The New Pictures

The Harvey Girls (MGM) is a Technicolored musical celebrating the coming of chastity, clean silverware and crumbless tablecloths to the pioneer Southwest. The bearers of this culture, according to evidence presented here, were waitresses brought out from the East and Midwest 50-odd years ago to staff the Fred Harvey system of depot lunchrooms. As history, this thesis might astonish even the late Mr. Harvey. As light-horse-opera, complete with cowboys, Indians, a rattlesnake, a railroad and Judy Garland in leg-of-mutton sleeves, it has its points.

The railroad involved is the one celebrated in the now-familiar ditty by Johnny Mercer and Harry Warren: On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe. Miss Garland rides the railroad and sings the song for all and maybe a little more than it's worth. As one of the Harvey girls, she also fires pistols, plunges wholeheartedly into catfights with dancehall girls and falls in love with the owner of the local gambling den--bold, bad Ned Trent (John Hodiak). At bottom, of course, Ned is not too bad, for on the sly he reads Longfellow and admires the rugged scenery. Besides, there is a still bigger crook in town called Judge Purvis (Preston Foster).

In the end virtue, as symbolized by the starched waitresses, triumphs, and the gamblers and besequined light ladies take off, leaving the town at least as pure as any from which the Harvey girls have come.

More or less directly derived, with the help of only six intermediate writers, from Samuel Hopkins Adams' novel of the same name, The Harvey Girls is good fun in spots. Miss Garland doesn't seem as recklessly happy as she was in St. Louis but she still appears to be having a pretty fine time.

Abilene Town (Jules Levey-United Artists) is just one more in a current series of Western omelettes. This time Randolph Scott is the fighting marshal and Ann Dvorak the beautiful, bad-tempered barroom singer. Against a background alive with neighing, gunfire and the sound of crashing wagons, Marshal Scott states the theme by drawling that thar ain't no justice in Abilene Town. He's dead right: hard-drinking cattlemen raid the village every few weeks, brawl in the bars and take pot shots at the God-fearing homesteaders who have settled on the town's outskirts.

The merchants and respectable townspeople realize that the homesteaders are in the right in their feud with the cattlemen, but everybody has too much business prudence to stick his neck out. Everybody, that is, except Mr. Scott, who organizes the homesteaders and brings a specious truce to Abilene.

Deep-voiced, leggy Ann Dvorak is an admirably put-together heroine. The same cannot be said of the prop furniture: it gets mixed up in Randolph's rough-&-tumble fights and falls apart before it is really hit.

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