Saturday, October 18, 2008

February 7, 1932



HARLOW OFFERED WORK IN BRITAIN
Jean Harlow, the original platinum blonde, is entertaining an offer to star in a British-produced special feature. If current negotiations terminate in an agreement, Miss Harlow will sail for Europe early in April, returning to America in June, after eight weeks shooting in England and Italy.
The British producers, headed by John Amery, son of the ex-cabinet minister, have made a generous offer for the American star’s services, but have not yet agreed to the terms asked.




MOVIES POPULAR
One of the most popular forms of inside entertainment these days is showing motion pictures. Joan Crawford gave Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. a projecting machine, screen and entire outfit for his Christmas present. Since that time a private movie show has taken place in the Fairbanks Jrs home almost every night. Both silent and sound pictures have been shown. Marion Davies has had a projection machine for a long time and she usually follows her dinners both big and small with some current feature film. Buster Keaton, Norma Shearer, and the Fairbanks Srs, are among others who give their own movie entertainments.




A SCREEN COMEBACK
Can a movie favorite, absent from the screen a year or more, really stage a successful comeback? Madge Bellamy is about to try to furnish the answer. She will make a picture with Phil Goldstone, independent producer, and one of the few people who has money enough to retire any time he gets enough of the movies.

EUROPEAN STAR TO START WORK
Sari Maritza, European screen star who arrived in Hollywood recently, will begin her American film career in the continental success, “The Man Who Had No Private Life,” Paramount announces. Written by Otto Furth, the romance relates the adventures of a manicurist who becomes involved in the life of a reformer. Direction has been assigned to George Cukor.

FAKES SOUND
Lewis Stone wears a felt sole on one shoe and a wooden sole on the other to create a realistic impersonation of a man wearing an artificial limb in his characterization of a shell-shocked doctor in “Grand Hotel.” The difference in soles impars an unevenness in his tread that sounds convincing, it is said, when recorded over the microphone.

NOVEL VACATION
John Barrymore has a novel idea for a vacation. He is looking up the possibilities of sea-elephant hunting in South American waters. Last vacation it was Alaska.

FEMININE FIGHTERS
Irene Purcell and Mona Maris claim the title of champion feminine free-for-all fighters of Hollywood! During filming of “The Passionate Plumber,” starring Buster Keaton, “Purcell and Maris” were a strenuous fighting team. They portray the roles of two jealous women who finally come to blows in a terrific battle which is a climax to the picture.




OPERA STAR LATEST ROLE GIVEN TO GLORIA
All the brilliant comedy and romantic appeal which made “Tonight or Never” one of the outstanding hits of the New York stage last year appears again on the screen in Samuel Goldwyn’s production of the famous play, with Gloria Swanson playing the leading role.
“Tonight or Never” was the last success of the late, great David Belasco, grand old man of the American stage.
Melvyn Douglas, the rising young New York leading man whom Belasco had signed up for the hero’s role a year before production of the play began, is again playing the same role in the picture version. And the rest of the cast assures the same finish and brilliance which “Tonight or Never” had in New York.
It includes Ferdinand Gottschalk, Robert Grieg, Greta Mayer and Warburton Gamble, all of whom appeared in the original stage production. Alison Skipworth, who has become highly popular with talking picture audiences in such pictures as “Outward Bound,” and “Raffles,” is playing the dowager role.
The heroine’s role was taken in New York by Helen Gahagan and was at once seized upon by Gloria Swanson as a part she wanted to do when she saw the play on Broadway. Its background of romantic comedy, filled with the night-time gaiety and throbbing gypsy music of Budapest, give her exactly the opportunity she has been desiring. Mervyn LeRoy, director of “Little Caesar” and “Five Star Final,” directed the picture for Samuel Goldwyn.




YOUNG HOLMES STARS
Two of Paramount’s popular blond-haired personalities – Phillips Holmes and Miriam Hopkins, are featured together for the first time in “Two Kinds of Women.”
In this headlong, actionful romantic drama of life in New York city, Holmes plays the role of a Broadway playboy; Miss Hopkins is seen as the daughter of a South Dakota senator, a girl who has always hungered for adventure in the big city and now gets it.
Others in the big cast of popular talkie artists are Irving Pichel as Miriam's pompous crusading dad; Stuart Erwin as a clever newspaper reporter; Wynne Gibson as a smart Broadway moll; Stanley Fields as a night club muscle-inner; Vivienne Osborne as a sophisticated speakeasy habitué.

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