New Feathers for Path

Beneath a gleaming chrome and glass marquee, celebrities swarmed one night this week to the opening of Manhattan's new $300,000 French movie theater, the Paris. They had paid $12.50 a head to look at one another and a movie (La Symphonic Pastorale), test the comfort of the 571 natural-birch seats, and sip coffee and bouillon in the lounge.

They liked the theater's proportions. But what the Paris' owners, the French Pathe movie syndicate*, liked about the theater was its dollars, which should fatten Pathe's lean coffers. For Pathe, whose crowing cock once ruled the world's movie roost, was now a scraggly bird.

Old Scars. Old (85), rich Charles Pathe, now in retirement at Monte Carlo, had hatched the bird back in 1897. "I did not invent the cinema," he once said, "but I industrialized it." On money made from selling the first Edison Kinetoscopes (the original peephole movie), he launched into making film, cameras and movies on his own, bought and built theaters, pioneered newsreels and the first amateur movies.

Until World War I, Pathe dominated the world movie market. Then the Pathe influence began a fadeout. But Charles Pathe got about $2,500,000 for the syndicate when he cannily sold out his share just before the 1929 crash.

Since then the Pathe producer-exhibitor network has gone successively through bankruptcy, reorganization, Nazi occupation, and the purge of collaborators. The Bank of France's Ferdinand Liffran is titular boss, has the help of a potent cross-section of French big business (steel, oils, insurance, cognac and utilities are represented on Pathe's present board). By diligent squeezing Pathe last year made a profit of $151,200 from films and its 35 European theaters.

New Spurs. Since 1941 Pathe has turned out only 50 full-length films, most of them second-rate. But it has done better with such films as Children of Paradise and Maurice Chevalier's Le Silence Est d'Or. With its dollars, Pathe was able to gamble that the Paris would give it a profitable outlet in the U.S. market. If the Paris pays off, Pathe may build as many as twelve other small, fancy houses in U.S. cities. Prosperity could not come too soon. In Paris last week, Pathe's dapper little distribution chief Louis Metayer said sadly: "We make more profits in Colombia than we do in the United States."

*Not to be confused with Railroad-juggler Robert R. Young's Pathe Industries, Inc. or Warner-Pathe News.

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