The Old Pictures

Confronted by a dearth of new pictures (TIME, May 16), cinema producers last month took to reviving old ones. By this week, 52 old pictures, from Birth of a Nation (1915) to Stowaway (1936), had been exhumed from storerooms, placed on view in cinemansions throughout the U. S. Result of the process was a pair of discoveries which, to an industry proverbially hypnotized by precedent, seemed utterly astounding. One was that any good old picture will often outdraw any poor new one. The other was that at least one old picture was the best cinema bargain of 1938.

Rodolfo Guglielmi, born May 6, 1895, in the little Italian village of Castellaneta, died August 23, 1926, in New York, as Rudolph Valentino. Last and best Valentino picture--a sequel to the one which had made his reputation five years before --was The Son of the Sheik, which grossed $2,500,000 after his death. Last year, Producer Joe Schenck's Art Cinema Corporation, which made the picture, sold the negative, along with some 30 other old cinema scraps, to an alert entrepreneur named Emil Jensen. Wary Mr. Jensen began operations by trying out The Son of the Sheik in Washington. When it broke all house records, he decided to invest a little money in reconditioning. With a musical score and a few elementary sound effects, the picture opened in Boston three weeks ago. By last week, it was apparent even to Mr. Jensen that, whatever he had paid for it, his antique was one of the box-office hits of 1938.

In New York, The Son of the Sheik went into its second week after drawing nearly $14,000 at the George M. Cohan Theatre. In five other Eastern cities it packed theatres. But the greatest triumph of The Son of the Sheik was at Chicago's Garrick Theatre, where it did more business than any other show in town except Holiday, accompanied by Tommy Dorsey's swing band. Garrick audiences were apparently about evenly divided between middle-aged women and young girls who had heard about Rudy Valentino from their mothers. Wrote one lady patron to the theatre's manager: "I loved him, I loved him, I loved him--I still love him." This week The Son of the Sheik is scheduled to play in 16 cities, including Los Angeles, Cleveland, San Francisco and Philadelphia. Next week, it will be on view in 31. Thereafter, it will play about-500 key circuit theatres and eventually 5,000 neighborhood houses. Entrepreneur Jensen's conservative estimate of his takings from The Son of the Sheik's renaissance: $500,000.

A bizarre rigmarole about a desert scion who kidnaps a dancing girl (Vilma Banky), The Son of the Sheik delighted audiences of its day .chiefly because it permitted the most famed matinee idol in cinema history to play a dual role--the Sheik and the Sheik's son, who is finally rescued by the Sheik from a cutthroat gang. Immediate consequence of its successful revival was naturally a race between proprietors of other old Valentino pictures to get their products to the screen. Also on view was The Sheik (1921), which, as an example of an even cruder school of cinema production, was exhibited in a mood of frank burlesque, with a bald-headed pianist thumping out The Sheik of Araby to make the audience laugh. But not all of them thought it was funny. One woman complained of the irreverence to the manager: "My God, it's disgraceful." Responsible for the revival of The Sheik in New York was President Harry Brandt of New York's Independent Theatre Owners Association, Inc., who last month announced that a quorum of Hollywood's top-ranking stars were "poison at the box office." Chortled Mr. Brandt, whose picture was doing almost as lively a trade as Mr. Jensen's just down the avenue: "It took a star like Valentino who has been dead twelve years to bring people to the box office."

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