Modern Screen (Dec 1940 - Nov 1941)

WARTIME HOUSE GUESTS Hollywood's opened its heart and its purse to dozens of little Britishers — whose sole complaint is that "the war's a nuisance" Roddy McDowall is twelve. A slim, wigglesome twelve with chocolate-colored eyes and a brown forelock of straight hair which he keeps shoving away from his brow as he tells about the teacher-priest at his school, St. Joseph's College on Beulah Hill, London, who climbed into a hole left by a time bomb. . . . "The Jerries dropped the bomb, and it fell through to the school cellar. Father went down to see how much damage had been done, and someone threw a pitcherful of water in after him. They didn't know he was there!" says Roddy with small-boy glee. There are many little boys and girls like Roderick Andrew McDowall of London, England, in Hollywood this season. About twenty or twenty-five in all. The British Consulate in the Southern California city says twenty-five, thinks there must be more, wishes they would all register with the Consulate "in case of trouble." They hasten to add that there has been no "trouble" so far. The arrival in America of little boys like Roddy and little girls like Gracie and Primrose and Ursula began over a year ago and continued under the eye of our State Department, the United States Committee for the Care of European Children and, in Los Angeles, the International Institute. The children are in this country only for the duration of the war, and a ruling of the British government makes their adoption into American homes impossible. American film-making's a cinch to Roddy McDowall, who made British films under fire last year. That's part of an anti-aircraft shell he's exhibiting to his teacher. 52 The flow of evacuees stopped almost entirely with the shelling and sinking of the ship, City of Benares, with its tragic loss of child life. Parents in England felt they would rather have their little ones stay at home "and face the perils of aerial warfare than to subject them to the terrifying and inevitable risk of submarine attack on a wide and deep ocean. So it is that grave, well-mannered children, a, poignant handful of them, have found their way to Hollywood and now remind the film colony that there is war almost everywhere, and that only in America can children still play peacefully. "It is so hard to know how to comfort these children," says Conrad Veidt on the set of Columbia's "Tonight Belongs to Us." "My wife and I have with us the young son — he's thirteen — of my good friend and physician in London, Dr. Wigram. Clive came to us last August, and the next month we entered him in military school. "He's such a child in some ways, and in others he is a grown man, fully matured by being separated from his parents, whom he misses very much. There are many times that my wife and I would like to treat him as a child, pamper him, humor him, as we might a child of our own, but there is much of the Spartan in Clive. He is lonely in this country in spite of the boys at the school — Urban, and he holds aloof from any babyish overtures that we are tempted to make. "It is tragic, this circumstance, because it is re-enacted in many other cases of the evacuees who are in this country. There is deep sentiment in all the children — I have seen Clive prop up pictures of his mother and father before him as he writes to them. But the children find themselves in bewildering situations, trying to adapt themselves to a country that is so (Continued on page 79) Left to right: Fiona Greig, George Sanders, Rosemary Barkman, Ursula Greig, Wendy Barrie and Paula Mooring. In the back row: W. H. Mooring and Charles Barkman. MODERN SCREEN