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No Hollywood director is so free from executive meddling today as La Cava. The public likes his pictures (he claims never to have made a box-office flop), studios like his economy, actors like to work for him, and executives are afraid to brave his withering tongue. As a result La Cava generally gets a fat fee ($100,000-$150,000) for turning out a picture.
Unorthodox is La Cava's method of making a picture. He believes that the screen is not (like the stage) an acting medium, that a scene plays itself. La Cava begins a picture by throwing away the script, keeping the bare outline of the plot and developing it spontaneously around the personalities of the actors he has selected. If a scene rings true, it is right; if not, the actor should not be forced to play it. He writes most of the new script himself.
Closest crony and bitterest critic of Director La Cava, now 49, is another unreconstructed Hollywoodian, one W. C. Fields. Fields refers to La Cava as The Wop. La Cava's nickname for the comedian is unprintable. Crack golfers, they used to play for $100 a hole. Fields, who says he would cheat his own grandmother for cash, generally managed to talk his opponent out of match and stakes. He has willed him (although La Cava doesn't know it) $5,000 for mad money.
Parachute Battalion (RKO Radio) is exciting proof that World War II is eminently photogenic. Although the picture's foremost actors, the U.S. Army's 501st Parachute Battalion, are now at peace, their heavenly ballet is a hair-raising dress rehearsal of war's newest arm.
Shot partly on the 501st's home grounds at Fort Benning, Ga., Parachute Battalion follows the rigorous training of a modern parachutist with documentary nicety. And its shiploads of husky, fully equipped youngsters cascading out of their transports like peas from a pod make first-rate drama.
Best that can be said for Parachute's hackneyed story of how the Army made parachutists out of a feuding hillbilly (Buddy Ebsen), a colonel's son who thought himself yellow (Edmond O'Brien) and an amorous football hero (Robert Preston) is that the picture survives the plot's monkeyshines. Better left unmentioned is RKO's error in making its football chutist an All-American from Harvard, a university which has not turned out a bona fide All-American in nine years.