Jean Arthur

Dominion, Volume 33, Issue 198, 17 May 1940, Page 6

Jean Arthur

New Part Will Test Her Talents

TEAN ARTHUR is facing the most crucial test in her young years as a motion picture star. As versatile as her roles have been in the past, she has a task ahead of her that will tax her talents.

The role is Phoebe Titus in Clarence Buddington Kelland’s historical novel, “Arizona,” to be produced and directed by Wesley Ruggles. For the film Columbia Pictures claim to have spent almost half a million dollars in re-creating Old Tuscan of 1860 in abode on a mile-square desert tract Id miles from the present Tucson. In preparation for such an unusual character role Miss Arthur has served a long apprenticeship. Formerly a Manhattan model, she entered films in two-reel slapstick comedies and Westerns. From the. Westerns, in which she learned to ride cow ponies, she went back to the stage for more thorough training In dramatic acting before answering Columbia's call back to the pictures. Her real success started in Frank Capra’s “'Mr. Deeds Goes to Town." From there her versatility loomed more prominent. In “You Can’t Take It With You,’’ an Academy Award winner, in which she was a stenographer, she learned the ways of a winsome household. Her next, “Only Angels Have Wings,” was a sharp departure,

giving her a role charged with emotion, of a worldly-wise cafe entertainer pitted against hard-bitten aviators in a South American banana port. . Next came another delightfully decisive portrayal in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” in which she was permitted to wear tailored suits and adapt herself, as best she could, to being a secretary once more.

Adding to her range of character roles, Miss Arthur next went gay in ‘‘Too Many Husbands,” when she found herself with two charming husbands on her hands and unable to choose one against the other. However, she is reported to be suited to the light comedy of this film. Phoebe Titus, as Wesley Ruggles will have her play the part, is an exciting personality, proud, ambitious, and aggressive, the type of woman without which the West would never have been conquered. She was the first while woman in Arizona, and, as such, knew how to look after herself in the city of cut-throats. .She was feminine enough to conquer men with her cooking and, at times, a woman of uncontrollable anger. Miss Arthur must learn to ride a horse as Phoebe Titus rode, at the head of her freighting caravans, and in the thick of Apache attacks. The film is being made in technicolour. William Holden and Warren William will support Jean Arthur.

T UISB RAINER'S contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer has been cancelled by mutual agreement.