Word: duel
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...million, plus $2 million for promotion). By giving moviegoers a sort of super-sumptuous scrapbook of all the titillating, sure-fire elements that experience has convinced him they want, he figured to earn his millions back-plus a sizable profit. Box-office returns in Los Angeles, where Duel has been showing simultaneously in two theaters for the last couple of months (and is reportedly outgrossing Gone With the Wind by some 34%) indicate that Mr. Selznick may well be Hollywood's smartest businessman...
...successful works generally keep pointing winningly to their warm hearts and remain sentimental about their subjects (The Razor's Edge) or their characters (The Yearling) or their audiences (It's a Wonderful Life). With no pretense at all to having a heart, big, beautiful, humorless Duel remains shrewdly cynical about both itself and its sensation-hungry public...
...Duel's promotion campaign-which includes practically every trick imaginable, from dropping 5,000 parachutes at the Kentucky Derby to beach stickers which spell out the title on sunburned skin-makes Hollywood's normally brassy efforts in this line look pale. Duel is currently showing only in Los Angeles; the plan is to blanket the country, area by area, during the spring and summer, releasing some 350 prints before fall. Reasons for the distribution delay: 1) labor troubles have delayed Technicolor processing; 2) difficulties with United Artists have forced Mr. Selznick to set up his own distribution machinery...
Hollywood has been saying, with some bitterness, that Duel's censorship troubles come at a bad time, for everybody in pictures. Through the Legion of Decency, the Catholic Church can pledge some 24 million Catholics to avoid the picture if it disapproves. Protestants and Jews in the Los Angeles area have also questioned Duel's morals. Now an aroused group of churchmen, including all denominations, seems to be shifting the offensive to include not only Hollywood's public product, but also Hollywood's private life (TIME, March...
...Grass (MGM) lasts only a couple of hours, but it is possible to age a lot during that time. The story is a duel between conservative Cattleman Spencer Tracy and progressive Attorney Melvyn Douglas. Which shall make use of the prairie-the cattle, which will leave it as God made it, or homesteading farmers who (Mr. Tracy keeps warning) will skin it alive? Since Lawyer Douglas has Progress and the Federal Government on his side, the homesteaders eventually...