Harrison's Reports (1951)

164 HARRISON’S REPORTS October 13, 1951 The film carriers will transport the collected drippings without charge to a designated theatre equipment dealer in each film distributing city. The equipment dealer will in turn periodically sell the accumulated drippings to an authorised metal scrap dealer, and all monies collected from the sales will be turned over to the Welfare Fund of the local Variety Club. This copper drippings program is an industry-wide effort that has been endorsed by the film carriers, studios, exchanges, labor unions and leading exhibitor organizations throughout the country. Harrison’s Reports urges the exhibitors to fully cooperate in the program, for it will not only help the Variety Clubs to carry on their wonderful humanitarian work, but even more essential is the fact that the theatres will be making an important contribution to the vital and urgent copper scrap program new being conducted to meet defense requirements. As Mr. Golden pointed out in his talk: “Not a pound of copper should be over-looked. In the aggregate, it may well mean your own survival in business, especially if the world situation deteriorates any further along the Communist road to war.” MONOGRAM SOUTHERN EXCHANGES, Inc. 163 Walton St., N.W. Atlanta 3, Ga. September 4, 1951 Mr. P. S. Harrison, Editor Harrison’s Reports 1270 Sixth Ave., New York 20, N. Y. Dear Pete: I want to commend you on your timely warning writing of your issue of September 1. Your thoughts and suggestions are in keeping with what I have always felt and believed, that the producer-distributors are to a large extent responsible for the exhibitor’s overadvertising and misrepresenting the quality of pictures he is offering to the public, and it is that advertising campaign they put on for mediocre pictures that prompts people to go into the theatres the opening day and then the following days and fail to get their money’s worth. All because the producer-distributor has in his employ a publicity man and it is up to him to get out publicity material that looks enticing in the press sheet, and the poor exhibitor falls for it, spends his money in the newspaper, finagles people into his theatre to see a lousy, uninteresting, poorly-produced picture, and that automatically runs patronage away from a theatre or theatres. This is just as it would be if any merchant misrepresented his merchandise at the time he took the customer’s money. He automatically would lose his patronage. I think those are excellent warnings, and you should keep hammering on it until you accomplish your high ideals. Yours sincerely, ( signed ) Arthur C. Bromberg President “The Raging Tide” with Richard Conte, Shelley Winters and Stephen McNally (UnivAnt'l, Now.; time, 93 min.) The Raging Tide” is fairly interesting from the melodramatic point of view, but it is handicapped by a story that lacks conviction and by artificially developed characters and motivations. The chief fault with the story, as well as the main reason why it is dramatically ineffective, is that it attempts to win sympathy for undeserving characters. For example, Richard Conte, a fugitive murderer, is depicted as having some decent traits, but he soon follows up a kindly deed with a vicious act, thus disillusioning the spectator after winning his sympathy. Among the others for whom sympathy is sought is Shelley Winters, as Conte’s sweetheart, a weak character who has no valid reason for protecting him from the police, and Alex Nicol, a young man with crooked tendencies, who is disrespectful to Charles Bickford, his kindly father. Both Shelley and Nicol become regenerated at the end, but it has little effect on the spectator’s emotions: — To evade the police after murdering an underworld enemy, Conte, a San Francisco racketeer, conceals himself aboard a small fishing boat owned by Bickford, a kindly Swede, who carried on his fishing operations with the unwilling help of Nicol, his son. Conte makes his presence known when the boat is out at sea, explaining that he is a salesman who got drunk and had apparently boarded the ship to sleep it off. His offer to work for his “keep” is readily accepted. Meanwhile ashore, Stephen McNally, a police lieutenant searching for Conte, centers his attentions on Shelley, who refuses to cooperate with him. Before the boat returns to port, Conte learns that Nicol hated the life of a fisherman, and disdains his father, but could not quit because he had been placed on parole after being convicted of an auto theft. Conte hires him at $200 per week to make collections on his gambling machines and to serve as contact to Shelley whenever the boat is in port. Meanwhile he tells Bickford that he enjoys the life of a fisherman and arranges to remain on the boat. Between fishing trips Nicol, without his father’s knowledge, performs Conte’s errands. Shelley dislikes Nicol at first because he forces his attentions on her, but she becomes more responsive when he changes his attitude. Nicol also softens toward his father after Conte gives him a sound thrashing for being disrespectful. In the events that follow, McNally starts to tail Nicols after observing his meetings with Shelley. Conte, fearing that McNally will close in on him, meets Shelley and presents her with a plan to clear himself of the murder by framing Nicol. But Shelley, by this time in love with Nicol, informs McNally of the scheme. Out at sea, the boat is floundering in a squall when Nicol tells Conte that he is washing his hands of crime, and that he intended to marry Shelley and become the fisherman his father wanted him to be. Moments later Nicol is washed overboard and Conte leaps into the sea and rescues him, but he sacrifices his life in doing so. It all ends with Nicol and Shelley carrying through their plans for marriage and an honest life together, while Bickford beams approval. It was produced by Aaron Rosenberg, and directed by George Sherman, from a screenplay by Ernest K. Gann, based on his own novel, “Fiddler’s Green.” Adult fare.