Cowboy from Brooklyn (Warner Bros.) (1938)

PUBLICITY. u Mat 202—30c IT'S A RIP-ROARIN' ROMANCE when ‘“Dead-Eye" Dick Powell meets “Prairie Pip’ Priscilla Lane in the musical laugh round-up, “Cowboy from Brooklyn," scheduled to open at the Strand Theatre next Friday. 4 (Lead ) ‘Cowboy fro m Brooklyn’ Mixes Melody With Mi rth “Cowboy from Brooklyn,’ with Dick Powell, Pat O’Brien and Priscilla Lane in the leading roles has been booked for the next feature attraction starting Friday, announces the management of the Strand Theatre. It’s the story of hilarious adventures—and misadventures— of a Brooklyn crooner who goes West in order to make good in the East. Blended with the amusing story are charming melodic interludes in which Powell, Miss Lane and several other members of the large and talented cast sing the five new songs written for this production as well as some famous old-time cowboy ballads. Despite the fact that ‘‘Cowboy from Brooklyn” opens in a western locale, it is distinctly not a ‘‘western”’ picture. It is, in fact, the direct antitheses of all westerns, for it takes nothing seriously. At the outset, Powell is seen as an indigent musician from Brooklyn beating his way to the west coast with two pals. They Mat 102—15c “THREE-GUN" O'BRIEN — (Pat to you!) rides the range on a wave of laughs in "Cowboy from Brooklyn,” coming to the Strand Theatre. all get stranded at a Wyoming dude ranch. Daughter and son of the owners of the ranch are Miss Lane and Johnnie “Scat” Davis. There the three musicians get jobs entertaining the guests. A Broadway theatrical. producer, played by Pat O’Brien, comes to the ranch, thinks he has discovered in Powell a ‘“‘natural’’ cowboy crooner and rushes him back East, where he wins huge success as a he-man from the wide-open spaces. His deep, dark secret, however, is that he’s scared to death of a horse. When Powell has become famous on the radio as “Wyoming Steve Gibson,”” Dick Foran, playing an authentic cowboy with aspirations as a singer, proclaims that “Gibson” is a fake. Foran is motivated by jealousy over Powell’s success and over Priscilla’s obvious preference for the easterner. To convince the public that Powell is a genuine cowboy, O'Brien arranges for him _ to ride a bronco and bulldog a steer at a rodeo at Madison Square Garden. That begins a series of delirious complications which are climaxed—and it would be cheating to tell here how it was managed—with Powell doing precisely what he was advertised to do, O’Brien becoming a candidate for another rest cure, and Priscilla getting her man. Headed by Johnnie Davis, Dick Foran, Ann Sheridan and Ronald Reagan, is one of the largest supporting casts of featured players ever to appear in a Warner Bros. picture. The screen play was written by Earl Baldwin and was based on the stage play, “Howdy Stranger,"’ which was written by Robert Sloane and Louis Pelletier, Jr. At the directorial helm was Lloyd Bacon, Warners’ topnotch comedy director, whose last previous achievement was “A Slight Case of Murder.” NV HWS (Advance) Famous Song Team Penned Hit Tunes For Powell Movie One of the most famous song writing teams of all time was split when death claimed Dick Whiting during the filming of “Cowboy from Brooklyn,” the Warner Bros. musical farce coming to the Strand Theatre next Friday. The man who wrote the words . for Dick Whiting’s melodious tunes was Johnny Mercer, and this team of Whiting and Mercer was a rarity among song writing teams, for they insisted upon having a reason for each song they wrote. Given an assignment to write the music for a motion picture, they wrote and composed with but one thought in mind. Every song they wrote must advance the story of the picture. Under no circumstance would they consent to a song being dragged in by the heels just because there didn’t seem to be anything else to do at the moment. And that, undoubtedly, is why the majority of their songs became the tune hits of the country. Over a long period of years Whiting and Mercer were responsible individually, together or in collaboration with other writers for ‘““Too Marvelous for Words,’ ‘‘On the Good Ship Lollipop,”” ‘‘Mammy’s Little Coal Black Rose,” “‘Louise,"’ ‘‘Adorable,"’ ‘‘Goody, Goody,’ ‘Till We Meet Again,”” which holds the all time record for sheet music sales; ‘‘Ain’t We Got Fun," “Lazy Bones,’ “Japanese Sandman,” “‘Have You Got Any Castles, Baby,"’ ‘‘Old King Cole” and an _ overwhelming list of other hits. Since a large portion of the action in “Cowboy from Brooklyn’ takes place on a dude ranch, before they wrote their songs for the picture, Whiting and Mercer spent weeks on various dude ranches absorbing local color and watching dude ranchers in their native element. As a result they turned in “Ride, Tenderfoot, Ride,”’ ‘“‘Howdy, Stranger,” “I'll Dream Tonight,”” and “I've Got a Heartful of Music,” all of which advance the story and complete the job of transporting the audience from the theatre into the actual scenes of the story. STRICTLY A ‘COWGIRL’ Priscilla Lane startled diners at the Beverly Brown Derby one evening by pulling out a sack of makings and rolling a cigarette in true cowboy style and smoking it, what is more, with obvious enjoyment. She has Wayne Morris rolling his own too. Priscilla mastered the art of rolling her own several years ago, long before she had any idea that she would be a motion picture actress and would be called upon to portray a ranch girl, which is what she plays in her latest picture, ‘Cowboy from Brooklyn,’ opening next Friday at the Strand. (Advance) Two Dude Ranch Sets Built for Cowboy From Brooklyn Huge, spectacular sets are no novelty in Hollywood. But it was a novelty when an elaborate set was built in duplicate for “Cowboy from Brooklyn,’ Warner Bros. hilarious new musical comedy which opens next Friday at the Strand Theatre. Film history contains no record of a similar occurrence. The set in question was a colorful dude ranch. One set, the only complete working ranch in the industry, was constructed at the Warner Bros. ranch at Calabassas in the San Fernando Valley. The exact duplicate of this set was constructed on one of the immense sound stages, each of which covers more than an acre, at the Warner Bros. studio. Here, in complete detail, were the ranch-house, the bunkhouses, corn crib, barbecue pit shaded by a large oak tree, a corral and other features of the dude ranch. It was less expensive to build the two sets than to depend on the whims of California spring weather. When it was raining, or cloudy, or foggy at the exterior set, the company worked inside at the studio. A feature of the _ interior ranch set was a huge cyclorama, containing 75,000 feet of canvas, on which was painted a western panorama to serve as a background for the ranch yard. Interesting, too, was the barbecue pit where the ranch guests gathered in the evening. Another outstanding construction achievement for this picture was the huge set representing the interior of Madison Square Garden in New York York City, on which the rodeo sequences were filmed. Here several thousand extras watched world champion cowboys perform on the huge arena—and also watched Powell, who plays a Brooklyn boy who is afraid of all animals, attempt to prove himself a legitimate cowboy from Wyoming. In contrast to these sets were those representing the expensively ornate New York hotel apartment of Powell, the completely equipped interior of a broadcasting station and _ the concourse of Grand Central Station in New York. Mat 101—15c "FARO" FORAN — otherwise known as Dick, is a croonin’ broncho-buster in "Cowboy from Brooklyn,’ which comes to the Strand Theatre. xX & Se Ge Gh NNN ae NNN pee NNN ee NNN NNN SN NNN NNN ee NN ee NS ee NN re AN NN SN NON NNN NNN NNN NNN NN NN NNN NNN TNS NNN NN Na