Shorts

P: Producer Gabriel Pascal last year astonished the cinema industry by screening the first of a series of Bernard Shaw's plays, whence all but him had fled. Last week, en route from Hollywood to London to start work on The Doctor's Dilemma, he stopped off in Manhattan long enough to announce his future plans: a repertory company to make two Shaw pictures a year and, in 1940, a film biography of Amelia Earhart, to be made with the assistance of her husband, George Palmer Putnam, and a score by Conductor Leopold Stokowski after the expiration of his present 18-month contract with Walt Disney.

P: In July 1936, when Pius XI praised the Catholic Legion of Decency for its good work in helping to clean up the U. S. cinema industry, most cinemaddicts were inclined to agree with him. Since then, U. S. cinema censors have grown bold enough to be a nuisance. Primary screen censor is the Hays organization in Hollywood, which has an elaborate code explaining what kind of pictures producers may or may not make. Secondary screen censors are State and municipal boards which, even when the Hays organization has passed a picture, can forbid its showing. Last week, the New York State Board of Censors forbade showings of Yes, My Darling Daughter, adapted from a mildly sophisticated little comedy which was a hit on the Manhattan stage in 1937.

Warner Bros, promptly appealed the ban -- as surprising to the Hays office, which had already approved the picture, as it was to its producers--to the State Board of Regents, which has power to rescind it.

P: Hollywood divorce suit of the week: Joan Crawford v. Franchot Tone.

Grounds: extreme mental cruelty. Exam-pie: "He would insist that the plaintiff would go out with him socially."

P: The Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art proudly displayed its latest acquisition: Dorothy Lamour's sarong, donated by Paramount to "stimulate public interest in the museum as a whole."

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