Word: film
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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With all due reverence for all concerned, may I suggest the role of W. C. Fields for Mr. Herbert Hoover in any film based on the life of the former gentleman? Your picture, hat & all, in TIME, Dec. 13 [see cut], prompts this suggestion...
Last week Washington learned how Harry Truman had made up his mind. Shortly after the Gallegos government was overthrown, a White House secretary called the Simon Bolivar Memorial Foundation, which had arranged last summer's celebration in Bolivar. "The President," said the secretary, "would like to see your film on the Bolivar ceremony." Harry Truman sat silent through the half-hour, full-color documentary. Both his own speech and that of Gallegos were exhortations in praise of democracy. The movie over, the President said: "A fine picture. It says what we want to stress. It should be shown...
Broadway had begun to wonder when Cole Porter's next smash was coming; Kiss Me, Kate marks an interval of five years and two flops since his last hit show (Mexican Hayride). In the barren interval he also had to endure a film biography, Night and Day, of which he said: "It ought to be good because none of it is true...
Shostakovich, in his music for the Young Guard (TIME, Oct. 25), and Aram Khachaturian, in his score for a film on Lenin, had managed to "reorganize" themselves. Other composers had begun "to rebuild their work," although "the process of their reconstruction proceeds slowly." But Prokofiev's work still smelled of the "marazm [wasting away] of bourgeois culture." Said Khrennikov: Prokofiev obviously had not "drawn the necessary conclusions from the decree of the Central Committee...
Having thus stated its double-feature message, the film even contrives an ending in a happy, hopeful vein. At no point does it give its central anti-war theme the emotional contagion that the same message got in The Search or the Italian-made Shoeshine, both of which dealt movingly with war's impact on children by simply telling a straight story honestly...