Cinema: Going Like 70

The two hottest personalities in Hollywood last week were neither blonde and seductive, nor tall, dark and handsome. They were a couple of shrewd, bouncy septuagenarians with white fringes around their bald heads. Producer Samuel Goldwyn, 73, was hard at work on the Runyonesque musicomedy Guys and Dolls. Cecil Blount DeMille, also 73, was producing and directing a supercolossal remake of his first (1923) The Ten Commandments. These two movies, bossed by two old experts, were the most expensive and most talked about in town, and both were a long-way from The Squaw Man, Hollywood's first feature length film, made by Goldwyn and DeMille 42 years ago, when DeMille practically discovered Hollywood singlehanded. They have helped shape the industry from the nickelodeon era to the television age and have seen the movies acquire audiences, income, longer running time, a tongue, color and superscopic wide screens.

A Lot of Scratch. Goldwyn has never pinched his moviemaking pennies in his zeal for what he calls "quality." Guys and Dolls, with Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Jean Simmons, Vivian Elaine and 16 Goldwyn Girls, is budgeted at $5,500,000. Goldwyn paid $1,000,000 merely for the screen rights to the Broadway musical and that, as a Goldwyn hireling put it in Runyonese, "is a lot of scratch." It is probably the highest price ever paid for a single film property.

DeMille likes to do things with an even more lavish hand. The Ten Commandments, with Yul Brynner, Charlton Heston, Anne Baxter, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, some 20,000 extras and a 300,000-gallon tank filled with water to play the Red Sea, is budgeted at $8,000,000. But the film version of the story of Moses from the time he is taken from the bulrushes until, a bearded old man, he climbs Mount Nebo, is expected, almost literally, to run forever in movie houses throughout the world. The picture will take at least 3½ hours to play and Paramount hopefully estimates that it will gross as much as $100 million.

Good Show. Directing his 70th movie, DeMille, on the set, puts on one of the great shows in show business. A retinue of eleven follows him wherever he goes. He is attended by an associate producer, a personal female aide, a couple of press-agents, a dialogue director, two script girls, a secretary, an assistant director, a mike boy to thrust a microphone before his mouth whenever he feels like really thinking out loud, and a chair boy to slip a chair under him whenever he feels (in the manner of Queen Victoria) in the mood for sitting.

DeMille's conception is so grandiose that his movie dominates the entire Paramount studio, occupying twelve of the 18 sound stages. To film the six-minute Red Sea sequence, where the waters part and close as the children of Israel flee the Egyptians, more space was found by breaking down fences and spreading out in the adjoining RKO lot (where razed buildings will eventually be replaced).