Cinema: Selznick Out

Of all Hollywood's troubled producing companies, the most thoroughly bothered by inability to produce good pictures has been Radio-Keith-Orpheum Corp. A year ago, RKO hoped it had solved its problems by merging its two producing organizations (RKO-Pathé and RKO-Radio), hiring young David Selznick as vice president in charge of production. Last week it became certain that RKO's problems were not solved. After two months of dickering about terms and methods with RKO's eastern officials, David Selznick resigned. He agreed to postpone negotiations for a job elsewhere until he had finished RKO's current productions, conferred once more with RKO's President Benjamin B. Kahane, who rushed west. Principal cause of the resignation was a difference of opinion about using Selznick's "unit plan." This plan is to make individual producers responsible for a small number of pictures each year instead of having one producer, like Selznick, responsible for a whole year's output of 50 or more. RKO officials favored putting the unit plan into operation for all RKO pictures immediately. Producer Selznick thought that such a drastic change might jeopardize the success of his plan. He proposed that next year RKO reduce its studio product from 50 pictures to 25, supplement the 25 with a group of pictures made by four units, headed by Lewis Milestone, King Vidor, Walter Wanger, Merian C. Cooper, each to make from one to four pictures a year. Although he spent too much on Rockabye and Bird of Paradise, Producer Selznick has accomplished great economy by reducing RKO's average production costs by nearly $100,000. In Bill of Divorcement he launched a new star. Katharine Hepburn, something which RKO had been trying unsuccessfully to do for three years. He hired able writers like Clemence Dane, Rosamond Lehmann, G. B. Stern to make more "adult" pictures, employed interior decorators like Hobe Erwin to make RKO sets look like fashion plates. Most recent Selznick coup was beating the rest of Hollywood's producers in the race to acquire the services of Broadway's newest matinee idol, Francis Lederer. Cynara (United Artists—Samuel Goldwyn). One moral of Cynara might be that it is highly injudicious for a promising young London barrister like Jim Warlock (Ronald Colman) to dine in a Soho restaurant with a mildly lecherous old bachelor like the Hon. John Tring (Henry Stephenson), particularly if the barrister's charming wife (Kay Francis) has just gone to Italy for a month. It is Tring who suggests making friends with two shopgirls at the next table. It is Warlock who gets involved with one of them (Phyllis Barry) because she is accessible and he is unsophisticated. It might have turned out harmlessly if the shopgirl had not committed suicide when Clemency Warlock's return from Italy meant that the affair had to end. Cynara starts with Jim Warlock trying to explain his actions to Clemency. It ends with Warlock boarding a boat for Africa alone and with the Hon. John Tring arriving just in time to persuade Clemency to follow.