Sons & Bombers

The fact that Premier Benito Mussolini's second son Bruno had arrived with 23 brand new Savoia-Marchetti S-79 B's, considered among Italy's fastest and best bombers, on the Island of Majorca (TIME, Oct. 11), caused this Rightist base to be furiously strafed last week by three flights of Leftist bombers from Valencia.

Son Bruno, 20, reputedly soon got his hand in bombing Valencia, and in Rome friends of his mother said she had told them: "If I had not been at our country place I would have stopped Bruno from going. He telephoned through to say he was leaving for Spain at dawn and nothing I could say was any use."

"Our family is like that. We are given freedom to live, with no interference from anyone," the Premier's eldest son, Vittorio, 21, explained in San Francisco last week. There his partner, Hal Roach, in the new Roach and Mussolini cinema producing firm R.A.M. (TIME, Oct. 4), was sued last week for $30,000 by Dr. Renato Senise, the Italian who originally thought up the idea and brought Roach to Rome. In Hollywood, Messrs. Roach and Mussolini had been more & more embarrassed as fewer & fewer people came to their parties and the "20-day" instruction period young Mussolini was to put in in the film capital was cut to seven after cinema trade papers carried full-page ads denouncing Vittorio Mussolini for having bombed Ethiopians last year and quoting him as having said "To me war is a sport--the most glorious sport in existence."

With deputy sheriffs for Dr. Senise trying to attach Mr. Roach's bank account he gloomed: "I can't say if a picture will ever be made under my partnership with Mussolini, but the partnership has not been dissolved." By this time Son Vittorio was en route by sleeper-plane to Washington, obviously aware that a Fascist has about as much chance to succeed in Hollywood as a Zionist producer would enjoy in Mecca.

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