REACTION

Evening Star, Issue 23693, 28 September 1940, Page 5

REACTION

Edward H. Griffith, the director responsible for such smart pictures as ‘Cafe Society ’ and ‘Honeymoon in Bali,’ is convinced at long last that you can’t please all the people all the time. Recently Griffith took a print of his latest picture, ‘ Safari,’ which stars Madeleine Carroll and Douglas Fairbanks, jun., to a preview in a little town just outside Hollywood. En route Griffith and other Paramount executives meditated pleasantly on the fact that his audience was about to see Madeleine Carroll in a very dishevelled conditions-

This was no sadistic whim on Griffith’s part. When ho was making the picture lie took careful heed of tortured screams from moviegoers everywhere, who protested violently against pictures that show beautiful stars going through a fire, floor?, hardship, and disaster —and coming out without a single curl of hair misplaced. Consequently, when he filmed Madeleine taking a shower hath in the jungle he got her hair wet and disarrayed. When he filmed her the morning after an involuntary overnight sleep in a hollow tree ho "got her face dirty and her clothes mussed up. When he filmed her at the end of a day’s trek through the African forest he showed her tired and weary. All this, he felt, was realism of the highest order and the kind audiences would approve. So yon can imagine how ho felt when tho comment cards started coming in from the audience a few days later. “ Who (To vou think you are?” they demanded. ' “ What right have you to take a beautiful, gorgeous, lovely, delectable. enticing, alluring girl like Madeleine Carroll and muss her up? It’s subversive!”

JTiobard Arlen has received over 6.000 applications for entry into his now aviation school. Tho latter will accommodate 300 students a year.