A THE CHINA MAIL, SATURDAY, MARCH 25, 1961.
Roderick Mann
Quiet Mr Ladd scotches that "tough guy' tag
She's a girl with that indefinable quality few men can resist. Like Greta Garbo she comes from Sweden. Already the star of Ingmar Bergman's The Magician and Brink of Life, she is now making her first American film-The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypecwith Glenn Ford. Her name? Ingrid Thulin.
Joan of Arc: Is her
Rome.
MR ALAN LADD is in Rome, making one of those Westernis with togas called Orazio, so I rang him up and suggested. we split a pizza together.
Just before I set out to pick him up, a mutual friend caught my arm in the foyer of the Excelsior and counselled:
"He's very small, you know. On the way to the restaurant you'd better walk in the gutter or you'll give him a complex and he'll clam up."
"However, Mr Ladd's lack of inches was known to me. In- disc deed, I had once met a man in Greeap who had slipped a digging trenches for Sophia Loren to stand in while acting with Mr Ladd.
And I remembered that Shelley Winters. had once nearly broken her leg when she tried to wall: away after a love scene with him-completely forgetting she was standing in a hole.
Five feet six on the launching pad-that's nli there is of Mr Ladd. Or all, Hollywood's many fents of prestidigitation, the projection of the tiny, mild-mannered Mr Ladd as a towering, fast-shooting superman surely ranks supreme.
The camera, in his case, has Hed, and led again.
He is, charge his critics, a one-look actor. "Fear, fury, passion, rolety and surprise ore all portrayed" by a sudden rigidity of the double-chin and a clicking of those ventrilo- quial tips," writes one.
Aura of menace
George Stevens, the distinguished Holly wood director, seen nothing wrong in this "Show me one good expression," he says, "end a great picture can be built around. It”
Mr Ladd showed him his one good ex- pression and Mr Stevens obligingly bulit Shane around it. A memorable Western, which gave Mr Ladd his finest hour and a half.
is
But camera craft and a fixed expression cannot make a star. Screen chemistry
that makes required-the-magic ingredient Grant and Cooper, Monroe and Taylor tower above their fellows. And Ladd, in his carlier : days, had it,
her legend
one big hoax...?
OPERATION SHEPHERDESS. By Andre Guerin and Jack Palmer White. Hoine-
mann, 25s.
There have
ON the switchback of history, the reputation of Joan of Arc has climb-
ed to a dizzy crest. But it has been an exciting run. been plenty of "downs" before this "up." Indeed, the present bull market, if it can be called that, is only about 90 years old.
on the film. You really beloved Clift was going to kill the girl. It was fantastic."
He was allent for a moment munching bla pizza thoughtful- ly and alpping the red wine.
"Funny, isn't it, how I won this reputation for toughness on the screen. I'm not tough at all. In fact when I went to be interviewed for This Gun for H-ho aim that 'really made me-someone said; What are
you doing here? You're the Tennis. Anyone? type." But I got it, and I was made. over- night.
"But even after I got that break, I never took things for granted.
"Look at Veronica Lake. Remember her in those early pictures with me? The girl with the Dang? She began to think no studio could exist with- out her.. She put her hair up In a bun and started turning up at the studios in slacks, looking a mess. Well, that was the end of her.
lile "Real professionals Sophia Loren never make that the mistake, they never drop glamour."
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Find The
and
What made him a star in such wartime aims as This Gun
He saw my sudden look and for Hire and The Glass Key
I remembered aura of smiled slightly. indefinable Was the menace which surrounded him: the big feud 'which had sprung the menace of powder await up between Miss Loren
himself while they were making ing the spark.
Boy on a Dolphin in Greece,
Today, ut 47, some of it 19 still there. And producers are
ip pay prepared
hur £75,000 a picture-plus a large slice of the profits to get It into their pictures.
his in
A3 We sat late over our pizzas he fingered his gold watch--a present from wife, ex-agent Sue Carol, scribed: For my Laddle from Sue and talked slowly, almost hesitantly, about his career.
"I suppose I've been lucky," he said. "But I worked at it. Worked at it hard. Actors today! won't work at anything.
The best
:
"Look at those gun-slinger8. Most of their quick draws are faked, because they're too lazy to practise. The camera is
It may be said that the English, with their phenomenal gift for guilt and breast-beating, started the whole movement of rehabilitation. "Ever since the entente cordiale and the canonisation, no force on earth has been able to stop the English, miserable and abashed, from accusing slowed down so that when the themselves of an abominable and inhuman crime, which they did not commit." Thus, in generous recognition, write Mr Guerin and Palmer White.
It is true that Shakespeare
was less then generous to the
Maid. He was politically biased:
Carlyle neatly combined dis-
ke of the French with admira-
by George Malcolm Thomson
tion for Joan: "Heartless it was won over by a series of Farmed out to respectable Frenchmen, you are not worthy providential miracles. of the Noble Virgin!"
Bernard Shaw completed the process of identification between the Mald and her captors by turning Joan into a no-nonsense social worker. A kind of Lady Astor in tights. British remorse for the execution at Rouen could go no further.
4 -
A PATRIOT
Meanwhile, the French had not been idle. They discovered that the witch, herelle and transvestist of 1431 was a pious tile shepherdess, a patriot who had been, shamefully murdered. And, in due course and by authority of Pope Benedict XV, she was declared a saint, no less,
transformation
Was
people, Jonn was brought out of On May 9, 1920, before a dis- obscurity when somebody had tinguished company In St the brilliant political Idea that Peter's, Joan was elevated to she was the virgin who, accord- the celestial peorage.
Ing to popular belief, would sweep the English and the Bur- Kundians out of France. REMARKABLE
film is projected at normal f speed, the hand seems to move like ightning.
"Well, I wouldn't have that. I worked at fast draws my- Bolt. I persuaded Paramount to loan me a couple of pearl- handled guns to practise with, and every day I practized until my palms bled,
almost anyone.
"In the end I could' outdraw
They didn't. have to fake any gun-battle in Shane. I really was a fast gun.
"Shane" he repeated the name 10 ilmself. That was a picture. If you only get one like
that in a lifetime it's enough Gourge Stevens directed it, and he's the best in the business.
As for her supposed execution at Rouen, that happily did not Now what footnote have take place. Was it likely that the Guerin and Palmer While to English Duke of Bedford would "He knows exactly how to add to this strange story of kill a young woman who was, in judgments reversed and virtue fact, the sister-in-law of King Vindleated?
Henry V of England?
The main purpose of this Jaunty Franco-American excur- No. The burning at the sinke alon into history is to establish was an elaborate hoax. It is no a version of Joan's life and coincidence that the Rouen re- death which is derisively at, corda for 1431 contain no single variance with accepted hoglo-alluston to the execution of logy,
*Joan of Arc.
Guerin and Falmer White tellį, Joan, kept for some years a a remarkable story. Far from prisoner, escaped and married belig an illiterate peasant girly one Habert des Armoises. Joan (they say) was the illegit
+ This Initiated by an Indomitable pre-mate daughter of Duke Louls of Those who doubt that, MAY late, Monslenor Dupaalous* Orleans and his sister-in-lap, forgive the frailors! I forgive Isabel of Bavaria. the executionera! forgive the English! I do not forgive the
cowarda!"
His Reverence
EQUALITY
meant the. al
handle actors. He has mood music played on the set until just before he shoots the scene, so everyone is relaxed,
Remember?
"He controls the music him- self from a control box by his chair. And be never shouts "Action' or anything like that. Ilo just waves his finger genilly
and you're away.
see her arms on the wall of her "I never tired of watching -husband's chateau at Jauiny, Į how he got actors in, the mood 118 miles from Meta
for their scenes. Take the time Gueria and Palmer White re he was directing Plack in the write. history with no undue solemnity. The evidence, the Frenchmen who had failed to This explains why she used deductions, the guesses, the g to take Shelley Winters out on rescue Joan from her enemies. the Orleans colours, and was culations are piled up,
cloud granted the Orlean coat of upon adning. Cloud. It is 'nil nems, with the bend sinister highly entertaining; gloriously appropriate to a bastard. impudent--but hardly convine-
He did his best to make amends, Dupanloup and his successors worked away on the Vatican.
The Vatican was for a ime, acepilént, inclined to believe with Bernard Shaw that Jouni wan really a protestant but, finally,
ing
Sun. Monty Clift turned up Doo day with a hangover. It was the day he was supposed
a lake and drown her..
***Blevens mado Cilit, row for hour after-hour, 'with the muso play potty la the
background, -until' he dropping from exhaustion.: "He looked a lille ettejwand that was what Stevens esplured
It also explains how, from the beginning, she was on terms of "Spints are not born; they. cany qquality, with the royal are made." But it fa not easy. family.
to unmake them."
"I like Sophia," Ladd sold, "If she dislikes me well, I'm BOTTY...
"All that happened during Boy on a Dolphin was that the director of the Alm, Jean Negulesco, fell in love with her -with the result that she got all the good, close-ups. "All you ever saw of me in most scenes was the back of my neck.
"Sophia's big girl and Pm just a litle guy, so I got rather fed up with it."
He finished the wine and walked with me to the door and out into the Rome sunshine, watched by a small but enthu slastle crowd.
Sixty-six inches, topped by one Axed look. And worth, at present market prices,
£1,000 an inch.
over
**(London Express Service).
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