Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1940)

We Cover the Studios (Continued from page 39) with Joel McCrea in "He Married His Wife," a divorce farce, then Sonja Henie, switching from skates to skis in "Everything Happens at Night." She's wearing a cute blue ski suit and cap the day we find her on the golf course of Fox Hills. Ray Milland and Robert Cummings, on loan from Paramount and Universal, woo Sonja in this little mystery comedy. They're supposed to be rival reporters trying to solve the disappearance of a famous journalist. Sonja, really their quarry's daughter, poses as a nurse and kids them along romantically. The scene we see, shows her gliding down over the shaved ice snow and crashing into Ray and Bob — her introduction to the pair. They have to film it fast. The sun is turning the synthetic snow into slop. Sonja shoots down, doing daring Christianas with the greatest of ease. She rockets right in between Bob and Ray, tripping them neatly. She does it over again and again. Pretty soon there's not enough "snow" left to give her a ride and Director Irving Cummings says he thinks he has an okay print. Sonja is fresh as a daisy. As for Bob and Ray, they're stretched out on the side lines, gasping. "Now I know how a tenpin feels," says Bob, "when a bowling ball comes along." WARNER BROTHERS' movie males seem to be getting a little better break the day we look in on the Burbank bad men, although on the first set we visit, "Invisible Stripes," George Raft takes the count. George has clicked like a turnstile at Warners, since he parted from Paramount. "Invisible Stripes," a story of a paroled convict's fight to stay straight, is his first solo starrer. It's another Warden Lawes' Sing Sing case history, with Bill ("Golden Boy") Holden and Humphrey Bogart providing the tough-guy opposition, and Jane Bryan, the woman's touch. On the set of "The Fighting 69th," we find Warners' other tough guy, James Cagney, in the doghouse, although strictly for dramatic purposes. For the first time in his long and stormy career, Jimmy plays a craven coward. What's more, he's liking it, and so are George Brent, Pat O'Brien, Jeffrey Lynn, Bill Lundigan, Frank McHugh, Alan Hale and a few thousand male extras. It's a man's picture — the World War saga of Father Duffy's famous New York regiment. And there's not a woman in it, except a few French girl extras. William Keighley directs the whole outfit. Pat O'Brien is in his glory playing one of his real life heroes, Father Duffy. Two other actual characters come to life via George Brent and Jeffrey Lynn — Major "Guild Bill" Donovan, and Joyce Kilmer, the poet. The entire 69th regiment was Irish — yep, even the coward that Jimmy plays — but he gets brave at the end. So, when Keighley lines up for a crowded extra shot of the entraining soldiers and is about to order a take, he suddenly cries, "Hold it!" and points to an extra in the front camera line. "Will you," Bill requests, "step around in back?" The extra obeys. "I wonder what I did?" he wonders. The answer is — nothing. But we know why he was moved out of the front line. All the soldiers in the 69th, as we said, were Irish, and this extra is almost a double for Sammy Cohen, the Jewish comedian. Meanwhile, "Brother Rat and a Baby" is keeping the younger generation at Warners out of mischief. The studio we head for now is RKORadio where Kay Kyser and his College of Musical Knowledge are educating the natives in a loud way. "That's Right, You're Wrong," titled after Kay's famous radio catch phrase, brings the good professor, Ish Kabibble, Ginny Simms, and all his gang before the camera for the first time, with Adolphe Menjou, Lucille Ball and Dennis O'Keefe showing them the movie ropes. I HE main idea is hilarity in Hollywood. Kay's a band leader who gets a break in Hollywood. But he's such a lousy actor he can't make a picture! The band conspires to fix all that. The set we visit is in front of the magnificent mansion of Jay Paley, an RKO tycoon. Kay's supposed to have rented it, swimming pool and all. His scene is to trot down the front steps and address his band airily, thus: "How come everybody's not swimming in the itty bitty poo?" At least a dozen times he comes down the steps repeating the "itty bitty poo" line a dozen different ways with as many grimaces. He looks very silly. But not quite as silly as when Ish Kabibble, the dead pan, says "Thanks, Kay, for the pictures." The maestro whirls. Ish Kabibble holds up his own little movie camera and pats it lovingly. He's caught every one of Kay's absurd practice emotings! Two screwy Hollywood playwrights, called Village and Cooke, figure in the plot of the Kyser insanity, a take-off on Towne and Baker, RKO's vociferous Hollywood plot scribblers, whose first independent production, "The Swiss Family Robinson," is just starting with Thomas Mitchell, Edna Best, Freddie Bartholomew, Tim Holt and Terry Kilburn as the desert island family. Carole Lombard's nurse movie, "Vigil in the Night," looks like a good bet, too, at RKO. It's the story of a nurse who loves nursing and her sister, Anne Shirley, who doesn't. When Anne gets in a messy accident, Carole takes the blame. The picture shows her fighting her way back again from disgrace and helping a disillusioned surgeon, Brian Aherne. As we enter the hospital set, Carole and director Stevens are trying to get a bunch of kids to act like suffering patients. All they do is giggle. i AR AMOUNT is practically on relief this month, with just one picture going. Dorothy Lamour is still seductive but not sarongy in another of those South Sea things, "The Road to Singapore." It's much ado about playboys Bob's and Bing's attempts to dodge matrimony in the South Seas, surrounded by beautiful cocoa-butter babes. We are a steady Bing Crosby fan and Bob Hope pleases us, too. But if you've ever listened to Bing croaking through the lazy first singing of a new song, you're bound to be slightly disillusioned. He smokes a pipe at the same time which makes it worse. Dottie Lamour is out with Bob Preston today and — all in all — "The Road to Singapore" leads us right over to Columbia and Rosalind Russell, Cary Grant and Ralph Bellamy in "His Girl Friday." We might as well tell you right now that this is the old newspaper play, "The Front Page," with sexes switched. If you remember "The Front Page," you'll know that Hildy Johnson was a departing ace reporter whose managing editor tricked him into one more exciting assignment. This time Hildy's a girl, an ace female newshawk, divorced from Editor Cary Grant and about to marry dumb-bunny Ralph Bellamy. Roz, as Hildy, just drops up to tell Cary to leave her alone when the story breaks and from then on it's "The Front Page," woman's edition, with murder, politics and everything. As we watch, the gang is razzing Roz Russell for her hat. "Why don't you take that thing off," Cary suggests, "and plant a geranium in it?" "This is a very nice hat," she retorts coolly. "It will do a lot for the picture." "S-h-h-h-h-h!" shushes the sound man. "I'm trying to work this out." They ask him what and he says he is trying to work up a certain sound effect before they can shoot the next scene. Everyone moves over to watch his contraptions when suddenly he cries, "That's it! Who did that?" "I'm sorry," apologizes Roz. "My hat hit the mike." "Do it again," the sound man says. "Yep — that's just what I've been looking for." Rosalind eyes Cary and gloats. "I told you that hat would do a lot for the picture!" At Rosalind Russell's home studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, her old playmate of "Night Must Fall," Robert Montgomery, has talked the studio into another try at tragedy, we find. Nobody but Bob himself knows how hard he has fought to get away from playboy comedy. "The Earl of Chicago" is a big step in the battle. It's the story of a former Windy City gangster who, by a freak of fate, inherits an estate in England, a seat in the House of Lords. Bob is on a prison set when we see him, fixing things up for a few of his screen gangster pals. "This is the very same set," Bob informs us, "where I got my start in Hollywood. We made 'The Big House' right here. I hope," he adds, "it isn't where I finish." He's joking, of course, but a picture and a part like this are always a gamble. M-G-M swings into full stride soon with the next Joan Crawford picture, "Not Too Narrow, Not Too Deep" and the reunion of Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald in "New Moon," based on that tuneful old Broadway hit. Ernst Lubitsch, having successfully brought Garbo back with a bang in "Ninotchka," will have the same job next with Margaret Sullavan in "The Shop Around the Corner." Meanwhile, two possible new movie series are getting their start at Culver City — "Nick Carter, Master Detective," and the first screen adventure of Damon Runyon's average Americans, "Joe and Ethel Turp Call on the President." M-G-M had to buy the rights to twelve hundred lurid Nick Carter dime novels, published over the past fifty years to launch the former. There wasn't a story in the lot they could use, so they've cooked up a modern mystery yarn involving super airplanes and international spies for Walter Pidgeon to make his detective debut. If the first one clicks, there'll be plenty more. The same goes for Ethel and Joe Turp, or Ann Sothern and Bill Gargan, whom we see calling on the president, Lewis Stone, in a very elegant White House office set, which M-G-M has taken pains to make look as different as possible from President Roosevelt's. Unlike most Washington movies, too, there's no attempt to make Lewis Stone look like the real president. Joe and Ethel are calling on the president, we learn, because Walter Brennan, a tender-hearted old postman, has just been fired for destroying a registered letter. They know he did it to spare the feelings of an old lady who thinks her son is a great success, when he's really a jailbird. So they're here to tell his boss. Director Robert Sinclair orders "Places!" and Ann, dolled up within an inch of her life, plumps down in a White House office chair. Lewis Stone takes his place behind his desk. Bill Gargan stands by Ann. "I used to imagine myself in a lot of places," Ann remarks, "but I never thought I'd be sitting on a chair in the president's office." Lewis Stone smiles, "My dear," he replies, "you have nothing on me!" Director Sinclair, who has been listening, says, "That's great! Say those lines again. We'll use them!" Ann looks surprised, but Lewis Stone smiles. "That's Hollywood for you," he says. "You can't even give birth to a thought, without getting it in pictures." MOVING over to the Hollywood radio studios, we find the picture star parade swelling every week, though new faces are making hits and old favorites are falling by the wayside. Nelson Eddy is through with Chase and Sanborn for keeps after November. David Niven, the most popular male radio-screen star of the year, has gone to war. And Tony Martin has served notice to his sponsors that unless "Tuneup Time" stays permanently in Hollywood, he's ditching radio for pictures and home life with Alice Faye. Of the new faces, Dennis Day, Mary Livingstone's Irish tenor discovery for the Jack Benny singing spot Kenny Baker deserted, leads the list. He's a solid hit on the air and the movies are after him. Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce are laying off pictures until they make "Sherlock Holmes" a sure thing. The Screen Guild-Gulf show is expanding Radio Row to include Earl Carroll's famous nitery, where programs draw the greatest galaxy of stars in Hollywood, complete with footprints in the sidewalks, a la Grauman's Chinese. There's a waiting list of stars for both performers and ushers, and a fortune is coming right out of the air to assure the Screen Guild sanitarium and home. $220,000 came in last year. $390,000 comes in this year, and half-million is all the Guild needs to get going. Other gossip gags and Hollywood radio goings on: The whole aircast of "Tuneup Time"— Tony Martin, Kostelanetz and Kay Thompson — are set for a movie at Columbia, "Music in My Heart" . . . Career note — Kenny Baker's two thousand a week on the Texaco show isn't making him happy; he thinks only four minutes on the air is killing his career . . . Ginger Rogers is balking at reading commercials . . . Mary Livingstone won't be in Paramount's "Buck Benny Rides Again." . . . Herbert Marshall serves tea to his Woodbury Playhouse guests. . . The Edgar Bergen-Kay St. Germaine romance is on again and hotter than ever . . . Robert Preston and Randy Scott take turns beauing Dottie Lamour to her Chase and Sanborn broadcasts. . . Jackie Cooper hangs around rehearsals for Judy Garland. . . Bob Hope's new adopted daughter, Linda, is making him hate evening rehearsals. . . . 76 PHOTOPLAY