Word: film
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Dates: during 1930-1930
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Last week the Ohio board of film censors refused to permit The Big House, Hearst (Cosmopolitan) editorial cinema designed to flay prison conditions in the U. S. (TIME, July 7), to be shown anywhere in Ohio. The board's reason: "The display of such films is harmful to the boys & girls of Ohio." Commented Chairman Henry G. Brunner of the state Democratic executive committee: "It is apparent that the state [Republican] administration fears the picture would revive interest in the Ohio penitentiary fire, costing 320 lives because it portrays overcrowding and other prison evils involved in that disaster...
...that somehow or other the director, Howard Hughes, managed to spend some four millon dollars in the production, which ought to guarantee something stupendous at any rate: The point omitted, however, is how much was paid for the story. For while a story is essential to bind the film together, it seems that Howard Hughes was out to fill the requirement but no more and the result is that the picture is a series of unexcelled air scenes interrupted by a few feeble shots of uninteresting characters in sadly weak roles...
...that we have done away with the story, there is but one major fault remaining, namely that the second half of the film is a sharp anticlimax to the zeppelin scenes portrayed in the first half. It is too bad, because after you have had your breath taken away by shots of a zeppelin drifting through clouds, and an almost melodramatic series of events leading up to its destruction, then you have to sit through some air pictures which, in different order would be much more effective than they...
Reporter Stubbendorff's party had to fight off polar bears, shot five while they collected from the camp a sledge, oars, snowshoes, remnants of the balloon basket, boats, unopened food tins, ammunition, sleeping bag, instruments, clothing, a roll of exposed photograph film, a gold fruit knife, medicines, a white dress-cravat, etc. etc. Then they found a skull, probably that of Andrée.* But best of all they found Strindberg's diary...
...White Hell of Pitz Palu" to be shown at the University Theatre next week is one of that very small and select group of motion pictures in which all of the elements of film making are carried to their highest refinement. The photography of the Alpine winter is in itself so striking that it could assure the success of the picture. At times it is impossible to conceive of where the camera could have been. But there is no one individual feature that can be singled out as better than any other. The daring flying of Germany's greatest...