Judge — April 1938 — page 37: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE PATENT-MEDICINE ADVERTEISEMENE AND THE NERVOUS GENELEMAIN THE MOVIES By Robert Terrall HE Adventures of Tom Sawyer may seem more solemn than it should because it was photographed in Technicolor (“Glorious Technicolor,” as David O. Selznick says). We believe there are mechanical reasons why a color camera is more ponderous than a black-and- white camera. There is so much machinery involved that it has to lum. ber heavily from one place to an- other instead of be- ing whisked around on a sort of flying carpet. Of course that is probably not the way it works We ought to read a book on the subject—it’s no use depending on Mr. Selznick. He gives off great clouds of enthusiasm, but no information. About the only person in the movie industry who is completely unfeazed by Technicolor is Donald Duck. And be- sides, Tom Sawyer is a classic, and Mr. Selznick is slightly feazed by the classics. Of course he likes the classics; he likes nothing better than a good classic, even if it's only The Prisoner of Zenda. But they make him very solemn. With Tom Sawyer he took approximately as great pains as he is taking right now with Gone With the Wind—which, as you know if you follow the activities of Mr. Selznick, is saying a great deal. Well, 2 producer cannot take pains with a dassic. If he does, it is likely to turn out like a shirt that has been hung out to dry on a cold day. at all. Nothing quite so awful happens to Tom Sawyer. After all, it is a vigorous specimen that has withstood the on- slaughts of more determined men than Mr. Selznick. Mark Twain is more difficult to subdue than whoever it was wrote The Prisoner of Zenda. Tom Sawyer is a pretty good movie. It has some funny parts and some exceedingly terrifying parts—it is almost as much of a horror picture as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Now that it occurs to us, it is remarkable how much Snow White and Tom Sawyer, the two most ambitious movies of the last few months, are alike. It might have been that we saw Tom Sawyer at Radio City (in New York) just after the manager had re- luctantly relinquished his death grip on Snow White after taking in more than half-a-million dollars in five weeks. But in Tom Sawyer the graveyard at midnight and the underground cave and the island in the Mississippi are all so picturesque and studied that they might just as well have been animated by Walt Disney. And any fool prefers Walt Disney to Mr. Selznick: Tom, having run away from home, is taken with homesickness when he is falling asleep after playing pirates all day. Suddenly there is a shooting star. Tom weeps, and that is the end of the scene. Well! Walt Disney would have had the shooting star go down the neck of Cassiopea. We are afraid, too, that Tom Sawyer is about as sentimental as Snow White. There is one very trying scene between 93|) April, 1938 Tom (under the bed) and Aunt Polly (praying). There are a lot of tears shed before Sid gets a strawberry short. cake full in the face, the lights go up, and a man in a wrinkled dinner jacket starts playing the organ to get people out of the theatre. And Mark Twain is not a particularly sentimental author. Mr. Selznick handles the sentiment in Tom Sawyer effectively only once. A funeral is a sentimental occasion: the flowers, the melancholy music, the preacher telling sanctimonious lies about the dear de. parted, the snivelling parents in the front benches—it is a very sentimental occasion. But it was Mark Twain, not Mr. Selznick, who thought of hav- ing the dear departed, during the funeral sermon, alive and present in the balcony. The only thing Mark Twain got really sentimental about was the Mississippi. And you would have ex- pected Mr. Selznick to follow after and become perfectly maudlin about the Mississippi. But with really astonishing restraint he does nothing of the kind: he ignores the Mississippi. He leaves it entirely to Pare Lorentz. So if you want to see what the Mississippi looks like, go to see The River. There was an interesting program note at Tom Sawyer describing all the trouble Mr. Selznick took in getting ac- tors to play Tom and Becky Thatcher. Recklessly and with complete disregard for the expense he sent a large number of Talent Scouts around to interview every student in every grammar school in the United States. They discovered Tom Sawyer attending school in the Bronx—nice-looking Tommy Kelly. Mr. Selznick should have sent his spices around to a few old ladies’ homes. May Robson, who plays Aunt Polly, turns in a regrettably bad performance. We had kinder recollections of her. 35 comicbooks.com