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TV and Films with Freda Bruce Lockhart
Vivien Hill's star gossip
TV
ELECTION night seems just the time to revive Down You Go. For, one side or the other, the title must hold a grim irony. Or, as Elizabeth Gray says: "Results will presumably still be coming in; and, if people are beginning to feel desperate, they may turn to us for relief."
Elizabeth is the veteran of this particular panel, and, in my view, its mainstay. Not 'only because she has been there from the start, but because of her almost uncanny faculty for shooting bolts into the blue which , find their target. Often it seems as though she had a positive genius for guessing wildly but right.
Elizabeth herself is very modest about this gift, insisting it is just an instinct or intuition.
"I'm rather like that at everything," she says. "Either a bell rings and something clicks, or else I'm miles off the mark: There's nothing brainy about my way."
She contrasts herself with Paul Jennings sitting beside her on the panel, his quick mind working it all out, then giving "that little sigh" if one of her shots hits its mark.
Watching these lively minds at work, Elizabeth's brilliant flashes and Paul's active deductions, is what makes Down You Go the best of the current panel games. It hasn't quite the human appeal of What's My Line? but it's less artificial than Find The Link and usually slicker than Guess My Story.
Another keen mind joins the panel this week, for Helen Bailey is an economist and a pretty one too. Elizabeth may protest she is not brainy, but that noble brow of hers is not for nothing. "Reading philosophy" is officially listed as one of her hobbies, although she's inclined to amend that to "reading everything I have time for."
Elizabeth and I discussed the way TV has flung the acting profession into a melting pot. Success as a panellist has, for the moment, made Elizabeth more prominent as a personality than as an actress, except on sound radio. It has also made her a journalist or columnist. "It's no good making plans," she says." In present conditions you just have to wait and see what turns up and be ready for it. And be grateful to be in work."
In this competitive new world, it is certainly a great advantage for an actress to have such a well-trained, lively and versatile mind as Elizabeth.
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A Star is Born If there were nothing in this but Judy Garland, she would still have to be seen. There has been no comeback performance to touch hers since Janet Gaynor's in the original version; I doubt if there has been any performance of such dynamic compelling energy, which also wrings your heart.
You may feel the little Cinderella, who marries a falling star and becomes a star herself, should be someone simpler, less talented than Judy. But because Judy enters so consciously heart and soul into the spirit of the film she gives it something perhaps no other star could have done; unless she had suffered as Judy has.
For this film is more than the personal heartbreak story of one Hollywood marriage. It has been turned, by George Cukor’s brilliant direction and a wealth of tunes, into a superlative, satirical, fantasia on Hollywood in all its glitter, vulgarity and cruelty.
Judy singing happily in a dark jazz den; Judy singing" Born In A Trunk" in a blaze of glory; Judy making nonsense of the studio make-up routine; these must be seen. So must the rest of the film, all two and a half hours of it, including James Mason's broken star-husband, and Jack Carson's contemptible publicity officer.
The Ship That Died Of Shame Here's a title that tells its story (by the author of The Cruel Sea). But it doesn't indicate the excitement Motor Gunboat 1087 gets and gives her wartime crew before she shows them what she thinks of them.
The crew, George Baker, Richard Attenborough and Bill Owen, buy her up to be used for smuggling, Her protests make a thrilling film, and you will quite believe the ship has a mind of her own.
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A BIG break for glamorous Belinda Lee is her co-starring role with Norman Wisdom in Man Of The Moment. The plot is as mad as you'd imagine. Norman, a humble clerk, is mistaken for an exalted official and appointed ambassador to a South Sea Island state, Belinda, who has a fine flair for comedy, should enjoy filming it, particularly as it fits her own career plan.
ONE of the loveliest of our younger actresses, she is tired of being thought of as just a "pin up" girl. When she was first picked to play the dumb blonde in The Runaway Bus, she had a horror of being typed. But that phase passed with a little push from Belinda. "Luckily the last role I had in Rebound was much more my type." It's a girl who falls in love with a murderer (Stewart Granger). Her new Rank contract is especially exciting She'll be working near her husband, Cornel Lucas, a photographer at Pinewood Studios.
THEY'RE calling Richard Egan the junior Gable in Hollywood, I hear. Not surprising after his performance with Jane Russell in Underwater. Richard has the same dashing virility that is the Gable trade mark. And we'll be seeing more of it soon, notably in the new mammoth film about South Africa, Untamed. Richard is wisely taking. his success calmly. He remembers how he failed in tests at nearly every studio in Hollywood before finally winning a part several years ago. "When I was offered a contract recently, I was bewildered. Nobody before ever told me: 'You're a leading man'," said Richard. So he consulted his elder brother, Will, a Jesuit priest, to whom he has always looked for advice all his life. It was Will who told him to become an actor in the first place.
WHEN I heard Doris Day was to be James Stewart's co-star in a Alfred Hitchcock thriller, The Man Who Knew Too Much; I could hardly believe it.
Gay singing Doris didn't seem at all the type to, be mixed up in murder and shady goings on.
But Doris herself made me change my ideas, telling me her great ambition was to "do everything" in films. "I don't want to be known just as a singer, although I love it. I'd like to be dramatic, too," she said. However, Doris plays an ex-singer in the film; so maybe there'll be a few trills as well as thrills.
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