CHILE: Cousin's Cinema

Among Chilean blood relations of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is his smart fourth cousin, Jorge Delano of Santiago. Cousin Jorge is a grandson of sea-roving Paul Delano, the swashbuckling Chilean patriot who helped to break Spain's power on South America's West Coast. Last week Jorge Delano emerged from a garage near Santiago's noisy Alameda de las Delicias to announce a triumph of which all Delanos may well be proud. He had just shot 30,000 feet of sound cinema film, the first 100% Chilean talkie.

Only the lenses and film were imported by Cousin Jorge. Chilean mechanics made the cameras and sound recording apparatus. The naval attache of the U. S. Embassy, eager to help the President's kinsman, acted as his casting director. For heroine he cast Chile's leading radio singer, Miss Hilda Sour.

So extremely smart is Cousin Jorge that he persuaded the State Mining Bank to pay $32,000 toward backing his development of Chile's first talkie. As a result Heroine Hilda Sour stars in a plot concerned largely with copper and gold mining in Northern Chile. As many shots as possible were taken in the garage near the Alameda de las Delicias which proved so noisy by day that most of Chile's first talkie had to be made at night.

Distantly related to Producer Delano is Chile's present Minister to Washington, Don Emilio Edwards. Not long ago the President gave him a book about the Chilean adventures of a Delano to be presented to Santiago's University. At Seville in 1929 Fourth Cousin Jorge, who is closer kin to the 32nd President of the U. S. than the 32nd President was to the 26th President, won the Ibero-American Cinema Grand Prix with his silent Chilean film, The Street of Dreams.