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P: For $650,000 down, Producer Sam Goldwyn got the film rights to George Gershwin's Negro folk opera Porgy and Bess. Gershwin's estate and other beneficiaries will get a straight 10% of the movie's gross receipts. Goldwyn, reportedly seeking Calypsinger Harry Belafonte to head an all-Negro cast, plans to release Porgy late next year.

P: Unwinding a kaleidoscopic, 90-minute CinemaScope preview of its coming attractions, 20th Century-Fox announced that it will soon release 55 feature movies in a twelve-month period. This splurge--raising the question of whether theater-shown films will some day antiquate much TV entertainment--will represent the biggest output of any Hollywood studio since 1951.

P: Warner Bros., producer of The Spirit of St. Louis (TIME, March 4), had reason to wonder if the epic's hero, Charles A. Lindbergh, is still a hero in his own home town. After big hoopla in Little Falls, Minn. (pop. 6,717), Spirit, showing in two local theaters, grossed a miserable $7.50 in one house on the second night of its run. Warner Bros.' take for the evening: $3.75.

P: The Cannes Film Festival made news with its film entries rather than with the spectacle of unknown starlets baring things for the photographers. The festival's French judges had mixed feelings about Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's film version of Columnist Robert Ruark's Something of Value. Reason: Something is some affront to most Frenchmen; its story of British colonialism's bitter fruit in Kenya unhappily resembles France's current gory predicament in Algeria. M-G-M unhappily scratched this entry. Most sensational movie shown in Cannes was the Soviet Union's The Forty-First, marking the Russian moviemakers' discovery that sex can be a more interesting theme than Stakhanovism. The film's heroine, a Bolshevik sniperette, fresh from mowing down 40 White Russians in the 1917 Revolution's aftermath, finds herself marooned on a Caspian isle with a handsome Czarist officer. Peeling off their wet clothing after their swim to shore, the ill-starred couple falls head-over-Hegel in love. Inevitably, however, when a boat heaves up to rescue the decadent nobleman, the trigger-happy lady sadly perceives her Marxist duty, hauls out her gun and chalks up her beloved as The Forty-First.

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