Four Mothers (Warner Bros.) (1941)

‘Not Easy to Make Film Love Ring True’ —Director Keighley Kisses in pictures are a manufactured product, not the result of natural impulses, even though the principals are in love, explains Director William Keighley, master craftsman in the handling of romance on the screen. “Every screen kiss must be planned in advance and made according to rules set down by the director, the cameraman, the wardrobe designer, the hairdresser and a half a dozen other people whose handiwork is directly involved,’ Mr. Keighley points out. One might think, he adds, that with all the practice Priscilla Lane and Jeffrey Lynn have had in the “Four” series — ‘Four Daughters,” “Four Wives,” and now in “Four Mothers’ — that they could be trusted to kiss as they pleased before the camera. But that isn’t so. It is never so, he says, because the kissed and the kisser can’t watch the angles, can’t tell whether the hair is being mussed unbecomingly, can’t know if the hero’s nose hides the lady’s eyes from the camera or if her best features are being pressed out of shape. Thus a good screen kiss is a manufactured article designed and built by many people besides the principals. The principals, of course, are still the main factors in the kiss, but no matter how good they are at their job, they’ve still got to keep all these little details in mind. ~“Ff-this weren‘t true,” grins Mr. Keighley, “motion picture work would be more fun for everybody making them.” May Robson Has 'Lemp' Room in Her House May Robson is copying the interior arrangement and furnishing of the Lemp family living room, used in Warner Bros. film “Four Mothers,” for the music room of a property she has purchased in Los Angeles. “Y’m grown fond of this room, having done housework in it for four pictures,” May declares. She has played Aunt and housekeeper in the series which began in 19388 with “Four Daughters,” continued with “Four Wives” in 1939, and now is followed by “Four Mothers.” | RE A HAPPY FOUR-CAST — Priscilla, Rosemary and Lola Lane and Gale Page, the ‘Four Daughters" who captured your hearts in their first Lemp family picture, are back with their babies in their grand new hit, "Four Mothers, which opens at the Strand Theatre on Friday. The Collaborating Lanes, They Call Us So We Put Our Heads Together And Try to Explain How It's Done We really should have the knife out, and be busy cutting each other’s throats. According to tradition of professions where competition is so hot, the Priscilla-Rosemary habit of working together for mutual good is a bad habit. But we have it, and it may be too deep-seated to root out. It started in school when we used to slip each other answers to tough exams, and help each other with lessons. Then we had a session of it with Fred Waring, who encouraged it. We used to get up gags for him, and somehow we couldn’t do it alone. It worked so much better when we tossed them back and forth. One would say, “Gee, that’s corny!” and the other would reply, “So it’s corny — but can you improve it?” And by the time we had tossed it around awhile it may still have been corny — but not quite so much on the cob as before. So here we are, sitting on set—one of us said “setting on the set,” but the other made an awful face and we struck it out — of Warner Bros. “Four Mothers.”’ Two of the four are us, as in “Four Daughters” and “Four Wives,” and if they ever make “Four Great Great Great Grandmothers” we’ll probably still be collaborating. Of course, Lola is one of the “four,” too, but she isn’t like the two of us, closer than twins. Even when we were tots and she Still FM10; Mat 206—30c YOU'RE NEVER TOO YOUNG to learn Beethoven, if you're a member of the musical Lemp family, as Baby Quintanilla is in "Four Mothers," the picture coming to the Strand. Her teachers are Claude Rains and Priscilla Lane. by Priscilla and Rosemary Lane was a schoolgirl at home and sometimes took care of us, it was only when we got scared and flew to her protection that we weren’t a twosome. By and by our professions pulled all of us apart, except us two. Lola is closer to us now than ever before, even in the days when she used to fly out and lick the Brannigan brats, who delighted in picking on us. But the habit we two collaborators got into sometimes pulls us into a huddle before we notice it, and Lola steps back, and then we realize what we’ve dene and say, “Hey, Lola, come on in!” So today, although it so happens she is not here to help write this, we two are practically three in community of interests. Don’t think there haven’t been times, already, when we’ve ve AN Se ~~ res, Ot RG SRN SS Sa ‘Four Daughters’ Cast Increases by Four In ‘Four Mothers’ Latest and said to be best of a very successful series, “Four Mothers” opens on Friday at the Strand Theatre. The cast differs from that of its predecessors, “Four Daughters” and ‘Four Wives,” only in point of natural population increase. As the new title indicates, some of the Lemp daughters have become mothers. Tots Barbara Quintanilla and Sharon Van play the children of Priscilla Lane and Gale Page, and twins Barbara Ann and Arlene Lande are assigned to Lola Lane. Jeffrey Lynn, Rosemary Lane, Eddie Albert, Frank McHugh, Dick Foran, Claude Rains, May Robson and Vera Lewis are the other principals. William Keighley directed. The rest of the staff, like the cast, is little changed. While the series is self-limiting, as it set out to depict only four phases in the lives of an interesting American family, there is a possibility that one or two more episodes in the lives of the Lemp family may be filmed in the next year. grinned and said, “Congratulations, kid!” with tears in our eyes. But when one of us got a swell break, fortunately just around the corner would come an equally good one for the other, so to date the collaborating kids haven’t ever had to be too Pagliacci. From this point of view, however, our work in the Lemp family series has been particularly happy. Honors and satisfaction in the parts have been pretty equal from the first. It’s just as though our parts had been planned that way, which they haven’t. Everybody in the cast of one of this series knows, when a new one starts, that any one of the principals may “steal” the show. This time the majority opinion is that Claude Rains, our papa in the picture, will stroll away with the honors. We like that, because he’s nice. The new one, “Four Mothers,’ has an even bigger cast than previous Lemp family shows, due to natural increase of the prolific — but still all-daughter — tribe. One of the babies is the one who stole Eddie Cantor’s “Forty Little Mothers,” playing a boy, at that. Playing a girl baby, it ought to be simple for her to walk away with only 4 mothers. (Ouch! Corny?) Mg But just leave that last gag in. It’ll illustrate how the nearly-twin Lane kids, by collaborating, do improve — a little. new Strand hit, ''Four Mothers." Still FM 10; Mat 304—45c Jeffrey Lynn Runs Gamut of the Arts In His Film Roles Jeffrey Lynn is well on his way to becoming the screen’s number one artist, if, indeed, he hasn’t already achieved that distinction. Since he started his motion picture career in the memorable “Four Daughters,’ Lynn has run the gamut of the arts from music to poetry and painting. In that first of the Lemp family pictures, the tall New Englander played a skilled pianist and composer. By the time “Four Wives” was filmed, he’d progressed far enough up the musical scale to conduct a 100piece symphony orchestra. In “Four Mothers,” latest saga of the Lemps, he continues with his musical triumphs. “Four Mothers” opens Friday at the Strand. That’s nice going for a young fellow whose musical talents in real life are limited to harmonica tootling and elose harmony baritoning. It is typical, however, of Lynn’s_ spectacular progress in the other fine arts. In “The Fighting 69th,” for example, he played the soldier poet, Joyce Kilmer. In real life, the closest he ever came to writing poetry was scribbling a bit of doggerel for the Bates College Student Weekly. The artistically versatile Lynn portrays a painter in “Invitation to Murder,” the new picture with Thomas Mitchell and Geraldine Fitzgerald. His artist is a topnotch craftsman, too, good enough to counterfeit masterpieces and have them pass as genuine originals. That perhaps _ represents Lynn’s greatest advance from reality to artistic make believe. As a musician he can play the harmonica and sing a bit, and he’s studying the violin. As a poet he can rhyme June and moon. As a painter, the artist who works with such sure mastery in “Invitation to Murder,” knows absolutely nothing about the art, confesses that if he had to make a living at it, he’d be completely sunk. He says he once tried to paint a chicken house, but gave it up when the hens refused to come home to roost. Lynn is a husband, father and a bit of a playboy in his new picture “Four Mothers,” indulging in a mild bit of flirtation with his sister-in-law. Still FM329; Mat 203—30c MOTHERS AT WORK — Gale Page, Priscilla, Rosemary and Lola Lane con centrate their motherly affections on little Sharon Van, in this scene from the ]