Foreign News: Mussolini’s Roach

No longer does the hulking Italian liner Rex have to stop at Quarantine for medical inspection since the granting eight months ago of “radio pratique” to certain liners entering New York harbor (TIME. Sept. 6). It stopped there last week, however, to let two moon-faced gentlemen climb down a gangplank to a Coast Guard cutter. The cutter snaked up the river to a Fire Department pier. Here the chubby passengers, Cinema Producer Hal Roach and Dictator’s Son Vittorio Mussolini, were transferred to an earnest knot of alien squad members, policemen. State Department and Italian Embassy officials, and rushed cross town to the Ritz Tower Hotel, thus avoiding a noisy incident as the Rex warped into its regular pier. A thunderous loud speaker, operated by a microphone hidden in the pier’s men’s washroom suddenly boomed:

“Down with Mussolini! Mussolini is an admitted murderer! Deport Mussolini’s son,”

At about the same time plump Vittorio Mussolini was explaining to Manhattan reporters that he was in the U. S. to spend 20 days in Hollywood studying production methods as a prelude to his new career: the presidency of an Italian cinema corporation to be known as R.A.M. Films. He said his favorite Hollywood characters are Greta Garbo and Mickey Mouse, there was absolutely nothing political in his visit and he found American women beautiful.

Fat Vittorio Mussolini, 21, married and a veteran bomber of Ethiopian villages, has been excited about the cinema for over a year. But the original idea for this latest of Fascist corporations belonged to neither Vittorio Mussolini nor Hollywood Producer Hal Roach. It belonged to an earnest Italian, Dr. Renato Senise, nephew of the chief of Rome’s secret police and son of an Academician. To Hollywood he went over a year ago fired with his pet idea, the production of full length cinema operas in Italy where tenors are as plentiful as olives. There he met Producer Hal Roach. Mr. Roach has spent a great many of his 45 years in Hollywood among the custard pies of its comedy lots. There he demonstrated his possession of the common touch of producing interminable series of Our Gang pictures, in which succeeding generations of fat, freckled, good, bad, pretty and colored children were featured. Mr. Roach made a fortune out of these films but this spring he put his name on a different kind of comedy, a full-length sophisticated picture. It was a good one called Topper, starring Constance Bennett, Cary Grant and Roland Young, and Hollywood sat up and admitted that Hal Roach had widened his horizons in a hurry. Laying his head to Dr. Senise’s, he proceeded to widen it still further in a fashion to take even a Schenck’s breath away. Few Hollywoodsmen have dared dream of taking in a government for a partner.

Back to Italy a few months ago went Dr. Senise to tackle the then head of Fascist films, Luigi Freddi, in the expensive Cinema City that II Duce has built outside Rome. To Filmtsar Freddi the idea of cinemoperas seemed “too big, too beautiful” for Italy. Piqued Dr. Senise went immediately to Vittorio Mussolini, who carried the plan just as quickly to papa.

II Duce was quick to understand the political advantage of producing what looked like 100% Italian films with all the advantages of Hollywood imported technicians, cameramen, designers.

At this point Originator Senise dropped from the picture. The R.A.M. Films were incorporated, the name means nothing less than Roach And Mussolini, capitalized at $5,000,000. The $5,000,000 comes directly from the public treasury, with Producer Hal Roach guaranteed 50% of the profits, responsible for 50% of the losses. In return he is sworn to produce no pictures anywhere else for three years.

Four operas will be produced as a starter: Rigoletto, Aïda, Tosca, probably La Traviata, with oldtime Composer Pietro Mascagni (Cavalleria Rusticana) to conduct at least one.