Motion Picture Herald (Jul-Aug 1944)

MOTION PICTURE HERALD COLVIN BROWN. Publisher MARTIN QUIGLEY President and Editor-in-Chief TERRY RAMSAYE, Editor Vol. 156, No. 6 QP August 5, 1944 THE DAY of VICTORY THEATRES in many centers are likely to be faced with a swiftly breaking problem on that day, be it soon or far, when the armistice and victory in Europe shall be announced. The humor of the customers and the street crowds will control. There will be, one might suppose, dancing in the streets and general carnival hell to pay in the metropolitan centers. Few, one would fancy, would be of the mood to sit and consider pastime pictures, with the best news in the world boiling in their heads. The forehanded, aggressive little Stanley theatre in New York, just off Times Square, some weeks ago announced it would open the doors and close the box office. That might prove a dangerously venturesome experiment. It will be a time to batten down the hatches. long in pretense and emulation. That has happened. Also, in sequel, it has become necessary to rate picture budgets in the millions to be even respectable in Hollywood. The exhibitor, as reported in this journal, reflecting the reaction of his audiences, is beginning to have adverse feeling about these long, long pictures, so often demanding high percentage rentals and advanced admission prices, blanket fashion and regardless of local conditions. The assumption embodied here is that the exhibitor does not know his business or how to get revenues out of his box office. It may be pointed out about now that the theatre has a year-around problem and policy, week by week, into which the extraordinary production, no matter if it is terrific, must be fitted. A picture can hit and run. The theatre cannot run. LONG PICTURES SOME publicity writer doing copy for "Since You Went Away" has set forth in behalf of Mr. David Selznick that it exemplifies his adoption for the screen of the novel form as typified by Charles Dickens. It is a method entailing the piling of detail upon detail. It was used with notable success by Mr. Sinclair Lewis in his "Main Street", many the year ago, and by Mr. Theodore Dreiser in novels which closely resembled collections of newspaper clippings. That sounds impressive, but printed words are not cinema, and their audiences are not movie audiences, even though they include many of the same persons. The approach under the library lamp and in the theatre is most decidedly different. Mr. Dickens was a space filler and a time killer. He wrote for serialization and in a day when there was an abundance of reading time. Also, the class which read Dickens represented a stratum of society which is today only a minor component of the box office audience. Possibly the current reference to Dickens takes its origin out of the fact that "David Copperfield" was a Selznick screen success. It was good movie, but it was not Dickens, by considerable distance. The principal value of the title, as a title, was in the tradition. It was a book that many persons thought they should have read. THE style and method of Mr. Dickens pertains to a period when a book was an important luxury and a symbol of culture. There were long evenings under the invitingly mellow light of the kerosene lamp. The reading went along with father's leisurely pipe and mother's crocheting. They dipped into a bowl of popcorn, nibbled at doughnuts and sipped cider. As recently as thirty years ago in this America, periodicals carried advertising from mailing list concerns: "Get a big mail. Send us your name and get lots of free reading matter. Free." That was most positively another day. Most of us now have much more to do and many more challenges to attention. The long, long pictures of today owe their origins more to the rivalries within the production community than to the requirements of the customers. When "Gone With the Wind" opened on Broadway, this editor ventured the opinion that it would, with its success, become a precedent which would inspire other endless attempts at endless epics, which would be made FOUR GULP PICTURE DOWN in Atlanta Mr. William K. Jenkins finds himself entertained and impressed by a new order of picture rating contrived by Mr. Ernest Rogers, onetime picture editor and now special columnist for The Atlanta Journal, and so a specimen is forwarded to The Herald. "A .'gulp' results when a picture has caught me up in its story," says Mr. Rogers, "has grabbed me with the power of its acting . . . wrung me with emotion. Under such circumstances I gulp." So he rates "Going My Way" as a "four gulp picture". If we are to have a new nomenclature of appreciative and critical response, permit this editor to observe that he recently saw a masterpiece of cinema which contained not only four or five gulps but also six gurgles and no end of genuine gripes. Gripes arrive every time the picture departs from the story in hand to deliver messages or to proclaim the glory of the production and producer. € Vacation Note — Up where the sea breaks around the Thimble Islands and time and sand and wave weave together endlessly in unchanging pattern of endless change. Little storm-beaten cedars, twisted in their stunted age, cling in crevices of the bald, ungiving rock. Two generations ago their prospering contemporaries on the mainland were cut and shipped to the pencil factory. These starved, struggling refugees survive by hunger and failure. Yet one day their seed, bird-borne, may reforest the shores from which they came. The germ stuff of giants is in them. C| Evening falls till grey of sky and slate of water merge and melt away that thin far line that was the horizon. Sea birds circle and cry over a reef. A bell-buoy tolls a dolorous warning over deserted waters. With creeping fingers the tide reaches with its tentative agressions up the harbor beach. At the advancing rim of the whimpering little surf bits of kelp are tossing, and tangled in it the trivial flotsam of a summer shore: an infant's sand shovel gay with paint, a cork from a magnum of Cliquot dropped overside from some gay yacht, the corroded shell of a compact case — whether debutante's or courtesan's, one wonders. The tide is forever, but it keeps no records. — Terry Ramsaye