Cinema: Well-Shod Owl

Donald Duck has not yet been called to testify before the Kefauver committee, but his appearance there could scarcely have been more surprising last week than the performance of his distant cousin, a politically conscious Hollywood owl. The owl, Dr. Owsley Hoot, brainchild of a onetime Disney employee named John Sutherland, is the chief character in Fresh Laid Plans, a nine-minute animated cartoon independently produced by Sutherland and distributed throughout the nation by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

By & large, M-G-M heroes are not famed for taking sides on hot political issues. Sutherland’s owl, however, is made of stern stuff. By insisting in Fresh Laid Plans on exposing a community of farming chickens to the rigors of Fair Dealing price control, farm subsidies and other bureaucratic gimmicks, he landed the chickens in the soup and M-G-M spang in the center of the hottest political controversy in the farm belt.

The picture, cried one farm editor last week, “is a one-sided political editorial . . . a clever attempt to use the movies to sway public opinion … [it is] making history in the field of farm politics.” Does it mean, he went on to ask, that the movie industry “is going to bat to knock the Government out of agriculture?” “The cartoon,” said Satirist Sutherland, “was not aimed specifically at the . . . Brannan Plan, but if the shoe fits, they can wear it.”