The New Pictures

The Westerner (United Artists). Samuel Goldwyn's most expensive and most successful horse opera gives short, swart Director William Wyler, whose first films were crash-bang cowboy-Indian dramas, a chance to return to the simple legend the U. S. loves best: that of the strong, silent, straight-shooting hero (Gary Cooper) who makes bashful passes at the homesteader's daughter (Doris Davenport), gets into some tarnation tight squeaks but finally heads the villains off at Eagle Pass.

This indigenous and robust form of U. S. art remains Hollywood's fundamental formula, developed in the days when a movie could be made cheapest with a handful of cowboys in California's rambling hills and canyons. The infallible dramatic value of danger and sudden death on the plains had been proved by the annual consumption of tons of cheap fiction by Authors Zane Grey, Harold Bell Wright and worse. The supply has yet to surfeit the demand.

The best Western film is still unchallenged even by top-flight foreign cinemakers, whose chases are at best eerie, fog-shrouded pursuits over moors by bowler-hatted constables. The Western has risen to heights of tingling dramatic effect in such great films as The Covered Wagon, The Vanishing American, Stagecoach. It has also descended to stark banality in countless Hoot Gibson "quickies." But every U. S. adventure film, whether the performers wear hussars' caps or carry marlinespikes, owes much to the Western formula.

Today cinemaudiences are getting their Westerns once more clad in chaps and sombreros, and liking it. The Westerner, a prime example, is a juicy footnote to Texas' rowdy history. It is a rollicking tale of the eccentric jurisprudence of grizzled old Judge Roy Bean (Walter Brennan). In the frontier village of Vine-garoon he set up a bar, had himself elected Justice of the Peace. With one moth-eaten copy of Revised Statutes and a shelf full of six-shooters, he administered his self-styled "Law West of the Pecos." Scripters Jo Swerling and Niven Busch have made this bear-gun Blackstone a wily, vicious but winning scoundrel with one soft spot --his naive idolatry of Lily Langtry, the curvesome British stage darling of the '80s for whom he changed the name of Vine-garoon to Langtry.

Walter Brennan's penetrating personification of Judge Bean makes The Westerner a cinema event. There is pathos in his childlike reverence when he hangs a homesteader for shooting a steer. While the accused still sits a horse with his neck in a noose, Bean takes a last solemn look, bows his head, murmurs: "Shad Wilkins, may the Lord have mercy on your soul." Then with a whoop and a holler he boots the horse in the rump, sends it scurrying off to leave Shad Wilkins swinging from a branch. There is anguish in his painful hangover after a drinking bout with Cooper. There is tragedy in his first meeting with Lily when, mortally wounded by Actor Cooper, he gets one precious look, then slumps to the floor--dead.

Brennan's Judge Bean may not win the 1940 Academy Award, but it will give cinemaudiences a good idea why he is a director's actor. At 46, he is a World War I veteran (having lost his teeth and acquired a grating voice from a gas attack), a two-time Oscar winner (Come and Get It, Kentucky). Practically never on the screen without an old man's makeup, the real Brennan can still stroll unnoticed along the streets of Hollywood, a slight, sandy-haired, balding man who might be a real-estate salesman.

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