Short Subjects

Two unusual short subjects are beginning the rounds of U.S. movie houses.

Martin and Gaston is an animated cartoon in color, drawn and written by children, aged 8 to 10. in a French grammar school. It tells the story of two little boys who take an ocean voyage, are shipwrecked on an island, live there like Robinson Crusoe, are attacked by cannibals, rescued by the French navy and taken back to France, where they get "a parade, and many medals and money."

Like most children's drawings, these have the beauty of the gem raw from the mine. The sun is a spoked yellow wheel, a whale a colossal comma. Cannibals are orange, and look like fierce textiles. Flame is a fluttering rose. Whereas the best professional cartoons--those made by U.P.A. (TIME, Sept. 14)--seem like fine artifice, this one feels like crude art.

The Stranger Left No Card starts out like one of the old two-reel comedies.

An eccentric comes to stay in a small British town. He is one of the harmless kind who imagines he is Napoleon Bonaparte, carries a rabbit in his old-fashioned beaver, decks out in a Dickensian weskit and cravat, and parades the streets in perfect weather under an open umbrella, followed by mobs of delighted children. Everybody calls him Napoleon, and is happy to have him around for laughs. The beauty of it is that Napoleon, in a well-juggled ending, turns out to be not so mad after all--or is he really much, much madder?

George K. Arthur (real name: Arthur G. Brest), dapper, London-born producer of Martin and The Stranger, is an oldtimer in films. He and the late Karl Dane were a popular brain 11. brawn Hollywood comedy team during the silent '205 (The Rookie, All at Sea). His acting career nipped by the transition to sound, Arthur turned promoter, ran a one-man advertising agency.

In 1951, he began making movie shorts which could be sold to TV chains as well. He hired Free-Lancer Sidney Carroll as scriptwriter, scraped together $8,000 and turned out The Gentleman in Room 6, a 20-minute horror fantasy about Hitler. Still on a shoestring, he went to England, with a seven-man company produced The Stranger and A Prince for Cynthia, a haplinesque story of a stenographer's daydream. In Paris, on a visit to a Left Bank nightclub, he saw a showing of 16-mm. colored slides drawn by local schoolchildren, promptly bought the set to make Martin and Gaston.

All four of Arthur's "featurettes" are now on the U.S. movie-house circuit. The

Stranger has appeared twice on CBS-TV's Omnibus; the others will be released for TV after their movie runs end. De spite his recovered prosperity. George K. Arthur plans to stick to low-budget short subjects, maintains he is not a full-fledged movie mogul: "After all. I still do advertising. Movies are only my hobby."

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