Motion Picture Herald (Mar-Apr 1945)

MOTION PICTURE HERALD COLVIN BROWN, Publisher MARTIN QUIGLEY President and Editor-in-Chief TERRY RAMSAYE, Editor Vol. 158, No. 9 OP March 3, 1945 wards to Showmen THROUGH a war year of great and continuous distractions the zeal of the showmanship which delivers production upon the theatre screen continues in hearty spirit and high efficiency. This was given official exposition at the annual judging in the finals of the Herald's Round Table competition for the Quigley Awards, announced this week. It was the expressed opinion of the array of industry leaders and authorities gathered at the Hotel Astor function that the quality of performances of the theatre showmen stood at a high level and represented progress beyond the high achievements in the promotions entered in the years before. This is the more significant in the face of a prevalent box office condition of well near automatic prosperity created by war swollen purses among the customers for screen entertainment. The great list of able campaigns put before the judges represented earnest effort put forth, not under the sharp drive of business necessity but in a pride of skill and an enthusiasm for the job. A speech by Mr. G. S. Eyssell of New York's Music Hall put interesting emphasis on his view of the institutional responsibility of the theatre to the community. "Ballyhoo of the carnival type", he pointed up, was of a migrating organization which did not have to stay in town and meet the consequences. There was, to be sure, a positive aspect of the speaker's approach, however, and a twinkle in his eyes when he mentioned that the exploitation of the Music Hall's precision dancers and a discreetly gala appearance in Paris had managed, as a promotional device, to get the theatre a bit of attention and pieces in the papers. His counsel was for the touch of artful discretion. + + + + + + RED CROSS 1945 The authors of the campaigns, spread across the broad expanse of the ballroom judging field, could well have been filled with a glow of pride at the animated comment and discussion of their works among the judges. Industrious showmen, scattered all across the big map of Round Table contributors, were having their day of attention at Distribution's capital at the hands of the ranking experts in the art. There was recognition, too, that the work of retail showmanship has been carried on through an endless demand on the manager's time for all manner of national and local causes of wartime significance. Many names of active showmen in the field beyond the list of award winners came in for attention. The working showmen of W HEN a year ago this March the motion picture industry addressed itself at a share in the drive for funds for the Red Cross, our armies were poised for the great Invasion — the storming of Fortress Europe and the surge of battle that finds us now in the most desperate campaigns of the war, at last on German soil. The cost in blood and suffering runs higher, higher. For a chill, hard, unemotional statement, which tells more of the desperate story than any report of battle can give, consider this excerpt from a current news dispatch from Washington on the manpower situation: The Selective Service announcement said that, In the face of Increasing requirements by the armed forces for combat replacements, the supply of physically fit men in the age group of 18 through 2ft was practically exhausted and that the supply of men of 26 through 29 was extremely limited. That phrase, "for combat replacements", means new men to take the place of men fallen in battle, dead and wound shattered. When it is recorded that the supply of "fit men in the age group of 18 through 25" is practically exhausted, that tells the nation of the great price of the war in blood and ordeal. The words are statistical — the meaning heroism and tragedy. With that must come, too, realization that, while so many soldiers are fighting and dying across the battletorn miles of the vast fronts of Europe and the bloodstained beaches of the Pacific, there are those thousands upon thousands of non-combatant victims of the war, homeless and hungry, suffering just as soldiers suffer. Now again the motion picture, with its showmen and its theatres, is enlisted in the Red Cross cause with the drive which starts March 15 and runs the week, ending with March 21, under the national chairmanship for the industry of Mr. N. Peter Rathvon of RKO. "No matter what the fortunes of war may be," says Mr. Rathvon, "the iob of the Red Cross in 1945 will be vastly expanded. The splendid results of the 1944 collection must be topped by a substantial margin." Special cages in this issue detail methods and materials. the box office were there of record on paper for the judges to see. It is a good record. O F relevancy to the obligations of the Red Cross drive, are remarks in Mr. Winston Churchill's report to the Commons on Yalta: "I suppose that during these last three winter, months the human race all over the world have undergone more physical agony and misery than at any other period through which this planet has passed. ..." S' PEAKING of words, as we so often do, something ought to be done about "drastic". It is being run entirely ragged. Everything is drastic these days, from brown-out regulations to meat rationing. It comes from a simple Greek root pertaining to "to do". For more than a century it has been used almost entirely with reference to medicines, purgatives, especially calomel, which does plenty. Its current use with reference to film rationing by the WPB and the draft rulings carries much more implication than the naif writers really mean. So far we have been spared any announcement of a drastic production. — Terry Ramsaye + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +