The New Pictures

Follow the Boys (Universal) is a glorification of the service which cinemice & men are rendering the Armed Forces. It is well described by an old subtitle from a comedy of the silent movies. The subtitle introduced the heavy as "musclebound from patting himself on the back."

Once in a great while a biceps unflexes, and the result is a good act. W. C. Fields, looking worn-&-torn but as noble as Stone Mountain, macerates a boozy song around his cigar butt and puts on his achingly funny pool exhibition with warped cues. Donald O'Connor continues to prove himself a Mickey Rooney with some unspoiled, big-Adam's-apple charm to boot. Orson Welles, as a nice parody of a magician, saws Marlene Dietrich in two and watches her better half walk off with the act. Sophie Tucker, the Manassa Mauler of her field, shouts a 1 1/2-entendre salute to the boys through a meat-grinder larynx. Dinah Shore, singing I'll Get By over the short waves, soothes the entire planet in generously buttered mush. Ted Lewis talks through his top hat, and everybody who has ever liked Lewis--or John Barrymore --is happy. There are at least a dozen other acts, some of them all right. But they seem like three dozen, and the air gets so thick with self-congratulation that it is hard to see the patriotism.

Wriggling through all this dense tedium-laudamus, like a Pekingese lost in a shopping rush, is a story. George Raft, a hoofer, marries Vera Zorina, a dancer. But George can think of nothing but camp shows and Vera can think of nothing except their impending baby (about which she is too miffed to tell him), so they part. Before they can make it up Raft dies, a hero, in the Pacific. His widow becomes the pride of the USO.

Buffalo Bill (20th Century-Fox) is Joel McCrea in fringed buckskins. He looks as embarrassed as if, invited to a masquerade, he had turned up and found everyone else in formal dress. In real life Buffalo Bill was a tough, bewildered, showy neurasthenic whose 70-odd years spectacularly illustrated both the magnificence and the decline of the West.

Whitewashed behind the ears and rouged in Technicolor, this friendly piece of grave robbery substitutes drawling charm for the rawboned, murderous innocence of the frontier. A pretty Indian girl (Linda Darnell) teaches Bill Cody how to write a presentable letter to his pretty Eastern bride-to-be (Maureen O'Hara). Likewise prettily, in a coy ritual with a blanket, they plight their troth. When Bill and his wife break up there is no hint of the fact that he was quite a bronco buster with the ladies, nor does he follow history by accusing his wife of trying to poison him. Notably absent from the picture are his great, mad friend Wild Bill Hickok, the almost equally mad, sure-shot Annie Oakley.

What the cinema does give is the story of a simple man who wavered and whirled like a weather vane in the crossed winds of his time. He liked the Indians but killed scads of them, loved the plains but did more than any one man to turn them into a bone yard. As the picture also shows, he deeply suspected the East, as represented by his wife and by railroad capitalists, and made difficulties for himself by telling off the latter in favor of the Indians. And at length he recouped his fortunes by diluting into showmanship the curious honest grandeur he had known when he was young.

Though the pathos, irony, and confusion implicit in this career -- which is, in its way, U.S. history crystallized in one man -- are avoided like so many mortal diseases, they manage now & then to seep through. But the best of the West is not in the characters or the story. It is in the immense and finely colored country and the hurrying of people on it. It shows itself best of all in able Director William {The Ox-Bow Incident) Wellman's violent, full-blooded staging of a battle with Indians. (Fine shots: the apoplectic charging of horsemen through shallow water, churning into haze around hundreds of hoofs.) Even this battle, the showpiece of the picture, is nearer to kids'-book than to real killing. But however short it may fall of the Wild West, as a Wild West Show it is first-rate.

It Happened Tomorrow (United Artists). The idea which Dudley Nichols and Rene Clair picked up from an obscure one-acter by Lord Dunsany--what happens to a man who beats the world to the next day's news--sounds more comically appetizing than it is. Dick Powell, cub reporter for a Manhattan newspaper of the '90s, is the man who thinks it would be fun to know the future. An old city-desk pensioner (72-year-old Newcomer John Philliber), on the point of death, decides the boy needs a lesson, hands it out to him in easy doses in the form of three issues of the paper, neatly printed, a day ahead of time. Thanks to this ectoplasmic tip-sheet, Reporter Powell scores a beat on a box-office holdup, runs foul of irate Police Inspector Edgar Kennedy as a suspected accomplice, saves pretty Linda Darnell from pseudo suicide, sees a chance to stack up a quick fortune at the races--and comes smack against the third day's headlines, which announce his own violent death. The picture's funniest moments show him trying to worm his way out of that one.

Students of cinematic style will find many shrewdly polished bits in It Happened Tomorrow to admire and enjoy; and Dick Powell's graceful sportiness and Linda Darnell's new-minted loveliness are two arresting samples of what wise directing can do. But by & large the simple comic pleasures of the picture lose themselves in intricate artifice, until the last half-hour. Then, with the crowded, horse-playful race-track scenes and with the long, romping cops-&-robbers chase which ends the picture, cinemaddicts will know for sure that this film is the work of Rene Clair, the French cinemagician whose Le Million, Sous les Toits de Paris and A Nous la Liberte are among the most inspired screen comedies ever made.

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