Dust Be My Destiny (Warner Bros.) (1939)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

ADVANCE PUBLICITY —“DUST BE MY DESTINY” SSRN AT John Garfield and Priscilla Lane have a hitch-hiking honeymoon in the new Warner Bros. drama, “Dust Be My Destiny.” (Mat 202—30c) Good Laugh Actor's Best Asset—Says Director Laughter often is no laughing matter in the movies. Many otherwise promising film prospect laughs himself right into oblivion. And not because he guffaws at the wrong jokes. The sad truth, according to Lewis Seiler, one of Hollywood’s veteran directors, is that too few thespians really know hew to laugh. The can summon forced roars, synthetic cackles or strained chuckles but they can’t make them authentic expressions of emotions. Crying, on the contrary, is a simple problem. Some players ean do that easily, others can’t. For those who can’t, the prop men can supply tears in a jiffy, but they can’t supply laughter. “Seriously, laughter is one of the most effective mediums of expression. It can express everything from sorrow toe bitter for tears to wild hilarity, or soft, bubbling happiness. It can also express more menace than the most vicious snarl.” Seiler added that John Garfield, whom he recently directed in “Dust Be My Destiny,” the Warner Bros. picture coming Friday to the Strand Theatre, has one of the screen’s most effective laughs today. “He can express more bitterness with laughter than a good writer can cram into a page of words,” the director said. “That bitter, sardonic laugh is his best. But he can also make laughter express embarrassment, self deprecation, pleasure and downright youthful happiness. His whole face lights up when he gives one of his rare happy laughs.” For youthful joyousness, however, Seiler hands the palm to the laughter of Priscilla Lane, Garfield’s leading lady in “Dust Be My Destiny.” Mentioning the “tear jerking” possibilities of laughter, the director cited a scene from this picture. “Garfield and Priscilla are a couple of kids who have nothing but each other,” he said. “They’re down to their last fifteen cents and he goes out to rob someone to get money to buy food. She tells him if he does that he needn’t come back. “Well, he can’t go through with it. He comes back, shame-faced to the wife who thought she had lost him. It’s a grand scene with a world of heart tug. They don’t ery, they laugh. And if it does to an audience what it did to us on the set, there won’t be a dry eye in the theatre. It’s the kind of a scene that would be too sentimental with tears, but with the laughter, it’s perfect.” John Litel, as district attorney, puts the finger on John Garfield in “Dust Be My Destiny.” Center is Moroni Olsen. (Mat 205—30c) ‘Dust Be My Destiny’ Reunites Love Team John Garfield, who loved and lost Priscilla Lane in ‘“Four Daughters’? and “Daughters Courageous,” is much more successful in “Dust Be My Destiny.’ Not only does he win Priscilla’s love in the beginning in the film, but he marries her almost immediately afterward. In_ the course of their love scenes, he kissed her thirty-two times. All of which should be very satisfying to those many fans who wrote in after the first two pictures demanding that the team be reunited in a picture with a happy ending for them both. A ROLLING STONE, ALAN HALE GATHERS NO MOSS, MUCH FUN After twenty-eight years in the movies, not to mention the time he spent dabbling in osteopathy, opera and musical comedy, Alan Hale came right back to where he started from — in a newspaper office. Hale’s varied experience brought him a promotion, it’s true. With the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, where he got his first job shortly after the turn of the century, he was a lowly writer of obituaries. With the Banton Journal, where he bossed John Garfield for the Warner Bros. picture, ‘‘Dust Be My Destiny,’’?’ which opens next Friday at the Strand Theatre, he was the managing editor. That, Hale opines, is farther than he would have gotten in the newspaper profession had he stayed in it instead of quitting to start the devious route which led to the screen. Rolling stones gather no moss, but they cover a lot of territory. Hale always has been as restless as a bouncing pebble. He’s covered a lot of territory. And in his late forties, he is about as far from being a venerable moss-back as anyone could imagine. A little stouter, a trifle grayer than he was when he played the villain in ‘‘The Covered Wagon,’’ he’s still a human dynamo. And thanks to his saloon demolishing feats in ‘‘ Valley of the Giants’? and ‘‘ Dodge City,’’ his reputation as a Cain-raising fighting man is brighter today than it was when he and Douglas Fairbanks were the terrors of Sherwood Forest. VERSATILITY HAS WON JOHN LITEL VARIETY OF ROLES The Hollywood movie studios, like the big league baseball teams, have their general utility men and prize them greatly. The baseball utility man is a versatile athlete who can step into any one of half a dozen positions and play a bang-up game. The Hollywood utility man is an actor who can do anything from a romantic lead to a bearded character part and deliver an outstanding performance. One of the better known of these invaluable utility actors is John Litel. In his latest Warner Bros. picture, “Dust Be My Destiny,” which opens next Friday at the Strand Theatre, he plays the flinty-hearted district attorney who does his best to get John Garfield hanged for murder. His next part is to be a mysterious bearded doctor in the shocker thriller, “The Return of Dr. X.” In “On Trial,” he was the innocent victim of a threatened miscarriage of justice and in the notable series of Warner Bros. historical featurets, he has portrayed such diverse personages as Patrick Henry, Philip Nolan, and Thomas Jefferson. [6] John Garfield Leads Violent Film Career John Garfield has been in Hollywood only a little more than a year, but that is long enough for him to have learned that a movie actor may be ealled upon to do most anything in line of duty. In “Four Daughters,” his first picture and the one that made him a star, Garfield got by fairly easily. Aside from participating in an automobile crackup, he didn’t have to do anything that he might not have been required to do on the stage. In “They Made Me a Criminal,’ there. was a little matter of diving into an irrigation tank to rescue the “Dead End” Kids. In “Juarez,” the picture that has made him very proud of being in the movies, Garfield, as Porfirio Diaz, was required to do a lot of hard riding as well as fine acting. That entailed getting acquainted with a horse, something he’d never had the opportunity to do during his boyhood in New York. All those past experiences paled into insignificance, however, compared with those he encountered in “Dust Be My Destiny,” the Warner Bros. picture starring him and Priscilla Lane, which will open on Friday at the Strand Theatre. These ineluded hopping a moving freight train, fighting a rough-and-tumble battle with an ex-All Coast football star twice his size, wearing a tuxedo (which comes under the heading of refined torture in Gar field’s rating) and last and most formidable, milking a cow. A year, however, had taught the young actor a bit about taking movie crises in stride. After that first distinct feeling of dismay which followed his reading of the “Dust Be My Destiny” script, he rallied. The story, he said, was a good one. He wanted to do it, even to the point of braving the cow milking episode. Hopping the freight proved easy. He had done that in real life during a memorable hitchhike and grab-ride jaunt across the continent several years ago. The fight was also a “push-over.” Ward Bond, the former football gladiator with whom he tangled, has been a movie heavy long enough to know how to pull his punches. It was the cow milking ordeal he dreaded, and rightly so. To begin with, they didn’t even give him a fair chance. They made him tackle the job from the wrong side of the animal. Of course she resented it, as she was supposed to do. Garfield, however, figured he was lucky. The cow was in a stanchion where she couldn’t use her horns on him, and he only got kicked twice. As for the tuxedo wearing, Garfield had a preliminary workout when his wife forced him to wear a dinner jacket to the formal premiere of “Juarez.” He came out of the theatre not only alive, but reasonably happy. Henry Armetta and Alan Hale look on while Priscilla Lane and John Garfield go into a clinch in “Dust Be My Destiny.” (Mat 203—30c) (Guest Column) Hollywood Via Broadway By JOHN GARFIELD (Currently co-starring with Priscilla Lane in ““Dust Be My Destiny,’’ coming to the Strand.) Had I been invited to write a guest column a year ago I could have filled it telling what was wrong with Hollywood. I had just arrived in the film capital and I had not made a picture. That’s why I knew so much about the faults of the movies. Today I’m not so sure what is wrong with Hollywood. I am not even positive there is anything radically wrong with it. It strikes me now that a lot of us who come to the screen from the New York stage bring a provincial attitude with us. Broadway. We think of America in terms of I came to Hollywood armed with the stock objections to pictures and some of my own. They were mechanical and formulized. They seldom had social significance and never took definite stands on important issues. In other words, they were all right as light entertainment, and a good medium for broadening one’s experience. It was not until I read the script of ‘‘Juarez’’ that I began to be truly enthusiastic about working in pictures. It took the trip to Dodge City, Kas., for the opening of the picture, ‘Dodge City,’’ to finish removing the blinds from my eyes. I saw America — not just Broadway and Hollywood — and realized in a small way what the entertainment provided by the movies meant to it. Hoot Gibson and Buck Jones, the veteran Western stars, were with us. It gave me a thrill of understanding to see and hear the ovations they received. I still intend to go back to the stage. I think I need that change. If I ever reach the point where I think there’s nothing wrong with Hollywood, I’ll be in danger. I still have just one car, live in an inexpensive rented house and haven’t had any yearning for a swimming pool. I have bought an awful lot of phonograph records and books, however, and a few days ago I weakened arid purchased the first tuxedo I’ve ever owned. Maybe I am going Hollywood!