Max's Festival

Through quaint and Alpine Salzburg, in Austria, prowled last week a Manhattanite with a tiny cinema camera. While local mountaineers gawked he accosted a honey-haired Diana, persuaded her to pose before a crazily swung gate, "shot" Maria Jeritza.

Prowling on, the camera grinder paused before the tiny Cafe Masalli, since 1705, a snug topers' haven. Within, a paunchy Hungarian was munching a sandwich, playing with a pretzel, drinking beer. He too consented to emerge and pose. He was Francis Molnar, most famed of Hungarian dramatists, illustrious in Manhattan as the author of Liliom, and The Swan.

Mrs. Sinclair Lewis, Lady Diana Manners, Fritzi Massary, "the German Sarah Bernhardt," strolled past the cafe, were filmed en passant. James Speyer, famed Manhattan banker, followed with Mrs. Joseph Medill ("Chicago Tribune") Patterson (nee Higinbotham).

All these, able Manhattan cartoonist Ralph Barton filmed with his tiny camera. To newspapermen he said: "I do not have to ask my victim to pose for hours while I sketch him or her. I just shoot a few dozen feet of film and have my prey at my mercy forever after."

"But have you filmed Max Reinhardt?" queried a newsgatherer. No, Mr. Barton had not been allowed to "shoot" the man whose genius had attracted so many of the World's celebrities to the Saltzburg Festival (see p. 17). Max Reinhardt, who is making of Salzburg, his childhood home, an annual August rendezvous of everyone at all Art conscious, lurked in his Festspielhaus, directing a rehearsal of Turandot, is proverbially averse to being photographed. Came a little Jew, "the slickest Jew on earth," the uncrowned Barnum of the Drama. Mr. Morris Gest, in genial mood, volunteered to get Cartoonist Barton and his camera into the Festspielhaus where never a cinema camera had clicked before. Mr. Gest succeeded. Max Reinhardt threw up his hands: "There is no stopping you Americans!" Max Reinhardt posed. Flickering light rays imposed upon the film the likeness of a curly haired German Jew, low of collar, loose of tie--seemingly no great one. Yet at Max Reinhardt's beck there had come to Salzburg not only a world of celebrities but the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, the Vienna Male Choral Society, the famed Oscar Ziegler Rose Quartet, and a trainload of minor operatic and dramatic stars, stage hands, electricians, scene painters. A majority of these normally well paid minions of Art rendered notable homage to Max Reinhardt's genius of appearing gratis at the operas, concerts, recitals of his festival. Not only was Everyman played tut Turandot and Ariadne were sung. The towseled German Jew who with Gordon Craig laid the foundations of the new stagecraft triumphed last week at a festival which was recently an innovation (TIME, Aug. 24, 1925) but has become a tradition today.