Motion Picture Herald (Nov-Dec 1946)

SHOWMEN'S REVIEWS SHORT SUBJECTS COMPANY CHART ADVANCE SYNOPSES SERVICE DATA THE RELEASE CHART This department deals with new product from the point of view of the exhibitor who is to purvey it to his own public. Song of the South RKO Radio -Disney — Entertainment for Everybody It's important news of the art-industry this week that Walt Disney finally has whipped that problem of combining the cartoon film medium with the orthodox variety employing players, and has come up with a picture like nothing he or anyone else has supplied the entertainment screen. It's a story about a little boy who listens lar sense for a showman to start talking about to the tales about Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox, him in advance. told him by the all-wise Uncle Remus of im Perce Pearce js credited as associate producer perishable memory, and conducts himself accordingly, and the 30 per cent of it which is cartoon fits into the 70 per cent which is human performance as snugly as currency in a cash-drawer. Exploited in proportion to the delight it delivers, the picture promises to wind up in the blue chip class by the time the final returns are in. Considered strictly as a commercial property in the marquee sense, this is the first Disney picture a showman could exploit in terms of talent names negotiable at his box office. These include, this time, Ruth Warrick, Hattie McDaniel, Lucile Watson and Mary Field, and the result of this inclusion suggests further enterprise in this direction next time, for it simplifies the billing, job tremendously to have proper nouns instead of impoverished adjectives to work with. The Disney solutions of the problem of combining cartoon and straight movie turns out to be as simple as it is charming. He starts his picture with a length of quietly pleasant live action in which a little boy arrives at his grandmother's plantation and is turned loose to learn its ways under guidance of a pickaninny his own age. They have good experiences and bad, all in the normally childish category, and the wise Uncle Remus, general factotum around the place, supplies one of his meaningful tales about Brer Rabbit whenever the boy needs counsel. The tales themselves are told in the cartoon form, the rest of the story in the orthodox medium, with just about the right amount of transitional blending, and the operation is expertly managed. The effect of the whole is first to amuse and then to charm, and totally to stimulate the gentler emotions, which have taken such a beating from killer-mellers and psycho-chillers this past year or so. Wholesome is doubtless the word for the whole of it, but wholesome in the wider sense of being universal in appeal, with nary an age bracket or other fractional division of the population roped off from the general and genuine enjoyment. In addition to the players named above, there is special exploitation material in the presence of robust, genial, sensationally competent James Baskett, recruited from the Amos and Andy radio program to portray Uncle Remus. People who see the picture will be talking about him a long time afterward, wherefore it's dol MOTION PICTURE HERALD, NOVEMBER 2, 1946 of the picture, Harve Foster as director of the live actors and Wilfred Jackson on the cartoon side, and the screenplay is by Dalton Reymond, Morton Grant and Maurice Rapf, from a story by Reymond. Previewed at the Academy Award theatre to an all-press audience which loved it. Reviewer's Rating : Excellent. — William R. Weaver. Release date, November 20, 1946. Running time, 95 min. PCA No. 11580. General audience classification. Uncle Remus James Baskett Boy Bobby Driscoll Ruth Warrick. Hattie McDaniel, Mary Field, Lucile Watson, Glenn Leedy, George Nokes, Eric Wolf, Anita Brown, Gene Holland, Johnny Lee. The Strange Woman UA-Stromberg — "Emotional Red Meat" A singularly definitive program note in the printed credit sheet furnished press people at the Hollywood preview of this Hunt Stromberg production calls it "a thick slice of emotional red meat," and any showman proffering it to his customers as other than that can expect to hear from them. There is plenty of potent exploitation material for exhibitors who elect to go after it. There is Hedy Lamarr, as the sinningest sinner seen on the screen in recent years, and there are George Sanders, Louis Hayward and Gene Lockhart as the three gentlemen of slightly less sordid pattern with whom she carries on her sinister romancing. And there is the background fact that the film is from a book by Ben Ames Williams, who also did the similar but milder "Leave Her to Heaven." The present work was a Literary Guild selection in its day. Quite a lot to work with. The period is 1840 and the setting is Bangor, Maine, then a lawless community dominated by a lumber king (Lockhart) many years the senior of a drunkard's beautiful and scheming daughter (Miss Lamarr) whom he marries under pretense of saving her from a life of poverty and probable sin, all this sanctimoniously. The gal, whom the audience knows married the oldie to get at his money, tires of the deal •in a hurry and switches to his son, whom she persuades to bump off his dad so thay can be together. By the time he's done so, however, she's fallen for a big timber man (her girl friend's fiance) and so she gives the son a fast gate and proceeds to trap the woodsman. This turns out to require seducing him first, a feat accomplished handily on a dark and stormy night in the shadow of the dangling cadaver of the son, who has accommodatingly hanged himself after drinking and talking too much. She gets her man. She's got him, Bangor and most of New England in hand, and is going strong, when a fire-spitting evangelist inspires her to tell her present husband that she really did have the boy knock off her first one, and this upsets the current spouse enough so that he goes up country with his former fiancee to talk things over. He decides to stand for the whole deal, however, inclusive of the irrelevant and detailed disclosure that his wife can't give birth, but the witch doesn't know this, so she tries to run him and the girl down with her surrey and gets herself killed in the spill. If it all proves anything, it seems to be that the wages of sin is death, but it takes a lot of it. Jack Chertok produced the picture and Edgar Ulmer directed it, both trying to tell too much in too little footage. It is from a screenplay by Herb Meadow. Previewed at the Fox-Wilshire theatre, Los Angeles, to a mixed reaction. Reviewer's Rating : Yes and No. — W. R. W. Release date, October 25, 1946. Running time, 101 min. PCA No. 11659. Adult audience classification. Jenny Hager Hedy Lamarr John Evered George Sanders Ephraim Poster Louis Hayward Isiah Poster Gene Lockhart Hillary Brooke, Rhys Williams, June Storey, Moroni Olsen, Olive Blakney, Dennis Hoey, Alan Napier, Ian Keith Laughing Lady British National: Anglo-American — Romantical Zest Granted it's a cloak and dagger thing painstakingly compounded to accepted recipe, but here's a confection which the British showman will know precisely how to handle. It has Technicolor, some pleasant singing (choral and otherwise), lavish spectacle and— beyond all — shows true ycung love coming by its own. Simple Britons love the faithful recipe invariably. It is to be surmised that American showmen likewise will welcome the submission on appropriate booking terms. Director Paul Stein, abetted by scenarist Jack Whittingham and music-maker Hans May, chose the French Revolution and the contemporaneous junketings in nearby England as the background for their enterprise. They contrive to pack everything and everyone in to it ; not only the kitchen stove, but Napoleon, Robespierre, the younger Pitt, England's gay Prince of Wales of the day, not to speak of a remarkable galaxy of noble ladies and gentlemen mingled with gallant highwaymen and other raffish ruffians of the road. They tell their story — it doesn't matter very much, being concerned with a young French aristocrat who smuggles his way to Britain to recover the Royal jewels and thereby save his noble mamma from the guillotine — with song and dance. What does matter is the fact that the noble puppets sing, dance, act their way 3285