Sweepstakes

Hollywood used to shy away from heavy "messages" and social consciousness, but last week the moviemakers were feverishly racing one another to make problem pictures. Emboldened by last season's success at denouncing anti-Semitism (Crossfire, Gentleman's Agreement) and examining mental illness (The Snake Pit), Hollywood was tackling a new and difficult subject: the Negro problem. Apparently no one was much worried about how it would do at the box office; the only question was which company would get its picture out first.

M-G-M hurried to Mississippi on location to film William Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust, a novel about an attempted lynching. Twentieth Century-Fox was preparing Pinky, a story about miscegenation, and had in reserve No Way Out, a tale of a Negro intern. In New England, Louis de Rochement, the first to announce a project on the Negro theme, was shooting for Film Classics, Inc. a picture called Lost Boundaries, about Negroes who pass for whites.

Ahead of the field thus far was bustling little Screenplays, Inc., which dusted off Arthur Laurents' play Home of the Brave (changing its hero from a Jew to a Negro) and put it on a sound stage under heavy secrecy with virtually unknown actors. The picture is already finished.

Twentieth Century-Fox's Darryl F. Zanuck, who likes to buck both taboos and competition, had groomed Pinky for shooting this spring as his "personal production" of 1949, with John Ford as director and Jeanne Grain as star. Last week Zanuck looked around him and ordered Pinky into immediate production.

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