Working With G.B.S.

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXVII, Issue 12821, 16 August 1939, Page 6

Working With G.B.S.

Working with George Bernard Shaw is ‘ the best experience any screen writer could possibly have. He makes you really work and use your ingenuity. So declares W. P. Lipscomb, celebrated English scenarist.

Before bringing his typewriter from England to the Universal lot, Lipscomb gained the honour and distinction of being the first scenarist to work with Shaw. He -adapted the latter’s play, “Pygmalion” for the screen.

And the, first thing Shaw said to him when they met was: I am here to see you don’t make a mess of filming my play. They tell me I don’t know anything about films. Neither do the people who make them. They are 30 years behind the times. . “For fifty years play critics have told me my plays are not proper plays,” Shaw said. “The only thing about it is that my plays are still running after 50 years and everybody else’s plays are dead. I was right about plays, , maybe I’m right about films.

"I believe that interesting ideas such as mine, with interesting characters and good photography, can be more 'entertaining than the so-call-ed action pictures in which the action is not in the least interesting and effects nothing but exhaustion and eye strain."

After getting that * blast from Shaw, Lipscomb went to work—and what work! But he turned out a' script that pleased both Shaw and the public. That Pygmalion, Word 1

The Shaw boom continues, says the London Daily Mail. The fourth revival of "Pygmalion" (original production at His Majesty’s, 1914) has been launched the other side of the street at the Haymarket Theatre.

The play’s earliest'description was "a farcical comedy." As such it is played under Campbell Gullan’s direction. A highly individual interpretation of the iflower-g'irl Eliza, is given by Margaret Rawlings. Where most actresses are content to play Eliza in the early scenes simply as a shrill, rather drab Cockney, she gives the girl warmth and a. certain gaiety. She hit the right note, and it was not her fault that she did not hit the bull’s-eye, as Mrs Patrick Campbell did, with that exit on the phrase "not b—y likely," so lacking in sensation to-day is that famous; or infamous, adjective.

Basil Sydney is effective as the professor of elocution: Helen Haye, as his mother, surveys the odd muddle with humorously aristocratic aloofness; and George Merritt is too good a comedian not to be amusing as Doolittle, the dustman

The former film star Norma Talmadge has obtained a divorce from her husband, George Jessel, stage and radio comedian, on the ground of incompatibility, says a message from El Paso, Texas. It was recently announced that Norma Talmadge would marry "Orry” Kelly, Australian dress designer.