The Wild Old West Lives Again In Columbia's Great Screen Classic

"ARIZONA" The Wild Old West Lives Again In Columbia's Great Screen Classic

The world's premier of Columbia's great epic of the American west, “Arizona,” will be held in Tucson early in October. A filmization of Clarence Budington Kelland's novel, “Arizona,” this screen classic is expected to be one of the most important pictures of the year.

The picture has the lasting interest of all Arizonans because it portrays the life and times of Old Tucson, and was filmed entirely in Arizona.

An adobe village, on the desert, costing several hundred thousand dollars, is the background of the picture.

Columbia Pictures built Old Tucson near the modern city to create authentic scenes of the wild Arizona of territorial days. The set is one of the greatest ever built out-of-doors.

"Arizona," directed by Wesley Ruggles, will have its preview in Tucson in early October. It is to be Columbia's major picture of the year.

The role of Peter Muncie, hero of the Kelland novel, is portrayed by William Holden. A young soldier with the U. S. Army, Peter Muncie first came to Old Tucson on a march to California.

The cattle drive through Old Tucson is one of the spectacular scenes in the film. The greatest care was taken to have details correct in every way.

Storied figures in Arizona's history, wrought mightily to make Wesley Ruggles" "Arizona" come true. Driving north from Tucson, through Gates Pass, the spectator is treated to one of those unique spectacles which only the movies can make possible. At the top of the pass, looking backward, is the modern Tucson. On the other side, Old Tucson takes you back 80 years to a day when pioneers, weary of travel, halted their covered wagons and made their homes.

Old Tucson, a tradition, a mystic fragment of a dream which is coming true, is the perfect prototype of all that is splendid in Hollywood. There actors and extras, workers and technical experts proved to the world that nothing is impossible to movie-makers. Authentic in every detail, realistic to the last degree, an ancient city serves as the largest outdoor motion picture set in history.

Movie technicians whipped up a Tucson of adobe bricks, set it back to the period of 1859-64, laid it out to dry in the sun and went off and left it in It's Old Tucson, the town of the 1860's, which Columbia Pictures built sixteen miles north of the modern bustling city of Tucson. More than 350,000 adobe bricks went into the reproduction of Arizona's earliest settlement. One hundred or more buildings rose behind the ancient wall. Where cactus and sagebrush had held sway, a teeming town, peopled with The Apache chapter in Arizona history tells of the most terrible and bloody Indian warfare ever known to the American continent. In the motion picture "Arizona" full-blooded Apaches were used to relive those days when Old Tucson was the center of what little civilization existed in the West and the Apaches were a constant menace.

Old Tucson, half North, half South, was in bitter turmoil during the Civil War. PHOEBE SOLOTION TITUS WARNER FREIGHTING ALL POINTS FAIR RATES

The Northerners cheer when the Boys in Blue go marching by.

Old Tucson, whose history is portrayed in the motion picture, "Arizona," was a sprawling adobe village on the Arizona desert. When the Civil War started Federal troops were withdrawn from Arizona leaving the territory unprotected against the hostile Apaches and the desperadoes of the frontier. order that it might age and become a part of its surroundings. They returned, found it looking a bit tired from a winter's hibernation, lifted its face and announced its readiness for occupancy.

Columbia not only peopled the city with players and workers, but purchased 1,400 head of cattle, 750 horses, 80 head of oxen, 125 mules and burros, 40 hogs, 50 stray dogs, rescued from Tucson's pound, 200 chickens and 20 buzzards, to make the background more authentic. Ancient covered wagons either were unearthed in Arizona, or brought to the state from Hollywood. The vehicles employed in A passing column of Confederates, heading for California passed through Arizona and for a short period controlled Old Tucson. Confederate rule in Arizona was shortlived. The only battle of the Civil War in Arizona was fought at Picacho Peak.

Warren William, one of the great actors of the American screen, portrays a prominent role in "Arizona." Over a year of research was done by Columbia Studios working out every detail of the great production before cameras began to crank. A fortune was spent to have buildings, street scenes, costumes, wagons, and all the many things going into the picture be authentic and real. The studio called in pioneers of the old west, scholars, historians, and delved in dusty albums to catch in faithful detail all the color, all the bustle, all the rough-and-tumble life that boiled in Old Tucson, the frontier town, a million miles from no place.

the movie include 10 ox-carts and 20 oxen yokes, 15 Conestoga wagons, 15 prairie schooners, 30 additional wagons of prairie type, 20 ore-wagons with 6-foot wheels, one army buckkboard, one old Spanish Victoria and one Butterfield stage coach.

The walls surround a general store, flour mill, drugstore, butcher shop, saloon, cantinas, stage office, newspaper office, the Shoo Fly Restaurant and the Only Restaurant.

During the winter that the set idled in the sunshine, thousands of visitors from all over the country were attracted to Old Tucson, rubbed their eyes and wasted no time in writing home about this miracle in the desert.

That's one reason Ruggles is convinced, together with Columbia, that "Arizona" will be one of the most successful motion pictures in recent years. It has had voluble word-of-mouth advertising. Everyone is talking. While the old walled city was aging on the desert, hundreds of salesmen were retailing its novelty to the world. Most of them had read Clarence Budington Kelland's story in the Post.. All of them were frank to admit that they wanted to see the picture.

Probably Kelland's own description of Old Tucson, which helped the movie technicians in their labors, is one of the most apt of the reconstructed town. Of it, Kelland wrote: "The most wonderful A scatteration of human habitations ever beheld . . . a city of mud boxes, dingy and dilapidated; cracked and baked into a composite of dust and filth; littered about with broken corrals, sheds, bake-ovens, carcasses of dead animals and broken pottery. The adobe walls of the buildings and houses were without whitewash inside or out.

Swarms of flies were attracted by the rubbish strewn about the town, which was fought over by mongrel dogs, chickens and buzzards. Scrawny pigs wandered about at will. Numerous burrosMany of the Apache depredations of the Old West were brought about through the connivance and cunning of villainous white men.

The spirit of Arizona territory of the '60's is faithfully produced in such scenes as this in the picture "Arizona."

Phoebe Titus, left stranded in Old Tucson by the death of her father, baked pies for a living. The pies sold for $1 per pie; at that price the pies must have been awfully good or there was a shortage of pastry along the frontier.

And everybody owned one when not being used, browsed precariously on the beans or scanty leaves of mesquite trees. The plazas were criss-crossed by roads that wove about mesquite trees, clumps of greasewood, groups of prickly pear or the hazards created by the numerous pits resulting from the removal of clay for the making of adobe bricks."

Behind the ancient-appearing huts and hovels of the '60's was a modern, 1940 motion picture studio. Each of the buildings was put to work in some capacity as a storage place for properties, dynamos, arsenals, wardrobe, dressing rooms, cutting room, sound apparatus and all the rest of the paraphernalia which makes movie-making possible.

When Miss Jean Arthur, who is Phoebe Titus in the film, arrived at Old Tucson, she found her trailer dressing room completely The thrilling excitement and action of Clarence Budington Kelland's great novel, "Arizona," first published in the Saturday Evening Post, is made doubly attractive by the tender theme of romance drawn about Phoebe Titus and Peter Muncie. The marriage was a community event in Old Tucson, the whole town turning out for the affair.

In a background of conflict, amid the huts of Old Tucson, life and death went serenely on together. Modern audiences will find in the motion picture "Arizona" an authentic glimpse of a life and a time vanished forever.

surrounded by an adobe wall, which fitted neatly into the general scheme. The star, in her overalls, her tattered hat and her plaid shirt and boots made herself quickly at home. Miss Arthur plays a role which is markedly different from anything she has done previously. Bidding good-bye to glamour, she entered into the spirit of "Arizona" with a zest which reveals her delight in the role. She is Phoebe Titus come to life, a frontier woman who stands on her two feet, ready to defend her rights against any of the bad men who infested the early settlement. William Holden, who skyrocketed to stardom in his initial screen appearance as "Golden Boy," grew three beards during the picture's filming. His hair needed Regarding and his clothes were certainly not patterned from Esquire, but he, too, in the leading masculine part, is reveling in his characterization of Peter Muncie. Other prominent supporting players are Warren William and Porter Hall. There are more than 50 name parts in all. Wesley Ruggles wisely refrained from (Turn to Page 31) All the technical genius of the motion picture industry was called upon to translate the Kelland novel into the screen classic "Arizona." Wesley Ruggles, master creator of great pictures, directed the production.