with a machine politician who becomes President of the United States and who becomes mentally deranged in an automobile accident, it shows how the " deranged " President, as a result of his condition, immediately institutes wide reforms in banking, international relations and other vital fields. Under his influence, the world's gold supply is assembled on an island off the coast of England, and measures are taken to form a brotherhood of nations. There is considerable propaganda about foreign debts and the honor of European nations. It was all a little disturbing and now that it has been made considerably less so, it will be released.