Cinema: A Movie Is Born

Among the millions listening to General MacArthur’s speech before Congress last week were an obscure Hollywood producer named Maurice Duke and a casting director named William Selwyn. At the close of the speech, when MacArthur quoted from the “barracks ballad,” Old Soldiers Neiver Die, Selwyn’s reaction was instantaneous and practical. He turned to Duke and remarked that whoever got the movie rights to that song would certainly be sitting pretty. Duke at once got on the trail.

The trail led to a Chicago music concern—which had previously sold its rights to a subsidiary of Warner Bros.—and thence to Manhattan. Together with three partners (including Idea-Man Selwyn), Duke finally managed to buy the movie rights to one version of the song* for $1,000. Then he registered the title, for a prospective movie. To his dismay, he found that another Hollywood producer had beaten him to the draw. Fifteen minutes after the general’s speech, Darryl Zanuck had registered the same title.

Undaunted, Duke announced that he would go ahead with a movie based on the song, anyway. His picture, explained Duke, would be about “a fellow in a little town” who “makes a great -life in the Army and comes to the point where an old soldier never dies.” Added the producer: “If he happens to resemble Mac-Arthur or Omar Bradley or Skinny Wainwright, it isn’t intentional.”

*An old Army favorite, apparently compounded of a 19th Century English tune called Kind Words Can Never Die (1855) and homemade soldiers lyrics. Since World War I, at least six versions have gained currency.