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Taranaki Daily News, 24 September 1940, Page 10

The U.S.S.R. has 30,000 cinema theatres, almost as many as all Europe's put together, but only 8000 are wired for sound. # # ^ * Every day, in various v/ays, the lives of popular screen characters are getting longer and longer. Most characters it is true. still live but a single picture. They go their adventurous and romantic ways for seven, eight or nine thousand feet of film, and then pass into oblivion. Unless they are definitely killed off, however, the exceptional favourites may fare better these days. The public has discovered it can resurrect them by appealing to the studios who create them. An example is the Lane Sister played by the three Lane girls and Gale Page. Originally they were scheduled to live only through the Warner Bros. film "Four Daughters." The public wanted them back, so they have been given a new lease of life in "Four Wives.' Clark Gable Mauled. A recent studio casualty is Clark Gable, who was badly mauled in a fight scene for "Boom Town" by rough extras, who evidently had not been told that they should not get too tough with a film star. Their chances of working on Ihe M.G.M. lot again are slight. Apart from Ihe grievous injury to Gable's amour proprc, the production schedulc was disrupled for sevcral days while he stayed at home nursing a black eye and a cut lip. Dogs Not Likc Acroplanes. Metro are doing their best to cure little Ann Rutherford of her fear of flying. She is so afraid of aeroplanes that she will not even stand at the door of one to have still pictures taken. But now she is playing with Wallace Beery in "The Bad Man of Wyoming," and he hopes to be the one to end her fear. Beery flies his own plane to location, and by taking along his adopted daughter, Carol Ann, as a passenger. Beery hopes to persuade Ann Rutherford to ,ake her first flight.