Trans-Lux

Neatly capitalized on a modernistic fagade in Manhattan, the word Trans-Lux last week made its first public appearance in the world of entertainment. Trans-Lux means: 1) a machine to project images onto a screen from behind it; and 2) Trans-Lux theatres.

Trans-Lux projection has advantages over the common method of projecting film from in front of a screen because it can be used in a low-ceilinged, fully lighted room. A Trans-Lux lens placed eight feet behind a screen projects a picture eight feet wide. Standard film can be used. It passes over the wide-angled Trans-Lux lens which throws the image on the reverse side of a translucent screen through which it is visible from the front. Ordinary screens for movies are opaque, made out of heavy cloth painted with certain chemicals. Screens used in Trans-Lux are molded of a chemical composition of which gelatin is the base. A combination of properties in the lens and the screen prevents the image from penetrating beyond the screen. Trans-Lux first became commercially practicable about two years ago. Early Trans-Lux machines in brokerage houses illumined the ticker-tape quotations of the 1929 crash.

Percy Furber is president of Trans-Lux Daylight Picture Screen Corp. which owns 40% of the stock in Trans-Lux Movies Corp. Fifty per cent more of the stock is owned by RKO, the rest by the president of Trans-Lux Movies, Courtland Smith, on whose first theatre the new word made its appearance last week in large violet letters. This theatre, about (he size of a small drugstore, has 158 comfortable arm-seats, a turnstile in front and a svelte modernistic interior in which newsreels now flicker from 10 a. m. till midnight. There are no ushers; a ticket girl, two operators (union requirement) and a manager run the house. Admission is 25-c-. Two more such theatres will be opened in Manhattan in a month.

For the present, Trans-Lux theatres will show only Pathe, Paramount or Universal newsreels. Courtland Smith, who two years ago opened Manhattan's highly successful Embassy Theatre for newsreels only, was convinced by the success of this enterprise that a chain of newsreel theatres would be profitable. The Embassy cost $19,000 and made $150,000 in one year. In the same year, Roxy's, which cost $12,000.000, made $440.000.

Mr. Smith was discouraged by the discovery that there were only 38 theatres in the U. S. sufficiently cheap, small and well-situated to be incorporated into a news-theatre chain. He therefore investigated the possibilities of Trans-Lux projection, found that by projecting from behind the screen he could make miniature movie theatres out of small stores and offices at nominal cost. All Trans-Lux theatres will have big comfortable chairs, rows far enough apart for patrons to sit with their legs crossed. They will be too well lighted for the operations of leg-pinchers and knee-rubbers, who make the grandest cinema palaces their playground.

Originally a newspaper man, Promoter

Courtland Smith went to Washington with Will Hays in 1921, followed Hays into the movies, there became associated with William Fox to whom he expounded the merits of sound-with-pictures. Trans-Lux newsreels will all be talkies. Trans-Lux Movies Corp. owns the sole rights to Trans-Lux projection.

The New Pictures

Body and Soul (Fox). This picture is noteworthy only because it was chosen as the vehicle for the U. S. cinema debut of Elissa Landi, whose talents are emphasized by the film's other shortcomings. Actress Landi has the flimsy role of a heroine who, having passed the night with an aviator on leave, has to express her certainty that she has given him a "moment of heaven." The aviator is Charles Farrell who portrays drunkenness by waggling his head from side to side. The lady, nicknamed Pom-Pom, has been the wife of one of his friends who is killed in action. She is temporarily suspected of being a spy. Farrell is therefore accused of having, in moments of intimacy, given information to an enemy agent. Emotional tensity is emphasized by dropping articles on the floor: a champagne glass, later a revolver. Presently Pom-Pom is vindicated. Worst shot: a group of flyers teasing Farrell when they find him writing a letter to his girl. The vogue of Greta Garbo has been such that no important company considers itself to have a quorum of talent without one blonde actress capable of narrowing her eyelids inscrutably and talking alto. Elissa Landi is obviously the Fox Garbo. She also possesses important qualifications which are her own. Her face is attractive from certain angles; she performs with knowing restraint and a finish quite incongruous to such a story as Body and Soul. In her first U. S. appearance, on the Manhattan stage in A Farewell to Arms (TIME, Oct. 6), her beauty was more noticeable than it is when photo- graphed. Universally praised by critics, she was immediately taken to Hollywood. Body and Soul is her first U. S. movie. Daughter of the Countess Zanardi-Landi, Actress Landi was born in Venice, edu-cated in England. She is now 26, has written two published novels, likes tennis, is billed as never drinking.

June Moon (Paramount). Using the slight story of a scatter-brained youth who leaves Schenectady to write popular song lyrics in Manhattan, June Moon builds a satire on song writers and their lady friends, their bons mots and their ridiculous but engaging selfimportance. The scatter-brained youth meets a girl on the train who falls in love with him. He re-turns to her after adventures in Tin Pan Alley. These include advances made by the cold-hearted mistress of a music pub- lisher, committing malapropisms which cause him to be the butt of Broadway tune-sharpers. Finally he gets $2.500 for a song, because he has given the publisher a good excuse for getting rid of his girl. Jack Oakie makes the talkie almost as funny as the play by Ring Lardner and George S. Kaufman, which was the most hilarious of the 1929-30 Manhattan season. The wisecracks of a cynical pianist suffer slightly in not being rendered by Harry Rosenthal, who created the role. The song publisher's mistress is played a little too broadly by June MacCloy. Most of the acid and laughable dialog of the play has been retained, as has the depraved and tuneless anthem, composed by a writer of novelty songs: Should a father's carnal sins Blight the life of babykins? All I ask is: Give our child a name--mean, a last name. My Past (Warner). Pregnancy used to be established in the films by a glimpse of tiny garments. Preliminary activities were intimated by two pairs of shoes out-side a door. Grown slightly more sophisticated, the talkies still employ euphemistic symbolism. In this picture it becomes necessary for an actress (Bebe Daniels) to tell a young man whom she loves that she is the mistress of an older man, his best friend and financial patron. This she does by grasping an armful of roses.

The plot revolves around the loyalties of the three persons involved. The young man (Ben Lyon) wants to marry the actress. He is unable to do so because he owes a debt of gratitude to her lover (Lewis Stone). These complications are resolved when the older man retires from the situation in a Monte Carlo setting. He is last seen standing on the deck of his yacht, drinking a toast to the young man and the actress who remain ashore.

On Location

A crackling evening over White Bay, Newfoundland, last week. A lonesome woman, solitary radio operator on Horse Island, took a long bedtime look at a brig-antine's bulk in the broken ice 16 miles off shore. It was the Viking, seal hunting ship from which Varick Frissell* with a troupe of 15 last year took the major part of a talkie, to be named White Thunder. For continuity, he this year wanted shots of seals pupping and the pups learning to swim. He also wanted scenes of sealers dynamiting icebergs out of their ship's path. The Viking was loaded with explosives. The crew of 139 would take care of the rough work. Henry Jackson Sargent, fellow explorer,/- and A. G. Penrod, cameraman (Down to the Sea in Ships), would do the picture-taking.

The lone woman jerked from her late look at the ice-battered Viking. Flames flared from the ship. Things sprang into the air and, before they tippled to the blocks of dancing ice, a boom rolled to the woman's ears. The Viking had exploded, was blazing. By the ship's dancing glare the woman saw those things coming toward her. Some skipped from block to block. Some crawled. Some rolled into the water. Two days later some 60 seamen succeeded in crossing the broken ice, in reaching the radio station's shelter.

Publicity Man

"Cinema publicity" suggests live elephants in theatre lobbies when African hunting pictures are being shown, or stunting airmen cavorting over housetops to herald films with flying heroes. It does not suggest a knowledge of stocks, bonds and corporate finance. Yet last week Glenn Griswold became vice president in charge of publicity for Fox Film Corp., and for 20 years the Griswold career has been exclusively in financial journalism. Financial editor of the Chicago Examiner and, later, of the Chicago Tribune, Chicago manager for Dow Jones & Co., the man who helped organize the Chicago Journal of Commerce in six weeks and edited it for eight years, Mr. Griswold is much more familiar with sinking funds and gold notes than with theme songs and synchronization.

Yet observers familiar with Fox Film Corp. and its current financial situation were not surprised at the appearance of a financial man in Fox publicity. Fox Film must soon raise between $55,000,000 and $75,000,000 to repay loans resulting from the frenzied finance of William Fox and the emergency financing of the reorganization in which William Fox ceased to direct Fox destinies and Harley Clarke succeeded him. Able is Mr. Clarke and varied are his interests (which include ownership of the second largest brickyard in the world), but depressed is the cinema industry and few are the cinema companies which can expect an eager rush of investors to purchase their securities. Keen, swart, mustachioed Mr. Griswold has influential connections and a thorough understanding of how securities are issued, how the press receives them. He, better than Winfield Sheehan, Fox vice president and general manager, and better than any Fox man accustomed to the usual cinema publicity, should be able to launch the forthcoming Fox bonds into a quiet and receptive financial sea.

*Frissell, Yale '26, nephew of Governor Gifford Pinchot of Pennsylvania, discovered the Grenfell River and Yale Falls in Labrador. Sargent was Harvard '12.

/- Producer of The Swillin' Racket, The Silent Enemy and The Vikings of the North, all cinemas of seal taking.

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