Cinema: Summer Vacation

At 9 o’clock one evening last week, a dignified, white-haired man, his lawyer at his side, walked into Los Angeles’ towering county jail building and surrendered on his bond. At the booking desk he emptied his pockets, received an ill-fitting blue denim uniform to replace his elegant double-breasted grey flannel suit. Soon, reported a turnkey, No. 22487 was “sleeping like a baby” in the upper bunk of cell 10A2 on the twelfth floor. Hollywood Producer Walter (Stagecoach) Wanger, 57, a suave man with “no previous arrests,” had begun what he called his “summer vacation.”

In the lower bunk of Wanger’s cell lay stone-faced Evan Charles Thomas, the warped railroad switchman who, with his .22 rifle, had murdered one woman, wounded four, and thus inspired the recent movie The Sniper (TIME, May 19). But Producer Wanger slept the sound sleep of a man who knew an ordeal was all but ended. Its climax had really come last December when Wanger fired a pistol bullet into the groin of Actors’ Agent Jennings Lang, whom Wanger then accused of trying to break up his marriage with Actress Joan Bennett. After Wanger threw himself on the court’s mercy, the charge was reduced from assault with intent to murder to assault with a deadly weapon. He thus avoided a possibly unsavory trial which Hollywood dreaded, and got off with a four-month sentence. (Lang’s recovery helped.)

After two days in jail, spent mopping floors and getting his “aptitudes” tested, Wanger was sent off to the county’s honor farm at Castaic, 50 miles from town. There he was put to work as a librarian. Between his bookish chores, Producer Wanger hoped to swing back into the old stride that had helped him turn out such hit movies as Algiers. His own occupational therapy project: working on a movie called Kansas and Pacific, which he plans to produce at Monogram after his release.