The New Pictures

Strictly Dishonorable (Universal). Between the necessities of being naughty to please the audience and nice to please the censors, lies a great void. Into this void flop most of Hollywood's attempts to be sophisticated. Universal Pictures made a valiant try to sidestep the flopping process in this production by sidestepping sophistication. When Preston Sturges wrote the play he invented a heroine who spent a good deal of time during the story trying to be seduced, but the movies, true to their glorious traditions of U. S. womanhood, calmly purified her.

The narrative fades in with the young person enroute to a Manhattan speakeasy with her fiance. Drinking therein are an Italian tenor and a courtly ex-judge. Before many reels have elapsed the fiance gets himself jailed for badgering a cop and the young person finds herself in the tenor's rooms for the night. So childlike and pure is she that he puts her to bed with a huge teddy bear and goes to sleep on the sofa. He surprises her and probably himself the next morning by proposing marriage. Since she has fallen drip-pingly in love with him the only obstacle to be disposed of is the fiance who arrives hotfoot from jail. They send him out to wait in a taxi and forget all about him.

The loudest laughs went, as they did in the play, to the Irish policeman, ably acted by Sidney Toler. Messrs. Paul Lukas and Lewis Stone were the tenor and the judge with their usual suave excellence. Mr. Lukas did not sing. Sidney Fox played the young woman and would have been very good indeed if she had not been so cutey-cute. Characteristic shot: Miss Fox lying on the bed thrashing arms & legs and wailing, "I'm not a baby!"

Once a Lady (Paramount). While her son is reaching his majority in The Sin of Madelon Claude t, Helen Hayes changes from a blooming peasant girl into a shrunken harridan, withered and stringy with age (TIME, Nov. 9). In Once a Lady, Ruth Chatterton survives the years which it takes her daughter to grow up without developing a single wrinkle. Both heroines pass the intervening period in more or less persistent prostitution. The fact that dissipation has a less damaging effect upon Ruth Chatterton may be regarded as a tribute to the durability of the First Lady of the Cinema. The picture is a tribute to her in no other respect.

The plot is in the same pattern as Madame X and Madelon Claudet. Prom- ising an estranged husband (Geoffrey Kerr) to support a fortuitous rumor that she is dead. Miss Chatterton disappears into the Parisian demimonde. Years later she threatens to reveal that she is still alive and resentful when he refuses to let their grown-up daughter marry. Cinemas in which the climax arrives only with the maturity of the heroine's offspring are likely to be long drawn out. This one, though Ruth Chatterton acts well and ably affects a Russian accent, seems as long as two ordinary cinemas and twice as ordinary.

RKO & Selznick

Last week the cinema industry was ad- justing itself to two momentous shifts in personnel. At a meeting of Paramount's directorate, three new directors had been added to the board. One of them, John Hertz (Yellow Cabs, race horses) became chairman of the finance committee. The others were William Wrigley Jr. (gum) and Albert Davis Lasker (advertising). Also last fortnight, President Hiram K. Brown of RKO-Radio and RKO-Pathe announced a merger of the production facilities of both companies, announced that David Oliver Selznick had been named vice president-in-charge-of-produc-tion of RKO-Radio and vice president of RKO-Pathe.

As to the consequences of the first shift, Hollywood last week was still uncertain. The consequences of the second shift were not uncertain at all. It was the end of a chapter in the history of Radio-Keith-Orpheum Corp., a chapter which corre sponded to an exciting and seemingly parlous period in the cinema industry.

Hollywood producers were frankly frightened in 1929, when Radio Corp. of America entered the cinema industry by buying 118 Keith-Albee and Orpheum theatres, the producing facilities of Film Booking Corp., and organizing RKO. Their consternation seemed to have a reasonable basis. The new company had a directorate sufficiently powerful to rock any industry. David Sarnoff, head of Radio Corp., was chairman; other direc tors were General Electric's Owen D. Young, Publicist Herbert Bayard Swope, Bankers Arthur Lehman and Elisha Walker, President Merlin H. Aylesworth of National Broadcasting Co., Maj. Gen eral James G. Harbord, retired, Drygoods Tycoon Cornelius M. Bliss. President Hiram Brown was head of U. S. Leather Co. RKO was capitalized for $20,000,000. Behind it were all the resources of Radio Corp. of America, all Radio's affiliated companies for producing mechanical amusement--National Broadcasting Co., R. C. A. Photophone. R. C. A. Victor, R. C. A. Radiotrons, Radio Music Publishing Co.

From the era of the nickelodeon, the cinema industry has been created by the crafty and extraordinary methods of one-time fur peddlers, garment dealers, second-hand jewelers--mostly Jews--who were, ail-importantly, great and daring showmen. These individuals had an embarrassing presentiment that "big business" might discover methods in the cinema industry far more efficient than their own. They had padded their payrolls with relatives, produced pictures at immense cost, settled their biggest deals over all-night poker games, entertained each other at parties decorated by the most expensive actresses in the world. They discussed the new force which RKO represented in "picture business" with awe-stricken whis-pers and comic strip dialect. For a time, the chief slogan of the industry was: "Vait till ve see vat Radio vill do."

RKO began by securing William Le-Baron, long with Paramount, for production manager. LeBaron brought in two Paramount stars--Richard Dix, Bebe Daniels--augmented the list later with Ina Claire, Betty Compton, Bert Wheeler, Robert Woolsey, Evelyn Brent, Lily Damita. RKO installed RCA sound apparatus in its circuit of theatres, enlarged the U. S. circuit to 202 by buying the F. F. Proctor chain, the Pantages circuit on the West Coast, the Interstate circuit in the South, and the Libson-Heidingsfeld-Harriss chain in the Middle West. In January 1930, RKO acquired Pathe and four stars of Pathe's "personality group" --Constance Bennett, Ann Harding, Helen Twelvetrees, William Boyd. By last December, RKO'S total current assets were $15,200,615, almost twice what they had been the year before. Nonetheless, by last year, Hollywood producers were definitely less frightened by the potentialities of the new company. RKO had failed to produce a single new star of its own, an obvious symptom of extemporaneous methods in the production staff. The company had had three hits--Cimarron, Rio Rita, Amos & Andy--but these were hardly sufficient to balance the average of mediocre and definitely unsuccessful pictures. RKO had foolishly tried to push the vogue for musical comedies after other producers had dropped it. It had turned out a string of clumsy program pictures which showed a lack of unified efficiency. But if RKO had not justified the apprehensions of Hollywood, the company at least made money in its first two years--$1,669,564 in 1929, $3,385,628 in 1930. Last week, in its third year, the idea of RKO as a menace to other producers had become almost farcical. The company's earnings for the first nine months of 1931 showed a deficit for the last two quarters, a net profit of $622. Recent RKO pictures--for example, The Woman Between (TIME, Nov. 2)--have shown a dearth of producing, writing, directorial and acting talent.

The move which RKO made last week to extricate itself from a humiliating and costly situation, while it may again make RKO an important factor in Hollywood, must have greatly tickled the producers who were most worried two years ago. For RKO's savior-elect, David Selznick, son of Lewis J. Selznick, the jeweler who stampeded the cinema from 1916 to 1919, is definitely a scion of the peculiar hier- archy which always has controlled the cinema industry and, it now begins to seem, always will. Son-in-law of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Louis B. Mayer, David Selznick is doubly a member of Hollywood's highest, smallest, most ridiculed caste. Nonetheless, when he gave up a $2,000-a-week job as assistant to Paramount's Production Manager B. P. Schulberg to venture with independent production (TIME, Aug. 3), it became clear that David Selznick had more radical ideas than the other members of Hollywood's nobility. Dissatisfied with Paramount's methods, he wanted to try making pictures in a way of his own. He set out with Director Lewis Milestone to get backing for an independent company which would not employ factory production methods or stars at exorbitant salaries. When he broached his scheme to them, Hiram Brown and David Sarnoff liked it so much that instead of giving him backing for a small unit of his own, they offered him a job which amounts to reorganizing, according to his own ideas for independent production, the most impressively backed organization in Hollywood. Two months after he arrived in Manhattan with a precarious scheme for earning his livelihood, young David Oliver Selznick returned to Hollywood last week with an importance in the industry more than comparable to that of his father (whose enmities he has thus far avoided), with a contract far more profitable than his connection with Paramount, which will make him one of the five Hollywood executives under 35 who earn more than $200,000 a year.*

As executive vice president of RKO-Radio, David Selznick's first task will be to improve the functionings of the Radio production staff. Pathe's vice president-in-charge-of-production, Charles G. Rogers, now also a vice president of RKO-Radio, will continue to be responsible for Pathe productions. Hollywood gossip however lost no time in concluding that the controlling figure in RKO-Radio and RKO-Pathe would be David Selznick, that his policies would determine the management of both companies. In general, Radio pictures will, for the future, be made at a lower than average (for Hollywood) cost. The Selznick idea is to develop stars rather than buy them ready made; to recruit acting and directorial talent from the Manhattan stage; to hold down production costs by avoiding some of the most flagrant waste motion common and to some extent unavoidable in cinemanufacture. Knowing observers last week suspected that the competition from RKO which Hollywood had foreseen with so much consternation two years ago, might now be forthcoming, not from a directorate of bankers but from a clever member of Hollywood's own inner, more odd than vicious, circle.

*Irving Thalbcrg (MGM) $520,000

Carl Laemmle Jr. (Universal) $260,000

Darryl Zanuck (Warner) $389,000

Howard Hughes (United Artists) .. .$520,000

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.