The six or seven minutes of newsreel exhibited in ordinary program houses are selected from many reels of current events. Nowhere could one be sure of seeing all the newsreels made in any one week. In Manhattan William Fox, in collaboration with Hearst Metrotone, found what to do with the newsreels discarded weekly by their companies. He took over a Broadway theatre (Embassy) and changed its program from a $2 show twice a day to a continuous 25¢ show. He made the program all newsreels, to run for an hour, a full photographic report of the pictorial parts of the week's news.
On the first bill was a sound picture, made as an experiment by the Philadelphia Police Department, of a murderer, one William E. Peters, confessing his crime. With a tired, unshaven face and worn, disordered clothes pulled and stretched by fierce handling in the patrol wagon, Peters told slowly about going to his girl's home, following her upstairs, quarreling with her, shooting her.
You saw Prince Umberto of Italy riding in a Brussels street at the moment when an anti-Fascist took a shot at him (TIME, Nov. 4). You heard the shot, saw the crowd swerve to pounce on the assassin. You saw the young Prince, his face tight as a drum, proceed to lay a wreath on a monument as though nothing had happened.
Lighter events relieved such stern episodes. The Embassy Theatre became so thronged with newsreel patrons that its backers announced they would start a chain of such theatres through the U. S.
The New Pictures
Is Everybody Happy? (Warner). One of the most popular acts of stage orchestras used to consist in the leader telling the audience that he was going to play a classical piece and a jazz piece and asking everybody to show by the way they clapped which one they liked best. A variation of that idea has been arranged for Ted Lewis in the form of some nonsense about an old Hungarian violinist who played symphonies for royal families and his son who played jazz. Elements of mother love, fatherly pride, wealth that can buy finery but not happiness, fail to depress Jazz King Lewis. He excitedly and excitingly blows his clarinet and saxophone, juggles his high hat, croons odd songs in a hoarse voice. Best song: "I'm the Medicine Man for the Blues."