Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1940)

CLOSE UPS LONG SHOTS BY RUTH WATERBURY Typifying the spirit of Hollywood today — Bob Young's reaction to "Northwest Passage" . . . 9/OH; *"<* He„ HAPPY NEW YEAR, readers, from Photoplay and Hollywood . . . Photoplay will most certainly try, in each one of its next twelve issues, to give a glorious one to you . . . and if it accurately reflects the mood around Hollywood right now it simply must bring you happiness . . . for Hollywood is in a strange new mood these days, but one which should mean wonderful things for us mere ticket-buyers. . . . For Hollywood, like the rest of the world, all save pitiful Europe, is settling down from its war jitters . . . the hecklers outside the film colony always say that we inside it talk nothing but pictures . . . that's only half-true . . . movies are an absolutely international product and therefore what's going on in the rest of the world touches Hollywood in its sensitive, economic nerve . . . but even more important than that, the people who make pictures today come from every race and every locality . . . the transatlantic telephones were working constantly while Charles Boyer, Norma Shearer, Maureen O'Sullivan, Geraldine Fitzgerald, George Raft, and many others were over there . . . but behind these glittering people there are the scores of musicians, cameramen, technicians who are German or French or Italian or British-born and who have friends and relatives at the front to worry over. . . . The economic worries sobered Hollywood . . . then its heart was wrung by the plight of innocent millions of human beings . . . then it got concerned with its own labor troubles within the studios . . . but with the beginning of this new year the town that is supposed to be all nonsense has adjusted itself in a way that reflects the sober, shrewd brains that actually guide it . . . and suddenly, by its very ability to keep on being itself and producing its own products, you do realize that movies are truly creative and that Hollywood in its mood today is not unlike that of Fifteen Century Florence that, when wars were raging all about it, kept on calling up the beautiful visions which Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo painted for posterity. . . . Hollywood got its big stars, even Boyer, safely back ... it has, temporarily, at least, settled its labor troubles ... it is quietly learning how to make good pictures at a lesser cost . . . the best of the English producers have settled down here . . . Eric Pommer and Charles Laughton, Herbert Wilcox and Anna Neagle, Alexander Korda and the beautiful Merle Oberon, the very American Ben Goetz, who produced in London for M-G-M . . . they are all in town, working vividly, and the freshness of their point of view is bound to reflect itself in the pictures that will be produced in the next year. . . . rROWLING around Hollywood, I have never encountered more enthusiasm than I have in the last month . . . (and incidentally how one does prowl out here in wintertime . . . just as Hollywood does everything in reverse to the patterns everywhere else, it takes most of its vacations in the winter rather than in summer and getting around takes a rambling reporter from the snows of Arrowhead to the heat and charm of the desert where the verbena is blooming early this year, spreading its deep purple carpet out miles and miles over the yellow-white sand until it is engulfed in the eternally blue sky). . . . Henry Fonda simply bubbles over when he talks about the new flat lighting in "Grapes of Wrath" and John Ford's direction . . . Henry says it is all new and revolutionary ... no individual in any of the scenes is focused upon, leaving all the rest of the cast in darkness . . . (like those scenes in "The Women" where Norma Shearer has so much light on her face and everyone else is so blacked out that around town they said the billing on the picture ought to be "Norma Shearer and her Ethiopians") . . . the lighting in "Grapes" makes everyone in all the scenes look exactly as they do in real life. . . . You run into Robert Young, playing the role Bob Taylor turned down in "Northwest Passage" and he is glowing with excitement over that opus . . . Bob says the picture stops where many readers believe the book itself should have stopped . . . right here in America . . . but that he thinks it is going to be one of the finest things ever screened ... "I hear you're terrific," I say . . . "Don't you believe it," says Bob, "I've seen myself . . . but wait till you see Tracy". . . .