The New Pictures

Dallas (Warner) as pictured in this high-budget western, is a culturally aspiring town without indoor plumbing, Nieman-Marcus or much law & order. It makes a backdrop for a story about ex-Confederate Colonel Gary Cooper's revenge against the carpetbaggers (Raymond Massey, Steve Cochran) who razed his Georgia home and are busily raising the devil in Texas.

Yankee depredations have forced Cooper to become an outlaw, at least in the eyes of the scoundrels who administer justice. Out of a gunpoint encounter, he strikes up a friendship with an upright dude (Leif Erickson) from Boston who has become a U.S. marshal in Dallas. Cooper takes over Erickson's identity and fancy duds, his official mission and, at length, even his girl (Ruth Roman).

Dallas packs plenty of guns and keeps them smoking; it spurs its horses vigorously over a well-traveled, well-Technicolored course. The picture rises a bit above the level of the standard western by dint of some dabs of humor and Actor Cochran's performance as a dull-witted second villain who takes a gleeful pride in his dastardly work.

Vendetta (RKO Radio) began shooting in 1946, ran through three versions, four directors (Max Opuls, Preston Sturges, Stuart Heisler and, finally, Mel Ferrer), and tireless tinkering Producer Howard Hughes. Total estimated cost: $3,200,000, which tops what Hollywood's Stanley (Champion, The Men) Kramer has spent in all on the five pictures he has produced so far.

After more than three years in Cinemogul Hughes's vaults, Vendetta has now been released, with an advertising splurge featuring Faith Domergue in a fetching decolletage (which never appears on the screen). The film is a solemn attempt to puff up the overblown passions of Colomba, Prosper Merimee's novel of 19th Century Corsican intrigue. It will make many a moviegoer wonder what all the shooting and reshooting were about.

An ominous offscreen voice introduces the picture and most of its characters, lingers over a definition of "vendetta" until the dullest schoolboy in the balcony can understand what it means. Then the movie spells out its story just as laboriously. Colomba (Faith Domergue), a proud Corsican beauty, determines to avenge her father's murder by members of the villainous Barricini family. She makes her brother (George Dolenz) the instrument of her revenge and, incidentally, the object of her more-than-sisterly affections.

Playing with dogged intensity in a variety of foreign accents, the actors seem at times about to burst into arias, an impression the score compounds with passages from Tosca and Boheme. The accent of heavily costumed Actress Domergue wavers between Corsica and California; yet, possibly because the setting is suitable, her overwrought style seems more fitting than it did in Where Danger Lives (TIME, Dec. 18).

If a star can be made by what seems to be the most extravagant star-making venture in Hollywood history, Faith's stardom should be assured. But Vendetta is unlikely to be the picture that turns the trick.

The Sound of Fury (Robert Stillman; United Artists) sets out to show that lynching is not a good thing. It proves more convincingly that movies with a message ought to be made well or not at all. The picture hobbles a valid theme with amateurish script construction, academic soapbox speeches, uneven performances, affected direction and a complete lack of insight into the mechanism of mob violence. Even the climactic lynching sequence, which is hard to deprive of some ugly impact, pales alongside similar action in such films as 1936's Fury and 1 950's The Lawless.

The movie's main claim to novelty is that the victims of its lynching (Frank Lovejoy, Lloyd Bridges) are actually guilty of kidnaping and murder in a small California city. While dwelling in standard melodramatic fashion on the criminals and their crime, the script does nothing to illuminate the city and its citizens beyond hammering at the superficial point that self-serving newspapermen (Richard Carlson, Art Smith) should not print inflammatory stories. As a result, the lynchers make up the most dimly motivated mob that ever shouted at a camera.

Whether The Sound of Fury will discourage lynching is doubtful; if it gets the reception it deserves, and Hollywood logic prevails, it is likely to discourage abler producers from trying to cope with social problems.

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