HOLLYWOOD AT WAR

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 77, 29 August 1942, Page 3

HOLLYWOOD AT WAR

THE STARS DO THEIR PART

MANY SERVING J\' DANGER ZONES

Hollywood has gone to war. Prob ably no other centre of American life has accepted and undertaken the multifarious tasks of wartime more enthusiastically than has this hub of the art and industry of motion-pictures. There are many reasons for this—geographical, social, psychological Hollywood is only a short motor-jour-ney from a section of the Pacific Ocean’s coast at which the Japanese have already spat a couple of futile but noise-making chells. Hollywood has been diagnosed as, next to Port Said, the earth’s most international settlement, and that makes it all the more imperative for its citizens to prove themselves intensely patriotic. And, again, Hollywood lives, breathes and forever feeds on drama- -and war has always been the greatest drama of them all. This last bit of diagnosis must not be misapprehended. There is no playacting about Hollywood’s part in the war It is an earnest, hearty, brainy part, and an extra big one, too. It would surprise an old home-comer to Hollywood, for instance, to see how thoroughly some of the motion-picture studios have been camouflaged. They had to be. It needed only the first false air-raid scare—inevitable flurry which accompanies the beginning of any modern war—to suggest to the studiomanagers that the great, grey oblong exteriors of their stages resemble nothing so much from above as giant air-plane-hangars, and that something would certainly have to be done about that. It has been done. The five famous boulevards which run through Hollywood are thronged with uniforms these days. Even Washington, D.C., would firfd it hard to put up a braver show of them. Nor are they uniforms out of any costuming department. They are the genuine servicegai b of the United States fighting forces. They are the regulation duty-dress of all the different corps—combatant, non-combatant, male and female. Army. Navy, Red Cross, Civilian Defence, State Guard—which have become the protective coloration of American humanity from coast to coast. The motion-pictures, it must be remembered. are almost automatically useful to the scheme of modern warfare —useful in several ways, of which moral is only one and not necessarily the most important one. Expert photography has a great job, or set of jobs, to do when reconnoitring is necessary. Many fundamentals of soldiering, the simple squad-formations, discipline, hygiene, manual of arms, etc., which used to need weeks of a drill-sergeant's grimly repitious teaching, can now be taught ten times more quickly, easily, pleasantly and permanently by the visual method of making and showing movie shorts. DIRECTORS IN SERVICE That is why so many of the biggest producers and directors in the picturecolony have been drafted into that special army service. There is similar upheaval of male stars of motion-pic-tures. Many of the handsomest and most popular young males on the rosters of the major picture-making companies have departed for active service with the U.S. Army, Navy, or Marines. In their enlistments, 'naturally, there is a publicity-value which these various arms of the forces could not afford to o' erlook. Yet in almost every case the young man himself has tried to go quietly, without fanfare or press-depart-ment notice.

Robert Montgomery, in historical sequence, heads this list of decorative but dutiful young Americans. Even before the fall of France Montgomery had enlisted as a volunteer ambulancedriver and was seeing hectic sendee over there. He returned home only after that debacle, and almost immediately received a commission in the U.S. Navy. He was stationed for a time in London, as naval attache to the U.S. Embassy, but this was too tame a task for one of his adventurous blood. Now he has his desire, as at last report he wa s on the high seas, his duties truly hazardous, his station in the very midst of actual fighting. In the N&vy, too, is Lieut. Douglas Fairbanks, who recently represented the United States as an unofficial envoy through a long good will tour of the Latin-American countries. In the Navy, too, is Tony Martin, now a chief petty officer. One of the most popular stars of all, Tyrone Power, has also enlisted in the Navy. As soon as the present picture he is making is completed he is to report for training. Whether or not he comes out of it with an officer’s commission he does not care much. He says that he is out for service stripes, not gold ones. CONSIDERATION OF MORALE This special consideration shown by the U.S. Army and Navy for the careers of young picture-stars has made Hollywood duly grateful. For it is only rarely that these men have been called summarily to camp in the middle of making a new film. Usually, as in Tyrone Power’s case, the civilian assignment is permitted to be completed first. Tim Holt, son of Jack Holt, for example, is due to go into the U.S. Army Air Corps, but he has been notified that he may still go ahead starring in his energetic cavalry roles for six more pictures. Wayne Morris is in the U.S. Navy now. Jeffrey Lynn chose the U.S. Army. So did Ronald Reagan, who has made many “hit” pictures. One of the first to go into the service was the lanky, world-beloved James Stewart. Several months before the /attack on Pearl Harbour, James Stewart tossed aside the script for his next picture to study the U.S. Army manual instead. Then, with a minimum of talk and emotion, he took a sence from Hollywood to become a “buck private.” A few months later he was proud to be wearing a corporal’s chevrons, and early in 1942 he exchanged these for the shoulder-bars of a 2nd lieutenant in the Army Air Corps. Nothing less could have been expected of any American who, back home in his boyhood, used to act in a basement drama of his own creation which he had entitled “To Hell with the Kaiser.’’

Another screen-favourite who deserted the Klieg lights for the Air Corps searchlights is Burgess Meredith. He, too, is in special training for his commission. But in the midst of his airfield activities he was recently ordered to New York to play with the “first lady” of the American stage. Katharine Cornell, in her brilliant revival of Bernard Shaw’s “Candida,” all proceeds of which —and they have been remarkable—go to the Army and Navy relief funds. That joyful interval over. Cadet Meredith goes back to his planes. Of the number of well-known English actors who endeared themselves to Hollywood and its audiences Leslie Howard was the unchallenged chief. This blond star of both stage and screen on each side of the Atlantic has to-day the rank of lieut.-commander in the Royal Navy. Spruce, spi*y David Niven, so genial a comedian that few could guess that he had been born and bred in the British Army and had graduated from Sandhurst as an officer in a crack Highland regiment, has gone straight back into the British Army which he once left for his picture-career. He is a major to-day, on one of the fiercest battle-fronts. Richard Greene is a tank-corps captain and in the thick of the war. Among the older actors who will probably have to be restrained from taking on the dangers of the front fighting-lines, but who are none the less in sober service uniforms now, are such pillars of Hollywood as Donald Crisp and Lewis Stone. They are both

high officers in their branches of service. Indeed, there is scarcely a man or woman, writer, performer or technician, in the whole of the community, from the mountains through Beverley Hills to the sea, who is not doing some thing intensive, important and more or less official. The peacetime industrial front of | Hollywood embraces three all-import- j ant guilds—the Screen-Writers, the Screen-Actors and the Directors. The ! wartime plan has combined all three of ' these into a solid machine, ready to I furnish radio and picture scripts, pag- j cants and glamorous personalities, at : the slightest request. And air-raid ! wardens*, interceptors, volunteer sen- j tries and nursing corps abound on \ every palm-arched avenue, up every j mansion-lined canyon. GIVE UP LUXURIES Hollywood people have gladly given up many of their most sacred luxuries —swimming pools, for instance, and Japanese servants. They have had to. The U.S. Government has taken the very necessary precaution of moving 77,000 sons of Nippon into comfortable but more appropriate quarters sufficiently far back from the California coast. Finish this account of present-day Hollywood with the tale of a man who desires to remain ananymous. He happens to be one of the best known of the world’s motion-picture directors, and one of the best. Two hours after the announcement of America’s entrance into the war he had already figured out what a man of his ripe age could do —and he had gone ahead and done it. He had taken a job as a common labourer in a munition plant. It is a back-breaking, nerve-wearing, very ordinary job with nothing to enliven it except the possibility of his some day being accidentally blown to bits, and with no recompense for a man who was used to making 5,000 dollars a week, except the promise that he would stay as anonymous as he now staj r s here. But somehow that famous director’s example went the round of Hollywood lips and Hollywood hearts.