Word: celluloid
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Died. William Harrison (Will) Hays, 74, pioneer guardian of Hollywood's celluloid morals (as head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America), onetime G.O.P. National Committee chairman (1918-21) and Harding's first Postmaster General (1921-22); of a heart ailment; in his home town, Sullivan, Ind. Resigning as Postmaster General, he accepted Hollywood's offer to let him wipe clean the sin-filled screen (at $100,000 a year), forestalled a widespread public demand for state censorship. No czar, wily Will Hays became U.S. filmdom's No. 1 booster (and whipping boy), helped...
...Home (Universal) is a musical with its brains in its feet. The feet, young Donald O'Connor's, are clever enough to weave their way through any reasonably foolish script. But in this picture, Dancer O'Connor is tangled in at least a half-mile of celluloid that should have been left on the cutting-room floor. The love interest: Janet Leigh, in a sweater. The whole thing ends with a sort of death rattle: a concert of "symphonic Dixieland" that seems better calculated to finish jazz than to revive...
Banned aboard ship by U.S. Navy, banned on Sundays by the City of Boston, The Moon Is Blue is a celluloid peek into present day American sexual mores. But only the most stodgy will find its lampooning of erotic fashions and follies other than civilized and urbane...
...small but steady consignment of celluloid continues to cross the Iron Curtain westward. Russian movies, still shown in a handful of small U.S. theaters, are mostly party-line pageants, e.g., Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible (which was practically rewritten by that supercolossal scenarist, Joe Stalin himself), and heavy footed musicals. But occasionally a good film comes out of Russia. One of the best in years is Sadko (Mosfilm; Artkino). Directed by Alexander Ptushko, who also did Stone Flower (TIME, Jan. 27, 1947), it is a hearty, grandly dressed and often beautiful version of the opera* that Rimsky-Korsakov...
...made largely because the late John J. Raskob, the treasurer of Du Pont, had recommended that Du Pont waste no time getting into the young auto business. Raskob's recommendation had also stated: "Our interest in [G.M.] will undoubtedly secure for us the entire Fabrikoid [artificial leather], pyralin [celluloid], paint and varnish business . . ." But Pierre du Pont declared: "There was no discussion whatever [of this]. It was an unimportant statement ..." The only reason, said he, that Du Pont had bought into G.M. was to "get a good investment. . ." It was forced to invest millions more...