Modern Screen (Dec 1941 - Nov 1942)

THEY LIVE WITH THEIR BOOTS ON (Continued from page 29) "Poor old Dismal Durham? Oh, it was blitzed ages ago. We weren't in it at the time, were down staying with Ralph Richardson, who's in the Staff Office of the Fleet Air Arm. But our friends Ursula Jeans and Roger Livesey were there and spent the night mostly under the kitchen table. It was blast, not a direct hit, but — you remember that glass roof?" (We did, and the dreary, dark back-yard and the sad clematis Larry was trying to grow between the stones) "Of course that all came down into Ursula's dresses and over the furniture, and it was a frightful mess. We had to take everything out, though the house is still standing. All the ceilings and carpets were ruined." . AT this point the Minion put his head round the door again and told Vivien they had nearly finished That Bit on the stage, and she had better come. Realizing belatedly that the talk had never got round to films at all, we asked her, as we made for the stage door and our old friends, the buckets of ice, whether she or her husband had any film plans in mind. No, she assured us, not a thing. She hardly saw any pictures these days, she said, except "Lady Hamilton," which Larry had taken her to by main force, and Leslie Howard's "Pimpernel Smith," which was really her favorite film. For entertainment, she said, she and Larry went to vaudeville. Anything to laugh. . . . Meanwhile, our spies suggest that if Vivien does relent and do anything on the screen this year, it may be (a) Shaw's "Caesar and Cleopatra" (b) Daphne du Maurier's new novel, "Frenchman's Creek" or (c) "Jane Eyre," for which she has always had a hankering. The next on our list of inquiries was David Niven, whom we very fortunately encountered in Claridge's. And when we say fortunately, we mean fortunately, for David is probably the most elusive of all the film stars in England. A soldier by training and tradition — for all his people are Army people — he came home to join one or other of the Services. He had a yen for the R.A.F., having flown back from France to England in the bottom of a bomber, disguised as a mail-bag or something and surrounded by what he called "perfect Dawn Patrol types." But old habit overruled this romantic dream, and he became a soldier in the Rifle Brigade. He became a soldier with such zeal that he has risen to the rank of Major and married a Commandant in the A.T.S. The Army owns him, body and soul. Film executives may tear their hair and chew on their cigars, but David Niven remains quite unperturbed. He is perfectly ready to make a picture, if the Army gives him leave. But in the meantime, he is Somewhere on Operations, Somewhere on Manoeuvres, Somewhere on a Special Roving Commission. Tracked down for the moment and involved in a story conference, he suddenly looks at his wristwatch, raises those five sardonic lines on his forehead and says, "Sorry, I'm on duty. I've got to go." And he goes, becoming another invisible unit in the war machine. It's somehow tonic. When caught in Claridge's, where he was lunching with non-professional friends, David Niven looked the perfect hero of a service film, brown as a nut, lean and smart in his uniform with a green cord on the shoulder, which looked fine but didn't mean a thing to our lay mind. He was nonchalant, gay and friendly, and used a lot of Army slang, particularly the address, "Chum," picked up from the Australians, we gather. Occasionally he would flip a penny idly across his knuckles, the way he learned to do for "Eternally Yours." He was palpably unwilling to talk about films, being far more interested in His Men, meaning, we suppose, his regiment or whatever a Major in the Rifles has, and what good boys they were, and how they had been escorting a convoy past a popular race-course the other day, and what they said to him, and what he said to them, and what happened, and what were the odds on the winner. He admitted, though, that he had leave to make one film, and that the film when it came off, would be "The First of the Few," Leslie Howard's biography of R. J. Mitchell, the Spitfire inventor. Leslie himself produces, directs and plays the Mitchell part, starting on locations Monday. David is to be the test pilot who becomes a Schneider Cup winner and goes through the whole tale, flying successive models of the Spitfire and falling for all the girls as he goes along, until he sobers up at forty and finds his affinity in the Boss's secretary. NO date has yet been fixed for David Niven's arrival on the floor. It happens, or so we suppose, in His Majesty's good time. We have it hard, though, from Leslie's sister and business manager, Irene Howard, that "The First of the Few" will be Niven's first ex-army date. No one has anything hard from Leslie himself. He is as vague and disarming as Niven: an infuriating and irresistible pair. Old friends in Hollywood, they carry on their absurdly off-hand association here. When they confer on the telephone, they address each other as Slingsby and Trubshaw, wholly imaginary characters. No one yet has been able to discover, and we fancy both Leslie and David have forgotten the primeval origins of Trubshaw and Slingsby. In passing we would note that it's funny the way Leslie Howard creeps into this story, which didn't set out to be about him at all. Actually, though we should hate to make an issue of it, Leslie Howard is just about the most significant film figure in England at this moment. That vague, retiring, forty-plus-something star, with his tired old clothes and horn-rimmed spectacles, can be found at the end of every avenue, behind every significant movement in this country. We suppose he has vision or something. Certainly he has loyal friends and valuable connections. What is more important to us, he has integrity. We have known Leslie for fifteen years, and in all that time we have never heard anyone, anyone for whom we had the slightest respect, criticize him adversely. Vivien and Larry thought his film, "Pimpernel Smith," the best they had ever seen. David Niven prefers to work for him. Young Richard Greene, our fourth quarry, turns out to have been an old friend of Leslie's in Hollywood. He can't keep him out of the conversation. When the army swallowed up Trooper Greene a year ago, only Leslie Howard could have told the film world where he was. But Leslie didn't. We got Richard Greene's own story in a dressing-room at Denham, where he is spending his first army leave making a Fleet Street-Dunkirk film for Columbia release, called "Unpublished Story." Richard Greene, 2nd-Lieutenant Greene of the Royal Armoured Corps — which means Tanks — is a young man to whom, if we were a man and had one, we should solemnly remove our hat. The baby of our homing film stars, with most of his friends and what looked like all his future career in Hollywood, he almost certainly feels the break in his life more than the others. He hadn't David Niven's traditional army background to pull him home. He hasn't the Oliviers' green-room circle, their stage detachment from screen affairs, their unbroken threads of interest just waiting to be picked up again, war or no war. Richard Greene was only nineteen when he left England to go to 20th Century-Fox and "Four Men and a Prayer." He had never made a film. The most noteworthy thing he had done in his own country was to model for a popular advertisement of hair-cream. The posters still haunt him, a little fly-blown now, prewar and incredibly young. He looks at them with malice. His imitation of a smiling youth pouring cream on his hair is vicious, a joy to behold. He hates the stuff, he says bitterly, would like to put it on record that he never used it. Richard Greene was very happy in Hollywood, and it meant a big decision for him to throw it all up and come home and join the Army. He slipped out of Hollywood, he says, with only two people knowing where he had gone. (One, which argues hard sense, we feel, was a member of the publicity department. The other was not specified, and we were far too tactful to ask.) He ducked the English ship-news reporters and vanished, just vanished into thin air. An aunt in Kensington ("No one has more aunts than me," says Richard proudly) blocked a blind trail. That was September, 1940, . and since then, until two weeks ago, he has simply played the Invisible Man. Here is Richard's own story. I GOT back to England on September 6th," he says diffidently and adds, "Stop me if I'm being boring. I saw my first blitz over Liverpool from the deck of a ship. It was my first sight of England under war conditions, and I felt I was watching it all through a plate-glass window. We were twelve miles away, and it didn't seem real at all. I watched it all night, and in the morning I went ashore. We had seven alerts in Liverpool that day and several genuine raids. It was just the beginning of the blitz, and everything was chaos and confusion, nothing was sorted out properly yet. It was my first experience, not exactly of panic, for there wasn't any panic, but of emergency, of doing everything for yourself, standing on your own feet. . . . "I can tell you it was an absolutely new experience for anyone coming from Hollywood, where everything is done for you. You had to queue up for trains. You had to wheel your own barrow with your baggage — when you could find it. I don't believe I should ever have got my baggage through, but finally a porter recognized me and got my stuff into the station master's office. Our train was due out at 11:15 p.m., but just as dusk came on — that was my first experience of the black-out — the sirens sounded again, and I was herded down into a funny little shelter in the station cellars until 3 a.m., when the train left, four hours late. (Continued on page 64) 62 MODERN SCREEN