Profound Mouse

Every four weeks the big-eyed, wisp-snouted rodent that is the world's most celebrated film actor re-emerges on the screens of the world with shrill eagerness and a new set of adventures. He pokes into the unknown, pants, heaves and swells his chest at Minnie Mouse, meets grievous setbacks, shrilly gives fight and taps out marvels of dancing, bullfighting, footballing.* Like his predecessor in world popularity, Charlie Chaplin, he has "the wistfulness of ... a little fellow trying to do the best he can." In Germany he is Michael Maus, in France Michel Souris, in Japan Miki Kuchi, in Denmark Mikkel Mus and in Spain Miguel Ratonocito. Last week he became Art. In Manhattan's Kennedy Galleries art critics piously eyed a collection of original Mickey Mouse cartoons from the Walt Disney Studios in Hollywood. Wrote one, "Genius . . . profoundest stuff . . . drama of the eternal ego." Another noted "the integrity of the draftsmanship, the flair for effective massing of spaces and the never failing rhythmic pattern of the drawings." From Manhattan the cartoons will go to leading U. S. colleges and museums for exhibition under the auspices of the College Art Association./- Mickey Mouse's popularity derives from the absolute freedom of the art form in which he exists. He can break all natural laws (he never breaks moral laws) and always win. He lives in the moment, has no inhibitions. When he wins he frankly gloats as though he thought he fully deserved to win. There is rarely a standard cinema Menace threatening him. It is his overeagerness. optimism and weakness for showing off before Minnie that get him into trouble. When Minnie is in danger he rescues her. Toward her he smiles a vast lopsided smile that wavers now and then with embarrassment, returns soon to the simpleton grin. He turns everything to use. He wrestles off the edge of a cliff, wrestles on in midair. Suddenly he looks down in horror, races back across space to the cliff, resumes wrestling with complete concentration. He flees interminably before a lion which loses its teeth when it nips him. Mickey claps himself into the teeth and turns on the lion which flees abjectly, its toothless mouth a parched wrinkle. Mickey pursuing, champs the teeth ferociously, suddenly gives out a lion-like roar. Mickey is a mouse but he acts like a man. He has a sack-like hound and a cat. They and the incidental animals and things contrast with Mickey's seriousness, act with fantastic playfulness. A swarm of canary chicks will escape Mickey's cage, light in unison on a table. Suddenly they all go into a dance, do a double shuffle, a stationary skating motion and bump fundaments by twos. Audiences roar with astonishment. Mickey's cat and dog chase one another into a pair of drawers on a line. The drawers stand up and do a buck & wing. A bedspring rises on end. Mickey twangs the strings and it becomes a harp. Anything may take on life and humanity, express itself. A singing bird does its scales like a tyro, gulps, quivers and heaves like a diva, perches on the sheet music on the piano rack and turns the pages. The dog chases the cat through a clothes wringer. Both come through flattened out like sheet iron, go leaping on, smack into a fence which jolts them back into three dimensions. Nothing in a Disney cinema is ever entirely dead, nothing ever dies, nothing is impossible.

Mickey Mouse's creator, Walter ("Walt") Disney is a slim, sharp-faced young man (31) of Irish-German descent. His father, a contractor, let him study drawing for a few months at the Chicago Art Institute before the family moved to Kansas City. He spent six years of his childhood on a Missouri farm watching the animal ancestors of Mickey's pals. In school he early learned the schoolboy trick of drawing figures on the margins of his textbooks, graduating the poses on succeeding pages so that when he flipped the leaves rapidly, the figures seemed to move. At 17 he was drawing animal cartoons to advertise a barber shop, in exchange for haircuts. Then he got a job drawing animated cartoon slides as film advertisements for a Kansas City cinema palace. In his "studio" over a garage he spent hours coaxing a pair of mice out of their hole onto his drawing board. When they assumed faintly human attitudes, his guffaw of delight sent them scampering back. Then, singlehanded, with $40. he tried to make an animated cartoon cinema called Steamboat Willie. His brother lent him several hundred dollars more to photo graph it and get to Hollywood. The pic ture did not sell but it got him a studio job. Soon after he invented an Oswald the Rabbit cartoon. Sound came to the cinema and his boss scrapped Oswald and Disney. With $15,000 savings, he and his elder brother went to work on an animated cartoon cinema with sound & dialog synchronized. Its hero was first named Mortimer Mouse, its leading lady Minnie. Mortimer soon became Mickey, an accurately cartooned mouse with a mouse's four fingers, an inert tail, and a trick of lolling out its tongue. Hollywood turned down the finished product. It was first exhibited modestly in September, 1928 at a small Manhattan theatre. A week later it was jamming the Roxy. Walt Disney's struggles were over. Mickey Mouse's had just begun. No understudy has yet been found to think up Walt Disney's simple ideas for Mickey Mouse. In the complicated translation to cinema form, 175 understudies do most of the drawing far better than Disney could. In his $150,000 Hollywood studio, the preparation of a Mickey Mouse short is much the same as for any solemn Hollywood picture. When the script is finished, "animators" draw Mickey's attitudes as at the beginning and end of each action. "Inbetweeners" draw the graduated poses between. "Inkers" place a transparent square of celluloid on the drawing and outline it boldly in ink on the celluloid. The first square is superimposed on a painted background. A picture is taken. A second is superimposed; and so on. While the film is run off in a soundproof room, an orchestra plays the score. Disney talks for Mickey Mouse. Five other men put in other dialog and sound imitations. But if the simple explosion of Disney's comic idea has missed fire somewhere in the translation, the whole thing is done over. All his time, energy and his $400,000 a year, Disney turns back into Mickey Mouse and the Silly Symphonies (hero-less, dialog-less fantasies of jigging birds, beasts, fish, insects, skeletons, minerals and vegetables). His wife. Lillian Marie Bounds, a Hollywood girl who has never had anything to do with the cinema, calls herself a "mouse widow." She considers her husband's conversation fascinating because it is entirely given to Mickey Mouse.

Brooklyn Robbed

One afternoon last week when the guards in the sprawling, five-story Museum of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts & Sciences shooed out visitors at closing time, their calls and retreating footsteps were heard by two or more men hiding silently in the shadows, probably under the beds in the American period rooms on the third floor. The strangers had a job to do but not a hard one.

After midnight, when the fourth floor guard had passed the collection of the late Col. Michael Friedsam. the lurking thieves walked silently up into the dim-lit gallery. Swiftly & neatly they unhung ten famed paintings, turned them over, knifed out the wooden panels from the back, removed the canvases on their stretchers. They unrolled a 70-ft. length of heavy sash rope, tied one end to a newel post on the fourth floor landing, dropped the other out a window. There was no moon.

Not until twelve hours later, as a Sunday afternoon guard took up his post on the fourth floor was one of the most amazing museum robberies of modern times discovered. Most valuable of the ten stolen paintings were an "Annunciation" by Fra Angelico, a "Christ's Ascension" by Peter Paul Rubens. Most embarrassing loss was a "Judith" by Lucas Cranach, lent to the Museum by Sculptor Carl Milles. The other seven were a Rogier van der Weyden, a Sir Thomas Lawrence, a Romney. Van Dyck, Jean Fouquet. Francois Clouet and Bernardino Luini. Eight were from the Friedsam collection. The Van Dyck was 2 ft. by 1 1/2 ft. The rest were all about half as large, easy to handle. Total value: about $40,000.

Like all Museum robberies, this one was probably unprofitable. The ten paintings were practically unmarketable. No dealer or collector anywhere in the world would want them, except to look at in secret or unless some underworld tycoon was in the market to decorate his gangland mansion. The Brooklyn Museum had no insurance on the stolen pictures, and no intention of insuring the rest of its treasures. No public museums or libraries carry insurance because, 1) it would cost too much for public subscription. 2) it is not necessary. Nearly every important picture ever stolen from a museum has eventually been recovered.

* Latest pictures: Mickey's Melodrama (based on Uncle Tom's Cabin) and Ye Olden Days (based on When Knighthood was in Flower). Coming: Mail Pilot. /-Last week the city fathers of Worcester, Mass, announced an even greater salute to Mickey Mouse. May 12 will be Mickey Mouse Day in Worcester. On that day a little street built in front of the Worcester City Hall will be named Mickcv Mouse Street.

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