Newsreel

  • Ernest Hemingway let word out that he was planning an independent full-length documentary on the sights and sounds of big game hunting in Africa. His associates: Frank McCarthy, Hollywood public relations man, and William Lowe, onetime Look editor turned Manhattan adman.

    Although he plans to lead the film-making safari across his old Kenya hunting grounds, Papa will write no scripts, do no acting. Production will start when Hemingway's novel writing permits and "Mau Mau activity ... is at a minimum." In Cambridge. Mass... the Brattle Theater asked a court order reversing a local ban on Sunday showings of Miss Julie. The film, a gloomy Swedish import dealing with sexual abnormality, approved for weekday exhibition, was turned down by Massachusetts Commissioner of Public Safety Otis M. Whitney and Mayor John Foley as "inconsistent with [the Sabbath's] due observance.'' In neighboring Boston... RKO Pictures Corp. distributors fought a similar blue law ban on Sunday showings of The French Line. Movie theaters are charging higher prices than ever, reported the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Compared with the period 1935-39, adult ticket prices have risen 97%, 4% higher than last year. To compete more readily with TV, the Motion Picture Association of America took a deep breath and let out a notch or two in Hollywood's self-censorship production code. Permitted in future films are such expressions as "hell," "damn," "fanny," "nerts." Miscegenation "within the limits of good taste" is lawful grist for filmmakers. Even jokes about traveling salesmen and farmers' daughters are permissible, if properly bleached.