Silver Screen (May-Oct 1937)

Ed Sullivan Says : — he Screen Is True To L He Is An Experienced Ne wspaperman Who Sees Everyone/ Goes Every= wKere And Writes As He Eikes. Here He Takes The Producers To Task. 1WAS sitting with Bugs Baer, famous Hearst syndicate humorist, in the loge section of the Capitol Theatre, and on the screen Robert Benchley was playing a very amusing drunk character: "You get around to night clubs a lot," remarked the Bugs, "have you ever seen a drunk who was amusing?" My mind raced down the night club aisles and memory spread before me the thousands of drunks that a Broadway columnist meets in the course of years. Not one of them was amusing. All of them had been annoying pests, noisy, quarrelsome, the most disagreeable people you wouldn't care to meet. "In the movies, a drunk is always pictured as the life of the party," said Baer. "Even his wife forgives him because he is a witty guy, full of corn, con and conviviality. Now you know that ain't so. The wife of the life of the party would drag him to a settee and flatten him!" On the screen, however, just as Baer pointed out, the drunken Benchley was the life of the picture and the party. Everything he did was hilarious. From the drunk scene, there was a fade into a night club scene where people were dancing: "You see," said Bugs, "that's what I mean. Have you ever been in a night club where the dance floor was big enough to dance on? Every time I go to a night club, I sit out every dance because the floor is smaller than one oL Farley's special delivery stamps, and dancing on it is legalized assault and battery. But, in the movies, the night club dancing floor is as big as the afterdeck of the Queen Mary. Another thing, look at those couples dancing on the screen. The director has matched them off for height. It couldn't happen in real life. I'll bet you 1000 to 1 that you've never gone to a Broadway night club without finding at least one short guy dancing with a tall girl, and at least one short girl dancing with a tall guy." I had to confess that this was true, and that I'd often commented on it. Ed Sullivan James Cagney as the amateur who knocks out the professional prizefighters. (Left) Shirley Ross — she did not have to rehearse. Bob Benchley, as a drunk, is always the life of the party. Bugs' incisive observation prodded my dull mind into action. Like the mills of the gods, the Sullivan mind works slowly but once the gears are grinding, they grind exceedingly fine. I started to wonder how many other things the movie directors did that were contrary to what you find in actual, everyday life. If movie directors were so unobservant as to believe that all drunks were amusing, gay creatures, instead of brawling pests, they must be just as wrong in other things. I thought back over the moving pictures I'd seen, and arrived at some amazing conclusions. In the past fifteen years, first as a sportingwriter and for the past five years as a Broadwav columnist, I guess I've known all of the Public Enemies, the chiefs of the underworld. In fact, I've been friends with most of them, sat with them nightly in Broadway clubs and restaurants. You can conclude that from this first hand observation, I'd know something about them, but believe me when I tell you that no gangster ever b rough t to the screen, or pictured on the screen, remotely resembles the mobsters I've known on Broadway. I've been writing on New York newspapers for the past seventeen years, but no newspaper movie I've ever seen bears the slightest resemblance to newspapers I've worked for, or newspapermen with whom I've worked. No night club picture I've ever seen has had the slightest actual lesemblance to the night clubs which I visit every night on my rounds of the Dawn Patrol. I covered sports for twelve years, saw every big championship contest in baseball, football, tennis, rowing and in the ring. Yet no moving picture plotted around anv of these sports ever has resembled the actual things that happen [Continued on page 76] 29