The Wagons Roll at Night (Warner Bros.) (1941)

ADVANCE PUBLICITY — ‘THE WAGONS ROLL AT NIGHT’ Love Scenes Worry Eddie Albert Much More Than Lions Eddie Albert has remained a bachelor in spite of many rumors that he was or would be married to several different girls. A native of Minneapolis, where he used to serve “home-style” malted milks behind a drug store fountain, Eddie got to Hollywood by way of the New York stage. His first role at Warner Bros. studios was his stage role in “Brother Rat.” Slow of speech and action but quick-witted and understanding, he has become an almost legendary figure in his brief sojourn in Hollywood. He lives alone on a hill-top north of Hollywood, literally surrounded by books, phonograph records, gadgets he is investigating and newly-found friends who want to promote him—and who usually do. He has a boat on which he periodically gets lost. The longest time he has been missing was when he made his much publicized trip into interior Mexico. He came out safely enough—and brought an interest in a quicksilver mine out with him. Sympathetic and careless with money, he never refuses a request for help and he numbers among his friends a weird collection of people he has met on freight trains, downtown corners and at Ciro’s. He likes the hobo friends best. Albert has just completed a picture in which he plays a liontamer, called “The Wagons Roll at Night” and opening Friday at the Strand. In that he makes bashful love to Joan Leslie — scenes which worried him more than the lions did. Director Enright Realizes Old Dream In Making ‘Wagons’ Back in the “circus belt” of Indiana, where a dozen of America’s best known tent shows have made it a long practice to settle down for their permanent winter quarters, a chunky lad grew up in Anderson, Ind., and became “circus crazy.” This chunky red headed lad, who sniffed and hungered for the rollicking life of a menagerie keeper in his grammar school years, was Ray Enright, now an ace director at Warner Bros. Enright turned a _ reluctant back on the headquarters of the Indiana circuses and his friends in them, when he reached high school age, and removed with his family to Los Angeles, Cal. But the breath of the show business was in his nostrils, and Brick began odd jobs around the Hollywood film studios as a kid. In the days’ since’ then, “Brick” Enright, now 45 and possessed of a vast experience in motion pictures, has directed more than fifty feature films, of which none failed to click at the box office. But the old itch for circus life persisted. Enright was in his glory with his newest picture, “The Wagons Roll at Night” featuring Humphrey Bogart, Joan Leslie, Eddie Albert and Sylvia Sidney, and opening Friday at the Strand Theatre. Six of the loudest roaring lions from Goebbels’ Lion Farm, on Ventura Boulevard, outside of Hollywood, are part of Enright’s picture. Enright also had his set full of circus wagons, monkeys, bull whips, fortune _ tellers, and even a calliope. the Strand Theatre this Friday. Still C118; Mat 205—30c THRILLS BY THE THOUSAND as Eddie Albert and Humphrey Bogart struggle for their lives in this scene from "The Wagons Roll at Night," which goes into ‘Wagons Roll at Night’ Outdoor Action Drama There is a patch of ground over beyond the Hollywood Hills and the barely moist bed of the Los Angeles river that is known as the Thirty Acres. If you are a tourist visiting southern California, and can find the place, you can go out there most any day and watch them make motion pictures. Watch them, that is, if you want to see motion pictures being made. You can stand there, or sit in your car, and look right through the fence. It’s the only studio area, in Hollywood or anywhere near it, that’s not enclosed by solid brick or plaster walls, 10 feet high, and guarded by cops as sentries. Pending the day it will be used as a building site, it is used for big exterior sets and scenes that can be filmed even while airplanes are droning overhead. The San Fernando Valley near Burbank is one of the greatest plane building and flyer training centers in the world. There’s scarcely a minute of the day that a plane can’t be heard from Thirty Acres. Recently Nick Coster’s Original Coney Island Carnival was pitched there; a big midway lined with sideshows, rides, wheel and dart games, grease joints, girl shows, menagerie tents, the whole hulabaloo that belongs with a wandering show of its sort. But look closely and you would have seen lots of things not to be seen at a real carnival, and you’d meet some people you wouldn’t exactly expect to be at a place like this. Doing the things they were doing, that is. Nick Coster was Humphrey Bogart. He owns the show. And Sylvia Sidney was a fortune teller, “Madame Florina” according to the frayed and faded banner over the tent in which she sat and gazed balefully at a molded-glass “crystal” ball. Out behind the menagerie tent, where the cameras can’t eatch the action, Eddie Albert was watching white haired and wirey Louis Roth handle a kitchen chair in his left hand, crack a long bull snake with his right. Roth is a professional lion tamer. He was giving the nervous Albert a primary lesson in how to “tame” the so-called king of beast, for Eddie was supposed to be an amateur lion tamer in “The Wagons Roll at Night’ and he was trying to learn a few of the rudimentary tricks. Out on the midway someone was yelling to the whole crowd. “Everybody in,” he shouted. “Come on, let’s go. Let’s make ys It’s now that you become more than ever aware that this Thirty Acres is a funny little place, and that Nick Coster’s Original Coney Island Carnival is not a real carnival at all. For, filing out of a tent bannered “Folies Bergere. Risky, Frisky, Frenchy, Funny — Girls — Girls—Girls” comes a reluctant parade of youngsters, girls and boys of around 12 years and a little younger. You look inside the Folies tent, behind its intriguing banners, and you see nothing but long wooden tables and orderly rows of folding chairs. Books, note books, scratch pads and yellow pencils are scattered over the tables. The tent is a school room. The only girls around now are three gray-haired and matronly teachers, relaxing for a moment until their pupils return at the end of the scene being filmed outside the tents. Studio Worries When Albert Gets Dreamy Eddie Albert has Bros. worried. Eddie got that dreamy look in his eye during the filming of “The Wagons Roll at Night,” the picture opening Friday at the Strand and began wondering, aloud, what a man’s sensations would feel like, the first time he ever made a parachute jump. Warner Bros. has had reason to be wary of Eddie’s dreamy looks. The last time he began wondering aloud, it was about how it might feel to be a mariner who might be castaway on the bleak shores of Mexican Lower California. On that occasion, it took a month to get Eddie back. Albert had his employers temporarily pleased, because he got dreamy and speculative about the sensations of a man walking into a lion’s den for the first time, and since then Eddie has played lion tamer and enacted a dozen action sequences inside the cages of lions from the Goebel Lion Farm in “The Wagons Roll at Night.” Eddie’s studio employers are trying to shift his interest to something mild like wondering how it feels to learn pogo sticking, or painting barns. Warner Humphrey Bogart Stars In Mile-A-Minute Drama Humphrey Bogart wouldn’t swap his early experience as manager of a theatrical company on “the road” for anything you could readily name. For one thing, it deflated a badly swollen ego, and Humphrey admits that in those days, he was as brash a young man as they come. It gave him a liberal education in the byways and alleys of human nature, and made him an authority on the tricks of box-office sharpers, along the “tank town” circuits of the show business. Last but not least, it equipped Bogart with a background which enables him to play Nick, the two-fisted circus proprietor in Warner Bros. mile-a-minute action drama, “The Wagons Roll at Night” as if he had been running a tanbark troupe all his life. Bogart broke in with a theatrical road company when he took Grace George on tour in “A Ruined Lady,” under the management of William A. Brady. “Listen to me, Bogie,” said Brady, “you’re scrappy, you’re smart you’re hard-boiled and you’re cocky. If they don’t beat it completely out of you before you get back to Broadway, you ought to make a fairly good manager.” “What I didn’t know about the show business was a crime,” confided Humphrey, as he retold the story. “Our first stop was in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. I stationed myself at the door to take the tickets in person. Along came a big Slav coal miner who never had attended a theatre before. I took his tickets and tore them in half, and he reached out grabbed me by the collar and almost shook me to death. “That experience taught me something. It taught me that two ticket takers are always better than one. Tough guys get less tough when they have two to contend with, instead of one. “T found out about the ticket stubs that the local ushers were accustomed to stick in their pockets,” Boggart went on. “I got wise to the practice of letting in some of the audience, at reduced rates, by the stage door entrances where they couldn’t be counted. I learned about gallery entrances which had their openings in grocery stores or unobtrusive hallways around the corner from the theatre’s main box office, where ‘ nobody could guess a second sale of tickets was being carried on. “Everything I picked up in those tours from Binghamton to Bucyrus, has come in handy,” Bogart says. “In ‘The Wagons Roll at Night’ I always carry an ivory-headed baton of sturdy walnut wood. I learned to keep Still C87; Mat 105—15e JOAN LESLIE and HUMPHREY BOGART something handy about me after I once got cracked on the head.” Nothing about a road show runs smoothly or softly, Bogart says. “A fellow learns to talk fast and loud. And he has to keep talking all the time or those other guys will talk him out of something. You carry a chip on your shoulder every minute. It’s no business for a_ shrinking violet. “I’m playing my role in this circus picture the way I watched the traveling showmen behave. You’ve got to be noisy. You’ve got to push people around. If you don’t, you’re being pushed, and then you don’t belong in business with a traveling show.” Joan Leslie Is Star at Sixteen Joan Leslie, leading woman with Humphrey Bogart in “High Sierra,” and with Bogart and Eddie Albert in “The Wagons Roll at Night,” celebrated her 16th birthday on Jan. 26, 1941. Miss Leslie is a new featured player who is one of the “finds” of 1940, on the Warner Bros. contract list and is scheduled for several of that studio’s biggest new productions. Still C18; Mat 201—30c SHE'S A MATCH FOR HIM—Sylvia Sidney lets Humphrey Bogart know she can be just as tough as he is, in "The Wagons Roll at Night," new action drama opening Friday at the Strand Theatre. 3