Motion Picture Herald (Mar-Apr 1945)

MOTION PICTURE HERALD COLV1N BROWN, Publisher MARTIN QU1G LEY President and Editor-in-Chief TERRY RAMSAY E, Editor Vol. 158, No. 12 OP March 24, 1945 THE CURFEW MORE merry hell than has been had in a twelvemonth comes out of the curfew, now that New York's volatile Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia has ameliorated Mr. James Byrnes' midnight order by adding "an hour of tolerance". The New York Sun, which never gives the Mayor any percentage, rises to remark in a Monday leader: "If one man by ukase can make a law, another by ukase can modify it. . . . Not only he can, but also jolly well has. And, to borrow a phrase from our facile Mr. Peter Burnup in London, he has assuredly "put the cat among the pigeons". Feathers are flying. The staid New York Times deplored and took at par "a stated desire to save coal, transportation and manpower in the fourth year of American participation in the greatest war in history. ... "If the Mayor can do this with one law, he can do it with any other law. . . . He is riding a very high horse, indeed." It is to be observed that Mr. LaGuardia has always traveled, on a high horse. That is the way he gets around. Also The Times is deciding that the Byrnes "request" is indeed a law. In an adjacent column Mr. Arthur Krock, commentator and reporter of high status, also, while disapproving, observed: "... New York's problem is in a sense unique among all the cities of the United States. . . . An attempt to force curfew compliance on the largest city in the nation might be harmful far beyond the local orbit." The air is filled with cries that the Mayor of New York is "playing politics". That would not be entirely unique either in his career or among the statesmen who rise to condemn. One is not to forget the while, too, that the Mayor has handed New York two meatless days a week, by ukase, too — supported by a promise to enforce it by indirection through such forces as the Health and Fire Departments. There is talk of enforcing the Federal curfew by the same sort of processes. The issue is not at all Mr. LaGuardia in his infinite versatility, but the problem of New York and its people, and the nation's problem, too, in rule by bureau orders or "requests". "Due process of law" is still supposed to obtain. WAR REPORTS WITHIN a week two striking "war shorts" of exceptional poignancy reporting from the very forefront of battle have come to the screen from combat cameramen through the services and War Activities Committee. One is from the German front, "The Enemy Strikes", Twentieth Century-Fox QWITH a blithe fanfare Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation this week moves into the celebration of its thirtieth anniversary — and most appropriately with accented attention to pictures^ current and coming. It stands on the yesterdays only to speak for today and tomorrow. The titles tell a story of design. Entertainment, emphatically entertainment, is the policy. In view of some confusions in cinemaland, in the war years, that singleness of purpose is to be noted. It is more marked than ever in the precisely mapped plans of the Skouras administration, and in the array of product to which Mr. Tom Connors points with pride. Clear it is that this precise address at box office performance has begun in the decisions of Mr. Joseph M. Schenck and Mr. Darryl Zanuck in the palm shaded studios in Westwood Hills. There is direct address to the function of this industry — the selling of seats to the customers. It is as simple, as direct, as that. distributed by Universal Pictures, and the other "Fury in the Pacific". By perhaps planned coincidence, these two topical records of the phantasmagorias of desperation and death by steel and flame arrive to tell us what the victories won and to be won have cost and will yet cost in blood and suffering. It is the same story from the storied Rhineland to the jungleclad isles on the road to Tokyo. "The Enemy Strikes" is bitter accounting of atrocities, in film that German soldier cameras made to take home for boasting, captured undeveloped when "the Bulge" was straightened out. It is the stuff of hate and measure of inhuman foes. The Army Pictorial Service produced it. "Fury in the Pacific", distributed by Warner Brothers, takes the spectator to the capture of the Japanese strongholds at Peleliu and Angaur by naval bombardment, plane bombing and amphibious charge upon the beaches, under hail of cannon dealing sudden death in an endless, relentless storm of fire. It gets close-up, too, so close men fall across the screen, so close you can all but hear the flamenwerfers fry the Japanese in their pillboxes and dugouts. It is terrible to see, as terrible as the war. Obviously in these days of Red Cross drives and War Loans the military authorities have decided to tell the people something about the war. "Fury in the Pacific" is, incidentally, the first joint pictorial effort of the Marines, the Army, the Navy and the Coast Guard, all with parts in "the show". It is a cooperative pattern which can improve the war report. The production was under the administration of Commander Bonney M. Powell, of one time fame with Pathe News and more recently with Movietone News. Among cameramen he is especially remembered for the scene he got, many a year ago, by pushing a portable camera through the steel geometry of the bore of a 14-inch naval rifle. Out in the Pacific the guns are too hot and too busy. "UNELECTED GOVERNMENT' MR. CECIL B. DE MILLE, whose notable stand against political coercion in that matter of the one dollar union assessment, which took him off the air a few weeks ago, made a speech in Omaha on that subject the other day. "Too many business men and labouring men alike have been Neros who fiddle while the liberty of their country burns," he said. There has been built up an unelected government which is superseding in power and authority the elected government." Mr. DeMille has only asked the personal right to decide his (Continued on following page, column 2)