Q. Please settle a disagreement. For years, the Columbia Pictures emblem has been a woman holding a torch in her upraised right arm. My boyfriend says the most recent model for this woman is actress Annette Bening. I disagree. Your final word would be greatly appreciated.
-- L.S., of Belleville
A. Hey, your boyfriend has a great eye. (Well, he did fall for you, didn't he?) But as in most cases, when a man picks an argument with a woman, he's wrong.
Your boyfriend is hardly the first to think that the Columbia symbol is the spitting image of the thrice Oscar-nominated actress who turns 50 on May 29. So many have said so that Bening herself once told Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic Roger Ebert she had been informed that she was indeed the model the artist had in mind.
It just isn't so, maintains the artist who did it.
After Sony Pictures Entertainment bought Columbia in 1989, the company decided the woman who introduces movies with that time-honored 18-second opening needed a facelift. So, Sony commissioned New Orleans artist Michael Deas to update the logo.
He, in turn, chose Jennifer Joseph, a 31-year-old designer with The (New Orleans) Time-Picayune newspaper as his model. You can even see a reported picture of the 1992 modeling session at rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?category=ANSWERMAN&date=20041031.
Although the story is that Deas used a composite of computerized features for the face, Deas told Ebert the face is patterened after that of Joseph, a mother of two who now lives in the Houston area.
"I have never met Annette Bening, nor have I ever spoken to her," Deas wrote Ebert of the woman who now is the mother of four children with Warren Beatty. "(Joseph) was an exceptionally gracious and unassuming model, and received very little compensation for her work."
Q. While working the night shift five years ago, I was watching a documentary on KETC Channel 9 about the Americans' arrival in one of the last Nazi concentration camps. This was a documentary that was narrated and filmed by Alfred Hitchcock, probably in early 1945. Please help me find the name and purchase availability of this film. It was one of the most disturbing but moving films I have ever seen.
-- Laura Ives, of New Baden
A. No wonder. In the final weeks before Germany surrendered, the British Army Film Unit and the American Army Pictorial Service launched Project F3080 -- making a film record of concentration camps as they were being liberated.
As defined by director Sidney Bernstein, the idea was to shake up and humiliate the Germans, proving to the world beyond doubt that these crimes against humanity had taken place and that the German people -- not just Nazi leaders and the SS -- shared responsibility.
By early May 1945, the British Ministry of Information and the American Office of War Information began to collaborate on collating the film and making a rough cut. A month later, Bernstein persuaded Hitchcock to leave Hollywood and come to England to add his talents.
In an interview before he died, Bernstein said Hitchcock was the one who made sure the German people could not, like Klink on "Hogan's Heroes," later say "We knew nothing."
"He took a circle around each concentration camp as if it were on a map -- different villages, different places and the number of people, so they must have known about it. Otherwise, you could show a concentration camp, as you see them now, and it could be anywhere, miles away from humanity. He brought that into the film."
The famed director of suspense movies also made sure the film had a feel of realism to it. His concern was that "we should try to prevent people thinking that any of this was faked," said Peter Tanner, one of the film's editors. "So Hitch was very careful to try to get material which could not possibly be seen to be faked in any way."
But after all that work, the film wound up collecting dust for 40 years. Early on, there were bottlenecks in the London film labs and difficulties in the search for an editing machine. Americans were reportedly slow handing over their material to the British. In late July, Hitchcock went back to Tinseltown.
By September 1945, the mood had changed. Knowing they would need Germany as a post-war ally, British military officials decided they should take a gentler approach to improving relations. A film that shamed the German people would only widen the chasm between the two countries.
As a result, the five reels were shoved into a vault in London's Imperial War Museum. That's where they remained until 1985, when PBS's "Frontline" acquired them. "Frontline" then commissioned the late actor Trevor Howard to record the original typed narration and used the title given it by the museum: "Memory of the Camps." It was broadcast for the first time on May 7, 1985, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the liberation of those nightmarish camps.
Now, anyone can own a copy of "Memory of the Camps." It's $23.99 through www.CDuniverse.com, $26.99 (but free shipping) through www.amazon.com and $29.99 (VHS or DVD) at www.shoppbs.org. As you are aware, the film does contain the same graphic, disturbing images Allied soldiers saw as they entered the camps for the first time.
If you'd simply like to watch the program again, you can go to www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/campand click. You'll also find a fountain of educational information about the program and the camps.
Send your questions to Roger Schlueter, Belleville News-Democrat, 120 S. Illinois St., P.O. Box 427, Belleville, IL 62222-0427 or rschlueter@bnd.com
