Newsreel

P:Prosperity-in-Hollywood note: M-G-M announced that its stable of topflight screen writers had hit an eight-year high, with 51 writers at work on 41 major movies.

P:The four-cornered race to film Leo Tolstoy's classic, War and Peace, is over, and the Italian producers, Ponti-de Laurentis (American associate: Paramount), are left with a clear field; Producer Mike Todd has dropped his project, despite a finished script by Playwright Robert E. Sherwood and months of preparatory work put in by Director Fred (High Noon) Zinnemann. (MGM and Producer David O. Selznick quit the race months ago.) The Ponti-de Laurentis movie version of the great Russian novel is being shot in Italy and Yugoslavia, with Audrey Hepburn starring.

P:Indicating that his previous warnings against sadistic scenes in movies were not being heeded, British Movie Censor Arthur T. L. Watkins blasted British and American producers, announced that in the first seven months of this year 624 cuts were made in 389 movies shown in England, most of them because of excessive cruelty and violence.

P:Chicago Police Commissioner Timothy J. O'Connor also acted as censor when his department banned the French film Game of Love (TIME, Jan. 24). O'Connor testified that the movie must be immoral and obscene because it "aroused sexual feelings in me." Said he: "Feelings should come naturally. There are no stimulants necessary for nature. Nature takes care of itself."

P:Many of the novels (A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls) and short stories (The Killers, The Snows of Kilimanjaro) of Nobel Prizewinner Ernest Hemingway have long since been translated to the screen, but 20th Century-Fox announced that Hemingway's first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), will finally get a movie treatment with Howard Hawks directing.

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