Motion Picture Herald (Aug-Oct 1947)

SHOWMEN'S REVIEWS ADVANCE SYNOPSES SHORT SUBJECTS SERVICE DATA SHORT SUBJECTS CHART THE RELEASE CHART This department deals with new product from the point of view of the exhibitor who is to purvey it to his own public. Unconquered Paramount-DeMille — Injuns Are Comin' The technique of the super-Western, thrills, suspense, continuous action, fights and danger, uncomplicated drama and straight romance combined with grandeur of setting and a broad canvas— -has no better master than Cecil Blount DeMille. He's been doing it since "The Squaw Man" and he does it here again in the grand manner. The catalogue of historical epics which includes "King of Kings," "The Crusades," and "Union Pacific" will be embellished but not diversified by this latest work; it is DeMille complete down to the bathtub, wooden, with Paulette Goddard immersed in the suds. The producer-director turns this time for his history to the American colonial struggle for the empire west of the Appalachians. It is 1763, the year that Pontiac, chief of the Ottawas, led 18 Indian nations in a final desperate struggle to halt the white man's westward march and after burning and massacring forts and settlements along 500 miles of frontier was defeated at Fort Pitt after a 90-day siege. The history is accurate in infinite detail, erring only on the side of simplification in the interests of the story ; the settings are magnificent in Technicolor, and the actors are numerous, expensive and competent. All that, in these days of fantastic prices, costs money, and the picture gives evidence in every one of its 130 minutes that the budget was never spared. The story is never allowed to get in the way of the action. Cooper, as a frontier scout, sets out to expose and thwart the plans of an unscrupulous trader who not only supplies the Indians with arms but encourages them to fight the settlers in order to protect his empire. Howard DaSilva is credible as the trader in a role which parallels historically the career of Sir William Johnson, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, who appears in the picture only as a minor character. Paulette Goddard is a bondswoman whose attractions sharpen the conflict between hero and villain and who motivates Cooper's more heroic feats, including a rescue from an Indian torture stake and a flight by canoe over a waterfall. As always, DeMille goes to enormous lengths to maintain fidelity of detail. Years of costly research are evident in costumes, sets and props. The color photography is flawless and breathtaking. These values, added to melodramatics of alphabetic simplicity, are proved assets of appeal to an audience of millions. A trade audience at an advance screening in New York was impressed. Reznewer's Rating : Excellent. — James D. Ivers. Release date, not set. Running time, 130 minutes. PCA No. 12064. General audience classification. Capt. Christopher Holden Gary Cooper Abby Hale Paulette Goddard Martin Garth Howard DaSilva Guyasuta, Chief of the Senecas Boris Karloff Cecil Kellaway, Ward Bond, Katherine DeMille, Henry Wilcoxson. Sir C. Aubrey Smith, Victor Vacroni. Virginia Grey, Porter Hall, Mike Mazurki, Richard Gaines, Virginia Campbell, Gavin Muir MOTION PICTURE HERALD, SEPTEMBER 27, 1947 The Foxes of Harrow 20th Century-Fox — Period Piece Fastidious production by William A. Bacher, and meticulous direction by John M. Stahl, endow with luster and a seemingness of import a story about an illegitimate who succeeds independently of scruples in overcoming the social barriers against the nameless which prevailed in the period — 1795 to about 1840 — of Frank Yerby's best-selling novel. With Rex Harrison, Maureen O'Hara, Victor McLaglen and Gene Lockhart as personalities for the marquee, the attraction figures to sell well against the product in contemporary release. It is strictly for the adult trade, dealing candidly and not at all delicately with matters of sex and morals presumably beyond the ken of the very young. Harrison enters the picture as a Mississippi River gambler caught at cheating and deposited on a sand bar by his detectors, to be rescued by McLaglen, a similarly unprincipled pilot of a pig boat, whom he bribes to put him ashore alive. A prologue has shown Harrison as a baby, illegitimately born to the daughter of the aristocratic House of Harrow in Ireland, who is given into a peasant's care with motherly instruction to send him into the world, when he has grown up, proud and free. Made aware of his illegitimacy, the grown boy has acquired gentlemanly graces and scoundrelly habits which, arriving in the New Orleans of 1817, he employs first to crash and then to subjugate fashionable Creole circles, multiplying his deviously gotten gains until he has gained possession of a plantation which he christens Harrow, many slaves, much wealth, and a position of power and respect. Bringing charm and influence to bear, he obtains the hand of Miss O'Hara in marriage, planning to establish a new and legitimate family line, but the bride locks the door against him on their wedding night, when their nuptial kiss is interrupted by ruffianly companions who delay him overlong in his cups, and ha forces his way into her chamber to consummate their relationship in what she later terms violence, after which she decrees their marriage' shall be that in name only. A son born of this union turns out to be imperfect and dies in an accident precipitated by overhearing them as they quarrel. He takes a mistress, whom he tells her is twice the woman and three times the wife she ever was, and they go along like this until a financial panic which sweeps all fortunes away brings her to him with offer to bear him another child. They save enough of the plantation so that they can be seen sadly reunited over the grave of their son in an ending which gives no suggestion that he's changed his principles and going to live differently thereafter. There is interest in the picture's presentation of the New Orleans of the early nineteenth century, and in the presentation of the institution of slavery, this latter including some aspects which may invite attentions similar to those accorded "Song of the South" and, more recently, "Curley." The script by Wanda Tuchuck is a carefully wrought document, powerful in its appeal for about the first hour, and less so after lesort is had to such staples of melodrama as the crippled child, the voodoo chantings and the thunderstorm in which the master drives his slaves to the saving of his crop after the mistress has failed to enforce their obedience. Prcviezvcd at studio. Reviewer' s Rating : Good. — William R. Weaver. Release date, October, 1947. Running time, 118 min. PCA No. 12357. Adult audience classification. Stephen Fox Rex Harrison Odalie Maureen O'Hara Richard Haydn, Victor McLaglen, Vanessa Brown, Patricia Medina, Gene Lockhart, Charles Irwin, Hugo Haas, Dennis Hoey, Roy Roberts, Marcel Journet, Kenneth Washington, Helen Crozier, Libby Taylor, Renee Beard, others Desire Me MGM — Love and Tears Few actresses today can surfer so convincingly or so prettily as Greer Garson. Before "Desire Me" opens Miss Garson has suffered for five years. She hasn't had a dry eye or a stationary nerve in her body all that time while waiting out the release of her husband, Robert Mitchum, from a prisoner-of-war camp. But that's only the beginning. As the picture opens, Miss Garson is telling the whole story — and a gruelling one it is — to a psychiatrist. You are not sick, Miss Garson, the psychiatrist tells her. Oh, your aches and pains are real enough, but they are not bodily pains, they are pains in your mind. When her husband was a prisoner, he told a fellow prisoner, Richard Hart, all about Miss Garson : how they lived happily on the Brittany sea coast, how the gas jet whistled, where the tobacco was kept, how Miss Garson liked to be called "carrot top." When the two try to escape, Mitchum is wounded. Hart, because he has fallen in love with Miss Garson, refuses to aid Mitchum and rushes back alone to the Mitchum homestead. Once met with Miss Garson, Hart tells her her husband is dead. He lies about that, but he doesn't lie about loving her. And because he knows so much about her, Miss Garson gradually lets herself fall in love with him. What happens when Mitchum finally does come home, and what happens when he and Hart fight until one is killed, can't be told here, because MGM has put a "lady or the tiger" end 3849