Boxoffice-July.04.1960

—
Automatic Canteen Forms
Rowe-AMI Sales Co.
CHICAGO—Nathaniel Leverone, chairman
of Automatic Canteen Co. of America,
recently announced the establishment of
Rowe-AMI Sales Co. as a wholly owned
subsidiary of Automatic Canteen.
The new company will coordinate sales
of Rowe vending machines and AMI commercial
music equipment in the United
States and Canada. The lines have been
previously sold separately by Automatic
Music, Inc., and Rowe Manufacturing Co.
both subsidiaries of Automatic Canteen.
Headquarters of Rowe-AMI will be in a
building now under construction which occupies
a square block on the Congress Expressway
and Laramie avenue on the west
side of Chicago.
John W. Haddock is chairman of Rowe-
AMI and Charles H. Brinkmann, president.
Other officers are: Edward R. Ratajack,
executive vice-president; Robert Deutsch,
vice-president: Jack Dunwoody, vice-pi-esident;
T. M. Kobza, treasurer, and Frank
J. Newman, secretary.
Haddock and Ratajack will continue to
serve also as president and vice-president
of Automatic Music, Inc. Brinkmann,
Deutsch and Dunwoody who were Rowe
officers in New York will move to the
new Rowe-AMI headquarters. Kobza and
Newman, both officers of Automatic Canteen,
will occupy that company's Chicago
headquarters.
Brinkmann joined Rowe in 1946 and had
been serving as vice-president in charge of
sales since 1954.
Leverone also announced the promotion
of Raymond R. Leonard, vice-president of
Rowe, to the presidency. Leonard joined
Rowe in 1954 and became vice-president
in 1955. He succeeds Robert Z. Green who
continues as chairman of the executive
committee and a member of the board of
directors of Automatic Canteen.
Automatic Canteen also announced this
week acquisition of ABT Mfg. Co., manufacturer
of electronic controls devices for
coins and cui-rency.
Small Fine for Hal Roach Jr.
In Guterma Involvement
WASHINGTON—Hal Roach jr., producer,
has been fined $500 for his role in a
$750,000 propaganda arrangement involving
the Dominican Republic and Alexander
Guterma, financier. As officers of the
Mutual Broadcasting System they received
the money from the Dominican Republic
to broadcast propaganda as news though
they had not registered as foreign agents.
The propaganda was not broadcast and
the Dominican Republic lost its money.
District Judge Joseph R. Jackson said
Roach was "more sinned against than sinning,"
and that the record showed he did
not receive "one single penny of the $750,-
000." Guterma will be sentenced later.
Offer TV Olympic Film
NE'W YORK — Trans -Lux
Television
Corp. is offering TV stations the motion
picture of the 1956 Olympics because of
public interest in the coming 1960 Olympic
Games in Rome this summer. The
film runs 90 minutes.
FEATURE
'Elmer
United
REVIEW
Artists
Gantry'
By IVAN SPEAR
QONTROVERSY—with a capital "C"—
should in itself prove a sufficiently
potent ingredient to assure a commanding
position among the year's top grossers for
United Artists' opulently produced, adroitly
limned, masterfully directed and brilliantly
enacted celluloid edition of "Elmer
Gantry," Sinclair Lewis' disputatious, bestselling
novel of 33 years ago. A vast majority
of the conservative clergy and members
of their respective flocks may damn
the photoplay as a blatant, flamboyant
travesty on religion and true faith, while
the hit-the-sawdust-trail type of religionists
land they are still legion, as is established
by the current success and popularity
of evangelist Billy Graham) will laud
the film as a ringing message of righteousness.
That UA publicists and exploiteers recognize
that its provocative facets are extraordinarily
prominent among the film's
many assets is shown by the type of penetrating
campaign they have devised for the
feature, an operation that places a self-imposed
semi-adult classification on the picture
I "no child will be admitted unless accompanied
by an adult"' and stresses the
prerelease pressure for stringent censorship
that is being brought by various
church councils and similar regulatory
groups. This campaign, as well as the picture
itself, is already under heavy fire and,
if it is intensively pursued at local levels,
there probably will be no ceiling to the
quantity of the patronage the mentoring
and its cinematic merits will generate.
As to the featm-e itself, regardless of individual
reactions to its text, no one who
views it with objectivity will gainsay that
it is a superb accomplishment of an un-
Lancaster-Brooks Productions
presents
"ELMER GANTRY"
Cinemascope and Eastman Color
Released tfnrough United Artists
Rotio: 1.33-1
Running time: 145 minutes
CREDITS
Produced by Bernard Smith. Directed by
Rjchord Brooks. Screenplay by Richard Brooks
from the novel by Sinclair Lewis. Music by
Andre Previn. Production monager, Gilbert
Kurlond. Assistant directors Tom Show, Rowe
Wallerstein and Carl Beringer. Cameraman,
John Alton. Sound mixer, Harry Mills. Head
grip, John Livesley. Gaffer, Harry Sundby. Art
director, Ed Carrere. Set dresser, Frank Tuttle.
Property master, Hudson Rodotiaugh. Makeup
men, Harry Moret and Bob Schiffer. Hoirdresser,
Joan St. Oegger. Dialogue coach, Thom
Conroy. Film editor, Marge Fowler. Costume
designer, Dorothy Jeakins.
THE CAST
Elmer Gantry Burt Lancoster
Sister Sharon Falconer Jean Simmons
William L. Morgan Deon Jogger
Jim Lefferts Arthur Kennedy
Lulu Bains Shirley Jones
Sister Rachel Potti Page
George Babbitt Edward ArxJrews
Reverend Pengilly John Mclntire
and Joe Moross, Everett Glass, Michael Wholen,
Hugh Marlowe, Philip Ober, Wendell Holmes,
Barry Kelly, Rex Ingram.
Burt Lancaster with Barry Kelly and
Ed Andrews, at left, in "Elmer Gantry."
usually difficult job of film fabrication. In
which connection, first consideration
should be given to Richard Brooks, who
both wrote the screenplay and directed.
In both chores, he achieved the almost
legerdemainic straddling of altercation.
Neither his scrivening nor his piloting undertakes
to answer any of the debatable
issues the film projects: Is revivalism a
loot-snatching racket or a rugged, downto-earth
approach to the creation among
the masses of true and lasting faith? Are
evangelists inspired leaders or phoney,
breast-beating opportunists? These inquii--
ies and several others. Brooks' "Gantry"
poses in such a manner that the spectator
must arrive at his or her own resolution
thereof. Brooks' script embraces about one
half of the situations and aura of the Lewis
tome and interpolates just about as many
of his own creation. But, whether it Is
Lewis or Brooks who spins the yarn, the
offering always remains in character as
to performances, circa and atmosphere.
It necessarily follows, then, that delineations
in many instances are parallelingly
subject to personal interpretations. Burt
Lancaster, who in the title role heads the
star-studded cast, delivers one of the more
impressive performances of his career and
never once deviates from the noisy, blustering,
lecherous, thick-skinned, saint-orsinner
character that Brooks made of
Elmer Gantry. Jean Simmons must be
credited with a comparably fine-grained,
hew-to-the-line contribution. The same obtains
regarding several members of an excellent
and shrewdly selected supporting
cast, with special laurels to Shirley Jones
as a self-described five-dollar-hooker, and
Arthur Kennedy, a cynical reporter whose
exposes of evangelist Simmons and opportunist
Lancaster furnish much of the
framework upon which the fascinating
story is hung.
Because it treats unabashedly with sex,
seduction and vice— with emphasis on two
particularly daring lines of dialog—the
picture would rate adult classification, even
had UA not taken the bull by the horns.
Producer Bernard Smith's unsparing
mounting and accoutrements reflect
themselves forcefully in every phase of the
film—the effective utilization of Eastman
Color, the lavish employment of extras and
several scenes of spectacular proportions,
to name but a few.
The cash customers w'ill either hate
"Gantry" or love it; lampoon it or laud
it. But, in any event, they'll come and see
it in house-packing droves and that, in
the final analysis, is what keeps theatres
in profitable business.
BOXOFFICE July 4, 1960
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