Film and Radio Guide (Oct 1945-Jun 1946)

10 FILM AND RADIO GUIDE Volume XII, No. 5 book dramatizations so as to be shown in one forty-five-minute high-school period. These plays and books often take ten or more class periods to read, so why should anyone expect them to be squeezed into a forty-five minute dramatization? This all stems from the fact that teachers disagree with Shakespeare’s dictum that “the play’s the thing.’’ They seem to think “the book’s the thing.’’ We stick by the Bard whose perpetual popularity is attested by the fact that his Hamlet has been played at least once each day someplace ever since it was written ! That’s a preferential record that bespeaks merit. We have asked hundreds of teachers whether they wish the theatrical productions of the classics changed in any way, and their unanimous answer is, “No!” There are many who are willing to place so much trust in words, and so little faith in things, that they are akin to those persons who show little concern over the devil’s making monkeys out of men but raise a hubbub when anyone suggests that God can make a man out of a monkey. It is quite as worthy an effort to make a drama out of a book as to make a book out of iiiv, drama of life. The cinema must be accepted as the realistic, visual form of communication and the book must be recognized as a man-made, symbolic audiocommunication. Then and then only will this “confusion” in the English field, as well as in many other fields, pass away. Drama is life. The book is merely about life. BEHIND THE SCREEN CREDITS BY HELEN COLTON Hollywood has what is probably the most talented train in the world. For where else could you find a train that has toot-tooted its way around the world without traveling more than a quarter of a mile? That has smashed speed records without going more than 15 miles an hour, and then, not even under its own power? That has survived bombings, hold-ups, crack-ups, and bridge wash-outs? That has had kings and queens, cops and robbers, cowboys ’n Indians for passengers? And has been everything from a swanky redand-gold private car or an extra-fare silver streamliner to a shabby second-class coach or a freight train? What makes this train so unique is that it has done all of these things with only a locomotive and a half-dozen cars. without evci moving off Lot No. 2 at MGM Studios in Culver City. Most of its frequent trips begin and end right at the MGM version of a big-city train-station, one of three “standing sets” of railroad stations. To bring Robert Walker to New York’s Pennsylvania Station in The Clock, Greer Garson to London’s Victoria Station in Mrs. Miniver, Robert Taylor to Moscow in Song of Russia, Irene Dunne to Southampton in White Cliffs of Dover, and Fred Astaire and Lucille Bremer to a mythical South American capital in Yolanda and the Thief, the train has taken exactly the same route. It has stood still on the track and had the signs on its adjoining station changed! Before Mickey Rooney went into service, it actually got to travel once in a while — to Car vel, home of Andy Hardy and his family. “Traveling” to this train means moving a few hundred feet up the track, pulled by a ten-ton truck loaded with concrete blocks to give it traction. As it pulls into “Carvel Depot,” the second railroad standing set, it huffs and it puffs and it chugs as joyously as if it had escaped from Lot 2 and were making a real trip to a real middle-western city. On a few occasions over the many years it’s been an actor, the train has gone to Toledo, Ohio, by going to Carvel. Toledo being the first stop after Chicago on the New York Central’s Twentieth Century Limited, anyone who forgets to mail a letter in Chicago usually jumps off at Toledo to do so. Carvel Depot, with a change of sign and the addition of a U.S. mailbox, becomes part of the Toledo sta