Boy Meets Girl (Warner Bros.) (1938)

Advance PUBLICITY (Advance Feature) Cagney Got To Hollywood The Hard Way—Hoofing GOLF NOT SISSY CAME SAYS GALNE! Ca se ney-U James Cagney and Pat O’Brien, one of the most popular film teams of recent years, have been reunited and they will come to the screen of the Strand Theatre next Friday as the co-stars of “Boy Meets Girl,” the Warner Bros. film version of the comedy of the same name which was so big a hit on the stage. Most interest, aside from that bestowed upon the stars will probably be centered around the debut as an important player of Marie Wilson, the pretty, blonde Warner comedienne, chosen by popular acclaim for the role of the waitress who is the unwitting cause of the farcical complications upon which the two writers play ed by Jimmy and Pat capitalize. Ralph Bellamy, following his success in “The Awful feat Dick Foran. and.Frank MM. 3 Mat presi . .. he capitulated No longer will James Cagney call golfers sissies. The two-fisted star of many a melee has capitulated to the siren song of the green-sprinklers, punctuated as it is occasionally by the dull “plut” of the pellet as it drops into the cup. Cagney played his first game er golf the day after~he~-fmished work on his latest Warner Bros, picture, “Boy Meets Girl,” which opens next Friday at the Strand ‘Theatre. Frank McHugh, Lloyd cont the director, and Dick Mayberry, Bacon’s assistant, completed thé foursome with Jimmy. The three others, with whom he worked on “Boy Meets Girl,’ spent the weeks of production on the picture talking him into an attempt at the royal and ancient game. He finally agreed to try it once, if for no other reason than to silence them henceforward. Lakeside Country Club,. which is Drei = Aa A OA OU ee ee a Forty young men formed in a double line across a bare stage started to dance. One of them at least wasn’t watching the director. His eyes were oa the feet of his nearest neighbor and he was stepping exactly as the other man stepped. He had never danced before. Finally the instructor waved to the pianist and the music stopped. “The short fellow step out,” he said. “Rest of you try it again.” The short fellow stepped out. He was redheaded and he had a determined jaw. There were seven mouths at home to be fed “You'll do,” said the instructor, “what is your name?” “Cagney; said the dancer in his low voice, “James Cagney.” (who is soon to appear in “Boy Meets Girl” at the Strand Theatre.) That was the beginning of Jimmy Cagney’s stage work. A friend of his, knowing of the sudden necessity for Jimmy to work to earn moncy to help his family out of a tight place, had told the stocky Irish boy that chorus men were needed for the forthcoming musical show, “Pitter Patter” and together they had gone to the theatre to try out. It was his first theatrical job and he had won a place on bluff. He was nineteen years old. At fourteen Jimmy had got his first job as an’ office boy on the New York Sun. Because bundle wrapping at Wanamaker’s offered more money he left the newspaper work for a wrapping counter there. Then he became a custodian at the Webster Branch of the Public Library. It was a high sounding name for a job that is usually filled by an ordinary janitor. Cagney stayed by the library work for two years during which time he read as much as he swept and finally entered Columbia University. He could get along on near the Warner studio. When it was over, Jimmy agreed that it was not a sissy game and that he would really set about the business of learning how to play. He shot over a hundred his first time out, but sufficiently close to that number to encourage him to keep trying. Cagney, who likes walking and used to be a heavy batter in baseball, said golf seemed to combine the best features of both. @ Motion Pictures Are Your Best Entertainment @ a pair of daffy screen writers in “Boy Meets Girl,” Mat 212—30c TERPSICHOREAN exhibition that would put the old Greek Muse of Dancing to shame is put on in impromptu style by Jimmy Cagney and Pat O'Brien, the hilarious comedy com ing Friday to the Strand. Pipe the dainty toupee atop Pat's dome in this scene. the seventeen dollars a month the work paid him but when his father died and this mother needed financial help with his brothers and sisters, he knew it was time to leave college and really go to work. The dancing job lasted thirtytwo weeks and at the end of that time Jimmy could really dance and had been given a specialty act. From then on, it was up and down the land for five years, playing such out-lying places as Altoona, Reading, Easton, York, Allentown and others which he lists now as towns on the original “Cagney Circuit.” He was called for an audition for a new play to be called “Outside Looking In.” He put everything he had into those lines and the role was his. He knew in his heart that it would be because he had been “outside looking in” for so long. He meant the lines that he spoke. This was followed by “Women Go On Forever,’ “The Grand Street Follies,” (in which he once danced as cupid in purple tights and carrying a bow and arrow) and then in “Maggie the Magnificent” and “Penny Arcade.” Within a week after the last named show closed, Cagney was on his way to Hollywood again with a Warner Bros. contract in his inside coat pocket. As the wheels clicked over the rails they sank a refrain of the first magic words he had ever heard in the theatre: “The short fellow step out.” And HOW. WEDDING BELLS FOR MARIE WILSON Mat 107—15c “and lots of flowers’’ Marie Wilson, who told her friends that she might think seriously about marriage after she finished her role in “Boy Meets Girl,” the Warner Bros. comedy coming to the Strand Theatre, has set no date for her wedding to Nick Grinde, the director, but she has made some preliminary plans. “T want a big wedding,” she explains sweetly. “I want my friends to see how happy I am to be. “Tr’ll be a church wedding, I guess, with veils and bridesmaids and things, but I want to wear pink. I think I look better in pink. “And lots of flowers.” “At what church are you planning to have the ceremony?” she was asked. “Oh,” said Marie, “any church. Just so long as it’s close.” “Close to what?” “Close to home. So I won’t get my veil mussed and so my pink roses won’t fade on the way there from home.” “When will this be?” “Oh, not for a long time — weeks and weeks. I would like to make one or two more pictures first, if I have the chance. I'll let you know.” Mat 210—30c PAIR OF EX-HOOFERS — Jimmy Cagney and Pat O'Brien, both actually former chorus boys on the New York stage, break in on a dance set in a scene from "Boy Meets Girl’ to show the shapely dancer how the thing should be done. The Warner Bros. screenplay, adapted from the Sam and Bella Spewack play, comes Friday to the Strand Theatre for a week's engagement. (Advance Feature) NoSnon-W bite He O’Brien Wheezes While He Works By CARLISLE JONES Pat O’Brien claims he was once one of the best line dancers on Broadway. If so, he has slipped sadly since that day. He isn’t one of the best line dancers in Hollywood and he probably knows it. Pat had said he could dance in his original contract questionnaire. Armed with these facts or fancles, your correspondent was lured one afternoon not long ago, to the set of “Boy Meet Girl,” where Pat and his good friend Jimmy Cagney were learning a dance routine with a line of chorus boys for a scene in the picture, which opens next Friday at the Strand Theatre. Pat was out in front — way out. Much too far for the good of the appearance of the “line,” and trying manfully to get back in place while catching up with the step. He was grinning and perspiring, and occasionally he would step on his own feet. “Can’t get the old dogs to tracking again,” he wheezed during a moment’s recess. “Once I was good at this—good enough to earn a living by it, anyway. But I’ve lost the knack. Give me time. I’ll catch on again.” “Tt’s for comedy anyway,” explained Pat in defense of his dancing. “We're not supposed to be good.” The scene was finally filmed that same afternoon. Pat proved to be even a poorer dancer in front of the camera that he had been during rehearsal. Director Lloyd Bacon didn’t let that stop him. He ran the scene through three times and then indicated that he was satisfied. “What Honky-tonk did you dance in?” he asked O’Brien. “At the Met,” lied Pat glibly, “where you've never directed.” Just then Bacon spied a visitor to the set coming through the stage door and he ordered his players into place again. “We'll do it once more,” he said. “It’s a comedy scene,” he went on, “but it might be funnier if you guys could dance a little better. Let’s try it.” They were half through the scene before Pat saw the visitor. It was Hugh Herbert, there at the express invitation of Director Bacon, and grinning like an owl. Pat stopped short in his routine, and walked straight toward the camera. “If that camera has film in it, Ill apologize,” he said. “If its empty, (ll... .” But his threat went unheeded. Bacon, Herbert, Cagney and your correspondent were already on their way to the exit. @ Motion Pictures Are Your Best Entertainment @ Foran Is Back Home On The Range For two and one-half years the Warner Bros. studio employed Dick Foran as its cowboy star. The studio then stopped making westerns and Dick was informed that in the future he would be featured in topical films, which would afford wider opportunity for his dramatic talents than was possible in the restricted field of horse opera. So Dick put away his spurs. So then, after he was formally and officially no longer a cowboy, what happened to Dick? He was assigned to play a comedy cowboy with Dick Powell and rat O’Brien. in “Cowboy from Brooklyn.” And just ee he finished working in the Powell-O’Brien picture, he was assigned to satirize his own former vocation, being cast as the vain and rather dull cowboy film star in “Boy Meets Girl,” the Warner Bros. mat 1138—15c “Boots And Saddles’’ comedy about Hollywood which is coming soon to. the Strand Theatre, with James Cagney and Pat O’Brien in the star roles.