SHORTS FROM STUDIOS

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 460, 18 February 1933, Page 7

SHORTS FROM STUDIOS

Lee Tracy has signed a long-term contract with Metro-GoWwyn-Maycr, and will have the masculme^ lead m that company s productwn oi Cleai All Wires." Benita. Hurne, young English actress, who is now at the M-G-M studios, will have the feminine lead, and George Hill will direct.

Tribute to the amazing fidelity of the character portrayals in "Rasputin and the Empress," new_ Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer screen production, was paid by Grand DucKess Marie of Russia, herself .a memher of the one reigning Russian royal family. "It gave me great satisfaction to see what a careful study hoth of events and of character had been made, when presenting this picture, said Grand Duchess Marie after attending a screening of the film. The sets and costumes are finely conceived and h'andled, and the shades of characterisation recreate most vividly the personalities of that period. The picture brings to one's mind some of the glamorous things which now no longer exist. Ethel Barrymore seemed to me a verv dignified and appealing

figure as the Empress, while John and Lionel Barrymore were extremely forceful and compelling." Grand Duchess Marie is a first cousin of the late Czar Nicholas II, and was brought up in the Romanoff family circle in Moscow and old St. Petersburg, leaving the country only at the time of her marriage in 1910.

Do you know that: Jean Harlow was once a featured comedienne in Hal Roach comedies, taking falls with all the rest of the comedy routine? Ernest Truex is a man of few words. When he arrived at the Metro-Gold-wyn-Mayer studios to play his famous Broadway stage role in "iWhistling in the Dark," he wa,s> asked to describe his first impresssions of Hollywood. "Sunshine, oranges, and oil-promot-ers," was his laconic xep-ly. Madge Evans felt lilce the absentminded profes.sor recently, 'when returning home from the Metro-Gold-wyn-Mayer studios she found a strange person opening the door of her house, and then only remembered that she had that very moming moved.