Dark Secret

In Hollywood, where every sleeve holds a concealed dagger, producers were more than usually wary. On top of processing scads of mystery pictures and several hush-hush mellers about the OSS, Hollywood had a cloak-&-dagger drama of its own: Who will produce the first big atom-bomb picture?

Chief rivals are Paramount and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. According to Hollywood gossips, they are infiltrating each other's lots with company spies disguised as extras. Following standard practice, Paramount has already surmounted the first production hurdle: picking and discarding various titles. The chosen one: Top Secret. It is no top secret that the picture will be masterminded by cinema wizard Hal Wallis (Casablanca, Love Letters), whose signature is pace and palaver. Estimated cost: $2,000,000.

Metro, too, is prepared to shoot the works on its more ominously titled The Beginning or the End. Cast for the leads: Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy. Producer: heavy, slow-talking Sam Marx,* who, in Hollywood's inscrutable ways, qualified for his present assignment by patiently directing a collie dog through Lassie Come Home and Son of Lassie.

The battle has progressed far beyond Hollywood. Both studios have sent secret missions to Washington, both have consulted with famed atom-expert Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer. Each has enough "technical advisers" to set up a Hollywood branch of the Nuclear Physicists' Club, although there is little new which the scientists can disclose. Tension has mounted: customers at Mike Romanoff's posh eatery now talk in whispers instead of in the regulation Hollywood yell. Dark diplomacy is hinted at.

Interloper. Meanwhile, coony oldtime Producer Sol Wurtzel, formerly 20th Century-Fox's nabob of the Bs, had an idea. Long ago he realized that what he lacked in high budgets and Washington connections could be made up in speed. He has already completed, for Fox release, a Nazi spy chase called Rendezvous 24. While not strictly an atom-bomb picture, it deals with German scientists who tried to blow up Paris by radio-controlled atomic energy. It may conceivably pass, in the sticks, for the veritable atomic gospel.

But neither Paramount nor Metro professes much alarm at this crude trespass. Paramount confidently says that Hal Wallis has the "official" story of the atom bomb locked safely in his desk. Says Metro: "SammyMarx has the atom sewed up tight."

*No relation to Karl, Groucho, Harpo, Chico, Zeppo.

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