About Picture People FROM FILM WEEKLY

Waikato Times, Volume 124, Issue 20785, 21 April 1939, Page 4

About Picture People FROM FILM WEEKLY

Cinema . ~ Snapshots

SPENCER TRACY and MICKEY ROONEY have been closely connected on the screen lately. They’re to be connected again but in a strange way. M-G-M have bought rights to the biography of Thomas Edison, who first invented a mouse-trap and then the movies. He has such a life story it will make two whole films. Mickey will star In “The Boy Edison” as the boy Edison. Tracy wiU follow' in “The Wizard of Menlo,” as Edison grown up. • • • • JACKIE COOPER and FREDDIE BARTHOLOMEW are to take a plunge in the later stages of adolescence together. They’ll be co-starred in “Spirit of Culver,” rather & free remake, 1 gather, of “Brown of Culver,” in which Tom Brown starred. Vague memory tells me this was one of those military academy affairs with more football th*an fighting, which usually feature young leading-«nen rather than boy actors. Tom Brown himself was nineteen when he did it. Freddie is not quite fifteen, Jackie just over. So they’ll he growing up slightly. Interesting to see them together again. Jackie looked already quite & size when he was one of the young toughs called In to help Freddie out of his mental and physical Eton collars in “The Devil Takes the Count.” • * • • JANET BEECHER is & comfortable character actress I thought had been kept constantly busy since sho came to Hollywood for “Gallant Lady.” But it seems she’s been having a slack time. Now she’s getting superstitious. She’d about decided to give up and go back to New York, when a crystal gazer told her to stick around Hollywood. Very next thing, Warners sent for her to play title part in “The President’s Wife.” That’s an honour. Mrs Roosevelt, with her newspaper column and her radio talks, means more to America than just Mr Roosevelt's wife. Apparently she doesn't mind being put on the screen since she visited Warners last year. < Janet Beecher has some sort of a J claim to play politics on the screen. She's a great grand-daughter of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote “L'ncle Tom’s Cabin,” but also did a lot of less entertaining things to bring about the abolition of slavery. A NNA STEN’B poking her head off the shelf again. Director Anatole Litvak (who used to be known as Miriam Hopkins's husband, but now works harder than his wife) has been making tests of her for the feminine lead in “Confessions of a Nazi Spy.” The mysterious case of Anna Sten is one of the real mysteries. In her German pictures she was terrific. In her first Hollywood efforts she flopped w'ith ail' the weight of the two years and £300,000 Goldwyn had spent grooming her. Her qne English picture, “A Woman Alone,” is forgotten and best so. Since then (two and a-h&lf years ago) she hasn’t been seen. She’s supposedly under contract to Grand National. Every few months comes news of the great Sten vehicle. November said it had really started under its sixth title in eighteen months. Since then I’ve heard nothing except a seventh title, “Exile Express.” But everybody knows she once w f as good ajid could be again. Perhaps will be as the Nazi spy.