Hands Across the Sea

Most British stars of Margaret Lockwood's magnitude are fixed in contracts to J. Arthur Rank. Last week Rank's biggest rival, Sir Alexander Korda, made a major bid for star-power. He signed a deal with Hollywood's biggest independent, David O. Selznick, to produce made-in-England pictures with made-in-Hollywood stars.

Selznick agreed to lend Korda his constellation of stars* in return for western hemisphere ownership of all pictures they might make in England. For the first time, Korda had something like the weight he needs to wrestle with Rank for the British box office. He promptly made plans to star Jennifer Jones in a Technicolor version of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and Gregory Peck in a Technicolored Tale of Two Cities. Also on the schedule: Joseph Conrad's An Outcast of the Islands, Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point, Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, and a new unpublished novel, The Third Man, by Graham Greene.

* Among them, Gregory Peck, Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotton, Dorothy McGuire, Valli, Shirley Temple, Louis Jourdan, Robert Mitchum, Robert Young.

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