NOTHING QUITE IMPOSSIBLE

Evening Star, Issue 21710, 3 May 1934, Page 1

NOTHING QUITE IMPOSSIBLE

MOVIE PRODUCERS SELDOM DEFEATED There’s nothing quite impossible in the movies nowadays. I’lve only limit to the screen is the writer’s imagination. Time was, not so far back, when stories were written with the limitation of the camera and the motion picture stage in mind. To-day, “ the sky’s the limit.” And the sky (pardon the pun) was the limit in ‘ Above the Clouds,’ which is coming to the Octagon Theatre to-morrow. So far has the industry progressed that tlie producers did not bat the proverbial eye-lash when the script called for the wrecking of a dirigible, the size of the ill-fated Akron, in a fierce gale. They scarcely turned a hair when they read in the story that they must secure a scene of a speeding destroyer ramming and sinking a submarine. These scenes would have been, impossible and unthinkable a few years ago —but that they are now relatively easy to procure is attested by their appearance on the screen in this thrilling drama of the newsreel cameramen. The thrilling scenes aboard the dirigible were made feasible by the advances made in tlie technical branch of picture production wherein it is possible to record visually and audibly scenes which hitherto were well outside the scope of the camera. A few years ago, it would have been impossible to photograph th 6 wrecking of the balloon except bv using unconvincing miniatures. The same would have been true with the submarine disaster, hut through the wizardry of modern photography, coupled with the ingenuity of studio* mechanics, scenes such as these are all in the day’s work. Even a champion prize fight, with its thousands of spectators, proved an easy thing to film for the screen, as were shots of Richard Cromwell riding the wing of a racing and stunting aoroplane. . “ Above tlie Clouds.’ featuring Robert Armstrong, Richard Cromwell, and Dorothy AVilson,. is the story of the intrepid newsreel cameramen.