World Film and Television Progress (1937-1938)

Radio Judging by reports of Stage Door, big bow should be taken by director Gregory La Cava who has created a new Hepburn, made a promising actress of Ginger Rogers, and guided Andrea Leeds to stardom. Picture is drawing big money in the States. The Marx Brothers have signed a contract for three pictures with Radio, first of which will be Room Service. £55,000 has been paid for the rights of the play. Cost of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, new Disney feature-length cartoon, has exceeded $1,100,000 to date. Release is expected some time in December, and Disney gets down to another feature, Bambi. Katharine Hepburn now steps into Bringing Up Baby with Cary Grant as leading man, and Miss Rogers, after polishing off Vivacious Lady which was postponed owing to James Stewart's illness, starts Having Wonderful Time. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. has been contracted for male interest, and returns to the RKO lot for the first time in three years. Meanwhile Fred Astaire concentrates on A Damsel in Distress which George Stevens is directing. George Burns, Gracie Allen, and English orchestra-leader Ray Noble are in the cast. Coveted role of leading lady to Astaire in the latter's first solo starring vehicle goes to Joan Fontaine, who was discovered less than a year ago by Jesse Lasky playing in a Hollywood Little Theatre Production. She made her debut in a big role in Quality Street, shortly afterwards playing opposite Preston Foster in You Can't Beat Love. Next picture re-uniting the Astaire-Rogers team will be Castles in the Air. Story deals with Vernon and Irene Castle, first professional ballroom team to win fame and fortune. Pandro S. Berman will produce, Oscar Hammerstein direct, Irene Castle act as technical advisor. United Artists Old-line producers were greatly shocked of late when Walter Wanger decided to photograph an actual dawn on New York's Fifth Avenue for his Vogues. Stock stuff had been used to indicate the locality for so long that most of Hollywood had forgotten the place really existed. Wanger's coming programme includes Madeleine Carroll's Personal History, to be followed by The River is Blue, Spanish civil war story with Sylvia Sidney. Hecht and MacArthur are scripting Wuthering Heights, which they regard as their best joint writing effort to date. Tallulah Bankhead is definitely set for the Scarlet O'Hara role in Gone with the Wind. Ann Harding is reported to be testing for the part of Melanie, and latest rumours have it that Clarke Gable and Fredric March may be cast. Reports that Charlie Chaplin will abandon his tramp roles for a "new personality" are emphatically denied. At present he is working on his first talkie, to star Paulette Goddard. He writes, directs and produces, but will not appear in it. Jimmy Wong Howe, only Chinese cameraman in the industry, is nursing the idea of filming his native country. He had cherished the idea of doing camerawork on The Good Earth, but when the assignment failed to materialise he resolved to turn producer and director. Ambition is to record in film the lives of millions of his countrymen who dwell in sampans on the Chinese rivers. Born in China as Wong Tung Jim, Howe was educated in America, received his early camera training under de Mille, starting as a camera carrier and ending as a chief. Most important pictures were The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, and Laugh, Clown, Laugh in the silent era, and and more recently Viva Villa, The Thin Man, Fire Over England and The Prisoner of Zenda. His technical inventions in camera construction are highly valued in Hollywood. Paramount Marlene Dietrich gets the star role in French Without Tears, adaption of Terry Ratigan's Criterion Theatre success. Mitchell Leisen, who made Swing High, Swing Low, will direct. Money from Home, steeplechase comedy by Damon Runyon, is to be filmed with Shirley Ross in the lead. Paramount and Sam Goldwyn, who have been feuding for a year or so over the services of Gary Cooper, have settled their differences. Parties have signed a pact whereby the former lets Goldwyn have director Henry Hathaway for three pictures and the latter lets Paramount have Gary Cooper for one. Cooper's one is Bluebeard's Eighth Wife, Ernst Lubitsch production with Claudette Colbert. Comedy role goes to Edward Everett Horton. Gloria Swanson made the film as a silent. Company also hopes to get Cooper for P. C. Wren's Foreign Legion story Beau Geste, alongside Oscar Homolka, Frances Farmer and Ray Milland. Bertram Milhauser, who scripted Ebb Tide, has been signed to work on the screenplay, with Lucien Hubbard producing. After Beau Geste comes The Marching Herd, spectacular western in the Texas Rangers tradition. Films on the floor include True Confession, Carole Lombard-Fred MacMurray starrer directed by Wesley Ruggles; The Big Broadcast of 1938 with Martha Raye, Dorothy Lamour and Shirley Ross; and a Gladys Swarthout musical, The Yellow Nightingale. M.G.M. Currently shooting are Mannequin, Joan Crawford-Spencer Tracy co-starrer directed by Frank (Big City) Borzage ; Navy Blue and Gold, story of Annapolis life with Robert Young, James Stewart, Florence Rice and Lionel Barrymore; The Four Marys with Myrna Loy, Franchot Tone and Rosalind Russell ; and Wallace Beery's Bad Man of Brimstone, saga of the overthrow of lawlessness with the coming of progress to the West. Valuable social service in the U.S. is done by Crime Does not Pay featurettes. Latest is Soak the Poor, written by an ex-G.-Man, spotlighting the abuses of public and private charities. Today is Tonight, original yarn by Jean Harlow, has been placed on the M.G.M. production chart. Maude Fulton is scripting. Luise Rainer is having a Sarah Bernhardt screenplay written for her by Bernhardt's own grandson-in-law, Louis Verneuil, French playwright. 0 Italy Hal Roach closed one of the biggest deals of the year when he signed an agreement to produce four operas for the screen, all to be made in Italy, financed by Italy, with Vittorio Mussolini, eldest son of II Duce, as his partner. Story goes that the idea of Italy financing the production of big films for world release was originally hatched by Reanto Senise, who brought it to the attention of picture-minded Mussolini. Mussolini in his turn introduced the idea to his father, who gave permission for the enterprise to proceed if an experienced producer was brought from England or America to head production. Overtures were also made to Korda, Wilcox and Wanger, who still have an open invitation to shift production activities to Rome any day they wish. Company is to be known as Ramfilmco and plans to make four pictures to start, all operas, on which $6,000,000 will be spent ; half of the massive new plant and studios at Cinecity have been put at its disposal, with an understanding that Roach may later move out and build his own studios. Operas to be filmed will be Rigoletto, Aida, Traviata, and finally Tosca. New regulations in Italy provide that only twice as many foreign films may be shown as Italian films — which has set exhibitors wondering whether the industry in the country can produce fast enough to keep the theatres supplied, even with the help of Ramfilmco. During the past season 41 films were produced in Italy ; so according to regulations exhibitors will only be able to show those plus 82 foreign films — 123 altogether. Up to now American producers alone had been sending over 150 pictures each year. Last season's production was necessarily small because of the effect of sanctions, the burning of two big stages at Cinecity, and the great demand made on the industry's time and labour by Condottieri and Scipio the African, two largescale pictures. Quite a number of American films have failed to pass the Italian censor of late, for political, religious and moral reasons, and in some cases for no stated reason at all. Chaplin's Modern Times was exhibited in the country a couple of times and was then withdrawn from circulation, the censors refusing any explanation to United Artists. Beloved Enemy, You Only Live Once, These Three, Woman Chases Man and The Garden of Allah were others held up by the board. % Russia Romm — director "thirteen" on the floor at Mosfilm, Moscow, is working on a new film provisionally titled Revolt. Complete railway station and goodsyard has been built in the studio and look exactly like the real thing. Moscow Chronicle Films, chief newsreel and semi-documentary organisation (Vertov works there) are building a large studio to cope with new and ambitious schemes. Need for it is also due to demands of such reportages as Joy March (physical culture parade in Red Square) which had 36 cameras, and the urgency of doing big jobs in a hurry such as the full history of the Gromov Moscow-San Francisco flight which was put out complete with all American material and an entire reel covering the arrival in U.S.S.R. on the second day after the event. 27