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Show Months Spent In Finding Props for Historic Film Working night and day on the biggest assignment of their careers, pro) men on the Warner Bros, spectacle, spec-tacle, "The Charge of the Light Brigade," which plays at the Cameo Theatre Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, Tues-day, April 18, 19 and 20, assembled the most difficult and numerous properties ever needed for a motion picture. Among the articles set aside in carefully checked sections were lances, sabres, rifles, saddles, pottery, pot-tery, rugs, elephant howdahs, regimental reg-imental flags, drums of native and British regiments, all the trappings of the Russian and Turkish armies and thousands of other items. Craftmen in the studio prop shop constructed duplicates of articles of the period. Rubber-tipped lances and fool-proof swords which cost twice as much as real ones were made for the battle scene which climaxes the picture. Several hundred "Brown Betty" rifles of the cap and ball type were rented and the rest copied. Lorries, coaches, ambulances, bullock carts and litters providing almost every form of transportation of the time were assembled. Seven hundred spirited horses were used. Elephants, leopards, bullocks, chickens, monkeys and snakes are used in the Indian leopard leop-ard hunt. Five cavalry troops took part in the charge; the Seventeenth Lancers, Lanc-ers, the Fourth, Eighth and Thirteenth Thir-teenth Light Dragoons and the Eleventh Hussars. Each had different dif-ferent saddles, trappings and accoutrements ac-coutrements which were copied in every detail. "Scotty" Moore and "Limey" Plews, head prop men on the picture pic-ture are both veterans of the British Brit-ish Army and specialists on pictures of this type. Both studied and checked for months so that no slipups slip-ups should be made in their unparalleled unpar-alleled assignment. Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havil-land Havil-land are starred, and the support includes Patric Knowles, Henry Stephenson, Nigel Bruce, Donald Crisp and David Niven besides a score of other important players and thousands of extras. n |