The New Pictures

Rose of the Rio Grande (Monogram) is foamy, small-budget beer to tease tastes jaded by cinema bubbly. Its frank melodrama is based on the Mexican border legend of a rough-riding Robin Hood of the last century whose caballeros jubilantly bedevil the inept soldiery, pink villains neatly through the heart, are never too preoccupied to sing a rousing song or chuck a cantina girl jovially under the chin.

Its tall, broad, swashbuckling hero is dimple-chinned John Carroll (real name: Julian La Faye), a little-known player who resembles Ronald Colman, has a hint of Douglas Fairbanks' agility, and sings in a rich, concert-trained baritone.

Opposite him is oval-faced Movita (full name: Movita Castenada), 22-year-old Arizona-born Mexican singing & dancing actress whose chief handicap in Hollywood has been that Dolores Del Rio got there first.

Four Men and a Prayer (Twentieth Century-Fox) demonstrates in brisk, British-cut, melodramatic fashion: 1) that the sun never sets on Producer Darryl F. Zanuck (Clive of India, The House of Rothschild, Lloyd's of London), and 2) that Producer Zanuck can excuse the world munitions ring for any atrocity except an affront to British family honor.

Fomenting its trade in India, the ring brings disgrace and death to a British colonel. With a gushy American heiress (Loretta Young) tagging along, his four stout sons--Beano (George Sanders), Nosey (David Niven), Stinky (Richard Greene) and Snigglefritz (William Henry) --set out from ancestral Saint John-cum-Leigh (pronounced Sinjin-comely) to un-smirch the escutcheon. Guided by Director John Ford (The Informer, The Lost Patrol), their juvenile, helter-skelter quest roams two hemispheres, seldom loses its bearings. By thrusting Hollywood's dreamiest-eyed glamor girl smack up against a methodical machine-gunning of a screaming mass of helpless men and women, Director Ford shows modern war technique in outlines no cinemagoer can fail to comprehend. When, after that, the film attempts to whitewash the munitions industry, it succeeds only in getting itself all messed up.

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