Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1938)

CLOSE UPS AND LONG SHOTS BY RUTH WATERBURY IN the month just passed, Hollywood production reached an all-time low ... in weeks where in previous years forty-five to fifty pictures would have been shooting, as few as twenty-seven were in the works ... in the "home offices," meanwhile, producers were shaking haggard heads over box-office statements . . . we, the public, were staying home in droves . . . and why not? . . . we can get every movie star of any importance whatsoever almost any night on our radios . . . free . . . and usually in good skits. . . . Until the last several months I have always chosen the movies I attended very carefully . . . like any other bargainer in entertainment, I tried only for the best . . . but recently I have been literally going to every picture shown . . . and I have been appalled, not so much by the poorness of the pictures shown, but by their total lack of understanding of you and me and what we want to amuse us. . . . Two things have stood out most . . . the nutsy comedy cycle and the musical comedy in which acts popped up without any more relationship to each other or the plot than so many empty beer bottles . . . now the "vaudeville" type of musical movie is a good enough sort of entertainment . . . and so, too, is the nutsy comedy . . . only we want other things by way of contrast . . . other dramas . . . some tears . . . some conflict ... not this persistent abandonment of all common sense. . . . IE have many causes for complaint . . . but we are not complaining ... we are indulging in actions that speak louder than any words . . . we are staying home. . . . For example . . . Metro announced that it was making no more "B" pictures . . . which, in effect, means Metro hates the double bill . . . and by putting out pictures that run for two hours it would have an effective weapon against the second or "B" picture in the average theater. . . . All very well and good if Metro will put out pictures in which the drama holds our interest for two hours . . . "Test Pilot" is a swell, exciting picture but two hours of it, in my opinion, is too long . . . "The Girl of the Golden West" would have been a fifty percent better production if it had been cut off a reel or so ... do away with "B's" . . . that's fine . . . but don't do it by making A into B pictures. . . . MODERN life is packed with drama ... we have war and conquest in Europe . . . we have strikes and labor troubles at home ... all over the world we see men haggard with unemployment and women wondering if they dare give birth to the babies that are already on the way . . . we have kids getting out of school not knowing what kind of a job, if any, they can find for all of their fine diplomas that prove they majored in this or that . . . and Hollywood isn't reflecting one bit of that. . . . Don't misunderstand ... I am neither for films getting highbrow or deadly serious ... I still want entertainment and amusement when I go to the theater and I believe you do, too . . . but I want something that relates to me and my problems . . . you and yours. . . . Virginia Bruce in "The First Hundred Years" is a successful businesswoman married to a . . . perhaps because of the same alarming situation that is making many people stay away from the movies today — and which Miss Waterbury discusses here less successful businessman ... a situation that faces many thousands of American women today . . . that plot could have been made an interesting theme . . . but, in the movie, they solved it by having her go back to her husband . . . because — and get this — her lawyer finds out through Virginia's trying to get a new insurance policy that Virginia is going to have a baby . . . that's their portrait of a 1938 businesswoman for you . . . having to have her lawyer discover by such an involved route that she was going to be a mother. . . . Kay Francis in "Women Are Like That" takes over her husband's business when he takes to drink and succeeds at it magnificently . . . she is about to be married to another man when her husband comes back ... so, while the fiance sleeps off a cold, she succumbs once more to her husband's charms ... all of which is supposed to be mighty funny. . . . NOW, all right . . . maybe all businesswomen are jokes ... I don't really believe it, but I'll argue that way for the sake of getting my point over right now . . . but those two pictures started out seriously . . . Virginia and Kay were presented to you as heroines . . . that is, somebody to admire, with tough problems on their hands . . . and both pictures end up by showing you what saps both those women were. . . . Think of the women who are facing the prob