Lowell v. Block Booking

Three months ago, as chairman of the Motion Picture Research Council, President Emeritus Abbott Lawrence Lowell of Harvard signed a petition to President Roosevelt asking that the cinema code include restrictions on block booking. President Roosevelt signed the code without such restrictions and appointed Dr. Lowell. Eddie Cantor and Marie Dressier as Government representatives to the Code Authority. Last week Dr. Lowell refused the appointment. His reasons, explained in letters to General Johnson, showed a remarkably sound knowledge of the cinema industry.

Dr. Lowell's first letter complained that the code, instead of checking block booking, gave it "a certain legal sanction." When General Johnson reminded him that the code does permit exhibitors to cancel up to 10% of the blocks of films which they are forced to buy from major producers if they want any films at all, Dr. Lowell wrote back:

"The right of exhibitors to cancel 10% of the product ... is futile because it is perfectly easy for the producers to put in 10% of films which the exhibitors are certain to reject before reaching the objectionable ones. ... I am very much struck by your explanation of why the representatives of the Government on the Code Authority are not given a vote. You say 'What is the use of a vote against a certain majority?' This assumes that a member of the Code Authority whose only interest in the matter is clean films will find himself necessarily in opposition to the producers. I fear this is only too true. . . ."

The New Pictures

In Going Hollywood (Metro-GoldWyn-Mayer) Marion Davies stands proxy for all U. S. radio enthusiasts who grow sickly sentimental over crooners. In a girls' school she listens to the songs of one Bill Williams (Bing Crosby) which so stir her that she pursues him to Hollywood. There she finds that radio crooners are less romantic in real life than they seem on the air. Bill Williams is acting in a cinema, backed by a solemn Ernest-P. Baker (Stuart Erwin). directed by a sardonic Mr. Conroy (Ned Sparks). In the cast is Williams' temperamental mistress Lili Yvonne (Fifi D'Orsay), whom he describes in Going Hollywood's most sombre song as his Temptation.

In a story designed for audiences who share the admiration for Bing Crosby which Miss Davies affects in this picture, it would be unthinkable for Williams' temptation to get the best of him. Miss Davies supplants Lili Yvonne as the lead in the Williams picture. When Temptress Yvonne whisks Crooner Williams away to a Mexican border saloon. Miss Davies pursues and persuades him to return. He is reeling slightly but still able to deliver one more tune, called "Our Big Love Scene."

An informal, rambling musicomedy written by Donald Ogden Stewart, Going Hollywood is an effort to use radio as a decoy for cinema audiences, which succeeds much better than previous attempts built around less genuinely valuable performers than Bing Crosby.

Bing Crosby is probably the world's best paid male singer ($275,000 a year). For Going Hollywood he got $75,000. He was born in Tacoma, Wash, in 1904. studied law at Gonzaga University, failed to take his bar examination, became a "hot" singer with Paul Whiteman's Rhythm Boys. When William Paley of Columbia Broad casting System heard a Crosby phono graph record, Bing was hired to sing on the radio for Cremo cigars, imitating Rudy Vallee's low register quavers. Now almost as popular as Vallee in the U. S. and Eng land, Crosby is much more popular else where, partly because his singing has ceased to be affected, partly because he is the only U. S. crooner sufficiently present able and mentally alert to be a successful cinemactor. He plays golf in the 703, wants to write short stories, is incorporated under his real name, Harry Lillis Crosby. His acting shoes contain one and a half-inch "lifts." His great-great-grandfather was one of John Jacob Astors sea captains. His wife, onetime Cinemactress Dixie Lee, calls him the Crooner. Says Crosby : "I'd like to be able to sing like the crooners. The reason is a crooner gets his quota of sentimentality with half his natural voice. That's a great saving. I don't like to work." Convention City (First National) is a glib, disorganized batch of footnotes on a familiar aspect of U. S. business. It deals with the Atlantic City convention of the Honeywell Rubber Co. President J. B. Honeywell (Grant Mitchell) is to choose a new general salesmanager. Slick Adolphe Menjou wants the job. So does paunchy Guy Kibbee. But both of them get into trouble. Salesman Kibbee paws at a wench (Joan Blondell) who maneuvers him into the first stage of the badger game. Salesman Menjou is discredited when a jealous saleswoman (Mary Astor) interferes with his attentions to President Honeywell's daughter. The salesmanager-ship finally goes as a bribe to a maudlin inebriate who has caught President Honeywell about to visit "Daisy La Rue, Exterminator."

Convention City is adumbrated with many a drinking scene, a company song ("Oh. Honeywell" to the tune of "My Maryland"), and some quips which may cause some cinemagoers to wonder what Will Hays is doing. Typical sequence: a drunk loudly advocating that "Our merchandise be placed in slot machines on every corner, in case of emergency" only to discover that he is in the wrong convention. Flying Down to Rio (RKO). In the current cycle of musicomedies there are three major types: 1) elaborate revues, with plots based on backstage activities or neo-Freudian dreams, like Roman Scandals; 2) naive comedies based on the real careers of the actors involved, like Going Hollywood (see col. 1); 3) semi-sophisticated romances like Flying Down to Rio. For Flying Down to Rio, Vincent Youmans was hired to write the music for four songs: "Flying Down to Rio." "Music Makes Me," "Orchids in the Moonlight," "Carioca." Fred Astaire was hired to dance as frequently as possible. A fleet of airplanes was engaged for a finale with showgirls in gauze uniforms capering on their wings. To play the lead in Flying Down to Rio, RKO wisely persuaded handsome Dolores Del Rio to come out of a year's retirement.

No more sensible than most such chronicles. Flying Down to Rio starts with Belinda Rezende (Dolores Del Rio) sitting in a Miami cafe where a band leader (Gene Raymond) is making eyes at her. When he accepts her invitation to dance, his assistant (Fred Astaire) who pays less attention to music than to hoofing and joking with pretty Ginger Rogers remarks: "Hold your hats, boys.. Here we

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