Watch on the Rhine (Warner Bros.) (1943)

PAUL LUKAS, GERALDINE FITZGERALD. GEORGE COULOURIS, LUCILE WATSON STORIES Hungarian-Born Paul Lukas Began His American Film Career in 1927 So Thorough Was Early Training That Actor Was Recognized As a Full-Fledged Star at Age of Twenty-one, Creating the Title Role in Molnar’s ‘Liliom’ in Budapest Comedy Theatre Paul Lukas, who stars opposite Bette Davis in Warner Bros.’ “Watch on the Rhine,” currently at the Strand Theatre, was lured to America by motion pictures in 1927 and for the most part has remained in Hollywood during the ensuing years. His enthusiasm for the country has been so great that he has become a citizen of the United States. The actor was born in Budapest on May 26. He received his early schooling in the preparatory schools of his birthplace at the College of Budapest and at the Actors’ Academy in Hungary. At this latter school students are drilled in all phases of theatrical work and on the stage play character roles one week, bit parts the next, with an occasional fling at stardom. So thorough was Lukas’ train ing that at 21 he emerged as a | full-fledged star, creating the stellar role in Molnar’s “Liliom” at the Comedy theatre in Budapest. He remained with this organiza PAUL LUKAS tion for nine years. Prior to coming to America he had made one film, “Samson and Delilah,” for UFA in Berlin. His stellar performance in this production increased his fame. America accepted the Hungarian matinee idol with great cordiality and his career began brilliantly. The advent of talkies threatened to check its course, but Lukas applied himself intensively to the mastery of English and soon he was able to talk with only a slight trace of accent. Among the pictures in which Lukas has appeared are ‘“Shopworn Angel,” “I Found Stella Parrish,” “By Candlelight,” “Glamour,” “Little Women,’ ‘Dodsworth,” “The Lady Vanishes” and others. He went to England in 1936, making several pictures at the British studios before returning to America for appearances on the American stage in “The Doll’s House” starring Ruth Gordon. Lukas is six feet, one inch tall and has brown hair and eyes. He lists as his hobbies fencing, tennis, horseback riding and aviation, owning his own plane and piloting it on jaunts to many of the Southland resorts. He is a desert enthusiast and owns a home at Palm Springs. Ireland’ Geraldine Fitzgerald Believes in Pixies and Banshees Leprechauns, Trolls, Hobgoblins, Lycenthropes, Hamadryads, Water Sprites, Oreads, Naiads, Fauna, Mab, Puck, Ariel and Oberon Among Her Best Friends Those charming people, the Irish, are probably the only breed of grown folks left in the world today who still believe in pixies and still have faith in banshees who go “boomp”’ in the night. Miss Geraldine Fitzgerald, motion picture actress, brick-topped and emerald-eyed, born in Dublin, blandly confesses that, yes, she is acquainted with leprechauns, trolls, hobgoblins, lycanthropes, hamadryads, water sprites, oreads, naiads, fauna, fresh-water nymphs, sea maids, Mab, Oberon, Titania, Ariel, Puck, Robin Goodfellow, and various other good folk and little men in the pantheon of mythical beings. All this is part of the paradox of being Irish. Miss Fitzgerald is a practical young person and shrewd in a deal. She has made a habit of bluffing to a fare-yewell. She does very largely as she pleases and does it very efficiently. At the moment, she is more or less her own attractive and amusing self in Warner Bros’ “Watch on the Rhine,” opening Friday at the Strand Theatre, playing a sympathetic role as the wife of a traitorous and shabby Count of the Rumanian nobility. More re Still WR 18; Mat 107—15c GERALDINE FITZGERALD cently, she satisfied herself with a life of screen sin and meanness, topping off several such parts with an especially vicious characteriza tion in “The Gay Sisters.” Whimsical to an alarming degree and apparently incapable of striking a bargain with anybody, she has negotiated one of the slickest contracts in Hollywood. She can, when she wants to, shake the gold dust off her feet and run to Broadway and act in a play, which she did recently. She and her husband own a grand home in Ireland and could turn a nice penny by leasing it to some British family eager to escape the discomforts of war-time London. They refuse. They refuse because to allow strangers to inhabit their home might bring evil spirits into it. Their house is a “good” house, and mustn’t be contaminated. But it is available, rent free, of course, if refugee families should ever need it. She used to employ a woman chauffeur. She thinks women drive more carefully than men. She is unfriendly toward the California climate. She is a beautiful girl, but when she had her portrait done recently she insisted on having all the freckles in, and counted them to make sure. Quite a girl. You believe in pixies, too, don’t you? At Least, It’s Never Too Late to Learn Herman Shumlin, directing the toughest scene a director ever faces—the first scene in his first picture — was meticulous in rehearsal and expertly advised in camera angles when he began “Watch on the Rhine,’ now at the Strand Theatre, from his hit Broadway play, at Warner Bros. But he ran into one of the oddest difficulties in his long show experience. The six men scene showed playing poker. Incredibly, not one of them had ever played poker before. Shumlin began his motion picture career by teaching them to shuffle. P. S. Discretion Is Better Part of Valor The actor playing the brutal “butcher boy’? Nazi in Warner Bros.’ “Watch on the Rhine” now at the Strand Theatre, is probably the only actor in the world who ever razzed Adolf Hitler to his face—and got away to talk about it. Kurt Katch, trigger man for the Germans in the filmization of Herman Shumlin’s Broadway play, recalled that he used to see Hitler at the Muenchener Kammerspille, famed Munich restaurant, in 1924. Katch was a star on the German stage. Hitler was regarded as a Clown. “I used to take a table near him just to insult him,” Katch said. “I'd call him ‘paperhanger,’ anything else nasty that came to mind.” P.S.—Katch left Germany in a hurry in 1937. Still Service Stills available on most of the scene cuts on the publicity pages in this campaign plan. Price: 10c each. Order by still number indicated under each cut, from Campaign Plan Edi tor, 321 West 44 Street, New York 18, N. Y. If still number is not given, photo is not available because the cut was made from a special retouch or a composite. (Asterisk denotes still is available at local Vitagraph Exchanges.) Lucile Watson Finds Fame (and Profit) In Old Lady Parts Repeats Stage Role She Played for 15 Months In ‘Watch on the Rhine’ Be a mean old woman and earn high pay in Hollywood. The season has been good to acidulous old ladies, and now comes Lucile Watson straight from __ Broadway to favor the screen with her already famous portrayal of Fanny Farrelly in Warner Bros.” “Watch on the Rhine,” now at the Strand Theatre. She is the second such character with whom Bette Davis, no mean _ coper, has had to cope recently. In “Now, Voyager,” Gladys Cooper, once the darling musical comedy queen of the London stage, now much older in wig and wrinkles, tasps at her as an authoritative Boston mother. Miss Watson is Bette’s mother in “Watch on the Rhine,” less stringent but more articulate. She played the mother role for 15 months on Broadway and on the road tour and found it easy enough to transfer her talents to the screen. Has One Difficulty Just one difficulty, she says. Accustomed to audiences and to making her voice heard in the farthest reaches of the peanut gallery, she talks too loudly for movie microphones. “Make your own adjustments,” she told the director. ““That’s the way I was taught to talk. Loud. I can’t change. I always forget.” Like her contemporary, Ethel Barrymore, Miss Watson made her debut in a Clyde Fitch comedy. The play was “Glad of It.” Her leading man was Hasard Short, now known as an extravaganza producer. Also in the cast were Thomas Meighan, Robert Warwick and John Barrymore. The latter played the part of a press agent. She first appeared with Ethel Barrymore in “Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines,” a reminiscent piece to persons something over 40. Miss Watson retired from the stage, she thought, when she married Louis Shipman, the playwright. But upon his death she returned to the theatre. Now she is a regular commuter between Broadway and Hollywood, and is under the impression that she is fooling the public. She plays middle-aged matrons and querulous grandmothers, and thinks audiences suspect she is two persons. She forgets that she’s the one who always talks a little louder than all the rest. A. lot of old ladies are like that, too. Mat 106—15c¢ Lucile Watson Audiences Booed George Coulouris For 15 Months It Was All Because He Was Too Real a Villain in Stage Hit George Coulouris, the jet-black villain who plays the shabby count in Warner Bros.’ “Watch on the Rhine,” currently at the Strand Theatre, is grateful to escape the boos of Broadway. He is the same desperate scoundrel that he portrayed for 15 months on Broadway and on the road, but when he finished his Mat 103—15¢ perform George Coulouris ances on the screen he knew that he would not have to dodge eggs or endure hisses. “I guess it was a compliment, since I’m supposed to be an actor,” he said. “But a man gets tired of being booed every night. I thought that sort of thing went out 25 years ago. But no, every curtain call, every audience would applaud everybody else and boo me.” Enjoys Hollywood Coulouris, having completed his fifth picture, also says he is enjoying Hollywood for the first time. In the first place, having acted in the play for those many months, he knew his lines letterperfect. He knew his character as well as all the other characters. In the second, Herman Shumlin, who directed and produced the play, also directed the movie. That, says villain Coulouris, makes life easy. George started his career of mustache-tugging when he ran away from his native Manchester, England, and snagged the part of dastardly Duke Frederick in “As You Like It.” London’s Old Vic and touring provincial troupes provided him with a varied background. In London he played in such American hits as “Porgy” and “Caprice,” which whetted his appetite for the American theatre. Travelling to America, on the heels of a pretty American student who is now Mrs. C., he landed with the New York Theatre Guild as Sempronius in G. B. Shaw's royal romp, “The Apple Cart.” He became a first-class Broadway villain as the unscrupulous art dealer with Pauline Lord and Walter Connolly in “The Late Christopher Bean” and has been a professional mean man_ ever since. Appears on Radio For a change of diet, Coulouris enacts Bulldog Drummond on the airways, and is very noble indeed. But villainy, he says, pays well and is easier than other parts, anyway. “Your character is always so definite,’ he declares. “Audiences always remember the bad man, too.” The role of the double-crossing remnant from Rumania, Count de Brancovis, is by far the most villainous he has ever had, Coulouris says. On the screen, he persecutes Bette Davis and Paul Lukas, among others. Coulouris wonders whether the fine old habit of hissing and booing the villain will be picked up by motion picture audiences. Maybe, he prophesies. But he won't be there, and he’s glad Ofit: ]