CINEMA NEWS

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 68, Issue 28, 13 November 1947, Page 8

CINEMA NEWS

(By “Spotlight”)

GREER GARSON’S FIRST SEVEN YEARS With the completion of “Desire Me” Greer Gare on completes a seven-year Hollywood career cycle which began in 1940. It has been an eventful seven years. Once, after being there a year, she returned to England. She thought then that Hollywood wasn’t for her. But M.G.M. brought her back. In 1942 she made Mrs Miniver and for that she won an Academy Award and she has had nine Academy Award nominations and hundreds of other honours. Her first going to Hollywood had an element of “fate” in it. Louis B. Mayer was in London and saw a play advertised, “Old Music.” Thinking it was a musical, he went. It was a drama and Greer Garson was the star. Mayer signed her. If someone had told him it was a drama he might not have gone! Only recently Greer Garson signed a new long-term contract with M.G.M. She has started on her second seven-year cycle. .

LANA TURNiER FLYING TO FRANCE Lana Turner who went into “Cass Timberlane” with Spencer Tracy immediately after completing her starring role in “Green Dolphin Street” has applied for a French visa and intends leaving for the continent immediately her third starring role in the one eeason, in which she appears opposite Clark Gable in “Homecoming,” is completed. She plans to fly to France via the Azores accompanied .by her daughter Cherrill Crystine. “THE HILLS OF HOME” M.G.M.’s “The Hills of Home” technicolour drama of the Scottish highlands, went before the cameras this week on a vast location site high up in the Bierra mountains. Lassie, the collie dog star, Edmund Gwenn, Donald Crisp, Tom Drake and Janet Leigh were included in the large cast that made the trip from Hollywood to launch the filming. Cameras, crew and cast were transported by a pack train of horses to one of the highest summits in Sonora Pass to film winter sequences at an elevation of 10,500 feet. FRENCH STAR SIGNED BY M.G.M.

One of France’s most famous youngeer actresses is to make her moton picture debut in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’e* “The B.F.’s Daughter.” She is Barbara Laage, star of the Comedie Francais and whose fame as a dramatic actress and comedienne is known throughout France and England. The blue-eyed, ash-blonde actress, who had to nee Paris during the German occupation, has been assigned one of the most dramatic roles of the year in which to make her film debut. She will portray a blind girl with whom Barbara Stanwyck -suspects her husband, Van Heflin, is in love. This leads to a most tensely emotional scene between the two. « LOST HER HORSE Elizabeth Taylor who has just returned to Hollywood after visiting England, reports that one phase of her trip was most disappointing, for she failed in one of its main purposes, which was to find her horse Betty. Betty was the first horse the youthful M.G.M. actress ever owned, having been given her by her godfather when she was four years old. It was one cf the saddest moments of her life when she had to leave Betty behind when she left with her parents for America early in the war. Elizabeth’s godfather was killed in the war and his estate has since been sold. There is no trace of Betty. NEW, ZEALAND GIFT Peter Lawford says he can’t pronounce it, but in Maori it means Good Luck. Lawford, who with June Allyson, is to co-star in the M.G.M. musical “Good News,” received a surprise recently in the form of a pair of cuff links from New Zealand. The unusual gift, came from a married couple who live near Wellington, and bore the traditional Maori “Good Luck Charm,” the Tiki. AUTHENTIC SCOTTISH CROOK For sentimental reasons, as well as for the sake of authenticity, Donald Crisp will carry a genuine Scottish crook, or twisted walking stick and smoke a small curved pipe that is more than 100 years old in his role in M.G.M.s “The Hills of Home.” Both were presented t.o Crisp by his grandfather when he left his native Scotland to go to America in 1906.

“THE BIG CITY” Robert Preston will make his first screen appearance at M.G.M. and at the same time accomplish a startling switch oil film characterisation when he joins Margaret O’Brien in “The Big City.” More noted as a screen villain, Preston will enact the role of clergyman, one of the three “fathers” appointed by the courts to raise a yonng waif from New York’s East Side. The other two “parents” are a Jewish Cantor and an Irish policeman. He joins an outstanding cast which includes Danny Thomas, Lotte Lehmann and Betty Garrett. Joe Pasternak will be the producer. CLIFTON WEBB’S NEW ROLE Twentieth Century Fox has purchased “Belvedere, a novel by Gwen Davenport, published by Bobbs Merrill, as a starring vehicle for Clifton Webb. The story, which is being adapted for the screen by F. Hugh Herbert, will be re-titled “Sitting Pretty.” Webb’s role, that of Lynn Belvedere, an author Whose versatility includes babysitting, .provides him with unique opportunity. His crisp, stylised technique is ideal for the nervous, erratic author of a trilogy who answers an advertisement in the “Saturday. Review of Literature,” inserted by a desperate father and mother who nevergot away from their young.