DEAD END KID

Wairarapa Times-Age, 3 May 1940, Page 9

DEAD END KID

TO PLAY PART OF ENGLISH SCHOOLBOY.

There was surprise and, in certain quarters, not a little indignation when it was learned that Billy Halop, of the erstwhile Dead End Kids, was to play lhe part of an English public school boy in “Tom Brown’s School Days,” writes Thornton Delehenty in the New York “Herald-Tribune.” On its face it would be hard to imagine a more quixotic bit of casting. Yet there is nothing funny about it to Billy Halop himself, who is as anxious to bury his Dead End past as he is to probe new realms in the art of acting. He cannot very well do one without accomplishing the other, and so he is investing himself these days with an aura as thick and British as a London fog. Curious to learn how Mr Halop happened to forsake his East Side playmates for the association of Freddie Bartholomew and Sir Cedric Hardwicke, we sought him out on the set the other day and put the question to him point-blank. “What arc you doing around here?”

we asked him in effect, and his answer shows how whimsical are the events which make or break the movie aspiron t.

"I heard they were going to do a picture called ‘Tom Brown's School Days.’” he said, "and it sounded like something up my alley, so I went to see my agent about it. 1 didn't know till then that it was an English story, but that didn't bother me. In fact it made me all the more anxious to get the part. I had been trying for a long time to get away from tough New York boy stuff, so when my agent asked me if I wanted to take a chance and invest five bucks I said sure." The five bucks, it turned out. went tc pay for a phonograph recording in which Halop spouted a few speeches in the English manner. He didn't take time out to practice. He simply went into an impersonation of Basil Rath-

bone and followed it with another of Sir Nigel Bruce. The agent took the record to Gene Towne and played it for him. Towne said, “I don't know who that blighter is but he can have the part.”