Quaint Mistakes Made in Movies

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 874, 18 January 1930, Page 25

Quaint Mistakes Made in Movies

SILK STOCKINGS FOR NUNS SKYSCRAPERS IN PARIS ‘•Only in films does the society butler wear striped trousers at 6 a.m. and serve food on a restaurant ‘plat,’” writes H. M. K. Smith, sartorial expert, in the “New York Times.” He discusses many other quaint mistakes of the recent past. Miss Norma Talmadge's production, of “Camille,” in which site gave so brilliant a personal performance, was marred by many inexcusable technical errors, exasperating to those who know Paris, he claims. The polished Menjou, who should know better, permitted a large group of supposedly French male guests at his chateau In a picture to appear each and every one in the most English of golf clothes and to drink only the largest and longest of Scotch and sodas. Now everyone knows that golf and whiskey in almost any form are utter strangers to the Gallic male. WOMEN IN DIVES In Jeanne Eagels’s production of "The Letter” there was not a single flower that was ever seen within 3,000 miles of Ceylon. The courtroom scene was full of technical errors, aiid the dive in Singapore was full of white women. Now the world knows that through the efforts of Lady Astor a law was passed in England forbidding the presence of white women in such places in the Orient and that this law has for many years been strictly enforced. In the Fox production of the “Iron Horse,” which was dated back to the time of the first railroads in America, the heroine appeared in a tightfitting “cloche” hat not three weeks out of Paris. In Helen Morgan’s “Applause,” all the nuns had the highest of French heels and the sheerest of silk hose. In a picture called “The Popular Sin” lovely Greta Nissen attempts suicide from the window of her hotel, all very plausible if the director had

not shot downward to the street more than twenty storeys below. EIFFEL TOWER JUMP! To jump from such a height in Paris, where the height of buildings was limited until recently at least, to eight storeys, Miss Nissen would have had to leap t from the top o that Same Eiffie Tower. Why and how i it that the hair o a shipwreckc heroine come through such rat as caused th deluge and hour of submersion i salt water with it waves intact an more permanent than those of the sea itself, were it frozen? By what magic, too, does this lady coax her trunk through the porthole of a sunken liner to east itself at her very feet on the short of some desert island and to disclose, when opened, the sheerest of lingerie and the filmlwrinkle ?

simultaneously on the same negative, and afterward developed, printed, and projected together. This ensures perfect synchronisation throughout. “To produce sound on film, microphones are placed in certain positions to collect the sound, which passes through an amplifier to “boost up” the sound waves to the correct volume. These are conveyed to the light valve in the camera, where an .apparatus photographs the sound waves. On recording and projecting sound film, the film must pass the light valve at the constant speed of 90 feet each minute. “The first productions of talkie films made with this equipment are now being screened in Auckland theatres.”