Movies: Four on Location

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A long time ago, wide-eyed youths were encouraged to join the Navy to see the world. But that idea is in Grandad Village now. The kind of crew to join today is a film crew. Of course, life on location is often a little out of focus.

∙Near Dublin, the cast, crew, director, scenarists, and flacks connected with filming Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage have been behaving as if they were making another version of the offscreen Cleopatra. Soon after shooting began a couple of months ago, Roderick Mann of London's Sunday Express arrived for an exclusive interview with Kim Novak—and that's what he got. He stopped taking notes and started holding hands with her at the races. "This is a very personal thing between Roddy and me," Kim tells Roddy's competitors. Meanwhile. Director Henry Hathaway. 65, was telling Novak that she was "a silly bitch" and "a stupid cow." Novak went off to London and hid from reporters in her own reporter's pad. Hathaway quit. Actor-Scriptwriter Bryan Forbes quit, too. Laurence Harvey, who plays the young Maugham in the transparently autobiographical story, tried unsuccessfully to buy his way out, then went off to St. Jean-Cap-Ferrat to talk it over with the original Maugham. The two got along splendidly, so Harvey returned to Dublin with new faith in his high destiny. The producer hired a new director (Ken Hughes), Novak was coaxed back to Ireland, where she calls up Roddy Mann every other hour. With enough humans back in bondage, shooting of the film has begun again.

∙In the Drakensberg Mountains of South Africa, a crew financed by mighty Joe Levine is making Zulu. It concerns an incident which was a kind of Alamo in reverse—on Jan. 22, 1879, some 130 British soldiers stationed at a remote mission called Rorke's Drift successfully withstood an attack by 4,000 Zulus. The South African government, eager to see new Hollywoods springing up out of the veld, is earnestly cooperating. It has supplied soldiers, giraffes, prop men, leopards, spears—everything but phalaropes. Director Cy Enfield also called on Dinizulu, paramount chief of the Zulus, and Dinizulu came through with 4,000 of his finest, plus a faultless selection of his most nubile maidens for a bare-breasted scene in which the Zulu warriors on the eve of battle are given the sort of sendoff that might well cause 4,000 men to lose to 130. The Zulus are cocky, freewheeling, and flamboyantly natural actors. They seem content with their basic $17 a month. They charge in sweating, shining waves with rawhide shields and high-borne spears. They all but shout to one another. "Don't fire until you see the whites.'' At night, to keep them out of mischief, the producers show them movies.