Motion Picture Herald (Jan-Feb 1945)

MOTION PICTURE HERALD COLVIN BROWN, Publisher MARTIN QUI G LEY President and Editor-in-Chief TERRY RAMSAYE, Edit^ Vol. 158, No. 6 February 10, 1945 1 RAW STOCK THE complexities of the map of motion picture operation, at home as well as abroad, multiply apace. While the picture in detail grows more complex it proceeds to clarify in the broader aspect — in the direction of more and more regulation, more controls. There obtains a growing inter-mixture, or else coincidence, of the pressures of war necessity, represented especially just now by the War Production Board, and the social and political forces operating on the economic structure principally through the Department of Justice. It is of particular interest that two representatives of the Department of Justice sat as observers at last week's imposing meeting of the Motion Picture Industry Advisory Committee with the War Production Board in Washington. In practical fact one may be wondering whether the Department of Justice was watching the motion picture industry, or maybe the WPB, or both. In view of the ultimate effect of the freezing of the industry in the status quo, from the WPB findings, a reasonable question might arise as to whether or not the industry was being pressured into an agreement which could be called "in restraint of trade." Something has to be restrained. That might put a pretty question before Mr. Wendell Berge of the Department of Justice. It might also raise a lot of other questions. It is, entertainingly enough, somewhat a part of the situation where the American industry operating abroad might have to be as well controlled in cooperations as though it were a cartel. We have been criticized at times for saying "the Government are". It sure are, and various, utterly plural. THERE is no avowed or even indicated connection between the regulative efforts of WPB under the law of wartime necessity and the regulative programs of the Department of Justice with reference to the trade practices of the industry. There are those who, however, point out that there can be relation without connection. It is inevitable that the restrictions of distribution imposed in the film rationing have a direct physical effect on the pattern of distribution — which of course means the pattern of service to which theatres with what. That is impact on trade practise right in the film can. There will be plenty of discussion of that, from now on. Inevitably the limitation of the number of prints in circulation by WPB tends to make the picture "play out" more slowly, reach the subsequent runs later. Coincidentally, the week's move of the Department of Justice in court action, filed In New York, aimed at sweeping away various categories of clearance would tend to make the product, whatever the number of prints, move faster, cover more screens, class by class, in less time. That might not be coordination, but it could be added up into such a picture. Anyway the firm hands of regulation, war demand on one side, industrial and economic legislation on the other, are coming closer together. FOR those of longer memory it is tq be recalled that there was once upon a time out in Madison in Wisconsin a famous oil litigation in which various companies were charged with conspiracy in restraint of trade. Their defense was that they had moved under the authorization and requirement of the National Recovery Administration — which is to say under the wings of the Blue Eagle — to make certain arrangements of efficiency for the commonweal. Anyway they got convicted of being utterly in conspiracy, so their arrangement was dissolved, forbidden, etc. It's a bit of the problem of the left hand and the right hand. The Government are. FORTUNES of WAR OOZING out from Paris in the melange of war minutiae comes word that one Robert Brasillach, accused of "intelligence with the enemy", has been tried, convicted and shot. Here are unhappy tidings about a young man of decided journalistic competence, to which we must add: of interesting service of the traditions of the screen. In 1938 his Histoire du Cinema, in which he collaborated with Maurice Bardeche, was published here in translation by Miss Iris Barry, curator of the Film Library of the Museum of Modern Art, and with a foreword by Mr. John E. Abbott, head of that institution. The Bardeche-Brasillach history of the screen was pro-French and pro-European with more valiance than verity, but the while remains an animated recording of many events and developments of interest to the student able to discriminate, with the assistance of the many footnotes by Miss Barry, calculated to impose some objectivity on the account. It is the best telling of the story of the films on the Continent yet presented. [The charge was thaf M. Brasillach wrote his way out of a Nazi prison camp in 1941 with an article for Je Suis Partout, pro-German weekly, and then became its editor. January 27 in Lyon, Charles Maurras, Royalist leader and mentor of M. Brasillach, also long editor of L' Action Francaise. was sentenced to life imprisonment, also for "intelligence with the enemy".] TALKING BOOKS TALKING Books, literature for the blind, recorded on special phonograph records and now available for a widened field of service to soldiers who have lost their eyes in battle, are, as few today know, a technological contribution out of this industry. They are recorded by a process invented and patented by the late Frank L. Dyer, once a famous name in the world of the motion picture. He gave the rights under his patent to the American Foundation for the Blind, some years ago. The Dyer process records in a microscopically fine groove, producing a long playing record, made audible by an electrical "reading machine" which looks like a portable phonograph. The records are thin, flexible and resistant to damage in transit. Mr. Dyer's invention was evolved years ago, after he had become a patent attorney in New York. That followed his service to Thomas A. Edison, as attorney in the days when the motion picture was invented, and later functioning as a figure in the Motion Picture Patents Company and with the once allpowerful General Film Company. His gift to the blind is a memorial to his wife, Isabelle Archer Dyer. — Terry Katnsaye