Cinema: Zanuck’s Start

When, three months ago, dynamic little Darryl Francis Zanuck and his partner, Joseph M. Schenck, merged their flourishing Twentieth Century Pictures with huge, debt-laden Fox Film, Hollywood had its doubts as to what the result would be. Would Zanuck, struggling to prop up the sagging bulk, suffocate beneath it? Or would he bring it back to life? Last week, with one picture (Metropolitan) released (TIME, Oct. 28), Producer Zanuck showed three more products of his peculiar art. Hollywood scanned them for answers to its questions. The pictures:

Show Them No Mercy. When Zanuck started the gangster cycle five years ago, censors had not yet ruled that picture makers must not show the manner in which a crime is committed. This story obeys the new rule by beginning at the end of a “perfect” kidnapping, picking up the kidnappers at the point where, receiving the ransom money, they begin their flight. A serious complication develops when the gang finds that a young couple have taken shelter in their hideout, a deserted farmhouse. In that simple interior and a few exteriors (the grounds of the house, the countryside around it) is played a drama so compact and terrifying it makes other G-men stories seem like Mother Goose. Although the operations of Government agents provide initial tension, the real drama is the conflict of the criminal characters, worked out between each other and the stranded couple.

The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo. The vacant chair beside the banker at the baccarat table in the sporting club at Monte Carlo is reserved for M. Gallard of Paris who, arriving late, proceeds to break the bank, taking home his winnings in a suitcase which he has brought for the purpose. What follows is an adventure story designed to fit Ronald Colman’s elegant, off-hand romanticism. Will he go back to the tables? Hunchbacks, horseshoes and other lucky symbols strewn in his path by the backers of the sporting club fail to lure him. On the Blue Express back to Paris he meets Joan Bennett, falls in love with her, does not know that she has been employed by the sharpers of the sporting club to bring him back to the tables to leave his winnings, and a little more. Once more the reserved chair at the baccarat table is the setting for a climax in which M. Gallard attempts an encore.

Thanks a Million. To get Dick Powell for the lead in this topical, pell-mell musical cinema. Producer Zanuck traded Fredric March to Warner Bros, for Anthony Adverse. A troupe of entertainers, stuck in a small town on a rainy night, strangle into a political rally to get dry and become part of the election machinery when Troupe Manager Fred Allen sells the candidate for Governor the idea of spicing up his speeches with songs by the Yacht Club Boys, Rubinoffs fiddling. Before long Dick Powell wins the party nomination, campaigns successfully with speeches guaranteed not to last more than 30 seconds and with such songs as Thanks a Million, I’m Sittin’ High on a Hilltop, I’ve Got a Pocket Full of Sunshine.

That Darryl Zanuck had composed four strong life-potions for sick Fox seemed fairly evident last week. His course of treatment, mysterious to receivers of bankrupt film companies, began last August when, arriving on the big lot in Westwood Hills, he set up provisional headquarters like a field surgeon in a row of hot, dusty bungalows. He ordered all Fox scripts brought to him, read them in four days & nights, threw out twelve, stopped six on which shooting had already started, installed his own production manager. He re-inventoried studio properties and personnel, cut 77 private policemen on the payroll to 35. Prop boys were reduced from 107 to 35, music departmenteers from 69 to 30. Other economies, in spite of doubled production activities, brought the payroll down $10,000 a week.

Cinema subjects were torn in characteristic Zanuck style from headlines and history books: The Country Doctor, Message to Garcia, Doctor Mudd.* Although he brought his own executive staff with him. Zanuck surprised studio politicians by retaining several Fox producers and writers known to be competent. In contrast to cinemen like Irving Thalberg and David Selznick, Zanuck cares nothing for high polish in his products, feels that every picture will have uneven spots, will succeed when its entertainment content is strong enough to wipe out flaws. Four weeks is his average shooting time. He reads each version of every script, sees the daily rushes of each picture in production, works on each rough negative with the cutter. He lunches with all his executives every day so that they can get his reactions without waiting for an office appointment.

He gets to the studio at 10:30 a. m., works till 7 p. m., goes home to Beverly Hills for dinner, returns at 8:30 p. m., stays until 2 or 3 a. m. With a national two-goal rating, he has played no polo since he has been at Fox. Consumption of cigars from the fortlike box on his desk has increased from 15 to 20 a day but so far this has produced no visible effect on his physique.

Stars Over Broadway (Warner). ”I’m not opera league,” says a singer’s manager (Pat O’Brien) late in this picture. The same may be said of Warner Brothers, who yield to Hollywood’s current preoccupation with opera only to the extent of casually inspecting Manhattan’sMetropolitan and having Radio Tenor James Melton sing Celeste Aida. At the beginning Melton manages this famed Verdi aria, in what is meant to be a promising manner, at a Metropolitan audition. At the end he sings it in full costume on the Metropolitan stage, heaves into its final high note to tumultuous applause. What happens in between is a well-worn success story, distinguished by an odd note of lése-majestè when O’Brien, intent on quick fame and fortune for his protege, launches Melton as a radio and night-club singer instead of giving him the training the Metropolitan demands. This enables Melton to sing a pleasant song called Where Am I?, to participate with Radio Singer Jane Froman in an elaborate Busby Berkeley divertissement built around another song, At Your Service, Madame. Drink and women, ruinous to him as a crooner, seem to be minor obstacles to his studying seriously, making his Metropolitan debut in better voice than ever.

In his cinema debut James Melton speaks with a trace of the accent he got from his birth 31 years ago in Georgia, his attendance at Florida, Georgia and Vanderbilt universities. Tall (6 ft. 2½ in.), he affably overcomes the disadvantages of a buttony nose, a wide face, much as does his current Manhattan neighbor, Baritone Lawrence Tibbett (Metropolitan). No Tibbett in disciplined artistry, as he demonstrated when he tried a Manhattan concert recital a few years ago (TIME, May 2, 1932), Tenor Melton sings with the gusto of one who has been a radio artist for Coca-Cola, Salada Tea, Palmolive, Armour and a member of the money-making Revelers Quartet. His next picture, The Desert Song, may remedy a minor omission from Stars Over Broadway. In this one he exhibits only the most casual interest in the girl (Jean Muir) whom Pat O’Brien eventually wins.

Annie Oakley (RKO). This is a fictionized biography of the woman who could hit a Hying quail in the head with a rifle bullet, draw her portrait on a target with bullet-holes at 50 yd., who shot a cigaret out of the lips of Crown Prince (later Kaiser) Wilhelm, and was the outstanding attraction of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show for so long that her name became the argot term for box-office passes.* Her story is romanticized with a plot about the love of Annie (Barbara Stanwyck) for a cocky sharpshooter (Preston Foster), her kindness in concealing from him that she is a better shot than he, his disappearance after he has wounded her arm trying to hit a dime she is holding. All this is adequately handled, is neither offensive nor particularly interesting. What makes Annie Oakley a good picture is the intelligent assumption of the people making it that Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show has definite importance in U.S. tradition. Under supervision of white-haired Edward Phillips, once a young trick-roper with the Cody outfit, the famedacts of Col. William Frederick Cody’s show are faithfully reproduced: the bulldogging, target-shooting, parade of Sitting Bull and his tribe, and the famed fight between the immigrant wagon train and the attacking Indians. Cody (Moroni Olsen) is a fine likeness of the picture that hung in every small boy’s bedroom 30 years ago. Drawn from life also is Cody’s pressagent, Ned Buntline (Dick Elliott) writer of the famed Buffalo Bill dime novels and originator of the phrase, “Another redskin bit the dust.” Trickshooting by Stanwyck and Foster was actually done by Capt. H. H. Hardy, coach of the champion Los Angeles police pistol team.

Mary Burns, Fugitive (Paramount) is evidence that, if the cinema is not quite ready to call off its exploitation of G-men and supergangsters, it feels driven nevertheless to eerie heights of implausibility in search of new twists. Sylvia Sidney, naïve proprietress of a roadside restaurant, falls in love with a winning stranger (Alan Baxter) only to learn, when he begins discharging firearms, that he is Public Enemy No. A1. She is accused of aiding his escape, bullied into a falseconfession, sent to prison. To trap Baxter the G-men rig up an elaborate escape for Miss Sidney, shadow her every move. The infatuated public enemy manages to harass her while eluding his pursuers and robbing a football stadium, almost ruins her romance with Melvyn Douglas before he is shot. For cinemaddicts who are not ruffled by uneven pacing and exaggerated detail, Mary Burns, Fugitive has enough taut sequences to be entertaining.

*Producer Zanuck got his idea for this picture from TIME’S story on the life of the Maryland physician who served a prison term for doctoring John Wilkes Booth immediately after the assassination of Lincoln (TIME, Feb. 4 & March 18). *”Annie Oakleys” arc so called because holes are usually punched in them to prevent their being sold.