Cinema: Menu

By last week most of Hollywood’s producers had laid before U. S. exhibitors a tempting menu of cinema fare for the 1 939-40 season (beginning about Aug. 31). Some entrees:

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, mighty producing subsidiary of Loew’s Inc., promised to spend $42,500,000 on 52 pictures, another $2,500,000 to advertise them. Headliners: Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here (shelved in 1936); The Wizard of Oz in Technicolor; Northwest Passage with Wallace Beery, Spencer Tracy and Robert Taylor; Quo Vadis?; The Women with Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford. M-G-M will also release Producer David O. Selznick’s Gone With the Wind. Biggest M-G-M questionmark is fox-faced Hedy Lamarr, who after seven months of grooming at M-G-M was borrowed by Producer Walter Wanger and made an overnight sensation in Algiers. M-G-M has scrapped a Lamarr-Spencer Tracy picture, is now filming a Lamarr-Robert Taylor vehicle, Lady of the Tropics.

Twentieth Century-Fox’s ebullient Darryl Zanuck characteristically promised “at least five” $2,000,000 pictures: The Rains Came, with Tyrone Power, Myrna Loy, George Brent; Stanley and Livingstone; Little Old New York with Alice Faye; Brigham Young; Drums Along the Mohawk. Shirley Temple will do Lady Jane in Technicolor.

Warner Bros., which got the jump on the industry by introducing talkies in 1927, has since scored as a pacemaker in gangster films and biographies, is now the spearhead of Hollywood’s biographical thrust. Some Warner projects: Paul Muni in The Life of Beethoven, James Cagney in The Story of John Paul Jones, biographies of Knute Rockne, John Dillinger, Hitler-baiting Pastor Martin Niemoller.

Paramount will build a new $12,000,000 plant in West Los Angeles, make 60 pictures, including two starring Charles Laughton; Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn and London After Dark with Vivien (Scarlett O’Hara) Leigh.

Columbia has a great director in Frank Capra, who will make Mr. Smith Goes To Washington with James Stewart and Jean Arthur. Columbia’s fuss-&-feathers for the coming year was a “great director policy,” under which Mr. Capra will be abetted by such colleagues as Wesley Ruggles, Frank Lloyd, Howard Hawks, Rouben Mamoulian.

United Artists Corp., founded 20 years ago to distribute pictures for independent producers, is today a relatively small pond full of big fish. Biggest fish is Samuel Goldwyn (né Goldfish), who has owned U. A.’s studios since 1935 and last week renamed them the Samuel Goldwyn Studio. Producer Goldwyn proposes to make Music School, with Violinist Jascha Heifetz, and The Real Glory, with Gary Cooper. Other U. A. producers and their promises: Charles Chaplin, The Dictators; David Selznick, Rebecca, directed by Alfred Hitchcock; Alexander Korda, five Technicolors, including two with his East Indian Mickey Rooney, Sabu; Walter Wanger, Vincent Sheean’s Personal History; Hal Roach, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men; Douglas Fairbanks, a biography of Adventuress Lola Montez called The Californian.