Beautiful Ice Queen Makes Screen Debut

Manawatu Times, Volume 62, Issue 123, 26 May 1937, Page 11

Beautiful Ice Queen Makes Screen Debut

“GIRL IN A MILLION” SONJA HENTE’S FIRST VEHICLE (State: Screening Soon). Tho world’s most versatile skater, lovely Sonja Henie, winner or more than a dozen major skating titles, whose first picture is Twentieth Century-Fox’s winter musical, “Girl in a Million,” was surprised to find the studio rink almost as versatile as herself. With varying backgrounds, the rink, which i 3 the first one to be constructed in any movie studio, served as three different fashionable Swiss lakes, as a replica of the 193 G Winter Olympic arena, and as a section of New York’s Madison Square Garden. Although to tho camera eye the ice ,was authentic, studio technicians released a secret. Test “shots” of the rink revealed the freezing pipes through the transparent ice, so that for water they substituted, of all things, skimmed milk. With the butterfat removed to permit freezing, the opaquoness of the milk hid the pipes. Adolph Menjo, featured in tho cast of “Girl in a Million,” was the first “victim” of the technician’s ingenuity. Complaining that while on the rink he was “hot-headed but had cold feet,” he took temperature tests, and found that on the ice it was 3 degrees, waisthigh it was 43 degrees, and at heai level it was 50 degrees. In the largest cast ever assembled for recent musical films are also Jean Her sholt, Ned Sparks, Don Ameche, the Ritz Brothers, Arline Judge, Borrai'i Minevitch and his gang, Dixie Dunbar, Leah Ray and Shirley Deane. Darryl F. Zanuck, Twentieth Century-Fox production chief, selected Sidney Lanfield to direct with Raymond Griffith as associate producer. Leonard Praskins and Mark Kelly wrote the screen story and Lew Pollack and Sidney 1). Mitchell composed six song hits for the spectacle. Jack Haskell staged the ice ensembles.