Variety (January 1957)

Wednesday, January 9, 1957 Fifty-first J^SSliETY Anniversary INTERNATIONAL 201 West Berlin Show Biz Summary By HANS HOEHN . Berlin. Despite the fact that West Berlin, located behind the Iron Curtain, is geographically considerably handicapped, there is more going on here than in most W-European capitals. About 500 pix are annually shown, big-scale Festivals are regularly rolling up, top foreign ensembles and performers keep finding their way to Berlin. 1956 has probably been a record for W-Berlin. No other local postwar year has seen so many show biz events as the last one. Here, W-Berlin’s show biz of 1956 in capsulated superlatives: Best film — foreign . “La Strada” (Italy) Best film — domestic . “Captain of Koepenick” Most depressing film . “Nuit & Breuillard” (French) Best play . “Diary of Anne Frank” Best acting — male . . Walter Frank in “Anne Frank” ' Best acting — female . . . . Grete Mosheim in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” Best acting — foreign . Jean-Louis Barrault in “Le personnage combattant” Best jazz presentation . Modern Jazz Quartet Most popular jazzman . . . Lionel Hampton Best jazz arranger . Stan Kenton Best cabaret group . . . Stachelschweine (Porcupines of W-Berlin) Best cabaret program ...... “Schiess Mich, Tell” (Shoot me, Tell) Most glamorous event . “Holiday on Ice” Best circus . . . . Circus -Althoff Best radio station . . AFN-Berlin Best Ballet . . N. Y. C. Ballet Most perfect gentleman . . . William Holden. Funniest personality .• . . . Bob Hope Highlight of the Year . . Film Festival (June 22-July 4) Italo Legit Up Via Govt Handouts; Cafes Seasonal, Disk Biz Booms By ROBERT Rome. The Italian legitimate theatre, supported as usual by government subsidies, has made a slight come¬ back during the past year, and the trend is up. The vital state handout, which this season has been promised to 27 companies, organized as always on an itinerant repertory basis, is also designed to protect and aid the Italian playwright, and an esti¬ mated 77% of this stanza’s play¬ bills will therefore be reserved for local authors, even though very often it’s the foreign play which brings in the money. Among the 84 foreign plays list¬ ed for this season are such already successful items as Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” “A Hatful of Rain,” Peter Ustinov’s “Romanoff and Juliet,” “The Rainmaker,” “Picnic,” and others, as well as a full schedule of Shaw and Anouilh, seemingly in favor this year. Most companies tour for six months in the year. Still most successful, though re¬ ceipts have been falling off as prices mount to now astronomical heights ($5-$7), is the musical re¬ vue sector, which this season sees a return of comic Toto to the live medium after seven years of pic work, while Walter Ciari, Carlo Dapporto, Billi and Riva, Wanda Osiris, Ugo Tognazzi and Macario all have put their shows on the road. | Italo Niteries Parttime | The Italian nitery picture con¬ tinues to be a seasonal affair at best, with only Milan and Rome holding out on an all-year basis. Genoa and Naples play to the gob trade, but here the standards are considerably lower. In the summer months, talent gravitates to the spa circuit (Viareggio, Venice, San Remo and the Riviera, Capri, the Adriatic Coast) or the alfresco situ¬ ations in and near major centers. In Rome, nightclub activity re¬ mains centered around Bricktop’s Via Veneto spot, the Jicky Club, Open Gate, KitKat, or the outskirt Villa del Cesari, by the Appian Way. In summer months, it’s the Casina delle Rose and the Belve¬ dere delle Rose. L’Aiglon, a new spot, has just opened off Via Ven¬ eto. This year has also seen a pro¬ found modification of the fabled ‘VVBeach” with the addition, just opposite the Excelsior Hotel, of a new sidewalk cafe-snack-bar comf bination, The Cafe de Paris, which 3ojns Doney’s, Strega, Rosatis, and others in the paraisol table set Vfhich gives the street its name. Italians also seen* to have taken to the shack bar — cafeteria idea: oesides the new Via Veneto eatery, several other Italo spots have joined the California, Colony, Jer¬ ry s Galleon, etc., as dispensers of hamburgers and other such Yank F. HAWKINS inspired sundries. News in the res¬ taurant field is that Capriccio’s traditional show biz rendezvous, has moved to a new (and larger) location— still only a stone’s throw from the Excelsior hub. In the disk sector, sales . during the past year are said to have dou¬ bled. R&R is big, especially Elvis Presley, but jazz is also a strong seller, and steadier. Sale of U.S. records in general, especially of the new crop of vocalists, has risen to the skies, Italian artists have held their own, while the big loser in the past year has been the French song, which previously had a guaranteed niche here. Classics and opera continue in steady demand, with Toscanini still the biggest in this field. Socalled hi-fi, exemplified by some twin-speaker German sets, has made a dent in the market, but sales have slowed down on these expensive units, and the portables <are now getting a play once more. High local prices still make for resistance to Ip’s, with some Italo outlets actually bootlegging part of their lp stocks while covering themselves via legit imports (but limited) of same catalogs. Some, complaining that disk companies are slow-moving, claim that’s also a faster way of meeting customer demand. ‘Rififi,’ ‘Daughters’ Top B.O. Draws in Mexico Last Year; ‘Rebel’ 4th Mexico City. The French cops-and-robbers drama, “Rififi” (Cont) and the Mex-made, “Who Goes With Our Daughters” were the top local b.o. draws in 1956, it was announced here this week by Mexico’s gov¬ ernment film department bureau of exhibition statistics. “Rififi,” with a record-breaking 31 weeks run at the swanky downtown Del Prado cinema, grossed $123,414 before being yanked by local cen¬ sors because of its alleged effect on local youth. “Daughters” showed a total gross of $93,306. ^ Other films which followed the two blockbusters were the Mexmade “The Innocent,” a Pedro Infante-Silvia Pinal starrer with $93,978 gross; “Rebel Without Cause” (WB), which pulled in $88,688; “The Hidden One,” starring Pedro Armandariz and Maria Felix, which in its first-run alone has grossed $80,869; “Long Live Youth,” a Resortes comedy, which to date has shown $65,415 income and the ItaloJap co-production of “Madam Butterfly,” which has $51,928 in the till. According to the report, edited by chief government film statisti¬ cian, Javier Arouesty, 1956 was the top year for Mexican-made product in local industry history. R V R Exportable; Brit. Woos Deejay Freed & Co. London. A tentative date of Feb. 16 has been set as the beginning of a short series of rock ’n* roll shows to be presented in this country by U. S. disk jockey Alan Freed. In this package are likely to be LaVern Baker, the Chuckles and the Moonglows (vocal teams) and Chuck Berry, who all appeared in the just-released film, “Rock, Rock, Roc,k,” with Freed. The tour is planned for a mini¬ mum of seven days, but it’s ex¬ pected that three extra concerts will be held. Impresario Phil Ray¬ mond is negotiating the deal this end, but nothing is definite yet. Best B.O. Insurance For Foreign Film Invasion of U.S.: Aeeent Authentic Native Character By FRED H1FT 10 Years More Of "Quota Upsets Some Britons By HAROLD MYERS London. The widespread belief that the Board of Trade has pulled a fast one on the British motion picture industry, by including a renewal of the existing Quota Act' in the new Films Bill without providing an opportunity for amendment, found an echo in the House of Lords during, the second reading debate. Many trade associations have al¬ ready expressed their surprise at the government's decision and the Assn, of Cine and Television Tech¬ nicians made a personal protest to the Board Of Trade prexy, when they accused him of having com¬ pletely misled the industry and de¬ manded a promise that there would be a government-promoted amending Bill before 1958 to give the trade an opportunity of sub¬ mitting its points of view. They suggested that the present legis¬ lation was being rushed through “almost indecently.” When the Bill was given an un¬ opposed second reading in the Lords, Lord Jessel said it came as a tremendous shock to the trade and they had had no hint that the quota arrangement was going to be prolonged for another 10 years without consultation. The exhibi¬ tors, He said, had suggestions ready for some time for amendments to the 1948 Act and would have pre¬ ferred a separate Bill to deal sole¬ ly with the quota problem. The main government spokes¬ man in the debate, Lord Mancroft, emphasized that for reasons of prestige and balance of payments, the government considered it im¬ portant that Britain’s cinema screens should not be monopolized by foreign product. The number of exhibitors who had failed to show their required quotas had dropped in the last few years, inr dicating that British films could hold their own. The only peer to take a swipe at America in the debate was Lord Lucas, who said he was delighted that the British film industry had not followed the unfortunate course of the American industry when it had to fight the powerful competition of television. The U.S. industry, he declared, had at¬ tempted to meet vulgarity with vulgarity, and he urged the Board of Trade prexy to review some of the dollar expenditure on Ameri¬ can imports as “some of the films were not fit to be shown on the screens of any country.” The two trade experts in the House participated in the debate. Lord Westwood, a north country exhibitor, warned the government that unless there was a hefty cut in admission duties, there would be very few picture theatres open in 1967 when the Bill came to an end. Hundreds of small theatre operators were “just hanging on” to learn what their fate was going to be in next year’s Budget. Lord Archibald, the f prmer Rank pro¬ ducer, considered the statutory levy an extraordinary clumsy in¬ strument and suggested the gov¬ ernment should find an alternative formula under GATT to pay a di¬ rect subsidy to British film produc¬ tion. The future of the foreign film in the American market hinges on precisely the extent to which it’ll manage to stay “foreign.” This may sound like a fairly simple formula under the circum¬ stances, but curiously enough, it isn’t. For where experience would dictate to producers overseas one course, various pressures — includ¬ ing the American exhibitors with their great and faithful addiction to' the Hollywood formula — point them in a different direction. Every year, a steadily rising flood of imported pictures flows into this country. More foreign films are actually brought in than American films emanate from Hollywood. Yet only a small — a patheticallj* small — percentage of them form the crest of the wave that spills over into the theatres and registers with the broad pub¬ lic. What makes this performance such a sore-point with industries abroad is that, in the reverse in¬ stance, the American product is so widely and whole-heartedly ac¬ cepted among global audiences. Since Hollywood has thus be¬ come an integral part of the oneworld concept, overseas producers are anxiously looking for ways to make the bargain pay off at their end, too. During the past year, this determination to establish the foreign film in the U. S. market has been more pronounced than ever. | British, French, Italians, Japs I lywood product and untouched by linguistic, intercourse. Since their pictures frequently fail to score in the U. S. in an almost direct inverse ratio to what they do abroad, the temptation is to con¬ form. That means hire “experts” who know “The American mind,” cast available Hollywood players, “tailor” story and script to “the American way” and seek the kind of pace indicated by the Ameri¬ can films. It also means, as a rule, the loss of that precious and often inde¬ finable “local” quality that has skyrocketed some of the imported productions to the top. It means a conscious attempt to compete with the American product on a level on which, at least in terms of the American audience, competition is virtually impossible. Special Flavor On Own Britain’s J. Arthur Rank com¬ pany has established its own dis¬ tribution agency in America; the French are wracking their brains to come up with a workable for¬ mula under which their pictures might obtain wider distribution; the Italians, still maintaining a tot¬ tering Italian Films Export (I.F.E.), want to revive promotion for their pictures (they can never forget those big breaks for Gina Lollobrigida); the Germans are juggling budgets in the hope of setting up a U. S. office to pub¬ licize their pictures, and the Japa¬ nese are holding a film fest in N. Y. and also may set up an of¬ fice in Gotham. South of the bor¬ der, the Mexicans have developed a sudden yen for dubbing some of their features for possible wider release in the U. S. Mexico’s Cimex has an office in N. Y. and Los Angeles. Spain, with a couple of international successes under its belt, is beginning to eye the U. S. market. And so it goes. Everywhere there is a firm conviction that this, apparent wall of resistance against foreign films among Americans— and particularly the exhibitors — can be broken. The pictures are there (at least in volume), the will is there, and the conditions, what with the “product shortage,” etc., seem to be ripe. Why then has the imported product failed to go places as yet? The range of answers covers a truly vast field. Some are utterly puzzling to Europeans because they are not rooted in convenient logic. Others are annoying be¬ cause they don’t conform with con¬ venient notions that have been formed regarding the true poten¬ tial of the market. Others, still, are too complex to be fully under¬ stood by any people who have learned to accept the fact that the screen speaks an international language. If there is a future in the U.S. for the foreign film, whether Brit¬ ish or otherwise, it is solely in the kind of pictures that are “differ¬ ent,” the pictures that reflect a mode of life, manners and morals so distinctively apart from the U.S. norm that they appeal through the very fact of their being “foreign.” Years of frustration have brought some foreign producers, and nota¬ bly the Rank Organization’s John Davis, to the point where they see a “plot” among exhibitors to deny them entry. In more than one angry statement, Davis has pointed a finger at U.S: theatremen, accus¬ ing them of standing as a wall be¬ tween British films and their pub¬ lic. In mid-year 1956 he even went to the length of taking out a fullpage N.Y. Times ad to make his point. 1 Where Both Sides Err I A Building Clientele There has, since the war, de¬ veloped a steady clientele for the foreign lingualers; the good ones — s u c h as “Diabolique,” “La Strada,” “Gate of Hell” or “Rififi” — have earned very respectable sums of money; some 600 theatresnow will 'play imports on an offand-on basis and of these there are between 200 and 250 “hard¬ core” situations that live on im¬ ports alone. Some of these houses, and they are almost exclusively in the big cities, do a nice, steady business, and it seems to be an ex¬ panding one. Producers abroad are an impa¬ tient lot. And very frequently they will not, or cannot, recognize the . of the Yet Davis is wrong, and the ex¬ hibitors are also wrong. Davis, now ommitted to battle the giant on his own, fails to recognize the eco¬ nomic necessities imposed on American exhibs by a narrowmargin operation, and fails to un¬ derstand American mentality. The exhibitors do not realize that they must sometimes lead their audi¬ ence instead of follow it; that by exposing their patrons to at least some foreign product they might well open up a new and as yet untapped source of new and appealing merchandise. The man who books a western reissue in preference to a new and welltouted British, Italian or French attractions is playing it safe in a business that literally grew up on taking risks. The foreign film has made pro¬ gress. The fact that a “Rififi,” in dubbed version, could play the RKO and other N.Y. metropolitan circuits and outdraw “Bus Stop” in many spots has been duly noted. Foreign producers are waking up to the economics of the business, recognizing that handling of one of their features by a major dis¬ tributor does not necessarily rep¬ resent a profitable apex. Even though unrealistic guarantees are still being asked from the indie distributors, the realization has simmered down among the ranks that the streets of the U.S. are not (necessarily) paved with hoxoffice gold. The credit side of the ledger definitely shows a widening ac¬ ceptance of the imported fare. But obstacles a-plenty remain. Code and Legion of Decency, the moralistic guardians of our society, find little room for foreign morals and too many imports are sold on a sex-sational pitch that may be conjured up out of a single, thin scene. Also, most foreign stars remain unknown here, even though some have been snapped up by (-Hollywood and U.S. audiences thus will become acquainted with them eventually. Furthermore, the overseas industries’ promo¬ tional offices should be doing an effective job before long. Advance publicity on incoming features is scant and the promotional material that accompanies them is wholly inadequate. In this respect, Europe really could take a leaf from the Americans’ book. In others, it might as well stick to doing what it does best without those envious comparative insularity American public, nurtured on Hoi glances at Hollywood,