Motion Picture Herald (Mar-Apr 1945)

MOTION PICTURE HERALD COLVIN BROWN, Publisher MARTIN QUIGLEY President and Editor-in-Chief TERRY RAMSAYE, Editor Vol. 159, No. 4 April 28, 1945 FIRST TRUMAN LOAN r M THE war loan call sounds again. It is the J Seventh. It is "general quarters" and to action for the motion picture industry and its showmen, from Broadway to the most remote hamlet. This must go on until the buglers sound retreat at the first guard mount ceremony at the headquarters of occupation in Tokyo — and perhaps after that, too, for the stupendous costs of war will run over into the peace. A new commander-in-chief sits at the desk of high strategy in Washington. His post imposes upon him the problems of a world bitter in anguish, struggle and destruction, on top of the problems within the boundaries of the nation of which he is the chief executive. No man has faced a graver or greater task then has fallen to Harry S. Truman. CThis week's Seventh War Loan Drive cover, with President Truman, General Eisenhower, General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz, states the assignment : Theirs to fight — Ours to sell, for Victory. No President, not even George Washington, has come to office with the nation so united in support and sympathy as this plain sober man from Missouri. That can find expression now. The Seventh War Loan is President Truman's first war loan. #1 Each day that the war can be shortened can *■ save as many as two thousand casualties. The lists are not issued that way but if they could be so presented it would take a solid page of a big newspaper to print the names, in little six-point type, of the Americans killed and wounded from dawn to dawn every bloody day. The type you are reading is ten-point. The total American casualties of this war now total just about a million, a million killed, wounded, or missing. So far, in War Department statistics, the foot soldier missing in action has just one chance in a hundred of proving to be lucky enough to be alive and a prisoner. The war is fought with men, munitions — money. War bonds supply the money that speeds Victory, saves Men. ■ ■ ■ ft The War Department is still trying to find out what J makes a homing pigeon go home. An official release, 25-19223-240, relates an experiment which possibly may indicate that radio waves have an effect on the flight of the Signal Corps birds. In three tests with different groups of ten birds each, flights were released from a radio station ten miles from the pigeon loft. In each test five were sent off while the station was silent, and all reached their roosts in fifteen to twenty minutes. Then the remaining five loft mates were sent away while the station was transmitting. The late birds flew about the station in confusion and were long in taking their course. They were forty-two to fifty minutes getting home. The Signal Corps has no theories, but it does have questions. Maybe that crowded radio spectrum, where the broadcasters and television experimenters compete for space, will now have to allow "a pigeon band". BIN FILM AT SAN FRANCISCO ^HHE motion picture is at the United Nations Conference | for World Organization in San Francisco. It is the first impingement of the international art of the screen upon international affairs in designed approach and participation. If the showings to be made there follow the patterns indicated, there will be entire separation, even to theatres, of motion pictures of entertainment and pictures of purpose, propaganda and message. That is appropriate. It is to be observed, incidentally, that none of the showings is in a direct official sense part of the proceedings, but may well be that in effect. The procedure, entirely apart from its intrinsic contribution, is signal recognition of the place of the motion picture in the world of today and in the world of tomorrow which this conclave of statesmen, emissaries and conferees is trying to plan. The motion picture has these many years won and held its place of importance in the hearts of the people, the millions, of all lands. It has now come to the making of its place in the minds of their leaders and governments. ■ ■ I AN INDICATION of how things are tending in France is had in a cable which announces that the government has \named a new general manager of France-Presse, the principal news source of the papers over there. It is said to be in the budget for a yearly subsidy of 200,000,000 francs. That does not by our standards suggest a free press, or promise a free field for other media, such as the motion picture. Consider what would be implied here by a similar procedure with reference to the Associated Press! Anyway, when France did have a free press it made trivial, and commonly entirely political, use of its freedom. ■ ■ MAD with the intoxicating exuberance of spring, the daffodils are dancing, row on row and drift on drift in their kirtles of gold like a happily frantic chorus that has outrun both stage and music escaping with their make-believe, merrily to taunt our world of glum reality. If they be true, a lot of else around us is a lie. So blithely young and gaily fair they seem utterly of today. Still, one remembers that they came over years ago, with centuries of culture behind them, from polders in Holland now drowned in floods of salt sea and hate, from fields in Belgium now covered deep in battle ruin, from gardens in Britain now torn and tossed by the berserk terrors of the rocket bombs. In this peaceful Yankee valley of the Silvermine these gifted refugees have taken root and, flourishing, are giving to and enriching their environment. One could make an allegory out of that, but it is just an editor's garden. — Terry Ramsaye